The Texans (13 page)

“Squash does speak English.”

Agent Torrey looked timidly at the chief through the haze of his sweat– and grease-smeared lenses. He was sure that the biggest joke in the entire world was the fact that he had been appointed an Indian agent. Until coming to Texas he had never laid eyes on a wild Indian. His only qualifications were his reading of several journals by American naturalists. Upon his arrival in Houston he had attempted to sketch the natives he had met, and the president must have been highly impressed with his clerk's renderings—as if simple sketches implied some knowledge of his subjects.

He was sure he was by no means qualified to speak with any Indian, much less a chief. “I think I need some fresh air.”

They all watched as he took up his bag and sidled his way through them and out the door. Red Wing handed care of the patient back over to her family and followed him while the commissioner relayed Agent Torrey's instructions to Chief Squash.

When Agent Torrey burst out the door the first person he saw was Captain Jones squatted in the shade of a nearby arbor. He had his rifle across his knees and was watching the crowd of Wacos with no love at all. The Delawares were nowhere in sight.

“Don't quit now, Doctor. There are more patients to attend to,” the commissioner said before Agent Torrey could take a seat.

Agent Torrey looked at his superior with horror but obediently followed him to the next lodge. More determined in his actions, he dispensed with the tonic all together. Twenty house calls later and his sack of red pills was all but empty.

The Wacos offered the party the use of an arbor with a raised floor for the night, but they refused and set up camp just outside the village. Spending the night in a village with sickness running rampant made them afraid of hospitality. The Delawares had killed a yearling deer and the group gathered around the fire and made quick work of the venison.

Agent Torrey found it amazing just how much food active men on almost a straight meat diet could consume. Normally, he could have eaten more than his share, but weariness and frazzled nerves had ruined his appetite. He dragged his saddle to the downwind side of the fire, hoping the smoke would keep the mosquitoes off of him. It was too sultry to need a blanket, and he simply flopped down with the saddle for a pillow. He stared sleepily between his outstretched feet at the flickering flames.

“Well, Agent Tom, did you cure them or kill them?” Captain Jones asked from across the fire.

“I don't know.”

“What was that pill you were giving them? Some chewed it up before they swallowed it, and seemed to even like it. I'd swear it looked like hard candy,” the commissioner said.

Agent Torrey managed to laugh. “That's what it was, just plain old red candy.”

Commissioner Anderson tried to glare a hole through him. “Just what good is that supposed to do them?”

Agent Torrey was too tired to cringe. His eyelids were impossibly heavy and he gladly closed them and forgot about the commissioner's accusing stare.

“Well, one thing's for certain. He isn't going to kill them with candy.” The commissioner pitched the dregs of his coffee cup in the fire.

“No, but them dying of their own accord might be just as bad as if he killed them. The Wacos aren't going to know the difference,” Captain Jones said.

The commissioner scowled at him and turned from the fire. He liked being in command when everyone wasn't giving him bad reports or discomforting observations. While he thought about their predicament, it dawned on him that something didn't seem right. He whirled back to the fire.

“Where's Red Wing? We've let her run off again!”

Red Wing hadn't run, at least not yet. She stood at the picket line beyond the fire and stroked the muzzle of her horse. She could hear the captain plainly, and her mind raced to determine if the night still offered her any chance of escape. Had she known the men were so tired and distracted she would have already been gone. Now the Delawares were probably slipping through the darkness searching for her.

The commissioner may have been proud of his tame scouts, but the way they looked at her sometimes made her skin crawl, especially Jim Pockmark. Thinking of his hungry, predatory eyes and the constant sneer on his face made her hand reach for the little antler-handled knife in the pocket of her dress. She had stolen it from one of the Waco lodges, and she turned the weapon in her hand slowly. It was a puny thing, more fit for cutting up supper than killing a man, but anything that might give her a fighting chance felt good with the Delawares prowling around.

She heard running footsteps to each side of her and made a beeline for the fire shining through the trees. She slipped the knife back into her pocket and smiled as she stepped into the firelight, as if she'd only left for an evening stroll.

Chapter 15

T
he Prussian stopped his horse in an oak thicket atop a little mountain and scanned the ground between him and the river for sign of his Tonkawa scouts. After a long look, he finally made out Placido loping back to him with three of his warriors, dodging and weaving through the sparse brush on the little stretch of prairie. From the Tonk chief's demeanor, all seemed well with the trail ahead, but the Prussian paused before starting down the slope. He studied the men to either side of him with pleasure.

The Tonks under Chief Placido had been at the headsprings of the San Marcos River just as he had hoped, and thirty-two of them had been more than willing to ride against their ancient enemy, the Comanche. The Prussian was a well-known fighter, even if a strange and not particularly likeable man. Any company under his leadership was bound to mean there would be victory spoils.

What hadn't been certain was his ability to locate and entice the kind of Texan fighters necessary to fill out his war party. A land where the threat of Indian attack was more certain than the weather was bound to produce men skilled in the ways of frontier warfare—survivors of a brutal testing ground where the weak were sifted like chaff on the wind. The problem was that such men were fiercely independent and notional to say the least. Any number of them could be counted on to ride to avenge an Indian raid, but the trick had been to get a suitable number of them to buck the will of Sam Houston and to convince them that he could locate a Comanche camp without being ambushed first.

However, two things played well in the Prussian's favor. Houston's pet theories on peaceful relations with the tribes weren't very popular with most Texans, and the Prussian let it be known that he intended to follow in the Peace Commission's wake and let them lead him to the Comanche. The fact that the Wilsons were well-known and loved members of Stephen F. Austin's original colonists, or the Old Three Hundred, didn't hurt. No matter that Red Wing was Comanche herself, the audacity of Houston taking the Wilsons' adopted daughter didn't play well with the kind of men brave enough to do something about it.

The news that he was mounting an attack on the Comanche and going to get the Wilsons' daughter back ran like wildfire along the frontier grapevine. The Prussian had spread the word as he traveled, and volunteers trickled in one at a time, and sometimes in bunches of twos and threes. They were all grim-faced men with good horses and well-cared-for weapons. They were the kind that needed little encouragement to fight and that died hard. Many of them had chased Indians for the government when it wasn't too broke to pay such ranging companies. They had no official sanction for the Prussian's expedition beyond his militia appointment, but then again many of them had been going out after the Comanche long before Texas was even a republic. By the time the Prussian struck the Colorado where it bent to the west, he had twenty-five of Texas's finest at his side, plus Placido's Tonks.

He looked to his right and the first man he saw was Hatchet Murphy. A Comanche war club had twisted and crushed his right cheekbone, and left the eye on that side of his face a sightless, weeping, white orb. He had once been a blacksmith, and besides the shotgun he carried like it was an extra limb, there was a blood-rusted, custom war hatchet stuffed in his belt. His wife and children had died at Victoria in the Great Comanche Raid of 1840, and it had driven him more than a little crazy. He had left his trade and disappeared for two years before anybody saw him again. When they did, he had five tanned Comanche scalps and twice that many ears hanging off one of his latigo saddle strings.

And then there was Manuel Ortega. He wasn't big as a minute, but the little Mexican was hell on wheels in a scrap with a gun or a knife and he was an equal match on horseback for any Comanche ever born. He had spent three years of his boyhood as a Comanche captive, and that time hadn't improved his opinion of those he called “
los diablos de Tejas
.”

To the Prussian's left was Kentucky Bob Harris, hero of San Jacinto, and survivor of the Santa Fe Expedition. He was possibly the best rifle shot in Texas, and to those present that meant the world. The veterans of the Cherokee War had watched him kill two Cherokee warriors with his fancy squirrel rifle at distances that seemed impossible. Kentucky Bob never went anywhere without his brother, Dub. Dub wasn't as fine a marksman, but he was an uncommonly strong, mean bastard. Anybody who could pick two Mexican soldiers up over his head and throw them back among their own, as he had during the fight with General Cos at San Antonio, was a good man to have in a fight.

And just beyond the Harris brothers was the one man besides Placido that the Prussian was most glad to see. There was no guessing just how old Son Ballard really was. He had been traipsing around Texas when there wasn't anything there but mustangs and mesquite beans. He looked to be a hundred, but he could travel all day either on horseback or afoot without complaint. When foul weather and hardship turned most men back, old Son was still grinning and laughing. He knew Texas as few men did, and nobody who called him friend was ever surprised if he showed up anywhere from the Rio Grande to the Red, from the Sabine to the Pecos. He was a wanderer to say the least. Son swore he could smell Comanches, and that the hair on the back of his neck stood out and warned him when an attack was imminent. Maybe that was true, because after all his years traipsing the distances alone, he still had a full head of hair, and nothing more than a faraway look and a weathered countenance to ever prove where he had been.

The other twenty white men that rounded out the Prussian's volunteer ranging company were all of the same sort. The Comanche had pretty much pillaged and plundered at will as long as there had been Texans around to kill, and it was high time the hostiles got a dose of their own medicine. If President Houston's Peace Commission worked, it was going to gather a large number of the Comanches together for them to attack. Old Sam might have good intentions, but he never had understood that the only good Comanche was a dead one.

The Prussian started them down off the mountain, a tiny army of good men, if a touch hardened by the times, filibusters and self-motivated mercenaries every one, loyal to nothing but their families, friends, and their own ideas of justice. No drums or regimental flags proclaimed their march, and few would remember their daring if they didn't return. Earlier failures had taught these men that the only way to whip Comanches was to copy many of their tactics, and that meant traveling fast and light, and striking hard when they got there. There were no supply-laden pack trains to slow them, and every man carried his own larder in his saddlebags, mostly relying on nothing more than a little salt and coffee and whatever they could procure during their travels to feed them in the coming days or weeks. If game was scarce, they went hungry; if water couldn't be located, they died.

Grown men and weapons were heavy enough, and there was no grain for their horses to further weigh them down. The individual mounts were the best each man could procure, speed at a premium and endurance a must. Their warhorses had to be as tough as the Comanche ponies and able to live off nothing but whatever grazing was at hand after a hard day's travel. A man afoot in the country where they were going was as good as dead, and he had better choose his mount wisely.

While their weapons were different from the Comanches', the men following the Prussian were savages of a sort themselves. No town-tamed citizen of more civilized parts could view them and not wonder what barbaric horde they belonged to. They brought the blood feud with them from places like Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama. They migrated from mountains and backwoods bayous already hacked into submission by blood, sweat, and ax. Some of them came to Texas to avoid debts, others to avoid being hung, and some because the lands they left had already grown too tame and stagnant for such free-thinking men. The Comanche were their sworn enemy, gave no quarter, and had no understanding of mercy. Neither did the Texan fighter, and he would keep at the Comanche until one of them was wiped off the face of the earth.

They rode hard for two days, and when nearing the old presidio forty miles along the San Saba River, the entire party pulled up to study the lone figure waving at them from the rock ruins. The Tonk scouts were already cautiously flanking the man on the north bank, but most of the party didn't need their guides to tell them what their own eyesight already had. It was a white man yonder, and he looked to have come a long way and played hell getting back from wherever he had been.