Destiny, Texas Read online

  DESTINY, TEXAS

  BRETT COGBURN

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PART I - HAMISH

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  PART II - JOSEPH

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  PART III - ARGYLE

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Chapter Forty-nine

  PART IV - GUNN

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Chapter Fifty-three

  Chapter Fifty-four

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  Copyright Page

  PART I

  HAMISH

  Chapter One

  Somewhere along the Little Wichita River,

  100 miles beyond the frontier, state of Texas, 1866

  Gunn and I rode the lead oxen, him on the big gray, and me beside him with my scrawny legs dangling down either side of the motley-colored steer Papa called Speck. Gunn had his freckled nose wrinkled and his eyes squinted against the far horizon like he always did, as if he were more than twelve years old and leading the wagon train himself, as if he could look into all that distance before us and see something that I couldn’t. Gunn always thought he was bigger than he was, and maybe that was because Papa doted on him so.

  It wasn’t really a wagon train at all: just Mama’s buggy, two wagons, a Mexican cart, two milk cows, on one tailgate a crate of fussy leghorn chickens that Mama insisted on bringing, and Gunn’s big yellow dog running in and out amongst us all.

  Old Ben was driving Mama to one side and out of the dust, the brim of his big flop hat tugged down over his face, shading his bushy gray eyebrows against the glare of the sun. Ben was from back in the Alabama times. That’s how I was already thinking about what we’d left . . . other times . . . before Texas . . . back before the war and before Papa came home half-dead and found what the Yankees did while he was gone. “Blackhearted Blue Bastards” are what Papa called them. Burned the big white house he built, stole Mama’s silverware, broke her fine china, and carried off the split-rail fences for firewood. What they didn’t eat or steal, they burned or ruined out of pure spite.

  Everything changes, and a man can’t stop it any more than he can stand in front of the wind and make it stop blowing. That’s what Mama said. What she said didn’t matter, because everybody cried some over our misfortune, except for Papa and Gunn. They never cried.

  I looked behind us at the pale wagon tracks mashed into the spring grass and wildflowers until they faded and disappeared the way we had come, leading back to somewhere else, beyond some point of no return, to some other people that looked like us, our forgotten predecessors of a sort in a world we’d quit. Old things were fading and something new took their place. All around us there was nothing in sight that spoke of civilization and nothing to prove we might exist except those wagon tracks—just miles and miles of sky and nothing. You could see forever, like a promise or a threat. Nothing and everything, that was Texas for you.

  I turned the other way and saw Papa riding back to us from the south. I knew it was him because nobody else sat a horse like that. And his horse was easy to spot, too—the same long-legged, harebrained Thoroughbred that used to carry him along the roads, trading cotton and seeing to the business of his plantation, and the same chestnut gelding that packed him along with General Forrest from Chickamauga to Brice’s Cross Roads, where he got shot in the left leg by a Blue Bastard minié ball. Nobody rode Shiloh. He was a one-man horse, even if Papa would have tolerated anybody else on his back.

  “Mama’s fussing and wants to make evening camp in the shade,” I said to Papa when he rode alongside us.

  Papa scowled for an instant at Mama’s buggy. She was fair skinned, wouldn’t be caught outside without a hat or bonnet, and was used to waiting out the heat of the day on her porch swing or under the high ceilings of the house we used to live in. But Papa knew her buggy would follow along behind him, no matter if he decided we were going to travel past sundown and all night if he wanted to. Old Ben never failed Papa, and Papa didn’t have to look behind him to know that Old Ben would be bringing Mama along. She could complain all she wanted about Papa’s hardheaded, Scotsman ways.

  “You boys get off of those oxen and get your rifles out of the wagon,” Papa said. “Hurry up now.”

  Gunn bailed right off and ran for his gun. Me, I hesitated and looked a question at Papa.

  “Do like I said.” Papa’s expression made it plain that he wasn’t going to tell me again. “Smoke to the south.”

  I noticed for the first time the sooty column of smoke mixing with the cotton-white clouds in the distance and didn’t ask any more questions. Smoke was bad. Things burned—things you missed. And then there were the Indians Old Ben had talked about all the time since we ferried our wagons across the Sabine River months and months ago. Indians were fierce; everyone said so.

  Gunn was already inside the wagon and he handed me my gun. The Richmond musket was longer than I was, and I envied the short Maynard carbine that Papa had given my younger brother. It didn’t look near so outsized or so silly in his hands when he carried it back to Papa.

  “You men look to your weapons,” Papa said to the four Mexicans he’d hired to come along with us. “That smoke might be something or it might be nothing.”

  Papa passed Old Ben a look and nodded when he saw that the black man already had his double-barreled shotgun propped up against the buggy’s dashboard and the slab-sided Dance revolver that Papa had bought for him laid on his lap. Old Ben was a good shot, and there were those back before Texas that said Papa was mistaken to give a nigger a gun. But Papa took great pride in his own common sense and laughed at them and reminded us boys that a Scotsman must be practical above all, and that it made sense to give Old Ben a gun. Ben could be trusted, and from what we heard about the Texas frontier, I suppose Papa might have armed all his slaves if that Republican, Abraham Lincoln, hadn’t taken them away from him.

  I wasn’t sure then exactly what a Republican
was, but I knew they were as bad as those Blue Bastards. If you went to Texas you might get away from them, and Papa was dead set on that and making a new home for us. Once we got to Texas, men that he talked to along the trail said all the good cotton ground down south was taken. What’s more, a carpetbag (another word I aimed to find out about) governor and other “radicals” had beaten us to Texas. All bad things, but that didn’t stop Papa. He said we’d go farther west than anyone else. Maybe there wouldn’t be cotton ground there, but we would find other ways to make a living. No matter what, we would live like freemen and like a Dollarhyde should. I was young, but even then, I had an inkling of how stubborn we Dollarhydes were.

  The rutted trail we followed left the prairie and entered a thick belt of low, scrubby oaks. Gunn and I walked to either side of the wagon, both of us eyeing the edge of the trail to either side of us. Indians might be anywhere, and Texans said they stole children if they didn’t cut out your guts and scalp you. Gunn and I had spent a great deal of time on imagining what terrible ways an Indian could hurt you. Mama made us quit if she heard us discussing Indian massacres. She said such talk would give us nightmares.

  We soon came to another stretch of prairie barely visible through the timber ahead. The smoke climbing black into the sky was close by then, and Papa had us all stop and form up the wagons tight together. He put Mama, Baby Beth, and Juanita, José’s wife, inside one of the wagons, and the Mexican men stood guard around it. We didn’t know anything about Texas Indians at that time, or I don’t think Papa would have been so foolish as to think his arrangements might help anything.

  “You boys look out for your mother,” Papa said while he waited for Old Ben to untie his saddle horse from the buggy and mount up.

  We nodded fiercely but neither one of us had a clue. We just stood there and watched him and Ben ride off toward that smoke. The south breeze couldn’t find its way through that thicket, and it was as hot as the dickens. The flies were bad and making the stock restless, the Mexicans looked nervous under their big hats, Baby Beth was crying inside the wagon, and neither Gunn nor I could see a thing of what had everyone so worried. Neither of us spoke Spanish, so we had a fair excuse when we took off after Papa, ignoring whatever orders or warnings those Mexicans were calling after us.

  We knelt at the edge of the oak thicket, where we had a good view of the far prairie. There was about a mile of nothing but grass and prickly pears between where we were and where the river made a bend to the south. Not far from the riverbank were the ruins of some kind of settlement. Smoke was pouring from it, and at such a distance, the black silhouettes of what was left of the buildings looked charred.

  The wind picked up hard enough to bend the grass, and a couple of white wagon tops down there stood out, billowing and snapping against their bow frames. I couldn’t see anybody moving among the wagons, but the wind kept blowing the smoke across everything and made it hard to see. One thing was for sure. A ways out from those wagons, little stick figures of men on horseback were trotting back and forth. Occasionally they shouted or made strange, shrill cries, but nobody answered them.

  “Indians,” Gunn said.

  I glanced at him, seeing how he had his carbine ready, and that his hands weren’t shaking like mine. It would be like him to notice that, too, and remind me of it later.

  “Comanche or Kiowa, I guess,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I’m smarter than you.”

  I might not shoot like Gunn, or get my pocketknife as sharp as he could, or decipher a deer’s track from a hog’s, but I read a sight more than he did. Hamish the reader, the bookish one, that was me. Papa was always on me to put down my books and quit lazing about and do something, but hadn’t I been the only one to read Mr. Irving’s book about what we could expect on the prairies? Gunn never read anything.

  “See there,” Gunn said with a quaver to his voice. “Papa’s getting ready to fight.”

  Indeed, Papa had pulled up a couple of hundred yards from the besieged emigrants in those ruins. He was off his horse and kneeling with only his upper body sticking up out of the grass and his Sharps to his shoulder. Old Ben was dismounted, too, holding both horses by their bridle reins behind Papa.

  “Man on foot can shoot steadier,” Gunn added, like he had ever fought an Indian in his life.

  “Papa doesn’t have but one shot, and there looks to be a half dozen of them.”

  “Papa ain’t scared.”

  No, Papa probably wasn’t, but I was. And Gunn would have been, too, if he weren’t such a fool for any kind of trouble.

  The stick Indians finally noticed Papa, and after more milling around, they started toward him. I wanted to call out for him to run back to the timber, but the words wouldn’t come.

  The warriors came on in a wide skirmish line until I could make out the bright paint on their horses and on their own, burned-brown hides—strange hieroglyphics in blues and whites and yellows and reds. Their horses’ legs surged through the waving grass, and the faint tinkling of the little hawk bells some of those braves had braided into their horses’ manes barely reached my ears over the wind. Feathers, scalp locks, buffalo tails, and other trinkets dangled from the edges of their shields or from their weapons.

  I’ve heard a lot of people, so-called pioneers, try and describe various plains tribes’ war cries, but none of those imitations did the real thing justice—not even close. The shrill cries and whoops coming from those Indians made my bladder spasm, and all I wanted was to run or pee.

  “Savages,” Gunn said with awe in his voice, and more than a hint of admiration.

  Papa waited and he waited, until one warrior fired off an old trade musket. The powder smoke from that musket hadn’t even blown away when Papa shot him off his pony. That was the first man I ever saw killed.

  Chapter Two

  One of the Kiowa—for that’s what they were—pulled up to gather his downed comrade while the rest of them kicked their horses to a run and came on. Papa never took his eyes off them while he set down the empty Sharps and stretched out an arm and an open palm behind him. The saddle horses were spooked from the gunshots, but Ben held on to them and handed Papa the shotgun. Papa leveled the 10-gauge and waited some more while those Kiowa came on through the grass.

  The charging warriors split into two bunches a long rock’s throw in front of Papa and passed to either side of him at a dead run, hiding behind their buffalo hide shields and hanging from the off side of their horses. Papa held his fire, unwilling to be baited into wasting his last rounds. Most guns back then didn’t reload near quick enough. Maybe one of those Blue Bastard Spencers or Henry repeaters, but not a breechloader like Papa’s Sharps. And especially not that old double-barreled shotgun Old Ben handed him.

  Old Ben popped off a couple of shots with his Dance revolver, but missed, the frightened horses jerking him around too much to take good aim. The Kiowas’ momentum carried them well past him and Papa, and they were almost to where Gunn and I waited by the time they pulled up to turn for another go. One of the Kiowa was having trouble with his horse, and it reared right in front of where we hunkered in the thicket. I heard the sound of Gunn’s carbine cocking several seconds before it dawned on me what he was about to do. None of those Indians had a clue that we were so close to them, and I started to whisper to Gunn not to shoot right before he did.

  That Maynard gun cracked and the Kiowa on the rearing horse tumbled off its back before the animal’s front hooves even hit the ground—as if it had thrown him for a tumble, instead of Gunn’s bullet boring a hole through his rib cage.

  The remaining warriors turned to face the timber, and I rested that Richmond musket on an oak limb and eared its hammer back to full cock. Gunn was cussing like a grown man, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that he had his Maynard tipped open and was trying to find another cartridge and primer in his belt pouch. Two arrows hissed between us and rattled off the tree limbs, but that only made Gunn cuss worse—
words that I didn’t even know he knew. Papa didn’t have anything on Gunn when it came to cussing.

  I couldn’t keep any of the Kiowa in my gun sights. They were milling and moving too fast, and my Richmond gun was too big and awkward for me to handle like I should. Something hit the tree trunk I was hiding behind, and flying bark and I don’t know what else struck me full in the face. Guns began going off behind us, and our Mexican teamsters were coming through the brush to help us by the time I could see anything again.

  The Kiowa were caught between us and Papa and Old Ben and not liking it any. My eyes were still watering too badly to take aim and I never fired a shot. By the time Papa and Old Ben rode up, the Kiowa were retreating across the prairie, joined in the distance by the other one who had stopped to pick up the warrior Papa had killed.

  Papa and Old Ben took some time looking me over to make sure that I hadn’t been shot in the eye, and then some more time chewing out the Mexicans for leaving Mama alone in the thicket. Those two delays were an opportunity and excuse for Gunn to slip off. He was out in the grass by the time we spotted him.

  Gunn was staring at the body when I walked up. The flies were already buzzing around where the dead Kiowa lay bent and crooked in the bloodstained grass. He would have been as tall as Papa if somebody had straightened him out.

  “It’s all right, Gunn,” I said. “You did what you had to.”

  The Kiowa’s face wouldn’t let me look away. A fly crawled across one of his eyes, yet it remained wide open and unblinking. The dead warrior was all but naked except for a red strip of wool cloth covering his privates, and that breechclout was soaked were the Kiowa had spilled his bladder. The bits of gray intestine around the ugly bullet hole stood out starkly against his brown skin. The fly and the smell of guts and urine made me want to puke.

  Papa and Old Ben rode up.

  “From the look of you, I’m taking it that it was your shot that got him,” Papa said.