The Journey South

Book 1: Cap Whitlatch Western

by Reavis Z. Wortham

Genres: Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

In a land with no law, there’s only two things a man can count on—a deadly sense of justice and an even deadlier ability to outdraw the most dangerous lead-spitting gunslingers.

Texas cowboy Cap Whitlatch has never shied away from hard work. Whether driving cattle or busting broncos, he gets the job done right. When he hires on with a ranch, he earns his pay with blood and sweat, keeping him honest. And when a friend is in dire need, Cap will move the tallest mountains to defend and protect them from harm.

Gil Vanderburg has known Cap since they were children. Now, he’s in jail for murder in a small Oklahoma town. To see justice served right, Cap volunteers to escort his friend to South Texas where he will stand trial for robbery. But they’re not quite traveling alone along the unhealthy trail in Indian territory. Three bloodthirsty Cherokee brothers want revenge on Gill for killing their sibling. A pair of vicious outlaws are after the gold in Cap’s saddlebags. And the marshal pursuing them all is determined to bring every lawbreaker in—dead or alive.

Cap is not about to let any man—no matter which side of the law he falls on—deter him from fulfilling his righteous mission. And he will show no mercy to anyone who tries . . .

Release date: April 23, 2024

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

It was a damp spring afternoon and I was but a couple of miles outside of Panther Junction when I came over a windy little ridge that gave me a good, wide look at the wagon road winding down into the Indian Territories. It was late in the afternoon on that humid day and the thick shade of tall red oaks provided little relief from the sun.

The steeldust I was riding thought the same, for she paused and blew for a moment. I’d given the mare her head most of the day, letting her set the pace, for I was in no hurry to get back to my daddy’s old place, where I’d been living.

The northeastern Indian Territories, where nearby Tahlequah and Stumptown were located, were a fairly safe place for criminals who robbed and killed in the surrounding states, then hid out on the tribal lands. Of course, they didn’t slow down their habits much at all in the territories, and a man’s life hung in the balance of an outlaw’s wants at any moment in time.

Half the towns and communities had their share of dodgers, and most families had one or two wanderers who’d run afoul of the law and decided to disappear into the fabric of societies that resided under Cherokee law. Shoot, I had kinfolk down in Texas who’d run an iron or two on somebody else’s cattle, or maybe took possession of a horse that belonged to someone else and went up there until things cooled down back home.

The towns themselves were safe, but traffic between them was down to a trickle that year. Even farmers didn’t go anywhere unless they were armed. Pistols usually stuck inside a belt or waistband weren’t as common as rifles or shotguns, but there were still plenty of them.

Men usually traveled in groups of half dozen or more. Ten or twelve together almost guaranteed safety, but not out toward Comancheria, far to the west. The plains were controlled by the Comanches, who refused to recognize those marks on maps they didn’t understand. They traveled and raided whenever and wherever they wanted, controlling with an iron fist everything out beyond the tree line, even though the Treaty of 1883 gave them a specific territory of their own.

You could get your hair lifted in half a second riding alone out there. They hated everyone who wasn’t born one of them, and that included most of the other tribes, whites, and Mexicans. I imagine even if you painted someone blue and sent them riding out toward Santa Fe or such, they’d have ’em staked out on an anthill before you could say “thunder.”

Only the cavalry rode there in relative safety, and even that wasn’t guaranteed.

You never knew where a war party was going to pop up. They might raid out near the Llano Estacado one morning and only a week later be back east of Kickapoo Town to the Deep Fork of the Canadian River, burning out a farmer’s cabin or two just for fun.

Texas, west of Fort Worth, was in their area of destruction, too. There wasn’t a county out there that hadn’t seen raiders come through every few months, killing whoever they wanted and gathering up herds of horses along the way. It was the horses that gave them their freedom and the ability to roam at will.

I was bucking the odds on the way back to where I was raised down in Texas with the intention to build a little cabin by some clear-water stream not far from my daddy’s place and raise a few head of cattle. There was Springfield money in my pocket from selling a string of saddle-broke ponies to a rich Missouri lawyer, and it wasn’t the first time I’d made a killing on horses with him. I understood colts, and they broke gentle enough for a four-year-old to ride all alone. After six such trips, I was feeling pretty flush.

That last little herd came at a dear price to the lawyer. I usually put together a string and took them up there, but this time he specified what he wanted, and it took quite a while to round up a herd of ponies with the qualifications he required. By telegraph, we agreed on a price that was way more than I’d ever heard of anyone paying for horseflesh, but he was adamant about them and I never was one to argue with a man who was working hard to get rid of his money.

Like I said, the Indian Territories were dangerous for any man at any time, so I always took a different route up there, and then again back home to make sure no one put two and two together and was waiting to knock me in the head for the money on some trail. I’d learned long ago not to be predictable, and that notion served me well through the years.

This time, since there were so many horses, I paid an old cowboy named Chet Jenkins to go with me and take the herd up through the Kiamichi and Winding Stair Mountains into Springfield. It was rough country, up and down most of the time, and Chet told me it was the hardest job he’d ever had, but we managed without incident. Once we delivered the horses, I paid Chet off and he drifted on to St. Louis to find some lost family members.

I came back alone, and preferred it that way.

Unseen blue jays squawked from the post oak trees and a cardinal flickered into view, bright against the indigo sky. A squirrel on a black walnut limb took umbrage to my presence and set up a chatter, alerting his kinfolk I was around. I watched the irritating little rodent, thinking that if I’d been hungry enough, he’d be roasting over a bed of coals in about thirty minutes.

Fresh spring leaves rustled all around me, a soft, steady noise that covered most everything I should be hearing. Sitting there in the shade and thinking about the future was a good feeling that lasted until I saw a wagon down below, driven by what appeared to be a farmer with his wife. They were coming my way, uphill, and the team of mules pulled hard with their heads low. A tarp covered the wagon bed and I couldn’t tell if it was because it was loaded with something heavy, or he was driving slow and easy on the way home from town.

I didn’t want the couple to think I was any kind of a threat. Figuring I’d just wait there until they drew close, I’d wave and go my own way. Here in the shade, they could see me once they approached the crest and have time to think about what to do, instead of me riding down the winding road and coming out suddenly from around a thick growth of trees.

As I watched the wagon and its occupants, two men emerged from under a wide tree and stopped their horses in the road. They were all small in the distance, but I saw the driver rein up. The woman beside him sat straighter, and the word “stiffened” came to mind.

Reaching into my saddlebag opposite the one with the money, I dug around and came out with a pair of cavalry field glasses my dad brought home from the war. Tilting my hat back to get the wide brim out of the way, I brought them to my eyes and the situation jumped into clear focus.

Bearded and lean as a starving wolf, one of the riders had a pistol pointed at the driver, who wore long black hair down to his shoulders, held into place by an old slouch hat. They were Indian and the young, slender woman I took to be his wife sat stock-still at the sight of the revolver.

The stocky, clean-shaven man dismounted and drew his own weapon. He gestured at the driver, who reached down by his feet and picked up a double-barreled shotgun and pitched it to the ground. The outlaw on foot glanced around them, then up toward my ridge. Knowing I was hidden by distance, shadows, and the trees around and behind me, I remained still for the moment. There was nothing I could do from that distance, so I kept the glasses to my eyes and watched, hoping the couple wouldn’t do anything to turn a simple robbery into something much worse.

I was hoping those two highwaymen would ride away after getting what they wanted. It couldn’t have been much, because the young couple appeared to be farmers who had little more than the sustenance they needed to survive.

Unfortunately, what those two gunmen wanted wasn’t just those folks’ possessions, and things were about to turn ugly. While the bearded man in the saddle held them at gunpoint, the other went through the wagon, throwing items out of the bed.

Jars shattered, the flying glass flickering in the sunlight. A sack of flour burst open in an explosion of white dust, and he cut two other sacks open and poured the contents over the side. Finished with his destruction, he carried a valise over to his horse, where he hung the long handles over the saddle horn. That done, he went back and motioned for the couple to get down.

They complied, and the rider waved an arm, issuing another order. When the wagon driver shook his head, the outlaw on the ground laid him out with the butt of his pistol. The husband went down like a felled tree and the woman started for him, but now both outlaws were on the ground and they grabbed her.

I knew what was coming next. Tucking the glasses back into my saddlebags, I nudged the steeldust into a lope and headed down. The ground was soft from recent rains and I hoped the wind would cover the sound of the mare’s hooves until I was almost on them.

I needn’t have worried, they were intent on the woman and having a big old time as she screamed and fought back with everything she had. It didn’t take long to get down there, and most of her clothes were ripped off by the time I slowed the mare and reined up a few feet to the side of the mule team.

Their horses were standing ground tied, and I would have admired their training if there’d been time. I appreciated something else, too. I had to hand it to the black-haired woman who was fighting for all she was worth and screaming at the top of her lungs, but there were two of them.

One at her head held her arms down and there was a good reason why. She’d already clawed his face with her nails and it looked like a Mexican lion had gotten ahold of him. The other guy had his back to me and was sitting on her legs, yanking at her blouse.

They were laughing and concentrating on what they were doing as I drew my Spencer pump shotgun from the scabbard. There was no need to jack a shell into the chamber, because I carried it fully loaded.

Still mounted, I felt the blood start to pound in my ears, accompanied by a high keening that always sparked violence. “It always takes more than one, don’t it? Gentlemen, y’all might want to stop what you’re doing and leave that woman alone.”

The bearded man sitting on her legs stiffened and the rangy one raised his head to look up at me from under the brim of his hat. He stood, resting his hand on the butt of a revolver stuck in his belt. “Mister, it’s stupid to risk your life for an Indian woman. You better get on out of here if you know what’s good for you.”

“I don’t.”

His hand dropped to the pistol in his belt. Now that he was standing up, and the spread of buckshot didn’t endanger the woman, I shot him in the chest. The report seemed soft to me, but the load of double-aught shot put holes in his dirty shirt from shoulder to shoulder. His knees folded and his full weight collapsed right on top of the woman.

The steeldust under me hadn’t moved a muscle, for I’d trained her well. I pumped another shell into the chamber as the bearded outlaw came up with a cocked pistol coming to bear on my chest.

The shorter distance worked in my favor when I pulled the trigger again. The load didn’t have time to spread out. The full charge took him in the midsection and the impact of all eight double-aught pellets looked like I’d hit him with a howitzer.

His pistol went off, the bullet plowing a hole in the ground. He fell sideways, trying to hold himself together with one hand. Even though I didn’t need a second shell, I pumped another round into the chamber and kept it pointed at him.

The woman kicked the lean man’s body off and rolled sideways to get out from under him. Hair untied and wild, her face was twisted in fury. Holding her torn dress together with one hand, she picked up the Beard’s dropped pistol, cocked it with both hands, and shot him in the head.

She cocked it again and shot the other man the same way before raising the barrel in my direction. I kept the shotgun’s muzzle pointed away from her. “Lady, don’t you pull that trigger.”

Realizing what she was doing, she pitched it on the ground and hurried to her husband, either unconcerned about how much skin was showing, or unaware that very little protected her modesty. Close now, I took them both to either be Cherokee or Choctaw from their features.

Kneeling beside him, she turned him over. “He’s still breathing.”

I dismounted and joined her. His scalp was split, but the wound was already clotting, which was a surprise to me because scalp wounds tend to bleed a lot. “Looky here at the size of that lump on his head. When it swells outward, he’s fine. You have any water on that wagon?”

“There’s a quart fruit jar under the seat.”

I found it and returned. She’d moved around to hold his head in her lap and I had to look away as I flipped the wire holding the glass lid in place. It popped up off the gasket, and instead of smelling corn liquor, as I imagined, it really was water.

“Ma’am, is there another dress in the wagon?”

She saw her dilemma and angled her shoulders to turn away from me. “No, but there’s material and a new shirt for my brother in a basket back there. Got it back in town.”

I set the jar nearby and went to the back. The shirt was lying on the ground beside everything the lean highwayman threw out. They couldn’t have been doing too badly as farmers, if they could afford to buy a shirt instead of making it herself, as most folks did.

Keeping watch all around us, I returned. She’d torn a piece of her dress off and wet it to wipe her husband’s face. I handed her the shirt without looking. “Put this on.”

She was a tough old hide and didn’t make much more effort to hide herself. I turned my back and she put the shirt on and went over to check the outlaws’ horses for a moment. They were both of good quality, though the saddles were worn and one was rat-chewed. “You decent?”

“Yes.”

I took notice of her then. One eye was turning black and the left side of her jaw was swollen, but at least I’d gotten there in time. “Y’all live close?”

She pointed back the way I came. “A couple of miles.”

“You said something about a brother?”

“Yes. He lives with us.” Her husband stirred and his eyes fluttered open. She cupped his cheek with one dry hand. “Hokta. Wake up.” He jerked and tried to rise, but she held him down. “It is all right. They are dead and this man killed them.”

He groaned and lay back. “Who are you?”

“Cap Whitlatch.”

She raised her eyes to me. “I am Naach. Thank you for your help.”

“I did what any decent man would have done.”

Not wanting to talk, I used one of the outlaws’ ropes and his horse to drag the bodies off into the trees, while Hokta shook out the cobwebs, but that was all the energy I would expend on such men. They didn’t deserve a proper burial. Curious about the robbery, I kicked around until I found where they’d waited.

By the number of hoofprints and boot tracks, they’d been there a good long while. I puzzled out that Hokta and Naach weren’t specific targets, merely a couple of unfortunate farmers in the wrong place at the wrong time. Had I been along a little sooner, they might have tried to brace me, instead, but the result would have been the same.

I came back and tied the outlaws’ horses to the back of the wagon, throwing their saddles and bedrolls in the back. While Naach tended to her husband, I picked up with everything the couple’d purchased in town that wasn’t broken, even scooping up dry beans with my hat and tying what was left in the cut tow sack.

The shadows were long by the time Hokta regained his senses enough to handle the team and take them back home. I helped him up into the seat and then held out a hand for Naach. Placing hers gently in mine, she made eye contact with a look of hope mixed with fear, and gave me a crooked grin before climbing up.

Once seated, she adjusted the shirt, which was too big for her, and paid me with a small smile. “Come with us. We will feed you and you can sleep in the barn tonight.”

“No thanks. I’m not one to backtrack, but I appreciate your offer.”

“Let us pay you, then.”

I shook my head. “No, ma’am. Hokta, there are two pistols in there that belonged to those guys, and a considerable amount of ammunition. I suggest you and your wife practice with them, and the next time somebody stops you like that, y’all shoot as quick as you see what they’re up to.”

He nodded and gestured back over his shoulder. “The horses are yours. You won them in battle. It is the way of our Old People.”

“They’re good stock. Well trained, but I don’t need them. They don’t have brands, so keep ’em or sell ’em to make up the supplies you lost here.”

“You are a good white man.” Naach made a sign in the air. “We will give one to my brother. He doesn’t have a horse.” She made another sign and spoke in Choctaw. “That is a blessing that will keep you safe.”

“I’m just a traveler on this road, like you, but much obliged.”

“Wait.” She lifted her long hair with both hands and reached back to untie a braided cord. She lifted a small leather pouch from between her breasts and held it out to me. “You must take this, if nothing else.”

Thinking it was coins or even paper money, I shook my head. “Ma’am, I don’t need payment.”

“This is my medicine. My father gave it to me as protection. It is yours now.”

Hokta nodded. “You must take it. This is a special gift that cannot be denied.”

I saw the beadwork and thought it looked like the Sioux had made it, though I couldn’t understand why a Chocktaw woman wore it. “Your medicine didn’t protect you with those men.”

“Yes, it did. You came along.” She had me there.

“Well, you might need it next time.”

“No. I see something over you. Your eyes open into the spirit world, and sometimes that is good and other times bad. You will require this protection, and I will get another.”

More than one person, male and female alike, have said my eyes are piercing green. They’re a light shade that’s as rare as hen’s teeth and they startle people at first before they get used to them.

I took the bag, tied it around my neck, and nodded. Hokta clucked the mules and popped the reins and they drove away, while I turned my horse south and went to find a good place to make camp for the night.

When I rode down the dirt main street in Blackwater, Oklahoma, the air was almost chewy and thick with humidity and woodsmoke. It worried me some that the rest of my trip down to Kerrville in the Texas Hill Country was going to be mildewy at best.

I’d already passed the Grand Hotel sitting out by itself on the outskirts of town, a wooden two-story box with an unpainted false front and a stable out back. It even had a two-story outhouse, something I’d heard of, but never seen. Accessible from the second floor, I wondered about the guy who had to clean out the top section, or the folks doing their business down below at the same time another patron was suddenly struck with a pain.

Such a luxury surprised me and I was tempted to stop and look at it a little closer, and would have if I could find a drink nearby. But I had no intention of riding farther into town, drinking for an hour or so, if I could scare up something to eat.

I got that from my old daddy who fought in the Union’s Iron Brigade during the War Between the States. I once asked him how he and the rest of his infantry division could walk into hundreds, if not thousands, of Confederate guns firing at him at the same time and he said, “Getting started was the hardest part, but going back the other direction before I finished what I was doing never entered my mind.”

It always felt like he was riding beside me after that, and because of that presence, I never wanted to disappoint him by turning back, though he’d likely never know of it.

The rest of Blackwater was about what I expected to find out there in Cherokee Territory, seventy-some-odd miles northwest from Fort Smith, Arkansas, and Judge Isaac Parker, also known as the Hanging Judge. Wooden false-front buildings in the bustling town lined a wide lane full of horses, mules, and wagons.

At one point during a wet spell, the dirt street had been churned to muddy ruts by the passing of heavily laden wagons. Dry now for the moment, those ruts were somewhat worn down by hooves and steel rims, but they still made unsteady travel underfoot, and that included my own mount.

There were more men on the boardwalks than I expected to see, and a couple of women carrying covered baskets or waiting on buckboards for husbands to finish their business in the stores. Soiled doves sat on a second-floor balcony, watching people go by, but they minded their manners and didn’t holler or wave at potential customers. Guess that’s why the housewives didn’t mind going about their business, but I ’magine they kept their eyes down as they passed a colorful sign for the Honey Hole.

Most of the folks were Indian, but there were more than a few whites on the streets of Blackwater, and I couldn’t help but compare it to Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. I’d passed through there once on my way to Springfield, and that place was growing like a weed, with brick streets and buildings.

This place had a long way to go, and by the number of drinking establishments under innocent names, I figured it didn’t have much time before the laws rode in and either shut it all down, or burned the place to the ground. Alcohol was illegal in the Indian Territories, and most towns kept all that hidden from sight.

The reins slack in my hands, my steeldust mare snorted and stepped around a bloated hog covered in a swarm of flies. I’d seen vultures circling high in the air long before I reached town, but I didn’t expect to come across a sow’s putrid carcass right in front of the general-goods store.

Dead animals in a town weren’t an uncommon sight. Hell, horses and mules fell out all the time, and usually when they were in harness. The laziest owners tended to just unhitch everything and walk off, leaving the town fathers or an aggravated store owner to foot the bill for dragging the remains out a ways for the coyotes to finish it off, if they didn’t take a notion to do it themselves. I heard back in the big cities, like Chicago and New York, they just walked away from it all in great numbers and every street had at least one rotting carcass to deal with a day.

It was hard to imagine anyone so slovenly, but then again, they weren’t raised by my daddy, neither.

Part of what must’ve been two hundred pounds of pork I had to rein around had been gnawed on, and I suspected it was by an old mammy dog lying under the board sidewalk on my right. Instead of being drawn down by the four pups sleeping in a pile a couple of feet away, her stomach was tight as a tick and I figured she’d stay close by the porker until somebody finally got tired of the smell and drug it off.

It was a busy street with false-front buildings that extended above the roofline and sides to create a more impressive appearance, supposedly showing stability and a respectable town. More than a few customers and townies stopped what they were doing out front of the stores to watch me pass. Most of them were Indian, but I couldn’t tell what tribe. They could have been Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, or Creek. Four of the five tribes the government settled there decades earlier. I knew they weren’t Seminole, I can tell most of them right off, by their color, features, and dress.

There were plenty of white folks, and I must have caught their attention, being a stranger and all. Most of them looked at me suspicious-like, as if I owed ’em money, and I figured they took me for one of Judge Parker’s Deputy U.S. Marshals scratching around for outlaws or miscreants hiding out from the law.

Laughter boiled out of a door under a sign reading CHINAMAN BAKERY as I passed. There wasn’t much to see through the dark open door that leaked the odor of spilled beer instead of baked goods.

I noticed the interesting sight of telegraph wires strung up on peeled cedar poles and disappearing down the street. I hadn’t expected such a little one-horse town to have such modern conveniences.

The place was a budding metropolis.

It must have been a Saturday, because there were people everywhere, dressed in everything from hand-tanned leather pants, to some made of wool, to those Levi Strauss denim overalls I’d been seeing here and there, to dandies in suits and ties.

Regular folks, but then there were the others I was talking about earlier, hard-looking men who seemed never to blink, like rattlesnakes.

An aggravating horsefly kept buzzing round in front of my eyes. I snatched the hat from my head and slapped at the insect, and when I did, a gentleman on the board sidewalk in front of the butcher shop misunderstood the gesture and took his hat off and doffed it in my direction.

We nodded howdy and I went on past another general store advertising dry goods, such as boots, hats, shoes, valises, trunks, and carpets. A surveyor’s office boasting CLAIMS AND DEEDS listed the rest of their services in flowery script on the front and glass on both sides of the door.

A blacksmith’s hammer rang like silver over the chaos of rattling trace chains. Loud voices accosted me from businesses lining both sides of the street. A chicken waiting her turn in the pot squawked and flapped out of the way, while another cackled her excitement at laying an egg in an unseen nest. The steeldust gray I was riding ignored the flutter of feathers and saw a hitching post she liked. She turned and stopped in front of the Applejack Dispensary and Meals. That suited me just fine.

We’d passed half-a-dozen other false-front establishments in the whiskey town, and they all boasted medicinal drinks guaranteed to cure a variety of ailments, partic. . .