Cry of the Hawk

Jonah smiled. “You said it just fine for me, mister. Just fine. I’d buy you a drink—but I’m afraid my cousin and me are a shade light.”

“No matter,” replied the Union man, turning his back on the major and escort. “Let me offer you two a drink on me.” He snagged the neck of the bottle being held by the barkeep. “Put it on my bill.”

“They wanted to see the color of our money before we got a drink,” Moser apologized.

“It’s like that out here. There’s a lot of worthless scrip floating around these days. Gold will always do the trick. That, and army money.”

“Always army money,” Jonah replied. “Ain’t no other work for a man what needs a job to eat.”

“Take heart, friends. The army isn’t the only good money on the plains,” said the veteran. “I’m Eli Robbins.”

They shook hands and introduced themselves, then helped themselves to Robbins’s bottle.

“You look like you ain’t hurting for walking-around money,” Moser said.

Robbins smiled. He stood taller than Moser and almost as tall as Hook, but with a good thirty pounds on the whipcord-lean Confederate from Missouri. “I suppose I’m not. Work when I have to—never really want to. When my poke gets short, I know where to go looking. What brings you two Southern boys all the way out here to the middle of Nebraska?”

“Jonah come through these parts a couple times while he served out here—fighting Injuns.”

The stranger’s eyebrow lifted. “You was with one of them galvanized outfits, eh?”

“Third U.S. Volunteers,” he answered. “Kept the telegraph up and the roads open when we could.”

Robbins chuckled. “That was a job of soldiering. Outfits like yours cut their teeth on Sioux and Cheyenne I hear.”

Hook wiped his bushy black mustache with the back of his hand. “What you said before, Eli—you got any ideas where we could find work?”

“I’m fixing on moseying south myself in a day or two. Hear the K-P needs hunters.”

“What’s the K-P?” Moser asked.

“Kansas Pacific Railroad. Word has it that the track gangs have reached Abilene.”

“Down in Kansas.”

He nodded. “They need hunters to supply meat for their bed gangs and riprap as well.”

“Bed gangs?” Moser asked.

“Level the road where the track will lay. Riprap cuts through timber and brush, crossing water with bridges.”

“I’ve shot mule deer and antelope before,” Jonah said, pouring himself another glass of the red whiskey. “I figure I could do that.”

Robbins chuckled. “You won’t be shooting no mule deer or antelope out there, Jonah. Them gangs get real hungry.”

“Why no deer or antelope?”

Robbins snorted with a chuckle. “Didn’t you ever see ’em while you was soldiering out there in Dakota Territory?”

“See ’em—see what?”

“Buffalo, goddammit! The K-P needs buffalo hunters!”

18

Autumn, 1866

“HE THE ONLY skinner you got?” came the question from the big man perched behind the table crowded with paper and whiskey glasses in the Abilene saloon.

Jonah glanced at Moser. “Yeah. Just him and me.”

This central Kansas town on the great Smoky Hill River was only then starting to boom. Ever since the 1862 Homestead Act had begun to bring settlers fleeing the war that was devastating the east, granting them for next to nothing 160 acres of prairie grassland, towns like these had started to crop up across the central plains. But this particular town had something different going for it. Someone had seen something special when he had first set eyes on Abilene, Kansas.

Just this past summer, Illinois cattle buyer John McCoy had recognized the potential in putting up the corrals and shipping depot that would soon revolutionize the business of driving Texas cattle to the eastern markets. He was the first to see that profits could be realized by having a railroad closer to the cattle empires. Working alongside the Kansas Pacific, McCoy had erected the first of his cattle pens and would keep his crews constructing those pens and loading chutes until cold weather set in. The first marriage of cattle and the railroad was less than a year from becoming a reality.

Tracks heading east were already laid. Abilene and the K-P would be ready come next trail-drive season.

Chewing on some shag leaf tucked in a tight lump within his cheek, the big man behind the wobbly table eyed the two Southerners severely, his gaze eventually coming back to rest on the half-stock, heavy-barreled muzzle-loading rifle Hook rested on its butt between his scuffed boots. “You ever shoot buffalo before?”

“Served with the Third U.S. Volunteers out to the Dakotas during the war.”

“Rebel, eh?”

“I was,” he answered.

“I asked if you ever shot any buffalo, Reb.”

“On Connor’s march up to the Powder—Sioux country.”

“You was with Connor?”

“I was.”

“I think you’re pulling my leg, mister. Bet you can’t tell me—”

“You want to know about the Platte Bridge fight? Or when we got in there and wiped out that village of Black Bear’s Arapaho.”

The man sat there, looking a bit stunned by the suddenness of Hook’s reply. “Don’t remember you.”