Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  Antelope tried to protest, saying, “He helped move the village each day like many of the others—”

  Tall One put his hand out against his young brother’s chest to interrupt him. “I did then what my people needed of me. And this morning I will make ready to fight these tai-bos. Because that is what my people need of me. Then—when we have killed these white men, and their scalps hang from our belts—I will call for you, Burns Red.”

  “Why will you call for me, Tall One?” Burns Red demanded haughtily. “You want to carry my belongings and be my tai-bo pony?”

  The small group laughed with Burns Red and Old Owl Man.

  “No. Because at long last, after all this time, I will see you take back all the insults you have heaped on me for so many seasons.”

  Burns Red laughed, and most of the others there laughed with him. “How are you going to make me take back these insults, Tall One, the tai-bo pony?”

  “You will take them back—or I will kill you.”

  Captain Lockhart had kept the marches of the last two days as short as he could while still gaining some ground on the village moving before them. The Rangers were closing in, and their weary, broken-down stock had to be as ready as those men could make them.

  Jonah felt proud to be among these men. Not one of them seemed concerned they were narrowing the lead on a force of proven warriors at least three, perhaps four times their own number. Instead of worrying about the coming fight, the Rangers instead talked about everything else but. Girls they left behind back home. What the coming spring meant to them as they were growing up. The smell of laundered sheets taken off the line by their mother and spread atop their tick mattresses with that once-a-week cleaning. The proper cutting of a male colt that made for the least amount of bleeding, hence narrowing the possibility of infection after doping the wound. How best to judge the fine qualities of a colt to know if you were going to geld him or leave him stand to stud.

  As well as talking about which weapons were better than others there among Company C as it went through the last hours before those thirty-some men rode into war with Quanah Parker’s Comanche.

  That last day they had covered a minimum of twenty-five miles without unduly punishing their horses, but Lockhart urged them on just so they could reach this great depression in the prairie where cold rainwater had been trapped in the passing of a storm two nights back. It had been a damp dying of winter, cold and chill, and the Staked Plain was now dotted with many ponds, some as wide as a hundred yards or more.

  The pond where the Rangers spent last night had been muddied by the village they were trailing. If the sediment hadn’t settled, Lockhart explained to men who really needed little explanation, then the village could not be more than a half day’s ride ahead.

  They didn’t light fires, nor did the captain allow any of the men to charge their pipes. That was perhaps the biggest loss to many of them—in Indian country a bowl of tobacco was so often a man’s only consolation when he could not have a cheery fire at his feet, bringing his coffeepot to boil.

  Instead, Lockhart would not allow the men to brood on what they were going to do without. He put them out in messes, separating the men as well as the horses they kept saddled in the event some of the Comanche had become aware of the Rangers on their backtrail and returned after nightfall to stir up trouble, attempting to run off their stock or make a night scalp raid. The wind grew ugly, and already there was a cold spit to it that served to let no man sleep. Throughout the long hours of cold darkness beneath a crooked strip of sky filled with whirling stars above that rolling tableland, the men had for the most part kept to themselves. Few talked at all, and if they did, it was only to let others know they were moving off for a minute or so to relieve themselves.

  Somewhere in the middle of the night as the sky swung around the north star, the wind swung down around them from the north. It tasted now of snow, guffawing around their cheerless camp like mocking swirls of Comanche laughter. Then the first of the icy snow began in that hour past midnight, pattering against the canvas and leather and wool felt of their hats like little feet come to steal away every vestige of their hope of catching the enemy.

  The cold, utter silence of that high, barren land seemed to swallow all sound in huge, hungry draughts … the darkness of that sky overhead graced with but the thinnest rind of moon behind the icy clouds, and that steady, incomprehensible rhythm of the wind, all made for one of the longest nights in Jonah’s life. Without the talk of other men, without the luxury of being called to action, Hook was forced to talk to himself, forced to stay in one place where he could not flee his bitter memories. Bittersweet thoughts of the past, painful thoughts of what might have been, once more came to darken his mind like the spilling of a tin of lampblack.

  What should have been.

  Hattie was back there in the East, as safe as any man could make his daughter now. Learning about books and manners and cultured things and … great Lord! he thought. Hattie would turn twenty this spring. Was it still February? No sure idea what month it was—he would have to find out from Coffee. The sergeant kept his log for Lockhart. And when they got down to Fort Concho, Jonah vowed to go in to the sutler’s there and find something to send his daughter. Maybe a dress he could have posted to the seminary school he sent money to regular. Maybe he could even find a music box. He remembered how she had always wanted one of those. The perfect gift for a girl her age.

  Twenty—he marveled. She was near five years older than her mama was when he and Gritta had married back in the Shenandoah. So Hattie wasn’t a girl no more. She’d be a full-blown woman when at last he went back to get her.

  As soon as he had his two boys back, as soon as he got back on Jubilee Usher’s trail. He’d find Gritta. He’d find her. He’d find her.

  He had found Hattie.

  And now they were only a matter of hours from this village of Quanah Parker’s Kwahadi who held white prisoners.

  Jonah knew he had found his boys.

  This done and his young’uns took back to Cassville, where they could likely stay with old Boatwright and help the old sheriff about his place … Hook would set out again, back to the land of the Mormons. How swiftly faded the dead from people’s minds, he brooded. It was the living lost that haunted a man.

  But he’d find her. He would find her.

  The wind died a little as the east seeped into gray, then a murky crimson behind the fleeing snow clouds. For a moment it reminded him of the birth opening on one of the old cows back to Missouri. Helping the old girls work their calves out into this world, a struggle of cow pushing and man pulling, the calf all spindly of leg and refusing Jonah a dry place for a grip. It was all a part of life, that. So much of life a person damned well had to do on his own.

  No one else to do it for him. Like this hunt. As much as Shad Sweete and Riley Fordham and now Two Sleep had come along to ride this trail with him—it was in the end his trail alone to ride this last mile.

  Like these last minutes as Lockhart motioned them up to shake out the kinks from sitting out the passing storm, knock the ice off their blankets and shelter halves they had wrapped around themselves in that silent, icy darkness; told to roll them up and lash them behind saddles as they each and all shivered in that cold crunching of the predawn wilderness. Tightening cinches, warming bits before slipping them back into horses’ mouths, loosening cold weapons in stiffened holsters and saddle boots.

  With only a wave of his hand to give voice to his command, Captain Lamar Lockhart signaled Company C of the Texas Rangers into the saddle, and pointed that brave band of thirty into the dawn’s cruel slash of whispering wind.

  42

  February 1875

  AFEW DAYS BACK one of them had told him what season this was. Said the Comanche called this the Moon of the Last Cold. Something like that. They also said next month was called the Moon of Geese Returning.

  Could be, Jonah thought now as a cold, cheerless sun rose on that small band of white m
en moving north at an easy lope across the icy snow gathered in crusted fans around the stubble of dead prairie grass. Not so hard a pace that it would take any more than necessary out of the horses.

  The ice crystals in the wind flew against his canvas mackinaw, pecked at the brim of his hat the way Gritta’s chickens had pecked at the yard outside their cabin.

  His eyes crawled from horizon to horizon. Maybe it was so, in a few weeks they might actually get to see the big longnecks stretching their great wings out in wide vees across the bright spring blue of the sky overhead. It was always a sight to behold, he told himself. No sight to match it, those longnecks coming and going, spring or autumn.

  To think on how those birds made a circuit of their seasons, great loops encompassing thousands of miles with every flight. They would be moving around to the north soon, come the spring. Then back around, retracing those same thousands of miles with the first halloo of autumn. Hell, just like the buffalo. The numberless that wandered into the winds with the countless, ageless seasons.

  Those animals no different from the wind itself that worked around a man in great loops that likely meant a journey of thousands of miles too, a journey that eventually brought the wind right back where it began.

  How Jonah prayed the wind and this great endless cycle of the seasons would take him back to where he had started.

  Prayed it, as Company C rode the cold sun up into that late winter sky unsullied by a single cloud, save for the east, where the storm had blown.

  What a perfect day for a man to go hunting or fishing, to work his fields, to repair harness or fix that ill-hung door on the barn. Or a perfect day for a man to do nothing at all but lie on his back among the bounty of his fields and stare up at the great endless immensity of all God’s handiworks. Wondering where he fit, in all that had been wrought of the seasons and sculpted by the wind around him.

  A damned cold day as well, one fit for spilling blood. Then at last he could start back home with his boys.

  This was turning out to be one of those late winter days when the sun hung high, dull as a pewter button, when the air would never really grow warm—when John Corn, who was riding point, suddenly wheeled his mount around in a tight, haunch-sliding circle and skedaddled back for the column. Reaching those in the lead, the Ranger pointed ahead, talking in hushed tones to the captain, then led Lockhart, Johns, and Coffee ahead a ways where all three stopped in view of the rest. Lockhart reached about and took his field glasses from a saddlebag, then sat staring, likely adjusting on something Jonah could not sec with the naked eye, something lost in all that immensity of snowy brilliance.

  “You think they’ve spotted the village?” Hook quietly asked Two Sleep beside him in the column.

  The old Shoshone nodded. “Yellow jackets.”

  “Comanche? That what you figure?”

  “That what I see.”

  Hook glared again, squinting into the shimmering distance of the icy plain, trying to make out anything that Two Sleep could claim would be Comanche.

  Lockhart reined about, hurriedly stuffing the field glasses away. He slowed his horse to a walk as he reached the company and began by giving them what sounded like his first real order in many days as he rode down their line.

  “Dismount.”

  They obeyed him instantly without question, without muttering a word. The only sounds among those thirty were those of the restive horses, the squeak of soaped leather, the rattle of buckle and chain, the squeak of holster and rifle boot. Their captain had news for them fit to singe the hair even in a Ranger’s ears.

  “If your cinches need tightening, now’s the time,” Lockhart instructed. “We’ve spotted the enemy ahead.”

  “The Comanch’?” Clyde Yoakam asked.

  “No doubt, Sergeant,” Lockhart said, wheeling his horse and walking it back up the line of men, who stood flipping stirrups over their saddles, tugging and tightening on cinches and cruppers, drawing up their own britches, taking belts up a notch or so. That done, some men pulled rifles from their boots with a noise like tired buggy springs, chambering a cartridge into the breech. Others broke open the action of their pistols, exposing cylinders, slipping a sixth round beneath the finely honed hammers.

  “You see how many, Captain?” asked June Callicott.

  “Not certain how many. Not really sure that they’ve seen us just yet either. If it weren’t for the glasses I used, that camp’d still be just a black dot on the edge of the horizon. So it’s not likely they know we’re here just yet.”

  “You saw ’em still in camp?” Jonah asked, his eyes going to fix a cold, milk-pale sun against midsky.

  “We’ve caught them sitting.”

  Hook wagged his head. “We didn’t catch ’em, Cap’n. They ought to be up and on the move long before now. Only reason we got ’em sitting is those Comanche are waiting for us.”

  Lockhart’s face went dark as scorched wood behind his bushy black mustache and that week’s growth of shadow over his cheeks. He jutted his chin at Hook’s severe appraisal of their situation. “So be it, men. Remount—and form into line for inspection.”

  Jonah had to admire the captain for that. Lockhart wasn’t about to be bullied into fearing this bunch of warriors. He could be a cool one when it came down to cutting the deck with the whole night’s game resting on this one last hand they were about to play.

  The entire company came into the saddle and settled almost noiselessly, jostling their mounts left-about into one long line stretching right and left, facing their stiff-jawed captain. Clearly holding his horse in check, Lockhart eased down that formation, appraising each one of them from their sun-faded hat to the toes of their high-heeled boots stuffed clear to the insteps in the stirrups. Nearly every last one of them wore two belts, one looped over the other around their outer coats in a lazy X, all brass and lead that looked damned near as impressive as a crown of feathers would atop a proven Kwahadi warrior.

  The captain slowed before Two Sleep and Hook, and stopped. “I’m a little concerned about your Snake here, Jonah. Going into battle now, things are likely to get a bit confusing for the rest of the men. Perhaps he should stay behind.”

  “I go fight with you,” Two Sleep said evenly, his eyes held straight ahead, as unwavering and military as any soldier’s.

  Jonah felt more proud of him at that moment than he had since that morning in the red desert when they jumped Usher’s Mormons. He stared straight ahead too as he said, “He’ll do fine, Cap’n.”

  “If the Indian doesn’t mind, I do need someone to see to the pack mules. Benton!”

  “Sir?”

  “Bring up those mules.”

  “What you have in mind doing with them two mules?” Hook asked as Billy Benton brought their pair of pack animals up and halted beside Lockhart.

  “These mules carry what extra ammunition Company C has along,” the captain explained. “I’m putting it in charge of the Snake here.”

  He turned to Two Sleep, whose black-cherry eyes finally veered to touch the captain’s face. Lockhart asked, “You understand what’s expected of you?”

  The Shoshone nodded. “I guard the mules with my life.”

  Lockhart flashed a grin, motioning Benton forward with the picket ropes strung back to the mules. “I can see I’ve made a good choice in this matter. Thank you … Two Sleep.”

  It was the first time Jonah could recall any of the Rangers, much less the captain himself, calling the warrior by name. As if until this moment he had been just an Injun. A faceless, nameless red-belly. But in these minutes before the bloodletting, Two Sleep had somehow become one of them. Worthy of no less an honor than standing watch over their supply of cartridges.

  No matter that there were biscuits and beans and bacon in those packs. The Shoshone had just been asked to protect what was even more precious, perhaps life sustaining. The bullets.

  “For some of you this charge will be the first time you ever rode into something like this,” Lockhart conti
nued, reining his horse to the side and easing on down the line of Rangers. “Hell, I gotta admit I never rode into a bunch of Comanche that’s been ready for us. No matter is it—your green will be worn off by the time the second shot is fired and you’ve got a whiff of gunpowder in your nostrils, men.”

  When the captain reached the end of the line, he sawed his mount about and brought his horse back to the middle, where he stopped to face his thirty. “You’ll ride out at my order. I will take the point, and no man will allow his mount to pass mine. Make yourselves clear on that. When we begin, spread out ten feet apart, and keep the same pace as those on either side of you. Our success or failure will depend on us staying together.”

  Lockhart drew the back of his glove across his lips, chewed the lower lip a moment, then continued. “If one of you becomes separated from the company, do all that is in your power to make it back to us. In the end we may be pressed to dismount and fort up behind the bodies of our horses. If I give that order, we will circle Two Sleep and the mules. Re-form around the pack mules before we start dropping the horses.”

  “Dropping the horses, Captain?” asked Wig Danville. “Shoot ’em?”

  “Yes.”

  “But, sir—I say ride. And ride hard. We fort up, them Comanche gonna swallow us up for sure.”

  “Danville, there’s a lot of old frontiersmen who can tell you chapter and verse of their own history where the few held out against the many—and held the day.”

  “You run, Wig,” Coffee added, “the Comanche got us separated. Chase us down one at a time.”

  “What the sergeant says is the gospel according to Lamar Lockhart,” the captain added. “We stay together.”

  “We all live,” Deacon Johns bellowed in that brimstone-laced voice of his, “or we all go to the bosom of the Lord our God together.”