by Bill Dugan
“What’s a Jayhawker?”
“A pirate in uniform, I guess. They started out during the war as irregular cavalry. Now, who knows what they are. All I can tell you is any one of them would as soon kill you as look at you. They take what they want. You’d best get your herd moving, better yet, give him what he wants, because he’ll follow you until he gets it anyway, and he’s not likely to settle now. You showed him up in front of that pack of wolves. He’s sure not gonna forget it.”
“What about the sheriff? He’s still coming, isn’t he?”
9
TED SAT ON the ridge, looking down at the Wilkins spread. In first light, the place looked peaceful, almost deserted. Wilkins lived alone, and it was unusual for him to be asleep when the sun had been up for more than an hour. Nudging his horse down the steep grade, he angled across the slope. He froze for an instant when a glint of orange slashed past him. The burst of light momentarily blinded him, and he twisted away from it.
Looking through his fingers, he realized it was just a window, catching a few rays of sunlight. As he reached the flat, he kicked the pony once, then clucked to him. The horse broke into a trot, and he covered the last two hundred yards in short order. At the front of the house, he dropped to the ground, wondering where Wilkins was. It wasn’t like the big man to ignore visitors. He was supposed to have ears like a rabbit, and stories about his hearing were legendary. Most of them were almost certainly exaggerated if not outright false, but this still was odd.
Ted stepped onto the porch and rapped on the screen. He heard the echo of his knuckles, but nothing moved inside. He rapped again and turned to look across the yard, toward the barn and the corral. He wasn’t even sure why he was here, but it was something he felt he had to do.
“Jack?” His voice seemed to bounce around the yard, then stop dead. Not even an echo from the barn. He rapped a third time, then pulled the screen open. He tried the door, and it swung open easily with a press of his fingers.
“Jack? You in there?”
Wilkins still didn’t answer. Ted felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle, a sensation he hadn’t had in three years, not since he’d left the front as the war was winding down. Inside, everything looked normal. He went to the bedroom and stood in the doorway.
The door was half open, and Ted could see the lower half of the bed, but it was empty and, from the looks of it, unslept in. Wilkins never took pains with the ordinary domestic details, so there was no way to be sure.
The bedroom was empty. Ted shook his head and walked back to the front room, which tripled as kitchen, dining room, and living room. Wilkins had planned to add another room, but when his wife, Mabel, caught typhoid, he hadn’t bothered. When Mabel died, there was no reason. Jack’s Winchester was missing from over the fireplace, but it was the only thing out of the ordinary.
Ted stepped off the porch and crossed to the barn. The barn door was open, and he walked through cautiously, convinced that something was seriously wrong. Jerking his Colt free, he ducked to the left, just inside the dark barn.
“Jack, you in there? Jack Wilkins?”
His own voice came back at him, and something skittered across the loft, but no one answered him. Rather than search the barn on his own, he thought about riding for help, then pushed the idea aside. If Wilkins needed that much help, it was already too late for him.
He backed out of the barn and walked around to the rear. On the way past the corral, he noticed rails were down on the back side. On the damp ground, he spotted half a dozen moccasin prints. They could have been from the day before, but he didn’t think so. A little water still sat in the center of each depression. If the prints were a day old, there would have been no such puddles.
Ted stared off through the stand of cottonwoods behind the barn. Then, for some reason he didn’t understand, he raced toward the trees, as if something were drawing him there against his will. The hair on his neck was standing out straight, now.
“Jack?”
Again, he got no answer. Pushing into the sparse undergrowth, he saw a smear of blood on some leaves. There was no mistaking it. It was fresh and glistened in the sun as the leaves rippled in the breeze. On the far side of the brush, he found Jack’s Winchester.
He picked it up and sniffed the muzzle. The sharp bite of gunsmoke told him the carbine had been fired recently. So there was hope the blood wasn’t Jack’s. Hope … but not conviction.
Ted started out into the saw grass, where he saw another smear of blood. A few yards ahead, he saw flies swarming around the tips of the grass blades. He sprinted for the spot, found even more blood, and a place where the grass had been pressed flat, probably by a human body. The long oval depression was smeared with fresh blood, and the flies were already busy.
He moved slowly now, brushing the grass away with his forearm. The grass was bent in a long, narrow channel winding off toward the creek bed another hundred yards away. An occasional smear of blood glittered on the grass. So far, there was no sign of Jack or anyone else. No sign, that is, except for the blood. It could even belong to a horse, but he didn’t think so.
Ted straightened, cocking his ears toward the gentle slope across the creek. He might have heard something, but wasn’t sure. He knew he didn’t want to go any farther on foot. If someone was out there, he couldn’t risk being run down by a mounted man, whether white or Indian. He sprinted back to the house, Jack’s Winchester cradled in his arms.
Dashing into the house, he grabbed a box of shells for the carbine from the ledge over the fireplace, then ran back out to his pony. He sprang into the saddle and urged the horse around the barn. He picked up the trail almost where he’d left off, and slowed the horse to a walk. Keeping one eye on the ground ahead and one on the channel through the rough grass, he followed the pattern of bloodstains with mounting concern.
Down by the creek, he stopped and dismounted. The marshy edge of the creek was covered with prints, all fresh. Hoofprints and the depressions of moccasined feet intermingled. There was no doubt now that Jack Wilkins had had a second visit from the Comanches. The only question was, where was Jack?
Little swirls of mud eddied in the water, silt curling just above the creek bed, clouds of light brown in the clear water. He looked upstream, then remounted. The pony didn’t want to go, and he squeezed it with his knees until it stepped into the tepid water.
Fifteen yards later, he was sorry.
Jack Wilkins lay on the creek bank, his hands bobbing in the sluggish current. His throat had been cut, and his scalp was gone. For good measure, a lance had been driven through his belly, pinning the body to the ground. Ted turned away, his stomach churning, a bitter fluid rising from his gut and filling his mouth with the taste of metal.
Torn between the desire to run away, and the need to do something about the horrible vision oozing the last of its blood into the sand, he kneed the pony ahead a few paces. The horse tossed its head and shied away from the body. Ted didn’t look, couldn’t look, and swallowed hard.
He took a deep breath, then jerked his canteen from the pommel and took a long pull on the warm water. He swirled it around, trying to wash away the taste of his own bile, and spat into the creek. He shuddered once, then took a second long swallow from the canteen. It changed nothing.
Pulling on the reins, he pushed the pony up onto the far bank. Ted followed the course of the stream, leaning far over to look for some sign that the Comanches had left the water. It was not uncommon for someone trying to elude a tracker to use a streambed to double back, but the little mud eddies seemed strong enough a lead to pursue them upstream.
He didn’t doubt they were paying the white man, any white man, back for their recent losses at the hands of the Cotton men. In one sense, he was directly responsible for the bloody corpse lying back there. And part of him wanted revenge. He could hear Jacob’s voice as if the old man were riding at his side, warning him that revenge was not the way, but he wanted it anyway. Jacob wasn’t there, after all. A
nd besides, what could Jacob know about the guilt he felt?
The creek flowed a little faster as he started up-hill a little. It was only two more miles to the spring where the creek had its source. If he didn’t find anything by then, he’d have to make a decision. If he tried too long and too hard to do it on his own, he was helping the Comanches make their getaway. But if he was close now and went back to town, he’d be doing the same thing.
Plunging ahead, he was only too aware, was exactly what Johnny would do, but that made it all the more important for him to push on. It seemed almost as if he were filling in for his absent brother, doing what Cottons had always done.
It was pigheaded, and he knew it, but he also knew he had no choice. Part of him was withering away, and if there was any way to stop it before it had gone too far, he had to try. For all he knew, it was already too late. But he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life wondering when, or if, he had stopped being a man, at least the way the Cotton family had always defined it.
He was less than a mile away from the spring now, and still hadn’t seen a sign. The stream was narrowing perceptibly. If the Comanches’ raiding party had come this way, they would have had to have gone in single file in another quarter of a mile. That would be no problem, except for the fact they were driving stolen horses. Unless they had them on a string, keeping them in line would have been all but impossible.
Fifty yards later, it didn’t matter anymore. He found the place where they’d come out of the water. Half a dozen unshod Indian ponies and nearly a dozen more wearing iron shoes, Jack Wilkins’s remaining horses, had climbed up the bank, leaving water-filled prints in the short span of soft sand between the water’s edge and the verge of the saw grass. Not more than two hours before, probably more like one, the horses had passed this way. He followed the bent grass for three miles before he realized they were headed for the mouth of Breakneck Canyon.
It was almost too neat.
It was coincidental, more than likely, but there was a kind of fitness to it, too, one that he recognized and that the Comanches would appreciate. They were going to have another go at it. But this time he was on his own.
This time, though, he was not going into the canyon. This time, he would take the long way around and ride the rimrock. If the Comanches were taking the short route on through, he’d have an advantage, maybe offset the odds a bit. If not, at least they would have only the advantage of numbers. The high ground would be neutral.
He worked the switchbacks in a hurry, almost jerking the reins too hard at every hairpin. The loose rock beneath the pony’s hooves skidded and skipped away, bouncing like flat stones on a summer pond, but he didn’t worry about it. The Comanches weren’t stupid. They had to be expecting pursuit. If they had wanted to stand and fight, he’d have run into them long before now. It seemed obvious they wanted to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the scene of the small massacre that had been Jack Wilkins.
No longer the scourge of the Texas plains, they were still a fearsome enemy. But they seemed to realize their days were numbered. The battle at Adobe Walls had taken a heavy toll. Superior in numbers, the Comanche had been outgunned and had their spirit crushed by Kit Carson’s men in the rooms of Bent’s trading post. Most of the Comanches had long since surrendered and accepted the imposed tranquility of the reservation.
But by no means all.
And, as usual, it was the most fearless who refused to be confined. As far as Ted could tell, this was no hit-and-run band who would scurry like frightened squirrels to the reservation and prop one another’s spirits in the middle of the night with reminiscences of the raid. These were free-ranging Indians, wild red men, avatars of an earlier time.
He’d know for certain when he found them.
10
IT WAS PAST MIDDAY, and Ted was beginning to wonder if he had made a mistake. Halfway across the rimrock ledge of Breakneck Canyon, he still hadn’t seen a single sign of the Comanches. In a couple of hours, he’d have to start thinking about going back. There was no way in hell he would spend the night alone on the rim. Not even a madman would risk that.
And Jacob Quitman’s voice still whispered to him, telling him how foolish he was being. Only God can make that kind of decision, Theodore. Not man. Man has no right to judge his fellows, not the way you are doing. And when a man tries to pass judgment on another culture, he is trespassing all the more on alien territory. He flies too close to the sun, and he gets burned. That is a law of nature. It is, even more, a law of God, Theodore.
Or so Jacob would have it.
The first blush of his rage long since faded, reason was crowding him, nudging the passion aside, making him wonder why he was there at all. He wondered, but deep down he knew the answer. It was one he didn’t like, so he chose to wonder still, in hopes that there might be some other, still hidden, reason.
And in the other ear, Johnny kept shouting, trying to drown Jacob out: “You yellow bastard … you yellow bastard.” And Ted knew he wouldn’t be there at all unless he at least half believed that Johnny was right. He was trying to prove something to himself, and to Johnny. It didn’t seem to matter that Johnny wasn’t even there, and might never know what he’d been trying to do.
He could die out here, and when somebody stumbled over the gleaming cage of his ribs, another rack of bones on the dry-as-dust rim of the canyon, no one would know who he had been, or what his name was. And no one would care! Bones were all too common out here. The irony was that bones had no color. A Comanche and a white man, stripped of flesh and sinew, looked the same. After death, the same wind whistled through the white pipe organ, playing the same monotonous song for Comanche and Texan alike.
And Ted Cotton wondered whether that was all he had left. Maybe that’s how he wanted it to end. Maybe he was even right to want that.
Maybe.
But he’d never know; not until it was too late to change his mind.
As he neared the far end of the canyon, he heard something far below him. Almost certain it was a horse, he dismounted. Creeping close to the edge of the rim, he took cover behind a jumble of rocks. Cocking an ear, he strained to hear it again. After a long moment, it drifted up to him, the shuddering whinny of a horse.
Then, metal struck rock, and he knew it was a shod horse. Creeping even closer to the rim, he leaned out to look down into the canyon. Almost directly beneath him, several horses, on a string, shuffled nervously. As he tried to get even closer, one hand slipped on the sandy rock. He landed hard on his elbow, dislodging a chink of stone. He reached for it, but it skittered away from his fingertips and disappeared over the rim.
Ted pressed himself flat, waiting an eternity before he heard the rock land below. The horses nickered, and he heard one or two of them paw at the ground. It was almost as if they sensed something, even at this distance.
He was breathing shallowly, his throat constricting and the air whistling noisily down into his lungs. His mouth was dry, and he tried to moisten his lips with his tongue. The rasp sounded like emery paper and left them as dry as they had been.
A whiff of burning wood drifted up from below. The Comanches weren’t waiting for him, they were pitching camp. They’d never have risked a fire if they thought someone was on their trail. That tipped the odds a little in his favor. But not much. He repositioned the hand and levered himself up again. Wrapping one leg around a rock, he slid closer to the rim. With his hat off, he peeked out over the rock straight down nearly two hundred feet.
There was no sign of the Comanches. His skin went cold. Maybe they were aware of him. Maybe this was all a decoy, while they slipped up behind him. He was suddenly paralyzed. It wasn’t fear. It was that sudden flash of understanding. Life was more complicated than he was willing to see. This wasn’t about life and death, exactly. It was more about the way the two intersected.
The seamless web of connections. Ted and the Comanche he’d killed, Johnny and his dead Indian, Jack Wilkins and the red man who
’d lifted his scalp. And now this, just the latest intersection, one of many, each as meaningless as the others, or as meaningful. It all depended on how you wanted to look at it. And what paralyzed Ted Cotton was not knowing. What the hell was he supposed to do? What should he think?
He lay there, stunned by the depth of his confusion. And the silence saved his life.
The whisper of leather on stone, so soft he would have missed it if he had been breathing normally, made him turn. The Comanche stared at him for a second, then leapt. Ted rolled aside, and the Indian landed heavily, just to his right. The charge carried the Indian to the edge of the rim-rock, and the slippery sand prevented him from stopping.
The Comanche shouted and Ted turned as he started to go over the edge. Instinctively, Ted grabbed for him, catching the Indian by one knee-length moccasin. The Indian pitched over the edge and Ted braced himself for the shock. He arrested the fall, but the Comanche was already out of sight. The soft leather felt smooth under Ted’s fingers, the brave’s weight ripped at his shoulder socket.
Wrapping his legs around a rock, Ted squeezed with his thighs and crooked both knees to lock them in place. Rolling partway over, he was able to get his free hand on the same ankle. He ignored the searing pain in his shoulder and reached out over the edge, groping for something to grab onto, shifting his grip and latching onto the Comanche’s leather leggings.
The Indian squirmed as Ted inched forward. Almost close enough to the edge to look over the rim, he gritted his teeth. Hauling on the leg like a fisherman, he scissored his legs, dragging himself back a few inches. It grew quiet. His elbows scraped the rock, sand whispering between stone and bone as he dragged the Comanche back.
The brave’s left leg swung up and over the rim, and. Ted pulled harder. The pressure eased a bit, and he realized the Comanche was pushing away from the rock face with his arms in some bizarre push-up. The Indian’s hips were almost level with the ledge now. It made pulling easier. Under the soft leather, Ted could feel the hard muscle and the harder bone beneath it.