“Ricos and their blood money,” piped up Deacon Elijah Johns. “Scum-bellied fornicators. Satan’s blasphemers we need to put in the ground.”
“You said you spent time among the comancheros?” asked Captain Lamar Lockhart, stepping over to the brush where Jonah Hook dropped his saddle and blanket.
“For a long time I had reason to believe my boys was sold off to traders headed for Mexico.”
Most of the company had quietly turned to listen in. With his Indian partner, the new man had ridden with the Rangers for the better part of two months now—a long time without opening up and pouring out all that much of himself.
Lockhart nodded. “Cattle and horses, Mr. Hook. The ricos will buy furniture and clothing and mirrors and even family Bibles—”
“Satan’s handiwork, they are!” Johns snapped. “Good and kind Jesus—help these sinners see the error of their ways!”
The company captain pulled off his hat, the print of his hatband lying across his forehead like a wide scar as he pressed ahead. “Those traders will take anything the Comanches bring them what they got off the settlers they murdered. Anything worth stealing, that is. Only what the ricos’ comancheros will pay for in whiskey and in guns.”
“A bad combination, that one,” June Callicott added, his face as hard as a war shield, his cheeks flaring red as if he sweated chinaberry juice. “Whiskey and guns.”
For as long as there had been this ground called Texas, there had been Comanches and whiskey and guns. A deadly mix for those who wanted nothing more than to bring the fruitful hand of civilized man to these plains. Come here with a wagon and a milk cow and a family, come here to raise crops and cattle and a passel of children.
As far back as the Texas Revolution there had been Rangers—first organized in 1835 as local committees of safety and correspondence, right in the midst of their war with Mexico. Silas M. Parker was empowered to engage the services of three companies of Rangers whose business would be to range and guard the frontiers between the Brazos and Trinity rivers. From then on, in one incarnation or another, the Ranger existed on that high, wild prairie where he was first given birth to meet the outlaws of three races: American desperado, Mexican bandit, and Indian warrior. Down through the years the function these few men served might have changed in detail, but never did the Ranger cease standing as a bulwark between the lawless, savage elements and the coming of civilization.
No matter what other description might be given of him, the Ranger was a fighting man.
It took a lot of doing in the years after the revolution, but the few eventually subdued many of the tribes—formerly warlike—such as the Tonkawa and Caddo. The Rangers began pushing back their wilder cousins like the Kiowa and Comanche just before Texas went from being a republic to joining the Union itself, when Texans disbanded their Rangers, believing that it was now the duty of the federal government to protect them.
After more than a half-dozen years of waiting for the troops to come make a stand against the renewed raids of the wild tribes, Texans figured they had endured enough. In the late fifties the Rangers flourished once more. Again they issued the call, and young men rode in to answer the clarion. Again they sent out the companies to construct their modest outposts strung like distant beads on a strand of spiderweb, all the way from the Brazos on the north clear down to the Rio Grande flowing against the border of Mexico itself. Small bands of a dozen or more were scattered to live among the far-flung pioneer families tenaciously dug in like hermit bugs out there in that brutal, beautiful country. The Rangers were ready to ride out at a moment’s notice—to track down and punish any and all who cast a shadow of lawlessness and savagery across the whole of west Texas.
Years later when the South ripped itself away from the Union, the call went out for men to join the likes of John Bell Hood. Fighting men answered that resounding trumpet, leaving gaping holes in the fabric of Texas’s frontier defense. Quickly sensing the change, the wild tribes brought out their drums once more and danced over the scalps. Again the red tide savagely pushed against the scattered white settlers, reversing all the good the Rangers had accomplished.
When the men of Texas returned home after Appomattox, they found they had been defeated on two fronts. Not only had the Yankees whipped them in those four bloody years of war back east, but while they were gone, off to save the Confederacy, the savage horsemen of the southern plains had risen up to reclaim their buffalo ground. While some of the sons of the South continued to cry out that they would never surrender, a few even fleeing across the Rio Grande to continue their war, most accepted their defeat and rode home to put family and life back together once more.
And wound up staring right into the blood-flecked eye of another war.
How could a man think of plowing and planting when there were warriors roaming about, ready to undo everything a man might accomplish?
The Rangers offered a private $1.25 per day for pay, rations, clothing, and the services of his own mount. To sign on, each of them had to be ready with a trail-worthy horse, saddle, bridle, and blanket, along with a hundred rounds of powder and ball. Officers—the captain and his lieutenants, in addition to the sergeant of each company—were paid a pittance more. For most the pay did not really matter.
No more were these men mere green recruits. While most were young, very few weren’t proficient with a gun—most had been proven in battle.
To Hook it seemed that most of the men who rode with Company C were hard-wintered and humped in the loin. Seemed too that they could stare eyeball to eyeball with death itself, ride for days in the saddle and gallop straight-up into daunting odds.
So it was that Jonah found comfort in this irregular company of men. Nothing like Sterling Price’s Missouri Confederates. Further still from the galvanized U.S. Volunteers he had joined to fight Indians in Dakota Territory after the Great War. Probably as far from the Army of the West as any civilians could be, the Rangers still weren’t anything like militia. No matter, their captain stood them to a grueling inspection each morning. While Company C did not dress in uniform, their captain nonetheless did expect the men to wear clothing that was clean and functional, demanding that the men keep their horses fit and their weapons in fighting trim.
“We may not be military,” Lamar Lockhart had reminded them before they rode out from Jacksboro. “We may be nothing more than irregulars—but we have no need of looking like bobtails, do we?”
Irregulars indeed: a Ranger furnished all his own needs and arms. Never did these men ride beneath any flag, nor with a surgeon along. And all matters of rank came about through a man’s ability to lead and inspire his own company of staunch individualists—not through some political appointment or timely graduation from the U.S. Military Academy.
It did not take long for Jonah to come to admire the saddle-hardened men in this crude bunch he rode with, marching northwest from Fort Richardson toward the Staked Plain of the Penateka and Kwahadi Comanche.
No—not for pay, nor for glory did this company of Rangers ride into the breach.
For most of these it might be but the memory of a loved one killed, scalped, and savagely mutilated that spurred them to join. Mothers and fathers, perhaps a sister or brother. Blood kin captured and enslaved, outraged or butchered.
This was something that Jonah Hook understood right down to the very core of him.
These were men who rode into Comanche country with a score to settle.
33
Summer 1874