Love and War in Texas

by Jack Llyle

Love and War in Texas is an adventure /suspense novel told in both the nineteenth century and in the present day. The founders of the northeast Texas pioneer family central to the story are Zebediah and Mary Holmes who come to Texas in 1863, fleeing the wrath of a Yankee General in Missouri. Zebediah has been a Missouri Bushwhacker, riding with William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson. Along the way, he becomes close friends with Frank and Jesse James as well as the Younger brothers. Zebediah ends his war by coming to Texas with a wagonload of stolen Yankee gold to begin his reconstructed life.

His descendants, Matt, Nancy, and Erin Walker are the central characters in the present day who live on the property bought by the Holmes’ in 1863. Matt is a retired university professor who is having troubles relating to his late in life teenaged daughter, Erin. In cleaning out his father’s belongings after his death, Matt, Nancy, and Erin find a rolled document that Matt’s great grandmother has labeled “Grandpa’s treasure map” in her old Spencerian script.

Matt and Erin enlist the aid of Matt’s best friend, Harry Dickenson, to help them in their search for buried treasure on their ranch using the cryptic notes on the treasure map to guide them. In the process, they stir up an old family feud and uncover wrongdoing that nearly undoes them.

ISBN 1-59431-784-4 or 978-1-59431-784-2 Romance / Western

Chapter 1 Jasper County, Missouri September 1863

Tell me not of sorrows gone by

Or past ordeals with grief and sigh.

Tell me instead of joy and light

Of battles won and heroes’ fight.

Zebediah Holmes

Zebediah Holmes didn’t look left or right as he exploded at a hard gallop through the Jayhawkers’ lines into Jasper County. Surprised by the horse and rider bursting through from their rear, the Union boys couldn’t react fast enough to bring their rifles up. Keeping his head low near his horse’s neck, Indian style, he prayed that none of those Kansas boys would shoot his horse out from under him as he galloped away. He had left the Indian Nation two days ago and chanced cutting across the southeast corner of Kansas through Galena in order to chop a day off his trip home to Jasper County and finding permanent fortifications on the Kansas—Missouri border was totally unexpected.

The war in Kansas and Missouri had been largely a guerilla affair, Union Jayhawkers against Confederate Bushwhackers. Permanent battlements and artillery emplacements didn’t fit the tactics that were used there. Jayhawkers and Bushwhackers swooped in and burned, killed, and looted, running to fight again another day. Now it looked like the Union sympathizers were ready to stand their ground like the real Yankee army, another sign that the conflict was evolving and that the Southern cause was in trouble. The Jayhawkers were daring the Bushwhackers to engage in a pitched battle.

Zeb’s American Saddlebred horse had the speed of a thoroughbred and the stamina of a Morgan. He held the horse at a full gallop until the Kansas boys were well behind him, and then let him slow to a walk to rest the animal as much as possible. Zeb raised fine horses before the war, and this mount, Reno, was one of the last few American Saddlebred horses that the Holmes’ still owned. He had left his bushwhacker squadron of thirty men behind in the Indian Nation after word reached them of Yankee General Ewing’s hated General Order Number 11, expelling all Confederate sympathizer families from southwest Missouri in reaction to Colonel William Quantrill’s raid on Lawrence, Kansas. Zeb’s wife, Mary, and their two daughters were still on the Holmes farm at Carthage on the Spring River, and he needed to get them out before the Yankees burned the farm fixtures and buildings around them and left his little family homeless and defenseless. Ewing had given the Rebel families two weeks to get out before he burned four counties, and that time had almost expired.

Zeb had joined the Missouri State Guard when the war broke out, but his commanding general wanted to take the troops south to join up with a Texas brigade to fight the Yankees. Captain Holmes told the general that he was going to fight by his fireside, not off in another state, and he stayed behind and formed his own squadron of guerrilla cavalry. They later joined up with squadrons led by Major Livingston and Captains Rusk and Robertson. Frank James, not yet infamous, was one of the band of brothers. The two became friends when the Federals at Columbus took Frank and Zeb prisoners, and they succeeded in breaking out of the Columbus jail and rejoining their unit. The bond that is formed when men face danger together is a tough and durable one. Theirs would last forty years.

After Livingston was killed in a bloody assault on Stockton, the tattered band joined up with Colonel William Quantrill just in time for his infamous raid on Lawrence, Kansas on August 21, 1863.

Nearly four hundred Rebel-yelling raiders descended on sleeping Lawrence just before dawn that morning, and by nine a.m. they were riding out with their booty, leaving nearly two hundred dead men and boys behind in the streets and buildings of the burning town. All of the stores and banks had been looted for all valuables and consumables. Quantrill’s principal human target in the raid, Jayhawker Senator James Lane, the Jayhawk leader at the sacking and destruction of Osceola, Missouri two years before, escaped from the raiders by fleeing through an unharvested cornfield in his nightshirt.

Zeb and his men were sickened by the bloody slaughter and the atrocities that Quantrill’s men committed, but the Jayhawkers had done as bad or worse in Missouri towns. Frank James and Zeb discussed joining the regular Confederate Army as soon as they got a chance where officers and men had a sense of honor. Neither of them owned any slaves or was especially political, but they just didn’t like being told they couldn’t own some if they took a notion to.

There was a vociferous public backlash against Quantrill over the Lawrence raid in Missouri. Missourians supported the Bushwhackers, by and large, but Quantrill’s tactics crossed the line into brutality and criminality. Buying time to let that uproar blow over, the Colonel took all of the raiders into Indian Territory with their ultimate destination being relatively peaceful North Texas. Zebediah and many other men needed to get their families out of Missouri, and the Colonel cheerfully gave them all leave. Quantrill told them when they were through relocating their families to meet the raiders in winter quarters on Mineral Springs Creek in Grayson County, Texas.

Frank had to get his family and other relatives out, too. The two men decided to form a wagon train out of southwest Missouri so they could help provide security for each other. Crossing the Indian Nation was dangerous because of marauding bands of savages and renegade whites, and a single wagon traveling alone was an easy target for them. It was much safer to travel in groups.

Zeb had sent word ahead to Mary that he was coming to fetch her and the kids. He hoped that she would be packed. Under General Order Number 11, all crops were to be burned as well as houses, equipment, and outbuildings. All they could take were personal possessions. Still, there would be a considerable amount of household things to move.

He stopped a half-mile from his eighty-acre farm, dismounted, and slowly walked on in so he had lots of time to spot any forces that may be waiting for him. He thought there might be a Yankee or Jayhawker welcoming committee. The place seemed peaceful enough, though. Zeb could see that most of the livestock were gone by now. The Yankees had already burned the orchard and his hay fields. He and Mary were young—just in their early twenties—but seeing all your hard work go for naught was sorrowful and starting over was hard at any age. His heart ached for Mary. He knew how much this would be hurting her.

They had worked hard to earn and save the money needed for the down payment on their farm—two hundred dollars—and Zeb hated to lose it. The Clay County Bank in Liberty, Missouri, about 150 miles north, held the mortgage note on the place. The bank was Yankee owned so Zeb had no qualms about walking away from the obligation. His relationship with the bank had not been cordial, either. Although he never missed a payment, they hounded him constantly over trivial matters, so he didn’t feel a twinge about leaving the bank holding a worthless note.

He caught sight of his sweet little Mary Cooke when he was still two hundred yards from the house. She was loading her things into a wagon with sideboards in the house lot. She must have seen him about the same time because she began walking up the lane from the house to meet him. He had only been gone from home a month, but when a man is in his twenties, that’s a long time to be away from home and hearth and especially the marriage bed. He swung back into the saddle and closed the distance between them quickly. She caught hold of his left stirrup as he rode up on the horse. Looking up at him with blue eyes in a sea of freckles framed by coppery red hair, she was the prettiest thing he could imagine in God’s creation. She held her arms up to him, and he caught her up and set all ninety pounds of her in front of him sidesaddle and kissed her in such a manner that he hoped she could tell how much he had missed her.

“I love you, Mary Cooke.” He spurred Reno into a slow walk to the house, enjoying Mary’s closeness and the sweet smell of lilacs about her.

“Oh, Zeb. I love you, and I’ve missed you so. I’m so happy you’re home, but what in the world are we going to do? That Yankee General Ewing says we have to leave everything behind, and they’re going to burn four whole counties.”

“Well, darling, as far as I’m concerned they are burning the bank’s farm. We won’t pay a Yankee bank for a farm a Yankee General burned. I have a friend who is going to make up a wagon train with us, and we’re going down to Grayson County, Texas. That’s where the outfit will be.”

“Where will we live?”

“We’ll rent rooms for you in town. It’s a nice little town called Sherman. The unit is going into winter quarters, so I will have plenty of free time to find us a new farm there. I’ve been talking to some of the boys from Texas in the Raiders, and they say that all of the country from Sherman down past Kiowa is God’s country. It’s open prairies with scattered hardwoods and big pine trees, and the land is still cheap in Texas. The area has tall native grass and good rainfall. It’s right on the edge of the North Texas plains and the East Texas Piney Woods. Sounds like horse country to me, darling.”

“Where will we get the money? All we have is in this land.”