Cry of the Hawk (2 page)

—Richard S. Brownlee
Gray Ghosts of the Confederacy

Prologue

Late Summer, 1908

“T
HERE
AIN’T TIME
for you to make it back to town before dark,” the old frontiersman said. “I best make you comfortable here.”

Nate Deidecker marveled at the old man’s vitality. Something on the order of seventy-one years old now, and still the former plains scout stood as straight as a fresh-split fence rail. Only the careful, considered pace he gave to all things betrayed his true age.

“I appreciate that, Mr. Hook.”

“Told you—you’re to call me Jonah.” The old man smiled, a few of his teeth missing. Not unexpected. “We’re friends, Nate.”

Nathan appreciated that, having made a friend like Jonah Hook so quickly. Yet there was something that bothered the newspaperman who had traveled to Wyoming from Omaha, on a hunch and a limited budget begrudged him from a tightfisted managing editor at the
Omaha Bee.
In 1908 there weren’t many newsmen actively following up the old warriors who still had stories to tell.

Having heard whisper of an unknown former scout living somewhere at the base of the Big Horn Mountains, Deidecker had finally convinced his editor and publisher to open their wallets and spring for a round-trip rail ticket, along with expenses for hiring the horse and carriage he had driven down from Sheridan.

   Stepping off the railroad platform, he had been met by the aging newsman who had founded and owned the Sheridan
Press.

“How’d you end up picking me, Mr. Kemper?” Deidecker asked as the two sat down for coffee once a carriage and horse had been secured outside the bustling Sheridan café. The summer sunlight was startlingly bright on the high plains. Even here in the café, Deidecker found himself squinting.

“You been writing stories, haven’t you?”

Nate swallowed the hot coffee, its scorch something akin to the hot August weather that had accompanied him all the way west across Nebraska. “What stories?”

The old newsman chuckled. “Your stories about the old plainsmen. I don’t mean those goddamned bragging, strutting peacocks we’ve seen time and again.” He quickly leaned across the table, head close, grasping Deidecker’s wrist between his old hands. “We’re talking a different sort of man here, you understand.”

Nate Deidecker looked down at the waxy hands gripping him, the ink forever tattooed in dark crescents at the base of the man’s fingernails. “I understand, Mr. Kemper. Just as you said when you wrote me—not like Buffalo Bill over at Cody, or Pawnee Bill down in Oklahoma. You said Will Kemper would steer me to the real thing.”

Kemper leaned back and seemed to suck on a tooth a moment before speaking. “This man’s the real thing. Those others you’ve been writing about either been honest-to-goodness grandstanders or they simply aren’t the caliber of the man I want you to meet.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jonah Hook.”

“Why haven’t I ever heard of him?”

Kemper smiled, running a single finger around the rim of his white china cup. “As long as I’ve been writing stories out here, it seems the ones who got the best stories to tell are always the ones who keep most to themselves.”

Deidecker ruminated on that, sipping the hot coffee he really didn’t relish on this hot summer afternoon. Something else to drink was on his mind, like a beer in that shadowy, beckoning place across the street. Unconsciously he wiped a hand across his lips before he replied.

“One thing’s bothered me ever since that first letter you wrote me.”

“You write good stuff, young man,” Kemper said. “That’s why I came to you first. I’ve been reading everything you’ve written about the old scouts you’ve found on your own. You can be proud your copy’s been picked up by the
Tribune
and the
Herald.
”

“I am—but I want to know why you want me to talk with this particular fella. Why don’t you?”

“Don’t get me wrong—I’ve talked with the man many a time,” Kemper said, without the least bit of defensiveness.

“Surely you could write this story yourself. Why don’t you?”

Kemper once more leaned in close to the young reporter.

“Because you write as well as I did when I was your goddamned age, Deidecker.” Slowly he creaked back in the chair. “I don’t write that well now. Don’t do anything that well now.”

Deidecker pushed his cup and saucer aside, glad to be through with it. Itching to get on with the long ride south out of Sheridan. “He knows I’m coming?”

“Like I said, when you told me you’d be here—I went down there to tell Jonah.”

“No problems?”

Kemper shook his head. “No problems. Just take it slow. Don’t rush things.”

Deidecker had patted his coat pocket, knowing he would be shedding the wool suit coat as soon as he stepped outside to the carriage. From inside the pocket came the reassuring sound of the folded map Will Kemper had drawn him of the route to the cabin where the Omaha newsman would find this reclusive Jonah Hook.

“I best be going.”

Kemper looked out the window. “Yes. It’s a long ride.”

Deidecker held his hand down to the Sheridan newsman, who did not rise from his chair, as if he were comfortable right as he was and was not about to be disturbed from his perch by the formalities of another man’s leave-taking. Kemper took Nate’s hand. They shook, then the older man held Deidecker’s for a moment longer, looking directly into his eyes.

“Find out about the woman—his wife,” Kemper whispered. “No man’s ever found out about her.”

Nate remembered how at that very moment the cold splash of something had run down the length of his spinal cord. “Is she—was she killed somehow?”

Kemper removed his hand from Deidecker’s sweating palms. “Not exactly. No. You’ll see her … meet her.”

“She’s there? With the old man.”

“He loves her deeply. And she’s all he has now. Except the stories.”

“The stories.”

“Best you go now.”

“Yes, Mr. Kemper. I’ll come round when I get back to town.”

Kemper was gazing back out the window at the bright splash of liquid sunshine spraying the hot, dusty street.

“Like I said, Mr. Deidecker. Take your time asking—and you will be richly rewarded.”

Funny how things had turned out on that long ride south from Sheridan, Wyoming, crossing the Tongue River and heading toward the country where Colonel Henry B. Carrington had decided to raise the pine stockade for his Fort Phil Kearny in the middle of Red Cloud’s hunting ground some forty-two years gone. Not that long, Nate had thought at first. Many a man that old or older.

But as the horse hit its comfortable stride and the wheels of the jitney clattered and rumbled along the jarring ruts of the old wagon road that led him south toward the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains, Nathan Deidecker himself slowed down.

His heart found a new pace. What’s more, his own youthful and impetuous hurry to get on with things was seeping out of him with every drop of sweat pulled from him by this high, arid land. What was normally the aggravation of summer’s heat now became something to be savored as richly as the smell of green-backed and white sage, stunted cedar and juniper.

He turned again now to look at the woman in her old rocking chair, remembering Kemper’s cryptic admonition.

“
Find out about the woman.
”

Deidecker watched as the thin old man descended the five creaking steps from the porch into the grassy, dusty yard in front of the old cabin nestled here in the foothills, beneath the shadow of Cloud Peak.

Jonah Hook went about pulling firewood from the cords of it he had stacked against the north and west sides of the cabin. A few pieces he selected for kindling and split them agilely. One final thin sliver of kindling the old man furred into curls that he laid atop a generous pile of ashes filling an old fire pit. Dragging a wooden lucifer across one of the flat stones ringing the fire pit, Hook started his supper fire as the sun sank closer and closer to Cloud Peak.

Swallowing hard, just as he had when preparing to commit one of the deadly sins of a schoolboy in class with the teacher’s back turned, Deidecker glanced again at the old woman. For the first time all afternoon, finding himself amazed that she continued to rock in that dark, cherry-wood, ladder-back rocker with its old arms rubbed down to the color of yellow pine.

She hadn’t spoken to him all afternoon. Looking at him only once with those cloudy blue eyes of hers when the old man first brought the newsman up onto the porch when Deidecker arrived. Here out of the sun at that moment, she had seemed to study something in his eyes only, and only for a moment—not really looking at the newspaperman, rather looking through him, somewhere—then went back to staring up at the green hills gone summer brown and gold, beyond them the blue and purple and lavender of the high places tucked beneath the clouds of this high land.

Never a word. Not a sound from her except for the incessant creaking of the rocker’s bows on the plank porch.

“I built this place for us, you know.”

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.