were all far to the north, hunting most like. Nary a sign of anything for the last three days now on his ride coming west out of Laramie.
Quickly he had tied off the animals, then dragged saddle and packs from their backs, letting them graze on the sun-stunted grasses back in a copse of alder where they would be less likely seen. He hurriedly made it look as if he were going to spend the night right there, then slipped off among the willow as if he were going to relieve himself, with one hand tugging his britches down over his hip as he went.
But once behind the thick growth of alder, Jonah rebuckled his belt and stuffed his shirttail back in his pants, squatting beneath some overhanging branches, where he gently parted the drying leaves with the barrel of his Winchester repeater. He waited, watching across the stream. To his right lay his campsite and the plunder he hoped would be bait enough to draw in the sneaky bastard dogging his backtrail.
He fought the sleep struggling to overtake him as the rain hammered the ground at his side, battering the leaves above, soaking his old hat that served as little protection. Jonah shuddered, growing chilled to the bone, and tried desperately to keep his eyes open.
“Keep ’em moving,” he told himself, remembering the words of Sweete and Bridger about sentries who had tired and fallen asleep because they had not kept their eyes moving. Staring at one thing too long proved deadly when a man was weary. Such a fool woke up too late—finding himself out of the frying pan and into the fire—if he woke up at all.
There came a rustle of movement to his left, along the creek bank, on the far side. Then a half-dozen birds took to the wing noisily, startling Jonah as he whirled the repeater about.
In the deepening silence that followed their frightened departure, Hook reasoned that no white man was going to make a successful sneak on him. All he had to do was wait and watch his campsite. That was the place the backtracker was surely headed. Likely the man had come across the river where the birds had taken wing and was moving downstream on the near bank, making for Jonah Hook’s camp.
The wet ground made it hard to hear a thing, and the sodden air didn’t carry a sound well at all. Two marks against him, Jonah brooded.
“Damn,” he muttered as more of the cold rain spilled from the hat brim down his collar.
He was sitting in a cold puddle of it now, yet he dared not move. His stalker was likely drawing close. He held his breath a moment, listening, straining against the rain for sound. His eyes must be deceiving him. He’d be damned, but it sounded as if someone were already in his camp, rummaging through his packs.
Try as he might, Jonah could not see a soul. As well as he had chosen this spot, for some reason he still could not see anyone rustling the oiled canvas. But, plain as sun, Hook could hear the sound.
Slowly rising on one knee, Jonah inched forward, parting more of the leaves and branches with the rifle muzzle. Then he saw the top of a man’s head.
“A Injun,” he said under his breath, swiping a damp forearm across his lips.
Brushing his thumb across the Winchester’s hammer to make sure it was cocked, he rose to a crouch and prepared to make his play—just as the Indian pulled free one of the glass bottles Jonah had purchased back at Laramie.
A loafer, by God. Nothing more’n a good-for-nothing, whiskey-bellied loafer!
Hook burst from the willow and alder, Winchester at his hip and leveled at its target.
“Goddamn you! Leave my whiskey alone, you drunken redskin!”
At the white man’s growl exploding from the rain-soaked undergrowth, Two Sleep scrambled awkwardly for his feet, moccasins slipping on the wet ground, and flew backward, tumbling headlong over more of Jonah’s packs. Yet he slowly raised one arm in the air, grinning sheepishly at the white man, almost apologetic, for certain triumphant. Somehow in his fall he had miraculously kept the whiskey bottle aloft, safe, and unbroken.
“Drop it, I say!” Jonah roared, half-ready to laugh at the Indian sprawled in the mud, intent on that bottle of whiskey.
But as he said it, the Indian’s empty hand came up filled with a pistol. That hammer cocked loud enough to be the clattering of an iron wagon tire rolling over granite.
Little did Hook like staring down the bore of any weapon, much less a pistol he figured was gripped in the shaky hand of a whiskey-sodden Indian. Unpredictable, that’s what their kind was. And this one might up and pull that trigger as soon as look at Jonah, just for the whiskey. Just another dead white man, more or less—
“Two Sleep,” the stranger blurted plain as paint.
Hook wagged his head, not sure he had heard what he thought he had. Plain-spoke English.
“What was that you said, you drunk devil?”
“Two Sleep. My name—Two Sleep. But not drunk.”
He looked sideways at the intruder, suspicious. “Speak English, do you?”
With a nod of his head, the Indian used the hand holding the bottle to scratch the side of his face where some brown mud clung, dripping onto his shoulder from his fall.
“You’re a sight to boot,” Jonah went on. “Put that belt gun away before one of us gets hurt.”
“You shoot Two Sleep?” the Indian asked.
“Sure. Always shoot whiskey thieves, I do,” Hook replied, the beginnings of a grin crawling across his lips.
He didn’t want to like the Indian, didn’t want to trust him. But Jonah couldn’t deny that he was already beginning to do both. “Still, I ain’t yet shot a man I was drinking whiskey with.”
Already it had proved to be a memorable summer for High-Backed Bull, having sworn his allegiance to Porcupine, who in turn took his faithful warriors north to join with the great Shahiyena war chief, Sauts: the one known as the Bat. Among the white men, however, the muscular one was called Roman Nose.
This summer the Northern Cheyenne of Roman Nose and Tall Bull and Two Moon were joined by the great Brule Lakota village of Pawnee Killer. Their alliance had proved fruitful in recent moons: ever since the shortgrass time in late spring, the young warriors had been striking out, raiding into the land of the white settlers as far south as the Solomon, the Saline, even south to the river the white man called the Smoky Hill, where the pony soldiers built their string of forts and the iron road for their smoking horse.
As he reached the smooth, grass-covered brow of the last hill, High-Backed Bull saw the camp circles laid out in rings below him in the river valley, the River of Plums. The fighting bands had been following its course for the last three suns, slowly ambling to the north and west, in no hurry. It seemed they had come to dare the small party of white men to catch up with them.
Behind the young Shahiyena warrior now, he heard the yips and cries of the others, mostly Brule, a few Dog Soldiers like himself. They raced over the ridge and sprinted this last slope at a full gallop, urging their ponies ever faster, calling out to the camps below, feeling across every inch of their bare flesh the excitement of the news they brought.
Women at the river turned from bathing young children, washing clothing or cradleboards, or filling skin pouches with water. Still others rose from morning fires or scraping the skins pegged out across the prairie, hides surrounding the three great camp circles. Children began crying out in the contagious excitement, darting here and there with the news of approaching riders, while camp dogs set to the howl and yip. So much clamor was it all that the old men who sat in the shade of the lodges rose finally with wonder, shading their eyes from the late-morning sun.
Then High-Backed Bull saw him—the tall, muscular one, emerging at last from his lodge near one horn of the camp crescent farthest to the east—the direction where the white man marched, coming on at a hurry.
As High-Backed Bull yanked back on the single horsehair rein, bringing with it his pony’s jaw, the animal skidded to a lock-kneed stop, prancing in a wild circle around Roman Nose. The war chief grabbed for the rein and held on as he peered into the light of the high sun, and the face of the young scout.
“You bring me good news?”
Catching his breath, finding his tongue so dry from the race that it stuck to the roof of his mouth, Bull asked, “I am first?”
