The Rattlesnake Season Read online

  He would be a member of Company B, since he lived near Tyler. Headquarters were eventually going to be in Garland, over one hundred miles from home, but since the companies were still forming, they had all been called to a camp along the Red River. There was a task to complete first, before making that trek: Bring in Charlie Langdon.

  Luckily, the Rangers could live just about anywhere they chose—as long they didn’t mind being away from home for long stretches at a time.

  Josiah didn’t mind traveling so much when he was younger.

  When he first joined up with Captain Fikes, life was pretty much an adventure. He had a pretty wife, Lily, whom he’d been in love with all his life, and three fine-looking daughters. The money he made with Captain Fikes wasn’t much, if there was any at all, but it helped keep a couple of cows in the barn, and between that and his hunting skills, there was always meat on the table for his family.

  Sometimes, riding with Captain Fikes and the other Rangers took him away for months at a time, but when Josiah returned home it was always to a hero’s welcome.

  Lily always made a big to-do when he entered the pine cabin, and the girls giggled and clapped like he was the King of England or somebody equally important, returning from a great exploit or conquest. He liked that word then, “conquest.” It made him feel important.

  Lily loved books, and filled the girls’ heads with a multitude of story ideas.

  Several seasons passed, and they all got lulled into a comfortable rhythm—until the influenza struck. First, the fevers took Fiona, the youngest. After weeks of battling the sickness, the poor little thing slipped away in her mother’s arms. And then, like a wild boar rampaging carelessly through the small cabin, the fevers took his other two daughters, Claire and Mavis, only days apart.

  For the first time in years, Josiah and Lily were left alone, their emotions and hope all but drained out of them. They pretty much wanted to die, too—but they held on, fought off the flu with tonics and sheer determination for one simple reason: Lily was pregnant, and the baby was nearly due to birth.

  Wolfe shook his head . . . tried to force the thought of Lily from his mind as he brought the horse back up to pace, leaving the stink of the skunk behind him, heading toward his new life as a Texas Ranger—and leaving his young son behind.

  Traveling was not such a welcome adventure these days, but it was a relief not to look up on the hill and see a row of graves that had yet to settle into the ground.

  There was no escaping the loneliness on the trail. Even the birds were silent. Somewhere in the distance he heard a growl and a yelp, and figured it was the skunk celebrating the snake kill with its brood.

  The ridge Wolfe had been riding on flattened out, and he spotted a few puddles of water up ahead in what used to be a creek. It had been a good while since he’d watered Clipper.

  He glanced up at the sun and figured he’d be in San Antonio by nightfall, even with a stop.

  It didn’t take long to venture down to the water.

  Vultures soared overhead, and he could hear the first frogs of spring croaking for a mate. The grasses were still tender, their tips still a little brown. Bluebonnets, red buck-eye, and paintbrush were slowly setting into bloom, coloring the dull landscape in all the colors of the rainbow. The fragrance from the wildflowers was overwhelming.

  Lily had loved spring.

  The Appaloosa took to the water like it had been trudging through a desert for days. Wolfe hadn’t ridden the horse hard, but he had kept up a steady, headlong gait, stopping only to relieve himself and watch the skunk do away with the snake. It had been a good while since he’d asked Clipper to make such a long trail ride. The horse was a bit out of shape.

  With the sun beaming down from a cloudless sky, the air was beginning to warm.

  Josiah Wolfe propped himself against a boulder the size of a good bull and closed his eyes, with the thought of resting.

  It was as if he were snakebit himself.

  Memory gripped him, and the image of Ofelia standing over Lily’s body with the skinning knife flooded lifelike through every corner of his mind. It was like it had just happened. He could still smell the blood.

  Josiah opened his eyes quickly and tried to think of something else, tried to force away the image of Lily lying dead on their marriage bed. Even thinking of Lyle, smiling and laughing, his eyes just like Lily’s, did little to relieve his mood.

  He mounted Clipper and headed toward San Antonio.

  The thought of Charlie Langdon, the man the Rangers were to bring in, dangling from the end of a rope, didn’t bring him out of this funk, either, as Josiah let his mind wander back to the present.

  Charlie was a low-down scoundrel if ever there was one. For a time, Charlie had been his deputy in Seerville, after the two of them had fought together in the war, but Josiah caught on pretty quickly that Charlie was the kind of man that liked to walk on both sides of the law, and couldn’t cast away the confederate demons who urged him to steal, and kill.

  Charlie Langdon made things up as he went, twisted the law so it suited whatever con he was knee-deep in at the time. And that’s what got Charlie in trouble. After Wolfe fired him, Charlie left Seerville, and went on a cheating and robbing spree that claimed four innocent lives in Tyler over the next two years—and then Charlie disappeared.

  Josiah had no authority in Tyler, so Charlie’s crimes were out of his jurisdiction, but he would have given anything to have gone after the double-crossing snake at the time.

  Some said Charlie went to Indian Territory and was hiding out in the canyons, while others just hoped he was dead. Neither was right. Charlie had changed his name and gotten another badge pinned on his chest. But skunks can’t change their stripes any more than a rattlesnake can sneak up quietly on a man, and before long, Charlie was walking on both sides of the law again. It was his bad luck to come up against a small group of men finishing up a fight with a band of Kiowas, the Texas Rangers—most notably, Captain Hiram Fikes.

  Fikes had sent word to Wolfe and told him Charlie Langdon was in custody. If Josiah wanted the charge, he could come to San Antonio and take Langdon back to Tyler for sentencing for the four previous killings. Once he delivered Langdon to the jail in Tyler, he would have little time to head back to the camp along the Red River for indoctrination into the formal ranks of the Rangers.

  In Captain Fikes’s eyes, Josiah was still a Ranger. Now, with the changes being made in Austin, his past experience as a Ranger was needed even more. It was a hard decision, leaving Lyle with Ofelia, but Josiah felt he had no choice. He needed a new future, for himself and for Lyle. And he knew the citizens in and around Tyler were beating the drum to see Charlie Langdon hang. But that wasn’t Josiah’s immediate concern.

  His main concern was returning home to his son as soon as possible.

  The rest of the ride was uneventful. It was dusk when he rode into San Antonio. The liveliness of the town shocked his system. City life always did.

  After Lily’s death, he stayed as close to home as possible. The silence of his land, of Seerville, which was now nothing more than a ghost town, host to only a few Mexican squatters, including Ofelia, was comforting. He had never been one for the pleasantries of society—manners and conversation were Lily’s gift—so he did not miss being around people on a daily basis. But he did mind the loneliness more than he’d thought he would.

  Oddly, the noise of the streets, of wagons and horses coming to and fro, piano music banging out of the saloons, was a tad bit comforting to Wolfe. His dull mood did not lighten, but for the first time in a long while, he began to think about the pleasure of a bath and shave.

  He found a livery near the jail and stabled his horse. Most people paid him no mind. Wolfe was just another face in the crowd, since the Rangers didn’t wear a badge. The organization was more akin to a brotherhood, and though it wasn’t a secret society, it felt like it at times . . . though recently, with Governor Coke installed in Austin, after President Grant r
efused to oust him, the Rangers were out in the open, a welcome sight to most Texans. Many of the Rangers were war heroes, and they operated on the legend of their name, like Hiram Fikes.

  Josiah hadn’t been with the organization long enough for people to recognize him—he had no legend attached to his name. Not yet thirty-four, in comparison to Fikes he felt he was still green behind the ears, and had become more tepid and reclusive since Lily’s death. But he had a strong interest in seeing justice served.

  It only took a little asking around, and Josiah found out the whereabouts of Captain Hiram Fikes. He was playing poker in the Silver Dollar Saloon, two doors down from the jail.

  “Pull up a chair, Wolfe.” Fikes was a short and skinny man with a head full of solid white hair, barely taller, it seemed, than a whiskey barrel. His skin was leathery and wrinkled, and from a distance he looked like a stiff wind could blow him straight away into Indian Territory.

  More than a few brash and arrogant outlaws had underestimated the captain and found themselves six feet under without the chance to beg for forgiveness. The captain was one of the best shots Josiah Wolfe had ever met. It was as if the new model Winchester Fikes carried was an extension of his arm instead of a weapon all to itself.

  “Just checking in, Captain. I’ll take my leave if you don’t mind. I’d like to get the trail dust off my neck.”

  Fikes shook his head no, pointed insistently to the chair, puffed heavily on the cigar that dangled from the corner of his mouth, and said nothing further to explain his command.

  The other three men at the table looked impatient. It was the captain’s turn to deal, and by the size of the chip stacks, it looked like he was cleaning out some deep pockets.

  The music and laughter seemed foreign to Josiah. He tried not to stare at the two painted women standing next to the piano, or at the picture of a naked woman over the bar. It had been a long time since he’d been in a room with women, even the lowly kind, and it stirred a deep longing inside him that almost made him blush.

  Aside from going into town, Ofelia was the only woman he came into contact with these days . . . and not once had Josiah let his mind wander to the fence of desire since the day he buried Lily next to his three girls.

  “I’ve been waiting for you, Wolfe, and we haven’t got much time.” Fikes shuffled the cards like a professional dealer, a smile growing on his face as he turned his attention back to the game. “I know you might be wondering why I had you ride all this way, other than that Charlie Langdon has a history with you.”

  “I was, sir, but I’m glad to fulfill the request. It came at a good time.”

  Fikes flopped out five cards to each man, then stared up at Josiah, the smile gone from his face.

  “It’s time for you to decide if you want to keep Rangering. The last couple of years have been tough for you, but it’s time to realize there’s people that still count on you, Wolfe. There’s going to be more Rangers now than ever, and you’ve been around me long enough not to be considered a greenhorn. I’ll need you one hundred percent. There’s a lot at stake. The legislators in Austin are wasting no time in setting up the companies, and Governor Coke’s going to want quick results to prove we’re worth the money.”

  “I understand, Captain.”

  “I hope you do. There’s trouble brewing up your way, and I’m gonna need every man I can count on to keep a spark from turning into a wildfire. Ain’t none of the men I got are as familiar with that country up there as you. Some are going to be mighty disappointed because they signed up to fight with Comanche in the counties out west. They might not have their heads where they need to be, thinking an outlaw ain’t near as dangerous as a redskin. They’re going to need a strong hand, a strong aim, these new recruits, not a man with calluses from a plow.”

  Wolfe understood the tone, the underlying meaning of the words just spoken. Captain Hiram Fikes wasn’t sure he could trust him in his current state of mind because he hadn’t fully committed to Rangering. He was still in mourning for his family, his demeanor was as black as widow’s weeds, and Fikes was telling him to snap out of it, or go home and be a farmer.

  Josiah couldn’t blame the captain. You had to trust the man you picked to cover your back. He knew right then that the request to escort Charlie Langdon back to Tyler was a show of faith as much as anything else. There were other Rangers Fikes could have called on to make the trip.

  “I don’t mean to be anything else other than a Texas Ranger, Captain.”

  “Good. That’s what I was hoping to hear. There’s a room for you at the hotel across the street.”

  “The Menger is a little out of my league, Captain. I was planning on staying down by the livery.”

  “You let me worry about the hotel room this time around. You’ve had a long ride. Feders and Elliot are keeping an eye on Charlie Langdon for now, and I’d just as soon he not see you until he needs to. He’s got men all over town, and I hear he might try to bust out of jail. He’s got a grudge against you a mile long, and I figure he’s marked you with his boys. I’d rather you be at my side than at the smoking end of the barrel of one of those scoundrels.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Josiah left the captain at the Silver Dollar, the big pile of gambling chips getting bigger. He didn’t bother to introduce himself to Fikes’s card mates. Their identities were none of his business, and they looked like locals—but for all he knew, they could have been fellow Rangers that he did not know. Everything was changing pretty fast since Governor Coke took office. In any case, Captain Hiram Fikes was the last man in Texas who needed looking after.

  Josiah paused, and thought it was a little odd that the captain was wasting away the night while his men were standing guard outside the local jail, but he figured even an old Ranger needed to blow off steam.

  He made note of Feders and Elliot, one on the roof, one by the door, both about as inconspicuous as that skunk on the trail. He’d met Feders, a lanky true Texan like himself, before and ridden with him briefly on one of the early sojourns with Captain Fikes. He didn’t know Elliot at all. He was a new recruit. But they were both Rangers, and he was glad to see them, glad to know Fikes wasn’t just relying on the locals to keep an eye on Charlie Langdon.

  If Charlie Langdon did have a gang in town, they knew there were Rangers to contend with, too, and might think twice about busting Charlie out. Neither Feders nor Elliot noticed Josiah; they looked bored, none too concerned about Charlie Langdon, or much else for that matter. But for all he knew, that could have been a ruse.

  Josiah, on the other hand, was aware of every sound, of every man, woman, and child bustling about, and unsure of who was who since the captain told him he might be a marked man.

  Having to think about the safety of his own person was enough to give any man pause, but Josiah instantly thought of Lyle, and what would happen to his young son if Langdon’s men carried out their intent.

  Lyle would be an orphan—plain and simple. The boy would more than likely be pulled from the small pine cabin that had always been his home, out of Ofelia’s arms, and taken to the county orphanage. It was a thought Josiah could barely stand to consider, so he pushed the thought away and refused to consider it any further.

  He headed quickly to the Menger Hotel, and stopped once he stepped inside the grand lobby.

  It was a magnificent sight, three storeys of opulence—white tiled floors, with intricate geometric designs that looked like a sharp-edged number eight repeated over and over again, and ivory pillars, gilded with gold leaf paint, that held up a mezzanine and another floor. Plants of the like he had never seen before were scattered about the lobby, tall and jungle-like, as big as trees, but fragile-looking, adding to the expensive airs the hotel decorators had successfully put on.

  It would have been the highlight of his life if he could have brought Lily to a place like the Menger Hotel, all fine and fancy, just the two of them, holding each other’s hand like they did when they were courting.

  But
that was not to be, and Josiah knew it.

  His heart ached for Lily every day, and he still forced himself to think of her as living and walking on the earth, bustling about at home, taking care of the girls and Lyle, while he was away. He knew it was a lie to himself, but the matters of love, and of the future, were subjects he’d desperately tried to avoid, until lately. He kept telling himself that he had a job to do, a son to look after—that was enough for any man to worry about.

  But for a brief moment, he allowed himself a glimpse into the past, into his imagination, and watched Lily, dressed in her Sunday best, stroll across the lobby floor of the Menger Hotel, like a queen.

  He shook his head, cleared his mind, and made his way to the registration desk.

  The clientele of the Menger Hotel was more apt to be businessmen and formal ladies than a Ranger fresh off the trail.

  Josiah immediately felt self-conscious, and almost decided to head down to the flophouse by the livery, but he just couldn’t bring himself to leave. He didn’t want to insult Captain Fikes by declining his generosity.

  Fresh pomade glistened in the hair of the mousy-looking man who stood behind the registration desk. There was not a speck of dust on his dark blue double-breasted uniform. Gold buttons tinkled on the little man’s sleeves as the clerk lifted a pen, a look of disdain rising on his face.

  “May I offer some direction, sir?”

  “A room is all I need at the moment.”

  The clerk hesitated. “We are full up. You may want to check the other hotels for your needs, sir.”

  Josiah stiffened, knew he was being looked down on, and he didn’t take too kindly to the man’s attitude. “I’m with Captain Fikes. He said there was a room reserved in my name.”

  The clerk’s eyebrows arched with immediate recognition. “My apologies. Name, sir?”

  “Wolfe. Josiah Wolfe.”

  The man ran the pen down a piece of paper in a fancy big book that looked more like a ledger than a guest book, and nodded.