Winter Rain (52 page)

From the look on Two Sleep’s face, it seemed the Shoshone wanted to ask the same question Jonah had posed of the Ranger.

“You got any idea where we’re heading, Sergeant?”

“There’s a place out there,” Coffee replied, pointing with the blade of his folding knife he used to curl a sliver of chew from a dark plug he shoved back into the pocket of his canvas mackinaw. “We get on up where the White River comes in—you can sit there and keep an eye on a whole bunch of country.”

“That’s what the cap’n wants to do, you figure? Damned cold for a man to do nothing more than keep an eye on things.”

Coffee grinned, his tongue noisily slipping the sliver of chaw to the side of his red-whiskered cheek. “It’s country the Comanch’ gotta go through if they’re on the move, Jonah. If they been wintering down south of us where Heck Peters’s Ranger company runs their territory, then the Comanche gotta come back north through that White River country. And if the red bastards been wintering up farther north in Cap’n Roberts’s country after Mackenzie’s Fourth give ’em the rout back at Palo Duro Canyon … then we’ll catch ’em traipsing south again. Either way, I see it through the same keyhole as Cap’n Lockhart does.”

“You can’t mean you think there’s only one way in or out of this piece of country!” Jonah exclaimed.

“I know you got scars and experience hunting Injuns up north, Jonah,” Deacon Johns said quietly in that way of his as he eased down beside Hook beneath the cold starshine. “But you gotta remember we been fighting
these
heathens most all our lives. Every gray hair on this ol’ head is a day I’ve suffered hunting Comanch’—days grave with fret and frazzle, trouble all.”

“That may be so, Deacon. But one thing I’ve learned about the Injuns I’ve tracked and fought,” Jonah said, “is that when you figure you’ve got an Injun figured out—he’s already one jump ahead and bound to outsmart you.”

“Maybeso these Comanch’ ain’t really any different from other Injuns,” Coffee said.

Johns nodded. “Could be. But what we do know of these godforsaken fornicators—the Comanch’ are creatures of habit. For generations they been moving up and down their buffalo ground, following the trails the buffalo use. Don’t matter if they’re moving their village, gone hunting for hides and meat, or taking out on the warpath. The Comanch’ follow the old trails they know, trails going into and out of a piece of country.”

“If they come onto the ground this company of Rangers is sworn to protect,” Coffee said, his voice low, laden with resolve, “by God they’ll have to come through a narrow door in the caprock less’n three mile wide.”

Jonah followed where the Ranger pointed, Coffee’s arm extended toward the last rose tint to the twilit sky. Against the pale pink of that aging sunset stood the rising bulk of the caprock that surrounded the immensity of the Staked Plain, swathed boldly in black as all light drained from day. Back to the east a few first stars blinked on. But here, looking toward the west and all that wild, open country ruled by the red lords of these southern plains—it was the raw, ragged edge of the earth itself thrown against the far sky.

Where they were heading, the ground itself seemed to swallow the heavens in huge, hungry, ripping gulps.

As long as he had been out here in this country, riding with these men—never before had Jonah ever experienced such a feeling staring at all that jagged, savage immensity. A land every bit as big as the sky itself. And someplace in that primitive, ragged country, these men seemed cocksure of waiting out the Comanche, of being there in the right place when the Kwahadi up and decided to move out with the break in the winter weather.

Lockhart had them up and scrubbing leather before sunrise, after coffee and a breakfast of what leavings they could find among the skillets from last night’s feast. Niles Coffee said they’d make the White River portal by nightfall if they humped it and got high behind. And with the way the captain let his big gelding have his head, Company C had their tails high behind and covering ground.

“This is real country for a real man, Jonah Hook,” Johns said to him that morning not long after sunrise. “A land for a man who loves nature and all God’s finest handiworks. Bet you’ve seen some tall mountains out where you been.”

“I have, that.”

“They must be something, Jonah,” he replied in imagined awe. “But nothing could possible compare with the savage beauty of what God Himself has took up and made for the critters out here,” Deacon Johns said, admiration closing on reverence in his voice as he gazed side to side. “Hill and valley and canyon teeming with deer and buffalo and turkey and antelope. Streams so full of fish, we don’t have to use a line—only that seine the captain carries along. Bear caves and bee trees—Lord, what bee country this is! Why, in the spring a man can ride for near three hundred miles on a solid bed of flowers the color of the rainbow.”

Jonah replied, “And for generations it belonged to these here Comanche.”

Johns squared his eyes at Hook, his face souring a bit as he answered. “Yep. It did belong to them. But God Almighty Himself set the way of nature when He created this world in six days, Jonah Hook. God Himself made it the first law of nature that in the wilds the strong shall always hold sway over the weak.”

“So these Comanche are about to find out which of us is stronger?”

The deacon nodded. “It’s the way of nature. The way of all things under God’s own heaven. They submit and move aside of the progress of white Christian civilization—or we’ll crush ’em underfoot on our way past.”

“Praise God, eh?”

Johns drew himself up and replied, “Praise God for making things right in His world, Jonah.
His
world. Not man’s. This is God’s world, and it’s herein He reigns.”

That evening when Lockhart brought them to a halt in the first cold caress of winter’s darkness after the sun had fallen, he explained that this was likely to be their last night together as a company for some time to come. They had permission to build fires for boiling coffee, but only if those fires were set at the bottom of pits scooped out of the hard, flinty ground. The captain did not have to waste his breath explaining that the light from any fire was likely to travel a great distance in country such as this.

Sergeant Coffee mustered out his three watches, then sent out the first after the men had picketed and sidelined mounts. Then the camp fell quiet as the rest lay down two by two to share body warmth and their scant issue of blankets. Above them lacy silver clouds scudded across the growing moon. Jonah figured it would reach full plug in something less than two weeks. And then they could count on the Comanche moving.

If they weren’t already.

Their breath came frosty, the hairs of his mustache and beard matted icy film that next morning as the captain stood them to inspection and broke them into squads in that predawn darkness. Four, each with one of those who had long served with Lockhart, to act as squad leader.

“We’ll rotate duty at this base camp,” the captain explained. “Two different squads will move out every morning. The first to make a wide sweep to the west, nosing around to the north, then east before coming back in here just after nightfall. And the other will begin their sweep heading east, moving around to the south, then up into the west before reporting in by sundown.”

“And the next day the other two squads will make the same patrols?” asked Coffee.

Lockhart nodded. “Those of us remaining in camp will keep the country both north and south glassed throughout the day, laying low and resting the stock. I want this unit to be in fighting trim when it will be required of us. Not if—
when.”

“Them bloody fornicators will show up, Captain,” Johns cheered.

“I’m counting on it, Deacon,” Lockhart replied, easing over toward Jonah. “I’m sure Mr. Hook is counting on it as well.”

“I am, Cap’n.”

Lockhart turned away, his hands laced behind him as he paced before those two squads chosen for the first day’s scout. Continuing, he told them, “We may not see anything for a few days, perhaps a week or better. But you will cut sign. Keep your eyes moving when you’re out. This is naked, open country. Each squad will stand out like a four-bit whore in church—excuse me, Deacon … but so will a Comanche war party.”

“We’ll keep our eyes on the horizon, Captain,” Coffee promised.

“Very well, Sergeant,” he said, eyeing the east. “Let’s get squads one and three out before the sun comes up.”

No one had
to awaken Jonah that second morning.

The rest of the men of Company C lay about him as dawn came up slow as winter’s own pull, Rangers cocooned in blankets around their fire pits like obsidian chips at the floor of a dark stream in the cold moonlight. He had hardly slept that night before their first patrol, his back against the wide bulk of the Shoshone who rarely left Hook’s shadow. The two ate, slept, and now would again ride together with Second Sergeant Clyde Yoakam’s squad. After gulping down the scalding coffee that would serve as his breakfast, Jonah saddled the horse, then returned to the fire pits dug deep to smother the flames’ tattling glow, where he stood and waited, rocking boot to boot anxiously.

After standing his squad to inspection, Yoakam settled down between the high wishbone pommel and rounded cantle upon the open-slot seat of his McClellan saddle and moved them out. Most of those riders turned to look back at least once before their camp disappeared from view in that broken land of bare, buzzard-bone ridges streaked red, yellow, and white, waving at those friends and compatriots they were leaving in camp, those who would recoup and rest: repairing saddles, bridles, even reshoeing if necessary. All the while Lockhart would debrief yesterday’s squad leaders and those men most familiar with this ground. No man wanted to know more about this country and where the Comanche might turn up than Lamar Lockhart.

No man, besides Jonah Hook.

Especially after that first long day in the saddle, riding back at nightfall empty-handed and with nothing of import to tell Lockhart. No trails crossed. No smoke seen. Even
the small, normally unobserved things: they had spotted ample game throughout the day; the water holes and springs remained untrammeled. Only the crusty snow atop the flaky ground betrayed the passing of yesterday’s scout.

The Rangers moved in and out and around that country for the better part of the next ten days, on into the first week of February. Camp became a familiar haven with its odors of gun oil and soaped leather, the pungent aroma of men and animals about this business of waiting for war. What few decks of cards they had packed along grew dogeared as those decks were passed from squad to squad to squad, the men funning themselves playing seven-up or rowdy games of monte. A few precious sets of checkers also served to break up some of the camp monotony, played on limber game boards of gingham-checked cloth a man could roll up around the scuffed black and red checker pieces, then stuff the whole of it away into a saddlebag.

Former barber Enoch Harmony gave a trim to all those who desired a haircut. Slade Rule, a brands inspector, gave every horse a good going-over at least once every third day to determine if the pounding of their patrols was wearing down the company’s stock. And Lockhart himself held the outgoing squads to inspection every morning: their outfits, belt guns and carbines, in addition to each individual’s saddle and tack.

“When it comes time for this company to fight,” the captain preached with regularity, “the success of the whole must not be hampered by the failure of the one to see to the readiness of his outfit.”

“A worn cinch strap, a shoddy stirrup latch, maybe even a loose bit chain—anything,” explained Sergeant Coffee, “sure as tarnal sin it could mean the difference between life and death when we finally run down these Comanch’.”

Over the past fall and into the winter grown old, Lockhart’s company had kept up with what old news
drifted off the agencies or out of the army’s posts. After the War Department had caught the last hostile bands between the five jaws of their mighty clamp, most of the Kiowa and Cheyenne, and even some of the Comanche bands, had wearily marched into Darlington, Anadarko, and Fort Sill itself. Mackenzie and Davidson and Buell and Miles had pulled a victory out of their collective hat. The hostiles were coming in. Slowly, for sure—but they were coming in to surrender and be counted, even knowing that their headmen were to be arrested and herded off to a faraway prison.

Agents Miles up at Darlington and Connell at Anadarko, especially Haworth at Fort Sill, all three knew how to send word to Jonah if one of their bands showed up with two white boys … two young men the age Jeremiah and Ezekiel would be that winter. They had promised to send a rider with the news, no matter the cost—just get a rider moving for Texas and Company C of the Frontier Battalion.

But after October came and went with the surrender of the first bands to give up after Mackenzie whipped them at Palo Duro Canyon, then November faded into December with no news … something began to twist inside of Jonah, roll over and shrivel a little more each day. Hope it was. What he had left of hope that got him into December and through until late in January when Lockhart had marched them out here to the Llano for the White River country. But now they had been out patrolling close to a month without any news from the Territories about what the warrior bands were doing or what the army was continuing to accomplish.

All anyone knew was that the most irrevocably savage of the Comanche, the band that called themselves the Antelope People, the warriors who rode under a half-breed named Quanah Parker—that bunch was still out. No one, army nor civilian, had seen sign of them since Palo Duro.
Word had it they had been in the canyon when Mackenzie struck last September. The story was that about half of the fourteen hundred ponies Mackenzie’s men had captured, then slaughtered, on the prairie had belonged to Parker’s Kwahadi.

“There’s them that says Mackenzie got himself something personal for Quanah Parker—wants that one red bastard more’n all the rest put together,” John Corn had said, the liver-colored bags under his eyes the same as the rest, telling the tale of too little sleep.