The Silent Rifleman! a Tale of the Texan Prairies

The Texas frontier in the 1830s is a land where a man's survival depends on his wits, his weapons, and his willingness to trust strangers. Pierre Delacroix rides alone across the high dry prairie between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande - a small man whose unremarkable frame conceals remarkable agility and the instincts of a seasoned frontiersman. When he spots a company of dragoons on the horizon, every instinct tells him to avoid them. But something about the travelers draws him in, and what begins as wary observation becomes an uneasy alliance. The soldiers guard Lieutenant Arthur Gordon and his young bride Julia, daughter of the formidable Colonel Forester. As night falls and the vast Texan landscape transforms from beauty to danger in moments, Pierre finds himself their reluctant protector against threats both human and wild. Henry William Herbert, an English Eton and Cambridge educated writer who emigrated to America in 1831, brings authentic frontier detail and a sportsman's eye for landscape to this tale of survival, unexpected bonds, and the harsh romance of the pre-Revolution Texas wilderness.