was only to let others know they were moving off for a minute or so to relieve themselves.
Somewhere in the middle of the night as the sky swung around the north star, the wind swung down around them from the north. It tasted now of snow, guffawing around their cheerless camp like mocking swirls of Comanche laughter. Then the first of the icy snow began in that hour past midnight, pattering against the canvas and leather and wool felt of their hats like little feet come to steal away every vestige of their hope of catching the enemy.
The cold, utter silence of that high, barren land seemed to swallow all sound in huge, hungry draughts … the darkness of that sky overhead graced with but the thinnest rind of moon behind the icy clouds, and that steady, incomprehensible rhythm of the wind, all made for one of the longest nights in Jonah’s life. Without the talk of other men, without the luxury of being called to action, Hook was forced to talk to himself, forced to stay in one place where he could not flee his bitter memories. Bittersweet thoughts of the past, painful thoughts of what might have been, once more came to darken his mind like the spilling of a tin of lampblack.
What should have been.
Hattie was back there in the East, as safe as any man could make his daughter now. Learning about books and manners and cultured things and … great Lord! he thought. Hattie would turn twenty this spring. Was it still February? No sure idea what month it was—he would have to find out from Coffee. The sergeant kept his log for Lockhart. And when they got down to Fort Concho, Jonah vowed to go in to the sutler’s there and find something to send his daughter. Maybe a dress he could have posted to the seminary school he sent money to regular. Maybe he could even find a music box. He remembered how she had always wanted one of those. The perfect gift for a girl her age.
Twenty—he marveled. She was near five years older than her mama was when he and Gritta had married back in the Shenandoah. So Hattie wasn’t a girl no more. She’d be a full-blown woman when at last he went back to get her.
As soon as he had his two boys back, as soon as he got back on Jubilee Usher’s trail. He’d find Gritta. He’d find her. He’d find her.
He had found Hattie.
And now they were only a matter of hours from this village of Quanah Parker’s Kwahadi who held white prisoners.
Jonah knew he had found his boys.
This done and his young’uns took back to Cassville, where they could likely stay with old Boatwright and help the old sheriff about his place … Hook would set out again, back to the land of the Mormons. How swiftly faded the dead from people’s minds, he brooded. It was the living lost that haunted a man.
But he’d find her. He would find her.
The wind died a little as the east seeped into gray, then a murky crimson behind the fleeing snow clouds. For a moment it reminded him of the birth opening on one of the old cows back to Missouri. Helping the old girls work their calves out into this world, a struggle of cow pushing and man pulling, the calf all spindly of leg and refusing Jonah a dry place for a grip. It was all a part of life, that. So much of life a person damned well had to do on his own.
No one else to do it for him. Like this hunt. As much as Shad Sweete and Riley Fordham and now Two Sleep had come along to ride this trail with him—it was in the end his trail alone to ride this last mile.
Like these last minutes as Lockhart motioned them up to shake out the kinks from sitting out the passing storm, knock the ice off their blankets and shelter halves they had wrapped around themselves in that silent, icy darkness; told to roll them up and lash them behind saddles as they each and all shivered in that cold crunching of the predawn wilderness. Tightening cinches, warming bits before slipping them back into horses’ mouths, loosening cold weapons in stiffened holsters and saddle boots.
With only a wave of his hand to give voice to his command, Captain Lamar Lockhart signaled Company C of the Texas Rangers into the saddle, and pointed that brave band of thirty into the dawn’s cruel slash of whispering wind.
42
AFEW DAYS BACK one of them had told him what season this was. Said the Comanche called this the Moon of the Last Cold. Something like that. They also said next month was called the Moon of Geese Returning.
Could be, Jonah thought now as a cold, cheerless sun rose on that small band of white men moving north at an easy lope across the icy snow gathered in crusted fans around the stubble of dead prairie grass. Not so hard a pace that it would take any more than necessary out of the horses.
The ice crystals in the wind flew against his canvas mackinaw, pecked at the brim of his hat the way Gritta’s chickens had pecked at the yard outside their cabin.
His eyes crawled from horizon to horizon. Maybe it was so, in a few weeks they might actually get to see the big longnecks stretching their great wings out in wide vees across the bright spring blue of the sky overhead. It was always a sight to behold, he told himself. No sight to match it, those longnecks coming and going, spring or autumn.
To think on how those birds made a circuit of their seasons, great loops encompassing thousands of miles with every flight. They would be moving around to the north soon, come the spring. Then back around, retracing those same thousands of miles with the first halloo of autumn. Hell, just like the buffalo. The numberless that wandered into the winds with the countless, ageless seasons.
Those animals no different from the wind itself that worked around a man in great loops that likely meant a journey of thousands of miles too, a journey that eventually brought the wind right back where it began.
How Jonah prayed the wind and this great endless cycle of the seasons would take him back to where he had started.
Prayed it, as Company C rode the cold sun up into that late winter sky unsullied by a single cloud, save for the east, where the storm had blown.
What a perfect day for a man to go hunting or fishing, to work his fields, to repair harness or fix that ill-hung door on the barn. Or a perfect day for a man to do nothing at all but lie on his back among the bounty of his fields and stare up at the great endless immensity of all God’s handiworks. Wondering where he fit, in all that had been wrought of the seasons and sculpted by the wind around him.
A damned cold day as well, one fit for spilling blood. Then at last he could start back home with his boys.
This was turning out to be one of those late winter days when the sun hung high, dull as a pewter button, when the air would never really grow warm—when John Corn, who was riding point, suddenly wheeled his mount around in a tight, haunch-sliding circle and skedaddled back for the column. Reaching those in the lead, the Ranger pointed ahead, talking in hushed tones to the captain, then led Lockhart, Johns, and Coffee ahead a ways where all three stopped in view of the rest. Lockhart reached about and took his field glasses from a saddlebag, then sat staring, likely adjusting on something Jonah could not sec with the naked eye, something lost in all that immensity of snowy brilliance.
“You think they’ve spotted the village?” Hook quietly asked Two Sleep beside him in the column.
The old Shoshone nodded. “Yellow jackets.”
“Comanche? That what you figure?”
“That what I see.”
Hook glared again, squinting into the shimmering distance of the icy plain, trying to make out anything that Two Sleep could claim would be Comanche.
Lockhart reined about, hurriedly stuffing the field glasses away. He slowed his horse to a walk as he reached the company and began by giving them what sounded like his first real order in many days as he rode down their line.
“Dismount.”
They obeyed him instantly without question, without muttering a word. The only sounds among those thirty were those of the restive horses, the squeak of soaped leather, the rattle of buckle and chain, the squeak of holster
