The Raiders: Sons of Texas - Softcover

Elmer Kelton (1926-2009) was the award-winning author of more than forty novels, including The Time It Never Rained, Other Men's Horses, Texas Standoff and Hard Trail to Follow. He grew up on a ranch near Crane, Texas, and earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas. His first novel, Hot Iron, was published in 1956. Among his awards have been seven Spurs from Western Writers of America and four Western Heritage awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. His novel The Good Old Boys was made into a television film starring Tommy Lee Jones. In addition to his novels, Kelton worked as an agricultural journalist for 42 years, and served in the infantry in World War II. He died in 2009.

Chapter One
Yesterday nature had been quarrelsome. Dark and chilly clouds had scudded ominously inland from the Gulf of Mexico, threatening a drenching cold rain across the gently rolling prairie land and dense forests that stretched westward beyond the flat coastal plain of Texas. An angry wind had lashed the trees, whipping away new leaves still the pale green of early spring. Michael Lewis had pulled his bay horse into the deep woods in search of protection, but the trees had offered only partial shelter from winter’s final revolt against the changing of the season.

He had slept fitfully last night, for an old nightmare he hoped he had finally put behind him had crept back like a thief in the darkness. He had awakened wide-eyed to the sound of his own voice crying out. Afterward he had lain cold and trembling, trying to rewrap his thin woolen blanket around his shoulders in a way that would shut out the chill. But the chill came more from within than from without, and no blanket was thick enough to shield him from a memory too cruel to die.

Today Nature smiled. The skies had cleared. The sun was pleasantly warm, and he had taken off his old woolen coat, remnant of another time back in Tennessee. The wind had dropped to a soft and kindly breeze that carried the hopeful scent of new grass, the sweetness of wild flowers coming to blossom, and at times the slightest salty hint of the Gulf many long miles eastward. Michael had lived close to Nature all of his twenty-five years; he accepted her blessings with the same equanimity that he endured her torments. Nature had to be taken as she was, for nothing a man could do would change her. The works of men, however, need not be accepted without question, and Michael never had. So now he wandered here, far west of the American settlements, hoping the solitude would give him peace, would help him put down old angers, old ghosts.

Michael Lewis was a tall man, with strong arms and shoulders, though he had a gaunt and hungry look about him, as if he seldom had enough to eat, seldom got a full night’s sleep. Comfort was but an occasional acquaintance, and plenty was a stranger. From the hills of Tennessee to the first American colony in Texas, his next meal had often depended upon the long-barreled rifle he carried. He seldom failed to hit what he saw over the sights, but there were times the rifle stayed cold when game was scarce and he found nothing at which to aim. The shadow of want was often upon him when he left home and hearth for the challenge of unknown lands.

Days behind him waited his French-Spanish wife Marie and a young son Michael had named Mordecai after his father, long since buried. By now Marie probably worried that he might have met with misfortune, for the few days intended had stretched to many. He knew he should be turning back. But the devils which had driven him here had come along with him, and he did not know how to shake free of their torment. It had to do with this land, this Texas, which he had visited with the first Mordecai Lewis almost a decade ago. It had been a forbidden land then, property of the Spanish crown. No longer forbidden, at least by law, it could still at times be forbidding.

This was a Texas which belonged to a newly independent Mexico but had guardedly opened its doors to limited numbers of American settlers under a young Missouri empresario, Stephen F. Austin. An older Austin named Moses, who had lived under Spanish rule when Spain had owned Missouri, had appealed to colonial authorities in San Antonio de Bexar. He had argued that despite its great size and potential, the interior of Texas had attracted only some two thousand Spanish inhabitants. Even these few were constantly endangered by Indian depredation. As bad or worse were nagging incursions by illegal land seekers who relentlessly pushed across the boundary from Louisiana. For a century or so these had been mostly French. Now that the Louisiana Purchase had transferred a vast region to the United States, they were American in the main. How much better it would be, Austin had reasoned, that legal immigrants be allowed to establish a deterrent to the filibusters and illegal squatters, as well as placing a buffer between the few isolated old Spanish settlements and the Indians who roamed wild and free to the west and north. To that argument he found Spanish ears receptive. If Indians had to kill someone, let it be Americans, the authorities decided.

To Austin, once wealthy but broken by a national money panic, Texas had seemed a promised land. Like an earlier Moses, he had not lived to see his promised land become reality. His son Stephen, frail in body but possessed of a dogged patience and steely determination, had taken up the lantern lighted by his father’s dream. It had been a twisting, thorny path. Just as the colony was driving its first stakes into the ground, Mexico had thrown off the domination of the Spanish crown and declared itself free, as the United States had severed its ties to England two generations before. The young Austin had faced the formidable challenge of doing over with the new government of Mexico all that he and his father had accomplished with the old colonial leadership. Through nerve, statesmanship, and a stubborn refusal to accept half a loaf, he had gradually established a friendly, if sometimes uneasy, relationship with at least some of the powers in Bexar and Mexico City. He had been granted a region some one hundred twenty miles square, extending northwestward from the Gulf of Mexico. His Old Three Hundred colonists were firmly entrenched in this new land, mostly along the two major rivers, the Brazos and the Colorado. Others were gradually coming in overland and by sea, breaking the prairie sod, chopping away at the forests, transforming the wilderness into some resemblance of the places they had left behind them in the old states.

Texas was accepting more and more newcomers, some under Austin, many under other empresarios who followed the path Austin had blazed.

Part of what troubled Michael Lewis was this, for he had seen the same forces at work during his youth back in Tennessee. He had loved the woods and the wild open spaces where a man afoot or on horseback could travel for hours, even days, and see no mark of another human. Little by little he had watched the woods hacked away, the open spaces surrendered to the plow, the game decimated or driven off. Now those forces were here, repeating in this virgin land the pattern of the whole western migration. And Michael, though he did not like it, had been a party to the process.

Back yonder, many days’ ride behind him, he owned a grant of land, guaranteed by a paper which carried the flourish of Stephen F. Austin. Over the last three years he had gradually enlarged his field, turning under the ancient prairie sod, bringing up the rich black soil built through untold ages of nature’s annual cycle: growth, decay, and regrowth. He should be at home now, plowing out the winter weeds, planting the seed for a new year’s crops. He knew many would call him an idler, a shiftless leatherstocking tramping in the woods when good Christian men were at work in their fields, living up to their responsibilities.

But in Michael’s veins pulsed the blood of a father who had been a leatherstocking in his own time, a product of the canebrake and wood, a man whose hands fit more easily upon the rifle than upon the plow. Mordecai Lewis had grown fitful when he spent too many days in the fields, too many nights within the confines of his cabin. His eyes would turn west toward new lands that lay somewhere beyond sight. His westering ways had brought him finally to a violent death and an unmarked grave in an alien country far from home.