Shadow Walker: The Texas Anthem Series: Book 3

PROLOGUE

NOVEMBER 1866

The body seemed to take forever to fall. The legs splayed out, arms fluttered as it performed an ungainly somersault There was a crackle and snap of barren branches, then a muffled thud as the body struck ground.

It was a hell of a way for Matt Behan to end a hunt.

Matt’s sons were climbing the slope below when they saw their father fall. Fearing the worst, they worked their way up through big timber until they found the body. Matt Behan, a man of power and prominence in life, was dead, brought down just a month shy of fifty years old.

Jordan Behan, Matt’s eldest son, stood off to the side, speechless at the sight of his father’s broken frame. Ezra Behan, younger by a couple of years, knelt by his father’s side to inspect the corpse.

That’s damn peculiar, Ezra muttered.

Pa’s dead, Ezra. Must you number his bones? They look all broken. And there’s his rifle, bent to hell. Jordan pointed to the gun where it lay, bent and broken on an ice-flecked ledge. He glanced at the corpse again. Cover him and let’s bring him home to Mother. Jordan frowned. Peculiar? How do you mean? He drew closer, his big frame casting a shadow over his father’s corpse.

To Jordan’s horror, Ezra pried open the dead man’s jaws, reached in, and pulled out a rounded crystalline stone about the size of a thumbnail. He wiped it clean of blood. The stone had lodged in the dead man’s cheek on impact.

What kind of fall slits a man’s throat from ear to ear? Ezra said. And stuffs this in his mouth? Ezra held out the stone for his older brother’s examination.

Jordan swore.

It was a diamond.

1

APRIL 1867

Blue Elk O’Brian laughed at the men who were trying to kill him. He clung to his concealed perch in the lofty branches of an oak tree and watched as the Regulators lined themselves on the crest of a limestone ridge, then continued down toward him, following the circuitous trail he had left for them. O’Brian, better known as the Osage Kid, brushed his shaggy black hair out of his eyes and grinned. He adjusted his weight, being careful not to disturb the swarm of bees at the end of the branch he had sawed almost completely through. Supporting the weight of the branch and massive hive with his left arm, O’Brian braced himself by shoving his right foot against a nearby branch and worked himself deeper into the cleft of the trunk. As yet, the mass of bees hadn’t noticed him. O’Brian’s build was small, unlike that of most Osage men, and he was able to blend into the shadowy recesses of the tree. He had wrapped himself in a faded brown blanket to better conceal his beaded buckskin shirt and Confederate-issue britches.

His fingers absently played with the mussel-shell necklace circling his throat as he watched the three troopers riding toward him.

The officer in the lead, Major Andrew Kedd, wore a blue felt hat that trailed a black plume. The thin, delicately built Regulator rode as if he were on parade. As he paused to study the tracks leading down the hillside into the grove of oak trees, Kedd removed his hat and brushed back a shock of prematurely silver hair. A silver goatee added emphasis to an already jutting jaw. Kedd replaced his hat and motioned for the two men behind him to follow as he continued down the slope. The other two Regulators looked worriedly from one to the other. The Ozarks were hardly things of beauty to them. These forested ridges and dark hollows were places to be avoided.

A man could wind up real dead hereabouts. And the only thing worse than being dead was being real dead. Everybody knew that.

Their voices carried to the Osage Kid in the treetop.

Major Kedd, sir, meaning no disrespect, but shouldn’t we be waiting for the rest of the men to find us, the bolder of the two, Corporal J. D. Canton, called out.

The man at his side, middle-aged like the corporal but without any ranking, rubbed his reddened cheeks. He needed a drink. Hell, Pepper Fisk always needed a drink. J. D.’s got a point, Major, sir.

Kedd did not bother to reply but waved the men onward. Come along, lads. We’ll skin this half-breed buck today. Mark my word we’ll shoot him down like the disreputable savage he is or truss him up and ship him off to Indian territory the same as we did the rest of the red devils.

Yes sir. Fisk found the courage to continue the argument. But he’s gone and scattered the boys over half of almighty creation … and left just us three … He searched the forest ahead, his gaze wide eyed and worried.

That’s quite enough, Private Fisk.

Pepper Fisk swallowed a retort and glanced aside at the corporal, who shook his head.

Show some backbone, Pepper, the corporal growled as if he had never complained. He flexed his big beefy shoulders and flashed a yellow-toothed wicked smile that added no warmth to his grizzled features.

Sideburns thick as briar patches covered his cheeks. Beneath his hat, his bald skull was dotted with sweat. Moisture glistened in the graying sideburns. A ragged scar cut a crescent moon just beneath his right eye.

Pepper rubbed a hand over his thick fleshy lips and veined cheeks. His bulbous nose twitched as he sniffed the air in hopes of discovering the scent of a campfire. His rounded belly growled, but his thoughts weren’t of food. Only of the taste of the rye whiskey the corporal had concealed in his saddlebags.

The three men reached a dry watercourse and, keeping to the winding ribbon of hoofprints, continued on into the shade. There the spring air brushed cool against their features and the land waited in mystery, for the tracks in the soft earth indicated their quarry had experienced some confusion as to the path ahead. No tracks led away. They simply stopped.

What the devil is this? said Andrew Kedd.

J. D. Canton and Pepper Fisk were busy trying to make some sense out of the tracks beneath the tree. They never had a chance to reply. Up above, the Osage Kid slashed down with his broad blade—fourteen inches of double-edged steel honed to a razor-sharpness—and severed the branch at its base. The branch dropped like a rock carrying its burden of newly swarmed bees right into the middle of the Regulators. The cluster of insects exploded and attacked both horse and rider in their agitated state. As the bees found their target, O’Brian ducked beneath his blanket to keep from being stung. Kedd, Fisk, and Canton yelled and batted at the insects. Their horses neighed and reared and kicked the air teeming with furious bugs. All three horses bolted as one away from the woods and headed at a gallop toward the slope. They took the incline without breaking stride as the bees swarmed after them. Fisk howled the loudest as stinger after stinger lanced his skin. Corporal Canton bellowed like a bear. Kedd bore his pain and suffering in silence until the last minute, when a peculiarly vengeful bee found his ear and thrust deep. The major straightened in the saddle, slapped at his head, and rent the afternoon with a piercing cry that turned to a curse levied against O’Brian.

When the troopers had vanished in the distance beyond the hills, the Osage Kid took his chances and scampered down the oak. He darted away from the tree and followed the deer trail deep into the woods.

He found his horse where he had left the animal, ground-tethered near a bubbling spring. O’Brian knelt by the chestnut and unwrapped the strips of cloth he had tied on its legs to soften the imprint of the shod hooves in the soft earth. The animal continued to crop the tender shoots of sweet spring grass growing around the edge of the spring.

When O’Brian finished unwrapping the hooves, he pulled up the stake he had driven into the ground, and patted the gelding’s neck. Looks like we won again, he said softly. Taking reins in hand, he swung up into the Confederate-issue saddle.

O’Brian had skirmished with Major Kedd on several occasions, ever since the Yankee major had arrived in Arkansas with his force of military police, men from both sides of the Mason-Dixon. Under Reconstruction, Kedd enforced the laws with a ruthless intensity that had earned him the enmity of the populace.

O’Brian paused, listening to the music of the hills, the wind’s sigh, the rush of a nearby creek hidden beyond the dense foliage of cedar and oak, sweet gum and redbud, leatherwood shrubs and beech ferns.

And the winner gets to stay, O’Brian added. Twenty-one years old, he was the last of his kind. All the rest of his mother’s people had been relocated west, to Indian territory. But not Blue Elk O’Brian. And so long as he remained, these verdant hills belonged to the Osage.

2

O’Brian reined in the gelding on the creek bank and waited still as a statue in the shade of the surrounding beech trees. No one was supposed to know about the cabin on Tomahawk Creek, but smoke curled from the stone chimney and a hammerhead roan nibbled on the dry grass bundled in the corral.

The Osage Kid was a good two days’ ride from where he had routed the Regulators with the bees. Here in this hollow, the Kid had built his humble two-room cabin of white oak and cedar shingles chinked with mud from the creek. The cabin stood a hundred feet from the creek and was all but obscured beneath an overhanging ledge of vine-draped limestone.

The Osage Kid slid from horseback and walked the gelding deeper into the woods, where he ground-tethered the animal in the darker recesses of the forest. Then he drew his Navy Colt .36, checked the loads, nodded satisfied, and holstered the revolver. He opened his saddlebag and pulled out a second Navy Colt. The weapon’s barrel length had been shortened by a couple of inches, to ensure a more comfortable fit. The Kid tucked the spare in his gun belt. It fit neatly in the small of his back, where it rode unnoticed. Such a little surprise might mean the difference between living and dying. During four years of war, fighting for the Confederacy’s lost cause, O’Brian had learned well the value of a surprise attack.

Stepping away from the horse, the Kid worked his way back to the creek, where he squatted down and continued to watch the cabin. As the minutes ticked away, he waited, studying his cabin and the smoke trailing from the chimney.

One horse, probably one rider. Probably not a Regulator, since they seldom traveled alone. Then, who? The Kid sniffed the air. His mouth began to water and his stomach growled. Someone was cooking his bacon, brewing his coffee. By heavens, enough was enough! He sprang forward and darted across the creek, momentarily exposing himself before reaching the opposite bank. He crouched low and waited for a gunshot. Nothing happened. Cautiously he parted a cluster of beech ferns and studied the cabin once more.

No sign of life save for the chimney smoke, no movement around the cabin. He searched the length of the cliff that protected the rear of the cabin. To an outsider it might appear that the Kid had built his cabin in a dead end and left himself no way to escape, the limestone cliff offering a formidable barrier. Only an experienced eye could discern the series of hand- and footholds that traversed the face of the bluff.

Thirty yards to the cabin. No problem, the Kid grinned. Child’s play, unless whoever was inside had espied his approach, unless whoever was inside shot him through the brisket as he charged.

As the cabin door crashed open, it tore loose from one of its leather hinges and slammed into the faded wood siding of a big old apple barrel set against the wall. The Osage Kid was a blur in the entranceway as he darted inside and crouched behind a table. The interior of the cabin was a dark, warm space intersected by a single beam of sunlight flooding in through the open doorway.

The Kid thumbed the hammer on his Navy Colt and swung the gun sights in an arc to cover a pair of three-legged stools, a ladder-backed rocking chair, then a skillet of bacon set on a rack above the fire in the hearth. The door to the small bedroom stood ajar, revealing a portion of the cot within. The front room was empty. And that meant … As the Kid’s eyes adjusted to the light, he stood and moved toward the back room, his steps muffled on the hard-packed dirt floor. He scooped up a stool and tossed it at the bedroom door to knock it completely open. He reached the doorway a few seconds after the stool. The Kid crouched low as his eyes ranged across the meager furnishings within: the homemade cot, a leather-sided trunk that had belonged to his father, a lopsided washstand and chipped enamel basin, and there in the dust beneath the cot, Osage beaded shirts and belts, tomahawks and ax heads, tins of coffee, fruit, beans, and milk, all of which he remembered storing in the apple barrel.

Now why would someone have emptied that big old …

The Kid spun in the doorway and dropped to the floor, the first shot from his Navy Colt reverberating in the cabin. Splintered wood erupted from the side of the barrel in a shower of fragments as the Colt spoke again and four times more. Gunsmoke clouded the air, the revolver kicked like a wild bronc, the report left the Kid’s ears ringing. Every shot struck home, making a sieve of the apple barrel and whoever had concealed themselves within. He charged across the cabin floor, adrenaline pumping every step, grabbed the lid, threw it aside, and gun in hand, peered down into …

An empty barrel!

Suckered!

The shutters behind him parted and gunmetal rasped on the wooden sill as the muzzle of a Winchester ’66 poked through the