sipped from the glasses each man kept filled from bottles newly purchased this payday. Hands were shaken all around with the newcomers. Most already knew of the two civilians and the Pawnee woman staying at Porter’s infirmary, by the grace of the surgeon’s largess.
Major Wycliffe Cooper was the brooding one who said little, Hook discovered. Playing his cards conservatively and drinking twice as much as anyone else. He was not a happy sort and made a disagreeable drunk as the night wore on and the room began to stink of stale sweat and cigar smoke and spilled whiskey. Yet not even Cooper dared bother the woman once he had asked the reason for her presence and Porter had explained she belonged to the buffalo hunter named Jonah Hook.
“Yes, I’ve heard of you,” Cooper admitted, as he dragged red-rimmed eyes from the corner where the woman sat watching the white men. “Rode in here with a bullet still in you. There’s a story there, my friend. Share it with us.”
“I’m not your friend.” Hook said it as pleasantly as he could, yet the words possessed an edge. “And there’s no story to tell.”
Cooper laid his cards down, bleary-eyed from the smoke and alcohol. “I’ll not play a gentleman’s game with a liar.”
“Major,” Captain Frederick W. Benteen said, putting his hand on Cooper’s shoulder. “We came here to play cards, and by God—I don’t want you causing any trouble for Porter’s guest here. I’m bound and determined to get some of my money back that I’ve lost to Hook here tonight.”
Cooper sank back into his chair. “I’m done for the evening. The rest of you can stay and play with this—this civilian. I’m going for some air and then to bed.”
In silence the officer saw himself out, openly glaring at the woman as he dragged his long wool coat onto his arms.
“A shame,” Porter commented sourly. “I think Custer’s tolerance is running a short fuse for Major Cooper’s drunkenness.”
There followed a long moment of silence as each man dealt with his own thoughts.
“Let’s play cards, gentlemen,” the handsome Captain George W. Yates suddenly suggested, rubbing his hands together. “I feel I too might be dipping into Benteen’s personal coffers this night. If Mr. Hook lets me!”
The rest at the table chuckled. A few raised their glasses.
“About time too,” Jonah said. “The last game of cards I was playing, I had to leave before collecting my winnings.”
“That the game earned you your bullet?” asked Lieutenant Myles Moylan, adjutant to Custer.
“Yes,” Hook answered without hesitation. “Instead of gold, you might say I carried away a little lead for my trouble.”
That eased them some that first night, as did the way Hook carefully let go most of his winnings through the final hour of the game, losing enough of what he had won earlier in the night that no man left hard of feelings or hesitant to return come next payday.
But that payday was Jonah’s last at Fort Hays. There was nothing more Porter could do with the bullet wound. The rest was up to Hook now. Besides, word had it that the regiment’s lieutenant colonel was growing anxious to know why Porter had taken in three civilian boarders, feeding them from his own dwindling personal pantry.
“You’ll find something useful to do with yourself for the rest of the winter?” Porter asked that February day as Hook, Moser, and the woman prepared to ride out.
“Never fear, Doctor.”
“It’s not safe west of here.”
Moser glanced at Hook. Then away.
“We’re not going west of here,” Jonah replied. “Find something to do until spring comes.”
“Then what? Go back to looking for your family?”
“I’ve got to try.”
“Don’t waste your life, trying to find out what happened to theirs,” Porter said as Jonah went to the saddle, slowly rotating the tender shoulder once he was settled.
“I don’t figure any day I have now is a waste, Doctor. Every day’s a gift from here on out. Owe my life to that squaw and to you too.”
“Word has it there’ll be work here come spring.”
“Not interested in soldiering.”
“You’ve told me of your scouting with Bridger up in the Dakotas,” Porter said, backing a few steps to gaze up at the horseman in the bright winter sunshine. “I figured you could put to good use what you learned from him and that character Sweete.”
He remembered now—so long without remembering—and touched the small rawhide-and-quill medicine wheel suspended from his neck on a cord there beneath his shirt. “Shadrach Sweete.”
“They’ll be hiring scouts for the coming campaign. A man like you can use the work.”
“And the money!” Moser said.
“Till spring, Doctor!” Hook cried out as he reined about and set his horse in motion, pulling along the packhorse. Behind him came Moser, and the Pawnee woman riding bareback on the animal that of a time had been Moser’s pack animal stolen from the Creeks down in Indian Territory.
“Till spring!”
She called him Hook. And her heart had grown big and warm for him. The way she grew moist for him whenever those yellow eyes told her he must have her.
He called her by her name now, ever since leaving the soldier fort she knew as Hays. Called her Grass Singing in his tongue, unable to pronounce it in her Pawnee language. It was enough that he called her Grass Singing and held her close beneath the blankets in this dugout the three of them had made against the side of a hill where erosion had started to form this small cavern they had called their home these past two moons since leaving the soldier fort.
The three had lived as her own people had lived, she told herself whenever she began to miss the village and her friends. But then she remembered her mother and aunt, and how they had been thrown away by the tribe once their husbands had been killed by Lakota. No longer could the women live within the Pawnee circle, not without a man to care for them.
Grass Singing had a man to care for her. Hook, she called him. It made a ringing sound on the back of her tongue.
Many white men had lain atop her, but he was the first she had grown to care for before she ever received him. Looking back, she had come to care for him that terrible day the white men shot their guns at one another in the drinking place, the day she ran from that awful place, following the two white men who had helped her. Not knowing anything else to do—afraid to stay there more than she was afraid to ride into the unknown with the pair.
He had not clawed at her the way others had. Still, she sensed his overpowering intensity as he rode atop her and finished quickly, sooner than she had wanted. He had slept against her that first day, still asleep when the other white man returned to the dugout with fresh meat. She was not embarrassed, for the blankets were over them, and it seemed the other white man knew anyway what would eventually come to be between her and the man Hook.
With little of the white tongue that she could remember, the three of them mostly spoke in sign that Hook taught the other man through those long weeks of waiting for the prairie to green and the winds to come about out of the south, once more blessing this land with warmth.
She did not expect him to care for her the way she had come to feel for him in her heart. It was enough that he was here with her now, touching her body the way she had always wanted it to be touched, making her breasts and nipples alive with tension and desire, his fingers stroking the inside of her thighs before he drove himself into her moistness as she sang out in maddening fury for him.
And she came to love the way he cradled her after they were finished while his flesh grew small once more.
