Winter Rain

Military

Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie—commanding, Fourth Cavalry

Major Eugene A. Carr—commanding. Fifth Cavalry

Major William B. Royall—Fifth Cavalry

Texas Rangers

Major John B. Jones—Commander, Frontier Battalion

^*Captain Lamar Lockhart—commanding Company C

^*Deacon Elijah Johns—Lieutenant, Company C

^*Niles Coffee—Sergeant, Company C

^*Clyde Yoakam—Second Sergeant, Company C

^*June Callicott

^*John Corn

^*Harley Pettis

^*Wig Danville

^*Enoch Harmony

^*Slade Rule

^*Billy Benton

Civilians

^*Nate Deidecker

^*Heber Usher

Major Frank North

Captain Luther North

Lieutenant Gustavus W. Becher

Lieutenant Billy Harvey

William Schmalsle

^*Ezra Dickinson

William F. Cody

^* fictional characters

Prologue

Late summer 1908

HE CAME AWAKE with a struggle.

The overwhelming enemies were musky in their sweat-slicked red skins. Their heaving breath stank like rancid meat in his nostrils. The muzzles of their guns exploded in his face like the roar of riven earth on Judgment Day.

Still, his was not the sort of thrashing, physical convulsion someone suddenly awakened from a sound sleep might fight.

No, his struggle was all within the dream.

And that frightened him even more.

Of a sudden he smelled the air.

Its sharp tang reminded him. With a start he knew where he was.

Breath catching in his pounding chest, his hands grasped the edges of the grass-filled, tick-covered mattress beneath him in something close to relief.

As his head slowly plopped back against the pallet, Nathan Deidecker sighed and closed his eyes in emotional exhaustion, then drank in another breath of the cool, pungent air. Hungrily drank of the summer darkness outside.

Then realized why he had awakened.

Another low blat of thunder rumbled in off Cloud Peak rising thirteen thousand feet above the level of the sea out there in the blackness—not far off, its bellow slapped that high land in the deepest dark of postmidnight, the light of the heavens tracing down in tongues of fire just to the west of this small two-room cabin raised on a small promontory of ground by the back and shoulders and sheer will of the sinewy old scout.

Nate listened to another distant rumble, heard it coming almost serpentine across the heaving upvaulted land from a long way off, like it was some rock slide, a frightening avalanche careening down off the Big Horns toward him.

With the thunderous bellow fading onto the prairies below, the night stilled, and Deidecker marveled at just how clear and distinct and ominous sounds could seem out here in this country. Back east—hell, even back on the central plains of eastern Nebraska that he now called home—Nate could not recall ever really hearing any sound so distinct before.

As distinct as he now heard the whispers of this summer night.

Clear as rinsed crystal, he remembered the expression used by the old man just the day before when describing the property of light and sound and even how far a man might himself see in this immense, mind-numbing country.

“Damn right, Mr. Hook,” Nate mumbled to himself now. Some things were starting to come clear as rinsed crystal.

A creak of old rope crept past the thick wool blanket that hung as a crude door across the single opening between the cabin’s two small rooms.

Nate conjured a mental picture of the prairie bed: rough pine slats interlaced with hemp rope woven crosshatch to support its own grass-stuffed tick mattress.

Just someone stirring in their sleep, Nate thought. One of ’em awakened by the thunder like I was. Maybe that godforsaken green lightning—

As another distant, eerie flash backlit the Big Horns, there came another creak of the old rope, but louder this time. More stretch. And below that arose the muffle of voices. Whispered entreaties: low, husky, in need.

The green light’s eventual clap washed over the valley, and in its dying, Nate realized what was happening in the next room. Not without a little wonder.

“He’s … that old man’s making … making love to—” And he stopped whispering a moment, self-conscious at even the tiny sound his night voice made in that great silence of the thunder’s retreat. “…love to his woman.”

Deidecker sensed something rise in his throat, not sour nor choking like disgust at overhearing a bestial act. Not even fear of being discovered as an unwilling voyeur. Nothing closely resembling strong sentiment aroused by his own need of a woman to come into his life. No, what the newspaperman felt, lying there on that fragrant, landheady tick mattress dropped on Jonah Hook’s whipsawn wood floor, was something that filled Deidecker not only with immense happiness for the old scout, but with a profound sense of awe as well.

“That man’s too old to be climbing atop a woman,” he contented himself to say, rolling onto his side, away from the insistent, rhythmic creak of that rope-bed in the far room. “Especially that one … that … woman.”

Deidecker recalled just how dead she had been yesterday as he and the old scout talked of his early years come west to the prairies and mountains. She had been next to lifeless. Dead was the most apt word he could use to describe her, even wrote it down on some of the pages of his notes as Jonah Hook talked and Nate stole furtive glances at the old woman. He remembered now the way her pale blue eyes had gazed out at him without any light or the slightest fire behind them. As if Hook’s woman were a shattered hulk of some weakened building, those blue eyes like gaping, paneless windows, staring out at him with nothing but bleak, hollow emptiness inside.