Cry of the Hawk (42 page)

That was where the white men belonged, Turkey Leg thought to himself proudly, watching some of the young warriors race across the nearby prairie with bolts of cloth pulled from the wreckage, bright colorful streamers fluttering from their ponies.

In the land to the east. Where the white man should have stayed in the first place.

Out here—this land belonged to the Lakota and Shahiyena. Coming out here only meant death to the white man.

He should have stayed in the east, where the sun came up each day.

35

September, 1867

T
HIS WAS THE
only time of the day when the air cooled this late in the summer. Here when the moon finally sank from the sky.

He had waited for better than two weeks for this phase of the moon. When there wasn’t so much of the moon’s light to shine on this thickly wooded land—part of the Choctaw Nation down in the Territories … or were they now in the Creek Nation?

Riley Fordham didn’t know for sure. Certain only that it really didn’t matter right now as he swallowed down his heart that was choking him. Afraid of being caught as he stood and listened into the night. Hearing the June bugs scritching at one another, listening for the swoop of owls at their nightly hunting, the croak of frogs and other creatures up here in the darkness when few men walked the earth.

Only he and a dozen others guarding the perimeter of Jubilee Usher’s camp.

Fordham was one of the trusted ones. That’s the only way this was going to work. Boothog Wiser had put Riley in charge of a detail of camp guards. Every man of them knew they had to be extra careful now, this deep in Injun territory, what with the way they were stealing horses and borrowing squaws from the villages where the Choctaws and Creeks and Cherokees squatted, living out their miserable existences here where the white man had moved them from the east.

Riley swallowed down his heart, hearing it thunder in his ears as he strained at the night-sounds. Hoping none of the others were up and wandering about. He had made sure the rest of his guards were spread thin that night. He untied the horse where it grazed nearby, leading it into the thick timber along the game trail he had chosen for his escape.

Riley had been planning this for weeks now. Waiting for moon-dark, as Usher called it. And waiting to figure out a good route of escape. Earlier in the first dark of the moon’s silvery rising, not long after returning here to his spot, having completed an entire circuit of the camp and finding his pickets in their places for the night, Fordham had taken the tools from his saddlebag and pried each of the four shoes loose from his horse’s hooves.

Moving silently, slowly down the game trail, he knew the horse’s tracks would in the morning appear to be nothing more than an unshod Indian’s pony—when Jubilee’s men came looking.

Usher and Wiser would mount a search to one degree or another. Simply because Riley was one of the best they had. The best marksman. Perhaps the smartest Usher had working for him now.

Smart enough to know he wanted out. The war was long over, and still Usher was not taking them back to Deseret. Instead, Jubilee had told them their God-granted work was here on the plains, not back with Brigham’s people in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. All was at peace there. It was here, Usher told them, here where the might of God’s hand was needed.

Here, where Jubilee Usher would baptize the land with the blood of the lamb.

Riley had followed Jubilee east with the others that last trip, part of the Mormon army protecting the wagon train when they were all commandeered to fight the Civil War. He had been willing to fight and kill and even die for the faith—his family’s faith in Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

But this had become something different altogether.

Jubilee Usher kept the fair-haired woman to himself. And the girl. She couldn’t be more than twelve now … and still Boothog lusted after her. It would not be much longer that Usher could keep Wiser off the girl. Riley strained to remember the girl’s name. Wishing for a moment that he had brought her along. Knowing if he had, the chances were good that neither of them would make it.

Hattie.

He felt sorry for her as he plunged deeper and deeper into the timber along the game trail, farther and farther from Usher and Wiser and their insanity.

The woman was lost. She belonged to Usher now, after all this time, body and soul. But the girl. She was starting to bud, her young breasts only lately beginning to press against the too-small cloth dress she was forced to wear like a blouse over the men’s britches they had given her. One of these days her beauty would drive Boothog Wiser to madness, and he would no longer deny himself her virgin flesh.

Riley Fordham had to desert—risking his life to escape north to Kansas. He knew that country, been up there scouting it with Hastings for Jubilee Usher. Up there with the westbound railroad. Up there with all the rumors of the tribes making trouble for settler and track crews alike—why, a man could lose himself among the many. And no one, not even Usher and Wiser, could track him down and make him bleed as he knew they would if they ever got their hands on him.

No man ever quit Usher’s outfit. No man ever just walked off the job. To Usher, this was God’s work. And God’s vengeance would be his if a man just up and rode off.

But that’s exactly what Riley Fordham was doing. Planning to ride until sunup. Lie low where he could just before the sun rose. Then ride again come nightfall. Day after each new day of freedom.

Fordham had to go, and now. Because he knew that come one day soon, Boothog Wiser would claim the girl for his and Usher would allow it. Them two so alike in their abuse of the women. Not that Riley didn’t like pinning a squaw beneath him of a time when they had one for the men to use. That was something different. Something Brigham had said about the Indians being some animal less than the white man. Like the land was God-given for the Saints to use—and with it the use of the dark-skinned Injuns who lived here too.

Those two women weren’t squaws. They were beauties to his way of seeing things. And they had belonged to a white man. A man’s wife … and his daughter.

And if that man weren’t killed in that bloody war back east, Riley Fordham knew damned well that man was pretty near crazy by now, wondering, hunting, stalking down those who took his family.

Riley didn’t want to be around when that man caught up with Jubilee Usher and Boothog Wiser.

It sure wouldn’t be a pretty sight what those two crazed blood-lovers would do to that poor sod-buster come to claim his wife and daughter.

The crumpled rail
cars lay on both sides of the track like a child’s toys. From a distance, they looked like something he had carved for Jeremiah or little Zeke. Tiny railcars scattered along the ruin of its rail bed.

With all his might, Jonah Hook hefted the memory of his two boys from his thoughts.

Enough to think on now. Knowing the chances were good that he would find his cousin somewhere out here.

For the past two days, he had asked after Artus every chance he had, whenever Lieutenant James Murie stopped his small detachment of Pawnee scouts. Major Frank North had assigned Jonah to Murie, because the ex-Confederate knew a good measure of sign language as well as some of the Pawnee tongue.

“After that time we chased Cheyenne and Arapaho with General Connor, I spent a winter learning what I could from a Pawnee gal,” he had explained to North and Murie.

“You’re hired, Mr. Hook,” said the major.

“I can track and am a pretty fair marksman,” he had gone on to explain.

“Major North said you were hired,” Murie reminded.

“Just like that?”

“By talking with Bear Runs Him over there,” North said, pointing at one of the Pawnee sergeants, “you’ve showed your worth. Now, Murie here will get you squared away with the McPherson quartermaster. We’re likely to have something for you to do soon enough.”

And they had. As soon as word arrived of the attack on the train, along with orders telegraphed from General Hancock, Major North dispatched Murie and his squad of fifty scouts to explore the ground near the derailment and see what they could come up with for clues to who the war party might be.

All Jonah knew was that his cousin had pumped away from the repair station the afternoon before the derailment along with another man named Harris. Bound for a break in the wire somewhere west of there. With every passing mile, Jonah had prayed the two had made it past the scene of the destruction long before the warriors had arrived to rip up the track and stage their ambush on the train. He prayed Artus was long gone west of the scene, unable for the moment to get word back east that they were safe because of the downed line. After all, Artus would have no idea that his cousin was come looking for him ….

The fires were out now. Likely the warriors hadn’t stayed around long enough to make sure the rail cars were completely destroyed. But the autumn rains of the past two days very likely put out the smoldering wreckage. Just charred hunks of twisted, toppled—

“Over here!”

Murie was hollering at him in English. Likely found something the lieutenant wanted him to ask the Pawnee to look at.

Hook slowly turned the body over with his toe. The man was too damned fleshy, downright fat, to be Artus. What there was left of the man. It wasn’t the first time he had seen work done like this.

“They say it was Cheyenne, Lieutenant,” Hook explained after asking the warriors who had committed the butchery.

“The arms … cut like they are?”

“You’re learning.” Hook looked up as a trio of Pawnee riders loped onto the scene. They had gone on ahead, following the tracks to scout for prints, sign, anything worthy of attention.

“You come. Now,” one of the older Pawnee said. His long braids nuzzled his cheek above the blue tunic the Indian scouts wore above their breechclouts and buckskin leggings.

“Find something?” Hook asked.

“Come.”

The scout motioned, then reined his pony about as Jonah raised himself to his saddle.

Through the string of low hills they rode along the gaping iron rails pointing their way west, toward the far blue mountains of Dakota Territory.

“Two more,” said the Pawnee scout, breaking into Jonah’s reverie. He was pointing at the wreckage of the half-burnt handcar as he reined up near the other two Indians on the ground.

Hook slowed his horse, but he kept on, passing the three Pawnee. The first body was clearly not Moser. He sighed with little relief, the bile stinging the back of his throat. This was nothing new, no sir. Not the mutilation anyway, nor the heat bloating and the way the insects had been drawn to the blood and gore. Every wound, as well as the open mouth and eyes frozen wide in horror were now home to the wriggling maggots and larvae of the green-bottle flies … it was enough to turn any man’s stomach. It would not be long before the wild dogs of the prairie would find this place of death.

Jonah dropped to the ground, letting go the reins, and walked slowly forward, down the side of the graveled roadbed. He spotted the second body, laying face down. The ground around the body had soaked up the blood in several spots, especially beneath the head.

What was left of the head anyway.

He swallowed down the acid taste, afraid he would lose his belly then and there beside the puffy, swollen, blackening body.

It could be Artus, he thought. He hated himself for even thinking it as he circled around the remains. Get upwind, he told himself.

He started to turn the body over with the toe of his boot, but the swollen skin burst with a sickening hiss, emitting a horrendous gas that drove Jonah back from the corpse.

Taking a deep breath, he approached once more, again using his boot to turn the body over. At first the skin slipped and tore, already mortifying out here in the elements these past few days. But slowly the stiffened body moved, leaving slime on the toe of his dusty boot.

He swallowed hard, turning away, unable to stop his belly from lurching. He lost his breakfast as he stumbled away, his head swimming, gasping, spitting bile and vomit and stinging pain wrenching the center of him. Some of it clung to his lower lip, in his beard.

He realized he would never forget the smell of this place where his cousin had died.

He knelt there, several yards upwind from the blackened corpse, his back turned to what had once been more than just family—what had been a true friend these last years since they both had returned from a damned long war.

His stomach finally heaved its last into a pool between his knees.

Jonah wiped and wiped his beard again. Thinking only on how he had to bury what was left of his cousin.

Trying to remember now the words he should say over the grave. Words of love and forgiveness and everlasting peace.

Jonah realized he knew nothing of love and forgiveness … and damned well would likely never know anything of everlasting peace.

It wasn’t like
he expected to find the warriors responsible for wrecking the train, but Shad Sweete led the soldiers north from Fort Hays anyway.

Not that he always did what he was ordered. No matter that General Hancock himself had telegraphed his dispatch sending this bunch out on the chase. Sweete could have refused. But there was no point.

That hot-blooded bunch had disappeared onto the prairie. Shad was sure of that. At least they would be disappearing like breathsmoke on a winter wind soon enough, what with this squad of Seventh Cavalry coming up from the south and Frank North’s Pawnee Battalion sweeping the country clear along the Platte River itself. It was North’s Pawnee who were going out to the scene of the derailed train. And likely, Jonah Hook would be with them.

Not that he was worried about Jonah either. The Cheyenne would be long ago gone from the countryside around Plum Creek Station by the time Shad Sweete led Captain Louis Hamilton and his two companies of cavalry to the scene.

There was no danger the Seventh would catch the warriors. Too far to travel for this bunch of plodding horsemen. And he doubted this bunch of cavalry had the resolve to find the guilty warriors anyway. Easier to jump the villages filled with women and children and the old ones too sick to fight. Much harder to track and follow the wild-roaming bands of young warriors ready to turn and spit in your eye.