Legend of Badger Claw

Harry Simpson

Description

In the late 1830's it was told that a Great White Spirit came to the Arapaho people and slew their enemy. Whether true, exaggeration or a myth to scare children, it spread from tribe to tribe, like a plague. Among the Plains Indians of the Kansas Territory, the Legend of Badger Claw was born.

Sujets

• Westerns
• Western (genre)
• Western

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 19 septembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785385803
• Langue: English

Extrait

Legend of Badger Claw
Westward Series Book Two
Harry Simpson




First published in 2016 by
AG Books
www.agbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
© Copyright 2016 Author Name
The right of Author Name to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.




In Loving Memory
Maternal Grandparents
George Mannford Howard
and
Pearl Lavisa (Elder) Howard



Prologue
Living amongst the animals on the Great Plains is the badger, considered so vicious that even the great grizzly bear avoided confrontation. The badger has a very thick skin and uses its long strong claws for tearing up ant hills but also for ripping apart any that dared to fight it.
In the late 1830’s, it was told that a Great White Spirit came to the Arapaho and slew their enemy. Whether truth, exaggeration or a myth to scare children it spread from tribe to tribe, like the plague. Among the plains Indians of the Kansas Territory, the Legend of Badger Claw was born.
In the northwest corner of Missouri, six teenage cousins decided to go westward into the untamed Kansas Territory. They were fed up with the feud between their families and the Estes Clan, which had been going on so long none remembered when it started or why. They were tired of killing or being killed simply because of this feud. One of these cousins was Jake Elder.
Jake’s mom and aunts had taught him to read and he read everything he could find and also listened to the stories told by older generations. As with most young boys, he particularly was attracted to the ones about battles and to the various weapons used. From the combination of his imagination and his unusual strength, he took a household tool, the broad ax, and made it into a weapon. He liked the feel of the slightly bowed thirty inch handle and increased the cutting blade to eighteen inches and increased the weight by four pounds.
He did not know that he had taken the first step in creating the Legend of Badger Claw.



Chapter 1
Jake Elder was scared, very scared. He was lying atop of a soft, moist covering of decaying leaves under tall lacy leafed ferns, on his stomach trying to press his body through the rotting debris and into the musky smelling black earth. The shadowy woods were eerily quiet, like the preverbal - quiet as a mouse. Even all the birds and insects seemed to be hiding from the scary intruders invading their deep forest. No breeze could penetrate the tightly bunched trees and brush so there wasn’t even a rustling of leaves overhead.
A medium sized snake was Jake’s only perceived movement as it stealthily slithered across his legs. Jake was too damn scared to even glance to see if it was poisonous. He surmised the snake was too intent on finding its own hiding pace to pay any attention to some foul-smelling human. Jake was sweating immensely and feared that the droplets dripping off his brow would be magnified to sound like a cascading waterfall.
CRACK!
Something or somebody had stepped on a brittle stick, but the exaggerated silence of the forest expanded the volume to be more like the sound of a giant hundred foot tree falling to earth. He swore under his breath when he sensed a slight vibration to his left. Shifting his eye slightly, he saw torn and filthy grey canvas pants five feet from his hiding place. No additional sound to verify that he had sensed movement, but defiantly the rank odor of an unwashed body was dominating all other smells.
Both the sight of the pants and the disgusting stink verified this was no Injun moving silently through the forest. Whoever it was, he was knowledgeable for stealthily moving through forests. He was making no sudden movements only taking slow, careful steps with toes testing the ground before committing to a placement of the foot verified that this was an experienced woodsman. Jake was positive this was not one of his five cousins. Although each was also an experienced woodsman, they had better hygiene. The hovering odor of an unwashed body made Jake confident it was one of the Estes clan. Jake and his four cousins had entered the woods when they spotted twenty of that filthy clan on their back trail.
This feud between the families had been going on for over fifty years and no one recollected why. Jake’s great-grandpa Audie Cole pulled up roots from West Virginia to resettle in Case County, Missouri well before Jake was born and damned if Salman Estes and his relatives had not migrated to Platt County, Missouri, the next-door county.
Jake thought back to the events that caused him and his cousins to be hiding in the woods all yellow like.
Jake’s Cousin Benjamin Younger had just buried the third of his older brothers and told his close cousins he had had enough. He convinced seventeen year-old Jake and four other cousins, all under the age of eighteen, to travel outside Missouri for a new life. They were all fed up with the continuous cycle of burying kin and killing members of the Estes clan. Benjamin and Jake were heading west accompanied by cousins William (Little Billy) James (17), Ben’s younger brother Buford (15), and the Cole twins, Willard and Earl, both 16.
The six riders were only four miles from the town of Kansas situated on the Missouri River- the jumping off point for entering the unsettled Kansas Territory, a portion of the Louisiana Purchase. Willard Cole was on drag watching their back trail.
He yelled, “Hey guys hold up a minute.” When they stopped he told them that a group of several riders seemed to be shadowing them.
Benjamin told Little Billy to take the horses up to a copse of trees ahead and hide. The other five slid into the woods and found places of their own for cover.
Benjamin said, “I’m going to move back a little ways to see if I recognize them. If it is the Estes group, I plan to take a shot and then duck back to you guys.” He gave them all a hard stare and added, “Then you all cut loose like at a turkey shoot and see how many we make dead.” He took his shapeless hat off and rubbed his head. “We can’t have them following us. Maybe they will scamper back to Platt County.”
Earl Cole shuffled his feet and asked, “What if they don’t run? What if they stay and fight?”
His twin patted Earl’s arm with his hand and looked over to Benjamin for an answer along with everyone else.
Jake cleared his throat and said, “I reckon we are in for a fight, then.”
Benjamin looked at his well-armed cousins as he rubbed the stubble on his cheek, “We are probably outnumbered and we all know they are plenty good shots. Keep shooting until I say ‘get’ then we take off into these woods and find cover.” He stared at each one and said, “Don’t want any of you to get kilt, so run and hide and keep mouse like quiet.”
As the followers came into sight, Jake counted twenty three riders in the dust covered group. They were too far away for him to recognize but he trusted his cousin and when Benjamin’s shot blew the lead rider off his horse, he knew they were the Estes’ clan. He had already taken aim so he just pulled the trigger of his flintlock rifle and reached for his second as the skunk he had shot at dropped off his horse, all loose of limb. Two others fell along with one horse as the other three cousins fired. The remaining riders jumped off their mounts and started firing at where Benjamin had been as well as at Jake and the others.
Like a swarm of locus, lead balls started shedding the leaves off the trees around the five cousins as Benjamin ran through the trees and rejoined them. None dared to risk exposure to return fire, so they kept large trees in front of them. Jake dropped to his belly and snuck a glance. “Damn guys. They am spitting up and sending a flanker group into the woods. Scatter, uh I mean get.”
A long run through the trees carried them to this spot where Benjamin told them to split up and hide. So they did and that is why Jake was acting like a mangy dog hiding from a cougar.
As the rank smelling man walked slowly by Jake, he suddenly stumbled causing a loud ruckus. “Damn, I done did step on one of them ...”
His shout came to an abrupt stop, interrupted by the sound of a pistol and a black cloud of burnt powder. The sound of several men running through the brush followed as others of the Estes clan stormed over to where the original sound had erupted.
Jake spotted Willard dashing away to his right leaving a twitching body behind. He also saw a troop of his enemy congesting towards Willard. Willard dropped to one knee and fired two pistols towards the men. He rolled to the left just in time to escape a flock of lead balls whizzing into trees around where he had fired from. Then he was back up with two new pistols.
Jake saw that the men chasing Willard were refocusing their aim, so Jake rose to a knee with two of his pistols in hand and cut down two of the unsuspecting men. He dove for cover behind a large stump as Willard fired into the surprised men followed by shots from Earl as he rose up just behind where Jake had been hiding.
Jake cou