“Five dollars a day,” Shad Sweete answered. “Bridger’s getting ten. He’s chief of scouts.”
“I never seen that kind of money in my life.”
“Scouting pays well. Bad thing about it, you got to eat army food.”
“Why can’t we hunt?”
“You wander off to hunt, likely it will be your scalp hanging from some brownskin’s lodgepole.”
“I think your brain’s been boiled by the sun, Shad. We ain’t seen a feather since we left Laramie,” Jonah said.
“Don’t you ever doubt it, son. They’ve been watching us ever since we crossed the North Platte.”
“Connor ready for ’em?”
“Damn right, he is. That little redheaded Irishman is taking the war right to the Sioux and Cheyenne up there in the Powder River country.”
“He sure as hell is a fighting man, for a Yankee,” Jonah agreed.
“You liked the way he formed his outfit back at Laramie when Walker’s men refused to march, eh? Connor gave them sunshine soldiers five minutes to fight or get walking.”
“That was some show when those guns and field pieces were turned on Walker’s men.”
“This bunch with Connor all think this trip is a lark for ’em,” Shad grumbled as they rode along, the entire column of cavalry, infantry, and 187 wagons strung out for more than two and a half miles. “Some of these greenhorn soldiers lay eyes on antelope or buffalo and go off running their horses to death, like this was some Sunday social.”
Jonah said, “Every Injun in fifty miles knows this column’s coming, don’t they? The way that platoon set fire to the grass day before last. Smoke cloud that high had to tell them we was coming.”
On north from the four columns of Pumpkin Buttes, the pebbled bottom of the murky Powder River became a welcome sight that fourteenth day of August, after Connor’s soldiers had crossed so much dry country north of the North Platte. But while the general had his troops making camp on the level benchland between the sharp bluffs and the river, right where he would soon order Colonel J. H. Kidd and his 250 men to begin building his Fort Connor, Jonah Hook followed Sweete downstream.
Two miles from the soldier camp, the scout stopped, listening, eyes scanning the river bluffs. “Look there, Jonah. And remember it well.”
“What you want me to see?”
“Those circles, all over—where the dried grass been trompled down.”
“Who?” Then he caught himself. “Injuns.”
“Lodge circles, son. A fire pit in every one. And each circle likely means three warriors of fighting age. You remember that too.”
“Those little brush shelters there by the riverbank. That for the children to play in?”
“Hell, no,” he said, smiling, some of the nervous watchfulness gone from him. “Those the places where the young warriors sleep when they’re too old to stay with their families, but don’t have a squaw of their own yet. They lay brush and blankets over the top of those wickiups to keep out the rain.”
“How many warriors was here, Shad?”
He wagged his head. “More’n that little Irishman can cut his way through in a day—if they decide to ride down on us.”
Two days later, Jonah heard his name called and turned to find Sweete riding up to him, leading a second horse through the scattering of tents.
“C’mon, Jonah!” he huffed. “We’re going scouting.”
He didn’t need a second invitation. Hook took the reins and climbed aboard. “Where to?”
“Riding out with some of North’s Pawnee. North by west. See if we can scare up some sign.”
The Pawnee trackers were not long in doing just that.
By midmorning, they came across a fresh trail of some two dozen hostiles, including at least one pony dragging a travois. The Pawnee immediately grew excited. They halted and milled about a moment, talking excitedly among themselves, then dropped to the ground to tie up the tails of their ponies. Each one prepared himself for the coming fight by performing his personal medicine.
Hook watched, wide-eyed, as most stripped off their army tunics. Others adorned themselves, smearing paint on face and chest, tying feathers in hair and the manes of their ponies. When all was ready, the group leapt atop their ponies and rode on with a single wild cheer.
That cry sent a chill of anticipation down the Confederate’s spine, like a ghost from Platte Bridge Station.
Yet for the next four hours as they dogged that enemy trail, the entire Pawnee battalion led by Major Frank North fell eerily quiet.
“They’re moving fast,” Sweete whispered to Jonah.
“We’re gonna have to move faster, aren’t we?” He watched Shad nod. “Who are they, this bunch?”
“Can’t tell for sure. But my money would lay on them being Cheyenne. If I know any tribe, it’s the Shahiyena.”
“Shahiyena,” he said the word, rolling it around on his tongue the way a man would a quid of chew. “They’re the bunch you said killed Lieutenant Collins at the bridge.”
“Had to been. Sioux liked the man. Cheyenne still carrying a mean heart for what happened down on the Little Dried River last winter. They ain’t giving no quarter to no white man—and they ain’t expecting none either, Jonah.”
He wasn’t sure if it was the late-summer heat, or if it was the pinched look of determination on Shad’s face, but Hook sensed a rumble of apprehension troubling his bowels. He caught himself gazing about at the other riders, Pawnee all except for North and Sweete and himself, hoping these Indians would know how best to fight other Indians when the time came.
Trouble was, Jonah wasn’t reassured. It was one thing to march out to fight Indians with a group of soldiers around you and a mountain howitzer backing you up—not that it was anything like the heavy field artillery both sides battered one another with at Corinth and on up at Brice’s Crossroads. And it was an entirely different matter when you were riding out with Indians to fight Indians.
“You stay close,” Shad whispered, his great hand gripping Jonah’s arm in a sudden lock, then releasing the hold. “We’re going to a gallop, son.”
The words were barely out of the scout’s mouth when the trackers hammered their ponies into a run behind North and his Pawnee sergeant. Hook figured they had decided to eat up ground faster, chew away at the hostiles’ lead.
Steadily up, then down, the swales of the rough, rolling land bordering Powder River, the Pawnee tenaciously clung to the trail as the sun eased down behind Cloud Peak in the faraway Big Horns. Twilight came over the high land, and with it North halted his Pawnee. The trackers had a quick, animated discussion with their white commander. Sweete came back to find Jonah sitting in a small patch of grass, where he was watching their two horses graze.
“North’s sending about half of his bunch back.”
“Why?”
“Their ponies are done in. They’ll go back and tell Connor what we’ve found—and tell him we’re going on in to find the enemy.”
He swallowed. “Then you figure to stay on the trail?”
Sweete knelt in front of Hook. “You don’t have to come, Jonah. I came to tell you to ride back with the Pawnee.”
Something pricked his fierce pride of a sudden. “Sure—so the rest of you can say I didn’t have the balls to ride with you after those Cheyenne warriors—that it?”
Sweete smiled. “That mean you’re coming along with me?”
“Damn right it is, old man,” he snarled, getting to his feet. “Anyone gonna say Jonah Hook ain’t got the bottom to chase these red savages down, better be ready to eat his words.”
“No one said you ain’t got the grit, Jonah,” Sweete said, backing up with a huge smile. “Figured there was fire in you when I met you, first off.”
Later that evening after half the trackers had headed back to Connor’s camp on their played-out ponies, North
