He sighed, his head going back against the pillow. “I owe her, Artus.”
“We both owe her,” Moser replied. “Likely, she figures she was just paying you back for helping her, cousin.”
“I help those I can … until I can help those of my own.”
He was slow healing, not like when he had been younger, or even when he had been winged in the war. But that festering bullet in his shoulder had taken most everything out of him during those long days; it had brought fever to his mind and an endless series of nightmares drawn sepia-toned against the back of his heated, fitful thoughts. Even now, he still dreaded closing his eyes for fear of the visions of war and guerrillas and those broken windows of his Missouri home with their raggedy curtains drifting in and out on the cold breeze. Hook had always considered himself a strong man in that way—and would not let another know of his fear. But he wondered how long he would carry this horror inside.
Jonah knew that horror would plague him until he found them all.
“Your cousin tells me you’re quite a hand at cards,” said surgeon Henry Porter late one afternoon as the sun began to set at the edge of a clear, cold sky.
“Never learned at home,” Hook explained with a grin on his wolfish face, yellowed eyes glowing as Porter turned up a nearby lamp. “Mama wouldn’t allow my daddy such instruments of the devil’s work.”
“You learn in the war?”
“Most times there was little else for us to do—waiting to walk here or there, either attacking or retreating. Only to wait some more after the fighting was done.”
“You figure you’re up to playing?”
A ragged piece of Jonah’s soul leapt. “When?”
“Tonight. Some of the others—we get together every two weeks or so. Usually after the paymaster’s been to the fort and each of us is feeling flush, ready to spread some of our meager pay among friends of our choosing.”
“They won’t mind, will they? Me being …”
“A Southerner? No, not at all. In fact, one of my best friends is a Missourian, like yourself, Jonah. Captain Frederick Benteen. He’s always anxious to play as much as he can, as there’s talk that he’ll be sent farther west come spring.”
“What’s west of here?”
Porter wagged his head. “Between us and Denver City—not a lot but the open jaws of hell itself. Benteen hears he’ll be assigned to garrison Fort Wallace out on the Denver Road.”
“Tough duty?”
Porter rose from the side of the bed. “It’s all tough, Jonah. Otherwise, wouldn’t you be soldiering—instead of making a handy target of yourself?”
He had to admit he liked Henry Porter. There were times after Porter finished rounds in the early evening that Hook came to know the surgeon’s habit of returning to his monkish cell and there pulling a bottle from inside one of his dress boots. It became a habit with Hook to thus time his visits with Porter. The surgeon had made it clear he was a social animal who hated drinking alone.
Hook liked the genuineness of the man.
“That arm and shoulder of yours are likely to be stiff for some time to come, Jonah,” said the surgeon that evening as he spread a gray army blanket over a table soon to see chips and cards and drinking glasses.
“How long?”
Porter stopped, holding in his hands four small china ashtrays. “It may never be the same again. I don’t want you to expect that it will respond to you the way it did before you were shot.”
Hook felt the severe pinch of fear cross his chest. He looked down at the sling that cradled the arm. “But I got feeling, and I move it every day.”
“I know. But—that bullet sitting in there for that long, the way I had to tear at the muscle to get that sonofabitch out—all of that took its toll. It’ll be some time before you get all that strength back. And it may never come back good as new.”
Jonah settled into a chair, with his right arm turning an empty glass round and round, staring at his distorted reflection beneath the lamplight. “It’ll come back, Doc. I know you done everything you could for me. So it’ll come back in its own time.”
“That’s right.” Porter smiled, watching the woman settle herself in the corner out of the light. “In its own time, Jonah.”
The woman was always there, wherever Jonah went. He had come to accept that, then almost ignored it, taking it for granted that she followed him everywhere. Silent.
The others came in not long after Moser showed up, gone and back again from Hays City not far away, there to see about buying a pair of holsters that Jonah wanted for the two of them. Better to carry the belt guns in them than stuffed in the waistband of their britches. They were gleaming, freshly soaped, and heavy rigs. Artus claimed he would need time getting used to wearing his.
At the table, most fired up Porter’s cigars as a means of socializing, smoking the fragrant cheroots while they sipped from the glasses each man kept filled from bottles newly purchased this payday. Hands were shaken all around with the newcomers. Most already knew of the two civilians and the Pawnee woman staying at Porter’s infirmary, by the grace of the surgeon’s largess.
Major Wycliffe Cooper was the brooding one who said little, Hook discovered. Playing his cards conservatively and drinking twice as much as anyone else. He was not a happy sort and made a disagreeable drunk as the night wore on and the room began to stink of stale sweat and cigar smoke and spilled whiskey. Yet not even Cooper dared bother the woman once he had asked the reason for her presence and Porter had explained she belonged to the buffalo hunter named Jonah Hook.
“Yes, I’ve heard of you,” Cooper admitted, as he dragged red-rimmed eyes from the corner where the woman sat watching the white men. “Rode in here with a bullet still in you. There’s a story there, my friend. Share it with us.”
“I’m not your friend.” Hook said it as pleasantly as he could, yet the words possessed an edge. “And there’s no story to tell.”
Cooper laid his cards down, bleary-eyed from the smoke and alcohol. “I’ll not play a gentleman’s game with a liar.”
“Major,” Captain Frederick W. Benteen said, putting his hand on Cooper’s shoulder. “We came here to play cards, and by God—I don’t want you causing any trouble for Porter’s guest here. I’m bound and determined to get some of my money back that I’ve lost to Hook here tonight.”
Cooper sank back into his chair. “I’m done for the evening. The rest of you can stay and play with this—this civilian. I’m going for some air and then to bed.”
In silence the officer saw himself out, openly glaring at the woman as he dragged his long wool coat onto his arms.
“A shame,” Porter commented sourly. “I think Custer’s tolerance is running a short fuse for Major Cooper’s drunkenness.”
There followed a long moment of silence as each man dealt with his own thoughts.
“Let’s play cards, gentlemen,” the handsome Captain George W. Yates suddenly suggested, rubbing his hands together. “I feel I too might be dipping into Benteen’s personal coffers this night. If Mr. Hook lets me!”
The rest at the table chuckled. A few raised their glasses.
“About time too,” Jonah said. “The last game of cards I was playing, I had to leave before collecting my winnings.”
“That the game earned you your bullet?” asked Lieutenant Myles Moylan, adjutant to Custer.
“Yes,” Hook answered without hesitation. “Instead of gold, you might say I carried away a little lead for my trouble.”
That eased them some that first night, as did the way Hook carefully let go most of his winnings through the final hour of the game, losing enough of what he had won earlier in the night that no man left hard of feelings or hesitant to return come next payday.
But that payday was Jonah’s last at Fort Hays. There was nothing more Porter could do with the bullet wound. The rest was up to Hook now. Besides, word had it that the regiment’s lieutenant colonel was growing anxious to know why Porter had taken in thr
ee civilian boarders, feeding them from his own dwindling personal pantry.
“You’ll find something useful to do with yourself for the rest of the winter?” Porter asked that February day as Hook, Moser, and the woman prepared to ride out.
“Never fear, Doctor.”
“It’s not safe west of here.”
Moser glanced at Hook. Then away.
“We’re not going west of here,” Jonah replied. “Find something to do until spring comes.”
“Then what? Go back to looking for your family?”
“I’ve got to try.”
“Don’t waste your life, trying to find out what happened to theirs,” Porter said as Jonah went to the saddle, slowly rotating the tender shoulder once he was settled.
“I don’t figure any day I have now is a waste, Doctor. Every day’s a gift from here on out. Owe my life to that squaw and to you too.”
“Word has it there’ll be work here come spring.”
“Not interested in soldiering.”
“You’ve told me of your scouting with Bridger up in the Dakotas,” Porter said, backing a few steps to gaze up at the horseman in the bright winter sunshine. “I figured you could put to good use what you learned from him and that character Sweete.”
He remembered now—so long without remembering—and touched the small rawhide-and-quill medicine wheel suspended from his neck on a cord there beneath his shirt. “Shadrach Sweete.”
“They’ll be hiring scouts for the coming campaign. A man like you can use the work.”
“And the money!” Moser said.
“Till spring, Doctor!” Hook cried out as he reined about and set his horse in motion, pulling along the packhorse. Behind him came Moser, and the Pawnee woman riding bareback on the animal that of a time had been Moser’s pack animal stolen from the Creeks down in Indian Territory.
“Till spring!”
She came to him again as she had those times before, most every day when he sent the other man away to hunt or search for firewood or peel cottonwood bark for the horses to eat.
She called him Hook. And her heart had grown big and warm for him. The way she grew moist for him whenever those yellow eyes told her he must have her.
He called her by her name now, ever since leaving the soldier fort she knew as Hays. Called her Grass Singing in his tongue, unable to pronounce it in her Pawnee language. It was enough that he called her Grass Singing and held her close beneath the blankets in this dugout the three of them had made against the side of a hill where erosion had started to form this small cavern they had called their home these past two moons since leaving the soldier fort.
The three had lived as her own people had lived, she told herself whenever she began to miss the village and her friends. But then she remembered her mother and aunt, and how they had been thrown away by the tribe once their husbands had been killed by Lakota. No longer could the women live within the Pawnee circle, not without a man to care for them.
Grass Singing had a man to care for her. Hook, she called him. It made a ringing sound on the back of her tongue.
Many white men had lain atop her, but he was the first she had grown to care for before she ever received him. Looking back, she had come to care for him that terrible day the white men shot their guns at one another in the drinking place, the day she ran from that awful place, following the two white men who had helped her. Not knowing anything else to do—afraid to stay there more than she was afraid to ride into the unknown with the pair.
He had not clawed at her the way others had. Still, she sensed his overpowering intensity as he rode atop her and finished quickly, sooner than she had wanted. He had slept against her that first day, still asleep when the other white man returned to the dugout with fresh meat. She was not embarrassed, for the blankets were over them, and it seemed the other white man knew anyway what would eventually come to be between her and the man Hook.
With little of the white tongue that she could remember, the three of them mostly spoke in sign that Hook taught the other man through those long weeks of waiting for the prairie to green and the winds to come about out of the south, once more blessing this land with warmth.
She did not expect him to care for her the way she had come to feel for him in her heart. It was enough that he was here with her now, touching her body the way she had always wanted it to be touched, making her breasts and nipples alive with tension and desire, his fingers stroking the inside of her thighs before he drove himself into her moistness as she sang out in maddening fury for him.
And she came to love the way he cradled her after they were finished while his flesh grew small once more. Never before had any man done more than finish with her and pull up his britches and be gone.
Until Hook had come along, she had expected no more than what she had watched the ponies do back at her village that moved with the seasons—hunting buffalo and fighting Lakota and Shahiyena.
She did not want this winter to end, knowing when it did that he would be gone from her, perhaps never to return. But Grass Singing kept her sorrow to herself and cherished each day with the man she had secretly given her heart to … she would not trouble him with her love or make demands on him.
Outside the snow was melting and the prairie had begun to green. The entrance to their dugout dripped with the rhythm of the changing seasons as the buds on the willow and alder began to make their appearance. More sign each day of this prairie coming back to life after a winter’s sleep.
Inside, there in the private place that was her heart, Grass Singing wept with the changing seasons.
23
Late March, 1867
“WHAT YOU MEAN you can’t use him?” Jonah Hook asked the two soldiers and long-bearded, unkempt civilian seated behind the table in the shade of this fort porch.
“Your friend there—”
“He’s my goddamned cousin!” Hook snapped.
The officer sighed, smoothing his waxed mustaches this early spring day and continued, “Your cousin doesn’t have enough experience out in this country to warrant the army hiring him as a scout.”
“What am I going to do?” Artus Moser asked in a husky whisper, his eyes telling of his fear. “You got hired on, Jonah.”
Hook stared at the toes of his boots, bewildered.
They had come here counting on the both of them getting hired on to scout for the forthcoming campaign. When the chief of scouts and the officers here gathered learned of Hook’s months of experience along the Emigrant Road and with General Connor’s Powder River Expedition as a U.S. Volunteer, not to mention the fact that he had been employed last fall as a buffalo hunter for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, the army promptly snatched up this tall, gangly Southerner the way summer rain fell in this part of the plains: fast and furious.
Hiring Moser as a scout was a different matter altogether.
“Why can’t you use him?” Hook asked of the long-bearded, middle-aged frontiersman who sat quietly chewing on the stump of a much-battered briar pipe.
“I’ve tried to explain that to you,” interrupted the double-barred officer.
“What if he rides along with me—at no pay?”
The officer slammed an open fist down on the table. “I’ve told you, mister. Now—if you keep at this, you’ll likely find yourself without a job as a scout.”
“I doubt that, Lieutenant,” said the frontiersman, speaking for the first time, and getting a stony glare from the officer for his trouble.
The soldier grimaced and said, “I’ve been given the task of helping you by General Custer himself—”
“And a fine job you’re doing too. But I’ve been hired by the general as chief of scouts, and I’ll hire and fire my own scouts, thank you.” He turned back to Hook. “Besides, any man who went along on that Powder River campaign had to know Gabe Bridger and Shad Sweete.”
Hook smiled, relief washing over him suddenly. “Damn right I knowed both—and those two taught me some on that expedition.”
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“That’s why I hired you, Hook. You got the makings. It’s just that your cousin here don’t know a Sioux or Cheyenne from squat.”
“He fought in the war.”
“That was a white man’s war.” The frontiersman tried to make it come out gently, packing his smoldering pipe with a fingertip.
“If he don’t get to come with me—I s’pose I gotta move along.”
“Just as well,” growled the officer, dipping his pen into the inkwell and preparing to scratch the name from the rolls.
The frontiersman clamped a hand around the soldier’s wrist. “You’re fixing to walk out on a good job if this bunch don’t hire on your cousin?”
“I am. Always enough for a man to do out here. I wasn’t looking for my last job when it found me. I s’pose I can always find something to eat and a place to sleep while I’m waiting for something else to come along.”
“Good,” the frontiersman said. “Both of you’ll do.”
Jonah Hook was drawn up short by that. “You mean Artus can come along as a scout?”
“No, I didn’t say that. But I know the wagon master, named Grigsby, is looking for teamsters and herders for the remuda we’ll be wrangling along with the wagon train. If Moser here can handle a wagon or horses—he has him the chance to work with Grigsby.”
“Where we find this wagon master?”
He jabbed the air with the stem of his pipe. “Off yonder.”
Hook glanced in that direction, toward the trees that lined the nearby Smoky Hill River. Then he held out his hand to the chief of scouts. “Thank you, mister. Didn’t catch your name.”
“Joe Milner.”
“You’re the one they call California Joe?”
He beamed. “That’s right.”
“Shad Sweete told me some about you! Knew you up to Oregon country before he give it up and come back to the mountains.”
Milner was smiling broadly, his stained teeth dull against his dusty beard. “After me and Shad helped Ol’ Zach settle them Mexicans down, I got me a pretty wife out to the California diggings before moseying up to Oregon country to try my hand at settling down. Nancy Emma is her name—and she give me a passel of young’uns before I decided I had to come back to these parts just like Shad done. Something about all this open country.”
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