By riding along with the white man, Two Sleep was trying to find a way of forgiving himself after all this time. After living so long as a failure—with the fear, the terror, the utter shame of never trying. Happened that a man crawled far enough, long enough around the whiskey cup, he just might find himself reaching the handle.
Two Sleep got to his feet, clutching his thin blanket about his shoulders. “I brave enough now, brave for all the days I not brave enough to go find them. I ride with you—so it make things right for me.”
With the Shoshone finally expressing it, Jonah knew the warrior was right. By riding along to help Hook, Two Sleep was somehow righting his medicine, his spiritual power long gone stale and rancid—long gone the coward’s way of hiding down in the white man’s whiskey and gambling and the emptiness of a coward’s sanctuary. But for some reason Jonah Hook had come along to offer a way, the only way, the warrior could make his medicine strong once more. By helping another man put his family back together.
“I’m not sure I know how to pray much anymore, Two Sleep—but I figure the Lord is somehow listening,” Jonah said. “I figure you’re here to help make things right for both of us.”
Waiting out here in the dark among the clumps of sage, stretched prone on the cold ground as a gust of cold wind slapped his face, Jonah sensed what a brown-skinned warrior must feel as he lay beyond the welcome, warm ring of a white man’s firelight. It seemed evil was always executed beyond the pale of darkness.
The Danites’ fire had gone to red coals untended and writhing in the pit they had dug to conceal the flames and thereby prevent discovery by a chance and wandering war party.
Jonah found little amusement in that. The Mormons had no reason to worry themselves over wandering Indians tonight. It was instead the darkness and the cold autumn wind snarling across this high land that would cloak the danger.
The six had picketed their hobbled horses downwind from camp. He had learned always to graze his animals upwind, as a source of early warning. Especially in darkness: the time for evil.
How he wanted to feel the warm blood of these Mormon zealots on his hands again. Just as he had at Fort Laramie when he killed Laughing Jack. Before he stuffed the body beneath the river ice. A long, long time ago it seemed now—so many miles gone under his heels since.
Then he remembered the taste of his rage as he knelt over the bleeding Boothog Wiser back in Nebraska, in the end killing Jubilee Usher’s lieutenant before he could allow himself to flee with his daughter. Hattie.
Here in the cold he keenly sensed the loss of her, wanting again the soft, warm touch of her as he embraced the skinny girl teetering on the verge of womanhood there on the Kansas railroad platform, sending her east to St. Louis—far from harm, far from this wild, cruel land that had become his prison.
Four, maybe even more of them, had Jonah tallied for himself already as he drew closer and closer on the trail of Jubilee Usher, closer to reclaiming his wife from those who had ripped his family apart. He lay there now in the dark of that moondown, brooding on how much easier the killing got when he thought of these men as nothing more than animals: beasts who were meant to die. Easier it was for him to pull the trigger or use the knife, to do what he had to do when he thought of the Mormons as—
The scrape of boot soles on the sandy soil leapt out at him from the darkness.
Muffling the sound against his body, Jonah lightly brushed his thumb back across the hammer of one of the big .44-caliber pistols, then the other hammer, to assure himself they were cocked. His eyes strained beneath the dim starshine now that the moon had fallen. The sky was quickly whirling to the coldest time of the day—the moments before the first faint strands of gray would emerge out of the east. And with this wind blowing the way it was, torturing the sage … he was thankful none of the Danites could smell him bellied down in the darkness.
Ten feet away the man stopped and turned slowly, as if himself trying to make something out of the night. From the hole he punched out of the starry skyline, the gunman carried a rifle across the fold of his left arm.
“Bolls!” the man whispered harshly.
There came no answer.
Jonah knew he wouldn’t have much time to act if the Mormon grew nervous. He might just up and turn, shouting a warning back at the other four who lay sleeping like black humps of coal on the prairie, their feet to that shallow fire pit.
“You asleep, Bolls?”
And when no answer came, the man there to relieve the watch started to turn again. Jonah slowly raised his pistol—wishing he could do this another way: use his knife as Two Sleep had on Bolls, the first guard, lying somewhere out there in the darkness. It would be quieter, and every bit as efficient.
“Where you, Bolls?”
He wouldn’t have much more time, a heartbeat or two only—
As the guard turned his back on Hook, Jonah rose from the sage, pistol flung back at the end of his arm. He could knock him in the head if he could cross the ten feet before the man heard him.
The guard whirled back, rifle coming up to block the barrel of Jonah’s pistol as it fell to graze the side of the Mormon’s head, slashing downward against flesh and bone. The fury of his attack caused the guard to stumble backward a step as Jonah clumsily lashed out with the pistol in his left hand. Swearing, the guard brought the rifle down. It spat bright, blinding fire, the bullet keening wildly into the black of desert night.
It had passed close enough to make Hook fling himself onto his belly and pull a trigger himself, aiming by feel—like that night with Major North’s Pawnee scouts, clustered among the baggage of Chief Turkey Leg’s Cheyenne camp when the young Cheyenne warriors came charging out of the blackness. Now he saw behind the muzzle flash a second bright blast from the guard’s gun as the Mormon was flung backward.
Only one thing would have made the man arch backward like that.
Jonah knew he had hit him.
Behind the roar of those three shots came the frightened cries of the nearby horses and the rustle and grunt of men clearing their blankets and canvas bedrolls, hollering out questions and orders, chambering cartridges in their weapons, one of them kicking dirt onto the red embers.
When a gunshot rang out, the muzzle flash caught the corner of Jonah’s eye. The fire tender pitched headlong across the remnants of the uncovered embers. He wasn’t moving.
“Out there!” one of them shouted, pointing into the darkness.
Three of them fired a succession of shots.
“Careful! Hines—go see if we got ’im.”
“Me? In the dark?”
“There’s five of us—”
“Four, Cap’n.”
“Four then, by God! And there’s likely less of them out there or they’d rushed us. Goddamn Injuns!”
Another shot rang out on the far side of the camp, causing the horses to cry out, hammering the ground in their hobbles, tearing against their pickets. Jonah knew Two Sleep had moved like mercury spilled on a table after his first shot had killed the fire tender.
“They’re after the horses!”
A pair of shots rang out as the gunmen whirled in a crouch to the west—all but one of them. The one that Jonah had failed to see. Hook rose from the blackness of the sage again, intending to take them in the back. And to his left as he did, Jonah heard the
The bullet stung his left wrist, snarling past his belly.
Like something hot he lost the pistol in that hand, felt it spinning to the ground, still intent that he would not lose the one in his right despite the pain that came to his belly as the wind whined past, kicking dust into his eyes. Another shot collided with the flaky sand at his side, the flash bright and searing in the deep of desert blackness. The gunman moved slowly toward him. Then a third shot as Jonah rolled, hearing the whispering hiss before it too screamed into the ground where his head had been a heartbeat before.
Behind him arose the rattle of more shots shattering the twenty-five feet to the fire, dying as the cries of men and protests of their horses split the dark. Finishing his roll, Jonah raised his gun hand—hearing the unearthly war cry of the warrior.
“It’s Injuns, Slade!”
“Kill ’em, Charlie! Kill ’em all!” the man coming for Hook cried out.
Hook fired as the steps loomed closer. He heard the bullet hit, that unmistakable sound of a wet hand slapping putty. Then the grunt of the gunman.
