“Who’s the new man, Captain Hastings?” Wiser called out from the far side of the noisy celebration.
Hook figured Wiser had caught him studying the major. He felt a nudge now and found Hastings at his elbow, prodding him down the bar, through the reveling crowd of horsemen just off the trail. To meet the major himself.
“This is a new man I picked up back at the Missouri.”
“I see, Captain.” He drank a little from his glass, eyes studying Hook over the rim. “Where you from?”
“Missouri.”
“You sound Southern.”
“I am. Born in Virginia.”
“You fight for the Confederacy?”
“I did. General Sterling Price.”
“I knew this Price,” Wiser said. “Fought him myself. Perhaps we were on different sides of a battlefield at one time.”
“Ain’t likely. War ended early for me. I was captured.”
“Prisoner, eh? What then? You see the light—and figure the grand republic was worth saving?”
Hook wagged his head. “Weren’t that way, Major. The Union will take care of itself. I figured the Yankees and their grand republic can just leave me be and let me get on with my life.”
Wiser grinned slightly and brought the glass from his lips. Then held out his hand. “Lemuel Wiser. I didn’t catch your name.”
“Jonah Hook, Major.”
“Pleased to have you with us, Jonah. You care to stay with Captain Hastings’s platoon of scouts—and if he wants to keep you with him—that’s fine by me.”
“By all means, I’d like him to stay with my outfit, with the major’s permission,” Hastings said. “Jonah’s had experience fighting Indians.”
“Indians?”
“Sioux and Cheyenne,” Hastings replied to Wiser’s question.
“Where was that, Jonah?”
“Out on the Emigrant Road. On the Sweetwater. North Platte. With General Connor’s expedition to Powder River.”
“My, my,” Wiser said approvingly, glancing quickly at Hastings with a bright light in his eyes. “You just might do to ride back home with us, Jonah.”
Hook felt the first wings of hope take flight. “Thank you, Major. I was hoping to meet the colonel himself soon too. Heard so much about you both.”
“You’ve learned of Jubilee Usher?”
“Yes, Major. Is he with you?”
Wiser grinned, on his face a benevolent light. “The colonel will meet us at Fort Laramie, Jonah. He has taken a different route.” He looked at Hastings. “And we will all go forth from here to effect that rendezvous with the colonel.”
“How soon we pulling out, Major?”
Wiser looked back at Hook. “Captain, we have a few days to spare. And I plan on spending them here. The men with me have rarely had money of late with which to gamble. And when they have had the money—it seems most no longer have the heart to gamble with me.”
“I take it you like to play cards, Major?” Hook asked.
“You a gambler, Jonah?” The light brightened behind his eyes.
“Let’s say I get serious about a game of cards every now and then.”
“Perfect! Simply perfect!” Wiser called out to the bartender to bring over two more glasses into which he poured drinks of the red whiskey. “Captain Hastings—first a toast to you for enlisting so splendid a recruit as Mr. Hook appears to be.”
“I figured he’d do, Major.”
“Indeed.” Wiser studied this new recruit. “Any man who believes the U.S. government should damn well stay out of the affairs of its citizens—especially the religious affairs of a growing population—that man should do well upon our return to Deseret.”
“This grand republic got no business telling any man how to run his life, Major.”
“Splendid, Jonah! Just what we have been saying for years now. There is, you are aware, a separation of church and state in the Constitution drafted by our Founding Fathers?”
“I never knew that. No, Major.”
“The Founding Fathers knew best—that it was God’s plan that our government should keep its hands off the religious affairs of the people.”
“I figure the Yankees and their Union ought to just keep hands off of most everything, Major Wiser.”
Wiser laughed suddenly, a head-rearing, hearty laugh. He clamped a hand on Hook’s bony shoulder. “To think we’ve found a kindred heart, Captain Hastings. In this land of the Gentile heathen, so far from Zion no less. And—a man who loves to gamble to boot!”
46
HE WAS THANKFUL the prairie nights cooled off the way they did. As short as that starlit respite was from the growing heat of summer come to sear the high plains.
Lemuel Wiser sat at the big table with Jonah Hook and the rest, fewer now than when they had started fourteen hours ago that very morning after a breakfast of eggs and potatoes and thick slices of ham with gravy served up by the former army mess cook in his smoky kitchen at the back of this saloon. Good biscuits on the side too, washed down with lots of coffee laced with sipping whiskey.
“Gets the old heart pumping for the game,” Wiser had cracked as he tore open the first deck of cards for what had been a long, long day that saw players come and go. Very few of his men tried their luck. Soldiers mostly, in Dobe Town from Fort Kearney for a little recreation—some drinking, some gambling, and most surely some treasured but precious few moments behind those doors out back where the powdered chippies plied their trade.
Army troopers or Wiser’s own soldiers—men always seemed to like the girls better than the gambling. Back there away from things, where a man was no longer self-conscious around his fellow soldiers, where a man could scream and holler and let it all out when the explosion came as he rode one of those fleshy or bony, coffee-colored or alabaster-skinned, whores.
From time to time men dropped in and out of the game, at times there were more than eight ringing the table with Wiser. At times down to no more than four. Yet the gambler in the soul of the new man kept him at the table. Jonah Hook won a little, lost a little, managing to stay just far enough ahead that he could afford to keep a bottle at his elbow through the last fourteen hours. He poured drinks for the other players and himself, and stayed far enough ahead that he was not driven to carding out like so many of the others who gave up and left, empty- handed.
Some of those losers stayed to watch. Others went out the door in silence. A few left noisily, grumbling their complaints as to the suspected lack of honesty in the good-looking stranger with the smooth tongue. It was not the first time Lemuel Wiser had heard such complaints, not the first time he had been accused of having an oily tongue or fast, slippery fingers.
Wiser enjoyed being a gambler in everything he did in life. There was enough boredom after all. And all a man had to do was open his eyes and look around him to see the desperate lives of little men to know that. Long ago, Wiser had promised himself he would not be one of them. He would make things happen, create his own world and along with it create a specific order to that world, mirroring most how he saw himself. So far, he had done well in that regard.
And with Jubilee Usher now returning to Deseret, it just might mean a promotion for Lemuel Wiser. If
