[Texas Rangers 02] - Badger Boy (6 page)

Billing's face glistened with sweat, his eyes wide. "Oh God! Are you sure he's dead?"

"Dead enough." Rusty knew the disgust was palpable in his voice, but he did not care. He dismounted, fighting an urge to club Billings as he had clubbed the Indian. "Instead of goin' after one of your own, you came runnin' to try and finish mine when he was already down. I ought to've let him gut you."

A quick look around assured him that no other danger was imminent. The war party had broken up. Warriors were fleeing in several directions, most pursued by rangers.

A single rider approached. Fearing he might be Comanche, Rusty hurried to reload his rifle. He was relieved to recognize Sergeant Forrest.

Billings's fright gave way to impatience. "you just goin' to stand there? Get this horse off of me."

Rusty glared at him. "You brought this on yourself. I wanted to keep that warrior alive."

"What for? There's still plenty of Indians. I'm ordering you, Shannon, get me out of this fix."

"Order away, damn you. I'm not in the army yet."

He tugged halfheartedly, in no real hurry. The horse's dead weight barely budged.

Billings's voice went shrill again. "Put some muscle into it. You want those savages to come back and catch me helpless?"

Rusty saw merit in that proposition. "That'd suit me, except they'd catch me, too. I turned my horse loose to save your ungrateful neck." True, he had let go of the reins, but the dun horse had stopped a hundred feet away. The excitement over, the animal was beginning to graze. Rusty saw no reason to point out that he would be easy to catch. He watched Forrest's approach.

"Maybe me and the sergeant together can get you loose."

Forrest dismounted on the right-hand side because of the wooden leg.

Billings complained, "It's about time you got here. I can't get this redheaded peckerwood to be any help."

Forrest frowned. "I saw enough to know that this red-headed peckerwood saved your life, and with some risk to his own." He leaned down to inspect the fallen animal.

Rusty said, "There's still a little life in that horse, Sergeant. You'd best watch out for his hooves if he commences to kick."

Straining together, Rusty and Forrest managed to raise the animal a little. Billings wriggled free just as the sergeant's breath gave out and forced him to turn loose.

Forrest told Billings, "Better be sure that leg's not broke." His voice sounded hopeful.

Billings rubbed the limb and found it intact though skinned and bruised. He rebuked Rusty. "You ought to've shot that Indian good and proper the first time. He wouldn't have killed my horse." Still sitting on the ground, he jerked his head quickly from one side to the other, eyes wide with concern. Looking for Indians, Rusty supposed.

"What'll I do now?" Billings demanded. "I've been set afoot."

And we ought to leave you that way, Rusty thought. It'd do you a world of good, walking back to Belknap. "There's several Indian ponies runnin' loose. I'll try to catch one for you."

"Then don't just stand there talking." Billings arose shakily and limped to where the Indian lay. He picked up a painted bull-hide shield. With the Comanche's own knife he cut a leather thong from around the warrior's neck and removed a small leather pouch. Rusty knew it would be the Indian's medicine bag, containing sanctified articles supposed to protect him from harm. They had brought him no luck today.

Billings cut two eagle feathers from the warrior's braided hair. "Too bad he wasn't wearing a headdress. That would look good hanging on my wall."

Rusty reflected that Comanches did not often encumber themselves with full headdress on a hasty raid like this one appeared to be. Billings stuck the feathers into his hatband. Rusty hoped they were infested with lice. "I'll see about catchin' you a horse."

Sergeant Forrest said, "I'll go with you."

Billings reacted with fright. "Don't go off and leave me here alone."

Rusty worked up a little saliva and spat dust from his mouth. "If any Indians show up, just lay down and play dead."

Riding away, he told the sergeant, "I almost wish I'd left him and that Comanche to sort things out for theirselves."

"Don't expect gratitude. If anything, he'll resent you more than he already does."

"After I pulled his bacon out of the coals?"

"He's a proud man, though God knows he has little to be proud about. To him you're an inferior, and you've made him beholden to you. That'll itch at him like a case of the mange."

Slowly the rangers gathered. Captain Whitfield was the only casualty. He had taken an arrow in the hip. The wound did not appear deep enough to cripple him permanently, but his ride back to Doc Belknap would be grueling punishment. Blood poisoning was always a possibility.

The captain tried to cover the pain with a forced smile. "At least we've scattered them to hell and gone."

Rusty pointed to the dead warrior. "That was the leader, I think. I was hopin' to take him alive so we could use him to make the others turn back."

Whitfield pressed a bloodied neckerchief against his hip. "We set half of them afoot. Ain't much they can do but give up the game and go back where they came from."

Typically when Comanches split they regrouped at some previously agreed-upon gathering point. Rusty could see three Indians half a mile away, moving north. Two were on horseback, a third walking.

Whitfield said, "Let's back off a ways and give some of them a chance to come get this one. Then we'll follow them so close they can't do anything except return to the river."

"We?" Rusty asked. "You'll do well just to get back to camp."

Whitfield saw the logic and nodded in reluctant agreement. "I'll take one man with me in case I fall off my horse and can't get back on by myself. I'm leavin' you in charge Rusty. You and the sergeant." He made a point of leaving the lieutenant out.

Billings was freshly mounted on a horse Rusty had caught. It was skittish, fighting its head. Rusty hoped it would keep the officer so busy staying in the saddle that he could cause no trouble. A brand on its hip indicated it had belonged to some settler before a Comanche had laid claim. Billings objected, "We've already lost a lot of time. This wasn't our responsibility in the first place, chasing somebody else's Indians."

Whitfield said, "You can go with me back to camp. The rest'll come along when they finish the job."

That suggestion was met in the same sour spirit it was given. "I intend to file a protest when we return to Austin. You people will have hell to pay."

Whitfield grimaced at the pain in his hip. "File and be damned. Take over, Rusty." He turned his horse and started away, giving no indication that he cared whether Billings came along or not.

Sergeant Forrest said, "I'll go with the rangers."

Billings accepted the decision with poor grace. "You make certain you still have all of them when you get back to Belknap."

Forrest's only answer was a grunt that could mean anything or nothing. He glanced at Rusty. "You're holdin' the cards."

Rusty nodded. "We'll do what the captain said ... back off and give them room. If that's all right with you."

"It's all right with me if we don't see Austin before next Christmas."

They waited afoot, giving their horses a chance to rest. After a time, several warriors who had not lost their mounts returned to retrieve the man who had fallen. They lifted him and placed him belly-down on a black pony. Shortly they caught up to several who were afoot, some of them wounded. The rangers followed at a couple of hundred yards, close enough to be an irritant but not enough to present an immediate threat.

Len Tanner remarked, "To them, we must be like mosquitoes that buzz around your face but don't bite."

Rusty said, "We want them to know we could bite if they was to give us reason."

It did not appear that the Indians were going to give them reason. They trudged northward at a pace slow enough to accommodate those who had to walk.

The sergeant pulled in beside Rusty. "You were unhappy about having to kill that Indian."

"I've killed Indians when I had to. This time, I oughtn't to've had to. If we'd made him a prisoner, I figured the others would give up the raid."

They gave it up anyway. It's my feeling that you had more reason than that."

Rusty considered before he replied. "If things had taken a different turn a long time ago, I might've been ridin' with them myself."

The sergeant's mouth dropped open. "With the Indians? But you're white."

"You've heard of the big Comanche raid on the Gulf Coast back in 1840? I was there. Just a little tyke, not much more than walkin' good. Best anybody could figure, the Indians killed my folks and carried me off. Intended to raise me for a warrior, I guess. Later on, when volunteers hit the Indians at Plum Creek, Mike Shannon and a preacher named Webb found me on the battleground. Mike and Dora Shannon gave me a home."

"Do you remember anything about your real folks?"

"Just a foggy picture, is all. Never could even remember their names. And nobody ever found out who they were."

"Tough, being left an orphan at that age."

"The worst of it is not knowin' who I am. By raisin', I'm a Shannon. By blood, I have no idea. I see strangers and wonder if they might be kin. I might have kinfolks livin' right down the road from me and I wouldn't know it. Sometimes I wonder if I'm kin to
anybody
. It's like there's a piece of me missin', and I'll never find it."

"Everybody needs family. Without family, a man is like a leaf loose on the wind."

"My real folks couldn't have done better by me than the Shannons did. They treated me like I was their own. But if it hadn't been for the fight at Plum Creek, chances are I'd've been raised Comanche. Or I'd be dead."

"So y

"Don't know as I'd call it kinship, exactly. After all, they must've killed my real folks, and they've killed lots of other good people. But I could've become a Comanche myself if it hadn't been for luck."

"Maybe it wasn't luck. Maybe the Almighty had other plans for you."

"I don't think He planned for me to go back east and shoot at Union soldiers."

"I've suspected all along that you're not much in sympathy with the Confederacy."

"When Daddy Mike came home from the Mexican War, he hung an American flag on the wall where we'd look at it every day. He never wanted to forget what him and others like him went through to get Texas into the Union. Even after Texas seceded, he never backed away from that."

"So now the Shannons are gone and you've got nobody."

"There's a voting woman down on the Colorado River. If this war ever gets over with …

"Good for you. When a man spends his life alone it seems like he shrivels up inside. We all need somebody."

Rusty grimaced. "Nobody knows that better than me."

At last the visible remnants of the Comanche raiding party reached the Red River. Rusty was reasonably sure the rest would come along soon, or perhaps had already crossed at some other point. Once the Indians reached the far side, the rangers rode up to the river to water their horses. Rusty was careful where he let his mount step. The Red was notorious for quicksand. The riverbed was wide, but the river itself looked deceptively narrow. Much of the water seeped along just beneath the wet sands, out of sight.

The sergeant cased up beside him. "You know, don't you, that the other side is Union territory?"

"It's also Indian territory."

"But the Indians we trailed have gone on. If someone from this party were to cross, there's nothing I could legally do to make him come back."

Rusty grasped what the sergeant was trying indirectly to say. His skin began to itch. "I've got no business on the other side. No Texan has."

His mind ran back to the sorrowful time when he had been among a party of volunteer rangers escorting friendly Indians across the Red River against their will, throwing them off a Texas reservation they had been promised would be theirs forever. He had felt ashamed, though he understood the settler anxiety that had led to Indian removal. The intervening years had not lessened his feeling of guilt. To go across the river now would reopen old internal wounds, even if the Indians did not inflict new external ones upon him.

The sergeant said, "If we happened to look the other way, you could slip free and go wherever you want to."

"Where I'd most like to go would be my farm down on the Colorado River."

"Other conscription officers might find you."

"There's a lot of timber down there. I'd make them hunt awful hard."

"Then I'd suggest you hang back when we start east. I'll make it a point not to be watching you."

"You'll be in trouble with Lieutenant Billings."

"A mite more won't make any difference. The day the war is over I'll be leaving the army anyway. It doesn't have much place for a one-legged soldier."

Rusty reached for the sergeant's hand. "Maybe in better times we'll see one another again."

"That'd pleasure me." The sergeant turned to address the other rangers. "Anybody share Shannon's leanings?"

Len Tanner said, "If you can stand my company, I'll string along with you, Rusty."

"Thought you'd decided to go to the army."

"I'm afraid I'd have to kill that Billings before we ever got to Austin. At least notch his ears and teach him the ranger code of conduct. I expect there's some silly law against that."

"I'd be tickled to have you."

No one else offered to stay behind. With luck, Rusty thought, the war might be over before any of these men reached the battlefields back East.

Aside from his farm, far away, almost every possession he had was on his back or tied to his saddle. But he had been obliged to leave his black horse behind. To try to retrieve Alamo now was too risky. Returning to camp a second time would ask more from good luck than one man was entitled to.

To the sergeant he said, "Please ask Captain Whitfield to watch out for my horse. If the outfit breaks up he can take Alamo home with him. I'll find him when this foolishness is over with."