The 7th Western Novel

by Francis W. Hilton

  He stepped down from his saddle with Joe Wheat, Quarternight, and the others following behind him, and saw first eight or ten men afoot near the office. Then Pete Rachal was coming toward him, swaying rapidly on his stubby legs. And at the same time, even as Rachal said, “I got your crew, Burnet,” and nodded at the group, “but there’s a bunch—” he saw Clay and Ed Splann just inside the barn’s dark maw.

  What he couldn’t see in that moment was how many others might be watching him from the huge blackness behind the wide doorway. Then one other edged into the band of outshining light from the office, and close to his shoulder Joe Wheat’s low voice said, “That’s Stoddard, the boss.”

  He recognized Stoddard without showing that he did, a short, squat man who, at the mouth of Crazy Woman Creek, had made the mistake of offering him a job. He brought his glance back to Clay and Ed Splann, seeing the dulled heavy drunkenness of Clay’s face. Splann was not drunk but stood with his huge body poised a little forward, strangely like a man on tiptoe, his long arms loose at his sides.

  These things he saw in a brief survey that could have lasted only a moment—with his own men and his new hands turned rigidly silent and Pete Rachal’s face in front of him setting into a weary look.

  Then he moved, hearing Joe Wheat’s “Lew, for God’s sake!” and paying no attention to it. He walked toward Clay Manning, feeling there was no recognition in Clay’s heavy-lidded eyes. He reached him and took his arm.

  “Clay,” he said, “come on.”

  His tug brought the big shape out a little from the support of the doorway post, stumbling against him. He jerked his right hand up to brace Clay’s body—and someone must have mistaken that or an order was given that he didn’t hear.

  A gun’s flame streaked from the black interior of the barn to become instantly blended into a crashing roar.

  He felt Clay jolt as if pushed. He was trying to pull his own gun and hold the big man up. But the suddenly dead weight threw him off balance. Something hot stabbed his arm.

  They went down together, and a running wave of fire passed over their heads.

  Rolling free and struggling up, he had a blurred knowledge of dust and frightened horses and a last rattle of shooting far back toward the livery’s end; and all at once there was silence, a breathless hush in the way of these battles, until somewhere a man groaned and deep within the barn another called, “They got out here!”

  And from the office Pete Rachal’s unmoved voice said. “Curly, you better get the doc.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Quarantine

  The hospital was an abandoned army barracks standing on the prairie’s grass beyond the freight yards east of town. The doc, too, was a discard from the army, a gaunt man with bloodshot alcoholic eyes. But watching him, Lew guessed he was capable enough even now; he must have been a top surgeon once.

  He saw the long hands were steady, probing the slightly puffed blue holes which were all that showed of the wounds in Clay Manning’s naked back. At such close range the bullets had entered straight.

  It wasn’t clear in his mind yet what had happened; perhaps he’d never know. But it seemed that all the Open A guns must have been turned in his direction, willing to sacrifice Clay and even Ed Splann if they could blast through to him. And they hadn’t. Clay’s huge bulk had saved him, taking that fire. He remembered Ed Splann turning and screaming at them before he fell and the way his new men had jumped instantly into the fight. Stoddard and the Open A hadn’t expected that. He hadn’t himself.

  They were gone now with Joe Wheat and the others back to guard the Cross T camp. He was alone here, waiting for the doctor’s verdict before he let Joy know.

  This room had been the officers’ mess hall. There was an iron range at one end and a sink with lead lining. A dozen wooden bunks with grass ticks stood in a row beneath the high square windows. It smelled of chloroform and turpentine and dust; it needed cleaning up.

  Clay was face down, naked, on a cot directly in front of him, still drunk enough so the doctor had given no anesthetic before going to work. Ed Splann, covered with a blanket, was on the next cot, while beyond him another Open A hand lay thin and flat and wholly still, his face the color of gray ash.

  As far as he knew this was all that had come out of the battle. There might have been some wounded. He had tied a handkerchief around a gash on his own right arm.

  The doctor probed a hole and brought out something and ran in a swab like cleaning the barrel of a gun. He wiped the spot and tossed a blanket over Clay. “That’s all.” He went to the sink to wash his hands.

  Lew followed. “What’s the answer, Doc?”

  “You Texans are tough. He’ll pull through, but he shouldn’t be moved.”

  “How long?”

  “Say a month.”

  “All right.” He started for the door. “I’ll arrange to leave him here.”

  Riding back across the plaza and up the two blocks of Second Avenue, he felt an unreasonable irritation at the way things had turned out. But then all that was gone when he saw her sitting in the hotel lobby. He knew how desperate this wait must have been. It softened him; he’d have to tell her gently. And yet, seeing him, she rose and came to the doorway quickly and took his arm. She seemed to know.

  “Joy,” he said, “Clay’s hurt. He’s in the hospital.” Then he tried to ease it for her. “Don’t worry. He’s going to pull through.”

  He needn’t have said that. Her acceptance was strangely calm.

  “Take me to him,” she said, and that was all.

  They returned to the hospital, walking, and in the crowded plaza men gave way for him, seeing the girl on his arm. In this part she could have walked alone unmolested; that was the code north of the tracks. He felt the light pressure of her hand, hardly touching him, and the space she kept between themselves at his side. He might have been a stranger, taking her to the one man in the world, for there was that feeling in the directness of her walk and in her silence.

  Entering the hospital, he half expected she would throw herself on Clay’s cot. She released his arm, crossed to the side of it, and stood there looking down. Only her dark eyes showed him any emotion, pity and tenderness and then a long grave look that he could not read.

  Afterward he saw her glance up at the speckled windows and the cobwebs spun in the corners of the room.

  “Doctor,” she asked, “have you a nurse?”

  “Why, no, ma’am,” he said. “No, I sleep in the building. Nurses are hard to get in Dodge.”

  “I see.” She looked at Clay, saying quietly, “He’s sleeping now.” She didn’t know that Clay was drunk. “But if he needs anything tonight I’ll be at the Wright House. Will you let me know?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he promised. “Don’t you worry. He’ll be all right.”

  Outside again, walking back the way they had come, she seemed unaware of the crowd or the town or anything beyond her own silent thinking. They were almost to the hotel when she spoke.

  “Lew, you understand. I can’t go on.”

  He did. He had known it as she stood there looking down at Clay.

  “He’ll need a nurse,” she said.

  He nodded. It wasn’t what she meant exactly, but he understood that, too. They were only using words to cover up what they both felt and knew in this moment.

  “I’ll leave a draft for you,” he said, “at Wright and Beverly’s store. You’ll need some things.”

  They reached the light of the hotel windows. She took her hand from his arm. Her eyes came up to his then, shining with a moistness in that light.

  “I’ll write to you at Ogallala. We’ll come by train as soon as we can.”

  * * * *

  In a little while he was riding from Dodge, leading her horse with its empty saddle, and in that saddle’s emptiness was a symbol of the way he knew thing
s were to be for him. Loyalty was the strongest trait she had. She would never desert Clay Manning now.

  Even with the guard of his extra riders he felt no safety so close to town. In camp, where they were all waiting, he said, “Some of you haven’t had much fun in Dodge this trip. But you see how it is. We’d better get on.”

  They eased the longhorns up from their bed ground and trailed them north until after midnight when the moon set and darkness brought them to a halt. But the summer’s dawn came between three and four o’clock these mornings; at four they were moving again.

  Beyond Dodge they entered immediately into what maps called the Great American Desert. With the dark line of the Arkansas down over the rim of the world behind them, no other landmark broke the flat brown earth. Even the little far-apart streams at which they watered were treeless and dried to muddy pools. The grama grass was cured and short and would not last another month; yet its heads were still full of black seeds and on them the cattle grew fat.

  It was like a treadmill, day after day the unbroken prairie moving beneath the longhorns’ hoofs. In the sultry heat this season, with July turning into August, desert mirages appeared each morning, lasting until night—forests ahead of them into which they never entered, mirrored lakes, and once a lone antelope with no legs.

  Sometimes, looking back from the point, he could see the drag end of the herd and the wagons coming up out of cool blue water; or again they were high in the air, distorted and magnified, the wagons as big as barns. Young Jim Hope was driving Joy’s mules now. But he had stopped thinking about that. He had dropped back into an old habit, focusing all he had on working out one thing at a time. The one thing now was to get these longhorns north.

  For the first days and nights out of Dodge he had kept close watch on Steve and had posted Rebel John and Joe Wheat to keep an eye on him. He had thought then that Steve might quit the herd and run back. But there had been no sign of that. Instead he felt Steve was thoroughly scared over what had happened in town or thoroughly whipped. It settled his first concern, and yet, remembering Clay’s tameness before he made his break into Dodge, he would rather have had Steve in some open rebellion. Quietness in his kind was never good.

  On this last lap of the march he held again far west of the trail, beyond sight of the dust flags of any other herds. Even if the Open A had left Dodge soon after he did his long daily drives of twenty miles would keep him in the lead.

  There were times in these long monotonous hours when old Willy Nickle came before him against the mirages that drifted across the plain. And as they approached the fertile valley of the Solomon River for their first camp in a grove of trees he wanted to see a familiar signal smoke rising there. It wasn’t, and afterward he knew that Willy would not turn up this far north in an empty land. Someday, maybe, but more likely not. For Willy was very old. He’d wander on in his strange way over his ancient trails to the end as most of his kind did, unnamed bones in an unmarked grave.

  Those old fellows, he thought, deserved to be remembered somehow. But they never would be. It was their names that ought to be left on the mountain peaks and rivers of this country. They were the true discoverers among the whites. Fremont and Reno and all of those gentlemen who claimed the honor were led by old Willy and his like. He himself owed Willy more than he could ever pay back.

  Beyond the Solomon they traveled a gently rising plateau that lifted them into a cooler air, and he rode these days feeling that nothing could stop them now. He was far enough west to avoid the trap of settlers’ fences when they crossed the Republican on the fifteenth of August.

  “Boy,”—Quarternight grinned that day—“I guess we’ve got her licked!”

  He thought so himself. This was Nebraska. With two weeks left and Ogallala only a little more than a week away he could see no hitch. If it came to a last-minute fight, now that he was bending east toward the trail, he had plenty of men. Each night he doubled the riders on guard and during the day kept a flank of scouts out a mile from the herd.

  They were going through, and yet there was no exultant feeling in him, no uprush of tremendous satisfaction that a man should have. It would be the end of the trail; that was all. There would be news for him in Ogallala. Perhaps she would be there herself with Clay.

  And afterward? He didn’t know. He could still let the future wait a little longer before he made his plans.

  Thirty miles south of Ogallala a high divide marked the Keith County line. Beyond that it would be like rolling downhill. On the same day that its straight ridge edged against the sky ahead of him he saw four mounted men come up from the southeast, circle his herd off at a distance, and ride back the way they had come. And that night from his camp on a creek still south of the ridge he watched a chain of little fires break out along its crest.

  “Indians,” somebody said, “waiting for their beef.”

  But it wasn’t Indians. In the cool dawn next morning all of his men were having breakfast for an early start when a group of eight or ten riders trotted out of the north. The two crouched circles around the fires broke instantly and spread. Then the trotting figures swung wide of the longhorns. It wasn’t an attack. In a moment he could make out the leader’s headgear, a stiff rolled brim and center-creased crown, known this country over as a peace officer’s hat.

  He said, “It’s the law, boys. All right, I guess.”

  They took their hands from their guns. All except Steve. He saw Steve back away slowly, his gun fully out of the holster and rising in a guarded aim as the peace officer came on.

  He sprang across and stood in front of him. “Get out of sight!”

  There were nine men in the party. Off at a distance their leader raised his hand.

  “United States marshal, boys. Hold back your dogs!”

  He came on in through the gray light, smiling, a stocky man in a black town suit.

  “I’m acting for the commonwealth of Keith County,” he said. “Your boss here?”

  Lew paced out toward him, saying nothing. He couldn’t make this out. For a moment back there he had thought the same thing that was in Steve’s head. The law was coming to make an arrest.

  The marshal leaned across his saddle horn. “My friend,” he said, “you’ve come a long way up from Texas. I know how long it is and hate to hold your herd up now. But we’ve got a dead line.” He waved toward the ridge. “That’s Keith County. We’ve got men camped for fifty miles along there with a quarantine order against all herds coming out of your state. Texas fever has been bad this year. You’ll have to hold up sixty days or until the first frost.”

  He didn’t answer. His breath had stopped. He felt like a man hearing the judge pronounce a sentence.

  And beside him Quarternight rumbled, “Good God! Sixty days!”

  That was it—sixty days, with the contract for these longhorns ending in less than a week.

  He knew the dread of Texas fever. A Southern herd that seemed immune could spread it like wildfire among cattle in the North, killing them off by thousands. The only thing these Northern men could do was stop the trail drives.

  Then he saw one hope.

  “You’ve got me in a jackpot, sure,” he said. “I won’t try to buck your dead line. But since this is Indian beef under government contract to reach Ogallala by the first of September I feel I’m only bound by orders of the army commandant and the Indian agent up there. They might waive the quarantine in this case.”

  “That might be,” the marshal granted. “You needn’t lose any time finding out. The army is helping us enforce this dead line. A Captain Wing of the commandant’s staff is camped straight north of here on the ridge.”

  He led his little party off to the east.

  “Well, boys,” Lew said, “you might as well get out your cards. There won’t be any work for a while. Keep the herd from drifting too far, that’s all, until I get back.”

 
He picked up his saddle, starting toward the picketed horses, and then behind the cook’s wagon he came upon Steve. He had forgotten about Steve.

  “They weren’t looking for you,” he said. Then his words struck out with no softness. “So you’re a gunman now—that’s it! Going to be on the jump for the rest of your life whenever a badge shows up!” He wheeled on without waiting for any answer.

  Saddled and riding north, he thought back over what he had seen. It was clear enough. Ever since they had left the Little Comanche Steve had been hounded by something behind him on the trail. This morning showed it was the law he feared, and that must go back to Sheriff Rayburn, killed in Ox Bow the night the bank was robbed. If Steve had done that he knew nothing could save him. For there was a certain dumb conceit in every bad man he had known. They hadn’t sense enough to see how much the game was stacked against them and could go on to a fighting end. Steve was not that dumb.

  He was already scared, and when a man is scared he whips himself.

  On top of the ridge the little military camp made a straight neat lane of pup tents, with a flag planted in front of a larger tent at the end. A bunch of yellow-legs currying down their horses stared at him and a sentry challenged him as he rode into the street.

  He said, “I’m looking for Captain Wing.” The sentry led him on.

  Like Lieutenant Eaton at Doan’s Crossing, Captain Wing, coming from his tent a moment later, was very young. He wore a saber and a pair of gauntlets, and his brown hair was down long beneath his campaign hat in the way the old Indian fighters had made popular for these boys. Looking stern and military, he showed his disapproval of all Texas trail men, which had reason enough, and Lew thought, Not much chance here.

  But he gave his name and placed himself with the Cross T herd of Indian beef, then asked, “What’s thirty miles, Captain, more or less? Since we’ve come twelve hundred to make this delivery, seems like your commandant might stretch a point and accept it right here. Why not? It’s going to be scattered anyway. You won’t hold it in Ogallala.”