“Yes. He swears his desire for vengeance on any white man—even if that white man is his father.”
Shad swallowed hard, as if the news were something foul. “My son, where would I find him?”
“He rides with the young warriors of Porcupine.”
“This Porcupine,” Shad began, careful not to sound too anxious, “he is war leader in your village?”
“He is of this band. But Porcupine is gone from us for now. He rode north to join the Dog Soldiers of Roman Nose.”
Sweete glanced at Hook, who was fervently trying to follow the sense of the discussion, even if he could not understand the words being spoken.
“I know of that one.”
“Yes. Many white men have heard of the Nose. But no white man has ever set eyes on this great warrior— and lived to tell of that meeting.”
“Tell me, Turkey Leg—where would I find Roman Nose?”
“Where one would find Tall Bull and White Horse—the Dog Soldier bands. That is where a man could find Roman Nose.”
39
“YOUR NAME’S HOOK, isn’t it?”
Jonah looked up from his coffee-making chores. The tall, handsome soldier came to a stop on the far side of the small fire where supper was beginning to roast. Jonah spotted the clusters on the collar.
“Have we met, Major?”
The soldier held out his hand as Jonah rose, dusting off his own.
“Not official, mind you. Joel Elliott. U.S. Seventh Cavalry.”
They shook, Hook suspicious. “I see. To what do I owe the honor of your come to call, Major? This go back to that time I was ready to shoot Tom Custer, don’t it? Go ’head and have you a set, where you can,” he said, waving at a nearby spot.
Elliott settled on a hardtack box, one by one slowly undoing the buttons on his tunic. As if he were searching for an answer.
“Suppose I only wanted to meet you—especially after that incident with your cousin—”
“He’s dead,” Jonah interrupted sharply, his suspicions confirmed.
The major appeared brought up by that, something short. “I see.” Then he cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Hook.”
“Jonah.”
“As much as you created a stir that day on the South Fork of the Republican … as much as Tom Custer has hated you ever since for holding him at gunpoint, I’ve got to say, and will admit this to any man who asks—I admire your sense of family. Your loyalty to family in the face of overwhelming odds.”
“Not overwhelming, Major,” Jonah said, dusting coffee grounds from his hands after he had dumped them into the boiling water. “It was just Tom Custer and me.”
Elliott smiled. “There were at least a dozen soldiers there, ready to put holes in you.”
Hook smiled in return. “Important thing was that Tom Custer understood that there was only one important hole—and that was the one I was fixing to put in him if he didn’t let my cousin go.”
“Like I said, as much as Tom hates you, and as much as the general himself doesn’t quite know how to deal with your brand of courage—I figured it was time for me to shake your hand.”
“Still doesn’t figure that I done something so special that a cavalry major come look me up.”
“You pour me some coffee, Jonah?” Elliott asked, watching Hook pull up two tin cups. “Sounds to me like you’re selling yourself short.”
As Jonah poured the steaming coffee from the blackened pot, he listened to the nearby
Elliott accepted his cup. “How old are you—you mind me asking?”
“Thirty, this last spring.”
“You been out here long?”
He hoisted his cup in the fashion of a toast. “Just since the Yankees brought me west to keep telegraph wire up and follow General Connor to the Powder River.”
“Back a little more than two years then.” Elliott sipped at his coffee. “You figure we got a chance making peace with these bands?”
“Major—you’re asking the wrong fella. That’s for certain. I’ve fought the Injuns, bedded down one winter with a Pawnee gal who taught me a bit of her tongue … and I’ve tracked around a good chunk of this territory with North’s Pawnee Battalion.” He speared a thick slice of buffalo hump and turned it over in the cast-iron skillet. “None of that makes me no great shakes when it comes to knowing if the army can make peace with these bands.”
“I’ve been trying to find out if there is really much cause to hope.”
“Hell—it’s hard enough for most men to make peace with themselves, much less have to worry about making peace with each other.”
“Let’s pray the chiefs of the warrior bands aren’t as cynical as you are, Jonah.”
Hook smiled, liking the open, ready good humor of the soldier. “Glory be—but we might have a chance to make peace between the Cheyenne and the army yet. If all the Injuns was like Turkey Leg—and all the soldiers like you, Major.”
Miles to the south down on the Cimarron River were camped the bulk of the Cheyenne bands, more than 250 lodges. They waited, skeptical of the white man’s good intentions and promises of presents. On Medicine Lodge Creek itself Black Kettle’s 25 lodges of Southern Cheyenne camped. Below them were more than 100 lodges of Comanches. And below them stood the camp circles of some 150 lodges of Kiowa, along with 85 lodges of Kiowa- Apache. Closest to Fort Larned were 170 lodges of Southern Arapaho.
A great and impressive gathering of more than 800 lodges, all in a joyous mood, for recent hunting had been good, and word had it the soldiers at the nearby post had just received shipments of the goods soon to be brought out to the great encampment in wagons: coffee, sugar, flour, and dried fruits; in addition to blankets and bolts of colorful cloth, and surplus uniforms from the white man’s recent war among himself, uniforms the War Department had in the last few months turned over to the Interior Department. And on its way was a sizable herd of the white man’s cattle to feed the gathering bands.
When the white commissioners arrived at the scene on the fifteenth, they and their military escort of the Seventh Cavalry camped across the creek, on the north side of the Medicine Lodge. Row upon row of tents housing the troopers spread in grand fashion across the prairie. Next to those tents stood a long line of the freight wagons bulging with the presents for those making peace with the Great Father back east, and closest to the creek were the tents erected for the commissioners themselves. In that flat meadow between their tents and the streambank, the great council had begun its informal sessions on 17 October. Yet it had not been until the nineteenth when the chiefs began making their formal speeches.
Behind the commissioners, both military and civilian, hung a large canopy beneath which the many clerks and stenographers sat, recording the proceedings, word for word. There too sat the many newsmen here to record for their readers back east this momentous gathering with the warrior bands of the Great Plains.
On each morning the council assembled, the Cheyenne and Arapaho chiefs seated themselves on the right hand of the white men, or on the west. On the left-hand side sat the Kiowa and Comanche leaders. And in a broad crescent behind these chiefs sat the old men, councillors and leaders all. Beyond them along the stream itself the young warriors moved about in all their finery—feathers and bells, paint and totems, not shy in the least of showing off their weapons. Eager young boys at times attempted to mingle with the warriors, but only with caution, for
