news of something other than army doings.”
They started from the tiny room as the Pawnee woman settled back in the corner, pulling her blanket about her shoulders and intently watching the two hospital stewards in their ministrations over Jonah Hook.
“You said something about the army being the only law out here west of Leavenworth,” Moser said. “What army you mean?”
Henry R. Porter stopped. “Why, the Seventh U.S. Cavalry.”
“Sorry, but I ain’t heard of you … of them.”
The surgeon smiled, licking his dry lips in need of a drink. “Mister, there soon won’t be a man who hasn’t heard of this outfit. Not if General George Armstrong Custer has his say about it.”
22
CHRISTMAS HAD COME and gone, and the celebration of New Year with it.
Fort Hays had done its best to bring 1867 in with a roar, out here in the middle of Indian country, in the middle of winter, in the middle of some place no man really wanted to be.
Jonah Hook and Artus Moser vowed that they would exchange gifts once they had made it back to a town. Their plan was to take the Smoky Hill Route, the stage and freight road that ran all the way west to Denver City. It was that Smoky Hill Route that the Kansas Pacific was to follow into the Rockies: grading bed, engineering bridges, softening slopes up and down the gradual rise to that mile-high settlement spreading boomlike along the South Platte and Cherry Creek.
But neither Jonah nor Artus ever talked of returning to work for that railroad as meat hunters. Only one time in the past week and a half of convalescing had Hook mentioned it as work come spring, both men agreeing that it would be pushing their luck. Jonah felt no need to say anything more.
“What did she eat while I was out of my head?” Hook asked his cousin early in January after he was up to sitting and taking solid food.
“She ate everything you left on your plate, cousin,” Moser answered with a grin. “One time that soldier, Nisley—”
“The fella who’s good at cards.”
“That’s the one. He come back in sooner’n she thought he would, and he caught her scraping food outta your bowl faster’n a hen pecking grit.”
Jonah looked at the corner where the woman sat, huddled in her blanket and wool capote, legs drawn up to the side, squawlike. “She been getting enough, you figure?”
Moser said, “From then on, Nisley took over duty on feeding her too. He always brought two bowls of mash or ribs or fatback when he come to feed you. And always set one bowl in front of her. She ain’t yet gone to bone, Jonah. Not by a long chalk.”
He sighed, his head going back against the pillow. “I owe her, Artus.”
“We both owe her,” Moser replied. “Likely, she figures she was just paying you back for helping her, cousin.”
“I help those I can … until I can help those of my own.”
He was slow healing, not like when he had been younger, or even when he had been winged in the war. But that festering bullet in his shoulder had taken most everything out of him during those long days; it had brought fever to his mind and an endless series of nightmares drawn sepia-toned against the back of his heated, fitful thoughts. Even now, he still dreaded closing his eyes for fear of the visions of war and guerrillas and those broken windows of his Missouri home with their raggedy curtains drifting in and out on the cold breeze. Hook had always considered himself a strong man in that way—and would not let another know of his fear. But he wondered how long he would carry this horror inside.
Jonah knew that horror would plague him until he found them all.
“Your cousin tells me you’re quite a hand at cards,” said surgeon Henry Porter late one afternoon as the sun began to set at the edge of a clear, cold sky.
“Never learned at home,” Hook explained with a grin on his wolfish face, yellowed eyes glowing as Porter turned up a nearby lamp. “Mama wouldn’t allow my daddy such instruments of the devil’s work.”
“You learn in the war?”
“Most times there was little else for us to do—waiting to walk here or there, either attacking or retreating. Only to wait some more after the fighting was done.”
“You figure you’re up to playing?”
A ragged piece of Jonah’s soul leapt. “When?”
“Tonight. Some of the others—we get together every two weeks or so. Usually after the paymaster’s been to the fort and each of us is feeling flush, ready to spread some of our meager pay among friends of our choosing.”
“They won’t mind, will they? Me being …”
“A Southerner? No, not at all. In fact, one of my best friends is a Missourian, like yourself, Jonah. Captain Frederick Benteen. He’s always anxious to play as much as he can, as there’s talk that he’ll be sent farther west come spring.”
“What’s west of here?”
Porter wagged his head. “Between us and Denver City—not a lot but the open jaws of hell itself. Benteen hears he’ll be assigned to garrison Fort Wallace out on the Denver Road.”
“Tough duty?”
Porter rose from the side of the bed. “It’s all tough, Jonah. Otherwise, wouldn’t you be soldiering—instead of making a handy target of yourself?”
He had to admit he liked Henry Porter. There were times after Porter finished rounds in the early evening that Hook came to know the surgeon’s habit of returning to his monkish cell and there pulling a bottle from inside one of his dress boots. It became a habit with Hook to thus time his visits with Porter. The surgeon had made it clear he was a social animal who hated drinking alone.
Hook liked the genuineness of the man.
“That arm and shoulder of yours are likely to be stiff for some time to come, Jonah,” said the surgeon that evening as he spread a gray army blanket over a table soon to see chips and cards and drinking glasses.
“How long?”
Porter stopped, holding in his hands four small china ashtrays. “It may never be the same again. I don’t want you to expect that it will respond to you the way it did before you were shot.”
Hook felt the severe pinch of fear cross his chest. He looked down at the sling that cradled the arm. “But I got feeling, and I move it every day.”
“I know. But—that bullet sitting in there for that long, the way I had to tear at the muscle to get that sonofabitch out—all of that took its toll. It’ll be some time before you get all that strength back. And it may never come back good as new.”
Jonah settled into a chair, with his right arm turning an empty glass round and round, staring at his distorted reflection beneath the lamplight. “It’ll come back, Doc. I know you done everything you could for me. So it’ll come back in its own time.”
“That’s right.” Porter smiled, watching the woman settle herself in the corner out of the light. “In its own time, Jonah.”
The woman was always there, wherever Jonah went. He had come to accept that, then almost ignored it, taking it for granted that she followed him everywhere. Silent.
The others came in not long after Moser showed up, gone and back again from Hays City not far away, there to see about buying a pair of holsters that Jonah wanted for the two of them. Better to carry the belt guns in them than stuffed in the waistband of their britches. They were gleaming, freshly soaped, and heavy rigs. Artus claimed he would need time getting used to wearing his.
At the table, most fired up Porter’s cigars as a means of socializing, smoking the fragrant cheroots while they
