39

Late February 1875

AT DICKINSON’S PLACE the settler and his three sons greeted Company C with nothing less than flat-out celebration as the Rangers legged down off their weary mounts. That family of stockmen and farmers eking out its existence at the edge of the west Texas frontier hadn’t seen different faces for going on three months.

It was either in the barn, or outside in the barn’s sun-striped winter shadows, that Jonah Hook and Two Sleep stayed across those next thirty hours as Ezra Dickinson and his boys helped Lamar Lockhart’s Rangers recoup from their patrol. It was a barn built at no cost to the old stockman, raised free by the State of Texas in return for allowing Ranger patrols to use it to store feed, tack, supplies, and provender. A hundred of these barns cast their shadows across the caprock fringe of the Staked Plain.

While the celebration of men and the talk of weather and stock and horseflesh was one thing Jonah hoped to avoid, it was the Dickinson women that Jonah tried most to stay clear of. Too much did they remind him of those once a part of his own life. Both gone: one off to St. Louis and Miss Emily Rupert’s Seminary; the other … just gone.

Memories of her were the bitterest water Jonah had been forced to drink in those years lost and gone. But drink he did, forcing himself to taste a little more of her remembrance each day. Sad glimpses of what he once had, triggered ofttimes by smells, delicious smells coming from the kitchen where the three Dickinson women cooked supper for that bunch. As the others joked and sang and arm wrestled, Jonah remembered the smells of snap beans and carrots set on a pale-blue plate next to a mound of Gritta’s mashed potatoes, them that she boiled and mashed, then served up skins and all.

So as much as Jonah yearned to study the face of a white woman, to stand just close enough to determine how a white woman might smell, as much as he felt a need to be in the company of such genteel farming folk of the earth like those he was raised among, Hook of a sudden felt ill at ease, ill-mannered, rough, and more coarse than he ever had in all his life. And downright afraid of making a damned fool of himself.

So he stayed to himself, there in the bam with Two Sleep while the younger Rangers flirted with the three Dickinson girls and the missus baked dried apple pies for her guests. The merry sounds of men at their fun, the tinkle of women’s laughter, made Jonah recall the days of camp meetings back to the Shenandoah—religious tent revivals that got so frolicsome, the long-coated preachers had to keep women off the grounds between sunset and sunrise.

“Peel your ears back, Jonah—I got some news!” bellowed Niles Coffee as he strode up through the deepening shadows that first night after the company had come in to the ranch.

“What news?”

Coffee settled, his back against the rough-plank barn wall where Hook leaned. “Dickinson says Mackenzie’s figuring he’s got the Comanche whipped bad enough so he’s gonna offer the Kwahadi a chance to make peace.”

“What’s his peace offer mean to us?”

Sucking on the chewed and fractured stem of his old pipe, Coffee answered. “Mackenzie offers peace to Parker’s bunch to come in—that means the war’s over.”

Hook studied the flame-headed Ranger beside him a moment there in the last glow of the day, the sun having slid beyond the far rim of the prairie, beyond a small piece of ground above the barn where he had frequently gone to sit, staring, wondering.

Jonah asked, “Ain’t that what you boys wanted to do all along? Get the war over with?”

With a wag of his red head. Coffee said, “Not exactly. Those of us I can speak for, we took the oath so we could get us a crack at the Comanche. Captain Lockhart ain’t leading no rag-tailed bunch of splay-footed farmers now. To the last man we joined the Rangers to fight those sonsabitching red-bellies. Never counted on the army coming behind us and making it unpossible to hunt down Comanche.”

“That what Mackenzie will do? Keep us from hunting?”

He dug at the ground with a sliver of weathered barn wood. “Not likely the army can keep us from hunting, Jonah. Just keep us from … killing Comanche.”

“You want to get your licks in first—don’t you, Coffee?”

The sergeant’s dark, larval eyes narrowed on Hook. “Don’t you? Seeing how the Kwahadi are the bunch that stole your boys?”

“Just want my boys. That’s all.”

Coffee snorted quietly. “Can’t believe you could just ride in there, fetch back your boys, and ride off without taking blood from them that stole your kin.”

“My boys is all … all I need,” Jonah repeated, his words coming hard. Hot flecks began to sting his eyes, and something sour and thick clogged his throat.

They fell silent for a few minutes as Coffee sucked on his pipe and the sky they watched wheeled from orange to rose, then faded to the deeper hues of twilight.

“Major Jones sent out the word,” Coffee said.

“Word that Mackenzie was gonna make peace with the Comanche?”

“Yep. Sent a rider through here a few days back with the major’s dispatch for the captain. Jones wants all his company captains to meet him at Griffin in a couple weeks to plan our final campaign.”

“What’re you talking about—a final campaign? You just said the army’s making peace with the Comanche. It’s over, Sergeant. Your goddamned war is over!”

“Not my war, Jonah,” Coffee growled. “Not the war we Texans been fighting since the days before we tore free from Mexico. No, sir—by god-bloody-damned! This war ain’t over till Texas says it’s over. Those are our Comanches—not the army’s. And sure as hell they ain’t Mackenzie’s.” He raised his arm, pointing at the house porch where many of the Rangers lounged. “See them boys? Not a one of them ready to say their war is over, Jonah. Their war. My war. I lost kin! Goddammit—I lost kin!”

“All right,” Hook said quietly as Coffee shuddered with that jolt of passion. “So what you aim to do?”

The fire-headed sergeant composed himself and turned back to look at Jonah. “Lockhart figures from Jones’s dispatch that the major is going to send his Frontier Battalion out in force. To make a real campaign of it. All the companies in a grand fight of it: loop up from Fort Griffin, north, clear to the Canadian. Sweep the country clear before the army goes and herds all them Comanche onto the reservations at last—before Kwahadi get about as scarce as a harpsychord in a whorehouse.”

“Sweep the country clear?”

“Goddammit, Jonah!” Coffee growled. “Major Jones wants what Lockhart and the rest of us want. One final push against them red bastards.”

“The Rangers gonna make your own war?”

“A bloodletting the likes of which no Texan has seen in the history of the Lone Star Republic.”

“I’ll bet you get your licks in too.”

“Look, Jonah. We all of us got a hunting permit the good people of Texas give us the day we signed on with the Rangers.” Coffee reached into a pocket inside his heavy coat and pulled out the star into the dimming light. “Here’s my six-pointed hunting license, Jonah. Each man of us carries it, ’cause we take this war serious.”

“I got something else other’n Comanche bucks to hunt.” He pushed himself back against the barn and stood slowly.

“Ain’t you with us, Jonah? They got your boys. And now you can even things up. Looks like we’ll have this one last chance to wipe out all them stragglers what don’t go in to their agency.”

He wagged his head. “Sergeant, I don’t need to even things up, because there ain’t no way on God’s green earth things ever will get even for me.”

“No matter if you find your boys—you won’t be even?”

“No. I lost so much—time, years, miles … just living—ain’t nothing nobody can do to ever get Jonah Hook even again.”

He started off down the side of the barn, hearing the Shoshone rise from the winter-parched stubble to shadow him. Then Coffee’s voice caught Hook again.

“I want to try, Jonah. Good Lord knows I had kin took and killed,” Coffee tried his best to explain in that darkness. “So the Good Lord knows my heart when I stand here now and I vow to try to help you even things up. Once and for all.”


Jonah had walked on without stopping, slipping on out of the dimming, translucent light of that sunset and disappeared into the shadows of twilight. For the rest of that evening until well past moonrise, the sounds of laughter and loud talk trickled out to him from the rifle ports in Dickinson’s two sod houses that squatted here on the prairie, the both of them joined by the low-roofed dogtrot. For so long he remained afraid of dawn coming, afraid that someone would light a candle or bring a lamp looking for him. Not even wanting to look into the light of a fire that night—simply for the fear that he might be forced to look into his own thoughts, like shadowed corners of a sudden given light.

Lockhart ordered them back to the saddle at midmorning, marching them a little east of due south, aiming for Fort Griffin and the war council called by the commander of the Frontier Battalion. And while they rode the sun down that day, Jonah Hook wondered what he would do now, come this last push against the Comanche—the ones said to hold his boys.

Had he eaten up too much time that he didn’t have? Time and again did he just up and ride after a ruse, believing in smoke on the wind, hoping against his better judgment? Following one hunch after another that had clabbered up like Lamar Lockhart’s White River patrols?

Had the time come for him to leave Texas and head southwest? Go back where he had the last—and really the first—solid evidence of what had happened to his boys? At least that dingy, grayed, washed-out shirt had been more solid than any cantina rumor or wild comanchero tale he had listened to over the years. Perhaps to go back there to New Mexico, maybe back south to Sonora once more—there to pick up more of a solid thread. Something to cling to, even if it was only a thread as thin as spider’s silk.

The captain halted the company when the sun had touched the top margin of the caprock to the west, turning the slopes of braided cedar to a rusty band of gold beneath the dark, gut-colored clouds. Lockhart instructed them to build only three small fires, then dismissed the Rangers. Some gathered and tied off the horses. Others sought out firewood. A few got out cups and knives to scoop and dig at the flint-hard soil, the better to hide the tattletale flames of their fires. And when the water had been poured from canteens into the blackened pots and set to boil for coffee, a drink the trail-weary men would use to soften the thick, wide strips of dried beef Lockhart had bought off Dickinson, Jonah moved out of the circle and sought a place to relieve himself.

Seemed such a simple thing as taking a pee was getting harder every year. His body growing older, the pounding his kidneys took of the trail felt more magnified with each successive season.

On the far side of camp from where the animals had been hobbled, Hook stopped near some clumps of winter-brittle grass and unbuttoned his fly. On a scout like this in country where they would likely come quickly on the enemy, a plainsman had to practice all varieties of precaution: even to using the heel and toe of his tall stovepipe boots to scoop out a shallow hole quickly at the base of some stunted scrub. He would then pee in that hole. Done, Jonah used his scarred boot to cover up best he could the sign, and that telltale odor, of a white man’s passing. Buttoning up as—

“Jonah.”

He turned with a jerk, finding Lockhart and Coffee. “Surprised me, Cap’n.”

There was no nonsense on that face with its bushy black mustache. “Want you to come with us. Get that Snake—Two Sleep—to come with you.”

Following the two Rangers back into the midst of the camp, Jonah motioned for the Shoshone to follow. Through the scrub where the herders had hobbled the stock and were cross-lining the pack mules, Lockhart and his sergeant moved on into the waning light. As they rounded the base of one of the rolling hills, Jonah saw Billy Benton. The man rose when he heard the rest coming.

“You find anything more of interest, Billy?” Lockhart asked.

“Nothing but the tracks, Cap’n.” His was a pointed, prying type of nose set between friendly eyes. The man dusted his hands off on the front of his britches, then straightened.

“Billy here came out to have himself a look around before he took up his guard post ’top that hill,” Lockhart explained, turning to Hook and the Shoshone. “And in the late light he came upon something I want you both to have a look at.”

“You got sign?”

“Look for yourself, Jonah. Tell me what you fellas think.”

The graying man pointed at the ground, his beard and mustache tobacco-stained like Deacon Johns’s. Benton moved his hand back and forth, then once around in a circle, before he stepped back out of the way as Jonah nodded for Two Sleep to join him. Side by side they knelt, studying the ground.

After a moment the Shoshone rose and moved off a few yards in the direction taken by the trail. Jonah glanced at the sky. The tracks headed north. Hook stood and turned to the three Rangers.

“What’s south of here? Maybe not far as Griffin.”

“You know, Sergeant—that’s what I like about Mr. Hook here,” the captain began. “I’m glad you’re still with us, Jonah. So what’s south of here? And well this side of Fort Griffin … why, it’s Cedar Lake.”

As Coffee and Benton grunted what sounded like approval, Jonah asked, “What’s Cedar Lake?”

Lockhart grinned slightly, some of his teeth showing. “Seems it’s an ancient place the Comanche go. They wander there from time to time over the years.”

Coffee nodded, removing his hat and scratching that red scalp of his. “It’s a place that the interpreter up to Fort Sill, fella named Phil McCusker, says the half-breed Quanah Parker his own self claims he was borned.”

“They’re moving north,” Jonah said, again looking into the distance where Two Sleep rose from the ground and began heading back slowly.

“Back to the White River gate,” Coffee added. “Like we figured all along. You was right, Cap’n.”

“I guess we were, Sergeant,” Lockhart said. “Only thing we had wrong was we got there way too early. How old are those tracks, Jonah?”

Hook turned to Two Sleep, moved his hands in the question at the same time he asked it in English of his saddle partner. “How old the tracks?”

“A week. Maybe little more.”

Lockhart nodded, moving forward a step, motioning along the ground. “From what I see, doesn’t seem they were in any hurry.”

“Nope. No rush.”

“How many you figure on?” asked Niles Coffee.

“Eight. Maybe ten,” he answered, looking at Two Sleep. The Shoshone nodded to confirm it.

“No travois, though,” Lockhart grumbled.

“Likely a raiding party,” Jonah ventured. “Maybe out hunting.”

“Scouting the way north, out ahead of the whole village?” Coffee inquired.

“Could be,” Jonah said, looking at the deepening sky. “We can tell more come morning.”

“C’mon, then,” Lockhart ordered. “Let’s get back and get supper in our bellies. I’ve made my decision to move on a few miles after we eat and before we bed down.”

“Makes more sense to have a cold camp now,” Jonah replied.

“Damn right, Captain,” Coffee agreed. “This ground rightly swarms with Comanch’. If them Kwahadi are up and about at long last, I don’t want no wandering scalp party finding sign of us. Them sonsabitches worse’n red ants swarming over my mama’s slop bucket back of her stove.”

Company C soaked their hard-bread and jerky in their coffee, for the most part eating silently, each man down in his own thoughts now that they had fresh sign. It was not a sullen bunch that emptied the blackened pots in the fire holes, kicked dirt back to fill the depressions, then walked their horses back and forth over that ground before mounting and moving out at a lope behind Captain Lamar Lockhart. This time, however, he turned them about, turned them into the wind. Instead of pointing their noses south for Fort Griffin and the earthy recreation offered by St. Angela, the fleshpot across the river from the post, the Rangers were coming about to the north.

Deacon Johns had grumbled his praise as they went to saddle in the dark. “Praise God you boys are forced to go a while longer before you lie fornicating with some likely, oily-tongued slattern what has her seven kinds of pox!”

Lockhart had them backtracking for the White River portal, on a fresh trail that just might mean a payday come at last for Company C.

In the gray of dawn’s first awakening that next morning, Jonah and Two Sleep led Lockhart and Coffee in a wide swing to the south for insurance’s sake while the rest of the Rangers waited in a cold camp for their return. In little more than an hour, it looked like they had their answer.

Jonah reined them up and dropped once more to the new tracks they had just come across.

“I don’t think this bunch is scouts for a village on the move, Cap’n,” he said, rising and slapping his glove against his britches silvered with dust. Jonah pulled the glove on, saying, “We should’ve found something by now, sweeping around like we done. No outriders would be pushing this far out from the village moving to new ground.”

“Like I said, it’s a scalping party,” Coffee replied, assuredly.

“Sorry, Sergeant,” Jonah said. “This bunch ain’t on the lope—it’s moving too slow to be making a war trail. They might just be hunters. But that ain’t the who of it.”

“What else, Jonah?” Lockhart asked.

“They’ve run onto friends out here.”

The captain’s eyes narrowed sharply, a deep furrow dug between his bushy black eyebrows. “Friends?”

“Another bunch,” Jonah replied, his arm motioning over the new tracks, then pointing north.

“These are the prints of the war party we found last night?”

With a shake of his head, Jonah said, “No. Different. One of these bucks riding a pony got a hoof I ain’t see before. A mustang with a split hoof. Back a ways you can see where they stopped while one of the riders changed mounts. Took the weight off the pony with the split hoof.”

“I’ll be go to hell,” admired Lockhart, smiling in his black mustache. “What else you tell me about this bunch? How many now?”

“Probably a couple dozen by now—what with this second outfit joined up.”

“What’s all that tell you, Jonah?”

“Says this ain’t a hunting party. Probably not a real scalp raid neither.”

“What then?”

“Likely the village split up to move across a big piece of ground, coming out of that Cedar Lake country you say is down there. Split up because of what you fellas told me—with the soldiers patrolling out of Fort Concho and all.”

Lockhart worked his hands anxiously over the saddle horn. “Which means they’re re-forming ranks?”

“If you mean they’re coming back together—you can bet the bank of Texas on it, Cap’n.”

“By damned!” he exclaimed. “We’ve got a fresh trail—and it will lead us right to their village.”

“Cap’n Lockhart,” Jonah said soberingly, “remember this bunch of Comanche is on the move.”

Coffee leaned forward, his face suddenly gone serious in that red beard of his. Concerned, he asked, “They don’t know we’re behind them, do they?”

“No,” Hook said. “They don’t know we’re back here—yet. But that’s only a matter of time.”

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