by Judith Pella
“Do you give your word you’ll hear me out?” Micah asked. “And that you’ll see my friend gets help?”
“You got my word. Now throw out them guns.”
Micah complied, then very carefully moved to stand out in the open, his hands in the air.
“Easy, boys,” warned the same man who had spoken before. An instant later he, too, stepped out from his cover.
In a few moments all the rangers had come out and were approaching Micah. Before he knew what was happening, one grabbed Micah’s arms and tied them behind his back.
“I thought you was gonna hear me out!” Micah protested.
“Reckon you can still talk with your hands tied—“ The speaker stopped abruptly and gasped. “Well, I’ll be! Micah Sinclair! That really you?”
Micah peered more closely at his captor. That voice had been familiar. The man was sporting whiskers now, but there was no doubt just who he was.
“Yeah, it’s me.” For some reason Micah could not explain, he felt a twinge of shame as he made the admission.
“You remember me?”
“Yeah. Tom, ain’t it?”
Micah looked the man up and down, from the top of his slightly tattered slouch hat to the tips of his worn, dusty boots. The man’s teeth were just as yellow and rotten as Micah remembered. And his skin looked even more like an old boot than when Micah had last seen the man—that is, what skin could be discerned under the thick growth of brown-gray whiskers. This man, this ranger, was clearly the same fellow who had rescued Micah’s family years ago. It was old Tom Fife.
Micah didn’t know whether to be relieved or even more worried about this unexpected encounter.
“So you’re a ranger now, Tom?” he said, cautiously feeling the man out. Was he a hard-nosed lawman now or the same easygoing character who had been so kind to Micah years ago?
“Reckon so.” There was a sheepish quality in Tom’s tone, as if the admission was somehow embarrassing. “And you are . . . ?” He paused, his eyes, which seemed to have a permanent squint in them, giving Micah an incisive appraisal.
“What’re you up to, Micah?”
Before Micah could answer, another ranger approached, leading the chestnut by the reins. “Look here, Tom. This horse fits Pete Barnes’ description. And see this—“ he moved his hand to the animal’s rump. “The brand’s been tampered with.”
“Looks that way,” Tom said noncommittally.
“Besides that, this here fella fits the description—yellow hair, baby face.”
“Whadd’ya got to say to that?” Tom asked, an inscrutable expression on his grizzled face.
“Nothing,” Micah said, trying to affect his own inscrutable look.
“I reckon I’m gonna have to take you in,” Fife said.
“Guess you gotta do what you feel is right.”
Fife shook his head slowly and, Micah thought, rather regretfully. Micah felt confident that at least he’d have the benefit of a trial before they hanged him.
CHAPTER
6
MICAH LAY ON A COT in a San Antonio jail cell, his eyes scanning the ceiling for the hundredth time. He was coming to know intimately all the cracks and holes where the adobe had chipped away completely, revealing the rough, crumbling insides of the bricks. Old as this place was, he had no doubt it was solid. The oak door of the cell was several inches thick.
Escape was out of the question. He’d already tried it once on the trail when the rangers were taking him in and had received a lead ball in the thigh for his efforts. Well, it had only grazed his leg, but it hurt like the dickens. Tom, who had fired the shot, had been mighty sorry about it and hoped Micah understood he’d had no choice.
Micah rubbed the place on his leg now covered with a thick bandage. He couldn’t figure out Tom Fife. Everything about the man indicated he didn’t like having to arrest Micah, yet he seemed in no way disposed to looking the other way for a few moments in order to give him a bit of a break. Guess the man had indeed grown hard-nosed, taking his job as a ranger a bit too seriously.
At least he had gotten help for Jed, though it had been a grueling three-day ride to San Antonio and Jed had suffered mightily. Micah still had no idea if the doctor had been able to help the kid. He’d been in jail two days now, and there’d been no word about anything. It seemed that Fife had dumped him in jail, then forgotten about him.
Micah’s gaze was diverted to the far side of his cell where a cockroach the size of a walnut was making its way across the soiled wall. Micah took off his boot and gave it a hard toss. Thwack! The critter fell to the floor, either stunned or dead, but it didn’t move. This had been Micah’s chief amusement the last couple of days. The floor was littered with carcasses of dead varmints. This complemented his mood perfectly.
Since coming to jail he’d been having frequent nightmares. He was almost afraid to sleep anymore. He was starting to wonder if all this was his comeuppance for an evil life. After six years he still could not shake all that religious prattle from his mind. He’d always sensed God was an angry God with an appetite for retribution. Well, now He would get His full measure.
Maybe I deserve it, Micah thought.
At twenty, Micah had already seen and spilled so much blood that he felt certain he deserved the nightmares as well. He thought he had lived through hell but wondered if surviving was something to brag about. He certainly had not escaped without scars and soul-deep wounds that still were not healed.
After a few early skirmishes in the war, Micah and his Uncle Haden had been sent to the presidio of La Bahia near Goliad to join General Fannin, who was rebuilding the fortress that he had renamed Fort Defiance. Eventually four hundred twenty men gathered at the fort.
Fourteen-year-old Micah had observed this fighting force with skepticism. “Uncle Haden, some of them men don’t even have guns.”
“Or shoes either,” Haden replied. “And I hear Fannin is low on supplies himself.”
Micah wanted to leave. This motley group did not represent glorious warfare as he’d imagined it. But Haden said they were bound to get in some fighting soon. Rumor had it that a call for reinforcements had come from Travis at the Alamo. Haden promised Micah that they would be the 45 first to join up with these reinforcements. But Fannin would not release any troops to aid Travis. Some said he couldn’t make up his mind what to do, others said what passed for a revolutionary government in Texas was sending Fannin a stream of contradictory orders. At any rate, Fannin's army lolled away at the fort in frustration and boredom while a war passed them by.
Finally Fannin organized a relief force, but en route supply wagons kept breaking down, delaying the army. Then news came that the Mexican General Urrea was closing in on Goliad. Fannin ordered the ill-fatedforce back to the fortress. Not long after, word came that the Alamo had fallen. In response to this defeat, Houston ordered Fannin to blow up the fort and retreat.
“Ain’t we ever gonna fight, Uncle Haden?” Micah had complained.He hadn’t gotten to shoot anyone yet and was growing bored with this whole idea of war.
At last, however, they met the enemy in battle, if the minor skirmish outside La Bahia counted as such. Fifteen hundred Mexican troops against Fannin’s paltry force. Micah was in the rear and didn’t get a chance to fight. But his efforts would have hardly mattered. With nine dead, sixty wounded, and overwhelming odds, Fannin surrendered, and his army was led back, captive, to the fortress. The prisoners were told they would be paroled to New Orleans. They wanted to believe that more than the rumors of vast executions of Texans by the Mexican army. When a week later they were told they would be marched out the next day and taken to ships bound for New Orleans, Micah figured his fighting days were over before they had really begun.
That last night in the fortress the men were in good spirits. Some had heard the Mexicans would allow them to stop on the way to the sea to say farewells to their families. And New Orleans wasn’t such a bad place.Eventually they would make it back to Texas, hopefully before
the war ended.
Micah lay back on the bare ground, using his blanket as a pillow, and gazed up at the stars. Uncle Haden was sitting beside him smoking a cheroot. They had become quite close in the last months. Though neither talked about it much, they both shared the deep pain of the loss of Micah’s mother. Haden understood Micah as his father never had.
“Uncle Haden, you ever been to New Orleans?”
“Yes, a time or two. It’s a beautiful city.”
“I was there once on my way to Texas.” Micah didn’t like to think of those dreary times, but for some reason he had an urge to speak of them now. “We didn’t really go into the city. Pa called it an especially godless place, the Devil’s playground. So we mostly kept to the harbor some miles south.”
“I forget you’ve done some traveling yourself, Micah. You’re getting to be quite a worldly fellow.” Haden smiled that grin of his that made his eyes twinkle and made anyone who saw it want to grin in return.
“Guess I got my pa to thank for that,” Micah said dryly.
Haden laughed heartily. “He was good for something, then, I reckon.”
Micah only replied with a loud “Harrumph!”
“Too bad you couldn’t have known your pa when he and I were younger,” Haden said. “He was quite a rascal, that one.”
“My pa?”
“He ever tell you about the time we set the parson’s barn on fire?” When Micah shook his head, Haden added ruefully, “Oh no, he wouldn’t. Well, we didn’t mean to do it. We had hid in the barn during a picnic in order to smoke a couple of Wilfred Miller’s big stogies we had found—actually, we had found them in the pocket of the man’s coat, which he had laid over a chair while he played horseshoes. Anyway, our pa came in the barn looking for us, and we knew we’d catch it if we were caught. Ben grabbed both stogies and stuck them in a pile of hay. Not too smart, your pa!” Haden laughed, not in a derogatory way, but rather as if at a pleasant memory. “You can guess what happened after that. We were lucky the house and the entire town didn’t go up in flames. Our pa blistered our bottoms so bad we couldn’t sit for a week.” Haden sighed, then crushed out the stub of his smoke. “Religion spoiled your pa.”
“That’s why I’m gonna stay as far away from it as I can,” Micah said firmly.
“Can’t say as I blame you, boy. But I wish . . .” Pausing, Haden glanced over at Micah, sadness replacing his earlier humor. “Your pa ain’t all bad.Fact is, I heard he’d changed since Rebekah’s death. Fella told me he’d come before his parishioners recently real humbled and talked about how he’d been wrong in some of his notions about God. I saw something, too, Micah, when he came after you last month. Maybe . . . maybe he ought to get another chance.”
“Not after what he did to Ma.” Micah’s tone deepened to that of a steely man, not a boy. “He don’t deserve to wreck everyone’s lives, then say he’s changed and expect to be forgiven.”
“Maybe not.”
“Would you, Uncle Haden? Would you forgive him?”
Haden drew up his knees, rested his folded arms on them, and was silent for a long while before answering. “I ain’t quite ready to forgive him either, but if I live through this war, I might go and talk to him at least.”
But Haden did not live past the next day. In the morning the prisoners were marched out of the fortress in four separate groups, each heading in slightly different directions. When they were halted a half mile from the fort, some began to realize what was going to happen, but it was too late for anything but a defiant shout.
“Hurrah for Texas!” the doomed men cried.
Within seconds the shooting began. Micah saw his uncle gunned down before he obeyed the man’s order—or was it a plea?—to run. The sight of the massacre of Haden and the others would be etched in Micah’s mind forever, both waking and sleeping. Only a handful of the four hundred and twenty men, Micah among them, escaped.
Wounded, weaponless, and starving, Micah had spent a harrowing five days on the run before he caught up with Houston’s army. Lying in the brush with nothing but a growling stomach for company, Micah had thought only of avenging his uncle and the others. When one of Houston’s men gave him a rifle, his fingers had truly itched to use it. It had been hard not to shoot at some of the Mexicans fighting with the Texans. There was a distinction in Texas, and always would be, between good Mexicans and bad Mexicans—meaning those who fought with Texas and those who didn’t. Fourteen-year-old Micah found that distinction extremely hard to fathom. He still did.
Adding to his frustration was the fact that Houston kept retreating from the Mexicans. They called the retreat of the army and the settlers from the path of Santa Anna the “runaway scrape,” and it was quickly causing Houston to lose face with his army. Hundreds deserted, mostly to aid their families, who had become refugees in the face of the enemy’s advance. But in the end Houston led the army to San Jacinto.
In all the time of the retreating, Micah’s bloodthirst had not abated. He fought bravely, if savagely, on the battlefield of San Jacinto. He only vaguely remembered the first man he ever killed, a Mexican private. It had happened quickly, and the heat of battle did not allow him to think much about it, especially as many more fell by his hand after that. But Micah remembered too clearly the last man he had killed in the war. He still had nightmares about it.
The battle was mostly over. Victory belonged to the Texans. The Mexicans had dropped their weapons in surrender, and that’s when Micah realized he was not the only one still longing for vengeance.
A yell ripped through the battlefield. “Take prisoners like the Mexicans do!”
Even Houston could not stay the hand of slaughter. The Texans fell on their prisoners, stabbing, slashing, and clubbing them mercilessly.
Cries of “Remember the Alamo!” “Remember Goliad!” mingled with the screams of the victims.
Those screams would sear Micah’s memory, but he had joined in the slaughter. For once Scripture stood him well. “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” But instead of the killing quenching his thirst for revenge, it only seemed to whet it more. Near the end, he chased a Mexican soldier, pinning him up against the bank of the bayou. The man fell on his knees before Micah, hands clasped beseechingly, tears oozing down his battle-stained face.
“Have mercy, por favor!” the man begged.
Micah stared into those pleading eyes, leveled his pistol, and fired.
Holy retribution? Yes, Micah had no doubt he was in for a strong dose of it. He could almost hear his father’s voice quivering with fer-vent zeal.
“ ‘And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.’ ”
Micah smiled as he realized he himself had spoken the oft-heard words out loud. For good measure, like a sword thrust, he added, “Matthew chapter three, verse ten.”
How Micah hated that he knew all this. But it had nearly been rammed down his throat. He’d been forced to memorize half the Bible!
He’d like to exorcise it from his brain, but no matter how much he tried to forget, a sneaky little verse would invade his mind at the most inopportune moment before he had a chance to do anything about it.
At any rate, Micah was headed for the fire for certain now. He wished he didn’t believe in heaven and hell. Well, he wasn’t so sure about heaven, but he knew without a doubt there was a hell. He’d lived in it for years now.
CHAPTER
7
SOUNDS OUT IN THE CORRIDOR captured Micah’s attention. He’d just had supper, so it couldn’t be that. Maybe a new tenant was arriving. The distinct sound of a key in a lock proved this was probably true. Then a door opened with a groan and a moment later creaked shut again.
Footsteps thudded in the corridor again, and then there was silence.
“Micah, you there?” came Jed’s voice.
Micah jumped from his cot and with a single stride, though limping slightly on his one
bare foot, went to his cell door.
“Jed? You okay?” he called out the small barred opening in the door.
“Yeah. My arm pains me still, but my head feels better.”
Micah hated to admit how good it was to hear a friendly voice and to know this particular friend was all right. Funny, but he hadn’t given near as much thought to Harvey or Joe.
“You break your arm or something?” Micah asked, just to keep up the welcome flow of conversation.
“Don’t know for certain. The doctor said he had to ‘locate’ it. But I could see my arm was there the entire time. Don’t know what he meant.”
Micah could almost picture his friend’s bemused look.
“But that locating business hurt worse than that time I sat on a cactus! The doc liquored me up good but still I about passed out. Now he’s got it all trussed up in a sling. Said it’d be better in a few days.”
“Glad to hear that, Jed. Did you hear about anything else? Did they bring in Harvey and Joe?”
“Not as I know of.”
There was a long pause. Micah tried to think of another topic for discussion but could think of nothing besides their fate, and he didn’t really want to consider that at the moment.
It was Jed who brought it up. “What’s gonna happen to us now, Micah?”
“I was told we’d stand before a judge soon, but they didn’t say nothing else.”
“What about that fella you seemed to know? Maybe he’ll get us out.”
Micah shook his head as if Jed could see. “Don’t know.”
“He came to see me at the doc’s. Just to see if I was okay. Maybe he’ll help us.”
The hopefulness in Jed’s voice was a little pathetic, even desperate. Micah cursed himself, as he had done continuously since his arrest, for getting Jed involved.
“I told him how you were a good man, and how you wouldn’t have got caught ’cept that you came back for me. Maybe it’ll help.”
