“What of it?” asked the young one.
“That Snake there is handier with that Spencer of his than a Comanche with a new scalping knife.”
They looked at each other, then the bushy mustache wagged his head. “Just don’t know about enlisting a—”
“Listen,” Hook said, quieter now as he leaned forward on the table. “He’s been riding with me for more’n five year now. Been through one scrape and another. Just say he can ride with me and you won’t have to pay him. And what you get is two good guns for the price of one.”
Hook watched the two men look quickly at one another, and if there was some exchange there between them, Jonah could not say what it was. Perhaps only something in the cast of the eyes. When next the younger man spoke, the die had been cast.
“You’ll provision him on your own, Mr. Hook. From your own rations. And I will expect him to keep himself to himself. For the sake of my command. Is that understood?”
“Perfectly.”
“You both have horses, I take it?”
“And two pack animals.”
“Sell one of ’em,” the old man ordered.
“Where?” he asked.
“To the fort. Army always needs horses—the way them brunette troops and Mackenzie’s cavalry going through good riding stock the way they are.”
“You won’t need but one pack animal for the two of you, Mr. Hook,” the younger man explained, the muscles along his clean-shaven jaw making little ripples just beneath the surface of the tanned skin. “We travel light and fast.”
“You got to,” Hook agreed. “If you’re going to track a war party what’s moving light and fast. More times’n not, the army moves too damned slow.”
“Amen to that!” the old man exclaimed, animation brought to that face sharp-stitched with lines of hard living.
Hook asked eagerly, “When we go?”
“Two days. At dawn. Front of the sheriff’s office down the street,” answered the younger, his blue eyes become narrow points of light. “But drop by there tomorrow sometime, and the deacon will get you signed on proper.”
“Papers?”
The younger man eyed Hook with another hard-eyed cast of appraisal. “You ain’t got a reputation to hide, do you?”
“Nothing what would keep me from signing my name to your paper, no,” Jonah answered. “Nothing what would keep me from hunting Comanche neither.”
“Good,” he replied, and stood, putting a hand on the old man’s shoulder as they rose together. “This is Deacon Johns.”
“Mr. Johns,” Jonah repeated, putting out his hand and shaking with the gray-headed one.
“Deacon. I’m lieutenant of this company—but you can call me Deacon. It’s what I figure is my God-give tide. And such as that carries more weight than any temporal military rank.”
The younger man took Jonah’s hand and shook. “And I’m Lamar Lockhart. Captain of the company you have just joined.”
“What company is that?” Hook asked Lockhart.
“Company C. Texas Rangers.”
32
Moon of the Long Cold 1874
WINTER STILL HELD the plains in its death grip.
While there hadn’t been any snow of late, the cold had kept the warriors near the village, and the ponies worked harder to find some graze worth the work. High scurrying clouds looking suspiciously like clots of ice crystals shined beneath a dull pewter dish of a sun. Only the deep canyons offered shelter from the brutal, incessant wind that ravaged the prairie above.
Down here they could find more grass for the herd. And more firewood to keep the lodges warm. Still, the children cried with empty bellies.
Antelope was a father already—his son born early last autumn. And now Prairie Night thought she carried her husband’s second child. Tall One knew the young ones always suffered the most.
Time and again he watched the gray-eyed war chief send scouting parties out into the cold, dispatched this way and that, to the south mostly, to look for sign of the great herds. What was left of the once-great herds, that is.
More and more the big shaggy animals hung to the south, away from the banks of the Arkansas River, even south of the Cimarron of late. The buffalo hunters with their big guns riding out of the white man’s settlements in Kan-saw had seen to that. Those hairy-faced hunters would now have to push farther and farther south still if they were to continue their slaughter of the humped masses. And by pushing across the Canadian, the hide men would march right into the heart of the Kwahadi hunting ground.
Tall One could not wait for the air to warm and the grass to raise its green head on the prairie, for the ponies to grow sleek and the dancing to begin once more. The calls would go out from one war chief or another—asking for young men to ride in search of the white men. Come shortgrass time, Tall One would ride with the war parties. And this season Antelope would be at his side.
The air blew racy with the fragrance of winter’s decay, last autumn’s leaves hurling along the ground ahead of the brutal wind moaning out of the west like a death song upon this high, barren land given its Spanish name, Llano Estacado. Spring and renewal come to resurrect the land. But for now Tall One thought only of the band’s last search for meat. How the hunters had to go farther, search longer. The Kwahadi were running dangerously low on meat they had dried to last them the winter, forced to venture out on the hunt much earlier this winter than they had in winters come and gone.
It was during one of those hunts last fall that Tall One had gone with the war chief, when he and the older warriors had killed a few white hide hunters they discovered far south of the “dead line,” that place where the tai-bos’ government treaty-talkers declared white buffalo men were not to cross.
The white man’s government and its guarantees seemed to matter little to the white men intent on plunging farther and farther south of the Arkansas River, come now to the last hunting ground promised the southern nations as their own.
“A waste of time, this talking treaty with the white man,” the war chief growled at Tall One that night at their small fire after they had killed the buffalo hunters. There were scalps to dance over, clothing and mirrors, and the guns—those big buffalo guns taken from the dead men.
Tall One asked, “Is it true the old men give away to the white treaty-talkers all that we young men have fought to hold on to?”
He touched the rangy youth with those gray eyes as he said, “Six winters ago, ever since the autumn when the old chiefs of the Kiowa, Cheyenne—and Comanche too—all signed that talking paper up on Medicine Lodge Creek, the white hunters have been pushing into our buffalo country in greater and greater numbers.”
“These buffalo hunters with the big guns who you and the others speak of more often these days—you are afraid they will slaughter their way through the herds?”
“I fear these white men will soon cross the Canadian River—the river that is the northern boundary of our sacred buffalo ground. And when they do, I fear this coming fight will prove to be the last stand for our people.”
From all that Tall One had learned from Wolf Walking Alone he knew that killing soldiers carried nothing but a curse for the Kwahadi. If they had learned anything since the first white man set foot in this country, the Comanche had learned that the yellow-leg soldiers would strike back with a vengeance—sending even more of their number against the Kwahadi next time.
“No matter,” protested young Antelope. “Because we should strike and strike again. The yellow-legs never find our roaming warriors.” He had made his first, bloody kill that day. And at long last had his first white scalp.