“Ain’t it true,” Hook replied.
“I’d like to palaver later with you boys,” Joe said as he rocked back in the chair again, stuffing the pipe stem between lips all but hidden beneath by his overgrown mustache. “Catch up on what ol’ Sweete is up to. You both come round.”
“I’ll look to do that before evening.”
They had made it through the worst of the winter. That was enough for any man to take some pride in. Those two weeks lost to him with the bullet-fever in that line shack, then the long time mending with regimental surgeon Porter at the Fort Hays infirmary, and finally the last two months spent getting through the waning days of winter in that dugout they had made for themselves against the side of a hill overlooking Big Creek, not many miles from Fort Hays itself. There had been some small measure of security felt by both Hook and Moser in staying those last violent months of winter near the frontier fort. At times the pair had run across small patrols of cavalry riding this way or that on one errand or another—always seen in the distance, loping along in their column of twos, rarely with a guidon or flag fluttering above their determined purpose.
Were it not for Moser’s skill in tracking deer and finding antelope out on this rolling tableland of central Kansas, they might not have fared as well as they had through that prairie winter. But both men had emerged from the dark days and endless nights of that dugout renewed in some unspoken way. Clearly closer to one another.
With that time behind them both, Jonah better understood his cousin’s need of him here in this foreign land, and dared not tug on that bond hard enough to snap it in two like a rawhide whang.
And without saying anything, Artus showed he understood his cousin’s need for the woman through those long weeks. Hook was clearly grieving in his own way the loss of Gritta, perhaps drowning himself in the squaw’s flesh in some way to numb the pain come of the loss of his family.
Moser put his own thoughts on the coming campaign, his muscles to the task, thereby finding a way to salve his own wounds brought of deep loss.
In this late March there were fourteen hundred soldiers gathering for the coming campaign General Winfield S. Hancock would lead. Besides infantry foot soldiers, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer would ride at the head of eight companies of his Seventh Cavalry: the sword Hancock intended using to punish the Sioux and Cheyenne who had been raiding and killing, stealing, raping and kidnapping up and down central and western Kansas.
Every bit as pressing to the morale of the army itself was the news of a late-December disaster now common knowledge on the high plains. For what was still an inexplicable reason, Captain William Judd Fetterman had disobeyed the orders of his commanding officer and led another eighty soldiers and two civilians to their deaths up on the Bozeman Road, lured into a seductive trap miles from Fort Phil Kearny. Two thousand warriors wiped out the entire command in less than thirty minutes of battle.
The frontier army clearly chafed at the bit, anxious to even the score.
While the military on the plains for the past two years had labored to separate itself from the wholesale slaughter of Indians committed at Sand Creek by some Colorado volunteer militia, the leadership in both the War Department and in the Department of the Missouri were not much concerned now in any distinction between the horse-mounted warriors committing the depredations and the noncombatants back in the villages.
“We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children,” wrote William Tecumseh Sherman to his superior back in Washington City, Ulysses S. Grant.
Indeed, General John B. Sanborn, one of the commissioners appointed to interview frontier officers in his investigation of the Fetterman Massacre found that, “Army officers of high grade openly proclaim their intentions to shoot down any Indian they see, and say that they instruct their men to do likewise.”
Sales of weapons and ammunition to the Indians were suspended in the Department of the Platte in July of 1866. Yet it was not until January of 1867 that General Hancock issued the same order forbidding such sales in his Department of the Missouri. Forever the one given to thoughtful deliberation, Hancock had waited until both his superiors in Washington City, Grant and Sherman, agreed on the need for keeping weapons out of Indian hands.
“You hear the news?” Moser asked.
Jonah Hook turned as his cousin came up. “What news?” He went back to lashing his bedroll into a gum poncho.
“About that Dakota Territory where you was last year. The Powder River country and all.”
“What about it?”
“Whole fort’s buzzing about it. Half a regiment wiped out by Injuns up there just afore Christmas.”
He stopped, slowly looking over his shoulder at the man who cast a shadow over him this early morning. “Where?”
“Place called Fort Phil Kearny they say,” Moser explained. “Cap’n named Fetterman marched off over a ridge with his men—and it was over in less’n half an hour.”
Hook wagged his head in disbelief. “Where’s this fort?”
“They say northwest of the Powder. Near a river called the Tongue.”
“I know that country.”
“That’s why I come to tell you soon as I heard.”
A fear suddenly clutched him in its talons. “Any civilians killed with them soldiers?”
“Word has it two was killed. They was all butchered like hogs for slaughter, Jonah.”
“I don’t doubt it, cousin.” He swallowed hard, rising. “I had two friends up there scouting for the army.”
“Bridger and Sweete?”
He nodded. “Lord, I pray they weren’t the ones butchered with those soldier-boys gone off marching where they shouldn’t.”
Moser wrung his hands in front of him, searching for the right thing to say. “Then just what the hell we doing—marching off with these soldiers?”
Jonah gazed off onto the distant prairie, past the fort grounds and buildings and spring-dampened parade. “Let’s just hope this bunch of soldiers is more’n those Injuns wanna tackle right now.”
“Hope, hell, Jonah! I’m all for praying!”
The wagon boss named Grigsby hollered for his men to account for themselves at the wagon yard, where there was no lack of work backing mules and horses into their traces and trees in preparation for this first day’s march from Fort Hays into Indian country. Off Moser went, with Jonah tying his horse near California Joe’s and Jack Corbin’s.
“I’ll be off yonder for a bit,” Hook told them.
“Hancock’s got us pulling out soon,” Milner replied. “We’re leading his column, Hook. So don’t you be late.”
Jonah grinned. “Never.”
He found her minutes later, where he knew he would.
She was sitting near the dugout where they had fared the winter together, squatting on a buffalo robe, her legs tucked at her side as she drove a bonehandled awl through the thin buckskin she had tanned herself that spring. The Pawnee woman did not immediately look up, though Hook was sure she had heard him draw near.
“Grass Singing,” he said as he settled before her. Still she would not look at him.
Jonah took her chin in his hand, raising her face to his. Only then did he understand why she had been reluctant to look at him.
“You’ve been crying,” he said in English.
She gently pulled her chin from his rough palm and blinked her eyes clear, then went back to poking animal sinew strung with large, moss green beads through the hole she had made with the awl.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said, himself searching for words that would touch her as his hands moved silently before him in sign. A part of him withered when he realized she was not watching his hands, much less comprehending most of his white man’s tongue.
“Hell, some of this you’ll understand, I hope. The rest—well, the rest I hope you’ll figure out down the road some.”
He reached for her hand. She pulled
it away as the first large drop of salty moisture spilled down a cheek, no longer held in check, pooled in those blackcherry eyes. Jonah took her hand in his a second time, and now she did not resist.
“I got to go, Grass Singing.”
“Take me,” she said, her eyes imploring him as they flooded.
“Can’t. This is war.”
“My people take women … families on war path.”
“My people don’t. You’ll stay behind. Go find what’s left of your family in Abilene.” And the cold of it hit him as surely as the rising of the warm spring sun caressed the side of his face. “Maybe you can understand I got to keep moving. If I don’t, I can’t ever hope to find my own family.”
She set her beading down, using her hands to sign. “Your family is no more.”
His mind struggled with the concepts she formed with her hands. “No more family,” he repeated, then comprehended. “It’s not true. Who says this?”
Grass Singing said it aloud. “Moser.”
“He lies, woman,” he said it aloud too, forgetting to sign. “My family is alive. Somewhere. I’ll find them. I’ll find every one of them.”
“You go on a fool’s journey,” she signed. “I have prayed to the Great Everywhere that it would not be your final journey.”
He snorted self-consciously. “Me? No—I’m not ready to die.”
Her eyes moistened more. “There is the smell of death all around you.”
“That’s just the blood you’re smelling—”
“I talk now of the death spirits. Their stench is heavy around you, Hook.” The last word she spoke aloud, as there was no sign for his name.
While the rising sun warmed his face, nonetheless a chill splashed down his spine as she said it. Afraid to admit that she might know something he did not. He chose to leave, and now.
Hook stood, reached for her hands, and pulled her up into a tight embrace.
“I will not die, Grass Singing.” He spoke into the top of her head where it rested below his bearded chin. “And come the time when I ride back through this country, I’ll look for you. You have helped me live—not just this bullet hole”—and he tapped his chest—“but the big hole put in my heart when my family was took from me.”
She pulled away from him to sign, “You grow old looking for a few pebbles lost at the bottom of a great pond.”
He caught himself before he struck her, his hand hung in midair near her cheek, looking down at her moist eyes.
“You got no right to tell me what to believe in … tell me what to give up on.”
He whirled from her, moving to his horse.
“Hook!”
She hurried after him, flung herself, and wrapped her arms about him before he could rise to the saddle. She sobbed openly, the wild keening of a squaw losing her man.
“Grass Singing—I want to come back,” he explained, crushing her against him. He kissed her gently, then held her at arm’s length as she stood there, arms at her side, sobbing. “But I can’t come back to you until I have this done and over with. Some way … you try to understand.”
Hook was in the saddle quickly, hammering the horse’s flanks with his boot heels, intent on hurrying as fast as he could from this place. Hoping she would in some way understand his quest.
Hoping too that she was wrong—praying now that he did not carry the stench of death on him.
24
April, 1867
“I HEAR THE pickings are good up there in Kansas,” said the tall, long-haired, bald-topped Jubilee Usher in his soft-edged yet cannonlike voice.
Boothog Wiser longed to have the power to move men as Usher did, to wrap them up into his powerful presence and move them. Yet Wiser had to be content threatening this band of freebooters and cutthroats. Whereas Usher motivated through awe, Wiser maintained control only through fear.
Usher laid his big arm over the beefy shoulder of one of the band of scouts under Captain Eloy Hastings newly returned to Indian Territory from a long reconnaissance. “Fordham here tells me the country’s wide open up there.”
Riley Fordham smiled. Wiser couldn’t blame him. Any man among them would kill to bask in the glow of their leader’s bright light.
“Tomorrow morning, we’re pulling out,” Usher went on. “Riding north. The railroad’s up there in Kansas, boys. And you know what that means.”
“Whiskey!”
“Women too!”
“Yes,” Usher goaded them. “All that and more. It’s about time this bunch had a holiday, don’t you think?”
The roar of their voices was deafening, that band of more than forty now backslapping and shoulder pounding, dancing little jigs in anticipation of the hurraw they would have themselves once up there in Kansas Territory.
“I want the harness soaped and the wagon hubs greased,” Usher commanded, bringing some order to the raucous celebration. “Work first, boys. Then we play!”
Usher turned away from the celebrants, dragging Riley Fordham with him as he stepped back toward Wiser. “C’mon, Major Wiser. Let’s go have a drink with Riley.”
“A drink, Colonel Usher?” Fordham asked.
“Some of my best.”
Fordham licked his lips. “I’d drink your whiskey anytime. Not like the rest of that mule piss the rest of us been drinking.”
When they stood beneath the awning of Usher’s tent, each holding a china cup at the end of an arm, Usher’s Negro manservant poured the whiskey red as a bay horse from a decanter. Wiser watched Fordham close his eyes and drink in the hefty aroma of the aged whiskey.
Usher raised his cup. “To your successful journey, Riley.”
“Yes, sir, Colonel.”
“To Kansas, Colonel,” Wiser said as he brought his cup to his lips. He savored these moments shared with Usher, especially the bonded whiskey. Moments when Usher was as smooth as old scotch whiskey.
“Yes, Riley. Tell us about your trip to Kansas with Captain Hastings,” Usher suggested as he took his cup from his lips.
Fordham swiped a hand across his mouth, his eyes already alive with the potency of the whiskey. “Like a juicy fruit, Colonel. Ready to drop into our hands.”
Usher smiled the benign smile that made his whole face glow. “How far has the railroad penetrated?”
“They must be starting work by now, Colonel. West of Abilene. Track runs along the Smoky Hill River.”
“Headed west for Colorado?” Wiser asked.
“You remember Colorado, don’t you, Mr. Wiser?”
Boothog had fond recollections of the high country and the gold camps and the women who flocked to the places where men came to dig gold from the hard earth. He liked remembering the women. Times were this flat, rolling land ate at Boothog’s soul the way this running and hiding, and running again did. Times were he longed for those high places where the powdered, painted women flocked, there to do things to a man he had only dreamed of.
“Maybe Kansas has some women worth the trouble, Colonel,” Wiser replied.
Usher smiled, his big teeth brilliant in that shining face. “A man can find that sort of woman anywhere, Major.”
“They come west, right along with the track crews, Colonel,” said Fordham. “Chippies and the gamblers and the drummers all come marching right along with the railroad.”
“You see, Major Wiser. In Kansas we will find your type of woman.”
“Just once, Colonel—for once in my life I’d like to spread the legs on a woman like that one you’re keeping all to yourself.”
Boothog watched the grin drain from Usher’s face like water from a busted pail.
“She is not your kind—and you’ll not entertain such thoughts ever again, Mr. Wiser. That woman is truly a different sort, meant for the likes of me. Are we agreed on that?”
Wiser realized his mouth had gone dry. “We’re agreed, Colonel.”
“Make this the last time we will talk on this subject,” Usher said as Wiser’s eyes flicked to Fordham’s face with the movem
ent of a hummingbird. “We are different people, Major. And we have different needs. Yours, well—yours are more primitive. While mine … what I have with that woman is something spiritual. Divine and ordained—we are truly bound to one another in the manner of the temple wed. Yet you likely don’t understand. Nor will you ever.”
“I’ll never, never cross you, Jubilee.”
“Colonel Usher,” Jubilee snapped, the sharp narrowing of his eyes indicating to Wiser that there was another man in their presence.
“Yes, Colonel,” Boothog replied, remembering that other passion Usher possessed: always being addressed by his rank in front of the men. No matter when he and Wiser were alone—Boothog could address him as he pleased. But whenever they were before the men …
Usher turned and retrieved a long leather cylinder from the field table beneath the canvas canopy. From it he pulled a series of maps, found the one desired, then laid it flat upon the table, placing lunch dishes and an inkwell at the corners.
“Fordham, come over here and show us where you were on your journey to Kansas.”
Wiser watched as the two of them hunched over the map, Fordham moving his finger this way, then that, at times a little uncertain.
“I don’t read much, Colonel—”
“It doesn’t matter, Riley.”
“But this looks familiar … the rivers and creeks here.”
“Good. Now show us where the outlying settlements are from here, and here. With the railroad coming their way—it means gold for us. Lots of gold.”
Wiser watched and listened as Fordham went on, explaining the fruits of his scout north into Kansas Territory. But Boothog listened only halfheartedly. He glanced at the nearby tent flaps, not daring to let Usher catch him looking. Yet it excited him nonetheless to know that behind those flaps was the light-haired, blue-eyed Missouri woman they had captured two years before. He had rarely seen her since—only moving from the tent to Usher’s ambulance, where she rode hidden, always with a cloak hood over her head, helped along by Usher and the Negro manservant. And Wiser never heard her anymore. In the beginning she had cried out each time Usher climbed atop her. But it hadn’t taken long for that to come to an end.
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