Cry of the Hawk

Broken though they were, the words fell clearly English on his ears. Yet it took a moment more before they registered. In that time, Jonah found himself staring—absorbed in studying the way in which coming in from the cold had made the young woman’s high-boned, copper cheeks glow, how her hair lay plastered against the side of her head with melted snow and the overwhelming humidity of this low-roofed back room.

Jonah cursed himself. A faint, burning tingle rumbled across his loins, stirring what had been for so long dormant flesh. He had clearly been too long without a woman.

“She wants us out?” Moser asked.

“Seems so,” he replied, not taking his eyes off the woman, who put the kettle back on the stove. She then threw Moser a towel.

“I ain’t finished,” Artus said. “Just getting to enjoy this. ’Sides, we paid a dollar to sit and—”

“Looks like we ought to go play some cards, Artus. ’Pears our time is up lollygagging here in this soapy water.” He reached up to catch a towel the woman threw him, high enough in the air that he had to come out of the tub, standing just enough.

She smiled at Hook, admiringly, then turned away to go work with the two older women.

“Thank God that squaw looked away,” Moser complained. “I wasn’t about to come out with no woman staring at my privates like that. You didn’t tell me these Injun women are so bold they got no shame to ’em.”

Hook hurriedly dabbed the damp towel over the length of his shivering body, water puddling onto the rough-plank floor with the melting snow the young woman had dragged in. “Don’t know a thing about Injun women, cousin.”

“But you spent time out here.”

He grabbed for his longhandles. “Don’t mean I ever met an Injun woman. Can’t claim I ever seen a one, much less know anything about ’em. C’mon—grab your clothes. We got a poker table calling out to us.”

Moser wagged his head, skipping into his canvas britches. “But I damn well know everybody we’ve talked to since coming out here tells us they swear by Injun women—says squaws’re the best for poking that can be.”

For the moment Hook longingly studied the difference in the rear ends of the three women. Two were broad-beamed and shapelessly straining against their hide dresses. So different was the young woman’s rump, small and firm as it pressed every bit as much against its confining buckskin dress, clearly outlined.

“I don’t know nothing about that squaw-poking, cousin. But I can tell you, I’d be less than a man if I didn’t want to find out about Injun women for myself.”

20

Late November, 1866

HIS OWN RUMP had that comfortable feeling to it despite the fact it was cradled upon a hard chair, that sort of feeling that came from a familiar numbness that came of being planted for a time.

Jonah Hook played cards the way he had hunted buffalo. It was not an all-consuming passion, as it was for some on this frontier, more something to pass the time.

The same could not be said for the five others around the big table. Four of them were tie-gang laborers, big men with hardened hands and dull, clearly defined moves to their physical presence. Nothing slight about them.

The last was clearly not of this place, in speech and dress and the manner in which the man conducted himself. Jonah figured he could not be over thirty—no older than he. But despite the fact that the man did not fit in with the other six players in even the crudeness of their talk, the well-groomed man was nonetheless comfortable with this table and this game of cards, and perhaps the whiskey the barman kept at the ready whenever the young, long-mustached card player nodded in his direction.

Over the hours Jonah and Artus had been planted at the table, the first hints of cold had rattled into a plains snowstorm that whistled and threw everything it had against the north side of the clapboard building. Every time someone new came or went, the door thrust open with a noisy will of its own, urged on by a chill scut of freezing wind laced with icy snow. At times the arriving patrons would require the barman to hustle from his perch behind his bar and perform another sort of commerce at his nearby barrels of crackers, boxes of dry goods and shelves piled with all those sundry items the populace of central Kansas could not live without. He was clearly a businessman intent on making a living—if not from whiskey and cards, then from hawking his general merchandise to those who had nowhere else to acquire what was here for sale.