pronouncement.
“Then our warriors can sweep around the tail end of the soldier column—assured they will not turn and attack our camps as they attacked the Bear’s Arapaho village.”
“They will not,” Crazy Horse declared, watching many of the dark eyes turn his way. “The soldiers are beaten—once and for all. The white man’s army will not dare attack our mighty villages as they destroyed the Arapaho camp. The Bear was not wise, my friends. It is a very careless thing for a man to embrace peace when all around him the countryside is filled with those who hunger for war!”
13
“I’LL MISS YOU, Shad,” Hook said in a husky tone that scraped past the hot knot in his throat.
“Here,” Sweete said gruffly, holding out his hand. “Promised I’d give you a going-away present.”
Hook glanced at the lines of troops shuffling into formation, teamsters easing themselves down onto plank seats and the columns of cavalry escort going to saddle.
“What is it?” he asked, studying the small rawhide-wrapped ring in his palm. It had been divided into quadrants, at its center was encircled a small, smooth pebble. The rawhide strands were wrapped with flattened porcupine quills of greasy yellow, robin’s-egg blue, and a light moss green.
“Toote’s people call it a medicine wheel. This is one she made for me some time back. A pebble spoke to me beside a stream near the place where I first laid eyes on the woman. Injuns believe rocks and such things are creatures too, and talk to people.”
“You believe that?”
“I’m here to tell you that’s the certain of it.”
“This is something she made special for you—I can’t take it.”
“That’s why I’m giving it to you. Among these Indian people, everything sacred is a circle. Life itself is a great circle: from borning to dying. I’m asking you to keep this, ’cause one day you’ll return.”
“I ain’t never coming back, Shad.”
“You keep telling me that, Jonah. But there’s a great circle of all things out there—and you don’t know what will ever bring you back. All I know is, this pebble talked to me again last night. Ain’t talked to me since I first picked it up and heard it say I ought to take some ponies to a particular Cheyenne warrior so I could ask his daughter to be my wife.”
“It told you to marry Toote?”
“And this morning, after all those years, it spoke to me again. Telling me it was time for it to go with you on your journey home.”
Jonah held out the medicine wheel in his palm, self-consciously, and more than a little concerned about all the mysticism.
He swallowed, anxious to be on the road to Fort Leavenworth where his unit would be mustered out, from there on his own to southern Missouri. But not anxious enough to rip himself from the warm security this big man had offered during Jonah’s brief sojourn on the high plains. This, he felt, was something to be done carefully. He stared down at the medicine wheel.
“You can wear it round your neck—or keep it in your plunder. Its power will be with you no matter what, son,” Sweete explained. With the scuffing of boots on wood, his eyes flicked over to watch the officers emerge from Colonel H. E. Maynadier’s office, turn, and salute in leave-taking.
Jonah felt suddenly like hugging the big man, but such a thing just wasn’t his way. Things were too much of a rush for him at the moment. Instead of embracing the old trapper, he held out his hand, reaching for Sweete’s, hoping he would not become moist-eyed as he said his farewell.
“I’ll remember you, Shadrach Sweete,” he said as he dropped the big man’s hand and started off toward his company, who were hollering for him to join their ranks. “You come to Missouri soon and look me up—you know where.”
He smiled at the old trapper, waving as the dusty column was ordered to face about and into a march, pushing off the parade and past Fort Laramie’s stone guardhouse, heading down the North Platte for the east and home.
“I’ll find you, Jonah Hook. By glory, I’ll find you.”
Hook was damned well relieved that the sun had made a glorious rising this crisp fall morning. Its brightness meant he and the rest had to squint as they marched into that brilliant sunflower yellow orb. Because now no one would see the moistness come to his eyes as he shuffled along in cracked ankle-boots he hoped would last him long enough to make it home to Gritta and the children.
Crying was all right. But it sure as hell wasn’t any other man’s business.
Jonah glanced around him, on both sides of the column of fours, cavalry escort up ahead, wagons loaded with provision for the homeward-bound march at the tail end of the line.
As much as he had tried to deny it the last few weeks, there was something about this place that he was going to miss—although he had admitted it to no man.
At first Hook figured such thoughts rumbled around inside him merely because this was such new country to his eyes and ears and tastebuds. And for the longest time he had figured that newness would wear off. But with the rounding of every new green hill or ocher ridge or yellow-tinged bluff, the scenery never went stale to the eyes. With each new mouthful of buffalo or elk, mule deer or antelope, the tumbling, endless plains of the West became something to be savored with all his senses. With every new scent and sound, or shape to the clouds in the incredibly immense sky that always hung just beyond arm’s length overhead, Jonah had slowly come to accept that his affection for this place was not merely because of its newness only.
Yet lingering still was the doubt that he would ever return to this wild, untamed land where there was no law, and certainly no church for his Gritta and the young’uns. The ache for home and family was far too strong.
It lay heavy on his heart as he moved east across the plains—this doubt he carried with him that he would ever again lay eyes on Shad Sweete’s face in this lifetime.
Yet that medicine wheel lay in the palm of his hand for the rest of that day’s long march. And the next day’s. And the next …
So it had been the natural, expected thing to do out in that western kingdom of Deseret to join Brigham Young’s special, handpicked military arm. With his Avenging Angels, the Mormon Prophet smote those who threatened the sanctity of the State of Deseret. Citing ancient precedent, Young empowered his hundred handpicked Danites, these Avenging Angels, to right all wrongs done the Saints, or the Mormon state.
They were vigilantes, self-empowered men who saw things through their own self-righteousness. Justice in this broad, big western land skewed to their side of the pew.
Year after year, young Lemuel Wiser had come to know the tall, imposing figure of Jubilee Usher, who was rapidly rising in influence among the more militant and self-protective of the Saints. As Wiser grew to manhood, he found the immense tower of a man all the more a capable leader of men, able to inspire and motivate, cajole when needed, threaten when necessary—but always able to get his men to do exactly what he wanted, if not exactly what Brigham Young himself desired as well.
Boothog remembered now when Jubilee first began to lose his hair, early in life for a man. Before one of those first trips east with the Mormon handicrafts for sale in Missouri and other points east. For a time, Usher felt ridiculed for this early receding of hair, then eventually learned to admire his balding head himself. He took to growing what hair there was down past his shoulders—thick and black as sin. And only in recent years had he begun to wear a mustache that curled down into a neat Vandyke beard every bit as glossy black as the boots he had one of the men shine with lampblack and grease each night in camp.
Young Wiser had yearned to take his horse and carry his new rifle along with Usher’s military escort that
