saddles. No one had to spell it out plain, that theirs had been nothing more than a repeat of the weeks gone before.
The captain sighed. “Thank you for your suggestion, Jonah. However, I’m the leader of this company and my decision is made. Day after tomorrow, we light out for Dickinson’s Station.”
39
AT DICKINSON’S PLACE the settler and his three sons greeted Company C with nothing less than flat-out celebration as the Rangers legged down off their weary mounts. That family of stockmen and farmers eking out its existence at the edge of the west Texas frontier hadn’t seen different faces for going on three months.
It was either in the barn, or outside in the barn’s sun-striped winter shadows, that Jonah Hook and Two Sleep stayed across those next thirty hours as Ezra Dickinson and his boys helped Lamar Lockhart’s Rangers recoup from their patrol. It was a barn built at no cost to the old stockman, raised free by the State of Texas in return for allowing Ranger patrols to use it to store feed, tack, supplies, and provender. A hundred of these barns cast their shadows across the caprock fringe of the Staked Plain.
While the celebration of men and the talk of weather and stock and horseflesh was one thing Jonah hoped to avoid, it was the Dickinson women that Jonah tried most to stay clear of. Too much did they remind him of those once a part of his own life. Both gone: one off to St. Louis and Miss Emily Rupert’s Seminary; the other … just gone.
Memories of her were the bitterest water Jonah had been forced to drink in those years lost and gone. But drink he did, forcing himself to taste a little more of her remembrance each day. Sad glimpses of what he once had, triggered ofttimes by smells, delicious smells coming from the kitchen where the three Dickinson women cooked supper for that bunch. As the others joked and sang and arm wrestled, Jonah remembered the smells of snap beans and carrots set on a pale-blue plate next to a mound of Gritta’s mashed potatoes, them that she boiled and mashed, then served up skins and all.
So as much as Jonah yearned to study the face of a white woman, to stand just close enough to determine how a white woman might smell, as much as he felt a need to be in the company of such genteel farming folk of the earth like those he was raised among, Hook of a sudden felt ill at ease, ill-mannered, rough, and more coarse than he ever had in all his life. And downright afraid of making a damned fool of himself.
So he stayed to himself, there in the bam with Two Sleep while the younger Rangers flirted with the three Dickinson girls and the missus baked dried apple pies for her guests. The merry sounds of men at their fun, the tinkle of women’s laughter, made Jonah recall the days of camp meetings back to the Shenandoah—religious tent revivals that got so frolicsome, the long-coated preachers had to keep women off the grounds between sunset and sunrise.
“Peel your ears back, Jonah—I got some news!” bellowed Niles Coffee as he strode up through the deepening shadows that first night after the company had come in to the ranch.
“What news?”
Coffee settled, his back against the rough-plank barn wall where Hook leaned. “Dickinson says Mackenzie’s figuring he’s got the Comanche whipped bad enough so he’s gonna offer the Kwahadi a chance to make peace.”
“What’s his peace offer mean to us?”
Sucking on the chewed and fractured stem of his old pipe, Coffee answered. “Mackenzie offers peace to Parker’s bunch to come in—that means the war’s over.”
Hook studied the flame-headed Ranger beside him a moment there in the last glow of the day, the sun having slid beyond the far rim of the prairie, beyond a small piece of ground above the barn where he had frequently gone to sit, staring, wondering.
Jonah asked, “Ain’t that what you boys wanted to do all along? Get the war over with?”
With a wag of his red head. Coffee said, “Not exactly. Those of us I can speak for, we took the oath so we could get us a crack at the Comanche. Captain Lockhart ain’t leading no rag-tailed bunch of splay-footed farmers now. To the last man we joined the Rangers to fight those sonsabitching red-bellies. Never counted on the army coming behind us and making it unpossible to hunt down Comanche.”
“That what Mackenzie will do? Keep us from hunting?”
He dug at the ground with a sliver of weathered barn wood. “Not likely the army can keep us from hunting, Jonah. Just keep us from … killing Comanche.”
“You want to get your licks in first—don’t you, Coffee?”
The sergeant’s dark, larval eyes narrowed on Hook. “Don’t you? Seeing how the Kwahadi are the bunch that stole your boys?”
“Just want my boys. That’s all.”
Coffee snorted quietly. “Can’t believe you could just ride in there, fetch back your boys, and ride off without taking blood from them that stole your kin.”
“My boys is all … all I need,” Jonah repeated, his words coming hard. Hot flecks began to sting his eyes, and something sour and thick clogged his throat.
They fell silent for a few minutes as Coffee sucked on his pipe and the sky they watched wheeled from orange to rose, then faded to the deeper hues of twilight.
“Major Jones sent out the word,” Coffee said.
“Word that Mackenzie was gonna make peace with the Comanche?”
“Yep. Sent a rider through here a few days back with the major’s dispatch for the captain. Jones wants all his company captains to meet him at Griffin in a couple weeks to plan our final campaign.”
“What’re you talking about—a
“Not my war, Jonah,” Coffee growled. “Not the war we Texans been fighting since the days before we tore free from Mexico. No, sir—by god-bloody-damned! This war ain’t over till Texas says it’s over. Those are
“All right,” Hook said quietly as Coffee shuddered with that jolt of passion. “So what you aim to do?”
The fire-headed sergeant composed himself and turned back to look at Jonah. “Lockhart figures from Jones’s dispatch that the major is going to send his Frontier Battalion out in force. To make a real campaign of it. All the companies in a grand fight of it: loop up from Fort Griffin, north, clear to the Canadian. Sweep the country clear before the army goes and herds all them Comanche onto the reservations at last—before Kwahadi get about as scarce as a harpsychord in a whorehouse.”
“Sweep the country clear?”
“Goddammit, Jonah!” Coffee growled. “Major Jones wants what Lockhart and the rest of us want. One final push against them red bastards.”
“The Rangers gonna make your own war?”
“A bloodletting the likes of which no Texan has seen in the history of the Lone Star Republic.”
“I’ll bet you get your licks in too.”
“Look, Jonah. We all of us got a hunting permit the good people of Texas give us the day we signed on with the Rangers.” Coffee reached into a pocket inside his heavy coat and pulled out the star into the dimming light. “Here’s my six-pointed hunting license, Jonah. Each man of us carries it, ’cause we take this war serious.”
“I got something else other’n Comanche bucks to hunt.” He pushed himself back against the barn and stood slowly.
“Ain’t you with us, Jonah? They got your boys. And now you can even things up. Looks like we’ll have this one last chance to wipe out all them stragglers what don’t go in to their agency.”
He wagged his head. “Sergeant, I don’t need to even things up, because there ain’t no way on God’s green earth things ever will get even for me.”
