Fellow Warriors of Company K
From Fierce Foes to Fellow Warriors
Disillusioned U.S. Cavalry Major Sam Nabors hopes to retire when he is called to Fort Leavenworth in the post-Civil War West. Guilt-ridden after the murder of his family on their Silver Creek farm in Kansas, Nabors is promoted to colonel and convinced by General Andy Chutte that he is one of few who can lead a mission to retrieve an abandoned cache of gold…before disaffected Confederate marauders steal it to finance a new war. Nabors grudgingly accepts, buying time to resolve his grief and please the general.
Nabors is joined by an unlikely match of Union and Southern officers, the famed all-black Buffalo Soldiers, Comanche and Osage, and remarkable emancipated women of the period. Too late, a supposedly loyal officer is linked to his family’s death…and a whole lot more. A trail of blood and betrayal ensues from New Mexico territory to Silver Creek before Nabors and fellow warriors extract the long-delayed revenge and Nabors can hang up his spurs for good.
Chapter 1
Beyond the Firelight
I start this story which Bad Runner, my friend, calls a biography. He and I were among the last of Quanah’s warriors to come to the reservation after Bad Hand’s soldiers burned our village in Palo Duro and murdered most of our horses.
Quanah, one of our leaders, is really the one who caused me to write my story. This was at a time when I knew not how to read and write.
He told me, in his words. “You must write your story, which in every way is the Comanche story. First, you must survive these times of hunger and White man’s disease. Then, you must learn to read and write the White man’s language. There may be more war. But I have decided to come in out of the cold and starvation of the Llano Estacado to save our people. This is what you and our Quahadi must do to live. Then, you can write your story.”
This was told to me as some of us rode and some walked slowly east to Fort Sill and the reservation, starving and humiliated by our losses. Struggling to hold our heads high as men of honor must always do.
Our women and children suffered most. They gathered and cooked weeds and buffalo horn stew along the way. Some died along that trail. There was nothing we could do. We had been beaten by Bad Hand. That’s Colonel Ranald MacKenzie, and his troops of mounted cavalry.
These were black days. I could not see far beyond the closest campfire. Not far into my future at all, for my mind was occupied by ideas of escape and revenge. More revenge was my ambition, not writing stories on papers that can teach but blow away in the wind. I would learn otherwise in the future, beyond the firelight.