Cry of the Hawk (52 page)

He smelled her hair, drinking in its fragrance of smoke and hides and sage, deeply.

Then turned quickly, mounted his horse, and jammed heels into its flanks so that none of them could see the hot tears.

44

Early Spring, 1868

S
PRING
HAS
a way of slipping in on the plains like no other season.

Summer is always upon that land before you know it. Autumn arrives in the nonchalant way of a shy suitor. And winter usually blusters in with a fury, bravado, and sometimes sheer terror.

But spring most often of all sneaks up on a man with the seductive secrecy of a woman. Here he had been living through each winter day and night, surviving. Not really noticing that the sunlight grows longer by a few minutes each day. Perhaps not really noticing any change in the snowpack, realizing that what snow comes might be a little wetter, the winds a little stronger at times.

So it is with this beguiling seductive quality that spring arrives on the plains. Just like a woman will slip in on a man and tangle up his heart when he least realizes it. And when he finally opens his eyes one morning, she is there, she is everywhere, she is with him. And he is hooked. Madly, irretrievably in love.

Spring had come to the plains.

Here along the Missouri River, there were already signs that the great ice jams of the upriver were breaking. Sawyers and flotsam flowed past, tumbling in the muddy foam from up north, now headed east for a union with the waters of the Mississippi far downstream. An occasional buffalo carcass too, rocking slowly with the frothy, icy, mud brown Missouri. Water born of the high places, A land where Jonah Hook had only marched along the fringes. Not daring yet to penetrate. Perhaps never—he got his family back, and things settled down back in Missouri. Maybe go as far east as he ought—back to the Shenandoah, in the shadow of Big Cobbler Mountain. They’d be safe from harm there once more.

And put this all behind them.

But that was as much a dream as any Jonah experienced each time he closed his eyes.

Late March it was. After three months of backtracking from Fort Laramie, the hunt had brought him here to this country near the Missouri River, just inside Kansas. Upriver from the great bend and Kansas City. At Fort Leavenworth again, remembering that winter of sixty-five when first the Union army brought him west to fight Indians.

More a staging arena now than any fort Hook had seen out west. When first he got here days ago, it was as if he had stepped back into another world, one that had become unfamiliar in the years gone between. What struck him most about Leavenworth was that this grouping of neatly whitewashed buildings and close-cropped lawns and wide graveled walks, along with its band shell and central flagpole and drilling infantry had no business calling itself a western fort.

But perhaps that was it, he had thought. Maybe he was no longer in what could be termed the West. Perhaps this was the end of the East and the beginning of the frontier, that term others were using out here more and more now. Maybe the West started here at the Missouri.

Again Jonah Hook had prayed that here his journey would come to an end.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have reason to give voice to that prayer. He had damned good reason. The last three months had led him here—with word that he might find a bunch that sounded like the ones he was looking for. Men, the story had it, who’d come riding north out of the Territories on some of the best of horseflesh anyone had seen in a long time—tough, lean, and good configuration. And every man jack of them was well-armed, swaybacked almost under the firepower each sour-faced one of them carried.

They stayed off by their own and kept to themselves, he was told. Likely waiting for something, somebody. And they had to do with the sutlers when need be. Drinking whiskey among the watering holes and hovels near the fort. And dealing with the chippies and whores in their cribs back of those dingy, smoky places. But only in rotation, it was noted by a few who had cause to notice such things.

The entire group never ventured out of its camp as a whole. Always some staying behind while the others came in for leave. On schedule they rode into the settlement to take their recreation. On schedule they rejoined out front and remounted, riding back to their camp, where they bothered no man.

“They pay for what they need,” a clerk at the mercantile had told Jonah of the band camped down by the river. “Never an argument on price or quality of what they buy. Good customers.”

“There a tall one with ’em? Bald on top—long hair down to his shoulders?”

He had thought, then shook his head. “No. No man like that.”

“How ’bout a fella that walks with a hobble, like this?” Jonah had inquired of the clerk days ago, hobbling across the floor as Riley Fordham had mimicked Boothog Wiser’s peculiar clubfooted walk.

Again he shook his head. “No, sir. I’d remember something like that.”

And with the news came a sinking feeling that the bunch camped out yonder were not the ones he wanted. Until he joined three of them in a card game one cold, blustery afternoon that slicked the mud puddles in the rutted street with ice scum and drove men indoors while their horses hunched around, rumps to the cruel wind, heads bowed at the rail.

“Gimme two,” Jonah said to the dealer, a local. In fact, two other locals were sitting in on the game. Seven hands in all at the big, battered table beneath an oil lamp spreading yellow light and smoky shadow over them all.

A crack of lightning snapped his nerves taut as catgut, and seconds later came the slap of thunder stampeding in off the plains with nothing to slow it in the slightest. It made the low-roofed shanty of a gambling palace shake, rattling clapboard against quaking frame stud. Shaking the lamp above them, causing a few among them to shift in their chairs. The three he had been getting to know did not. Glued as they were, unnerved by the noise.

“That’un was close,” said one of the locals.

Jonah laid his cards down when called. “Nothing more’n three of a kind.” He knew he would be bested by the fleshy, jowly unspoken leader of the trio. But it was as he had planned.

Jowls grinned, creasing all the lines leading from his red-veined bulbous nose down to the five-day whiskers. His eyes gleamed at the other two. “We’re making money, our time out, boys.”

They both grumbled, as did the locals while Jowls raked his winnings from the center of the table.

“These two with you, are they?” Jonah asked, sensing he had to turn up the heat a bit.

It was time. He’d pried enough out of them to know the trio was from the ten or so camped down by the river. And the more they had talked during the three hours they had been trading cards and coins and scrip back and forth, Jonah had come to realize that the bunch had just spent time farther south, and east some too before that. Enough clues to pick up their talk among themselves about places he knew in southern Missouri, what with their talk of fighting Confederate sympathizers during the rebellion on the borderlands, and even referring at times to a prolonged stay down in the Territories. They were most proud of that—amused with the fact and not short of brag that they had eluded any man or posse or squad of soldiers sent to follow them.

“We was our own law down there,” Jowls had claimed, with another big grin that brought smiles from the other two.

“How was them squaws?” ventured one of the locals, leaning in over the table to ask eagerly.

“We had one whenever we was needing to dip our cock in something warm!” exclaimed a man with a pinched rat face covered by a patchy set of whiskers.

“Your boss—he like poking them squaws like you fellas?” Jonah asked as he dealt a five-card hand around the green-blanket table.

“Me?” Jowls asked. “I liked it a whole bunch.”

“No,” Jonah replied. “I’m asking about your boss, mister. One running your outfit.”

“Naw. He didn’t stoop to poking squaws like us,” Rat-face answered.

“That’s right. Jubi—” and suddenly then the third man shut himself off, noticing the glares of the other two. He cleared his throat. “The colonel keeps hisself a woman what could answer all his needs of the flesh.”

Like no struggle he had ever known, Jonah forced himself to sit there in the chair, slowly looking from face to face to face, measuring each one. Not for playing this hand, but for what he knew lay in store. He drew cards, folded, watching the rest play through the hand. Then he passed the deck on to Jowls. Jonah got lucky, and though his mind wasn’t really there in the game, he ended up winning the hand. And the cards went on to the rat-faced gambler.

Time for Hook to force the play.

“You dealt two off the bottom … friend.” Jonah’s eyes leveled on the dealer, flicked once to Jowls to find the leader measuring Hook coolly. Flicked next to the third man on the far side of the dealer, a flat-faced, nondescript man in whose eyes registered the first licks of fear. Flat-face laid down his cards and slid them toward the dealer.

“What makes you say that?” Jowls asked.

In his eyes, Jonah could see the fleshy one wasn’t too sure how he should play it. Hook had only one hand on the table right then. The other somewhere in his lap.

“I saw it,” Jonah replied, not taking his eyes off the dealer, or the flat-faced man. “Now, since I ain’t lost no money on this hand, I’m not going to kill the dealer.”

Jowls slowly eased back from the table with a loud scrape of his chair. “You better figure on holding a royal flush, mister—’cause you just bit off more than you can chew.”

Bringing his pistol up from his lap into plain view, Jonah laid his cards down, then filled that right hand with a second pistol from his belt. “You can sit this hand out, you wanna, mister. My trouble’s with this one dealing bad cards. But—since I get the idea you can talk these boys into trouble, or out of it—I’ll probably blow your head off first if any of them two make a funny move on me.”

Jonah watched Jowls flick a tip of his tongue out to lick his lips.

“Now, all three of you—here’s the way we’re going to play this hand,” Hook said. “I’m going to give you three a chance to lay your hardware on the table, and slide it over to these fellas here. They look like honest folks—so we’ll trust ’em with your guns.”

“We do, what you fixing to do with our weapons?” Jowls asked.

“Hold ’em—while I beat the shit out of the dealer.”

The rat-faced man flared. “You ain’t got the balls—”

“I could shoot you in the balls right here and now under the table—and that’d end you ever having another squaw again, wouldn’t it, mister?”

The dealer puckered with imagined pain. “You wanna fight me?” he asked with a nervous grin. “All right.” Then he slowly pulled his pistol out and laid it on the table. It made a loud noise in the small, low-roofed room.

“Now the other one,” Jonah prodded, anxious. “The both of you two, get shet of your weapons.” He wagged his own pistols as the three stood and pulled coats aside, showing they now had empty holsters. “Gentlemen, watch these guns and these other two fellas for me while I teach this one bottom-dealing bastard how not to play cards with honest folk.”

When he had waved Jowls and Flat-face back from the table, Jonah set his two pistols down in front of one of the locals, then strode past the fleshy man, heading for the rat-faced one who was moving off, volving his shoulders, bringing up his fists and flexing his ropy muscles.

With a crack, Jonah caught him unprepared with a quick jab. Rocking Rat-face backward. A second jab brought a spurt of blood as the man shook his head, bewildered. The room erupted into cheering and jeering. From the corner of his eye, he saw the flat-faced man balling his fists, uneasy, wanting in on the action.

That glance cost him.

Rat-face was on him with a crack to the side of the head that stunned Hook. It made his temple throb with bone against bone, and seeing stars. A big, powerful fist doubled him over, a fist on the back of his head brought Hook to his knees. As Rat-face stepped up, preparing to ram his knee under Jonah’s chin, Hook moved aside and caught the leg, standing as he did it. The man spilled backward, cracking the back of his head on the edge of a far table.

Of a sudden the air was being choked out of him. Jonah felt an arm around his neck, fingers in his hair, reaching down for his eyes, a thumb clawing toward his mouth, gouging for all the man was worth. Shifting his weight, Jonah saw from the corner of one bloody eye that Jowls still stood his ground, yelling enthusiastically. It had to be the plain, pie-faced one. Jonah had not counted on this.

Now he jammed a heel into the man’s boot. Feeling a lurch in his grip. A second time he jammed down, even harder with his heel. The arm came loose, just enough that Jonah spun beneath it, feeling some of his long hair come away in the man’s grip. He drove one fist into the gut, the heel of his other hand came up beneath the man’s chin, driving him backward.

Hook tasted the salty blood on his tongue, felt it dribbling from his nose. And the sting of torn flesh at the corner of his eye where the man’s fingers had raked him good.

And then Jonah had his hands full again as Flat-face came at him, charging, head down, crushing Hook with both his arms as Jonah pummeled him on the back of the head, neck, shoulders. Arms locked him in a painful vise, choking off his breath. Hook couldn’t get any air as the man shoved him against the wall, driving the last breath from him. Then, again he rammed Hook against the clapboard. A collision against the wall. Each time with a grunt from the Confederate.

“Drop the knife, Perkins!”

He heard someone yell. Not sure who. His eyes weren’t clear—not for the blood and for the tears of pain.

“Leave me cut him, Hastings!”

Rat-face was there at Hook’s side now. Knife out, he was badly bruised and bloody.

“He could have gut-shot you—but he didn’t, Perkins,” said Jowls, the man called Hastings. “Leave it at that.” He was looking over the room like he knew good and well that none of them really could stand a chance of getting away from committing murder in this fashion.