Cry of the Hawk

“I … I know he does. Go ’head. Kill me now. Better that way. Least I won’t have to live with what I done. What I didn’t do to stop all the hurt.”

“This bunch brought hurt to a lot of folks?”

Fordham looked from Sweete to Jonah, whose eyes were only inches from his. “A lot. I figured I needed out—so I could make my peace with God about it.”

“S’pose you start now,” Sweete said. “Tell this man where he can find his wife.”

“And his daughter,” Fordham said quietly. “It was ’cause of her I run off. Usher’s bunch finds me, Usher will kill me for running off. No one gets out alive.”

“I don’t give a damn about them finding you, Fordham!” Hook snapped. “Just—tell—me—of—my—daughter.”

“Hattie,” Fordham said her name softly.

The sound of her name in that tiny room caught Jonah by surprise. But not nearly as much as did the look on Fordham’s face, or the catch in Fordham’s voice as he spoke the name. Almost with something akin to reverence.

“Yes,” Jonah replied, easing back, “tell me about Hattie.”

“I wish you’d just quit your bellyaching, Jonah.” Shad Sweete’s words were louder than normal as they had to be flung into a stiff wind edged with winter’s bite coming face-on out of the west. “You damn well now know you’re no closer to finding Usher’s bunch down south in the Territories than you are sniffing around out here on the plains.”

“It’s for sure we aren’t gonna find ’em out to Fort Laramie,” Hook grumbled.

Shad pulled up the fur collar more snugly around his face. “That’s where you just might be wrong, son. You spent time out there along that Emigrant Road your own self. And that’s the way any bunch like this Usher’s is going to make it back across the mountains, and on down to the Salt Lake where those Mormons have settled in.”

“You can’t stand us Mormons, can you?” asked Riley Fordham, riding on the far side of Jonah.

“It shows, does it?” Shad asked. Knowing it did—in his eyes for sure. Maybe in the sound of his voice.

Mormons had tried to kill Jim Bridger years before, and missing out on that, Brigham Young’s band of Danites had killed some of Sweete’s friends who worked Bridger’s ferry on the Green River. There was no love lost there, no, sir. If anything, that hatred had smoldered every bit as hot that day as it was the day he and Bridger had come down from the hills to find Fort Bridger half burned to the ground. They had found some of the stock killed and left to bloat in their pens, riding east in dread only to find the bodies of friends left to rot among the willows along Green River.

“Can’t say I’m proud of everything I’ve done,” Riley Fordham admitted.

“You wasn’t old enough then to be a part of that,” Sweete said, seeing the young man’s eyes mist up. Perhaps only with the cold, incessant wind stiff against their faces.

“My uncle was,” Fordham said. “And we always heard how heroic it was going against Indians and Gentiles—white men who were no better than savage Indians anyway.”

“That’s what they taught you ’bout what those butchers did up there on the Green?”

“I got my own sins to account for, Mr. Sweete,” Fordham said, answering it in his own way. “Can’t blame no one else for what I’ve done on my own.”

“With the help of this Usher and his right-hand man, the one you called Wiser,” Hook said.

“Perhaps that’s why I chose to stay on with the two of you back when we crossed the Smoky Hill,” Fordham admitted. “Because I’ve got my own righting of things to see to.”

The deserter from Jubilee Usher’s Danites had told the two stunned plainsmen all he could there in that tiny room near Fort Larned that late November day as winter came down to squeeze the central plains. Fordham told them how he had rarely seen Gritta Hook, only going from tent to ambulance and back again.

“They keep both her and Hattie pretty sleepy most of the time.”

“What they using?”

“Laudanum,” he answered. “The woman … your wife—she stays with another squad. Usher keeps the girl with a small bunch I rode with, under Wiser. That’s why we didn’t always know what was going on with the woman. But I was one Usher put in charge of keeping an eye on Hattie. A bright and pretty child, Mr. Hook,” Fordham said with clear admiration in his eyes. “If ever I had a daughter of my own, I’d pray she’d be like your Hattie.”

“Why’d you desert, leaving her in that den of animals, Fordham?”

“I knew there’d come a time when Wiser would get Usher talked into letting Wiser have Hattie for his own. It was just a matter of time. As each year passed, she grew older, prettier … starting to …” Fordham cleared his throat nervously. “She was starting to fill out, looking more and more like a young woman. I could see it in Wiser’s eyes when he looked at her. One day soon—he’d get her. ’Cause every man of us knew Wiser had already laid claim to her. He’d killed before for her.”

“Killed some of his own men?”