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.

What a perfect day for a man to go hunting or fishing, to work his fields, to repair harness or fix that ill-hung door on the barn. Or a perfect day for a man to do nothing at all but lie on his back among the bounty of his fields and stare up at the great endless immensity of all God’s handiworks. Wondering where he fit, in all that had been wrought of the seasons and sculpted by the wind around him.

A damned cold day as well, one fit for spilling blood. Then at last he could start back home with his boys.

This was turning out to be one of those late winter days when the sun hung high, dull as a pewter button, when the air would never really grow warm—when John Corn, who was riding point, suddenly wheeled his mount around in a tight, haunch-sliding circle and skedaddled back for the column. Reaching those in the lead, the Ranger pointed ahead, talking in hushed tones to the captain, then led Lockhart, Johns, and Coffee ahead a ways where all three stopped in view of the rest. Lockhart reached about and took his field glasses from a saddlebag, then sat staring, likely adjusting on something Jonah could not sec with the naked eye, something lost in all that immensity of snowy brilliance.

“You think they’ve spotted the village?” Hook quietly asked Two Sleep beside him in the column.

The old Shoshone nodded. “Yellow jackets.”

“Comanche? That what you figure?”

“That what I see.”

Hook glared again, squinting into the shimmering distance of the icy plain, trying to make out anything that Two Sleep could claim would be Comanche.

Lockhart reined about, hurriedly stuffing the field glasses away. He slowed his horse to a walk as he reached the company and began by giving them what sounded like his first real order in many days as he rode down their line.

“Dismount.”

They obeyed him instantly without question, without muttering a word. The only sounds among those thirty were those of the restive horses, the squeak of soaped leather, the rattle of buckle and chain, the squeak of holster and rifle boot. Their captain had news for them fit to singe the hair even in a Ranger’s ears.

“If your cinches need tightening, now’s the time,” Lockhart instructed. “We’ve spotted the enemy ahead.”

“The Comanch’?” Clyde Yoakam asked.

“No doubt, Sergeant,” Lockhart said, wheeling his horse and walking it back up the line of men, who stood flipping stirrups over their saddles, tugging and tightening on cinches and cruppers, drawing up their own britches, taking belts up a notch or so. That done, some men pulled rifles from their boots with a noise like tired buggy springs, chambering a cartridge into the breech. Others broke open the action of their pistols, exposing cylinders, slipping a sixth round beneath the finely honed hammers.

“You see how many, Captain?” asked June Callicott.

“Not certain how many. Not really sure that they’ve seen us just yet either. If it weren’t for the glasses I used, that camp’d still be just a black dot on the edge of the horizon. So it’s not likely they know we’re here just yet.”

“You saw ’em still in camp?” Jonah asked, his eyes going to fix a cold, milk-pale sun against midsky.

“We’ve caught them sitting.”

Hook wagged his head. “We didn’t catch ’em, Cap’n. They ought to be up and on the move long before now. Only reason we got ’em sitting is those Comanche are waiting for us.”

Lockhart’s face went dark as scorched wood behind his bushy black mustache and that week’s growth of shadow over his cheeks. He jutted his chin at Hook’s severe appraisal of their situation. “So be it, men. Remount—and form into line for inspection.”

Jonah had to admire the captain for that. Lockhart wasn’t about to be bullied into fearing this bunch of warriors. He could be a cool one when it came down to cutting the deck with the whole night’s game resting on this one last hand they were about to play.

The entire company came into the saddle and settled almost noiselessly, jostling their mounts left-about into one long line stretching right and left, facing their stiff-jawed captain. Clearly holding his horse in check, Lockhart eased down that formation, appraising each one of them from their sun-faded hat to the toes of their high-heeled boots stuffed clear to the insteps in the stirrups. Nearly every last one of them wore two belts, one looped over the other around their outer coats in a lazy X, all brass and lead that looked damned near as impressive as a crown of feathers would atop a proven Kwahadi warrior.

The captain slowed before Two Sleep and Hook, and stopped. “I’m a little concerned about your Snake here, Jonah. Going into battle now, things are likely to get a bit confusing for the rest of the men. Perhaps he should stay behind.”

“I go fight with you,” Two Sleep said evenly, his eyes held straight ahead, as unwavering and military as any soldier’s.

Jonah felt more proud of him at that moment than he had since that morning in the red desert when they jumped Usher’s Mormons. He stared straight ahead too as he said, “He’ll do fine, Cap’n.”

“If the Indian doesn’t mind, I do need someone to see to the pack mules. Benton!”

“Sir?”

“Bring up those mules.”

“What you have in mind doing with them two mules?” Hook asked as Billy Benton brought their pair of pack animals up and halted beside Lockhart.

“These mules carry what extra ammunition Company C has along,” the captain explained. “I’m putting it in charge of the Snake here.”

He turned to Two Sleep, whose black-cherry eyes finally veered to touch the captain’s face. Lockhart asked, “You understand what’s expected of you?”

The Shoshone nodded. “I guard the mules with my life.”

Lockhart flashed a grin, motioning Benton forward with the picket ropes strung back to the mules. “I can see I’ve made a good choice in this matter. Thank you … Two Sleep.”

It was the first time Jonah could recall any of the Rangers, much less the captain himself, calling the warrior by name. As if until this moment he had been just an Injun. A faceless, nameless red-belly. But in these minutes before the bloodletting, Two Sleep had somehow become one of them. Worthy of no less an honor than standing watch over their supply of cartridges.

No matter that there were biscuits and beans and bacon in those packs. The Shoshone had just been asked to protect what was even more precious, perhaps life sustaining. The bullets.

“For some of you this charge will be the first time you ever rode into something like this,” Lockhart continued, reining his horse to the side and easing on down the line of Rangers. “Hell, I gotta admit I never rode into a bunch of Comanche that’s been ready for us. No matter is it—your green will be worn off by the time the second shot is fired and you’ve got a whiff of gunpowder in your nostrils, men.”

When the captain reached the end of the line, he sawed his mount about and brought his horse back to the middle, where he stopped to face his thirty. “You’ll ride out at my order. I will take the point, and no man will allow his mount to pass mine. Make yourselves clear on that. When we begin, spread out ten feet apart, and keep the same pace as those on either side of you. Our success or failure will depend on us staying together.”

Lockhart drew the back of his glove across his lips, chewed the lower lip a moment, then continued. “If one of you becomes separated from the company, do all that is in your power to make it back to us. In the end we may be pressed to dismount and fort up behind the bodies of our horses. If I give that order, we will circle Two Sleep and the mules. Re-form around the pack mules before we start dropping the horses.”

“Dropping the horses, Captain?” asked Wig Danville. “Shoot ’em?”

“Yes.”

“But, sir—I say ride. And ride hard. We fort up, them Comanche gonna swallow us up for sure.”

“Danville, there’s a lot of old frontiersmen who can tell you chapter and verse of their own history where the few held out against the many—and held the day.”

“You run, Wig,” Coffee added, “the Comanche got us separated. Chase us down one at a time.”

“What the sergeant says is the gospel according to Lamar Lockhart,” the captain added. “We stay together.”

“We all live,” Deacon Johns bellowed in that brimstone-laced voice of his, “or we all go to the bosom of the Lord our God together.”

“Together,” Lockhart reminded them. “Likely, it will be fighting these red-bellies to the last ditch and victory to the strongest.”

“That ol’ sulfur-belly of Satan’s son is about to get his due from a jealous God!” Deacon Johns bellowed.

Then they all fell silent again as Lockhart’s eyes went up and down the long line. Only when he had done so did the captain gently nudge his horse about. “Let’s move out, Sergeant Coffee.”

“You heard the captain!” Coffee bawled. “Move out!”

They closed on a mile of the village within a few heartbeats. Was no problem for any man to make out the village by then. A smudge of oily brown haze hung over the lodges. Morning cook fires. In the midst of the lodges there was the flicker of movement. Off to the right and beyond, Jonah could make out what extra animals the tribe could claim. Those that had not been brought into camp and readied. The warriors were already easing out of the village, disappearing for a moment as they led their ponies down the far slope of a wide arroyo, before reappearing on the near side where they halted. Waiting as more, and ever more came up.

Lockhart raised himself in the stirrups and twisted about to the left. Then the right, assuring himself of the readiness of his line spread out from him like great, undulating wings. Jonah sat two away from the end of the right flank. Behind them, riding center on Lockhart’s tail root, came the Shoshone with those two pack mules strung out at a walk behind him.

The captain raised his left hand and made a quick circle with it, then brought the arm down.

Not a one of them uttered a word but as a body urged their mounts into a lope behind Lockhart as he settled back to his saddle.

They crossed that first quarter of a mile as the Comanche themselves began to spread out, milling a bit, but spreading left and right as the Rangers had formed. Within a moment the center of that line began to surge forward at a walk, away from the side of the arroyo.

All Jonah had to do was break through the Comanche and get across that arroyo. Into the village and find the boys. Before he figured the Comanche could escape with their prisoners.

There was a lot of dust coming from the north now, hung like a faint smudge against the blue of the midday sky. Far and beyond the pony herd.

Jonah figured some of the Comanche were already skedaddling. Retreating north. Fleeing as soon as the first cry had gone out that white men were coming. Damn, but that dust lay a long way off to the north. Far enough away that Hook prayed his boys were not already among those first to escape. To have that kind of head start.

“Good Lord!” exclaimed the man beside him.

Jonah’s attention was yanked back to the warriors ahead of them as they passed the half-mile point. The Comanche horsemen still moved forward at no more than a walk, the heads of their ponies bobbing, a’flutter with scalp locks lashed to hackamores and shields and the muzzles of rifles and just back of the foot-long iron points on their buffalo lances. It seemed the number of riders doubled, then doubled again of a sudden as more and more appeared on the near side of that dusty arroyo. As if sprung from the ground itself.

“Quiet in the ranks!” Coffee snarled as more of the Rangers uttered surprise at getting their first good view of the numbers they were now facing.

But they held, and not one turned back nor slowed his gait. Jonah’s heart swelled to be among these men who had helped bring him here to get his boys. These, the cold, cast-iron, double-riveted sort who now showed what they were made of, showed that they possessed the nerve few men are ever pressed to dig deep enough to find within themselves.

Then Lockhart was standing again in his stirrups, twisting about to give his command. “For Texas and our families! Charge!”

His words were barely uttered, driven on across that line by the cold breeze when Company C hammered their horses into a gallop behind their captain: the ringing of bit and spur chains, the clinking of stirrup irons, of buckles against cinches, the tinkling of bridle snaps and linkings, the groans of saddle leather and the squeak of fenders and skirts, the rubbing of the tall boots … then the air above the thirty blistered with their shouts and yells and profane vows. Hook’s own throat ached with his ki-yi-yi-ing rebel wolf-cry as they galloped thigh by thigh.

As if that were the very cue for their own action, the Comanche burst into a ragged charge, closing the last quarter of a mile left to that arroyo in the space of a half-dozen heartbeats. Only enough time for Jonah to fire one shot with the Winchester before he booted it and yanked out his first belt gun.

He fired it once, then a second time as they closed on the fluttering line of half-naked horsemen glistening copper and wild-eyed in the midday winter sun. Hook stuffed the two thick latigo reins between his browned teeth and slid the second pistol from its holster.

There was time to fire one shot with it and a third from his right hand before the two lines collided in a crash of dust and stinging, swinging, swirling confusion. To his right he watched one of the Rangers go down, hurled from his saddle at the end of a warrior’s lance. Jonah reined up savagely, his tired mount fighting the bit as he sawed about, firing at the warrior who had toppled the Ranger.

For the most part, the Comanche line had charged on through the Ranger flanks without great damage. Two more of Lockhart’s men had been spilled, but they had clambered back to their knees, continuing to fire at the backs of the Comanche as the great warrior front came about, screeching and singing out their death songs.

He looked for Two Sleep, found the Shoshone just this side of the arroyo, struggling with the frightened mules near Lockhart. Barking his orders in that loose-shouldered way of his in the dust, noise, and confusion, the captain’s mouth was no more than a black O in his shadowy face. No telling what he was ordering. But he was pointing, waving his pistol hand as his horse pranced high-headed, round and round in a tight circle.

Then Jonah saw what Lockhart was hollering about. More warriors were swarming out of the village now, plunging down into the arroyo, catching the Rangers between the two groups of painted horsemen.

Hook really didn’t need to hear the captain’s voice to sense what order was being given. He saw those who were closest to Lockhart whirl about and retreat, falling back on Two Sleep. Come the time to fort up.

There in some of the brush by the lip of that snow-crusted arroyo smeared darkly with a narrow trickle of runoff against its far side.

“Throw them down!” they were yelling at each other. “Throws ’em down!”

The first of the horses were falling as Hook slid his mount to a halt near Two Sleep and stuffed one of the pistols away. He snugged the animal’s muzzle down tight, struggling to shoulder the animal up beside Callicott’s horse already down and kicking its last. He fought him, fought the smell of blood and gunpowder strung in thick layers in the air. Stuffing the gun’s barrel in front of the ear, he pulled the trigger. The big roan yanked its head away, thrashing as its legs went to water beneath its great weight. He barely had time to leap out of the way as it crashed onto the thin, icy crust of snow and lay there at Hook’s feet heaving its head, as if willing itself to stand. Then, as its life seemed to ebb before his eyes, the roan lay almost still in a matter of moments, still except for the last wheezing cries coming from that heaving chest. In a shudder it was done.

“Awright, boys!” Niles Coffee was yelling. “In a matter of minutes there’s gonna be lead smacking around here, thicker’n smoked bees!”

Jonah dropped behind it as the new line of warriors came splashing across the narrow creek and flung sand from a couple hundred hooves in great golden cascades like roosters’ tails. To his left came one of the men running for the barricade on foot. Slade Rule slid behind the carcass of horse, his chin whiskers and the front of his dirty shirt smeared with blood. The man rolled onto his side, wheezing, trying to speak, his back and chest pocked with uncounted bullet holes.

“You made it,” Jonah said, kneeling over him. Gazing into the fear-drenched, teary eyes of that youngster beneath him. “You hang on for now—you’re gonna make it rest of the way.”

As Jonah tried to inch away, Rule snagged his sleeve, pulling him back, his mouth working mechanically, soundlessly against the great cacophony of battle snarling around them: bullets whining past or thudding into the bodies of their dying horses, the cursing of men, the bellows of Lockhart’s and Coffee’s and Deacon Johns’s orders, the cries of the wounded Rangers, the shrill death songs of the enemy, the wailing of the women across that arroyo … in the village where Jonah had intended to go.

“Good and kind, brother Jesus!” the deacon shrieked, half standing, firing with a pistol in each hand. “Heartily smite these heathen sinners!”

As he gazed back down at the Ranger, Rule’s eyes widened, then eased half-down the mast. His hand loosened on Jonah’s arm as the rest of his body slumped. Hook used two thumbs to ease the eyelids closed.

“What the hell are those bastards up to now?” June Callicott was hollering, half standing at the barricade of carcasses.

Hook found the greater number of warriors breaking off their attack after those first few grinding minutes. The Rangers, what was left of Company C inside that ring of carcasses, lay waiting among the sprawled and leg-flung horses for the next rush by the Comanche.

“Sonsabitches gonna work us down with their goddamned wheel,” Coffee reminded them.

Harley Pettis dropped his serious bulk to his knees. “They re-forming, Sarge?”

Coffee and the rest watched the horsemen pulling off. The second wave from the village joined up with the first, swirling about one another, working themselves up into a fighting frenzy, shrieking at one another, waving lances and shaking scalps.

“Looks like they’re ready to wear us down, boys!” Lockhart promised them.

But as the Rangers watched, breaking open the actions on their pistols to dump empty cartridges, jamming new ammunition into their heated weapons, the lords of the southern plains surprisingly did not form into that spinning, death-carrying wheel that would work itself around and around its prey, inch by inch, yard by yard, moment by moment grinding away, working ever closer to the white man until the enemy could be overrun in one great sweep of terror.

Instead, the Comanche drew off.

Stunned, slack-jawed in shock, Jonah stood, watching the horsemen drive their ponies into the arroyo, plunging across the sand and up the far side into the remnants of the village where all was of a sudden panic.

Above the screaming and wailing of the women, the barking of the dogs and the war cries of the men, above it all floated the first distant, but no less distinct, notes of a bugle.