“Ricos, not comancheros. Not here.”
“Back up north, goddammit?” Jonah growled.
He licked the drops of tequila from the red hairs of his mustache. “Yeah. Chihuahua is where you’ll come when you find out which rico train brought your boys in. Here is where you’ll come to get some idea where the boys were taken once they were brought down here. Until then, you got to go back north and find some answers.”
“Back … back to El Paso?”
With a wag of his big head, the Irishman said, “No. Out there. To the northeast is the trail you need to take. It’s wide and well beaten. Used every autumn trading season for years. Centuries, likely.”
“Northeast?”
“To Portrillo and beyond the river.”
“Beyond the river, you say? Texas.”
“Texas.”
So now Jonah drank in this dark, smoky hovel of a cantina in a village he thought the locals called Vieja. Another one of the miserable, stinking jacales squatting somewhere north of the Rio Grande.
With Two Sleep he crossed back into the States at a place called Presidio, angling north by east from there, staying clear of the mountains that hugged the distant skyline here, there, and on almost every side of their line of march. It was a hostile land peopled with too few gringos and too many Mexicans, where a growing population of Texans were protected as best they could be upriver by Fort Quitman on the west, by Fort Davis to the north and Fort Stockton on farther east of there, outposts strung so far apart in that long, desperately thin line of frontier defense the army had been establishing ever since the end of the South’s bid for independence from the Union.
“You got the right idea,” the old man declared to Jonah. “But your line’s off some.”
At a settlement called Marfa a bartender had suggested that Hook scare up one of John Bell Hood’s faithful—an old Confederate soldier who might be able to help point the two sojourners in some likely direction or another. For reasons he could not explain, Jonah trusted the old man more than he had trusted most others come across in the years since leaving Shad Sweete and Fort Laramie behind. It came hard for Jonah Hook to trust others. So much already lay crushed and trampled inside him. Hard anymore to trust, to hope.
The old soldier dragged out a rumpled map with few lines scratched across its dark surface, a parchment given a rich buckskin patina of time and smoke and the grease of many fires.
“There,” Jonah said again. “I draw a line from Chihuahua north by east,” and he slowly traced his fingernail northeast across the Rio Grande the way he and Two Sleep had come, heading on east into the open ground east of Fort Davis and west of Camp Hudson and Fort McKavett.
“Like I said—appears your thinking is on the right track when you head out from Chihuahua. But trick now is you gotta think like a comanchero, friend. Think like someone going north to trade with the Comanch’.”
Jonah’s eyes studied the map, smarting in the dim light and the smoke of cheap tobacco, the smudge of tallow candles that gave this cold, stinking, low-roofed room its only glow of life. The far northern edge of the old Confederate’s map had the words Indian Territory scratched across it in bold letters, while the tracings of rivers were barely more evident than the many wrinkles aging the old parchment.
“I come this far from the plains because I was told that the comancheros trade outta New Mexico. Went down there the long way from Fort Laramie, wandered around and found out I needed to head south to Chihuahua. That was where I was told to come back north, into Texas.”
“And here you are,” the old man said softly, his rheumy eyes lit with the candles’ glow and the cheap aguardiente. “When’d you leave that north country? Fort Laramie, you said?”
“Right,” he answered. “End of summer, sixty-eight.”
Jonah watched the old man’s eyes flick from him to the Shoshone and back again, widening in pure wonder as he whistled low. “You got any idea what month and year it be, son?”
With a shrug Jonah replied, “Didn’t keep track. S’pose it never mattered. Why?”
“Man has a job to do—he just does it, right?” He wagged his head in amazement. “Got the patience of the Eternal Himself, you do. Why, don’t you have any idea you been wandering over four year, friend?”
In ways, it felt like more than four years. In another way, Jonah was just as certain the old man was having sport with him. “Four years. You’re crazed, mister. It can’t be seventy-two.”
“No, friend, it ain’t.”
Jonah grinned, smiling at Two Sleep. “See? Told you. Knew you was having fun with me.”
With a shrug of his shoulder, the old man explained. “It ain’t seventy-two. It’s winter of 1873. Already two months gone past the new year.”
For a long moment he stared down at his hands, in a way wishing he hadn’t come to know that so much time had slipped under him wandering through the land of the Mormons before he plodded back and forth through season after season begging for and scratching out information in New Mexico, time fooled away before they ever wandered south to Chihuahua. All that time had stacked up solid as cordwood behind him, one piece at a time. He hadn’t noticed because there had always been another village to visit, another trail rumored to hold promise. In the end every day, week, month, and year had come at him and flowed on past in such small, unobserved pieces. So much of his life, and he hadn’t noticed it gone.
Of a sudden Jonah’s thoughts turned on something peculiar: that he would turn thirty-six this approaching summer. And owning up to that only meant that Gritta had grown much, much older too. Some ten years’ worth of older from the time Jonah had last held her against him.
And the boys. They weren’t really boys no more. Grown into men without him.
As much as he wanted to cry or lash out and hit something, someone, Jonah stoically turned back to the old soldier. Then gazed back down at the map, his heart thrumming in his ears, his breath come shallow like the flight of moth’s wings. “All right, old soldier. You want me think like a comanchero.”
The old man wiped some tobacco juice out of his gray chin whiskers before he asked, “Lookee there and tell me where you gonna go to trade, friend?”
Jonah’s eyes rose to the Shoshone’s, then slowly moved over to the old man’s. “I’m gonna go where the Injuns are.”
“Good! But—not just any Injuns.”
“The Comanche.”
There was that gap-toothed smile of triumph. “Doggedy—now you got it!”
With a slash of a grin, feeling the hot hammer of blood at his ears, Jonah gazed back down at that old, faded map in the candlelight. “All right. Show me where the comancheros go to trade with the Comanche.”
Without a word the wrinkled one licked his lips in the glow and wispy faint smoke of those tallow candles, then dragged his long fingernail across the parchment … slowly up from Chihuahua, across the Rio Grande west of Presidio, ever on as his fingertip neatly split the seventy-odd miles of wilderness lying between forts Quitman and Davis.
Jonah looked up and asked, “What’s out there?”
26
Spring 1873
THERE WASN’T MUCH out there.
Like the old soldier told him, “Jackrabbits and desert. A few Mex squatters. And the Pecos River. North of there—ever’thing—the hull durn country belongs to the Comanch’.”
Into the bitter cold of winter’s last gasp on the southern plains they plunged, crossing low mountains, peeling their way over rough country like all that they had pierced coming to Comancheria. This was a waterless chaparral where only the creosote brush and spear grass grew to break up the harsh monotony of the rise and fall of a sinister land. That, and the cactus. Always the cactus.