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[Continuing chapter seven]
“Dear God,” Polk cried. “Why don’t they turn back?” He waved his large hat again, though he knew it would do no good because no one who mattered was watching him. He saw the gout of smoke that signified a second volley from the invaders. For a few seconds the whole valley seemed to be shrouded in thick white smoke. Then, as a breeze picked at the smoke like a brush going through freshly picked cotton, he began to see the destruction his hubris had wrought.
He’d recognized the danger the instant the invaders had moved up the slope and formed themselves into a line. These were not just Regulator thugs; this was an army. Someone had taken it upon himself to invade Texas. Polk had seen this because he had been trained to. None of the men he’d sent into that valley had known what danger was represented by that line of men who’d sent their horses back to the reverse of the summit they defended. They fight like mounted rifles, Polk thought.
Who are those people?
“Reverend!” Polk turned to see the McCulloch brothers riding hard up his hill and calling to him. “We got to get out of here!” Henry McCulloch shouted.
Polk looked over the McCullochs, at the thin cloud of dust pointing toward him like an arrow. Dragoons, he thought. They’ve smashed my other wing, and now they’re coming for me. “They knew we were coming after them,” he said when the McCullochs reached him. “They knew and they set up an enveloping movement and I sent my boys right into it. Oh, God.”
“There’s plenty of time to regret yourself, Reverend,” Ben McCulloch said. “But there won’t be if we don’t get ourselves back into those woods yonder. Ride, Reverend. Now.” The two men set off eastward, followed by Polk’s two companions; after a moment in which he toyed with the idea of offering himself up as a sacrifice for the memory of the men he’d caused to die, Polk wiped the tears from his eyes and raced after the McCullochs.
“Did anyone survive?” he asked when they finally stopped running, back in the safety of the woods. For the time being it appeared nobody chased them.
“Don’t know,” Ben McCulloch said. “Did you think I was going to be fool enough to ride with them? I warned you, Reverend. I told you not to go chasing after those fellows until we knew more about ‘em.”
“I know you did, marshal. But the boys wanted it so! And how was I to know those were professional soldiers? They wear no uniforms. What kind of army invades a country in disguise?”
“And in such small numbers?” McCulloch scratched his chin. “They were enough to stop you, that’s true. But I didn’t see more than a dozen men on that slope, Reverend. Even if you assume there were a hundred horsemen coming up around you from the south, that’s still no army.”
“Unless it’s one of those Mexican private armies,” Henry McCulloch said. “Remember those? Before the war of independence? Or maybe it’s like I told you earlier, renegades from Indian Territory up Canada way. I hear stories about Confederate deserters hiding out there in bands, turning to robbery and such.”
“They ain’t Mexicans,” Ben McCulloch said. “Not coming from Louisiana, they ain’t.”
“I can’t see Confederates raiding us, either,” Polk said. “Not even deserters. We’re their kinsmen, after all. We’ve even sent a legion of our own to help their army fight the Federals.”
“I don’t believe that bandits think too much about the bonds of kinship,” Ben McCulloch said sourly. “They might be well enough organized to offer up the kind of fight I just saw. But something about this just doesn’t feel right. Why would deserters be raiding this far into the country? There’s just homesteads, maybe the odd plantation, between here and the centre of the old Austin colony—next to nothing worth stealing. And do either of you recall anyone complaining of the kind of thievery you’d get if it was bandits? I don’t like this, don’t like it a bit.”
“Say, Mister?”
Polk turned in his saddle, and saw a boy of about fourteen emerge from the woods on the back of a nervous young mare. The McCulloch brothers motioned the boy toward them. “What is it, son?” Ben McCulloch asked.
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Chapter Seven
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