Free Paxton and the Lone Star by Kerry Newcomb Page A

man had parted with no more than a perfunctory wave of the hand. At first, True had not understood such a casual farewell between close friends, but in that moment when he faced his father, he did. There really was nothing to say. Any attempt to express the bond between them would have been banal. Adequate words simply didn’t exist. True’s and Thomas’s hands met, and through that grip flowed twenty-two years of love, of a little boy’s tears and of his laughter, of a father’s hopes and dreams, of quick anger and chastisement and forgiving, of lessons small and large, of gifts and sharings, of the quiet moments when, hand in hand, they had walked across meadows, and through forests, and down shaded and bright lanes that brought them to the moment of parting, but from which they would never be parted. It was that way, and it was enough. When their hands fell apart, True mounted and, with his brothers leading the way, turned his horse down the path.
    Hogjaw watched them approach. When they drew even with him, he lifted a battered bugle to his lips and blew a blast that drove the herons from the marsh into the air and echoed over the meadows, causing the field hands to stare around in terror and the animals in the forest to turn and listen. “Come along, you Paxtons,” he said. “And don’t look back, mind you, for him that does begins a habit that’s hard to break.”
    Joseph gave a derisive snort. Andrew chuckled and urged his horse into the lead. True pressed his hand against the amulet beneath his shirt. Together, they rode from Solitary.
    And none of them turned back for a last look.

PART TWO

Chapter V
    October 10, 1834
    â€œYou ought not to go,” Elizabeth Michaelson cautioned soberly. “You know what Mr. Jones said.”
    Lottie raised her eyes to the cloud-filled heavens, which rumbled a warning of their own. “Mr. Jones is as staid and stuffy as Pa,” she replied peevishly. “If we must go to Texas, where I’ll probaby never see pretty lights or hear music or go to dances again, I intend to have some fun while the opportunity presents itself. Honestly, Elizabeth! How can you be such a stick-in-the-mud?”
    Elizabeth’s back stiffened. Thaddeus Jones, the wagon master they had met the day before, had spent a half hour warning his new charges that Natchez must be the limit of their excursions, and that the thin line of bordellos and taverns clinging to the banks of the Mississippi at the base of the Natchez Bluffs was to be avoided at all costs. In the first place, it was physically dangerous, for when the Mississippi uncoiled and flexed its muscles in awesome muddy majesty and roared above the banks like the Apocalypse itself, it carried off the pineboard buildings and bullied the patrons inside them into watery graves. More importantly, the short strip called Natchez Under the Hill was a den of gamblers, shady women, and thieves, where no decent person could or would be found. It existed, and was barely condoned by Natchez’s more proper elders, because it provided an outlet for the roisterers and carousers who passed through on their way west, and in the process kept them from the streets of Natchez itself. That Elizabeth had taken the warning seriously while Lottie had not was a fair indication of the difference in temperament between the two sisters. “Papa wouldn’t like to hear you talk like way,” Elizabeth said. “He asked around. It’s a place of sin and damnation.”
    â€œOld folks always say that fun is dangerous and sinful,” Lottie sniffed. She pulled her cleanest dress over her head and patted the bodice smooth against her swelling bosom before turning to the mirror.
    Elizabeth compared Lottie’s abundant figure to her own trimmer, firm physique, and quickly donned a clean workshirt. “You still ought not to go,” she repeated, tucking the shirt-tail into her trousers.