Cry of the Hawk

Here along the Missouri River, there were already signs that the great ice jams of the upriver were breaking. Sawyers and flotsam flowed past, tumbling in the muddy foam from up north, now headed east for a union with the waters of the Mississippi far downstream. An occasional buffalo carcass too, rocking slowly with the frothy, icy, mud brown Missouri. Water born of the high places, A land where Jonah Hook had only marched along the fringes. Not daring yet to penetrate. Perhaps never—he got his family back, and things settled down back in Missouri. Maybe go as far east as he ought—back to the Shenandoah, in the shadow of Big Cobbler Mountain. They’d be safe from harm there once more.

And put this all behind them.

But that was as much a dream as any Jonah experienced each time he closed his eyes.

Late March it was. After three months of backtracking from Fort Laramie, the hunt had brought him here to this country near the Missouri River, just inside Kansas. Upriver from the great bend and Kansas City. At Fort Leavenworth again, remembering that winter of sixty-five when first the Union army brought him west to fight Indians.

More a staging arena now than any fort Hook had seen out west. When first he got here days ago, it was as if he had stepped back into another world, one that had become unfamiliar in the years gone between. What struck him most about Leavenworth was that this grouping of neatly whitewashed buildings and close-cropped lawns and wide graveled walks, along with its band shell and central flagpole and drilling infantry had no business calling itself a western fort.

But perhaps that was it, he had thought. Maybe he was no longer in what could be termed the West. Perhaps this was the end of the East and the beginning of the frontier, that term others were using out here more and more now. Maybe the West started here at the Missouri.

Again Jonah Hook had prayed that here his journey would come to an end.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have reason to give voice to that prayer. He had damned good reason. The last three months had led him here—with word that he might find a bunch that sounded like the ones he was looking for. Men, the story had it, who’d come riding north out of the Territories on some of the best of horseflesh anyone had seen in a long time—tough, lean, and good configuration. And every man jack of them was well-armed, swaybacked almost under the firepower each sour-faced one of them carried.

They stayed off by their own and kept to themselves, he was told. Likely waiting for something, somebody. And they had to do with the sutlers when need be. Drinking whiskey among the watering holes and hovels near the fort. And dealing with the chippies and whores in their cribs back of those dingy, smoky places. But only in rotation, it was noted by a few who had cause to notice such things.

The entire group never ventured out of its camp as a whole. Always some staying behind while the others came in for leave. On schedule they rode into the settlement to take their recreation. On schedule they rejoined out front and remounted, riding back to their camp, where they bothered no man.

“They pay for what they need,” a clerk at the mercantile had told Jonah of the band camped down by the river. “Never an argument on price or quality of what they buy. Good customers.”

“There a tall one with ’em? Bald on top—long hair down to his shoulders?”

He had thought, then shook his head. “No. No man like that.”

“How ’bout a fella that walks with a hobble, like this?” Jonah had inquired of the clerk days ago, hobbling across the floor as Riley Fordham had mimicked Boothog Wiser’s peculiar clubfooted walk.

Again he shook his head. “No, sir. I’d remember something like that.”

And with the news came a sinking feeling that the bunch camped out yonder were not the ones he wanted. Until he joined three of them in a card game one cold, blustery afternoon that slicked the mud puddles in the rutted street with ice scum and drove men indoors while their horses hunched around, rumps to the cruel wind, heads bowed at the rail.

“Gimme two,” Jonah said to the dealer, a local. In fact, two other locals were sitting in on the game. Seven hands in all at the big, battered table beneath an oil lamp spreading yellow light and smoky shadow over them all.

A crack of lightning snapped his nerves taut as catgut, and seconds later came the slap of thunder stampeding in off the plains with nothing to slow it in the slightest. It made the low-roofed shanty of a gambling palace shake, rattling clapboard against quaking frame stud. Shaking the lamp above them, causing a few among them to shift in their chairs. The three he had been getting to know did not. Glued as they were, unnerved by the noise.

“That’un was close,” said one of the locals.

Jonah laid his cards down when called. “Nothing more’n three of a kind.” He knew he would be bested by the fleshy, jowly unspoken leader of the trio. But it was as he had planned.