“By my clean soul, Captain, not a damn word.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ll have a paper ready for you to sign. Affix your name and go home to Florida, if you’ll take my advice.”
Keel turned his bulk around effortlessly and walked toward the doors. Gannon remained planted, like he himself was in one of those stalls. He could not believe that his life had just been upended for doing his job. He tracked a killer, attempted to bring him in, the man assaulted his horse, was trampled, died—and now a decorated veteran with an unblemished service record in war and peace was being asked to resign.
His inclination was not to. This was an outrage, and the officer felt that by giving in he dishonored his parents and their parents. Three generations of Gannons owned a farm in Florida where they raised cattle and pigs. One branch established a fishery on the Atlantic coast. The Gannons helped feed a nation and, when the nation was divided, those who did not fight continued to send pork, beef, and fish to the Confederate troops. Hank Gannon had remained in Texas after the war because his parents had urged him to bring the Gannon name and values west, to the Pacific seaboard. To raise a family.
Thinking of that brought Constance front and center. What would she think about all of this? If he were to run? There wasn’t even time to find out.
Make time, he told himself.
There was a rickety back door, behind the stalls, and Gannon took it. He ran past the twin troughs, past the back of the feed store, and reached the Breen home. Constance’s mother was in the kitchen, baking the apple pies she sold to tourists as well as to town folk. Gannon rapped on the sill above two cooling pies. With a little gasp of surprise, followed at once by a scowl of disapproval, Mrs. Breen looked down in thought before leaving to get her daughter. Constance entered the kitchen hurriedly, with pained eyes creasing her flawless skin. She went to the open window.
“Hank!” she cried. “I was just in the street seeing what was going on—”
“The man I was chasing was killed,” Gannon cut her off.
“What?”
“It was an accident, an issue between him and my horse,” Gannon said. “But the captain wants me to leave.”
“Leave—the force? Town?”
“Both.”
It took her a moment to digest the information. “Dear Lord, Why? You said it was an accident—”
“Being the only living witness, what I say doesn’t hold water,” Gannon told her. “It was an accident, but Keel doesn’t think people will believe that.”
“What people, the black police?”
“Maybe them, but he’s mostly worried about the governor,” Gannon told her, refusing to believe that the men of all colors and nationalities that he had worked so closely with, camped with, fought alongside, would turn on him. But then, Keel had done just that.
“You took an oath,” Constance said. “An oath to protect all citizens of Texas. If the captain backs you—”
“The captain is not convinced I acted as carefully as I should have.”
Constance hesitated. “Did you?”
Gannon took several seconds to answer. “I think so. Truth told, I also wanted to get back to you. Maybe I was sloppy. Maybe. But whatever the reason, a man died.”
“I don’t believe this,” she said. “You should rest. Talk to the captain again when you’re clearheaded. You’ve been up all night—”
“Won’t budge him,” Gannon said. “No, I’ve got to leave town while I sort this out,” he went on. “But I didn’t want to go without a farewell.”
Constance shook her head, said firmly, “Hank, you have to stand up for yourself!”
“I agree, but not today. Not with everyone riled up or washing their hands of me.” He leaned carefully over the pies, took Constance’s shoulders gently, and kissed her on the forehead. He had intended to kiss her mouth until he saw her mother and father—a carpenter with strong hands—watching them from the living room. Maybe it was the shadows, but his expression seemed dark and disapproving.
“Hank?” Constance asked.
Gannon took a step back. “I will find a way to let you know where I am and what I’m doing.”
“Find a way—how?”
“I don’t know,” Gannon admitted. “Homing pigeon, if I have to,” he joked. “Would you get my wages from the captain? I don’t particularly want to see him again. Buy yourself somethin’ pretty.”
“I’ll fight for you,” she said, smiling through tears. “Whatever happened, I believe in my heart that you mean no man harm.”
Gannon smiled tightly as he took another step back then ran off to the barracks on the other side of the stable. He did not look back when Constance was not correct. During the war he had inflicted a great deal of injury, and he meant every wound of it.
Martha Breen reentered the kitchen. She was a narrow-faced woman with an upturned nose and alert eyes beneath a bun of gray hair. Constance made a point of not looking at her. The younger woman turned to leave the room. Martha touched her shoulder as she passed.
“I believe we should discuss this,” the older woman said.
“Were you listening?”
“I’m your mother.”
“To what end should we ‘discuss this,’ Mother?”
“That man has dishonored himself,” the older woman said. “Yet you have just promised to see him again, to speak up for him.”
Constance stepped from under her mother’s hand. She paused in the doorway. “Hank was wrongly accused and pursued, just like the slaves you and father once championed,” she said.
“No, not like them,” Martha snapped. She pulled at the underside of her floral sleeve, a habit she had to calm herself. “The situations are nothing alike. This man has admitted to a crime.”
“An accident, not a crime,” Constance corrected her.
“Murder no less,” Martha replied.
“What of the man he was chasing? He killed.”
“He had cause.”
“I don’t wish to discuss this further,” Constance said and turned to go.
This time her mother grabbed her arm. She had strong fingers, equal to her will. “I do not wish to discuss this murderer either,” she said. “I have no doubt he will desire to see you at some point. When he does, you will not see him.”
“Would you say that, Mother, if the victim in question were a white Confederate and not a black man?”
“Men are innocent in this country until a jury declares otherwise—”
“Men other than Hank,” her daughter said.
“—unless they have admitted their guilt. If Hank were innocent of a crime, he would not have been dismissed from the police force.”
“You know that isn’t true,” Constance said. “His ‘crime,’ as you well know from eavesdropping, is having created a political hot potato.”
Martha’s lined expression hardened even more. “If that is true, Constance, then consider what this ‘hot potato’ would do to your career and to your future.”
“My future with that gelding from the legislature?” she asked.
“You are impertinent! That gentleman has a name, Senator Daniel Delacorte, and you refuse even to talk with him!”
“Because I love Hank—”
“Your ‘vision of manhood.’”
“Not just a vision,” Constance protested. She felt betrayed by that. The young woman had come home and told her mother about their first meeting; Martha never let her forget the word she had used.
“It’s only infatuation,” the older woman persisted. “I was a girl once. I recognize the malady.”
“Even if that were true, and it is not, what of Delacorte? He is the opposite of holding me in any kind of thrall. The very look of him bores me, Mother.” The emphasis was Constance’s dismissal not just of Martha but of what the older woman felt for Hank. “That man you would push on me—”
“For your own welfare, child!”
“—I would bear children and he would bore our children, un
less he made them just like him. And that I could not have. I would not.”
Martha was silent for a moment, regrouping to resume this familiar attack.
“But you are educated,” the older woman said. “You read about history and science. How can a former slaveholder from a swamp hold any lasting interest?”
“Hank has lived life, outside of Texas. Outside of fancy halls. Besides, I do not seek a scholar or social position.” She gently removed her arm from the woman’s grip. “I will be late for giving Mr. Jones his reading lesson. And frankly, Mother, I am more concerned about the future of an illiterate black man than I am about my own.”
With that, the young woman left the room. She brushed past her father Albert, a slope-shouldered man with a round face, curly gray hair, and a bit of a belly stuffed behind his overalls. He stood with his lunch pail ready to return to work. He had not tried to push another man on her the way her mother had. He had actually seemed to like Hank; he cottoned to any man who had worked with his hands, who rode hard, who was bold in his actions—even one who had fought for the South during the War.
Albert did not speak. There were no tears from Constance, only a haze of anger at Captain Keel and disbelief at the way fate had thrown her for sacrifice on an altar her own family had taken part in building.
* * *
Gannon’s grip was packed and waiting outside the barracks. Keel would not have ordered that; had that been his intention, he would have said so. It was a final indignity, a spit in the eye from one or more of his fellow officers. It would not have been Sgt. Calvin, who had no patience for petty vendettas; and it would not have been Officer Hernando Garcia, a Tejano who was too easygoing to want to hurt anyone but Comanche. Not that it mattered. It had been done.
Gannon wanted to go inside and see who was there. But that would have given the captain another reason to arrest him. It also would have delayed his departure, something that Gannon suddenly wanted very much.
The Texas police officer slung the seaman’s canvas duffel bag over his shoulder. It had been a gift from his fisherman uncle Maple. For now, the love of his family and the love of Constance sustained him as Gannon returned to the stable, mounted the saddlebred, and was beyond the town center by 10:30.
PART TWO
Blood and War
CHAPTER ONE
October 16, 1871
It was a sky dark as a coal mine and sprayed with stars, each one proudly brilliant in the still night. A pair of Appaloosas stood obediently beyond the glow of a campfire. Grease from the two spitted hares caused the blaze to crackle and sputter, the aroma enticing the youth to lean farther out from under his woven blanket and into the cloudy gray smoke.
“Treasure all, not just some,” said the older man sitting cross-legged behind him.
Puzzled, the younger man looked over. “What have I missed?”
“It is not just the cooking meat you celebrate,” the brave informed him. “It is the spirit of the rabbits you inhale. Just as, in battle, you take the heart or hair or eyes of the fallen, so it is with the death of every living thing.” He thumped his bare chest. “We become stronger with every deed.”
His name was Roving Wolf. His long black hair was braided, he wore a long white neckerchief damp with sweat, and he sat in his own blanket with his sister’s son Soon to Be a Man at the bottom of Cedar Valley. His knee boots sat beside him, drying from an earlier creek crossing. On the back of his right forearm was a blue cactus ink tattoo of a knife, warning all of the strength in his arm. The hair of both men was worn in braids, and around the older man’s head was a beaded band with an eagle feather at back; below it was the tail of a wolf. Around the ankles of both men were leather bindings that were used to rub the sides of horses, for control, without abrading the skin of the ride.
The slope was gentle here, almost like a river that had gone dry. It was where Roving Wolf used to hunt as a boy, a place he knew well. The insects, the birds, the rodents were all known to him. The trees were larger, but the stones were familiar. It had been easy making his way through here, even in the dark. It was safer to travel, then; there was a war against the Comanche and the soldiers who made that war preferred the sun. Not so their Tonkawa scouts, who knew the territory well and had lifetimes of hate for the Comanche. But there was a saying, “Unknown dangers are as harmful as known dangers—and more plentiful.” One could not prepare for everything, and Roving Wolf was not one to live his life in hiding. The young man beside him must learn that, as Roving Wolf did when he was young.
The name Soon to Be a Man had caused the young man some embarrassment over his twelve years. Roving Wolf had brought him here to tell of the past week’s events, to present him with a special gift, and to explain why even the elder Comanche, at more than thirty years, was still becoming a man.
The gift was first, something the boy’s mother had expressly wished. Before he and the boy sat, Roving Wolf had gone to his horse and removed a bear hide that had been carefully bound in sinew from the animal. The elder Comanche held the parcel respectfully in both hands. The boy had not been expecting anything and seemed unsure what to do.
“This is yours,” Roving Wolf explained. “It belonged to Great Bear and now it is yours.”
“My father?” the youth said reverently.
“It was his dying wish that you have this,” Roving Wolf told him. “And as the white man may come to our teepees for blood, you must be able to protect your mother, your people.”
The boy accepted the package. Eager fingers tugged at the lacings. He collected them carefully and set them aside before he lifted the flaps of the skin. The light of the campfire revealed the most magnificent weapon he had ever seen. It was a bone the size of his own forearm. It was sharpened, at the end, to a knife point. At the other end, set in the base of the knobby hilt, were three large claws.
“Your father earned his name at your age,” Roving Wolf said. “Tell his story as your mother told it to you.”
“It . . . it was a time of drought and my father . . . he and a friend were fishing,” Soon to Be a Man said. “They were attacked by a starving bear for their fish. The friend was mauled . . . and my father came between them, with a torch from their campfire.” His eyes drifted almost reverently to their own campfire. The wood they had used was barely the size of his foot. “Was it a large torch?” the young man asked. “Was he very close to the bear?”
“Only the Big Father knows,” Roving Wolf said. “But he protected his friend, who was thereafter called the Ugly One, and your father was no longer Running Fox but Great Bear.” The brave pointed to the weapon. “With but one eye, Ugly One made this from the leg of the bear. He became a maker of totems, and your father fell in battle with the Tonkawa. It was his dying wish that you possess this weapon . . . and, with it, earn his name. When you have spilled blood, you shall be known as Great Bear.”
The boy was overwhelmed—by the weapon, by the honor. He took a moment to raise the weapon in both hands, utter words of thanks to the spirit of his father. The flickering of the fire cast a shadow of the weapon on the rock behind them, made the bear seem to live once more. The spirit of the animal was present. To Roving Wolf, the young man seemed older, stronger, greater when his arms came back to his lap.
“The bear is very powerful,” Soon to Be a Man remarked.
“He is.”
“But my father defeated it,” the boy said.
“That day,” Roving Wolf said. He raised a cautioning finger. “Each bear is a new challenge. It may not behave as its kin.”
“And the wolf? Tell me of your name.”
“A she-wolf let a babe live while he was yet in the belly of his mother,” Roving Wolf replied.
“You?”
Roving Wolf nodded. “My mother was gathering nuts, and the wolf met her eyes from the brush. My mother did not flee but met the eyes of the wolf, equal to equal.” The brave held his hands palms down, fingertips to fingertips. “The wolf came forward and walked by. Her spi
rit remained.”
“Is the wolf more powerful than the bear?”
“It is different, like the eagle is different from the crow or the snake from the toad.”
“But in a pack, the wolf is more powerful?”
“In some ways,” Roving Wolf answered. “When you rely on others, your strength is wider but that is not the same as greater. In some ways, the pack diminishes the one because the hunting and killing are shared.”
“A war party is the same?”
“In very many ways it is,” the elder brave said. “My father, Swift Hawk, once sat where I sit and told me of the day he went to the ancient lands to find his spirit.” Roving Wolf held his hand, palm up, toward the lowlands unseen in the dark. “There had been a sickness, and the tribe had suffered greatly. Even the medicine man was unable to help.”
“Your father?” the youth asked eagerly.
Roving Wolf smiled. “No. His father. Swift Hawk wished to help him. So he went to the place where, tradition tells us, fire once belched from the earth and smoke covered the land and death touched all things. He sat on a hard, hard ridge and prayed to the Big Father to speak to him through that place”—Roving Wolf grinned—“but with a quieter voice, if the god would not mind.”
The young man laughed at that.
“Sitting there, at night, Fire Hawk had a vision. Our people in a field with no teepees. The sun caring for them. He went back to the settlement and told his father what he had seen. Comanche helped Comanche, old helped young, mother helped father, and the vision was made real. The tribe recovered. There was a thing that was done in part by one, in part by the many.”
“I like tradition,” Soon to Be a Man decided. “I understand what it says.”
War Valley Page 3