Cry of the Hawk

“More’n once—when Wiser figured they looked at Hattie the wrong way, or too long. Make no mistake about it—Wiser considered Hattie his already. I couldn’t stand to be around when the time came ….”

By that next morning Sweete and Hook had been ready to pull out, heading north, with plans to make it to the Platte before turning west. They were again throwing in together to accomplish something important for each other. With that hangover yesterday Shad had learned Phil Sheridan wanted him to ride to Fort Laramie, there to meet with, advise, and interpret for the peace commissioners who had completed but a portion of their work at the Medicine Lodge treaty.

Some of the commissioners were going west, to see what they could do to bring an end to the bloodshed up in Dakota Territory. For more than a year now the army had strung itself thin along the Bozeman Road, establishing Fort Reno, Fort Phil Kearny, and Fort C. F. Smith. Each post existing day to day under a virtual state of siege, plopped down as they were in the heart of prime Sioux and Northern Cheyenne hunting ground.

But the army had put a call out to the bands to come in and talk peace at Fort Laramie. And if Two Moons’ band of Shahiyena chose to come in, Shad was sure Toote and Pipe Woman would be with them. The possibility was something the old mountain man did not want to pass up.

Jonah Hook would ride along until he found some word of where Jubilee Usher’s band of murderers had been, or might be going. It was for certain Sweete had been right about one thing: if Usher’s bunch was heading west to the City of Saints, they would in all likelihood pass Fort Laramie. It was as good a place as any he had right now to continue his search.

This would be a journey of the heart for all three of them. Sweete to once more touch and hold Shell Woman. Hook to find some clue to where he might next search for wife and daughter. And Riley Fordham rode with the two scouts for no better reason than he had to. He had his own sins to atone for.

42

Late December, 1867

“THAT THEM?” JONAH asked the old mountain man standing beside him. The light snow swirled from time to time, but mostly it drifted down flat and fluffy. Hook and Sweete watched shadows of movement in the distance. Coming out of the north. Down from the heart of Red Cloud’s country.

“Chances be, Jonah,” the tall trapper replied, his eyes never straying from that distance, hopeful.

“Gotta be,” Hook said. “Down from the land of the Tongue and the Powder and the Crazy Woman. As wild a country as you were a young stallion in your early days, I’d wager.”

Sweete nodded. “Man thinks of nothing more’n getting his stinger dipped in a woman’s honey pot when he’s a young colt. Ain’t till he gets older that a man learns the real value of a woman.”

“He don’t have to get old to learn that. Not if he’s a lucky man, Shad.”

Jonah felt the keen, sharp-edged anticipation of the big man beside him. Not angry at Sweete for it, when he could have been. For there was plenty of need in Hook to experience just that same anticipation of seeing one’s woman again after a long separation. And while Hook realized his was a far greater separation in both time and distance, he begrudged Sweete not.

It had been Spotted Tail, chief of a large band of Brule Sioux camped near Fort Laramie these days, who had told the two white men that he had reason to believe Two Moons’ band of Cheyenne were coming south to the fort. Not so surprising as it might seem, the old chief had said. There were many bands coming in to Laramie to see what the peace-talkers had to say. After all, listening meant receiving presents. Fine presents the likes of which other bands had received at the talks down on Medicine Lodge Creek. Word of such splendor traveled fast along the moccasin telegraph, all the way up the Bozeman Road to Montana Territory.

Travel on the road was all but impossible this time of year, what with the Indian troubles coupled with the way winter had clamped down hard on the northern plains. Just a year ago many of these same bands had waited in ambush while a dozen young horsemen lured Captain William Judd Fetterman and eighty soldiers over the snowy Lodge Trail Ridge up by Fort Phil Kearny. And when the white men were all in the trap, killed every last one of those soldiers.

And only this past summer the warrior bands of Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho had agreed to wipe out the two northernmost forts on the Montana Road in one furious day of bloodletting. As it turned out, the warriors failed in destroying Fort C. F. Smith up on the Bighorn River. It was there they failed in a day-long attempt to wipe out the few civilians and a handful of soldiers hunkered down inside a corral beside a hay field a few miles from the post.