The Rattlesnake Season

by Larry D. Sweazy

  Scrap was on the other side of Josiah. “I’ll be behind you.”

  “You sure about that, Captain?”

  Scrap gritted his teeth and glared at Josiah.

  “The kid’s a crack shot, Wolfe. You’re going to have to trust us.”

  Josiah nodded again, and sighed. “All right.”

  Feders turned his attention back to the cabin. “There’s three more Rangers scattered about at the edge of the woods and the bayou, standing watch just in case Langdon has reinforcements coming in, or tries to make a run for it.”

  “You sure this is going to work?” Josiah asked.

  Feders shrugged. “I’m not sure that we have any other choices. But I don’t really think Charlie Langdon wants to kill a child in cold blood. The Mexican? She might already be dead. We haven’t seen her since we surrounded the cabin. There was some shooting when we took out the lookouts and let Charlie know that he was trapped.”

  “You don’t know Charlie Langdon like I do. He planned for this. He’s got an escape route figured out . . . always has.”

  “I’ve known plenty of devils like him, Wolfe. Don’t worry. He won’t be expecting you to do what you’re about to. And, we’ve got your back—this has to work.”

  “All right. Let’s do it.”

  Josiah dismounted from Clipper about fifty yards from the cabin. He immediately raised both arms over his head. “Langdon. It’s me, Wolfe. I got an offer for you.”

  His voice carried on a soft breeze. The sun was bright overhead, staring down from the center of a cloudless sky. There were no sounds other than grass brushing against grass in the slight wind. No screeching hawks, no horses whinnying, no vultures flapping their giant wings to stay aloft—those birds were probably feasting four miles away. There was nothing but silence, nothing but the heartbeat of a man, intent on saving his son’s life.

  He stood there staring at the cabin—his Peacemaker left behind, his belt empty, his saddle sheath vacant of the Sharps carbine. He held no weapons, not even a knife hidden in his boot. Feders had insisted, and Josiah had reluctantly agreed with him.

  There was no word from inside the cabin. Not even a flutter of the curtain in the window next to the front door.

  “You hear me, Langdon? I got an offer. A trade. Me for the boy and the Mexican woman. We ride out of here then.”

  The front door cracked open. “How stupid do you think I am, Wolfe? There’s Rangers all around this place. You think I’m gonna risk gettin’ my head blown off by a buffalo gun, thinkin’ I’m a free man on my way to nowhere?”

  Josiah heard Lyle squeal inside the cabin. He couldn’t tell whether the boy had been hurt or was playing happily.

  “Me for the boy, Langdon. I’m unarmed, I swear. Kill me right here and now if you want, but don’t hurt the boy. He’s of no consequence to you just because he’s my blood. He’s an innocent.”

  “Lot of innocents die, Wolfe. You know that. Saw it often enough. Killed ’em yourself.”

  “Only when I had to.”

  “You always were hesitant on the trigger. Never did feel comfortable with you on the drive.”

  The door cracked open a little more, and Josiah could see the silhouette of a man standing off to the side. He’d know Charlie Langdon anywhere.

  “I’m standing here in front of you now, Charlie,” Josiah said. “Not at your side, not covering your back. Those days are long gone. Take my life. I’ll gladly give it for my son’s.”

  “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll ride out of here with your son, and leave him and the woman when I’m certain I’m not being followed.”

  “That’s not the offer.”

  “Well, that’s the deal. Other than you’re coming along, too.”

  Josiah heard a twig snap behind him, and knew Scrap was settling into his position. “All right, then,” he said, stiffening a bit. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and for a brief second, he was afraid, then he pushed the fear away with the confidence he held in Feders’s judgment and plan.

  “You have no choice,” Charlie said.

  The door to the cabin opened wide then, and Ofelia was standing in the center of it. She blinked from the harsh sunlight, and Josiah could see a dried streak of blood on her face that reached from her eye to her neck. Somebody pushed her out onto the porch, the barrel of a rifle stuck securely in the center of her back.

  It was then that Josiah first heard the noise, a familiar but distant tinkle. The sound was so faint he could barely hear it over his rapidly beating heart. He took a deep breath and scanned the shadows beyond the porch for the origin of the new sound, but saw nothing.

  Other than the blood and fear on her face, Ofelia looked to be fine. Josiah didn’t recognize the tall, straggly man with the rifle in her back, but that wasn’t a surprise.

  “You just stay right where you’re at, Wolfe,” Charlie hollered from inside the cabin.

  The breeze shifted, and Josiah heard the tinkle again. Only this time it was louder, like there was more than one, a chorus of rattles. And then he knew—knew for certain what it was that he was hearing.

  In his absence, a rattlesnake had set up a nest in a hole under the porch. It happened every year. The spot was too perfect for a snake to pass up. One of his chores was to keep the porch and surrounding areas free of the deadly critters, but he hadn’t given the chore any thought until now.

  He wanted to shout out and warn Ofelia, but he held his tongue, and watched carefully as the tall cohort of Charlie’s urged her down the steps. They made it down without issue, without sensing anything was amiss, though the man did look around on the ground when he stepped away from the porch.

  The snake was not yet fully riled, had yet to show itself, and Josiah hoped it would wait.

  Charlie appeared in the doorway. Lyle was stuffed under Charlie’s left arm like a bag of potatoes, a Colt stuck to his son’s head. There was another man behind Charlie. He held a gun to Lyle’s head, too.

  One false move, and Lyle was dead for sure.

  Josiah was completely panicked. His eyes focused under the porch. As Charlie stepped down, Josiah saw the snake peer out from under the boards. The rattler grew loud, enraged that it had been disturbed.

  “Stop!” Josiah screamed, Charlie’s order to stand still forgotten as he rushed forward.

  Charlie heard both warnings, Josiah’s and the snake’s, but was down to the next step before he realized what the warning was for. It looked for a brief second like he thought he was walking into a trap, a trick, but he realized quickly that he was in danger from something other than a Ranger.

  The man behind Charlie jumped back up on the porch, pulling the gun away from Lyle’s head as he did. Charlie skidded to a stop just off the step, and was about to do the same, jump back up on the porch—but the rattlesnake struck, tearing through Charlie’s pant leg, biting into the flesh of his calf.

  Charlie yelled out in pain as the snake buried its fangs deep into his flesh. He held on to Lyle as best as he could, but the pain and the surprise were too intense, and the gun fell from his other hand, tumbling to the ground.

  Josiah was in front of Charlie in a matter of seconds. He ripped Lyle out of Charlie Langdon’s clutch and dove off to the right, his son safely in his grasp.

  Charlie was screaming, grabbing at the snake, rolling on the ground, when a loud report from Scrap Elliot’s rifle shot echoed across the valley, announcing the end to Charlie Langdon’s reign of lawlessness.

  Josiah held Lyle as tight as he could, feeling every inch of the boy, who was screaming and crying wildly, to make sure his son hadn’t been shot, that he was all right. Lyle continued to cry, a welcome sound to Josiah’s relieved heart and mind.

  After a long minute, after the rush of Rangers surrounding the cabin, and hearing Captain Peter Feders order everyone to lay down their weapons, Josiah stood with Lyle in his arms—who until that very moment had not realized that it was his father who had come to his rescue.

  Lyle stopped crying,
smiled, and threw his arms around Josiah’s neck, and for the first time in a long time, Josiah smiled, too.

  EPILOGUE

  Josiah loaded the last crate onto the wagon. Ofelia sat with Lyle on her lap, waiting on the seat up front. Clipper was fully rested and tied comfortably to the back of the wagon.

  “I think that’s the last of it,” Josiah said. “I’m glad you’re coming with us, Ofelia.”

  “I have been here all my life, señor. It is past time I saw more of the world.”

  “Austin is a different kind of place.”

  “That will be the best thing for the both of us. There are many bad dreams here.”

  “And many happy ones.”

  Ofelia nodded, and forced a smile. “They will always be here, the happy ones, but there are more down the road. Ones that can touch you.”

  This will always be my home, Josiah thought. He took a deep breath, and drank in the sight of his land and cabin for the last time. He had already visited the cemetery, had bidden Lily and the girls good-bye, all the while asking their forgiveness for leaving them. But he had to go. He would have never felt right about leaving Lyle alone at the cabin again. Besides, he felt more alive now than he had in a long time.

  He wasn’t sure what lay ahead, what his life would be like in Austin, but it offered him more than the family homestead could now.

  Charlie Langdon had survived the snakebite and gunshot wound—Scrap’s orders from Feders had been to hobble the man, not kill him—and was set to stand trial in a week. Charlie had been properly delivered to the jail in Tyler by eight Texas Rangers, including Josiah himself. The hang-man surely wasn’t too far behind . . . but that was an event Josiah had no desire to see. His duty was done.

  Juan Carlos had been cleared of all his implied crimes, but there was no word about the old Mexican’s whereabouts. Josiah hoped he would see the captain’s half brother again sometime in the future, but he wasn’t certain of it.

  Captain Pete Feders had gone on to the Red River camp, where he was forming the new company. Once Josiah got settled in Austin, he was to join the rest of the Rangers, including Scrap, on the edge of the Indian Territory.

  He did not allow himself to think of Suzanne del Toro . . . but he could not help thinking of Pearl, and he more than hoped that he would see her again, even though she was complicated, uncertain—and one of the most beautiful women Josiah had ever seen.

  He climbed up on the wagon, smiled at the thought of Pearl, flicked the reins, and called out, “Let’s go. Come on, let’s go.”

  Turn the page for a preview of the next book in the Josiah Wolfe, Texas Ranger Series

  THE SCORPION TRAIL

  by Larry D. Sweazy

  Coming soon from Berkley Westerns!

  PROLOGUE

  September 1852

  Twelve-year-old Josiah Wolfe was acutely aware of every sound in the woods. The long gun he carried was his father’s—and it was the first time he had ever been allowed to carry it away from the house on his own. Beyond target practice, he had hardly ever handled the gun, much less hunted with it, but his father was ill, struck with a fever that had lingered longer than anyone thought it would, and the meat in the larder was growing thin.

  His ma gave him the charge to bring home some squirrels or rabbits—something, anything, to get them through until his father recovered.

  There’d been an anxiousness in his ma’s blue eyes that he’d never seen before, a tenseness in her voice when she saw him off and said, “Now, you be careful out there on your own, Josiah. I need you to come back whole. I need you to come back,” she’d repeated with fear frozen in her throat. His father coughed from the bed behind her, too weak to raise his head. “I couldn’t bear to be like those Parkers.” She watched him until he disappeared down the lane.

  There was not a child in East Texas who did not know the names of Cynthia Ann and John Richard Parker. The children, Cynthia, age eight, and John, age five, were kidnapped by the Comanche in 1836, after a violent raid on their home. Fort Parker had been built by the eldest Parker two years earlier, and it was surrounded by twelve-foot walls that enclosed four acres, with six cabins inside. Most of the inhabitants were extended family from Illinois. The raid in which the Parker children were taken was quick and bloody—conducted by a large party of Indians, mostly Comanche, but there were also Kiowa, Caddo, and Wichita involved.

  Fort Parker was less than a day’s ride from Seerville, the closest town to Josiah’s father’s small parcel of farmland, and even though the massacre had taken place four years before Josiah Wolfe’s birth, he carried a healthy fear, mistrust, and curiosity about anything that had to do with Indians. The kidnapping was lore. A spooky story used to correct bad behavior.

  Just the utterance of the word “Comanche” made Josiah shiver, even though Indian Territory was a long way away and the Comanche and other tribes had been all but run out of East Texas. No child wanted to be the next Cynthia Ann or John Richard—and no parent in the vicinity was fully confident that such an attack could never happen again.

  There were still Indians that refused to give up the raiding, and some strays stole cattle and still traded with the Mexicans down south.

  John Richard had been ransomed back from the Comanche, but had run off to rejoin them not soon after. No one had ever seen or heard from Cynthia Ann again—though there were newspaper reports that she’d been spotted trading with a companion, a Comanche, on the Canadian River. The memory of her white life, it seemed, had been stolen from her, and most folks believed that Cynthia Ann would be better off dead than living among the Indians.

  With the world on his shoulders, and surely not wanting to disappoint his father or his sweet but forever nervous ma, Josiah had headed out into the woods, assuming the role of provider, of doing for others what they could not do for themselves.

  At first, he was confident, but as the morning edged along, and he got farther from home, he became more fearful. He had shot one scrawny little gray cat squirrel that barely covered the bottom of his satchel. The bigger fox squirrels foraged later in the morning than the gray cats, so there was still hope. But then the need for meat took Josiah deeper into the forest than he had ever been.

  He wished it was spring instead of fall.

  In spring there’d be plenty of cat squirrels bouncing around the hardwood forest close to the cabin. But all of the wishing in the world wouldn’t turn back time. There was a chill in the air, and the days of late were regularly overcast, and growing shorter. Now that the harvest of corn was in, Josiah had been obliged to return to school—which did not make him too happy.

  A game trail caught his attention, and he eased along a hidden winding path that cascaded down a steep ravine.

  He clung tightly to his father’s long gun and navigated his way through the towering hardwoods, a thick grove of pines, then into a floodplain that was dried up and sandy.

  Silt covered the first six feet at the base of every tree along the meandering river that was at the end of the trail, remnants of the spring floods. A red-bellied woodpecker chortled three times as it lit out overhead, then it landed on a nearby tree and started to work, quickly hammering away in search of ants or other insects to eat.

  Every creature on earth must be hungry, Josiah thought. He stopped and caught his breath. He could feel his heart beating in his chest, and another pang of hunger gurgled in his belly—breakfast had been a bit of grease-soaked bread.

  After he had stood still for five minutes or so, a big squirrel buck jumped from one tree to another. But it was nearly a hundred yards away. Josiah raised the gun, steadied himself, and tried to balance his weight so he wouldn’t go tumbling backward once he pulled the long gun’s trigger. The light was dim under the canopy of leaves that had yet to fall, and the sky above was roiling gray, the clouds tossing and turning in a north wind that seemed to be growing stronger by the minute.

  The buck was busy jumping from one tree to the next, and with each jump it wa
s farther away from Josiah, and the certainty of a piece of meat was quickly running out of range. Josiah took a deep breath, sighted the squirrel as best he could, and pulled the trigger. The blast shattered the peaceful silence that blanketed the river bottom. The squirrel fell to the ground with a loud thud. The shot was square-on.

  The discharge had propelled Josiah back a bit, but he did not fall—he knew what to expect. The smell of black powder tickled his nose, and it gave him a feeling of satisfaction and comfort. He’d have two squirrels in his bag—a couple more and he could head home and present his parents with a few days’ worth of meals. Hopefully, his father would recover quickly and they could go hunting together.

  He made his way to the squirrel, unconcerned about how much noise he made. All of the creatures had now been alerted to his intention. The buck was truly the biggest squirrel he had ever seen. It had to weigh three or four pounds. It made the gray cat look like a mouse when he tossed the buck in the satchel with it.

  Blood covered the fingers of his right hand, so Josiah went to the river to clean himself up. He had laid the long gun down on the ground a few feet behind him, but he clutched the satchel tightly between his arm and ribs. He could smell the squirrels, the blood, and it quelled his appetite, almost made him queasy, but he would not for a second part with the kills—some critter might grab them and run off.

  Bent over, staring down at the water, washing his hands, then his face, Josiah could see the reflection of the clouds overhead—but after a second, after wiping the last bit of water from his face, he nearly quit breathing.

  There was a man in the reflection, a man standing over him with his father’s long gun in his hands. Even worse, setting panic free to scream through his veins, was the realization that the man was an Indian. Josiah was almost certain it was a Comanche.

  He froze until the Indian nudged him from behind with his foot. “Up,” the Indian demanded. “Up.”