Last summer had grown old as the two horsemen marched north from Fort Concho, stopping to ask for any fragment of news at Fort Griffin on the Brazos. The most he could muster of any word was that up at the Fort Sill Agency, where some of the Comanche were watched, might be a place a man could start. Stories always ran free about the Comanche, stories that the army had more reports of white children among the wild tribes than you could shake a stick at. Stories, that is. Lots of goddamned stories.
Autumn was seeping down the central plains, coming in its relentless crawl to mark the end of another season, working its way across the Arkansas and Cimarron, on over the Canadian and then to the Red River by the time they heaved away from Fort Richardson and headed north to Indian Territory carrying Colonel Ranald Mackenzie’s handwritten pass for Two Sleep.
“It wouldn’t do for an Indian to be caught wandering around off his reservation in this part of the country,” the commanding officer of the Fourth U.S. Cavalry had said to Hook. “A Shoshone at that.”
“But this ain’t Snake country, Colonel.”
Mackenzie’s brow had wrinkled. “To most folks in Texas, Mr. Hook—an Injun is an Injun. And if an Injun isn’t on his reservation … he’s fair game. Take my pass for your friend here, with my hope that it will serve you well. I commend you to your good sense, and may God bless your search. Watch your backtrail.”
The hardwoods had been illuminated with autumn’s fire by the time Jonah and Two Sleep crossed the Red River into Indian Territory. That first night back in that country Jonah spoke of tracking the Mormons into the land of the Creek.
“Sixty-six was it?” Hook asked himself thoughtfully. “Or was it sixty-seven?” He had wagged his head. “The Creeks were a good people—farmers, raised some horses too. I had my cousin at my side. Artus.”
For a long time he was deep in himself, mucking around in the memories of those first bygone days spent searching for family, on the trail of blood kin. Better it was to have blood kin beside you when you set upon that trail.
Cousin Artus, who came home to Missouri from the war to find his mother already in the grave while he was off fighting Yankees. Soon to put his father in the ground beside her final resting place. When Jonah showed up to discover his family took and his place gone to ruin—why, it became clear neither of them had anything better than to leave behind all their loss and say farewell to that Missouri valley.
Following the recollections of old man Boatwright, the one the Mormons had tortured, Jonah and Artus tramped west into the land of the Creek before Usher’s trail went cold. They moseyed north out of Indian Territory and found work supplying buffalo for the railroad crews laying ties and track along the Smoky Hill in Kansas. When Jonah later went to work as a scout for the army, cousin Artus was left behind to continue working for the westbound railroad.
Jonah had often joked how safe Artus had it—while Jonah seemed to be riding out there on the point, pushing his luck at the head of soldier columns searching for the warrior bands.
Still, it was the railroad and the great smoking horse that drew much of the red fury back then, the way the high points in country like this would draw the most lightning strikes.
There by that fire, his first night back in Indian Territory, shivering from the cold autumn wind gnashing its teeth at his back, Jonah remembered how he first saw the scene of the derailment—how the crumpled cars lay askew on both sides of the twisted track like a child’s toys. At first glimpse from that distance the cars seemed like something he had of a time carved for Jeremiah and little Zeke.
Trying his best to control his panic as he drove his horse into a gallop along the ravaged rail bed, Jonah had eventually stood over the second bloated, burned body, thinking it had to be his cousin. When he had tried to turn the blackened body over, the swollen skin burst with a sickening hiss, releasing a horrid gas that made Jonah stumble back from the corpse. After losing what breakfast he had left in his belly, Hook had turned back to what remained of his cousin after the warriors got done with the railroad men.
He had wished he remembered more of the words he should have said over the shallow grave he dug there beside the twisted tracks. Words of love and forgiveness and everlasting peace. But in the past seven years since his cousin’s death, Jonah had come to realize all the more that he knew very, very little of love and forgiveness. And had long ago come to the conclusion he would likely never know a damned thing of everlasting peace.
