Cry of the Hawk (49 page)

Fordham looked from Sweete to Jonah, whose eyes were only inches from his. “A lot. I figured I needed out—so I could make my peace with God about it.”

“S’pose you start now,” Sweete said. “Tell this man where he can find his wife.”

“And his daughter,” Fordham said quietly. “It was ’cause of her I run off. Usher’s bunch finds me, Usher will kill me for running off. No one gets out alive.”

“I don’t give a damn about them finding you, Fordham!” Hook snapped. “Just—tell—me—of—my—daughter.”

“Hattie,” Fordham said her name softly.

The sound of her name in that tiny room caught Jonah by surprise. But not nearly as much as did the look on Fordham’s face, or the catch in Fordham’s voice as he spoke the name. Almost with something akin to reverence.

“Yes,” Jonah replied, easing back, “tell me about Hattie.”

“
I wish you’d
just quit your bellyaching, Jonah.” Shad Sweete’s words were louder than normal as they had to be flung into a stiff wind edged with winter’s bite coming face-on out of the west. “You damn well now know you’re no closer to finding Usher’s bunch down south in the Territories than you are sniffing around out here on the plains.”

“It’s for sure we aren’t gonna find ’em out to Fort Laramie,” Hook grumbled.

Shad pulled up the fur collar more snugly around his face. “That’s where you just might be wrong, son. You spent time out there along that Emigrant Road your own self. And that’s the way any bunch like this Usher’s is going to make it back across the mountains, and on down to the Salt Lake where those Mormons have settled in.”

“You can’t stand us Mormons, can you?” asked Riley Fordham, riding on the far side of Jonah.

“It shows, does it?” Shad asked. Knowing it did—in his eyes for sure. Maybe in the sound of his voice.

Mormons had tried to kill Jim Bridger years before, and missing out on that, Brigham Young’s band of Danites had killed some of Sweete’s friends who worked Bridger’s ferry on the Green River. There was no love lost there, no, sir. If anything, that hatred had smoldered every bit as hot that day as it was the day he and Bridger had come down from the hills to find Fort Bridger half burned to the ground. They had found some of the stock killed and left to bloat in their pens, riding east in dread only to find the bodies of friends left to rot among the willows along Green River.

“Can’t say I’m proud of everything I’ve done,” Riley Fordham admitted.

“You wasn’t old enough then to be a part of that,” Sweete said, seeing the young man’s eyes mist up. Perhaps only with the cold, incessant wind stiff against their faces.

“My uncle was,” Fordham said. “And we always heard how heroic it was going against Indians and Gentiles—white men who were no better than savage Indians anyway.”

“That’s what they taught you ’bout what those butchers did up there on the Green?”

“I got my own sins to account for, Mr. Sweete,” Fordham said, answering it in his own way. “Can’t blame no one else for what I’ve done on my own.”

“With the help of this Usher and his right-hand man, the one you called Wiser,” Hook said.

“Perhaps that’s why I chose to stay on with the two of you back when we crossed the Smoky Hill,” Fordham admitted. “Because I’ve got my own righting of things to see to.”

The deserter from Jubilee Usher’s Danites had told the two stunned plainsmen all he could there in that tiny room near Fort Larned that late November day as winter came down to squeeze the central plains. Fordham told them how he had rarely seen Gritta Hook, only going from tent to ambulance and back again.

“They keep both her and Hattie pretty sleepy most of the time.”

“What they using?”

“Laudanum,” he answered. “The woman … your wife—she stays with another squad. Usher keeps the girl with a small bunch I rode with, under Wiser. That’s why we didn’t always know what was going on with the woman. But I was one Usher put in charge of keeping an eye on Hattie. A bright and pretty child, Mr. Hook,” Fordham said with clear admiration in his eyes. “If ever I had a daughter of my own, I’d pray she’d be like your Hattie.”

“Why’d you desert, leaving her in that den of animals, Fordham?”

“I knew there’d come a time when Wiser would get Usher talked into letting Wiser have Hattie for his own. It was just a matter of time. As each year passed, she grew older, prettier … starting to …” Fordham cleared his throat nervously. “She was starting to fill out, looking more and more like a young woman. I could see it in Wiser’s eyes when he looked at her. One day soon—he’d get her. ’Cause every man of us knew Wiser had already laid claim to her. He’d killed before for her.”

“Killed some of his own men?”

“More’n once—when Wiser figured they looked at Hattie the wrong way, or too long. Make no mistake about it—Wiser considered Hattie his already. I couldn’t stand to be around when the time came ….”

By that next morning Sweete and Hook had been ready to pull out, heading north, with plans to make it to the Platte before turning west. They were again throwing in together to accomplish something important for each other. With that hangover yesterday Shad had learned Phil Sheridan wanted him to ride to Fort Laramie, there to meet with, advise, and interpret for the peace commissioners who had completed but a portion of their work at the Medicine Lodge treaty.

Some of the commissioners were going west, to see what they could do to bring an end to the bloodshed up in Dakota Territory. For more than a year now the army had strung itself thin along the Bozeman Road, establishing Fort Reno, Fort Phil Kearny, and Fort C. F. Smith. Each post existing day to day under a virtual state of siege, plopped down as they were in the heart of prime Sioux and Northern Cheyenne hunting ground.

But the army had put a call out to the bands to come in and talk peace at Fort Laramie. And if Two Moons’ band of Shahiyena chose to come in, Shad was sure Toote and Pipe Woman would be with them. The possibility was something the old mountain man did not want to pass up.

Jonah Hook would ride along until he found some word of where Jubilee Usher’s band of murderers had been, or might be going. It was for certain Sweete had been right about one thing: if Usher’s bunch was heading west to the City of Saints, they would in all likelihood pass Fort Laramie. It was as good a place as any he had right now to continue his search.

This would be a journey of the heart for all three of them. Sweete to once more touch and hold Shell Woman. Hook to find some clue to where he might next search for wife and daughter. And Riley Fordham rode with the two scouts for no better reason than he had to. He had his own sins to atone for.

42

Late December, 1867

“T
HAT
THEM
?” J
ONAH
asked the old mountain man standing beside him. The light snow swirled from time to time, but mostly it drifted down flat and fluffy. Hook and Sweete watched shadows of movement in the distance. Coming out of the north. Down from the heart of Red Cloud’s country.

“Chances be, Jonah,” the tall trapper replied, his eyes never straying from that distance, hopeful.

“Gotta be,” Hook said. “Down from the land of the Tongue and the Powder and the Crazy Woman. As wild a country as you were a young stallion in your early days, I’d wager.”

Sweete nodded. “Man thinks of nothing more’n getting his stinger dipped in a woman’s honey pot when he’s a young colt. Ain’t till he gets older that a man learns the real value of a woman.”

“He don’t have to get old to learn that. Not if he’s a lucky man, Shad.”

Jonah felt the keen, sharp-edged anticipation of the big man beside him. Not angry at Sweete for it, when he could have been. For there was plenty of need in Hook to experience just that same anticipation of seeing one’s woman again after a long separation. And while Hook realized his was a far greater separation in both time and distance, he begrudged Sweete not.

It had been Spotted Tail, chief of a large band of Brule Sioux camped near Fort Laramie these days, who had told the two white men that he had reason to believe Two Moons’ band of Cheyenne were coming south to the fort. Not so surprising as it might seem, the old chief had said. There were many bands coming in to Laramie to see what the peace-talkers had to say. After all, listening meant receiving presents. Fine presents the likes of which other bands had received at the talks down on Medicine Lodge Creek. Word of such splendor traveled fast along the moccasin telegraph, all the way up the Bozeman Road to Montana Territory.

Travel on the road was all but impossible this time of year, what with the Indian troubles coupled with the way winter had clamped down hard on the northern plains. Just a year ago many of these same bands had waited in ambush while a dozen young horsemen lured Captain William Judd Fetterman and eighty soldiers over the snowy Lodge Trail Ridge up by Fort Phil Kearny. And when the white men were all in the trap, killed every last one of those soldiers.

And only this past summer the warrior bands of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho had agreed to wipe out the two northernmost forts on the Montana Road in one furious day of bloodletting. As it turned out, the warriors failed in destroying Fort C. F. Smith up on the Bighorn River. It was there they failed in a day-long attempt to wipe out the few civilians and a handful of soldiers hunkered down inside a corral beside a hay field a few miles from the post.

The following August day saw a repeat of the same failure—this time Red Cloud’s own, in another hot fight that saw the Oglalla chief’s horsemen hurl themselves against a tiny ring of wagon boxes where some thirty soldiers held out against the hundreds, a matter of miles from Fort Phil Kearny while the sun hung high in that summer sky.

Nothing moved on the Montana Road now. Winter had come, and only the army escorted its occasional supply trains north. From time to time a solitary mail carrier slipped through, riding by night, making himself scarce by day. Men like Portugee Phillips, who were made of sinewy stuff that could take what the land and the sky and the warrior bands handed out—and still not break.

Riley Fordham had decided he would wait for spring and the first civilian train to gather on the outskirts of Fort Laramie, bound for the goldfields along Alder Gulch and Bannack and Virginia City.

“A man gets older and learns a little humility, doesn’t he, Mr. Sweete,” Fordham had commented one recent evening, “when he finds out he isn’t so immortal.”

“Gives a man a whole new outlook on life, Mr. Fordham, it does.”

But the prospect of waiting out the winter at Laramie did not improve the deserter’s disposition. Most of the time Fordham was looking over his shoulder, watching every new group of horsemen come riding in from the east along the Platte River Road, or south from the Colorado Territory. Always on the lookout for a familiar face, someone who might be looking for his.

The uncertainty in that waiting must surely take its toll on a man, Jonah decided. Perhaps, just perhaps, as much as the not knowing took its toll on him.

He gave Riley Fordham a grudging respect for riding away from Jubilee Usher. Better had it been that he rode away with Hattie, rather than just saving his own skin. But then again, Jonah figured, Fordham would have to deal with that ghost of failure in his own way, in his own time.

“You know that band. I can tell you do,” Jonah said, the cold breeze whipping the breathsmoke from his face. The wind here came cruelly off the Medicine Bows to the west.

Sweete smiled a bit bigger now. “Ain’t that I know the band so particular, Jonah. But I do recognize three of them ponies.”

“You see her?”

“Yes,” he said finally, pushing the wolf-fur hat back farther on his brow. “I believe I do.”

It might have been difficult for some men to pick an individual out of that crowd of several hundred warriors, women, and children, along with the old ones too lame or frail to walk or ride atop the ponies. Those wrinkled ones cackled and complained from the travois slung behind many of the horses where they sat among the folded lodge skins and camp equipment, parfleches and rawhide boxes filled with dried buffalo. Man and woman looked so much alike at this distance, every one so wrapped in blanket and robe, hoods pulled up around faces, coyote and wolf and bear hides pulled down to eyebrows to keep out the blowing, stinging snow. A colorful parade this was, coming down to Laramie in a gray December snowstorm.

In the van rode the young warriors, each brandishing his favored weapon, bow or rifle. They gave the gathering soldiers and the great number of civilians employed at the fort a brief exhibition of their horsemanship; their animals kicked up great clods of the frozen snow as they tore past, hanging from rumps by one heel, hiding behind the great, heaving necks of the grass-fed war ponies recent of the buffalo hunts in the north country. Then came the old men, each one riding more stately than the prancing bucks, no longer having to prove anything to any man, white or red. On the scarred ones came, their fans and pipes and other symbols of office now on display as they arrived at this great gathering place to be counted in those discussions to come with the white peace-talkers.

At the last came the women, guiding, riding, or walking beside the ponies who packed on their backs or dragged behind them on a wide vee of lodgepoles the wealth of the band. Like the great arms of an arrow point behind their men, the women slowed their march as the young men slowed theirs, waiting now for the Medicine Pipe Bearer to show the site he had selected for their camp.

And once the word was passed that their long march south had ended, a great shout went up from the old men, echoed by the young warriors—answered and eventually drowned out by the trilling, keening cries of joy from the women and children. Dogs barked their agreement. It had been a long, long journey of many, many days. And this would be a good camp, with many presents yet to come just for listening to the words of the white peace-talkers.

“Shell Woman!” Sweete called out, flinging his voice into the cacophony of camp making as the women shouted to one another as they raised the swirl of their lodgepoles, forming the great horned crescent facing the east.