The 7th Western Novel

by Francis W. Hilton

  Wing thought about it, frowning. “Your contract I know,” he said, “calls for delivery across the river. As far as the army is concerned I can’t see that thirty miles mean anything. All we do is act as escort for the Indian agent. But I think there’s where you’ll run into trouble.” He shrugged. “Not telling tales out of school—you know how it is. The agent deals with the Indian Supply Company, and two partners of that company are in Ogallala now, waiting for a herd of their own.”

  “Sure,” Lew said, “the Open A. Fought me all the way up. That’s why I’ve got to beat this quarantine. If I’m held after September first my subcontract with them is broken. They can deliver their own herd any time.”

  He looked at the officer and thought the army was a decent outfit after all. But he knew how it was with some Indian agents. They were in a place where money could turn the game. If this one in Ogallala had been reached that way there’d be no favors for the Cross T.

  “You think,” he asked, “it would do any good if I rode in to see your commandant?”

  “No,” Wing said, “you needn’t do that. I’m sending a courier in this morning. I’ll write a note and have an answer back sometime in the afternoon.”

  “All right, thanks.”

  He moved his horse and stopped and sat, gripped between a thing he wanted to know and didn’t want to know either. She had said she would write and tell him how Clay was. In the end he said, “If it isn’t too much trouble your man might bring out the Cross T mail.”

  Riding along the ridge afterward before turning south, he could see the wide twisting line of the South Platte river bottom and almost make out the town far across the gently sloping plain. For a man to be this close, hardly a frog’s jump away, compared to the trail—he shook his head and put that sight behind his back.

  His hope was small enough, but it carried him through that afternoon, riding guard on the loosely grazing herd until he thought it was time to get his mail. Then he saw a yellow-legged trooper loping out of the north. He waved the rider over, thanked him, and said there was a good poker game going in camp and was alone then with two envelopes in his hand.

  He opened the brown official one of the War Department first and was not surprised, only a little heavier inside, to read that it had been determined there could be no waiver of the quarantine. The Cross T herd would have to be delivered one mile north of the South Platte as per contract.

  The other was a gray paper of the telegraph office. She never was much on letter writing, never a girl to waste a lot of words. It was like that in this message when he opened it:

  Clay recovering. Will be able to come by train soon.

  He counted them. Ten exactly to tell him all he needed. He didn’t even have to guess. They’d be married, he knew, before they started that journey of a week together. He looked at the date. It had been sent August fifteenth. Maybe they were now.

  Waiting, idle, was hard on men who had hired out for fighting and on his own hands who’d had no time to blow themselves off in Dodge. In a couple of days they had gambled on all there was to gamble on, draw and stud and blackjack; there’d been an argument about horses, settled by a race. Most of the money by this time was in Joe Wheat’s and Rebel John’s pockets.

  Across the miles off east of them the dark blots of other held-up herds were like piles of driftwood behind a dam. At night their campfires glowed and beckoned, but he didn’t allow the crews to mix.

  He had tried not to show what the wait was doing inside himself. Yet they must have known and thanked God the responsibility of this herd wasn’t on their hands. It drifted aimlessly like a ship becalmed on a flat brown sea. Only there had been a wind blowing, the wrong kind of a wind, soft and warm out of the west.

  The night when he crossed August twenty-ninth from the cook’s almanac was like every other. After supper, with two card games starting up around the campfire, he dragged his bedroll to Joy’s wagon and sat there, smoking a cigarette with his back against the huge wheel. He watched Steve play at one of the games for a little while, saw him stand up and look around for something, then come on past the firelight.

  Afterward he was able to know what brought Steve to him. But that took time. His first thought now, as Steve came on and sat down at his side without a word, was that the kid was moved by a sort of pity, and that turned him bluntly silent. He didn’t speak and kept his eyes on the campfire as if he were still alone.

  Yet he could see the boy’s sober face a little without looking directly at it, as he settled himself on the bedroll and bent forward, his arms on his knees. It was an older face than when they had left the Little Comanche. The trail had done that. The young petulance was gone from the full, wide mouth. It had hardened. Then something, a strange feeling in the quietness, made Lew turn his head. And it wasn’t pity for him altogether that had brought Steve here now.

  Perhaps that was part of it, a little. Steve knew he was almost licked, down under. It put them on some common ground. But what he saw in the hollowed, staring eyes was a loneliness that he understood. Let times get black enough and that was the last thing left in a man. You were born lonely, he guessed; he knew it was how you died. Long ago he had watched a man die, a hard man, and this knowledge of loneliness had come to him then. “Boys, don’t leave me,” was all that one had asked.

  There comes a time when you can’t go it any longer alone.

  “Steve,” he said and laid his arm across the drooping shoulders, “buck up. What is it, kid?” He closed his hand in a strong grip. “Get it off your mind.”

  There was a little wait. A whoop burst from the circle down cross-legged at the card game. From the darkness off toward the bed ground he heard Charley Storm’s one guard song for all occasions, good or bad, drifting in.

  How happy am I,

  From care I am free.

  Oh, why cannot all

  Be happy like me?

  A faint smile turned the straight set of his mouth and something in the clowning fool’s song lifted the weight in him.

  Then Steve said, “Lew, what are you going to do?”

  “Me?” He hadn’t meant to talk about himself. “I don’t know exactly. We can salvage something out of this. It won’t all be loss. The market’s gone for beef, but five dollars a head for hides and tallow, maybe.” He figured it up. “That makes fifteen thousand. You can bank the money. Then there’s this bunch of a thousand shes and young stuff, less two hundred the Cheyennes got. They’ll start your new ranch in Wyoming. Beef is bound to pick up again. It always does after a drop.” Out loud the future didn’t sound so bad.

  But he saw Steve move his head slowly back and forth, not looking at him.

  “Not for me, Lew. I told you once I can’t go on.” He paused, staring down. “I’ve got to go back.”

  “Back where?”

  “Texas. It’s like you said; I’m going to be on the jump for the rest of my life whenever a badge shows up. Once I thought I could face it like that. But I can’t. I found that out the other day. I’d rather hang than be on the dodge.”

  It was bitter talk and a little young in its remorse, he felt, swinging too far from one side clear to the other.

  “Want to let me in?” he asked. “Where did it start, the bank?”

  Steve nodded. “That’s it. Earlier in the evening I was with the bunch who did it and rode with them up Crazy Woman afterward that night. No one would believe this. I got drunk and haven’t any idea what happened in between. But they said I held the horses and killed Sheriff Rayburn when he found me. It’s the word of four of them against mine.”

  “Now wait,” Lew said. He pulled his arm from the bent shoulders. “Who were the four? Do I know them?”

  “One. Ed Splann. I don’t think you ever saw the other three. But they’re riding with the Open A.”

  This didn’t tell much that he had not already guessed. He let Ste
ve wait and when no more seemed coming he asked, “Where does Clay come in?” And then to keep it straight he added, “I’ll tell you what I know. Clay let some of that bunch run off your father’s horses at the start. That put the traitor’s brand on him right there.”

  Steve’s head turned beside him sharply. “Lew, it wasn’t that! Clay tried to stand in front of me and got caught himself. I know how you feel about him. You’ve had plenty of reason to hate him on the trail. But after the robbery I let Clay know the fix I was in. Ed Splann and the other three hadn’t joined the Open A. They were only drifting friends I’d picked up. Clay made a deal with them to get clean out of the country with what they knew I’d done. Their price was twenty head of saddle stock. I know now it was a blunder. They didn’t leave and came back for more, and then riding north with the Open A, they could hold over both of us all they knew. Hadn’t you thought of that?”

  No, he hadn’t, not Clay’s part, trying to help Steve; and it held him silently thinking you could never wholly judge any man. Clay, he had thought before, had his tail in some kind of a crack. Tracing it through those unexplainable times of letting Splann run him and seeming only trying to block the Cross T herd, he could see now how Clay was acting under the Open A’s threat of knowing that Steve Arnold had killed a man. It was like Clay, though, to make one blunder and then horn in deeper in his bullish way.

  “Lew,” Steve was saying, “you should’ve let me go into Dodge when Clay did. That was my fight. We’d talked about it. If we got Splann and the other three in a corner we’d wipe them out.”

  “If Clay thought that,” he said, “something broke loose in his brain! But he’s getting along all right.” He hadn’t told about the telegram. “I got word from Joy today. They’ll be up here pretty soon.” He thought about it. “They’ll be married, Steve, I figure. And when we get rid of this herd you and I’ll backtrack the trouble you’re in.”

  “But you’re going on.”

  He shook his head. “No. We’ll let Clay and Joy start the new ranch. I can see plenty of loopholes in Rayburn’s killing. Those four can swear it against you now, but maybe we can make them swallow their tongues. Ed Splann took liquor inside the Indian Nations. I can get witnesses, Chief Spotted Horse for one. That throws them into the hands of the United States marshal right here in Ogallala. Gives me an ax to hold over their heads. And there’s other ways to make a man give up the truth.” He considered that and didn’t say what he saw. “We’ll find out who killed Rayburn. I’d gamble it wasn’t you.” He grinned suddenly. “You can’t hit the broad side of a barn when you’re sober. That night you were drunk!”

  Again he put his arm across the slanted shoulders and pulled them up. “We’ll work it out, Steve. Don’t let it hound you anymore.”

  He lay that night in his bedroll smoking a last cigarette—he needn’t ride guard now with so many extra hands—and there was a mingled bleakness and relief in what he felt.

  Something had filled in him that had long been empty.

  He was back on his old footing again with Steve. And Steve himself was finishing up this trail facing his troubles in a way that Tom Arnold would be proud of. It was one thing the old man had wanted most in his life. That account was settled.

  But his own failure with Tom’s fortune on the hoof was black. He couldn’t be blamed for the quarantine, and yet when a man set out to deliver a herd he delivered it, come hell or high water. It was the pride of being a good trail boss. Fifteen thousand dollars, maybe, for the hides and tallow sounded good in talk, but it wasn’t much of a payoff for the years that had gone into the herd. It wasn’t ninety thousand and wouldn’t be much for the new ranch after all.

  He finished his cigarette and rubbed it out against the ground. It seemed strange then that he didn’t feel as low as he might. Over him the stars had never looked so clear and sharp. There was nothing going to spoil his sleep.

  He turned on his side and dropped off soundly—and the next thing a mule’s trace chains were clanking and dragging over him and a voice was yelling, “Whoa there! Whoa!” He bolted upright in his blankets and saw Charley Storms in the gray dawn, running and yanking the chains over the row of beds.

  Other shapes were sitting up and someone growled, “Who the hell turned that fool loose?”

  Then he saw John Quarternight rise more slowly next to him.

  Charley Storms came back to yell, “Look you lazy cowboys! Look!”

  He saw it then—all the prairie lying beyond as white as Quarternight’s hair. Frost!

  The old man turned to him. “Lew,” he said, “if that don’t make you believe in God nothing will.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Joy

  They could move now. Sixty days’ time or one good frost would kill the Texas fever. The quarantine wouldn’t hold. Dressed, he stepped out of his blankets onto a mat of grass as stiff as nails. In the dawn the prairie looked like snow.

  To the cook he said, “Pull up the ridge before you stop for breakfast. We’re going to get a wiggle on ourselves.”

  With the herd shaped and walking fast in the cold air, waiting for the frost to melt before they grazed, he pointed up the ridge at eight o’clock. No one stopped them. On along the crest he could see the Northern cowmen breaking their dead-line camps, and as he passed the military street where the yellow-legs were rolling up their tents, Captain Wing rode out.

  His brown face was polished from an early shave; he was looking pleased.

  “Well, Texan,” he said, “you played in luck. The Cheyennes claimed we’d get an early frost this year. I’m going on to the post now, but I’ve detailed some of my men to escort you in the rest of the way, just in case of trouble.”

  “That’s mighty good of you, Cap,” he said. “The cook’s up there in front with beefsteaks for breakfast. You’d better stop.”

  One last night’s camp south of Ogallala, a dry one—there was no water here—and they crossed the river the next day at noon. For more than a mile the thirsty herd spread out in the wide bottom, drank and splashed themselves and romped on up the low bluffs beyond. They were fatter and better-looking than when they had left the Little Comanche. That was good. He wouldn’t need to argue with the agent about condition. All his contract stated anyway was numbers and an average weight of five hundred pounds when this beef was dressed. Even a greenhorn could see the animals would do that.

  From the flat top of a mesa north of the river, flanking the herd and shaping it again, he looked back and could see the far-off arrowheads of other herds coming down the divide. The Open A must be among them. Let them come.

  A yelling commotion turned him. He was up high enough now to see all the mesa toward its rim of hills. Hundreds of canvas tepees dotted it. A swarm of mounted bucks had started a race toward him, riding cream-colored ponies and decked out in gaudy blanket shirts for this special occasion. Women and children were running afoot behind them, the squaws’ dresses flapping in a dangerous way for cattle.

  He called across to Quarternight and they ran their horses forward to turn that danger of a stampede. The bucks veered off at his waving signal. The women stopped. He judged there were a thousand Indians in this camp.

  Riding back to the point again, he was thankful he didn’t have to see this beef issued. Hunting down wild animals was a different matter, but these longhorns had become almost as tame as pets. Mostly these days the government did its own butchering. Yet they still let the Sioux and some of the Cheyennes make a holiday of it if they had been good, he guessed.

  The cattle would be held in a stockade, and when each tribe’s ration had been counted out that number would be released on open ground. The mounted bucks would wait until they got to running good. Then they’d sweep out on their ponies, using lances and steel-tipped arrows to make the kill. It was the squaws’ job after that to strip the hides and trim the meat; while in all the camps there would be da
nces and big doings through the day and night. It was as near as they could come now to their old-time buffalo hunts.

  He saw the stockade a little later, a huge square fenced with poles and wire on the flat mesa top. And soon after that an army ambulance came up from the east in the direction of Ogallala. The town was out of sight below the river bluff. An escort of yellow-legs trotted beside the slick-varnished three-seated outfit. They swung off out of his dust, until one of the troopers came toward him and he recognized Captain Wing.

  “There was another telegram in town for you,” Wing said. “Thought you might want it.”

  He nodded, turned the gray envelope in his hand, and waited till Wing rode off. He ripped it open. It was like her other. Ten words:

  Arriving Ogallala on Cannon Ball nine p.m. August thirty-one. Love.

  He slapped the settling dust from it and read it again, staring at the last. She might be only filling the allotted space. And yet she never did waste her words. He felt a quick warm stir run through his blood and tried to hold that feeling down. But tonight she would be here. This was August thirty-first.

  There were those afternoon hours to pass, the dusty job of parting out the ranch stuff from the herd and after that feeding the beef longhorns in a thin line through the stockade gate. He sat his horse on one side, counting, while the post commandant and the Indian agent watched from the other. He could see their eyes sweat and knew they lost their count early. In the end they took his word.

  And all the time, shouting out his tally at each hundred head to Joe Wheat who wrote the numbers down, he was only half seeing the cattle streaming past.

  * * * *

  Long before train time he was pacing the loose cinders of the depot yard. He needn’t have come so early. The Cannon Ball was late. But he hadn’t wanted to join the drinking and the blow off going on in town—later, maybe, but not yet. The Black Elephant and the Dew-Drop Inn and the Lone Star would have a rush tonight. Off in the dark he could hear riders pounding across the bridge as they came from late-arriving herds. There would be fights aplenty before morning. His men could take care of themselves now though; the only trouble he worried about was the one around Steve. And so, as in Dodge, he’d had Steve keep out of town for a little while, staying on guard with the ranch cows.