Authors: Terry C. Johnston
“Squaw man, eh? What’s the name of the woman Jeremiah married?”
Jonah looked up from stirring the chunks of onion in the kettle, as much a look of surprise on his face as Deidecker had ever seen.
“You didn’t understand … when we was talking about the picture back at the cabin?”
“Understand what, Jonah?”
“That was Prairie Night.”
“Prairie … Zeke’s squaw? Uh, wife?”
He went back to stirring. “A custom among the uncivilized savages, don’t you know. A downright civilized one, I might add. Jeremiah done what any Kwahadi would’ve done for his brother killed in battle: he took in his brother’s wife and children. They became his wife and children. He’s raised them two like they was his own. And he took that woman as his own wife.”
Nate blinked, thinking on the beauty of sentiment practiced by those he had heretofore regarded as savagely primitive in every way.
“Did she go back to Fort Richardson with you, then back up to Missouri to bury Zeke?”
Hook shook his head. “She run off with the rest of the village that escaped the soldiers that day. Escaped with the two young’uns, one still small enough to nurse at her breast those first cold nights without no lodges, nary a blanket for the three of ’em.”
“How’d you … how’d Jeremiah—”
“After we left Missouri, heading for the land of the Mormons, I took Jeremiah back to the Fort Sill Agency. I knowed the agent there, Haworth. We found my daughter-in-law there. My grandchildren.”
“What became of her while you two went off hunting Jubilee Usher?”
“Jeremiah told her he’d come for her and the children
soon as he finished some unfinished business. Told her he intended to marry her when he got back. She told him she figured they was already married—him being Antelope’s older brother. The gal waited for him, all right—raising them young’uns while Jeremiah was gone.” Jonah looked up from the kettle again, his eyes brimming once more. “I figure Jeremiah was tore apart between his two families: called to go find and put back together the one he was raised with … called to return to the bosom of the family he was raising of his own.”
“He went back among the Comanche?”
“Yes, Nate. I s’pose it was for the sake of them children that he raised ’em among the Kwahadi. Jeremiah been a close friend of Quanah Parker’s all these years. Time or two the chief’s even said Tall One is the one friend he can count on. Proud that my boy’s doing what he can to help his old friend bring the bones of his mother home to the Comanche reservation.”
“Cynthia Ann Parker’s remains?”
“Jeremiah does what he can, speaks to those’ll listen—writes letters for Quanah, asking the Parker clan down in Texas to let the woman’s boy take his mother’s bones home to the prairie she’d come to love.” He raised his eyes to the treetops. They glistened in the dancing fire glow. “Jeremiah’s made his pa so damned p-proud.”
The old man’s voice cracked as he said it, so Hook turned and rose slowly, unsteady at first, then moved off to fetch up one of the packs that he brought back to the fireside. He untied the thongs from the cowhide case and from it began pulling some utensils they would need for their dinner.
An object tumbled to the ground as Hook pulled free a green bottle of pepper. Curious, Nate leaned over and retrieved it, intending to straighten up the spill. “Here, let me help.”
Then he stopped, turning that object over slowly: a
small cloth-wrapped bundle he moved into the flickering light of their fire. At one time the cotton fabric had been brightly colored, a fine calico fabric. Now it lay in the newsman’s hands a dull, grimy scrap of once-vibrant cloth. It smelled deeply of many camp fires. Bringing it under his nose, Nate felt something hard wrapped within the folded bundle of old cloth.
“Something special, Jonah?” he asked, wanting to open it, but afraid he would never get permission. Thinking maybe it contained the ear of an enemy, perhaps one of those shriveled fingertip necklaces he had seen on display in the Smithsonian Institute.
Hook put his hand out to take it, then shook his head, dropping his hand, empty. “No.” His eyes leveled on Deidecker. “I figure it’s time you looked at what’s inside there.”
“This cloth, whatever is the story—”
“Zeke’s shirt. The one I come on down there in Texas.”
“The shirt the whore’s child wore?”
“Same.”
Through the folds of cloth Nate of a sudden sensed something strange, wild, and unnamed communicated to his fingers. As if the years were reaching out to touch him.
“Go ’head, Nate. It’s time you saw the … saw what’s there.”
Reverently he slowly peeled back the layers of faded, worn calico folded over and around the object. Fold by fold he exposed the object he finally pulled out of his lap and into the firelight that sundown in the Big Horns. A rawhide-wrapped wheel about as wide as his hand. Dividing the wheel into four equal quadrants were two twisted rawhide strands, each quadrant a maze of rawhide netting. At their center was lashed a hard, textured object, almost resembling a blackened peach pit.
“Go ahead, Nate. Take a close look.”
“Is this what you call a medicine wheel?”
“I suppose folks back east call ’em that. Out here the Injuns call that a
dream catcher.”
Over Deidecker’s hands spilled the long, black tendrils, some of which were flecked with gray. He figured it had belonged to an old warrior.
Just inside the circumference of the stiff rawhide wheel had been lashed a crude circle of stiffened skin from which dangled that thick patch of long, gleaming hair. No more than four inches across. Just the topknot no doubt, Nate thought as he began to stroke, that fine black hair flecked with snow. He felt a sudden, evil chill and figured it was nothing more than the thrill of holding such an artifact against his own skin.
“A scalp? A real honest-to-goodness human scalp?” Nate asked.
“Ain’t ever seen one before?”
“In museums. Never held one in my own living hands. And I never did see one of these wheels … a dream catcher, with a scalp sewn on it.”
“That travels with me, wherever I go, Nate,” Hook said as the old man bent over the fire, sliding the skillet with the two loin steaks atop the flames.
The fire’s glow in the deepening mountain twilight gave the shining hair reflections like a candle in a mirror. Glittering, gleaming beads of light, like black diamonds dancing up and down the full length of the silky strands. “Never knew many Indians, Jonah. And from what I’ve seen, I can’t say as I ever realized an Injun’s hair could be so fine to the touch.”
“That ain’t a Injun’s scalp.”
Nate’s mouth went dry. His heart thundered at his ears. He swallowed and forced the words around his parched tongue. “A … a white man’s sc-scalp?”
“Yep.”
“Who … whose scalp is it, Jonah?”
Hook gazed evenly at the newsman. The fire crackled and popped between them, spitting fireflies of sparks into the deepening dark of that immense, all-consuming land. Tiny, iridescent shooting stars born of their wilderness fire sent spiraling skyward toward the great heavenly bodies.
“The one Gritta took herself.”
T
ERRY
C
.
J
OHNSTON
1947–2001
Terry C. Johnston
was born on the first day of 1947 on the plains of Kansas and lived all his life in the American West. His first novel,
Carry the Wind
, won the Medicine Pipe Bearer’s Award from the Western Writers of America, and his subsequent books appeared on bestseller lists throughout the country. After writing more than thirty novels of the American frontier, he passed away in March 2001 in Billings, Montana. Terry’s work combined the grace and beauty of a natural storyteller with a complete dedication to historical accuracy and authenticity. He continues to bring history to life in the pages of his historical novels so that readers can live the grand adventure of the American West. While recognized as a master of the American historical novel, to family and friends Terry remained and will be remembered as a dear, loving father and husband as well as a kind, generous, and caring friend. He has gone on before us to a better place, where he will wait to welcome us in days to come.
If you would like to help carry on the legacy of Terry C. Johnston, you are invited to contribute to the
Terry C. Johnston Memorial Scholarship Fund
c/o
Montana State University-Billings Foundation
1500 N. 30
th
Street
Billings, MT 59101-0298
1-888-430-6782
A Preview of
RIDE THE MOON DOWN
In the sequel to Terry C. Johnston’s bestselling frontier trilogy,
Carry the Wind, BorderLords
, and
One-Eyed Dream
, readers watch the mountain man Titus Bass continue his heart-wrenching journey through the perils of the Wild West.
Ride the Moon Down
is another triumph of the master of frontier fiction, Terry C. Johnston, who brings to life once more vivid slices of America’s history.
Here is a preview of the opening chapter of this fascinating novel.
The baby stirred between them.
She eventually fussed enough to bring Bass fully awake, suddenly, sweating beneath the blankets.
Without opening her eyes, the child’s mother groggily drew the infant against her breast and suckled the babe back to sleep.
Titus kicked the heavy wool horse blanket off his legs, hearing one of the horses nicker. Not sure which one of the four it was, the trapper sat up quiet as coal cotton, letting the blanket slip from his bare arms as he dragged the rifle from between his knees.
Somewhere close, out there in the dark, he heard the low warning rumble past the old dog’s throat. Bass hissed—immediately silencing Zeke.
Several moments slipped by before he heard another sound from their animals. But for the quiet breathing of mother and the
ngg-ngg
suckling of their daughter, the summer night lay all but silent around their camp at the base of a low ridge.
Straining to see the unseeable, Bass glanced overhead to search for the moon in that wide canopy stretching across the treetops. Moonset already come and gone. Nothing left but some puny starshine. As he blinked a third time, his groggy
brain finally remembered that his vision wasn’t what it had been. For weeks now that milky cloud covering his left eye was forcing his right to work all the harder.
Then his nose suddenly captured something new on the nightwind. A smell musky and feral—an odor not all that familiar, just foreign enough that he strained his recollections to put a finger on it.
Then off to the side of camp his ears heard the padding of the dog’s big feet as Zeke moved stealthily through the stands of aspen that nearly surrounded this tiny pocket in the foothills he had found for them late yesterday afternoon.
And from farther in the darkness came another low, menacing growl—
Titus practically jumped out of his skin when she touched him, laying her fingers against his bare arm. He turned to peer back, swallowing hard, that lone eye finding Waits by the Water in what dim light seeped over them there beneath the big square of oiled Russian sheeting he had lashed between the trees should the summer sky decide to rain on them through the night.
He could hear Zeke moving again, not near so quietly this time, angling farther out from camp.
Bass laid a long finger against her lips, hoping it would tell her enough. Waits nodded slightly and kissed the finger just before he pulled it away and rocked forward onto his knees, slowly standing. Smelling. Listening.
Sure enough the old dog was in motion, growling off to his right—not where he had heard Zeke a moment before. Yonder, toward the horses at the edge of the gently sloping meadow.
Had someone, red or white, stumbled upon them camped here? he wondered as he took a first barefooted step, then listened some more. Snake country, this was—them Shoshone—though Crow were known to plunge this far south, Arapaho push in too. Had some hunting party found their tracks and followed them here against the bluff?
Every night of their journey north from Taos Bass had damn well exercised caution. They would stop late in the lengthening afternoons and water their horses, then let them graze a bit while he gathered wood for a small fire he always built directly beneath the wide overhang of some branches to disperse the smoke. Waits nursed the baby and when her tummy was full Bass’s Crow wife passed the child to him. If
his daughter was awake after her supper, the trapper cuddled the babe across his arm or bounced her gently in his lap while Waits cooked their supper. But most evenings the tiny one fell asleep as the warm milk filled her tummy.
So the man sat quietly with the child sleeping against him, watching his wife kneel at the fire, listening to the twilight advancing upon them, his nostrils taking in the feral innocence of this land carried on every breeze. With all the scars, the slashes of knife, those pucker holes from bullets and iron-tipped arrows too, with the frequent visits of pain on his old joints and the dim sight left him in that one eye … even with all those infirmities, this trapper fondly named Scratch nonetheless believed Dame Fortune had embraced him more times than she had shunned him.
Every morning for the past twenty-five days they loaded up their two packhorses and the new mule he had come to call Samantha, dividing up what furs Josiah Paddock had refused to take for himself, what necessaries of coffee, sugar, powder, lead, and foofaraw he figured the three of them would need, what with leaving Taos behind for the high country once more. By the reckoning of most, he hadn’t taken much. A few beaver plews to trade with Sublette at the coming rendezvous on Ham’s Fork where he would buy a few girlews and geegaws to pack off to Rotten Belly up in Absaroka, Crow country. When Bass returned Waits by the Water to the land of her people for the coming winter.
Josiah. Each time he thought on the one who had been his young partner, thought too on that ex-slave Esau they had stumbled across out in Pawnee country,
*
on the others he left behind in the Mexican settlements … it brought a hard lump to Scratch’s throat.