James Burke - Two for Texas

“There’s five of us, walleye. You better pick on another camp if you want to be a squaw man.”

“That’s just how many balls I got in my Colt. Can you see them loads real good from there?”

Four days later the three of them splashed across the Red River into Indian Territory. The land was flat and baked in the sun, and heat waves seemed to rise off the horizon like distant mountains. The sky was so blue and hard that it looked like it would crack if a rifle ball were fired against it. Their horses’ hooves clattered on the rocks in the stillness, and they had to squint their eyes against the white sun’s glare to distinguish a tiny clump of oaks from a pool of shadow in an arroyo. Hugh was already talking about a river in Colorado called the Platte and panning float gold as big as elk’s teeth. But his description of that country, where he had never been, was not real to Son, because this land here was too immense, like Texas had been, to believe that anything larger could lie beyond it. This land rang under a horse’s shoe, it was now. The dry rocks in the stream beds had never been cut by a wagon rut, as though the history waiting to happen again had been checked south of the Red River.

Hugh would live out his last years among the Rickaree Indians on the Milk River in Montana, and Son would see war come to Texas again in 1861. His children would ride with General Hood’s Texas cavalry at the battle of Atlanta, open the Chisholm Trail from San Antonio to Kansas, and as lawmen bring an end to the Sutton-Taylor feud in DeWitt County. But on that hot day they crossed the Red they didn’t think of the power that lay in their blood. They thought only of the dust devils blowing across the plain and the Comanches that could hide like shadows in an arroyo.