Warriors of the Night (11 page)

“Mister Poole won’t mind?” Ben asked, remembering yesterday’s encounter with the burly, tomahawk-wielding Texas Ranger. The man was obviously not one to trifle with. Gandy was trouble enough—Ben McQueen didn’t need a run-in with Clay Poole.

“Hell, Clay’s got another rig. This here’s just collecting dust. Either way, he won’t be missing it.” Virge chuckled softly. “Cap’n Pepper’s got him playing nursemaid to General Abbot’s son over in Main Plaza.” Virge fished a
cigarillo
from his belt pouch, lifted the glass chimney on the lantern, and lit the tobacco from the dancing yellow flame. Gray smoke curled around him like a shroud that unwound as he led the way out of the barn and to the corral.

The horses reacted to the approaching visitors by trotting to the far side of the corral. A brown stallion pawed the earth, shook his mane, and neighed a challenge. Most of the mares bunched together, made skittish by the strangers in the moonlight. Virge set his
cigarillo
on top of a fence post and reached for the lariat that was hung over the gate.

“See the roan mare yonder. She’s a head taller than most and built strong in the chest. Anxious as a widow at a hoedown. Maybe you better wait till sunup. Night ain’t no time… hey.” Virge stepped back as Ben tossed his rig onto the top rail and climbed over the gate. He took the hemp rope out of the Ranger’s hands and stalked off across the packed earth. Virge watched, thumbs hooked in his gun belt, legs bowed, his hat tilted back, and a look of curiosity on his face. He was convinced the soldier in blue was fixing to get himself trampled.

Ben McQueen swung the lasso over his head. When he reached the center of the corral, the rope snaked out and the loop settled over the mare. Then, with a firm hand Ben guided the roan away from the other horses and brought the nervous animal to the gate. Virge heard a soft, sibilant chanting as Ben approached, and for a brief second the Ranger glanced around to see if there was an Indian close by. Then he realized the chanting was coming from Ben. The Ranger had seen Comanches calm their mounts in the same manner, singing softly to them, using their red magic to calm even the wildest stallion.

“Well, I declare,” Virge said while Ben saddled the mare and slipped the bridle into place. “You’re about as much a Yankee blueblood as I’m the King of England.” Virge blew a cloud of tobacco smoke. The burning tip of the
cigarillo
glowed like a miniature caldron each time the Ranger inhaled. “Never seen the roan handled so easy. What did you say to her?”

Ben shrugged, unlatched the gate, and led the animal out of the corral. “I gave her a choice—she could come with me or I’d leave her for Snake Eye.” Ben stroked the roan’s neck and rubbed her behind the ears.

Virge chuckled and didn’t press this newcomer for any further information about himself. Virge might be curious, but it wasn’t his way to pry. However, what he had seen served notice that Gandy had yet to take the measure of the man he called “Brass Buttons.”

“Lightning off to the west,” Virge mentioned. “There’s an abandoned mission just off the south road. Be a place to hole up and wait out a storm. Nothin’ but open country and mesquite everywhere else.” The Ranger stroked his jaw in thought. Then he pulled off the serape, taking care not to ignite the fabric with the glowing end of the
cigarillo
. He draped the serape behind Ben’s saddle.

“You might need this,” Virge muttered as Ben swung up astride the horse. The Ranger looked out at the night. From afar came the rumble of thunder. It reminded Virge Washburn of the buffalo he had seen up in the panhandle. Herds from sunup to sundown, the sound of their hooves a thunder on the land. He had hunted hides upon the staked plains and battled his share of Comanches and Kiowa before joining up with Amadeus T. Pepper’s command. A crack shot with a Hawken rifle and dangerous in a scrape, Virge possessed all the necessary qualities Captain Pepper expected in the men of his command: honesty, skill, and not an ounce of “quit.” The Ranger reached out and caught the bit before Ben could turn the mare aside.

The lieutenant looked down as Virge offered one thing more, his Patterson Colt revolver. “Might need this too.”

“I can’t take your gun,” Ben protested.

Virge reached behind the small of his back and produced a second revolver identical to the first, which he promptly dropped into his holster. “You can return the other with the horse. And ride clear of La Villita. It ain’t a place for an Anglo soldier boy to venture in come nightfall. Them narrow alleys is best seen at noon, not midnight.”

“Thanks,” Ben replied, and tucked the long-barreled weapon through his belt, butt forward and within easy reach of his right hand. Then the lieutenant pointed the mare east toward the Calle Dolorosa, the Street of Sorrow. Ben didn’t intend to ride it for very long.

He kept to an easy pace and took his time leaving the city. He skirted the Main Plaza, with its noisy crowd. The din of voices, strumming guitars, and occasional gunshots carried to him from a couple of blocks away. He turned south on the Calle del Paso and crossed a wooden bridge over the San Antonio River. To his left, the adobe buildings of La Villita, the Old Town, huddled cheek to jowl with thatched-roof
jacales
. He considered ignoring Virge Washburn’s warning concerning the settlement, then decided to press on. He was looking for solitude, not confrontation, and what he intended to do required privacy. He rode south, leaving the town in his dust and heading into the rolling countryside. The western sky shimmered with sheet lightning and Ben hoped he’d find shelter from the storm before it hit. A breeze kicked up and the wind bore the scene of rain. Ben McQueen rode on. The mare had an easy canter, a distance-eating pace, easy on man and beast. The moon ducked behind the clouds. The darkness prevented Ben from leaving the wheel-rutted road. He would not chance crippling his horse by stumbling blindly into a prairie dog mound or cluster of spiny cactus. He kept the river to his right and a wary eye on the approaching storm. Lightning draped the clouds with its bone-white glare and outlined the twin limestone towers of a mission in the distance.

Ben quickened the mare’s pace to a gallop, and twenty minutes later, by the time the first drops began to spatter the thirsty earth, he had reached the mission’s outer buildings and the crumbling ruins of what had once been a defensive wall. Ben rode beneath a limestone arch and guided his horse into the nearest ruins, a granary consisting of three walls and half a roof. At least it afforded shelter. Ben dismounted and tethered his horse to the remains of a broken beam. Fortunately there was enough debris to start a fire. Soon the mission’s solitary visitor was drying himself by the flames while rain dripped from the ragged edges of the roof.

Lightning flashed and outlined the lieutenant’s deserted surroundings. He found no threat in the empty facade of the abandoned church. And if there were ghosts of those the mission had served, well, they were welcome at his fire. Alone now and free from the threat of discovery, Ben removed a buckskin bag he had tucked inside his coat, then the carved stem and bowl of a sacred pipe given to him by his mother, Raven O’Keefe McQueen. He filled the Choctaw ceremonial pipe with a mixture of cherry bark, wild roots, and tobacco, tamped it into the bowl, and lit it with a shard of burning timber.

It made an incongruous sight, an officer wearing the dark blue uniform of the United States Army, seated on his haunches in the glare of a campfire, enacting a ritual taught to him by his mother’s people, the Choctaws. He raised the pipe to north, south, east, and west. A gust of wind fanned the embers in the bowl. His prayers rode the sacred smoke up beyond the edge of the roof to the black sky.

“Grandfather

I walk a path between

Red Truth and White Truth.

Guide my steps.

Hear the words I speak,

And those I do not know how to speak.

Find them in my heart.”

He paused in his chant and puffed on the pipe, blowing four clouds of smoke that swirled and trailed out into the storm. Ben thought of his sons and ached to see them, to hold them in his arms. Jesse and Daniel. They, too, would one day walk the path of their father, between two truths. Like Ben, the boys would have to decide for themselves and cut their own trail.

Ben set the pipe on the ground and, reaching beneath his shirt, palmed the medal. Duty… honor… the legacy of the McQueens had cost him dearly. It had been a storm worse than this one, a driving downpour that lashed the roof and shutters of the Hound and Hare Tavern and pounded the hard-packed clay surface of the Trenton Pike.

Eleanor McQueen was used to having her own way. Young and prideful, with porcelain-white skin and hair fine as corn silk, her pretty face was a mask of suppressed anger as Ben revealed his decision to accept a position in the army with the rank of first lieutenant. As far as Eleanor was concerned, her husband had betrayed her. She had never planned to be a soldier’s wife, not when he could have found a place managing her father’s iron mines north of Philadelphia. But Ben had a different calling. The same voice that had whispered in the ears of his Highland forebears, warriors all, had called him by name.

An ember crackled in the campfire, and Ben added fuel to the fire. The memories came, one upon the other, like misfortunes, unbidden. He did not try to avoid them. The past had to be faced.

In her fury, Eleanor had abandoned the children—unannounced to Ben or his Aunt Esther—and fled into the night, returning to Philadelphia.

Ben followed Eleanor to her father’s estate but the gates remained closed to him. Wealth and prestige and power were insurmountable adversaries. Within the month, the marriage was dissolved and Eleanor was spirited away to stay with a relative in the south of France, well beyond the reach of the likes of Benjamin Bitter Creek McQueen.

Movement in the weathered rafters overhead distracted him and the memories of his wife’s death drifted away with the smoke from the Choctaw pipe. He wasn’t sorry to see them go. He looked up and saw a patch of blackness like a dark angel move along the length of a darkened beam.

Ben lifted a burning brand from the flames and held it aloft. In the dancing light a raven preened its glossy black wings and eyed the man with unsettling familiarity. Tendrils of smoke wreathed its talons and feathers. The bird seemed wholly unafraid of Ben or the storm. It belonged here. Man was the intruder. Nature was in the process of reclaiming the mission. The raven was the harbinger of that change.

Memories again, behind veils of medicine smoke.
He was a child of ten and seated by his mother, watching her as she scraped a deerskin pelt, making it smooth and pliable. Soon she would make him a shirt to wear when he joined the other boys as they ranged the rolling hills, eager to prove their hunting prowess.

“I will have the finest shirt,” Ben proudly proclaimed.

“It will do for now,” Raven said. She was lithe and strong and the dark cascade of her unbraided hair spilled forward across her shoulders as she worked. Raven paused and adjusted the hide upon the tanning rack, then looked aside at her only child. “But the day will come when you shall walk among your father’s people and need more than a shirt of buckskin, my darlin’ boy,” she added, her speech touched with the brogue of her Irish father.

“I don’t understand.”

“The world of your father is like a great forest. The true paths are harder to find.” The ten-year-old started to interrupt, but Raven waved his unspoken question aside. The words she spoke had to remain with him all his life.

“You have been given two names. You are Ben McQueen and you are Bitter Creek. When one is lost, the other will know the way.”

S
NAKE EYE GANDY KNEW
better, but he couldn’t bring himself to ride away from a fight. It was a weakness of character he hoped to correct one day. But not this day, with Cal Ashworth sitting astride a horse before the ruins of the powder house on the Camino Viejo. Gandy recognized trouble and altered his course to ride toward it.

“Hello, Ashworth. Ain’t seen you since Austin,” Gandy said. The information he’d gathered on the Comanches had him worried. He’d circled the town and twice cut sign indicating whole villages were on the move. Whatever or whoever had chased them out of the mountains, he figured, must be bad medicine indeed.

“I’m honored you remember me,” Ashworth said. His flat-brimmed beaver hat shaded his pinched features. “I, too, have found your unwarranted attack on me impossible to forget.” He patted a wrinkle from his frock coat.

“You got all the airs of a gentleman right enough,” Gandy said. “But with a belly full of rum, you’ve all the sweet disposition of a rattler.”

Ashworth’s gaze darkened. He remembered only too well how this disreputable Ranger had interfered when Ashworth had attempted to discipline a lady friend. Gandy had wrested Ashworth’s cane from the gun merchant’s grasp, soundly thrashed him, and left him lying senseless in the middle of an Austin Street.

“There is unfinished business between us,” Ashworth said. Tracking Gandy to San Antonio had been part luck, part educated guess. “This time I’m stone-cold sober.”

Snake Eye grinned. His glass eye gleamed in the morning light. He considered Cal Ashworth a pompous, arrogant fortune hunter without scruples. He had a mean vicious streak and could be cruel simply for the sake of cruelty. These were qualities Snake Eye Gandy had no tolerance for.

“Lead on.”

Ashworth jabbed a thumb in the direction of the Alamo’s shattered, broken walls. “I’ve camped by the old church. We won’t be disturbed there.”

The gun merchant turned and walked his mount across the mud-soaked street. Gandy bristled at the man’s choice of campsites. The likes of Cal Ashworth had no business being within those hallowed walls.

It was mid-morning on the fourth of May. After waiting out another cloudburst that struck at sunup, Ben had left the abandoned granary to its ghosts and the spectral raven who had kept him company through the night. Cutting across country to intersect the mission road, Ben skirted the bend of the San Antonio River east of town. The clouds covered the sky like a quilt, a patchwork of light and dark gray textured by the wind at the upper levels of the atmosphere. The temperature wouldn’t climb much past sixty today, a cool day for late May, but then Texas weather was as fickle as a spring bride, so no one was particularly surprised. Coats weren’t usually stored away until well into June.