Cry of the Hawk (26 page)

Over the hours Jonah and Artus had been planted at the table, the first hints of cold had rattled into a plains snowstorm that whistled and threw everything it had against the north side of the clapboard building. Every time someone new came or went, the door thrust open with a noisy will of its own, urged on by a chill scut of freezing wind laced with icy snow. At times the arriving patrons would require the barman to hustle from his perch behind his bar and perform another sort of commerce at his nearby barrels of crackers, boxes of dry goods and shelves piled with all those sundry items the populace of central Kansas could not live without. He was clearly a businessman intent on making a living—if not from whiskey and cards, then from hawking his general merchandise to those who had nowhere else to acquire what was here for sale.

And, as well, he took in laundry. At least that’s how he had started with the three Pawnee women when the track first neared this one-street town, he was prompt to explain to anyone who would listen at the bar or from the few tables that occupied most of the floor space in the low-roofed shanty of a smoky saloon. No paintings of nudes here behind the bar, at least not yet. And no smoky mirror behind those neatly arranged bottles. No, all that was unnecessary. A man came to his establishment not to have to look at himself or to stare at a wall full of bottles. His customers came to this place to drink and play cards.

Or they came to have a go at one of his three Pawnee whores.

“Didn’t know they was whores,” Moser whispered to Jonah there at the table. “I figured they really was washing clothes back there.”

Across the table one of the big men laughed, raising his red-rimmed eyes from considering the merits of his cards held in those huge-knuckled, well-worked hands. “You’re new here, not to know them three will wash the dew off your lily, Secesh!”

Hook felt the tremble go across the flat of his stomach at the mention of that word—something unrepentant Yankees liked to call Southerners. Not like
Rebel
—something a man would call himself proudly. But instead, it had become that sort of slur a Yankee could use in polite company and still get away with. Secessionist. “Secesh” for short. Almost as bad as calling a man’s family to task—questioning his breeding, his mother, and a nameless, no-count father as well.

“You fight in the war?” Jonah asked, sullen and telling himself to let it be.

“Third Michigan I was.” The man smiled cruelly. “We ever fight, Secesh?”

Hook wasn’t about to let the man know that word nettled him.

“Not that I reckon on knowing.”

“You’d remember the Third Michigan if you’d fought us. Likely you’d not be here playing cards with me and Hiram here.” He tossed his head to his partner in the next chair, every bit as big and imposing in the splash of yellow lamplight and shadow in the barroom now that the sun had made its exit for the night. “Likely, you’d be laying in some moldy grave with all your kind.”

“Your outfit tough?” Moser asked.

“We crushed every Johnny outfit tried us,” Hiram, the second man, answered. “If you wanna call that tough.”

“I’ll take two,” Hook told the dealer, another of the hard-handed laborers who didn’t appear willing to join in on the verbal sparring. Jonah had been struck by the faint, hard edge to the taciturn man’s words, something that spoke of distant Teutonic roots.

A German like me, he had thought the first time the man spoke hours ago when the first deal was set round that table.

The blanket behind him rustled, and Jonah watched the eyes of the others around the table fix upon something pleasant. He turned to glance and found the young Pawnee woman emerging with a bundle of clothing wrapped in a canvas sheet, bound with manila twine. She stood for a moment at the bar, whispering to the barman, then finally hefted her delivery under her arm and set off toward the door as the barman disappeared behind the blanket curtain.

The first big man toppled his chair with a shattering scrape as he got out of it and lumbered toward the woman, blocking her way at the door, where melted snow and ice and mud made for a crusty, red-tinged puddle.

She tried to step around him in one direction, then the other. He stood there grinning at her, not saying a thing.

Jonah found Artus looking at him. Hook let his eyes drop slowly down to Moser’s waist, where the pistol butt poked from the front of his coat like a sheep’s hoof. When he looked back at his cousin’s face, Hook found Moser wide-eyed with a tinge of fear at what might be expected of him in the next few minutes.

“You go,” she growled in that English that wasn’t readily understandable to the rest in the room filled with murky light. But with a shove of her arm, she made her meaning clear enough.

Hook admired her from that moment. Not the kind to be content with calling out for her employer. She had declared her intention to right the situation on her own. While he had clearly liked what he saw of her willowy frame and dark eyes back in the washroom hours ago, Hook was all the more attracted now.

“You hear that, Hiram? She’s telling me to go.” The big man grabbed her shoulders and stuffed his face down into the nape of her neck as the bundle splashed into the muddy puddle. The woman tried to batter the big man with her clenched fists.

Hiram was up and moving their way. “Looks like you need some help, Simmons. Whatsamatter? Little hellcat more’n you can handle by yourself?”

Simmons wrenched one of her wrists away from the hold she had in his hair and looped it roughly behind the woman’s back. She arched, wincing in pain as he shoved her toward an empty table.

“Goddamned redskin whore,” he grumbled. “Not like she ain’t had my pecker in her times before, is it?”

“Maybe she don’t like you much as you like her, Simmons!” Hiram joked.

They both laughed. Hook sat there, growing numb by the moment, the thunder in his ears now a roaring tumult. The palms of his hands itched, sweating, as he glanced at the other three men at the table.

Hiram turned to the players as he threw the woman atop an empty table at the edge of the lamplight. “You boys want any of this when I get done—you can have her.”

“I’m next, Simmons,” Hiram said huskily as he snagged the woman’s flaying arms and pulled them over her head, stretching the squaw across the table on her back.

“She’ll throw rocks at your pecker once she gets a fill of mine, Hiram.”

Simmons savagely tore up the bottom of her deerhide dress, stepping in between the woman’s legs. They were encased in deerhide leggings tied to a belt around her bare waist. A wide piece of wool cloth hung like a short breechclout from the same belt, covering that flesh left bare by the leggings. Hiram yanked on it once, then a second time before the belt snapped and the cloth fell away. She began kicking at Simmons for all she was worth, with what strength she could muster against the both of them, cursing in her own tongue.

The heat had risen in Hook’s throat, knowing what was about to happen and not knowing what to do. Perhaps leave. It was not of his concern, he told himself.

Then he remembered Gritta. Sensing somehow that she too might be alone against men such as these who came and took what they wanted and all others be damned. Gritta too might be unable to fight her own fight—

“Leave her be!” Hook said, loud enough that Hiram’s head snapped up.

But only his. Simmons kept on, one thing only on his mind now, blood worked up and warmed to lust as he braced one of the woman’s legs against the table, the other leg pinned with his huge hand, bruising the woman’s dark-haired flesh while he tore at the buttons to his britches.

“Simmons! You got trouble,” Hiram snarled, wagging his head once at the table.

The big man glanced over his shoulder, squinted his eyes at Hook, then slowly grinned as he freed the last button on his britches. “Don’t you want none of this, Secesh? A good Pawnee honey pot? Best you ever had out here, I’ll bet.”

“Said to leave her be.” Jonah leaned back slightly at the same time the well-dressed dealer backed slowly from the table, arose, and walked slowly to the bar behind Hook.

“I heard you, Secesh. But I ain’t gonna leave it be. She’ll get paid, so she’s got what’s coming.”

Artus eased back from the table. From the corner of his eye, Jonah could see his cousin’s hand resting on the pistol.

“Let’s play cards, boys,” Hook said quietly, as he watched Simmons tug at the front of his longhandles, trying to free his swollen flesh.

“When I’m done here, you goddamned stupid idjit!” Simmons barked.

“Pull your damned trousers up,” Hook said quietly.

Simmons turned, his engorged flesh protruding from the front of his stained longhandles, eyes flaring like glowing flints at the other two men still seated like stone at the table with the Southerners. “Shut that stupid Secesh bastard up!”

As if moving in deep, clear water, the other two tie-gang laborers turned to look in Hook’s direction, then rose from their chairs. Their eyes told it—going for their guns.

Beside Jonah, Moser was no slower in getting his big hog-leg out of his coat, and stumbling backward as he pushed himself away from the chair.

Hook fired and fired again at the first of the pair, watching him crumple in half and go to the floor like a damp rag neatly folded and lying still in the muddy water. A bullet whispered past Jonah’s ear, from the second man’s gun. Funny to think on it like that—a whisper when the guns were roaring, rocking off the roof of this tight, closed room.

Jonah’s next shot missed the second man as he dived to the side, his left arm already bloodied by Moser’s ball. Then the laborer was shoved forward, clutching at his back with his gun hand, slowly turning, his eyes full of fear and question as he turned round to look at Hiram behind him.

“Shit!” Hiram cursed, his gun out, realizing he had shot one of his own in the melee.

It was all he said as Hook dropped to his knees and aimed, hitting Hiram low in the gut. The man clutched his belly. Hook fired a fourth shot, blackening Hiram’s chest just as Jonah felt an intense heat and pressure in a shoulder. Spun around sideways, falling, seeing the muzzle of Simmons’s gun blaze a second time in the dim light, an orange burst of quick flame, followed by a snap of breaking floorboard beside Jonah’s head where the ball impacted.

Hook straightened the arm at his target and pulled the trigger on instinct, hitting Simmons high in the chest, almost in the throat. The hole opened up bright red on his dirty longhandles. Still the big man took a step forward, his manhood wagging before him, and fired at his tormentor.

Through the gunsmoke at the corner of his eye Jonah saw Moser struggling with his old pistol on his knees, snapping caps. Then Hook fired again, hitting Simmons lower in the chest this time. The big man reeled a moment and took another step forward, bringing his pistol up slowly.

Hook clicked one cylinder, then a second as Simmons came on, smearing the bright blood down his greasy shirt with one hand. Frantic, Jonah shouted. “Shoot ’im! Artus, shoot!”

Moser opened his mouth as Simmons got his pistol up and cocked the hammer.

“My play now, Secesh,” he growled with a smile as a gurgle of blood poured from his lower lip.

Then the side of the big man’s face disappeared in a blinding glow of pink gore.

Hook winced at the blast, like a turtle shrinking his head back into his body, whirling onto the painful shoulder in that echoing roar of a pistol behind his ear. Moser was flattened on his belly, still struggling with his own weapon.

And the well-dressed young card man gripping an army 44 at arm’s length, smoke crawling lazily from the muzzle.

Hook stared, blinking, while the man walked over to him.

“You’re bleeding a bit,” the stranger said. “That will be a nasty one, I reckon.” Then he stepped over to Artus. “Help your friend get out of here, will you?”

Moser nodded. Both of them watched the younger man walk over to the fallen laborers. He knelt and inspected one, then the others.

“Simmons is dead. So’s this one called Hiram.” The stranger stood, straightening his coat and stuffing his pistol away beneath it at last. “The other two are hurt bad—but they ain’t dead.”

“You two g’won get outta here now.”

Hook turned to find the barman with a double-barreled fowler at the blanketed doorway.

“We’ll go,” Jonah said, rising, feeling the sharp numbness growing in the shoulder. Half his chest was burning with sharp pain already. He glanced at the young Pawnee woman as she rolled off the table and collapsed to the floor, gathering her clothing up, straightening it as best as she could.

It had all happened so quickly, sweeping them all up into the maddening swirl before any of them knew how to pull out.

“These four will likely have friends,” the card man said. “I spent some time scouting for the Union during the war, and some time out here since. So I figure you ought to take my advice. You best do what this barkeep says—and ride while you can.”

“Where?” Moser asked.

“Doesn’t matter now,” said the barman. “Just get out of my place. Out of Abilene.”

Hook stuffed the pistol into his left hand already wet with blood from the shoulder. He held out the right to the young card man. “Thank you, mister. Likely saved my life.”

“I’m still trying to do that. But your life ain’t gonna be worth much if you aren’t long gone from here in the next few minutes.”

“My name’s Jonah Hook.”

The young man smiled. “I’ll remember that.”

Jonah squeezed the gunman’s hand. “Maybe we’ll run across each other down the road sometime.”

“If you like cards and beer, we’ll likely bump into one another, sometime,” he said to Hook. “My name is James Butler Hickok.”

21

December, 1866

“Y
OU GONNA KEEP
her with us?”

Many times had Artus Moser asked that question since the snowy night he had fled the Abilene watering hole with Jonah Hook and the Pawnee woman.

And over the past nine days—or was it ten now?—Moser had grown more scared of this foreign land and the way winter settled down on them in the middle of a great big patch of nothing, a rolling prairie where fleeing west they had come upon a line shack beside the unfinished roadbed where track would be laid come spring.