“What’s that?”
“I said—I come from Missouri.”
“Thought you said you was from Virginia.”
“Original. Moved few years back with my wife and oldest child to southern Missouri.”
“That where you got caught up in all this, I’ll bet.”
The soldier hung his head between his propped knees. “Yeah.”
“You wanna go home so bad you taste it, don’t you?”
“I don’t figure I’m any different from any of the rest of them back there in camp.”
“No, I bet you ain’t,” Sweete replied quietly. “But you’re here now. And if you don’t take a notion to watching out for your hair—you’ll never get home to see that family of yours again.”
“What’s it matter to you, old man?”
Shad sensed the chip suddenly back on the shoulder, as if the soldier had realized he was dropping all that veneer of bravado. “Matters only ’cause I’ve got family myself I’m worried about.”
“Back east?”
“Down in Indian Territory. Cheyenne.”
“You’re a squaw man, ain’t you?”
“Suppose you could say that. But there’s a war going on out here too. And it can be every bit as messy as what’s happening back across the wide Missouri.”
“Didn’t come here looking for a fight,” the soldier explained. “Just putting in my time till it’s over back there. And I can go home and pick up where I left off.”
“Sure hope you can pick up where you left off, son.” He held out some of his twist. “Care for a chew.”
The soldier regarded what the scout held in his hand. “Might taste pretty good about now. Yessir. I thankee.”
They chewed together for a while before Shad spoke again. “You keep your ears open—you’ll learn a lot more about this land than you will flapping your jaws.”
“You’re one to tell me,” he said. “I don’t need to learn about this wide-open desert, old man. I’m going back home when I’m done here.”
“Believe I’ll turn in,” Shad said minutes later. He got to his feet and was ready to stroll off the hilltop when the soldier stood.
“Figure I was a little hard on you, Mr. Sweete. Maybe you’ll forgive me—it’ll make me feel better.”
“No harm done.”
“We both got us family we’re worried about, don’t we?”
“I figure we got that in common, son.”
“It’s all I think about these days.”
“Weren’t no different in prison, was it?”
A shapeless grin moved across his wolfish face burled with a new beard. “Think about it all the time.”
“You watch yourself out here, son. You’ll make it back to that family of yours.”
Shad Sweete took two steps before the soldier tugged on the sleeve of the buckskin war shirt the scout wore on the chill of evening. Turning, he found the young man holding his hand out.
“Glad to meet you, Mr. Sweete. Man needs a friend out here I suppose.”
He smiled, pine-chip teeth glimmering in the new moonlight splaying silver across the rising tableland stretching to the spine of the continent itself. “I can always use a friend, mister.”
“Name’s Jonah Hook.”
“Let’s go find our bedrolls, Jonah. These bones hollering for rest something fierce.”
“I sleep better out here, Mr. Sweete. Better’n I ever have—if it weren’t for the nightmares about my family.”
“Don’t you let ’em spook you. Don’t mean a thing.”
Shad wished he meant it. But as he walked down the slope into the soldier camp, the old scout shuddered with the chill in remembrance of his own recurring nightmare—that burned and gutted camp of Black Kettle’s on Sand Creek.
And how damned lucky his own wife and daughter were to escape the butchery of madness unleashed.
“I figure we’re safe enough here,” answered Sergeant Amos Custard of the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry, swinging an arm around their camp. “That scout of yours is a nervous old woman, you want to know what I think.”
Lybe glanced at Shadrach Sweete perched atop his Morgan mare. “When you left Sweetwater Station ahead of us this morning, I was hoping you’d get more ground under you before you stopped for the night.”
“You take care of your own galvanized Johnnies, Captain,” Custard replied. “We’re going home, and we’ll mosey if we wanna.”
Jonah Hook pulled his head back from the cool water of the spring where the rest of Lybe’s small detail had been guzzling, in time to watch the old scout nudge his mare forward until he stood above the sergeant.
“The Sioux been hitting this line regular, Sergeant. But I ain’t telling you anything you don’t already know.”
“That’s right,” Custard said. “If you’re so damned nervous, go on and take the rest of these Confederates with you to Platte Bridge.”
“The farther we come since this morning,” Lybe explained, “the more I feel like I want to make a night march of it into the stockade at Platte Bridge.”
Custard gazed at Sweete a moment more. Then he turned to Lybe. “He suggest you make a night march of it?”
“He did. And I agree. Something’s up, Sergeant.”
“You put in your time out here—like I have, Captain—you won’t be so damned nervous about every shadow or flap of an owl’s wing. And you won’t be so ready to take the word of a squaw-man scout either.”
Hook watched Shad Sweete gently rein his mare away.
“Let’s be going, Captain,” said the scout.
“See you at the station tomorrow, Sergeant Custard.” Lybe put heels to his horse and brought it around. “Let’s mount up and move out, men!”
Jonah wanted one last drink of that water as he corked his canteen and caught up the reins to his mount. He had to admit, his butt was growing accustomed to the riding when for so long he had either been languishing in prison or walking across the plains. Far better to ride.
And ride they had. Ever since arriving at the Sweetwater Station near South Pass, Lybe’s I Company had been busy almost daily, inspecting the emigrant road for telegraph line needing repair, replacing sections at times a mile or more in length dragged down by the hostiles.
Wire pulled down. Poles burned in blackened scars along the road, the scene blotted with tracks of Indian ponies and moccasined warriors. Yet Jonah Hook had yet to see a warrior. Some of the others in I Company had been blooded in skirmishes. One killed and one dead with First Sergeant William R. Moody. But for all of the excitement, Jonah had never been in the right place at the wrong time.
He kept counting the days until he would be shet of this land and back in the bosom of family in Missouri.
This short trip back down the road to Fort Laramie was just the sort of diversion to keep his mind off so much of the yearning. Captain Lybe needed supplies the Eleventh Ohio and Eleventh Kansas had used up prior to being replaced by the galvanized Yankees of the Third U.S. And the Confederates were owed a payday as well. Lybe said he would accompany some of the Kansas and Ohio troops east to Laramie where he could pick up rations, forage, and pay vouchers.
“Watch yourself, Sergeant Custard,” said the Captain as Sergeant Moody led out the mounted Confederates. “Reports of heavy activity between this spring and the bridge.”
