Only The Strong

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They were seven rattlers on horse back.

They came out of the east, and the dawn, wending along the belt of green that fringed the Platte River. In the lead rode a hawk-faced man in buckskins, a fine Kentucky rifle in the crook of his arm. His eyes were as hard as flint. He missed nothing, this man. Not the deer that bounded off at their approach, not the buzzard that circled high in the sky, not the lowly sparrows that flitted and chirped in the undergrowth.

The man was a hunter by nature. As a boy he’d hunted everything that breathed. Rabbits, coons, squirrels, deer, boars, bear—all fell to his swift trigger finger. Now, as a man, he hunted a different kind of game. His quarry didn’t have four legs; his quarry had two. He was a hunter of men. But only a certain type of men. Men—and women—with black skin.

He hunted runaway slaves.

Wesley was his name. That was all he went by. He always wore buckskins. He always had his rifle with him and a knife on his hip. Born and bred in the backwoods, he was a product of the forest.

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