Winter Rain

“Make love to a woman … and kill a man.”

1

Moon of Drying Leaves 1868

HE ROLLED AWAY from his attackers and vaulted onto his feet, crouching warily as he brushed the talclike powdery dirt from his eyes and mouth. He did not like the taste of it. But even more, he hated the taste of his own blood.

“Your lip, it is bleeding,” sneered one of the older boys.

Another one of his attackers nodded as the group inched toward him, saying, “Would you like to give up now and see to the cut for yourself?”

With a shake of his head, the youngster prepared for these older boys to lunge for him again.

Long ago Jeremiah Hook had learned not to take any of what the other boys dished out. They took pleasure in tormenting him because he was white. Both Jeremiah and his younger brother Zeke.

As the biggest brown-skinned youth suddenly rushed him, lowering his head like a bull on the charge, Jeremiah slid aside, whirling to snag the boy’s head under an arm. As much as the older youth tried to free himself, Jeremiah had that big boy secured in a headlock and began pummeling the sweaty, screwged face with blows from his small fist.

“Arrrghghg!” Coal Bear growled until Jeremiah clamped all the tighter, cutting off the youth’s protest.

Unable to catch his breath, much less speak, Coal Bear hammered Jeremiah with a fist, connecting again and again above the back of the white youth’s hip, right over the kidney.

Jeremiah crumpled, spinning to his knees in pain, dazed, as the big youth and his friend, Snake Brother, drove the white boy to the ground.

“Brother!”

Through the stirring dust and sweat stinging his eyes, Jeremiah watched his younger brother come flying in a leap, sailing out of nowhere beyond the edge of the lodge circle. Zeke hurled himself on the back of the biggest of Jeremiah’s tormentors. There he clung like a blood-swollen tick to an old bull, his arms clamped in front of the boy’s throat.

“Get this little gnat off me!” Coal Bear hollered raspily, as loudly as he could, the words strangling in his throat. Around and around he lumbered into a spin, trying to throw off his troublesome attacker.

“Get up, brother!” Zeke yelled as the whirling drew closer to Jeremiah.

“What goes on here?”

At the sound of that particular voice, both Coal Bear and Snake Brother came to a dead stop. Both started to talk at once, but the tall war chief raised his hand and shook it at them, signaling for their silence.

“Does this little tick want to cling to his enemy’s back all day?” asked the warrior.

Jeremiah watched Zeke glance his way for approval. He nodded. Only then did Zeke slide from Coal Bear’s back.

The gray-eyed war chief smiled. “Now, will someone tell me what is going on here?”

“We were playing only,” the youth said.

“From where I stood,” the gray-eyed one replied, gesturing back to a shady spot among the buffalo-hide lodges raised among the leafy cotton woods along the creek bank, “the two of you were making sport of our young friend here.”

Jeremiah swiped more troublesome sweat from his eyes, where it stung and muddied the dirt thrown at his face by his two opponents.

“If he is to be one of us, uncle,” said Snake Brother, using a term of respect for the warrior, “then he must learn. It has been said by the elders’ council.”

The handsome war chief scratched his chin. “So let us see if he can hold himself against only one of you.”

That instantly wounded Jeremiah’s pride. “I can take them both!” he shouted back in that tongue still unfamiliar. Yet he struggled to learn the language. Just as he would learn to fight like these Indian boys.

The warrior smiled knowingly. “It is good that you do not shy away from what trouble comes calling on you.”

“We will never turn our faces away from trouble,” hissed little Zeke in his near-perfect Comanche.

Jeremiah glanced at his younger brother, sensing a swell of sentiment for Zeke. He was all Jeremiah had now, with his father gone off to war many winters before. And the band of looters who came to lay waste his father’s farm but ended up instead carrying off those his father had left behind. Early on Jeremiah had determined that if he could not escape his circumstances with those bloodthirsty thugs, fleeing back to southwestern Missouri and home … if nothing else, he would then forge a family of the two of them. Little Zeke and Jeremiah Hook.

That little family was all either of them had had for so long.

Riding bareback tandem on a stolen horse into the Creek Nation over in Indian Territory with the band of white freebooters who had kidnapped them from the family home, Jeremiah rarely saw his sister or mother in those first few weeks. Then months had crept by.

It was only time, a lot of it. So much time that Jeremiah could not be sure how many months had slipped past. Perhaps even years. He was certain only that there had been several long summers broken by the cold of winter. And once more they were in the days the Comanche called the Moon of Drying Leaves.