temples. Quickly he glanced at Starving Elk and Little Hawk, their young heads bobbing eagerly in anticipation.
Still far off across the starlit prairie twinkled the faintest glimmers of light: enough to see that they were a handful of fires, their dim, bloodlike glowing beneath the star-dark skies. White-man fires gone low with neglect. He knew that the white horsemen would likely be asleep.
“They will have guards on their herd,” the Bull said softly.
Bad Tongue agreed with a nod. “We will not have to worry about their guards.”
“Into their horses and drive them out again before the guards know what bad wind blew through camp,” the second Brule added.
“Let’s go close enough to see these soldiers?” Little Hawk asked.
Bad Tongue turned on the youngest of that group. “Yes, my little friend. We will go close enough for you to see all the white men.”
“When we have driven off these horses, then we can ride back to wait for the others to attack at dawn?” Starving Elk added. On his face was written that look of apprehension, as plain as his earth-paint.
The Sioux warriors stood with Bad Tongue, all five as one.
“We Lakota did not come to
“You may come to take the horses and mules,” sneered High-Backed Bull. “The Shahiyena came to take scalps this night. Do you ride with me, Starving Elk?”
Starving Elk took a deep breath, looking at his younger brother. “I … I go to steal the horses. My brother, Little Hawk, can choose if he wishes to return to camp now—before the attack.”
“No! I will ride with Starving Elk. He is my brother and I will follow him.”
Without another word Bad Tongue led the half-dozen Sioux atop their barebacked ponies, unfurling blankets, some unrolling stiff pieces of rawhide brought with them. One even pulled a large hand drum from a coyote-skin cover he had slung over his shoulder.
“What is this you are doing with these things, Bad Tongue?” asked High-Backed Bull as he pulled his old Walker Colt’s revolver from the belt around his waist.
The Sioux warrior glared at his Cheyenne companion. “Make ready, Shahiyena. For the Burnt Thigh are making ready to put the white man afoot!”
The sleeper came up startled, lunging for the pistol at his side as he blinked his eyes at the huge man hulking over him.
“Strickler, it’s your colonel.” He put a finger to his lips and motioned the man to follow.
Jubilee arose and moved off, knowing Oran Strickler would not fail to follow. Satisfied when he heard the sound of blankets coming off and the creak of cold leather boots scrunching across the sandy soil behind him.
When he had stopped among the cottonwood and turned, Usher hissed, “I have come to trust you as much as any of these.”
The man hawked up some night-gather in his throat, flung it into the darkness, then replied, “I been with you from the very start, Colonel. I was riding along with the same wagon train when we was took.”
“You got as much stake in all of this as I, don’t you, brother Strickler.” Usher could tell just what effect that endearing term had on the man. It had quickly softened the harsh night edges of the Danite’s face.
“Perhaps—like you say—it is time for a change in Deseret. The American government, its army sent out to aim its guns down on us—something should’ve been done long ago.”
Usher placed a hand on the tall, thin man’s shoulder. “We need only to show the many others in Zion the error of Brigham’s ways. Was a time I would have followed Brigham through the fires of hell.”
“We done that, Colonel. And we’re on our way back again, by damned!”
He snorted, then threw a thumb over his shoulder. “Back there, on our backtrail—we all know we’ve got that sodbuster following us.”
“The woman’s husband.”
“He’s not her husband!” Usher snapped, then composed himself a bit. “She’s mine by rights of all divine law now. By rights of time, by rights of angelic purpose, by right of might.”
“But don’t it bother you that this sonofabitch just keeps coming on when he ought’n to know better, Colonel?”
Usher chuckled softly, the breath before his face steamy in the cold. “It will bother me much less when that man is taken care of—for good and all time.”
He nodded. “That where I come in, is it, sir?”
“That’s right, my brother.” He reached overhead and snapped a narrow twig from a branch. This he waved in an arc across their Muddy Creek camp. “Take three with you. No—make it five more. And ride back the way we came. Likely he is this side of the pass by now.”
“Somewhere between South Pass and the Green, I’d lay a wager on.”
“No money required. Only the man’s blood.”
“We’ll go in the morning.”
Jubilee shook his head. “No. I want you to find your five and go now. Saddle up, draw your rations for how long you calculate you’ll be gone—and leave now.”
Oran Strickler swallowed hard. Then scratched at the thick, unshaved growth across his dirty cheek. “You want me bring you something back?”
“If you can do it.”
He waited for Usher to elaborate. When the colonel did not, Strickler asked, “What you want? His scalp? His balls? Maybeso his whole head, eh?”
Usher draped a big arm over Stickler’s shoulder. “No. If you can, I want you to help me reunite the sodbuster with the woman. For just a few minutes, I want to be able to look into both their faces and see the looks they will give one another, how they will regard me—before I kill him. Slowly. Slowly.”
“You … you figure on killing him right in front of his … uh, the woman?” Strickler corrected himself.
“Yes. As simple as that,” Usher replied. “Now. You have your orders. Bring him to me alive. Do not—on pain of death—do not return to me without this sodbuster alive.”
Strickler swallowed again, turned, and disappeared back into the dim glow of the dying fires. Usher listened to the snoring, the footsteps halting here, then there, listened to the unintelligible, whispered voices, heard the faintest betrayal of the rolling of blankets and the shuffling of bodies out of camp toward the horses. Into the darkness. And it grew quiet once more around Jubilee Usher.
Deathly quiet.
He had chosen the right man. And Oran Strickler would choose his men just as wisely, Jubilee felt certain.
Just as certain that one day he would sit in the Prophet’s chair at the center of Zion, leader of God’s chosen people.
His only doubt lay with her. By watching with her own eyes the killing of her husband by Jubilee’s hand— would she give up all hope of rescue, all hope of returning to that sodbuster and their former life together?
Only then would she relent and give herself totally, irrevocably, irretrievably over to Jubilee Usher.
9
FAR, FAR AWAY on the distant edge of the awakening land a thin smear of gray bubbled along the horizon
