Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  “The Comanch’re the devil’s own handiwork, my friend,” spouted the older man, his ire suddenly pricked. “Pure murdering fornicators, them are.”

  “See that Spencer the Indian’s packing?” Jonah asked the two, turning to throw a thumb at Two Sleep.

  “What of it?” asked the young one.

  “That Snake there is handier with that Spencer of his than a Comanche with a new scalping knife.”

  They looked at each other, then the bushy mustache wagged his head. “Just don’t know about enlisting a—”

  “Listen,” Hook said, quieter now as he leaned forward on the table. “He’s been riding with me for more’n five year now. Been through one scrape and another. Just say he can ride with me and you won’t have to pay him. And what you get is two good guns for the price of one.”

  Hook watched the two men look quickly at one another, and if there was some exchange there between them, Jonah could not say what it was. Perhaps only something in the cast of the eyes. When next the younger man spoke, the die had been cast.

  “You’ll provision him on your own, Mr. Hook. From your own rations. And I will expect him to keep himself to himself. For the sake of my command. Is that understood?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “You both have horses, I take it?”

  “And two pack animals.”

  “Sell one of ’em,” the old man ordered.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “To the fort. Army always needs horses—the way them brunette troops and Mackenzie’s cavalry going through good riding stock the way they are.”

  “You won’t need but one pack animal for the two of you, Mr. Hook,” the younger man explained, the muscles along his clean-shaven jaw making little ripples just beneath the surface of the tanned skin. “We travel light and fast.”

  “You got to,” Hook agreed. “If you’re going to track a war party what’s moving light and fast. More times’n not, the army moves too damned slow.”

  “Amen to that!” the old man exclaimed, animation brought to that face sharp-stitched with lines of hard living.

  Hook asked eagerly, “When we go?”

  “Two days. At dawn. Front of the sheriff’s office down the street,” answered the younger, his blue eyes become narrow points of light. “But drop by there tomorrow sometime, and the deacon will get you signed on proper.”

  “Papers?”

  The younger man eyed Hook with another hard-eyed cast of appraisal. “You ain’t got a reputation to hide, do you?”

  “Nothing what would keep me from signing my name to your paper, no,” Jonah answered. “Nothing what would keep me from hunting Comanche neither.”

  “Good,” he replied, and stood, putting a hand on the old man’s shoulder as they rose together. “This is Deacon Johns.”

  “Mr. Johns,” Jonah repeated, putting out his hand and shaking with the gray-headed one.

  “Deacon. I’m lieutenant of this company—but you can call me Deacon. It’s what I figure is my God-give tide. And such as that carries more weight than any temporal military rank.”

  The younger man took Jonah’s hand and shook. “And I’m Lamar Lockhart. Captain of the company you have just joined.”

  “What company is that?” Hook asked Lockhart.

  “Company C. Texas Rangers.”

  32

  Moon of the Long Cold 1874

  WINTER STILL HELD the plains in its death grip.

  While there hadn’t been any snow of late, the cold had kept the warriors near the village, and the ponies worked harder to find some graze worth the work. High scurrying clouds looking suspiciously like clots of ice crystals shined beneath a dull pewter dish of a sun. Only the deep canyons offered shelter from the brutal, incessant wind that ravaged the prairie above.

  Down here they could find more grass for the herd. And more firewood to keep the lodges warm. Still, the children cried with empty bellies.

  Antelope was a father already—his son born early last autumn. And now Prairie Night thought she carried her husband’s second child. Tall One knew the young ones always suffered the most.

  Time and again he watched the gray-eyed war chief send scouting parties out into the cold, dispatched this way and that, to the south mostly, to look for sign of the great herds. What was left of the once-great herds, that is.

  More and more the big shaggy animals hung to the south, away from the banks of the Arkansas River, even south of the Cimarron of late. The buffalo hunters with their big guns riding out of the white man’s settlements in Kan-saw had seen to that. Those hairy-faced hunters would now have to push farther and farther south still if they were to continue their slaughter of the humped masses. And by pushing across the Canadian, the hide men would march right into the heart of the Kwahadi hunting ground.

  Tall One could not wait for the air to warm and the grass to raise its green head on the prairie, for the ponies to grow sleek and the dancing to begin once more. The calls would go out from one war chief or another—asking for young men to ride in search of the white men. Come shortgrass time, Tall One would ride with the war parties. And this season Antelope would be at his side.

  The air blew racy with the fragrance of winter’s decay, last autumn’s leaves hurling along the ground ahead of the brutal wind moaning out of the west like a death song upon this high, barren land given its Spanish name, Llano Estacado. Spring and renewal come to resurrect the land. But for now Tall One thought only of the band’s last search for meat. How the hunters had to go farther, search longer. The Kwahadi were running dangerously low on meat they had dried to last them the winter, forced to venture out on the hunt much earlier this winter than they had in winters come and gone.

  It was during one of those hunts last fall that Tall One had gone with the war chief, when he and the older warriors had killed a few white hide hunters they discovered far south of the “dead line,” that place where the tai-bos’ government treaty-talkers declared white buffalo men were not to cross.

  The white man’s government and its guarantees seemed to matter little to the white men intent on plunging farther and farther south of the Arkansas River, come now to the last hunting ground promised the southern nations as their own.

  “A waste of time, this talking treaty with the white man,” the war chief growled at Tall One that night at their small fire after they had killed the buffalo hunters. There were scalps to dance over, clothing and mirrors, and the guns—those big buffalo guns taken from the dead men.

  Tall One asked, “Is it true the old men give away to the white treaty-talkers all that we young men have fought to hold on to?”

  He touched the rangy youth with those gray eyes as he said, “Six winters ago, ever since the autumn when the old chiefs of the Kiowa, Cheyenne—and Comanche too—all signed that talking paper up on Medicine Lodge Creek, the white hunters have been pushing into our buffalo country in greater and greater numbers.”

  “These buffalo hunters with the big guns who you and the others speak of more often these days—you are afraid they will slaughter their way through the herds?”

  “I fear these white men will soon cross the Canadian River—the river that is the northern boundary of our sacred buffalo ground. And when they do, I fear this coming fight will prove to be the last stand for our people.”

  From all that Tall One had learned from Wolf Walking Alone he knew that killing soldiers carried nothing but a curse for the Kwahadi. If they had learned anything since the first white man set foot in this country, the Comanche had learned that the yellow-leg soldiers would strike back with a vengeance—sending even more of their number against the Kwahadi next time.

  “No matter,” protested young Antelope. “Because we should strike and strike again. The yellow-legs never find our roaming warriors.” He had made his first, bloody kill that day. And at long last had his first white scalp.

  Sadly Tall One could only reply, “My brother, don’t you understand that the white man’s Tonkawa
trackers seek out our villages where stay the women and children, the old ones who cannot flee?”

  Antelope laughed without mirth. “I am the one with a woman, brother! I am the one with children. Don’t talk to me about the villages where the women and little ones are trapped by the yellow-legs!”

  Indeed, rarely were the young warriors punished by the tai-bo soldiers. It was the Kwahadi families who were made to suffer—losing lodges and blankets and robes, clothing and meat and weapons when they fled quickly enough to escape the soldiers. Losing their lives, falling prey to the Tonkawa scouts and yellow-leg soldiers when they did not run faster than the white man’s bullets.

  A person crippled by an empty belly, weakened because there was simply too little food for all to eat—he or she would stand little chance of outrunning the hissing bullets when the tai-bos came.

  With a shudder Tall One ducked out of Old Owl Man’s lodge and stood feeling the sting of great cold. A terrible storm had rumbled down the very gut of the plains, rolling in on the hoary, marrow-numbing breath of Winter Man. In its wake on the prairie above, the storm left behind icy snowdrifts, and many children cried out with hungry bellies. Old ones as well wailed in want. As hungry as he might be, Tall One had vowed not to complain with the gnawing pain. The warriors must be brave, the men reminded themselves. It was up to them and them alone to find meat—and thereby exorcise the ghost of starvation from the Kwahadi.

  Their last hunt had taken them far, far from this canyon where the village waited. After riding south for many days, the gray-eyed war chief and his hunters found themselves at the southernmost extent of the Llano Estacado. Without sign of buffalo or promise of other game.

  “It is as if Winter Man has wiped all before him with his great cleansing, cold breath,” Tall One said quietly to his brother.

  “Have the white men killed them all?” asked Antelope with a hiss of hatred in his question.

  As those first cold days of searching stretched into many, the hunters had finally come across a few old bulls partially buried in a coulee here, then some more frozen in a snowdrift against a ridge—no longer strong enough to march on with the rest of the herd.

  “These are what the Great Mystery offers us, to keep our families from starving,” their war chief explained. “These few left to rot by the passing of Winter Man’s storm.”

  Antelope snarled, “We get these poor animals, while the white hide hunters leave the carcasses of the rest to rot in the sun!”

  With nothing more to hope for, having reached the southern frontier of their hunting grounds, the Kwahadi warriors turned their noses north, limping back to their winter village.

  “Where have the rest of the herds gone?” asked some.

  “Farther and farther south still,” answered the few.

  “To the land of the summer winds?” worried a growing number.

  If the buffalo had indeed fled as far to the south as the tribe was beginning to fear, the herds would likely not return until the shortgrass time came to the prairies—not until that shift in the great season of things, when the winds blew soft and the Great Mystery once again compelled the great buffalo herds to nose around to the north in their annual migrations.

  The terrible, cold breath of Winter Man whipped hot tears at his eyes as he remembered, and heard the low keening, the cries from the lodges huddled in this canyon, sheltered from the strongest of the winds.

  In the waning days of winter the rains came to soften the hard breast of the land. Spring arrived, with little letup in the rain. It was a time of cold, gray, never-ending days. The ground sucked at a pony’s hooves. Yanked at a man’s moccasins. And still the little ones, the sick and dying, whimpered in their lodges.

  The buffalo had yet to return. And the old men prayed over their drums and rattles and notched sticks.

  And when despair seemed the darkest, news of a new shaman arrived from another band, a shaman who was said to perform wonderful miracles. He had promised to make war on the white man: those the Comanche did not kill would turn and flee from this land, their hearts gone to water, soiling their pants as they ran.

  Tall One prayed this new medicine man would prove the answer to so many doubts.

  His name was Isatai.

  “The ass of a wolf?” Antelope asked, barely able to keep from laughing out loud. He had to keep a hand over his mouth.

  “Some say his name means coyote droppings,” Tall One explained.

  Born of a different band of Comanche, nearly the same age as their own gray-eyed war chief, this young shaman was already a rising star among his Penateka people. When two of his major predictions came to pass, news of Isatai spread like prairie fire across the southern plains. A year ago when a fiery comet had burned its first path across the springtime night sky for three days, the medicine man predicted the star would perform five more times, then return no more.

  It amazed the Kwahadi to find no comet in the heavens on that sixth night. The fireball in the sky had obeyed Isatai.

  Not long afterward the shaman predicted the beginning of a great drought that would parch the southern prairie and especially the Staked Plain.

  True to his prediction, the creeks dried up last summer. Normally in abundance, the game wandered far away, gone in search of water. Suspended overhead, the sun seemed like a dull brass button as each new day of torture seeped into the next with no relief from the blistering heat. Isatai told his people to persevere, that winter would bring rain—but that respite would not last: they would suffer another time of great dryness.

  The rains had come as predicted. The Comanche bands praised the power of Isatai. And all but the most hardened cynics believed when they were told that the shaman had vomited up a wagonload of cartridges right before the eyes of his most faithful believers.

  “Our prayers are answered!” cheered Antelope. “A man to lead us in wiping out the white man.”

  “I too want to see the bullets—then I will believe,” Tall One said. “Without question, then I will believe in Isatai.”

  But the messengers exclaimed that Isatai had swallowed the bullets again.

  “So there is nothing left for us to use killing the yellow-leg soldiers?” demanded Antelope.

  Sheepishly the messengers replied, “The whole wagonload is gone.”

  Tall One shivered again as the wind knifed through the canyon, its striated red walls rising eight hundred feet above the creekbed where his people camped. Very soon, when winter at last released its tight hold on these prairies, the gray-eyed chief would send pipe bearers among all the bands of Comanche still roaming the Llano Estacado. Others would carry his message on to the Cheyenne and Kiowa reservations. If the chiefs took up the gray-eyed chief’s pipe and smoked it, they vowed to join the Kwahadi in war.

  If, however, the chiefs decided not to touch that offer of the pipe, then they would be told to step out of the way. War was coming with the spring winds.

  The mere thought of it made Tall One’s blood run hot. Like Antelope, he too hungered for this chance to prove himself against the tai-bos. To prove once and for all that he was no longer white. That he had become a Comanche.

  War.

  “Ricos and whiskey. Ricos and guns,” grumbled June Callicott, one of the Rangers with Company C, as they loosened cinches and pulled saddles, blankets too, from their weary horses the evening of that late spring day. He constantly chewed his cud like a glassy-eyed cow, his teeth the size and color of pin-oak acorns beneath an unkempt mustache that bent like a small black horseshoe over his mouth.

  “Ricos and their blood money,” piped up Deacon Elijah Johns. “Scum-bellied fornicators. Satan’s blasphemers we need to put in the ground.”

  “You said you spent time among the comancheros?” asked Captain Lamar Lockhart, stepping over to the brush where Jonah Hook dropped his saddle and blanket.

  “For a long time I had reason to believe my boys was sold off to traders headed for Mexico.”

  Most of the company had qui
etly turned to listen in. With his Indian partner, the new man had ridden with the Rangers for the better part of two months now—a long time without opening up and pouring out all that much of himself.

  Lockhart nodded. “Cattle and horses, Mr. Hook. The ricos will buy furniture and clothing and mirrors and even family Bibles—”

  “Satan’s handiwork, they are!” Johns snapped. “Good and kind Jesus—help these sinners see the error of their ways!”

  The company captain pulled off his hat, the print of his hatband lying across his forehead like a wide scar as he pressed ahead. “Those traders will take anything the Comanches bring them what they got off the settlers they murdered. Anything worth stealing, that is. Only what the ricos’ comancheros will pay for in whiskey and in guns.”

  “A bad combination, that one,” June Callicott added, his face as hard as a war shield, his cheeks flaring red as if he sweated chinaberry juice. “Whiskey and guns.”

  For as long as there had been this ground called Texas, there had been Comanches and whiskey and guns. A deadly mix for those who wanted nothing more than to bring the fruitful hand of civilized man to these plains. Come here with a wagon and a milk cow and a family, come here to raise crops and cattle and a passel of children.

  As far back as the Texas Revolution there had been Rangers—first organized in 1835 as local committees of safety and correspondence, right in the midst of their war with Mexico. Silas M. Parker was empowered to engage the services of three companies of Rangers whose business would be to range and guard the frontiers between the Brazos and Trinity rivers. From then on, in one incarnation or another, the Ranger existed on that high, wild prairie where he was first given birth to meet the outlaws of three races: American desperado, Mexican bandit, and Indian warrior. Down through the years the function these few men served might have changed in detail, but never did the Ranger cease standing as a bulwark between the lawless, savage elements and the coming of civilization.