[Texas Rangers 05] - Texas Vendetta (33 page)

Dick appeared intrigued.

Andy said, “We could tell them we lost his tracks. It should all seem natural enough. Big’un took his shot at Jayce and saw that it didn’t kill him, so he quit the country. Lots of people drift away and are never heard from again. Everybody would figure after a while that he found him a safe place and decided to settle there for good.”

“But what about his body?”

“All we need is a shovel.”

Dick gave him a quizzical look. “That’s crafty. Some of your Comanche raisin’?”

“I’m just thinkin’ it would take care of several problems. If Jayce knew Big’un is dead he might decide not to leave. Then I’d have to arrest him and take him to trial. You know how that would likely come out, especially in this county.”

Dick said, “I know a farmer who lives over the hill. He’s not much for talkin’, and he’d lend us a shovel without askin’ questions. What about Big’un’s horse?”

“We’ll unsaddle him and turn him loose to find his way home. Folks’ll figure Big’un caught a fresh horse and left for a better climate. With him and Jayce both gone, maybe the feud will die away.”

They wrapped Big’un in his saddle blanket and buried him with his saddle and bridle. Andy watched the bay horse roll in the dirt then wander off, oblivious to the drama that had played out around him. Andy took a tree branch and smoothed the ground, hoping to hide the fact that it contained a grave. “It don’t seem right without somebody sayin’ some words over him.”

Dick shook his head. “Wouldn’t make any difference. He was beyond prayer a long time ago.”

Scooter held the wagon team’s reins, for his leg still pained him when he tried to sit on a horse. Rusty, his shoulder still bound, sat beside him on the wagon seat, restless eyes searching over the terrain. Andy rode horseback beside them, watching nervousness build in both Rusty and Scooter. The extra horses were tied on behind the wagon.

Rusty said, “The more I think about this, the more I get to wonderin’ if it’s right to burden the Monahans with me. I could heal all right in the Ranger camp.”

Scooter asked, “What if they don’t like me? And I don’t know if I’ll like them either.” He still grieved over parting with his father.

Andy replied, “The Monahans wrote and told you-all to come, that they’d be glad to have you both. Anyway, Rusty, you’ve already been took off of the pay roster. Captain said anybody who’s been shot up that much ought to retire before he gets himself killed. You’ve gotten to be a bad risk.”

The captain had come near to taking Andy off of the roster too. “Look at your record,” he had said. “You went off to transport a prisoner but lost him.”

“It was the sheriff that lost him,” Andy countered.

“Even so, he got caught a second time and you lost him again. Then there was the old bank robber, the boy’s daddy. You had a chance to grab him but didn’t. And that jailhouse arsonist—you ought to’ve caught him but let him slip through your fingers. Lord knows where any of them are now. That is not a good record for a Ranger, even a green recruit.”

Andy had said, “I’ll bet I can learn better, sir.”

“From what I’ve been told you showed initiative on several occasions. That is a point in your favor even if the results were not as we might have wanted. I’ll give you another chance, but you are on probation, Private Pickard.”

Andy had thanked him for his generosity and then accepted leave to take Rusty and the boy to the Monahan family. Andy knew he had not followed the letter of the law, but he felt that he had served justice. That was the more important consideration.

A wheel dropped into a shallow hole and jolted the wagon. Scooter said, “Sorry, Rusty. I didn’t see that one. I’ll never make a teamster.”

“You can make yourself into anything you want to be. You’ve just got to work hard at it.”

“I’d like to be a Ranger someday, like you and Andy.”

“You can do it if you want it bad enough. But by the time you get there things are liable to be considerable different. In my early days we mostly fought Indians. That’s about come to an end. Now we’re fightin’ robbers and stock thieves, murderers, border jumpers, and the like. But we’ve got more to fight them with, like the telegraph. And they’re startin’ to build railroads across Texas. In a few years a Ranger will be able to put a horse on a train and take him halfway across the state in a day, then jump off ready for a chase. Show me the criminal who can beat that.”

Andy said, “The way you talk, I think you’d still like to be a part of it.”

Rusty shook his head. His hair that used to be red was rusty now, gray softening the color. “No, these last weeks convinced me it’s time to hang up the six-shooter and take hold of a plow handle. This body has taken too many beatin’s.”

“The state will lose a good Ranger.”

“But it’ll gain a pretty good farmer.”

A boy of about Scooter’s size loped toward them on a paint horse, waving a misshapen felt hat over his head. He shouted, “Andy! Rusty!”

Andy pushed out a little in front to meet him. “Howdy, Billy. Still growin’ too fast for your clothes, I see.”

The boy rode up on Rusty’s side of the wagon. “You been shot again? How many times does this make?”

“Too many,” Rusty said, grinning. “How’s all your folks?”

“Ready and anxious to see you.”

Billy gave Scooter a critical scrutiny. “You the boy that’s comin’ to live with us?”

Scooter was ill at ease. “That’s what everybody’s tellin’ me.”

Billy considered for a bit. “I guess that’ll be all right.”

The Monahan homestead came into view. Billy said, “I’ll lope on ahead and tell them to put supper in the stove.”

Rusty leaned forward as if he could see the place better from the edge of his seat. “You’ll like these folks when you get to know them, Scooter. They’re the nearest thing to a family that I’ve got. I’ve seen happy days with them, and I’ve seen bitter tears.”

“So I’ve heard,” Scooter said.

Andy had told Scooter most of what he knew about the Monahans, about the tragedies they had suffered during the war because they had held to their Union sympathies, about their struggle to rebuild after the hostilities, about the loss of the patriarchs and the death of Josie Monahan, who was to have been Rusty’s wife.

Rusty said, “The Monahans have been through more hell than most people ever ought to suffer. But they’ve always gotten up, squared their shoulders, and started again.” His face went grim. “That’s what we all have to do when trouble knocks us down. Else life will grind us into the ground.”

“Like it did you when Josie was killed?”

Rusty looked at him sharply, then at Andy. “He told you about that, did he?”

Andy looked away, his face reddening. He had not considered that the guileless boy would say whatever popped into his mind.

Scooter said, “He told me Josie has a sister who’s a lot like her.”

Rusty’s expression slowly mellowed. “Maybe a little bit.”

The whole Monahan clan was waiting as the wagon pulled up to the house. Mother Clemmie, limping a little from lingering aftereffects of a stroke, led the greetings. She hugged Andy, then Rusty, taking care for the bandaged shoulder. She turned then to Scooter. “This is the boy you wrote about? I’m goin’ to have to fatten him up some. Like he is, he won’t hardly throw a shadow.”

Andy shook hands with everybody who came up to greet him, then realized he had missed someone. Alice.

She and Rusty stood on the other side of the wagon. They had shaken hands, then neglected to turn loose.

Preacher Webb gave the blessing before supper, expressing special thanks for Rusty’s survival and wishing a better future for the new boy who was to share the family’s bed and board. Through supper Scooter and Billy kept eyeing each other nervously.

Afterward Webb sat down to read his Bible, though Andy was sure he already knew it by heart. Billy asked Scooter to go with him out to the barn. “We’ve got some new puppies. Maybe you can help me name them.”

“I’ve never had a puppy,” Scooter said.

“You can have one of these for your own if it likes you.”

Andy stood at the window, watching the two boys start walking toward the barn, then break into a run. He turned back to help Clemmie and her married daughter Geneva clear the table. He said, “I’d best go look for Rusty.”

Clemmie caught his arm. “I wouldn’t disturb him right now, was I you.”

Andy saw Rusty sitting on the front porch, talking to Alice. Clemmie smiled. So did Geneva. Clemmie asked, “How would you like some more of that cobbler pie, Andy?”

He said, “Sounds real good to me.”

Life in Texas was changing rapidly in the post–Civil War decade of the 1870s, the setting of this story. The long and much-resented federal occupation had ended. The disenfranchised former Confederates regained their vote, allowing them to elect state and local governments of their own choosing. They adopted a new constitution guaranteeing their individual rights.

The Texas Rangers organization had disintegrated during the war years and was abolished by the federally established postwar government. One of the first acts of newly elected governor Richard Coke in 1874 was to reorganize this force, which had first been called into service by colonizer Stephen F. Austin in 1823. Though a special frontier battalion stood watch at the outer edges of settlement, guarding against Indian incursion, a majority of the state’s Rangers now concentrated on suppression of crime and violence.

A vigorous army campaign in the fall of 1874 drove most Comanches, Kiowas, and other hostile Plains tribes to reservations. Buffalo hunters were systematically annihilating the vast shaggy herds, forcing the Indians into dependency on the government and opening the Plains for permanent white settlement. Apart from relatively small outbreaks, Indian trouble was over for most of the state. The Apaches continued to roam a few more years in far West Texas, but settlement there was sparse and remained so until most of the more productive Texas land was taken.

Law enforcement was the Rangers’ main concern now, and the challenge was formidable. The war had left Texas threadbare. Veterans returned to find their families in deplorable straits, often losing land and home to opportunists who flocked in to reap where they had not sown. The excesses of corrupt officials had bred a widespread contempt for law and an acceptance of violence as a means to accomplish what might otherwise not be possible.

From its beginnings, Texas had been subject to savage feuds. In one case Sam Houston felt obliged to call out the army to quell a particularly bitter fight. Other feuds flared in the combative postwar climate and required response by the Rangers to cool them down.

The border with Mexico had bred racial conflict almost constantly since the Texas revolution and would continue to do so well into the twentieth century. Border jumpers were a major problem for the Rangers in the 1870s. Captain Leander McNelly once stacked the bodies of a dozen bandits in Brownsville’s town square as an object lesson. However, the Rangers had never forgotten the Alamo and were prone at times to administer punishment to Mexicans simply for being Mexicans without regard to guilt or innocence.

Cattle drives to the northern railroads were bringing fresh money into an impoverished state. They increased the value of range cattle and encouraged rustling, sometimes on a massive scale. Rustling required physical labor, however. Robbing banks was easier.

The banking industry grew in response to Texas’s gradual economic recovery. Banks became a prime target for robbery by organized gangs as well as ambitious individual entrepreneurs who might rationalize that they were simply carrying on the Civil War against Northern interests.

The Rangers embraced new technology to help them meet these challenges. The spread of the telegraph meant that word of a crime could be flashed instantly across the state. Texas railroads, though few and of a limited regional nature, were beginning to plan expansions that would revolutionize travel by the early part of the next decade. That would allow Rangers and other law officers rapid transportation no outlaw’s horse could outrun.

A few people were already experimenting with Alexander Graham Bell’s new invention. Shortly telephone lines would be spreading across Texas like spiderwebs. A Ranger in Fort Worth would soon be able to talk to one in El Paso and others in between. Such notable outlaws as Sam Bass and John Wesley Hardin, who earlier had been able to hit, then run for the brush, would soon find themselves hemmed in by wires and rails. They could still run, but it would be increasingly difficult to hide.

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

TEXAS VENDETTA

Copyright © 2003 by Elmer Kelton