Chapter 15

While Ma, Sgt. Williams, Sue and them dogs palavered over what had just happened, I was ‘informed’ to ready an area for ‘our’ tribe to locate to. No longer surprised by anything that was to happen I ‘enlisted’ Brave Bear and He Who Laughs Loud to that task. A man could get used to doing all this work if he had good help. Water, shade and grassy fields were plentiful around the ranch, We had one of them General’s tents so that was used as training for a dozen of the drovers to learn about setting them up, right quick. Eight drovers and two regular ranch hands rode out to show everyone where to set up. Four others drove a wagon load of fresh supplies and those general’s tents to the area just outside the ranch proper that had water and grassy plains for horses and cattle to graze.

It would take them Comanche a few days to start rounding up strays and cattle rustled by those Mexican bandits too. Hopefully they would round-up enough to graze on another nearby field or two. I had a feeling the future would see The Red-man raising cattle, maybe even farming once they were on decent land rather than deserts.

Looking back now, an awful lot had happened in such a short time. If I had to think about things before they were done I suspect not much would have been done. I took a deep breath, several in fact and looked around me. Unlike what I had seen after the war, I saw smiling, happy faces so I think something was going right. I still had that bad feeling though. Hear tell a lot of places were having troubles in many of the old Confederacy and rumor had it expansion past St. Louis was an ‘at you own risk’ thing. The Blue Belly’s were being called back to the Maryland, Virginia border. We in Texas hear tell a half dozen more tribes joined up with the Sioux and that the In-jun Territory was fix-in to stay that way. If that were the case Texas might ... Hell it might even become free.

I knew things were star-tin up in Kansas again and Cole and Jesse took right up where Billy left off. Things were getting interesting, I declare.