It took a long time for Jonah to calm his daughter, cradling her in his arms as she collapsed there beside the little creek bordered with elm and alder and plum brush. Jonah had waved the other two men off while she sobbed, muttering incoherently as the laudanum released its grip on her. Rocking her against him, he murmured soothingly into her ear.
The sun had fully torn itself from the sky that evening before she tore herself from her father’s embrace. She stared fully at last into his bearded face, touching him, kissing him, not really believing it was her own pappy. Then the terror caught in her throat as she remembered the two others who had been with her father. She turned, finding the pair seated close by.
“He’s one of them,” she whispered, pointing to Fordham.
“Riley Fordham, Hattie. He’s took care of you before.”
She said, “I never knew his name, but—I’ll never forget his face.”
“Riley—come on over here now,” Hook said. “The other’n, Hattie—he’s like a father to me now. Taught me, kept me alive a time or two. And they both saved our hides a few days back when I was busting you free of the ones had you prisoner.”
“You remember me, Hattie?” Fordham asked as he came to kneel nearby.
She nodded shyly, sliding behind her father. “Never knew your name.”
“I’m Riley.”
Hattie glanced sheepishly at Jonah, then stuck out her hand to the man. Fordham took it and shook.
“You’ve got good manners, Hattie Hook.”
“Her mama taught all the children good.” Hook choked on the sour ball of pain the thought of the boys caused him.
“He … Riley protected me, Pappy,” she explained in a whisper, holding her father all the tighter. “I never … without him—”
“Jonah, time we was going,” Sweete suggested. “We only got so much dark these summer nights. Let’s use every minute we got.”
“I did not introduce myself,” Hattie said. “Mr.—?”
“Shad Sweete,” he replied with a big grin, bending at the waist gallantly there among the dried grass and rustling plum brush to accept her tiny hand. “Much pleased to meet you, Miss Hattie.” Then he kissed the back of that filthy, alabaster, rope-burned hand.
“You see what he did? He kissed my hand, Pappy!” she exclaimed, suppressing a giggle.
Hook smiled at the old mountain man before Sweete turned to his horse. “That’s right, Hattie. Shad Sweete’s full of surprises.”
The afternoon of the fifth day found them striking the Kansas Pacific tracks just east of Fort Harker. Riley Fordham suggested they ride east from there.
“First town ought’n to be Salina,” Shad Sweete had told them.
“We’ll find a rail stop there, won’t we, Jonah?” Fordham asked.
“For certain we will,” Hook replied. “You still want to do what you set your mind to do?”
“I do. I owe Hattie for running out on her—like I told you that first night as we rode south from Dobe Town. I’m gonna watch over her for you, Jonah. That’s a promise. She’ll be safe while you go fetch the rest of your family.”
Hook had smiled, then glanced at Sweete, who nodded approvingly. “Looks like you got yourself a stepdaughter, Riley.”
“More like my little sister.”
By noon the sixth day they were riding into the outskirts of Salina, Kansas—a town smelling of new-cut lumber and weathering sideboards, of cattle dung and horse apples and the sweat of honest men at labor on this midsummer’s day. The commerce of the east probing west, ever west.
They stopped at a plain-fronted, two-story clapboard house set off the main street away from the whir of things, where hung a sign in a yard overgrown with too much ragweed and prairie bunchgrass. A rap on the door brought a fleshy woman wiping her flour-dusted hands on a dingy apron.
“Afternoon,” Riley said, smiling and setting his tongue for charm. “My name’s Fordham, and this here is Jonah Hook.”
The woman nodded to each, her eyes coming back to the girl standing between them.
“And this is Hattie, Mr. Hook’s daughter.”
“Hello, ma’am,” she greeted the woman softly.
“Hello yourself, young lady.”
“Could we ask a favor of you?” Fordham inquired.
“Room-and-board prices posted on the sign by the door,” she said, cutting him off.
“No, ma’am. We just want to know if Hattie could use some of your water, a clean towel, and a little of your lye soap to freshen up, a young lady and all … if you don’t mind.”
She was not long in eyeing the girl down, then up, once more, and determining the child was badly in need of a good scrubbing. “You come on in, young lady. We’ll take you up to my room where we’ll freshen you right up. You fellas, just make yourself comfortable on the porch here. I’ll send my girl out with some lemonade for you.”
The good part of an hour later, Hattie reappeared. While not washed, her dingy dress had been nonetheless dusted, and the many small tears repaired by the hand of a fine seamstress. The young woman stood before them, freshly scrubbed, cheeks rosy, eyes gleaming and bright, her hair washed, brushed, and newly braided, finished off with a scrap of ribbon.
“Her teeth were something awful, you ought to know, Mr. Hook,” the woman said.
Riley grinned at Jonah when Hook sheepishly covered his own mouth with a hand.
“We thank you for seeing to her teeth too,” Hook mumbled. “Lord, Hattie—it’s been so many years. You’ve growed so. And look at you now!”
“What do we owe you?” Hook asked the landlady.
The woman looked at the girl, then Jonah and Riley, and finally the big man in greasy buckskins. She gave Hattie a gentle hug, then a playful slap on her rear.
“You go ’long now, Hattie. It was my pleasure, fellas. You all take care of that little lady now. She’s something real special.”
Hook brought his hand up to shake the woman’s. “Real special. Thankee, ma’am.”
They led their weary horses back onto the main, dusty street, not finding it hard to locate the rail station, where they counted their assets after inquiring the cost of a ticket east.
“Got enough to get her to Kansas City,” Hook said.
“She needs to go farther than that,” Fordham declared, staring at the scrip in his hand. “Clerk said it cost forty dollars to get to St. Louis.”
“Only twenty’s what he said,” Hook replied. “But I don’t have that much. It’s for damn sure I ain’t asking for your money, Riley.”
“I’m paying. And I’m riding too—like I said from the start. Two tickets to St. Louis is forty dollars, and I’ve got enough for both.” He patted his belly, beneath his shirt where he had belted a leather wallet. “I figure to have a lot left over from what I eased away from Jubilee Usher when I ran out on him.”
“More’n enough to get you to St. Louis?”
“That, and enough to get Hattie enrolled in a good seminary.”
“Seminary?”
“A girl’s boarding school.” Fordham looked down at the young woman. “If that’s all right with you and your daddy.”
She beamed, went to embrace her father. “May I, Pappy?”
“I only just got you back, Hattie.” Clutching her to him, Hook finally smiled, crinkling the flesh on his homely, bony face. Moisture welled in the eyes that finally looked up at Fordham. “Whyn’t you go on now, Riley—and buy them two tickets to St. Louis. This young lady’s gonna need a proper escort she goes riding the rails east to boarding school.”
As Jonah stood and drew up the cinch in the gray light of summer’s dawn here outside Fort Laramie, he knee-popped the horse in the belly, causing the mare to blow. He yanked quickly and buckled—in, down, and in again. And remembered that sunny afternoon back nearly a month gone now. A July afternoon in a railroad town called Salina cropping up like a prairie weed beside the Smoky Hill and Kansas Pacific line.
With the whistle growing more and more fai
nt, he and Shad Sweete had reined up atop the first row of low hills shouldered along the timbered river course, turning in their saddles to gaze back at those last few cars of the eastbound disappearing into the shimmering summer haze of that late afternoon.
“She’s gonna be fine, Jonah,” Sweete had told him.
“I know she is.”
“Time we get to Laramie, chances are Riley’s wire be waiting for you already.”
“It’s something I need to know. Where she is. Who she’s with. For so long—”
“Any man can understand that. Especially Riley Fordham. He’ll wire you where she is. The school matron’s name.”
Shad swiped at troubling, buzzing, green-backed flies tormenting the men and horses in the afternoon heat.
Still Jonah had sat, watching until the last smudges of billowing wood smoke was all that remained on the far horizon. “She wants me bring her mother home,” he had said ….
Here at Fort Laramie now Sweete lumbered up beside the younger man as the cool breezes worked their way off the Medicine Bow Mountains to the west. Down the valley of the LaRamee River, through the smoked-hide lodges clustered in a small circle where the old mountain man and wife and daughter camped among the others in the shadow of the white soldiers’ fort.
Hook tugged the diamond hitch on the pack animal before Sweete spoke.
“I want you know I was disappointed as you, Jonah—finding Usher’s bunch already pushed through here before we got back.”
“I’ll find him,” Jonah replied. “I know who. And I know where now. I’ll get Gritta back home with Hattie. Like I promised the girl.”
Shad motioned the women on over, Toote and Pipe Woman, when they emerged quietly from the lodge into the new light of day. “Any use me asking to go ’long with you, son?”
He turned to the old mountain man. “I s’pose there’s still a lot for me to learn, Shad. But not this trip. The track is plain enough to read—and we both know they’re headed back to that Salt Lake country. It’s just a matter of time now.”
“Man always needs someone watching out for his backside, Jonah.”
He dropped the stirrup leather and strode over to the older man. “If ever I feel the need of that—I know one man I can trust to do it. You pulled my fat out of the fire a time or two.”
“You’re still a young hoss, too. Lots of time for us.”
Toote hugged Jonah just as she had when he had pulled away on that trail east. But now, to everyone’s surprise but her own, the young woman came forward into the arms Toote backed away from.
“Come back, Jonah Hook,” Pipe Woman said quietly in her rough-edged English. She had clearly practiced for this leave-taking.
He gazed down into her pretty face, noticing the dark, cherry eyes misting over. He suddenly sensed the hurt of tearing away, like flesh from flesh.
“I got to find her.” He looked at Shad for help. “Dead or alive. I got to—”
Sweete put his big hands on his daughter’s shoulders and gently pulled her back from Hook. “We know. I’ll make her understand why you’re going, Jonah.”
“You do, don’t you?”
Sweete nodded. “Come gimme a hug, son. And tell me you’ll be back. Tell Pipe Woman too. That you’ll be back. One day.”
He looked at her, snagged her arms again, and crunched her with all he had to give at that moment, feeling a little less hollow for human closeness. He brushed her cheek with his lips, knowing if he did anything more, he would be sorry for it. Like he was doing Gritta wrong because he would likely find himself staying when he had to be pushing on after Jubilee Usher and the Danites. There was a woman and two boys out there.
Releasing Pipe Woman, Jonah quickly hurried into the big man’s arms and turned away before he betrayed himself.
“You know her heart is riding off with you, Jonah. Take care that you do come back to us.”
Atop the young mare, yanking on the halter to the pack animal, then reining away, Jonah swallowed down the emptiness and hurt. He rode away, hard and fast. Not knowing for sure what else to do now with the hollow pain.
Knowing only that he could not stay while there was still blood and kin and half of him still out there among the deserts and mountains.
Still out there … somewhere.
Epilogue
Late Summer, 1908
THE YOUNG NEWSPAPERMAN lay stretched on the freshly filled straw tick below the front window, where the night was beginning to cool at last.
In the back room, he heard the soft murmur of the old man’s voice. A cooing really, to Nate Deidecker’s ear anyway. That’s how Jonah Hook half sang, half whispered his wife to sleep as night had eased down on this high land in the shadow of Cloud Peak.
Whereas of a time long ago gone the couple had lain together in the shadow of Big Cobbler Mountain in the Shenandoah—seasons before a long, long trail had brought Jonah and his wife here to the edge of the high plains, their backs against the Big Horns.
Deidecker’s eyes burned beneath the poor light of the smoky oil lamp. Nate set his pencil upon the pad that lay beside the tick, reached over, and rolled the wick down, snuffing the lamp and plunging the room into momentary darkness—dark only for the time it took his eyes to grow adjusted to the moonlight rising over the vaulting land, starshine as bright as any ballroom back east in Chicago, Philadelphia, or New York.
He stuffed his hands behind his head as he rolled onto his back and drank deeply of the scents in the room. The freshly dusted tick, emptied of sour straw and refilled that afternoon by the old man.
He remembered Hook taking down the sickle from the porch wall and going to work only yards from the cabin as if he’d done the same every day of his life for a hundred years, slashing back and forth in a neat row across that small meadow where Nate’s picketed buggy horse grazed contentedly. Fresh grass, growing summer cured beneath the high-country sun now late in the season, was what the old scout stuffed into the tick until it could hold no more. Then Hook buttoned it closed and dragged the mattress into the cabin’s front room.
Here beneath the open window where the curtain was nudged into a gentle dance above him, casting teasing shadows over his outstretched body, the night was cooling.
Strange how quickly the night sounds came to him once the lamp was out and all was darkness once more in this world of consuming wilderness. Just outside that door, beyond this window only inches from his elbow—those crickets and locusts and tree frogs and the little toads down by the Big Piney. And from the distance, on that gentle, warm breeze came the first of the distant calls he was not sure at first he had actually heard.
A wolf.
Deidecker was sure that’s what it was. Hook had explained the difference earlier that day. How the coyote yammered and yipped—a smaller cousin to the big, yelloweyed, lanky-legged prowler of the high plains and mountains.
Out there now, that was a wolf.
Only then did he realize Hook was no longer singing to his wife. He too must be listening to that wolf, Nate thought.
Then the quiet, soothing rumble of the old man’s voice drifted back to him once more. Renewed, as he cooed his wife to sleep. Like a man would rock his children.
And something struck him, a thought that his mind hung on the way a man might catch his coat on the head of a nail as he carelessly brushed past an old, weathered wall. In this way his thoughts brushing past in the summer night as he heard a different voice coming from the old man this night, in the black of that back room. A voice unlike the one the old scout had used to tell his story to the newspaperman—soft enough to put Nate Deidecker to sleep as well.
He savored that sound, like water running gently over its high-country streambed. Hook cooing to the silent, far-seeing woman who never spoke, never so much as looked at Deidecker but once all that day and into the long evening of listening to the old scout’s stories. Rocking, forever rocking in her chair set down in the grooves worn into that old porch out front.
This wild,
forbidden silence was their most private possession here in the darkness, with another summer night come stealing up the slope of these foothills. The light of a long day had hurriedly climbed over the Rockies.
As surely as Jonah Hook must have hurried west from Fort Laramie, over the Continental Divide, and marched to a rendezvous in that valley of the Great Salt Lake.
That part of the story would come tomorrow, Nate figured.
Enough for the newsman to digest in one day. Listening more than scribbling notes as Hook talked in that easy way of his so flavored by the things seen and heard, the things that had touched a heart gone old among these high and far places.
Nate had done enough of the writing though. But a lot of listening—to get the flavor of the old scout’s speech. Deidecker had to capture it just so, if he was ever going to make something of it.
He had come here for a story. And beneath this window with the wilderness slowly creeping in on him from the darkness realized he had a book. Good Lord—did Nate Deidecker have a book!
He closed his eyes, thinking on the leather binding … the expensive deckle-edged paper … signing copies of this breathtaking biography for the likes of folks back east who would buy out of wonder and amazement and …
… hours later, as the newspaperman came slowly awake, sensing there was a reason he had, Nate listened to the night. Listened to the great, shrinking wilderness that would soon be no more. Then he realized that the moon had risen, journeyed, and was coming down in the western half of the night black sky. Its first gentle, silvery rays slipped through the window only inches over his bed on the cabin floor.
Deidecker turned on his side, away from the window, propping an elbow beneath his cheek, ready to close his eyes again and give himself back to sleep when that moonlight caught something and shined from it, like a gentle ribbon of quicksilver off a mirror.
Pushing the single blanket from his legs, Nate rose, padding barefoot across the roughened plank floor. Never taking his eyes off the object beckoning from the stone mantle above the small fireplace.
He took it down and carried it quietly back to the window, where he turned the dull biass frame in the light to rid it of reflection.
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