Winter Rain

36

Late September 1874

DAY AFTER ENDLESS day Company C probed deeper, rode longer, yet came up with empty hands. Tides of heat and dust and distant thunderstorms brought one day after the next washing over them, taking each day away in the same order. Summer waned and grew weary, one of the hottest any man on these plains could remember. Steamy nights swirled overhead with a million old stars flecked behind gray rain-heads, and this land once more grew old before its time. These final days of August came up clear and green-skied and hotter than the last, then imperceptibly the sun’s path grew shorter, a man unable to notice until it was too late and autumn was upon him.

Closing fast with the odor of things dying, turning, changing—never to be the same again.

Come this cooling of the nights, come this season of the yellow leaf, Jonah was told by the others. That’s what they said the Comanche called autumn.

All he knew was that soon enough another winter would be closing in, and once more he had all too little to show for the miles crossed since the first green break of spring when he had decided to ride with Lamar Lockhart’s company of poorly paid Texas Rangers.

From time to time they circled back to re-provision, backtracking east to Camp Supply, using vouchers to draw on the treasury of the great State of Texas. It was there these men caught up on the momentous news following the bloodletting at Adobe Walls. The southern plains were indeed on fire—and from the sounds of it, the government was finally determined to put an end to Indian problems down here once and for all. William Tecumseh Sherman’s War Department had ordered no less than five columns into the field, all to converge on the Staked Plain, home of the holdouts: the Kwahadi Comanche.

Trouble was, right in the middle of it all lay the territory assigned Major John B. Jones’s Frontier Battalion of Texas Rangers. And at the heart of that was a piece of ground marked out for patrol by Captain Lamar Lockhart’s company of horsemen. Them, and some of the most skillful nomadic red raiders of the Llano Estacado.

Back in late August when Company C rode in to Camp Supply, they learned that Colonel John W. Davidson’s four companies of brunettes had already cut the deck. Those buffalo soldiers had forced the issue—scattering some of the fiercer bands, driving others back to their agencies. Seemed the government had demanded a roll to be made of all the peaceful bands on the reservations. Those not answering the roll call were deemed clearly hostile and would be hunted down, then driven back to their agency if possible.

“If that ain’t possible,” Niles Coffee was explaining what had been told him by friends he knew among Camp Supply’s soldiers, “then the army’s got orders to exterminate ’em.”

“Praise God!” Deacon Johns wailed. “Them savages are purely onhuman. Separate the wheat from the chaff, sayeth the Lord.”

“Trouble is,” Lamar Lockhart cautioned, “all those warrior bands that didn’t answer the roll at Fort Sill, or over at Anadarko and up at Darlington—they’ve all gone off and scurried west toward the headwaters of the Red River, the Brazos—who the hell knows how far they’ll scatter now.”

“The Kwahadi … they’re scattering?” Jonah asked anxiously.

“Chances are that’s what they’re doing—and why we haven’t found a sign one of all that bunch that went and hit the buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls,” Coffee answered.

“You think we’ll find any Comanche?” Jonah inquired, his cheeks growing hot in angry frustration. “Or we gonna keep riding back and forth till we’re old men?”

Lockhart turned to Hook. “You took an oath when you joined up, Jonah Hook.”

“I don’t give a goddamn about Texas!”

“No,” Lockhart replied all too quietly as the company of men moved close. “Maybe you don’t. But the rest of these men do. So I want you to think of one thing before you decide on booking in and giving up on this company’s duty. Think about the fact that of all these men here—I don’t know a one of them who positively knows they have a member of their family among the Comanche.”

Jonah’s eyes moved slowly across the more than two dozen men standing quietly nearby, every last one of them watching him with intense interest. “I don’t understand what you mean, Cap’n.”

“Jonah—it’s as simple as this: these men ride out with me into the unknown every morning for less than a dollar a day, hoping to find the scattered hostile villages, praying they’ll find white captives in those villages we do run onto. But not a one of these brave men has kin among the Kwahadi. But you do, Jonah Hook. By damned, you do.”

He felt the sting of the words slap him with the force of a flat hand across his jaw.

Lockhart stepped closer, his eyes gone as black as gun bores. “Jonah, I don’t know a bunch of men you could ride with who could pray any harder than this outfit has that it will be them that finds your boys for you.”

The colicky harshness, the utter truth of the captain’s words made Hook tremble inwardly. “I … I’m sorry, Cap’n Lockhart.” He snorted back some of his unrequited anger. “I’m riding with you. Riding with all of you.”

“Give us time, Jonah,” Niles Coffee said, “time and a little luck—we’ll find ’em for you. By God—we’re bound to find ’em.”

That night, their last at Camp Supply for some time to come, Jonah lay awake for the longest time as the rest of them snored. Unable to sleep, he could not tear his mind loose from what war machinery the soldiers told Coffee was already in motion. If by some kind of luck his two boys were still alive and still with the hostile Kwahadi of Quanah Parker out there on the Staked Plain, there now existed the very real possibility that they would soon be in the very path of that hungry war machine.

Two small boys …

But he had stopped, forcing himself to remember they were no longer little. Grown to young men already. Old enough to be … soldiers themselves.

How he had prayed for sleep to come soothe him as his fevered mind dwelt on nothing else but those five columns that would converge on the Llano Estacado to effect the final cleanup of the southern plains before winter set in. Major William R. Price was said to be marching east along the Canadian River out of Fort Union in New Mexico with eight companies of the Eighth Cavalry to effect a junction with Colonel Nelson Miles.

Lieutenant Colonel George P. Buell, leading four troops of the Ninth U.S. Negro Cavalry and two troops from the Tenth, along with two companies of the Eleventh Infantry and thirty scouts, was moving northwest across the Brazos from Fort Griffin, Texas.

Lieutenant Colonel John W. “Black Jack” Davidson was leading six troops of his Tenth U.S. Negro Cavalry, three companies of the Eleventh Infantry, and forty-four scouts west from Fort Sill.

On south of the austere caprock of the Staked Plain, Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie was probing north out of Fort Concho at the head of his column comprising the largest prong of the attack: eight companies of his battle-tough Fourth Cavalry, four more of the famous buffalo soldiers from the Tenth Cavalry, one company from the Eleventh Infantry, in addition to some thirty scouts.

Then there was Colonel Nelson A. Miles himself, who was marching southwest at the van of eight troops of the Sixth Cavalry, four companies of the colonel’s own Fifth Infantry, along with one Parrot ten-pounder and two Gat-ling guns.

It boggled Jonah’s mind to think that those five columns made for more than three thousand soldiers converging on the ancient buffalo ground of the Kiowa and Comanche. The war those hostiles had started with the white man would soon be over, every man was saying. Only a matter of weeks now. Then he thought of a bitch in heat, and all the town dogs yammering around her, tails up and whipping with great excitement. That female finally left with nowhere to run—only to turn and snap back at the frenzied pack.

Sure enough, the army was going to go out and give those red heathens a bellyful of war. Whip the lords of the southern plains back to their reservations. That, or wipe them off the earth.

At sunrise the next morning, Lockhart turned their noses west again for another swing across the North Fork of the Red River. With this second summer of horrid drought, no man could say he relished the thought of more miles and saddle galls, riding all day through the stifling dust and searing heat to find nothing more than a parched pucker of ground where they had expected to find a water hole to slake the thirst of their animals. No water, and only stunted, sun-parched grass to offer those lathered horses.

With a vengeance summer had gripped the plains in its dry and lifeless paw, refusing to release the land. Until the second week of September, when the skies clouded, frothed, then boiled over, drenching the thirsty killing ground.

But with the rains came a whole new set of problems. Now the horses had trouble pulling each hoof out of the thick red gumbo that sucked at man and beast alike. Day and night the thunder rolled, rattling like dice bones in a horn cup. Storms that gave the men little relief, and no time for any of them to dry out. They slept wet and cold, if they slept at all. They rode soaked to the skin, shivering clear to the marrow, teeth chattering as the first winds of autumn hissed out of the west with a wiry whine, hurrying before them those whispered hints of winter.

Somewhere beneath this same low sky, he repeatedly told himself, his two boys slept and ate. And rode, prisoners of the Kwahadi. Just out of reach. Somewhere out there in all this tangle of creeks and streams and river systems, this land haunted by the holdout Comanche. He had to remind himself that they walked beneath this same sky. Under this same unforgiving sky.

Jonah grew thinner still. Hard for a man to keep his appetite about him when there was little in the way of cooked food to eat. Few fires allowed, by order of Captain Lockhart. So instead Jonah fed himself on his renewed hopes. Those, and his fervent prayers.

Beneath that unforgiving sky, filled horizon to horizon with slate-colored sheets of bone-numbing rain, Jonah Hook prayed for his boys harder than he had in the six years since he last left Fort Laramie behind him.

Prayed he would find them both before the army cornered Quanah Parker.

This season of the year the air freshened, cooled quickly, after the sun went down. It felt good on Tall One’s face as he and the others loped toward the east, driving their great pony herd before them. They hoped to lure away the yellow-legs who rode with Three-Finger Kinzie, draw the pony soldiers away from the village as it marched to the north.

“The tracks of our herd will serve as the bait,” explained the gray-eyed war chief. “Kinzie cannot resist the chance to follow so wide a trail.”

In the past five days the soldiers had drawn ever closer to the village that hurried to the canyon where they would join Lone Wolf’s Kiowa in safety until Kinzie passed on by. But they needed meat to feed their people. Of late too many days had passed without time taken to hunt. And if they were to wait out the soldiers at the bottom of the dark canyon, then the Kwahadi desperately needed meat. Reluctantly the war chief had allowed a small band of hunters to go in search of the buffalo said to be just south of the canyon.

He hoped this wide, scoured trail of the pony herd would be enough to draw the army scouts from discovering the trail of their meat hunters. Drawing so close to the canyon where his people would hide, the war chief had come up with what all the Kwahadi prayed would be a successful diversion.

Many of the warriors had even tied bundles of lodgepoles to some of the herd ponies, the better to scratch the ground in shallow furrows, to fool the Tonkawa trackers into thinking this was indeed the trail of a great village fleeing to the east, back to the reservation.

Surely, the lure of so fresh a trail could not be denied by the pony soldiers and their scouts.

But if their diversion failed, Kinzie’s Tonkawa would bring the yellow-legs right to the canyon, once more to the very doorstep of the Kwahadi.

So to confuse the soldiers all the more, to make Kinzie think the Comanche warriors were acting as a rear guard to their fleeing village, to draw Kinzie’s scouts off the scent of the chase, the Kwahadi war chief ordered a large-scale night raid on the yellow-leg camp.

Hours after sunset, when the sky had darkened from rose to twilight’s deep hues, more than 250 horsemen lashed their ponies in among Three-Finger Kinzie’s herd. Only to find the soldiers ready for them.

In the midst of the confusion, yelling, and gunfire, the war chief rallied his warriors. If the soldiers would not scatter with surprise, then the Kwahadi would fall back on what always worked: the grinding of the Comanche wheel. Around and around Tall One and Antelope galloped with the rest, firing into the herd, working in and out, looking for a weak spot in the soldier lines where they could drive the frightened soldier horses. From time to time, Tall One barely heard Antelope’s familiar war song against the rattle of gunfire, the rumble of hammering hooves, and the shouts of men at battle.

Then as quickly as he had come and found the soldiers prepared for their attack, the war chief called off his warriors. They drew back and sniped here and there on the perimeter of the yellow-leg camp throughout the rest of that cold night. Just before dawn, when the soldiers finally gathered up the courage to make their own counterattack, the gray-eyed one ordered his warriors back atop their ponies, telling them to withdraw as he led them in a circle to the east, riding away into the bright, rosy-gold autumnal sunrise, their backs to a falling, overturned sliver of a moon—a route determined all the better to confirm for the soldiers and their Tonkawa trackers that the village lay to the east. Only after that great war party had covered many hours and that many more miles did the gray-eyed one finally rein about to the north. Back toward the deep canyon where their families waited.

Every man of them prayed their buffalo hunters had been successful. Every man of them prayed for the success of their costly ruse.

Riding with the ten chosen to stay behind atop the ridges, where they would keep an eye on the yellow-legs, Tall One watched Kinzie march his soldier column to the northeast, along the outbound trail they had made with their pony herd.

“Our plan is working!” one said as the soldiers plodded below them.

“We can go tell the others,” agreed another.

“Shouldn’t we follow the yellow-legs a while longer?” asked Tall One of the warrior who led the scouting party.

“I remember you as a boy, Tall One,” Dives Backward chided. “You always refused to listen to the rest of us. Always wanted to go your own way.”

Standing laughed. “He didn’t learn his lesson then. And it seems he still hasn’t learned!”

“How long are you going to think like a white man?” demanded Tortoise Shell.

The burn of embarrassment fired Tall One’s face. “I only want to be sure. To know that the yellow-legs are really going to march on to the east, away from our village.”

“You have eyes, Tall One!” Dives Backward roared. “Look!”

He felt their eyes on the back of his shoulders, burning holes in his flesh with their disapproval. He wanted to belong to them more than just about anything, wanted their approval. What hurt him most at that moment was that he still hungered to belong just as he had when he had first come to the Kwahadi. Thirsted for their approval like a man many days in the desert. To belong, he would now shove aside his gnawing suspicion.

“Let us … let’s go tell our war chief his plan has worked,” Tall One eventually said, turning away from watching the soldier column, back to the smirking faces of the others.

“For all their looking, those stupid Tonkawa haven’t come up with a feather, not one Kwahadi pony, much less a single lodge,” Tortoise Shell said. “We give them tracks to follow, to follow clear to the end of yesterday! As for what they will think, let them think we have disappeared into the air.”

“Come,” Standing said. “We’ll ride back to the canyon, where the earth can swallow us whole!”

Dives Backward laughed, his head thrown back. “To the canyon, where the white man’s trackers will never find us!”