Cry of the Hawk

And, as well, he took in laundry. At least that’s how he had started with the three Pawnee women when the track first neared this one-street town, he was prompt to explain to anyone who would listen at the bar or from the few tables that occupied most of the floor space in the low-roofed shanty of a smoky saloon. No paintings of nudes here behind the bar, at least not yet. And no smoky mirror behind those neatly arranged bottles. No, all that was unnecessary. A man came to his establishment not to have to look at himself or to stare at a wall full of bottles. His customers came to this place to drink and play cards.

Or they came to have a go at one of his three Pawnee whores.

“Didn’t know they was whores,” Moser whispered to Jonah there at the table. “I figured they really was washing clothes back there.”

Across the table one of the big men laughed, raising his red-rimmed eyes from considering the merits of his cards held in those huge-knuckled, well-worked hands. “You’re new here, not to know them three will wash the dew off your lily, Secesh!”

Hook felt the tremble go across the flat of his stomach at the mention of that word—something unrepentant Yankees liked to call Southerners. Not like Rebel—something a man would call himself proudly. But instead, it had become that sort of slur a Yankee could use in polite company and still get away with. Secessionist. “Secesh” for short. Almost as bad as calling a man’s family to task—questioning his breeding, his mother, and a nameless, no-count father as well.

“You fight in the war?” Jonah asked, sullen and telling himself to let it be.

“Third Michigan I was.” The man smiled cruelly. “We ever fight, Secesh?”

Hook wasn’t about to let the man know that word nettled him.

“Not that I reckon on knowing.”

“You’d remember the Third Michigan if you’d fought us. Likely you’d not be here playing cards with me and Hiram here.” He tossed his head to his partner in the next chair, every bit as big and imposing in the splash of yellow lamplight and shadow in the barroom now that the sun had made its exit for the night. “Likely, you’d be laying in some moldy grave with all your kind.”

“Your outfit tough?” Moser asked.

“We crushed every Johnny outfit tried us,” Hiram, the second man, answered. “If you wanna call that tough.”

“I’ll take two,” Hook told the dealer, another of the hard-handed laborers who didn’t appear willing to join in on the verbal sparring. Jonah had been struck by the faint, hard edge to the taciturn man’s words, something that spoke of distant Teutonic roots.

A German like me, he had thought the first time the man spoke hours ago when the first deal was set round that table.

The blanket behind him rustled, and Jonah watched the eyes of the others around the table fix upon something pleasant. He turned to glance and found the young Pawnee woman emerging with a bundle of clothing wrapped in a canvas sheet, bound with manila twine. She stood for a moment at the bar, whispering to the barman, then finally hefted her delivery under her arm and set off toward the door as the barman disappeared behind the blanket curtain.

The first big man toppled his chair with a shattering scrape as he got out of it and lumbered toward the woman, blocking her way at the door, where melted snow and ice and mud made for a crusty, red-tinged puddle.

She tried to step around him in one direction, then the other. He stood there grinning at her, not saying a thing.

Jonah found Artus looking at him. Hook let his eyes drop slowly down to Moser’s waist, where the pistol butt poked from the front of his coat like a sheep’s hoof. When he looked back at his cousin’s face, Hook found Moser wide-eyed with a tinge of fear at what might be expected of him in the next few minutes.

“You go,” she growled in that English that wasn’t readily understandable to the rest in the room filled with murky light. But with a shove of her arm, she made her meaning clear enough.

Hook admired her from that moment. Not the kind to be content with calling out for her employer. She had declared her intention to right the situation on her own. While he had clearly liked what he saw of her willowy frame and dark eyes back in the washroom hours ago, Hook was all the more attracted now.

“You hear that, Hiram? She’s telling me to go.” The big man grabbed her shoulders and stuffed his face down into the nape of her neck as the bundle splashed into the muddy puddle. The woman tried to batter the big man with her clenched fists.

Hiram was up and moving their way. “Looks like you need some help, Simmons. Whatsamatter? Little hellcat more’n you can handle by yourself?”

Simmons wrenched one of her wrists away from the hold she had in his hair and looped it roughly behind the woman’s back. She arched, wincing in pain as he shoved her toward an empty table.

“Goddamned redskin whore,” he grumbled. “Not like she ain’t had my pecker in her times before, is it?”

“Maybe she don’t like you much as you like her, Simmons!” Hiram joked.