generation, settlers had fought Comanche, Kiowa and Lipan Apache war parties, Mexican bandits and homegrown outlaws. The battle fury of the recent War Between the States had left this part of Texas untouched, but there was not a family in the valley that hadn’t given husbands and sons to the armies of the Confederacy. Few had returned.
The folk of Midvale were not weaklings. Not fools, either. They were undone by treachery, by a vicious attack that struck without warning, like a bolt out of the blue. By the time they knew what hit them it was too late to mount any kind of defense.
Ringing the town, the raiders swooped down on it, shooting, stabbing, and slaying. No fight, this—it was a massacre.
After the killing came the plundering. Then the burning, as Midvale was put to the torch.
The scene was an inferno, as if a vent of hell had opened up, bursting out of the dark ground in a fiery gusher. Shots, shrieks sounded. Hoofbeats drummed through the red night as the killers hunted down the scant few who’d survived the initial onslaught.
All were slain outright, all but the young women and children, boys and girls. Captives are wealth.
The church was the last of Midvale to burn. It stood apart from the rest of the town, a modest distance separating it from worldlier precincts. A handful of townfolk had fled to it, huddling together at the foot of the pulpit.
That’s where the raiders found them. Their screams were silenced by hammering gunfire.
The church was set on fire, its bell-tower spire a flaming dagger thrusting into night-black sky. Wooden beams gave, collapsing, sending the church bell tumbling down the shaft into the interior space.
It bounced around, clanging. Dull, heavy, leaden tones tolled Midvale’s death-knell.
The marauders rode out, well-satisfied with this night’s work. They left behind nearly a hundred dead men, women and children. It was a good start, but riper targets and richer pickings lay ahead.
The war had been over for almost a year, but there was no peace to be found on the Texas frontier. No peace short of the grave.
But for the ravagers and pillagers who scourge this earth, the mysterious and unseen workings of fate sometimes send a nemesis of righteous vengeance
CHAPTER TWO
From out of the north came a lone rider, trailing southwest across the hill country down into the prairie. A smiling stranger mounted on a tough, scrappy steeldust stallion.
Man and mount were covered with trail dust from long days and nights of hard riding.
Texas is big and likes bigness. The stranger was no Texan but he was big. He was six feet, two inches tall, raw-boned and long-limbed, his broad shoulders axhandle wide. A dark brown slouch hat topped a yellow-haired head with the face of a current-day Viking. He wore his hair long, shoulder-length, scout-style, a way of putting warlike Indians on notice that its owner had no fear of losing his scalp to them. A man of many ways, he’d been a scout before and might yet be again. The iciness of his sharp blue eyes was belied by the laugh lines nestled in their corners.
No ordinary gun would do for this yellow-haired wanderer. Strapped to his right hip was a cut-down Winchester repeating rifle with a sawed-off barrel and chopped stock: a “mule’s-leg,” as such a weapon was popularly known. It had a kick that could knock its recipient from this world clear into the next. It rested in a special long-sheath holster that reached from hip to below mid-thigh.
Bandoliers lined with cartridges for the sawed-off carbine were worn across the stranger’s torso in an X-shape. A sixgun was tucked butt-out into his waistband on his left side. A Green River knife with a footlong blade was sheathed on his left hip.
Some time around midmorning the rider came down off the edge of the Edwards plateau with its wooded hills and twisty ravines. Ahead lay a vast open expanse, the rolling plains of north central Texas.
No marker, no signpost noted that he had crossed a boundary, an invisible line. But indeed he had.
Sam Heller had come to Hangtree County.
CHAPTER THREE
Monday noon, the first day of April 1866. A hot sun topped the cloudless blue sky. Below lay empty tableland, vast, covered with the bright green grass of early spring and broken by sparsely scattered stands of timber. A line of wooded hills rose some miles to the north.
The flat was divided by a dirt road running east-west. It ran as straight as if it had been drawn by a ruler. No other sign of human habitation presented itself as far as the eye could see.
An antlike blur of motion inched with painful slowness across that wide, sprawling plain. It was a man alone, afoot on the dirt road. A lurching, ragged scarecrow of a figure.
Texas is big. Big sky, big land. And no place for a walking man. Especially if he’s only got one leg.
Luke Pettigrew was that man, painfully and painstakingly making his way west along the road to Hangtown.
He was lean, weathered, with long, lank brown hair and a beard. His young-old face, carved with lines of suffering, was now stoically expressionless except for a certain grim determination.
He was dressed in gray, the gray of a soldier of the army of the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy was now defunct a few weeks short of a year ago, since General Robert E. Lee had signed the articles of surrender at Appomatox courthouse. Texas had joined with the South in seceding from the Union, sending its sons to fight in the War Between the States. Many had fallen, never to return.
Luke Pettigrew had returned. Minus his left leg below the knee.
A crooked tree branch served him for a crutch. A stick with a Y-shaped fork at one end, said fork being jammed under his left arm and helping to keep him upright. Strips of shredded rangs were wrapped around the fork to cushion it as best they could. Which wasn’t much. A clawlike left hand clutched the roughbarked shaft with a white-knuckled grip.
