brain for all that Jonah hoped to learn. In the end they saw a handful of white children waiting to be claimed, were shown crinkled daguerreotypes of others—pictures that had been taken by a photographer out of Topeka, photographs to be circulated among the forts and towns of Kansas in hopes that relatives might come to claim these orphans of the Indian war.
As much as Jonah wanted any of those boys to be his, as much as he strained and squinted, trying to make those dim, sepia-toned tintypes into something he might recognize, he finally had to admit he had come up with a busted flush again. What hurt even more was his growing fear that in the end he would never recognize his grown- up boys, even if by that unadulterated God-ordained miracle he ever came across Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
In taking his leave from the Kiowa-Comanche agency, Jonah stopped for a moment with Haworth outside the door of the small clapboard shack topped by a hip roof that served as the agent’s office. A few yards away on a patch of bare ground, a young man was using a long branch to pick up dirty, greasy clothing. Those worn and torn garments were fed to a smoky fire, one at a time. Jonah watched as britches and shirts, pantaloons and dresses, coats and even Indian clothing, were fed onto the smoldering, smoky flames.
“What’s he doing?” Hook asked Haworth.
“The children’s clothes.”
“You burn what they got to wear?”
“We give the recaptured children a bath, cut their hair, and purge them of the body lice before we give them new clothes donated by Friends back east.”
Hook’s eyes narrowed as he turned away from the fire. “Your work should give you satisfaction, Mr. Haworth. What you do makes these poor children white again.”
The agent wagged his head. “Not so simple as that, Mr. Hook. Some of these young wretches will live with their horrors the balance of their natural lives.”
“And the rest?”
He tried a smile. “They’ll do fine. Just a matter of getting them back to their own people.”
Jonah turned his back on the fire and asked, “How about a child, took when he was five or six?”
Haworth tried to put a cheerful face on it, but it turned out to be nothing more than a wan smile. “Who is to say?” And he shrugged.
“No,” Jonah forced the question. “I want to know. What are the chances?”
The agent’s face went as gray as old oatmeal. “Perhaps that child will heal in time. Any younger, a child— well, it depends on how long the child is held by his captors. Still …”
“Still … what, Mr. Haworth?”
“Any younger than that, Mr. Hook—truth is, I’m afraid there is little hope of fully recovering the child to a life among a God-fearing white culture.”
He turned back to watch the fire, watch the smudge of smoke rise among the trees losing their autumn- tinged leaves that chilly afternoon. Finally he asked, “So where does a man go from here?”
“You might move north. To Anadarko on the Washita. If you find no help there, you can check with John Miles, agent at the Darlington Agency up on the Canadian.”
“What tribe?”
“Cheyenne, Mr. Hook.”
“I know something of the Cheyenne,” he replied too quietly, two fingers brushing the long scar at his hairline where a warrior’s bullet had grazed him seven long years gone. Then he stared directly at the agent, saying, “These Indians will never make farmers, Mr. Haworth. Scratching at the ground is something for the white man who wants to dig like a burrow mouse.”
“I must still try, Mr. Hook. Like you, I must keep on trying.” Haworth held out his hand, hope in his eyes. “I wish you God’s speed in your search.”
Perhaps it would have been better if they had never tried Anadarko and Darlington. About that time another Christmas passed and with it his unenthusiastic greeting of another new year. Just a waste of time. Slowly they made their way through each camp dotting the two agencies, looking, talking in sign with those who would talk. For the most part, the old men stood around their lodges as Jonah and Two Sleep came through, old men who talked in furtive whispers with their heads bent together. Jonah thought of those on the free prairies to the north when he looked at these beaten people. These old warriors so much like gaunt prairie wolves caught and trapped in this cage—grown suspicious, cautious, anxious, and frightened of the white man who holds their spirits prisoner. Yet saddest of all were the starving, sunken-cheeked children peering up at the two horsemen, each one in his ill-fitted, cast-off clothing from a benevolent white society back east.
He talked as best he could with the old men who did not turn away when he made sign, asking them about two boys—one who soon would be fifteen, and the other seventeen. And as he talked with the old warriors gathered around smudgy fires on those cold early-winter days, a piece of Jonah’s mind snagged on a thought the way a man’s coat might catch on a nail worked loose from barn wood by the torment of the wind: these were no longer boys he was looking for. They were young men now. Going on a dozen years since he walked away down that narrow, rutted lane, stopping to turn one last time and wave back at those three children and their mother, before he marched off to fight the war. A war he had yet to come home from.
He hated these Cheyenne and Kiowa, hated them even more for what they kept hidden behind their unmoving, gaunt faces and the hollow looks in their black, sunken eyes. Hated them for ever riding with the Comanche. He hated them most for giving up and coming in to feed their families on the infested flour and moldy salt pork now that the buffalo were disappearing from the southern plains. In those cloudy, angry eyes and sullen faces Jonah caught a glimpse of himself—like dark light sliding off a broken shard of mirror.
In their eyes he saw the hopelessness that grew daily inside his own breast. Their hopelessness now become a way of life. His, a hopelessness for two boys and their mother. In reality no less a way of life for Jonah Hook.
In late January he raked off his chips and turned their trail south once more, back across the Red River to Fort Richardson. From there he planned to strike out to the northwest, pointing into the deepest reaches of the Llano Estacado. A land where the trickles of rainfall grew and gathered into creeks and streams and then the meandering forks of the great rivers like the spreading of a great many-fingered hand. Among those canyons and austere, sere-colored bluffs Jonah Hook decided he would stake himself one last turn of the cards.
And came up with a hand that would not force him to fold.
“You a resident of the state of Texas?”
Hook looked at the tall, skeletal old man who had asked him the question. The skin fell in folds over the gaunt cheeks, dark rings of sleeplessness gouging liver-colored pockets below the eyes lit with some distant, yet bright inquisitional fire. His white mustache and much of his chin whiskers were yellow, stained with dribbles of tobacco juice. His clothes seemed of the wrong size, too big for the bony frame—yet there was a sinewy strength and assurance about the elder one, something that gave an intangible bulk to his otherwise wispy stance: that aura of rock-solid resolution there in the jut of his jaw, that and the butt of the big Walker Colt’s pistol that rode in front of the man’s left hip as if it hung there from birth.
“Missouri.”
“If I get this right—you’re telling us you’d join up just to hunt Comanche?” asked the second man at the table, a civilian as well.
He was younger than the first, clean-shaven except for the bushy black mustache that fell from the severe crimp of his face to hide his lower lip. The tip of his tongue repeatedly combed the long brush aside as the man gave voice to the deep concerns seen in his blue eyes. They were as blue as a good trout hole, all tracked up with crinkles that made him seem real sociable.
“I would. You’re hunting Comanche I was told.”
The younger of the two flicked his trout-hole eyes at his partner. “This company is commissioned to keep the peace, Mr. Hook. We don’t set out a’purpose to hunt down Comanche. If they are raiders—we’ll follow their trail wherever it leads.”
“Out there,” Jonah asked, pointing. “To the Staked Plain.”
The old man nodded his gray head, his face so old and creased, it looked like a frost-bitten apple. “We go to that savage land on the trail of the heathens, and snag the feet of murderers if God so wills it.”
“Then I want to join.”
The younger one quickly eyed Two Sleep. “I’m not so sure we can use you.”
“But you said you needed men—any man who could use a gun.”
