Hook stopped at the wood stove, turned, and gazed at the newspaperman strangely. “You best eat now, son. Lots of ground for us to cover this day—and you’ll be needing your strength.”
Deidecker smiled at that. “Don’t take much for me to push my pencils over my paper, Mr. Hook. But thank you just the same—”
“Wasn’t talking about us covering ground on your paper there,” he interrupted, flinging a veined gesture at the corner of a small table, where Deidecker had stacked his writing tablets and a bundle of lead pencils. Hook gazed at the younger man with those cold gray eyes of his, wrinkled and chiseled at their corners with deep clefts, and turkey-tracked like a piece of barren earth gone too long without the blessing of rain. “We’re riding today, Nate. Out there.”
Deidecker sensed the rising chill of goose bumps as he watched Hook point an arm out the open door at the tall peaks slow a’coming purple, their snow touched with the dusty rose color of the east as he watched, without a thought on what to say. Struck dumb he was: choking on his own fear of where Hook was vowing to take him—that great, gaping void of wilderness that few men had ever wandered, a land most men of the last generation had wisely skirted in their business of bringing civilization to the West.
Hook turned away and dragged a huge cast-iron skillet off the stove, opened the griddle, and dropped in some wands of dried kindling before striking a lucifer to some char he then pitched into the inky netherworld of the squat black frog of a stove.
“Riding?” Deidecker asked when he found his voice. “You’ve got a saddle horse I can use instead of that buggy animal?”
Hook turned with a smile gone warm, something around his mouth that also brightened his eyes in that murky, gray gloom. “Of course, son. You’ll need a more proper animal where we’re going. One of mine. That buggy horse ain’t fit for what we got to do today. Rustle together what you feel you need. We won’t be back in here till late tomorrow. Maybe next day.”
Something cold seized in Deidecker’s chest. “We’ll … spend the night … o-out?”
“’Less you figure on some other way to get the whole story you’re hankering for from me.”
“N-no, I want the whole story, Mr. Hook. Just that, I’m not used to sleeping out. L-like you probably are.”
“It’s all right, son,” Hook said quietly as he turned back to the stove stuffed back in its dark corner, said it in that fatherly way of his that reassured. All the edge and abrasiveness that had been in his voice at the doorway was gone now. “You best get over there and roll up your shuckings. We’ll be riding out right after I rustle us up breakfast.”
“Before sunup?”
Hook only nodded, snatching up the bail on the battered coffeepot and starting past Deidecker for the doorway.
“I’ll just take some coffee, Jonah. Usually don’t eat any breakfast.”
Hook stopped. “You’ll eat breakfast today, Mr. Deidecker.” The old frontiersman said it in that most particular way that left no room for discussion. Then he turned back to the newspaperman. “Out here in this country, a man eats when he can—not when he necessarily wants to. So when the opportunity presents itself, a man eats.”
“I understand.”
Hook wagged his head. “Not so sure you really do understand, Nate,” he replied quietly. “Not just yet, anyways.”
Deidecker felt himself bristle with that challenge from this old man. True enough, Hook was thin and sinewy still with all his miles and all his rings. But Nate felt certain he could answer the call of anything physical the old scout could hand out. “I figure I can travel well enough as the next man on an empty stomach, Mr. Hook.”
But with the way the old man gazed at him from the doorway, backlit with gray light seeping like alluvial mud off the high places in the Big Horns, Deidecker suddenly felt a little unsure of himself, with this man, in this place. Getting ready to push off into that immense unknown.
Of that moment a little bragging on his own manly qualities seemed antidote enough to help allay some of Deidecker’s apprehension. “And besides, Lord knows, Mr. Hook—I’ve done my share of drinking on an empty stomach as well.”
The old scout snorted with a single wag of his iron-flecked head. “Only two things I’ve found a man can do on an empty stomach, Mr. Deidecker. And drinking’s sure as hell not one of ’em.”
Deidecker sensed the seizure of even more uncertainty in that next long and painful moment as his thoughts whirled. “What, then?”
Hook came two steps back toward the newspaperman, with his free hand dragging off the top of the lard container beside the seasoned cast-iron skillet. “Only two things a man can do on a empty stomach?”
He plunged one of Gritta’s wooden spoons into the lard and plopped a gray curl down into the gut of the skillet. Only then did his eyes narrow on Deidecker.
“Make love to a woman … and kill a man.”
1
HE ROLLED AWAY from his attackers and vaulted onto his feet, crouching warily as he brushed the talclike powdery dirt from his eyes and mouth. He did not like the taste of it. But even more, he hated the taste of his own blood.
“Your lip, it is bleeding,” sneered one of the older boys.
Another one of his attackers nodded as the group inched toward him, saying, “Would you like to give up now and see to the cut for yourself?”
With a shake of his head, the youngster prepared for these older boys to lunge for him again.
Long ago Jeremiah Hook had learned not to take any of what the other boys dished out. They took pleasure in tormenting him because he was white. Both Jeremiah and his younger brother Zeke.
As the biggest brown-skinned youth suddenly rushed him, lowering his head like a bull on the charge, Jeremiah slid aside, whirling to snag the boy’s head under an arm. As much as the older youth tried to free himself, Jeremiah had that big boy secured in a headlock and began pummeling the sweaty, screwged face with blows from his small fist.
“Arrrghghg!” Coal Bear growled until Jeremiah clamped all the tighter, cutting off the youth’s protest.
Unable to catch his breath, much less speak, Coal Bear hammered Jeremiah with a fist, connecting again and again above the back of the white youth’s hip, right over the kidney.
Jeremiah crumpled, spinning to his knees in pain, dazed, as the big youth and his friend, Snake Brother, drove the white boy to the ground.
“Brother!”
Through the stirring dust and sweat stinging his eyes, Jeremiah watched his younger brother come flying in a leap, sailing out of nowhere beyond the edge of the lodge circle. Zeke hurled himself on the back of the biggest of Jeremiah’s tormentors. There he clung like a blood-swollen tick to an old bull, his arms clamped in front of the boy’s throat.
“Get this little gnat off me!” Coal Bear hollered raspily, as loudly as he could, the words strangling in his throat. Around and around he lumbered into a spin, trying to throw off his troublesome attacker.
“Get up, brother!” Zeke yelled as the whirling drew closer to Jeremiah.
“What goes on here?”
At the sound of that particular voice, both Coal Bear and Snake Brother came to a dead stop. Both started to talk at once, but the tall war chief raised his hand and shook it at them, signaling for their silence.
