[Texas Rangers 01] - The Buckskin Line (3 page)

Hardly a building remained intact. Most not already burned to the ground were ablaze now as the raiders retreated. A heavy pall of dark smoke hung over the town. Linnville would be little but ashes and ruin when its citizens mustered courage to row back from the sea. Then they would know the true price of Texan treachery.

It mattered not that the people here probably had nothing to do with what happened in the San Antonio council house. They were white. In the eyes of The People, vengeance against one enemy was vengeance against all. They had no patience with individual responsibility, separating the guilty from the innocent. All their enemies were guilty.

Buffalo Caller noted that the head of the column was moving in a northwesterly direction. That pleased him. In a few days he would be back in the familiar and pleasant surroundings of his own country. He had gazed upon the big water once, had felt its wetness and tasted its salt. His own eyes had witnessed a great house that floated upon the sea. He had not seen the fish as large as horses, but he had seen enough. His curiosity was satisfied.

He thought of the boy he had taken and the pleasure a son would bring to his lodge, even one whose hair was red. It was time now to go home, to enjoy the fruits of conquest. It was time for dancing and celebration, for the proud telling of great and daring deeds.

Warren Webb enjoyed riding alongside Michael Shannon on the wagon road to Linnville. The jovial farmer was pleasant company, never short of stories to tell. It mattered not whether they were totally true or were partly a construction of an imagination enriched by Shannon's thirty years or so of drifting from Tennessee across Arkansas and Louisiana and finally down the Texas coast. He had entered into every conflict he could reach, however far it might have been out of his way. Mike Shannon had never seen a fight he did not want to mix into, bringing all the gusto other men put into games and horse races.

Though summer heat made each mile seem like two, conversation helped relieve the weight of fatigue. And if Shannon's speech easily lapsed into the profane, that too afforded its guilty pleasures. For Webb to use such language would he unseemly if not actually forbidden by the Scriptures. He was a circuit-riding minister whose small farm was sadly neglected because of the travel requirements of his higher calling. Coming from someone else, a little profanity offered a tantalizing hint of wickedness, a minor and harmless rebellion he found refreshing. Shannon seemed little inhibited by the fact that his riding companion was a man of the cloth who carried the Word far past the forks of the creek where settlers could not afford a live-there preacher.

He said, "My God, Preacher Webb, this country is gettin' so choked up with people, they'll pretty soon be stumblin' all over one another. I'm studyin' on movin' west, out on the Colorado River. There's land to be had there, not half so dear as this on the coast."

Shannon did not own the tract he plowed. He simply squatted on unclaimed land, using it until he tired of it or a rightful owner came along to take possession from him and his wife. In such a way had generations of poor farmers progressed slowly westward from the Alleghenies to the Ohio Valley and across the Mississippi into Texas, amassing little of the world's goods but incurring little in the way of debt and obligation. They could plant and harvest a crop, then leave when the spirit moved them or a real owner came along with the deed. Shannon had already done that more than once, though he was little if any older than Webb, and Webb would be thirty come October.

For many, squatting was a means of survival in a country where cash was a stranger to most men's pockets. Now and then a farmer might roll up his sleeves and fight when someone came to move him, but most accepted their lot and looked to the west, confident that they would soon find a better place. It was a melancholy fact of life that trailblazers rarely profited like those who followed in their tracks. One sowed. Another reaped.

Webb would miss having Shannon around. "Surely you'd not depart our midst before you've harvested your crop."

"And leave the fruits of my labor for somebody who never broke a sweat? Old Mother Shannon never raised no halfwit sons, 'y God. I figure we'll leave in the fall and locate us a place. I'll break the land this winter and have her ready to seed in the spring."

Webb understood the pioneer wanderlust, for he harbored a liberal case of it himself. It had caused him to leave his boyhood home in Alabama and had brought him by fits and starts to the Republic of Texas after the revolution against Mexico. "I'd not mind followin' after you, Mike. I've an itch to be seein' new country."

"Come with us, then. There's fever in this low ground, and I've noted that you've got an unhealthy cough. There's others movin' out yonder. Where there's people there's a need for somebody to teach the ways of the Lord, lest they go heathen."

Shannon was right. Webb's lungs sometimes ached, and often he felt himself short of strength. He was tall of frame but so thin he sometimes wondered how he managed to cast a decent shadow. He attributed his condition to the humidity and smothering heat of this region near the Gulf of Mexico. A higher elevation should be better for his health.

Shannon said, "It ain't good to stay in one place too long—dulls a man. You wear out one farm, you move on to another. That's what the Lord put the land here for."

"I don't know that He meant for us to wear it out."

"He must've, 'y God, because He gave us so much. There ain't no end to it." Shannon made a broad sweep with his arm toward a horizon flat and endless.

For a while Webb had been aware of a tan cloud hovering low in the northeast. He had first thought it might be a dust storm, because the weather had turned dry of late, but it occurred to him that the wind did not seem strong enough to raise that much dust. Besides, the cloud appeared localized, moving slowly westward.

Shannon thought along similar lines. "Kind of odd doin's yonder, don't you think?"

Webb had seen large horse herds stir dust like that, but this seemed an out-of-the-way place for traders to be taking a remuda, away from the major settlements. "Might be a group of immigrants, strayed off of the main trail to look for grass."

"If so, maybe they're in the mood to hear the Word, and might be me and you could get us a woman-cooked meal."

"You had a woman-cooked breakfast this mornin'. Your Dora is as good a cook as ever I ate after."

"But I can't remember the last time I had a cup of real coffee that wasn't stretched out with parched grain. Maybe them folks have got some."

Webb had intended to be at the Linnville settlement by dark, but he supposed tomorrow would be soon enough. If these people were in need of preaching, it was his obligation to offer it. "Let's go see about that coffee."

First sight of the horses aroused a strange sense of foreboding, a queasy feeling of finding himself in the wrong place. "Did you ever see so many in one bunch, Mike?"

Shannon hauled up on the leather reins. Ordinarily given to shrugging off life's everyday aggravations with an easy "Aw, what the hell?" he appeared suddenly alarmed. "Somethin' queer-lookin' about this. They ain't no traders, and they ain't no movers. What they are is Indians, 'y God!"

Webb could not believe this at first. The only Indians he had seen this near the coast had been small gatherings of Tonkawas, the poorest, raggedest people he had ever encountered, come to barter or beg. Folks said they could be ferocious as hungry wolves against their enemies the Comanches, and that they even had cannibalistic tendencies. To him they had appeared harmless except for a little sticky-fingered thievery.

These were not Tonkawas.

Shannon said, "I hope you have favor in the eyes of your Maker. He'd better not let them see us before we get into that timber yonder."

Webb thought it prudent to be running while he consulted the Lord. He applied his spurs and drew his rifle from its long scabbard beneath his leg.

It seemed impossible that they were not discovered, but the passing Indians gave no sign they had noticed.

Shannon said, "They think we're part of their bunch."

"Our clothes and hats ought to tell them different."

Shannon turned for another squint-eyed look. "A lot of them are wearin' hats, too. The store-bought kind, and I'd bet you a U.S. dollar they didn't buy them."

A few wore coats as well, despite the summer heat. A couple had them on backward, buttons in the rear. Many horses and mules were laden with blankets and bolts of cloth.

Trophies of war, proudly displayed.

Shannon tried to make a rough count but gave it up. "Looks to me like there's a couple thousand horses and mules, and maybe a thousand Indians. Odd thing is, they've got squaws and children with them."

"But who are they? Where'd they come from?"

"Comanches, and I'd guess they're fresh from lootin' the hell out of some place. Headin' back to their own country now, most likely."

"God pity any poor souls they happen upon along their way."

Shannon frowned, mulling on that thought. "There's some farms out yonder, the direction they're travelin'. They'll gobble up them folks like wolves gobble a rabbit."

"We could circle around ahead of them and give warnin'. How's your faith?"

"Strong enough, long as I'm ridin' with a preacher. The Lord ain't goin' to let nothin' happen to you."

The column inched along, the animals traveling in a walk. Webb could see women and children. Were it not for the evidence of loot being carried away, he might take this for a tribe peacefully moving from one hunting ground to another. He saw no outriders, though it stood to reason there must be some somewhere. "They don't seem to be in a hurry or worried about anybody jumpin' them."

Shannon said, "I'd feel safe too, if I was them. It'd take an army to jump a bunch the size of that."

Riding at an angle away from the Indian column, the two remained within the cover of the timber to its southern edge. Webb looked back. "We ought to be far enough now." He set his horse into a long trot, paralleling the Comanches.

Shannon spurred alongside him, glancing warily in one direction, then the other. "They didn't pick all them doodads and all them horses and mules off of the trees. I'd wager they've left a string of dead folks behind them."

"First we need to look after the ones still alive. I'll pray for the others when I have the time."

At the first farm they found a man and his wife working in a garden just south of a log cabin. The farmer listened to their report with suspicion. "A bunch of Indians that size don't seem likely. You sure you don't just see them in a bottle?"

The farmer's wife seemed to believe right off. She brought her hands to her mouth to stifle a cry.

Shannon was not inclined toward patience when calamity bore down. "I been known to sip a little whiskey now and again; but Brother Webb don't drink, nor is he given to lyin'. Take a look at that dust comin' yonder. It ain't no sea breeze, 'y God."

The urgency in Shannon's voice began to temper the farmer's skepticism. "But Comanches, this close to the coast? Must be a bunch of Tonks, or maybe Karankawas."

"There ain't that many Karankawas in the whole nation. Wouldn't make no difference anyway. One'll kill you as dead as the other. You've got to get out of here."

The farmer at last believed, and with belief he reached a state bordering on panic. "Martha! Get the young'uns ready. I'll hitch up the team."

The woman rushed screaming into the cabin. Webb and Shannon helped the farmer harness his mules and saddle his horse. Webb boosted the woman up onto the seat while Shannon lifted three frightened children into the bed of the wagon.

The farmer pointed. "You'll find the Johnson family over that-away where you see that stand of trees. Old Man Blessing and his boys are a mile or so further on. They're the last ones I know of in that direction." He put his horse into a run, trying to catch up to the fast-moving wagon. The woman was applying the whip, and the children clung desperately to the wagon's sideboards to keep from being bounced out.

The Johnsons required no persuasion. Webb had known the young family at camp meeting, and they accepted his word. Their only question was which direction they should run. They wasted little time gathering up a few possessions and quitting their place.

Shannon watched them with regret. "Ain't apt to be much left here when they come back."

"There'll be the land."

Abner Blessing was a towering, rawboned farmer whose broad shoulders appeared to sag under their own weight. Webb had once heard him declare that he had "fit Injuns all over hell and half of Georgia" before coming to Texas. He was ready to take these on. The Blessings had built their cabin of stone, befitting a family of great strength. He pointed to his three grown sons, all rough-cut out of raw oak, in his image. "Me and my boys ain't givin' up our place. We'll take our stand behind them stone walls."

Webb argued, "You'd just as well try to wipe out a hornet's nest with a sharp stick. I don't doubt your fightin' spirit, Mr. Blessing, but you know what happened at the Alamo."

"Them fellers killed a heap of Mexicans."

"But they lost the battle."

"Me and the boys, we've worked hard to build what we've got here." Reluctantly Blessing turned to his sons. "Tom, Bert, Jim ... go gather the horses and mules. Them varmints may burn the house, but be damned if they'll add our stock to their string." The young men hastened to comply. Shannon moved to help them. Blessing said, "I hate to leave here without a fight. Where you reckon them red devils've been?"

Webb could only shrug. "They were comin' from the direction of Linnville when we saw them."

"Linnville." The farmer clenched his fists, his knuckles bulging like pine knots. "I've got a sister there, and her family. You don't reckon ...

"I don't know."

Misery came into the man's blue eyes, followed by a building anger. "Everybody can't just up and run. There's bound to be somebody with the guts to stand and fight."