Read The Rattlesnake Season Online
Authors: Larry D. Sweazy
The Rattlesnake Season (2 page)
CHAPTER 1
May 1874
Josiah Wolfe sat atop his Appaloosa stallion, Clipper, and watched a rooter skunk push through a dry creek, searching for anything that moved or anything that held the slightest hint of green.
The skunk, black with a broad white stripe down its back and a nose that looked like it ought to be on a hog, didn’t see the four-foot-long diamondback rattlesnake sunning itself on the bright side of a big boulder a few yards ahead of it.
Wolfe rubbed the butt of his gun, a .45 single-action Peacemaker, then thought better of interfering. He’d wait it out, see what happened next, though his betting side told him not to count out the skunk.
He gently edged the stallion back up the trail so he’d be downwind when all hell broke loose.
The snake hissed and wiggled its tail, setting its alarm in motion, but that didn’t seem to deter the hognose. In the blink of an eye the skunk recoiled and without warning jumped straight at the snake, capturing it just behind the eyes with a determined set of iron jaws.
There was no time for the snake to spit or smell the foul stink that escaped from the skunk’s defensive gland. Without so much as a shiver, the reptile succumbed with no chance of a fair fight, its head smashed flatter than a johnnycake. The rattle quickly subsided, a tiny echo in the wind, like the last bell ringing on a funeral coach.
Josiah had little use for snakes or skunks, and even less for their human counterparts.
If it wasn’t for one such critter, Charlie Langdon, he’d be home right now, readying the hard ground for planting even though the dry north winds had yet to stop blowing.
Winter had been slow to let go, and spring was hesitant to come on fully—not that winter was much of a worry in East Texas, not like in the Dakotas, but the wind still raged cold and fierce at times, and the leaves still fell off the trees.
Once in a blue moon, snowflakes fell from the sky on Christmas. But spring was near . . . The smell of renewal was in the air, and honestly, Josiah Wolfe wished more than anything that he was back home to welcome it, instead of being on the trail to bring a killer to justice.
Josiah watched the skunk drag the snake off, probably to a den nearby loaded with babies whose hungry mouths and eyes had yet to see the light of day.
He had been on and off the trail since the day he had become a lawman within the confines of Seerville, the town where he’d been born and raised. Like his father before him, Josiah had worn the marshal’s badge. Life was fine until the town up and died, when the railroad curved and went through Tyler instead. There wasn’t much left to marshal after nearly everyone moved on or was foreclosed on. But Josiah had the deed to the family homestead, and pulling up stakes was something he wouldn’t consider—not with all his kin buried on the back forty.
He wasn’t much of a farmer, and his land wasn’t real hospitable to much of anything of use, since most of it was floodplain and swamp, but he made do with what he had.
When the opportunity to become a Ranger came his way, he’d leapt at the chance. Josiah had listened to tales about the Rangers since he was a little boy, peering from behind the cupboard when he should have been tucked in bed, as his father and his deputies gathered around the fire and sipped whiskey.
The heroics of the Texas Rangers in the Cherokee War in 1839, and the Battle of Plum Creek, when more than a thousand Comanche warriors were faced down, were seared into Josiah’s memory. Not long ago, after Reconstruction, the Rangers had fallen out of favor, replaced by the Texas State Police—a halfhearted unit, formed by then Governor Davis, that was never afforded the respect of the Rangers.
The Rangers still existed during that time, but they weren’t funded very well, or at all, and mostly disappeared. But word went out that the newly elected Democrats, and specifically the new governor, Richard Coke, in Austin had recommissioned the Rangers, giving them more stature and power, and a healthy budget.
Six companies, consisting of seventy-five men each, were quickly being assembled. Now that this Frontier Battalion was being formed, the Rangers would be responsible for the whole state, and not just for responding to the Indian troubles in the West.
Josiah had ridden in a posse with Captain Hiram Fikes in the years since Reconstruction took hold, and when Fikes heard that Seerville no longer needed a marshal, he’d sent word to Josiah that he would be a welcome addition to the company of former Rangers who were to cover East Texas.
Josiah would be an official Ranger—which seemed odd, considering their lack of real organization in the recent past. He’d be on the dockets, something more than a side-kick to Captain Fikes, helping out when he was called on by the shadowy group of men who had called themselves Rangers during the years after the War Between the States.
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.
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 refused 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.
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