Cry of the Hawk

“I figure the Yankees and their Union ought to just keep hands off of most everything, Major Wiser.”

Wiser laughed suddenly, a head-rearing, hearty laugh. He clamped a hand on Hook’s bony shoulder. “To think we’ve found a kindred heart, Captain Hastings. In this land of the Gentile heathen, so far from Zion no less. And—a man who loves to gamble to boot!”

46

Early July, 1868

HE WAS THANKFUL the prairie nights cooled off the way they did. As short as that starlit respite was from the growing heat of summer come to sear the high plains.

Lemuel Wiser sat at the big table with Jonah Hook and the rest, fewer now than when they had started fourteen hours ago that very morning after a breakfast of eggs and potatoes and thick slices of ham with gravy served up by the former army mess cook in his smoky kitchen at the back of this saloon. Good biscuits on the side too, washed down with lots of coffee laced with sipping whiskey.

“Gets the old heart pumping for the game,” Wiser had cracked as he tore open the first deck of cards for what had been a long, long day that saw players come and go. Very few of his men tried their luck. Soldiers mostly, in Dobe Town from Fort Kearney for a little recreation—some drinking, some gambling, and most surely some treasured but precious few moments behind those doors out back where the powdered chippies plied their trade.

Army troopers or Wiser’s own soldiers—men always seemed to like the girls better than the gambling. Back there away from things, where a man was no longer self-conscious around his fellow soldiers, where a man could scream and holler and let it all out when the explosion came as he rode one of those fleshy or bony, coffee-colored or alabaster-skinned, whores.

From time to time men dropped in and out of the game, at times there were more than eight ringing the table with Wiser. At times down to no more than four. Yet the gambler in the soul of the new man kept him at the table. Jonah Hook won a little, lost a little, managing to stay just far enough ahead that he could afford to keep a bottle at his elbow through the last fourteen hours. He poured drinks for the other players and himself, and stayed far enough ahead that he was not driven to carding out like so many of the others who gave up and left, empty-handed.

Some of those losers stayed to watch. Others went out the door in silence. A few left noisily, grumbling their complaints as to the suspected lack of honesty in the good-looking stranger with the smooth tongue. It was not the first time Lemuel Wiser had heard such complaints, not the first time he had been accused of having an oily tongue or fast, slippery fingers.

Wiser enjoyed being a gambler in everything he did in life. There was enough boredom after all. And all a man had to do was open his eyes and look around him to see the desperate lives of little men to know that. Long ago, Wiser had promised himself he would not be one of them. He would make things happen, create his own world and along with it create a specific order to that world, mirroring most how he saw himself. So far, he had done well in that regard.

And with Jubilee Usher now returning to Deseret, it just might mean a promotion for Lemuel Wiser. If Brigham Young took Usher up the ladder, then Wiser would be the natural to step into the vacancy: to lead the Danites. To make of Young’s Avenging Angels what only Lemuel Wiser could make of them. To fashion them in his own image.

What glory before God and the Saints!

Yet across the last two hours, with the whiskey growing stale and the cloud of old smoke hung thick about their shoulders, Wiser had steadily lost. Not much each hand. But enough that his winnings were dwindling. Some going here, some there to that soldier. But mostly his money had been dragged across the wide table until it now sat in front of Hastings’s new man.

“I must say, Jonah—you’ve proved to be quite a good card player.”

Hook smiled back, cracking that bony face of his with a disarming grin. “Just lucky, I s’pose, Major. Cards is a funny game like that.”

“Man learns a lot about another man—watching him play cards.”

Hook peered over his cards, tonguing aside a quid of moist tobacco he was chewing. “That so, Major? What you learned about me?”

“You’re good, Jonah Hook. One of the best I’ve played. Not the best, mind you. Because I’ve never lost to any man before.”

“Not even Colonel Usher?”

“I told you! Lost to no man.” He said it a little harsher than he had wanted. But it did not matter. He had spoken.

Soon enough, Wiser told himself. Soon he would be stepping into Usher’s role—Colonel Lemuel Wiser. A man to be reckoned with—by Saint and Gentile alike.