Tim let the powerful current of the river take him where it willed. Using his one good hand, he struggled at a boot until it came free. Laboriously he tugged at the second. It too finally came loose. Fighting his pain, he jerked his belt buckle open and kicked out of his trousers.
With his lungs ready to burst, he shoved off from the river bottom and fought upward, clawing at the slippery water with his right hand.
He broke free of the suffocating water. He sucked a mighty draft of the life-giving air. God, how delicious!
He paddled and kicked weakly, barely holding himself afloat. He looked around. The river torrent had swept him away from the shore and was racing downstream with him. He had been carried around a bend of the river and out of sight of the outlaws.
Above Tim a giant sycamore, a century old and weighing ten water-soaked tons, ponderously swapped ends in the muddy current. The tree had been undercut from its high bank above the river and carried off by the flooding water. Hammered by thousands of blows during its two hundred miles of travel in the turbulent river channel, the tree had all its bark stripped away, limbs beaten short, and the tough knotty roots worn to less than a yard in length.
The tree rolled, drowning one-half of its roots and surfacing the other portion. It stabilized with the massive bulk aligned with the flood, an enormous battering ram charging downstream.
Tim did not see the behemoth sycamore bearing down upon him. It struck him a bone-cracking blow on the injured ribs, driving him under the water. A sharp root caught in his shirt and held him down.
The delicate balance of the tree was destroyed by the weight of the man. The tons of wood began to rotate. The momentum built, then rolled toward a new balance point.
Tim ripped free as the tree turned. He battled to the surface, spitting out the foul-tasting water that had slopped into his mouth.
He grabbed a short length of wood floating nearby and clutched its meager buoyancy to him. He began to kick across the current for the shore. For each hard-earned foot gained toward the bank, the river swept him a hundred downstream.
Tim felt the cold and his wounds turning his muscles to wet strings. How much blood was he losing? Surely a large amount. He started to doubt that he could reach the bank which sped so swiftly past. The fear built renewed strength. He kicked onward.
Tim’s legs gradually ceased to move. Only his hold on the piece of wood endured. He floated onward.
Bit by bit his mind became numb and nearly useless. His grip on the world and the chunk of wood slipped away from him. He sank below the surface of the water. Down he went through the cold, twisting current.
His feet touched the deep bottom of the river. Weakly he kicked upward, his one good hand reaching for the surface that he knew he would never see again.
His lungs were exploding. He had to breathe. His mouth opened and water flooded into his lungs. He was drowning.
* * *
Lew Fannin dreamed. A scowl formed about his closed eyes. Suddenly he became taut, every muscle hardening, and the trigger finger of his gun hand closed once, twice, three, four times.
Abruptly Lew sat bolt-upright. His eyes flashing around, he stared hard in every direction out through the cold gristle of the dawn and into the brush and trees surrounding his camp. He glanced down at the five-shot Paterson Colt revolver in its leather holster beside his bedroll. He grinned sourly at himself. This was the third time he had refought his last battle with outlaws.
The night was spent. He rose and packed his few belongings. He saddled his big gray horse and swung astride. Without a signal from the man, the horse moved off in a swift walk along the road at the base of the levee.
Man and beast had been together all the days of the animal’s life. It had grown to sense the state of the man. Now the tumult within the man’s mind communicated itself to the horse and it tossed its head and chomped on the metal bit in its mouth.
Lew spoke quietly to the faithful horse and slapped it playfully on the neck. “All right, old fellow, we’re almost there.”
The horse nickered, swished its tail, and broke into a gallop on the road winding through the deep woods.
Lew relaxed, the riding of the gray soothing him as it always did. He would take the horse with him to Mexico.
Louisiana was the most aggressive of all the states in forming regiments of fighting men to send to the war in Mexico. The state paid a twenty-five-dollar bounty to each enlistee for joining. Lew had heard that a company of mounted riflemen was being recruited in New Orleans. He planned to join and sail south to help General Winfield Scott whip the Mexicans.
A month earlier such an action would not have interested him much. He had been in the Texas Rangers for four years. He had always wanted to be a lawman, one of the small elite band of Rangers enforcing the law over the vast state of Texas. A nation until it had recently become one of the states of the Union.
He had taken naturally to the hard life and gun fights with outlaws and sometimes with the tough Comanche braves. His most recent assignment had been at Adamsville on the Lampasas River in the center of bandit country. His last arrest had taken him on a long journey after four rapists and murderers across Comanche territory to the Red River.
Lew had pushed the gray horse relentlessly along the tracks of his quarry. He came upon them as they crossed to the north side of the Red River and out of his jurisdiction. He pulled back into the trees and hurried upriver. There he crossed on a rock-bottom ford and swung back east and caught the four outlaws.
The men had fought him fiercely and he killed two of them. By then the blood of battle was in Lew’s eyes and he remembered the dead victims of the criminals. He refused to allow the remaining two murderers to surrender, but forced them to fight him. He killed everyone.
As Lew traveled the long weary days back to Adamsville with the corpses swollen and bloated in death, he reflected upon his merciless killing of the outlaws. That violence was a worrisome trait in him. He began to think of a change of jobs. However, he knew he would always be a warrior and not a farmer or office lackey.
The Ranger captain read Lew’s report and roughly reprimanded him for crossing the Red River into Oklahoma and for not taking the last two rapists prisoner. Lew knew without doubt that the captain was correct. But he was not certain he could ever allow justice be denied to a victim by a criminal merely crossing a river. He thought the savage deaths he had brought to the outlaws were justified. Lew immediately resigned and began the long journey east to New Orleans.
The concept of justice was important to Lew. He remembered his first lesson in justice and honesty. As a seven-year-old youth, he had tried to pick the pocket of an old man on the streets of Chicago. But the man felt the fingers digging for his wallet and, swifter than Lew had thought possible, whirled and caught him by the hand.
The old man lifted Lew off his feet and held him dangling from his arm. “Lad, stealin’s a bad thing, and you’re a poor thief. Where are your folks? I’m going to take you home and tell them what you tried to do.”
“I don’t have family. But I stay with a man. He’s a damn fine thief. Here he comes now. You’d better let me go, for he’s going to beat the hell out of you, old man.”
Lew smiled inside his head at the remembrance. That gray-haired, sixty-year-old man beat the younger man to the pavement in less than a minute. Then, catching Lew by the hand, he had dragged him along with him.
The man’s wife had stood in the center of the room staring at Lew. “What in God’s name are you going to do with that dirty ragamuffin?”
“He’s got no family and we got no kids. I thought we’d take him back to Texas with us. He’s had some bad friends. I think it’s our Christian duty to use our last years raising and teaching him to be fair and just to all men.”
And so Lew traveled to Houston with the old couple. For nine years he lived with them, until their deaths, the woman following swiftly after the man.
They were the only two people Lew had ever loved. He took their name, Lew, and considered it a very great honor.
Lew crossed the broad Mississippi River on a ferry boat at Baton Rogue and headed south toward New Orleans. Once it had rained all day without letup and he had taken a night’s shelter in a roadside tavern and lodging place.
The road entered a swampy zone and became deep with mud. Lew pulled the horse down to a walk and guided it out of the mud and up to the top of the levee flanking the river. He went on through gradually thinning woods.
A quarter-mile ahead, or a little less, a man climbed out of his bedroll on the levee and looked about. Then he walked down the bank to the river’s edge. Lew thought the clothes of the man resembled those of a horseman he had seen at a distance traveling ahead of him the day before. The fellow moved like a young man.
Three men broke from the woods on the inland side of the levee and ran up to the top of the embankment. Lew thought he could make out pistols in their hands. They talked with the first man. After a minute or two, one of the men went down the face of the levee. The first man began to struggle with the armed arrival.
The first man was being attacked, or was it an arrest? Lew had heard that travelers on this stretch of forested road were sometimes robbed, even murdered. The instincts of the lawman to investigate rose in Lew. He spurred the gray to a run through the trees. He pulled his Paterson revolver and held it ready across the saddle in front of him.
The crash of a heavily charged pistol shattered the stillness of the morning. The two struggling men stumbled out into the edge of the water. A second shot erupted and the first man was flung into deep water. He vanished below the surface.
Lew raced out of the trees and dragged his horse to a sliding stop near the men on the levee. He reined the mount to the side so that the barrel of the Paterson lying on his lap pointed straight at the three.
“What’s happening here?” Lew questioned. “Why did you shoot that man?”
The men had heard the pounding iron-shod hooves of the running horse and had spun to face the rider. The third man scrambled up the slope to stand with his cohorts.
The leader suppressed his surprise at the sudden appearance of the stranger. His face hardened and he shifted his cocked pistol for a quick shot.
Lew saw no badges on the chests of the dirty, scruffy trio. Their expression was not that of lawmen, but rather of men caught doing murder. Lew felt the wolf rising in his chest at the ruthless killing of the traveler.
“What man did we shoot?” asked the leader. “I see no body. All that’s here is an empty camp.” He spread his thick lips and a mouthful of broken teeth showed in a wicked, jeering smile.
With panther-cold eyes, Lew watched the men. A prickle ran over his body as his anger built. Without a corpse, murder could not be proved. And there were three of them to swear no man had been in the camp. He glanced along the bank of the river to see if by some slim chance the man who had been shot had lived and swum back to the shore. There were only weeds and the lapping muddy water.
The leader of the outlaws measured the young man in the broad-brimmed Texas hat and wearing the big silver spurs. He appeared confident, uncaring that there were three of them against him. Overconfident, for he should be easy to kill. The leader saw the Texan turn his view to look along the bank.
“Kill him,” shouted the leader. He jerked up his pistol.
Lew had expected the assault. He raised his Colt and burst the leader’s heart. He rotated the barrel of the weapon to point at the next man, who was swiftly raising his gun. Lew fired, the lead projectile shattering the thick sternum bone of the man and plowing onward through the soft lung tissue and out the back.
The third man halted the movement of his pistol, holding it only partway lifted. He stood looking directly down the black open bore of Lew’s gun.
The outlaw slowly shifted his stare from the gun to Lew’s face. He shuddered as he saw the chilling enigmatic gray of the Texan’s eyes. The danger in the man was absolute.
The man is a murderer, thought Lew. He will rob and kill again. There is no justice for the dead traveler. He held his anger at bay as he pondered the situation. What could be accomplished if he took the man into New Orleans? Nothing, except a long inquest, and Lew might himself be in trouble for killing two men.
Lew’s lips drew back and his teeth showed cruelly white. The man was guilty without a doubt, for Lew had seen the murder committed with his own eyes. The outlaw should die for his crime. Who should be the executioner?
Lew shot the man through the forehead. He fell backward, to sprawl on the steep bank of the levee.
Lew dragged the three dead men down to the edge of the Mississippi. He searched them, taking a pocket-book with fifty-two dollars from one of them. The others had only a few coins. He found no identification. That was all right, for he did not want to know their names.
Lew flung the corpses one after the other into the river. The leader went in last. As the man sank, a chuckling sound came from the water.
“I think killing them was a good idea too,” Lew told the river.
He washed his hands in the water, using the sandy silt of the bank to scour them clean.