The news that Hank Brazos had come back to Wildhorse caused a stir all the way from the tarpaper shacks of the disposed homesteaders along Bad Blood Creek, clear down the broad length of Trail Street to the town’s western limits at the foothills of the Shoshone Mountains.
Not that Wildhorse those days was in any way short of subjects for gossip, or indeed violent incidents. Far from it. Lying in the heart of the cattle country, Wildhorse, always a turbulent town for one reason or another, was those days the focal point for something named Reconstruction, the ugliest word in the South.
To the citizens of Wildhorse, the cattlemen and businessmen, the cowhands and their women, Reconstruction, as the Yankees enforced it, had come to mean something like slavery. The signing of a scrap of paper in Appomattox Courthouse had made victors of one half of the nation and vanquished of the other. However, Reconstruction had not, allegedly, been conceived in vindictiveness. Lincoln had declared again and again that defeat on the battlefield was punishment enough for the rebellious Confederacy. But Lincoln was dead now and the new man in the White House neither knew nor cared that Reconstruction, in remote Texas, had become the excuse for suppression of a defeated people.
So Wildhorse, Texas, in the summer of ’67, was anything but a sleepy rural backwater, but even so there was enough about young Hank Brazos and the dramatic manner of his return home to push Reconstruction into the background and give the citizens a fresh topic of conversation the following day. They would have been happy to see another boy back home from the war but having encountered Brazos again in the Three Dimes the previous night, old Flint Calvert decided that “mebbe it would’ve been best if thet young feller had stayed away fer keeps.”
Calvert, as Wildhorse’s leading gossip, made his observation next afternoon around the cracker barrel in Shad Martin’s store.
“Why do you figure he came back at all, Flint?” asked the storekeeper.
“Trouble,” Flint decided after due consideration.
Trouble, Flint’s audience reflected solemnly. Their memories of Joe Brazos’ son were those of a rambling young rangeland giant who, at seventeen, was already regarded as the strongest man in the county. Some of those seated around Martin’s cracker barrel that afternoon had been on Trail Street that memorable day six years ago when Hank Brazos and some seventeen other young men had ridden off for Austin to join the Texas Brigade with high hopes of victory and brave smiles.
Hank Brazos had been the biggest man in the cavalcade and in time his deeds had become the best known. Before a year’s fighting was done, Brazos’ war record had firmly established him as the hero of Wildhorse County, and there had been much lamenting when he hadn’t returned home with the pitifully few survivors of the Brigade after the war. A year had dimmed the high sentiments with which a conquered people had welcomed home its brave fighting men, but there was always a hero’s welcome awaiting Henry Houston Brazos whenever he might choose to return.
Not anymore. The subject of a welcome home celebration hadn’t even been broached to the big young man who’d ridden out of nowhere into Trail Street last night. The man who’d put Buck Swift in Doc Winslow’s hospital obviously hadn’t come home to steep himself in nostalgia. A man only had to look into this strangely changed Hank Brazos’ frosty blue eyes to know that, as usual, old Flint’s assessments were dead on target.
Trouble, the big man’s manner spelt out ... and Wildhorse considered itself a town that had had more than its share of that commodity of late without Joe Brazos’ son turning up to add to it.
And while he was being discussed from one end of town to the other, the subject of all this talk strolled into Shad’s store and ordered two boxes of .45 shells.
The tobacco-chawing company fell silent, staring. “Bigger,” was Shad Martin’s description of his young Samaritan from Coyote Street, and they saw immediately that the word fitted neatly.
Hank was a big man, by any standards, over six feet tall with massive shoulders. Even before he’d gone to war, they had called him the Frog Hollow giant and he’d put on a lot of beef since then, most of it in the chest and shoulders. He wore a faded purple shirt, and shotgun chaps over his crumpled Levi’s and sported a single Colt in holster worn on a hand-tooled Mexican gunbelt.
Yet, despite his size, it was Brazos’ face that drew attention most. It was a face that seemed to have been stamped out of bronze, hard and humorless. Hair and brows were sun-bleached blond and his eyes were of the clearest, coldest blue as he looked them over as though they were total strangers. Standing there relaxed and unmoving as Martin hustled about to fill his order, he looked indeed like trouble with a capital T.
“That damned war,” muttered Conway Wintergreen, “turned boys into old men.”
“T’ain’t the war that done most damage, but what come after,” insisted Joe Harris, one of the town’s most vociferous anti-Reconstructionists. And then to the alarm of his companions, little Joe called out, “Hey, Brazos, you hear anythin’ about ’em sendin’ in the cavalry to tidy things up hereabouts?”
Brazos pocketed his shells and change, then came towards them.
“No, I never,” he said quietly, the light sheening on the harmonica slung about his neck on a rawhide thong. “There’s been talk of that?”
“Some,” Harris conceded. “Sure is a bad thing when somebody licks you once, then starts talkin’ of doin’ it again on account everybody don’t toe the line like so many damned cavalrymen.”
“Here’s one here that won’t be toein’ any stinkin’ Yankee line, old man.”
Hank’s words brought a keener look to the eyes of his audience as he tossed a coin and caught it.
“Reckon you don’t have no love for them Federals, eh, Hank?” Shad Martin asked, rejoining the circle.
“I never signed no stinkin’ paper at Appomattox,” came the flinty reply. “I never admitted to nobody I was licked, least of all to no dirty Reconstructionist.”
A silence fell. That sort of talk was dangerous these days, yet those who heard it, heard Brazos’ harsh declaration with pleasure. For here was a battle-honored veteran standing before them saying openly and fearlessly, what they all believed.
The silence held, and then Harris was about to speak again when silver haired Doc Winslow came in to join them.
Wildhorse’s medic scowled when he saw Brazos, and came on more slowly to the barrel.
“Howdy, Doc,” said Flint Calvert. “Kinda late today ain’t you?”
Winslow looked steadily up at Brazos. “I’d have been along sooner, only Swift started bringin’ up blood again.”
“He’s lucky he’s not bringin’ up lead, Doc,” Brazos retorted, turning to go. “Next time he could be.”
“I doubt there’ll be a next time,” Winslow called after him. “I reckon that man’s best days are behind him, thanks to you, boy.”
Brazos paused in the doorway, head slightly bent to avoid the lintel. “Then all I can say is that his best were none too good, Doc ... mebbe like a lot of the yeller-belly Yankee-lovers in this man’s town.”
He spoke to his dog and they were gone.
Talk was resumed around the cracker barrel and then broke off suddenly. Getting quickly to their feet, the townsmen stared out as horsemen approached. Here in force was the flower of Alamo Ranch, the biggest in the county. Amongst the party were some old saddle partners of Hank Brazos, now working for Chard Ringerman, and riding at their head, Hayes Denham.
Denham, a big shambling man with wide, sloping shoulders, was ramrod of the cattle outfit, a gun-quick, two-fisted man with a reputation for toughness. Denham, they thought, looked mighty tight-lipped, and not for a moment did his hard stare leave the Three Dimes porch. It wasn’t until they made out the big figure of Brazos lounging in the shadow of the saloon’s porch overhang that they guessed at the reason for the Alamo riders’ arrival and Hayes Denham’s plainly dirty mood.
“Judas,” Shad Martin said as the cavalcade of horsemen jingled past, “we should have known Denham would come snortin’ in sooner or later, him and Buck Swift bein’ so damned thick and all.” His faded blue eyes brightened as he watched Brazos lazily touch a light to a cigarette, then flicked the match towards the approaching horsemen. “Boys, I calculate as how we’re about to see ourselves some fireworks.”