“You eat since breakfast?”
When Hook wagged his head, Sweete said, “Then come along with me.”
“I’ll wait for my cousin and then be along.”
“We’ll wait together,” Shad replied.
“I’ll find you, old man.”
“Likely you won’t, Jonah.” He flung an arm southwest of the fort. “Camped down there.”
“You staying with some of those Injuns down there on the creek?”
“Got the woman along. Our girl too.”
“They come north with you?”
“Gathered ’em up after last winter and moseyed north, fixing to find work myself. Never would I thought that we’d run onto one another this way. And from the looks of you, Jonah Hook is needing some fattening up at Toote Sweete’s kettle.”
“Good vittles?”
“Does a badger ever back down? None finer. C’mon, we’ll gather up that cousin of yours over to the wagon yard and get down to the camp.”
Minutes later the three were among the handful of smoked-hide lodges, dogs barking, the half-wild animals heeling them as they sniffed the newcomers. A few barefoot children dashed across the sodden prairie and pounded earth surrounding each lodge.
“Which one of these is your daughter?” Jonah asked.
“Which?” Shad replied, then laughed, head thrown back for a moment. “Ain’t none of these children, Jonah.” He pointed. “That’s my child—there.”
Coming head down out through a nearby lodge door, then standing full height to a little over five feet, she was clearly no child.
“
“Pipe Woman is twenty summers this year. Helps her mama around the lodge now. Too old to be running with the children.”
Jonah swallowed hard. “That ain’t no child, Shad. She’s gotta be the most beautiful Injun I ever saw.”
“Wait’ll you see her mama. Toote!” he called out. Shad’s daughter raised her head from her work as the men approached, her own broad smile brightening the high-cheeked face, eyes bouncing from one to the other of the two newcomers politely, then finding the earth once more in that traditional coy manner of her people.
“C’mon out here, woman—we got us guests for dinner!”
25
IT WAS TO be an expedition to show the flag.
“Hancock the Superb,” they called him. He, who had been most responsible for holding the vital center of the Union line against Pickett’s deadly charge at Gettsyburg. Let the nomadic warriors of the plains know that “The Thunderbolt,” General Winfield Scott Hancock, had led troops into every one of those bloody battles fought by the Army of the Potomac.
Yet now Hancock had to figure out how to deal with Indians on the Great Plains.
“Looking more and more like the bands want war,” Shad Sweete told Jonah on their march away from those log-and-adobe buildings that made up Fort Harker standing beside the Smoky Hill River. They were pointing their noses south by west on the Olde Santa Fe Trail, headed for Fort Larned erected along the Arkansas River. “What with the way they’ve been making hay on the freight roads—shutting things down flat. Hickok says that the general plans to give the Cheyenne and Sioux just that—war.”
Right about now Hook wasn’t all that sure this was where he wanted to be. He had been pushed and prodded and goaded from one war into another, from the Civil War into Connor’s War on the Powder. And looking for some whisper of a trace of his family, Hook found himself riding at the head of a huge column of cavalry, infantry, and artillery might marching off toward what had the makings of a new war.
“Ain’t he even gonna try talking to the Injuns?” Jonah asked innocently.
“For certain he will. Hickok says the general plans on palavering with the chiefs, first off. But damn if Hancock don’t make a lot of bluster and carry a damned big stick when he claims he’s just going out to palaver,” Sweete replied. “Bragging that he won’t tolerate no insolence from the warrior bands.”
General Hancock was, in fact, forced to cool his heels at Fort Larned. On 7 April, after having arrived with a force of fourteen hundred soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry, 37th Infantry, along with a battery of the Fourth Artillery and a pontoon train, the general was informed a delegation of chiefs was indeed on its way to see him. Then, as if the weather itself conspired against the Thunderbolt’s plans to subdue the tribes of the Great Plains, a spring snowstorm caught the delegates in their camp some thirty miles west from Fort Larned, up the Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas River. Five days later, only two Cheyenne chiefs came in from the snowy countryside: White Horse and Tall Bull.
“Damn if Hancock didn’t give them two Cheyenne what for,” Hook explained to Sweete and the other scouts at their camp fire that next morning while coffee boiled. “Like a Bible-thumping circuit rider, preachifying hell and damnation if they didn’t toe his line.”
Shad knelt over the fire, dragging the coffeepot from the flames, allowing the roiling water to slow itself. He pushed it toward his guest. “That’s why we’re marching up Pawnee Fork this morning, Jonah. General wants to preach his piece to more’n just them two.”
“Something down in my gut troubles me—telling me I don’t want to get so close to that many Injuns ever again.” Hook wrapped a greasy bandanna around the pot handle so he could pour coffee into the tin cups the others had waiting. “What I saw up there at Platte Bridge two years back was enough to last any man a normal lifetime.”
Shad grinned. “But here you squat, marching with the army on the trail of these red buggers—”
“Don’t remind me how stupid I am, Shad!”
“Why the devil you sign on with this outfit, Jonah—you don’t figure to get so close to Injuns?”
“Right about now, I’m wondering why I signed on myself.”
“Keep your nose in the wind and your eye up there on the horizon—you’ll fare through all right,” Sweete reminded.
The following afternoon, Hickok and Milner had the advance party of scouts spread out on a broad front, each of those plainsmen knowing they could expect to meet warriors riding out to protect their villages at any moment. Instead, mile after mile of shimmering prairie was crossed, with no sign of the bands or their crossing.
Late in the afternoon, only the horizon betrayed a massive dust cloud.
Hickok came tearing back toward his flankers, reining up and haunch-sliding his mount around in a tight circle, his shoulder-length hair lifting in the breeze from the collar of his red waist-length Zouave jacket resplendent with gold braid. “We got problems, Shad!”
“They’re running, ain’t they?”
“By glory if they ain’t.”
“They torn down the lodges?”
“No,” Hickok replied. “Just bolting off—women and young’uns.”
“Warriors staying behind?”
“They’ll likely guard the retreat.” Hickok reined about. “I’m going to tell the old man!”
Hancock immediately growled his displeasure with the fleeing Indians and ordered Hickok around, dispatched back to the village to find one of the headmen he could parley with.
“Tell those chiefs they better round their people up and bring them back, goddammit! Make sure they understand this is a bad show of faith on their part.”
“To them, General,” Hickok explained from atop his prancing horse, “this many soldiers along is a clear show of what your intentions are.”
