So as much as Jonah yearned to study the face of a white woman, to stand just close enough to determine how a white woman might smell, as much as he felt a need to be in the company of such genteel farming folk of the earth like those he was raised among, Hook of a sudden felt ill at ease, ill-mannered, rough, and more coarse than he ever had in all his life. And downright afraid of making a damned fool of himself.
So he stayed to himself, there in the bam with Two Sleep while the younger Rangers flirted with the three Dickinson girls and the missus baked dried apple pies for her guests. The merry sounds of men at their fun, the tinkle of women’s laughter, made Jonah recall the days of camp meetings back to the Shenandoah—religious tent revivals that got so frolicsome, the long-coated preachers had to keep women off the grounds between sunset and sunrise.
“Peel your ears back, Jonah—I got some news!” bellowed Niles Coffee as he strode up through the deepening shadows that first night after the company had come in to the ranch.
“What news?”
Coffee settled, his back against the rough-plank barn wall where Hook leaned. “Dickinson says Mackenzie’s figuring he’s got the Comanche whipped bad enough so he’s gonna offer the Kwahadi a chance to make peace.”
“What’s his peace offer mean to us?”
Sucking on the chewed and fractured stem of his old pipe, Coffee answered. “Mackenzie offers peace to Parker’s bunch to come in—that means the war’s over.”
Hook studied the flame-headed Ranger beside him a moment there in the last glow of the day, the sun having slid beyond the far rim of the prairie, beyond a small piece of ground above the barn where he had frequently gone to sit, staring, wondering.
Jonah asked, “Ain’t that what you boys wanted to do all along? Get the war over with?”
With a wag of his red head. Coffee said, “Not exactly. Those of us I can speak for, we took the oath so we could get us a crack at the Comanche. Captain Lockhart ain’t leading no rag-tailed bunch of splay-footed farmers now. To the last man we joined the Rangers to fight those sonsabitching red-bellies. Never counted on the army coming behind us and making it unpossible to hunt down Comanche.”
“That what Mackenzie will do? Keep us from hunting?”
He dug at the ground with a sliver of weathered barn wood. “Not likely the army can keep us from hunting, Jonah. Just keep us from … killing Comanche.”
“You want to get your licks in first—don’t you, Coffee?”
The sergeant’s dark, larval eyes narrowed on Hook. “Don’t you? Seeing how the Kwahadi are the bunch that stole your boys?”
“Just want my boys. That’s all.”
Coffee snorted quietly. “Can’t believe you could just ride in there, fetch back your boys, and ride off without taking blood from them that stole your kin.”
“My boys is all … all I need,” Jonah repeated, his words coming hard. Hot flecks began to sting his eyes, and something sour and thick clogged his throat.
They fell silent for a few minutes as Coffee sucked on his pipe and the sky they watched wheeled from orange to rose, then faded to the deeper hues of twilight.
“Major Jones sent out the word,” Coffee said.
“Word that Mackenzie was gonna make peace with the Comanche?”
“Yep. Sent a rider through here a few days back with the major’s dispatch for the captain. Jones wants all his company captains to meet him at Griffin in a couple weeks to plan our final campaign.”
“What’re you talking about—a final campaign? You just said the army’s making peace with the Comanche. It’s over, Sergeant. Your goddamned war is over!”
“Not my war, Jonah,” Coffee growled. “Not the war we Texans been fighting since the days before we tore free from Mexico. No, sir—by god-bloody-damned! This war ain’t over till Texas says it’s over. Those are our Comanches—not the army’s. And sure as hell they ain’t Mackenzie’s.” He raised his arm, pointing at the house porch where many of the Rangers lounged. “See them boys? Not a one of them ready to say their war is over, Jonah. Their war. My war. I lost kin! Goddammit—I lost kin!”
“All right,” Hook said quietly as Coffee shuddered with that jolt of passion. “So what you aim to do?”
The fire-headed sergeant composed himself and turned back to look at Jonah. “Lockhart figures from Jones’s dispatch that the major is going to send his Frontier Battalion out in force. To make a real campaign of it. All the companies in a grand fight of it: loop up from Fort Griffin, north, clear to the Canadian. Sweep the country clear before the army goes and herds all them Comanche onto the reservations at last—before Kwahadi get about as scarce as a harpsychord in a whorehouse.”
“Sweep the country clear?”
“Goddammit, Jonah!” Coffee growled. “Major Jones wants what Lockhart and the rest of us want. One final push against them red bastards.”
“The Rangers gonna make your own war?”
“A bloodletting the likes of which no Texan has seen in the history of the Lone Star Republic.”
“I’ll bet you get your licks in too.”
“Look, Jonah. We all of us got a hunting permit the good people of Texas give us the day we signed on with the Rangers.” Coffee reached into a pocket inside his heavy coat and pulled out the star into the dimming light. “Here’s my six-pointed hunting license, Jonah. Each man of us carries it, ’cause we take this war serious.”
“I got something else other’n Comanche bucks to hunt.” He pushed himself back against the barn and stood slowly.
“Ain’t you with us, Jonah? They got your boys. And now you can even things up. Looks like we’ll have this one last chance to wipe out all them stragglers what don’t go in to their agency.”
He wagged his head. “Sergeant, I don’t need to even things up, because there ain’t no way on God’s green earth things ever will get even for me.”
“No matter if you find your boys—you won’t be even?”
“No. I lost so much—time, years, miles … just living—ain’t nothing nobody can do to ever get Jonah Hook even again.”
He started off down the side of the barn, hearing the Shoshone rise from the winter-parched stubble to shadow him. Then Coffee’s voice caught Hook again.
“I want to try, Jonah. Good Lord knows I had kin took and killed,” Coffee tried his best to explain in that darkness. “So the Good Lord knows my heart when I stand here now and I vow to try to help you even things up. Once and for all.”
Jonah had walked on without stopping, slipping on out of the dimming, translucent light of that sunset and disappeared into the shadows of twilight. For the rest of that evening until well past moonrise, the sounds of laughter and loud talk trickled out to him from the rifle ports in Dickinson’s two sod houses that squatted here on the prairie, the both of them joined by the low-roofed dogtrot. For so long he remained afraid of dawn coming, afraid that someone would light a candle or bring a lamp looking for him. Not even wanting to look into the light of a fire that night—simply for the fear that he might be forced to look into his own thoughts, like shadowed corners of a sudden given light.
Lockhart ordered them back to the saddle at midmorning, marching them a little east of due south, aiming for Fort Griffin and the war council called by the commander of the Frontier Battalion. And while they rode the sun down that day, Jonah Hook wondered what he would do now, come this last push against the Comanche—the ones said to hold his boys.
Had he eaten up too much time that he didn’t have? Time and again did he just up and ride after a ruse, believing in smoke on the wind, hoping against his better judgment? Following one hunch after another that had clabbered up like Lamar Lockhart’s White River patrols?