“So how you gonna get horses?”
“We’re gonna borrow ’em.”
His throat seized up as his heart leapt. “You mean steal ’em. That’s what you mean!”
Jonah grabbed him. “They got plenty. They won’t miss two.”
Moser swallowed hard, trying to figure it as Hook grabbed his shoulders, bringing his face close.
“Artus, it’ll be all right. We’ll wait until way past moonrise, then go in and lead a couple horses out.”
“How we gonna do that? We ain’t got any tack—”
“The old trader back there. In his barn. We’ll go back after dark and get us bridles and what we can carry off.”
“Bareback?”
“If we have to.”
“Them Creek, they’ll shoot horse thieves, you know that.”
“Shit, Artus.” Hook smiled. “You been shot at before.”
“If you boys plan on doing any harder work than lifting that whiskey glass and poking whores,” announced the army major, “I know where a man can earn good money.”
“Thirteen dollars a month and two squares?” hollered a dirty civilian from the back of the watering hole the major had just entered, leading an escort of four privates.
There came an immediate burst of laughter from those in the room. Jonah Hook grinned and turned back to his drink. He and Artus Moser, like so many others, knew all too well what hard work soldiering could be.
“Slave work—that’s what it is, Major!” yelled out another of the civilians.
The officer waited for the group to quiet itself. “I’ve come to offer enlistment in the frontier army. General William Tecumseh Sherman has already dispatched a large body of troops from this department to Indian country.”
“Injun country? What the hell you think that is right out that door, Major? The cobble-paved streets of St. Louie?”
More laughter followed the jeering catcalls from the civilians long at working on their thirsts in the dimly lit, mud-floored saloon that passed for a barroom in Dobe Town, just beyond the boundaries of the Fort Kearney military reservation in Nebraska Territory.
“Colonel Henry B. Carrington recently departed with hundreds of foot troops to protect the Bozeman Trail for emigrants heading to the mines of Idaho and Montana.”
“Now that’s where a man can make him some money,” Artus whispered into Jonah’s ear.
“If he makes it through Injun hunting grounds with his hair.” Hook watched Moser absently stroke a palm over the back of his head.
“Colonel Carrington’s mission in protecting the Bozeman Road has depleted this department’s manpower strength. General Sherman hopes we can enlist what we need in the way of good soldiers right here on the prairie,” the major went on.
Down the rough-plank bar from Jonah a man with a hawkish beak of a nose turned about on the major and leaned his elbows back on the bar.
“Major, maybe you should just take your enlisting outfit on outta here. Most of these boys already had their fill of soldiering—for either Uncle Billy Sherman or Robert E. Lee.”
The major turned toward the speaker. “I take it you fought for the Confederacy?”
“I did not, Major. From The Wilderness and Gettysburg, Cold Harbor and Manassas. And I fought at the siege of Atlanta under Sherman hisself.” He turned back to the bar. “I had enough of soldiering. I can make more at a poker table in a week than I can in a month of Sundays as a buck-assed private, digging privy holes and shining officers’ boots.”
“You, sir—are the sort of soldier the army needs on the frontier at this moment in history. With the great rebellion subdued back east, our Republic can now turn its attention to the matter of pacifying the plains.”
“Go tell that to the goddamned Sioux!” yelled a faceless voice from the smoky recesses.
“No one is saying it will be easy,” said the major, hurling his voice into the barroom once more. “What say you now? Any of you ready for adventure in the Army of the West? I’ll have enlistment forms ready at this far table when you’ve thought it over and want to join those who will fight to bring peace to this land, once and for all, now that the Rebels lost.”
Jonah turned. “We didn’t lose.”
The major turned back to find the tall, thin rail of a man who had flung his words at the officer’s back. “The South lost the war more than a year ago—in case you haven’t heard.”
“I heard, Major. And I was there. But—the South didn’t lose.” Jonah listened as the barroom behind him fell still again. The Union veteran at the bar had turned around once more, this time to study Hook.
“If the South didn’t lose, mister—what would you call it?” asked the major, slapping his gloves across the front of his britches, sending sprays of fine dust into the smoky, oily atmosphere.
“We was whipped.”
“Damn right you were whipped,” shouted one of the major’s escort.
“I don’t see any difference,” said the major.
“Big difference. If a man loses, that means he give up. And I don’t know of many who gave up fighting until Robert E. Lee told ’em he was done and wanted his soldiers to go on home.”
“You lose or you’re whipped. Same—”
“No it ain’t, Major. When a man’s whipped, it means his enemy’s got more strength, better rifles, more rifles. But it don’t mean he lost. It just means his enemy whipped him.”
“The man’s right, Major,” said the Union veteran as he inched down along the bar toward Hook. “It would be about like me and the Johnny here taking on the five of you soldiers because your damned big mouth won’t stop flapping.”
“I won’t be talked to like—”
“And if the two of us get whipped by the five of you—which ain’t really likely, me taking a hard look at your escort here—then we get whipped. But we didn’t lose the fight.” He turned to Hook. “Isn’t that what you’re trying to explain to this dunderhead of a major?”
Jonah smiled. “You said it just fine for me, mister. Just fine. I’d buy you a drink—but I’m afraid my cousin and me are a shade light.”
“No matter,” replied the Union man, turning his back on the major and escort. “Let me offer you two a drink on me.” He snagged the neck of the bottle being held by the barkeep. “Put it on my bill.”
“They wanted to see the color of our money before we got a drink,” Moser apologized.
“It’s like that out here. There’s a lot of worthless scrip floating around these days. Gold will always do the trick. That, and army money.”
“Always army money,” Jonah replied. “Ain’t no other work for a man what needs a job to eat.”
“Take heart, friends. The army isn’t the only good money on the plains,” said the veteran. “I’m Eli Robbins.”
They shook hands and introduced themselves, then helped themselves to Robbins’s bottle.
“You look like you ain’t hurting for walking-around money,” Moser said.
Robbins smiled. He stood taller than Moser and almost as tall as Hook, but with a good thirty pounds on the whipcord-lean Confederate from Missouri. “I suppose I’m not. Work when I have to—never really want to. When my poke gets short, I know where to go looking. What brings you two Southern boys all the way out here to the middle of Nebraska?”
“Jonah come through these parts a couple times while he served out here—fighting Injuns.”
The stranger’s eyebrow lifted. “You was with one of them galvanized outfits, eh?”
“Third U.S. Volunteers,” he answered. “Kept the telegraph up and the roads open when we could.”
Robbins chuckled. “That was a job of soldiering. Outfits like yours cut their teeth on Sioux and Cheyenne I hear.”
Hook wiped his bushy black mustache with the back of his hand. “What you said before, Eli—you got any ideas where we could find work?”
“I’m fixing on moseying south myself in a day or two. Hear the K-P needs hunters.”
“What�
��s the K-P?” Moser asked.
“Kansas Pacific Railroad. Word has it that the track gangs have reached Abilene.”
“Down in Kansas.”
He nodded. “They need hunters to supply meat for their bed gangs and riprap as well.”
“Bed gangs?” Moser asked.
“Level the road where the track will lay. Riprap cuts through timber and brush, crossing water with bridges.”
“I’ve shot mule deer and antelope before,” Jonah said, pouring himself another glass of the red whiskey. “I figure I could do that.”
Robbins chuckled. “You won’t be shooting no mule deer or antelope out there, Jonah. Them gangs get real hungry.”
“Why no deer or antelope?”
Robbins snorted with a chuckle. “Didn’t you ever see ’em while you was soldiering out there in Dakota Territory?”
“See ’em—see what?”
“Buffalo, goddammit! The K-P needs buffalo hunters!”
18
Autumn, 1866
“HE THE ONLY skinner you got?” came the question from the big man perched behind the table crowded with paper and whiskey glasses in the Abilene saloon.
Jonah glanced at Moser. “Yeah. Just him and me.”
This central Kansas town on the great Smoky Hill River was only then starting to boom. Ever since the 1862 Homestead Act had begun to bring settlers fleeing the war that was devastating the east, granting them for next to nothing 160 acres of prairie grassland, towns like these had started to crop up across the central plains. But this particular town had something different going for it. Someone had seen something special when he had first set eyes on Abilene, Kansas.
Just this past summer, Illinois cattle buyer John McCoy had recognized the potential in putting up the corrals and shipping depot that would soon revolutionize the business of driving Texas cattle to the eastern markets. He was the first to see that profits could be realized by having a railroad closer to the cattle empires. Working alongside the Kansas Pacific, McCoy had erected the first of his cattle pens and would keep his crews constructing those pens and loading chutes until cold weather set in. The first marriage of cattle and the railroad was less than a year from becoming a reality.
Tracks heading east were already laid. Abilene and the K-P would be ready come next trail-drive season.
Chewing on some shag leaf tucked in a tight lump within his cheek, the big man behind the wobbly table eyed the two Southerners severely, his gaze eventually coming back to rest on the half-stock, heavy-barreled muzzle-loading rifle Hook rested on its butt between his scuffed boots. “You ever shoot buffalo before?”
“Served with the Third U.S. Volunteers out to the Dakotas during the war.”
“Rebel, eh?”
“I was,” he answered.
“I asked if you ever shot any buffalo, Reb.”
“On Connor’s march up to the Powder—Sioux country.”
“You was with Connor?”
“I was.”
“I think you’re pulling my leg, mister. Bet you can’t tell me—”
“You want to know about the Platte Bridge fight? Or when we got in there and wiped out that village of Black Bear’s Arapaho.”
The man sat there, looking a bit stunned by the suddenness of Hook’s reply. “Don’t remember you.”
“Don’t remember you neither. So what does that prove to us? That I kept to myself? Damn right I did. Now, you want someone to hunt buffalo for this railroad or not?”
The man smiled at last. “So you’re good with that old front-stuffer, are you?”
“Jim Bridger himself always asked me how good a man got to be to kill something big as a buffalo.”
“You knew Bridger?”
“Him and his partner, Shadrach Sweete. They scouted for Connor last summer. So how come you’re here working for the railroad? Got tired of puny wages and moldy hardtack?”
With a sudden gush, the big man laughed. “You’ll do.” He pushed the pencil toward Hook, his other hand indicating the line. “Need your name, and your skinner’s name there.”
Jonah carefully made his letters, the only thing in the world he could write, or recognize. In handing the pencil over to Moser, Hook asked, “What we get in the way of fixin’s?”
“The railroad will assign you a wagon and team. You lose ’em—you get docked on your pay. Three blankets a man and a poncho for each of you. Rope and come-a-long for pulling hides. You need mess gear—buy it yourself.”
“Don’t need none,” he answered as Moser straightened. “You said something about pay. How much?”
The man turned the ledger page around and squinted at the names. “Jonah Hook. And … Artus Moser. Together, you’ll earn two hundred dollars per month.”
They looked at one another in shock.
“I know, boys. It’s a shitload of money—if you got the makings of a buffalo hunter like you claim you do.”
Jonah felt numb inside, thinking about just how much two hundred dollars was in real money. “I am. A hunter.”
“K-P expects you to bring in the meat off ten buff a day. You get a bonus at the end of the month if you bring in more than three hundred for that month.”
“And a bonus too?” Moser asked, his voice a bit on the squeaky side.
The big man looked at Artus. “That’s right. But I personally think you got the worst of it. Him—he’s got the easy job: just shooting the buff. When he gets ten of the big brutes down, all the fun’s over and the work just starts. Ten buff a day will mean the two of you will be humping from first light to moonrise getting in and out of line camp with your meat.”
“Where’s camp?”
“Couple miles west of here now. The K-P been laying track since the first days after the war ended. The line camp moves west about once a week.”
“Soon enough, I s’pose—camp will be so far away there won’t be no more whiskey and women, Artus,” Jonah said with a wry grin.
“Don’t you count on that, mister,” replied the sign-up man. “Watering holes and whores will damn well follow these gandy dancers right on into hell if that’s where the railroad goes to lay track. Because gandy dancers got lots of money and a few hours of nighttime on their hands.”
Jonah looked over the smoky room. “Ain’t that fitting? ’Cause that’s just the two things a whore and fancy card dealers like most about a man.”
The man handed Hook a slip of paper. “You boys take this out to camp west of town. Past McCoy’s corrals next to the tracks. You can’t miss the camp. Just follow the tracks.”
“Who we see there?”
“Ask for the camp foreman. He’ll get you fixed up with the rest of your truck and wagon.”
Hook stuck out his hand. “You know our names. I didn’t catch yours.”
“Billy Crowell. Good to have you boys signed on.”
Jonah waved the hire-on slip in the air. “Believe me, mister—it’s damn good to have a job like this!”
Those shaggy beasts could weigh as much as a ton, and some stood over six feet tall at the hump.
From far away, they looked like a black brown growth on the prairie. Up this close, as Jonah belly-crawled to the crest of a low rise beside Artus Moser, the buffalo looked all the bigger than he could remember. Then he recalled he had never been this near a buffalo, much less a whole herd.
“Maybe it’s just the size of the head on the critter,” Jonah whispered to his cousin, who was dragging the extra pouch containing an additional powder horn and cast balls.
They had spent the better part of the previous afternoon heating bar lead and pouring it into hand-held ball molds. Each of the .62-caliber balls weighed a lot in Jonah’s pouch, along with powder horn and caps. And Artus was dragging another shoulder pouch full of them up the slope on his belly beside Jonah.
Once the pair had picked a place to begin, and if they were careful, the camp foreman instructed them yesterday, the Southern boys would be able to stay right where they were until they dropped
ten buffalo. If they weren’t careful and failed to read the wind, the rest of the herd would likely spook and take off.
“If that happens,” the foreman had explained with that aggravating smile, “then you two have to hightail it back to your wagon and trail that herd until they decide to stop and graze. Ten buffalo a day. You bring in more—there’s a bonus for you come the end of the month.”
“Crowell told us,” Hook had said, with his own wolfish grin.
“What … what happens—we don’t bring in ten?” Moser asked suspiciously.
“Then, boys—I get to fire you.”
Jonah remembered now how Artus had stared at him while the foreman walked off. Hook vowed, “Don’t you worry none, cousin. We’ll drop our ten, and more.”
Moser had looked like he wanted to believe, especially now that they were bellied down in the dirt and summer-dried grasses of this Kansas hill country, gazing down on a herd that blackened several acres to the south.
While most of the other hunters had pushed due west from line camp before sunrise that first morning, Hook and Moser had decided they would try their first day’s luck by pointing their wagon where no one else was headed. The air grew hotter with every hour the springless, rattling wagon had lurched and bounced over the rough prairie dotted with flat buffalo chips quickly dried beneath the relentless sun. And eventually as that single white eye rose to midsky, the pair began to suffer the torture of stinging buffalo gnats.
Tiny, red-hot, troublesome insects that sneaked in underneath their eyes and into their ears, swirling around in their nostrils and finding every square inch of exposed flesh. They were both so busy swatting gnats and swiping sweat that they were upon the herd before they knew it.
“Them critters are cursed with dim eyes and dull wits to match.” Hook repeated what he had told Moser the night before. “Bridger and Sweete—you remember me talking about them, don’t you?”
“You talk about ’em all the time since we left home,” Moser grumped.
“Well, them two taught me about buffalo—”
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