The Amarillo Trail

by Ralph Compton

  “I think you and I better have a talk, Jared,” Miles said. “You have the same idea that Tad had last night. I thought he was wrong and that we’d lose a lot of cattle and most of our men. We’re outnumbered and outgunned, pure and simple. But if you and I join forces and run our herds together, Tad’s plan might work.”

  “I’d like to hear about it,” Tad said, kicking a dirt clod with the heel of his boot. “Your cookie got any hot coffee we can guzzle down?”

  “He sure does,” Will said, then flashed a sheepish grin at Jared. “I just had me a cup.”

  “You get on back and tell Paco to ride up to the Rockin’ M chuck wagon. We’ll put our heads together and see if we can run this Boggs clear out of Kansas.”

  Becker turned and walked to his horse, which was ground-tied to a nearby bush. He mounted up and rode off toward the Lazy J herd.

  “Let’s get that coffee, Miles,” Jared said, “and talk this whole thing over.”

  They could see the chuck wagon from where they stood. Smoke rose from a fire burning in a ring a few yards from it. As they walked closer, they could smell the boiling coffee.

  The setting sun smeared the sky with red, gold, and silver, painted the cloud faces a royal purple, and seamed their linings with radiant silver. Ducks flew over the two rivers, quacking as their wings beat the air. There was a tang in the air, an aroma of river water, cattle, horses, and sweat-laden men that nearly smothered the aroma of the Arbuckles’ coffee.

  Miles wondered how he was going to tell Jared about Caroline and whether or not this was the right time to even mention it. He was glad that they were walking together and that they would talk. He had missed his brother, but knew that Jared had never forgiven him for taking Caroline away from him and marrying her.

  He vowed, as they approached the chuck wagon, that he would only mention Caroline if Jared brought her up, asked about her.

  And, deep inside, he hoped Jared never would, at least until the drive was over and they were celebrating in a Salina saloon.

  Chapter 28

  Pete Boggs stepped ashore on the other side of the river. The men waiting there saw that he was fuming with anger.

  “What’s up, Pete?” one of the men asked.

  Pete looked at Ralph Taggert, who had asked the question.

  “We got a real firecracker on our hands, boys,” Boggs said to the group. “Blaine’s brother, name of Jared, has got him a herd and aims to cross without payin’ the toll.”

  “To hell with him,” another man spoke up. His name was Dave Elkins, a bearded thirty-year-old farmer with a twice-broken nose and scars on his face from scalp to chin. He puffed on a corncob pipe and had a bottle of corn liquor tucked in his back pocket.

  “That one, Jared Blaine, he don’t back down none. I don’t know how many men he has with him, but with two herds and a passel of drovers, we might have a fight on our hands.”

  “Didn’t I see Will Becker over yonder?” Ralph said. “Sure looked like him. All growed up now.”

  “Yeah, like the rest of us,” Boggs said. “Yeah, I saw Will walkin’ up behind the Blaines before I left. The son of a bitch is a Texan now, I reckon.”

  “Maybe he ain’t,” a man named Hardy Coolidge said, a rawboned pig farmer with scars of acne pocking his wizened face. Like the others, he wore overalls and work boots with large heels. He smelled of swine and a dozen other barnyard aromas.

  “Will never was one of us,” Ralph said. “Even when we rode with Quantrill. He had no stomach for fightin’.”

  “You’re wrong there, Ralph,” Boggs said. “He done his share of killin’ when we was chased by Federals out of Springfield.”

  “Yeah,” Hardy said. “He was a pretty good shot, I recollect.”

  “Well, we got our hands full, that’s for sure,” Boggs said. “We got to stay on guard all night and wait to see what happens tomorry.”

  “We’re low on terbaccy,” one of the men said. “And ain’t enough coffee left to scald a cat.”

  “One or two of you hightail it into town and fetch us some terbaccy and coffee ’fore it gets dark,” Boggs said. “Ralph, you get the fire started and we’ll gnaw on pork ribs this evenin’.”

  The men scattered to perform various tasks. Boggs took Hardy aside and spoke to him as he looked across the river.

  “Hardy, you and Dave take the first watch. Keep an eye on that raft and make sure none of them cowboys crosses the river tonight. I’ll get two of the boys to spell round midnight. Can you do this for me?”

  “Sure, Pete. I done guard duty plenty when we was with Quantrill. Only we was called ‘pickets’ then.”

  Boggs smiled and slapped Hardy on the back.

  “Good man, Hardy,” he said.

  Boggs told Dave the same thing and then, after looking at the cook fire across the river, said: “You know what I forgot to tell them Blaine boys?”

  “Nope,” Dave said.

  Boggs chuckled.

  “I forgot to tell ’em that we charge ten dollars extry for wagons, chuck or otherwise.”

  Dave, a rather dull fellow, did not grasp the humor of Boggs’s statement. “Why, we sure better tell ’em next time you talk to ’em, Pete.”

  “I sure will, Dave,” Boggs said, and walked over to where some of the men were unwrapping knapsacks filled with kindling wood and dry branches retrieved from the river over the past few days.

  “I need two men to stand guard from midnight till dawn,” he said. “Dave and Hardy are takin’ the first shift.”

  Two men spoke up and raised their hands. Another was unwrapping a bundle of cured pork ribs and laying out the cooking irons.

  “I hope them boys get back from town afore it closes up,” Jesse Coombs said as he set dried grass beneath wood shavings to start the fire. He looked off down toward the town of Great Bend, which was nearly two miles away.

  “Simpkins will keep his store open long as someone’s got coin to lay on his counter,” Boggs said. He hated towns and commerce, merchants and drummers. If he had his way, people would still be using the barter system and there would be no greed such as existed in the settlements. He believed in men exchanging services for goods and that man was meant to live by the sweat of his brow.

  That is why he hated the cattlemen who came up from Texas and took money out of Kansas.

  “Greed begets greed,” he always said. “And them what holds slaves are the greediest of all.” He had been saying that since the war and believed it still. He was glad that the North had won, but he still knew of folks who held slaves and believed the Southerners, including Texans, still worked sharecropping whites and blacks in their cotton and tobacco fields.

  Boggs was a man filled with anger, and as he prepared himself mentally for a fight the next day, he envisioned his men eating fresh beef for supper the following night, while dead Texans floated in the river like poleaxed hogs, their bodies swelling up in the sun until the buttons on their shirts popped.

  “Them Texans will pay the toll,” he told the other men at supper. “One way or another, they’re gonna pay.”

  The men cheered his words as the fire shot bright golden sparks in the air and the smell of pork ribs floated across the river to the camp of the Texans.

  The night sky filled with stars and the moon rose like a graceful swan, beaming down an almost majestic light on the Kansas prairie.

  Chapter 29

  Before dark, Jared and Paco rode along the Little Arkansas River to assess their chances of crossing at another ford. They rode as far as the little town of Great Bend, which was an assemblage of mud huts and clapboard shacks, a couple of places with false fronts. It appeared to be a poor town, with only a few inhabitants. They saw a hardware store and a dry goods establishment. He read a sign in one store window that read PURDY’S DRUGS & SUNDRIES, and another that looked like a warehouse bore the legend CANTWELL’S FARM EQUIPMENT. Simpson’s General Store stood out as the largest and Jared figured it served the farmers for many miles around. In
the distance they saw small hardscrabble farms and fields of anklehigh corn and small fields of alfalfa and clover.

  “Can’t cross anywhere near this town,” Jared said. “We’d have cattle running into stores, and we’d get chased by women with rolling pins and shopkeepers with pitchforks and iron skillets.”

  “This is not a good place,” Paco agreed.

  They rode in the other direction, two miles above where the herds were being held. A man on horseback, with a rifle at present arms, followed them on the opposite side of the river.

  “Water looks too deep up this way,” Jared said.

  “The river gets narrow. We would have to swim the cattle across. Some would get drowned, I think.”

  “No, the only place seems to be where that ferry raft is. It’s wide and shallow there and that’s the crossing marked on the map my pa gave me.”

  “Then that is where we must cross,” Paco said, and there was no fear in his voice. But he, like Jared, knew they would have to fight their way through those Kansas jayhawks. There would be bloodshed on both sides.

  The two men returned to camp and supper around the chuck wagon fire. Cookie served up red beans, beef, and fresh corn bread, along with boiled cabbage and peaches out of airtights. There was hot, rich coffee and lively conversation about everything but crossing the river the next day.

  Then, when the meal was finished, Miles brought up the subject, addressing his brother, Jared.

  “Well, brother, you and Paco there looked up and down the river. What do you think?”

  “I think we must cross in the morning. At first light. If those jaspers on the other side stay up all night, they’ll be off their feed and that gives us a slight advantage.”

  “Do you have a plan, Jared?”

  The men at the campfire all leaned forward to hear what Jared had to say. In the momentary silence, they heard ducks chattering on the river and the far-off yap of a coyote. Bullbats soared like wraiths high above the fire, darting and weaving through the sable night, faded silver coins on their wings.

  “The way I see it,” Jared said, “we have a couple of choices. We can bring the entire herd, meanin’ your cattle and mine, put them in the water, and see what Boggs and his men do.”

  “They’ll likely start shooting the lead cattle,” Tad said, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, smoke scratching his eyes like shaved onions, which made them water and blink.

  “Yeah, that’s a prime possibility,” Jared said.

  “We could lose a lot of cattle with twenty men firin’ repeatin’ rifles,” Al Corning piped in.

  “Or,” Jared said, “we can strike them first.”

  “You mean just start shooting across the river?” Miles said.

  Jared looked over at Becker, who was on his second cup of coffee. “Will, you fought in the war. What do you think? Or have you thought about it?”

  “We really didn’t ever run acrost a situation like this when I was with Quantrill,” Becker said. “But I knowed some tactics from just listenin’ to the officers talk at night.”

  “And was there something said about fighting across a river?” Jared asked.

  “Not exactly, but some of the officers mentioned digging trenches during a siege. They called them ‘parallels’ and said an army could keep digging those parallels in circles around a town or a fort and pretty soon the troops would be at the gate and they could bring a cannon up and breach the fortifications.”

  “Hmmph,” Jared uttered. “There ain’t no town, nor no fort. There’s just that blamed river, wide as a cow pasture.”

  “We could dig trenches,” Tad said. “For cover.”

  “We maybe got four shovels between us,” Roy said. “We’d have to dig all night and then maybe . . .”

  “I thought we could use the chuck wagon for some cover,” Norm Collins said. “Put men on their bellies underneath, some in the bed, and others behind, in front and back.”

  “All good suggestions,” Jared said. “We could run the chuck wagon up close to the bank and parallel. Put some of our rifles behind that.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Miles said.

  Jared looked around at the men sitting at the fire. He mentally counted how many hands he had, and those who were riding as nighthawks around the herd.

  He looked again at Becker. “What would you do, Will?”

  The attentions of all the men shifted to Becker, who set his coffee cup down between his boots and looked at Jared with piercing eyes.

  “I don’t like the idea of bein’ in a trench, to tell you the truth. Or hidin’ behind that chuck wagon. We’re all horsemen. We live on our horses. We work on them. We can make our horses run or walk or jump over fences. When I fought with Quantrill, I was cavalry. We marched and we fought on horseback.”

  “Good point,” Jared said. “And all pretty good suggestions.”

  “Are you going to run this show, Jared?” Miles asked, his voice soft and nonthreatening. He asked it of a brother he had grown up with, a brother he loved dearly and whom he respected, despite their differences over Caroline.

  “Somebody’s got to call the shots,” Jared said. “You have any preferences, Miles?”

  Miles thought there might have been a tinge of sarcasm in Jared’s tone, but he couldn’t be sure. But he felt the old hostilities rising between them. And, with what they had to face on the morrow, he didn’t want to quarrel with Jared or rub him the wrong way.

  “The way I see it,” Miles said, “this cow camp ain’t exactly a democracy. Yet we all are facing the same decision, the same danger. We got to have a leader, but we all got to have a say in who that leader is and back him all the way. If you want the job, it’s yours. And if you don’t, you can appoint your foreman or anyone you trust to lead us through this dark valley.”

  “Miles, you got a poet hiding somewhere inside you,” Jared said. “But I agree. We got to all come to terms on how we’re goin’ to make this crossing tomorrow. And there’s sure as hell goin’ to be lead flyin’, in both directions.”

  “So, boss,” Paco said, “how are we to do this? The sodbusters have more men and I hear they are all good shots. I will fight and I think every man here will fight. But do we ride across with our guns and start shooting, or do we wait for them to shoot first?”

  “Paco, you’ve got brains, I’ll give you that,” Jared said.

  “Answer his questions, Jared,” Miles prodded. “I want to know too. How do we get across that river with all of our cattle and the least number of injuries or deaths?”

  Jared stood up. He walked around in a tight circle as if he were mulling over a plan of attack. He looked across the river at the glowing campfire and the silhouettes of the two men on guard. Then he returned to his place in the circle and sat down.

  “Boggs is expecting us to fight,” he said. “He knows we can’t, or we won’t, pay him his damned toll. But he’s determined to keep us from crossing if he has to kill every one of us. Pa once told me, and he probably told Miles too, that when you got a big problem, it’s like a big old bull is charging you, with its head down and hoofs a-flying. He said you can’t run and you can’t hide. He said you got to take the bull by the horns.”

  “Bulldog the son of a bitch,” Curly Bob said. “Throw him to the ground.”

  “Exactly,” Jared said.

  “So how do we take this particular bull by the horns?” Miles asked, genuinely curious.

  “All right,” Jared said. “I’ve listened to all these suggestions. I’ve scouted the river with my foreman, Paco. I know some of you and heard tell of some of you. We are horsemen. We are cattlemen too. So we use what we have to fight those bastards over there.”

  Miles leaned forward, eager to hear what Jared had to say. The others held their breaths and looked thoughtful.

  “No trenches,” Jared said. “We’ll use the chuck wagon for cover, but we’ll have riders behind it, sittin’ tall in the saddle, shootin’ rifles. We’re going to run the herd across that river.
Yeah, we may lose a few head, but we’re going to be drivin’ and shootin’.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear,” Tad said when Jared paused for a few seconds. “Bull by the horns.”

  “You’re damned right,” Al said. “Drive the cattle and shoot the soddies.”

  “Some men will have to ride the flanks, keep the cattle streaming across. Some will just shoot from behind the wagon. Others will come ridin’ up with more of the herd and keep their rifles hot. If you run out of rifle bullets, use your pistols. Ride, ride, ride, and shoot, shoot, shoot.”

  “Someone will have to time this all out,” Roy said. “Make sure we hit the water in waves and keep the rifles firing as we cross.”

  “Miles, you can do that,” Jared said. “You can watch and see who’s still shooting and send men to take the places of those who fall.”

  Miles sucked in a breath. He started to shake his head, but he could see what his brother was driving at. They would cross the river in waves, riders on both sides of the herd, and keep them all moving so that they would have a mass of cattle and men pushing across, firing their weapons, and dodging bullets. It was bold, it was daring, and it could work, if they all pulled together. And if they all were directed by one man who could see all that was happening and know when to send other men into the fray.

  “What about you, Jared?” Miles asked. “Where will you be?”

  Jared looked at all the other men who were waiting to hear his answer. He knew men and he knew himself. He licked his lips and spoke to all of them while looking directly at his brother.

  “I’m going to be in the lead,” Jared said. “I’ll take the leaders across and I’ll be aimin’ for that clod-kickin’ little bastard, Pete Boggs, while me and Puddin’ wade that river.”

  Some of the men smiled. Others looked sheepish and ashamed. There was not a man jack among them that didn’t know that Jared had picked out for himself the most dangerous job of all.

  They looked at him with admiration and respect.

  Miles looked at Jared with a sense of dark foreboding. He wanted to say something, but he would not dash the men’s hopes.