He thought of the boy he had taken and the pleasure a son would bring to his lodge, even one whose hair was red. It was time now to go home, to enjoy the fruits of conquest. It was time for dancing and celebration, for the proud telling of great and daring deeds.

CHAPTER

TWO

Warren Webb enjoyed riding alongside Michael Shannon on the wagon road to Linnville. The jovial farmer was pleasant company, never short of stories to tell. It mattered not whether they were totally true or were partly a construction of an imagination enriched by Shannon’s thirty years or so of drifting from Tennessee across Arkansas and Louisiana and finally down the Texas coast. He had entered into every conflict he could reach, however far it might have been out of his way. Mike Shannon had never seen a fight he did not want to mix into, bringing all the gusto other men put into games and horse races.

Though summer heat made each mile seem like two, conversation helped relieve the weight of fatigue. And if Shannon’s speech easily lapsed into the profane, that too afforded its guilty pleasures. For Webb to use such language would be unseemly if not actually forbidden by the Scriptures. He was a circuit-riding minister whose small farm was sadly neglected because of the travel requirements of his higher calling. Coming from someone else, a little profanity offered a tantalizing hint of wickedness, a minor and harmless rebellion he found refreshing. Shannon seemed little inhibited by the fact that his riding companion was a man of the cloth who carried the Word far past the forks of the creek where settlers could not afford a live-there preacher.

He said, “ ’y God, Preacher Webb, this country is gettin’ so choked up with people, they’ll pretty soon be stumblin’ all over one another. I’m studyin’ on movin’ west, out on the Colorado River. There’s land to be had there, not half so dear as this on the coast.”

Shannon did not own the tract he plowed. He simply squatted on unclaimed land, using it until he tired of it or a rightful owner came along to take possession from him and his wife. In such a way had generations of poor farmers progressed slowly westward from the Alleghenies to the Ohio Valley and across the Mississippi into Texas, amassing little of the world’s goods but incurring little in the way of debt and obligation. They could plant and harvest a crop, then leave when the spirit moved them or a real owner came along with the deed. Shannon had already done that more than once, though he was little if any older than Webb, and Webb would be thirty come October.

For many, squatting was a means of survival in a country where cash was a stranger to most men’s pockets. Now and then a farmer might roll up his sleeves and fight when someone came to move him, but most accepted their lot and looked to the west, confident that they would soon find a better place. It was a melancholy fact of life that trailblazers rarely profited like those who followed in their tracks. One sowed. Another reaped.