Tanner remarked to James, “It don’t look like you-all’s cup has run over with prosperity.”

“At least we ain’t takin’ orders from Richmond, or Austin either. We’re still free men.”

Free seemed a questionable description. The brush men were free in the sense that they were neither in the army nor in jail. But their situation hardly met Rusty’s definition of freedom. Hostile Indians roamed to the north and west. To the east, the Confederate government considered them traitors. The only relatively open course was to the south, toward a distant foreign border. Those willing to flee to Mexico had done so much earlier in the war. In a sense, those who remained here were confined to a huge prison without walls. They were refugees, hiding, moving periodically lest they be discovered and overrun.

Almost immediately Rusty and Tanner were surrounded by more than a dozen men. He knew his rifle would be useless. At best he might shoot one man before the rest swarmed over him. Tanner’s expression said he was still willing to fight if Rusty gave him the sign. Rusty shook his head.

Somebody demanded, “James, where’d you find these rangers?”

Rusty did not know the speaker’s name, but he remembered the face from among the men who used to loaf around the dramshops at the Fort Belknap settlement. He looked about, hoping to see other familiar faces. Surely some of the men he remembered deserting from the rangers would be among this group.

Clyde Oldham pointed to his brother and said Rusty had shot him . . . shot him down in cold blood. Someone grabbed Rusty’s rifle, jerking it from his hand before he could react. Tanner tried to hang on to his, but two men dragged him from his saddle, landing on top of him as he hit the ground. They took his rifle and his pistol.

Rusty felt hostility radiating from the men who surrounded him. He was reminded of the hatred Caleb Dawkins and other Confederate zealots had shown toward the Monahan family, hatred that had culminated in two hangings. His pistol was still in its holster on his hip, but if he tried to draw it he would not live to pull the trigger.

It would be useless to argue that the army had become too small and too weak to indulge its time searching the wide West Texas wilderness for a poverty camp like this. It was likely that most of these men had hidden out through a major part of the war. Many had probably suffered during the early period when fanaticism had inflicted injustice upon those whose loyalties were suspect. They would not easily believe that the long war had sapped the energy and resolve of even the most extreme, like the hangman Caleb Dawkins. Most Texans now simply wanted to put the conflict behind them and rebuild what they could from the wreckage of war.