Cry of the Hawk (54 page)

Wiser grinned slightly and brought the glass from his lips. Then held out his hand. “Lemuel Wiser. I didn’t catch your name.”

“Jonah Hook, Major.”

“Pleased to have you with us, Jonah. You care to stay with Captain Hastings’s platoon of scouts—and if he wants to keep you with him—that’s fine by me.”

“By all means, I’d like him to stay with my outfit, with the major’s permission,” Hastings said. “Jonah’s had experience fighting Indians.”

“Indians?”

“Sioux and Cheyenne,” Hastings replied to Wiser’s question.

“Where was that, Jonah?”

“Out on the Emigrant Road. On the Sweetwater. North Platte. With General Connor’s expedition to Powder River.”

“My, my,” Wiser said approvingly, glancing quickly at Hastings with a bright light in his eyes. “You just might do to ride back home with us, Jonah.”

Hook felt the first wings of hope take flight. “Thank you, Major. I was hoping to meet the colonel himself soon too. Heard so much about you both.”

“You’ve learned of Jubilee Usher?”

“Yes, Major. Is he with you?”

Wiser grinned, on his face a benevolent light. “The colonel will meet us at Fort Laramie, Jonah. He has taken a different route.” He looked at Hastings. “And we will all go forth from here to effect that rendezvous with the colonel.”

“How soon we pulling out, Major?”

Wiser looked back at Hook. “Captain, we have a few days to spare. And I plan on spending them here. The men with me have rarely had money of late with which to gamble. And when they have had the money—it seems most no longer have the heart to gamble with me.”

“I take it you like to play cards, Major?” Hook asked.

“You a gambler, Jonah?” The light brightened behind his eyes.

“Let’s say I get serious about a game of cards every now and then.”

“Perfect! Simply perfect!” Wiser called out to the bartender to bring over two more glasses into which he poured drinks of the red whiskey. “Captain Hastings—first a toast to you for enlisting so splendid a recruit as Mr. Hook appears to be.”

“I figured he’d do, Major.”

“Indeed.” Wiser studied this new recruit. “Any man who believes the U.S. government should damn well stay out of the affairs of its citizens—especially the religious affairs of a growing population—that man should do well upon our return to Deseret.”

“This grand republic got no business telling any man how to run his life, Major.”

“Splendid, Jonah! Just what we have been saying for years now. There is, you are aware, a separation of church and state in the Constitution drafted by our Founding Fathers?”

“I never knew that. No, Major.”

“The Founding Fathers knew best—that it was God’s plan that our government should keep its hands off the religious affairs of the people.”

“I figure the Yankees and their Union ought to just keep hands off of most everything, Major Wiser.”

Wiser laughed suddenly, a head-rearing, hearty laugh. He clamped a hand on Hook’s bony shoulder. “To think we’ve found a kindred heart, Captain Hastings. In this land of the Gentile heathen, so far from Zion no less. And—a man who loves to gamble to boot!”

46

Early July, 1868

H
E
WAS
THANKFUL
the prairie nights cooled off the way they did. As short as that starlit respite was from the growing heat of summer come to sear the high plains.

Lemuel Wiser sat at the big table with Jonah Hook and the rest, fewer now than when they had started fourteen hours ago that very morning after a breakfast of eggs and potatoes and thick slices of ham with gravy served up by the former army mess cook in his smoky kitchen at the back of this saloon. Good biscuits on the side too, washed down with lots of coffee laced with sipping whiskey.

“Gets the old heart pumping for the game,” Wiser had cracked as he tore open the first deck of cards for what had been a long, long day that saw players come and go. Very few of his men tried their luck. Soldiers mostly, in Dobe Town from Fort Kearney for a little recreation—some drinking, some gambling, and most surely some treasured but precious few moments behind those doors out back where the powdered chippies plied their trade.

Army troopers or Wiser’s own soldiers—men always seemed to like the girls better than the gambling. Back there away from things, where a man was no longer self-conscious around his fellow soldiers, where a man could scream and holler and let it all out when the explosion came as he rode one of those fleshy or bony, coffee-colored or alabaster-skinned, whores.

From time to time men dropped in and out of the game, at times there were more than eight ringing the table with Wiser. At times down to no more than four. Yet the gambler in the soul of the new man kept him at the table. Jonah Hook won a little, lost a little, managing to stay just far enough ahead that he could afford to keep a bottle at his elbow through the last fourteen hours. He poured drinks for the other players and himself, and stayed far enough ahead that he was not driven to carding out like so many of the others who gave up and left, empty-handed.

Some of those losers stayed to watch. Others went out the door in silence. A few left noisily, grumbling their complaints as to the suspected lack of honesty in the good-looking stranger with the smooth tongue. It was not the first time Lemuel Wiser had heard such complaints, not the first time he had been accused of having an oily tongue or fast, slippery fingers.

Wiser enjoyed being a gambler in everything he did in life. There was enough boredom after all. And all a man had to do was open his eyes and look around him to see the desperate lives of little men to know that. Long ago, Wiser had promised himself he would not be one of them. He would make things happen, create his own world and along with it create a specific order to that world, mirroring most how he saw himself. So far, he had done well in that regard.

And with Jubilee Usher now returning to Deseret, it just might mean a promotion for Lemuel Wiser. If Brigham Young took Usher up the ladder, then Wiser would be the natural to step into the vacancy: to lead the Danites. To make of Young’s Avenging Angels what only Lemuel Wiser could make of them. To fashion them in his own image.

What glory before God and the Saints!

Yet across the last two hours, with the whiskey growing stale and the cloud of old smoke hung thick about their shoulders, Wiser had steadily lost. Not much each hand. But enough that his winnings were dwindling. Some going here, some there to that soldier. But mostly his money had been dragged across the wide table until it now sat in front of Hastings’s new man.

“I must say, Jonah—you’ve proved to be quite a good card player.”

Hook smiled back, cracking that bony face of his with a disarming grin. “Just lucky, I s’pose, Major. Cards is a funny game like that.”

“Man learns a lot about another man—watching him play cards.”

Hook peered over his cards, tonguing aside a quid of moist tobacco he was chewing. “That so, Major? What you learned about me?”

“You’re good, Jonah Hook. One of the best I’ve played. Not the best, mind you. Because I’ve never lost to any man before.”

“Not even Colonel Usher?”

“I told you! Lost to no man.” He said it a little harsher than he had wanted. But it did not matter. He had spoken.

Soon enough, Wiser told himself. Soon he would be stepping into Usher’s role—
Colonel
Lemuel Wiser. A man to be reckoned with—by Saint and Gentile alike.

For the better part of the next two hours, the cards moved around the table. And the money moved between the last three of them left sitting at the table, in the center of the ring of onlookers who squinted down through the yellow, murky haze, a glow put to the tobacco smoke by the single oil lamp that hung just above their heads. Three remained. Wiser—sweating with more than the heat of this old summer night. An old soldier—who played his cards predictably as a barracks better, conservatively, and well. Jonah Hook—who now had all but a few of Wiser’s dollars on his side of the table.

“There, Jonah,” Wiser said, feeling a surge of confidence in the strength of his hand. A full house: kings and sevens. Boothog was certain, something in his gut telling him that his luck was about to take a turn for the better. A gambler who wins is a gambler who has to hang in there through a short run of bad luck and bad cards.

And Wiser knew he was truly a gambler.

“I’ll raise,” Hook replied, pushing more scrip to the center of the table.

Wiser watched the money come to the pot, then looked down at what he held in his hand. He studied what money he had left in front of him, next to his whiskey glass. It was as if Hook knew exactly how much it would take to wipe him out. And he suddenly hated the new man for it.

Wiser smiled, despising Hook. “Here you go, Jonah,” he said with a silver lilt to his voice. “I’ll match you—knowing that you don’t stand a chance of beating me.”

“That’s all you got, Major?”

He held his hands out, guarding his cards. “You see it, Jonah. I’m just going to have to win back some of that money you won from me. And this is the hand to do it on.”

Hook pursed his lips then took a swallow of whiskey from his glass. “I see. You figure you’ve got a hand good enough to beat me?”

“Let’s call and see. What do you say, Jonah?”

He wagged a hand. “Not so fast, Major. If you think you’ve got a good hand—I want you to know I’ve got a better hand. And I’m willing to see just how much a gambler you are. But—you’re out of money … so I guess you don’t really want to play for high stakes.”

Wiser leaned back in his seat, for a moment listening to the muttering of some of the spectators, soldiers and Danites both.

With a flair, he stood, pulling back the flaps of his rumpled coat to expose the two pistols. “You want my custom guns, don’t you? Had your eye on them, I know. They are fine specimens—”

“I got guns, Major. Don’t really need yours.”

“Then …” And he looked over himself, wondering what he could offer. He was growing a bit edgy, from the hours in the chair, enough whiskey to put a sharpness to everything, and from this hired man’s cocky attitude. “What is it you want me to wager?” His words no longer had that silver smoothness to them.

And that crooked smile Hook gave him made Wiser want to take the man’s thin, sinewy neck in both his hands right now and squeeze until the smile was gone and the eyes bugged out, tongue lolling, gasping for air—

“You ain’t got anything I really want. I s’pose the game’s over—”

“More money? Take my marker! When we get to Laramie to rendezvous with the colonel—I’ll honor my note.” He quickly turned to one of the men. “Get me paper and a pencil. I’ll write Mr. Hook my draft—”

“Don’t want any more of your money, Major. Told you. ’Sides, what can a man do with just so much money?”

Boothog slammed a flat palm down on the table, exasperated with the Southerner. He was thumping the clubfoot on the floor noisily, drumming in rhythm with his warning. “You’re trying to goad me, Jonah. And I won’t stand for goading from any man.”

Hook smiled back at the tongue-lashing, which vexed Wiser all the more.

“Few days back, you was telling me how much a gambler you was—how good you was too. Good at gambling in life too. I didn’t figure you’d buckle under and go belly up like this, Major. Just ’cause a man whipped you at cards.”

“You haven’t whipped me at cards, Hook!” he roared, wiping beads of sweat from his brow, swiping the finger off on his vest gone damp in the sticky, still air of the saloon.

Hook peered carefully at the table. “I don’t see you with any money left to call me. Appears I win this hand, and the whole game. It’s over.”

When the Confederate reached in with one long arm to rake back the pot, Wiser caught his wrist. “Hold it right there, Jonah,” he said quietly through his teeth, desperately trying to maintain control of himself and the situation.

“What’s that, Major?”

He started to choke on it. As much as he wanted to crack the man’s skull—it just might have to come to that later. But for now, in front of all these people … in front of these men he would one day command from the top—Lemuel Wiser would have to be just what he claimed he was: a gambler.

“Yes. I do have something you might be interested in, Jonah,” he said, releasing the Southerner’s wrist.

Wiser leaned back, smoothing his vest lapels. “You been a long time without a woman?”

Hook stared at him without expression. “Long time, Major. Why?”

“I have a prize. I mean a really rich prize I can offer you.” Wiser stared down at the money on Hook’s side of the table, glanced at the old soldier who had folded and sat watching them both, and then back to the Confederate. “You say I’m not a gambler? Well, let’s see if you are the gambler you claim to be. I’ll wager what special treasure I have against everything you have—all that money sitting in front of you.”

Hook dragged a hand through his long hair, then scratched a cheek as he gazed down on the pile of money. “This is a lot of money. But you got my interest up, I will admit. Just what you got that could be worth all this money? And what’s this talk of me not having had a woman got to do with it?”

Wiser felt himself leap joyous inside. His tactic would work, he was sure of it.

“Palmer,” he called out, wagging a finger to one of his men. Wiser whispered his orders in Sam Palmer’s ear and watched the man go.

Seeing Hook’s eyes follow Palmer’s exit, Wiser said, “I’m having my wager brought here now to show you, Jonah. I think a man of your needs … you’ll approve.”

Minutes later there was a hush that came over the group, a scraping of boot soles as men moved back and a grin that crept across Wiser’s lips.

“Here is my wager—against everything you’ve got. Winner takes all.”

He watched Jonah turn and look at the girl.

She stood weaving between Palmer and Colby, one of Hastings’s men, groggy and stupefied on laudanum. It was the safest thing to do, Usher had decided years ago. Keep the girl and her mother drugged so there was never any danger of them escaping. He had always wondered what the stuff would one day do to the girl’s brain. But it did not matter now. Jubilee Usher wanted that deserter Riley Fordham so bad that the colonel had promised the girl as a reward to the man who brought back Fordham’s head in a burlap sack.