The Outlaw Josey Wales (10 page)

His face hardened. It would be no leisurely ride to Mexico. He was surprised that his name was so well known, and the term “Regulators” was new to him. Lone watched and waited patiently for Josey to speak. Lone Watie was an expert trailsman. He had been a cavalryman of the first order, but he knew by instinct that this climate of Texas required the leadership of the master guerrilla.

“We’ll night-ride,” Josey said grimly, “lay out in the washes and tree cover by day. Farther south we git, better off we ought to be. Let’s ride.” They pointed the tired horses south, giving wide berth to the fires of the trail herds.

By the morning of the fourth day they sighted the Brazos and camped in a thick scope of cottonwoods a half mile back from the Towash road. Little Moonlight curled at the base of a tree and instantly was asleep.

There was no more horse grain, and Lone rope-picketed the horses on the sparse grass … and lay sprawled on the ground, his hat covering his face.

Josey Wales watched the Towash road. From where he sat, back to a cottonwood, he could see riders as they passed below him. A lot of riders, singly and in groups. Occasionally a wagon feathering up the powder-gray dust… and here and there a fancy hack. Toward the west he could see the town only dimly visible in the dust haze and a racetrack at the edge. Racing day; that meant a lot of people. Sometimes you could move ’mongst a lot of people and bear no notice at all.

Josey worked at a heavy tobacco cud and mused his thinking. toward a plan. He saw no blue riders on the road. Mexico, that temporary goal for temporary men who had no world and no goal, was a long way off. They would grub supply in the town and turn south toward San Antonio and the border.

“Anyhow,” he mused aloud, “iff’n Little Moonlight don’t git a saddle … or a hoss … she’ll bump her bottom off on thet paint.” He would wake Lone at high noon.

Josey didn’t know the name of the town. They were here by chance, having struck the old Dallas-Waco road after midnight and turned off as the first streaks of light hit the east.

The town was Towash, one of many of the racing and gambling centers of central Texas. There was Bryan to the southeast, which gained fame of a sort when Big King, owner of the Blue Wing saloon, lost that establishment on the turn of a card to Ben Thompson, the Austin gambler and ex-Confederate pistol heller. Brenham, Texas, farther south of the

Brazos, was another center for the hard-eyed gentry of card and pistol.

Towash was a ripsnorter. The town is gone now, with only a few crumbling stone chimneys to mark its passing… west of Whitney. But in 1867 Towash made big sign … Texas-style. It boasted the Boles racetrack, which attracted the sports and gamblers from as far away as Hot Springs, Arkansas. There was a hand ferry across the Brazos and close by a grist mill powered by a huge waterwheel. Dyer & Jenkins was the trading store. There was a barbershop that did very little business and six saloons that did a lot, dispensing red-eye… raw. Typical of many towns in the Texas of 1867, there was no law except that made by each man with his own “craw sand.” Occasionally the Regulators out of Austin rode in… always in large groups … more for protection than law enforcement.

When this occurred, it was the custom of the bartenders to move down the bar, rag-wiping as they went, announcing sotto voce, “Blue bellies in town.” This for the benefit of all the “papered” gentry present. Some faded, and some didn’t. In such cases another Texan often died with his boots on … but took with him a numbered thinning of the ranks of the Regulators in the fierce undeclared war of Reconstruction Texas.

A light whistle brought Lone to his feet. Little Moonlight squatted beside him as Josey talked and with a stick drew their future trail in the dirt.

“Ye goin’ in too?” Lone asked.

Josey nodded, “We’re way south, last they heard tell of me was the Nations.”

Lone shook his head in doubt, ‘The talk is everywhere, and yer looks is knowed.”

Josey stood up and stretched, “Lots of fellers’ looks is knowed. I ain’t goin’ to spend the rest 0’ my life wallerin’ ’round in the brush. Anyhow, we ain’t comin’ back thisaway.”

They saddled up in the late afternoon and rode down off the hillock toward Towash. Little Moonlight and the red-bone trailed behind.

Chapter 12

Josey had not seen blue riders on the road because they were already in Towash. Led by “Lieutenant” Cann Tolly, twenty-four of them had quartered in two of the straggling log cabins that fronted the road on the edge of Towash. They were Regulators, and now they walked the street in groups of four and five, pushing their way with the arrogance of authority through the crowds and into the saloons. They were the same breed of men as their leader.

Cann Tolly had once tried to be a constable, wanting dominance over other men without the natural qualities that gave it to him. He had failed, miserably. When first called on to restore order in a saloon scuffle, he had been flooded with fear and had melted into a simpering, good-fellow attitude that brought laughter from the saloon toughs.

When the Civil War came, neither side held attraction for Cann Tolly. He affected a limp and as the War progressed he cadged drinks in saloons with tales of battles he had heard from others. He hated the returning Confederate veteran and the straight-backed Union cavalryman with equal ferocity. Most of all he hated the stubborn, tough Texans who had laughed at his cowardice.

Joining the Regulators gave him his badge of authority from the Governor, and he quickly toadied his way up in the ranks with the sadism that marks all men of fear … passing it off as “law” enforcement. Always backed by men and guns he tortured victims who showed fear in their eyes by insult and threat until the tortured men crawled lower than Cann Tolly crawled inside. Where he saw no fear he had them shot down with quick ferocity and so eliminated another “troublemaker.” His was a false authority maintained by a false government. Lacking the true authority of respect by his fellow human beings, he enforced it with threat, terror, and brutality … and therefore … inevitably … must fall.

Lieutenant Tolly had spent the morning visiting those known peculiar dregs of the human race who take neither side of an issue but delight in ferreting out and betraying those who do. Clay Allison, the crippled pistoleer, had shot up Bryan three days ago and was believed headed this way. King Fisher had passed through town the day before, trailing back south … but had not stayed around for the fun … peculiar for a heller like Fisher, who loved games and action. But there would be enough to go around.

Late afternoon saw an end to the races, and the crowds poured back into Towash. The “boys,” whoopin’ it up, shot off their pistols and stampeded into the saloons to continue their betting urge at seven-up and five-card stud. The Regulators began looking them over.

It was into this confusion that Josey, Lone, and Little Moonlight rode their horses. Lone and Little Moonlight stayed mounted, as planned, across the street from the big sign that said “Dyer & Jenkins, Trade Goods.” Josey rode to the hitch rack in front of the store, dismounted, and entered. To one side a crude bar stretched the length of the store, and jostling, laughing cowpunchers drank and talked. The trade-goods section was empty except for a clerk.

Josey called off his needs, and the clerk scurried to fill them. He would like to see the man gone as soon as possible. A man with two tied-down holsters was either a badman or a bluffer… and there weren’t many bluffing men in Texas. Josey watched casually through the big window as blue uniforms sauntered down the boardwalks. Four of them paused across the street and looked curiously at the stoical Lone and then moved on. Two punchers circled the big black horse, admiring the fine points, and one of them said something to Little Moonlight. They laughed good-naturedly and walked into a saloon.

Josey selected a light saddle for the paint. He accepted the two sacks of supplies handed to him by the clerk and paid with double eagles. Now he moved slowly to the door and paused. Holding the saddle in one hand, he half dragged the two sacks with the other. With the easy air of a man checking the weather he looked up and down the boardwalk … there were no blue uniforms.

As he stepped to the walk he could see Lone start the black walking toward him… Little Moonlight behind… to take some of the supplies. He turned two paces up the boardwalk toward his horse and came face-to-face with Cann Tolly… and flanking him were three Regulators. At the same instant he had stepped from the store they had come out of the Iron Man saloon. Fifteen paces separated them from Josey.

The Regulators froze in their tracks, and Josey, with only the slightest hesitation, dipped his head and took another step.

“Josey Wales!” Cann Tolly yelled the name to alarm every Regulator in Towash. Josey dropped the saddle and the sacks and fixed a look of bleakness on the man who had shouted. The street became a clear distinctness in his eyes. From the side he saw Lone halt his horse. Men poured out of saloons and then fell back against the sides of buildings. The boardwalk emptied, and cowpunchers dived behind water troughs and some flattened themselves on the ground.

He saw a young woman, her eyes a startling blue, staring wild-eyed at him … her foot fixed on the hub of a wagon wheel. She had been about to mount to the seat, and an old woman held one of her hands. They were both motionless, like wax figures. The girl’s straw-colored hair shone in the sun. The street was death-quiet in an instant.

The Regulators looked back at him … half surprise, half horror was on their faces. Another minute and the Regulators all over town would recover from the momentary shock and he would be surrounded.

Josey Wales slowly eased into the crouch. His voice shipped loud and flat in the silence … and it carried a snarl of insult.

“Ye gonna pull them pistols, ’er whistle ‘Dixie’?”

The Regulator to his left moved first, his hand darting downward; Cann Tolly followed. Only the right hand of Josey moved. The big .44 belched as it cleared leather in the fluid motion of rolled lightning. He fanned the hammer with his left palm.

The first man to draw flipped backward as the slug hit his chest. Cann Tolly spun sideways and made a little circle, like a dog chasing his tail, and fell, half his head blown off. The third was hit low, the big slug kicking him forward, and he flopped on his face. The fourth man was already dead from a smoking pistol held in the hand of Lone Watie.

It had been a deafening, staccato roar … so fast that a single shot could not be distinguished. The Regulators had never cleared leather. The awesome speed of the death-dealing outlaw ran through the crowd like tremors of an earthquake. Bedlam broke loose. Blue-clad figures ran across the street; people jumped and ran … this way and that… like chickens with a wolf among them.

Josey sprang to the back of the roan, and in an instant the big horse was running, belly-down, and at his saddle was the head of the black with Lone laying forward on his neck.

They drummed west down the street and veered north, away from the Brazos. They had to have distance, and there was no time to cross a river.

Regulators dashed for their hitch-racked horses, which stood, all together, before a line of saloons. As they were mounting, an Indian squaw, probably drunk, lost control of her paint horse and dashed among them, scattering men to right and left and stampeding horses that bolted, reins trailing, down the street. A Regulator finally struck her in the head with a swung rifle butt and brought her crashing to the ground. The riders mounted, rounded up the running horses, and chased after the fleeing killers.

Behind them Little Moonlight lay motionless in the dust, a bloody gash across her forehead, but one hand still holding the reins of a head-down paint … a gaunt red-bone hound whined and licked the trickling blood from her face. Near her the four Regulators lay untended, sprawled in violent death, their blood widening in a growing circle … soaking black in the gray soil of Texas.

Cowboys mounted their horses to depart for the far-flung ranches whence they came Gamblers left on their high-stepping horses to return to the saloons of towns and villages that were haunts. With them they carried the story. The story that smacked of legend. The pistoleer without match in speed and nerve… the cold bracing of four armed Regulators strained the imagination with its audacity and boldness. The Missouri guerrilla, Josey Wales, had arrived in Texas.

When the news reached Austin, the Governor added twenty-five hundred dollars to the federal five thousand for the death of Josey Wales, and fifteen hundred dollars for the unnamed “renegade” Rebel Indian who had notched a Regulator at Towash. Politicians felt the threat as the shock waves of the story spread over the state. The hard-rock Texas Rebels chortled with glee. Texas had another son; tough enough to stand … mean enough; enough to walk ’em down, by God!

Two covered wagons rolled out of Towash that afternoon and crossed the ferry on the Brazos, headed southwest into the sparsely settled land of the Comanche. Grandpa Samuel Turner handled the reins of the Arkansas mules on the lead wagon, and Grandma Sarah sat beside him. Behind them their granddaughter Laura Lee rode with Daniel Turner, Grandpa’s brother. Two old men, an old woman, and a young one, with nothing left behind in Arkansas and only the promise of an isolated ranch bequeathed by Grandma’s War-dead brother. They had been warned of the land and the Comanche … but they felt lucky … they had somewhere to go.

It was Laura Lee, Josey had seen, straw hair and prim, high-collared dress, frozen in the act of mounting the wagon. Now she shuddered as she remembered the burning black eyes of the outlaw… the deadly snarl of his voice… the pistols shooting fire and thunder… and the blood. Josey Wales! She would never forget the name nor the picture of him in her mind. Bloody, violent Texas! She would not scoff again at the stories. Laura Lee Turner would become a Texan … but only after baptism in the blood of yet another of Texas’ turbulent frontiers … the land of the Comanche!

PART III