Cry of the Hawk

“Why?”

“Their ponies are done in. They’ll go back and tell Connor what we’ve found—and tell him we’re going on in to find the enemy.”

He swallowed. “Then you figure to stay on the trail?”

Sweete knelt in front of Hook. “You don’t have to come, Jonah. I came to tell you to ride back with the Pawnee.”

Something pricked his fierce pride of a sudden. “Sure—so the rest of you can say I didn’t have the balls to ride with you after those Cheyenne warriors—that it?”

Sweete smiled. “That mean you’re coming along with me?”

“Damn right it is, old man,” he snarled, getting to his feet. “Anyone gonna say Jonah Hook ain’t got the bottom to chase these red savages down, better be ready to eat his words.”

“No one said you ain’t got the grit, Jonah,” Sweete said, backing up with a huge smile. “Figured there was fire in you when I met you, first off.”

Later that evening after half the trackers had headed back to Connor’s camp on their played-out ponies, North and Sweete pushed the rest on down the Powder until total darkness made it impossible to pursue the hostiles any longer.

“North’s sending two of his best ahead on foot to stay with the trail.” Sweete settled onto the cold ground beside Hook, their horses nearby, jaws grinding the dry, brittle grasses with a reassuring crunch. “Get your saddle off and wipe that horse down with some grass, son. We’ll pick up and move out soon as it gets light enough to follow in a few hours.”

As far as Hook was concerned, it was still too damned dark to do anything but sleep when the old scout rousted him from the warmth of those two blankets he had wrapped himself in beneath the whirling stars overhead. So he was amazed that by the time he had tightened the cinch and remouthed the bit he had loosened while the horse grazed, the sky along the east had grayed enough to allow a man to pick out nearby landmarks and just barely make sense out of the trail that hugged the bank of the Powder River.

It gave him a newfound respect for not only the Pawnee trackers, but for Shad Sweete as well.

“One of these days, you get to Missouri like you said—I want you to teach me everything you know about tracking the enemy.”

Sweete smiled slowly. “Don’t have to wait till I come visiting you and your family down in Missouri. We got plenty time to get started on your lessons while we’re here.”

Just before sunrise, they came up on the two trackers North had sent ahead. Unable to understand either the Pawnee tongue or the sign language used in that gray dawn, Hook nonetheless sensed he understood the import of their talk. Especially when he looked on down the direction the trail was taking and spotted what the trackers were indicating.

Thin wisps of smoke rising slowly into the still, cool dawn air. Behind the bluffs not that far downriver.

“They’re Cheyenne, all right!” Sweete whispered with fiery excitement. “Northern—and that means they’ll fight like the dickens, Jonah. You loaded and ready for bear?”

“S’pose I’m ready as I’ll ever be, Shad. We gonna follow ’em again till we catch ’em?”

“Shit—we’ve caught ’em. Them two hurried back to meet us along the trail—to tell North the Cheyenne was already packing up to move out.”

As North and Sweete led their forty-eight Pawnee around the base of the bluff toward a thick stand of alder bordering the Powder, Hook caught his first glimpse of the quarry they had chased for a day and most of the night.

“Watch out for the women, if there be any, Jonah,” Shad instructed at the Confederate’s side. “But just remember the squaws can be as deadly as the bucks. They’ll fight hard as their men—God bless ’em. Heya!”

Hook watched as the old trapper licked the pad of his thumb, then wiped it down the bridge of his nose. Wetting his thumb again, Sweete made a cross just below the brim of his old hat, swiping across the eyebrows. As North kicked his bunch into a gallop with a wild screech, Shad opened his eyes, having made his private medicine. He grinned over at the startled Hook and added his voice to the wild calls of the Pawnee and the not-too-distant cries of the Cheyenne.

“Hopo! C’mon, Jonah—it’s a good day to die!”

With the surge of his own hot adrenaline, the sweep of the charging horses kicking up dust and clods of yellow soil into his nostrils, the wild cries of both Pawnee and the retreating Cheyenne, who now understood they were being attacked by Indians and not white men, Hook fought down the bile of fear for the unknown.

His hands were sweating on the reins and as he thumbed back the hammer on the carbine, finding the cap securely hugging the nipple. A trickle of cold ran between the cheeks of his ass as they burst past the stand of alder where the Cheyenne had camped for the night. The odors of their fires were strong in his nostrils as they shot through the grove. Something foreign on the wind as well—it made him think he was actually smelling the warriors who had spent the night on that ground.