Winter Rain (19 page)

For the longest time Jonah had feared Rock Island would be the last place he would close his eyes, never again to sleep in Gritta’s warm, sheltering arms.

But after weeks and months that became years of waiting, forced to watch others die the slow death of starvation and typhus, diphtheria and scurvy, Jonah was offered the chance to wear Yankee blue, to go west to fight Indians while the Union finished cleaning up the southern rebellion.

To wear Yankee blue meant to survive, to live out enough days until he could get back to that valley in Missouri where Gritta and the children waited. As long as he did not have to turn a gun on a southern patriot, Jonah agreed to come west with the eighteen hundred who were herded onto railroad cars for Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from there to march farther still to the Great Platte River Road where the telegraph wire required protection from the Sioux and Cheyenne.

It was here in this very country where he and Two Sleep watched the half dozen approach that Jonah Hook had first battled the red lords of the central plains.

He smiled grimly. For now in this very same country, things had once more come down to the simple matter of blood choices, the simple matter of him or the Danites likely sent back to eliminate him.

Kill, or be killed.

The longer he spent out here in the West, Jonah brooded now as he filled the long barrel tube on the sixty-six Winchester—the easier the choices were for him to make.

A
UTUMN NIGHTS IN
this high desert were enough to make a man’s blood run cold all of its own. You didn’t have to be waiting out the fall of the moon before you went about killing to feel the cold all the way to your marrow.

Beneath a cloudy glitter of stars Jonah shivered slightly within the single blanket as he sat with his back propped against the rock wall. Beside him squatted the Shoshone. The sky was still too light for what they had planned and polished together throughout that day of watching the approach of the six gunmen. Watching them ride on past.

When the hoof dust from the half dozen had reached the limits of the horizon, Two Sleep agreed that they could take up the backtrail of the Danites.

For the longest time there in the shrinking shadows of that rock shelf as they had waited to ride out, the Shoshone had argued against going after the six.

“Better to go on. Ride where you finish this,” he had told the white plainsman.

Jonah figured he had studied on the situation just about every way a man could, and come out with only one solution: he had to rid his backtrail of the six.

“Can’t go on west,” he had told the warrior. “Having them at my backside. Not knowing really where those six are. When they’ll show up on me.” He shook his head. “No. There’s only one way—and that’s to take care of ’em.”

“Want to follow them? Kill one, by one?”

Jonah shook his head again. Then stared into the Shoshone’s eyes. “No. I don’t have that much time to burn now. I got the scent of that bastard strong in my nose right now. After all these years—at long last I can smell him. Nawww, I ain’t bound to lose him—to lose my woman again just ’cause I messed up watching things over my shoulder.”

The warrior had pushed up from the rock shelf, stood brushing his hide leggings before they went to their horses. “I don’t go now—you still ride?”

“I will.” Jonah had nodded, confirmed. “A man must. You don’t go—it’s all right. I’ll go on alone.”

“Yes. You alone before I come. You go do what is right anyway. That is why I go with you now.”

There had been no more words, nothing more between them but the clasp of hands in that practice of solidarity between men.

And now it had been hours since the Shoshone had declared his allegiance to Hook’s plan to go after the six, to take them off his backtrail in one fell swoop. Hours since they had really talked. Having seen where the Danites had camped, found what side of camp the horses were grazed, seeing the size of their fire as autumn’s twilight squeezed down early on this land—the two sat propped against a handful of man-sized boulders less than a mile from the
Danites’ fire, waiting for moondown, waiting to move in and put an end to Hook’s backtrail problem.

Jonah finally said what he had been thinking ever since they emerged into the bright fall sunlight in the Red Desert Basin earlier that day and reined their horses into the tracks left by the six.

“Thank you, Two Sleep.”

“You say so when we are done, Hook,” the Shoshone replied. “When we go back to go on get your family.”

He sighed, gazing up at the spinning sky overhead, stars clear as dewdrops on corn silk of an early summer morning, the whole shiny glitter of them seeming almost close enough for him to reach out and knock those droplets off with a flick of his fingers. Not knowing why he couldn’t reach that far.

“You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“I know,” Two Sleep replied. “I do it with you.”

“That’s just it. Can’t figure out why you’d want to walk in there with me—when the odds are agin us.”

The Shoshone looked over at the white man riding beside him. “Odds better when I come, no?”

“This bunch is likely good at killing, Two Sleep. They didn’t get into Usher’s group—they didn’t stay alive in that bastard’s outfit less’n they were awful good with guns.”

“This Usher you tell me—he send the best back for you, yes?”

Jonah nodded. “I suppose he would. His best. Do it clean and quick.”

It was the warrior’s time to sigh and contemplate. “Then—you … me. We do much more to be better.”

After he had patted the Shoshone’s arm reassuringly, Jonah gazed a moment at the aging warrior in the pale starlight. “It still doesn’t tell me why you come along. This ain’t your fight. Not riding on with me to the land of the Mormons neither. Can’t make sense of why you just don’t
ride off down that road where you was heading when you bumped into me.”

“Told you. Like your whiskey. Like your company.”

“Don’t have any more whiskey, goddammit. You seen to that.”

Two Sleep nodded, pursed his lips. “So all I got is a friend to ride with, yes?”

“No. It’s gotta be more than that. More reason for you to pick this same bloody road as I picked for myself. Some good goddamned reason to put your life down for me. Why? Why you doing this for me?”

“Not for you,” he answered abruptly. “This trail is for me.”

“You? How—”

“Last chance for me, Hook.”

Jonah wagged his head, failing to make sense of any of it. Yet. “What the hell for—”

“I lost my woman. Lost children too,” the Shoshone admitted.

“White men? Like these bastards?”

“No,” he answered. “Got my own devils, Hook. You got yours.”

“Who then? Who took ’em? You know ’em?”

“I know. Lakota.”

“The Sioux?”

“Brule. Burnt Thigh. Bunch under Pawnee Killer.”

“Happened not long ago, I’d suppose.”

“No. Long time. Fourteen winters now. They gone a long time.”

“They? The Lakota come in and took your family?”

“Them didn’t die. Woman. She tall and pretty. My daughter too. Twelve summers old then. Both taken.”

“Other children?”

“Three boys. All fighting age.” He bent his head, staring at his lap.

Studying the way the Shoshone held his impassive
face surrounding those liquid eyes, Hook realized the man was still mourning. Even after all this time. Fourteen years, going on fifteen.

“What happened to them? Your boys? The three of ’em.”

Still bent over in prayerful repose, Two Sleep drew a single index finger nearly the circumference of his neck, then used that finger to draw a circle around his head, ending his wordless description by yanking on his own greasy topknot.

“Goddle-mighty,” Jonah exclaimed quietly. “Them Brule killed ’em all—all three of ’em?”

Two Sleep held up both his hands, palms up in a plaintive gesture. “All gone. Sons gone on Star Road now. I put them in the trees. Above the ground. Where the wind talk to them for all time.”

Hook found himself instinctively gazing up at the night sky paling as the moon fell far in the west. He swallowed hard, brooding on the loss of his own sons. Lord—the two of them took at once. From what Shad Sweete had told him, they was as good as gone now: in the hands of comancheros, spirited all the way south to Mex country. Death’d likely be a better fate than that, he figured. And what of Gritta? Her fate no better than that of …

Jonah forced himself to squeeze that off, like stopping the stream of warm, creamy milk from the cow’s udder back home, and looked over at the Shoshone instead.

“The Brule, they’d be cruel to your … your woman. And your daughter?”

“Yes,” he answered immediately. “No,” he replied a moment later. “After all time gone from land of the Shoshone—the two now Lakota. My woman, she get old.” Then he made a cradling motion down at his belly. “Maybe she carry many Brule baby. Make many Lakota warrior.”

Jonah watched as the Shoshone was seized with a
spasm of grief, something sour in his throat that was as quickly swallowed down.

“My girl,” Two Sleep continued, his words with a rocky edge to them as he spoke, “she have Brule babies too now.”

“You don’t know … can’t be sure.”

He nodded his head so emphatically, it shocked Hook.

“I know. The Lakota take women—make them Brule. Make Lakota warriors in their bellies. Marry and have many babies. Or … or the women they kill quick.”

“Your … the women—would they fight the Brule? Or would they have the Lakota babies?”

Two Sleep rubbed his eyes with his gnarled knuckles, as if some sandy grit were troubling them. “They gone,” he said finally, brushing one palm quickly across the other.

“Dead?”

“Dead,” the warrior answered.

“You mean: they’re good as dead.”

“They have babies for Lakota fathers,” Two Sleep agreed, “a bad thing for Shoshone woman.”

As good as dead, Jonah thought to himself. A woman of one tribe forced to give birth to sons of an enemy tribe—she was as good as dead to her own people.

“She wait. They wait for me,” Two Sleep continued after a moment. “Wait for first winter. A second and a third winter. They see no one riding to come for them. Maybe they dead now. Maybe after all winters they say Two Sleep not come for them—they carry Lakota babies. They come to be Lakota mothers. They not Shoshone no more. They be Lakota now. They forget Two Sleep.”

“But you never forgot them.”

Two Sleep dragged a hand beneath his nose hurriedly. “I never go find them. Afraid. No man go with me. I was young, strong in seasons ago. Not now. Too many winters gone. Other warriors give up oh Two Sleep. So now I afraid to go.”

Hook watched the Shoshone slowly drop his head on his forearms that lay cradled across his knees, hiding his face. There arose no sound from the warrior. Nothing to betray him but the slight, silent tremble as Two Sleep shuddered with the wracking sobs.

It grew clear to Jonah as he reached out, knowing nothing else to do but to touch the man’s quaking shoulder.

“After I told you my story … you up and decided you’re coming with me—’cause you want to help me get my family back. That it, Two Sleep?”

He raised his face, eyes glistening, but cheeks still dry as the flaky soil in this high land. “I come to help you. Too late to help me. Too late to help my woman. Help my daughter. Too late now help my sons gone far on the Star Road fourteen winters. But … still time for you, Hook.”

“Yes, Two Sleep. There is time for me.” He barely got the words out, choking on the unfamiliar taste of sentiment. It was something he had not often savored in his brooding past. But here, with this old Indian, in the cold of this autumn night somewhere near the windswept continental divide as they waited to pit themselves against six gunmen, Jonah Hook felt again that unaccustomed warmth of human kindness.

By riding along with the white man, Two Sleep was trying to find a way of forgiving himself after all this time. After living so long as a failure—with the fear, the terror, the utter shame of never trying. Happened that a man crawled far enough, long enough around the whiskey cup, he just might find himself reaching the handle.

Two Sleep got to his feet, clutching his thin blanket about his shoulders. “I brave enough now, brave for all the days I not brave enough to go find them. I ride with you—so it make things right for me.”

With the Shoshone finally expressing it, Jonah knew the warrior was right. By riding along to help Hook, Two Sleep was somehow righting his medicine, his spiritual
power long gone stale and rancid—long gone the coward’s way of hiding down in the white man’s whiskey and gambling and the emptiness of a coward’s sanctuary. But for some reason Jonah Hook had come along to offer a way, the only way, the warrior could make his medicine strong once more. By helping another man put his family back together.

“I’m not sure I know how to pray much anymore, Two Sleep—but I figure the Lord is somehow listening,” Jonah said. “I figure you’re here to help make things right for both of us.”

Waiting out here in the dark among the clumps of sage, stretched prone on the cold ground as a gust of cold wind slapped his face, Jonah sensed what a brown-skinned warrior must feel as he lay beyond the welcome, warm ring of a white man’s firelight. It seemed evil was always executed beyond the pale of darkness.

The Danites’ fire had gone to red coals untended and writhing in the pit they had dug to conceal the flames and thereby prevent discovery by a chance and wandering war party.

Jonah found little amusement in that. The Mormons had no reason to worry themselves over wandering Indians tonight. It was instead the darkness and the cold autumn wind snarling across this high land that would cloak the danger.

The six had picketed their hobbled horses downwind from camp. He had learned always to graze his animals upwind, as a source of early warning. Especially in darkness: the time for evil.

How he wanted to feel the warm blood of these Mormon zealots on his hands again. Just as he had at Fort Laramie when he killed Laughing Jack. Before he stuffed the body beneath the river ice. A long, long time ago it seemed now—so many miles gone under his heels since.