For some weeks already a few zealots on both sides of the states’-rights question had been tramping back and forth across the forests and fields of southern Missouri, gaining converts and picking up what money they could when they passed the hat. Fires of smoldering southern passion burned anew in Jonah’s breast when Confederate General Sterling Price showed up down in Cassville. The farmer, father, and husband told his family he had to go, to fight for all that he held dear.
Price had kept his swelling legions on the move: destroying bridges, removing rail ties, setting fires beneath the iron rails until they could be bent shapeless, firing into passing trains until most rail traffic slowed and eventually halted. Yet within a matter of weeks Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis, that West Point man out of Iowa, marched in with his Yankee army to destroy the Missouri State Guard. A week later the Union soldiers met Price’s ragtag band of volunteers at Springfield, down near Jonah’s home where Gritta and the children had stayed behind to work the fields.
In their bloody clash Curtis turned Price around and drove the ill-equipped rebel army farther south still, beating the Confederate’s rear flank like a man would flog a tired, bony plow mule.
It turned out to be so bad a beating that Price could count less than twelve thousand left in his army by the time they reached Pea Ridge in northern Arkansas that cold, sleety March of 1862. There Price finally rejoined General McCulloch and turned like a whipped dog ready to stand and fight. As much passion as those farmers put into that battle, General Earl Van Dorn and Iowan Curtis still made quick work of the southern plowboys on that bloodstained ridge strewn with bodies torn asunder by grapeshot and canister.
Price barely escaped with some remnants of his command: those who could still fight; those who had not already headed home, shoeless and demoralized, their spirits broken.
Jonah stayed on, determined to see the war through, walking barefoot as he followed Price’s legion east into Mississippi where the great Corinth campaign was shaping up.
It was after the sound of the cannon and muskets, the screams of the dying, all fell silent, after the Confederates withdrew that the Yankees discovered Jonah at the bottom of a scooped-out depression left behind by a canister explosion—a raw scar of a hole in the rich, black soil where the Missouri farmer had crawled when he could not retreat with the others, unable to move any farther with that bleeding leg that seeped his juices in a greasy track across the forest floor.
The Yankee surgeons had wanted to take his leg off, saying it was the only way to save his life. Jonah had stared at the nearby pile of bloody limbs the hospital stewards were slow in burning, and swallowed down his pain, refusing their offer of knife and saw. If he was to die, he told the Yankee surgeons, then let it be here in the South. So be it.
“Better to die quick with two legs on southern soil than to die the slow death of a cripple prisoner of the Yankees, with no hope of ever making a run for it,” he had snarled at them, his words sounding braver than he felt as he gritted his teeth on the rising pain that tasted like sucking on a rusty iron nail.
Instead of amputation, Jonah had asked for whiskey—been given brandy instead, which, along with sulfur, he poured into the open, ghastly wound. Two days later he dug the Union minie ball out while the surgeons themselves watched, unashamedly in awe at the rebel’s grit. Pinching that smear of lead bullet up between his fingers, and slowly opening the pink-purple muscle with slow, steady strokes of a surgeon’s straight-razor, Hook finally poured more of the brandy into the empty bullet hole, then promptly passed out.
After his capture in Mississippi, Jonah had been marched and wagon hauled, then put on rails mile after mile northward to a squalid prison that swelled with new prisoners arriving every week: Rock Island, Illinois.
For the longest time Jonah had feared Rock Island would be the last place he would close his eyes, never again to sleep in Gritta’s warm, sheltering arms.
But after weeks and months that became years of waiting, forced to watch others die the slow death of starvation and typhus, diphtheria and scurvy, Jonah was offered the chance to wear Yankee blue, to go west to fight Indians while the Union finished cleaning up the southern rebellion.
To wear Yankee blue meant to survive, to live out enough days until he could get back to that valley in Missouri where Gritta and the children waited. As long as he did not have to turn a gun on a southern patriot, Jonah agreed to come west with the eighteen hundred who were herded onto railroad cars for Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from there to march farther still to the Great Platte River Road where the telegraph wire required protection from the Sioux and Cheyenne.
It was here in this very country where he and Two Sleep watched the half dozen approach that Jonah Hook had first battled the red lords of the central plains.
He smiled grimly. For now in this very same country, things had once more come down to the simple matter of blood choices, the simple matter of him or the Danites likely sent back to eliminate him.
Kill, or be killed.
The longer he spent out here in the West, Jonah brooded now as he filled the long barrel tube on the sixty-six Winchester—the easier the choices were for him to make.
13
AUTUMN NIGHTS IN this high desert were enough to make a man’s blood run cold all of its own. You didn’t have to be waiting out the fall of the moon before you went about killing to feel the cold all the way to your marrow.
Beneath a cloudy glitter of stars Jonah shivered slightly within the single blanket as he sat with his back propped against the rock wall. Beside him squatted the Shoshone. The sky was still too light for what they had planned and polished together throughout that day of watching the approach of the six gunmen. Watching them ride on past.
When the hoof dust from the half dozen had reached the limits of the horizon, Two Sleep agreed that they could take up the backtrail of the Danites.
For the longest time there in the shrinking shadows of that rock shelf as they had waited to ride out, the Shoshone had argued against going after the six.
“Better to go on. Ride where you finish this,” he had told the white plainsman.
Jonah figured he had studied on the situation just about every way a man could, and come out with only one solution: he had to rid his backtrail of the six.
“Can’t go on west,” he had told the warrior. “Having them at my backside. Not knowing really where those six are. When they’ll show up on me.” He shook his head. “No. There’s only one way—and that’s to take care of ’em.”
“Want to follow them? Kill one, by one?”
Jonah shook his head again. Then stared into the Shoshone’s eyes. “No. I don’t have that much time to burn now. I got the scent of that bastard strong in my nose right now. After all these years—at long last I can smell him. Nawww, I ain’t bound to lose him—to lose my woman again just ’cause I messed up watching things over my shoulder.”
The warrior had pushed up from the rock shelf, stood brushing his hide leggings before they went to their horses. “I don’t go now—you still ride?”
“I will.” Jonah had nodded, confirmed. “A man must. You don’t go—it’s all right. I’ll go on alone.”
“Yes. You alone before I come. You go do what is right anyway. That is why I go with you now.”
There had been no more words, nothing more between them but the clasp of hands in that practice of solidarity between men.
And now it had been hours since the Shoshone had declared his allegiance to Hook’s plan to go after the six, to take them off his backtrail in one fell swoop. Hours since they had really talked. Having seen where the Danites had camped, found what side of camp the horses were grazed, seeing the size of their fire as autumn’s twilight squeezed down early on this land—the two sat propped against a handful of man-sized boulders less than a mile from the Danites’ fire, waiting for moondown, waiting to move in and put an end to Hook’s backtrail problem.
Jonah finally said what he had been thinking ever since they emerged into the bright fall sunlight in the Red Desert Basin earlier that day and reined their horses into the tracks left by the six.
“Thank you, Two Sleep.”
