Cry of the Hawk

Through the gunsmoke at the corner of his eye Jonah saw Moser struggling with his old pistol on his knees, snapping caps. Then Hook fired again, hitting Simmons lower in the chest this time. The big man reeled a moment and took another step forward, bringing his pistol up slowly.

Hook clicked one cylinder, then a second as Simmons came on, smearing the bright blood down his greasy shirt with one hand. Frantic, Jonah shouted. “Shoot ’im! Artus, shoot!”

Moser opened his mouth as Simmons got his pistol up and cocked the hammer.

“My play now, Secesh,” he growled with a smile as a gurgle of blood poured from his lower lip.

Then the side of the big man’s face disappeared in a blinding glow of pink gore.

Hook winced at the blast, like a turtle shrinking his head back into his body, whirling onto the painful shoulder in that echoing roar of a pistol behind his ear. Moser was flattened on his belly, still struggling with his own weapon.

And the well-dressed young card man gripping an army 44 at arm’s length, smoke crawling lazily from the muzzle.

Hook stared, blinking, while the man walked over to him.

“You’re bleeding a bit,” the stranger said. “That will be a nasty one, I reckon.” Then he stepped over to Artus. “Help your friend get out of here, will you?”

Moser nodded. Both of them watched the younger man walk over to the fallen laborers. He knelt and inspected one, then the others.

“Simmons is dead. So’s this one called Hiram.” The stranger stood, straightening his coat and stuffing his pistol away beneath it at last. “The other two are hurt bad—but they ain’t dead.”

“You two g’won get outta here now.”

Hook turned to find the barman with a double-barreled fowler at the blanketed doorway.

“We’ll go,” Jonah said, rising, feeling the sharp numbness growing in the shoulder. Half his chest was burning with sharp pain already. He glanced at the young Pawnee woman as she rolled off the table and collapsed to the floor, gathering her clothing up, straightening it as best as she could.

It had all happened so quickly, sweeping them all up into the maddening swirl before any of them knew how to pull out.

“These four will likely have friends,” the card man said. “I spent some time scouting for the Union during the war, and some time out here since. So I figure you ought to take my advice. You best do what this barkeep says—and ride while you can.”

“Where?” Moser asked.

“Doesn’t matter now,” said the barman. “Just get out of my place. Out of Abilene.”

Hook stuffed the pistol into his left hand already wet with blood from the shoulder. He held out the right to the young card man. “Thank you, mister. Likely saved my life.”

“I’m still trying to do that. But your life ain’t gonna be worth much if you aren’t long gone from here in the next few minutes.”

“My name’s Jonah Hook.”

The young man smiled. “I’ll remember that.”

Jonah squeezed the gunman’s hand. “Maybe we’ll run across each other down the road sometime.”

“If you like cards and beer, we’ll likely bump into one another, sometime,” he said to Hook. “My name is James Butler Hickok.”

21

December, 1866

“YOU GONNA KEEP her with us?”

Many times had Artus Moser asked that question since the snowy night he had fled the Abilene watering hole with Jonah Hook and the Pawnee woman.

And over the past nine days—or was it ten now?—Moser had grown more scared of this foreign land and the way winter settled down on them in the middle of a great big patch of nothing, a rolling prairie where fleeing west they had come upon a line shack beside the unfinished roadbed where track would be laid come spring.

Spring.

That had such a good ring to Moser’s ears as he said the word to himself. And pulled the blanket much tighter about his shoulders. He had allowed himself only one in keeping warm, giving another to the Pawnee woman. The rest were for Jonah—lying there on the leaky floor of the clapboard line shack, where the wind whispered through the joints and swirled snow a’times up through the cracks. On the rough planks Hook lay shivering, his lips barely moving in an endless chatter of fevered remembering.

There wasn’t much they could do for real heat in this tiny place. About all was to make it warm enough to keep the frost down on the inside of the clapboard walls that moaned each time the strong north wind attempted to grunt the shack over on them. The days were gray and the nights black and starless, as if the three of them had been set down in the middle of a flat tableland and someone had overturned a bowl atop them, allowing in only the thinnest stream of light off the far horizon when the sun rose, or when it set but a few hours later.

Artus had gone and collected what Hook had called squaw wood—deadfall down by the creek less than a mile away. That creek eventually gave itself to the Smoky Hill. The trees and brush along its banks offered the only firewood for them. When it ran out, the young, flat-nosed woman went in search of more.