Eventually the moon shrank from its former grandeur. The same way the hope that Tall One had once recognized on the face of the gray-eyed war chief faded in those days after the fight at the earth lodges. What man would not feel some despair, having watched so many warriors hurl themselves against the might of the buffalo hunters’ guns, and still call himself a man who cared for his people?
In those first days of frustration and rage as the war chief reluctantly turned his back on the meadow and led his horsemen away from that place of blood and defeat, there had been much angry talk, for most had yet to sort through the confusion borne of loss of hope.
Some believed their sin had been to hold Isatai’s sun dance.
“Other tribes hold their annual sun-gazing dances—but the Comanche have never celebrated in that fashion,” they said.
“Yes! We must never again follow the ways of the Shahiyena or the Kiowa. We must put our feet only on the path walked by the ancient ones.”
Once again the gray-eyed war chief and the headmen decided that The People were to avoid the white man just as they had attempted to do for far back in the generations. Only when it proved wise for the young men to attack outlying settlements to reap horses and scalps and plunder would the old men approve of such contact with the
Already Tall One knew that whenever the soldiers went in search of those villages, they always found what they were looking for.
36
DAY AFTER ENDLESS day Company C probed deeper, rode longer, yet came up with empty hands. Tides of heat and dust and distant thunderstorms brought one day after the next washing over them, taking each day away in the same order. Summer waned and grew weary, one of the hottest any man on these plains could remember. Steamy nights swirled overhead with a million old stars flecked behind gray rain-heads, and this land once more grew old before its time. These final days of August came up clear and green-skied and hotter than the last, then imperceptibly the sun’s path grew shorter, a man unable to notice until it was too late and autumn was upon him.
Closing fast with the odor of things dying, turning, changing—never to be the same again.
Come this cooling of the nights, come this season of the yellow leaf, Jonah was told by the others. That’s what they said the Comanche called autumn.
All he knew was that soon enough another winter would be closing in, and once more he had all too little to show for the miles crossed since the first green break of spring when he had decided to ride with Lamar Lockhart’s company of poorly paid Texas Rangers.
From time to time they circled back to re-provision, backtracking east to Camp Supply, using vouchers to draw on the treasury of the great State of Texas. It was there these men caught up on the momentous news following the bloodletting at Adobe Walls. The southern plains were indeed on fire—and from the sounds of it, the government was finally determined to put an end to Indian problems down here once and for all. William Tecumseh Sherman’s War Department had ordered no less than five columns into the field, all to converge on the Staked Plain, home of the holdouts: the Kwahadi Comanche.
Trouble was, right in the middle of it all lay the territory assigned Major John B. Jones’s Frontier Battalion of Texas Rangers. And at the heart of that was a piece of ground marked out for patrol by Captain Lamar Lockhart’s company of horsemen. Them, and some of the most skillful nomadic red raiders of the Llano Estacado.
Back in late August when Company C rode in to Camp Supply, they learned that Colonel John W. Davidson’s four companies of brunettes had already cut the deck. Those buffalo soldiers had forced the issue—scattering some of the fiercer bands, driving others back to their agencies. Seemed the government had demanded a roll to be made of all the peaceful bands on the reservations. Those not answering the roll call were deemed clearly hostile and would be hunted down, then driven back to their agency if possible.
“If that ain’t possible,” Niles Coffee was explaining what had been told him by friends he knew among Camp Supply’s soldiers, “then the army’s got orders to exterminate ’em.”
“Praise God!” Deacon Johns wailed. “Them savages are purely onhuman. Separate the wheat from the chaff, sayeth the Lord.”
“Trouble is,” Lamar Lockhart cautioned, “all those warrior bands that didn’t answer the roll at Fort Sill, or over at Anadarko and up at Darlington—they’ve all gone off and scurried west toward the headwaters of the Red River, the Brazos—who the hell knows how far they’ll scatter now.”
“The Kwahadi … they’re scattering?” Jonah asked anxiously.
“Chances are that’s what they’re doing—and why we haven’t found a sign one of all that bunch that went and hit the buffalo hunters at Adobe Walls,” Coffee answered.
“You think we’ll find any Comanche?” Jonah inquired, his cheeks growing hot in angry frustration. “Or we gonna keep riding back and forth till we’re old men?”
Lockhart turned to Hook. “You took an oath when you joined up, Jonah Hook.”
“I don’t give a goddamn about Texas!”
“No,” Lockhart replied all too quietly as the company of men moved close. “Maybe you don’t. But the rest of these men do. So I want you to think of one thing before you decide on booking in and giving up on this company’s duty. Think about the fact that of all these men here—I don’t know a one of them who positively knows they have a member of their family among the Comanche.”
Jonah’s eyes moved slowly across the more than two dozen men standing quietly nearby, every last one of them watching him with intense interest. “I don’t understand what you mean, Cap’n.”
“Jonah—it’s as simple as this: these men ride out with me into the unknown every morning for less than a dollar a day, hoping to find the scattered hostile villages, praying they’ll find white captives in those villages we do run onto. But not a one of these brave men has kin among the Kwahadi. But you do, Jonah Hook. By damned, you do.”
He felt the sting of the words slap him with the force of a flat hand across his jaw.
Lockhart stepped closer, his eyes gone as black as gun bores. “Jonah, I don’t know a bunch of men you could ride with who could pray any harder than this outfit has that it will be them that finds your boys for you.”
The colicky harshness, the utter truth of the captain’s words made Hook tremble inwardly. “I … I’m sorry, Cap’n Lockhart.” He snorted back some of his unrequited anger. “I’m riding with you. Riding with all of you.”
“Give us time, Jonah,” Niles Coffee said, “time and a little luck—we’ll find ’em for you. By God—we’re bound to find ’em.”
That night, their last at Camp Supply for some time to come, Jonah lay awake for the longest time as the rest of them snored. Unable to sleep, he could not tear his mind loose from what war machinery the soldiers told Coffee was already in motion. If by some kind of luck his two boys were still alive and still with the hostile Kwahadi of Quanah Parker out there on the Staked Plain, there now existed the very real possibility that they would soon be in the very path of that hungry war machine.
Two small boys …
But he had stopped, forcing himself to remember they were no longer little. Grown to young men already. Old enough to be … soldiers themselves.
How he had prayed for sleep to come soothe him as his fevered mind dwelt on nothing else but those five columns that would converge on the Llano Estacado to effect the final cleanup of the southern plains before winter set in. Major William R. Price was said to be marching east along the Canadian River out of Fort Union in New Mexico with eight companies of the Eighth Cavalry to effect a junction with Colonel Nelson Miles.
Lieutenant Colonel George P. Buell, leading four troops of the Ninth U.S. Negro Cavalry and two troops from
