The Outlaw Josey Wales by Forrest Carter Page A

over a captive, hidden fire.
    Lone was already eating. “I’m gonna take up tepee livin’ … if it’s like this,” he grinned. And as Josey stepped to feed the horses Lone said, “She’s already grained ’em … and watered ’em … and rubbed ’em down … and cinched the saddles. Might as well set yore bottom down like a chief and eat.”
    Josey took a bowl from her and sat cross-legged by the log. “I see the Cherokee Chief is already eatin’,” he said.
    “Cherokee Chiefs have big appetites,” Lone grinned, belched, and stretched. The hound growled at the movement … he was chewing on a mangled rabbit. Josey watched the dog as he ate.
    “I see ol’ hound gits his own,” he said. “Re’clects me of a red-bone we had back home in Tennessee. I went with Pa to tradin’. They had pretty blue ticks, julys, and sich, but Pa, he paid fifty cent and a jug o’ white fer a old red-bone that had a broke tail, one eye out, and half a ear bit off. I ast Pa why, and he said minute he saw that ol’ hound, he knowed he had sand …. thet he’d been there and knowed what it was all about… made the best ’coon hound we ever had.”
    Lone looked at Little Moonlight as she packed gear on the paint. “It is so… and many times… with women. Yore Pa was a knowin’ mountain man.”
    The wind held a smell of moist April as they rode south, still in the Choctaw Nation. At dusk they sighted the Red River, and by full dark the three of them had forded not far from the Shawnee Trail. They set foot on the violent ground of Texas.

Chapter 11
    Texas in 1867 was in the iron grip of the Union General Phil Sheridan’s military rule. He had removed Governor James W. Throckmorton from office and appointed his own Governor, E. M. Pease. Pease, a figurehead for the Northern Army under orders of radical politicians in Washington, would soon be succeeded by another Military Governor, E. J. Davis, but the conditions would remain the same.
    Only those who took the “ironclad oath” could vote. Union soldiers stood in long lines at every ballot box. All Southern sympathizers had been thrown out of office. Judges, mayors, sheriffs were replaced by what Texans called “scalawags,” if the turncoats were from the South, and “carpetbaggers,” if they were from the North. Armed, blue-coated Militia, called “Regulators,” imposed… or tried to… the will of the Governor, and mobs of Union Leaguers, half-con trolled by the politicians, settled like locusts over the land.
    The effects of the vulturous greed and manipulations of the politicians were everywhere, as they sought to confiscate property and home and line their pockets from levy and tax. The Regular Army, as usual, was caught in the middle and in the main stood aside or devoted their efforts to the often futile task of attempting to contain the raids of the bloody Comanche and Kiowa that encroached even into central Texas. These Tartars of the Plains were ferociously defending their last free domain that stretched from deep in Mexico to the Cimarron in the north.
    The names of untamed Rebels were gaining bloody prominence; Cullen Baker, the heller from Louisiana, was becoming widely known. Captain Bob Lee, who had served under the incomparable Bedford Forrest in Tennessee, was waging a small war with the Union Leaguers headed by Lewis Peacock. Operating out of Fannin, Collins, and Hunt counties, Lee was setting northeast Texas aflame. There was already a price on his head. Bill Longley, the cold killer from Evergreen, was a wanted man, and farther south, around DeWitt and Gonzales counties, there was the Taylor clan. Headed by the ex-Confederate Captain Creed Taylor, there were brothers Josiah, Rufus, Pitkin, William, and Charlie… with sons Buck, Jim, and a whole army of a second generation.
    Out of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama, they fought under the orders of the Taylor family motto, marrowed in their blood from birth, “Whoever sheds a Taylor’s blood, by