Winter Rain

Usher chuckled softly, the breath before his face steamy in the cold. “It will bother me much less when that man is taken care of—for good and all time.”

He nodded. “That where I come in, is it, sir?”

“That’s right, my brother.” He reached overhead and snapped a narrow twig from a branch. This he waved in an arc across their Muddy Creek camp. “Take three with you. No—make it five more. And ride back the way we came. Likely he is this side of the pass by now.”

“Somewhere between South Pass and the Green, I’d lay a wager on.”

“No money required. Only the man’s blood.”

“We’ll go in the morning.”

Jubilee shook his head. “No. I want you to find your five and go now. Saddle up, draw your rations for how long you calculate you’ll be gone—and leave now.”

Oran Strickler swallowed hard. Then scratched at the thick, unshaved growth across his dirty cheek. “You want me bring you something back?”

“If you can do it.”

He waited for Usher to elaborate. When the colonel did not, Strickler asked, “What you want? His scalp? His balls? Maybeso his whole head, eh?”

Usher draped a big arm over Stickler’s shoulder. “No. If you can, I want you to help me reunite the sodbuster with the woman. For just a few minutes, I want to be able to look into both their faces and see the looks they will give one another, how they will regard me—before I kill him. Slowly. Slowly.”

“You … you figure on killing him right in front of his … uh, the woman?” Strickler corrected himself.

“Yes. As simple as that,” Usher replied. “Now. You have your orders. Bring him to me alive. Do not—on pain of death—do not return to me without this sodbuster alive.”

Strickler swallowed again, turned, and disappeared back into the dim glow of the dying fires. Usher listened to the snoring, the footsteps halting here, then there, listened to the unintelligible, whispered voices, heard the faintest betrayal of the rolling of blankets and the shuffling of bodies out of camp toward the horses. Into the darkness. And it grew quiet once more around Jubilee Usher.

Deathly quiet.

He had chosen the right man. And Oran Strickler would choose his men just as wisely, Jubilee felt certain.

Just as certain that one day he would sit in the Prophet’s chair at the center of Zion, leader of God’s chosen people.

His only doubt lay with her. By watching with her own eyes the killing of her husband by Jubilee’s hand—would she give up all hope of rescue, all hope of returning to that sodbuster and their former life together?

Only then would she relent and give herself totally, irrevocably, irretrievably over to Jubilee Usher.

9

Moon of Black Calves 1868

FAR, FAR AWAY on the distant edge of the awakening land a thin smear of gray bubbled along the horizon like marrow scum risen to the top of blood soup brought to the boil.

High-Backed Bull and Bad Tongue had led the others around the base of the bluffs and ridges in this rugged, naked country heaved up with dark monoliths and black blottings against the paling, starlit sky that wheeled nonstop overhead in the land’s incessant crawl toward the coming day of blood on the sand by the Plum River. Once they had stopped to water the ponies, watchful not to let the animals have too much, only enough to slake their thirst. Then the horsemen crossed to the north bank of the river on foot, remounted, and set out again to the east.

The big bear among the stars lay but a hand’s width from the horizon when Bull touched Bad Tongue’s arm and signaled the rest to halt behind them. He sniffed at the air.

“Smell,” Bull whispered.

The rest drew the cold, high desert air into their noses noiselessly.

The Brule said, “Fire.”

He nodded to Bad Tongue. “The breeze has come around out of the south.” Bull pointed. “Beyond those ridges, we will find them.”

“The big American horses,” Bad Tongue growled in his poor Cheyenne.

“The half-a-hundred who have dared follow our camps,” Bull corrected. “The half-a-hundred who will lose their scalps for it.”

“Do not spill your own blood on this ground,” Bad Tongue admonished. “So anxious to spill the white man’s are you.”

Bull snorted derisively. “The rest of you can go get what you want now. And I will ride in for what I came for.”

Bad Tongue clamped a hand on the Shahiyena’s arm to stay the Dog Soldier. “Porcupine and Roman Nose—any war chief would say for one or two of us to spy on the white man’s camp first before riding in blind.”

Bull gazed at the starlit face of the Brule and could find no reason to dispute the Lakota’s fighting wisdom. “All right. You and me.”

“On foot.”

Bull nodded and slid from his pony, handing the rawhide rein to Starving Elk. He strode off without waiting for Bad Tongue, nor did he look back. He only heard the warrior off to his left.