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again.
    That haunting vision returned less and less with every year now, yet still it remained a torture he practiced on himself—forcing himself to believe again each time the dream returned that he was actually making love to his wife back home in Virginia.
    How real it had been. The touch and smells and tastes of her. The utter warmth of her wrapped around him.
    So cold now in the aftermath that he began to tremble uncontrollably, drawing his shirt to him across the dry grass. Dolefully Jonah dragged it over his head as the tears began to well in his eyes. So alone.
    So damned alone, after all. Halfway gone to hell and back all these years. Having finally found his girl. Hattie.
    The boys were gone—sold off somewhere into the Southwest. At least that was what he had learned from one of those who ripped his family from their homestead during the bloody days of the war.
    And his woman—said to be the property of some maniacal bastard who laid claim to her in the name of his own God.
    Jonah flung an arm at the night sky, shaking his fist at God, at everything that God wasn’t for Jonah. God wasn’t there to answer a lonely man’s prayers, his pleas to put back together the shattered pieces of his family, his life, the circle of those he loved.
    Instead, on that trackless high prairie sat a bitter, angry, lonely man filled with unrequited rage as he wavered to his feet and stood shaking beneath the great night sky—but more from the fury unspent within him than from the cold of this desert night in southern Wyoming Territory.
    “Damn you for this!” he roared.
    Damn you for hurling your anger down at my family the way you done—when you should have taken out your wrath only on me!
    Yanking his pistol from its holster, Jonah fired and fired and fired again until the hammer clacked repeatedly on empty cylinders. Each bullet sped into the black face of the heavens—perhaps into the face of God Himself—in futile hope of getting the Almighty’s attention to his private pain, this hell only God Himself could be putting this lonely man through.
    Jonah whirled and flung the pistol down onto his rumpled bedroll. He collapsed onto his knees, crumpling forward as he began to sob in earnest, not understanding why he had been cursed this way, not knowing just what he had done to merit having his family wrenched from him.
    After all, he had grown to be a man who had never knowingly hurt a soul, never so much as harmed another until the Yankees had come to Missouri. Any man worthy of his backbone had to stand and be counted to turn back the blue tide.
    Here he sat crumpled, knowing nothing more than that it hurt him beyond all endurance, this being without her. Not knowing if she was still alive, or dead by now.
    For years now his clumsy prayers had remained unanswered. He knew that much. Still, he had been told a man called Jubilee Usher waited for Jonah somewhere out there with his army of Mormon gunmen—cutthroats protecting the Mormon zealot and his woman captive as they marched back toward the City of the Saints.
    With a dirty hand Jonah swiped at his nose, slowly gaining control once more. He swallowed the sting of the salty tears, promising himself that one day soon he would stand in the streets of that Mormon stronghold and cry out the name of Jubilee Usher—calling the godless bastard forth to atone for his crimes against the family of Jonah Hook.
    Drenched in starlight, he reloaded his pistol quickly, ramming home powder and wad and ball, capping all six cylinders in the indigo loneliness, the sweat encasing his flesh grown cold and stiff, gone stale and rank in the freshening breeze of postmidnight.
    Where once his body had tingled with her touch, he now felt the cold seep of anger swollen into a furnace of rage.
    It was like nothing Jonah had ever compelled himself to do in all his life.
    This having to find her.

3
August 1868
    H E STOOD TALLER than most. Every bit as tall as the biggest men he had known in his