Scouts, Skinners, and Other Lesser Plainsmen

By: Virgil Cain

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Gus served with conflicted pride in that uncivil war, seeing more battlefields than most and losing more of himself than he could reconcile. He was, in most ways, disillusioned before the war even began. By the time Joe Johnston surrendered at Durham Station, he could no longer tell up from down, and certainly not right from wrong. He had killed indiscriminately for four years, displaying not a scrap of compassion for those who fell by his gun so long as they wore a gray jersey. Such heinousness against his fellow man, even if in the name of a noble cause, left him feeling irredeemable, as if there was no further left to fall. He was wrong about that. Though the next decade saw him become one of the most determined Indian fighters on the Southern Plains, the end of the Indian Wars revealed that men like him were the only savages left.