Cry of the Hawk (27 page)

Spring.

That had such a good ring to Moser’s ears as he said the word to himself. And pulled the blanket much tighter about his shoulders. He had allowed himself only one in keeping warm, giving another to the Pawnee woman. The rest were for Jonah—lying there on the leaky floor of the clapboard line shack, where the wind whispered through the joints and swirled snow a’times up through the cracks. On the rough planks Hook lay shivering, his lips barely moving in an endless chatter of fevered remembering.

There wasn’t much they could do for real heat in this tiny place. About all was to make it warm enough to keep the frost down on the inside of the clapboard walls that moaned each time the strong north wind attempted to grunt the shack over on them. The days were gray and the nights black and starless, as if the three of them had been set down in the middle of a flat tableland and someone had overturned a bowl atop them, allowing in only the thinnest stream of light off the far horizon when the sun rose, or when it set but a few hours later.

Artus had gone and collected what Hook had called squaw wood—deadfall down by the creek less than a mile away. That creek eventually gave itself to the Smoky Hill. The trees and brush along its banks offered the only firewood for them. When it ran out, the young, flat-nosed woman went in search of more.

She was gone what seemed like an eternity for him, Moser forced to sit there, watching his own breath curl up before his eyes—having to concentrate so that he would not stare at Jonah’s face barely visible for the blankets they had piled cocoonlike about him as the wounded man shivered from an internal fire.

Artus dared not think about losing Jonah. That scared him more than losing his daddy right after the war. With the squaw gone off and Jonah delirious with fever, for the first time Artus felt the pinch of loneliness and wondered if he would make it out alive. Afraid of dying.

It was then that he remembered scraps and fragments of the war—unwillingly. But the memories gave him some solace, remembering how he had felt best when they were about to go into battle, close enough to the Yankees to hear the big cannon softening things up, maybe even close enough to see the Yankee battle-flags snapping far across some grassy field, through the leafy trees, maybe up some bare slope to the hilltop they would soon have to charge, racing into the face of grapeshot and canister and wheezing death cries from the long lines of bloodied men falling on either side of Artus, crying out and falling …

But the hardest times for Moser had been the waiting, and the marching to wait some more as the generals moved their regiments about, intent on probing for an offensive or intent on escaping to fight another day. That’s when he had time to remember, like now. Time to remember and reflect and dwell on all that he had lived through.

Artus had learned never to grow too close to his fellow soldiers in that regiment and company and squad and mess. Never—because chances were they would be ripped from him by some bloody hand cutting a swath of gore and mangled flesh through what friendship had been kindled. Best not know their names.

Now his cousin lay dying on the floor of this tiny line shack beside a graded roadbed where the iron rails were to cross the creek come spring.

Spring.

But the woman returned, clutching the four corners of the one thin blanket she had taken along when she had left hours ago making Moser feel she was abandoning him at last.

“That’s right!” he had yelled at her. “Damn squaw—who needs you anyway! You belong out here … so run off if you’ve a mind to!”

So now he felt bad about screaming at her from that narrow doorway, his words flung at her back, into the snowless wind that raised swirls of old, icy snow at her feet as she plodded into the gray world away from the creek, where there was hope of finding firewood.

But she was back, dropping her blanket bundle beside the tiny one-foot-square sheet-iron stove in the corner. It was the only thing warm enough in the shack to touch, though this morning they had run out of Moser’s squaw wood. There remained but a few coals. He could see their brave, red struggle as she drew back the grate door with her knife handle.

“What’s that?” he asked as she crumbled something from her blanket into the stove. Then he realized.

“That’s a damned cow pie!” Moser exclaimed, wonder crossing his face, sensing some instant confusion—not certain if he should feel relief just yet.

“Buff …” She tried the word after a moment when the first crumbled chip smoldered and took to the heat of the coals. “Buff …”

“Buffalo?”

She nodded. Then crumbled more of the chip, using the tiny pieces as kindling in rebuilding the fire.

“Buffalo pie,” he said to himself, taking his hands from the blanket and holding them near the front of that tiny stove. “By God—you might have saved you and me doing this, woman.”

But of a sudden he felt guilty for saying that, his eyes drawn magnetically to the pale-skinned, mumbling cousin of his. Artus struggled, but with the woman’s help he moved Hook closer to the stove. As she fed the stove from her cache of prairie fodder, Moser watched for some sign of improvement in Jonah. It never came as another twilight brought a brief period of setting, yellow light sprayed on the snow while the sun dipped out of the low-hung clouds on its path beyond the far mountains.

“We gotta do something,” he whispered to her as the light seeped out of the sky. Soon only the glow from their fragrant warm stove illuminated this tiny spot in the middle of their world here beneath the dark nothingness of the overturned crock bowl.

As if she understood, the woman nodded, her plain face filled with resignation. “We go.”

He felt instantly buoyed by her willingness to try, as if she perhaps knew all the better how to get out of the hole he had dug them into. After he and Jonah had found this place miles and miles west of Abilene and Jonah said he could ride no more with his shoulder killing him the way it was and they had to stop and get a few hours rest before pushing on.

But they had never pushed on, and Moser felt he was to blame. As Jonah sank deeper and deeper into his fitful fevers, Artus fell into a darker and darker despair, desperate of ever coming out of this shack and this strange land alive.

“Morning comes,” Moser said, surprised at the sudden vitality to his words, “we go when the sun comes up.” His hands pantomimed the sun rising to the east, where it always did at one side of the line shack during their nine days here.

Or was it ten now?

She shook her head. “No—we—go,” she said, working over every word carefully with her tongue.

He was bewildered now. “We gotta go. Get him help. Back to Abilene if we have to. But somewhere.”

“Two suns.”

He worked on that, kneading it with his own chilled brain, then spoke her words. “Two suns … you mean two days!”

“Snow come. Two suns. We go two suns.”

The snow had
come that night. And the storm that blustered off and on had lasted for close to the two days she had predicted. It was a wonder to Artus how she had known that, and how she kept that fire going with those buffalo chips for three long nights and two short days when it grew only light enough to see a gray swirl from horizon to horizon.

Amazing that the Pawnee woman did not run out of buffalo chips before the first faint light of dawn streaking the east with pink orange.

Somehow they managed to get Hook onto his horse long enough for Moser to mount behind him. And there he cradled his shivering cousin against him and nudged the horse away from that line shack, pointing his nose toward the rising sun.

“No,” she said to him as she urged the pack animal she rode beside his, holding a lead halter to Moser’s horse. The woman pointed over her shoulder at the darker horizon.

Moser shook his head, nodded to Abilene, then glanced down at the pale, damp face wrapped in the blankets.

“No. Hays,” she said, pointing west again.

“Hays?”

“Soldiers.”

He swallowed hard. Fighting down the gall. “Yankee soldiers?”

“Go … Hays.”

He looked back at the face of his cousin and decided then and there. “All right, woman. You kept us all alive, you did. So I don’t suppose you’re about to steer us wrong now, are you?”

“Hays.”

“Yes,” he replied. “Let’s go to Hays.”

It was late afternoon by the time the little party limped past the outer pickets and entered the cluster of neatly arranged buildings that made up Fort Hays, Kansas. No walled fort this, much to his surprise.

“You’ve business here?” asked the sergeant of the guard.

“Got a real sick man is what I got,” Moser answered.

The sergeant waved a soldier over. “Take them to the infirmary. See what the surgeon can do.”

As Moser and the woman turned their horses from the sergeant to follow the soldier who strode off on foot, the sergeant called out again.

“That woman can’t go with you.”

“Why not?”

“What’s she?”

“Pawnee.”

The soldier shook his head. “No, what’s she to you anyway, Southerner?”

Moser drew himself up, his arms numb with ache and exhaustion from cradling his cousin within them. “She’s the one saved our lives, Sergeant.”

The soldier spat a brown stream onto the new snow. “All right. She’s yours to look after. I’ll have her gone from here in the blink of a gnat’s eye I have trouble from either one of you.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Artus replied, wishing he could have said something else as he urged the weary horse away to follow the trooper.

Hospital stewards placed Jonah on a cot in a small shanty extension off the main ward of the infirmary. They said the regimental surgeon gave orders stating he did not want to take any chances that this civilian had something contagious. At the same time he quarantined Moser and the squaw in the same small ward with the feverish patient.

“What’s his name?” the surgeon asked on his first visit to the canvas-roofed lean-to built against the west wall of the infirmary.

“Jonah Hook.”

In the spread of yellow lamplight, the surgeon eyed Moser with consideration, then went back to examining the patient. “You’re a Southerner?”

“Yes.”

“Him too?”

“My cousin.”

“Good lord!” the surgeon gasped, drawing back from Hook’s shoulder wound. “This man’s been shot!”

“I told the others—”

“Why didn’t somebody say something to
me
?” The surgeon turned, flinging orders at his stewards, then leaned over Hook once more. He rolled the patient on his side to search for an exit wound. A steward came back with a rustle of his short white tunic, carrying a wood tray laden with bottles topped with glass stoppers. “We’re going to have to probe this, Higgins. You and Nisley get this man ready while I go wash my hands.”

“Damn,” Moser muttered to the stewards as the surgeon whirled off into the infirmary. “During the war no doctor thought of washing his hands before he worked on a wounded soldier.”

“Doc Porter’s a different sort of animal,” said Private Nisley as he and Higgins yanked at Hook’s coat, shirt, and longhandles until they had their patient stripped to the waist.

The surgeon was a different sort at that. After sending Higgins to prepare a new bed in the main ward with the rest of the soldiers, Dr. Porter had Moser and Private Nisley pin the unconscious patient down before he placed a thin metal rod into the ugly, festering bullet wound.

“There it is,” Porter said quietly, glancing at Moser with his eyes smiling, then quickly looking the woman up and down. “Who’s she? She belong to him?”

“No. She just come with us after Jonah was shot. That woman’s the reason we both got through the last thirteen days.”

Porter raised his eyes, brow furrowing in a deep crease between the thick eyebrows. “He was shot two weeks ago?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Abilene.”

Porter nodded to the woman. “Over the squaw?”

“Not really. Just some railroad fellas was setting on abusing her.”

Porter had a delicate scalpel in his left hand, spreading the pink-and-purple bullet wound between the fingers of his right hand. “You mean this man stopped them from raping the Indian woman?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t have to ‘sir’ me. What part you play in this?”

“I …” Moser said, and stopped, swallowing, his eyes staring back at the others in the tight room. Afraid of his answer, afraid if he didn’t answer. “I likely killed one of ’em myself when the gunplay started.”

“By lord, man—I’ll buy you a drink when we’re done here.”

He didn’t know what to feel at that moment: relief, wonder, excitement. Mostly relief that no one was going to hold him accountable to the law.

Porter gently dragged the tip of the scalpel back and forth down into the puss-filled wound, wrinkling his nose as he did so until he made contact with the bullet itself.

“There. Nisley, bring that probe here and work it down to where I’ve got the blade against this goddamned piece of lead.”

The steward pushed the probe into the wound, carefully, as Hook mumbled and attempted to roll away from the pain.

“It’s getting to be a little too much for his brain to take,” Porter explained. “Hold him. Hold him now—we’re almost done.”

When he yanked the flattened piece of .44-caliber lead from the ugly hole, the surgeon plopped it into a small china cup on the tray beside the bed. It left a red streak down the inside of the cup.

“You don’t have to worry about a constable or peace officer out here, mister,” Porter said as he turned to Moser. “The only law west of Leavenworth is the army. And if the army isn’t looking for you because it has a warrant outstanding for your desertion or because you hijacked an army payroll … then your gunplay over a Pawnee squaw doesn’t mean anyone’s riding hard up on your backside.” He smiled at Moser, then turned to his stewards.

“Nisley, you show Higgins here how to get some sulfur worked down into that wound. It’s a nasty, smelly thing, so work it in good. Then tent it best you can so it’ll drain. I’ll see to him first thing in the morning.”

“He’s gonna make it, Doc?”