The Badger's Revenge Read Free Page A

trigger finger.
    â€œYou talk Comanche, Wolfe?” Scrap asked.
    â€œNot my job, that’s Feders’s worry.”
    â€œJustice ought not to be none of the captain’s concern, either,” Scrap said. “He obviously ain’t seen what a Comanche’ll do to an innocent family.”
    Scrap’s family had been killed by Comanche, or so he claimed, and his anger still clouded his judgment, at least as far as Josiah was concerned—so he ignored the comment as best he could. There was no use arguing with the boy at the moment—though that’s usually what happened when they were in each other’s company.
    â€œYou can take that up with the captain,” Josiah said, raising his own Winchester rifle to aim.
    The rifle was a model ’73, not as difficult to handle as the Sharps 50 he used to carry, the rifle Overmeyer still called his own, but still, the rise of his arm brought a quick pain that ran across his chest like a hot piece of iron burning him from the inside out.
    The shot of pain was a reminder to him that it hadn’t been so long ago that he’d been stabbed in the left shoulder by a knife in an attack by a Kiowa in Lost Valley. It was July when that skirmish had happened, and the wound was scarred over now, healed thinly, he thought, but a quick reaction still brought pain, telling him the wound wasn’t as healed it appeared to be. It was still tender. Sometimes, he wondered if it would ever be healed at all.
    â€œYou all right, there, Wolfe?” Red asked.
    Josiah nodded. “Take a shot. Let him know we mean business. Elliot, scoot around to the other side of this rock, and see if there’s a way in behind him. We’ll get him pinned in, then we’ll take him alive like the captain wants.” He hoped that neither Red nor Elliot sensed his own discomfort or his nervousness. This was his first real engagement under fire since he’d been wounded.
    â€œCareful now,” Red warned. “There’ll be more than one. Always is. I ain’t never seen none of them scouts stray too far apart.”
    â€œYou said there was only one,” Scrap said.
    â€œIs. For the moment. Like those flies, there, though. Do more damage in a swarm than alone. No such thing as just one Comanche scout. No such thing as just one Comanche, period.”
    â€œOught to just kill the savage, and be done with it,” Scrap replied.
    Josiah nodded forcefully beyond the rock, silently ordering Elliot to get a move on.
    â€œHe’ll learn to trust what I say one of these days,” Red Overmeyer said.
    Red was an old hand when it came to dealing with Indians. Probably fifty years old, or older, he wore a long beard—faded red, closer to orange with age—that made him look more like a mountain man on a beaver hunt than a Ranger out scouting for a Comanche raiding party. Red’s stained buckskin shirt looked nearly as old as he was, and it barely covered his rounded belly that hung over a leather belt. The shirt looked like it was about to pop apart at any second. A full complement of bullets sat waiting underneath his belly, and a Bowie knife sat firmly on his hip in a hand-tooled leather scabbard that looked old and worn, too, from plenty of use.
    It was not uncommon among Rangers to dress in the fashion to which they were comfortable, since there were no required uniforms.
    One of the appeals for Josiah of signing up back in May, when the Frontier Battalion came into proper being, was the lack of regimentation. He’d had enough of tight military control in his younger life when he’d served in the First Infantry, the Texas Brigade, in the War Between the States, and he didn’t care for that kind of strictness in his life these days.
    Red rarely talked about his encounters with Indians, and Josiah suspected he had lived among the plains Indians at one time or another, married to a Sioux or Shoshone, judging from the minimal tales