Sweete thought of Shell Woman. Funny to think of her not as Toote, but as Shell Woman. But then, he had found himself among her own people for the better part of the last two weeks now. And in that time had not really thought of her as being among and surrounded by his own people—where she often camped at Fort Laramie, waiting for his return to her lodge. Perhaps by now she and Pipe Woman were in a winter camp far up in the Powder River or Rosebud country.
But it hurt, thinking on them now as he watched the great cloud of dust rise into the clear, autumn-cold sky above the rear marchers—these Southern Cheyenne going off to find their own winter camps. It hurt, that thought of mother and daughter, Cheyenne both. So only natural now that he think on father and son. One a white man, happy only when he was among an adopted people. And the other a half-breed, a young man denying his white blood and swearing vengeance on all white men.
What overwhelming hate must fill the heart of his son. One day there would be no other white men standing between them. One day, Shad realized, there would be no gulf of time nor distance between him and the son he had long hoped for.
“You coming, Shad?”
Startled, Sweete looked up from staring at the march of the disappearing Cheyenne, yanked of a sudden out of his reverie. Jonah Hook had come up with the horses and that one pack animal they had shared between them this last few weeks. “S’pose there’s no reason to be hanging on here.”
He glanced over the great, empty campsites strung up and down the banks of the little creek, grass trampled and pocked with lodge circles and fire pits, pony droppings and bones and the remains of willow bowers used by the young warriors too old to live any longer with their families but too young yet to have a wife and lodge and children too.
His eyes misted for a moment as he swallowed the pain of loss. To be hated, despised, cursed by a son was a deeper wound than he had ever suffered—across all those years of trapping and freezing, of fighting Indians and grizzly and loneliness and time itself. To stand in this place and realize what with so much time gone from his life, all he had to show for it was a son who had spit on his father’s name, his father’s race—his father’s blood.
“Winter’s coming, Shad,” Jonah said, slowly easing forward after he rose to the saddle. He crossed his wrists atop the wide saddlehorn. “Maybe we can go find us some work down south.”
He remembered. “The Territories?”
Hook nodded. “Down with the Creek and Choctaw. Sniff around for some word.”
Shad rose to the saddle and settled his rear gently against the cantle for the coming ride. How he wanted now to be plopped down in the sun, leaning back against the fragrant homeyness of her lodge, listening to the kettles bubble and smelling the pungent tang of autumn on the same winds that drove the long-necked honkers across the endless blue in great, dark vees. Going south.
Where Jonah yearned to go as well for the winter.
“Let’s settle up at Larned, Jonah,” he said, easing the horse away, pointing their noses east out of the meadow, toward the sun now fully off the horizon. A new day of opportunity and possibilities. Another chance to deal with fears and disappointments and pain that no man ought to know.
He glanced at the silent man riding beside him, seeing the gentle curve of a slight smile on Hook’s bony face. Something tugged at Shad now—seeing the comfort it gave the Confederate to be heading down south at last. To be going where there might be some answers.
And in that moment, he felt a little peace within himself to balance out that pain. For some time it had been there, and he had chosen not to realize it—this peace versus the pain.
Now he felt it, assured by it, comforted by it. Because so jumbled up were those thoughts of father and son with thoughts of him and Jonah Hook … that it caused him confusion and comfort, guilt and a sense of completeness never before experienced—that left him wondering where to go for help.
Knowing the only help for Shad Sweete rested within.
40
November, 1867
“THEY WAS TRICKED—and we helped the army do it, Jonah.”
Hook gazed through his own red-rimmed eyes at the moist, bleary eyes of the old mountain man across the table from him, at Shad Sweete’s mouth as he stumbled over some of the words.
“For better than a day now you’ve been sitting here in this stinking hole, washing your tonsils with this whiskey, old man,” Jonah said. “And all that time I been telling you your crying ain’t gonna change a thing.”
“Was hoping you cared.”
“I do care, dammit.” He slapped a flat hand on his chest. “But what’m I to do by my lonesome? What you wanna do, huh?”
The whiskey had long ago passed the point of warming Jonah’s belly. It felt like there was a hole burned right through him, hollering for something more than the cheap grain alcohol turned amber with a plug of tobacco and potent with some red pepper. Some called it prairie dew, others stumble-foot. Jonah just called it whiskey.
“Don’t know,” Shad Sweete grumped.
“Damn right, you don’t. Wanna go riding off and tell ’em?” he asked, feeling his belly burn for want of food. “Go tell them chiefs how they got swindled for putting their marks on that piece of paper you asked ’em to come and sign?”
“Maybe we should. Somebody’s gotta tell ’em.”
“What then, old man? We gonna help ’em take on the whole army? Seems they been doing just that since before we come out here. And from the look of things—these Injuns’ll be fighting the white man long after our bones are buried and there’s grass growing over the spot they buried us.”
Sweete sighed, working the whiskey around in his mouth the way he worked the thoughts around in his numbed brain.
They had arrived back at Fort Larned and were four days all told getting mustered out. Shad Sweete released from duty with the army, and Jonah Hook bidding farewell to Major Frank North’s Pawnee Battalion. Come spring, they were told at the last, there would be work for a man who was willing to guide and track, interpret and fight. Come spring, that is, after a man made it on his own through the prairie winter.
So there was money in their pockets and a thirst in their throats. But first the old mountain man had his duties, learned years before in the fur trade at rendezvous. Company trapper like Jim Bridger, or free trapper the likes of Titus Bass—either one would tell you your money had to go down on the necessaries before the money went to liquor. No matter the color of the whiskey, no matter how strong the scent of the women once you started your drinking—a man had to assure himself of the necessaries before everything was drunk up and there was nothing left. Nothing to get him through the winter and over to shortgrass time when he would again find work.
So with their pokes bulging, Shad Sweete steered Jonah over to the local sutler at his canvas-topped mercantile squatting just beyond the fringe of the military reservation surrounding Fort Larned. There they perused what the squinty-eyed clerk had to sell.
“A nervous and shifty-eyed one, that he is,” Shad whispered.
“We go someplace else do our business?”
“No,” he replied, grabbing Jonah’s elbow. Shad looked up at the clerk. “The owner in, mister?”
“He’s off right now.”
“When he be back?”
“Tomorrow afternoon, most likely.”
“We’ll be back.”
And they were—not long after the sutler returned.
“Name’s Sweete. Yours?”
The man presented his hand. “Sidney Gould. What is it I can do for you?”
“Some outfitting,” Sweete had replied, and Jonah remembered now that look on the mountain man’s face as Shad had glanced at him, a look of warming to the haggling. “You see, we’re bound for the Territories for the winter and are in need of some provisioning.”
“You’ve got money? Gold, I take it?”
“Army scrip ought’n be as good as gold here, Mr. Gould.”
The dark-haired, full-bear
ded sutler smiled. “It is indeed, Mr. Sweete. Show me what it is you think you need for this trip of yours.”
“And we’ll talk.”
Gould showed more teeth, leaning across the plank counter. “Yes—we’ll talk.”
Shad had grunted his approval and walked over to the wood-and-glass case where the weapons were locked. “What’s them three guns? Never seen anything like ’em.”
“Winchesters,” Gould said. “Model 1866.”
“Let’s look.”
Gould unlocked the case and brought out one of the lever-action rifles with a full-length, twenty-four-inch barrel.
“What’s the caliber?”
“Forty-four rimfire, Mr. Sweete.”
“Paper, like army?”
The sutler shook his head. “Rimfire brass. Twenty-eight grains of powder behind a two-hundred-grain bullet.”
“Light charge,” the old mountain man grunted, used to bigger bore and bigger charges. “Must move that bullet at a good speed.”
“These give a man more than one shot. With one in the chamber and a full load—you have eighteen shots.”
“Eighteen, Jonah.”
“Spencer’s only got seven, Shad.”
“These the first I’ve seen of them,” Gould explained. “I’m told by the drummer who sold them to me he delivered the first pair to Major H. G. Litchfield, adjutant for the Department of the Platte, back in August.”
“How much you want for a pair?”
Gould studied it, scratching his chin. “Considering what I got in them—”
“How much?”
“A hundred-twenty dollars.”
He snorted, pulling at his gray beard. “You think a little gun like this gonna be a weapon a man can use out here on the plains, Jonah?”
Hook hefted it to his shoulder, down to look at the action, then back to his shoulder before answering. “That’s a lot of shooting, Shad.”
“Tell you what, Mr. Gould—I’ll give you what you want for two of these rifles. You throw in two hundred rounds each.”
Gould thought, then smiled. “I like a man who knows his own mind and can make a deal quickly. All right, Mr. Sweete. You and your partner have your Winchesters.”
Down the counter Sweete selected goods from the shelves: coffee, a little salt, and a lot of sugar. Toote sure enough loved her sugar, which reminded him to get both her and Pipe Woman the geegaws that would make her eyes shine when he came to fetch her up in the Laramie country. Bright finger rings and hawks-bells, some trade strouding and a bolt of fancy calico cloth. Along with a new brass kettle and some tin cups. Ribbons of many colors and a handful of shells brought all the way in from the far Pacific coast. Those pale, pink shells had been a pure wonder for Jonah Hook.
Then the old man had looked down at Jonah’s feet. “Them boots you’re wearing got deplorable on you.” Speaking to the sutler, “Show us your best boot. Hog-leg is preferred.”
“Your size, mister?”
Jonah shrugged, then brought one boot up to plop squarely down on the counter. “’Bout so big.”
Gould grinned. “I see.” He brought forth a tall pair of high-heeled boots. “In these parts, the teamsters and mule whackers call ’em Coffeyvilles. Other fellas prefer ’em because the heel is tall enough to hang in a stirrup the way they want.”
Jonah had tried them on and found them snug. “I can break ’em in all right, Shad. They’ll do.”
Sweete turned to Gould. “Get me a size bigger. Maybe two sizes.”
“What the hell for?” Jonah had protested. “Told you I could break these in.”
“I want you wearing more’n one pair of stockings from now on. Till I get you stomping around in buffler moccasins like me—least you can do is keep your feet warm this winter with a couple pairs of stockings.”
It was done. A new pair of boots he pulled on by yanking up the mule ears, with a snug, comfortable fit over two new pair of cotton stockings. Four new hickory shirts for each of them, and a new pair of canvas britches for Hook. With new suspenders and some deer-hide gloves to go along, they were ready to settle accounts with the sutler.
“By damn, I even think we got us a little left over to celebrate with,” Shad had declared. “We’ll be back in a couple days to pick up our truck and plunder from you, Mr. Gould.”
“It’ll be here, waiting.”
“Don’t go sell them two Winchesters on us.”
“They’re yours, Mr. Sweete. I’m taking them out of the case now.”
“C’mon, Jonah. I got me a terrible thirst and know a place down the street what sells saddle varnish they call whiskey!”
The plank floor in the dingy watering hole where Jonah and Shad sat at a corner table proved little better than dirt itself. In places the floor turned to mud and icy slop with so much November traffic. Despite the constant feeding of two wood stoves in the corners, the temperature in the place remained cold, the breath of so many like fine gauze above the knots at the tables and along the rickety bar, what with the incessant opening of the noisy, ill-fitting door.
“You mind I join you fellas?”
Jonah looked up into the haze of wood and tobacco smoke, enough to choke a man more accustomed to the clean air of the windswept prairie, finding a stranger gazing down at Sweete, his handsome face wreathed in breathsmoke. The stranger held a whole loaf of bread and an entire sausage that looked to weigh ten pounds by itself in one hand, while in the other he cradled a glass and the neck of a full bottle.
“Looks like you’re drinking the good stuff,” Sweete commented, his eyes coming clear enough to study the stranger’s bottle.
“I’m looking to share your table and my whiskey,” he said, shrugging a shoulder at the full room. “Don’t want to stand at the bar, eating my supper. And this here’s the last chair. Besides, you fellas look like good company.”
“Don’t mind company, neither of us,” Sweete said.
“And your whiskey too.” Hook licked his lips, anticipating the taste of the good stuff. If he could still taste the good stuff after so much of the saddle varnish.
“Got enough here to share,” the stranger offered, tearing off an end of the huge loaf of dark bread. “Help yourselves.” He reached beneath the tail of his calf-length coat and pulled forth a large skinning knife he put to work slicing off delicate slivers of the fragrant sausage.
It made Jonah’s mouth water. “Mister, you’re welcome at our table anytime. We was just talking about getting out of here and finding us something to eat.”
“From the looks of it—if you fellas don’t mind me being honest—you boys don’t look like you’re gonna be off anywhere for a while.”
Sweete rocked slightly in his chair. “Damn, but I think the man’s right, Jonah. S’pose we sit here and help this stranger dispose of his vittles, like he offered. Then we can work on finding ourselves a place to spend the night.”
“You fellas passing through yourselves?”
“On our way out of town,” Jonah answered. “You?”
“Up from Fort Dodge a few days back. Didn’t find no work down there. Damn, but I thought there’d always be something for a man to do around a army post—honest money—if he was willing to work.”
“Maybe not this time of year,” Sweete said. “Quarter-master across the creek at Larned might find you something to do keep you fed this winter. But you keep eating this high on the hog, you’ll be busted inside of a week.”
“I got a little money set back,” the stranger admitted. “Enough to feed on. Put me up a night or two when the weather gets bad—leastways until I can get on something regular.”
“Where you been working?”
His eyes went back to the sausage, slicing, slicing slowly in careful, considered strokes like he really knew what he was doing with the sticker. Like he was weighing his answer.
“Been down south of here for some time.”
“You a Yankee though,” Jonah said.
“Damn—but you don’t got
no manners,” Shad slurred. “He don’t mean to be rude, mister.”
“I s’pose I am,” the stranger answered. “Leastways, I didn’t do any fighting back east—if that’s what you’re asking. I figure you’re from the South.”
“By God, if you don’t have that right,” Jonah replied. “Where you do your fighting during the war?”
“Didn’t. Nothing more than a civilian—working what I could during that time.”
“Where ’bouts?” Shad inquired. “Out here to Kansas country?”
He tore part of a slice off with his big teeth in that handsome, well-groomed face of his. “Some time out here, yeah. The rest on the borderlands.”
It snagged Jonah’s attention as he stuffed a piece of dark crust into his own mouth. He vowed he would not sound anxious. “Just where … on the borderlands? Down to Texas? Up to Arkansas? Or just in the Territories?”
The stranger poured more good whiskey in the three short, smoky glasses. Apparently disarmed. “No. Mostly in southern Missouri. On the run to keep ahead of … ahead of any army wanted me to do its fighting for it.”
Hook sagged back in the chair, his belly feeling more settled now for the food. His gut more settled, yet disappointed was he that the stranger had not been part of either army that might know something of that band of freebooters that had come marching through his quiet valley back of a time.
“You been south of here, was it?” Jonah asked. “Not much on south, less’n you get into Injun country.”
“Injuns don’t bother me none,” he answered. “Now, that sausage was tasty, it was. You fellas eat up the rest. And,” he said, rising from his chair, “you figure on needing a place out of the snow—”
“It starting to snow outside?” Sweete asked, turning clumsily in his chair.
“Was when I came in. Big ol’ flakes, mister,” said the stranger. “I got me a small room for the night down the street.”
“Jenkins place?”
“That’s the one,” he replied.
“What’s a man do to feed himself down in the Territories?” Jonah asked before the stranger was ready to push away into the crowd.
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