“Just tell me,” he rasped, weary, afraid, angry. “Tell me what happened to my family.”
Hosking wagged his head. He glanced at the other two, who likewise shrugged. “Don’t know. From the talk going round, it’s been some time since anyone seen life out to your place. Don’t have an idea where your family went.”
“They didn’t go nowhere.” Hook balled his fists again, so filled with despair he would hit anyone just to feel the crunch of his knuckles against their cheek and jaw and nose. “They was took.”
Hosking regarded him a moment, stepping closer as he brought his rifle up. “How you so sure they was took, boy?”
Jonah watched the wariness of the man, moving his hands from the holster where rested the .44-caliber army pistol he had been allowed to keep with him when the army bade him farewell back at Leavenworth, Kansas.
“I’m sure. Just know from the looks of the place.”
“It will give a man the willies just going there, Mr. Hosking,” said one of the hired men with a jerky nod of his shaggy head.
“It will, eh?” Hosking replied.
“Things left there my Gritta would’a took, had she been of a mind to leave on her own. Up to the loft, the children left things belonged to them. Special things a child don’t leave behind if they’re moving out for good.”
“And down at the springhouse,” Moser said as he jumped in, “we found milk and butter gone sour and dried in the churns—left like someone was never intending to leave such victuals behind.”
Hosking licked his lips, his eyes flicking the hillsides on either side of them.
“I did hear of ’em coming through here some time back.”
“Who?” Jonah asked, taking a step forward that caused the old man to snap the rifle up.
“Keep your ground, traitor!”
“I—ain’t—no—traitor,” he growled each word as menacingly as he could. “Tell me who come through here?”
“They was like a army,” the hired hand volunteered.
“Shuddup!” Hosking shouted at his man, his eyes flicking into the hills again.
The old man’s furtive look now meant something to Hook. He recognized it for what it was. “You’re afraid they’ll come back—whoever it was. Ain’t you, Hosking?”
“We got no way of knowing, Hook. Now—for your own sake and your cousin’s hide—just turn around and get!”
“I ain’t leaving till I got me some answers.”
He wagged the muzzle menacingly. “You’re gonna get—and you ain’t never coming back.”
“C’mon, Jonah,” Artus pleaded, pulling, yanking. “We go on and find someplace else … somebody else what can tell us.”
Over Moser’s shoulder, Hook called to the hired man who had let too much slip from his tongue. “What army was they? Reb, or Yankee? How many, goddammit! Where was they headed?”
Hosking raised the muzzle of his rifle and fired it into the air, shocking both unwelcome visitors.
“C’mon, Jonah! Now!”
“You best listen to your cousin, boy,” Hosking’s voice followed them doggedly down the lane. “Get your ass outta here—and forget you ever had that family of your’n. Just g’won and count ’em gone ’cause your people is good as dead!”
Even his own cousin.
Artus Moser shook his head over the smoky fire where they were roasting five squirrels. Thinking maybe he really didn’t remember all that much about Jonah, like he thought he did. What with the way he had acted down at Hosking’s place yesterday, it had given Artus the willies.
Like what Hook had done out west fighting Injuns or maybe even something that Moser couldn’t begin to figure out—something had gone and made Jonah different from the man who left this valley with General Price back in sixty-two. Jonah sat on the far side of their little fire cleaning and recleaning those guns of his.
“Yankees let you keep your pistol?”
Hook looked up, squinting through the smoke as a gust of breeze snuffled it toward him. “You carried yours home, didn’t you, Artus?” He pointed his cleaning rod at Moser’s hip.
“Yeah,” Artus answered, still uneasy and unable to know why. “But that don’t explain the rifle. Yankees don’t give away rifles, Jonah. Been meaning to ask—”
“No, the goddamned Yankees didn’t go and give me this rifle. I brung it here all the way from Virginia,” he replied quietly, shutting his cousin off.
“Lord, how come them raiders didn’t—”
“Gritta kept it hid for me. Under the stones of the hearth. I put in a special place there for hiding things when I built the fireplace.”
“Thank God you got your hands on it, Jonah.”
“Thank me for putting that hiding place there.” He wagged his head, dragging the cleaning rod and oil-soaked rag up and down the full length of the barrel. “Maybe if she’d had the rifle out to use—wouldn’t she and the kids be gone to who knows where now.”
“Then again, Jonah—Gritta might be dead.”
Artus watched that jerk Jonah’s head up, a hateful, glaring look smeared across his thin, wolfish face. About to leap across the fire at Moser, if not say something stinging. But in a moment he went back to wiping the oilcloth around the percussion nipple and hammer on the rifle’s action.
“I thought of that myself,” Hook finally admitted. “She used this gun when those riders come through, chances are her bones be laying down in my yard where I come across what was left of old Seth.”
“Least you got family to find. They ain’t dead like mine.”
“I know they ain’t dead. In my gut—I know all four of ’em is still alive. Somewhere. For sake of us both right now, you remember your daddy and mama was my family too, Artus. I grieve ’em bad as you.”
“Didn’t mean no offense, Jonah. Just that—if it weren’t for you—don’t know what kin I’d have.”
“We’re riding the same horse, cousin. We both got to shuffle back to the Shenandoah down under Big Cobbler Mountain if we’re to look up any kinfolk of ours now. That”—Jonah nodded into the growing darkness of the hardwood forest thick around them—“or out yonder.”
“Lord, how I’d like to believe strong as you that we’ll find Gritta and the young’uns.”
He looked hard at Artus across the smoke made a sickly orange color as it rose from the coals. “I gotta count on finding ’em. Every last one of ’em. I’ll keep looking till I do. If I didn’t believe I could do it—I’d curl up and die inside and couldn’t go on.”
With his belt knife, Hook picked a string of meat from one of the squirrel haunches. “I’ll find every last one of my family—and them that took ’em—if it takes the rest of my life.”
Moser rolled himself in his blankets that night after eating. Hook turned away and settled into his bedroll without having said a word while they ate. Both knew morning would come soon enough. And the silence between them was all right.
The gray of dawn nudged both awake, scraping tongues around the insides of their mouths. Without saying it both men realized they shared a deep desire for the heady taste of a cup of coffee. The two men pulled at scraps of meat on the squirrel carcasses and sucked at the bones to satisfy the gnawing they likewise shared in their bellies.
“I hope we don’t have to go all the way to Neosho,” Artus said as they started north and east down the rutted road toward Cassville.
“You counting on us not getting any help in town?”
Moser said, “No. We got to get you some other clothes.”
“Goddammit—folks round here oughtta know me for what I am—not for wearing this Yankee uniform.”
“I wanna shet myself of this raggedy old uniform myself.”
“Then we gotta do it in Cassville.”
“They know you there.”
