She rarely made a peep now.
Still, Wiser hungered for her. There was something in the woman that he had never found in the others. But then, the rest had all had many men before him. They were used, soiled merchandise. Not like the settler woman.
That was why Wiser wanted the girl, the woman’s daughter—in the worst way. More and more over the last months, he found himself getting dry-mouthed just looking at the young girl. Waking up at nights, knowing he had dreamt of her. Wondering if he could wait long enough, till she was old enough and Usher would finally give her over to him. Then at last, Boothog would have one of the two things he wanted most.
Telling himself he must be satisfied with only one of them.
Simply because Major Lemuel Wiser couldn’t bring himself to believe he would ever have the nerve to kill Jubilee Usher.
Shad Sweete thought he recognized something familiar about the distant, thin rail of a man at first, then put the nudge of recollection out of his mind. It simply couldn’t be.
Not that the rider didn’t look one whole hell of a lot like someone he knew—or had known—but that it just didn’t seem likely to find the man out here. Must be the sun playing tricks on him.
No way Jonah Hook would be riding in behind Milner and James Butler Hickok, with the rest of those civilian scouts. Hook had gone back home to Missouri, and Sweete doubted there would be anything that could drag the Confederate off his farm, what with the way he talked and talked about his family and his place all through those months they had shared out on the Emigrant Road and up to the Powder River country. Likely nothing could shake Hook loose.
“Shad Sweete!”
“That you, Joe?” he called back to California Joe Milner.
The long-bearded plainsman brought his mule to a halt beside Sweete there at the edge of the parade of Fort Harker, central Kansas. “Before you go to hugging your how-dos on me, I figured I’d better ask you if you know this young fella. He claims you do.”
“Howdy, Shad,” the thin one said, kicking a leg over the saddle and dropping to the ground on both feet.
“Jonah?”
“By damned,” Joe said, “you do know one another!”
Shad embraced Hook fiercely. “What the hell you—”
“I don’t think Joe believed me when I told him I’d rid with you and Bridger,” Hook said. “Gabe here with you?”
“He’s gone back east, Jonah,” Shad said quietly. “Figures his time might come soon.”
“He dying?”
“Not just yet. But he’s give up on scouting for a time. Now answer my question, boy—what the devil brings you here when you got family back to home depending on you?”
Shad watched as Jonah glanced at Milner, and Milner urged his mule away with the rest of the scruffy civilian scouts James Butler Hickok had brought in from Hays to join up with Custer’s chief of scouts.
Jonah’s eyes narrowed. “They’re gone, Shad.”
“Dead?”
He shook his head. “I wish I knew. Not a trace.”
“Up and gone—like smoke?”
“Stole.”
“Took off, like prisoners?”
“Or worse.”
“You know who?”
“A little. A bad bunch running through Missouri there at the end of the war. Taking what they wanted from farms and settlements.”
“Heard tales there was a lot of that,” Sweete replied, not knowing what else to say.
Inside were a hundred feelings felt for the young man right now—but none which Shad could put to word. Instead, he drew Jonah near again. A fierce hug.
“Damn, it’s good to see you, Shad.” He pulled back, dragging a hand angrily beneath his nose. “Want you meet a cousin of mine. Hired on for the wagon train.”
“What you been doing since last I saw you?” Shad asked, eyeing the columns of cavalry pulling in behind the scouts, marching across the parade and preparing to go into camp on the far side of Fort Harker.
“Got back home finally, that winter. Found my place empty, almost like it was a coffin somebody had dragged the body out of.” Hook described the scene, kneading the leather rein in his hands as the spring sun loped down into the west. “Run onto my cousin at the place, and we went into town to try to find out something.”
“Anybody know what come of your family?”
“Only the old sheriff. Enough to send us off on the trail of that bunch into Indian Territory.”
“Wagh!” Sweete grunted. “That’s some. Likely that’s where the trail up and disappeared.”
“Nobody likely to talk to me and Artus down there. Finally run out of money and come north to work for the railroad.”
“Hard doin’s, Jonah.”
“Hunted buffalo, Shad.”
“Don’t that beat all by a long chalk now!”
“Then freeze-up come, and we hunkered down in a little dugout near Fort Hays for the winter.”
“Just the two of you?”
He dug a toe into the rain-dampened earth. “Had a Pawnee gal with me.”
“Been some time, Jonah—you without a woman. How’d you run onto her?”
“That’s a story for another time, how I come to be toting her out of Abilene. That’s where I first run onto Hickok. There was some bad characters and … the woman saved my life.” Hook yanked aside his shirt and longhandles to show the puckered bullet hole high in his chest. “Army doctor pulled the bullet out over to Fort Hays.”
“Lordee,” Shad whispered. “Some winter doings, weren’t they?”
“When green-up come, we needed work, and run onto California Joe, said he was hired on to work for Hickok for this big army march against the Injuns.”
“Hickok remember you?”
“When he found out I’d hired on to scout for this march, with California Joe, Hickok told the rest I’d do to back him up in a hot fight of it.”
“Hickok’s all right, Jonah. A square shoot any day. Damn! But this ain’t the first time we’ve marched with the army together!”
“Damn well pray it’s the last, Shad.”
“You eat since breakfast?”
When Hook wagged his head, Sweete said, “Then come along with me.”
“I’ll wait for my cousin and then be along.”
“We’ll wait together,” Shad replied.
“I’ll find you, old man.”
“Likely you won’t, Jonah.” He flung an arm southwest of the fort. “Camped down there.”
“You staying with some of those Injuns down there on the creek?”
“Got the woman along. Our girl too.”
“They come north with you?”
“Gathered ’em up after last winter and moseyed north, fixing to find work myself. Never would I thought that we’d run onto one another this way. And from the looks of you, Jonah Hook is needing some fattening up at Toote Sweete’s kettle.”
“Good vittles?”
“Does a badger ever back down? None finer. C’mon, we’ll gather up that cousin of yours over to the wagon yard and get down to the camp.”
Minutes later the three were among the handful of smoked-hide lodges, dogs barking, the half-wild animals heeling them as they sniffed the newcomers. A few barefoot children dashed across the sodden prairie and pounded earth surrounding each lodge.
“Which one of these is your daughter?” Jonah asked.
“Which?” Shad replied, then laughed, head thrown back for a moment. “Ain’t none of these children, Jonah.” He pointed. “That’s my child—there.”
Coming head down out through a nearby lodge door, then standing full height to a little over five feet, she was clearly no child.
“That’s your daughter?” Moser asked, the first of the pair able to squeak out the question.
“Pipe Woman is twenty summers this year. Helps her mama around the lodge now. Too old to be running with the children.”
Jonah swallowed hard. “That ain’t no child, Shad. She’s gotta be the most beautif
ul Injun I ever saw.”
“Wait’ll you see her mama. Toote!” he called out. Shad’s daughter raised her head from her work as the men approached, her own broad smile brightening the high-cheeked face, eyes bouncing from one to the other of the two newcomers politely, then finding the earth once more in that traditional coy manner of her people.
“C’mon out here, woman—we got us guests for dinner!”
25
April, 1867
IT WAS TO be an expedition to show the flag.
“Hancock the Superb,” they called him. He, who had been most responsible for holding the vital center of the Union line against Pickett’s deadly charge at Gettsyburg. Let the nomadic warriors of the plains know that “The Thunderbolt,” General Winfield Scott Hancock, had led troops into every one of those bloody battles fought by the Army of the Potomac.
Yet now Hancock had to figure out how to deal with Indians on the Great Plains.
“Looking more and more like the bands want war,” Shad Sweete told Jonah on their march away from those log-and-adobe buildings that made up Fort Harker standing beside the Smoky Hill River. They were pointing their noses south by west on the Olde Santa Fe Trail, headed for Fort Larned erected along the Arkansas River. “What with the way they’ve been making hay on the freight roads—shutting things down flat. Hickok says that the general plans to give the Cheyenne and Sioux just that—war.”
Right about now Hook wasn’t all that sure this was where he wanted to be. He had been pushed and prodded and goaded from one war into another, from the Civil War into Connor’s War on the Powder. And looking for some whisper of a trace of his family, Hook found himself riding at the head of a huge column of cavalry, infantry, and artillery might marching off toward what had the makings of a new war.
“Ain’t he even gonna try talking to the Injuns?” Jonah asked innocently.
“For certain he will. Hickok says the general plans on palavering with the chiefs, first off. But damn if Hancock don’t make a lot of bluster and carry a damned big stick when he claims he’s just going out to palaver,” Sweete replied. “Bragging that he won’t tolerate no insolence from the warrior bands.”
General Hancock was, in fact, forced to cool his heels at Fort Larned. On 7 April, after having arrived with a force of fourteen hundred soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry, 37th Infantry, along with a battery of the Fourth Artillery and a pontoon train, the general was informed a delegation of chiefs was indeed on its way to see him. Then, as if the weather itself conspired against the Thunderbolt’s plans to subdue the tribes of the Great Plains, a spring snowstorm caught the delegates in their camp some thirty miles west from Fort Larned, up the Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas River. Five days later, only two Cheyenne chiefs came in from the snowy countryside: White Horse and Tall Bull.
“Damn if Hancock didn’t give them two Cheyenne what for,” Hook explained to Sweete and the other scouts at their camp fire that next morning while coffee boiled. “Like a Bible-thumping circuit rider, preachifying hell and damnation if they didn’t toe his line.”
Shad knelt over the fire, dragging the coffeepot from the flames, allowing the roiling water to slow itself. He pushed it toward his guest. “That’s why we’re marching up Pawnee Fork this morning, Jonah. General wants to preach his piece to more’n just them two.”
“Something down in my gut troubles me—telling me I don’t want to get so close to that many Injuns ever again.” Hook wrapped a greasy bandanna around the pot handle so he could pour coffee into the tin cups the others had waiting. “What I saw up there at Platte Bridge two years back was enough to last any man a normal lifetime.”
Shad grinned. “But here you squat, marching with the army on the trail of these red buggers—”
“Don’t remind me how stupid I am, Shad!”
“Why the devil you sign on with this outfit, Jonah—you don’t figure to get so close to Injuns?”
“Right about now, I’m wondering why I signed on myself.”
“Keep your nose in the wind and your eye up there on the horizon—you’ll fare through all right,” Sweete reminded.
The following afternoon, Hickok and Milner had the advance party of scouts spread out on a broad front, each of those plainsmen knowing they could expect to meet warriors riding out to protect their villages at any moment. Instead, mile after mile of shimmering prairie was crossed, with no sign of the bands or their crossing.
Late in the afternoon, only the horizon betrayed a massive dust cloud.
Hickok came tearing back toward his flankers, reining up and haunch-sliding his mount around in a tight circle, his shoulder-length hair lifting in the breeze from the collar of his red waist-length Zouave jacket resplendent with gold braid. “We got problems, Shad!”
“They’re running, ain’t they?”
“By glory if they ain’t.”
“They torn down the lodges?”
“No,” Hickok replied. “Just bolting off—women and young’uns.”
“Warriors staying behind?”
“They’ll likely guard the retreat.” Hickok reined about. “I’m going to tell the old man!”
Hancock immediately growled his displeasure with the fleeing Indians and ordered Hickok around, dispatched back to the village to find one of the headmen he could parley with.
“Tell those chiefs they better round their people up and bring them back, goddammit! Make sure they understand this is a bad show of faith on their part.”
“To them, General,” Hickok explained from atop his prancing horse, “this many soldiers along is a clear show of what your intentions are.”
“By God—if they want war, I’m here to give it to them!” Hancock snapped. “Now go do what the hell I’m paying you for, Hickok.”
By the time Hickok returned to the advance of the march, the situation had soured. He rode up to Sweete and the rest where the scouts had halted on a low hillock.
“Damn,” Hickok muttered.
“They aim to make a fight of it,” Sweete said, nodding toward the hundreds of warriors who had spread out across a broad front before the scouts and advance guard.
Feathers stirred on the chill spring breeze. The tails of every war pony had been tied up with red trade cloth or strips of rawhide. Shields clung to every arm, a bow, rifle, or carbine held at the ready by the jeering, taunting warriors who urged the white men on.
“Fat’s in the fire now, boys,” Milner said, then spit some tobacco juice into the dust. “I reckon we ought’n go on down there and palaver with ’em afore ol’ Thunderbutt gets up here to stir things with his big stick.”
“Not a bad idea, Joe,” Hickok replied. “C’mon. You and Shad come with me.”
“We showing guns?” Sweete asked.
“By damn if we ain’t,” Milner said. “It’s the only thing these red bastards understand—is gunpower.”
The trio inched off that low hillock into the rolling lowland where the long cordon of warriors waited on their restive ponies. As the white men halted midway between the two lines, a score of the young warriors grew more than verbal. They raced their ponies back and forth along the Indian line, taunting, shaking their weapons in the air.
“Damn if they don’t want war every bit as much as Hancock’s itching for it,” Hickok muttered. He straightened in the saddle. “All right, Shad. Tell their chiefs we want to parley a bit.”
Sweete handed his rifle over to California Joe, now second in command of the scouts behind Hickok. Shad then held his hands up to begin signing as he spoke in the Shahiyena tongue. The white men wanted some delegates to come forward onto neutral ground for a parley, he said. For a few moments, a half dozen of the warriors conferred among themselves a hundred yards away. Then they too inched forward, ordering the rest to remain behind.
“We don’t want no trouble,” Hickok reminded Milner as Joe shifted uneasily on his saddle after tossing the Spencer carbine back to Sweete.
“These bastards won’t mind taking our scalps,”
Joe muttered. “Don’t trust ’em a bit.”
“And right you are,” Shad whispered as the chiefs drew near. “Let’s smile and act hospitable, boys. And keep your finger on your triggers.”
The warriors came to a halt twenty feet away, ponies pawing at the new grass flowering across the prairie. The breeze rustled feathers and fringe and the edges of blankets in that great silence beneath the cornflower blue sky while everyone waited for something to happen, someone to speak. A pony snorted. One of the warriors coughed.
“Shad, tell ’em what we want.”
“What is it we want?”
“Hancock wants to talk with the chiefs.”
Sweete once more spoke and signed—telling them the soldier chief wanted to talk with the mighty chiefs of the Lakota and Shahiyena bands.
One of the warriors snorted, loudly. He spit on the ground.
“Who’s that?” Hickok asked quietly.
“Think he’s called Pawnee Killer. Brule chief. Bad sonofabitch if it is.”
“Heard tell of him,” Milner added. “He’s a mean one what don’t know a lick of common sense.”
Sweete spoke after one of the half dozen had signed.
“They’re asking us something, Hickok. Why we brought along the soldiers—both walk-a-heaps and pony soldiers—if all that we mean to do is talk.”
Hickok shifted in his saddle. “I figure he’s got us there. A fair question, but I don’t know what to tell him.” He glanced over his shoulder, his eyes scanning the countryside behind them for sign of Hancock’s columns.
“I know what to say,” Milner growled.
“I won’t have you starting anything here, Joe,” Hickok snapped.
Sweete watched all the dark, lidded eyes concentrating on the two arguing white men. Behind the delegates, the rest of the warriors were surging, their ponies racing up and down the long line strung horizon to horizon—galloping the ponies about in short sprints to get their second wind.
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