Hook whispered then. “He … he using her?”
Fordham looked away to the single, small window in the room. The icy snow lanced against it noisily in that heavy silence. It seemed he could not bear to look at Hook.
“She’s his now, Jonah. Maybe you best forget and—”
He was across that six feet and had Fordham’s shirt in his hand, the pistol barrel shoved up under the man’s chin so far it made the deserter bug-eyed.
“Goddamn you, Fordham! I never will forget. Not till I find her. Not till I find my children. And make all of you pay for what you done to ’em!”
Sweete eased his big hand down on Jonah’s arm until the muzzle came away from Fordham’s throat. “He’s got every right in the world to splatter that ceiling with your brains, Fordham.”
“I … I know he does. Go ’head. Kill me now. Better that way. Least I won’t have to live with what I done. What I didn’t do to stop all the hurt.”
“This bunch brought hurt to a lot of folks?”
Fordham looked from Sweete to Jonah, whose eyes were only inches from his. “A lot. I figured I needed out —so I could make my peace with God about it.”
“S’pose you start now,” Sweete said. “Tell this man where he can find his wife.”
“And his daughter,” Fordham said quietly. “It was ’cause of her I run off. Usher’s bunch finds me, Usher will kill me for running off. No one gets out alive.”
“I don’t give a damn about them finding you, Fordham!” Hook snapped. “Just—tell—me—of—my— daughter.”
“Hattie,” Fordham said her name softly.
The sound of her name in that tiny room caught Jonah by surprise. But not nearly as much as did the look on Fordham’s face, or the catch in Fordham’s voice as he spoke the name. Almost with something akin to reverence.
“Yes,” Jonah replied, easing back, “tell me about Hattie.”
“
“It’s for sure we aren’t gonna find ’em out to Fort Laramie,” Hook grumbled.
Shad pulled up the fur collar more snugly around his face. “That’s where you just might be wrong, son. You spent time out there along that Emigrant Road your own self. And that’s the way any bunch like this Usher’s is going to make it back across the mountains, and on down to the Salt Lake where those Mormons have settled in.”
“You can’t stand us Mormons, can you?” asked Riley Fordham, riding on the far side of Jonah.
“It shows, does it?” Shad asked. Knowing it did—in his eyes for sure. Maybe in the sound of his voice.
Mormons had tried to kill Jim Bridger years before, and missing out on that, Brigham Young’s band of Danites had killed some of Sweete’s friends who worked Bridger’s ferry on the Green River. There was no love lost there, no, sir. If anything, that hatred had smoldered every bit as hot that day as it was the day he and Bridger had come down from the hills to find Fort Bridger half burned to the ground. They had found some of the stock killed and left to bloat in their pens, riding east in dread only to find the bodies of friends left to rot among the willows along Green River.
“Can’t say I’m proud of everything I’ve done,” Riley Fordham admitted.
“You wasn’t old enough then to be a part of that,” Sweete said, seeing the young man’s eyes mist up. Perhaps only with the cold, incessant wind stiff against their faces.
“My uncle was,” Fordham said. “And we always heard how heroic it was going against Indians and Gentiles —white men who were no better than savage Indians anyway.”
“That’s what they taught you ’bout what those butchers did up there on the Green?”
“I got my own sins to account for, Mr. Sweete,” Fordham said, answering it in his own way. “Can’t blame no one else for what I’ve done on my own.”
“With the help of this Usher and his right-hand man, the one you called Wiser,” Hook said.
“Perhaps that’s why I chose to stay on with the two of you back when we crossed the Smoky Hill,” Fordham admitted. “Because I’ve got my own righting of things to see to.”
The deserter from Jubilee Usher’s Danites had told the two stunned plainsmen all he could there in that tiny room near Fort Larned that late November day as winter came down to squeeze the central plains. Fordham told them how he had rarely seen Gritta Hook, only going from tent to ambulance and back again.
“They keep both her and Hattie pretty sleepy most of the time.”
“What they using?”
“Laudanum,” he answered. “The woman … your wife—she stays with another squad. Usher keeps the girl with a small bunch I rode with, under Wiser. That’s why we didn’t always know what was going on with the woman. But I was one Usher put in charge of keeping an eye on Hattie. A bright and pretty child, Mr. Hook,” Fordham said with clear admiration in his eyes. “If ever I had a daughter of my own, I’d pray she’d be like your Hattie.”
“Why’d you desert, leaving her in that den of animals, Fordham?”
“I knew there’d come a time when Wiser would get Usher talked into letting Wiser have Hattie for his own. It was just a matter of time. As each year passed, she grew older, prettier … starting to …” Fordham cleared his throat nervously. “She was starting to fill out, looking more and more like a young woman. I could see it in Wiser’s eyes when he looked at her. One day soon—he’d get her. ’Cause every man of us knew Wiser had already laid claim to her. He’d killed before for her.”
“Killed some of his own men?”
“More’n once—when Wiser figured they looked at Hattie the wrong way, or too long. Make no mistake about it—Wiser considered Hattie his already. I couldn’t stand to be around when the time came ….”
By that next morning Sweete and Hook had been ready to pull out, heading north, with plans to make it to the Platte before turning west. They were again throwing in together to accomplish something important for each other. With that hangover yesterday Shad had learned Phil Sheridan wanted him to ride to Fort Laramie, there to meet with, advise, and interpret for the peace commissioners who had completed but a portion of their work at the Medicine Lodge treaty.
Some of the commissioners were going west, to see what they could do to bring an end to the bloodshed up in Dakota Territory. For more than a year now the army had strung itself thin along the Bozeman Road, establishing Fort Reno, Fort Phil Kearny, and Fort C. F. Smith. Each post existing day to day under a virtual state of siege, plopped down as they were in the heart of prime Sioux and Northern Cheyenne hunting ground.
But the army had put a call out to the bands to come in and talk peace at Fort Laramie. And if Two Moons’ band of Shahiyena chose to come in, Shad was sure Toote and Pipe Woman would be with them. The possibility was something the old mountain man did not want to pass up.
Jonah Hook would ride along until he found some word of where Jubilee Usher’s band of murderers had been, or might be going. It was for certain Sweete had been right about one thing: if Usher’s bunch was heading west to the City of Saints, they would in all likelihood pass Fort Laramie. It was as good a place as any he had right now to continue his search.
This would be a journey of the heart for all three of them. Sweete to once more touch and hold Shell Woman. Hook to find some clue to where he might next search for wife and daughter. And Riley Fordham rode with the two scouts for no better reason than he had to. He had his own sins to atone for.
42
“THAT THEM?” JONAH asked the old mountain man standing beside him. The light snow swirled from time to
