“And here you are,” the old man said softly, his rheumy eyes lit with the candles’ glow and the cheap
“Right,” he answered. “End of summer, sixty-eight.”
Jonah watched the old man’s eyes flick from him to the Shoshone and back again, widening in pure wonder as he whistled low. “You got any idea what month and year it be, son?”
With a shrug Jonah replied, “Didn’t keep track. S’pose it never mattered. Why?”
“Man has a job to do—he just does it, right?” He wagged his head in amazement. “Got the patience of the Eternal Himself, you do. Why, don’t you have any idea you been wandering over four year, friend?”
In ways, it felt like more than four years. In another way, Jonah was just as certain the old man was having sport with him. “Four years. You’re crazed, mister. It can’t be seventy-two.”
“No, friend, it ain’t.”
Jonah grinned, smiling at Two Sleep. “See? Told you. Knew you was having fun with me.”
With a shrug of his shoulder, the old man explained. “It ain’t seventy-two. It’s winter of 1873. Already two months gone past the new year.”
For a long moment he stared down at his hands, in a way wishing he hadn’t come to know that so much time had slipped under him wandering through the land of the Mormons before he plodded back and forth through season after season begging for and scratching out information in New Mexico, time fooled away before they ever wandered south to Chihuahua. All that time had stacked up solid as cordwood behind him, one piece at a time. He hadn’t noticed because there had always been another village to visit, another trail rumored to hold promise. In the end every day, week, month, and year had come at him and flowed on past in such small, unobserved pieces. So much of his life, and he hadn’t noticed it gone.
Of a sudden Jonah’s thoughts turned on something peculiar: that he would turn thirty-six this approaching summer. And owning up to that only meant that Gritta had grown much, much older too. Some ten years’ worth of older from the time Jonah had last held her against him.
And the boys. They weren’t really boys no more. Grown into men without him.
As much as he wanted to cry or lash out and hit something, someone, Jonah stoically turned back to the old soldier. Then gazed back down at the map, his heart thrumming in his ears, his breath come shallow like the flight of moth’s wings. “All right, old soldier. You want me think like a comanchero.”
The old man wiped some tobacco juice out of his gray chin whiskers before he asked, “Lookee there and tell me where you gonna go to trade, friend?”
Jonah’s eyes rose to the Shoshone’s, then slowly moved over to the old man’s. “I’m gonna go where the Injuns are.”
“Good! But—not just any Injuns.”
“The Comanche.”
There was that gap-toothed smile of triumph. “Doggedy—now you got it!”
With a slash of a grin, feeling the hot hammer of blood at his ears, Jonah gazed back down at that old, faded map in the candlelight. “All right. Show me where the comancheros go to trade with the Comanche.”
Without a word the wrinkled one licked his lips in the glow and wispy faint smoke of those tallow candles, then dragged his long fingernail across the parchment … slowly up from Chihuahua, across the Rio Grande west of Presidio, ever on as his fingertip neatly split the seventy-odd miles of wilderness lying between forts Quitman and Davis.
Jonah looked up and asked, “What’s out there?”
26
THERE WASN’T MUCH out there.
Like the old soldier told him, “Jackrabbits and desert. A few Mex squatters. And the Pecos River. North of there—ever’thing—the hull durn country belongs to the Comanch’.”
Into the bitter cold of winter’s last gasp on the southern plains they plunged, crossing low mountains, peeling their way over rough country like all that they had pierced coming to Comancheria. This was a waterless chaparral where only the creosote brush and spear grass grew to break up the harsh monotony of the rise and fall of a sinister land. That, and the cactus. Always the cactus.
Reluctantly winter relinquished its brief hold on this southern land—making for a muddy time of things.
