[Texas Rangers 01] - The Buckskin Line (11 page)

Mike grunted. "I have, and it's damned foolishness."

"A lot of people are dead serious about it. And there's been more trouble up on the reserve. A bunch of white men rode in there and started a fight. When it was over there were dead on both sides. So the army has been ordered to move all tribes off of the reservation ... take them north of the Red River into Indian Teritory."

Mike scowled. "Even the ones that helped us fight the Comanches?"

"That's what we're told. I'm afraid most Texans don't put much faith in Indian loyalties."

"Damned poor piece of business. What ever became of gratitude?"

"Tom wants to take some of us up there and help see that the move stays peaceful."

Mike observed, "Then he'd best not take Isaac York."

"Isaac's not goin'. And neither are you, Mike. You'd best stay here and watch over Dora."

Rusty expected Mike to roar in angry protest because he had always welcomed any opportunity for adventure. Instead, he seemed almost relieved at not going. His easy acceptance brought home to Rusty—though he needed no reminding—that his foster mother was failing.

Mike gripped Rusty's shoulder. His legs might be weak now, but his hands were strong as steel. "You'll have to serve for both of us, young'un. It won't be a happy sight to watch. Gather up what stuff you need. I'll go saddle my black horse for you."

Rusty remembered the bitter ending of the last trip and did not want to go. But Mike had drilled the notion of duty into him too deeply for him to voice his reluctance. He rolled a blanket, collected a little grub and the rifle, and went in to say a hasty good-bye to Mother Dora. She clutched his hand as if she feared she would not see him again. She whispered, "Hurry back as soon as you can."

"Just a week or ten days, Preacher Webb says. It won't be forever."

"Not for you, but maybe for me."

Rusty blinked back the threat of tears and tried to make light of the turbulence he felt. "I'll be back before you know I'm gone."

Mike led the saddled horse out of the corral and watched Rusty tie the blanket behind the cantle. "Tom Blessing is a good man, so listen to what he says. But don't put all your faith in other people, because sometimes they can be wrong. Do your own thinkin'. In the long run every man has got to answer to himself, and
for
himself." He looked up at Webb, in the saddle and waiting. "Keep an eye on him, won't you, Preacher?"

"Don't you worry about Rusty. You take care of Dora."

Rusty and Webb cut across the river and put their horses into a trot. They intercepted Blessing and six others after a couple of hours. Webb explained about Mike's remaining behind. Blessing took the news with regret. "I always felt that everything would turn out all right when I could see Mike Shannon at my side. You've got a big pair of boots to fill, Rusty."

Rusty did not know how to reply. Webb smiled. "He'll fill them. He's still gettin' his growth."

Rusty glanced quickly over the men and was pleased to see that Isaac York was not among them. He had lain awake many nights, his mind's eye seeing York shoot the old man and the Indian woman over and over again. The memory usually brought him to a cold sweat. He would seek a balance by remembering the white woman so cruelly butchered, but that made him feel no easier about York. The man had a streak of madness in him, Rusty thought. Given provocation, there was no telling what he might do.

It took the rangers two days to reach the boundary of the reserve. There they met a couple of similar volunteer companies gathered to keep the peace. Looking at their determined faces, Rusty suspected that a few might welcome any excuse to break the peace instead, to kill a few more Indians before they were moved out of the state and, in theory at least, out of reach. Besides the rangers, a number of civilians came straggling along, well-armed and talking loudly. It was apparent that they were not burdened with the weight of good intentions.

Rusty was relieved to see a large contingent of U.S. Army troops on hand to accompany the march out of Texas. Without their protection, he suspected, many of the Indians would not live to see the Red River.

Major Robert Neighbors, the Indian agent, accompanied the final group of refugees that started the long northward trek. Rusty heard him mutter something about Philistines and the exodus from Egypt.

Rusty saw grown men weeping. He saw an Indian woman throw her arms around a tree and refuse to move until two soldiers forcibly pulled her away. He saw a travois with a woman lying on it, her shoulder heavily bandaged. He could not be sure, but he thought she was probably the one York had shot. If so, she had survived the wound. He hoped she would survive the long trip, the travois bumping along on rough ground and jarring her mercilessly.

The rangers followed at a respectable distance. It was plain to Rusty that the Indians were bitterly opposed to the move, forced upon them so suddenly that they had not had time to gather most of their livestock. He could imagine what would happen to the animals. As soon as the troops were out of sight, opportunists would drive off all the horses and cattle they could find. Even if the government permitted a delegation of Indians to come back for a roundup, they would find that most of their property was gone.

Finally watching the long, sad column cross the river into the territory, Tom Blessing said, "We'll all breathe easier with them gone."

Preacher Webb replied, "No matter how we may want to justify it, this is a damned poor reward for the help they gave us against the Comanches."

Rusty had never heard the minister use the word
damned
, at least not in that manner. It showed the depth of his feelings.

Blessing said, "You've got too busy a conscience, Preacher. "There's times a man has to lock it away and do what needs to be done. The white man and the Indian are too different to live side by side. We tried it, and it didn't work. Somebody has to give way. There's a lot more of us than there is of them."

Rusty listened in a quandary, swinging at first to Blessing's view, then back to Preacher Webb's, and finally hanging uncertainly somewhere in the middle. Daddy Mike had talked a great deal about the recent campaign against the Comanches who shunned the reservation. He claimed that had it not been for help from the reserve Indians, the expedition would have had no chance. Still, correctly or not, most people believed the reserve Indians were responsible for much of the raiding.

It was hard to know what was right. Watching the last of the Indians trail off into the distance, he was glad the decision had not been his to make.

* * *

North of the Red River, a satisfied Buffalo Caller sat on his horse at the edge of a stand of timber and watched the straggling column making its way toward a new homeland the federal government had staked out. This was what he had hoped for, why he had made false trails into the reserve. He felt no pity for the distress he saw among the evacuees. They had aided the
teibos
against the Comanches. They deserved whatever misfortune the dark spirits might visit upon them.

Now perhaps they would understand what the Comanches had known all along, that the whites were a treacherous and grasping lot, stealing everything they saw. Given their way, they would drive the Indian to the edge of the Mother Earth and push him over into the great emptiness.

Up to now the reserve tribes had regarded the Comanches as their enemy. Perhaps this would show them who their true enemy was.

COLORADO RIVER, EARLY 1861

.

Rusty watched with misgivings as Mike Shannon threw his saddle up over his horse's back and buckled the girth. "Don't you think I ought to go with you?"

Mike adjusted his coat, for the wind carried a chill. "Ain't no need. I'm just goin' to the settlement to have a drink or two and visit what friends I've still got left."

Lately there had been much less talk about Indians than about a proposed Texas referendum on secession from the Union. Most people along the river seemed to favor joining the new Confederacy. Mike vigorously opposed it, so longtime friends had been falling away from him.

Rusty said, "At least, don't be talkin' politics. It'll just get you into another fight."

"Why shouldn't a man say what he thinks when he knows he's right? Them boys've got no idea what they're talkin' about. Wantin' to take Texas out of the Union ... they've forgot how hard we fought to get
in
."

"It won't make a particle of difference what you or anybody else says in a little cotton-gin settlement most people never heard of. It'll be decided in places like Austin and San Antonio. That's where the big votes are."

"Just the same, if a man don't exercise his right to say what he thinks, pretty soon they won't let him say anything."

"Even Tom Blessing has given up on the Union, and he used to be as strong for it as anybody. He says a little bunch of Yankees up north are tryin' to boss everybody. Says it's time to rise up and tell them to go to hell before we lose all our rights."

Face reddening, Mike shook his finger at Rusty. "Don't you ever let me hear talk like that comin' out of your mouth. I was born American. I've fought under the United States flag. I'll not stand idle while anybody talks against it ... not you, not anybody." He swung up onto the horse. "Not anybody, 'y God!"

Watching Mike ride off eastward on the wagon road, Rusty felt chastened by the harshness of his foster father's voice. He should be getting used to it, he thought. Always one to speak his mind and opinions with his fists, Mike had been increasingly argumentative since the secession talk became serious. Moreover, he had taken to drinking considerably more since they had buried Mother Dora at the edge of the oak grove west of the cabin. Nobody had ever quite decided what her ailment was. She had simply faded before their eyes, becoming grayer and thinner, losing strength until one day Mike and Rusty had come home from the field and found her dying.

In a voice so low he could barely hear it, she had asked Rusty to look after his father. He had promised he would, but he feared he had done poorly at living up to the promise. Mike Shannon was too old to take orders from Rusty and too headstrong to accept advice. He had come home from the settlement more than once with his face bruised, his knuckles skinned and swollen.

Some of it was patriotism, Rusty reasoned, but some was simply a result of grief and restlessness, a combination too much for Mike to bear with grace.

Rusty was wrestling with his own feelings about the secession question. On one hand, he could see his father's side of it. The fiercely partisan Mike had drummed patriotism and duty into him from the time Rusty was old enough to understand the words. On the other, he could understand why Tom Blessing had joined so many in disillusionment with the federal government. It had long promised to protect settlers but had not delivered. The troops it sent to the frontier were limited in number and too often foot soldiers, incapable of anything more than holding a defensive position. Cavalrymen were so few that they were unable to keep Indians from stealing army horses out of the military's own corrals.

Yet the same Washington officials responsible for such unwise decisions felt obliged to exert increasing control over the daily lives of the faraway folk they served so poorly.

Some people were saying the whole problem was over slavery, but Rusty did not accept that. Tom Blessing owned no slaves, yet he staunchly defended secession on the grounds that the federals were becoming dictatorial. The only slave Rusty knew in these parts was Isaac York's man Shanty. Whatever York's faults, and he had many, he treated Shanty more like a friend and partner than a piece of property.

Maybe the whole notion would run its course and blow over like a whirlwind that raises a lot of dust, then falls away. Rusty did not relish the prospect of having to make a choice.

He harnessed old Chapultepec. The mule had recently caused a fistfight between Rusty and the Gaskin brothers. Twice Mike had asked howler Laskin to return the animal he had borrowed without a by-your-leave. Gaskin always had an excuse for keeping it a little longer. Seeing Mike's growing impatience and afraid he was on the verge of getting into a serious quarrel with Gaskin, Rusty rode to the neighboring farm alone, determined to fetch the mule home whether the Gaskins liked it or not.

They had not liked it. Fowler Gaskin had a way of looking pathetic as a beggar on a village square when he wanted something, and he usually wanted something. "Boy, you don't know how it is to be poor folks. We can't afford to buy a good strong mule for ourselves. We'd be obliged if you- all'd let us keep the use of this'un just a few more days."

Rusty acted as if he hadn't heard. "Where's he at?"

"He ain't real handy right now. Tell you what, I'll have one of the boys take him home the first of next week."

Suspiciously Rusty demanded again, "Where you got him?"

Gaskin backed away, half a step at a time. "Truth of the matter is, he ain't here. He's over at the Joneses."

By this time the two Gaskin brothers had come up to stand on either side of their father. Rusty could see fight in their eyes.

Anger rising, Rusty was in a mood to accommodate them. He balled his fists. "How come he's at the Joneses? Thought you borrowed him for your own use.

"Old Man Jones offered me fifty cents a day to hire him, and me and the family sure do need the money."

Rusty could feel heat rising in his face. He prepared to remount. "I'll go over to the Jones place and fetch him."

Gaskin took hold of Rusty's bridle reins. "You can't do that. Old Man Jones paid me for ten days, and he ain't used them up yet."

Rusty trembled with anger. "Then I reckon you'll have to give him his money back."

"But it's done spent, and I don't know how I'll go about gettin' any more."

"You might try sendin' your boys out to work."

"You act awful high and mighty, Rusty Shannon, because you-all have got a bigger farm and a lot more money."