Winter Rain

“I won’t stir a lot of dust with this, fellas. Want to come to the point of it fast,” Lockhart began. “I truly thought I had it figured out as soon as the weather broke and winter seemed to withdraw. But my hunch has gone and clabbered up on me.”

In the uneasy silence that followed Lockhart working up to things on a crawl, two of the men coughed that dry, unproductive hack that could trouble a man many times soaked and dried out in a cold wind blowing across country such as this.

“Thought we’d find sign of the Comanche, cross a trail, see smoke or something. I want the Kwahadi as bad as any of you. Even as much as Jonah there.”

Hook felt some of the others look his way for a moment before they shifted anxiously again, ready to have this meet over and done.

“But we’ve pushed rations about as far as I can. For the past five days I’ve had us on half rations, boys. No other jump to it: we’ll have to go in soon to reprovision … anyway.” The captain sighed, gazing at the ground.

There was an oversized silk kerchief tied loose around Lockhart’s neck, a grimy swatch of cloth as brightly colored as the sweet Williams that Gritta had planted in the bed at the front of the cabin back in that Missouri valley.

Able again to look his men in the eye, their leader continued. “So what’s hardest to take is that I was wrong about running across Parker’s bunch.”

“It weren’t just you, Captain,” Deacon Johns said softly. “Rest of us had it figured same way you did. Ain’t you what failed alone.”

“What you figure to do?” asked John Corn, his sun-browned skin shriveled up like last year’s potato.

“We’ll recoup one more day here. Not sending patrols out tomorrow. Following morning we’ll head back for Dickinson’s place. From there on in to our post. Time I sent word to Major Jones.” He scratched his sparse black whiskers. It had been four days since last he had shaved, enough of a clue for any man to see that the captain was not in the best of humors. “The major will be expecting a full report on our extended scout.”

In Jonah’s belly lay a cold stone of growing uneasiness.

“You really figure us to go in?” inquired Coffee, his hair and beard as red as a rooster’s comb.

“Isn’t that what you boys want? Get out of this heathen country?” Johns snapped at them, turning round on that group.

His words cut at them, forcing those rawhide-tough bravos to stare at their boots or the ground like scolded schoolboys, their eyes furtively glancing at one another

Until Hook finally spoke.

As much as he might have held against them long ago back there at Jacksboro and Fort Richardson, when he signed on to protect the citizens of west Texas, Jonah now knew the men of Company C were every one and all something more than ordinary men.

“Don’t really wanna go in, Deacon,” Hook told them. “I was figuring on staying out as long as it took. Live off the land, we have to. Where I was brought up, I was always taught you stayed with a job till it was done.”

“Hook might have a good idea there,” June Callicott said. “This bunch could live off the land.”

“Maybe we just need to find a different place to set up a base camp, Cap’n,” offered Wig Danville.

“True enough,” Johns echoed. “The foxes have their holes and the birds of the air have their nests—but the Son of Man ain’t got the where to lay his head across all of this wild creation!”

Lockhart drew himself up, his chin jutting. He turned like some of the rest, seeing that last patrol come easing in out of the east. They all saw the way the horses bobbed their heads, the way the men sagged in the saddles. No one had to spell it out plain, that theirs had been nothing more than a repeat of the weeks gone before.

The captain sighed. “Thank you for your suggestion, Jonah. However, I’m the leader of this company and my decision is made. Day after tomorrow, we light out for Dickinson’s Station.”

39

Late February 1875

AT DICKINSON’S PLACE the settler and his three sons greeted Company C with nothing less than flat-out celebration as the Rangers legged down off their weary mounts. That family of stockmen and farmers eking out its existence at the edge of the west Texas frontier hadn’t seen different faces for going on three months.

It was either in the barn, or outside in the barn’s sun-striped winter shadows, that Jonah Hook and Two Sleep stayed across those next thirty hours as Ezra Dickinson and his boys helped Lamar Lockhart’s Rangers recoup from their patrol. It was a barn built at no cost to the old stockman, raised free by the State of Texas in return for allowing Ranger patrols to use it to store feed, tack, supplies, and provender. A hundred of these barns cast their shadows across the caprock fringe of the Staked Plain.