Cry of the Hawk

Riley swallowed down his heart, hearing it thunder in his ears as he strained at the night-sounds. Hoping none of the others were up and wandering about. He had made sure the rest of his guards were spread thin that night. He untied the horse where it grazed nearby, leading it into the thick timber along the game trail he had chosen for his escape.

Riley had been planning this for weeks now. Waiting for moon-dark, as Usher called it. And waiting to figure out a good route of escape. Earlier in the first dark of the moon’s silvery rising, not long after returning here to his spot, having completed an entire circuit of the camp and finding his pickets in their places for the night, Fordham had taken the tools from his saddlebag and pried each of the four shoes loose from his horse’s hooves.

Moving silently, slowly down the game trail, he knew the horse’s tracks would in the morning appear to be nothing more than an unshod Indian’s pony—when Jubilee’s men came looking.

Usher and Wiser would mount a search to one degree or another. Simply because Riley was one of the best they had. The best marksman. Perhaps the smartest Usher had working for him now.

Smart enough to know he wanted out. The war was long over, and still Usher was not taking them back to Deseret. Instead, Jubilee had told them their God-granted work was here on the plains, not back with Brigham’s people in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. All was at peace there. It was here, Usher told them, here where the might of God’s hand was needed.

Here, where Jubilee Usher would baptize the land with the blood of the lamb.

Riley had followed Jubilee east with the others that last trip, part of the Mormon army protecting the wagon train when they were all commandeered to fight the Civil War. He had been willing to fight and kill and even die for the faith—his family’s faith in Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

But this had become something different altogether.

Jubilee Usher kept the fair-haired woman to himself. And the girl. She couldn’t be more than twelve now … and still Boothog lusted after her. It would not be much longer that Usher could keep Wiser off the girl. Riley strained to remember the girl’s name. Wishing for a moment that he had brought her along. Knowing if he had, the chances were good that neither of them would make it.

Hattie.

He felt sorry for her as he plunged deeper and deeper into the timber along the game trail, farther and farther from Usher and Wiser and their insanity.

The woman was lost. She belonged to Usher now, after all this time, body and soul. But the girl. She was starting to bud, her young breasts only lately beginning to press against the too-small cloth dress she was forced to wear like a blouse over the men’s britches they had given her. One of these days her beauty would drive Boothog Wiser to madness, and he would no longer deny himself her virgin flesh.

Riley Fordham had to desert—risking his life to escape north to Kansas. He knew that country, been up there scouting it with Hastings for Jubilee Usher. Up there with the westbound railroad. Up there with all the rumors of the tribes making trouble for settler and track crews alike—why, a man could lose himself among the many. And no one, not even Usher and Wiser, could track him down and make him bleed as he knew they would if they ever got their hands on him.

No man ever quit Usher’s outfit. No man ever just walked off the job. To Usher, this was God’s work. And God’s vengeance would be his if a man just up and rode off.

But that’s exactly what Riley Fordham was doing. Planning to ride until sunup. Lie low where he could just before the sun rose. Then ride again come nightfall. Day after each new day of freedom.

Fordham had to go, and now. Because he knew that come one day soon, Boothog Wiser would claim the girl for his and Usher would allow it. Them two so alike in their abuse of the women. Not that Riley didn’t like pinning a squaw beneath him of a time when they had one for the men to use. That was something different. Something Brigham had said about the Indians being some animal less than the white man. Like the land was God-given for the Saints to use—and with it the use of the dark-skinned Injuns who lived here too.

Those two women weren’t squaws. They were beauties to his way of seeing things. And they had belonged to a white man. A man’s wife … and his daughter.

And if that man weren’t killed in that bloody war back east, Riley Fordham knew damned well that man was pretty near crazy by now, wondering, hunting, stalking down those who took his family.

Riley didn’t want to be around when that man caught up with Jubilee Usher and Boothog Wiser.

It sure wouldn’t be a pretty sight what those two crazed blood-lovers would do to that poor sod-buster come to claim his wife and daughter.