Winter Rain

“Why will you call for me, Tall One?” Burns Red demanded haughtily. “You want to carry my belongings and be my tai-bo pony?”

The small group laughed with Burns Red and Old Owl Man.

“No. Because at long last, after all this time, I will see you take back all the insults you have heaped on me for so many seasons.”

Burns Red laughed, and most of the others there laughed with him. “How are you going to make me take back these insults, Tall One, the tai-bo pony?”

“You will take them back—or I will kill you.”

Captain Lockhart had kept the marches of the last two days as short as he could while still gaining some ground on the village moving before them. The Rangers were closing in, and their weary, broken-down stock had to be as ready as those men could make them.

Jonah felt proud to be among these men. Not one of them seemed concerned they were narrowing the lead on a force of proven warriors at least three, perhaps four times their own number. Instead of worrying about the coming fight, the Rangers instead talked about everything else but. Girls they left behind back home. What the coming spring meant to them as they were growing up. The smell of laundered sheets taken off the line by their mother and spread atop their tick mattresses with that once-a-week cleaning. The proper cutting of a male colt that made for the least amount of bleeding, hence narrowing the possibility of infection after doping the wound. How best to judge the fine qualities of a colt to know if you were going to geld him or leave him stand to stud.

As well as talking about which weapons were better than others there among Company C as it went through the last hours before those thirty-some men rode into war with Quanah Parker’s Comanche.

That last day they had covered a minimum of twenty-five miles without unduly punishing their horses, but Lockhart urged them on just so they could reach this great depression in the prairie where cold rainwater had been trapped in the passing of a storm two nights back. It had been a damp dying of winter, cold and chill, and the Staked Plain was now dotted with many ponds, some as wide as a hundred yards or more.

The pond where the Rangers spent last night had been muddied by the village they were trailing. If the sediment hadn’t settled, Lockhart explained to men who really needed little explanation, then the village could not be more than a half day’s ride ahead.

They didn’t light fires, nor did the captain allow any of the men to charge their pipes. That was perhaps the biggest loss to many of them—in Indian country a bowl of tobacco was so often a man’s only consolation when he could not have a cheery fire at his feet, bringing his coffeepot to boil.

Instead, Lockhart would not allow the men to brood on what they were going to do without. He put them out in messes, separating the men as well as the horses they kept saddled in the event some of the Comanche had become aware of the Rangers on their backtrail and returned after nightfall to stir up trouble, attempting to run off their stock or make a night scalp raid. The wind grew ugly, and already there was a cold spit to it that served to let no man sleep. Throughout the long hours of cold darkness beneath a crooked strip of sky filled with whirling stars above that rolling tableland, the men had for the most part kept to themselves. Few talked at all, and if they did, it was only to let others know they were moving off for a minute or so to relieve themselves.

Somewhere in the middle of the night as the sky swung around the north star, the wind swung down around them from the north. It tasted now of snow, guffawing around their cheerless camp like mocking swirls of Comanche laughter. Then the first of the icy snow began in that hour past midnight, pattering against the canvas and leather and wool felt of their hats like little feet come to steal away every vestige of their hope of catching the enemy.

The cold, utter silence of that high, barren land seemed to swallow all sound in huge, hungry draughts … the darkness of that sky overhead graced with but the thinnest rind of moon behind the icy clouds, and that steady, incomprehensible rhythm of the wind, all made for one of the longest nights in Jonah’s life. Without the talk of other men, without the luxury of being called to action, Hook was forced to talk to himself, forced to stay in one place where he could not flee his bitter memories. Bittersweet thoughts of the past, painful thoughts of what might have been, once more came to darken his mind like the spilling of a tin of lampblack.

What should have been.