Deidecker started at the old man’s voice. He found Hook standing in the yard, halfway between the porch and his fire. Hands stuffed in the pockets of his canvas britches.
Nate felt nervous again. “I—ah—”
“She don’t talk much, Mr. Deidecker.” Hook came up the steps. “I’m the only one.”
“She talks to you?”
He settled on the top step, next to the reporter. “And you’re the first I’ve talked to in a long while, son.”
“You’ve decided?”
“You can stay till you got all your questions answered. Gritta don’t mind.”
He looked at the woman, then caught himself and turned back to Hook. “You—you asked her?”
Hook tossed a stick toward the fire. “Don’t have to. Sometimes—a man and woman been together for a long time, they can just tell. It’s all right with Gritta if I talk to you. Just like, well—just like it’s all right with me if Gritta don’t talk to no one else no more.”
“How long you been married?”
The old man smiled, his bony face creasing all the more. Deidecker was amazed that many hard miles could show on a man’s face when he smiled or frowned. A face that nonetheless did not look to have seventy-one years of war and trails and tragedy indelibly scarred into it.
Hook gazed up at the peaks. To Deidecker, the old man might very well be looking at that same place the woman was staring. Far away. But somewhat nearer just by the mention of it aloud.
“Eighteen and fifty-four.” Hook tossed another twig at the nearby fire. “We’ll put meat on as soon as we get some good coals.”
“I can wait.”
Hook patted the newsman’s knee. “I wasn’t always as patient as you when I was younger. Didn’t get this way overnight neither.”
“I want to know everything.” And he couldn’t help it, but found himself flicking his eyes at the woman slowly rocking, rocking, forever rocking as if she were truly a part of the chair.
“I know you do, Nate. And if you’re patient—that’s just what you’ll find out.”
“You and … and Gritta were married in 1854?”
“I was seventeen. She just turned fifteen. Had eyes on her for some time, I had too. We were living in a valley between the Rappahannock and Shenandoah rivers.”
“Virginia?”
“You know it?”
“Only from schooling. The great war and all.”
Hook looked down at the palms of both his old hands. “Yes. The great war.”
“So I figure you fought for the Army of Virginia? Robert E. Lee, eh?”
“No. We left Virginia two years after we was married. Gritta and me decided we wanted to spread our wings. Find our own place in this big country. Hattie had come to us by that time.”
“Hattie?”
He sighed, rubbing his big hands across the shiny thighs of his threadbare canvas britches. “Daughter. Our firstborn. Come to us in the spring of fifty-five. Next year we was gone from that valley below Big Cobbler Mountain. Where Gritta’s folks had farmed for generations.”
“Gritta … is German?”
“Her folks was about as German as folks could get, that many generations out of the old country.”
“And you?” Deidecker asked.
“German too. There was some little Irish blood a ways back, my mother told me of a time. On her side. Scotch too, as I remember. But my father was firstborn to folks who came over from the north of Germany. Named Hecht.”
“Hecht? How—”
“Somehow got changed on some paper. Wrote down as Hook, so Hook it was from then on.” The old scout got up without explanation and stepped to the far edge of the porch. The old dog dozing alongside Gritta’s rocker raised its head and watched its master pee off the porch into the yard.
Self-conscious, Deidecker looked away to watch the sun settle on Cloud Peak, impaled with a rosy summer light that gave a rich, rose luster of alpenglow to these foothills. Leaves in the nearby trees rustled with the cool breeze that seemed to immediately sweep down out of those high places, down from those never-summer ice fields as soon as the sun began settling for the coming of twilight.
Hook came back to the steps and strode down off the porch, across the wide, dusty yard toward the smokehouse, a last, unshakable remnant of his southern heritage. The old dog raised its snout, then slowly rose with a shake of its rear quarters, a languorous stretch, and loped off the porch as well.
“Only damned thing that ranger will get up for.” Hook strode away, finding the dog at his leg. “If it ain’t a bitch in heat nearby … it’s meat.”
Hook disappeared into the darkness of the shed. A moment later a big bone came sailing out of that dark rectangle where in another moment Hook himself reappeared, two large steaks draped over his bare forearm.
“Best meat gets aged. Don’t ever let anyone else tell you different.”
“What is that, Jonah? Buffalo?”
He laughed a little. “Wish it were. No, buffalo good as gone now. We seen to that, Nate.”
“Elk?”
“You ever had yourself elk?”
“No.”
“Then you’re in for a treat, son.”
“This whole … this meeting you. It’s a totally different world out here. Something I’ve never experienced before.”
Hook trimmed the steaks and laid them in a huge cast-iron skillet. “Certainly is something different out here. I had no idea how different it was when first I come out.”
“You didn’t tell me where you went when you left Virginia.”
“Missouri. To homestead with an uncle.”
“You came on here to Wyoming from Missouri?”
Hook set the skillet atop the coals, where the steaks began to hiss as the cooking fire’s heat seeped across their bloody surfaces.
“We’ll talk more after dinner and Gritta’s fed.”
Nate cursed himself silently for pushing. “I’m sorry, Jonah.”
“No offense taken. Just … out here, you slow down a bit so that you can read the sign. A man in a hurry is going to miss most of what there is to read. The way a bird is calling out. The lay of a clump of bunchgrass. Maybe even the way the ants are acting on their hill. You slow down—you’ll get all your questions answered.
“Time was, I wasn’t one for it. This being slowed down. But—I learned from the best teachers there was back then how to slow down and read the sign. I learned from the best these plains ever could make out of white men.”
“The men who taught you to be a scout?”
“The best ever set a moccasin down out here.”
1
February, 1865
HE HAD GROWN to hate the sound of that door sliding open against its three rusty hinges. But he suffered it this one last time.
Jonah Hook stepped from the tiny cell into the narrow hall running the length of the entire building, one of the hundreds of cells here at the Rock Island Federal Prison for Confederate prisoners of war. He was fourth in line coming out of the cell, two more behind him. The rest staying behind in the bull pen hooted and spat on those few who had decided they’d had enough of rotting away in this stinking place.
Eighteen hundred had signed an oath of allegiance to the Union they had of a time fought so hard to tear themselves away from in those long, bloody years of insurrection and rebellion and ragged defense of what mattered most to a man who had himself a small plot of land down in southern Missouri.
All those years of wondering on Gritta and their young ones.
“All right, boys! Let’s march out into that sunlight, you Johnnies!”
The bellowing voice erupted volcanically from somewhere behind him, echoing off the rafters of the dirty prison building, built on the order of a warehouse, now smelling of piss and decay and souls rotting away month after month until the time spilled together into years of captivity.
Jonah Hook had vowed allegiance to the Union. He would put on a Yankee’s blue uniform as long as he
did not have to fight his former brethren dressed in butternut gray. He would go west with the others to hold back the Indians. He would keep the freight roads open and the telegraph wires strung across that expanse of open wilderness yawning out there in his imagination.
Hell, Jonah would do anything just about to get out of that stinking cell where one more man had died before the winter sun came up to make the whole damned building steamy again.
He wasn’t going to wait until it was him they dragged out by the ankles while everybody turned away. Jonah Hook was going west dressed in Yankee blue.
In the North for the past few months, President Lincoln had been engaged in a fierce campaign against his former chief of the army, George B. McClellan. Lincoln won a second term. But as the terrible human cost of the war mounted, the President’s Union found it harder to recruit soldiers for the effort. Draft laws and conscription edicts did nothing but incite the Northerners into riots.
Then there was Gettysburg, and the thousands of bodies piled up all in those three long days. Along with so many other less glorious battles with little-known and easily forgotten names, where thousands more lay waiting for a shallow grave, perhaps no grave at all, lying there for the animals and the seasons to reclaim their nameless mortal remains.
There were damned few substitutes left among those Yankee states by 1864—substitutes who would be paid a handsome bounty to serve in the stead of a man drafted to go fight the rebellious Confederates. So the Union continually drew manpower from its frontier army until it hurt, like an old-fashioned leech bleeding to cure a hopeless patient.
With little else to do, the army figured these Confederates they would galvanize into Yankee soldiers could hold back the red tide on the frontier until Grant and Sherman and Sheridan finished their nasty little business in crushing what was left of resistance in the South.
Make ’em all good Yankees by opening the doors for those who would go west—what with the promise of more and better food, dry clothes and some fresh, clean air.
So the eighteen hundred marched into the sunshine of this winter day. Still this place stunk of death, no matter the cold. If not of rotting flesh, then heavy with the stench of decaying souls.
“Gimme a double column, Johnnies!” hollered the throaty voice. “Double column … and march!”
The blue-bellies marched them between the low warehouses, past one row of high fence, then a second, and at last beyond a line of trees Jonah could make out the huffing of smoke and the familiar cry of iron on iron as the huge engines scraped to a stop near a much-battered rail-station platform. He had not seen this place in years. Since a train much like this one had brought him here.
But now this homely rail of a man all strap and sinew was headed west. Starved down to hide and bones by the years of hanging on, he was ready to be going anywhere. Jonah was scared nonetheless.
The promise of rations enough to fill his belly sounded the best. No matter that he had to fight Injuns out there. He had volunteered last September, then waited all these months into the maw of winter until the Yankee officers got their galvanized conscripts organized into two new regiments of Injun fighters to help General Pope out on the frontier.
Jonah damned well had lived on the frontier, leaving his birthplace of Virginia for the promise of rich land in southern Missouri, homesteading beside his uncle’s place. He arrived to find it a land embroiled in fiery turmoil between free-staters and slavers. The Hooks had never owned a slave, but—by God—a white man had a right to his property, and no so-called government was going to take it away except at the point of a gun.
As soon as Fort Sumter fell, the Union rushed their forces into Missouri to hold the line against the slavers. The state had a bad reputation for being a lawless land of bloody insurrection. A few zealots had been tramping back and forth across the southern forests and fields of Missouri, gaining converts and what money they could when they passed the hat. And when Sterling Price showed up down in Cassville, Jonah Hook told Gritta he had to go.
At first they were nothing more than freebooters themselves, living off the land and the gracious help of other free-state sympathizers. Price kept his growing legions moving: destroying bridges, removing rail ties, setting fires beneath the iron rails until they could be bent shapeless, firing into passing trains until most rail traffic slowed and eventually halted.
But then Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis, a West Point man from Iowa, marched with his army into Missouri to destroy the State Guard. The Union soldiers met Price’s ragtag volunteers near Springfield, down near Jonah’s new home where Gritta and the children stayed on to work the fields. And Curtis drove Price farther south, beating his rear flank like a man would flog a tired, bony mule.
A beating so bad that there were only twelve thousand of them left who stayed on with Price by the time they got to Pea Ridge in northern Arkansas in March of 1862.
It was there that Price rejoined McCulloch and turned to fight. But General Earl Van Dorn and Curtis made quick work of the Southern farm boys on that bloody ridge strewn with bodies and torn by grapeshot and canister.
Price escaped with a portion of his command: those who would still fight, those who had not headed home shoeless and demoralized.
Jonah followed Price east into Mississippi for the great Corinth campaign. Saddened already: the best the Confederates could muster had not been good enough to push back the Yankees from the western borders.
After his capture in Mississippi, Jonah had been marched and wagoned and railed mile after mile northward to a squalid prison that was swelled with new prisoners every week. Rock Island.
For the longest time, Jonah had feared it would be the last place he would sleep in his life. Come one morning and never waking up again.
Word was from one of the officers on the platform as the eighteen hundred were herded onto railcars that they were heading south and west.
“I know that place,” Hook had whispered when someone mentioned their destination.
“You been to Fort Leavenworth, friend?” asked the fellow behind him on the platform.
“No, but, it’s close to home … closer to home than I been in years now.”
“Don’t go fooling yourself, friend,” whispered the disembodied voice behind him. “You ain’t gonna be nowhere near home—what they got planned for us.”
“What’s that?” asked someone farther back.
“Ain’t you heard?” responded still another voice off in another column. “We’re being sent out yonder to fight all them Injuns the Yankees cain’t whip.”
Never before could he remember such a glorious chance to clear the white man’s Holy Road of emigrants in their wagons. So few soldiers left out here now that the white man was making war on himself back east.
Crazy Horse pulled the buffalo robe tighter beneath his chin. The sun shone brightly on the patches of old snow, it and the breeze cold enough to make his eyes smart.
For the past three winters while the warrior bands roaming to the south had hacked at the Holy Road, and the Santee Sioux to the east had waged war against the whites in Minnesota, this young Oglalla warrior had stayed north among the villages of his people, living off the buffalo grown fat on the tall grass. He had discovered that the solution to the white man moving onto the plains was to stay away from the white man altogether. Everything north of Fort Laramie was tranquil. The white man did not venture north into the land of the Lakota.
Yet in the time of drying grass last summer, even Crazy Horse had grown restive and yearned for the excitement talked about on everyone’s lips—ponies and plunder and coup to be found far to the south in the white man’s settlements just south of Fort Laramie.
Crazy Horse wanted to stay clear of the fort and its soldiers, not because he was afraid, but for more personal reasons. Fourteen winters gone, soldiers from Fort Laramie had come out to argue with a small band of Lakota over a skinny cow some warriors had appropriated for their families from one of the wagon trains pa
ssing through. There was shooting and much killing—more than enough blood for a young boy to remember.
But now in his twenty-fourth winter, Crazy Horse had formed a bond with a young soldier named Caspar Collins, who was stationed at Fort Laramie, where his father, Colonel William O. Collins, served as post commander.
Through the past winter the two young men had become friends. Oglalla teaching soldier to shoot the bow, taking him on hunts among the coulees and hills, instructing Collins on the rudiments of the Lakota tongue.
So when Crazy Horse had come south to raid with the southern bands, he gave Fort Laramie wide berth. Making war on the white man was one thing. Fighting a friend was something altogether different.
And now the bands of Shahiyena and Lakota were migrating north again, slowly. Herding before them their new horses and the hundreds of cattle stolen in their raids along the great Holy Road, not to mention the many travois groaning beneath all the plunder taken from the wagons and ranches and stage stops. Never before had the Sioux or the Shahiyena been so rich.
But for Crazy Horse—it was still too little salve on the wounds of the massacre at Sand Creek.
Three moons ago, white soldiers had attacked at dawn and killed not only the fighting men staying behind to cover the retreat of their families—but the white men had cut down women and children that cold November day, still fresh and painful as any open wound after all this time.
Black Kettle’s survivors sent out pipe bearers to other bands of Shahiyena, Lakota, and Arapaho, calling for a wholesale war on the white man. The warrior bands had argued and disagreed as to strategy, but when the vote came down, all the villages but one marched north from that council held near the Bunch of Timber on the Smoky Hill River. Only Black Kettle and the remnants of his band headed south. They would not carry the war pipe against the white man.
In that first week of the Moon of Seven Cold Nights, what the white man called January, the warrior bands had arrived on the hills overlooking the settlement of Julesburg. At least ten-times-ten-times-ten fighting men had prepared for this major attack on the white man. A small number of women had accompanied the horsemen north from Cherry Creek to cook meals and wrangle the herd of extra war ponies. Their march had been orderly, for this had not been a simple raid by a handful of warriors. Flankers and scouts had been thrown out along the path of their march, with camp police to assure that no hot-blooded young warrior eager for an early coup would ruin the surprise the war chiefs had planned for the white men along the South Platte River.
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