A Vast and Desolate Land

by Robert Peecher

  "Someone's up ahead!" Fitz shouted over the rush of wind as the horses gave all they had.

  "Evangeline!" Rab called back.

  Rab slid his rifle from its scabbard and fired a shot into the air. He was all but certain Evangeline had seen them and seen the Comanche, but Rab wanted to be sure that she understood they were riding in and bringing trouble on their heels.

  Now she wheeled her horse and disappeared from the top of the hill in front of them.

  An arrow, shot from distance, flew uncomfortably near to Sinclair's right side, and he looked back over his shoulder to see that several of the Comanche were raising up their bows.

  Rab had allowed Fitz and the other two horses to push ahead of him, and he realized that he was the only target within range of the Comanche arrows.

  Rab held the reins in one hand, and using his free hand he untied his saddlebags. He slung them over his shoulder, and none too soon as he felt an arrow hit his back and punch a hole through the saddlebag. It stung like the devil, but the arrow did not penetrate his buckskin jacket.

  They raced up the slope to the top of the hill where they'd seen Evangeline, and as they topped the hill a magnificent sight awaited them.

  At the bottom of the hill, half a mile away, Evangeline had dismounted behind a buckboard wagon.

  But she was not alone.

  Scurrying about to get up their rifles, Rab could see Caleb and O'Toole. Vazquez had already leveled his rifle back down the road, ready to provide covering fire to usher Rab and Fitz in. Kuwatee was unhitching a couple of mules from the buckboard to move them back.

  Carlos and the vaqueros were not there, and neither was Sancho, but it stood to reason that they'd be ahead with the cattle.

  Beyond the wagon, horses from the outfit's remuda were ground tied, all of them saddled.

  Fitz cleared the wagon with the pony and the other horse right behind him.

  Rab felt another arrow strike the saddlebag, and this one hit with more force. It was like a punch to the back. Without turning, Rab knew the Comanche were now gaining on him.

  Vazquez fired his Yellow Boy rifle with a crack like thunder and puff of white smoke.

  O'Toole fired, and then Caleb.

  Kuwatee had his rifle out now, and he let loose a shot.

  Evangeline shot also. All the shots were high and wide to prevent from inadvertently hitting Sinclair, and the Comanche were too far back for any of the shots to be effective, anyway. But the brief volley was enough to make the Comanche rein in.

  "What took you so long?" Evangeline called out as Rab Sinclair and Cromwell passed the buckboard wagon.

  Fitz wheeled his horse and grabbed the leads on the pony and the other horse, bringing all three horses under control to keep them from spooking the others and causing them to run.

  Rab reined in the blue roan and swung out of his saddle. He dropped the saddlebags off his back and saw there were actually four arrows stuck in the bag.

  He pulled his rifle from its scabbard and fell in with the others behind the buckboard. He'd deliberately jumped in beside Evangeline.

  "You're a sight," he said to her.

  "Not as much as you," she said. "When the others told me you'd been taken by the Comanche, I said we needed to start back to meet you in case you were hurt or needed a fresh hawss."

  Rab grinned at her.

  "You had more faith that I'd get away from the Comanche than I had, I'll tell you that," Rab said.

  "None of us doubted you would," O'Toole said.

  "I doubted it," Kuwatee said, and there was no humor in the comment.

  The Comanche, twenty or so, had pulled their ponies to a stop and were looking at the small band of fighters hunkered behind the buckboard. There was some discussion taking place among them.

  At last, one of them urged his horse forward a bit from the others.

  He was armed with a lance and a knife.

  He raised the lance high above his head and then threw it into the ground where the lance stood like a signpost beside the pony. He then threw his long knife into the ground near the lance, and it also stood up.

  With his arms raised out high over his head, the Comanche urged the pony forward at a walk.

  "Should we shoot him?" O'Toole asked.

  "Not yet," Rab said. "Looks like he's coming for a parley."

  "You going to ride out and talk to him?" Caleb asked.

  "I don't believe I will," Rab said.

  The small outfit greeted the sole Comanche rider with astonishment. In the face of half a dozen rifles, the unarmed Comanche continued to ride toward them at an easy walk. If he had any fear, his face did not show it.

  "What in hell do you think he's up to?" O'Toole asked.

  "Maybe he wants Skinner Jake," Fitz said.

  Vazquez looked back and for the first time saw the body tied to the horse.

  "Is he dead?" Vazquez asked.

  Fitz, who was still mounted and had the leads of the other two horses, dropped the pony's lead and pulled the other horse up to him. He reached over and felt Skinner Jake's back.

  "He's still breathing," Fitz said. "But he ain't in good shape. He's ridden tied to the horse like this for two days, and the Comanche burned his feet pretty bad. Truth is, I'm perplexed that he's still alive."

  The Comanche was now within a few yards of the buckboard, and still he had made no movement other than to ride forward. His hands were still in the air, and they could all see that he was completely unarmed.

  "That's about far enough," Vazquez called out, but the Comanche ignored him.

  He rode past the buckboard, with every one of the six rifles turning to follow him.

  Rab Sinclair glanced back at the other Indian warriors to be sure it was not some kind of trick, but none of them had moved.

  The sole Comanche now rode directly up to the pony that Rab had taken from the camp. He reached down and took hold of the lead, and then he wheeled his own pony and started back east to where the others were still waiting for him.

  "Hell," O'Toole said. "He just came to retrieve his pony."

  When he returned to the others, the Comanche all wheeled their horses. The sole rider dismounted long enough to retrieve his knife and lance, and then they all started back over the hill.

  -27-

  Vazquez and O'Toole drove the buckboard to Las Vegas with Skinner Jake stretched out on blankets in the back.

  "Leave him with the doctor, and have the doctor see me about paying for his care," Rab said. "And when you've left him, ride on back out to the ranch. I'll pay you your wages, and maybe we'll have a little fiesta to celebrate a successful trail drive."

  "Was it a success?" O'Toole asked. "It was damned hard to tell."

  "Another hour or two and Carlos will have those cattle on my ranch," Rab said. "We went to Texas to get three hundred head of cattle, and we've made it to the ranch with three hundred head of cattle. I'd call that a success."

  "I won't argue with you," O'Toole said. "We managed to all get back with our hair in place."

  "I don't believe I'll ride across the Staked Plains again," Vazquez confessed. "I felt safer when I was a deputy riding with a posse."

  Evangeline rode her piebald unnecessarily close to the roan as they walked the horses through the long valley leading up to Rab's ranch.

  Rab Sinclair did not mind.

  Evangeline had been with him at the ranch for a few years.

  Long-legged and blonde-headed, when Rab first met Evangeline Sadler she was working as a saloon girl in Santa Fe. Raised up on the banks of the American River in California, Evangeline's father was an unlucky prospector. Her mother cooked meals at the camp where her father sought gold, and they survived on the wages her mother earned from those meals.

  She married a man in California who brought her to Santa Fe, but when he took ill and died, Evangeline found herself alone, broke, and friendless in a strange place. So she went to work selling whiskey drinks in a saloon. The men who drank there were v
ulgar and sometimes cruel.

  She met Rab Sinclair in the saloon, and the easy mannered, quiet man who always wore a grin sparked on her right away. And she sparked on him. The vulgar men gave him a wide berth, and when one of them became too familiar one night, Rab Sinclair put that man on the floor. And then he offered Evangeline an opportunity to leave the Santa Fe saloon if she'd care to take up with him on his ranch.

  She leapt at the opportunity.

  They'd been together ever since — five or six years now. They'd talked of marriage, but Rab didn't have enough religion to care, even though his father had been a missionary, and Evangeline had tried marriage once and it had not gone so well.

  She was as hard a worker as any ranch hand he ever hired, which was one of the reasons he was able to sometimes leave the ranch, either to guide folks or to go on long hunts. He knew that Evangeline would see to the place.

  They'd never made any religious formality out of their relationship, and Rab always figured Evangeline would eventually get tired of his wandering and move on. But she took to ranching, and Rab sometimes wondered if she stayed on because she loved the ranch and tolerated him.

  But the piebald kept bumping into his knee as they walked along.

  Rab Sinclair and Evangeline, along with Fitz, Kuwatee, and Caleb, saw to the horses in the barn.

  They brushed them down, spending extra long with them. They gave them oats and fresh hay and put a little whiskey in with their water. Then turned them out in the paddock.

  Carlos, Miguel, Jorge, and Sancho Biscuit were waiting for them at the ranch house. They were sitting out rockers on the front porch, all of them dozing under the shade of the overhanging roof. They'd been asleep when the riders brought the horses to the barn.

  The hands Evangeline had hired to help bring in the cattle were pushing the critters out to the east pasture while the men who'd made the long drive dozed in chairs on the front porch of the house. They were all men who had worked for Rab at some point, either as ranch hands or during roundups or on cattle drives to Fort Craig, so they knew the place and would see to the cattle just fine.

  "Let's get up a fiesta," Rab said. "A little celebration of our success."

  Sancho Biscuit laughed.

  "Glad you escaped the Comanche," he said.

  "I'm glad Fitz came back and found me at the right time," Rab said.

  Rab, Evangeline, and Sancho went to the small pavilion where Rab had a kitchen, and together they cooked up steaks with hot red peppers. They fried cut potatoes in the skillets. Rab tapped a keg of beer, and the hands all drank and sat at the picnic table under the pavilion while the cooks did their work.

  Fitz entertained them with his description of the fight to save Rab and the flight from the Comanche. He told them about Skinner Jake and Cossatot Jim.

  Carlos translated some of the story for Miguel and Jorge, but largely they had picked up enough English that they could follow along.

  "When the Comanche had me, they didn't feed me much or bring me water very often," Caleb said, "but they didn't bother me none neither. Hearing what they did to Skinner Jake, I reckon it's a good thing I didn't try to make a run."

  "They keep you bound up?" Rab asked.

  "No. They kept a feller watching me all the time. But they just sat me on the ground and left me alone."

  "You were just a hostage, not a prisoner," Rab said. "They never did intend to do you harm. They wanted them buffalo hunters."

  "Your ranch isn't far from the Llano Estacado, Rab," Carlos said. "You think they'll try a raid on you?"

  Rab shrugged but shook his head doubtfully.

  "I'd be surprised," Rab said. "I'll probably keep the cattle in the east and north pastures for a time. I've got a neighbor who grazes his cattle out that away, too, and between us we can keep an eye out to be sure there ain't Comanche rustling. But I think those Comanche got what they wanted. They wanted Cossatot Jim."

  "And their pony," Evangeline pointed out.

  A short time later, even before the food was all prepared, O'Toole and Vazquez drove up in the buckboard.

  "We left Skinner Jake with the doctor," Vazquez said. "Doc says he might live but won't never walk again."

  Rab looked out to the paddock where the blue roan was rolling in the dirt.

  "Weren't for that hawss, I might have been laid up right there with Jake," Rab said.

  "He's a good ol' hawss," Evangeline said, touching Rab on the shoulder. "You be sure to give him some extra whiskey in his water for the next few days, Rabbie."

  "Make that old biter more ornery than he already is," Rab said.

  "I'm glad you ain't laid up next to that buffalo hunter," Evangeline said. "But if you were, I'd push your wheelchair for you."

  "It's a rough country," O'Toole opined. "Takes a hard man — and woman — to make it out here in the West."

  "It's a rough world," Fitz said, broadening O’Toole’s opinion. "I ain't found a place yet where men don't do awful things to each other."

  Rab Sinclair looked around at his small outfit. Evangeline and Sancho Biscuit were now setting down plates in front of them all. They were damn good men, all of 'em. Including Evangeline, in the loosest sense of the word.

  "I'm proud to have ridden with you boys," Rab said. "Obliged to you for all that you did. All you signed on for was to move some cattle, but you took on everything that came our way. You risked your lives for Caleb, and for me, and a man can't ask for more'n that. So maybe it is a rough world, I can't prove otherwise. But it smooths out the edges some when you've got folks you can count on."

  the end

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you so much for saddling up and riding along with Rabbie Sinclair, Caleb, and the rest of the outfit on this cattle drive.

  If you’ve not yet read the other novels featuring Rab Sinclair, I’d encourage you to check out some of the other books with this recurring character:

  Trulock’s Posse (in which an older Rab Sinclair joins a posse chasing a gang of outlaws)

  A Trail Too Far (in which a young Rab Sinclair leads a small wagon train along the Santa Fe Trail)

  The Glorieta Grudge (in which an old vendetta troubles Rab Sinclair).

  If you enjoyed this novel I’d be grateful if you would sign up for my newsletter at my website.

  My newsletter is the best way to learn about my latest releases and keep in touch with me.

  Sincerely,

  Robert Peecher