Cry of the Hawk

“There it is,” Porter said quietly, glancing at Moser with his eyes smiling, then quickly looking the woman up and down. “Who’s she? She belong to him?”

“No. She just come with us after Jonah was shot. That woman’s the reason we both got through the last thirteen days.”

Porter raised his eyes, brow furrowing in a deep crease between the thick eyebrows. “He was shot two weeks ago?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Abilene.”

Porter nodded to the woman. “Over the squaw?”

“Not really. Just some railroad fellas was setting on abusing her.”

Porter had a delicate scalpel in his left hand, spreading the pink-and-purple bullet wound between the fingers of his right hand. “You mean this man stopped them from raping the Indian woman?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t have to ‘sir’ me. What part you play in this?”

“I …” Moser said, and stopped, swallowing, his eyes staring back at the others in the tight room. Afraid of his answer, afraid if he didn’t answer. “I likely killed one of ’em myself when the gunplay started.”

“By lord, man—I’ll buy you a drink when we’re done here.”

He didn’t know what to feel at that moment: relief, wonder, excitement. Mostly relief that no one was going to hold him accountable to the law.

Porter gently dragged the tip of the scalpel back and forth down into the puss-filled wound, wrinkling his nose as he did so until he made contact with the bullet itself.

“There. Nisley, bring that probe here and work it down to where I’ve got the blade against this goddamned piece of lead.”

The steward pushed the probe into the wound, carefully, as Hook mumbled and attempted to roll away from the pain.

“It’s getting to be a little too much for his brain to take,” Porter explained. “Hold him. Hold him now—we’re almost done.”

When he yanked the flattened piece of .44-caliber lead from the ugly hole, the surgeon plopped it into a small china cup on the tray beside the bed. It left a red streak down the inside of the cup.

“You don’t have to worry about a constable or peace officer out here, mister,” Porter said as he turned to Moser. “The only law west of Leavenworth is the army. And if the army isn’t looking for you because it has a warrant outstanding for your desertion or because you hijacked an army payroll … then your gunplay over a Pawnee squaw doesn’t mean anyone’s riding hard up on your backside.” He smiled at Moser, then turned to his stewards.

“Nisley, you show Higgins here how to get some sulfur worked down into that wound. It’s a nasty, smelly thing, so work it in good. Then tent it best you can so it’ll drain. I’ll see to him first thing in the morning.”

“He’s gonna make it, Doc?”

“He lasted thirteen days without my help—he’ll damn sure make it now,” Porter said. “Now, c’mon, mister. Tell the woman to stay here with your cousin while you and me go get that drink I was fixing on having before you rode in.”

“Whiskey? Is it really … good whiskey?”

Porter laughed in that way that made his Adam’s apple bob a bit. “You grown particular, Southerner?”

“No, sir.”

“Then come share a drink with me and regale me with your tales of the outside world. By lord, I’m starved for news of something other than army doings.”

They started from the tiny room as the Pawnee woman settled back in the corner, pulling her blanket about her shoulders and intently watching the two hospital stewards in their ministrations over Jonah Hook.

“You said something about the army being the only law out here west of Leavenworth,” Moser said. “What army you mean?”

Henry R. Porter stopped. “Why, the Seventh U.S. Cavalry.”

“Sorry, but I ain’t heard of you … of them.”

The surgeon smiled, licking his dry lips in need of a drink. “Mister, there soon won’t be a man who hasn’t heard of this outfit. Not if General George Armstrong Custer has his say about it.”

22

January-March, 1867

CHRISTMAS HAD COME and gone, and the celebration of New Year with it.

Fort Hays had done its best to bring 1867 in with a roar, out here in the middle of Indian country, in the middle of winter, in the middle of some place no man really wanted to be.

Jonah Hook and Artus Moser vowed that they would exchange gifts once they had made it back to a town. Their plan was to take the Smoky Hill Route, the stage and freight road that ran all the way west to Denver City. It was that Smoky Hill Route that the Kansas Pacific was to follow into the Rockies: grading bed, engineering bridges, softening slopes up and down the gradual rise to that mile-high settlement spreading boomlike along the South Platte and Cherry Creek.

But neither Jonah nor Artus ever talked of returning to work for that railroad as meat hunters. Only one time in the past week and a half of convalescing had Hook mentioned it as work come spring, both men agreeing that it would be pushing their luck. Jonah felt no need to say anything more.

“What did she eat while I was out of my head?” Hook asked his cousin early in January after he was up to sitting and taking solid food.