“There’s more blood of white folks on the hands of those Kwahadi warriors than can ever be washed away with all the absolution and forgiveness in the world,” said Lamar Lockhart with a cold fire behind his eyes. “We don’t get Quanah Parker before Mackenzie does, men—the Rangers won’t ever have another chance to try to even the debt.”
“Them—Parker’s bunch—and only them is what we hunt,” swore Deacon Johns, all wrinkled, dried, and smoked of hide. “Pray God delivers them to us … and we’ll take care of the rest.”
“Make them red-bellies all good Injuns!” shouted June Callicott, the owner of a homely, narrow, overlong face.
“Buck, squaw, and nit,” growled Harley Pettis. “Company C will see there’s a few less to feed at the reservation come spring!”
The deacon closed his eyes, raised his face and arms to the diamond-dusted sky, saying, “Oh, Lord—deliver us from evil, and Quanah Parker to this outfit.”
The icy rains continued nearly every day, usually approaching from the west in the midafternoon when a man and his animal had grown most weary from the ride, bored with the monotony of covering the same ground week in and week out with nothing to show for Company C’s patrols. Driving, bone-numbing rains. By the middle of February most of the men suffered one malady or another. Some sniffled, others battled a persistent dry hack. And nearly all looked out from those red-rimmed, sunken eyes showing the first telltale signs of despair. Wasn’t a one whose disposition hadn’t become about as ragged and sharp as shards of broken bottle glass.
Behind Lockhart’s back a few were even beginning to whisper of the unthinkable. They murmured of leaving the White River country, talked of heading back into the settlements for a spell. Then as if the captain had heard them through their despair, Lockhart waited until late one afternoon when all but one late-arriving patrol was in their camp among the jagged rocks.
Sergeant Coffee called that sullen bunch together, but it was the captain who strode up and stopped before those restive men who stood or squatted among the damp, scattered baggage of Company C.
“I won’t stir a lot of dust with this, fellas. Want to come to the point of it fast,” Lockhart began. “I truly thought I had it figured out as soon as the weather broke and winter seemed to withdraw. But my hunch has gone and clabbered up on me.”
In the uneasy silence that followed Lockhart working up to things on a crawl, two of the men coughed that dry, unproductive hack that could trouble a man many times soaked and dried out in a cold wind blowing across country such as this.
“Thought we’d find sign of the Comanche, cross a trail, see smoke or something. I want the Kwahadi as bad as any of you. Even as much as Jonah there.”
Hook felt some of the others look his way for a moment before they shifted anxiously again, ready to have this meet over and done.
“But we’ve pushed rations about as far as I can. For the past five days I’ve had us on half rations, boys. No other jump to it: we’ll have to go in soon to reprovision … anyway.” The captain sighed, gazing at the ground.
There was an oversized silk kerchief tied loose around Lockhart’s neck, a grimy swatch of cloth as brightly colored as the sweet Williams that Gritta had planted in the bed at the front of the cabin back in that Missouri valley.
Able again to look his men in the eye, their leader continued. “So what’s hardest to take is that I was wrong about running across Parker’s bunch.”
“It weren’t just you, Captain,” Deacon Johns said softly. “Rest of us had it figured same way you did. Ain’t you what failed alone.”
“What you figure to do?” asked John Corn, his sun-browned skin shriveled up like last year’s potato.
“We’ll recoup one more day here. Not sending patrols out tomorrow. Following morning we’ll head back for Dickinson’s place. From there on in to our post. Time I sent word to Major Jones.” He scratched his sparse black whiskers. It had been four days since last he had shaved, enough of a clue for any man to see that the captain was not in the best of humors. “The major will be expecting a full report on our extended scout.”
In Jonah’s belly lay a cold stone of growing uneasiness.
“You really figure us to go in?” inquired Coffee, his hair and beard as red as a rooster’s comb.
“Isn’t that what you boys want? Get out of this heathen country?” Johns snapped at them, turning round on that group.
His words cut at them, forcing those rawhide-tough bravos to stare at their boots or the ground like scolded schoolboys, their eyes furtively glancing at one another
Until Hook finally spoke.
As much as he might have held against them long ago back there at Jacksboro and Fort Richardson, when he signed on to protect the citizens of west Texas, Jonah now knew the men of Company C were every one and all something more than ordinary men.
“Don’t really wanna go in, Deacon,” Hook told them. “I was figuring on staying out as long as it took. Live off the land, we have to. Where I was brought up, I was always taught you stayed with a job till it was done.”
“Hook might have a good idea there,” June Callicott said. “This bunch could live off the land.”
“Maybe we just need to find a different place to set up a base camp, Cap’n,” offered Wig Danville.
“True enough,” Johns echoed. “The foxes have their holes and the birds of the air have their nests—but the Son of Man ain’t got the where to lay his head across all of this wild creation!”
Lockhart drew himself up, his chin jutting. He turned like some of the rest, seeing that last patrol come easing in out of the east. They all saw the way the horses bobbed their heads, the way the men sagged in the saddles. No one had to spell it out plain, that theirs had been nothing more than a repeat of the weeks gone before.
The captain sighed. “Thank you for your suggestion, Jonah. However, I’m the leader of this company and my decision is made. Day after tomorrow, we light out for Dickinson’s Station.”
39
Late February 1875
AT DICKINSON’S PLACE the settler and his three sons greeted Company C with nothing less than flat-out celebration as the Rangers legged down off their weary mounts. That family of stockmen and farmers eking out its existence at the edge of the west Texas frontier hadn’t seen different faces for going on three months.
It was either in the barn, or outside in the barn’s sun-striped winter shadows, that Jonah Hook and Two Sleep stayed across those next thirty hours as Ezra Dickinson and his boys helped Lamar Lockhart’s Rangers recoup from their patrol. It was a barn built at no cost to the old stockman, raised free by the State of Texas in return for allowing Ranger patrols to use it to store feed, tack, supplies, and provender. A hundred of these barns cast their shadows across the caprock fringe of the Staked Plain.
While the celebration of men and the talk of weather and stock and horseflesh was one thing Jonah hoped to avoid, it was the Dickinson women that Jonah tried most to stay clear of. Too much did they remind him of those once a part of his own life. Both gone: one off to St. Louis and Miss Emily Rupert’s Seminary; the other … just gone.
Memories of her were the bitterest water Jonah had been forced to drink in those years lost and gone. But drink he did, forcing himself to taste a little more of her remembrance each day. Sad glimpses of what he once had, triggered ofttimes by smells, delicious smells coming from the kitchen where the three Dickinson women cooked supper for that bunch. As the others joked and sang and arm wrestled, Jonah remembered the smells of snap beans and carrots set on a pale-blue plate next to a mound of Gritta’s mashed potatoes, them that she boiled and mashed, then served up skins and all.