Winter Rain by Terry C. Johnston

Author:Terry C. Johnston [Johnston, Terry C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-75637-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

24

Winter 1870

THE TRAIL HAD gone cold.

Two winters came and passed; each day they hoped against hope that some clue would turn up, some slip of a tongue, some word of Jubilee Usher’s Danites passing through the country. But, nothing.

Back that October of sixty-eight, Two Sleep had taken Jonah on west from the land of the red desert beside the Sandy, crossing Green River, then pushing on to Fort Bridger. Like the back of his leathery, walnut-colored hand, the Shoshone knew the lay of that land and the caliber of those men in army blue. Jonah stayed quiet for the most part, letting the Indian ask the questions needing answers.

But none of the soldiers stationed at Bridger could remember a big outfit of horsemen, wagons, and an ambulance coming through of recent. Anything on the order of that many armed men would have surely caused that undermanned garrison at the frontier outpost to stand right up and take notice, what with so few civilian travelers moving east or west out in this infernal country. As it was, for the most part the soldiers said things had gone quiet to the north: up where the Sioux and Cheyenne had appeared to settle down after wrenching the big treaty of 1868, and the abandonment of the forts along the Bozeman Road, from the white man’s army. With that summer of sixty-eight fading into history, the troops assigned the Montana Road had filed back down toward Laramie, for all time quitting the hunting ground granted the wild tribes.

“We just got tired of fighting,” explained an aging captain commanding at Bridger. “After that four years of hell fighting the secesh back east, we were ordered out here to pacify this land, make it safe for the California argonauts, safe for business trade and what settlers was to move in.”

As Jonah and Two Sleep listened, the captain sighed in the autumn shade of that brushy porch awning outside his mud-walled office. “We’re taking a well-deserved retreat right now—this army that just got tired of fighting. You’re aware this land along the great immigrant road once was ruled by the Cheyenne and Sioux, you know? Still, they haven’t deviled us in a long time.”

“Wasn’t always that way,” Jonah said, feeling the captain’s eyes shift in his direction. “I fought them—the Cheyenne and the Lakota—to keep this road open.”

“You with the galvanized volunteers, were you?”

“Sixty-five.”

“Serve at Platte Bridge?”

Jonah only nodded, remembering Lieutenant Caspar Collins’s brave ride across the bridge to break through a cordon of a thousand warriors and rescue an incoming squad of soldiers.

The aging captain had gone back to staring at the sun setting beyond Utah and that land of Brigham Young, lighting the leaves in the trees with fall’s gold and crimson fire. “Yes, Mr. Hook. For a while now, the army got tired of fighting.”

“Can’t say as I fault ’em,” Hook replied quietly.

Jonah ended up selling to the army four of those horses taken from the Danites, keeping what they needed for packing. And

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