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Not long afterward the shaman predicted the beginning of a great drought that would parch the southern prairie and especially the Staked Plain.

True to his prediction, the creeks dried up last summer. Normally in abundance, the game wandered far away, gone in search of water. Suspended overhead, the sun seemed like a dull brass button as each new day of torture seeped into the next with no relief from the blistering heat. Isatai told his people to persevere, that winter would bring rain—but that respite would not last: they would suffer another time of great dryness.

The rains had come as predicted. The Comanche bands praised the power of Isatai. And all but the most hardened cynics believed when they were told that the shaman had vomited up a wagonload of cartridges right before the eyes of his most faithful believers.

“Our prayers are answered!” cheered Antelope. “A man to lead us in wiping out the white man.”

“I too want to see the bullets—then I will believe,” Tall One said. “Without question, then I will believe in Isatai.”

But the messengers exclaimed that Isatai had swallowed the bullets again.

“So there is nothing left for us to use killing the yellow-leg soldiers?” demanded Antelope.

Sheepishly the messengers replied, “The whole wagonload is gone.”

Tall One shivered again as the wind knifed through the canyon, its striated red walls rising eight hundred feet above the creekbed where his people camped. Very soon, when winter at last released its tight hold on these prairies, the gray-eyed chief would send pipe bearers among all the bands of Comanche still roaming the Llano Estacado. Others would carry his message on to the Cheyenne and Kiowa reservations. If the chiefs took up the gray-eyed chief’s pipe and smoked it, they vowed to join the Kwahadi in war.

If, however, the chiefs decided not to touch that offer of the pipe, then they would be told to step out of the way. War was coming with the spring winds.

The mere thought of it made Tall One’s blood run hot. Like Antelope, he too hungered for this chance to prove himself against the tai-bos. To prove once and for all that he was no longer white. That he had become a Comanche.

War.

“Ricos and whiskey. Ricos and guns,” grumbled June Callicott, one of the Rangers with Company C, as they loosened cinches and pulled saddles, blankets too, from their weary horses the evening of that late spring day. He constantly chewed his cud like a glassy-eyed cow, his teeth the size and color of pin-oak acorns beneath an unkempt mustache that bent like a small black horseshoe over his mouth.

“Ricos and their blood money,” piped up Deacon Elijah Johns. “Scum-bellied fornicators. Satan’s blasphemers we need to put in the ground.”

“You said you spent time among the comancheros?” asked Captain Lamar Lockhart, stepping over to the brush where Jonah Hook dropped his saddle and blanket.

“For a long time I had reason to believe my boys was sold off to traders headed for Mexico.”

Most of the company had quietly turned to listen in. With his Indian partner, the new man had ridden with the Rangers for the better part of two months now—a long time without opening up and pouring out all that much of himself.

Lockhart nodded. “Cattle and horses, Mr. Hook. The ricos will buy furniture and clothing and mirrors and even family Bibles—”

“Satan’s handiwork, they are!” Johns snapped. “Good and kind Jesus—help these sinners see the error of their ways!”

The company captain pulled off his hat, the print of his hatband lying across his forehead like a wide scar as he pressed ahead. “Those traders will take anything the Comanches bring them what they got off the settlers they murdered. Anything worth stealing, that is. Only what the ricos’ comancheros will pay for in whiskey and in guns.”

“A bad combination, that one,” June Callicott added, his face as hard as a war shield, his cheeks flaring red as if he sweated chinaberry juice. “Whiskey and guns.”

For as long as there had been this ground called Texas, there had been Comanches and whiskey and guns. A deadly mix for those who wanted nothing more than to bring the fruitful hand of civilized man to these plains. Come here with a wagon and a milk cow and a family, come here to raise crops and cattle and a passel of children.