The civilian nodded, his blue eyes squinted as if they perpetually squinted against the high plains sun and wind. “True, that’s what I said and I stand by it. I must recruit where I can, Mr. Hook. If that means to take our fighters from the watering holes and the knocking shops here across the way from Fort Richardson, so be it.”
“Poxy sluts,” the old man grumbled miserably, “sluts what don’t know nothing but how to prop a man up for minutes at a time.”
The younger one stared at Two Sleep, as if studying the Indian. “Deacon—we’ll recruit where we can.”
“Told you—I want to join,” Jonah repeated.
“And the Indian?” asked the younger, eyeing Two Sleep again.
“He’ll ride with me.”
Leaning back with a sigh, the bushy mustache said, “We are a paramilitary organization, sir. Men who have volunteered to undertake great privations to protect their families and homelands against outlaws of all color. And frankly—a lot of that job right now requires us to kill Indians. Your friend here, he’s a …”
“Shoshone.”
He cleared his throat diplomatically. “I’m concerned that he might be mistaken for the enemy in the heat of battle.” Jonah wagged his head, spreading both his hands on the small cafe table where he sat with the two white men. The winter sun was sinking fast on the small town of Jacksboro, a frontier settlement erected not far from Fort Richardson, state of Texas. It was to this smoky cafe that Hook had been told he might come to meet men who best knew the Staked Plain. Men who knew the Comanche, knew where the warrior bands might be hiding.
Finally Hook nodded toward Two Sleep, who stood with his back against a far wall, away from the ring of conversation, but with his eyes never leaving the three at the table.
“Look at him. Then you tell me that Injun’s gonna get mistook for a Comanch’.”
Reluctantly the two eyed the Shoshone, dressed the most part in the clothing of a white man. Most everything had come from traders over the years, all of it the dress of a white man, but those long braids spilling over his shoulder, along with the medicine pouch hung at midchest. The younger of the two civilians took his eyes from the warrior to glance at the rawhide-wrapped amulet hung around Jonah Hook’s neck.
“You spent time among the Injuns, you said?”
“Not the Comanch’. But I’ll bet my ass I been scrubbing leather a damn sight longer than most of the boys you two are toting along, boys swaybacked under all their iron and tin badges.”
“The Comanch’re the devil’s own handiwork, my friend,” spouted the older man, his ire suddenly pricked. “Pure murdering fornicators, them are.”
“See that Spencer the Indian’s packing?” Jonah asked the two, turning to throw a thumb at Two Sleep.
“What of it?” asked the young one.
“That Snake there is handier with that Spencer of his than a Comanche with a new scalping knife.”
They looked at each other, then the bushy mustache wagged his head. “Just don’t know about enlisting a —”
“Listen,” Hook said, quieter now as he leaned forward on the table. “He’s been riding with me for more’n five year now. Been through one scrape and another. Just say he can ride with me and you won’t have to pay him. And what you get is two good guns for the price of one.”
Hook watched the two men look quickly at one another, and if there was some exchange there between them, Jonah could not say what it was. Perhaps only something in the cast of the eyes. When next the younger man spoke, the die had been cast.
“You’ll provision him on your own, Mr. Hook. From your own rations. And I will expect him to keep himself to himself. For the sake of my command. Is that understood?”
“Perfectly.”
“You both have horses, I take it?”
“And two pack animals.”
“Sell one of ’em,” the old man ordered.
“Where?” he asked.
“To the fort. Army always needs horses—the way them brunette troops and Mackenzie’s cavalry going through good riding stock the way they are.”
“You won’t need but one pack animal for the two of you, Mr. Hook,” the younger man explained, the muscles along his clean-shaven jaw making little ripples just beneath the surface of the tanned skin. “We travel light and fast.”
“You got to,” Hook agreed. “If you’re going to track a war party what’s moving light and fast. More times’n not, the army moves too damned slow.”
“Amen to that!” the old man exclaimed, animation brought to that face sharp-stitched with lines of hard living.
Hook asked eagerly, “When we go?”
“Two days. At dawn. Front of the sheriff’s office down the street,” answered the younger, his blue eyes become narrow points of light. “But drop by there tomorrow sometime, and the deacon will get you signed on proper.”
“Papers?”
The younger man eyed Hook with another hard-eyed cast of appraisal. “You ain’t got a reputation to hide, do you?”
“Nothing what would keep me from signing my name to your paper, no,” Jonah answered. “Nothing what would keep me from hunting Comanche neither.”
“Good,” he replied, and stood, putting a hand on the old man’s shoulder as they rose together. “This is Deacon Johns.”
“Mr. Johns,” Jonah repeated, putting out his hand and shaking with the gray-headed one.
“Deacon. I’m lieutenant of this company—but you can call me Deacon. It’s what I figure is my God-give tide. And such as that carries more weight than any temporal military rank.”
The younger man took Jonah’s hand and shook. “And I’m Lamar Lockhart. Captain of the company you have just joined.”
“What company is that?” Hook asked Lockhart.
“Company C. Texas Rangers.”
32
WINTER STILL HELD the plains in its death grip.
While there hadn’t been any snow of late, the cold had kept the warriors near the village, and the ponies worked harder to find some graze worth the work. High scurrying clouds looking suspiciously like clots of ice crystals shined beneath a dull pewter dish of a sun. Only the deep canyons offered shelter from the brutal, incessant wind that ravaged the prairie above.
Down here they could find more grass for the herd. And more firewood to keep the lodges warm. Still, the children cried with empty bellies.
Antelope was a father already—his son born early last autumn. And now Prairie Night thought she carried her husband’s second child. Tall One knew the young ones always suffered the most.
Time and again he watched the gray-eyed war chief send scouting parties out into the cold, dispatched this way and that, to the south mostly, to look for sign of the great herds. What was left of the once-great herds, that is.
More and more the big shaggy animals hung to the south, away from the banks of the Arkansas River, even south of the Cimarron of late. The buffalo hunters with their big guns riding out of the white man’s settlements in Kan-saw had seen to that. Those hairy-faced hunters would now have to push farther and farther south still if they were to continue their slaughter of the humped masses. And by pushing across the Canadian, the hide men would march right into the heart of the Kwahadi hunting ground.
Tall One could not wait for the air to warm and the grass to raise its green head on the prairie, for the ponies
