“Somebody you’ve knowed for a long time?”
Sweete shook his head. “No. Not very long at all. Got to help him—so I can help myself in the bargain.”
“I don’t understand, Shad. You help this friend of yours—how are you gonna help yourself?”
“I help him, then I can forgive myself, Bill. That’s the hardest thing I have to do right now. To forgive myself.”
Cody glanced over his shoulder at the distant column. “If you’re headed north to Laramie, why not ride with us far as Sedgwick? It’s on the way.”
Shad wagged his head and tried a wan smile. “No, my friend. Gonna cross over the river down there. Head north by west. Ride up along the foothills toward the Laramie plain. Gonna be … all right to be alone for a while.”
“Will the woman be there?”
“Bull’s mother? She should be. If not, I’ll find out where. She deserves to know how he come to die. Where he’s buried.”
“I figured you took off from the springs to bury him.”
“The Cheyenne way: put back in the rocks where the ground and water spirits own his body now.”
“And after that? You’ll come on back to McPherson to work with me?”
Sweete held out his hand. Cody stared at it for a moment, then smiled and took it. When they finished shaking, Shad kept hold of the young scout’s. “After I tell Shell Woman about the boy, and she’s had time to grieve—a person needs someone there with ’em when they grieve … then I gotta ride off to find someone else.”
“Someone else should know about your boy?”
“No. Find the friend I want to help. The one I got to help now. Before it’s too late for the two of us.”
Cody finally took his hand from Sweete’s. “You … you need anything? Cartridges? Jerky? Some of the army’s goddamned rotten hard-bread? I got plenty of that.”
Shad grinned a little to show some measure of his appreciation, then the smile was gone. “Don’t need nothing else now but to be on my way, Bill.”
“You’re sure I can’t do nothing else for you, Shad?”
Sweete brought his old, gnarled hand up to his brow and saluted the young scout. “Well done, soldier. Well done.”
Cody choked a little, swallowing hard. His eyes seemed to brim as he forced a smile onto his lips and his own hand came up for a salute. “Well done yourself, old friend.”
Shad reined away abruptly, nudging his roan into a walk. “Watch your hair, Bill Cody. It’d look mighty fine on some buck’s coup-stick. Damn, but it’s awful pretty!”
Cody forced a quick laugh, watching the big plainsman’s back as Sweete moved away down the slope toward the wide silver band of river. “You … you watch your backtrail, Shad Sweete. By God, you watch your backtrail!”
It had been many, many miles, this travel they had undertaken after the soldier attack on their village at White Bluff Creek. Porcupine’s heart weighed heavy as a stone in his chest.
So total a surprise, so terrible a disaster. So complete their loss of nearly everything—all of it burned by the soldiers, all that had not been looted by the Shaved-Heads before the lodges were put to the torch. Meat and flour, blankets and robes. Weapons and powder and the wealth they had collected from the white homesteads across many moons of raiding. All of it—gone in the time it took for the sun to cross half the sky above.
And those bodies mutilated by the Shaved-Heads and left for the predators that always came, drawn by the smell of blood on the winds. Porcupine and many of the other warriors had returned to that smoking camp when the soldiers withdrew. Come to bury their own: fathers and sons, brothers and uncles, friends.
The bodies were all there, most still recognizable despite the butchery of the Pawnee trackers—identified by a fragment of clothing or quillwork, some body paint or a particular weapon, perhaps a necklace or hair ornament.
After the soldiers had gone, Porcupine had looked and looked, unable to find the body of his young friend who had stayed behind in the grassy ravine as the war chief and others clawed their way up the far side and escaped before the soldiers overran them. Bull’s body was not among those at the ravine near the village, nor among those who had taken refuge with Tall Bull in another deep ravine south of camp where the war chief and the rest had died bravely rather than run. Tall Bull had even killed his favorite war pony there at the mouth of the ravine—to show the Shaved-Heads that he would go no farther, that he would attempt no escape.
Like Bull, a handful of the Dog Soldiers had stayed behind to cover the retreat of the women and children and old ones. To give their lives for their people.
Inside his breast, Porcupine’s heart felt chilled and prickly, hollow as a buffalo horn, black as the far side of night. Having hoped against hope, praying as he waited until he could return to the devastated camp, unable to mount a counterattack, Porcupine and some of the others had angrily watched the Shaved-Heads mutilate the dead Shahiyena scattered throughout the village. From a nearby hill he had seen the tall white man approach the grassy ravine where Bull fell, saw the tall one guard the fallen warrior’s body with his own life—fighting off the Shaved-Heads until soldiers arrived.
Porcupine sensed in his heart what his thoughts had tried to tell him a long time ago—that the one Bull hunted now in fact grieved a great loss.
The white man wrapped the body in a blanket, then bound it in a buffalo robe. He took from one of the lodges soon to be torched those special possessions with which to bury a warrior: weapons and parfleches, food and finery. Binding it all inside the buffalo robe with the body, lashing it tight with rawhide whangs he cut from the bottom of a seasoned lodge, he tied the body across the back of one of the handsomest of the captured Shahiyena ponies and moved slowly out of that camp as the destruction of Tall Bull’s village began.
He had followed the old gray-head toward the river and beyond, heading south by southwest toward the tall, chalky river bluffs in that wild, austere wilderness that had long been the hunting ground of the Shahiyena. Each time Porcupine had turned around to look behind him at the site of destruction, it had sickened him to watch another tall spiral of greasy black smoke rising in the distance beyond the hills, where once the camp of Tall Bull’s people had waited beside the spring.
Into the second day the old one had pushed on with the two extra ponies strung out behind him on picket ropes, riding below the river bluffs slowly, looking carefully before he finally stopped—having selected the right crevice below the shade of both juniper and cedar, there above the quiet murmur of the great river fed by distant mountain snows.
In a struggle up the sharp, sandy slope, the old one had dragged the buffalo-hide bundle to its final resting place, taken one last look around, then placed the body of High-Backed Bull within the darkness of eternity. It took the rest of that second day and into the fading twilight for the old man to lumber up that slope with enough rocks gathered along the riverbank, enough to seal up the crevice forever and all time to come.
As the sun had sunk like a bloody benediction over those faraway mountains, Porcupine watched the white man bring the reluctant war pony up that loose and shifting slope, right to the base of the bluff, to the very foot of the rock-enclosed crevice where High-Backed Bull lay. There the old man raised his hand to the sky and began singing. Not the words of the white man’s prayer medicine—but the words of the Shahiyena air-spirits song.
The song over, its last notes falling away from the bluffs to echo across the river below, the old man pulled free his pistol, rubbing the neck of one of Bull’s favorite ponies.
That single shot reverberated for the longest time, carried back and forth along the river.
Just before dark the old gray-headed one finally rose and made his way down the slope, leaving behind the carcass of the war pony to guard the entrance to the rock cairn.
That rainy night icy hail lashed the white man’s cheerless camp as he softly sang over and over the traditional song that wished the departed one a safe an
d quick journey across the Star Road, into the far, far land of Seyan. With no drum, he beat a hand on the bottom of a much-used copper kettle.
When the hail was done with them, passing on to the east with its white fury, the white man stripped himself naked to the chilling night. At his deep fire pit the man lit some white sage and smudged his body in the sacred and healing smoke. All the while he mumbled prayers that Porcupine could not make sense of from his hiding place in the willows.
Prayers spoken not in the white man’s foreign tongue—but in the language of High-Backed Bull.
In the gray of sun-coming that next morning, Porcupine awoke cold and stiff in his rain-soaked blanket beside the river, blinking against the sleep-grit matting his eyes, rubbing them quickly before he peered through the willow to find the old one gone, disappeared some time in the night.
He wished the gray one a safe journey now that the white man rode all the more alone, rode without his son. Feeling sorry, Porcupine himself felt empty still, realizing the old one had journeyed far too many miles already without having the love of his son. The one born of his flesh, blood of his blood.
Yet Porcupine’s spirit sang as he rode below that river bluff one last time that glorious dawn, stopping to gaze above at the carcass of the war pony, at the vertical scar in the bluff, a dark slash filled with river stones of every size.
High-Backed Bull had gone where he had wanted to be.
And the one who had fathered him was now traveling a road to seek his own redemption.
For knowing them both, Porcupine felt stronger still as he moved away from the river. Resolved more now than before to help White Horse once again gather the Dog Soldiers and their families into a fighting force that High-Backed Bull would be proud of.
Porcupine sensed his own spirit renewed, knowing the struggle continued.
24
Winter 1870
THE TRAIL HAD gone cold.
Two winters came and passed; each day they hoped against hope that some clue would turn up, some slip of a tongue, some word of Jubilee Usher’s Danites passing through the country. But, nothing.
Back that October of sixty-eight, Two Sleep had taken Jonah on west from the land of the red desert beside the Sandy, crossing Green River, then pushing on to Fort Bridger. Like the back of his leathery, walnut-colored hand, the Shoshone knew the lay of that land and the caliber of those men in army blue. Jonah stayed quiet for the most part, letting the Indian ask the questions needing answers.
But none of the soldiers stationed at Bridger could remember a big outfit of horsemen, wagons, and an ambulance coming through of recent. Anything on the order of that many armed men would have surely caused that undermanned garrison at the frontier outpost to stand right up and take notice, what with so few civilian travelers moving east or west out in this infernal country. As it was, for the most part the soldiers said things had gone quiet to the north: up where the Sioux and Cheyenne had appeared to settle down after wrenching the big treaty of 1868, and the abandonment of the forts along the Bozeman Road, from the white man’s army. With that summer of sixty-eight fading into history, the troops assigned the Montana Road had filed back down toward Laramie, for all time quitting the hunting ground granted the wild tribes.
“We just got tired of fighting,” explained an aging captain commanding at Bridger. “After that four years of hell fighting the secesh back east, we were ordered out here to pacify this land, make it safe for the California argonauts, safe for business trade and what settlers was to move in.”
As Jonah and Two Sleep listened, the captain sighed in the autumn shade of that brushy porch awning outside his mud-walled office. “We’re taking a well-deserved retreat right now—this army that just got tired of fighting. You’re aware this land along the great immigrant road once was ruled by the Cheyenne and Sioux, you know? Still, they haven’t deviled us in a long time.”
“Wasn’t always that way,” Jonah said, feeling the captain’s eyes shift in his direction. “I fought them—the Cheyenne and the Lakota—to keep this road open.”
“You with the galvanized volunteers, were you?”
“Sixty-five.”
“Serve at Platte Bridge?”
Jonah only nodded, remembering Lieutenant Caspar Collins’s brave ride across the bridge to break through a cordon of a thousand warriors and rescue an incoming squad of soldiers.
The aging captain had gone back to staring at the sun setting beyond Utah and that land of Brigham Young, lighting the leaves in the trees with fall’s gold and crimson fire. “Yes, Mr. Hook. For a while now, the army got tired of fighting.”
“Can’t say as I fault ’em,” Hook replied quietly.
Jonah ended up selling to the army four of those horses taken from the Danites, keeping what they needed for packing. And with the credit the outpost’s commander gave them in trade for the animals, Fort Bridger’s contract sutler resupplied Jonah and Two Sleep with cartridges and powder, coffee and sugar, flour and a few looking glasses, along with a modest amount of some Indian trade goods the man had been a long time in getting shet of. Hook was anxious to push on after a matter of days.
But pushing on southwest into the land of Zion had been as big a waste of time as Jonah could ever remember.
The closer he rode toward the City of the Saints, the more Hook felt he was treading on foreign ground. He had been north of a time in his life, twice he could remember as a youngster crossing what became the Mason-Dixon. And he had been hauled to the land of the Yankees after his capture at Corinth. That had been war—and he a prisoner of that bloody struggle. Yet even then, with the exception of a few sadistic guards who beat their prisoners for the manic love of seeing the pain and blood and suffering, Jonah remembered being treated better at the hands of the blue-belly civilians than in the land of Brigham Young’s Saints.
No more was he merely a southern boy come north with his kin to conduct some commerce. No longer was he a Confederate soldier captured in the vain, brutal struggle waged by the South against a far mightier North. Now with the coming of another winter, Jonah Hook all the more felt like nothing less than a feared and distrusted stranger come to this foreign land. Not one with the religion of these quietly industrious people, he found himself treated civilly in few places, with cool indifference in most others, and outright hostility at many stops he and Two Sleep made.
A plainsman in tattered, trail-worn clothing, riding in the company of an aging Indian warrior, found himself nothing less than suspect of all color of crimes against the State of Deseret. Clearly a man of the prairie, and most certainly a Gentile, his companion none other than a member of a dark, heathen race of Lamanites said to be fallen from the grace of God—Hook was regarded more with pitying curiosity than with any desire on the Saints’ part to offer anything in the way of assistance.
Already he had steeled himself, prepared to find the Mormons closing ranks around their own, this Danite, this leader of avenging gunmen, this mongol lord of the plains. Instead, what Jonah discovered was that Jubilee Usher might actually be one Prophet too many in his own land.
“Who was it you said you were looking for again?”
“Jubilee Usher’s the man’s name,” Hook would answer those he would stop along the road, those who would come to the edge of the manicured fields long enough to listen as Jonah prodded for information. “Leader of the Danites.”
Hearing that, most of the shopkeepers and farmers eyed him severely before they moved off without so much as answering. Most, but not all.
“And why would you be looking for this Jubilee Usher?” asked the rare one.
“Heard of the man by reputation,” Jonah would say.
“Never met him, have you?”
“No, never,” Jonah answered truthfully, remembering to recite the keys he had learned while riding with Boothog Wiser’s Mormon battalion, keys he had sworn himself to use when at last the time had come to unlock the mysteries of Zion. “Rode with Lemuel Wiser—Usher’s right h
and. Decided I’d come here to Zion. Aim to join Usher’s Danites.”
That shopkeeper in a small agricultural settlement northeast of Salt Lake City flicked his eyes over at his wife as she swept the plank floor of their dusty establishment that frosty November day in 1868. What he had to say, he said guardedly, almost under his breath: “You got that right, stranger. That’s Usher’s band of Danites. Not Brigham’s no more, they’re not. That bunch belonged to Jubilee Usher for some time now.”
The woman cleared her throat loudly above her busy broom, as if to utter a warning. And kept on sweeping without once raising her eyes to look at her husband.
Hook had summoned up the patience to keep asking. “Then I suppose this Brigham Young you spoke of would know where I might find Jubilee Usher?”
The Mormon’s dark eyes moved to the window, beyond which the Indian waited in the autumn cold with their animals, clearly an Indian who knew and kept to his place among these whites who practiced a strict theocratic pecking order.
The shopkeeper said, “The Prophet would be most happy to know where Jubilee Usher is, stranger—if you’re one to know yourself.”
“I wouldn’t have to ask you if I knew where to find Usher my own self,” Jonah said.
“That much is clear. Still, it would be well worth your while to let Prophet Young know anything you might be privy to about Jubilee Usher.”
“Said I was just looking for the man.”
A cool smile darkened the face of the shopkeeper. “So is Young—looking for Usher, that is.” He eyed his wife quickly again, then whispered to the counter secretively, “You take the offer of my help: you’ll not go join up with that bunch.”
“Why shouldn’t a man be about God’s work with Jubilee Usher?” Hook asked, a bit too loud.
He shook his head, whispering, “Usher ain’t all that—”
“William!” the woman called out, standing there midfloor with her waxy hands draped over the top of her corn broom. “There’s lots of work you could be doing in the back if our customer is finished buying what he needs so he and that Indian can be on their way.”
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