“Damn them,” he now said quietly over the lip of his white china cup. “Damn their heathen souls to hell.”
He heard the rustle of blankets and cloth inside the tent. A moment later Jubilee recognized the sound of the woman at her chamber pot. At least she was taking care of herself again. For a time there after Major Wiser had been ordered to take the girl off with his company, the woman simply gave up all moving on her own and was constantly wetting the bedding. Making for a smelly mess Negro George had to tend to every day.
But for the past few weeks now, the woman seemed to be pulling herself back together. There was an admirable strength to be found in her, this beautiful woman wasting her life away on a farm, married to a man who sweated over the soil, grunted over the animals, dirt and worse forever caked beneath his fingernails.
Strange that Jubilee always thought of the farmer’s woman in that impersonal sense, even after these past four years. She had a name. Wiser had discovered it in a family Bible found in the cabin they ransacked at the homestead there in Missouri. Her folks had come from Germany, settling in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Her name was Gritta Moser. Married to a man named Jonah Hook. Mother of three live births. All three children gone now the way of these blasted prairie winds.
He had cleaved the wheat from the chaff, much to his own liking. He smiled for it again.
“Rider coming in, Colonel!” announced one of the camp guards as the sentry loped up to Usher’s awning. He flung an arm east.
“He alone?”
The picket nodded. “Appears to be.”
“Bring him on in when he arrives.”
The horseman proved to be one of Lemuel Wiser’s men—sinking wearily from his mount, winded and wind-burned, gaunt from the miles and weeks.
“You’ve been on the trail for some time, my good man,” Usher cheered as he rose, dusting both hands off on his flowered silk weskit, tugging on the points of the embroidered vest. “What news do you have from the major? I trust he’s not lollygagging far behind you?”
The man swallowed, his tongue flicking at his cracked, bleeding lips, greedily accepting a canteen of water from one of the pickets, with a half-done nod of appreciation. “Boot—… Major Wiser’s dead, Colonel.”
Jubilee sensed something seize him cold and low. “You joke with me, man—I’ll feed your heart to my hound!” Usher growled, instantly alarmed by the news. He took a moment to turn away from the rider to let this unfortunate disclosure wash over him.
Then Usher wheeled on the courier suddenly. “How did this happen? A card game? Perhaps a jealous husband? Such a dandy that Wiser thought himself to be.”
Indeed, Boothog Wiser was—or had been—a devilishly handsome man who loved his women and his gambling with unerring and equal passion. Both were vices Usher frowned upon. Perhaps one or the other had caught up to Jubilee’s young lieutenant at last. Perhaps a man faster with his gun discovered Wiser cheating at cards. More likely a jealous husband caught Wiser alone and dallying with his strumpet of a wife.
Although it came as a shock that Wiser could actually be dead, still it came as no surprise.
“Tell me all of it—or I’ll slice your tongue in ribbons!” Usher roared.
“It was a man,” the rider began, water droplets tracking dark veins from his sun-swollen lips, streaking down the fuzzy, dust-coated chin. “A man what’d been follering the major for some time.”
“Explain it!”
The courier’s eyes went small, like a ferret’s, as he flicked them toward the colonel’s tent. “The girl’s papa,” he answered in a small, trapped, feral voice.
That stung Usher to the quick. He straightened, still glaring at the rider. “The girl’s … father?”
The courier only nodded, greedily swiping another drink from the canteen.
Jubilee Usher slowly turned himself to gaze at the closed tent flaps—behind which the woman, Gritta Hook, kept herself hidden. He could only wonder if she was listening at this moment.
He turned back on the messenger. This, like any fear, always filled him with all the more rage.
“Then … I take it we’re being tracked by the woman’s husband.”
A week out of Fort Laramie and this was the last of his meat.
Jonah Hook speared the long sliver of flank steak on the end of the peeled willow and held it suspended over the low flames of the fire he had built at the bottom of a deep pit scooped from the sandy soil. There were no bright flames to be spotted by wandering eyes scouring the black of prairie night. When he finished his meal, Jonah planned to move on another three or four miles west, away from this creek bottom, there to make another cold camp for the night, far from fire and the odor of food that would hang about a place, far from any chance of some owl-hoot rider sneaking up on him out of the darkness.
He liked this moment of the day best, Jonah admitted. The long ride behind him, the warmth and cheer of the little fire close at hand, the fragrance of the sizzling meat rising to his nostrils, accompanied by the crackle of spitting grease as the antelope loin seared over the glowing embers. And with it a drink of the cold, clear waters taken from these streams that rushed down from the high country, eventually to join the North Platte and the Missouri and ultimately the Mississippi in its headlong rush to the sea.
That order of things really didn’t matter to Jonah. He had never seen an ocean, and doubted he ever would for that matter. All he knew was that right here in this high country, the water was found cold and sweet, unsullied by alkali salts and untouched by the sun’s heat.
Around his face swam a vapor of mosquitoes. As long as he stayed put, right where he was in the midst of what little smoke his fire put off, he held the troublesome winged tormentors at bay. True, they buzzed past his ears from time to time, but never seemed to land.
Out there in the beyond a lone coyote set up the first yammer of the night, calling for hunting partners to join in on the evening’s stalk.
Their kind hunted almost silently, Jonah thought to himself, pulling down their quarry without much of a sound. Not like he had to with one of the big-bore guns he carried along on the pack animal. He glanced over at the two horses now, both hobbled and content to browse on the good grass he had found for them near the stream bank.
Jonah dared not shoot, as hungry as he might be for the next two or three days in crossing South Pass. He remembered this country. Three years it had been since last the southerner set foot along the Sweetwater River. His uniform was cut of Yankee blue then—galvanized out of that Rock Island Prison with the rest come west to fight Injuns. He had grown smaller and smaller every black night in that prison, afraid he was dying more and more every day like the others the guards dragged out by their heels most every morning. Desperate to do anything to escape that half-living, slow death, Jonah had joined with hundreds of others who vowed allegiance to the Union as long as they did not have to turn guns on their Confederate brethren.
Far from the Yankees’ plans to ship us south to fight, he thought now, then snorted humorlessly. The Union had no desire to make their “galvanized Yankees” engage the southern secesh. Instead, Jonah and the rest were freighted west to the high plains, there to fight Indians and keep the freight roads open, fight Indians and keep the great transcontinental telegraph wire up, and just plain fight Indians.
This was, after all, the land that the Sioux and Cheyenne would hold on to so jealously.
Jonah had seen a lot of good men die, all of them ordered to wrench this godforsaken ground from the red men.
He clenched his eyes shut for a moment, pushing away the hoary vision of those pale bodies left behind when the warriors withdrew after every skirmish. Butchered, mutilated, limbs hacked free, desecrated in every way inhumanly possible. He doubted he would ever forget the sight of a soldier’s manhood chopped off and stuffed in his gaping mouth, death-frozen eyes staring in mute wonder at the sky.