Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Not for you,” he answered abruptly. “This trail is for me.”

  “You? How—”

  “Last chance for me, Hook.”

  Jonah wagged his head, failing to make sense of any of it. Yet. “What the hell for—”

  “I lost my woman. Lost children too,” the Shoshone admitted.

  “White men? Like these bastards?”

  “No,” he answered. “Got my own devils, Hook. You got yours.”

  “Who then? Who took ’em? You know ’em?”

  “I know. Lakota.”

  “The Sioux?”

  “Brule. Burnt Thigh. Bunch under Pawnee Killer.”

  “Happened not long ago, I’d suppose.”

  “No. Long time. Fourteen winters now. They gone a long time.”

  “They? The Lakota come in and took your family?”

  “Them didn’t die. Woman. She tall and pretty. My daughter too. Twelve summers old then. Both taken.”

  “Other children?”

  “Three boys. All fighting age.” He bent his head, staring at his lap.

  Studying the way the Shoshone held his impassive face surrounding those liquid eyes, Hook realized the man was still mourning. Even after all this time. Fourteen years, going on fifteen.

  “What happened to them? Your boys? The three of ’em.”

  Still bent over in prayerful repose, Two Sleep drew a single index finger nearly the circumference of his neck, then used that finger to draw a circle around his head, ending his wordless description by yanking on his own greasy topknot.

  “Goddle-mighty,” Jonah exclaimed quietly. “Them Brule killed ’em all—all three of ’em?”

  Two Sleep held up both his hands, palms up in a plaintive gesture. “All gone. Sons gone on Star Road now. I put them in the trees. Above the ground. Where the wind talk to them for all time.”

  Hook found himself instinctively gazing up at the night sky paling as the moon fell far in the west. He swallowed hard, brooding on the loss of his own sons. Lord—the two of them took at once. From what Shad Sweete had told him, they was as good as gone now: in the hands of comancheros, spirited all the way south to Mex country. Death’d likely be a better fate than that, he figured. And what of Gritta? Her fate no better than that of …

  Jonah forced himself to squeeze that off, like stopping the stream of warm, creamy milk from the cow’s udder back home, and looked over at the Shoshone instead.

  “The Brule, they’d be cruel to your … your woman. And your daughter?”

  “Yes,” he answered immediately. “No,” he replied a moment later. “After all time gone from land of the Shoshone—the two now Lakota. My woman, she get old.” Then he made a cradling motion down at his belly. “Maybe she carry many Brule baby. Make many Lakota warrior.”

  Jonah watched as the Shoshone was seized with a spasm of grief, something sour in his throat that was as quickly swallowed down.

  “My girl,” Two Sleep continued, his words with a rocky edge to them as he spoke, “she have Brule babies too now.”

  “You don’t know … can’t be sure.”

  He nodded his head so emphatically, it shocked Hook.

  “I know. The Lakota take women—make them Brule. Make Lakota warriors in their bellies. Marry and have many babies. Or … or the women they kill quick.”

  “Your … the women—would they fight the Brule? Or would they have the Lakota babies?”

  Two Sleep rubbed his eyes with his gnarled knuckles, as if some sandy grit were troubling them. “They gone,” he said finally, brushing one palm quickly across the other.

  “Dead?”

  “Dead,” the warrior answered.

  “You mean: they’re good as dead.”

  “They have babies for Lakota fathers,” Two Sleep agreed, “a bad thing for Shoshone woman.”

  As good as dead, Jonah thought to himself. A woman of one tribe forced to give birth to sons of an enemy tribe—she was as good as dead to her own people.

  “She wait. They wait for me,” Two Sleep continued after a moment. “Wait for first winter. A second and a third winter. They see no one riding to come for them. Maybe they dead now. Maybe after all winters they say Two Sleep not come for them—they carry Lakota babies. They come to be Lakota mothers. They not Shoshone no more. They be Lakota now. They forget Two Sleep.”

  “But you never forgot them.”

  Two Sleep dragged a hand beneath his nose hurriedly. “I never go find them. Afraid. No man go with me. I was young, strong in seasons ago. Not now. Too many winters gone. Other warriors give up oh Two Sleep. So now I afraid to go.”

  Hook watched the Shoshone slowly drop his head on his forearms that lay cradled across his knees, hiding his face. There arose no sound from the warrior. Nothing to betray him but the slight, silent tremble as Two Sleep shuddered with the wracking sobs.

  It grew clear to Jonah as he reached out, knowing nothing else to do but to touch the man’s quaking shoulder.

  “After I told you my story … you up and decided you’re coming with me—’cause you want to help me get my family back. That it, Two Sleep?”

  He raised his face, eyes glistening, but cheeks still dry as the flaky soil in this high land. “I come to help you. Too late to help me. Too late to help my woman. Help my daughter. Too late now help my sons gone far on the Star Road fourteen winters. But … still time for you, Hook.”

  “Yes, Two Sleep. There is time for me.” He barely got the words out, choking on the unfamiliar taste of sentiment. It was something he had not often savored in his brooding past. But here, with this old Indian, in the cold of this autumn night somewhere near the windswept continental divide as they waited to pit themselves against six gunmen, Jonah Hook felt again that unaccustomed warmth of human kindness.

  By riding along with the white man, Two Sleep was trying to find a way of forgiving himself after all this time. After living so long as a failure—with the fear, the terror, the utter shame of never trying. Happened that a man crawled far enough, long enough around the whiskey cup, he just might find himself reaching the handle.

  Two Sleep got to his feet, clutching his thin blanket about his shoulders. “I brave enough now, brave for all the days I not brave enough to go find them. I ride with you—so it make things right for me.”

  With the Shoshone finally expressing it, Jonah knew the warrior was right. By riding along to help Hook, Two Sleep was somehow righting his medicine, his spiritual power long gone stale and rancid—long gone the coward’s way of hiding down in the white man’s whiskey and gambling and the emptiness of a coward’s sanctuary. But for some reason Jonah Hook had come along to offer a way, the only way, the warrior could make his medicine strong once more. By helping another man put his family back together.

  “I’m not sure I know how to pray much anymore, Two Sleep—but I figure the Lord is somehow listening,” Jonah said. “I figure you’re here to help make things right for both of us.”

  Waiting out here in the dark among the clumps of sage, stretched prone on the cold ground as a gust of cold wind slapped his face, Jonah sensed what a brown-skinned warrior must feel as he lay beyond the welcome, warm ring of a white man’s firelight. It seemed evil was always executed beyond the pale of darkness.

  The Danites’ fire had gone to red coals untended and writhing in the pit they had dug to conceal the flames and thereby prevent discovery by a chance and wandering war party.

  Jonah found little amusement in that. The Mormons had no reason to worry themselves over wandering Indians tonight. It was instead the darkness and the cold autumn wind snarling across this high land that would cloak the danger.

  The six had picketed their hobbled horses downwind from camp. He had learned always to graze his animals upwind, as a source of early warning. Especially in darkness: the time for evil.

  How he wanted to feel the warm blood of these Mormon zealots on his hands again. Just as he had at Fort Laramie when he killed Laughing Jack. Before he stuffed the bo
dy beneath the river ice. A long, long time ago it seemed now—so many miles gone under his heels since.

  Then he remembered the taste of his rage as he knelt over the bleeding Boothog Wiser back in Nebraska, in the end killing Jubilee Usher’s lieutenant before he could allow himself to flee with his daughter. Hattie.

  Here in the cold he keenly sensed the loss of her, wanting again the soft, warm touch of her as he embraced the skinny girl teetering on the verge of womanhood there on the Kansas railroad platform, sending her east to St. Louis—far from harm, far from this wild, cruel land that had become his prison.

  Four, maybe even more of them, had Jonah tallied for himself already as he drew closer and closer on the trail of Jubilee Usher, closer to reclaiming his wife from those who had ripped his family apart. He lay there now in the dark of that moondown, brooding on how much easier the killing got when he thought of these men as nothing more than animals: beasts who were meant to die. Easier it was for him to pull the trigger or use the knife, to do what he had to do when he thought of the Mormons as—

  The scrape of boot soles on the sandy soil leapt out at him from the darkness.

  Muffling the sound against his body, Jonah lightly brushed his thumb back across the hammer of one of the big .44-caliber pistols, then the other hammer, to assure himself they were cocked. His eyes strained beneath the dim starshine now that the moon had fallen. The sky was quickly whirling to the coldest time of the day—the moments before the first faint strands of gray would emerge out of the east. And with this wind blowing the way it was, torturing the sage … he was thankful none of the Danites could smell him bellied down in the darkness.

  Ten feet away the man stopped and turned slowly, as if himself trying to make something out of the night. From the hole he punched out of the starry skyline, the gunman carried a rifle across the fold of his left arm.

  “Bolls!” the man whispered harshly.

  There came no answer.

  Jonah knew he wouldn’t have much time to act if the Mormon grew nervous. He might just up and turn, shouting a warning back at the other four who lay sleeping like black humps of coal on the prairie, their feet to that shallow fire pit.

  “You asleep, Bolls?”

  And when no answer came, the man there to relieve the watch started to turn again. Jonah slowly raised his pistol—wishing he could do this another way: use his knife as Two Sleep had on Bolls, the first guard, lying somewhere out there in the darkness. It would be quieter, and every bit as efficient.

  “Where you, Bolls?”

  He wouldn’t have much more time, a heartbeat or two only—

  As the guard turned his back on Hook, Jonah rose from the sage, pistol flung back at the end of his arm. He could knock him in the head if he could cross the ten feet before the man heard him.

  The guard whirled back, rifle coming up to block the barrel of Jonah’s pistol as it fell to graze the side of the Mormon’s head, slashing downward against flesh and bone. The fury of his attack caused the guard to stumble backward a step as Jonah clumsily lashed out with the pistol in his left hand. Swearing, the guard brought the rifle down. It spat bright, blinding fire, the bullet keening wildly into the black of desert night.

  It had passed close enough to make Hook fling himself onto his belly and pull a trigger himself, aiming by feel—like that night with Major North’s Pawnee scouts, clustered among the baggage of Chief Turkey Leg’s Cheyenne camp when the young Cheyenne warriors came charging out of the blackness. Now he saw behind the muzzle flash a second bright blast from the guard’s gun as the Mormon was flung backward.

  Only one thing would have made the man arch backward like that.

  Jonah knew he had hit him.

  Behind the roar of those three shots came the frightened cries of the nearby horses and the rustle and grunt of men clearing their blankets and canvas bedrolls, hollering out questions and orders, chambering cartridges in their weapons, one of them kicking dirt onto the red embers.

  When a gunshot rang out, the muzzle flash caught the corner of Jonah’s eye. The fire tender pitched headlong across the remnants of the uncovered embers. He wasn’t moving.

  “Out there!” one of them shouted, pointing into the darkness.

  Three of them fired a succession of shots.

  “Careful! Hines—go see if we got ’im.”

  “Me? In the dark?”

  “There’s five of us—”

  “Four, Cap’n.”

  “Four then, by God! And there’s likely less of them out there or they’d rushed us. Goddamn Injuns!”

  Another shot rang out on the far side of the camp, causing the horses to cry out, hammering the ground in their hobbles, tearing against their pickets. Jonah knew Two Sleep had moved like mercury spilled on a table after his first shot had killed the fire tender.

  “They’re after the horses!”

  A pair of shots rang out as the gunmen whirled in a crouch to the west—all but one of them. The one that Jonah had failed to see. Hook rose from the blackness of the sage again, intending to take them in the back. And to his left as he did, Jonah heard the click-chunk of the hammer an instant before the night whited in muzzle flame.

  The bullet stung his left wrist, snarling past his belly.

  Like something hot he lost the pistol in that hand, felt it spinning to the ground, still intent that he would not lose the one in his right despite the pain that came to his belly as the wind whined past, kicking dust into his eyes. Another shot collided with the flaky sand at his side, the flash bright and searing in the deep of desert blackness. The gunman moved slowly toward him. Then a third shot as Jonah rolled, hearing the whispering hiss before it too screamed into the ground where his head had been a heartbeat before.

  Behind him arose the rattle of more shots shattering the twenty-five feet to the fire, dying as the cries of men and protests of their horses split the dark. Finishing his roll, Jonah raised his gun hand—hearing the unearthly war cry of the warrior.

  “It’s Injuns, Slade!”

  “Kill ’em, Charlie! Kill ’em all!” the man coming for Hook cried out.

  Hook fired as the steps loomed closer. He heard the bullet hit, that unmistakable sound of a wet hand slapping putty. Then the grunt of the gunman.

  Still, the Mormon came on after only a moment’s hesitation.

  “Sonofabitch—I’ll have your balls!” the man grumbled, and fired into the blackness, then fired again.

  A third time the hammer fell on an empty cylinder as Jonah steadied his pistol and aimed it at the black hole punched out of the starshine in the high desert night sky.

  He fired. Heard the bullet smack soddenly into its target—the wind socked out of the man. Jonah heard him take one more step, then another, grumbling liquidly as he came.

  “Slade?” a voice called from the far side of the fire. “Slade?”

  Then the voice was cut off, gone garbled and wet—choking. Like a man drowning in his own juices.

  He heard the one called Slade pull a second pistol, cocking it in the growing silence of that blackest of time when night was prepared to give itself to the first seduction of day.

  “Get you … you red sonofabitch!”

  Where had he hit the man? Jonah wondered. The way the bastard cursed, that thickness to his words spoke of fighting down the pain. But—that he was still moving.

  Hook fired his last shot into the darkness, then rolled back in the direction he had come, struggling to drag a second, loaded cylinder for the pistol from his coat pocket.

  Without time to move the man was atop of him, collapsing to his knees soddenly, snatching Hook by the collar of his coat and yanking his face up close. He weaved a bit, putting the muzzle of his pistol into Hook’s face, wobbly.

  “You … you ain’t no Injun,” Slade spat, his tongue thick with blood. “Who the hell are—”

  With the plunge of the wide blade, Hook watched the Mormon’s night eyes grow big as Sunday saucers.

  Jonah gru
nted as he fought to drag the big skinning knife the full width of the gunman’s belly, feeling at last the warm, syrupy blood gushing over his hands as he disemboweled the Danite crouched over him.

  Dark fluid gushed from the man’s mouth as he struggled to find the words, sputtering. Until finally …

  “The … the goddamned farmer.”

  14

  Moon of Leaves on Fire 1868

  THE PALE-EYED WAR chief had made sure the two boys had homes and families when first they were brought to live with the Kwahadi. They were not only cared for and fed, but taught the way of the Antelope Comanche as well. They learned about weapons and riding, how to hunt the dwindling herds of buffalo, to stalk deer and antelope and turkey. They grew better with every season in the rough-and-tumble wrestling that was nothing less than preparation for the killing arts of making war on the white man.

  Jeremiah longed for the day he would be allowed to go on his first war party.

  Eleven summers old he told his adopted father he was now, and learning more of the language from Bridge every day, forgetting more and more of his own as the seasons turned. Like his brother Zeke, Jeremiah hungered to ride out on the raids, to come back bearing the red-hued scalps, draping themselves in glory with the rest of the young warriors.

  “But first,” the pale-eyed war chief explained, “first you must learn patience. Learn all you can while you wait. When it is time, you will ride with me.”

  “And bring back scalps?” Jeremiah had asked.

  “Yes. Many scalps, Tall One.”

  Jeremiah had liked his name from the start, when it was given him by Bridge, his adopted father, many seasons ago. Only rarely did he have reason to recall his Christian name. Fainter still in the recesses of that old life was his family name. He could not remember the last time he had said it with his own tongue, or heard his brother use it. They no longer spoke much English to one another. Having grown so accustomed to using the Comanche, they used the tongue even when by themselves. It had been a long, long time now since anyone was wary and watched them. No longer was anyone concerned that the two boys would run off, try to escape.