Hook’s whisper went the way of smoke on that cruel, winter wind.
“You won’t feel no pain soon enough.”
“
“Out of the Territories?”
“Yeah. Course, Fordham told us Usher was planning to do that eventual.”
“Riley—he gone now?”
“Must be. After we … finished with Jack: dragged his body a ways down the bank, rolled it under the ice in the river over yonder—Fordham lit out. Said he had to get moving or his scent would stay around for the next one come along.”
“He’s probably right. This bunch with Usher found Fordham this time—they’ll find him again.” Shad took a slice of the dried buffalo from Toote.
She offered one to Jonah. He took one, then a second slice, glancing at the back of the lodge where Pipe Woman sat side-legged, the blankets pulled up beneath her chin. She was no longer looking at him the same way she had the day they met. Now, instead, there was an expression of horror on her face.
Jonah couldn’t blame her. What he’d done … But, hell, he’d done it for her too.
Shad asked, “He say when they come north?”
“Half a year at the most, from what Laughing Jack told us. Says Usher figures to be slow at moving west— back to Deseret. With their prisoners. Gritta and Hattie.”
“Usher won’t give her away, Jonah. Remember that. Not until someone finds Fordham.”
“They better not—or I’ll kill Fordham myself.”
He watched Jonah stand, finishing the last of his coffee. “Where you heading?”
“Don’t see any use in burning daylight, Shad.”
“Doesn’t answer where—so a man knows how to find you.”
“East from here. First I’ll check around Sedgwick down on the South Platte. Wander on to McPherson, and Kearny. Don’t hear any word there, I’ll push on south a bit into Kansas. Someone—soldier or civilian—at one of the posts will hear of that bunch. If they’re going back to Mormon country—there’s one good way to get there.”
“Then why the hell don’t you stay here and wait for ’em to come marching by, Jonah?”
He shook his head. “Can’t take the chance I’ll miss ’em. Can’t sit still—just waiting. I got to be looking.”
“I understand, son.”
Hook glanced at Pipe Woman a moment. Wishing there were something he could say to her, to make her see that he wasn’t a violent man. But what else had he shown her? The look in her eyes last night when he was preparing to draw down on the man hurting her … the look in her eyes for that instant last night when she and Toote saw Jonah opening Jack’s neck like a hog at slaughter—before Shad shooed them back into the lodge.
What do you say to such a beautiful young woman who you felt such an arousal for, such a heated yearning to feel flesh against flesh—but now saw in her eyes nothing but fear and loathing for you? He told himself maybe it was better this way—after all, she was Shad’s daughter. And he had a wife out there … somewhere. Better in the long run that he just go.
“I’ll be moving out now,” he said quietly, pushing aside the door flap and stepping from the lodge into the cold.
Sweete and his family joined Hook in the gray light of early dawn.
“You need help—wire me here. The colonel will get word to me, for certain,” Sweete said. He folded Hook into his arms.
Toote came into him next, murmuring some Cheyenne. Then she backed up, mist in her eyes, and said in English, “Thank … Pipe Woman … safe now.”
He nodded, self-consciously, then turned to take up the halter on the pack horse. That’s when she shuffled close, standing there so close he could smell her. Jonah turned, finding Pipe Woman at his shoulder, those wide eyes still filled with fear. But, perhaps now no longer any fear of the violence he knew was inside him—but fearful instead of what violence might do to him.
She put out her arms and came into him, her head buried against his bony chest.
“Thank you, Jonah Hook,” she said, quietly against his wool coat.
He smelled her hair, drinking in its fragrance of smoke and hides and sage, deeply.
Then turned quickly, mounted his horse, and jammed heels into its flanks so that none of them could see the hot tears.
44
SPRING HAS a way of slipping in on the plains like no other season.
Summer is always upon that land before you know it. Autumn arrives in the nonchalant way of a shy suitor. And winter usually blusters in with a fury, bravado, and sometimes sheer terror.
But spring most often of all sneaks up on a man with the seductive secrecy of a woman. Here he had been living through each winter day and night, surviving. Not really noticing that the sunlight grows longer by a few minutes each day. Perhaps not really noticing any change in the snowpack, realizing that what snow comes might be a little wetter, the winds a little stronger at times.
So it is with this beguiling seductive quality that spring arrives on the plains. Just like a woman will slip in on a man and tangle up his heart when he least realizes it. And when he finally opens his eyes one morning, she is there, she is everywhere, she is with him. And he is hooked. Madly, irretrievably in love.
Spring had come to the plains.
Here along the Missouri River, there were already signs that the great ice jams of the upriver were breaking. Sawyers and flotsam flowed past, tumbling in the muddy foam from up north, now headed east for a union with the waters of the Mississippi far downstream. An occasional buffalo carcass too, rocking slowly with the frothy, icy, mud brown Missouri. Water born of the high places, A land where Jonah Hook had only marched along the fringes. Not daring yet to penetrate. Perhaps never—he got his family back, and things settled down back in Missouri. Maybe go as far east as he ought—back to the Shenandoah, in the shadow of Big Cobbler Mountain. They’d be safe from harm there once more.
And put this all behind them.
But that was as much a dream as any Jonah experienced each time he closed his eyes.
Late March it was. After three months of backtracking from Fort Laramie, the hunt had brought him here to this country near the Missouri River, just inside Kansas. Upriver from the great bend and Kansas City. At Fort Leavenworth again, remembering that winter of sixty-five when first the Union army brought him west to fight Indians.
More a staging arena now than any fort Hook had seen out west. When first he got here days ago, it was as if he had stepped back into another world, one that had become unfamiliar in the years gone between. What struck him most about Leavenworth was that this grouping of neatly whitewashed buildings and close-cropped lawns and wide graveled walks, along with its band shell and central flagpole and drilling infantry had no business calling itself a western fort.
But perhaps that was it, he had thought. Maybe he was no longer in what could be termed the West. Perhaps this was the end of the East and the beginning of the frontier, that term others were using out here more and more now. Maybe the West started here at the Missouri.
Again Jonah Hook had prayed that here his journey would come to an end.
It wasn’t that he didn’t have reason to give voice to that prayer. He had damned good reason. The last three months had led him here—with word that he might find a bunch that sounded like the ones he was looking for. Men, the story had it, who’d come riding north out of the Territories on some of the best of horseflesh anyone had seen in a long time—tough, lean, and good configuration. And every man jack of them was well-armed, swaybacked almost
