“A worn cinch strap, a shoddy stirrup latch, maybe even a loose bit chain—anything,” explained Sergeant Coffee, “sure as tarnal sin it could mean the difference between life and death when we finally run down these Comanch’.”
Over the past fall and into the winter grown old, Lockhart’s company had kept up with what old news drifted off the agencies or out of the army’s posts. After the War Department had caught the last hostile bands between the five jaws of their mighty clamp, most of the Kiowa and Cheyenne, and even some of the Comanche bands, had wearily marched into Darlington, Anadarko, and Fort Sill itself. Mackenzie and Davidson and Buell and Miles had pulled a victory out of their collective hat. The hostiles were coming in. Slowly, for sure—but they were coming in to surrender and be counted, even knowing that their headmen were to be arrested and herded off to a faraway prison.
Agents Miles up at Darlington and Connell at Anadarko, especially Haworth at Fort Sill, all three knew how to send word to Jonah if one of their bands showed up with two white boys … two young men the age Jeremiah and Ezekiel would be that winter. They had promised to send a rider with the news, no matter the cost—just get a rider moving for Texas and Company C of the Frontier Battalion.
But after October came and went with the surrender of the first bands to give up after Mackenzie whipped them at Palo Duro Canyon, then November faded into December with no news … something began to twist inside of Jonah, roll over and shrivel a little more each day. Hope it was. What he had left of hope that got him into December and through until late in January when Lockhart had marched them out here to the Llano for the White River country. But now they had been out patrolling close to a month without any news from the Territories about what the warrior bands were doing or what the army was continuing to accomplish.
All anyone knew was that the most irrevocably savage of the Comanche, the band that called themselves the Antelope People, the warriors who rode under a half-breed named Quanah Parker—that bunch was still out. No one, army nor civilian, had seen sign of them since Palo Duro. Word had it they had been in the canyon when Mackenzie struck last September. The story was that about half of the fourteen hundred ponies Mackenzie’s men had captured, then slaughtered, on the prairie had belonged to Parker’s Kwahadi.
“There’s them that says Mackenzie got himself something personal for Quanah Parker—wants that one red bastard more’n all the rest put together,” John Corn had said, the liver-colored bags under his eyes the same as the rest, telling the tale of too little sleep.
The inveterate worrier Harley Pettis agreed, two deep vertical lines marking the flesh between his bushy eyebrows. “Mackenzie won’t stop till he gets Parker and strings him up for what he done.”
“Back in the times of Abraham,” Deacon Johns exhorted, his eyes like smoldering slits, “vengeance might have been the Lord’s. But not here in Texas! Here on this ground, vengeance belongs to us as has a call to take it!”
“There’s more blood of white folks on the hands of those Kwahadi warriors than can ever be washed away with all the absolution and forgiveness in the world,” said Lamar Lockhart with a cold fire behind his eyes. “We don’t get Quanah Parker before Mackenzie does, men—the Rangers won’t ever have another chance to try to even the debt.”
“Them—Parker’s bunch—and only them is what we hunt,” swore Deacon Johns, all wrinkled, dried, and smoked of hide. “Pray God delivers them to us … and we’ll take care of the rest.”
“Make them red-bellies all good Injuns!” shouted June Callicott, the owner of a homely, narrow, overlong face.
“Buck, squaw, and nit,” growled Harley Pettis. “Company C will see there’s a few less to feed at the reservation come spring!”
The deacon closed his eyes, raised his face and arms to the diamond-dusted sky, saying, “Oh, Lord—deliver us from evil, and Quanah Parker to this outfit.”
The icy rains continued nearly every day, usually approaching from the west in the midafternoon when a man and his animal had grown most weary from the ride, bored with the monotony of covering the same ground week in and week out with nothing to show for Company C’s patrols. Driving, bone-numbing rains. By the middle of February most of the men suffered one malady or another. Some sniffled, others battled a persistent dry hack. And nearly all looked out from those red-rimmed, sunken eyes showing the first telltale signs of despair. Wasn’t a one whose disposition hadn’t become about as ragged and sharp as shards of broken bottle glass.
Behind Lockhart’s back a few were even beginning to whisper of the unthinkable. They murmured of leaving the White River country, talked of heading back into the settlements for a spell. Then as if the captain had heard them through their despair, Lockhart waited until late one afternoon when all but one late-arriving patrol was in their camp among the jagged rocks.
Sergeant Coffee called that sullen bunch together, but it was the captain who strode up and stopped before those restive men who stood or squatted among the damp, scattered baggage of Company C.
“I won’t stir a lot of dust with this, fellas. Want to come to the point of it fast,” Lockhart began. “I truly thought I had it figured out as soon as the weather broke and winter seemed to withdraw. But my hunch has gone and clabbered up on me.”
In the uneasy silence that followed Lockhart working up to things on a crawl, two of the men coughed that dry, unproductive hack that could trouble a man many times soaked and dried out in a cold wind blowing across country such as this.
“Thought we’d find sign of the Comanche, cross a trail, see smoke or something. I want the Kwahadi as bad as any of you. Even as much as Jonah there.”
Hook felt some of the others look his way for a moment before they shifted anxiously again, ready to have this meet over and done.
“But we’ve pushed rations about as far as I can. For the past five days I’ve had us on half rations, boys. No other jump to it: we’ll have to go in soon to reprovision … anyway.” The captain sighed, gazing at the ground.
There was an oversized silk kerchief tied loose around Lockhart’s neck, a grimy swatch of cloth as brightly colored as the sweet Williams that Gritta had planted in the bed at the front of the cabin back in that Missouri valley.
Able again to look his men in the eye, their leader continued. “So what’s hardest to take is that I was wrong about running across Parker’s bunch.”
“It weren’t just you, Captain,” Deacon Johns said softly. “Rest of us had it figured same way you did. Ain’t you what failed alone.”
“What you figure to do?” asked John Corn, his sun-browned skin shriveled up like last year’s potato.
“We’ll recoup one more day here. Not sending patrols out tomorrow. Following morning we’ll head back for Dickinson’s place. From there on in to our post. Time I sent word to Major Jones.” He scratched his sparse black whiskers. It had been four days since last he had shaved, enough of a clue for any man to see that the captain was not in the best of humors. “The major will be expecting a full report on our extended scout.”
In Jonah’s belly lay a cold stone of growing uneasiness.
“You really figure us to go in?” inquired Coffee, his hair and beard as red as a rooster’s comb.
“Isn’t that what you boys want? Get out of this heathen country?” Johns snapped at them, turning round on that group.
His words cut at them, forcing those rawhide-tough bravos to stare at their boots or the ground like scolded schoolboys, their eyes furtively glancing at one another
Until Hook finally spoke.
As much as he might have held against them long ago back there at Jacksboro and Fort Richardson, when he signed on to protect the citizens of west Texas, Jonah now knew the men of Company C were every one and all something more than ordinary men.
“Don’t really wanna go in, Deacon,” Hook told them. “I was figuring on staying out as long as it took. Live off the land, we have to. Where I was brought up, I was always taught you stayed with a job till it was done.”
“Hook might have a good idea there,” June Callicott said. “This bunch could live off the land.”
“Maybe we just need to find a different place to set up a base camp, Cap’n,” offered Wig Danville.
“True enough,” Johns echoed. “The foxes have their holes and the birds of the air have their nests—but the Son of Man ain’t got the where to lay his head across all of this wild creation!”
Lockhart drew himself up, his chin jutting. He turned like some of the rest, seeing that last patrol come easing in out of the east. They all saw the way the horses bobbed their heads, the way the men sagged in the
