Returning to the mud hut with the Shoshone, Hook shut her small door behind him. She knelt at the corner fireplace, a small fire already warming the tiny room. Motioning for the Indian to sit in one of the two chairs beside a narrow table, the woman went back to her work over the blackened skillet. Jonah dropped his oiled canvas bag beside her. From it the woman pulled some hard-bread, a small sack of cornmeal, and an oiled paper wrapped about nondescript strips of dried meat, as black as the bottom of that skillet of hers.
Jonah turned back to look over the rest of the room and noticed the small child again. His heart went to her as quickly, those big eyes so filled with fright of him and the tall Indian. She stood frozen at the edge of the firelight, there at the foot of the bed, gazing anxiously at the two strangers.
“She is afraid of men?” he asked the woman. “That is a good thing, perhaps.”
Turning her head slightly, the woman said, “No. I think she is most afraid of your friend. Indians.”
“Sí,” the little girl responded, her voice a’quaver “Comancherias! Comancherias!”
“No, no,” the woman soothed, rising and going to the child. She took the girl in her arms and lifted her, stroking her black hair. “Not Comancheria. From far, far away to the north is where the Comancheria live.”
When she brought her daughter into the greasy light of that flickering candle, into the spreading glow of the fireplace’s warmth, Jonah was not immediately struck with the child’s garb. Yet as he watched the whore calm her daughter, explaining that there were many tribes of Indians and they were not all the feared and hated Comanche, who rode back and forth through this country plying their seasonal raids into Sonora before they returned to their homes in the southern reaches of the Staked Plain—Hook was eventually taken by something strange in the girl’s clothing. Rather than dressing the child in a small chemise and skirt, smaller copies of adult clothing, the woman had instead draped her daughter in what appeared to be a boy’s shirt, long enough to reach the crude, wet moccasins the child wore. It was plainly a pullover, three-button style, the sort to be found among most households on the southern plains, the sort offered for sale in any sutler’s or mercantile.
Yet this was not a white settlement, his thoughts boiled as he studied the child again.
“Step over here,” he told the woman gruffly, with roughness taking her elbow in his hand.
“Come over here to the light,” he said, his voice low. “I don’t mean to frighten you.”
Her eyes pleaded with him. “My child,
“Yes, I know,” he replied, trying to smile at the young girl. “Just … just bring her into the light.”
That look of fear still captured on her face, the whore did as Hook demanded, reluctantly bringing her young daughter closer to the light.
When he reached out to touch the long hem of the shirt, the child shrieked and the woman pulled back. “No. Just tell her not to be afraid. I won’t hurt her. Only want to look at this shirt”
“She grows so fast,
“All right,” he interrupted the whore, having inspected the dingy, faded hem of the shirt. “Turn her around. I want to see in the back of the dress,
In curiosity the woman turned her daughter’s back toward Hook. He gently pushed aside the child’s long hair and twisted open the back of the collar.
“Over here—to the light more.”
She cooperated by leaning the child more into the candlelight on the narrow table where Two Sleep sat watching the whole process with curious eyes of his own.
Jonah felt it rush over him as he let go the collar of the shirt. He touched it with his fingertips, running his hand down the full length of the child’s back until his hand rested on the woman’s bare forearm.
“What do you want for the dress?”
Her eyes narrowed. “
“How much will you take for the child’s dress?”
“I do not understand—”
He turned abruptly and dragged up his outer coat, stuffing his hand into a small inside pocket. Pulling out a small skin pouch, Jonah brought forth a single eagle into the candlelight. She gasped slightly at the sight of the gold piece, her eyes grown even bigger while the frightened child buried her face in the crook of her mother’s shoulder.
“I’ll pay for the dress.”
“Say yes,” he interrupted, his mind scratching for more of the Spanish words to express it. All of it was coming so hard—staring at that scrap of shirting hung over the small child like a simple sack dress: … how dingy, dirty, sun faded, and stained. Across all these years.
Then he thought to remind her, “You won’t earn this kind of money in a week. In a month. Will you?”
