He smiled at Hook. “Whatever he can to keep himself busy, I suppose. You fellas don’t finish that bottle, bring it ’long with you.”
Sweete held up his hand. “By the way …”
“Yeah, I forgot my manners too,” he replied, taking the old man’s hand, shaking it quickly then letting it go.
“Shad Sweete.”
The Confederate held his hand out to the stranger reaching across the table. “Jonah Hook.”
“Glad to meet you fellas. Riley Fordham is my name. You come make yourselves to home with me tonight before I pull out to go talk with the quartermaster out to Larned in the morning.”
“Least we’ll be dry, Jonah.”
Fordham smiled with those big, pretty teeth of his as he turned and was gone through the smoke and tobacco haze and the crowd. The air stirred as the noisy door opened, then closed, shutting out the swirl of wet, icy flakes that had come to settle on central Kansas Territory.
“He might know something, Shad.”
“It’s for certain the man knows good whiskey, Jonah.”
“Dammit—I mean he might know about that bunch disappeared down in the Territories.”
“Been a long time, son.”
“We were fixing on going down there together.”
“Been wanting to talk to you about that.”
“Sounds like your whiskey’s talking now, old man.”
Sweete laughed. “All right. Let’s talk another time about going down to sniff around.”
Jonah gazed through the crowd, through that ill-fitting door, and right on through the icy, swirling mist squeezing down on the central plains.
“I scent me something, Shad. That fella—Riley Fordham … he smells like he just might have something to tell me about Missouri. And the Territories.”
“And that bunch you got a hankering to gut real slow with a dull elk antler?”
With a crooked grin that lit up the face beneath the wolfish, yellowed eyes, Hook said, “Real … real slow.”
41
Late November, 1867
“YEAH, I KNEW of a bunch like that,” Riley Fordham admitted, casually. His eyes held steadily on Jonah.
Either he’s telling the truth about all of this and he don’t have nothing to hide, Jonah thought to himself, or the man is a downright cold-blooded liar.
“You know of ’em in southern Missouri?”
Fordham nodded. “Seems I recollect hearing they rode through down there too. Like some others. I hear Missouri was a bad place during the war. Why you so interested in that one bunch of bad characters?”
“I got family mixed up in it.” He watched Fordham cleaning his pistols at the small table against the wall.
Jonah sat on the edge of the bed in the tiny room. Both of them were waiting for Shad Sweete to return from Fort Larned, where the old mountain man had been summoned by the post commander early that morning, red-eyed and plagued with a hangover, swearing he was too old to be drinking that way with young guns like Hook and Fordham. Official business, the messenger from Larned had said.
But this was family business for Jonah. Because of it he felt he was walking on eggshells with the man rubbing the oilcloth back and forth, in and out that .44-caliber pistol barrel.
“Looking for a bunch I understand rode into Indian Territory not long after end of the war come to that part of the country.”
Fordham kept on polishing. “Lots of bad folks always run off to the Territories when it gets too hot for ’em elsewhere. How are you so sure the fellas you’re looking for went down there?”
“I was told.”
The oilcloth stopped. Then after a moment, began polishing again.
“Told, huh? Somebody knew where they were going?”
“I s’pose,” Jonah said, beginning to sense a growing tension from the man at the table. “I guess they didn’t figure on this fella having any reason for talking.”
Fordham cleared his throat. “But sounds like he did—talk that is.”
“Said the man who hurt him bragged that they was going to the Territories—where no one would find them. He said that just before his men burned my friend’s eyes out.”
Fordham gazed at Hook steadily, then finally looked back at his pistol, slipping the cylinder back into the frame. “Pretty cruel torture, I’d say. Knew a couple men once like that. Loved to hurt. One of ’em loved to hurt for a purpose. The other just because he loved hurting.”
“You might know the fellas I’m looking for.”
“What makes you say that, Jonah?”
“Those two you talked about sound an awful lot like the men who burned my friend’s eyes out are the same ones you said you knowed of.”
“Didn’t mean to make you think that now. What makes you figure the ones I heard of are the same ones burned the sheriff’s eyes out?”
Hook leaned forward, almost coming off the edge of the bed, startling Fordham. “You do know ’em! Where they’ve been—where they’re going!”
Fordham licked his lips gone dry, watching Hook ease the pistol from its holster and lay it on the bed beside him. “How—how you so sure—”
“I never said anything about a sheriff. You’re the one just come up with that all on your own. You was there when they did it to him, weren’t you?”
The man stared a moment at Hook’s pistol on the bed, then found Jonah’s eyes.
“I damn well had to get out. You’ll never understand what it was like being in that bunch.”
Jonah sagged. “I don’t give a damn about you or how you come clean about what you done. God knows there’s enough hell for all of you to spend more than one eternity with the devil for it. All I want to know is where you took my family.”
Riley Fordham was about to speak when the door burst open and Shad Sweete filled the doorway. In the next heartbeat Fordham shot to his feet, lunging toward that door, when Jonah pulled up the pistol and caught him midroom.
“What the hell, Jonah!”
“Lemme go!”
Hook shoved the muzzle backward into the man’s belly, driving Fordham back to his chair. “Let’s talk some more, Riley.”
“What’s this all about?” Sweete stepped into the room, glanced both ways down the narrow hall and closed the door.
“Fordham here was with the bunch took my family.”
“Now listen, Jonah—”
“You shuddup, Fordham,” Hook snapped.
Shad chuckled. “Jonah Hook. If that don’t beat all. You’re having some fun with this new friend of ours. But from the looks of it you got him really scared. Time to put that six-shoot away and—”
“You best believe me, Shad.”
Sweete’s face drained of color. “This for real, Jonah?”
Hook didn’t answer. The old man looked from Jonah’s face to Fordham’s.
“What he say is true, Fordham?”
The deserter finally nodded. “I run with ’em. And I figure I know who Jonah Hook is now.”
Shad took a step toward Fordham. “You know ’bout his family?”
“We took ’em. The others wanted to use up the woman and the girl—then and there and be done with ’em. But for some reason, Usher took a shine to the woman.”
“Usher?”
“Jubilee Usher. Big fella. Every bit as big as Sweete here.”
“He’s got my wife and children?”
Fordham’s head sank, his hands working, finger in finger. “The boys … Usher and Wiser sold ’em to someone down in the Territories.”
“Sold …” Jonah swallowed hard on the pain of it. “Sold my boys?”
“Who? Where they go?” Sweete wanted to know.
He shrugged. “Someone out of Texas.”
“I oughtta kill you just for the—”
“Hold it, Jonah!” Sweete said, snagging the pistol barrel.
“Don’t blame you if you do, Jonah,” Fordham said. “Took me long enough to decide to leave. I ain’t got anyone else to blame but me for staying long a
s I did.”
“Why did you?”
“I believed Usher, that he was the new Prophet. Believed God was talking to him—that this was part of our plan against the folks that drove our people out of Missouri.”
“Your people?”
“Latter-day Saints—most of us.”
Jonah looked up at Sweete, shaking his head in confusion.
“Mormons,” Sweete explained. “Usher sold the boys to comancheros, didn’t he?”
Fordham said, “Seems I remember that word being used, yes.”
“Where’s my wife?”
“You said Usher took a shine to her?” Sweete asked as he took another step and towered over Fordham.
“Yeah. He wouldn’t let any of the rest touch her. Keeping her for himself.”
Hook whispered then. “He … he using her?”
Fordham looked away to the single, small window in the room. The icy snow lanced against it noisily in that heavy silence. It seemed he could not bear to look at Hook.
“She’s his now, Jonah. Maybe you best forget and—”
He was across that six feet and had Fordham’s shirt in his hand, the pistol barrel shoved up under the man’s chin so far it made the deserter bug-eyed.
“Goddamn you, Fordham! I never will forget. Not till I find her. Not till I find my children. And make all of you pay for what you done to ’em!”
Sweete eased his big hand down on Jonah’s arm until the muzzle came away from Fordham’s throat. “He’s got every right in the world to splatter that ceiling with your brains, Fordham.”
“I … I know he does. Go ’head. Kill me now. Better that way. Least I won’t have to live with what I done. What I didn’t do to stop all the hurt.”
“This bunch brought hurt to a lot of folks?”
Fordham looked from Sweete to Jonah, whose eyes were only inches from his. “A lot. I figured I needed out—so I could make my peace with God about it.”
“S’pose you start now,” Sweete said. “Tell this man where he can find his wife.”
“And his daughter,” Fordham said quietly. “It was ’cause of her I run off. Usher’s bunch finds me, Usher will kill me for running off. No one gets out alive.”
“I don’t give a damn about them finding you, Fordham!” Hook snapped. “Just—tell—me—of—my—daughter.”
“Hattie,” Fordham said her name softly.
The sound of her name in that tiny room caught Jonah by surprise. But not nearly as much as did the look on Fordham’s face, or the catch in Fordham’s voice as he spoke the name. Almost with something akin to reverence.
“Yes,” Jonah replied, easing back, “tell me about Hattie.”
“I wish you’d just quit your bellyaching, Jonah.” Shad Sweete’s words were louder than normal as they had to be flung into a stiff wind edged with winter’s bite coming face-on out of the west. “You damn well now know you’re no closer to finding Usher’s bunch down south in the Territories than you are sniffing around out here on the plains.”
“It’s for sure we aren’t gonna find ’em out to Fort Laramie,” Hook grumbled.
Shad pulled up the fur collar more snugly around his face. “That’s where you just might be wrong, son. You spent time out there along that Emigrant Road your own self. And that’s the way any bunch like this Usher’s is going to make it back across the mountains, and on down to the Salt Lake where those Mormons have settled in.”
“You can’t stand us Mormons, can you?” asked Riley Fordham, riding on the far side of Jonah.
“It shows, does it?” Shad asked. Knowing it did—in his eyes for sure. Maybe in the sound of his voice.
Mormons had tried to kill Jim Bridger years before, and missing out on that, Brigham Young’s band of Danites had killed some of Sweete’s friends who worked Bridger’s ferry on the Green River. There was no love lost there, no, sir. If anything, that hatred had smoldered every bit as hot that day as it was the day he and Bridger had come down from the hills to find Fort Bridger half burned to the ground. They had found some of the stock killed and left to bloat in their pens, riding east in dread only to find the bodies of friends left to rot among the willows along Green River.
“Can’t say I’m proud of everything I’ve done,” Riley Fordham admitted.
“You wasn’t old enough then to be a part of that,” Sweete said, seeing the young man’s eyes mist up. Perhaps only with the cold, incessant wind stiff against their faces.
“My uncle was,” Fordham said. “And we always heard how heroic it was going against Indians and Gentiles—white men who were no better than savage Indians anyway.”
“That’s what they taught you ’bout what those butchers did up there on the Green?”
“I got my own sins to account for, Mr. Sweete,” Fordham said, answering it in his own way. “Can’t blame no one else for what I’ve done on my own.”
“With the help of this Usher and his right-hand man, the one you called Wiser,” Hook said.
“Perhaps that’s why I chose to stay on with the two of you back when we crossed the Smoky Hill,” Fordham admitted. “Because I’ve got my own righting of things to see to.”
The deserter from Jubilee Usher’s Danites had told the two stunned plainsmen all he could there in that tiny room near Fort Larned that late November day as winter came down to squeeze the central plains. Fordham told them how he had rarely seen Gritta Hook, only going from tent to ambulance and back again.
“They keep both her and Hattie pretty sleepy most of the time.”
“What they using?”
“Laudanum,” he answered. “The woman … your wife—she stays with another squad. Usher keeps the girl with a small bunch I rode with, under Wiser. That’s why we didn’t always know what was going on with the woman. But I was one Usher put in charge of keeping an eye on Hattie. A bright and pretty child, Mr. Hook,” Fordham said with clear admiration in his eyes. “If ever I had a daughter of my own, I’d pray she’d be like your Hattie.”
“Why’d you desert, leaving her in that den of animals, Fordham?”
“I knew there’d come a time when Wiser would get Usher talked into letting Wiser have Hattie for his own. It was just a matter of time. As each year passed, she grew older, prettier … starting to …” Fordham cleared his throat nervously. “She was starting to fill out, looking more and more like a young woman. I could see it in Wiser’s eyes when he looked at her. One day soon—he’d get her. ’Cause every man of us knew Wiser had already laid claim to her. He’d killed before for her.”
“Killed some of his own men?”
“More’n once—when Wiser figured they looked at Hattie the wrong way, or too long. Make no mistake about it—Wiser considered Hattie his already. I couldn’t stand to be around when the time came ….”
By that next morning Sweete and Hook had been ready to pull out, heading north, with plans to make it to the Platte before turning west. They were again throwing in together to accomplish something important for each other. With that hangover yesterday Shad had learned Phil Sheridan wanted him to ride to Fort Laramie, there to meet with, advise, and interpret for the peace commissioners who had completed but a portion of their work at the Medicine Lodge treaty.
Some of the commissioners were going west, to see what they could do to bring an end to the bloodshed up in Dakota Territory. For more than a year now the army had strung itself thin along the Bozeman Road, establishing Fort Reno, Fort Phil Kearny, and Fort C. F. Smith. Each post existing day to day under a virtual state of siege, plopped down as they were in the heart of prime Sioux and Northern Cheyenne hunting ground.
But the army had put a call out to the bands to come in and talk peace at Fort Laramie. And if Two Moons’ band of Shahiyena chose to come in, Shad was sure Toote and Pipe Woman would be with them. The possibility was something the old mountain man did not want to pass up.
Jonah Hook would ride along until he found some word of where Jubilee Usher’s band of murderers had been, or mi
ght be going. It was for certain Sweete had been right about one thing: if Usher’s bunch was heading west to the City of Saints, they would in all likelihood pass Fort Laramie. It was as good a place as any he had right now to continue his search.
This would be a journey of the heart for all three of them. Sweete to once more touch and hold Shell Woman. Hook to find some clue to where he might next search for wife and daughter. And Riley Fordham rode with the two scouts for no better reason than he had to. He had his own sins to atone for.
42
Late December, 1867
“THAT THEM?” JONAH asked the old mountain man standing beside him. The light snow swirled from time to time, but mostly it drifted down flat and fluffy. Hook and Sweete watched shadows of movement in the distance. Coming out of the north. Down from the heart of Red Cloud’s country.
“Chances be, Jonah,” the tall trapper replied, his eyes never straying from that distance, hopeful.
“Gotta be,” Hook said. “Down from the land of the Tongue and the Powder and the Crazy Woman. As wild a country as you were a young stallion in your early days, I’d wager.”
Sweete nodded. “Man thinks of nothing more’n getting his stinger dipped in a woman’s honey pot when he’s a young colt. Ain’t till he gets older that a man learns the real value of a woman.”
“He don’t have to get old to learn that. Not if he’s a lucky man, Shad.”
Jonah felt the keen, sharp-edged anticipation of the big man beside him. Not angry at Sweete for it, when he could have been. For there was plenty of need in Hook to experience just that same anticipation of seeing one’s woman again after a long separation. And while Hook realized his was a far greater separation in both time and distance, he begrudged Sweete not.
It had been Spotted Tail, chief of a large band of Brule Sioux camped near Fort Laramie these days, who had told the two white men that he had reason to believe Two Moons’ band of Cheyenne were coming south to the fort. Not so surprising as it might seem, the old chief had said. There were many bands coming in to Laramie to see what the peace-talkers had to say. After all, listening meant receiving presents. Fine presents the likes of which other bands had received at the talks down on Medicine Lodge Creek. Word of such splendor traveled fast along the moccasin telegraph, all the way up the Bozeman Road to Montana Territory.
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