“I know damned well you ain’t never shot one yourself.”
Jonah’s eyes narrowed at his cousin. “Well, we’re about to take care of that right now, Artus. Best get your skinning knives honed on them stones we bought you back to Abilene.”
“That’s all I did last night whilst you was casting balls. These knives honed so sharp they’ll slit a flea’s leg up the long way.”
“All right,” Jonah replied, smiling briefly before it went the way of the stiff, hot breeze. “I’m fixing to have me some fun now. And fixing to put you to work for your pay.”
“My share’s fifty dollars a month—right?”
“You’ll work for it too,” Jonah said. “Just remember what I told you Shadrach Sweete taught me: buffalo may got the brains of a flea—but when they get riled, they are a mighty enemy. Shad always said, ‘They get their size and their surprising speed coming at you—all rolled into one deadly punch.’”
He jammed the pair of crossed sticks into the soil and laid the long-barrel of the half-stock muzzle loader into the vee. Bringing the hammer back to half cock, Jonah took a brass cap from his pouch and seated it on the nipple. He dragged the heavy hammer back to full cock and pulled on the back of the rifle’s two triggers, thereby setting the front trigger to respond to a hair’s touch.
“Wait a minute,” Moser whispered, touching his cousin on the shoulder.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just want to look at ’em a minute. I ain’t like you. I never seen anything like this before.”
This was as close to an eternal mystery as anything would ever be, but no man would likely know just how many buffalo there were in those four great herds blanketing the Great Plains at the time the Civil War whimpered to a close. There would be those who would later estimate the number at more than seventy-five million spread from the Canadian border to the southern reaches of Texas: the northern, the Republican, the Arkansas, and the Texas herds.
“There just ain’t no way for us to count ’em, Jonah. Like the fish in the sea.”
“You ever seen the sea, Artus?”
“That neither.”
“Well, cousin—to me there’s but one way to count buffalo. And that’s when we have ten of ’em on the ground. Then we know we keep our jobs and made our money for another day.”
Moser clucked. “I ’member something my mama said from the Bible she was always reading to me, words I think on looking out on all these beasts.” He cleared his throat in preparation, then spoke as if in a new voice, “‘Behold, for they are like the locusts of Egypt come to trouble the pharaoh.’”
As his cousin quoted scripture in that foreign voice filled with distant thunder, Jonah turned to Moser, a little wonder mixed with admiration on his bushy, sharply chiseled face. “You said those words like a true Bible-thumper, Artus. Sure you don’t want to pass a collection plate instead of skinning buffalo?”
Moser appeared a bit embarrassed, his eyes misting as he gazed back at the herd while it slowly shifted like a rolling black sea through the notch in the low hills. “I figure on skinning buffalo, Jonah. Always do what I set out to do.”
Hook nestled his cheek along the riflestock. “So do I, cousin. We need us the money.”
“You figure to stay here in Kansas a long time shooting buffalo?”
“Only as long as it takes to get us a small poke, cousin.”
“Then we get back to looking for your family?”
“Now you shut up for a while so Jonah here can get his mind on killing a buffalo down there.”
As he started to relax his breathing, Hook brought the front blade down on the nearest of the beasts. He set the blade back in the notch on the buckhorn rear sight and let half his breath out, held and moved his finger to the rear trigger.
With it set, he inched his finger to the front trigger. The rifle went off, shoving back against his shoulder so hard it surprised him. The cross-sighting sticks fell as the smoke rolled away.
“Damn, you missed him,” Moser said. “Fell short, Jonah.”
“Short?” he asked in that cursing tone as he dragged the rifle back, went to his knees, and blew down the barrel. Yanking up the powder horn, he poured a charger full of the black grains down the muzzle, followed by a ball seated on a greased linen patch that he drove home with the long hickory ramrod.
With the hammer at half cock, Jonah dug in his pouch for another cap and pressed it atop the nipple. “How far short, cousin?”
“From here, I’d have to say not more’n twenty foot where it kicked up dust.”
“Damn lucky, ain’t we?”
“How’s that, Jonah?”
Hook scrunched his belly down into the grass, spread his legs apart for a steadier hold, and closed one eye. “Lucky that shot didn’t spook that buffalo, or the whole damned herd.”
“I s’pose so, not knowing buffalo the way you do.”
The roar of the rifle surprised them both.
Through the gray smoke adrift on the gust of hot September breeze, Jonah watched the buffalo lurch forward as if spooked. Then his breath caught as the beast collapsed, hind legs first, then fell cleanly to the side, thrashing but a moment, attempting to throw its massive head about as if in so doing it could hurl itself back to his skinny, inadequate legs.
“Lordee, lordee!” Moser was screaming as Jonah clambered to his feet.
Hook grabbed his cousin and clamped a hand over his mouth. “Now you done it. Look it!”
“They’re going—dammit all and my big mouth!” Artus groaned. “But that was downright beautiful, Jonah!”
“To hell with the rest of ’em—we got one. Our first, by damned! We’ll get the other nine slick as shooting that one.”
“Damn right we will!”
They embraced unashamedly, bounding around and around in a tight circle there on the hilltop as the rest of the herd sauntered away from the carcass in their characteristic rocking-chair gait.
“You got work to do now, Artus.”
They looked at one another, smiling—a new kinship between them that had deepened what they already felt for one another.
“That’s just fine by me, cousin. Far as I’m concerned—you just keep me busy rest of the afternoon.”
“All right,” Hook replied, dragging the ramrod from the thimbles below the long barrel. “You get to skinning that one out so we can butcher him while I go see to dropping the other nine for the day.”
He was partway down the hill and jamming a cap on the nipple when Moser called out to him.
“Hey, Jonah! You’re a real buffalo hunter now.”
“By glory—I guess I am at that!”
19
Late November, 1866
ICE CRUNCHED BENEATH their boots as they plodded through the shallow puddles that lay everywhere. Ice-scum puddles and the dung from half a thousand horses and mules.
Track-end was always like this: its own shantytown of thrown-up board shelters and wall tents and smoky fires and sheet-metal stoves, men and animals all turned rump to the November wind that came down off the northern plains, invading Kansas where the K-P was shutting down for the winter freeze-up.
In long lines the men waited, stretching out from the tall Sibley tent like strings of coarse linen being threaded through the tent—in one side and out the other when they had been paid off and sent on their way. Germans and Irish mostly. The rest were a motley mixture of veterans come west after the war. Nothing left for them back home now. For most, home was gone, or something a man had no hankering to return home to after living through the horrors that had been that great rebellion.
So these men stood in line again, like old soldiers at the mess kitchens, collars turned up and hat brims pulled down as the few icy flakes lanced out of the low-bellied clouds little more than an arm’s length away overhead. A sky still deciding whether to snow or sleet. And with every gust of cruel wind, the smoke from the stoves and fire pits skidded in protest and in hurried patches along the groun
d in company with the dancing flakes.
Roadbed, grading, riprap, and track crews along with the hunters, laborers all—paid off then sent into the unknown for a winter’s respite. If the money lasted a man that long.
“Company will be back here come spring,” explained one of the men at the long table inside the tent as Hook and Moser inched inside the doorway, hugging as close as they could to those in front, so to squeeze into the warmth put out by the valiant sheet-iron stove.
“When you reckon on spring coming?” asked someone up ahead in line.
“Like I’ve said before—there’s a good chance we’ll be wanting to lay rail by the middle of March. Mayhaps the end of March. You men need work then, come round. We’ll start putting down track right out yonder, where the last tie section finished work yesterday.”
“March. Maybe middle of March,” was the whisper coming back down the line among these comrades in arms sharing that vital secret with one another.
But until then, they would be on their own once more, each man taking his money and parting from this place.
“What-cher name?”
“Jonah Hook,” he answered, watching his clerk beginning to scan the ledger as Moser stepped up behind Jonah and the next man in line shifted to another clerk down the table.
“You two together, is it?” the man asked, eyeing Moser.
Artus nodded.
The fleshy man went back to his ledger, then looked up, squinting. “Don’t find your name here. You a recent hire for that tie gang?”
“I didn’t lay track. Hunted meat.”
He pursed his full, fleshy lips in a mean fashion that reminded him of a schoolteacher he’d suffered back in the Shenandoah. She was the reason he had never gone beyond the fourth grade.
“Why didn’t you say so to begin with, Hook?”
He didn’t figure it was a question needing an answer as the clerk dragged up another, smaller ledger, opened it, and scanned down the page with an accusingly slow index finger. “Here you are. ‘Hunter.’” He looked up at Hook. “You been here awhile. Shows here you’ve turned in your wagon and team and squared accounts as of yesterday.”
“That mean I owe anything?” he asked, suddenly worried.
“No, Mr. Hook. But you’ve made yourself some money I see.”
“Three months’ worth coming to me.”
“Good wages they are too.” He pointed at Artus. “After he takes his fifty dollars per month off the top.”
“All right by me.” Jonah watched the man behind the table reach down into an iron-banded box stationed beside his chair. Behind each payroll clerk stood a pair of armed men, short-barreled scatterguns cradled in the crook of each elbow. Their eyes were constantly on the move—from the laborers standing at the tent flaps with craning necks, to the clerks who dipped in and out of the boxes filled with neat stacks of colored scrip.
The man licked a finger and counted through the sheets of scrip. Then satisfied, he held a stack in the air for Artus, counted out another bundle he presented to Jonah. “You fellas ever seen Union money?”
“Never. Not till now anyway.” He stared down at all the money he held in his hand. “How much is here?”
“I have paid Mr. Moser one hundred fifty dollars of your seven hundred eighty-eight.”
“That leaves me how much?”
The clerk smiled benignly. “Six hundred thirty-eight. You both made a few bonuses during your stay. Now please move along, fellas.”
They did, staring dumbly at what they held in their hands as they exited between a pair of armed railroad guards and out to the cold of that winter’s day.
“I was hoping for a bonus myself,” Moser grumped, staring at the difference between his bills and Jonah’s.
“You’d complain if’n I was to slit your throat with a new knife.” He slapped his cousin on the back. “Any this bonus money is ours together. You got your pay ’cause you did all the hard work.”
“You was always there, helping me skin, Jonah.”
“Like I told you—we hired on together.”
“And we’re looking for family together.” Moser stopped, getting Jonah to slow up and turn around. “So what we do now?”
Hook shrugged. “I figure we could do with some whiskey to wash down the memory of all this buffalo stink we got on us. Get me a new pair of boots and two new rifles for us.”
“A rifle—for me?”
“You best figure on using some of that money to outfit yourself for the road, Artus.”
Moser wagged his head, smiling broadly. “Damn, won’t that be something. Us having new boots and maybe a new shirt to go along with ’em—and a brand new shiny rifle too.”
“We got to get our outfits before we go drinking up everything we earned.”
“How ’bout some poker, Jonah?”
“Does figure that we’re due some fun, Artus. Let’s get into town and see what they got for us in the way of trail fixin’s.”
They saddled their Creek horses down in the tent shantytown and mounted. Jonah cradled the old muzzle loader across his lap as they pointed their noses east, a stiff, chill wind at their back, troubling the long, brown hair that now brushed Hook’s shoulders. Icy flakes hammered them in a growing swirl of white against the monotonous brown gray world as they pushed back toward Abilene.
Hard for a man to really tell, with as thick as the clouds hung overhead, but it was midafternoon by the time they reached the new town. Within another hour, they were stepping from a mercantile, wearing unfamiliar new boots, new canvas britches, and calico shirts. With new, stiff pinch hats on their heads and new Spencer rifles cradled protectively in their arms. Hook and Moser tied their old clothes in saddlepacks at the edge of the wide street.
“What now, Jonah?” Moser sighed.
“Don’t think I ever seen you smile so big, cousin.”
“Never had so much to smile about, I s’pose. There was a time or two that last few months where I got to wondering if I’d make it through butchering out another buffalo. We was always bringing our meat in, and it disappeared quicker’n we could shoot and gut and skin.”
“You sure had a bad mouth on you there the last few months.”
“What you expect—up to my elbows in blood ever’ day. Smelling like a gut-eater all the time. Even caught myself turning up my nose at my own smell, Jonah. Come a time or two the wind shifted.”
“We do smell like two of the prairie’s finest, don’t we?”
“You reckon there’s a place a man can get some of this washed off?”
He looked up, then down the one street that Abilene boasted beside the newly laid track. “One of these watering holes bound to have some water they can heat up for a man wanting to scrape some prairie stink off him. C’mon.”
In minutes they were standing at a low bar, watching the approach of an ugly barman.
“Most fellas just like washing the dirt down with some of my whiskey,” he told the pair of buffalo hunters. “I suppose for a dollar I could get them out back to heat you some water you two could swish around in.” He shrugged and turned. “Follow me.”
They pushed past a blanket hung over a crude doorway, passing into a steamy, warm room where two stoves were crackling, pumping out plenty of heat. Beads of moisture popped out on Hook’s forehead, just standing there, his eyes peering through the foggy gloom.
“Hey! Get over here!” the barman ordered, then turned to whisper to the two men. “This bunch ain’t bad as a lot I’ve seen—ugly as sin and stupid to boot. But they do what I tell ’em, and they keep the place clean.”
Jonah watched two middle-aged squaws appear out of the gloom of lamplight and steam. Dark stains covered the fronts of their hide dresses, from sagging breasts to the soaked moccasins they wore on their feet.
“We take in laundry,” the barman explained, then smiled as if in need of no more explanation. “And if the price is right, either one of these ugly sisters can clean a man’s plow right proper. Damn, but I
njun women is good in the blankets.”
He reached over and squeezed a woman, one hand on her rump, the other rubbing a breast. She looked at Moser and Hook with a faint smile, as if already figuring out what they had come for.
“No, they want to wash,” said the barman, loudly, as if the women were deaf just because they did not readily understand his English. “No poking now.” In sign with his hands and gyrating hips, he made the women understand that it was not fornication the customers had come for—but some of the squaws’ hot water instead.
“That’ll be two dollars,” he said.
When Jonah had paid him, the barman bent down and gave one of the squaws a sloppy kiss on the mouth, then turned through the blanket doorway, proud of himself as the woman wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and grimaced. The two squaws looked at the pair of men, wrinkling their noses slightly at the stench in the close room. Hook could tell that the smell of the buffalo hung heavy about them both. He pinched his fingers on his nostrils and made a wrinkled face to show he agreed with them.
Both old squaws smiled, then signaled the white men into the far reaches of the low-roofed back room, where they were shown low wooden tubs on the floor, filled with half-dirty water, a scum of soapsuds drifting on the surface. Jonah dabbed a finger into the water.
“Least it’s warm, cousin. You take that’un.”
“We gonna undress in front of these women?”
“They ain’t women, Artus. They just two old squaws.”
Jonah dropped his britches and hurried out of his boots. When he had his longhandles off, the rifle and the belt gun handy beside the tub, he stepped in and settled himself. “Now don’t this feel good. I ain’t had something like this soak in … last time was before I walked off to join General Price.”
“You been smelling a might gamy, that’s for—”
Jonah looked up when Artus stopped talking suddenly. Out of the foggy haze lit with two hissing oil lamps emerged a third woman, younger than the other two and the closest thing to pretty Jonah had seen in years. He swallowed hard, looking at the way her black hair gleamed in the saffron light as she pulled the hood from her head, her proud breasts pressed against the buckskin dress as she dragged the blanket capote off her shoulders.
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