torture seeped into the next with no relief from the blistering heat. Isatai told his people to persevere, that winter would bring rain—but that respite would not last: they would suffer another time of great dryness.
The rains had come as predicted. The Comanche bands praised the power of Isatai. And all but the most hardened cynics believed when they were told that the shaman had vomited up a wagonload of cartridges right before the eyes of his most faithful believers.
“Our prayers are answered!” cheered Antelope. “A man to lead us in wiping out the white man.”
“I too want to see the bullets—then I will believe,” Tall One said. “Without question, then I will believe in Isatai.”
But the messengers exclaimed that Isatai had swallowed the bullets again.
“So there is nothing left for us to use killing the yellow-leg soldiers?” demanded Antelope.
Sheepishly the messengers replied, “The whole wagonload is gone.”
Tall One shivered again as the wind knifed through the canyon, its striated red walls rising eight hundred feet above the creekbed where his people camped. Very soon, when winter at last released its tight hold on these prairies, the gray-eyed chief would send pipe bearers among all the bands of Comanche still roaming the Llano Estacado. Others would carry his message on to the Cheyenne and Kiowa reservations. If the chiefs took up the gray-eyed chief’s pipe and smoked it, they vowed to join the Kwahadi in war.
If, however, the chiefs decided not to touch that offer of the pipe, then they would be told to step out of the way. War was coming with the spring winds.
The mere thought of it made Tall One’s blood run
“You said you spent time among the comancheros?” asked Captain Lamar Lockhart, stepping over to the brush where Jonah Hook dropped his saddle and blanket.
“For a long time I had reason to believe my boys was sold off to traders headed for Mexico.”
Most of the company had quietly turned to listen in. With his Indian partner, the new man had ridden with the Rangers for the better part of two months now—a long time without opening up and pouring out all that much of himself.
Lockhart nodded. “Cattle and horses, Mr. Hook. The
“Satan’s handiwork, they are!” Johns snapped. “Good and kind Jesus—help these sinners see the error of their ways!”
The company captain pulled off his hat, the print of his hatband lying across his forehead like a wide scar as he pressed ahead. “Those traders will take anything the Comanches bring them what they got off the settlers they murdered. Anything worth stealing, that is. Only what the
“A bad combination, that one,” June Callicott added, his face as hard as a war shield, his cheeks flaring red as if he sweated chinaberry juice. “Whiskey and guns.”
For as long as there had been this ground called Texas, there had been Comanches and whiskey and guns. A deadly mix for those who wanted nothing more than to bring the fruitful hand of civilized man to these plains. Come here with a wagon and a milk cow and a family, come here to raise crops and cattle and a passel of children.
As far back as the Texas Revolution there had been Rangers—first organized in 1835 as local committees of safety and correspondence, right in the midst of their war with Mexico. Silas M. Parker was empowered to engage the services of three companies of Rangers whose business would be to range and guard the frontiers between the Brazos and Trinity rivers. From then on, in one incarnation or another, the Ranger existed on that high, wild prairie where he was first given birth to meet the outlaws of three races: American desperado, Mexican bandit, and Indian warrior. Down through the years the function these few men served might have changed in detail, but never did the Ranger cease standing as a bulwark between the lawless, savage elements and the coming of civilization.
No matter what other description might be given of him, the Ranger was a fighting man.
It took a lot of doing in the years after the revolution, but the few eventually subdued many of the tribes— formerly warlike—such as the Tonkawa and Caddo. The Rangers began pushing back their wilder cousins like the Kiowa and Comanche just before Texas went from being a republic to joining the Union itself, when Texans disbanded their Rangers, believing that it was now the duty of the federal government to protect them.
After more than a half-dozen years of waiting for the troops to come make a stand against the renewed raids of the wild tribes, Texans figured they had endured enough. In the late fifties the Rangers flourished once more. Again they issued the call, and young men rode in to answer the clarion. Again they sent out the companies to construct their modest outposts strung like distant beads on a strand of spiderweb, all the way from the Brazos on the north clear down to the Rio Grande flowing against the border of Mexico itself. Small bands of a dozen or more were scattered to live among the far-flung pioneer families tenaciously dug in like hermit bugs out there in that brutal, beautiful country. The Rangers were ready to ride out at a moment’s notice—to track down and punish any and all who cast a shadow of lawlessness and savagery across the whole of west Texas.
Years later when the South ripped itself away from the Union, the call went out for men to join the likes of John Bell Hood. Fighting men answered that resounding trumpet, leaving gaping holes in the fabric of Texas’s frontier defense. Quickly sensing the change, the wild tribes brought out their drums once more and danced over the scalps. Again the red tide savagely pushed against the scattered white settlers, reversing all the good the Rangers had accomplished.
When the men of Texas returned home after Appomattox, they found they had been defeated on two fronts. Not only had the Yankees whipped them in those four bloody years of war back east, but while they were gone, off to save the Confederacy, the savage horsemen of the southern plains had risen up to reclaim their buffalo ground. While some of the sons of the South continued to cry out that they would never surrender, a few even fleeing across the Rio Grande to continue their war, most accepted their defeat and rode home to put family and life back together once more.
And wound up staring right into the blood-flecked eye of another war.
How could a man think of plowing and planting when there were warriors roaming about, ready to undo everything a man might accomplish?
The Rangers offered a private $1.25 per day for pay, rations, clothing, and the services of his own mount. To sign on, each of them had to be ready with a trail-worthy horse, saddle, bridle, and blanket, along with a hundred rounds of powder and ball. Officers—the captain and his lieutenants, in addition to the sergeant of each company —were paid a pittance more. For most the pay did not really matter.
No more were these men mere green recruits. While most were young, very few weren’t proficient with a gun—most had been proven in battle.
To Hook it seemed that most of the men who rode with Company C were hard-wintered and humped in the loin. Seemed too that they could stare eyeball to eyeball with death itself, ride for days in the saddle and gallop straight-up into daunting odds.
So it was that Jonah found comfort in this irregular company of men. Nothing like Sterling Price’s Missouri Confederates. Further still from the galvanized U.S. Volunteers he had joined to fight Indians in Dakota Territory after the Great War. Probably as far from the Army of the West as any civilians could be, the Rangers still weren’t anything like militia. No matter, their captain stood them to a grueling inspection each morning. While Company C did not dress in uniform, their captain nonetheless did expect the men to wear clothing that was clean and functional, demanding that the men keep their horses fit and their weapons in fighting trim.
“We may not be military,” Lamar Lockhart had reminded them before they rode out from Jacksboro. “We may be nothing more than irregulars—but we have no need of looking like bobtails, do we?”
