Cry of the Hawk by Terry C. Johnston Read Free Book Online

sleeve of the buckskin war shirt the scout wore on the chill of evening. Turning, he found the young man holding his hand out.
    “Glad to meet you, Mr. Sweete. Man needs a friend out here I suppose.”
    He smiled, pine-chip teeth glimmering in the new moonlight splaying silver across the rising tableland stretching to the spine of the continent itself. “I can always use a friend, mister.”
    “Name’s Jonah Hook.”
    “Let’s go find our bedrolls, Jonah. These bones hollering for rest something fierce.”
    “I sleep better out here, Mr. Sweete. Better’n I ever have—if it weren’t for the nightmares about my family.”
    “Don’t you let ’em spook you. Don’t mean a thing.”
    Shad wished he meant it. But as he walked down the slope into the soldier camp, the old scout shuddered with the chill in remembrance of his own recurring nightmare—that burned and gutted camp of Black Kettle’s on Sand Creek.
    And how damned lucky his own wife and daughter were to escape the butchery of madness unleashed.
    “Our scout recommends you ride on in with us.” Captain A. Smith Lybe dragged a dusty hand across his cracked lips. He had just ridden up to Willow Spring Creek with his platoon of I Company, along with six horsemen from the Eleventh Ohio, to find the wagon train and its Kansas escort making an early camp of it.
    “I figure we’re safe enough here,” answered Sergeant Amos Custard of the Eleventh Kansas Cavalry, swinging an arm around their camp. “That scout of yours is a nervous old woman, you want to know what I think.”
    Lybe glanced at Shadrach Sweete perched atop his Morgan mare. “When you left Sweetwater Station ahead of us this morning, I was hoping you’d get more ground under you before you stopped for the night.”
    “You take care of your own galvanized Johnnies, Captain,” Custard replied. “We’re going home, and we’ll mosey if we wanna.”
    Jonah Hook pulled his head back from the cool water of the spring where the rest of Lybe’s small detail had been guzzling, in time to watch the old scout nudge his mare forward until he stood above the sergeant.
    “The Sioux been hitting this line regular, Sergeant. But I ain’t telling you anything you don’t already know.”
    “That’s right,” Custard said. “If you’re so damned nervous, go on and take the rest of these Confederates with you to Platte Bridge.”
    “The farther we come since this morning,” Lybe explained, “the more I feel like I want to make a night march of it into the stockade at Platte Bridge.”
    Custard gazed at Sweete a moment more. Then he turned to Lybe. “He suggest you make a night march of it?”
    “He did. And I agree. Something’s up, Sergeant.”
    “You put in your time out here—like I have, Captain—you won’t be so damned nervous about every shadow or flap of an owl’s wing. And you won’t be so ready to take the word of a squaw-man scout either.”
    Hook watched Shad Sweete gently rein his mare away.
    “Let’s be going, Captain,” said the scout.
    “See you at the station tomorrow, Sergeant Custard.” Lybe put heels to his horse and brought it around. “Let’s mount up and move out, men!”
    Jonah wanted one last drink of that water as he corked his canteen and caught up the reins to his mount. He had to admit, his butt was growing accustomed to the riding when for so long he had either been languishing in prison or walking across the plains. Far better to ride.
    And ride they had. Ever since arriving at the Sweetwater Station near South Pass, Lybe’s I Company had been busy almost daily, inspecting the emigrant road for telegraph line needing repair, replacing sections at times a mile or more in length dragged down by the hostiles.
    Wire pulled down. Poles burned in blackened scars along the road, the scene blotted with tracks of Indian ponies and moccasined warriors. Yet Jonah Hook had yet to see a warrior. Some of the others in I Company had been blooded in skirmishes. One