Through the gray smoke adrift on the gust of hot September breeze, Jonah watched the buffalo lurch forward as if spooked. Then his breath caught as the beast collapsed, hind legs first, then fell cleanly to the side, thrashing but a moment, attempting to throw its massive head about as if in so doing it could hurl itself back to his skinny, inadequate legs.
“Lordee, lordee!” Moser was screaming as Jonah clambered to his feet.
Hook grabbed his cousin and clamped a hand over his mouth. “Now you done it. Look it!”
“They’re going—dammit all and my big mouth!” Artus groaned. “But that was downright beautiful, Jonah!”
“To hell with the rest of ’em—we got one. Our first, by damned! We’ll get the other nine slick as shooting that one.”
“Damn right we will!”
They embraced unashamedly, bounding around and around in a tight circle there on the hilltop as the rest of the herd sauntered away from the carcass in their characteristic rocking-chair gait.
“You got work to do now, Artus.”
They looked at one another, smiling—a new kinship between them that had deepened what they already felt for one another.
“That’s just fine by me, cousin. Far as I’m concerned—you just keep me busy rest of the afternoon.”
“All right,” Hook replied, dragging the ramrod from the thimbles below the long barrel. “You get to skinning that one out so we can butcher him while I go see to dropping the other nine for the day.”
He was partway down the hill and jamming a cap on the nipple when Moser called out to him.
“Hey, Jonah! You’re a real buffalo hunter now.”
“By glory—I guess I am at that!”
19
ICE CRUNCHED BENEATH their boots as they plodded through the shallow puddles that lay everywhere. Ice-scum puddles and the dung from half a thousand horses and mules.
Track-end was always like this: its own shantytown of thrown-up board shelters and wall tents and smoky fires and sheet-metal stoves, men and animals all turned rump to the November wind that came down off the northern plains, invading Kansas where the K-P was shutting down for the winter freeze-up.
In long lines the men waited, stretching out from the tall Sibley tent like strings of coarse linen being threaded through the tent—in one side and out the other when they had been paid off and sent on their way. Germans and Irish mostly. The rest were a motley mixture of veterans come west after the war. Nothing left for them back home now. For most, home was gone, or something a man had no hankering to return home to after living through the horrors that had been that great rebellion.
So these men stood in line again, like old soldiers at the mess kitchens, collars turned up and hat brims pulled down as the few icy flakes lanced out of the low-bellied clouds little more than an arm’s length away overhead. A sky still deciding whether to snow or sleet. And with every gust of cruel wind, the smoke from the stoves and fire pits skidded in protest and in hurried patches along the ground in company with the dancing flakes.
Roadbed, grading, riprap, and track crews along with the hunters, laborers all—paid off then sent into the unknown for a winter’s respite. If the money lasted a man that long.
“Company will be back here come spring,” explained one of the men at the long table inside the tent as Hook and Moser inched inside the doorway, hugging as close as they could to those in front, so to squeeze into the warmth put out by the valiant sheet-iron stove.
“When you reckon on spring coming?” asked someone up ahead in line.
“Like I’ve said before—there’s a good chance we’ll be wanting to lay rail by the middle of March. Mayhaps the end of March. You men need work then, come round. We’ll start putting down track right out yonder, where the last tie section finished work yesterday.”
“March. Maybe middle of March,” was the whisper coming back down the line among these comrades in arms sharing that vital secret with one another.
But until then, they would be on their own once more, each man taking his money and parting from this place.
“What-cher name?”
“Jonah Hook,” he answered, watching his clerk beginning to scan the ledger as Moser stepped up behind Jonah and the next man in line shifted to another clerk down the table.
“You two together, is it?” the man asked, eyeing Moser.
Artus nodded.
The fleshy man went back to his ledger, then looked up, squinting. “Don’t find your name here. You a recent hire for that tie gang?”
“I didn’t lay track. Hunted meat.”
He pursed his full, fleshy lips in a mean fashion that reminded him of a schoolteacher he’d suffered back in the Shenandoah. She was the reason he had never gone beyond the fourth grade.
“Why didn’t you say so to begin with, Hook?”
He didn’t figure it was a question needing an answer as the clerk dragged up another, smaller ledger, opened it, and scanned down the page with an accusingly slow index finger. “Here you are. ‘Hunter.’” He looked up at Hook. “You been here awhile. Shows here you’ve turned in your wagon and team and squared accounts as of yesterday.”
“That mean I owe anything?” he asked, suddenly worried.
“No, Mr. Hook. But you’ve made yourself some money I see.”
“Three months’ worth coming to me.”
“Good wages they are too.” He pointed at Artus. “After he takes his fifty dollars per month off the top.”
“All right by me.” Jonah watched the man behind the table reach down into an iron-banded box stationed beside his chair. Behind each payroll clerk stood a pair of armed men, short-barreled scatterguns cradled in the crook of each elbow. Their eyes were constantly on the move—from the laborers standing at the tent flaps with craning necks, to the clerks who dipped in and out of the boxes filled with neat stacks of colored scrip.
The man licked a finger and counted through the sheets of scrip. Then satisfied, he held a stack in the air for Artus, counted out another bundle he presented to Jonah. “You fellas ever seen Union money?”
“Never. Not till now anyway.” He stared down at all the money he held in his hand. “How much is here?”
“I have paid Mr. Moser one hundred fifty dollars of your seven hundred eighty-eight.”
“That leaves me how much?”
The clerk smiled benignly. “Six hundred thirty-eight. You both made a few bonuses during your stay. Now please move along, fellas.”
They did, staring dumbly at what they held in their hands as they exited between a pair of armed railroad guards and out to the cold of that winter’s day.
“I was hoping for a bonus myself,” Moser grumped, staring at the difference between his bills and Jonah’s.
“You’d complain if’n I was to slit your throat with a new knife.” He slapped his cousin on the back. “Any this bonus money is ours together. You got your pay ’cause you did all the hard work.”
“You was always there, helping me skin, Jonah.”
“Like I told you—we hired on together.”
“And we’re looking for family together.” Moser stopped, getting Jonah to slow up and turn around. “So what we do now?”
Hook shrugged. “I figure we could do with some whiskey to wash down the memory of all this buffalo stink we got on us. Get me a new pair of boots and two new rifles for us.”
“A rifle—for me?”
“You best figure on using some of that money to outfit yourself for the road, Artus.”
