Autumn was seeping down the central plains, coming in its relentless crawl to mark the end of another season, working its way across the Arkansas and Cimarron, on over the Canadian and then to the Red River by the time they heaved away from Fort Richardson and headed north to Indian Territory carrying Colonel Ranald Mackenzie’s handwritten pass for Two Sleep.
“It wouldn’t do for an Indian to be caught wandering around off his reservation in this part of the country,” the commanding officer of the Fourth U.S. Cavalry had said to Hook. “A Shoshone at that.”
“But this ain’t Snake country, Colonel.”
Mackenzie’s brow had wrinkled. “To most folks in Texas, Mr. Hook—an Injun is an Injun. And if an Injun isn’t on his reservation … he’s fair game. Take my pass for your friend here, with my hope that it will serve you well. I commend you to your good sense, and may God bless your search. Watch your backtrail.”
The hardwoods had been illuminated with autumn’s fire by the time Jonah and Two Sleep crossed the Red River into Indian Territory. That first night back in that country Jonah spoke of tracking the Mormons into the land of the Creek.
“Sixty-six was it?” Hook asked himself thoughtfully. “Or was it sixty-seven?” He had wagged his head. “The Creeks were a good people—farmers, raised some horses too. I had my cousin at my side. Artus.”
For a long time he was deep in himself, mucking around in the memories of those first bygone days spent searching for family, on the trail of blood kin. Better it was to have blood kin beside you when you set upon that trail.
Cousin Artus, who came home to Missouri from the war to find his mother already in the grave while he was off fighting Yankees. Soon to put his father in the ground beside her final resting place. When Jonah showed up to discover his family took and his place gone to ruin—why, it became clear neither of them had anything better than to leave behind all their loss and say farewell to that Missouri valley.
Following the recollections of old man Boatwright, the one the Mormons had tortured, Jonah and Artus tramped west into the land of the Creek before Usher’s trail went cold. They moseyed north out of Indian Territory and found work supplying buffalo for the railroad crews laying ties and track along the Smoky Hill in Kansas. When Jonah later went to work as a scout for the army, cousin Artus was left behind to continue working for the westbound railroad.
Jonah had often joked how safe Artus had it—while Jonah seemed to be riding out there on the point, pushing his luck at the head of soldier columns searching for the warrior bands.
Still, it was the railroad and the great smoking horse that drew much of the red fury back then, the way the high points in country like this would draw the most lightning strikes.
There by that fire, his first night back in Indian Territory, shivering from the cold autumn wind gnashing its teeth at his back, Jonah remembered how he first saw the scene of the derailment—how the crumpled cars lay askew on both sides of the twisted track like a child’s toys. At first glimpse from that distance the cars seemed like something he had of a time carved for Jeremiah and little Zeke.
Trying his best to control his panic as he drove his horse into a gallop along the ravaged rail bed, Jonah had eventually stood over the second bloated, burned body, thinking it had to be his cousin. When he had tried to turn the blackened body over, the swollen skin burst with a sickening hiss, releasing a horrid gas that made Jonah stumble back from the corpse. After losing what breakfast he had left in his belly, Hook had turned back to what remained of his cousin after the warriors got done with the railroad men.
He had wished he remembered more of the words he should have said over the shallow grave he dug there beside the twisted tracks. Words of love and forgiveness and everlasting peace. But in the past seven years since his cousin’s death, Jonah had come to realize all the more that he knew very, very little of love and forgiveness. And had long ago come to the conclusion he would likely never know a damned thing of everlasting peace.
Pushing on into autumn Jonah and Two Sleep had reached Fort Sill. They spent time among the bands gathered at the Kiowa and Comanche agency. Talking with Indian agent James Haworth, they picked the man’s brain for all that Jonah hoped to learn. In the end they saw a handful of white children waiting to be claimed, were shown crinkled daguerreotypes of others—pictures that had been taken by a photographer out of Topeka, photographs to be circulated among the forts and towns of Kansas in hopes that relatives might come to claim these orphans of the Indian war.
As much as Jonah wanted any of those boys to be his, as much as he strained and squinted, trying to make those dim, sepia-toned tintypes into something he might recognize, he finally had to admit he had come up with a busted flush again. What hurt even more was his growing fear that in the end he would never recognize his grown-up boys, even if by that unadulterated God-ordained miracle he ever came across Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
In taking his leave from the Kiowa-Comanche agency, Jonah stopped for a moment with Haworth outside the door of the small clapboard shack topped by a hip roof that served as the agent’s office. A few yards away on a patch of bare ground, a young man was using a long branch to pick up dirty, greasy clothing. Those worn and torn garments were fed to a smoky fire, one at a time. Jonah watched as britches and shirts, pantaloons and dresses, coats and even Indian clothing, were fed onto the smoldering, smoky flames.
“What’s he doing?” Hook asked Haworth.
“The children’s clothes.”
“You burn what they got to wear?”
“We give the recaptured children a bath, cut their hair, and purge them of the body lice before we give them new clothes donated by Friends back east.”
Hook’s eyes narrowed as he turned away from the fire. “Your work should give you satisfaction, Mr. Haworth. What you do makes these poor children white again.”
The agent wagged his head. “Not so simple as that, Mr. Hook. Some of these young wretches will live with their horrors the balance of their natural lives.”
“And the rest?”
He tried a smile. “They’ll do fine. Just a matter of getting them back to their own people.”
Jonah turned his back on the fire and asked, “How about a child, took when he was five or six?”
Haworth tried to put a cheerful face on it, but it turned out to be nothing more than a wan smile. “Who is to say?” And he shrugged.
“No,” Jonah forced the question. “I want to know. What are the chances?”
The agent’s face went as gray as old oatmeal. “Perhaps that child will heal in time. Any younger, a child—well, it depends on how long the child is held by his captors. Still …”
“Still … what, Mr. Haworth?”
“Any younger than that, Mr. Hook—truth is, I’m afraid there is little hope of fully recovering the child to a life among a God-fearing white culture.”
He turned back to watch the fire, watch the smudge of smoke rise among the trees losing their autumn-tinged leaves that chilly afternoon. Finally he asked, “So where does a man go from here?”
“You might move north. To Anadarko on the Washita. If you find no help there, you can check with John Miles, agent at the Darlington Agency up on the Canadian.”
“What tribe?”
“Cheyenne, Mr. Hook.”
“I know something of the Cheyenne,” he replied too quietly, two fingers brushing the long scar at his hairline where a warrior’s bullet had grazed him seven long years gone. Then he stared directly at the agent, saying, “These Indians will never make farmers, Mr. Haworth. Scratching at the ground is something for the white man who wants to dig like a burrow mouse.”