Cry of the Hawk

Shad had only nodded as Custer whirled, slapping his quirt against the top of his boot.

“You there, Sweete. Come with me—back to Hancock. The rest of you can eat what you can find here. Chances are I’ll talk Hancock into freeing me to pursue these vile heathens this very night. If not to punish them for escaping us—then to punish them for what crimes they have committed against this … this child.”

“Stay with her, Jonah,” Sweete had said in a whisper before he left the lodge. “Chances are you’re the only one she’ll let near her now. I’ll see about getting a surgeon to help her back with Hancock’s soldiers.”

That night there hadn’t been much they could do for the girl, with the exception of washing her wounds caused at the hands of those who had repeatedly raped her. It took hours before she would let one of the hospital stewards close to her. Near morning, Jonah laid the girl on some blankets at the back of an ambulance, where she slipped contentedly into sleep, her head in the lap of the steward.

As the eastern sky stretched into a bloody pink, Jonah wearily found the rest of the scouts just then beginning to move about their fires.

“You need some coffee, Jonah,” Sweete said, trudging about the low flames of his breakfast fire with his blanket draped from his shoulders, slurring the ground.

Hook settled nearby, where the old mountain man patted the ground. Jonah pulled a blanket around his own shoulders against the predawn chill. “What I need is sleep. Forget the coffee, old man.”

“You’ll want the coffee, Jonah. We’re riding out in a few minutes.”

“Not until I get some sleep, I’m not.”

“Hancock’s asked that I stay with him and California Joe. He plans on heading down to Fort Dodge from here.”

“Good. Just as long as old Thunderass don’t climb into his ambulance till I get me a little shut-eye.”

Sweete dragged the coffeepot from the fire as he cleared his throat. “You ain’t going with Hancock.”

Hook opened one eye into the murky darkness and glared at the old trapper. “What you figure on me doing—I don’t go with you?”

“Custer asked for you go with him and Hickok.”

Hook closed the one eye and sighed. “He did, did he?”

“We’re riding out soon as you have a cup of coffee,” a new voice drew close from the darkness.

With the one eye opened again, he found the dusty, prairie-crusted long hair of normally dapper James Butler Hickok hanging disheveled about his face.

“I had my way about it—there’d been a few more of you goddamned Yankees I’d a’killed afore you put a end to the war,” he grumbled.

“Rise an’ shine, friend—there’s a trail of Injuns we’re bound to follow.” Hickok ran fingers through his hair.

“Likely it’s a war we’re off to start, Bill.”

Hickok straightened, allowing the Confederate room to kick his way out of the blanket. “You’re wrong there, Reb. Wasn’t us started this war.”

In their hasty flight, the bands left only small trails for Hickok’s scouts to mull over, deciding which to follow. But follow they did, heading north in the general direction of the many dim tracks, onto the open prairie, leading Custer and his eight companies of the Seventh Cavalry rapidly behind them.

North of Walnut Creek, Hickok left the guiding in the hands of others while he motioned Hook to join him in pulling away from Custer’s column. Without a word of explanation, Hickok set a bruising pace, the rising sun constantly on his right cheek as they loped across the rolling tableland of central Kansas Territory. It was late that day when the pair reined up at a stage ranch, embers smoking still.

Hook let his eyes run over the scene quickly, then glanced at Hickok.

“You ever see something like this, Jonah?”

“I fought that war, same as you,” he answered quietly.

“I know. But—you ever see anything like that?”

Hickok pointed his Spencer carbine at the blackened, bloated bodies of the two ranch hands, burned among the charred wreckage of this way station along the Smoky Hill Road.

“I’ve smelled this afore, Hickok—in Missouri.”

Hickok nodded. “Some of the worst of it happened on the borderlands. Let’s get.”

No one had to drag him from that place. Problem was, it was only the first of many the two ran across over the next two days.

“Looks like everything west of Hays been hit, General,” Hickok explained when he and Hook dismounted before Custer that third week of April, after they had returned from their far-ranging scout.

“All the same story?” Custer asked, his blue eyes narrowing.

“Every station … burned out. All the stock run off. Workers what didn’t make it out, we found butchered,” Hook answered.

At that moment they stood among the ruins of Lookout Station, only fifteen miles west of Fort Hays. The burned bodies of three men had just been found near the smoldering debris.

“They don’t even look like something once human,” Custer muttered in something close to a curse.

“Likely, they were tortured by the red bastards,” growled a handsome soldier standing at Custer’s elbow.