Cry of the Hawk (51 page)

43

Late December, 1867

O
NLY
THE
WIND
keening outside the lodge. Nothing more than that.

Shad Sweete closed his eyes again and rolled over, his bare back warming as he snuggled against Toote. He sighed in contentment, the air in the lodge cold, yet still fragrant with that night’s supper.

His eyes shot open again.

Sweete was certain now—sure that what he had heard was something more than the winter wind. Almost like the whimper of a man …

His ears strained, picking up the first sounds of footsteps across the icy snow. Two sets. Two men. No, not really … the second man was being dragged along by the first. And whoever was doing the dragging had that second man begging for his life.

More noise to it now on the old, icy snow.

As he bolted up, yanking his wool shirt over his longhandles, Shad’s ears picked up the sound of camp dogs snuffling around outside, their own paws padding across the icy crust atop the four-day-old snow outside.

Quickly he yanked on the two buffalo winter moccasins, sewn hair in, and snatched up his long winter capote. He was out through the lodge door, pulling the coat over his arms as Jonah Hook appeared from the backside of the lodge.

He was dragging a man across the snow.

In the pale moonlight that gave a dim, morning luster to the snow, Shad could see the thin, greasy trail of blood beneath the man as he was hauled along behind Hook. The dogs were busy over that track of warm gore, muzzle deep.

“What in glory is going on?” Shad demanded in a harsh whisper, his shoulder-length gray hair and beard brilliant beneath the winter starlight.

“Wanted you to meet somebody, Shad,” Jonah rasped, short of breath.

Sweete recognized a cold light in the young Confederate’s eyes. Something so cold it caused the old mountain man to shiver there in the snow spilling over his ankles that he found himself having to glance away, down to the stranger.

“Who’s this? What the bloody hell is going on?”

Hook knelt, jabbing his fingers into the man’s hair and yanking the head back. The eyes rolled up, attempting to focus on Hook a moment, then flickered toward Shad Sweete. A wild sheen came over them of a sudden.

“Help—help me, mister!” he called out weakly. “I’m bleeding to death, dammit.”

“I can see that,” Sweete replied. None of this made a tinker’s bit of sense. He knelt beside Jonah, the stranger too. “How—”

“This bastard shot me!” the stranger explained, reaching out his hand to Sweete.

Hook brought his pistol barrel down on the back of the man’s wrist with a brutal snap.

“He’s gonna kill me—for sure,” he whimpered. “You gotta help me!”

“You shoot him?”

Hook nodded. Silent in the moonlight.

Then something struck Shad, and his eyes opened a bit wider in its recognition. “This is the one Pipe Woman told us about when she come back to the lodge tonight—”

“He was about to rape her, Shad,” Hook explained, his voice emotionless.

Sweete looked back at the man. “She’s my daughter.” He snagged hold of the man’s throat himself, fingers on one side of the trachea, a big, powerful thumb pinching the other.

Gurgling with some feeble, small animal sound, he flailed with his arms at the grip the big mountain man had on him.

“She came running back here from the sutler’s all worked up, Jonah. I never made much sense of it, from the way she was going on about something happened up there while you and me was over talking to Maynadier at post headquarters. I just figured it had something to do with you—a fight of some kind you got into when I headed back here and you said you’d mosey over to the sutler’s to walk her back to camp.”

“What else she try to tell you?”

“Something about a fight. Toote finally got her calmed down. Talking about guns and blood and you and somebody hurting her. Figured we’d find out come morning. It didn’t make no sense—till now.”

“That ain’t but the start of it, Shad,” Hook said. “I brung him here for us both to hear him talk before I gut him.”

“Bad medicine. Not near the lodge, Jonah.”

“No. I’ll take him off a ways when I do it.” Hook paused, his head coming up, ear cocking as if listening.

Shad heard it too.

A shadow stood ten yards off, a dark monolith punching a hole out of the nightsky, the outline of a riflestock very plain.

“Gimme your pistol, Jonah,” Shad whispered.

“You won’t need it, Shad,” came the voice.

“Fordham?”

“It’s me. Now, just let me come on in, easy.”

“What business you got down here this time of night?” Shad asked.

“Got business with Jonah.”

The deserter came up and stopped as Sweete stood, watching the man’s eyes, and his hand on the action of that rifle. In the moonlight, Fordham gazed down on Hook, his rifle pointed in the Confederate’s direction.

Shad saw Jonah’s pistol pointed right at Fordham’s belly.

“You know ’im, don’t you, Riley?” Jonah inquired at last, in a quiet whisper.

He took another step up, slowly moving the rifle barrel toward the stranger as the bleeding man’s eyes grew bigger. Fordham jammed the rifle muzzle against the man’s jawbone and pushed the face more into the light.

“Yeah. Now I’m sure.”

“You gonna help me, aincha, Riley?” the man begged.

“And he sure as hell knows you, don’t he?” Jonah asked, his eyes narrowing.

Fordham finally dropped the angle of the rifle. “Yes.”

Shad began, “What’s this all about?”

“They worked together,” Jonah interrupted, not taking his eyes off Riley Fordham’s face. “Tell ’im, Riley.”

“What he says is right. This bastard being here can only mean one thing: they’re tracking me. He’s found me. Meaning that the others can too. I’d best be going, fellas. Pushing on to make the trail cold as I can before the rest come.”

Shad snagged Fordham’s arm as the deserter started to turn away. “You’re staying—least till this makes sense.”

“That man there,” Fordham said, pointing his rifle at the bleeding man. “He’s got two of Hook’s bullets in him. And near as I tell, Jonah’s likely got one of this bastard’s in him.”

“You hit, Jonah?” Shad asked.

Hook pulled aside his coat to show a dark stain at his right side, just above his hip. “Grazed me. A wild shot he got off when I hit him the first time.”

“How you two ever work together, Riley?” Shad asked. “Unless this one was with Usher’s bunch.”

“That’s what I tried to tell you. Now I gotta go. No telling how many out there now—coming.”

“There’s a way to find out.” Jonah handed his pistol up to Shad then and pulled out his skinning knife, laying the edge against the stranger’s jawline. “You remember his name, Riley?”

“Called Laughing Jack. Never knew his last name.”

“All right, Jack. S’pose you tell us how many there are here at Laramie.”

“O-only me,” Jack coughed his answer. “God! Don’t—”

Hook dragged the knife across the skin, opening a thin laceration that beaded with dark blood in the silver light.

“Goddammit—I beg you!”

Hook yanked back on the man’s head. “I’m gonna keep cutting down, slow … real slow—while you tell me who all came with you.”

“No one, for the love of God!” he sputtered, coughing up a little black fluid. “I’m alone. Though I am in the presence of mine enemies, may my hand be strong to smite the—”

“You believe him, Riley?”

“You gotta believe me, Riley!” the man pleaded. “Usher and Wiser—sent out a few of us they trusted. Some went on north, into Nebraska country. Others down sniffing around for you at Denver City … out to the forts in Kansas. You was there months back—they figured you’d … so some are asking around the railroad. I’m alone, goddammit! You can’t let this Gentile … get this crazy bastard off me and find me a doctor—I’m bleeding to death!”

Fordham knelt beside Laughing Jack. “What’s Usher gonna give the man who finds me?”

Jack’s eyes grew even more frightened. He swallowed, realizing now, then gurgled some on the blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth. “Usher’s gonna give ’im the girl. She’s a virgin—”

Fordham drove the back of his hand across Jack’s jaw. “Hattie—”

Hook yanked Jack’s head back, bringing the blade down in that heartbeat until Fordham put a hand against Jonah that stayed the Confederate’s. “All right, Jack. How ’bout you telling me and Hattie’s papa just where we can find them.”

“I don’t know where now—” Jack started, then screeched as Jonah dragged the knife blade deeper into the flesh of the man’s throat. It was pink and white, the neck turning bloody now, right across the rings of cartilage that formed the windpipe.

“Get back in the lodge!” Shad hollered as the two women started out the door with a rustle of frozen hides. They obeyed without question in a swirl of blankets. He heard their voices whispering in fear between themselves.

“Take the son of a bitch someplace else, Jonah. Away from this lodge—my family.”

“I’m leaving now,” Fordham said, rising to his feet.

“You’re coming with me, Riley,” Hook said firmly.

Fordham looked down at his rifle, then at Sweete with the pistol, and finally back at Hook.

“All right. I owe Hattie that much.”

“You owe me that much for not killing you the first time I found out back there in Kansas.”

Hook yanked on the front of Jack’s shirt, straining to pull the man. Sweete at last saw the two holes: one in the chest, the other low in the belly. Bleeders—both of them. A man drowns in his own juices, gut-shot that way, Shad thought.

“I’ll be back, this is over, Shad,” Hook said quietly as he started off, dragging Jack, with Fordham bringing up the rear.

Sweete watched them hobble through the snow toward the nearby cottonwoods and willow, listening to the whining of the dogs sniffing the blood on the snow where Jack had lain, hearing the whimpering of the man as he begged Riley for his life, begged his God for help, begged for anyone to put him out of his pain—quickly.

“Soon enough.”

Hook’s whisper went the way of smoke on that cruel, winter wind.

“You won’t feel no pain soon enough.”

“
They come north
, Shad,” Jonah explained, blowing the steam from his coffee. His first cup that morning. Always better in the gray of predawn like this, when it was the coldest time of day. Especially after a sleepless night.

“Out of the Territories?”

“Yeah. Course, Fordham told us Usher was planning to do that eventual.”

“Riley—he gone now?”

“Must be. After we … finished with Jack: dragged his body a ways down the bank, rolled it under the ice in the river over yonder—Fordham lit out. Said he had to get moving or his scent would stay around for the next one come along.”

“He’s probably right. This bunch with Usher found Fordham this time—they’ll find him again.” Shad took a slice of the dried buffalo from Toote.

She offered one to Jonah. He took one, then a second slice, glancing at the back of the lodge where Pipe Woman sat side-legged, the blankets pulled up beneath her chin. She was no longer looking at him the same way she had the day they met. Now, instead, there was an expression of horror on her face.

Jonah couldn’t blame her. What he’d done … But, hell, he’d done it for her too.

Shad asked, “He say when they come north?”

“Half a year at the most, from what Laughing Jack told us. Says Usher figures to be slow at moving west—back to Deseret. With their prisoners. Gritta and Hattie.”

“Usher won’t give her away, Jonah. Remember that. Not until someone finds Fordham.”

“They better not—or I’ll kill Fordham myself.”

He watched Jonah stand, finishing the last of his coffee. “Where you heading?”

“Don’t see any use in burning daylight, Shad.”

“Doesn’t answer where—so a man knows how to find you.”

“East from here. First I’ll check around Sedgwick down on the South Platte. Wander on to McPherson, and Kearny. Don’t hear any word there, I’ll push on south a bit into Kansas. Someone—soldier or civilian—at one of the posts will hear of that bunch. If they’re going back to Mormon country—there’s one good way to get there.”

“Then why the hell don’t you stay here and wait for ’em to come marching by, Jonah?”

He shook his head. “Can’t take the chance I’ll miss ’em. Can’t sit still—just waiting. I got to be looking.”

“I understand, son.”

Hook glanced at Pipe Woman a moment. Wishing there were something he could say to her, to make her see that he wasn’t a violent man. But what else had he shown her? The look in her eyes last night when he was preparing to draw down on the man hurting her … the look in her eyes for that instant last night when she and Toote saw Jonah opening Jack’s neck like a hog at slaughter—before Shad shooed them back into the lodge.

What do you say to such a beautiful young woman who you felt such an arousal for, such a heated yearning to feel flesh against flesh—but now saw in her eyes nothing but fear and loathing for you? He told himself maybe it was better this way—after all, she was Shad’s daughter. And he had a wife out there … somewhere. Better in the long run that he just go.

“I’ll be moving out now,” he said quietly, pushing aside the door flap and stepping from the lodge into the cold.

Sweete and his family joined Hook in the gray light of early dawn.

“You need help—wire me here. The colonel will get word to me, for certain,” Sweete said. He folded Hook into his arms.

Toote came into him next, murmuring some Cheyenne. Then she backed up, mist in her eyes, and said in English, “Thank … Pipe Woman … safe now.”

He nodded, self-consciously, then turned to take up the halter on the pack horse. That’s when she shuffled close, standing there so close he could smell her. Jonah turned, finding Pipe Woman at his shoulder, those wide eyes still filled with fear. But, perhaps now no longer any fear of the violence he knew was inside him—but fearful instead of what violence might do to him.

She put out her arms and came into him, her head buried against his bony chest.

“Thank you, Jonah Hook,” she said, quietly against his wool coat.