[continuing chapter 19]
His only sorrow was that they had taken Destiny from him last night. The horse had been with him since his return from Cuba, and the bond between them was stronger than that between Walker and any of his surviving men. Fontaine and Nelson were dead; Wheat had vanished; who was left to care for but Destiny? Surely not Patton, the most senior of his remaining officers. That whelp, Walker thought, was probably the cause of my downfall. Then he recognized one of the men fussing over Patton. Charles Stewart. I should have guessed. What a shame I hadn’t the time to kill him as I promised his idiot uncle I would.
It was only after he’d gazed at the staring man for several seconds that Walker realized that he was looking at Russell, his former employer. The newspaperman’s eyes suggested a deep disappointment, one that might any second tip over into disgust. At the same time, he continued to scribble with his pencil-stub.
“Even after they confirmed it was you,” Russell eventually said to him, “I prayed that it wasn’t.”
“God doesn’t always answer prayers,” Walker said. That should have been amusing. It wasn’t.
“I thought you were meant for better things,” Russell said. He sounded like a disapproving schoolteacher. “You were one of the smartest young men I knew, Walker. One day the people might eagerly have made you president. You could have held this nation’s future in your hands because you’d been given it. Why in God’s name did you have to go and do something like this?”
Walker shook his head. Because people like you have to ask questions like that one, he thought. He drifted over to the fence, heedless of what his guards might say. “I don’t like to wait,” he said. “I couldn’t wait. The nation couldn’t wait. I wouldn’t have wanted to be handed a nation that had continued down the road I see this one taking, Russell.”
The other prisoners, and their guards, stood watching him, listening in spite of their fatigue, and for a moment Walker felt the tingling of that sense of power over others that made command such a pleasure to him. These men supposedly held his life in their hands. Yet they hung on his words, awaited his pronouncements. How far, he began to wonder, could I take this?
Russell squashed the hope as flat as the prairie. “So you moved without thinking. Let your pride ride you. How many people have died, Walker, for your pride?”
Walker tried to block out the words, and failed. Russell pressed on: “And what have you accomplished? There may have been those who thought as you do about the course this nation’s taking, Walker. They won’t think that way anymore. Not admit to it, anyway.”
“I only did as God made me,” he said.
Russell stared at him, but Walker refused to be drawn by this. Instead, he returned the stare, aided by the calm of a man who has put his full trust in the Redeemer.
After a moment, Russell shook his head. “As they say, the Lord moves in mysterious ways,” he said.
After a pause, he added, “What do suppose was the Almighty’s purpose in bringing you to Texas to fail in this fashion?”
Walker’s stare faltered; he felt his eyes beginning to fill with tears. God has not forsaken me, he repeated to himself; it was I who proved unworthy. God has not forsaken me. Try as he might, though, he could not drive Russell’s words from his mind.
When he blinked his eyes clear of tears, Russell had gone. Now, suddenly, Walker was aware of the dust that rose up from the shuffling feet of his fellow-prisoners, of the nauseating smell of dried sweat and urine rising up from the men. He became aware, too, of the jeers of the Texans who, in their ridiculous Mexican uniforms, hung behind the soldiers escorting him. What they proposed to do to him was not civilized. It was scarcely human.
Next Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six
Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen
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