Winter Rain

“All right,” Hook said quietly as Coffee shuddered with that jolt of passion. “So what you aim to do?”

The fire-headed sergeant composed himself and turned back to look at Jonah. “Lockhart figures from Jones’s dispatch that the major is going to send his Frontier Battalion out in force. To make a real campaign of it. All the companies in a grand fight of it: loop up from Fort Griffin, north, clear to the Canadian. Sweep the country clear before the army goes and herds all them Comanche onto the reservations at last—before Kwahadi get about as scarce as a harpsychord in a whorehouse.”

“Sweep the country clear?”

“Goddammit, Jonah!” Coffee growled. “Major Jones wants what Lockhart and the rest of us want. One final push against them red bastards.”

“The Rangers gonna make your own war?”

“A bloodletting the likes of which no Texan has seen in the history of the Lone Star Republic.”

“I’ll bet you get your licks in too.”

“Look, Jonah. We all of us got a hunting permit the good people of Texas give us the day we signed on with the Rangers.” Coffee reached into a pocket inside his heavy coat and pulled out the star into the dimming light. “Here’s my six-pointed hunting license, Jonah. Each man of us carries it, ’cause we take this war serious.”

“I got something else other’n Comanche bucks to hunt.” He pushed himself back against the barn and stood slowly.

“Ain’t you with us, Jonah? They got your boys. And now you can even things up. Looks like we’ll have this one last chance to wipe out all them stragglers what don’t go in to their agency.”

He wagged his head. “Sergeant, I don’t need to even things up, because there ain’t no way on God’s green earth things ever will get even for me.”

“No matter if you find your boys—you won’t be even?”

“No. I lost so much—time, years, miles … just living—ain’t nothing nobody can do to ever get Jonah Hook even again.”

He started off down the side of the barn, hearing the Shoshone rise from the winter-parched stubble to shadow him. Then Coffee’s voice caught Hook again.

“I want to try, Jonah. Good Lord knows I had kin took and killed,” Coffee tried his best to explain in that darkness. “So the Good Lord knows my heart when I stand here now and I vow to try to help you even things up. Once and for all.”

Jonah had walked on without stopping, slipping on out of the dimming, translucent light of that sunset and disappeared into the shadows of twilight. For the rest of that evening until well past moonrise, the sounds of laughter and loud talk trickled out to him from the rifle ports in Dickinson’s two sod houses that squatted here on the prairie, the both of them joined by the low-roofed dogtrot. For so long he remained afraid of dawn coming, afraid that someone would light a candle or bring a lamp looking for him. Not even wanting to look into the light of a fire that night—simply for the fear that he might be forced to look into his own thoughts, like shadowed corners of a sudden given light.

Lockhart ordered them back to the saddle at midmorning, marching them a little east of due south, aiming for Fort Griffin and the war council called by the commander of the Frontier Battalion. And while they rode the sun down that day, Jonah Hook wondered what he would do now, come this last push against the Comanche—the ones said to hold his boys.

Had he eaten up too much time that he didn’t have? Time and again did he just up and ride after a ruse, believing in smoke on the wind, hoping against his better judgment? Following one hunch after another that had clabbered up like Lamar Lockhart’s White River patrols?

Had the time come for him to leave Texas and head southwest? Go back where he had the last—and really the first—solid evidence of what had happened to his boys? At least that dingy, grayed, washed-out shirt had been more solid than any cantina rumor or wild comanchero tale he had listened to over the years. Perhaps to go back there to New Mexico, maybe back south to Sonora once more—there to pick up more of a solid thread. Something to cling to, even if it was only a thread as thin as spider’s silk.

The captain halted the company when the sun had touched the top margin of the caprock to the west, turning the slopes of braided cedar to a rusty band of gold beneath the dark, gut-colored clouds. Lockhart instructed them to build only three small fires, then dismissed the Rangers. Some gathered and tied off the horses. Others sought out firewood. A few got out cups and knives to scoop and dig at the flint-hard soil, the better to hide the tattletale flames of their fires. And when the water had been poured from canteens into the blackened pots and set to boil for coffee, a drink the trail-weary men would use to soften the thick, wide strips of dried beef Lockhart had bought off Dickinson, Jonah moved out of the circle and sought a place to relieve himself.