Winter Rain

Hattie was back there in the East, as safe as any man could make his daughter now. Learning about books and manners and cultured things and … great Lord! he thought. Hattie would turn twenty this spring. Was it still February? No sure idea what month it was—he would have to find out from Coffee. The sergeant kept his log for Lockhart. And when they got down to Fort Concho, Jonah vowed to go in to the sutler’s there and find something to send his daughter. Maybe a dress he could have posted to the seminary school he sent money to regular. Maybe he could even find a music box. He remembered how she had always wanted one of those. The perfect gift for a girl her age.

Twenty—he marveled. She was near five years older than her mama was when he and Gritta had married back in the Shenandoah. So Hattie wasn’t a girl no more. She’d be a full-blown woman when at last he went back to get her.

As soon as he had his two boys back, as soon as he got back on Jubilee Usher’s trail. He’d find Gritta. He’d find her. He’d find her.

He had found Hattie.

And now they were only a matter of hours from this village of Quanah Parker’s Kwahadi who held white prisoners.

Jonah knew he had found his boys.

This done and his young’uns took back to Cassville, where they could likely stay with old Boatwright and help the old sheriff about his place … Hook would set out again, back to the land of the Mormons. How swiftly faded the dead from people’s minds, he brooded. It was the living lost that haunted a man.

But he’d find her. He would find her.

The wind died a little as the east seeped into gray, then a murky crimson behind the fleeing snow clouds. For a moment it reminded him of the birth opening on one of the old cows back to Missouri. Helping the old girls work their calves out into this world, a struggle of cow pushing and man pulling, the calf all spindly of leg and refusing Jonah a dry place for a grip. It was all a part of life, that. So much of life a person damned well had to do on his own.

No one else to do it for him. Like this hunt. As much as Shad Sweete and Riley Fordham and now Two Sleep had come along to ride this trail with him—it was in the end his trail alone to ride this last mile.

Like these last minutes as Lockhart motioned them up to shake out the kinks from sitting out the passing storm, knock the ice off their blankets and shelter halves they had wrapped around themselves in that silent, icy darkness; told to roll them up and lash them behind saddles as they each and all shivered in that cold crunching of the predawn wilderness. Tightening cinches, warming bits before slipping them back into horses’ mouths, loosening cold weapons in stiffened holsters and saddle boots.

With only a wave of his hand to give voice to his command, Captain Lamar Lockhart signaled Company C of the Texas Rangers into the saddle, and pointed that brave band of thirty into the dawn’s cruel slash of whispering wind.

42

February 1875

AFEW DAYS BACK one of them had told him what season this was. Said the Comanche called this the Moon of the Last Cold. Something like that. They also said next month was called the Moon of Geese Returning.

Could be, Jonah thought now as a cold, cheerless sun rose on that small band of white men moving north at an easy lope across the icy snow gathered in crusted fans around the stubble of dead prairie grass. Not so hard a pace that it would take any more than necessary out of the horses.

The ice crystals in the wind flew against his canvas mackinaw, pecked at the brim of his hat the way Gritta’s chickens had pecked at the yard outside their cabin.

His eyes crawled from horizon to horizon. Maybe it was so, in a few weeks they might actually get to see the big longnecks stretching their great wings out in wide vees across the bright spring blue of the sky overhead. It was always a sight to behold, he told himself. No sight to match it, those longnecks coming and going, spring or autumn.

To think on how those birds made a circuit of their seasons, great loops encompassing thousands of miles with every flight. They would be moving around to the north soon, come the spring. Then back around, retracing those same thousands of miles with the first halloo of autumn. Hell, just like the buffalo. The numberless that wandered into the winds with the countless, ageless seasons.

Those animals no different from the wind itself that worked around a man in great loops that likely meant a journey of thousands of miles too, a journey that eventually brought the wind right back where it began.

How Jonah prayed the wind and this great endless cycle of the seasons would take him back to where he had started.

Prayed it, as Company C rode the cold sun up into that late winter sky unsullied by a single cloud, save for the east, where the storm had blown.