“We just got tired of fighting,” explained an aging captain commanding at Bridger. “After that four years of hell fighting the secesh back east, we were ordered out here to pacify this land, make it safe for the California argonauts, safe for business trade and what settlers was to move in.”
As Jonah and Two Sleep listened, the captain sighed in the autumn shade of that brushy porch awning outside his mud-walled office. “We’re taking a well-deserved retreat right now—this army that just got tired of fighting. You’re aware this land along the great immigrant road once was ruled by the Cheyenne and Sioux, you know? Still, they haven’t deviled us in a long time.”
“Wasn’t always that way,” Jonah said, feeling the captain’s eyes shift in his direction. “I fought them—the Cheyenne and the Lakota—to keep this road open.”
“You with the galvanized volunteers, were you?”
“Sixty-five.”
“Serve at Platte Bridge?”
Jonah only nodded, remembering Lieutenant Caspar Collins’s brave ride across the bridge to break through a cordon of a thousand warriors and rescue an incoming squad of soldiers.
The aging captain had gone back to staring at the sun setting beyond Utah and that land of Brigham Young, lighting the leaves in the trees with fall’s gold and crimson fire. “Yes, Mr. Hook. For a while now, the army got tired of fighting.”
“Can’t say as I fault ’em,” Hook replied quietly.
Jonah ended up selling to the army four of those horses taken from the Danites, keeping what they needed for packing. And with the credit the outpost’s commander gave them in trade for the animals, Fort Bridger’s contract sutler resupplied Jonah and Two Sleep with cartridges and powder, coffee and sugar, flour and a few looking glasses, along with a modest amount of some Indian trade goods the man had been a long time in getting shet of. Hook was anxious to push on after a matter of days.
But pushing on southwest into the land of Zion had been as big a waste of time as Jonah could ever remember.
The closer he rode toward the City of the Saints, the more Hook felt he was treading on foreign ground. He had been north of a time in his life, twice he could remember as a youngster crossing what became the Mason-Dixon. And he had been hauled to the land of the Yankees after his capture at Corinth. That had been war—and he a prisoner of that bloody struggle. Yet even then, with the exception of a few sadistic guards who beat their prisoners for the manic love of seeing the pain and blood and suffering, Jonah remembered being treated better at the hands of the blue-belly civilians than in the land of Brigham Young’s Saints.
No more was he merely a southern boy come north with his kin to conduct some commerce. No longer was he a Confederate soldier captured in the vain, brutal struggle waged by the South against a far mightier North. Now with the coming of another winter, Jonah Hook all the more felt like nothing less than a feared and distrusted stranger come to this foreign land. Not one with the religion of these quietly industrious people, he found himself treated civilly in few places, with cool indifference in most others, and outright hostility at many stops he and Two Sleep made.
A plainsman in tattered, trail-worn clothing, riding in the company of an aging Indian warrior, found himself nothing less than suspect of all color of crimes against the State of Deseret. Clearly a man of the prairie, and most certainly a Gentile, his companion none other than a member of a dark, heathen race of Lamanites said to be fallen from the grace of God—Hook was regarded more with pitying curiosity than with any desire on the Saints’ part to offer anything in the way of assistance.
Already he had steeled himself, prepared to find the Mormons closing ranks around their own, this Danite, this leader of avenging gunmen, this mongol lord of the plains. Instead, what Jonah discovered was that Jubilee Usher might actually be one Prophet too many in his own land.
“Who was it you said you were looking for again?”
“Jubilee Usher’s the man’s name,” Hook would answer those he would stop along the road, those who would come to the edge of the manicured fields long enough to listen as Jonah prodded for information. “Leader of the Danites.”
Hearing that, most of the shopkeepers and farmers eyed him severely before they moved off without so much as answering. Most, but not all.
“And why would you be looking for this Jubilee Usher?” asked the rare one.
“Heard of the man by reputation,” Jonah would say.
“Never met him, have you?”
“No, never,” Jonah answered truthfully, remembering to recite the keys he had learned while riding with Boothog Wiser’s Mormon battalion, keys he had sworn himself to use when at last the time had come to unlock the mysteries of Zion. “Rode with Lemuel Wiser—Usher’s right hand. Decided I’d come here to Zion. Aim to join Usher’s Danites.”
