They were almost as amusing as the white men Two Sleep had learned to gamble with, learned to drink with. Whiskey and cards—the white man’s two most potent gifts to the Shoshone. He thoughtfully considered those gifts as he watched the solitary white man drag his saddles from the weary, rain-soaked horses down in the willow.
Two Sleep was compelled to draw closer to the stranger than he had wanted, mostly because of the thick, sluicing rain that seriously hampered his visibility. But as well, the Shoshone knew the rain cut down a man’s ability to smell danger, as well as softening the ground and everything on it so that the warrior would not betray himself in this stalk.
Yes, he loved the card games: monte and euchre. And with much practice at them in the shadow of Brid-ger’s fort, Two Sleep had become better than most of the white men he played. Better than them all, except that sour-faced Sweete. Never could read the man’s cards in that face. Sweete kept his hand too much a secret behind that impassive face.
Two Sleep wanted to get close enough to read this stranger’s face, to see if the white man packed along any whiskey in his spare packs. Two Sleep would show himself if there was a chance to drink some of the man’s whiskey. He would walk boldly in and announce his presence without fear, use some of his white-man words learned at the game table in Brid-ger’s fort.
Words like goddamn: the wagon the cursing white teamsters pulled behind his lagging oxen and mules as he yelled out, “Goddamn!”
Two Sleep guessed it meant something else too, for the white man used the word a lot at the card table.
Sumbitch, too. What the white man called himself, or some of his bad cards, or a balky mule. Or one another.
Two Sleep liked the way that Brid-ger and Sweete eloquently strung those flavorful words together when they talked among themselves, especially when excited or under the spell of whiskey. How Sweete especially put a lot of them together as he signed and spoke what little Shoshone he had learned from Two Sleep. Sweete knew Shahiyena; the white man’s wife was born to that tribe. Nonetheless, he tried to learn Shoshone at the card table.
Among white men there were a confusing number of words for one thing, Two Sleep thought as he saw the white man stop at the edge of the willow, unbutton his fly, and water the rain-soaked ground.
Especially that—all the words the white man had for his manhood. The warrior had learned from the best to call it many things: his cock, his dick, his peeder, his prick, and the funniest to his tongue, his love-stinger.
Why the white man did that, Two Sleep had decided he would never find out. Maybeso it was only to make his language seem all the harder to learn.
By now the lone white man was getting smarter, looking for dry wood beneath a tree thick with foliage. He started a small fire as Two Sleep watched, then stood long enough to take off all his clothing and drape his garments over low branches. The leaves of the tree suspended over his fire, and the heavy, wet air of the passing storm, muted the rising smoke.
With water on to boil, the white man rummaged through his packs until he found what he was looking for. He settled back against his saddle to drink, naked.
From the looks of the way the man drank, Two Sleep guessed the white man had some whiskey along. A bottle of it, perhaps more than one bottle—but at least the one the white man was sucking at with no small degree of satisfaction.
Frowning, Two Sleep brooded on how he would approach the camp—certain of only one thing. He would have to show himself before the white man got too much in the drinking way, or he might shoot a strange Indian—out of fear, or devilment.
Best to show himself and soon. Or, Two Sleep figured, he would simply have to do without any of that stranger’s whiskey.
Still, perhaps the white man would be willing to gamble away even more of his whiskey.
The Shoshone smiled.
Besides whiskey, maybe the white man had some cards too.
No reason either one of them had to be lonely ever again.
Not with a deck of cards, and enough whiskey.
5
September 1868
JONAH HOOK SENSED it, felt it to his marrow. Someone was watching him. But who, and why, his hunger-numbed mind refused to sort out.
For the better part of a day now he had known. There were subtle signs that only time in the wilderness can teach a man. Something nagging made him more than a little concerned that it might be one of Jubilee Usher’s men who had doubled back, coming wide around to see about rubbing out the man stalking the Danite trail.
Then the rain had come, sooner than expected, the storm racing faster than even Jonah could have figured it would. Caught out in the open when its first explosive dance started over the sun-baked plains, he shuddered beneath the thunderous cacophony of raindrops hammering the hardened ground like the echo of a thousand lead balls rattling inside a steel drum. It seemed as if the sky itself reverberated with the chorus of that driving rain, mirroring its pounding of the thirsty land and that single man struggling along beneath the onslaught of the skies.
Forcing himself to push on until he finally gave up, Jonah pulled his two horses into the willows beside the Sweetwater. He remembered the Sweetwater, with thoughts cured three winters over, time served in the Yankee army, protecting that telegraph wire from the Sioux and Cheyenne. This season of the year those warrior bands were all far to the north, hunting most like. Nary a sign of anything for the last three days now on his ride coming west out of Laramie.
Quickly he had tied off the animals, then dragged saddle and packs from their backs, letting them graze on the sun-stunted grasses back in a copse of alder where they would be less likely seen. He hurriedly made it look as if he were going to spend the night right there, then slipped off among the willow as if he were going to relieve himself, with one hand tugging his britches down over his hip as he went.
But once behind the thick growth of alder, Jonah rebuckled his belt and stuffed his shirttail back in his pants, squatting beneath some overhanging branches, where he gently parted the drying leaves with the barrel of his Winchester repeater. He waited, watching across the stream. To his right lay his campsite and the plunder he hoped would be bait enough to draw in the sneaky bastard dogging his backtrail.
He fought the sleep struggling to overtake him as the rain hammered the ground at his side, battering the leaves above, soaking his old hat that served as little protection. Jonah shuddered, growing chilled to the bone, and tried desperately to keep his eyes open.
“Keep ’em moving,” he told himself, remembering the words of Sweete and Bridger about sentries who had tired and fallen asleep because they had not kept their eyes moving. Staring at one thing too long proved deadly when a man was weary. Such a fool woke up too late—finding himself out of the frying pan and into the fire—if he woke up at all.
There came a rustle of movement to his left, along the creek bank, on the far side. Then a half-dozen birds took to the wing noisily, startling Jonah as he whirled the repeater about.
In the deepening silence that followed their frightened departure, Hook reasoned that no white man was going to make a successful sneak on him. All he had to do was wait and watch his campsite. That was the place the backtracker was surely headed. Likely the man had come across the river where the birds had taken wing and was moving downstream on the near bank, making for Jonah Hook’s camp.
The wet ground made it hard to hear a thing, and the sodden air didn’t carry a sound well at all. Two marks against him, Jonah brooded.
“Damn,” he muttered as more of the cold rain spilled from the hat brim down his collar.