Read [Texas Rangers 04] - Ranger's Trail for Free Online Page B

life sleepin’ on the ground. All I got from Mother Earth was rheumatism and a likin’ for an honest-to-God bed.”
     
    They crossed the Colorado River at a ford. The water was higher than it would be in spring, when winter-dormant vegetation came back to life and sapped much of the underground moisture before it had a chance to seep into the river. Rusty pushed hard to keep the team moving forward briskly enough that the current would not pick up the wagon and carry it away.
    He had ridden this trail many times, going to or from the Monahan farm or in the course of his ranger duties. Andy had ridden it, too, once when he was almost too young to remember. On that first trip he had traveled northward as captive of a Comanche raiding party. He had ridden again as a half-grown boy, this time heading southward to join his adopted brother as a participant in a horse-stealing foray. Fate in the guise of a fallen horse and a broken leg had dropped him back into the white world. There he had remained, though not willingly at first. He had never completely relinquished the heritage of his Comanche years.
    Some people considered him unreconstructed, a streak of the savage locked forever in his heart. Andy had found he could use such people’s attitude against them, keeping them at arm’s length as a measure of self defense. His friends accepted him as he was. He was not troubled by what others thought.
    Andy rode alongside the wagon, talking at intervals, then silent for long stretches. He was especially quiet after they made the first night’s camp. Rusty recognized the dark moods that came over him now and then and did not push him for conversation. As they hitched the team next morning, Andy asked, “We goin’ by the grave?”
    Rusty had suspected this had been heavy on Andy’s mind. “We can if you want to.”
    “ I reckon I want to.”
    The grave was above the north bank of a small creek, just off the wagon track. At one end of a stack of stones a wooden cross had fallen to the ground. Rusty moved the wagon a little beyond and stopped. He got down, but he stood back, letting Andy have his time alone.
    Andy dismounted and removed his hat, his head bowed. After a while he wiped a sleeve across his eyes, then straightened the cross. He pulled off a small wad of dark hair. “Buffalo,” he said. “They knocked it over, scratchin’ their itch.”
    Many of the stones lay scattered. Andy placed them neatly back over the mound. “Someday,” he said, “I’m comin’ back and puttin’ a fence around this.” When he was satisfied with the appearance of the grave, he straightened. Rusty joined him, hat in his hand.
    Andy said, “I wish we had Preacher Webb with us. He’d know the words to say.”
    Rusty nodded. “He already said them, when we first buried her here.” He shuddered, remembering.
    Andy bit his lip. “I can’t quite remember what my mother looked like. I sort of remember her voice, but I can’t see her face in my mind. I like to think she was pretty.”
    “ I expect she was, but she’d been poorly treated by the time we found her.”
    The memory chilled Rusty. It had been his first time to ride with the rangers, though they were little more than a loose band of local militia at the time. They had trailed after marauding Comanches who had killed several settlers and swept away all the horses they could find. They had kidnapped a small boy and his mother. The rangers had found the mother here, dead. The boy had disappeared. He was not seen again until Andy turned up years later, left behind in the wake of another Comanche raid.
    Andy said, “I guess a lot of folks wouldn’t understand. I don’t myself, sometimes. The Comanches killed my mother here. Then they took me as one of their own. Some would say I ought to hate them, but they became my people. They’re still my people.”
    “ I like to think we’re your people, too, me and Len and Shanty, and the Monahans. Tom Blessing, too.”
    “ You are.