Free The Texans by Brett Cogburn

moment, and it was enough to make the birds sing.
    Red Wing sat at her piano and tried to focus her attention away from the open window and on her music. The complexity and richness of the sounds possible from the instrument never ceased to amaze her, and she thought it the greatest gift her mother had ever given her. There seemed to be notes and melodies for whatever moods or emotions might possess her, and her nimble fingers and natural talent involuntarily pulled songs from the piano as magically as mist rising from the ground on a foggy morning. At such times her eyes became blind to the sheet music before her, and she was lost in the ringing lift of music that poured from somewhere within her. There had been no such music in her life among the Comanche camps. She had been only a child in that former life that became more vague by the year, but what little she could remember had been harsh and without music.
    But her heart was not in the music on that beautiful spring morning. The notes she played sounded flat and off-key to her, no matter how hard she tried, and she couldn’t seem to shake the melancholy from her soul. She shivered beneath her shawl despite the sunny morning. It was as if the winter wouldn’t leave her bones. It was going to take a lot of time and sunshine to warm her again.
    Her fingers paused over the piano keys as she spotted the travelers coming along the creek. She rose from her stool and walked out the front door to stand with her mother at the edge of the porch. She placed an arm around the shorter woman’s waist and pulled her to her side. Her mother leaned into her and sighed but kept her gaze on the party of men riding to the house. Red Wing studied the parched, hollow cheeks and the deep lines etched at the corners of Mrs. Ida’s dry blue eyes. It was plain to all that she had once been a lovely woman, but time and the sun had not been kind to her and she looked far older than she really was. The news of her husband’s death that the Prussian had brought home the previous fall seemed to have aged her ten more years in the span of the winter.
    Bud, Red Wing’s oldest brother, had spotted the riders, and had left his plow mule in the field he was working to come to the house. Mike, the youngest Wilson boy, followed closely on his heels, his bare feet padding through the fresh-turned furrows of earth. When they reached the porch, Red Wing handed Bud his rifle, and he turned to wait the riders’ arrival with a cautious look upon his face.
    Red Wing felt a little sick to her stomach for no good reason at the sight of the nine riders, and it wasn’t even the fact that most of them were Indians. She knew more about Indians than most of her family, and at a glance she recognized three of them for tame Delawares dressed in white men’s clothes, and another for a Waco by the cut of his buckskins. A small sliver of her was still Comanche, and she had no fear of them. Her ancestors had outfought and out-traded them for better than a century. Three others in the party were white strangers to her, but it was Colonel Moore and the wild Indian beside him that caused her fear. She knew them both, and instinctively, she felt something awful about to descend upon her, just like she did when the clouds turned black and thunder sounded in the distance. Those two men had done her a favor once, but their arrival still felt like a bad omen.
    â€œHello, Mrs. Ida,” the tall man in the lead said through his long whiskers. His horse was white as his beard and he pulled him to a stop just in front of where Bud stood off the edge of the porch.
    â€œHello, Colonel.” Mrs. Ida’s voice sounded as scared as Red Wing’s pounding heart.
    â€œI heard the bad news in Austin, and I’m sorry about your man. He was a good’un,” Colonel Moore said.
    â€œYes, he was.” Mrs. Ida’s eyes darted back and forth between the colonel and the Indian beside him.