Cry of the Hawk

Inside were a hundred feelings felt for the young man right now—but none which Shad could put to word. Instead, he drew Jonah near again. A fierce hug.

“Damn, it’s good to see you, Shad.” He pulled back, dragging a hand angrily beneath his nose. “Want you meet a cousin of mine. Hired on for the wagon train.”

“What you been doing since last I saw you?” Shad asked, eyeing the columns of cavalry pulling in behind the scouts, marching across the parade and preparing to go into camp on the far side of Fort Harker.

“Got back home finally, that winter. Found my place empty, almost like it was a coffin somebody had dragged the body out of.” Hook described the scene, kneading the leather rein in his hands as the spring sun loped down into the west. “Run onto my cousin at the place, and we went into town to try to find out something.”

“Anybody know what come of your family?”

“Only the old sheriff. Enough to send us off on the trail of that bunch into Indian Territory.”

“Wagh!” Sweete grunted. “That’s some. Likely that’s where the trail up and disappeared.”

“Nobody likely to talk to me and Artus down there. Finally run out of money and come north to work for the railroad.”

“Hard doin’s, Jonah.”

“Hunted buffalo, Shad.”

“Don’t that beat all by a long chalk now!”

“Then freeze-up come, and we hunkered down in a little dugout near Fort Hays for the winter.”

“Just the two of you?”

He dug a toe into the rain-dampened earth. “Had a Pawnee gal with me.”

“Been some time, Jonah—you without a woman. How’d you run onto her?”

“That’s a story for another time, how I come to be toting her out of Abilene. That’s where I first run onto Hickok. There was some bad characters and … the woman saved my life.” Hook yanked aside his shirt and longhandles to show the puckered bullet hole high in his chest. “Army doctor pulled the bullet out over to Fort Hays.”

“Lordee,” Shad whispered. “Some winter doings, weren’t they?”

“When green-up come, we needed work, and run onto California Joe, said he was hired on to work for Hickok for this big army march against the Injuns.”

“Hickok remember you?”

“When he found out I’d hired on to scout for this march, with California Joe, Hickok told the rest I’d do to back him up in a hot fight of it.”

“Hickok’s all right, Jonah. A square shoot any day. Damn! But this ain’t the first time we’ve marched with the army together!”

“Damn well pray it’s the last, Shad.”

“You eat since breakfast?”

When Hook wagged his head, Sweete said, “Then come along with me.”

“I’ll wait for my cousin and then be along.”

“We’ll wait together,” Shad replied.

“I’ll find you, old man.”

“Likely you won’t, Jonah.” He flung an arm southwest of the fort. “Camped down there.”

“You staying with some of those Injuns down there on the creek?”

“Got the woman along. Our girl too.”

“They come north with you?”

“Gathered ’em up after last winter and moseyed north, fixing to find work myself. Never would I thought that we’d run onto one another this way. And from the looks of you, Jonah Hook is needing some fattening up at Toote Sweete’s kettle.”

“Good vittles?”

“Does a badger ever back down? None finer. C’mon, we’ll gather up that cousin of yours over to the wagon yard and get down to the camp.”

Minutes later the three were among the handful of smoked-hide lodges, dogs barking, the half-wild animals heeling them as they sniffed the newcomers. A few barefoot children dashed across the sodden prairie and pounded earth surrounding each lodge.

“Which one of these is your daughter?” Jonah asked.

“Which?” Shad replied, then laughed, head thrown back for a moment. “Ain’t none of these children, Jonah.” He pointed. “That’s my child—there.”

Coming head down out through a nearby lodge door, then standing full height to a little over five feet, she was clearly no child.

“That’s your daughter?” Moser asked, the first of the pair able to squeak out the question.

“Pipe Woman is twenty summers this year. Helps her mama around the lodge now. Too old to be running with the children.”

Jonah swallowed hard. “That ain’t no child, Shad. She’s gotta be the most beautiful Injun I ever saw.”

“Wait’ll you see her mama. Toote!” he called out. Shad’s daughter raised her head from her work as the men approached, her own broad smile brightening the high-cheeked face, eyes bouncing from one to the other of the two newcomers politely, then finding the earth once more in that traditional coy manner of her people.

“C’mon out here, woman—we got us guests for dinner!”

25

April, 1867

IT WAS TO be an expedition to show the flag.

“Hancock the Superb,” they called him. He, who had been most responsible for holding the vital center of the Union line against Pickett’s deadly charge at Gettsyburg. Let the nomadic warriors of the plains know that “The Thunderbolt,” General Winfield Scott Hancock, had led troops into every one of those bloody battles fought by the Army of the Potomac.

Yet now Hancock had to figure out how to deal with Indians on the Great Plains.