“Long-range rifle at night? Yeah, I wanted to know about that.”
“That was Williams,” Long said. “He fired.”
“At boy,” Roving Wolf said hotly. He jabbed a finger at his own forehead. “Shot kill him.”
“I’m sorry,” Gannon said sincerely. “Bastard always was a good shot.” He looked at Long, who was just rising from the body. “By what authority did he shoot?”
The officer finally drew on his cigarette. He knew he was in trouble here; Negroes ranked higher than Indians. In the field, the command was his.
“Joe did this on his own cussed authority,” Long said. “I—I didn’t tell him to. He just did it. We were only s’posed to watch for Comanche.”
“Why?”
“Battle out west,” Long said. “Army all tied up there. Captain Keel figgered some’d come this way, so he sent a pair of teams out.”
“Soldiers came to our land, many soldiers,” the Indian said. He thumped his chest. “We defend.”
“I thought something like that when I heard horses movin’ through the other day,” Gannon said. His eyes dropped to Williams. “Williams here had his own feud, yeah?”
“That’s a likelihood,” Long said, then added, “or maybe he was bored or itchy or he just got stupid. People get that way out here, Gannon.”
Gannon got the point, right in his windpipe. He spit. “Talk less, Long. You may make me get stupid.”
Roving Wolf was looking down at the dead man, shaking his head. “Northern tribes—hate. Kill Comanche. They always want here.” He lifted an arm, made a large, horizontal, smearing gesture with one hand. “Great water.”
“Right,” Gannon said. The sea offered a ready supply of food and access to trade. Oklahoma tribes with historic rivalries to the south had only one route to the Gulf of Mexico: war.
“Long, me and this fella are gonna leave you,” Gannon said. “You stay put, smoke all your butts till morning, and then take Williams back to the cap’n.”
“Hank, this man murdered a scout,” Long said. “He has to answer for that.”
“He just did,” Gannon said. The former officer came forward now, stopping beside the Comanche. His personal .12-gauge scattergun tucked under his right arm, he toed Roving Wolf gently in the side. “You may get up.”
The Comanche rose, dead grass and leaves falling from him as if from a ghoul departing his grave.
“You cannot do this,” Long warned.
“It’s done.”
Long shook his head firmly, casting big shadows on the ground behind him. “You got away once. This time the captain will come after you.”
“For what? Saving your skin?”
Long’s eyes drifted to the Comanche. In the firelight, his tattoo seemed to write. His shadow also seemed alive. “This Indian is a murdering renegade. He killed my partner, flung a pelt fulla scorpions at us—he is dirt and he must be brought in. Listen, Hank,” he added with a whisper of softness. “Maybe if you do it, Captain Keel will rethink what he did. You can see Miss Constance.”
The mention of her name seemed to harden the man unexpectedly. “Don’t you remind me what I’ve lost,” he warned. “I’ve been livin’ off snake and quail out here, thinkin’ of very little except Keel an’ what he did. It was wrong, to think first about ap-peasin’ the gov’nor and his fellow roosters . . . just like bringin’ in this Comanche would be wrong. You already took from him—his lands and his travelin’ companion.”
“You’re mixing things up,” Long said. “I didn’t do anything. We didn’t. The action in Blanco Canyon was military. It was ordered by the Indian agent—”
“Long, just shut your mouth up. We’re leavin’.”
The officer did not move and then, suddenly, he did, reaching for his holstered Remington. A loud report from the rifle, fired from the hip, chewed up the earth a foot to Long’s right. Dirt landed on the fire, dulling it.
“Next one is in your arm,” Gannon threatened.
He took a step forward. Long retreated very slightly but enough to let him know the warning was taken seriously. “Do not test me. Don’t even talk. Keel took my life from me, an’ I don’t want t’hear his name again.” Gannon stood quietly, everyone remained still for a long moment. “But you can do something for me, man-to-man. You can tell Constance I will see her again.”
Long nodded once but otherwise remained frozen, praying that there were no more scorpions under his clothes to make him jump. He had always liked Gannon and wished they had met in some other fashion. He wanted to know where Gannon had been, what he was planning. But his lips were pressed shut. Smoke trailed up his nostrils from the dying fire and from the cigarette. He coughed inside his mouth.
“Hank?” the Indian said, and pointed to the knife that was still on the ground.
“Okay,” Gannon said.
“You just armed the enemy,” Long said with open disbelief.
“Yeah,” Gannon agreed. “But you’re the one gave him reason to kill.”
The Comanche bent and recovered his knife. He did not wipe the blade on the blanket but on the grasses. It was a show of respect to Gannon, not to further defile the dead man.
Slipping the blade into its doeskin sheath, Roving Wolf led the way into the darkness, Gannon following. Their footsteps faded before the small, dim fire had died. Only then did Rufus Long consider what he would have to do next: sit up with the dead man until morning, making sure his remains were not defiled. Come the dawn, he would put him on his horse and they would ride into Austin. He was not eager for those labors—or to face Captain Keel with the news that it might not have been the best idea to let Hank Gannon simply ride out of town . . .
CHAPTER TWO
October 17, 1871
Hank Gannon was usually not surprised by what God had up His big, white sleeve. Most times, God didn’t have to do much but move the world along like a shepherd staffing his sheep. But then there were moments like this that mystified Gannon with their very specific nature.
After leaving Austin, his heart heavy and his prospects thin, the suddenly rootless lawman did not feel as though God had a plan for him. Gannon had intended to go to Houston or San Antonio for work. He wasn’t prepared to return to Florida, like a cowed dog; but working on a ranch or farm or fishing seemed to make sense. For the moment, he didn’t care what he did as long as it wasn’t law enforcement, bounty hunting, soldiering, or anything else that required tracking. No God there.
But as that dark day had grown old and night settled on his aimless southern ride, something else settled too—the realization that Gannon loved the art of tracking, of challenging and honing his survival and sensory skills. He found himself thinking back to the trackers who worked with his unit during the war, with the Texas Special Police. Indians, all of them. Was the skill born into them or acquired? Or was it just dormant in everyone but the Indian, who used it every day? Gannon had no idea. He didn’t know if he could become as good as Chea Sequa, “Red Bird,” who had stayed behind when the men of the 2nd Cherokee Mounted Rifles quit the Confederate cause. But he did know this. “Chi,” as they called him, liked long odds. He said they made him better. And if a Cherokee could become a better tracker, so could a white man.
Captain Keel had spoiled that. And Gannon wasn’t sure what kind of law work he could get anyway, given that this unjust stain would follow him wherever he went. During the war, when his survival depended on it, he heard the refrain, “Go home to Florida.”
Gannon had received letters from home. Florida was no longer Florida. It had been blockaded by Union gunboats during the war, to prevent it from shipping much-needed cattle and salt to Confederate troops. He had learned only recently that his cousin Clementine had become a smuggler, carrying those goods southward, to Cuba, in exchange for gold. Both of those industries were crushed. Many Floridians, blacks included, had run to the North to serve in the Union army and had not returned. Countless others died of battle wounds and starvation. The state was invaded in 18
64, Reconstructionists took over in 1865, and now Florida was run by northern business concerns and freed slaves.
“Home.”
It had died a brave death, the body profaned, the spirit bottled and smothered.
No, Keel’s words had not been advice, as the captain himself had surely realized. It had been a dismissal. Keel liked things orderly, with the politics kept off the stove. Get out of my way, don’t cause me trouble. The more Gannon had listened to those words in his head, the less settled he became. He stopped riding with a destination in mind. Instead, he rode with a goal forming somewhere behind his eyes. Fuzzy at first, like foothills creeping with morning mist. Then sharper, finally gleaming as a single word: redemption.
But a goal is always easy. That distant hill, that remote horizon—easy to see, less so to reach. So he had ridden, thought, camped, thought, trapped, and while he thought some more he used pelt and sinew to fashion his sleeping cape, a wide bedroll that he also wore on his shoulders to smell like something other than a man. It brought prey to him. It shielded him from trackers like the Comanche. It made Gannon feel more than just man, as a Seminole who tended pigs once told him. Maybe that, too, would help him track. His thought had been: give it time.
Now, this. God’s handiwork seemed very present, of a sudden. But leading to what end?
Gannon and the Comanche recovered the white man’s horse before walking toward the site where Soon to Be a Man had fallen. They did not speak. Roving Wolf had no questions and Gannon did not want to intrude on the Indian’s grief. Different tribes and different members of those tribes each had their own way of honoring the dead. There was no chanting, no gesturing. Gannon knew, however, that they were taking a different path than the way Roving Wolf had come. Not because he had seen the Indian moving but because it was a very still night and the Comanche would have left his scent along the trail. By now, nighttime predators would have picked it up and gone there. One did not want to startle a pack of coyotes in the dark. They might attack and the horse would panic, for sure.
When they reached the campsite, Gannon collected the two horses while Roving Wolf knelt over the dead man. It was too dark to see very much, but he could see the Comanche kneeling silently beside the body, his hands cupped and rising up several times as though he were making an offering. Gannon guessed he was ushering the spirit to its guardian. It was a common enough gesture among all the tribes he had ever encountered. When he was done, Roving Wolf gathered the boy in his blanket and lifted him onto his horse. The animal tried to step away but Gannon was ready for that, gripping the mane firmly.
The frame-style saddle was made of cottonwood and covered with rawhide, attached by a single cinch cut from the same hide. It had a low arched pommel and an elk-horn cantle that held a lariat. The other horse was similarly outfitted. The Comanche removed his rope and used it to secure the dead man into burial position before the warmth had departed his body; the knees were bent upward to rest against the chest, the legs were lashed back to the thighs, the head was bent forward, and the arms were bent and tied to either side of the chest. The binding was done quickly, skillfully, even in the dark, the Comanche having practiced it many times in his life. The women of the tribe and the medicine man Green Snake practiced healing arts; the braves trained for death. When he was finished, the bundle was placed upright in the natural curve of the saddle. It was a precarious seat for a long journey but Roving Wolf would take the journey slowly. There might yet be other police in the valley, or trappers, or cowboys at camp. If they presented no threat, he would let them be.
For now.
Throughout the process Gannon stood respectfully, seeing little but knowing what the brave was doing. When Roving Wolf was finished, he took the two sets of reins from Gannon.
“You have no home,” Roving Wolf said.
“Not here,” Gannon said. Then he added, “Not anymore.”
“You are welcome,” he said, inclining his head toward the west.
Gannon heard that and choked up a little. “Driven out by my own kind, offered refuge by a Comanche.” He exhaled. “It’s a temptin’ offer but when you ride in with your—who was he, anyway?”
“Soon to Be a Man, the only son of my sister. A great heart and a great curiosity.”
“I wish I’d gotten to meet him,” Gannon replied. “I think if I went with you there would be great anger at me, at my skin.”
“There are always rabid foxes,” the Comanche replied.
Gannon smiled at him. “True. But if you can’t shoot ’em, best to go wide around them.”
Roving Wolf nodded once. Then he squatted, felt the ground around the camp.
“What is it?” Gannon asked.
The brave replied, “Bones that have been returned to the earth.”
Standing and looping a hand through both reins, the Comanche raised both index fingers and put them side by side, facing Gannon. Even in the dark, he knew that the Comanche had made the symbol for “union.” The white man did the same. Mounting his horse and tugging the other pony behind, Roving Wolf moved slowly along the canyon to the west.
* * *
“Shit.”
The man who swore, Moses Hawthorne, was squatting on a scrub-covered bluff some fifty feet above a plain at the western edge of Cedar Valley. Below him was an encampment of Comanche braves. He was squinting into a spyglass that had once belonged to his mentor, trapper Jim Bridger. The collapsible brass tube moved slowly up, down, left, right as he tried to pick out details. There were no campfires, no teepees, but the scout roughly numbered the Indians at fifteen to twenty based on the shadowy horses he could discern moving in the darkness. What concerned him as much as the Indians was the fact that there was a steep but straight path from where they were to where he was. And just below his position he had spotted what looked like the shape of a human foot. It was difficult to be certain in the dark, but it was like an Indian to explore every avenue of offense, defense, and escape from a place. This ridge was both.
Hawthorne shared that information, and his assessment of their situation, with his fellow Texas Special Police officer. Austrian émigré Kurt Ahrens stood several paces behind him, chewing tobacco, spitting, and soothing the horses from the sounds of the night.
“We still got a bunch o’ night,” Hawthorne half-turned and whispered through a mouth of few teeth. “I say we git. Sun finds us here, we in a fight.”
Ahrens spit again. “We stay with them,” he said.
“Yeah. More like they stay with us. Then they spit-roast our dicks for starters.”
“I knew a soldier, in the Old Country, shot his own head,” Ahrens said casually. “Better than be caught by Gypsies.”
“Fine story. Makes my case, don’t it?”
“His job was track Gypsies,” Ahrens said. “Our job is track Comanche.”
Hawthorne hated the Austrian’s logic because he was right. But being right and “shooting your own head” was not a skill he had learned from Bridger. The legendary trapper had taught him survival. Dogging the trail of savages who had just put up a wild-dog fight in Blanco Canyon was not how he wanted to die.
“You so eager, why don’t you stay an’ I ride back to Austin, get men,” Hawthorne suggested.
“We have to know where they go, what are their arms, and how many are wounded,” Ahrens told him. “Then you go. With information.”
That was logical, too, and equally villainous. Hawthorne was not a fearful man, but he tried to be a sensible one. You don’t go up a mountain in a snowstorm. You don’t try to ford a swollen river. And you don’t pit two men against a much larger party of Indian braves.
“They are not like bison,” Hawthorne muttered as he folded his spyglass. “You shoot, they do not run.”
“That is why buffalo will outlive them,” Ahrens said.
Damn the man, Hawthorne thought. His logic was like those snakes Hank Gannon used to talk about, big ones that could crush a man. There was just no getting away from it.
&
nbsp; Hawthorne slid the spyglass into its leather loop on his belt then looked out at the camp.
“You rest now,” Ahrens said. “I wake you for your turn to watch.”
There was finally some logic he could sign on for. Creeping from the ledge, he lay his shoulders against a half-rotted pecan log, crossed his arms across the front of his buckskin jacket, and was quickly asleep. It was the one talent Bridger had told him all trappers needed, the ability to stay awake for extended treks through dangerous territory, and to sleep whenever the opportunity presented—like a sudden gully washer that forced you under a ledge.
“Waste not,” was the old trapper’s saying for pretty much everything, which included sucking the marrow from bear bones and eating their eyes. Pan roasted, they were actually okay.
* * *
Hawthorne was awakened when a gloved hand clapped over his mouth. He gasped into the glove, which was the point. Ahrens’s face loomed over him in the darkness.
“Shhh.”
It was barely more than the sound of blowing out a candle. The Austrian removed his hand and, fully awake, Hawthorne rolled onto his left side. His Remington was in his hand and his ears had pinpointed what Ahrens had also heard. There were two sets of hoof-falls coming toward them. They were about thirty or forty feet distant; it was still too dark to see anything, but white men typically did not travel in the dark.
Their own horses snorted and clip-clopped suddenly, briefly, as they became aware of the other animals. Whoever was approaching stopped.
Ahrens tapped Hawthorne, motioned right in front of his face so he could see. He pointed north and indicated that the tracker should go south. Hawthorne nodded. However unlikely, if someone opened fire it was a bad idea to be bunched together.
The sound had been coming from the front end of the log, where Hawthorne was facing. He straddled the pecan, taking care not to bang anything on the bark or crush a rotted old nut on the other side. He continued moving sideways while Ahrens crept in the opposite direction. Every now and then, the tethered horses would renew their nervous sounds.
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