General Patrick E. Connor was indeed marching upriver to bolster what forces he had left along the upper North Platte. There was some considerable cheering when the general ordered his troops into a short halt there with Lybe’s men bound for Laramie.
“Going in for supplies, General. And the men haven’t been paid since they were assigned posts in May.”
“You’ve got reason to celebrate then, Captain Lybe,” said Connor as he knocked dust from his blue tunic with his gauntlets.
“Getting out of that scrap against the hostiles with our hair?”
“Perhaps that,” Connor said as Sweete and Bridger walked up to the soldiers. “Perhaps because the war’s over.”
“War’s over, General?”
Connor was smiling. More soldiers surged around him suddenly. The troops with the general from Laramie were joyously informing the upriver boys of the news as well.
“Lee surrendered to Grant in Virginia.”
“Lee surrendered?” Jonah Hook croaked, unable to believe it.
“War’s over, son!” Shad Sweete pounded the Confederate on the shoulder. “You’ll be going home soon.”
“Soon as I get mustered out,” Hook said, his eyes moist and his voice colicky with emotion, “that’s where I’m heading, straight off. Home.”
Gritta Hook stopped her hoeing and took the tattered bandanna she wore around her neck to swipe across her forehead, leaning against the hoe handle.
“You go get us another bucket of water from the well, Zeke,” she said to her youngest, six and a half years old now, and more help in these fields with every week.
Without a word he pitched his hoe aside and went galloping past the other two children, Jeremiah and Hattie. It was hard enough raising these three on her own without Jonah, but with the added burden of working the fields behind the mules twice a year, clearing the irrigation sluices, and chopping the wood all added to what she had done before Jonah took off to ride with General Price to keep the Yankees out of Missouri—some days she just ran off to the cool cellar her husband had dug down by the spring and there she cried where no one would hear her.
And it always made her feel better, stronger, able to walk back up the slope to the cabin once more and face her three children and what she had to do alone to hold this family together. More and more during the hard seasons like this, Gritta found herself falling asleep at night as her head hit the feather pillow, her arm by rote going over to Jonah’s side of the rope-and-tick-mattress bed. Dropping immediately into sleep before she could even whisper her prayer for Jonah—and for herself and the children.
But standing here beneath the hot sun of late July, Gritta prayed, for the strength to remain in her thin body until her man came marching home. The war had been over a few months and she dared not think about him never coming home—just pushed that thought out of her mind the way she had learned to shove and muscle the mules around in the corral, or shoulder over the milk cow when the old girl did not particularly want to give up on a morning.
No, she had decided Jonah was still alive, and he would come walking down that road one of these days before the fall colors came to these hardwood hills that reminded her more and more of back home to Virginia. Besides, weren’t but a few of the others who had marched off to war had already come walking back home yet. She wasn’t the only woman in this narrow holler with a man gone and children to raise and crops to tend.
“Mama!”
She turned at the sound of little Zeke’s call, finding him shuffling her way with the bucket. Jeremiah and Hattie were coming toward her as well, dragging their hoes, looking beyond her and off in the direction where Zeke kept turning, and pointing.
Old Seth, the rangy, ribby blue-tick hound they had brought with them years ago from Virginia set to barking and howling, as if pricked by some faraway danger.
Gritta sensed the cold prickle of fear slide down her spine in a single droplet of sweat cascading beneath the layers of her cotton clothing that gusted with a sudden hot wind forcing the bonnet ribbon hung loosely around her neck nearly to strangle her.
“Someone coming, Mama,” eight-year-old Jeremiah said as he came to a stop beside her. “You want me go and fetch the gun?”
She thought on it, shading her hand and watching the worm of movement as the horsemen eased their way over the far hills at the north end of the valley. Then she glanced at Hattie for a quick flickering moment that brought more moistness to her eyes.
“They don’t rightly look like Yankees, Jeremiah. Leave be the gun for now.”
The riders were inching down the slope into the narrow valley, on the far side of the Hook place, beyond the cabin and what barn Jonah and his uncle had been able to throw up by themselves. How she wished either one of them were here now, not gone off to the war. So late in coming home.
Perhaps these were just some soldiers coming home. They sure didn’t look like Yankee soldiers.
Her heart leapt instantly with bright hope, and she swallowed it down as quickly, still shading her eyes against the hot July sun as she watched the horsemen reach the edge of the yard there between the cabin and the barn.
No, not blue-bellies these.
The tall, hulking man in front with the big, black, dusty slouch hat shading his bearded face waved and said something to the others. She could hear his voice, but could not make out the words as he directed men to cover the cabin with their weapons, another bunch to surround the barn.
Then he nudged his horse forward, with three of his men on his heels. Slowly moving into the rows of mature crops, the tall, lathered horse bobbing its head, flecks of foam at the bit. He reined up before her and the children.
“That water in your bucket, ma’am?” he asked as he crossed his wrists over the saddle horn.
Gritta decided he didn’t sound like a Southern man—but, then—a lot of folks come to Missouri didn’t all talk the same neither.
“It is. You care for a drink, sir?”
“I would be dearly grateful for such refreshment, ma’am.” He removed the hat from his head, and she was instantly struck with the long, flowing black curls that fell past his shoulders. He bowed his head. “Whom do I have the honor of addressing?”
Gritta’s eyes flew to the other three waiting behind the big man. Then she took a step forward, hoisting up the bucket at the end of one arm, the hand still shading her eyes as she studied him for that instant.
“Gritta Hook.”
“Mrs.?”
“Yes. My husband is Jonah.”
“He hard at work today, ma’am?”
For a moment she thought, but could not conceive how better to answer. “He’s away—gone to fight the war. Coming home soon.”
The man pushed the big slouch hat onto his head and then dragged a hand across his lips as he plunged the dipper into the bucket. After he had handed the bucket back to the three behind him, he turned once more to Gritta.
“Lots of men won’t be coming home, Mrs. Hook. Shame, a downright evil shame of it. War’s like that, though. The Lord has seen that so many were cut down—like winnowing the wheat from the chaff.”
He turned to the three. “You there, Major—finish your drink quickly and get on back to the others. See what stock we can take along while the others are to go through the cabin. I want everything we can use.”
Her heart in her throat, she lunged for his tall boot, caked with dark red dirt in the stirrup. “Don’t steal from us! Dear God—the Yankee soldiers already come through and left us next to nothing.”
He gazed down at her as two of the men turned their glistening horses away, tromping straight across the field, hooves digging up some of the rows of ripening crops.
“My dear woman. We haven’t come to steal from you. We are merely appropriating what is rightfully ours by
