First came the rumors of some of the bands moving off from the agencies, heading southwest to Elk Creek to attend a big war-talk. But by the time any of the army got around to checking out what sounded like the wildest of stories—the Comanche holding a sun dance and crazy whispers of a powerful shaman whipping the tribes into a blood lust against the white man—the whole affair was yesterday’s news. Why, just about the time the army was getting set to check out the rumors, word out of the Territories was that some of the Cheyenne were even coming back to their agency after the big medicine stomp of the war bands.
Still, that left the Kiowa and Comanche out there roaming about, adding their numbers to the Kwahadi, who had never come in to their assigned reservation.
“Kwahadis led by one of Satan’s own,” Deacon Johns told Jonah. “The devil’s own whelp, that one.”
The old fellow with iron-crusted hair wore a set of dentures that gave Johns a pretty smile but were not too good for talking, what with all the clacking. He got in the habit of slipping them from his mouth behind his hand when he had a big piece to say. Which was most of the time with the deacon, his slack jaws at work like a well-used, wrinkled blacksmith’s bellows.
“Quanah Parker’s his name,” explained Lamar Lockhart.
“Got a English name, does he?” Hook inquired. “So the bastard’s a renegade, eh? Back to sixty-five, I rubbed up against my first half-breed renegade. North to the Platte Bridge fight. A Cheyenne name of Charlie Bent.”
“This one’s a half-breed too,” Lockhart replied. “His mother was took by the Comanch’ almost twenty-eight-some years ago, just a girl as I remember the story of it. Her seed’s turned out about as bad as they come, with a reputation as smelly as his breechclout.”
“He’s spilled blood from down on the Pecos all the way past the Prairie Dog Town Fork,” offered Niles Coffee, sergeant of Company C, his tanned, wind-seamed face a java color beneath a crop of red whiskers that gave the Ranger an air of raffish gaiety.
“We’ll get him,” Lockhart said sternly at the fire. “It’s only a matter of time.”
“Wanna see him swing,” murmured John Com, one of Hook’s messmates. His nose seemed oversized, it and his cheeks perpetually red, scored over with little chicken-track blood vessels. He was a walking barrel of a man, with toothpicks for legs.
“Shooting’s too good for that heathen fornicator,” Johns grumbled.
“Rest assured, he doesn’t have long to roam free,” Lockhart repeated.
Over the past months he had been riding with this company of Rangers, Jonah had come to have a real respect for the quiet captain of Company C. A year younger than Hook, Lockhart had been born late in the autumn of 1838.
“My parents came to Texas from Georgia when all this still belonged to Mexico,” Lockhart had explained one of those quiet prairie nights when men gathered at their cook fires just like this, watching the embers die slow at their feet, the stars dusting the dark canopy like coal water flecked with diamonds.
“My father came west to Texas like many of the rest in those days, intent on finding the length of his own stride. He fought in the revolution that drove out Santa Anna. When Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was first elected president of the Republic of Texas in thirty-eight, my folks named me after him—a man they both admired. He come from Georgia too, matter of fact. A dreamer, a poet—besides hating Injuns to the bottom of his craw. Probably why my father liked Lamar so much.”
“You hate Injuns as much as your father?”
“No. Not anymore,” the captain admitted thoughtfully. “Last couple of years I’ve been trying real hard to understand Injuns more than hate ’em. Hate will eat you up until you got nothing to feed on but it, Jonah. Still, I do understand men like my father. Men like Mirabeau Lamar. Neither one of them give a inch.”
“Tough on the Injuns?”
“President Lamar tough on Injuns!” Coffee hooted.
“These Comanche bands, yes,” Lockhart replied. “Lamar wasn’t in office a little over a year when three Comanche chiefs come riding into the village of San Antonio, saying they were sent by the rest of the chiefs to make arrangement for some treaty talks with the Texans.
“Comancheros?” Jonah asked, his interest growing more piqued as Lockhart went on with the story.
“Likely that’s where the Comanche learned the word,” the captain answered. “Seeing a chance to free some of the white captives held by the Comanches suddenly dropped in their lap, the Texans agreed to treaty-talks to be held at the Council House there in San Antonio—if … if the Comanche would bring in all their white captives to sell to the peace commissioners.”
“But them Texans weren’t about to buy the captives back, were they?”
Lockhart shook his head. “Plan was to capture all the chiefs and hold them prisoner. Exchange ’em for the white captives even up.”
“What came of it?”
