The Texians 2 Page 3

  A flip of a coin had determined who would be the man on foot; Sands had lost. Dub now traveled about a mile behind Peoples with the horses and supplies.

  From the pine, Sands could just see the top of the professor’s green-painted wagon. A heavy ring of bushes and overgrown weeds skirted the clearing in which the man had halted, blocking the ranger’s view. Sands had to maneuver himself closer if he wanted to see why the man had abruptly stopped here in the middle of nowhere.

  Crouching, Sands cautiously moved forward. His eyes darted back and forth between the medicine-show wagon and the ground. The first to make certain Peoples didn’t notice his approach, the second to assure himself that no dry limbs and twigs lay in his path ready to snap noisily beneath his round-toed boots.

  He reached a thick clump of red-stalked polk salad near the edge of the clearing and squatted on his heels. Easing the broad, green leaves aside, he peered into the camp.

  Peoples sat on the ground, leaning against the yellow-painted spokes of a wagon wheel with his back to Sands. While the man casually tended a small fire burning beneath a black coffeepot, he hummed and occasionally sang the words to a song the ranger had never heard before.

  Sands glanced at the two horses still harnessed to the wagon. Both wore canvas feed bags and were busily devouring their noonday ration of oats.

  Why would a man stop here in the middle of day and build a campfire to warm coffee? It didn’t make sense to Sands. Folks on the road ordinarily kept moving while the sun was up. A biscuit or two left over from breakfast was enough to see them through until they camped for the night.

  But then, a man traveling alone doesn’t ordinarily meet a Mexican ship in an isolated cove and pick up a case of rifles and a pouch of gold.

  The breeze shifted, wafting the tantalizing aroma of coffee to Sands’ nostrils. He bit back the curse that rose in his throat at the taunting reminder of the hot meal that had been forgotten after sighting the Mexican ship. Dub and he had quieted the rumblings of their bellies with jerky and water from their canteens.

  Another scent was also carried in the breeze: stagnant water. Sands’ hands parted the polk-salad leaves wider and located the source of the pungent stench. The opposite side of the clearing abruptly ended in a steep bank that dropped into a cypress swamp.

  Sands mentally retraced the northeasterly route Peoples had taken after leaving the cove last night. The professor hadn’t come far enough to reach the Neches River. This had to be the swamp surrounding Keith Lake. Or Sabine Lake, if they had traveled farther north than Sands had reckoned. Either way, he wasn’t that far from the Louisiana border.

  Closing the polk-salad barrier between Peoples’ wagon and himself, Sands back stepped to the trees in a crouch before he risked standing again. He glanced at the top of the green wagon one last time, then turned to pick his way back through the forest and rejoin his fellow ranger.

  Whatever the purveyor of patent medicines had in mind for those rifles grew muddier in Sands’ mind with each passing moment. Had the man driven westward, there would have been no doubt Peoples intended to trade with the Comanches. But what could he intend for Mexican rifles here in the swamplands bordering Louisiana?

  Sands pushed the murky confusion from his mind. If either he or Dub had the answer to that question, they wouldn’t be following Peoples in the first place.

  “We could just ride in and take him,” Dub said as he wiped his face with a handkerchief. “He has got that crate of rifles in his rig.”

  “I’ve considered that.” Sands nodded as he pushed a foot into a stirrup and pulled himself into the saddle. “It’d sure be easier than keeping track of him in this heat.”

  “But?” Dub’s expression revealed he knew Sands had no intention of handling this the easy way.

  Sands smiled. “There’s more at stake here than a crate of rifles. The Mexican navy isn’t interested in smuggling; they’ve got something in mind for those rifles and for our Professor Jonathan Peoples.”

  Dub offered no argument, just wiped at his face again. Sands was glad; this damned heat and humidity had him on edge. He wasn’t in the mood for even friendly bickering.

  “So Peoples sits and drinks his coffee, and we lay back and wait until he gets wherever he’s going?” Dub asked in a tone that was more statement than question.

  “I don’t think we’ll have to wait much longer,” Sands replied as he clucked his horse into a slow walk. “Peoples has the look of a man waiting for someone. My bet is that he’s stopped out here in the middle of nowhere expecting someone else to join up with him.”

  Dub’s boot heels nudged the gray’s flanks. “So while he’s awaitin’, we move in nice and easy like.”

  Sands nodded. “If things look good after the meeting, we’ll take Peoples and his friend or friends. If not, we’ll hang back and follow them to—wherever.”

  “Can’t think of anything better.” Dub voiced his approval as he reined the gray beside Sands’ gelding.

  Without further comment, the two rangers slowly rode toward the clearing where the medicine-show man had stopped for his afternoon coffee. Sands’ mind, however, was far from quiet. With each step his buckskin took, he imagined a thousand ways the simple plan could fall flat on its face.

  This woods wasn’t the plains; there were too many places a man—or men—could hide if he—or they—wanted. And something told Sands that anyone meeting with Professor Jonathan Peoples would have no desire to be seen by unwanted eyes. After all, a man didn’t arrange to meet a Mexican naval vessel in a deserted gulf cove unless he wanted to keep that meeting secret.

  Sands’ head tilted from side to side, listening. Too many unfamiliar sounds filled the forest. The cry of birds and the hum of insects made it almost impossible to hear the horses’ movement through the tall grass. Which would make it easy to move in on Peoples—also just as easy for anyone to do the same to them.

  Sands eased the Colt from his belt, methodically broke it down into its three parts, and double-checked the six chambers of the cylinder, making certain all carried a full load. He then pulled his rifle from its saddle holster to inspect its single load. Beside him, Dub silently did the same.

  An eighth of a mile from the clearing and the swamp beyond, Sands held up a hand, signaling his companion to halt. Together, they dismounted, slipped the reins off their mounts’ heads, and tied them to the low branches of a sweetgum tree.

  “Careful where you step.” Sands whispered a warning to his friend as they moved on foot toward Peoples’ camp. “Ground’s covered in branches and twigs.”

  Dub paused in mid-stride and glanced down. He gingerly lifted a scuffed boot, shifted an inch to the side to avoid a dried branch. He looked up and sheepishly shrugged at his fellow ranger. Sands said nothing, simply pushed deeper into the woods.

  Five minutes later the two stood behind the trunks of twin pines on the edge of the clearing. Two saddled horses were now tied to the rear of the medicine-show wagon.

  “’Pears we’re a mite too late,” Dub whispered. “Peoples has already got company.”

  “Better this way. Don’t have to worry about someone riding up behind us.”

  Sands peered around the bole. From this angle the wagon hid the professor and his companions. He could barely make out Peoples’ plaid coat through the yellow spokes. He thought he glimpsed the white of a shirt arm beside the man, but couldn’t be certain.

  “Let’s see if we can hear what they’re saying,” Sands whispered, tilting his head toward the dense growth of polk salad that had concealed him earlier.

  Dub nodded, then crouched and followed at Sands’ heels to the leafy clump and squatted behind it. Cautiously, each man edged aside the leaves and peered into the clearing.

  “There’s only one man with Peoples.” Dub’s voice was a doubly soft whisper.

  Sands had just noticed the same thing. A black-haired man wearing a white linsey homespun shirt and a wide-brimmed, rounded crown hat of a farmer sat cross-legge
d on the ground beside the patent medicine man, sipping from a steaming tin cup.

  Gaze darting back to the rear of the wagon, Sands reassured himself that he had indeed seen two mounts. While Peoples’ companion might have brought a second horse with him, it was far more likely another man had ridden in on the back of that saddled mount.

  “Where’s the other man?” Dub questioned.

  Sands shook his head. “I don’t—”

  “I’ve got the barrels of my rifle and pistol trained dead center of the backs of your heads,” a deep male voice answered Dub’s question from behind the two rangers. “Unless either of you two reckon to test my word, I suggest you drop your rifles, slowly stand, and turn around.”

  Sands froze for an instant, his temples abruptly pounding like the beat of a bass drum. Then he reluctantly let his rifle slip from his fingers to thud heavily on the ground as he did as ordered.

  “Now you do the same big feller,” the man’s voice ordered, and Dub’s rifle fell to the ground. “Nice and easy-like, both of you stand and turn around.”

  The two rangers pushed from their crouched positions and faced the voice’s owner. Sands’ jaw sagged. The man grinning at them from behind his guns was Beau Dupree!

  Sands blinked and stared. No! On second glance he realized that his first impression had been wrong. The man’s hair was blond, almost white, like Dupree’s. And he was a towering mountain of a man with arms as big as a tree trunk, like the prisoner they had turned over to the U.S. Army. There the resemblance ended.

  This man’s eyes were a cold green, agleam with a cruel light that could never give birth to the tears Sands had seen welling in Dupree’s watery blue eyes. The face itself might have been chiseled from Texas pink granite. It was the bright, burned red of a man who lived most of his life beneath the sun but whose skin is incapable of tanning.

  “That’s good. Now both of you lift your hands away from those pistols and keep real still while I call my friends over.” The man’s grin widened.

  An icy shiver shot down Sands’ spine. There was more than cruelty in this man’s face, or hatred. He had seen both in the faces of Comanche warriors who relished and prolonged the screams of captives they tortured for long hours. Theirs were the faces of hard men and experienced fighters at war with men they felt came to rob them of their lands.

  But this man’s face held ... Sands could not find the words to describe the sensations just gazing into those emotionless green eyes awoke in him. This was the face of death itself. This man killed for one reason only: pleasure.

  “Professor, Pumpkin!” The blond man’s head turned toward the wagon, revealing an elongated, bluish birthmark that ran from beneath his right ear down the side of his neck to disappear beneath the collar of the gray shirt he wore. “Professor, Pumpkin, you two come over here and see what I found!”

  From the corner of his eye, Sands saw Dub’s right hand drop to his Colt. Something in his mind told him to go for his gun also. But he couldn’t move. He stared into the grinning face of death personified, was mesmerized like some bird caught in the spell of a swaying snake.

  Fingers firmly about the handle of his Colt, Dub pulled upward—then jerked. The pistol refused to come free. Its sight was snagged on the bottom of his belt!

  Thunder rent the air. Dub went rigid. A dark hole, purple rather than red, opened in the middle of his forehead. For an instant he stood there, eyes rolled upward to the tops of the trees, and arm, unaware that death had claimed him, still tugging at the stubborn Colt. Then his legs crumpled beneath him, bringing him to his knees for a wavering heartbeat before he collapsed face down on the ground—dead.

  The acid odor of black powder assailed Sands’ nostrils when he turned back to his birth marked captor. The man’s green eyes were wide with wild delight as he raised his single-shot pistol and aimed it directly between Sands’ eyes.

  “Your friend wasn’t a lucky man. What about you? Feel lucky?” the man taunted, urged. “Go for your gun, and let’s see how lucky you are!”

  Sands remained motionless. Something twisted within his chest, something he had never felt in all his years of ranging, yet something he recognized instantly: terror. He saw his own death reflected in those crystal green eyes and fear knotted his gut, leaving him incapable of even batting an eye. Nothing—he would do nothing that would cause the blond to tighten his finger around the trigger of his pistol.

  “What the hell is going on here, Cotton!” This from Professor Jonathan Peoples, who pushed through the polk salad and abruptly halted, staring down at Dub’s lifeless body. “Did you have to kill him?”

  “Went for a pistol in his belt, what else could I have done?” the blond said without either his eyes or the barrel of his pistol ever leaving Sands. “Pumpkin, get this one’s gun, then the big one’s. Ain’t doing him any good now.”

  Pumpkin, the one Sands had seen sitting beside the professor, cautiously stepped to the ranger’s side and eased the Colt from his belt and then his hunting knife from its scabbard. His fingers also found Sands’ watch fob and yanked his watch from a buckskin pocket and stuffed it in his own. Nor did he overlook Sands’ money pouch.

  Satisfied he had cleaned Sands of all his valuables, Pumpkin stepped to Dub’s body and rolled it to its back. He slipped Dub’s gun free without the slightest problem before taking his hunting knife and money pouch. Scooping the two rifles from the ground, he walked to Cotton’s side.

  “You see these?” Pumpkin looked up at his companion while holding up one of the stolen guns in a hand. “These are those new Colt six-shot pistols we saw down in Galveston. The ones we tried to buy. Remember?”

  Dub’s murderer nodded, his eyes remaining on Sands. “I remember they couldn’t sell us one for six months. Said the rangers had bought all that could be produced until then.”

  Sands, numbness dissipating from his brain, watched Cotton take one of the Colts from the shorter man and heft it in his left hand for a few seconds. He then cocked the hammer with his thumb while he eased the hammer down on his own pistol and tucked it in his belt. Moving the Colt into his right hand, he took aim between Sands’ eyes.

  “Rangers?” The word came in quiet whisper from Peoples’ lips. The medicine-show man looked at Sands. “You two rangers?”

  Before Sands could answer, Cotton spoke. “Course they’re rangers. Didn’t I say nobody ’cept rangers had these revolving pistols!”

  “How could the rangers have found out about the—” Peoples started and was cut off by his mountainous companion.

  “Don’t make no never mind how, but they did! What matters now is how many more of these bastards are poking ’round out here. Unless either you or Pumpkin want to find out, I suggest we get the hell out of here.”

  “What about these two?” Peoples asked, his eyes shifting between Dub and Sands.

  “We dump the big one in the swamp,” Cotton casually replied. “Gators will take care of him. I need some time to think about what to do with this one.”

  Sands saw Peoples nod to Pumpkin, indicating the small man should help him move Dub’s body, to the swamp. Cotton shook his head.

  “Let him do it.” Cotton gestured Sands toward Dub’s body with the Colt. “It’s only right he should take care of his own friend.”

  Icy cruelty and pleasure etched across Cotton’s face in a demonic expression of triumph as he grinned at Sands. The ranger stared at the killer for a heartbeat, then stooped, grasped his dead friend beneath his arms, and started dragging him through the polk salad into the clearing, toward the swamp.

  The stinking, muddy waters—perhaps the belly of an alligator—wasn’t a fitting resting place for a good man like Dub Ferris. But there was nothing Sands could do about it. Earlier, when that instant of cold terror had frozen him motionless, his Colt might have saved both of them. Now he faced a simple harsh reality: Dub was dead and he still lived, and intended to see that he remained that way.

  Although how he intended to do that evaded hi
m. He only hoped that by the time the blond had made a decision, he would have the answer—find the courage to stare death in the face and defeat him.

  Sands released Dub’s arms when he reached the edge of the embankment and glanced down. The earth appeared to have been broken away, dropping twenty feet to the dirty brown water below. The bank itself was naked earth, muddy and as slick as grease. At the water’s edge, however, grew a stand of reeds. Cypress and willows, their roots half-exposed, stood just to the ranger’s left about twenty feet upstream.

  Sands detected a slow current in the water about five feet from the bank. The water’s motion was too lazy to wash away the green scum that floated about the reeds. Beyond that, nothing but swamp and a maze of cypress trees.

  “Push him over,” Cotton ordered from behind Sands. “We ain’t got all day!”

  Reaching out, Sands gently closed Dub’s eyes. He wanted to say a silent prayer for the man, but couldn’t think of any. Instead, he remembered the Bible Dub always carried as he shoved his friend over the edge. The book had given him comfort when he was alive; now he had gone to the greater comfort it promised.

  Like a barrel on its side, Dub’s body bounced and rolled down the steep incline, hit the reeds, breaking them beneath his weight, then sank face down in the murky, watery grave. Sands closed his eyes and stood.

  He felt the burning firebrand rip into his flesh and felt the invisible fist slam into his back to thrust him forward—before his ears recognized the explosion of black powder. Fiery pain lancing through his body, he scrambled, trying to find a footing. There was nothing, only empty air, then glass-slick mud. He fell, his brain railing with a single thought: Cotton had made his decision of how to dispose of him!

  Chapter Four

  The heels of Sands’ boots dug deep into the soft mud to send him tumbling head over heels down the embankment. Agony burst anew in white-hot flares as each chaotic revolution slammed his back against the ground.