That is where this story begins.

PROLOGUE

The Texas Rangers had their beginnings in 1823, when land impresario Steven F. Austin raised a volunteer company of ten men to act in defense of his colony in Mexican Texas. Rangers served during the decade of the Texas Republic and rode alongside the United States Army in the war against Mexico. Later in the years before and during the Civil War, volunteers manned a ragged picket line along the western frontier, guarding against Indian incursions. They had no official title but were commonly called rangers or ranging companies, minutemen, or spies.

During Reconstruction they were disbanded and replaced by a state police force, which did some good work but was badly stained by internal corruption and unwarranted cruelties. When the Confederate Texans finally regained the right to vote they dissolved the hated state police.

The reorganized state legislature created two battalions of Texas Rangers in 1874, giving them for the first time their official name and the famous star-in-a-circle badge, which was to become the stuff of legend.

This is a story of the early days, when small companies of poorly paid, poorly fed volunteers in homespun cloth and buckskin rode an unmarked frontier line for a primitive Texas that had only a toenail hold on survival. They had no uniform, no badge, not even an official name. But they had a job to do, and against all odds they managed to do it.

The story begins with one of the most unlikely events in early Texas history, the great Comanche raid that led to the sacking of Linnville town on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

CHAPTER

ONE

TEXAS GULF COAST, AUGUST 1840

He was Comanche, and he was known among The People as Buffalo Caller. Once in a time of hunger, when he was a fledgling on one of his first hunts, the older and more experienced men had ridden their horses to exhaustion without scaring up so much as one lone, lame bull. But Buffalo Caller, riding alone, had heard a faint and distant bellow. He had responded in the voice of a buffalo, and the buffalo had answered him. The calls led him to a small herd in a hidden canyon.

It was not buffalo he hunted now. He scouted as a wolf for the largest assembly of raiders the Penateka band had ever put together, moving to strike the land-greedy, hair-faced American settlers of Texas. Beside him against the Texans rode Swift as the Antelope, so named for his fleetness of foot.

Buffalo Caller tingled with excitement over the sights he was about to behold. He had never seen an ocean or even a boat, so it strained his imagination to visualize what old men had described around their campfires. If the veterans had not let fanciful dreams overcome the realities of memory, those wonders lay no more than half a day’s horseback journey ahead of him. It was claimed that the great water stretched so far one could not see all the way across. None of The People had ever ventured out upon it to determine how far it extended, for they were of the land, not of the sea. It was said that white men’s boats might travel for many days without touching shore and that fish larger than horses lived in the dark and frightening depths.