[Texas Rangers 02] - Badger Boy Read Online Free PDF

another mile in the dusk before coming upon a narrow creek. It seemed a likely place to spread his blanket. He staked Alamo where the horse could graze within reach of the water.
    He tried in vain to sleep. Heavy in spirit, feeling cut adrift from all he had known, he lay looking up at the stars and thinking of so much forever lost to him. His mind ran back over the long years to Daddy Mike and Mother Dora Shannon, the couple who had taken him in, a lost child orphaned by Indians, and had raised him as their own. He remembered a pleasant boyhood on the Colorado River farm so far from here in both time and distance. It still belonged to him by inheritance although it had been a long while since he was given leave to visit there.
    He thought of Geneva Monahan, who had moved to that farm with what remained of a war-torn family, seeking refuge from the dangers of their own place nearer the frontier. It had been the better part of a year since he had last received a letter and much longer since he had seen her. He pondered his risk in traveling there to visit her and to look again at the farm the Shannons had bequeathed to him.
    Finally, he thought about the years he had patroled the frontier. He thought of the comradeship, the shared perils and disappointments and occasional small victories. That it had come to an abrupt and unexpected end left in him a sense of emptiness, of work left hanging, incomplete. He had had no time to formulate plans. The most urgent consideration had been to remove himself from the conscription officers' reach. Where to go from here was the major question. He faced several alternatives, none of them to his liking.
    He pulled the blanket around him, hoping morning would bring him an answer. But the question continued to nag him. He could not sleep. He got up, finally, and started toward the creek for a drink of water. Alamo snorted, acknowledging his presence.
    The sight of distant firelight stopped him in mid-stride. He thought first it might be a lantern in some settler's window, but he dismissed that idea. The only cabins he had seen since leaving the ranger camp had been abandoned, their owners electing to move away from the Indian danger. No, this was a campfire. Two possibilities came to mind: brush men or Indians.
    The brush men, a combination of outlaws and fugitives from military service, tended to congregate in out-of-the-way places and in numbers that kept them relatively secure against attack by either Indians or civil authorities.
    Rusty stared at the distant fire and considered his options. The law be damned; he had never felt any moral obligation to pursue conscription dodgers for benefit of the Confederacy. Now that he was no longer part of the company, brush men were none of his business.
    Indians were another matter. This far south of the Red, an Indian campfire almost certainly meant trouble brewing for someone. His safest course would be to saddle up now and be far away by daylight.
    He told himself this was none of his business either. He no longer had any ranger obligations, no oath to live up to. If the Indians moved toward the settlements, someone else would probably find their trail. Only by purest chance had he seen this fire in the first place. Had he not been obliged to leave camp he would not have traveled this far west. If he rode away now no one would be worse off than if he had never been here.
    He tried to convince himself as he saddled Alamo. He mounted and turned the horse southward. He rode a hundred yards and stopped, looking back toward the fire. He felt a compulsion to know. Were they really Indians? And what could he do about it if they were?
    He followed the creek westward, holding Alamo to a walk to lessen the sound of his hooves and to avoid stumbling into deadfall timber that might make a noise. When he was as near the fire as he dared ride, he dismounted and tied the horse to a tree. He moved on afoot, stopping often to listen. He smelled the smoke and meat