Cry of the Hawk (25 page)

Roadbed, grading, riprap, and track crews along with the hunters, laborers all—paid off then sent into the unknown for a winter’s respite. If the money lasted a man that long.

“Company will be back here come spring,” explained one of the men at the long table inside the tent as Hook and Moser inched inside the doorway, hugging as close as they could to those in front, so to squeeze into the warmth put out by the valiant sheet-iron stove.

“When you reckon on spring coming?” asked someone up ahead in line.

“Like I’ve said before—there’s a good chance we’ll be wanting to lay rail by the middle of March. Mayhaps the end of March. You men need work then, come round. We’ll start putting down track right out yonder, where the last tie section finished work yesterday.”

“March. Maybe middle of March,” was the whisper coming back down the line among these comrades in arms sharing that vital secret with one another.

But until then, they would be on their own once more, each man taking his money and parting from this place.

“What-cher name?”

“Jonah Hook,” he answered, watching his clerk beginning to scan the ledger as Moser stepped up behind Jonah and the next man in line shifted to another clerk down the table.

“You two together, is it?” the man asked, eyeing Moser.

Artus nodded.

The fleshy man went back to his ledger, then looked up, squinting. “Don’t find your name here. You a recent hire for that tie gang?”

“I didn’t lay track. Hunted meat.”

He pursed his full, fleshy lips in a mean fashion that reminded him of a schoolteacher he’d suffered back in the Shenandoah. She was the reason he had never gone beyond the fourth grade.

“Why didn’t you say so to begin with, Hook?”

He didn’t figure it was a question needing an answer as the clerk dragged up another, smaller ledger, opened it, and scanned down the page with an accusingly slow index finger. “Here you are. ‘Hunter.’” He looked up at Hook. “You been here awhile. Shows here you’ve turned in your wagon and team and squared accounts as of yesterday.”

“That mean I owe anything?” he asked, suddenly worried.

“No, Mr. Hook. But you’ve made yourself some money I see.”

“Three months’ worth coming to me.”

“Good wages they are too.” He pointed at Artus. “After he takes his fifty dollars per month off the top.”

“All right by me.” Jonah watched the man behind the table reach down into an iron-banded box stationed beside his chair. Behind each payroll clerk stood a pair of armed men, short-barreled scatterguns cradled in the crook of each elbow. Their eyes were constantly on the move—from the laborers standing at the tent flaps with craning necks, to the clerks who dipped in and out of the boxes filled with neat stacks of colored scrip.

The man licked a finger and counted through the sheets of scrip. Then satisfied, he held a stack in the air for Artus, counted out another bundle he presented to Jonah. “You fellas ever seen Union money?”

“Never. Not till now anyway.” He stared down at all the money he held in his hand. “How much is here?”

“I have paid Mr. Moser one hundred fifty dollars of your seven hundred eighty-eight.”

“That leaves me how much?”

The clerk smiled benignly. “Six hundred thirty-eight. You both made a few bonuses during your stay. Now please move along, fellas.”

They did, staring dumbly at what they held in their hands as they exited between a pair of armed railroad guards and out to the cold of that winter’s day.

“I was hoping for a bonus myself,” Moser grumped, staring at the difference between his bills and Jonah’s.

“You’d complain if’n I was to slit your throat with a new knife.” He slapped his cousin on the back. “Any this bonus money is ours together. You got your pay ’cause you did all the hard work.”

“You was always there, helping me skin, Jonah.”

“Like I told you—we hired on together.”

“And we’re looking for family together.” Moser stopped, getting Jonah to slow up and turn around. “So what we do now?”

Hook shrugged. “I figure we could do with some whiskey to wash down the memory of all this buffalo stink we got on us. Get me a new pair of boots and two new rifles for us.”

“A rifle—for me?”

“You best figure on using some of that money to outfit yourself for the road, Artus.”

Moser wagged his head, smiling broadly. “Damn, won’t that be something. Us having new boots and maybe a new shirt to go along with ’em—and a brand new shiny rifle too.”

“We got to get our outfits before we go drinking up everything we earned.”

“How ’bout some poker, Jonah?”

“Does figure that we’re due some fun, Artus. Let’s get into town and see what they got for us in the way of trail fixin’s.”

They saddled their Creek horses down in the tent shantytown and mounted. Jonah cradled the old muzzle loader across his lap as they pointed their noses east, a stiff, chill wind at their back, troubling the long, brown hair that now brushed Hook’s shoulders. Icy flakes hammered them in a growing swirl of white against the monotonous brown gray world as they pushed back toward Abilene.

Hard for a man to really tell, with as thick as the clouds hung overhead, but it was midafternoon by the time they reached the new town. Within another hour, they were stepping from a mercantile, wearing unfamiliar new boots, new canvas britches, and calico shirts. With new, stiff pinch hats on their heads and new Spencer rifles cradled protectively in their arms. Hook and Moser tied their old clothes in saddlepacks at the edge of the wide street.

“What now, Jonah?” Moser sighed.

“Don’t think I ever seen you smile so big, cousin.”

“Never had so much to smile about, I s’pose. There was a time or two that last few months where I got to wondering if I’d make it through butchering out another buffalo. We was always bringing our meat in, and it disappeared quicker’n we could shoot and gut and skin.”

“You sure had a bad mouth on you there the last few months.”

“What you expect—up to my elbows in blood ever’ day. Smelling like a gut-eater all the time. Even caught myself turning up my nose at my own smell, Jonah. Come a time or two the wind shifted.”

“We do smell like two of the prairie’s finest, don’t we?”

“You reckon there’s a place a man can get some of this washed off?”

He looked up, then down the one street that Abilene boasted beside the newly laid track. “One of these watering holes bound to have some water they can heat up for a man wanting to scrape some prairie stink off him. C’mon.”

In minutes they were standing at a low bar, watching the approach of an ugly barman.

“Most fellas just like washing the dirt down with some of my whiskey,” he told the pair of buffalo hunters. “I suppose for a dollar I could get them out back to heat you some water you two could swish around in.” He shrugged and turned. “Follow me.”

They pushed past a blanket hung over a crude doorway, passing into a steamy, warm room where two stoves were crackling, pumping out plenty of heat. Beads of moisture popped out on Hook’s forehead, just standing there, his eyes peering through the foggy gloom.

“Hey! Get over here!” the barman ordered, then turned to whisper to the two men. “This bunch ain’t bad as a lot I’ve seen—ugly as sin and stupid to boot. But they do what I tell ’em, and they keep the place clean.”

Jonah watched two middle-aged squaws appear out of the gloom of lamplight and steam. Dark stains covered the fronts of their hide dresses, from sagging breasts to the soaked moccasins they wore on their feet.

“We take in laundry,” the barman explained, then smiled as if in need of no more explanation. “And if the price is right, either one of these ugly sisters can clean a man’s plow right proper. Damn, but Injun women is good in the blankets.”

He reached over and squeezed a woman, one hand on her rump, the other rubbing a breast. She looked at Moser and Hook with a faint smile, as if already figuring out what they had come for.

“No, they want to wash,” said the barman, loudly, as if the women were deaf just because they did not readily understand his English. “No poking now.” In sign with his hands and gyrating hips, he made the women understand that it was not fornication the customers had come for—but some of the squaws’ hot water instead.

“That’ll be two dollars,” he said.

When Jonah had paid him, the barman bent down and gave one of the squaws a sloppy kiss on the mouth, then turned through the blanket doorway, proud of himself as the woman wiped the back of her hand across her mouth and grimaced. The two squaws looked at the pair of men, wrinkling their noses slightly at the stench in the close room. Hook could tell that the smell of the buffalo hung heavy about them both. He pinched his fingers on his nostrils and made a wrinkled face to show he agreed with them.

Both old squaws smiled, then signaled the white men into the far reaches of the low-roofed back room, where they were shown low wooden tubs on the floor, filled with half-dirty water, a scum of soapsuds drifting on the surface. Jonah dabbed a finger into the water.

“Least it’s warm, cousin. You take that’un.”

“We gonna undress in front of these women?”

“They ain’t women, Artus. They just two old squaws.”

Jonah dropped his britches and hurried out of his boots. When he had his longhandles off, the rifle and the belt gun handy beside the tub, he stepped in and settled himself. “Now don’t this feel good. I ain’t had something like this soak in … last time was before I walked off to join General Price.”

“You been smelling a might gamy, that’s for—”

Jonah looked up when Artus stopped talking suddenly. Out of the foggy haze lit with two hissing oil lamps emerged a third woman, younger than the other two and the closest thing to pretty Jonah had seen in years. He swallowed hard, looking at the way her black hair gleamed in the saffron light as she pulled the hood from her head, her proud breasts pressed against the buckskin dress as she dragged the blanket capote off her shoulders.

“Lordee, Jonah—I didn’t figure on taking a bath in front of a girl.”

“She … she ain’t a girl, not rightly.” From what he could see, she was something damned closer to being a woman.

Now she flicked her shy eyes at them both, then bent to pick up the bundle she had carried in with her. Clothing, secured in a snow-stiffened canvas bag. One of the old women came over to her, talking in a foreign tongue. The girl set her bundle aside and went to a stove, where she picked up a steaming kettle. From it she poured a little hot water in Jonah’s tub, warming the water for the white man.

“You out—wash clothes,” she said brokenly.

Broken though they were, the words fell clearly English on his ears. Yet it took a moment more before they registered. In that time, Jonah found himself staring—absorbed in studying the way in which coming in from the cold had made the young woman’s high-boned, copper cheeks glow, how her hair lay plastered against the side of her head with melted snow and the overwhelming humidity of this low-roofed back room.

Jonah cursed himself. A faint, burning tingle rumbled across his loins, stirring what had been for so long dormant flesh. He had clearly been too long without a woman.

“She wants us out?” Moser asked.

“Seems so,” he replied, not taking his eyes off the woman, who put the kettle back on the stove. She then threw Moser a towel.

“I ain’t finished,” Artus said. “Just getting to enjoy this. ’Sides, we paid a dollar to sit and—”

“Looks like we ought to go play some cards, Artus. ’Pears our time is up lollygagging here in this soapy water.” He reached up to catch a towel the woman threw him, high enough in the air that he had to come out of the tub, standing just enough.

She smiled at Hook, admiringly, then turned away to go work with the two older women.

“Thank God that squaw looked away,” Moser complained. “I wasn’t about to come out with no woman staring at my privates like that. You didn’t tell me these Injun women are so bold they got no shame to ’em.”

Hook hurriedly dabbed the damp towel over the length of his shivering body, water puddling onto the rough-plank floor with the melting snow the young woman had dragged in. “Don’t know a thing about Injun women, cousin.”

“But you spent time out here.”

He grabbed for his longhandles. “Don’t mean I ever met an Injun woman. Can’t claim I ever seen a one, much less know anything about ’em. C’mon—grab your clothes. We got a poker table calling out to us.”

Moser wagged his head, skipping into his canvas britches. “But I damn well know everybody we’ve talked to since coming out here tells us they swear by Injun women—says squaws’re the best for poking that can be.”

For the moment Hook longingly studied the difference in the rear ends of the three women. Two were broad-beamed and shapelessly straining against their hide dresses. So different was the young woman’s rump, small and firm as it pressed every bit as much against its confining buckskin dress, clearly outlined.

“I don’t know nothing about that squaw-poking, cousin. But I can tell you, I’d be less than a man if I didn’t want to find out about Injun women for myself.”

20

Late November, 1866

H
IS OWN RUMP
had that comfortable feeling to it despite the fact it was cradled upon a hard chair, that sort of feeling that came from a familiar numbness that came of being planted for a time.

Jonah Hook played cards the way he had hunted buffalo. It was not an all-consuming passion, as it was for some on this frontier, more something to pass the time.

The same could not be said for the five others around the big table. Four of them were tie-gang laborers, big men with hardened hands and dull, clearly defined moves to their physical presence. Nothing slight about them.

The last was clearly not of this place, in speech and dress and the manner in which the man conducted himself. Jonah figured he could not be over thirty—no older than he. But despite the fact that the man did not fit in with the other six players in even the crudeness of their talk, the well-groomed man was nonetheless comfortable with this table and this game of cards, and perhaps the whiskey the barman kept at the ready whenever the young, long-mustached card player nodded in his direction.