Cry of the Hawk

“Morning comes,” Moser said, surprised at the sudden vitality to his words, “we go when the sun comes up.” His hands pantomimed the sun rising to the east, where it always did at one side of the line shack during their nine days here.

Or was it ten now?

She shook her head. “No—we—go,” she said, working over every word carefully with her tongue.

He was bewildered now. “We gotta go. Get him help. Back to Abilene if we have to. But somewhere.”

“Two suns.”

He worked on that, kneading it with his own chilled brain, then spoke her words. “Two suns … you mean two days!”

“Snow come. Two suns. We go two suns.”

The snow had come that night. And the storm that blustered off and on had lasted for close to the two days she had predicted. It was a wonder to Artus how she had known that, and how she kept that fire going with those buffalo chips for three long nights and two short days when it grew only light enough to see a gray swirl from horizon to horizon.

Amazing that the Pawnee woman did not run out of buffalo chips before the first faint light of dawn streaking the east with pink orange.

Somehow they managed to get Hook onto his horse long enough for Moser to mount behind him. And there he cradled his shivering cousin against him and nudged the horse away from that line shack, pointing his nose toward the rising sun.

“No,” she said to him as she urged the pack animal she rode beside his, holding a lead halter to Moser’s horse. The woman pointed over her shoulder at the darker horizon.

Moser shook his head, nodded to Abilene, then glanced down at the pale, damp face wrapped in the blankets.

“No. Hays,” she said, pointing west again.

“Hays?”

“Soldiers.”

He swallowed hard. Fighting down the gall. “Yankee soldiers?”

“Go … Hays.”

He looked back at the face of his cousin and decided then and there. “All right, woman. You kept us all alive, you did. So I don’t suppose you’re about to steer us wrong now, are you?”

“Hays.”

“Yes,” he replied. “Let’s go to Hays.”

It was late afternoon by the time the little party limped past the outer pickets and entered the cluster of neatly arranged buildings that made up Fort Hays, Kansas. No walled fort this, much to his surprise.

“You’ve business here?” asked the sergeant of the guard.

“Got a real sick man is what I got,” Moser answered.

The sergeant waved a soldier over. “Take them to the infirmary. See what the surgeon can do.”

As Moser and the woman turned their horses from the sergeant to follow the soldier who strode off on foot, the sergeant called out again.

“That woman can’t go with you.”

“Why not?”

“What’s she?”

“Pawnee.”

The soldier shook his head. “No, what’s she to you anyway, Southerner?”

Moser drew himself up, his arms numb with ache and exhaustion from cradling his cousin within them. “She’s the one saved our lives, Sergeant.”

The soldier spat a brown stream onto the new snow. “All right. She’s yours to look after. I’ll have her gone from here in the blink of a gnat’s eye I have trouble from either one of you.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Artus replied, wishing he could have said something else as he urged the weary horse away to follow the trooper.

Hospital stewards placed Jonah on a cot in a small shanty extension off the main ward of the infirmary. They said the regimental surgeon gave orders stating he did not want to take any chances that this civilian had something contagious. At the same time he quarantined Moser and the squaw in the same small ward with the feverish patient.

“What’s his name?” the surgeon asked on his first visit to the canvas-roofed lean-to built against the west wall of the infirmary.

“Jonah Hook.”

In the spread of yellow lamplight, the surgeon eyed Moser with consideration, then went back to examining the patient. “You’re a Southerner?”

“Yes.”

“Him too?”

“My cousin.”

“Good lord!” the surgeon gasped, drawing back from Hook’s shoulder wound. “This man’s been shot!”

“I told the others—”

“Why didn’t somebody say something to me?” The surgeon turned, flinging orders at his stewards, then leaned over Hook once more. He rolled the patient on his side to search for an exit wound. A steward came back with a rustle of his short white tunic, carrying a wood tray laden with bottles topped with glass stoppers. “We’re going to have to probe this, Higgins. You and Nisley get this man ready while I go wash my hands.”

“Damn,” Moser muttered to the stewards as the surgeon whirled off into the infirmary. “During the war no doctor thought of washing his hands before he worked on a wounded soldier.”

“Doc Porter’s a different sort of animal,” said Private Nisley as he and Higgins yanked at Hook’s coat, shirt, and longhandles until they had their patient stripped to the waist.

The surgeon was a different sort at that. After sending Higgins to prepare a new bed in the main ward with the rest of the soldiers, Dr. Porter had Moser and Private Nisley pin the unconscious patient down before he placed a thin metal rod into the ugly, festering bullet wound.