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Authors: Kerry Newcomb

BOOK: The Red Ripper
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“I SURE AM ALMIGHTY TIRED OF BEING CHASED OUT OF PLACES.”
It looks like more of Mexico to me,” Mad Jack glumly observed, squinting behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. Texas waited across the river, beyond the shallows of the Rio Grande, its surface aglow with shimmering patterns of reflected light.
“That's because you have no eyes,” William Wallace replied, breathing in the crisp, clean desert air. They finished the last of their coffee and broke camp, pausing now and again to watch the morning sun escape the bonds of earth, lift above the horizon, and chart its timeless course above the great river and the arid landscape. Now it hung like a beacon of hope in the mid-December sky, guiding them to the future, into the heart of a wilderness dream.
Wallace's mount, a long-legged roan gelding, seemed anxious to get on with the journey and not the least bit worried about fording the river. Thankfully, the Rio Grande was at its ebb, months away from spring flooding.
“My lights aren't dimmed yet,
mon ami,”
the pirate grumbled. The farther from the ocean, the more he complained. The headaches that continued to assail him were a painful reminder of Governor Guadiz's treachery. Ironically, for once in his life the irascible old freebooter had been telling the truth. All that remained of his treasure
was a couple of leather pouches of Spanish gold coins, one of which he had left with Manuel and Josefina for their village. The second bag was tucked away in his saddlebags. The bulk of the pirate's wealth lay among the ashes, the mementos of his wild and lawless life, leatherwork, books, fine furniture to rival any of the governor's, all of it burned and melted beyond recognition to ensure that Juan Diego and his lancers would find nothing of value when they came calling.
Wallace and Mad Jack had traveled hard and fast, avoiding contact with government troops, exchanging horses when necessary at isolated ranches, skirting Mexico City, and always watching their back trail. As the days stretched into weeks, the two grew confident that they had escaped pursuit. Wallace was under no illusion, however. Juan Diego was a proud man and not one to overlook the humiliation he had suffered at Wallace's hand. “Guadiz will never forget you now,” Mad Jack had grimly observed the night they escaped from Veracruz. William Wallace wouldn't have it any other way.
Throughout the first long week on the trail, William brooded over his failure to avenge his brother's death. Eventually he came to terms with his guilt, knowing full well he could not have allowed Flambeau, his friend and benefactor, to fall into the clutches of the governor. With his eyesight failing, Mad Jack was no match for his enemies. Flambeau continued to experience frequent headaches, and the vision in his left eye was severely clouded. Although the freebooter could still see well enough to function for himself, his swashbuckling days were history.
“C'mon,” William said, grinning beneath his broad-brimmed sombrero. He swung up astride the roan and waited, quietly bemused, as Mad Jack grudgingly remounted. The sea dog preferred the rolling deck of a
ship to the brown mare with her jolting gait and let the world know of his displeasure.
“We're burning daylight.” William's long white scarf fluttered in a breeze that hinted of colder climes to the north. Winters were seldom harsh here on the Rio Grande plain. But like all of Texas, if a person didn't like the weather, he only had to wait a minute. “Time to get wet,” William added, with a glance toward the river.
“Wait,” the Frenchman said, and, reaching out, caught the younger man by his iron hard forearm. A black-throated sparrow scolded them from the thorny branches of a nearby ocotillo. The bird's signature dark ruff of feathers was similar in hue to the pirate's somber attire, black shirt and breeches beneath the gray, and brown folds of his serape. Mad Jack dressed as if he were in mourning for the life he had left behind. “These are for you.” He tugged Bonechucker and Old Butch from his belt and passed the sheathed blades to his towering companion.
William looked perplexed. “I don't understand. Captain, I cannot accept—”
“Hang 'em from your belt.”
“But they're yours,” William protested, staring at the pair of weapons.
“No,” Flambeau said. “I stole those knives off a Spanish grandee, and they have served me well. But I think maybe I have been keeping them for you all along.” The freebooter refused to accept the weapons back. “Take 'em, my friend, and cross the river.”
“Not without you at my side.” William tucked the scabbards into the broad leather belt circling his waist. “See that path yonder. I reckon there's the Camino Real. The royal road. According to Don Murillo it cuts clear across Texas, practically all the way to San Felipe. Let's go.”
Mad Jack warily studied the opposite bank, so far from everything he had known. A desert was hardly the place for a sea wolf like himself. “I don't know. Where does it lead?”
And William, recalling another time and place when he had asked a similar question, replied, “To the rest of your life.”
 
Texas opened to William Wallace like a willing new bride at the first blush of morning. Texas seduced him with stark vistas of desert mountains and limitless sky and air fragrant as the first sweet breath of creation.
Day after day the beautiful country revealed its wonders. Vast and lonely peaks in the purple distance gave way to stark, eroded canyons and winding ravines that seemed to resonate with the echoes of all who had passed before.
Pine trees thrived at the higher elevations but quickly surrendered to frost-dusted cottonwood and post oak, to elegant madrona trees with smooth pink bark and twisted limbs, to cactus and mesquite, bunchgrass. Here was an ancient plain, a dry, serrated terrain where the wind moaned and whose harshness was only diluted by the infrequent encounter with a welcome spring.
The first week of Texas was a courtship; it was the land's own wisdom, its way of weeding out the weak and foolhardy. Those who persevered in the romance were rewarded with a wealth of grasslands, thigh-high bluestem and Indian grass, then the limestone escarpments of the Balcones Fault, battlements of pink granite, broken hills teeming with wildlife and a thousand springs and creeks bubbling cold as melted ice out of the earth.
They reached San Antonio nine days into the new year and found a bustling community sprawled along the banks of the Rio San Antonio de Padua. The adobe
buildings were a familiar sight with their natural brown or whitewashed walls.
William paused to appreciate the town, its haciendas, shops, shaded courtyards, mesquite fences for corrals, thatched jacals, hotels, and a thriving central market, orderly arranged streets bustling with wagons and horsemen, where children darted like swarms of angry bees among the merchants, farmers, laborers, and soldiers … . an all too familiar sight.
The troops stationed in the town were hardly the cream of the Mexican army. There was an unmistakable aura of dissolution to the scene. Men marched with less precision; the garrison housed in the abandoned mission on the edge of town appeared to be languishing within its crumbling battlements.
William scowled as he made a quick assessment of the soldiers garrisoned in the Alamo Mission a mile from town. A military presence was to be expected, but he didn't like it.
The two trail-weary travelers left the main road and approached San Antonio by keeping to the riverbank. News from Mexico, perhaps warrants for their arrest could have preceded their arrival, brought by boat and dispatch riders from the coast. Wallace and the pirate entered San Antonio as surreptitiously as possible, concealed by the willows and post oaks lining the river. They avoided the main streets and kept to a footpath that ran alongside Acequia Principal, one of the many aqueducts built by the early Franciscan friars who had settled the area and Christianized the local
tejanos
.
Mad Jack was leery of the soldiers lazily patrolling the streets. William retreated when necessary and kept to the alleys to keep from attracting the attention of the military. The two men reached the Calle Dolorosa and, with the helpful directions of a local goatherd, found the hacienda of Don Murillo Saldevar.
It was a handsome, solid-looking two-storied structure. A balcony with a rust-patched wrought-iron railing overlooked the street and a walled garden where the winter months had taken their toll. The hacienda's windows were shuttered and closed. A knock on the heavy oaken door failed to rouse anyone from within. No animals disturbed the serenity of the empty corral at the rear of the house. William shrugged. It had been worth a try.
Mad Jack sniffed the air and squinted up the street. “We passed a cantina over by the river.” His stomach growled. Someone was cooking chili and beans.
“Let's find a place without any soldiers. I think that goatherd might have mentioned our arrival to the local troops.”
They selected a ramshackle
pulqueria
on the outskirts of town. A reed-thin barkeeper filled a couple of clay mugs with pulque, the fermented juice of the agave cactus, and set out a couple of bowls of chili. The pulque helped to cut the trail dust. A meal of eggs, chili, and tortillas was simple but nourishing.
The
pulqueria
seemed to have its share of patrons—mestizo laborers, herders, a couple of vaqueros in from the range, a man who sold firewood. All of them seemed willing to gossip, and William soon learned the name of the local commandant, General Cos. The general had only recently arrived with the news that Bustamente had been deposed by Santa Anna. As the new president's personal representative, General Cos was held in particularly low esteem by the populace, who regarded him and the dictator as no friends to this far-flung Mexican state. Texicans had been fending for themselves without much help from the central government and resented the recently installed taxes and levies collected by the local authorities when the government in Mexico City provided them so little in return.
However, Don Murillo was well-known throughout
the community and much respected. The patrons of the cantina were quick to inform Wallace that the
haciendado
had been spending more and more time on his ranch along the Brazos near San Felipe. No one could blame the landowner, now that he had such a pretty young wife.
One of the cantina's patrons, a bewhiskered saddle maker with a generous demeanor, approached Wallace and Mad Jack and in a low voice informed them that General Cos had orders for any strangers in town to be brought before the general for questioning.
Mad Jack bought a round of drinks for everyone in the
pulqueria
and double for the saddle maker, then followed William out into the street. A column of soldiers in faded white uniforms hailed them from up the street and ordered the newcomers to remain by their horses. Deciding they had enough provisions to last until they reached San Felipe, William and the freebooter ignored the troops, mounting up and galloping out of town, leaving the startled dragoons in the dust.
A few miles from San Antonio, the two men slowed their horses to a walk and headed back onto the Camino Real. Mad Jack declared the encounter a bad omen. The fact that Santa Anna's influence penetrated this far north filled him with misgivings. To make matters worse, the saddle maker had cautioned Mad Jack to ride carefully, for the Comanche were raiding this winter and one of General Cos's patrols had fought a skirmish with a war party up on the twin forks of the Guadalupe.
“I sure am almighty tired of being chased out of places,” William grumbled. The idea of
President
Santa Anna left a bad taste in his mouth. With the general's ascension to power, Juan Diego's fortunes could only continue to rise. “I think that's the last time.”
Mad Jack sensed his partner's changing mood. “Watch yourself now, my boy. Defiance is a luxury neither
of us can afford right now. We're sailing in uncharted waters. A wise man keeps his sail to the wind, a spyglass to the horizon, and his powder dry.”
“Don't worry, Captain; I'll steer clear of trouble,” William replied.
“I want your word!” Flambeau exclaimed. San Antonio receded in the distance, and the rolling landscape embraced them, lush with wildlife and great stands of white and red and blackjack oak, cedar and cottonwood, pecan trees and small-leafed maples. “I haven't come this far to have my scalp lifted by savages.”
“Yours would be a poor trophy,” William laughed, indicating his companion's smooth, hairless skull.
“That red mop of yours would be treasure enough for any heathen and see us both sent under the brine.” Mad Jack gave the big man a sharp-edged look. “We sail clear of trouble, I'll have your word on it.”
William shrugged. The Butcher of Barbados had turned sheepish in his old age. But assurance wasn't all that hard to give. Wallace hadn't come to Texas looking for a fight. “You have my word,” he said.
It was the only promise he ever broke.
“I GOT A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS.”
Two days later, along the San Felipe road, “winter” found them. It rode the wings of the north wind over the bent earth, blanketed the sky with battlements of heavy clouds, dropped the temperature below freezing, and painted a sheen of frost on tree trunks and thistles. Despite the cold, William broke camp with renewed enthusiasm. Texas was a nourishment to his soul. His spirit feasted on the thick leafless stands of live oak, blackjack, pecan, elm, and walnut, on rolling meadows carpeted with yellow bunch grass and creeks teeming with sand bass, perch, and catfish.
Twice that morning Wallace cut the tracks of a white-tailed deer, and later the same day he spooked half a dozen wild turkeys from a tangle of bramble bush and deadfall. He rode easy through the morning, and his heart soared with the circling hawks. The future for him was the next stand of trees, the next meadow or broad open valley or brush-choked creekbed to cross. Everything was new and all things were possible if a man was bold enough. And didn't get himself killed.
For the better part of an hour the lowering clouds had threatened snow. Now the air was thick with a flurry of sodden flakes. Wrapped in his serape, with a wintry gust whipping across his left shoulder, William reined in his gelding beneath the spreading branches of a pecan tree.
He blew in his cupped hands to warm them, then pulled out his spyglass. Beyond the timber, where the land sloped down on a long gradual decline to a distant line of live oaks that concealed the sluggish undulations of a creek, a covey of quail had just exploded into bleak daylight from the underbrush where the trees thinned. That coupled with the distant rumble of hooves reverberating in the muffled air made ample reason for the spyglass.
Mad Jack walked his mount alongside William, who handed him the spyglass. Flambeau rubbed the moisture from his spectacles, hooked the wire rims over his ears, and squinted to clear what he could of his hampered sight. The sound of approaching horses was unmistakable.
“I got a bad feeling about this,” he muttered. With his good eye Mad Jack grudgingly studied the far side of the meadow, dimly visible through the snowfall. A particularly soggy flake spattered against the back of his neck and worked its way down between his shoulder blades. The freebooter grimaced and bunched his shoulders and wriggled in his shirt. But the ice trickling along his spine didn't chill him near as much as the sight of a Comanche war party driving their stolen horses and prisoners out onto the grassland. Mad Jack. stifled a gasp and lowered the spyglass.
“Remember, my brash friend. We do not look for trouble.”
Wallace tossed his rifle to his companion, slid from horseback, and began to gather as much dried kindling as he could find, bunching it together with a length of his hemp rope. The big man refused to be distracted, working with a sense of purpose and righteous resolve.
“William? Remember … ,” Mad Jack tried. But it was a waste of breath.
 
 
“They'll bust in your head if you don't stop your crying,” Roberto Zavala told his nine-year-old sister. Isabel rubbed her eyes and glanced around at her brother, who shared the saddle. He was five years older, and it seemed as if he had been ordering her around all her life. Right now she was grateful for his comforting arms about her waist. They kept her weary little body astride the mare. A wet snowflake slapped against the girl's cheek and sent her burrowing deeper into her woolen coat.
“I can't help it,” Isabel whimpered, struggling to stifle her sobs. Hours earlier she had seen her uncle killed, watched him tumble from horseback, clutching at the feathered shaft protruding from his chest. Her cousin had tried to make a stand, hoping to give the children a chance to escape. She had heard him cry out as the Comanche rode him down. Within minutes, the war party had surrounded the herd and captured Isabel and her brother. Now every mile took them farther from San Felipe and home. She thought of her father, the settlement's strong, sturdy blacksmith, whose heart would break when he learned of his daughter's capture. She thought of her mother, whose warm, shielding embrace couldn't save her children now.
“My sister needs to rest!” Roberto called out.
The Comanche warrior riding alongside the children gave them a withering look. His dark brown face, streaked with bands of crimson and black, held no softness. Like his four companions, the horseman's expression was as implacable as the gunmetal gray sky. Complain to the storm, to the winter wind, to the plump, wet flakes of snow.
There would be no camp until the raiding party had put a considerable distance between their captives and the stolen horses and pursuit from San Felipe. If the Comanche were lucky it would be several hours, possibly another day, before anyone learned of the raid. The
snow, falling steady now with a mixture of pea-sized hail, worked to the Comanche's advantage, covering their tracks beneath a blanket of frozen precipitation. By the time the Texicans in San Felipe could mount a pursuit the five young braves intended to be safely across the Trinity and heading northwest to the caprock country.
The warrior alongside the children cried out to his companions, “My brothers, it is a good day!” The two men at the front of the stolen herd and the two men at the rear echoed his sentiments. They were fierce and proud, made invulnerable by their youth. Any farm they passed was fair game. The warriors were always willing to add to their stolen herd.
Roberto watched the brave alongside them turn his face to the elements and proudly appraise the horses that had made up the Zavala family fortune—a stallion, a few colts, and several good brood mares. There was not a nag in the bunch. As for the Comanche's prisoners, the girl would be raised by the older women until she was of age, then given to a warrior who had proved his worth to take to wife. The boy was still young enough to learn the ways of the People. In time he would walk like a Comanche, ride like a Comanche, think like a Comanche. Their enemies would be his enemies. And he would make war upon the very settlers he had been captured from.
“I want to go home,” Isabel sobbed, struggling to control herself.
“Hush, Beth. Don't let them see you're afraid.” Roberto considered making a break for it, a mad dash for freedom. He weighed his chances. The Comanche looked to be natural horsemen, born to ride and fight. Indeed, this short, stocky, bowlegged race preferred to view the world from horseback. The fourteen-year-old stared at the feathered war lances, their scalp shirts and
bois d'arc bows that could send an arrow whistling through the pale light. His spirits sank. No. There was no escape. But the next second he convinced himself he had to try.
The warrior reached over and tugged at Isabel's coat sleeve. The girl tried to pull free; Roberto batted the man's hand away. The Comanche laughed and attempted to slap the fourteen-year-old boy across the face. Roberto dug his heels into his mare, caught the warrior's wrist, and held on as the mare bolted forward. The Comanche lost his purchase and toppled forward. He hit the ground, grunted, and rolled over on his backside.
“Hold on!” Roberto managed to shout into his sister's ear. The mare was a high stepper and blessed with a great deal of natural quickness that carried them past the herd and the two lead raiders before they could react to stop the captives.
“Roberto,” Isabel rasped, clutching the pommel. The mare plunged blindly through the snowfall. Roberto glanced over his shoulder at the war masks of his pursuers. Three of the Comanche had abandoned the herd and taken up the chase. And they looked angry as bees on a bear.
“We aren't going to make it,” Roberto moaned. He prayed to the Blessed Virgin as his father always had taught him to do. He prayed for courage, a strong right arm or a faster horse. What he got was deliverance.
“Roberto!” Isabel screamed, a new panic in her voice. Her brother forgot the Comanche gaining on him and turned his attention to the hillside and the great and terrible figure charging toward them from out of the sullen snowfall. He seemed more beast than man, a mountainous, monstrous creature shrieking at the top of his lungs and trailing fire.
“Watch out!” Roberto shouted as the mare stumbled and tossed the children onto the snow-covered slope.
Roberto shielded his sister with his own body. The boy noticed as the beast-man passed them what had appeared to be wings were the folds of a serape flailing the air. He glimpsed a long-limbed roan dragging a thick bramble bush by a length of rope. The dried vines and branches had been set ablaze. Gunshots filled the air. Off to the left, a rifle roared, then another. The towering stranger's voice echoed down the long hill. Roberto hugged his sister and buried his face alongside hers in the snowy field, hoping to shrink into the soil and find safety in the earth's bosom.
War cries, gunshots, hoofbeats drummed in every direction. Horses neighed in terror. Roberto covered his ears and still heard the screams of startled men, steel clanging against steel, the crack as a spear shaft splintered, the grunting and groaning and the thud of a body as it struck the ground. And then, at last, only silence save for the settling snow, which to the fourteen-year-old boy sounded like cats dancing on the brittle bluestem and the buffalo grass.
“Merde! Is that what you call riding clear of trouble?!” a voice shouted out, the speaker obscured by the snow. He seemed very upset.
“It's all right, young'uns,” said Wallace. “Those devils have business elsewhere.”
Roberto lowered his hands and lifted his face and found himself staring up at the tallest, broadest man the boy had ever seen. Flame red hair, powerful arms, a wide wicked knife glittering in one hand, powerful chest heaving for breath, legs like free trunks, and his feet … “
Usted tiene pies grandes
,” the boy dryly observed. Yes, big, big feet.

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