Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  Lockhart ordered them back to the saddle at midmorning, marching them a little east of due south, aiming for Fort Griffin and the war council called by the commander of the Frontier Battalion. And while they rode the sun down that day, Jonah Hook wondered what he would do now, come this last push against the Comanche—the ones said to hold his boys.

  Had he eaten up too much time that he didn’t have? Time and again did he just up and ride after a ruse, believing in smoke on the wind, hoping against his better judgment? Following one hunch after another that had clabbered up like Lamar Lockhart’s White River patrols?

  Had the time come for him to leave Texas and head southwest? Go back where he had the last—and really the first—solid evidence of what had happened to his boys? At least that dingy, grayed, washed-out shirt had been more solid than any cantina rumor or wild comanchero tale he had listened to over the years. Perhaps to go back there to New Mexico, maybe back south to Sonora once more—there to pick up more of a solid thread. Something to cling to, even if it was only a thread as thin as spider’s silk.

  The captain halted the company when the sun had touched the top margin of the caprock to the west, turning the slopes of braided cedar to a rusty band of gold beneath the dark, gut-colored clouds. Lockhart instructed them to build only three small fires, then dismissed the Rangers. Some gathered and tied off the horses. Others sought out firewood. A few got out cups and knives to scoop and dig at the flint-hard soil, the better to hide the tattletale flames of their fires. And when the water had been poured from canteens into the blackened pots and set to boil for coffee, a drink the trail-weary men would use to soften the thick, wide strips of dried beef Lockhart had bought off Dickinson, Jonah moved out of the circle and sought a place to relieve himself.

  Seemed such a simple thing as taking a pee was getting harder every year. His body growing older, the pounding his kidneys took of the trail felt more magnified with each successive season.

  On the far side of camp from where the animals had been hobbled, Hook stopped near some clumps of winter-brittle grass and unbuttoned his fly. On a scout like this in country where they would likely come quickly on the enemy, a plainsman had to practice all varieties of precaution: even to using the heel and toe of his tall stovepipe boots to scoop out a shallow hole quickly at the base of some stunted scrub. He would then pee in that hole. Done, Jonah used his scarred boot to cover up best he could the sign, and that telltale odor, of a white man’s passing. Buttoning up as—

  “Jonah.”

  He turned with a jerk, finding Lockhart and Coffee. “Surprised me, Cap’n.”

  There was no nonsense on that face with its bushy black mustache. “Want you to come with us. Get that Snake—Two Sleep—to come with you.”

  Following the two Rangers back into the midst of the camp, Jonah motioned for the Shoshone to follow. Through the scrub where the herders had hobbled the stock and were cross-lining the pack mules, Lockhart and his sergeant moved on into the waning light. As they rounded the base of one of the rolling hills, Jonah saw Billy Benton. The man rose when he heard the rest coming.

  “You find anything more of interest, Billy?” Lockhart asked.

  “Nothing but the tracks, Cap’n.” His was a pointed, prying type of nose set between friendly eyes. The man dusted his hands off on the front of his britches, then straightened.

  “Billy here came out to have himself a look around before he took up his guard post ’top that hill,” Lockhart explained, turning to Hook and the Shoshone. “And in the late light he came upon something I want you both to have a look at.”

  “You got sign?”

  “Look for yourself, Jonah. Tell me what you fellas think.”

  The graying man pointed at the ground, his beard and mustache tobacco-stained like Deacon Johns’s. Benton moved his hand back and forth, then once around in a circle, before he stepped back out of the way as Jonah nodded for Two Sleep to join him. Side by side they knelt, studying the ground.

  After a moment the Shoshone rose and moved off a few yards in the direction taken by the trail. Jonah glanced at the sky. The tracks headed north. Hook stood and turned to the three Rangers.

  “What’s south of here? Maybe not far as Griffin.”

  “You know, Sergeant—that’s what I like about Mr. Hook here,” the captain began. “I’m glad you’re still with us, Jonah. So what’s south of here? And well this side of Fort Griffin … why, it’s Cedar Lake.”

  As Coffee and Benton grunted what sounded like approval, Jonah asked, “What’s Cedar Lake?”

  Lockhart grinned slightly, some of his teeth showing. “Seems it’s an ancient place the Comanche go. They wander there from time to time over the years.”

  Coffee nodded, removing his hat and scratching that red scalp of his. “It’s a place that the interpreter up to Fort Sill, fella named Phil McCusker, says the half-breed Quanah Parker his own self claims he was borned.”

  “They’re moving north,” Jonah said, again looking into the distance where Two Sleep rose from the ground and began heading back slowly.

  “Back to the White River gate,” Coffee added. “Like we figured all along. You was right, Cap’n.”

  “I guess we were, Sergeant,” Lockhart said. “Only thing we had wrong was we got there way too early. How old are those tracks, Jonah?”

  Hook turned to Two Sleep, moved his hands in the question at the same time he asked it in English of his saddle partner. “How old the tracks?”

  “A week. Maybe little more.”

  Lockhart nodded, moving forward a step, motioning along the ground. “From what I see, doesn’t seem they were in any hurry.”

  “Nope. No rush.”

  “How many you figure on?” asked Niles Coffee.

  “Eight. Maybe ten,” he answered, looking at Two Sleep. The Shoshone nodded to confirm it.

  “No travois, though,” Lockhart grumbled.

  “Likely a raiding party,” Jonah ventured. “Maybe out hunting.”

  “Scouting the way north, out ahead of the whole village?” Coffee inquired.

  “Could be,” Jonah said, looking at the deepening sky. “We can tell more come morning.”

  “C’mon, then,” Lockhart ordered. “Let’s get back and get supper in our bellies. I’ve made my decision to move on a few miles after we eat and before we bed down.”

  “Makes more sense to have a cold camp now,” Jonah replied.

  “Damn right, Captain,” Coffee agreed. “This ground rightly swarms with Comanch’. If them Kwahadi are up and about at long last, I don’t want no wandering scalp party finding sign of us. Them sonsabitches worse’n red ants swarming over my mama’s slop bucket back of her stove.”

  Company C soaked their hard-bread and jerky in their coffee, for the most part eating silently, each man down in his own thoughts now that they had fresh sign. It was not a sullen bunch that emptied the blackened pots in the fire holes, kicked dirt back to fill the depressions, then walked their horses back and forth over that ground before mounting and moving out at a lope behind Captain Lamar Lockhart. This time, however, he turned them about, turned them into the wind. Instead of pointing their noses south for Fort Griffin and the earthy recreation offered by St. Angela, the fleshpot across the river from the post, the Rangers were coming about to the north.

  Deacon Johns had grumbled his praise as they went to saddle in the dark. “Praise God you boys are forced to go a while longer before you lie fornicating with some likely, oily-tongued slattern what has her seven kinds of pox!”

  Lockhart had them backtracking for the White River portal, on a fresh trail that just might mean a payday come at last for Company C.

  In the gray of dawn’s first awakening that next morning, Jonah and Two Sleep led Lockhart and Coffee in a wide swing to the south for insurance’s sake while the rest of the Rangers waited in a cold camp for their return. In little more than an hour, it looked like they had their answer.

  Jonah reined them up and dropped on
ce more to the new tracks they had just come across.

  “I don’t think this bunch is scouts for a village on the move, Cap’n,” he said, rising and slapping his glove against his britches silvered with dust. Jonah pulled the glove on, saying, “We should’ve found something by now, sweeping around like we done. No outriders would be pushing this far out from the village moving to new ground.”

  “Like I said, it’s a scalping party,” Coffee replied, assuredly.

  “Sorry, Sergeant,” Jonah said. “This bunch ain’t on the lope—it’s moving too slow to be making a war trail. They might just be hunters. But that ain’t the who of it.”

  “What else, Jonah?” Lockhart asked.

  “They’ve run onto friends out here.”

  The captain’s eyes narrowed sharply, a deep furrow dug between his bushy black eyebrows. “Friends?”

  “Another bunch,” Jonah replied, his arm motioning over the new tracks, then pointing north.

  “These are the prints of the war party we found last night?”

  With a shake of his head, Jonah said, “No. Different. One of these bucks riding a pony got a hoof I ain’t see before. A mustang with a split hoof. Back a ways you can see where they stopped while one of the riders changed mounts. Took the weight off the pony with the split hoof.”

  “I’ll be go to hell,” admired Lockhart, smiling in his black mustache. “What else you tell me about this bunch? How many now?”

  “Probably a couple dozen by now—what with this second outfit joined up.”

  “What’s all that tell you, Jonah?”

  “Says this ain’t a hunting party. Probably not a real scalp raid neither.”

  “What then?”

  “Likely the village split up to move across a big piece of ground, coming out of that Cedar Lake country you say is down there. Split up because of what you fellas told me—with the soldiers patrolling out of Fort Concho and all.”

  Lockhart worked his hands anxiously over the saddle horn. “Which means they’re re-forming ranks?”

  “If you mean they’re coming back together—you can bet the bank of Texas on it, Cap’n.”

  “By damned!” he exclaimed. “We’ve got a fresh trail—and it will lead us right to their village.”

  “Cap’n Lockhart,” Jonah said soberingly, “remember this bunch of Comanche is on the move.”

  Coffee leaned forward, his face suddenly gone serious in that red beard of his. Concerned, he asked, “They don’t know we’re behind them, do they?”

  “No,” Hook said. “They don’t know we’re back here—yet. But that’s only a matter of time.”

  40

  Moon of the Last Cold 1875

  THEIR ESCAPE FROM the yellow-leg soldiers at Palo Duro Canyon seemed like an eternity ago. More than four moons had come and gone since the Shahiyena and Kiowa, and the Comanche themselves, had torn themselves apart into smaller bands, scattering before the winds and Three-Finger Kinzie’s pony soldiers.

  It had worked. Once more the Kwahadi had survived the winter undiscovered. As brutal as the weather had been, as hard as it was to find the buffalo that would prolong the life of the band, as often as they had been compelled to uproot and move to a new camp, they had survived.

  The fight in the canyon had shown Tall One what few others were ready to admit. The white man and his army were not about to rest until they had driven the red man into the squalor of the agencies, until all the rest who remained out on the free prairie were ground under the heels of the tai-bos’ boots.

  What a fight it had been. Something that lived on in the bitter recollections of the warriors who recounted their bravery in covering the retreat of their people against the overwhelming numbers and the total surprise of the yellow-leg attack. From their hiding places behind trees and boulders, the Kwahadi men disappeared, melting into the chill dawn mist strung in a gauzy veil over the narrow creek, flitting away like cave bats come the rising of the sun. With their women and children climbing out of the canyon, with the Tonkawa and Seminole trackers in full possession of most of the Kwahadi pony herd—there was nothing left to do but flee. To escape so they could fight another day.

  So the gall of their defeat kept gnawing away at the men through that fall and into the time of cold. There in the canyon that morning they had been given no time for the women to gather up the travois ponies, to drag down lodges, to pack clothing and utensils, dried meat and robes, to ward off the coming winds of winter. Most everything had been lost to Three-Finger Kinzie.

  Doing what they had done time and again against this same soldier chief. Tall One and Antelope had joined the Kwahadi men in falling back slowly, firing, holding the soldiers at bay while they could. From every crevice in the canyon walls, behind every rock and tree big enough to give them cover, the warriors dogged and deviled that solid blue phalanx.

  Through the heated minutes of that fight the gray-eyed war chief was among them—Kiowa and Shahiyena as well as his own Kwahadi. He had exhorted them, rallied them, bolstered them as they fell back—urging them to hold the line a little longer. Many times during that hard winter Tall One recalled with great pride how he had stood with the war chief, he and Antelope some of the last to retreat.

  “For our women and children!” the gray-eyed one cheered first in one tongue, then in another. “For our families! For them we leave our bodies here to protect the ones who flee!”

  Back, back across the yucca and tiny prickly pear, across the white quartz studded in the red earth, the last holdouts had retreated, slowly scaling the upvaulted rock formations as red-tailed and swainson’s hawks drifted overhead on the morning’s warming air currents. For more than four twisted, tortured miles of that snaking canyon they had held the soldiers back. From afar Tall One had recognized the low, grumbling charge of the cavalry washing their way, so much like the sound of an old mare with her paunch filled with bad water. In the end it came time for the last of the warriors to disappear into the narrow washes and bent-finger arroyos like so many eye-corner wrinkles off the main canyon.

  “Flee!” the war chief hollered at them there at the last, waving his warriors away with his rifle. “We will regroup at the top.”

  It was there at the top of the canyon walls as that autumn day’s sun grew weary and desirous of seeking its rest beyond the far mountains that Tall One watched the gray-eyed war chief confront the headmen of the Kiowa and Shahiyena who said their people had suffered enough, who said they were turning away from the struggle. Would at last the Kwahadi join them on their road back to the agencies?

  “No, I will not join you in turning my back on my country. I will never join you in giving up the life of my father on the free prairie,” he told them. “How can you presume to ask that of me—the one who had never taken a mouthful of the white man’s food! How could I ever consider the reservation my last option? When I am the lone chief here who has never set my foot on the white man’s agencies—never held out my hand to accept one of his thin blankets, or his rotten pig meat, or his bug-infested flour.”

  The end had come there on the lip of that great crevasse as the Kwahadi war chief asked of those who were going in, “In your wisdom, tell me what my people are to do now. Is it better for me to lead them into the reservations now? Or better for us to continue this fight?”

  In the cold, bitter, hungry days that followed, many more voices took up the questions as the Antelope People argued among themselves.

  “Should now we be forced to walk the road those Shahiyena and Kiowa take? To follow their steps to the reservation, where the Kwahadi have never retreated, forced to turn over our weapons just so our starving women and children have something to fill their empty bellies now that these winter winds come slashing across the cold breast of our land? How do we expect the little ones, the old ones, and those who are sick to face this onslaught of winter bravely without lodges and blankets and robes, even spare moccasins for their frozen feet—when all was left behind?”

  Time ha
d altered their way of life as much as had the white man.

  In the nine winters Tall One had spent with the Kwahadi, he had seen the tribe teeter, then slip, from their one-time greatness. No more did they roam in such numbers. Summer after summer of warfare against the growing legions of yellow-legs, winter after winter as they hunted the disappearing buffalo—it took its toll year after year after year. One had only to look around him to see that the number of lodges had been whittled down by nearly half. Yet something in these proud people kept them alive and off the reservation that winter.

  They raised their crude shelters in the arroyos, out of the wind, until they could find enough old bulls to begin curing lodge skins once more. Again they hunted antelope and deer for clothing and moccasins. The few ponies they had escaped with had to be cared for more watchfully than ever, for those animals would allow the tribe’s finest horse thieves to strike once more come spring. Soon they would ride out as the grass shoved its first green shoots from the winter-weary ground.

  Once the weather began to moderate, they broke into six small groups, Antelope riding with one of the four scouting parties sent off to wander in search of buffalo and to clear the path for those to come. The other two warrior societies escorted the women and old ones, stayed with the children who rode atop the few drags they had left. The strongest of the women pulled the travois now, the ponies gone with the warriors, gone with the hunters. Antelope’s wife struggled as best she could, young and strong as she was with one child barely walking, another infant lashed in a blanket at her back as they plodded north, waiting for spring.