The Daily Brief

This last Saturday was the second day of Christmas on the Square in Goliad, Texas. I had a table there, as a local author, but the cold was so pronounced that the whole event was rather a bust … but it did mean that folding up and coming home early allowed some time for taking pictures on the way back. This is a part of Texas which overlies the Eagle Ford Shale formation, and over the last five years I have noted a good many changes along the route, and in the small towns that we pass through on a semi-regular basis. More »

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Click on the link… click twice on it. It’s OK. Mind-boggling, but OK.

(Busy working on the new book; my suggested reboot of the Lone Ranger franchise – title suggested by Blondie; “Lone Star Sons”. In the meantime, amuse with this bit of clip art.)

(This the second part of the set-up for my re-visioning of the Lone Ranger legend. Yes, there is a young ranger, who is the only survivor of a treacherous massacre … and a trusty Indian scout friend … but any other likeness to the Lone Ranger story is coincidental. Cross my heart, really. No Wild West memes were harmed in this essay into writing a classical Western, although some of them may have been slightly dinged.)

Chapter 2

“You should return to Bexar,” Toby Shaw urged Jim, on the day that he was well enough to stand and walk a little way beyond the shelter of the cave. Jim shook his head. They were sitting companionably on either side of the small fire which burned in the mouth of the shallow cave. The single horse which had escaped the treachery of Gallatin and his renegades was picketed a short way away, moodily nibbling on a stand of long yellow grass; a brown and white pony with a wall-eye and a jittery temper. Jim hadn’t known his owner long enough to put a name to horse or rider – but the beast likely panicked when the renegades had murdered the Rangers. While Jim had lain unconscious on the rough pallet of blankets in the cave, Toby had retrieved Jim’s saddle-bags, haversacks and revolvers, although not the Sharps.
“No,” he answered. “I’ve got to hunt down J. J. Gallatin, and find out what was in that wagon. That’s what Captain Hays sent us out to do, and I’m damned if I’ll return and face him empty-handed.” The pain of his broken arm – still bound and splinted between two straight lengths of willow-branch – had retreated to a dull and constant ache. His head was clear – and he no longer saw two objects before his eyes, instead of one. Toby, carefully roasting shreds of some desert creature for their meagre supper – Jim didn’t dare ask what it was – only shrugged. If Toby had been entirely white, Jim would have said he looked exasperated. Jim added, “Look, I’m not asking you to go with me …”
“I go with you of my own will, James. This is a duty laid on me.” Toby’s normally cheerful countenance reflected the utmost gravity. “There is an evil walking in the tracks of that wagon. I can feel it. To take no action, allow evil no hindrance – that is an evil of itself. You seek your law, one for all men – I seek for balance in things, what the white teacher said was fairness to all. This … whatever is in that wagon, is an un-balancing of things.”
“All right then.” Jim was obscurely comforted in this strange alliance between the two of them. “We take the cross and make our journey towards Jerusalem the Blessed, vowing brotherhood and service ‘gainst all perils. I am glad of your company, Toby. You have certain skills and knowledge which is closed to me. And I would have been dead very soon, if you had not found me.”
“That was a thing meant to be,” Toby shrugged and carefully turned the stick with the unidentified meat shreds roasting on it. It looked to Jim as if the ends were already burnt as tough as jerky. No, not completely inedible – not even unappetizing, for he was hungry for what felt like the first time in days. “I think that this is the journey that my uncle foresaw for me. The star-iron and you are my talismans. The horse … that was meant for me to find, also.”
“Would that you had found two of them,” Jim answered and Toby chuckled.
“The True People are not riders of the nehënaonkès, when we take to the warpath, James. And this may be the war-path. We should prepare carefully.”
“I will,” Jim promised, although he deeply regretted the loss of the Sharps, taken from the saddle holster of his horse as he lay insensible. He supposed that the renegades had been too much in a hurry to take his Patersons, although perhaps they hadn’t spotted them. “I’m getting low on lead for bullets, though.”
“Shoot wisely, then,” Toby advised, dryly. Jim laughed, with an ache of grief in his throat. “That’s what my brother always said. ‘Shoot wisely, Little Brother – and hit what you aim for.’”
“I also must hit what I aim for,” Toby nodded in perfect agreement. “But I get my arrows back, most times.”
“Mining for lead never appealed to me,” Jim answered. “Too messy.” Chuckling, Toby handed him one of the blackened wood skewers, threaded with shreds of meat which were hardly any lighter than the wood. Or any tenderer, as Jim discovered, although the sizzling meat gave off an aroma so as to make his mouth water in anticipation. They chewed away companionably, while the sun slid lower and lower in the sky, final slipping below the horizon in a brilliant smear of dark orange, threaded with gold-edged smears of purple cloud.
“In the morning,” Toby said at last. “At first light. You are certain you are able, James?”
“I am certain.” Jim was – although the broken bones in his arm had not yet begun to knit. “We can’t wait, Toby – the next winter rainstorm may destroy the trail beyond all your reading.”
“This is true,” the other man agreed. “But there will be something, even after this time.”
Jim thought of the straight-ruled ruts made by a heavy wagon, the disarrangement of the soil left by the teams which pulled it … and now the trail of the renegades and their stolen horses. Yes, there would be clear markings in the arid desert, where things grew slowly and the marks left by men and animals lasted long.

In the chill, directionless light of dawn, the two broke camp. It did not take any time at all, merely a moment to quench the tiny fire with a swift kick of dirt over it. Toby helped Jim saddle the wall-eyed brown and white pony and tighten the girths, for he could not manage that one-armed. One rolled blanket went behind the saddle and the other over Toby’s shoulder. Toby hefted his war-hatchet – a stout maple shaft of some age and very well worn, set with shell beadwork and terminated at the business end with a double-headed metal fitting. One side was a curving metal blade of antique design, viciously sharp and rather like a hatchet, balanced on the other by a shape like a blunt hammer-head. A leather quiver of freshly-fletched arrows and a bow-case with a short bow strung with buffalo sinews completed Toby’s baggage. In riding a horse, with saddle-bags well-filled with his own oddments and supplies – including Blackstone’s Commentaries – Jim felt as if he was driving a Conestoga wagon filled to the canvas cover, in comparison.
They set off, Toby in the lead, at a gentle trot which always kept a little distance ahead of Jim on the wall-eyed brown horse. They crossed a shallow valley, as the sun rose ahead of them, etching all the shadows of rocks and scrub brush in a clear outline. On the far side of the valley, Toby led him and the wall-eyed horse around the flank of a flat-topped hill, beyond which lay another shallow valley, in appearance the same as the first; clay-grey ground, dotted with sparse thickets of dull green brush. Only in this valley, the turkey-vultures circled and flapped now and again to the ground. Jim looked away from the grisly remains of his horse, now almost unrecognizable and reduced to white bone, shreds of dried brown flesh, hide, and tufts of sun-bleached horse-hair. Yes, this was the place.
“Wait a moment!” He called to Toby. These were the six graves, lightly mounded and hardly weathered at all. As Toby said, he had built six cairns of stones and driven a cross of slender willow branches into each. He must have gone to some trouble to find them – straight branches, in this desert country! Jim thought, with increasing gratitude for Toby Shaw’s civilized consideration, as he got down from the wall-eyed brown and white pony. I owe him twice over – for my life and for the care given to Daniel and the others. Daniel’s straw planter’s hat hung from the twig-cross limb – how Jim knew his grave from all the others.
He knelt by the grave, briefly overcome. It could not be that Daniel was dead and by treachery – but he was and buried in a wilderness grave, far from home and those he loved – Mama, Daddy, his sisters, Rebecca and the little ones. Jim swallowed over the lump in his throat, overcome by memories of his brother; six years older, daring and fearless, the noblest of men, and the bitter knowledge that he had been brought low by a treacherous bastard like J. J. Gallatin.
“I’ll catch him, Dan’l,” he promised in a whisper. “I’ll catch him, and bring him to justice … and I’ll do my best to rescue Daddy. That’s my promise, over your grave. Gallatin is a walking dead man, from this moment on, even if it takes me years.” There was a small stone at his knees. Jim took it up, and added it to the cairn. “Whenever I pass this way, I’ll add another stone. Maybe in time, you’ll have a mountain for a monument, Dan’l.” He got to his feet, fighting off the vague feeling of dizziness which the effort brought to him. Toby waited patiently, sitting on his heels with the war-hatchet in his hands. “Let’s ride, Toby … in a manner of speaking.”
Silently, Toby rose to his feet, and resumed that ground-eating slow trot. His head turned slightly to the right or left, those sharp brown eyes of his scanning relentlessly. Jim reined in the brown and white pony, to follow a little to one side of the tumbled ground, lest his own horses’ prints spoil the trail. They traveled without speaking or rest for all of that day, pausing only to drink a mouthful or two from Jim’s canteen and once to rest in the shade of a cottonwood sapling at the edge of a stagnant pool which when it rained would have been a small creek. The wall-eyed pony drank from it greedily, nonetheless. Now and again, Toby made a brief halt to examine a pile of horse dung, or a small dried indentation made by voiding urine; Jim guessed that he was gauging relative freshness and origin. He didn’t ask how far a lead that the renegades and the mysterious baggage-wagon had on them. A week for one, perhaps ten or twelve days for the other; it was a miracle to Jim that Toby remained ever cheerful, optimistic, even.
“It is the desert,” he explained, when Jim broached the subject. “Things grow slowly and marks on the earth are not washed away, or hidden by new growing.”
A day, and then another. Toby found several remains of campfires. He confidently announced that one set – the older and larger – were made by the Mexican deserters accompanying the mysterious wagon. The smaller and relatively more recent were by the renegades.
“How can you tell?” Jim asked, honestly intrigued. “Besides the age – which I cannot imagine how you deduce.”
“There were the ashes of tobacco, James. The Mejicanos, they roll their tobacco into cigarillos – sometimes in tobacco leaves, sometimes in paper. Your people, they smoke their tobacco in pipes, if not as snuff. And the Mejicanos, they make their corn into dumplings wrapped in dried corn leaves. I find burnt corn-shucks; Mejicano. Little heaps of burnt tobacco, or brown spittle on the ground? That is an Americano.”
“How many days lead do they have now, Toby?”
“Not as many as they did when we began,” Toby answered, oblique as always. “We gain on the wagon, James. But I fear – the men who killed your brother and friends – they also gain. What should we do when we find them?”
“I don’t know,” Jim answered. “I guess it depends on how we find them and what their condition might be.”

At dawn of the next day, James noticed a pair of dark birds, with wide-spread wings wheeling in the sky. They slid gracefully earthwards, some miles distant. James did not need say anything to Toby – he knew from the way that Toby also paused and watched the birds that their presence was significant. Now they were joined by another and another, dark specks in the distance, in the very direction of their trail.
“Something dead,” Toby remarked. “Something large and dead; take care, James.”
They approached the point where the turkey-vultures had gone to ground with great wariness and no little interest, seeing from a distance the shapes of several mules and what had been three men. Jim could see they were clad in the white trousers commonly worn by Mexican soldiers. The ground was much disturbed; Toby squatted on his heels and surveyed the scene. The vultures, momentarily disturbed by the approach of two men and one horse, flapped heavily a little distance away, but wheeled and returned, resuming their interrupted meal. Even at that distance, Jim could hear the buzzing of flies, and the smell of putrefying flesh hung in the desert air like some kind of horrible fog. Jim pulled his kerchief around his nose and mouth so that he did not breathe in any more of it than necessary. He held silence, not wishing to interrupt the course of Toby’s thoughts.
There were four mules, two of whom still bore the tangled remnants of their harness, hitched together, as if they had fallen at once. The other two lay a little apart, stripped of harness. That meant something, Jim knew. The marks of wheels scribbled an equally tangled course.
“They cut the dead or injured mules free, put two of their horses in place and lightened the wagon.” Jim ventured finally and Toby nodded once. Two leather-covered trunks lay on the churned ground among the quarreling vultures, among a number of smaller boxes and cases. One had burst open upon falling, spilling out a fountain of red and white fabric, spangled with gold braid. A brass-trimmed box also had opened, scattering an incongruous array of forks, spoons and knives across the sandy ground.
“Your renegades did wait in ambush, this time,” Toby said at last.
“How long ago did this happen?”
“Three days, perhaps four.”
“But they took the wagon,” Jim tried not to breathe in too much. “There must be something in it besides General Woll’s under-drawers. Captain Hays was right about the devilment … this looks like expensive trash an’ traps, the kind of things that most of us would want for loot and bragging rights. What’s left in the wagon must be of a higher value to Gallatin.”
“We do not have time to bury them now,” Toby finally rose to his feet. “Or what is left. We should go soon. I have a bad feeling, James.”
“At least, we can cover them, before we go,” Jim said, aware that he would not be able to do very much to assist, in his one-armed condition. The bulk of that unpleasant work would fall to Toby, who nonetheless nodded in agreement. He padded off to investigate the bodies of the Mexican deserters. Jim dismounted and tied the horse by the reins to the sturdiest branch of the biggest bit of sage scrub that he could see. He on took the relatively simpler duty of searching the jumble dumped from the wagon onto a heap on the ground for anything useful, turning up a number of gaudy silk handkerchiefs – which would not take up much room in his saddle-bags – a set of very fine linen sheets and several coarsely woven woolen blankets, obviously the bedding of the slain Mexicans. Struck by a sudden thought, he also gathered up some of the metal knives and forks, thinking that as they were of plain pewter, a lesser metal than fine silver plate, he might be able to melt them to form bullets. Obviously, this was for setting General Woll’s second-best table.
Working silently, as if an unvoiced agreement had been made, Jim and Toby shrouded the three bodies in sheets, at least as much to avoid looking directly at them, than for decency. One rather curious thing – all three Mexicans had been scalped after being killed by gunshots from a distance, as near as Jim could see. They dragged the three bodies into a shallow depression and spread the blankets over all, weighed down with stones and piled brush. When it was done, Toby stripped off his broadcloth coat – now unspeakably and horribly soiled, and threw it with a barely-repressed shudder as far away from the brush-pile tomb as possible. Behind the carefully impassive expression on his face was real revulsion. He scrubbed his hands on the dirt, and dusted them off against his leggings.
“It was not the Enemy who did this,” he observed presently. “Taking their scalps. Or the Other Enemy. It was your people, James. The same as killed your brother and the others.”
“It’s not our way,” Jim protested. “Taking hair … it just isn’t a white thing, ordinarily. Unless it was by one of those buckskin men who lived too long among the Indians.”
“The governor of Sonora put out a bounty for the scalps of the Other Enemy,” Toby answered. “White men are happy to do that work for him. A hundred pesos for the scalp of a warrior. And there is one thing, James …”
“Not much difference between the scalp of an Apache and a low-class Mexican,” Jim completed the thought. Toby nodded slowly. “A hundred pesos is more than a man could earn in a year at honest work. It wasn’t enough to murder these three men … but look to make money from it? Cap’n Hays said there was devilment in that wagon; he was more right then he knew, but I’m thinking that the greater part of devilment is in the souls of those following it.”
“If that is true, we must see that we do not become part of the evil remaining,” Toby agreed, his expression somber. “We have done the right so far, James. I think we should move on.”
“See if there is anything you think we can use in the General’s baggage,” Jim suggested. “I’ve taken some of his silver – I can melt them down, make bullets. That would be fitting, I believe.”
Toby looked over the tumbled luggage with a dubious expression. A bright red waist-length cavalryman’s jacket with ornate gold epaulettes appeared to catch his eye. He caught it up and shrugged it on – it fit him far better than the tattered broadcloth had. With an effort, Jim kept an indulgent smile from his face. His friend – and Toby was just that, a friend – was as susceptible as a flighty girl or a peacock for bright colors.

They had lost about an hour of daylight in that pause to cover the bodies of the Mexican deserters and to search the abandoned trunks and boxes. Jim was resigned to another three or four days on the chase of the wagon with it’s dangerous cargo and even more dangerous escort, at the very least. But the next morning, he and Toby again spotted vultures in the far distance, circling and gliding in that ominous fashion. Toby paused and sniffed the air.
“Smoke,” he explained briefly. “Something burned. More than a campfire.”
The two advanced warily for the last few miles, closer and closer to where the vultures wheeled down from the harsh blue sky. A smudge of smoke stained the horizon. Presently Jim could smell it also. Nothing moved, save the few scavenging black birds, at some little distance, wrangling over the remains of a single mule. Toby hunkered down on his heels, at the top of a low rise where he and Jim could look down at what remained.
It was barely recognizable as a wagon; only the iron hoops which had banded the wheels were recognizable in a random pile of wood burned to crumbling black charcoal. There was the wagon-tongue, and another iron hoop with fragments of wheel-spoke clinging to it. At the bottom of the rise lay the mutilated body of a horse, bloated as round as a barrel with four stiff legs pointing unshod hoofs at the sky, as the vultures squabbled over the tender flesh of its belly. Jim quietly unholstered one of his revolvers as Toby stood and nodded a silent acknowledgement. He moved as silently as a puff of breeze down the side of that scarred hill, while Jim scanned the horizon every which way, alert for any sound, movement – a falling pebble, breaking twig, a shout or the wicked whisk-and-snick of an arrow hitting home – every nerve drawn tight, and the hair on the back of his neck prickling.
Gallatin’s renegades had obviously caught up to and taken the wagon – but what had happened to them then? Whose was the horse, then? It looked to Jim as if it had the remnants of a simple bit and bridle on it, and what could be painted shapes and lines, so that it might have been an Indian’s horse. Had Gallatin and the others been attacked by Indians, and fought them off? Where were they? Jim waited impatiently for what intelligence that Toby could draw from the remains of the wagon, the footprints and marks in the ground, the dead mule and horse.
After some minutes, Toby looked back at him and waved – there was urgency in that gesture but no intimation of immediate danger. Jim put away the revolver and led his horse down to the remains of the wagon. Closer, he could see plainly that it had been consumed entirely by fire – and that small objects and broken pieces also marred by fire were scattered broadcast. The smell of smoke nearly banished the odor of carrion. Coals still smoldered in the heart of where the fire had burned, consuming all but the metal fittings of the wagon, and those chests, crates and barrels within. The bones of at least one man, arranged with a length of chain to a crumbled wheel were burned nearly as dark.
“The Enemy,” Toby remarked quietly, his face impassive. Jim stooped and stirred some of the cooling ashes with his finger, unearthing some not-quite cooled blackened metal; rifle barrels, flint-locks and triggers, from which the wooden stocks had all been burnt away. “You may tell your Captain Hays that the wagon is found, and what he feared in it is destroyed.”
“I am certain that he will find it ironic,” Jim replied. “Here, Woll and Santa Anna and all were hoping to rile up the Comanche – the Apache, too – against us. Looks like they did us a favor, after all; that wagon must have been packed full of rifles, Toby. And gunpowder…” The realization of what must have happened dawned as brightly as a sunrise. “See this, Toby – a Comanche war party took Gallatin and his people by surprise. Looks like at least one of them got taken alive, so those fiends …” Jim swallowed against an uprush of sudden nausea. “Chained him to a wheel and lit a fire underneath. Can’t say I’m all that sorry about that, seeing how those murdering scum killed Daniel and the others. But no one deserves dying that way … I’ll bet one of those casks of gunpowder was leaking all this time. All it took was a spark, one tiny flame.” He began to chuckle, overcome by mordant amusement. “There were some mighty surprised Comanche! I’ll bet we’ll find tracks of horses running from this place, and some of them may be running still.”
“Or not, James,” Toby answered in a peculiar quiet voice, freighted with meaning. Jim followed his gaze. Without a sound, an old Indian man had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.
He was an old man, his face deeply scarred by years and the sun, dressed in a ragged white jacket, buckskin leggings and moccasins sparsely adorned with quillwork. He stood with his his hands at his sides, weaponless and immensely dignified … and alone, although Jim couldn’t vouch for that, not entirely. When he watched from the hilltop as Toby examined the wagon, he could have sworn there wasn’t another living human for miles. Yet here the old man stood, waiting for something.
“I think we should be introduced,” Jim suggested, deliberately and eerily calm. “And I’d like to know who he is and what he knows of this.”
Toby nodded, just a brief motion, and spoke to the old man in a harsh, guttural language. The old man inclined his own head almost regally and answered. Toby sighed. “He is Mopechucope – Old Owl – of the Honey-Eaters, the Penateka Comanche. But he is inclined towards peace, in the main. He is one of their old wise ones. He says that there is an evil in this place, in the things that were brought here … he was not here, but he knows of what happened, or what he was told happened.” Toby added, as if that distinction made a difference. “It was as if a great bolt of lightening came to earth. Three of their warriors lived, although two of them not for long. The others … they vanished, as if taken into the sky by a great hand in a cloud of smoke. The one who lived and returned to the Penateka winter camp … he heard a great roar, louder than a hundred thunderclaps, and fled. He and his fellows were brave and daring warriors, who feared nothing … yet they ran from here. Old Owl, since he is very wise, he came alone to see what could be divined about this evil.”
“What of Gallatin and his men? Were they all killed here also?”
Another low-voiced and guttural conversation, to which Toby attended with a flattering air of courtesy and Jim listened to with growing impatience. Finally, Toby said, “He invites us to his fire and I have accepted. James, I will tell you that he is accounted a great man among his people, one to be treated with deference and every courtesy. Attend to what he says … and even if you do not at first accept his words, take them to heart. He knows what is, and that is a rare thing.”
“Tell him that I accept his hospitality and friendship,” Jim answered, although Toby’s eyebrows twisted momentarily in skepticism at the word ‘friendship.’ They followed the old man a little way, to the edge of the shallow defile where the ruined wagon lay. The ground under their feet was much churned in places, the bushes scorched in the flash-fire of the explosion. There was a curious mark on the ground, as if a heavy box – or something with a flat bottom had been dragged some little way.
In the hollow underneath a shrub nearly large enough to be dignified by calling it a small tree, a tiny fire burned, lazily sending up a thread of smoke. There was a ragged blanket the color of dirt spread in the patch of shade. Old Owl settled onto it with a grunt of relief, and gestured Toby and Jim to sit also, facing him. He spoke for some minutes, seeming to pick his words carefully. Jim waited, again with impatience. What was the puzzle; that great evil that Old Owl seemed to believe posed a hideous danger? Jim damped down his impatience, and schooled his expression to one of mild and courteous interest.
At last the old man finished his story, and Toby turned to him and spoke in English.
“Mopechucope, he says that their warriors thought to attack the wagon for the horses and mules. They waited until early dawn, when the four men were very tired. There was one man on guard, he says – the rest asleep. They were overcome quite easily – but the one who was awake, he caught a horse, and he tried to take something with him from the wagon. It was heavy; he dragged it on a rope a short way. One of the other white men ran after him, shouting … but the man with the horse, he did not rescue the other. Mopechucope, he says that the first man, who escaped – he was not a true warrior, but rather a coward with a black heart. He shouted and struck at the other with the butt of his knife, and then he dropped the rope and fled. It was still very dark and there were plenty of horses … so the warriors of the Penateka did not chase him very far. Those three who survived for a time, they did give chase and on return, they looked at what he had tried to take with him. It took some little time. In the meantime, the other warriors were celebrating.”
Toby’s expression was exceedingly noncommittal. Jim could make a very good guess at how the Comanche were celebrating. The bones of the renegade chained to the wagon wheel needed no further comment. “And then a sudden flash of fire and death. That one was deafened for some time; the other two were struck and burned. Their breath failed in their bodies and their bones were broken. The evil brought by those white men and their wagon was very great, so is Mopechucope’s judgement. He has a strong spirit and much wisdom, so he may come near to it without harm, but he is old and weak in body, so it must be that we were sent to remove it from the world of men. He says we should not touch it until he can do a medicine for us; make a good smoke so that we may be armored against the great evil and touch it without harm. It is his advice that we bury it, not marking the place.” Toby hesitated, then continued… “And to keep silent, to prevent others searching, which would permit the evil loose in the world to do harm once more.”
“Then what is it?” Jim asked, impatiently. “If it was guns and gunpowder meant to corrupt the Indians with … it’s all destroyed – what evil can reside in a pile of burnt wood and metal?”
“It’s over there,” Toby answered. “Where the one white man left it behind. The men of the Penateka opened it at the very minute that the wagon was destroyed. Do not touch it, until Mopechucope makes his medicine.”
Jim rose gracelessly from his seat on the ground, his legs grown stiff in that uncomfortable posture after half a day in the saddle. He had not made any particular note of the stout wooden crate among the fire-scattered debris, half-hidden as it was under the branches where the renegade Ranger had abandoned it. The small crate was scorched as badly as anything else and the topmost side had been wrenched loose. Jim hunkered down on his heels to look at it more closely, taking heed of Toby’s admonition. The inside of the crate was packed tight with coarse canvas bags, of the kind that ship sails were made of, each – as nearly as Jim could see – tied tightly at the neck with stout twine and sealed close with a lead roundel embossed with an elaborate stamp. But one bag was ripped open; the gleaming gold coins inside were scattered over the tops of the other bags. Jim caught his breath; oh, yes. Evil indeed – a fortune in gold, a fortune intended to set the frontier on fire, a fortune for the ruination of Texas … a fortune that had already killed Daniel and four Rangers of his company, corrupted and killed at least a dozen more – Mexicans and Rangers and Comanche alike. No, Old Owl was right, and so was Toby. There was only one thing to be done with that tainted gold.

When Old Owl had finished throwing dried sweet-grass on the fire, wafting it toward Jim and Toby with a desiccated bird wing, chanting all the while, he nodded towards the two young men. Silently they dragged the burnt, broken crate a little way from the campsite to an abandoned prairie dog burrow. They ripped open each of the bags, and spilled the golden coins down into the burrow, letting the empty bangs and seals fall after. The coins dropped with a faint jingling sound, sweet and yet redolent of something unclean, until the crate was empty. Old Owl looked on with grim satisfaction. They used the broken boards of the crate to scoop dirt into the burrow, nearly up to the top. Old Owl spoke once, in tones of utmost finality.
“He says that he will know us again, whenever we are in the lands of the Penateka, and treat us as friends. That is all, James.”
“Nice to know,” Jim agreed. He took up the reins of the wall-eyed pony, and Toby shouldered his blanket and war-hatchet. The voice of Old Owl followed them a little way, in a discordant chant that finally faded away behind the two friends as they went south to report to Captain Hays … to report everything but one small detail.

For no particular reason –
Ian and Sylvia – Early Morning Rain

For your Monday delectation – practically every fish-related play on words known to man.

And a brand new look, too. Just got tired of the first template, and this one has been updated oftener … so, what about a picture of a cute little cat? Isn’t that what the internet is for? Looking at pictures of cute animals?

(Who was actually named Flash, by his family. He is/was a friendly and fluffy black cat of indeterminant age, who used to come up and hang out in my garden, before the advent of the dogs. This afternoon when we got home from a short trip to Boerne, a neighbor called with the news that Bubba had been badly mauled again by a stray dog, and this time it does not seem that he will survive. This happened during the afternoon, and was so public a happening that the police were called and the owner of the dogs involve was fined. It’s been a long time since Bubba came and hung out in my back garden, so in memorial – an entry from 2005, about how my garden was once full of cats … including Bubba.)

In The Garden of Cats
Posted on 20050307 by Sgt. Mom

My back yard is entirely fenced, and sheltered from the late afternoon sun by an enormous mulberry tree, and is usually at its best during two times of the year— that is, spring and fall. Summers are hot and harsh, winters are cold and dreary, and our gardening season is split into two short seasons by them. The first best time is beginning now, when the jasmine and the potted Meyer lemon trees are out in clusters of starry white flowers, and everything else is leafing out, recovering from the whatever winter freeze we might have had. It has been a particularly wet and soggy winter, rather than cold, so this year everything in my yard will be most especially green and lush, and may yet carry through summer that way

We only had a couple of days of freezing temps, but it hit the plants I put in last fall the hardest; a grouping of native Texas plants to attract birds and butterflies, around a green glass Japanese fishing buoy in a metal stand, where the bird feeders hang from a branch of the mulberry. The fire bush and lantana, the Esperanza and liatris are all putting out new leaves. I love to sit out on the back porch in the mornings and evenings, when the big rose bush and the Esperanza are alive with birds, and there is a constant flutter of wings around the feeders.

Sammie, the white cat from across the road— who was nearly blind— used to like sitting behind the potted plants, and pretending that he was stalking the birds going after the spilled seed on the ground. Alas, he was too blind to actually catch a bird, not unless it was a bird with a death-wish marching right up to his whiskers. Sammie, who uncharacteristically (according to his owner) developed a deep affection for Blondie when she was home over Christmas, grumpily tolerated sharing my garden with Bubba, the black cat from down the road who has been coming around for years. I think Sammie and Bubba looked on my garden as a sort of gentleman’s club; not in the nasty, titty-bar sort of way, but the comfy chair and old-port English manner of gentleman’s club. Alas, Sammie was side-swiped by a car one day when on his way over; he was not seriously hurt, just shaken up, and stays in his own yard these days, which is for the best.

Bubba, the wise and wily old survivor, who does not have to cross the road— he frequently arrives by strolling along the top of the fence that runs along the back of all our houses— does not have the place to himself though. For the last two weeks, another young cat has been trailing along in his lordly wake, at 6 AM and 6 PM sharp. Just as young Percival the sort-of-feral began hanging around for the food, and was eventually coaxed into tolerating caresses, and then the soft life of an indoor cat of the First Degree, I am contemplating doing the same with this one. But oh no, not for myself! I have four cats already; another one will be crossing the boundary into �crazy neighborhood cat lady, as well as being frowned upon by the code compliance section of the City of San Antonio.

This new cat— who may yet actually belong to a neighbor, just like Sammie and Bubba— has been coming around for two weeks now, and already accepts being petted, and tolerates me sitting on the glider and listening to the radio while he crunches through a bowl of finest Science Diet Light. It is another young male, all white underneath with a brindle brown and grey patch on his back, and on the top of his head. He seems touchingly eager to reject the call of the wild, and curl up on soft furniture and embrace the life of an indoors cat – I must be strong and resist! But as soon as he is tame enough to handle without shedding a couple of pints of my blood— and I know for sure that he doesn’t belong to someone (Judy, my neighbor who knows all this sort of thing, says no, he is a stray) he is off to the spay and neuter clinic, and on to the waiting list for the Animal Defense League shelter, awaiting a soft chair and a garden of his own.

(Sammie eventually became ours, the little male stray wandered off into another orbit, and now the only cats in my garden might be Ollie from up the road. Which reminds me – we should warn Ollie’s owner about the loose dogs…)

It’s been a long time since I last stopped by, but this is the fortieth anniversary of swearing an oath and becoming an Airman Basic, so what better a way to celebrate than to reconnect with old readers, meet new ones, and remember all the friends that I made here in years past. Sgt. Mom has been gracious enough to give me the keys to the house, and I hope to be a welcome and frequent guest.

Past readers may remember Real Wife (she’s still with me after twenty years now) and Red Haired Girl (now a freshmen at a midwest Catholic university). As to the latter circumstance, I will have a lot to say in future posts as to my observations on how the higher education system is working, and the miserable way in which our public schools have contributed to that.

I have also had a ring side seat to the debacle of how our government has been stifling business and innovation in this country. I promise though that now matter how angry it makes me, I will endeavor to present my arguments with a touch of humor and satire.

I feel better already!

Classical music, from John Dowland, and amazingly – Sting. From a couple of years ago. I have to say I like it – Sting’s voice is a little rough, but passionate, which is just right for the song, which must have been seduction music for the late Elizabethan/early Stuart era.

(For the anniversary of the beginning of World War One, the war to end all wars, which ended instead three monarchies and came close to ending two republics … one of my best archive posts.)

We drove across the border on a Sunday, my daughter and I, on a mild autumn day that began by being veiled in fog when I gassed up the VEV at the PX gas station at Bitburg, and headed southwest assisted by the invaluable Hallwag drivers’ atlas, open on the passenger seat beside me. Blondie shared the back seat with a basket of books, a pillow, some soft luggage stuffed into the space between the seats, and half a dozen Asterix and Obelix comic books. Fortunate child, she could read in the back seat of a moving car for hours. Not like me— child or adult, I could not even look at the printed word while underway without becoming nauseated.

“We’ll cross right over Luxemburg, and then we’ll be in France,” I said. “You know, Gaul.”
“Will there be indomitable Gauls?” my daughter asked, seriously. She was just coming up to five years old. Her favorite comic books followed the adventures of the bold Gaulish warrior Asterix, and his friend, the menhir-deliveryman Oblelix, whose tiny village was the last to hold out against the imperial might of Roman conquest, thanks to a magic potion worked up by the druid Getafix, which gave superhuman strength to all the village warriors. The drawings in the books were artistically literate, and there were all sorts of puns and word-plays in the stories – and they had been translated and distributed all over.
“There could be,” I said, noncommittally. Three or four weeks ago, we had left the apartment in the suburb of Athens where we had lived for most of what she could remember of life and taken the car ferry from Patras to Brindisi, on our way to my new assignment in Spain.

In easy stages I had driven the length of Italy, over the Brenner Pass, through the tiny neck of Austria, and across Southern Germany. We had so far stayed in a castle on the Rhine, a couple of guesthouses, a hotel outside Siena which could have been nearly anywhere, as it overlooked a junkyard on one side, and acres of grapevines on the other three, and another which covered two floors on the top of an office block in Florence and offered a view of the Duomo from the terrace. We had been to see ruins in Pompeii, the Sistine chapel, the wondrous Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, a Nazi concentration camp, and a mineral bath in Baden-Baden.

“Where are we going to do first?”
“Buy some jam,” I said.
“What kind of jam?” my daughter asked.
“It’s very superior jam, made with currents. They pick out the seeds by hand with a goose-quill, so it’s very expensive and only made in this one little town in France, but it is supposed to be the tastiest on earth. It’s on the way between here and Paris.”
Well, it wasn’t any odder than anything else I had taken her to see in the time that we had lived in Europe. She curled up with Asterix, while the VEV’s tires hummed tirelessly down the road.

I could tell, without having to see a border sign, when we had left Germany. Germany was as clean as if Granny Dodie had dusted it all, and scoured it twice with Lysol, and then groomed all the grass and trees with a pair of manicure scissors. Houses and cottages were all trim and immaculate, not a sagging roof or a broken shutter to be seen – and then, we were in another place, where slacker standards prevailed. Not absolute rural blight, just everything a little grimier, a little more overgrown, not so aggressively, compulsively tidy. And the highway became a toll road, and a rather expensive one at that. I made a snap decision to take the rural, surface roads at that point, and the toll-taker indulgently wrote out a list for me of the towns along the way of the road I wanted, hop-scotching from town to town, along a two-lane road among rolling hills and dark green scrub-forest, and little collections of houses around a square, or a traffic circle labeled ‘centre’ around which I would spin until I saw a signpost with the name of the next town, and the VEV ricocheted out of the roundabout, and plunged headlong down this new road. (Good heavens, a signpost that way for Malmedy! Well, they did say snottily in Europe that wars were a means to teach Americans about geography, but I was interested this day in the earlier war, and my route led south.)

Always two lanes, little traveled on a Sunday it seemed. I had no shred of confidence in my ability to pronounce French without mangling every syllable, but at least I could read signs in Latinate alphabets. And this was Alsace-Lorraine, I was sunnily confident of being able to make myself clear in German, if required. The VEV’s tank was still better than half full, and it was only midday. Here we were climbing a long steady slope, a wooded table-land, and a break in the trees, where a great stone finger pointed accusingly at an overcast sky. A signpost with several arrows pointed the various ways farther on – Ossuaire …Ft. Douaumont … Fleury. A parking lot with a scattering of cars, the same oppressive sense of silence I had felt in places like Pompeii, and Dachau, as if even the birds and insects were muffled.
“What’s this place?” My daughter emerged from the back seat, yawning.
“There was a horrendous battle here, sixty years ago. The Germans tried to take it, but the French held on.”
“Indomitable Gauls,” My daughter said wisely, and I pointed up at the Ossuary,
“That place is full of their bones. We’ll go see the museum, first.”

This was the place of which the stalwart Joffe had commanded, “They shall not pass,” the place in which it could be claimed— over any other World War I battlefield— that France bled out as a significant military power. For ten months in 1916 Germany and France battered each other into immobility, pouring men and materiel into the Verdun Salient with prodigal hands, churning every inch of soil with shellfire and poison gas, splintering the woods and little towns, gutting a whole generation of the men who would have been it�s solid middle-class, the politicians and patriots, leaders who might have forestalled the next war, or stood fast in 1940. It was the historian Barbara Tuchman who noted that the entire 1914 graduating class of St. Cyr, the French approximation of West Point had been killed within the first month of war. For this was a wasteful war, as if the great generals all stood around saying “Well, that didn’t work very well, did it?— so let’s do it again, and again and again, until it does indeed work.” And afterwards, no one could very well say what it had all been for, and certainly not that it had been worth it, only that the place was a mass grave for a million men.

There was the usual little sign at the admittance desk to the museum— so many francs, but students and small children were admitted free, and so were war veterans and members of the military. I got out my military ID, and politely showed it to the concierge, a gentleman who looked nearly old enough to have been a veteran of Verdun saying
“Ici militaire…”
He looked at me, at the card, at my tits, and at my daughter, and then at the card again, and laughed, jovially waving me on to the exhibits; models and bits of battered gear, mostly, and a bit in the cellar made up to look like a corner of the battlefield, hell in a very small place, all the ground stirred up again and again. Supposedly, they had despaired of ever planting a straight row of trees; there was so much stuff in the ground.
When we came out again, the clouds were lifting a bit … down and across the river there was a golden haze over the town.

“Are we going to buy jam now?” my daughter asked.
“When we get to Bar le Duc. I think we’ll get something to eat, and stay the night there,” I said, and in that golden afternoon, I followed the two-lane road, the Voie Sacree, the only road into Verdun from the railhead at Bar le Duc, where traffic never stopped during the battle, two hundred trucks an hour, and 8,000 men shoveling gravel under their wheels day and night. The only visible mark left along the road were square white-washed mile markers, topped with a metal replica of a poilu’s helmet, like grave markers for a France gone sixty years ago.

I bought six jars of the confiture, six tiny jars of preserve as bright as blood, filled with tiny globes of clear red fruit. It was exquisite; saved for special occasions; I made them last for nearly a decade.

You know, there are days – which are happening more frequently of late – when I open up the internet window first thing in the morning and swear that I have accidently gone from Instapundit to The Onion. It used to be that August was the silly season, but I swear, the whole darned year is the silly season now…

Hoodies, Spike Lee and Tray-vonn Martin. I suppose any day now that Spike and the rest of his homies will be putting on their hoods and burning a cross on someone’s front lawn. Nice to know that the principle being upheld here is that a young person of color, in a neighborhood where he/she is not known can get mouthy and all thuggish on the local member of the neighborhood watch who wants to know who they are and what they are doing … to the point of knocking them down and banging their head on the pavement repeatedly.

Now screechy so-called comedian Rosannadanna Barr is tweeting George Zimmerman’s parents’ home address to her tens of twitter followers and threatening to show up at their house … I dunno what she is planning on doing when she gets there. Take a dump on their lawn, I guess. She is supposed to have a new television show coming out soon, too. Or did, until this desperately stupid protest movement congealed into a mass so dense that it threatens to drop through the world and out the other side.

Look – a lynch mob is still a lynch mob, whether it is tweets and facebooking, or torches and pitchforks. I am pretty sure that if George Zimmerman’s name had been George Martinez that hardly anyone outside of Florida would have heard anything about this. Funny how we were suddenly hearing all about it, though. Wonder what next week’s cause du jour will be – last week it was ‘ohhh, those nasty Repubs are coming to put a padlock on your lady-parts!’

Speaking of matters racial – is there a member of the Congressional Black Caucus who isn’t corrupt as all get-out, crazy as a loon, savagely nasty to work for or as dumb as a post? Honestly – I don’t think we’re seeing the best and the brightest members of the African-American community out here. Which is a pity really, because I know they are out there; I worked for and alongside many of the best while in the military. They probably are just too upright and competent to go into politics. It’s probably racist for me to even wonder about this, but then, I’ll always have Alan West to consider, and then I do feel a little better. Not much, but at least a little better.

Mallik Al Sham-wow – er, that is, Shabazz – a so-called local leader of the so-called New Black Panther Party threatened to burn Detroit to the ground, rather than allow … oh, whatever it is that will involve the state to impose a little order and sanity. OK then – how the heck will anyone be able to tell the difference, if he and his good buddies carry through with that threat? In fact, it might even improve the urban real estate somewhat.

Finally – Jane Fonda playing Nancy Reagan. In a movie about the Gipper. I have to sit back and contemplate the sheer, monumentally awesome stupidity of that casting decision. Is it time yet to quarantine Hollywood as a biohazard, lest the concentrated idiocy seep out and start contaminating the groundwater or something. I can’t see many liberals going to movie about Ronnie Reagan, even to point and laugh because likely it will be a partisan hit-piece like the Sarah Palin movie … and I can’t see any conserve-libertarian moving two inches off a rock ledge to see Jane Fonda in anything. Well, maybe if it was Jane committing hara-kiri on herself with a rusty bayonet and no CGI effects.

I used to think that I lived in a sensible country … at least the part of it that I live in is still OK. But I hafta tell you folks … I am getting seriously worried about some of the rest of it.

The whole thing, here: http://www.deadline.com/2012/02/advisory-nikki-finke-live-snarking-oscars/
If link is non-functional, just copy and paste. You’ll be glad you did.

Yes, it really happened – the details here, courtesy of Ace of Spades HQ.