part, letting the Indian ask the questions needing answers.
But none of the soldiers stationed at Bridger could remember a big outfit of horsemen, wagons, and an ambulance coming through of recent. Anything on the order of that many armed men would have surely caused that undermanned garrison at the frontier outpost to stand right up and take notice, what with so few civilian travelers moving east or west out in this infernal country. As it was, for the most part the soldiers said things had gone quiet to the north: up where the Sioux and Cheyenne had appeared to settle down after wrenching the big treaty of 1868, and the abandonment of the forts along the Bozeman Road, from the white man’s army. With that summer of sixty-eight fading into history, the troops assigned the Montana Road had filed back down toward Laramie, for all time quitting the hunting ground granted the wild tribes.
“We just got tired of fighting,” explained an aging captain commanding at Bridger. “After that four years of hell fighting the secesh back east, we were ordered out here to pacify this land, make it safe for the California argonauts, safe for business trade and what settlers was to move in.”
As Jonah and Two Sleep listened, the captain sighed in the autumn shade of that brushy porch awning outside his mud-walled office. “We’re taking a well-deserved retreat right now—this army that just got tired of fighting. You’re aware this land along the great immigrant road once was ruled by the Cheyenne and Sioux, you know? Still, they haven’t deviled us in a long time.”
“Wasn’t always that way,” Jonah said, feeling the captain’s eyes shift in his direction. “I fought them—the Cheyenne and the Lakota—to keep this road open.”
“You with the galvanized volunteers, were you?”
“Sixty-five.”
“Serve at Platte Bridge?”
Jonah only nodded, remembering Lieutenant Caspar Collins’s brave ride across the bridge to break through a cordon of a thousand warriors and rescue an incoming squad of soldiers.
The aging captain had gone back to staring at the sun setting beyond Utah and that land of Brigham Young, lighting the leaves in the trees with fall’s gold and crimson fire. “Yes, Mr. Hook. For a while now, the army got tired of fighting.”
“Can’t say as I fault ’em,” Hook replied quietly.
Jonah ended up selling to the army four of those horses taken from the Danites, keeping what they needed for packing. And with the credit the outpost’s commander gave them in trade for the animals, Fort Bridger’s contract sutler resupplied Jonah and Two Sleep with cartridges and powder, coffee and sugar, flour and a few looking glasses, along with a modest amount of some Indian trade goods the man had been a long time in getting shet of. Hook was anxious to push on after a matter of days.
But pushing on southwest into the land of Zion had been as big a waste of time as Jonah could ever remember.
The closer he rode toward the City of the Saints, the more Hook felt he was treading on foreign ground. He had been north of a time in his life, twice he could remember as a youngster crossing what became the Mason- Dixon. And he had been hauled to the land of the Yankees after his capture at Corinth. That had been war—and he a prisoner of that bloody struggle. Yet even then, with the exception of a few sadistic guards who beat their prisoners for the manic love of seeing the pain and blood and suffering, Jonah remembered being treated better at the hands of the blue-belly civilians than in the land of Brigham Young’s Saints.
No more was he merely a southern boy come north with his kin to conduct some commerce. No longer was he a Confederate soldier captured in the vain, brutal struggle waged by the South against a far mightier North. Now with the coming of another winter, Jonah Hook all the more felt like nothing less than a feared and distrusted stranger come to this foreign land. Not one with the religion of these quietly industrious people, he found himself treated civilly in few places, with cool indifference in most others, and outright hostility at many stops he and Two Sleep made.
A plainsman in tattered, trail-worn clothing, riding in the company of an aging Indian warrior, found himself nothing less than suspect of all color of crimes against the State of Deseret. Clearly a man of the prairie, and most certainly a Gentile, his companion none other than a member of a dark, heathen race of Lamanites said to be fallen from the grace of God—Hook was regarded more with pitying curiosity than with any desire on the Saints’ part to offer anything in the way of assistance.
Already he had steeled himself, prepared to find the Mormons closing ranks around their own, this Danite, this leader of avenging gunmen, this mongol lord of the plains. Instead, what Jonah discovered was that Jubilee Usher might actually be one Prophet too many in his own land.
“Who was it you said you were looking for again?”
“Jubilee Usher’s the man’s name,” Hook would answer those he would stop along the road, those who would come to the edge of the manicured fields long enough to listen as Jonah prodded for information. “Leader of the Danites.”
Hearing that, most of the shopkeepers and farmers eyed him severely before they moved off without so much as answering. Most, but not all.
“And why would you be looking for this Jubilee Usher?” asked the rare one.
“Heard of the man by reputation,” Jonah would say.
“Never met him, have you?”
“No, never,” Jonah answered truthfully, remembering to recite the keys he had learned while riding with Boothog Wiser’s Mormon battalion, keys he had sworn himself to use when at last the time had come to unlock the mysteries of Zion. “Rode with Lemuel Wiser—Usher’s right hand. Decided I’d come here to Zion. Aim to join Usher’s Danites.”
That shopkeeper in a small agricultural settlement northeast of Salt Lake City flicked his eyes over at his wife as she swept the plank floor of their dusty establishment that frosty November day in 1868. What he had to say, he said guardedly, almost under his breath: “You got that right, stranger. That’s Usher’s band of Danites. Not Brigham’s no more, they’re not. That bunch belonged to Jubilee Usher for some time now.”
The woman cleared her throat loudly above her busy broom, as if to utter a warning. And kept on sweeping without once raising her eyes to look at her husband.
Hook had summoned up the patience to keep asking. “Then I suppose this Brigham Young you spoke of would know where I might find Jubilee Usher?”
The Mormon’s dark eyes moved to the window, beyond which the Indian waited in the autumn cold with their animals, clearly an Indian who knew and kept to his place among these whites who practiced a strict theocratic pecking order.
The shopkeeper said, “The Prophet would be most happy to know where Jubilee Usher is, stranger—if you’re one to know yourself.”
“I wouldn’t have to ask you if I knew where to find Usher my own self,” Jonah said.
“That much is clear. Still, it would be well worth your while to let Prophet Young know anything you might be privy to about Jubilee Usher.”
“Said I was just looking for the man.”
A cool smile darkened the face of the shopkeeper. “So is Young—looking for Usher, that is.” He eyed his wife quickly again, then whispered to the counter secretively, “You take the offer of my help: you’ll not go join up with that bunch.”
“Why shouldn’t a man be about God’s work with Jubilee Usher?” Hook asked, a bit too loud.
He shook his head, whispering, “Usher ain’t all that—”
“William!” the woman called out, standing there midfloor with her waxy hands draped over the top of her corn broom. “There’s lots of work you could be doing in the back if our customer is finished buying what he needs so he and that Indian can be on their way.”
Jonah would learn no more from that one.
The closer he drew to the seat of Mormon power, the colder the trail felt to that unnamed lightning rod he carried in his belly. It grew colder all the time until on the outskirts of Salt Lake City itself, Jonah decided he was likely riding into a blind canyon. The horsemen passed on through the City of the Saints without stopping, swinging south and east toward the Green once more, marching through Zion’s outlying communities, their neatly platted streets and arithmetically plowed fields becoming more and more sparse as the horsemen pushed deeper into the southwest while November’s sweet taste of autumn unraveled into the first bitter days of winter.
