He came back to himself at the foot of a great oak, his head bare and burning, the world gone quiet and strange around him. He had been shot, scalped, and left for dead by the men who ambushed his little surveying party, and by every reasonable measure he should not have been alive at all. Yet Josiah Wilbarger was alive, and what happened next is one of the eeriest stories the Texas frontier ever told.
One day in the late summer of 1833, Wilbarger and a few companions were surveying land in the country that is now Austin when they were attacked. Two men escaped and rode hard to the nearest cabin, that of Reuben Hornsby, and reported that Wilbarger was surely dead. But that night, Reuben's wife Sarah woke from a vivid dream in which she saw Wilbarger alive, scalped, sitting beneath a tree. She had the dream again, and then a third time, each clearer than the last, until she could describe the very spot.
She would not let it go. In the morning she pressed the men to ride out and look, and...

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