He was sitting in a cold puddle of it now, yet he dared not move. His stalker was likely drawing close. He held his breath a moment, listening, straining against the rain for sound. His eyes must be deceiving him. He’d be damned, but it sounded as if someone were already in his camp, rummaging through his packs.
Try as he might, Jonah could not see a soul. As well as he had chosen this spot, for some reason he still could not see anyone rustling the oiled canvas. But, plain as sun, Hook could hear the sound.
Slowly rising on one knee, Jonah inched forward, parting more of the leaves and branches with the rifle muzzle. Then he saw the top of a man’s head.
“A Injun,” he said under his breath, swiping a damp forearm across his lips.
Brushing his thumb across the Winchester’s hammer to make sure it was cocked, he rose to a crouch and prepared to make his play—just as the Indian pulled free one of the glass bottles Jonah had purchased back at Laramie.
A loafer, by God. Nothing more’n a good-for-nothing, whiskey-bellied loafer!
Hook burst from the willow and alder, Winchester at his hip and leveled at its target.
“Goddamn you! Leave my whiskey alone, you drunken redskin!”
At the white man’s growl exploding from the rain-soaked undergrowth, Two Sleep scrambled awkwardly for his feet, moccasins slipping on the wet ground, and flew backward, tumbling headlong over more of Jonah’s packs. Yet he slowly raised one arm in the air, grinning sheepishly at the white man, almost apologetic, for certain triumphant. Somehow in his fall he had miraculously kept the whiskey bottle aloft, safe, and unbroken.
“Drop it, I say!” Jonah roared, half-ready to laugh at the Indian sprawled in the mud, intent on that bottle of whiskey.
But as he said it, the Indian’s empty hand came up filled with a pistol. That hammer cocked loud enough to be the clattering of an iron wagon tire rolling over granite.
Little did Hook like staring down the bore of any weapon, much less a pistol he figured was gripped in the shaky hand of a whiskey-sodden Indian. Unpredictable, that’s what their kind was. And this one might up and pull that trigger as soon as look at Jonah, just for the whiskey. Just another dead white man, more or less—
“Two Sleep,” the stranger blurted plain as paint.
Hook wagged his head, not sure he had heard what he thought he had. Plain-spoke English.
“What was that you said, you drunk devil?”
“Two Sleep. My name—Two Sleep. But not drunk.”
He looked sideways at the intruder, suspicious. “Speak English, do you?”
With a nod of his head, the Indian used the hand holding the bottle to scratch the side of his face where some brown mud clung, dripping onto his shoulder from his fall.
“You’re a sight to boot,” Jonah went on. “Put that belt gun away before one of us gets hurt.”
“You shoot Two Sleep?” the Indian asked.
“Sure. Always shoot whiskey thieves, I do,” Hook replied, the beginnings of a grin crawling across his lips.
He didn’t want to like the Indian, didn’t want to trust him. But Jonah couldn’t deny that he was already beginning to do both. “Still, I ain’t yet shot a man I was drinking whiskey with.”
The pony beneath him answered every urging he gave it with the elk-handled rawhide quirt, whipped across the mustang’s rear flank to keep him first among the riders returning to the camps with such great, momentous news: white men were stalking their trail, coming on fast, greedily eating up the ground between them and the great gathering of lodge circles.
Already it had proved to be a memorable summer for High-Backed Bull, having sworn his allegiance to Porcupine, who in turn took his faithful warriors north to join with the great Shahiyena war chief, Sauts: the one known as the Bat. Among the white men, however, the muscular one was called Roman Nose.
This summer the Northern Cheyenne of Roman Nose and Tall Bull and Two Moon were joined by the great Brule Lakota village of Pawnee Killer. Their alliance had proved fruitful in recent moons: ever since the shortgrass time in late spring, the young warriors had been striking out, raiding into the land of the white settlers as far south as the Solomon, the Saline, even south to the river the white man called the Smoky Hill, where the pony soldiers built their string of forts and the iron road for their smoking horse.
As he reached the smooth, grass-covered brow of the last hill, High-Backed Bull saw the camp circles laid out in rings below him in the river valley, the River of Plums. The fighting bands had been following its course for the last three suns, slowly ambling to the north and west, in no hurry. It seemed they had come to dare the small party of white men to catch up with them.
Behind the young Shahiyena warrior now, he heard the yips and cries of the others, mostly Brule, a few Dog Soldiers like himself. They raced over the ridge and sprinted this last slope at a full gallop, urging their ponies ever faster, calling out to the camps below, feeling across every inch of their bare flesh the excitement of the news they brought.
Women at the river turned from bathing young children, washing clothing or cradleboards, or filling skin pouches with water. Still others rose from morning fires or scraping the skins pegged out across the prairie, hides surrounding the three great camp circles. Children began crying out in the contagious excitement, darting here and there with the news of approaching riders, while camp dogs set to the howl and yip. So much clamor was it all that the old men who sat in the shade of the lodges rose finally with wonder, shading their eyes from the late-morning sun.
Then High-Backed Bull saw him—the tall, muscular one, emerging at last from his lodge near one horn of the camp crescent farthest to the east—the direction where the white man marched, coming on at a hurry.
As High-Backed Bull yanked back on the single horsehair rein, bringing with it his pony’s jaw, the animal skidded to a lock-kneed stop, prancing in a wild circle around Roman Nose. The war chief grabbed for the rein and held on as he peered into the light of the high sun, and the face of the young scout.
“You bring me good news?”
Catching his breath, finding his tongue so dry from the race that it stuck to the roof of his mouth, Bull asked, “I am first?”
Roman Nose nodded, impatient. “You are, High-Backed Bull. What do you, the first to ride in, have to tell me?”
The pony hurled flecks of foam as it threw its head from side to side—at a full gallop seconds before, then suddenly commanded to halt and stand obediently still by both rider and the man on the ground.
Bull gazed into the war chief’s dark eyes, wishing his own were as dark and truly Cheyenne as were those of Roman Nose. “The white men—”
“Yes, the half-a-hundred?”
Swallowing hard, Bull went on, “They are less than half a day behind now.”
“Do you think you know where they will camp tonight?”
Sensing pride that the war chief should ask such an important question of him, High-Backed Bull straightened on the pony’s back. “I cannot be sure, but I believe there is a place where they might find firewood along the shallow river, camp on the sandy bank.”
“How far?”
He thought a moment, rerunning the miles of race back through his mind. “Not far. I believe it would take us no longer than it would for a man to eat his supper.”
Roman Nose smiled, gazing off to the southeast, into the distance, as the Brule riders brought their ponies to a halt around him, kicking up dust in rooster tails, bringing the barking dogs and yammering, excited children as magnets would draw a scattering of iron filings.
“We must go tell Pawnee Killer!” shouted the war chief over the growing clamor. “Tell Tall Bull and Two Moon—get their ponies! We have a war council to attend.” He began to turn away into the crowd.