Pushing on into autumn Jonah and Two Sleep had reached Fort Sill. They spent time among the bands gathered at the Kiowa and Comanche agency. Talking with Indian agent James Haworth, they picked the man’s brain for all that Jonah hoped to learn. In the end they saw a handful of white children waiting to be claimed, were shown crinkled daguerreotypes of others—pictures that had been taken by a photographer out of Topeka, photographs to be circulated among the forts and towns of Kansas in hopes that relatives might come to claim these orphans of the Indian war.
As much as Jonah wanted any of those boys to be his, as much as he strained and squinted, trying to make those dim, sepia-toned tintypes into something he might recognize, he finally had to admit he had come up with a busted flush again. What hurt even more was his growing fear that in the end he would never recognize his grown-up boys, even if by that unadulterated God-ordained miracle he ever came across Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
In taking his leave from the Kiowa-Comanche agency, Jonah stopped for a moment with Haworth outside the door of the small clapboard shack topped by a hip roof that served as the agent’s office. A few yards away on a patch of bare ground, a young man was using a long branch to pick up dirty, greasy clothing. Those worn and torn garments were fed to a smoky fire, one at a time. Jonah watched as britches and shirts, pantaloons and dresses, coats and even Indian clothing, were fed onto the smoldering, smoky flames.
“What’s he doing?” Hook asked Haworth.
“The children’s clothes.”
“You burn what they got to wear?”
“We give the recaptured children a bath, cut their hair, and purge them of the body lice before we give them new clothes donated by Friends back east.”
Hook’s eyes narrowed as he turned away from the fire. “Your work should give you satisfaction, Mr. Haworth. What you do makes these poor children white again.”
The agent wagged his head. “Not so simple as that, Mr. Hook. Some of these young wretches will live with their horrors the balance of their natural lives.”
“And the rest?”
He tried a smile. “They’ll do fine. Just a matter of getting them back to their own people.”
Jonah turned his back on the fire and asked, “How about a child, took when he was five or six?”
Haworth tried to put a cheerful face on it, but it turned out to be nothing more than a wan smile. “Who is to say?” And he shrugged.
“No,” Jonah forced the question. “I want to know. What are the chances?”
The agent’s face went as gray as old oatmeal. “Perhaps that child will heal in time. Any younger, a child—well, it depends on how long the child is held by his captors. Still …”
“Still … what, Mr. Haworth?”
“Any younger than that, Mr. Hook—truth is, I’m afraid there is little hope of fully recovering the child to a life among a God-fearing white culture.”
He turned back to watch the fire, watch the smudge of smoke rise among the trees losing their autumn-tinged leaves that chilly afternoon. Finally he asked, “So where does a man go from here?”
“You might move north. To Anadarko on the Washita. If you find no help there, you can check with John Miles, agent at the Darlington Agency up on the Canadian.”
“What tribe?”
“Cheyenne, Mr. Hook.”
“I know something of the Cheyenne,” he replied too quietly, two fingers brushing the long scar at his hairline where a warrior’s bullet had grazed him seven long years gone. Then he stared directly at the agent, saying, “These Indians will never make farmers, Mr. Haworth. Scratching at the ground is something for the white man who wants to dig like a burrow mouse.”
“I must still try, Mr. Hook. Like you, I must keep on trying.” Haworth held out his hand, hope in his eyes. “I wish you God’s speed in your search.”
Perhaps it would have been better if they had never tried Anadarko and Darlington. About that time another Christmas passed and with it his unenthusiastic greeting of another new year. Just a waste of time. Slowly they made their way through each camp dotting the two agencies, looking, talking in sign with those who would talk. For the most part, the old men stood around their lodges as Jonah and Two Sleep came through, old men who talked in furtive whispers with their heads bent together. Jonah thought of those on the free prairies to the north when he looked at these beaten people. These old warriors so much like gaunt prairie wolves caught and trapped in this cage—grown suspicious, cautious, anxious, and frightened of the white man who holds their spirits prisoner. Yet saddest of all were the starving, sunken-cheeked children peering up at the two horsemen, each one in his ill-fitted, cast-off clothing from a benevolent white society back east.
