The Rattlesnake Season Page 8

  Josiah nodded again. The war had been a hard time for most everyone he knew or met. It was hard to believe that the fighting had ended nine years prior. It seemed like yesterday that he was in Suffolk. And some men still carried the fire of the war with them. It wasn’t over for everyone. Not even Josiah on some days.

  McClure continued to fuss around the fire.

  “There’s going to be hell to pay if my biscuits burn,” Charlie said.

  The big Scot stopped and glared at Charlie. “If I was you, Mr. Langdon, I wouldn’t be so certain on getting a bit of supper.” He paused and cast a glance over to the captain, and then added, “Especially if you’re going to continue to be such a disagreeable man.”

  Josiah ignored Charlie, who seemed surprised that he might be deprived of food.

  “So, you’re a Ranger now?” Josiah asked McClure.

  “I am. I met Sam in my travels, and he hails from near Austin. This is the most beautiful country I ever saw. I hope to never leave. We were working the cattle lands for a while, but the Comanche were always causing us grief. We figured joining up with the Rangers would be a good thing for us both. I never plan on leaving Texas.”

  “It’s good to have a home. A place where it feels like you belong.”

  “’ Tis. Most certainly ’tis. I plan on buyin’ a piece of land outside of Austin. Start a family of my own someday.”

  “You should have joined up with the Travis Rifles. You wouldn’t have to travel so much.”

  The Rifles, a small but formidable militia in Austin, was getting a lot of press in the newspapers lately. They had physically escorted Governor Davis out of the capitol, making way for Coke to take his duly elected seat. If Josiah had been a betting man, he’d have put down a week’s wages that a lot of the men in the Rifles would become Rangers sooner or later.

  “Well, you see, Sam is my best mate, and he has known the captain for a long time. There’s no other man I’d rather be ridin’ with. If this is where I’m meant to be, then that’s that. ’Tis a better day at the side of my friend than on the trail alone. Rangering is going to be an adventure, and the Rifles aren’t Indian fighters. I’m anxious for my first trip into Indian Territory with a group of like-minded men.”

  Josiah nodded that he understood.

  McClure was not the first Ranger he had met who did not originally come from Texas, but he sure seemed like one of the most interesting. The Scot was confident in his movements, his voice was musical, and he really took pleasure in cooking. Josiah was enjoying being in camp with Vi McClure.

  It was a good way to end the day, he thought, as the big man handed him a plate of steaming food that looked fit enough for a king to feast on.

  “That ought to take the bite out of your stomach,” Vi McClure said with a huge a smile crossing his face.

  “I believe it will,” Josiah said. “I believe it will.”

  Scrap Elliot nudged Josiah’s boot cautiously with the butt of his rifle. Being a light sleeper had always been a dependable trait for Josiah, but he was as much out of the habit of sleeping on the ground as Clipper. The trip had taken more out of him than he’d anticipated.

  He barely roused at the nudge.

  Scrap had to put a little more persuasion against his boot the second time around.

  Josiah sat straight up, reaching for the carbine at his side. “What?” He had been in a dreamless state. At least he thought so. There was no memory of anything other than a full, satisfied belly as he quickly fell asleep. Vi McClure’s supper was about the best food he’d ever tasted on the trail.

  “It’s your watch,” Scrap said.

  Josiah wiped open his eyes, caught a whiff of lingering smoke from the coals in the fire pit. The embers glowed orange. The sky was black and cloudless. Stars with pulsing silver tips filled Josiah’s gaze—they did not give enough light to navigate away from the bedroll, so he sat for a moment gathering his bearings.

  It was clear it was the middle of the night. The moon was nowhere to be seen.

  “Been pretty quiet, with the exception of a few coyotes yipping about,” Scrap whispered.

  Charlie Langdon snored loudly, capturing their attention for a second. Satisfied the outlaw was still sound asleep, and was no threat, Josiah slipped on his boots. “Good,” he said. “Didn’t figure you’d have any trouble.”

  “I’m worried that Langdon’s gang is laying in wait.”

  “Did you hear something?”

  Scrap hesitated. “It was probably a critter, but I thought I heard a horse at the bottom of the hill. I only heard it once.”

  “How long ago?’

  “ ’ Bout an hour ago. Might have been a stray.”

  Josiah stood and wiped the chill off his arms. “I doubt there’s any chance of that.” There hadn’t been any sign of a ranch or farm since they left the torn-down old town by the stream . . . and even there there’d been nothing living or even any sign of anything recently.

  With that thought in mind, he headed off to the bushes.

  Scrap kept whispering, keeping a good amount of distance but talking in a low tone nonetheless. Josiah couldn’t hear a word the kid was saying, nor did he care. He finished up his business and came back to grab up his carbine. “You better get some shut-eye. Captain will want to ride as soon as he can in the morning.”

  “But . . . ,” Scrap said.

  Josiah stopped. “No buts. Get some shut-eye. If there’s a gang out there, we’d know it by now.” Without waiting, he headed up the hill to take his post. The last thing he was in the mood for was a long, drawn-out conversation with a greenhorn about things that might or might not happen.

  The spot Captain Fikes had chosen as a lookout took about five minutes to get to. It didn’t take long for his eyes to fully adjust to the darkness and to see that the trail around here was lined with rocks all about as big as cow heads.

  Josiah was careful with his steps. He’d kicked up a snake more than once at night, and the last thing he wanted to do was draw any undue attention to himself . . . especially if they were being tracked.

  He settled in on top of the hill, propping himself against an old fallen tree. The view, given the limitations of the darkness on the moonless night, was more than he’d anticipated.

  A valley swept out below him, and if he turned all the way around in a circle, he could see hills reaching to the mountains in front of and behind him. There were shadows of trees—limbs with tender new leaves that were so soft they made little noise in the slight breeze—spattered about, but not thick enough to even be considered a stand. He couldn’t make out much detail in the distance. The trail was not visible, nor was any water source, which he had hoped to find for the morning ahead.

  The smoke from the dying campfire touched at his nose, but it was far enough away to just be sweet, not pungent.

  Dew had formed on the tree he was leaning against, and it was dampening his shirt. He had not lost the chill from sleeping.

  Oddly, he found that he was still tired—sleep had not refreshed him at all.

  It was at times like this that Josiah wished he had taken up the habit of tobacco—either chewing or smoking. But neither habit had ever agreed with him. Letting his mind wander would only take him on a journey into the past, and that was the last place he wanted to visit in the middle of the night. So he got as comfortable as he could, satisfied himself that Scrap had been hearing things, and began to whistle again—so softly he could hardly tell the difference from the song in his head to the song that was twittering out of his lips.

  Minutes turned to hours. The stars twinkled. A coyote yipped a good distance away. How many miles away was hard to tell. And the sky started to fade to gray on the eastern horizon.

  Josiah stood up when he heard some movement down in the camp, glad that his shift at watch was nearly over.

  He was certain the captain was waking up the men—until he heard the first gunshot shatter the calmness and promise of the rising dawn.

  CHAPTE
R 10

  Josiah didn’t take the time to consider that Scrap Elliot, in all of his eagerness and insistence, might have been right about Charlie’s gang lying in wait. There would be time enough for second-guessing himself later.

  After the first gunshot, a sudden volley of shots erupted almost simultaneously, accompanied by a thundering of horse hooves.

  A rush of wind delivered the whinnies and neighs, the shouts and commands, to Josiah’s ear quicker than he would have liked. Even though it was still dark, the quiet world of only a minute before had exploded into a storm, a sneak attack born in the early dawn hour. There was just enough light coming from the camp that Josiah could see shadows dancing on the cliff face—though he couldn’t make out any faces.

  Any sense of fear or physical discomfort from the morning cold left Josiah as quickly as his feet would move.

  The flashes of gunfire in the camp continued rampantly. He could hear more yelling—and his own heartbeat raced rapidly, adrenaline pumping into his veins like a dam had been unleashed, adding to the sudden bursts of sound. He was numbed, felt nothing, couldn’t even hear himself think.

  Josiah wanted to stand with his fellow Rangers and fight off the attackers, whoever they were. His wartime senses had come home without any begging. He scuttled down the trail, crouching as low to the rocks as he could, hoping that no one had been sent to kill the lookout.

  But anyone planning a surprise attack would know where the lookout was, and somehow, they had got past him, sneaked into camp from another way—under the cover of darkness, or in the shadows.

  Josiah had been able to see every way in and every way out of the camp. How had he failed? The questions came unbidden, rising over the shouts and gunfire. Surviving meant pushing away every doubt. There was too much on the line to fall victim to doubt.

  A bullet glanced off a rock just at his knees. The spark briefly lit the trail, made him blink and stop to gather his breath and thoughts, then he dove to the right, off the trail, to gain some cover. It was barely light, so he knew he was taking a chance, gambling with his own life that he would be safe since the shot came from the opposite direction.

  As he rolled, balancing the carbine as best he could, he fired off two rounds from the Peacemaker.

  The unseen shooter returned fire.

  Josiah’s shots had missed. He pulled the trigger three more times, wishing he trusted the new weapon enough to load it fully.

  The need to reload the Peacemaker came a second sooner than it should have—he wasn’t sure if he’d hit his unseen target. No shots were immediately returned, so he took another deep breath, half-cocked the gun, and opened the loading gate.

  He popped in a bullet, skipped the next chamber, loaded the rest, closed the gate, drew the hammer to full cock, and waited for a noise, a shot, anything that would give him a clue about where to shoot.

  Nothing came. At least nothing close. Camp was another story.

  There was more yelling, still plenty of shots being peppered about.

  Josiah was pinned in, at least for the moment.

  He heard Sam Willis call out to Vi McClure. More shots followed, bright sunny orange blasts of light that looked like fireflies in the gray dawn, the noise deafening, overtaking Vi McClure’s response. If he had one.

  The carbine already had a cartridge chambered home. It had been in the ready position since Josiah took watch. He was glad he wouldn’t have to load the Sharps, glad that the loud lever action wouldn’t give up his spot off the trail. A repeater sure would have been preferable at the moment.

  He couldn’t wait there forever, not knowing what had happened to the shooter or who it was who had spotted him. Slowly, he began to ease down the trail again, slinking on crouched knees behind the rocks and boulders toward the camp, the carbine in one hand, the Peacemaker in the other.

  His ankle slid down a hole.

  He was surprised he didn’t pull out a dangling rattlesnake as he moved on, trying not to overreact. It would be his luck to get snakebit while there was an attack on his fellow Rangers.

  Morning was coming on fast.

  The horizon was now fully lit with the rising sun. Gray had burned white. Soon the white would bloom a fragile blue, filling the sky with color and cotton-ball clouds, and there would be no hiding in the dark—either for himself or the attackers. Josiah figured the shooting would be over by then.

  The smell of gunpowder mixed with the waning campfire smoke, a blend of carbons that burned Josiah’s nose and throat. The coming day had arrived in the blink of an eye, and change had arrived at the pull of a trigger, and like so many days in the past, it was likely to be stained with blood and death.

  He could see the trail in front of him, and every few feet he would stop, peer around a corner, or over the top of a rock, to see if he could see who had had him in his sights.

  It wasn’t until he was nearly to the entrance of the camp that he discovered one of his own shots had found its target . . . and there was one less shooter to concern himself about.

  A man Josiah had never seen before lay propped back against a huge rock, a carbine on both sides of him. He had been outgunned and felt extremely lucky to be alive at the moment.

  It looked like the man was not much older than Scrap Elliot. A patch of soft stubble was hardly visible on his chin, and his hands looked like they had never seen a bit of farm work. A kid. He had shot a kid. Albeit unknown to him. He could feel a load of bile rising in his throat.

  Josiah knew he had only been protecting himself. But killing never came easy to him.

  This kid’s eyes were glazed, vacant, and his shirt soaked with fresh blood.

  Mixed with the shooting and smoke, the air now held the familiar smell of blood. The flies that feasted on the bounty of man’s madness would not be far behind. Josiah shivered at the thought. Pushed away ghost images that were not welcome, but were persistent and uncontrollable, regardless of his effort.

  It looked like the bullet had caught the shooter in the throat just right. Depending on how he looked at it, Josiah’s aim was a lucky shot or a ricochet. Regardless, the kid was dead.

  He hesitated for a second, stared at the dead man, and realized there was nothing he could do—and he wasn’t sure that the man would have deserved it even if he could—then he made a beeline to the camp, still skirting the trail, not taking any more undue chances but a little more confident in his movements.

  He had no idea how many more men were among the attackers . . . or what their motive was. Though it wasn’t hard to figure out that the men were after Charlie Langdon’s freedom.

  Josiah glanced back over his shoulder and thought the dead kid had gotten the short end of the stick.

  A devil like Charlie Langdon wasn’t worth losing your life over as far as Josiah was concerned. No man was worth that, but it never ceased to amaze Josiah what one outlaw would do for another.

  The shouting and shooting calmed. Then stopped suddenly. There were a few muffled voices, nothing that he could decipher, but any urgency seemed to be gone—vanished like a tornado rising back into the smoky sky.

  Josiah froze in his tracks as he came to the largest of all the boulders at the entrance to the camp, the spot Captain Fikes had chosen to spend the night at.

  Josiah was about fifty feet from the fire Vi McClure had cooked supper over.

  There was no one to be seen. He was shielded but could see nearly everything. Charlie was gone from his bed on the ground, the blankets left behind in a bundle that looked more like a rat’s nest than a bedroll. And no one was in the camp.

  A quick glance upward told him Clipper and the other Rangers’ horses were still corralled. Josiah was glad of that.

  When he looked back to the camp, Scrap Elliot appeared, edging around the cliff face, his head down, his gun pointed to the ground, barely in his grasp. The kid was in a stupor it seemed. Not quite staggering, but listless, like he was lost.

  Josiah knew the look. It was a good bet that the kid had k
illed, or at least shot, his first man. He edged out from his hiding place.

  Scrap jerked and started, and looked up quickly, aimlessly raising his gun at Josiah.

  “Oh,” he said. “Wolfe, it’s just you.” He hesitated, then let the gun fall back to his side. “They’re gone.”

  For some reason Josiah wasn’t entirely relieved. The expression on Scrap’s face gave him no reason to be glad of anything. The kid’s skin was ashen, and he was damn near in tears once he realized it was Josiah coming at him and not an outlaw.

  “What about Charlie?”

  Scrap nodded. “Gone.”

  “Damn it.”

  “It’s the captain, Wolfe. He’s been shot pretty bad.”

  “Where?”

  Scrap pointed from where he’d come. “Up near the horses. Feders told me I was no help there, to get the hell out. That’s what I’m doing. Getting the hell out.” He reached out, propped his hand on the cliff face to steady himself, then slid down to his knees.

  Josiah glanced up the trail, then hurried over to Scrap. There was a dribble of blood on his sleeve, growing larger. “You’ve been shot, too.”

  “It’s a graze. I’ll be all right.”

  Sure, Josiah thought. Sure you will. He tore open the sleeve to see the wound for himself. Scrap offered no resistance. The kid was right. It was a graze, but the bleeding needed to be stopped.