There was no time left. I started for the horse and in almost the same breath the brush cracked and suddenly a torch flared up and then another.
The first person I saw was Chance Thorne, and he was grinning. The second was Joel Reese, but there were at least six, and they had rifles.
Caught!
Reese lowered his rifle and from around his waist he unwrapped a short length of log chain.
Another man shucked a heavy belt with a large brass buckle, and several others had clubs. They stacked their guns and started for me.
“I’ve got the rope,” Reese told me, “and when we get through you’ll be glad to get it. Hanging will be a pleasure after this!”
They were all around me and they could see I was unarmed. Only I wasn’t. Taking my time I tucked my thumbs behind my belt and stood looking around at them. “You’ve got it all your way, haven’t you?” I asked. “But the first man who comes at me, I’ll kill.”
In the flickering light of the torch, and with them all unsuspecting, they didn’t see the slight movement when my thumb at the base of the derringer pushed it up into my palm.
Two bullets, and then they’d have me. I wanted Chance Thorne and I wanted Joel Reese.
“Lucky we caught that girl bringin’ you the horse,” Reese said. “A girl with a horse going down here at that time of night, well, it shaped up as suspicious. We followed a hunch.”
The flickering torchlight danced on the cottonwood leaves, and under cover of the talk they had been edging in on me. I had the derringer in my hand and I was ready as a man can be.
There were guns on the horse, which was just outside the circle. There was a rifle, and at least one pistol, and there were full saddlebags and a blanket roll behind the saddle. I could kill two men and make a try for it, but there wasn’t a chance that I’d make it. They had stacked their rifles, but each man I could see wore a belt gun—three of them, anyway.
That was three too many.
“All right,” Chance said, “let’s get him!”
Reese drew back his chain and they started for me and I fired. For the second time I missed Reese, but I hit the man holding the belt with the brass buckle. He screamed and the sound, coming with the gun blast, stopped them in their tracks.
“Look out!” It was Reese yelling. “He’s got a gun!”
One man grabbed for a pistol and I fired again and hit him right in the belly and at the same instant there was a wild Texas yell from somewhere behind me and a voice that yelled, “Hold up, in there! Hold it!”
The yell was followed by a shot that knocked another man to the ground with a smashed hip. I knew that yell. It had to be Seth Rames.
From behind them another voice spoke. It was cool, easy, confident. It was John Tower. “That’s right, boys. Just stand fast.”
Turning abruptly I walked to the horse and stepped into the saddle, and when I had my hand on a pistol I turned on them. “If you’ve hurt that girl, I’ll see every man of you buried in the swamps.”
Somebody spoke up. “She’s locked up at Reese’s place.”
“She isn’t now,” Tower replied. “She’s gone, and I let her go, and if she’s ever bothered again, I’ll add my weight to Baker’s.”
They stood very still. Two voices had spoke but there might be more men. They were sure there were more, and I had no idea how many there were, only that I had a chance and suddenly the future was wide and bright again…if we could just ride out of here.
So I walked the horse to where Seth Rames was, and saw his big, raw-boned frame sitting a horse in the shadows.
“Stand fast!” he repeated, and then he swung his horse. On the soft earth it made almost no noise, but he rode along with me until we reached he highroad, and then he turned. He was a big man, as big as me in weight, but taller. “We’d better ride, Cullen. Tower’s already gone.”
We took out.
Riding at a good pace, I checked the rifle, and it seemed loaded. The pistol was okay, too. So we rode into the night.
Near the Corners, Seth drew up. “Got to reach the boys,” he said, “and I’ve a soldier who’ll let me through alone. You can make the swamps.”
The roads were empty and still, and I knew them well. Luckily, I saw no one. Once I passed a house where a late light was shining, and near another a dog barked, but I rode on into the night with the cool damp air on my face, and the smell of the swamps. It was after midnight when I crossed the Louisiana state line heading for a place I knew on James Bayou.
Maybe they had expected me to keep going, to ride clear out of the country, but I wasn’t about to go until I knew all my friends were safe. The place to which I was riding now was one nobody would connect me with, nobody knew I’d ever gone here, or had any friends here.
Avoiding Caddo Station I rode past the Salt Pits, and when daylight was gray in the sky I drew up near the dark bulk of a small cabin on the edge of the swamps. A dog barked, and a man came from the house and stood watching in my direction.
“It’s Cullen, Mike, and I’m in trouble.”
“Come on in.”
Caddo Mike was a short, square man of powerful build, no longer young. This was solid ground, a little higher than most of it around here. Suddenly I realized this was one of the strange mounds that had been built here long before the oldest Indian could remember, and ages before the white man first came to the country.
Mike took my horse and dipped suddenly from sight. Following him I found him tying the horse in an underground stable concealed among the trees, and dug into the side of the mound. The stable walls were of ancient stone, built ages ago. There were four other horses, all fine animals. It was cool there, and quite pleasant. Caddo Mike had opened a skylight on a slope of the hill which he had covered with canvas. It allowed a little light.
“White men dig for gold,” Mike explained, “long time ago, in the time of my grandfather. No gold. The Old People had no gold. Just bones here.”
Caddo Mike’s face was seamed and brown. I felt as if I had known him forever. When I was a boy, the first month we had been here from Tennessee we had found Caddo Mike staggering and delirious with fever on the edge of the swamp. We had taken him home, and dosed with quinine, he had survived to become our good friend.
One night he was in bed, and in the morning he was gone, but a few days later we found a haunch of venison hung from the porch, and on another morning, two fine wild turkeys. It had been Mike who taught me most of what I knew about the swamps where he had lived all his life. He was now, I guess, at least sixty. But he was strong and able to travel for miles on foot or horseback.
Mike made black coffee that was more than half chicory and laced it with rum. Then he brought out some corn pone, brown beans and venison.
In this remote corner Mike cultivated a field of corn, and a good-sized vegetable garden. He rarely went into any of the towns, and almost never to the same one twice in succession. White men as a rule he did not trust, and he avoided their questions or any contact with them other than involved in his few business transactions.
Over the food I explained to Mike all that had happened, and ended by telling him. “Mike, I need to know what happened back there. And I must get a message to Katy Thorne.”
When Mike had ridden away I stretched out on the bed with a pistol at my side, and trusting to the dogs who were wary of strangers, I slept.
In the late afternoon I awakened suddenly, and for a moment, as always when I awaken, I lay still, listening. There was no sound, so swinging my feet to the floor I padded across to the window and peered out into a sun-bright world.
Going out back I dipped a bucket in the tank and sloshed water over myself. The water was cold and it felt good. Four more buckets and I began to feel human and alive, so I dried off in the sun and then went back in and dressed.
First off I checked my guns. There had been a pistol on the horse and Mike had offered me another which I accepted. The rifle was my own Spencer, although how Jane Watson came by
it I don’t know and can’t guess unless John Tower got it somehow.
It was a hot, still afternoon. There were a few scattered clouds.
Locating the feed bin I fed Mike’s chickens, and then the horses. Somewhere out on the bayou a loon called, a lonesome sound. Returning to the cabin I sliced a chunk from a ham and fried up some ham and eggs, and made coffee.
The sun was low by the time I finished eating and I was growing restless. Mike was not about to be back so soon, so I rummaged around for something to read. Right now I might as well admit I’m not much of a reader. I make out to read most things, given time, but I’ve got to have time and quiet.
Caddo Mike, whom I never figured to read at all, had a sight of old magazines and books around, most of them mighty old. There was a magazine there, a copy of Atlantic Monthly for August, 1866, and I started reading a piece in it called “A Year in Montana.”
Reading that article, I’d nearly finished when I dozed off and awakened to find myself scared…I’d no business sleeping so sound or so much. And me with the light burning. Putting out the light I stood in the door until my eyes were right and then stepped out. One of the dogs came up and stood near me, and I spoke to him, mighty soft. His tail thumped my leg, and I walked down off the stoop.
The night was too quiet to suit me, edgy the way I was, and I walked out away from the cabin and turned to look back. A man could have stood where I was, within sixty feet of the house, day or night, and never known it was there.
Near Caddo Mike’s the bayou described one of those loops so common among bayous, and even in the main stream of the Sulphur, which was well north of here. The bayou took a loop and then doubled back until it almost met itself, and at this point it was shallow and almost choked with hyacinth and old logs. The road at this point followed the outside of the loop, going up one side around the end and down the other side. Nervous as a bobcat about to have kittens, I crossed one arm of the bayou and started across toward the trail on the other side. Yet I’d gone not thirty feet when I heard riders.
Stopping dead still, I heard a voice grumbling, then another ordering silence. That grumbling voice was the Barlow man whom Katy had nursed, and this must be the Barlow crowd!
Listening, straining my ears to hear, I then heard someone ask a question of someone called Sam…and it figured to be Barlow himself.
They had drawn up, stopping on the road that cut me off from a return to Caddo Mike’s. Did they know of him and his place? Had they caught Mike, and were they now searching for me?
No! Mike would die before he would talk, and there was no connection between us that anyone could figure out.
Nevertheless, I started on, moving across the narrow neck toward the other side. When I was on the inside bank of the bayou and hunting a place to cross its fifteen yards of water, at this point a fairly deep pool and clear of growth I heard another party of riders.
Squatting on my heels, I waited.
This party was walking their horses and from the jingle of accoutrements could only be a party of soldiers.
The neck of land I had crossed was barely a hundred yards from bayou to bayou, but it was all of a half mile around the loop by following the road. The idea came to me suddenly.
Calling out in a low but clear voice, just loud enough for them to hear me, I said, “You fellers huntin’ Cullen Bakuh, you better cut an’ run! He’s a-comin’ raht down the road toward you all, an’ he’s sure set for trouble!”
“Who’s there?” The voice had a sharp, military ring that I hoped couldn’t be heard on the Barlow side. “Come out and show yourself!”
By that time I was moving back toward the other side. I wanted to get to Caddo Mike’s and a horse just as fast as I could make it. If all went the way I hoped, all hell was going to break loose any time within the next fifteen minutes or less.
Barlow’s boys had moved on when I reached the far side, but I was only in the middle of a log, crossing the bayou, when I heard a voice ring out, “Hey, there! Who’s that?” And a moment later a ringing command, “Fire!”
There had been at least a dozen men in the Army command, and probably twice that many.
The blast of gunfire smashed into the night’s stillness like a breaking of a gigantic tree limb, and like it was followed by a deafening silence.
The silence lasted a moment only, then there was a rattle of gunfire, a quick exchange of shots, shots, yells and then more silence.
On the edge of the bayou I started to cross the road, then heard a rush of horses’ hoofs and a man riding. He pulled up, listening for sounds of pursuit. And then I heard someone running. He fell, scrambled up and came on, his breath coming in great gasps.
The man on the horse started, then stopped and walked his horse slowly back up the road.
“Bravo?” By the gasping breath it was the running man.
“Sam, anybody else make it?”
“Ed, I think Ed did. He dove into the swamp.”
“The rest all gone?”
“Every man-jack of them.”
Carefully, I eased myself across the road, then waited a bit. Sam Barlow was a man could stand some talking to, but shooting right now would bring the Army down on us, and I’d no wish to be captured again…I’d come too close to stretching my neck as it was.
“Somebody set us up like pigeons,” Barlow was saying.
“Thorne, he figures he don’t need us no longer.”
“No, not Thorne,” Barlow replied, but he didn’t sound very convinced
“Let’s get out of here,” Bravo suggested. “Come daylight they’ll shake this patch down like they was huntin’ coons. We better be far off come daylight.”
There was no sign of Mike at the cabin. Packing up some grub, I slipped away from the cabin and hid in the brush near the hidden stable. From where I lay I could observe the cabin and the road approaching it. The way I saw it I needed to talk to Mike before I moved, I needed to know whatever he’d found out about the others. There was no possibility of going home now, and somehow I wasn’t sorry. Both Lacy and Katy had been right all along, for they’d give me no chance here. Out West, well I could find a place for myself and make my own way, maybe in the mines or the cattle business. Maybe I could, with Katy’s help, even learn to read and write better and make something of myself.
With Katy’s help? I blushed there in the darkness. Who was I to think a girl like that would go on the dodge with me? The more I thought of it the more I figured she did indeed like me. But maybe I was wrong, and I’d no right to ask her, anyway.
To go West I had to go through the country I’d just come out of, or skirt around it, which was mighty near as bad, so whatever Mike could tell me would help. But most of all, I had to know those who helped me got clear; it just wasn’t in me to go scot-free and leave a friend in the lurch.
Suddenly two riders came down the trail and drew up nearby, far enough away to hear them talking. “Why waste our time? No matter what the sergeant says, they’re gone. That wasn’t Cullen Baker, anyway, that was the Barlow crowd. You think I don’t know that bunch? I used to run in the Thickets my ownself.”
There was a mutter of voices I could hear, and then the first man spoke out again. “Six Barlow men dead and nine wounded or captured. It was a good haul.”
“Who d’you suppose that was who yelled at us?”
The first soldier chuckled. “Who d’you suppose?”
When daylight came again I went to the stable to saddle up, but before I could get the saddle on the horse, I heard the dogs barking and knew from the sound they were welcoming someone they knew.
It was Caddo Mike. And he was alone.
Chapter 7
* * *
RIFLE CRADLED IN the hollow of my arm, I stepped from among the trees.
“You got to git from here.”
“Did you see Miss Katy?”
“You know Willow Bluff? West of the old ferry in Bowie County? She gonna meet you there.
Few people l
ived in that remote pine-covered area across the Sulphur, and there was a chance to reach the place unobserved. And it was on the way out of the country where I was known.
“She shouldn’t be riding there alone.”
“I don’t figure she gonna be alone.” Caddo Mike did not enlarge upon the statement, but went on, “They huntin’ you. The sodgers huntin’ you, the sodgers huntin’ Sam Barlow, Sam Barlow huntin’ you.”
“What about Bob Lee?”
“He had a runnin’ fight with sodgers. Joe Tinney, he dead. Buck ride back to pick him up, he dead.
It would be like Buck to ride back for his brother. It was the end for them all. The feeling was on me that I would never reach Willow Bluff, nor see Katy again. Their luck had played out.
The urge was on me to ride into Jefferson and kill Chance Thorne. Deeply, bitterly. I felt he was the cause of all that had happened, and that until he died there could be no peace for me, no matter where I went or what I did Had it not been for his hatred of me Bob Lee and Bicker-staff might now be at peace with the Union Leaguers.
No, that was untrue. They were men who would fight and alone if need be, for whatever they believed. They were men who got their backs up at tyranny.
“You ride careful, ride skeery,” Mike advised. “They bad people.”
Mike insisted I take his dapple-gray mare, and she was a good horse, a better horse than Jane Watson had found for me. Still, I was wishing I had that ornery buckskin mule of mine. He could eat a handful of grass, drink a cupful of water, and he was already to go again.
Stepping into the saddle I looked down at Mike, reluctant to leave. “S’long. Mike,” I said, and walked the horse away, not looking back.
From this point every step was a danger, every mile an added risk. Right then I was sure I was going to be killed, it was a feeling I had not had before, and one that I could not shake. I should never have returned after the war, but to abandon the land would take all the meaning from the years of labor Pa and Ma had put in. Come to think of it, Pa himself had moved on a couple of times, and in such a case, he would move, too.
The First Fast Draw Page 13