Winter Rain

Company C soaked their hard-bread and jerky in their coffee, for the most part eating silently, each man down in his own thoughts now that they had fresh sign. It was not a sullen bunch that emptied the blackened pots in the fire holes, kicked dirt back to fill the depressions, then walked their horses back and forth over that ground before mounting and moving out at a lope behind Captain Lamar Lockhart. This time, however, he turned them about, turned them into the wind. Instead of pointing their noses south for Fort Griffin and the earthy recreation offered by St. Angela, the fleshpot across the river from the post, the Rangers were coming about to the north.

Deacon Johns had grumbled his praise as they went to saddle in the dark. “Praise God you boys are forced to go a while longer before you lie fornicating with some likely, oily-tongued slattern what has her seven kinds of pox!”

Lockhart had them backtracking for the White River portal, on a fresh trail that just might mean a payday come at last for Company C.

In the gray of dawn’s first awakening that next morning, Jonah and Two Sleep led Lockhart and Coffee in a wide swing to the south for insurance’s sake while the rest of the Rangers waited in a cold camp for their return. In little more than an hour, it looked like they had their answer.

Jonah reined them up and dropped once more to the new tracks they had just come across.

“I don’t think this bunch is scouts for a village on the move, Cap’n,” he said, rising and slapping his glove against his britches silvered with dust. Jonah pulled the glove on, saying, “We should’ve found something by now, sweeping around like we done. No outriders would be pushing this far out from the village moving to new ground.”

“Like I said, it’s a scalping party,” Coffee replied, assuredly.

“Sorry, Sergeant,” Jonah said. “This bunch ain’t on the lope—it’s moving too slow to be making a war trail. They might just be hunters. But that ain’t the who of it.”

“What else, Jonah?” Lockhart asked.

“They’ve run onto friends out here.”

The captain’s eyes narrowed sharply, a deep furrow dug between his bushy black eyebrows. “Friends?”

“Another bunch,” Jonah replied, his arm motioning over the new tracks, then pointing north.

“These are the prints of the war party we found last night?”

With a shake of his head, Jonah said, “No. Different. One of these bucks riding a pony got a hoof I ain’t see before. A mustang with a split hoof. Back a ways you can see where they stopped while one of the riders changed mounts. Took the weight off the pony with the split hoof.”

“I’ll be go to hell,” admired Lockhart, smiling in his black mustache. “What else you tell me about this bunch? How many now?”

“Probably a couple dozen by now—what with this second outfit joined up.”

“What’s all that tell you, Jonah?”

“Says this ain’t a hunting party. Probably not a real scalp raid neither.”

“What then?”

“Likely the village split up to move across a big piece of ground, coming out of that Cedar Lake country you say is down there. Split up because of what you fellas told me—with the soldiers patrolling out of Fort Concho and all.”

Lockhart worked his hands anxiously over the saddle horn. “Which means they’re re-forming ranks?”

“If you mean they’re coming back together—you can bet the bank of Texas on it, Cap’n.”

“By damned!” he exclaimed. “We’ve got a fresh trail—and it will lead us right to their village.”

“Cap’n Lockhart,” Jonah said soberingly, “remember this bunch of Comanche is on the move.”

Coffee leaned forward, his face suddenly gone serious in that red beard of his. Concerned, he asked, “They don’t know we’re behind them, do they?”

“No,” Hook said. “They don’t know we’re back here—yet. But that’s only a matter of time.”

40

Moon of the Last Cold 1875

THEIR ESCAPE FROM the yellow-leg soldiers at Palo Duro Canyon seemed like an eternity ago. More than four moons had come and gone since the Shahiyena and Kiowa, and the Comanche themselves, had torn themselves apart into smaller bands, scattering before the winds and Three-Finger Kinzie’s pony soldiers.

It had worked. Once more the Kwahadi had survived the winter undiscovered. As brutal as the weather had been, as hard as it was to find the buffalo that would prolong the life of the band, as often as they had been compelled to uproot and move to a new camp, they had survived.

The fight in the canyon had shown Tall One what few others were ready to admit. The white man and his army were not about to rest until they had driven the red man into the squalor of the agencies, until all the rest who remained out on the free prairie were ground under the heels of the tai-bos’ boots.