Winter Rain

Prologue

Late summer 1908

HE CAME AWAKE with a struggle.

The overwhelming enemies were musky in their sweat-slicked red skins. Their heaving breath stank like rancid meat in his nostrils. The muzzles of their guns exploded in his face like the roar of riven earth on Judgment Day.

Still, his was not the sort of thrashing, physical convulsion someone suddenly awakened from a sound sleep might fight.

No, his struggle was all within the dream.

And that frightened him even more.

Of a sudden he smelled the air.

Its sharp tang reminded him. With a start he knew where he was.

Breath catching in his pounding chest, his hands grasped the edges of the grass-filled, tick-covered mattress beneath him in something close to relief.

As his head slowly plopped back against the pallet, Nathan Deidecker sighed and closed his eyes in emotional exhaustion, then drank in another breath of the cool, pungent air. Hungrily drank of the summer darkness outside.

Then realized why he had awakened.

Another low blat of thunder rumbled in off Cloud Peak rising thirteen thousand feet above the level of the sea out there in the blackness—not far off, its bellow slapped that high land in the deepest dark of postmidnight, the light of the heavens tracing down in tongues of fire just to the west of this small two-room cabin raised on a small promontory of ground by the back and shoulders and sheer will of the sinewy old scout.

Nate listened to another distant rumble, heard it coming almost serpentine across the heaving upvaulted land from a long way off, like it was some rock slide, a frightening avalanche careening down off the Big Horns toward him.

With the thunderous bellow fading onto the prairies below, the night stilled, and Deidecker marveled at just how clear and distinct and ominous sounds could seem out here in this country. Back east—hell, even back on the central plains of eastern Nebraska that he now called home—Nate could not recall ever really hearing any sound so distinct before.

As distinct as he now heard the whispers of this summer night.

Clear as rinsed crystal, he remembered the expression used by the old man just the day before when describing the property of light and sound and even how far a man might himself see in this immense, mind-numbing country.

“Damn right, Mr. Hook,” Nate mumbled to himself now. Some things were starting to come clear as rinsed crystal.

A creak of old rope crept past the thick wool blanket that hung as a crude door across the single opening between the cabin’s two small rooms.

Nate conjured a mental picture of the prairie bed: rough pine slats interlaced with hemp rope woven crosshatch to support its own grass-stuffed tick mattress.

Just someone stirring in their sleep, Nate thought. One of ’em awakened by the thunder like I was. Maybe that godforsaken green lightning—

As another distant, eerie flash backlit the Big Horns, there came another creak of the old rope, but louder this time. More stretch. And below that arose the muffle of voices. Whispered entreaties: low, husky, in need.

The green light’s eventual clap washed over the valley, and in its dying, Nate realized what was happening in the next room. Not without a little wonder.

“He’s … that old man’s making … making love to—” And he stopped whispering a moment, self-conscious at even the tiny sound his night voice made in that great silence of the thunder’s retreat. “…love to his woman.”

Deidecker sensed something rise in his throat, not sour nor choking like disgust at overhearing a bestial act. Not even fear of being discovered as an unwilling voyeur. Nothing closely resembling strong sentiment aroused by his own need of a woman to come into his life. No, what the newspaperman felt, lying there on that fragrant, landheady tick mattress dropped on Jonah Hook’s whipsawn wood floor, was something that filled Deidecker not only with immense happiness for the old scout, but with a profound sense of awe as well.

“That man’s too old to be climbing atop a woman,” he contented himself to say, rolling onto his side, away from the insistent, rhythmic creak of that rope-bed in the far room. “Especially that one … that … woman.”

Deidecker recalled just how dead she had been yesterday as he and the old scout talked of his early years come west to the prairies and mountains. She had been next to lifeless. Dead was the most apt word he could use to describe her, even wrote it down on some of the pages of his notes as Jonah Hook talked and Nate stole furtive glances at the old woman. He remembered now the way her pale blue eyes had gazed out at him without any light or the slightest fire behind them. As if Hook’s woman were a shattered hulk of some weakened building, those blue eyes like gaping, paneless windows, staring out at him with nothing but bleak, hollow emptiness inside.

Abruptly Nate shuddered, remembering how Jonah described his return to his homestead in Missouri after the war and his service on the high plains fighting Indians—coming home to find the cabin windows broken, the fields gone to weed. His whole family ripped from his life. The daughter. His two sons. And that woman.

To rid himself of the frightening specter of that doomed homestead, Nate shook his head like the old scout’s rangy yard hound shook its hide free of water as it clambered up the bank from the Little Piney River and forced himself to think on other things.

The newsman wondered, How’s a man like Hook ever able to get it up? Not that the frontiersman was so old he physically couldn’t. Not that at all. Just, how can a man desire a woman who clearly isn’t involved in what he’s doing with her at the moment? Her body might be in that room. But, Deidecker figured, her mind surely wasn’t.

What with the way she rocked and rocked, and rocked on all that previous day out on that porch in the shadow of Cloud Peak.

The grassy yard lit up with a sudden green flare of phosphorescent lightning tonguing down from the peaks in splintered streaks. Landing so close to the cabin, it raised the hair on his arms, at the back of his neck. Its looming brightness surprised him, and for a heartbeat the eerie, unearthly glow illuminated the large room as if by the purest, unsullied daylight. As it did, the old chromotype gleamed again with a life of its own, once more drawing him as the slap of thunder gurgled off the high granite, rumbling down the slope toward the cabin.

It was in the silence of last night’s first flush of darkness that Nate had looked at the browning tintype—awakened, then drawn by the reflection of the figures he studied with the moon shining in through the window right above his mattress.

Must be close to dawn, he thought without real calculation as the first huge, sopping wads of rain struck the porch roof like mud clods, so loud it startled Deidecker bolt upright from the tick. He shook like he was under fire from disembodied spirits out there among the ghostly green light and wind-tortured pines soughing in the sodden, thunderriven darkness.

Then in a crack of that great, gaping silence Nate heard the old man’s voice whispering, his pleas just barely audible.

By God, he’s romancing her, Deidecker thought as he listened more to the tone and the inflection of the words—not really able to hear all that Hook was saying to his wife. But the newsman, here to get the story of a lifetime on one of the frontier’s most famous scouts, did not have to hear every word to know that, as the old man rocked his body back and forth atop the woman, Jonah Hook was also murmuring to her as if she might truly be intent, really hanging on all that her husband had to profess to her.

And for the first time since Nate had come awake and begun listening to the old couple groaning and grappling in that near room, Deidecker of a sudden felt like he was no better than the man who knelt at a keyhole and peered in on the private, shabby lives of others, spying on their most intimate moments.

He rolled over again, stretching a hand into the dark, its fingers spidering across the rough floor until they captured his pipe and tobacco pouch. Deidecker roiled and found his feet, rose unsteadily, and padded barefoot to the door. Noiselessly he drew back into the room just as another flare of lightning, white-hot as brimstone, ripped into the yard, sundering the black night in two as he flung an arm over his face. Nate stood there, temporarily blinded until the light’s sting faded from his eyes.

He was left with only the reassuring slap of the familiar thunder come to caress both him and this wilderness in remembrance of that streak of fire quickly swallowed by the dark void of this short summer night here in the lap of this great, silent land.

It was only then that he realized he had been robbed of breath, shocked by the closeness of the lightning’s strike now. In awe at the very raw, killing power of it. Something so primal, so savage. Like arrows of fire stalking out of the great black dome of the heavens, flung down onto this wilderness.

As he stood there in the doorway, the sudden blast of the riven air assaulted his nostrils with the rank odor of the storm, not only permeating his heightened sense of smell, but seeming to penetrate every pore of his body. Barechested and shivering slightly, Deidecker stepped onto the porch, then stopped, warily cocking an ear back into the cabin as the thunder rumbled away, once more creating that eternal void of silence in its wake.

“I love you, Gritta,” the old scout vowed in a whisper like rawhide dragged over rough ground. “More now—than ever. And one day, I know you’ll come back from …”

As much as the newspaperman strained, he didn’t hear the rest of Hook’s plaintive words. Instead, the only sound from that blanket-doored room some twenty feet away was more of the fevered grappling in the dark.

Deidecker turned away to load his pipe, then struck a match, shielding it against the incessant breeze washing down from the peaks and the glaciers and that never-summer snow far above him in the darkness, where for that moment he wasn’t sure just what was sky and cloud, and what might truly be hulking mountain ready to tumble down upon this high land of awesome silence intertwined with the brooding black of wilderness night.

Then with his next sharp-tanged breath, the rain came hard upon that place.

And when it did, the breeze freshened like a cold slap against his bare cheek. He gasped in the sudden explosion of the summer-tanged ozone as the huge, wad-sized drops hurled themselves onto that crude porch, wetting his bare feet and soaking the bottoms of the canvas dungarees he had wisely purchased back in Omaha before journeying west to northern Wyoming.

Deidecker did not mind summer’s reeking, prairie cold, really. Nor the chilling, bone-numbing wet of the storm’s fury driven at him. Rather than fleeing, he instead settled there in the woman’s chair, puffing bowl after bowl of his favorite pipe, brooding on all the old man had spoken of just the day before, thinking on all that he wanted to ask Hook with the thunderous coming of this second day among the memories and the ghosts of years and lives gone the way of summer snows. His bare skin warmed with the closeness of those strikes of green, phosphorescent lightning, and his mind electrified with all the old man had already told him. Then he began to dwell on all the old man had kept from telling him.

So Deidecker sat a long time, riding out summer’s late storm there in the old woman’s rocker, sensing for himself the chair’s singular place worn down in those two ruts she had scoured into the rough boards of the porch over her years of roosting here below Cloud Peak. He could almost feel some of the woman’s warmth remnant in the worn cotton pad, sense the touch of her flesh against his as he laid his bare forearms along the tops of the yellowpine armrests worn white from those endless hours gone in staring up into the hulking immensity of these mountains.

Only when Nate realized the storm was passing onto the plains below, its fury headed east for South Dakota, did he become aware of the subtle change in the quality of light in the yard beyond, the texture of skylight drenched over the nearby hills and flung up against the tall peaks, uplifted like a young woman’s breasts yearning for her lover’s touch. So close. So damned seductively close.

Of a frightening sudden he became aware of the old man.

Hook was standing in the open doorjamb, as frozen as a winter-gaunt wolf caught in the action of hunting snow-shoe hare, one paw in the air and the other three ready to spring, his eyes intent on Deidecker.

As much as Nate was startled to find the old scout staring at him in the murky, ashen light of predawn, he quickly reassured himself it was as natural a thing as could be: To find an old plainsman like Hook sneaking up on a man unawares, studying him as that hungry wolf would his quarry. Nate swallowed down his surprise like the most bitter, metallic taste of cold fear. And tried to smile.

“G’morning, Mr. Hook,” he whispered as cheerfully as he could muster.

Hook tore his eyes from the newsman’s, staring off into the darkness that reeked with the scent of the storm’s passing. “I’ll allow you didn’t know,” began the old man without budging from the open doorway. “But that there’s Gritta’s chair, Mr. Deidecker. No one ever sits in Gritta’s chair. So I’ll allow you didn’t know any better, and pass it off this time.”

Deidecker sprang up like he’d been bit, wheeling to stare at the chair, its flattened, faded seat pillow seeming to glare back at him accusingly.

“No … I didn’t know,” he stammered. “But … I’ll … next time I won’t—”

“Care for something to eat, Mr. Deidecker?” Hook asked, abruptly changing the subject. He turned slowly in the doorway, inching back into the cabin that filled ever so slowly with the seep of predawn’s gray light. “Course you do. What man in his right mind don’t want something to eat come morning get-up time?”

“I’ll be fine till later. Usually don’t get up this … really no sense in your making something to eat right now on my account. I’ll wait till you and Mrs. Hook are ready to eat.”

Hook stopped at the wood stove, turned, and gazed at the newspaperman strangely. “You best eat now, son. Lots of ground for us to cover this day—and you’ll be needing your strength.”

Deidecker smiled at that. “Don’t take much for me to push my pencils over my paper, Mr. Hook. But thank you just the same—”

“Wasn’t talking about us covering ground on your paper there,” he interrupted, flinging a veined gesture at the corner of a small table, where Deidecker had stacked his writing tablets and a bundle of lead pencils. Hook gazed at the younger man with those cold gray eyes of his, wrinkled and chiseled at their corners with deep clefts, and turkey-tracked like a piece of barren earth gone too long without the blessing of rain. “We’re riding today, Nate. Out there.”

Deidecker sensed the rising chill of goose bumps as he watched Hook point an arm out the open door at the tall peaks slow a’coming purple, their snow touched with the dusty rose color of the east as he watched, without a thought on what to say. Struck dumb he was: choking on his own fear of where Hook was vowing to take him—that great, gaping void of wilderness that few men had ever wandered, a land most men of the last generation had wisely skirted in their business of bringing civilization to the West.

Hook turned away and dragged a huge cast-iron skillet off the stove, opened the griddle, and dropped in some wands of dried kindling before striking a lucifer to some char he then pitched into the inky netherworld of the squat black frog of a stove.

“Riding?” Deidecker asked when he found his voice. “You’ve got a saddle horse I can use instead of that buggy animal?”

Hook turned with a smile gone warm, something around his mouth that also brightened his eyes in that murky, gray gloom. “Of course, son. You’ll need a more proper animal where we’re going. One of mine. That buggy horse ain’t fit for what we got to do today. Rustle together what you feel you need. We won’t be back in here till late tomorrow. Maybe next day.”

Something cold seized in Deidecker’s chest. “We’ll … spend the night … o-out?”

“’Less you figure on some other way to get the whole story you’re hankering for from me.”

“N-no, I want the whole story, Mr. Hook. Just that, I’m not used to sleeping out. L-like you probably are.”

“It’s all right, son,” Hook said quietly as he turned back to the stove stuffed back in its dark corner, said it in that fatherly way of his that reassured. All the edge and abrasiveness that had been in his voice at the doorway was gone now. “You best get over there and roll up your shuckings. We’ll be riding out right after I rustle us up breakfast.”

“Before sunup?”

Hook only nodded, snatching up the bail on the battered coffeepot and starting past Deidecker for the doorway.

“I’ll just take some coffee, Jonah. Usually don’t eat any breakfast.”

Hook stopped. “You’ll eat breakfast today, Mr. Deidecker.” The old frontiersman said it in that most particular way that left no room for discussion. Then he turned back to the newspaperman. “Out here in this country, a man eats when he can—not when he necessarily wants to. So when the opportunity presents itself, a man eats.”

“I understand.”

Hook wagged his head. “Not so sure you really do understand, Nate,” he replied quietly. “Not just yet, anyways.”

Deidecker felt himself bristle with that challenge from this old man. True enough, Hook was thin and sinewy still with all his miles and all his rings. But Nate felt certain he could answer the call of anything physical the old scout could hand out. “I figure I can travel well enough as the next man on an empty stomach, Mr. Hook.”

But with the way the old man gazed at him from the doorway, backlit with gray light seeping like alluvial mud off the high places in the Big Horns, Deidecker suddenly felt a little unsure of himself, with this man, in this place. Getting ready to push off into that immense unknown.

Of that moment a little bragging on his own manly qualities seemed antidote enough to help allay some of Deidecker’s apprehension. “And besides, Lord knows, Mr. Hook—I’ve done my share of drinking on an empty stomach as well.”

The old scout snorted with a single wag of his iron-flecked head. “Only two things I’ve found a man can do on an empty stomach, Mr. Deidecker. And drinking’s sure as hell not one of ’em.”

Deidecker sensed the seizure of even more uncertainty in that next long and painful moment as his thoughts whirled. “What, then?”

Hook came two steps back toward the newspaperman, with his free hand dragging off the top of the lard container beside the seasoned cast-iron skillet. “Only two things a man can do on a empty stomach?”

He plunged one of Gritta’s wooden spoons into the lard and plopped a gray curl down into the gut of the skillet. Only then did his eyes narrow on Deidecker.

“Make love to a woman … and kill a man.”