hammer fell, sending a bullet into the card player’s mouth, crashing on through the brain, and splintering out the top of his head with a wet, slimy explosion of blood and gore.
The body fell backward from the crate of hardtack, trembling in death throes.
Boothog rose after glancing at the rest, their eyes wide and hollow with shock. He walked over, held the muzzle of his pistol inches from the victim’s heart and pulled the trigger a second time. Baker’s shirt grew damp and shiny. Wiser knelt and picked through the dead man’s pockets, pulling out what little money there was.
“Bring me his bedroll,” Wiser commanded. “I get first call on the bastard’s things.”
“Get the body out of here,” Usher’s voice boomed from the roof of the cavern. “It’s beginning to smell a bit in here already.”
Wiser turned, smiling. “It is, isn’t it, Colonel?”
“Men die a violent death like that—they’re apt to fill their britches with shit,” Jubilee replied. “Dispose of the body now, Major.”
Wiser turned to the other players. “You heard the colonel. Take Baker’s body back to the far end of the cave and throw him down.”
One of the players who had hold of Baker’s leg snarled at the others. “I got call on his boots, I do.”
“Hurry up!” Wiser snapped. “Throw him down in that cave and get on back here. I got money to win. And then I want to dip my stinger in that nigger gal’s honey pot again before I take me a nap.”
14
HE HAD BEEN nearly three months getting here from Fort Laramie. Cold and wet and scared most of the way. Knowing that in the next few minutes when he finally stood on the hillside overlooking the homestead, he would at last feel a lot different.
God, how he wanted to hold Gritta. Just hold her. And hug his children. Until they cried for him to stop.
Then sit in front of the fireplace he had built with his own hands from rock quarried at the nearby creekbank. Drink the sweet milk they always kept cooling down in the limestone springhouse in the woods behind the cabin. He hadn’t had a drink of cow’s milk in …
Jonah couldn’t remember now. That’s how long it had been.
Drop after drop of sleet sliding off the stringy strands of oily hair at the back of his neck made Hook all the colder as he huffed to the crest of the hill where the north wind greeted him full in the face.
He drew a long breath of it, not minding its cold. For in the near valley he would finally see his home. Snowflakes lanced straight down from the icy clouds, then danced momentarily on the cruel gusts of wind cutting through the bare trees. He startled a flock of black-winged crows from their roost. They went cawing over him with a noisy clatter of wings and protest. And then it was quiet once more, except for the moaning sigh of the wind tormenting the skeletal branches brushing the underside of a low-belly sky.
He stood on one foot a moment, shaking the other. The side seam on each boot had split weeks back, just before reaching Fort Leavenworth, where he and the rest had to wait, and wait some more while the army got around to mustering them out. Because the Confederates were being discharged, the Yankees who were turning their army into Indian fighters weren’t about to issue any new shoes or boots to those soon-to-be civilians who needed them.
“G’won home barefoot, for all I care,” snapped a quartermaster’s sergeant at Leavenworth. “I’m saving these boots for Injun fighters. Not Yankee killers.”
What Jonah had left of stockings were now drenched and incapable of keeping his feet warm where the rain and mud and snow crept in through the split seam. It did not matter now. Just another mile or so was all they had to last, these boots, his feet, and he. His good broughams awaited him down there under their bed.
That made him worry of a sudden just how he would be with Gritta tonight when the lampwicks were rolled low and the children’s rhythmic breathing was all the two of them could hear from the loft overhead. That, and the reassuring crackle of a hardwood fire from his stone fireplace. How would she respond to his great appetite for her? After these years without a woman, and finally able to push that need aside of late … only to stand here now on the hillside above their farm and know he wanted that one woman like he had never wanted her before.
He’d be twenty-nine this spring, yet still felt his cheeks go hot now at how randy he felt. Like a stud colt for the first time snuffling the moist heat of a mare in the breeding corral. His eyes sought to penetrate the low clouds and wispy fog sticky among the bony hardwoods in the valley below.
Perhaps some of that’s smoke from the stone chimney—
But the more he squinted through the swirl of a few darting snowflakes, Jonah grew more certain that none of it was smoke rising from the chimney he had laid stone by stone.
“Maybe they gone over to Uncle Moser’s place,” he said to assure himself as he emerged from the trees.
Almost by feel beneath last autumn’s great dropping of leaf and the winter’s wet snow still clinging to the ground in icy slicks, his feet located the game trail that would take him down to the spring behind the cabin, right where he had built the limestone root cellar—there by the clear, cold spring where the deer and the other critters came to drink of a morning. A long-used game trail, worn by his feet across the many years he and Gritta had built their life together here in Missouri, at the far end of the same valley where his mother’s brother, Amos Moser, had homesteaded years before Jonah ever stood tall enough to climb atop a plow mule by himself.
Of a sudden he stopped. The cabin was clearly in view for the first time. Unsure if he should believe his eyes. A section of corral posts busted down and no animals to be found.
Two more steps and he stopped again, now able to see the yard between cabin and barn where one of its big doors lay in the icy mud like a sawyer in the river, the other door mournfully creaking with a ghostly whisper on its cracked leather hinges, ready to give up and join its brother on the ground.
Beyond, the fields were overgrown. Uncared for … for months now.
She’s gone to live with the Mosers, he told himself. I been so long getting back—what with her having to care for the children alone, the work and all. Maybe, goddammit, she give up on me ever coming back and went back to her family in Virginia.
The fear struck him more cold than any wind-driven sleet could at that moment.
He was cursing his luck, the Union, and the frontier army that had galvanized him out of Rock Island Prison and sent him off to the plains to fight Injuns—
But then his feet stopped him again, staring at the two windows he had been able to afford putting into the front of the cabin. What with the high price of glazing, he and Gritta bought only two when they raised the cabin from the valley floor. Both were broken, on either side of the dark, gaping rectangle where the door had once held out the cold Missouri winter.
From both holes fluttered the curtains Gritta had made years ago, looking now like the petticoats kicked up and swirled around pairs of plump knees on those chippies who worked the soldiers for all they were worth, night after night in those watering holes and brothels down in Dobe Town just outside Fort Kearney in Nebraska Territory.
That’s when he saw the carcass in the yard, not yet gone completely to bone. Decomposed by time and merely tormented by robber jays and crows content to sup on carrion. Not one of his stock—a small animal. Standing over it, he recognized the carcass as the dog who had followed him and Gritta from Virginia, tongue lolling as it loped alongside their cart, before darting into the dark forest, scenting a rabbit.
Kneeling slowly, he touched Seth’s skull, gently placing a fingertip into the big bullet hole.
