She asked, “How far do you think you can ride? What about that bad leg?”

“It’s a long way from the heart. Saddle up, Rusty, then let’s go get our guns.”

In the cabin, Rusty fetched down from its pegs a flintlock rifle Mike had brought home from the war with Mexico. It was the only one the family owned. He handed it to Mike.

From a corner he took an old shotgun Mike had carried to Texas in 1836 in hope of using it on Mexican general Santa Anna, or Santy Anna, as Mike called him. He was just in time to be on hand when Sam Houston took that fancy gentleman’s measure on the battleground at San Jacinto. Mike had felt cheated, getting to participate in only a single engagement, so one-sided that it was over almost before it began. He had to wait ten years for another full-blown war to break out. Mother Dora had reluctantly given her blessings and sent him off with a company of ranger volunteers to fight Mexico as his forebears had fought the British in two earlier wars.

Scouting for the United States Army, Mike and other Texans under command of Colonel Jack Hays had harried the enemy all the way to Veracruz and Mexico City. Rusty had heard him tell many a rousing tale, most of them more or less true, allowing for a little enthusiastic stretching of minor parts that otherwise would not have been so interesting. A faded and battle-worn U.S. flag hung in a place of honor on the kitchen wall.

A muzzle-loading horse pistol usually rested on a set of pegs beneath the rifle, but it was missing. A greasy-whiskered neighbor named Fowler Gaskin had borrowed it weeks ago. Gaskin was notorious for borrowing first one thing and then another, sometimes asking, sometimes just coming and getting. He was also notorious for not bringing anything back. If the owner wanted it, he had to go and get it. . . if Gaskin hadn’t misplaced it somewhere or sold it to somebody. A couple of weeks ago he had borrowed Mike Shannon’s best mule, Chapultepec. He hadn’t asked but had chosen a time when the menfolk were elsewhere. He led the animal out of the corral and told Mother Dora, “I need the borry of your mule,” then had shouted “Thankee!” back over his shoulder as he rode away bareback. The bridle had been Mike’s, too.

It might just be that the Indians had missed the Gaskin place, Rusty thought. If so, the Shannons still had one plow mule after all. They could team him with Alamo if they had to, though it would hurt Mike’s conscience to hitch the black to a wagon or plow. Especially alongside a mule.

Indian raids were no longer commonplace along this section of the Colorado, though they still occurred with regularity farther west. Texas had been a state in the Union for more than ten years now. Federal troops guarded the frontier, but most were infantry, restricted to guard and garrison duty and ill equipped for pursuit of the Comanches’ light cavalry. Several times Mike had enlisted in the state’s volunteer ranging companies for limited periods. Horseback, they moved faster than the federals, were burdened with less equipage, and did not have to answer to every pip-squeak bureaucrat misled into an overappraisal of his own importance.