Winter Rain

Slowly rising on one knee, Jonah inched forward, parting more of the leaves and branches with the rifle muzzle. Then he saw the top of a man’s head.

“A Injun,” he said under his breath, swiping a damp forearm across his lips.

Brushing his thumb across the Winchester’s hammer to make sure it was cocked, he rose to a crouch and prepared to make his play—just as the Indian pulled free one of the glass bottles Jonah had purchased back at Laramie.

A loafer, by God. Nothing more’n a good-for-nothing, whiskey-bellied loafer!

Hook burst from the willow and alder, Winchester at his hip and leveled at its target.

“Goddamn you! Leave my whiskey alone, you drunken redskin!”

At the white man’s growl exploding from the rain-soaked undergrowth, Two Sleep scrambled awkwardly for his feet, moccasins slipping on the wet ground, and flew backward, tumbling headlong over more of Jonah’s packs. Yet he slowly raised one arm in the air, grinning sheepishly at the white man, almost apologetic, for certain triumphant. Somehow in his fall he had miraculously kept the whiskey bottle aloft, safe, and unbroken.

“Drop it, I say!” Jonah roared, half-ready to laugh at the Indian sprawled in the mud, intent on that bottle of whiskey.

But as he said it, the Indian’s empty hand came up filled with a pistol. That hammer cocked loud enough to be the clattering of an iron wagon tire rolling over granite.

Little did Hook like staring down the bore of any weapon, much less a pistol he figured was gripped in the shaky hand of a whiskey-sodden Indian. Unpredictable, that’s what their kind was. And this one might up and pull that trigger as soon as look at Jonah, just for the whiskey. Just another dead white man, more or less—

“Two Sleep,” the stranger blurted plain as paint.

Hook wagged his head, not sure he had heard what he thought he had. Plain-spoke English.

“What was that you said, you drunk devil?”

“Two Sleep. My name—Two Sleep. But not drunk.”

He looked sideways at the intruder, suspicious. “Speak English, do you?”

With a nod of his head, the Indian used the hand holding the bottle to scratch the side of his face where some brown mud clung, dripping onto his shoulder from his fall.

“You’re a sight to boot,” Jonah went on. “Put that belt gun away before one of us gets hurt.”

“You shoot Two Sleep?” the Indian asked.

“Sure. Always shoot whiskey thieves, I do,” Hook replied, the beginnings of a grin crawling across his lips.

He didn’t want to like the Indian, didn’t want to trust him. But Jonah couldn’t deny that he was already beginning to do both. “Still, I ain’t yet shot a man I was drinking whiskey with.”

The pony beneath him answered every urging he gave it with the elk-handled rawhide quirt, whipped across the mustang’s rear flank to keep him first among the riders returning to the camps with such great, momentous news: white men were stalking their trail, coming on fast, greedily eating up the ground between them and the great gathering of lodge circles.

Already it had proved to be a memorable summer for High-Backed Bull, having sworn his allegiance to Porcupine, who in turn took his faithful warriors north to join with the great Shahiyena war chief, Sauts: the one known as the Bat. Among the white men, however, the muscular one was called Roman Nose.

This summer the Northern Cheyenne of Roman Nose and Tall Bull and Two Moon were joined by the great Brule Lakota village of Pawnee Killer. Their alliance had proved fruitful in recent moons: ever since the shortgrass time in late spring, the young warriors had been striking out, raiding into the land of the white settlers as far south as the Solomon, the Saline, even south to the river the white man called the Smoky Hill, where the pony soldiers built their string of forts and the iron road for their smoking horse.

As he reached the smooth, grass-covered brow of the last hill, High-Backed Bull saw the camp circles laid out in rings below him in the river valley, the River of Plums. The fighting bands had been following its course for the last three suns, slowly ambling to the north and west, in no hurry. It seemed they had come to dare the small party of white men to catch up with them.

Behind the young Shahiyena warrior now, he heard the yips and cries of the others, mostly Brule, a few Dog Soldiers like himself. They raced over the ridge and sprinted this last slope at a full gallop, urging their ponies ever faster, calling out to the camps below, feeling across every inch of their bare flesh the excitement of the news they brought.