Winter Rain (53 page)

The inveterate worrier Harley Pettis agreed, two deep vertical lines marking the flesh between his bushy eyebrows. “Mackenzie won’t stop till he gets Parker and strings him up for what he done.”

“Back in the times of Abraham,” Deacon Johns exhorted, his eyes like smoldering slits, “vengeance might have been the Lord’s. But not here in Texas! Here on this ground, vengeance belongs to us as has a call to take it!”

“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.”

A
T 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.

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.”