“Johns was crazy. There was no tellin’ what he might do.”
Matt nodded. Then lifting his glass, he glanced over it at Deane. “How long have you known Clive Massey?” he asked.
The half friendly light vanished from Logan Deane’s eyes and they turned flat gray. “I don’t just remember,” he said coolly, “I really don’t remember!”
“Well,” Matt said, “I know nothing about him, but I’ve got a feeling, Deane. It’s a feeling that he should be lined up with us!”
Logan Deane’s eyes studied him warily, but there was speculation in them now. “You mean, you think he’s a gun slinger?”
“Yes, I do. Only Clive Massey would throw a gun only for what he could get out of it. Remember that, Deane!”
Logan Deane studied him. “Why tell me?” he said. “Why warn me?”
“Because someday you and I may shoot it out, Logan,” Matt said. “I hope not, because I’m not a man who likes to kill, but if the time comes when we face each other, it will be fair and above board an’ the best man will win. If either of us ever faces Clive Massey, it will not be until all the breaks are on his side!”
Deane did not comment. He turned his glass on the bar, studying the wet rings left by the bottom of it.
“We’d have heard his name.”
“Maybe we have,” Matt suggested, “maybe we have … an’ it might be a different one than the handle he uses now.”
“Who?”
“You’re as good at guessing as I am.” Matt shrugged. “But a man could figure it out, maybe. Clay Allison has a club foot, an’ Wyatt Earp has a different color of hair an’ eyes. Also, he’s an honest man. He’s too big for Billy, an’ I know Dave Rudabaugh, but he’s one of them. I know he is!”
Matt was waiting on the street by the hitching rail when Murphy came up with Ban. Both men had stopped by after the show to get their horses, and now they were saddled up and ready to go. It was a good long ride they had ahead of them.
Bardoul glanced up and saw Brian Coyle going into the IXL, and saw Massey leave them at the door. All would be moving out soon, so if he was to speak, it must be now. Clive Massey was heading down the street, so without a word, Matt stepped up on the boardwalk and followed the Coyles into the hotel. Barney had joined them and the three were going upstairs.
They opened the door of Brian Coyle’s room, and he lighted a light. When he lifted it, he saw Matt Bardoul standing in the door. They all three looked at him, waiting, trying to find some reason for his being there.
“I’d like to speak to you, sir,” he said carefully.
“Very well.” Brian was puzzled. “Come in and close the door.”
“Sir,” he said, “tonight when I was saddling my horse a man spoke out of a dark stall … I didn’t get a glimpse of him … and warned me not to go on this trip. He warned me that nobody was to come back alive.”
“Nonsense, my boy! Utter nonsense! Why, the Sioux wouldn’t think of attacking a train as large as ours!”
“He wasn’t thinking of the Sioux. I believe he was thinking of the same thing I was, that there are too many outlaws on this wagon train.”
Brian Coyle’s face had hardened. “Just what is your motive for this advice, Bardoul? I’ll admit I was aware there was some bad blood between you and Massey, but I ascribed that to nothing more than Clive’s short temper and your own abruptness.”
“Are you aware of the character of the men around him? Of Bat Hammer, or Abel Bain?”
“Bain? I don’t believe I know him.”
“You wouldn’t. He’s hiding in Hammer’s wagon. He’s known in all the camps as a thief and a murderer.”
Coyle’s face was stiff now, and his manner had grown chill. “Really, Bardoul, I think you’ve gone far enough. If you had such suspicions you should have voiced them at the meeting and not come to me here alone and by night. I’m afraid, sir, you’re guilty of some very ungentlemanly conduct!”
Matt’s face paled a little. His eyes shifted to Jacquine’s but she glanced away coldly. “I was thinking of your daughter, sir. If there is trouble it would not be a good place for her.”
“We, my son and I, are quite capable of caring for Jacquine’s interests. You forget, young man, that I am one of the leaders of this wagon train, that I helped organize it, that I might say, I did organize it!
“Every man on this train is known to me, personally. Each one has been vouched for by one of my trusted friends. If there is any such person as Abel Bain, I have seen nothing of him.
“As to your tale bearing, and I’m sorry Bardoul, but there is no other name for it, I can only say that I have known some things about you and your past conduct for some days. I do not refer to the fact that you are an acknowledged gunfighter and a killer. I refer to other stories, known to the military, and they do not reflect well upon you, sir.
“Until now I had not mentioned those stories, nor did my son or daughter know of them, but under the circumstances, you leave me no other alternative than to mention them.
“Now, sir, let me give you a warning: you are going with us. I, myself, spoke for you against the wishes of Colonel Pearson and Clive Massey. But I know from what the Colonel has told me that you are a rebel and a troublemaker. We will have no trouble caused by you on this trip! Understand that! If there is, no one man on the train will be called upon to face you! We have organized our own force to keep the peace on this wagon train, and in the town until it is settled and an election can be held. At the first sign of trouble from you, you will be summarily dealt with!”
“Thank you, sir.” Matt Bardoul’s face was deathly white.
He turned abruptly and started for the door, then with his hand on the knob, he turned his head. “I know nothing of the personnel of your police force, or who its leader may be, but I’ll make a little bet that Clive Massey is the commander, and that he chose the men to enforce the law!”
That time the remark got over. He saw Coyle’s eyes narrow slightly with realization, and Matt knew he had been correct. He turned and walked outside, pulling the door shut after him.
Buffalo asked him no questions, and they mounted up and started out of town, yet when he turned off the trail to Split Rock and went by a different route, they made no comment. Buffalo was riding with his rifle across his saddle bows.
When he rolled out of his blankets at daybreak, the camp was already stirring. Fires were glowing over the bottomland where the wagons had gathered, and as he pulled on his boots he saw that Bill Shedd had a fire going.
The big man grinned when he walked up. “Little coffee goes good on a chilly mornin’,” he said. “But she’ll be plenty hot after that sun gets up!”
Bardoul nodded. “That’s right. Did you refill those water barrels?”
“Yep, sho’ did. We got plenty of water. More’n enough, most ways, to last us three days.”
“We’re liable to need it.”
Hardy and Buffalo came up and joined them, but there was little talk. He had said nothing about his warning to Coyle, but he knew they were quite aware of what he had done, and approved it. From his actions they probably deduced the result.
Last gear was loaded into the wagons, and Murphy had already mounted the seat when Matt looked around to see a tall young man, very slender, approaching him. The fellow had blond hair that needed cutting, and a shy face. “Mr. Bardoul?” he asked. “Could you use another driver? I know you have one, and you probably want to drive your other wagon yourself, but I thought, maybe you … besides,” he added suddenly, “I’d drive it for nothing! I … just want to be along. I want to go with the train.”
“Did you talk to Brian Coyle?”
“No, I didn’t. I talked with the other man … the tall one. The Army man.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I couldn’t come unless I had a wagon.”
That decided Matt. “Can you handle an ox team?”
The boy’s eyes brightened. “Yes, sir. I certainly can! Ox
en or mules, it doesn’t make any difference! I can keep your wagon in good shape, too!”
“All right! Mount up!”
He walked back to his horse and climbed into the saddle. From far ahead came the long, familiar call, “Ro-l-l-l-l ‘em over!”
Whips cracked, and his wagon started. From the back of the zebra dun, he watched the wagons roll out and form up in four parallel columns, each almost a half mile long.
Gray dawn was lifting behind them, and he watched the oxen move out, a step, and then another step, in a slow, swaying, rhythmical movement, the covered wagons rumbling behind. Long grass waved in the light breeze, and far ahead, skylined on a hill top, Colonel Orvis Pearson lifted his hand theatrically, and motioned them on.
For better or worse, they had started. Now it only remained to wait and see what was to happen.
4
Westward, the land lay empty. Behind them the rising sun threw their long shadows before them across the wind rippled grass. They were shadows not soon to fade from these virgin lands, but they were to lie long upon the plain and the mountain, darkening the retreat of the Indian.
The buffalo, of course, were gone. Here and there a lonely old bull, or a cow with a calf, wandered dismally and alone where once they trailed with their millions. The buffalo had roamed the prairies for countless years, and then the white man had come, and the buffalo were gone like a sprinkling of powder in a strong wind.
The Indians were a shattered few, defiant but defeated. In their last gesture, the swan song of a warlike people, they had met and defeated Custer. They had wiped him out.
After Custer the combined armies of Terry, Crook, and Gibbon advanced relentlessly, and against the scattered forces of the Indian they had little trouble. The warfare of the white man was never understood by the Indian, and if he learned at last, he learned too late, for his power was already broken.
To an Indian, a battle was a war. He did not think in terms of campaigns, and the winning or losing of a battle decided everything, and when it was over he returned to his tepee and his squaw. He had not learned to cope with the superior barbarism of the white man’s warfare. The white man did not stop. He kept coming.
Yet somehow, even in defeat the red man contrived to come off best. Wrapped in his blanket like a Roman senator in his toga, he stalked from the scene. The future might rob him of his morale, it might break him down, but he walked from the field a victor. If he was conquered later, it was never in full battle array. He was conquered by the slaughter of the buffalo and the relentless march of the white settlers even more than by the Army. It is still true that in the last major battle between the armies of the white man and the warriors from the Sioux and Cheyenne villages, that the Indian won.
Matt Bardoul loved the country into which he was riding. The blind drive after wealth and power had never seemed to him to be either worthy or comfortable. His own driving energies and his desire to see what lay across the horizon had moved him west, and once he saw the long, waving sea of grass, the rolling aspen cloaked hills, and the mounting ranks of the lodgepole pine, his heart was forever lost to this lonely, beautiful land.
The Big Horns still lay across that horizon, an image in the mind rather than the sky. Riding his long legged zebra dun on the side hill away from the wagon train, Matt knew that whatever the result, whatever the cost, this trip was worth the effort. This was his land, these were his people.
Riding alone, away from the dust of the wagons, he let the dun pick his own way, while his mind began ferreting a way down the winding burrows of passion and feeling that disturbed the people of the train.
In the clear light of day he was compelled to admit that he had no reason for any suspicion beyond his knowledge of the men around Massey. There was every chance that everything was strictly honest and straight forward. Father De Smet had always claimed there was gold in the Big Horns, and Tate Lyon’s story might be true. If it was not true, why had they gone to such pains? Such effort?
Was he not prejudiced by his innate dislike of Massey? Or by Jacquine’s seeming preference for the man?
Pearson had proved, some six years before, that as an Army officer he was an inexperienced nincompoop and a coward, but that was six years ago, and time may bring many changes to a man for the better as well as for the worse. It was true that so far Colonel Orvis Pearson’s only gesture toward leadership had been just that … a gesture.
Seated upon a splendid horse, very straight in the saddle, he had removed his hat with a sweeping gesture worthy of Custer himself, and waved the wagon train on.
Logan Deane was a killer, but as he had admitted, he had killed men himself. On Deane he could reserve an opinion. For Batsell Hammer there was no need nor room for reservation. He was a renegade who stopped at nothing. He was a thief and a murderer, and known by all the frontier as such.
Abel Bain was worse. The huge, surly Bain was a wolf where Hammer was a coyote. He was violent, treacherous, brutal. However, Massey was new to the frontier, apparently, and he might not know about Bain.
That Spinner Johns had tried to kill him shortly after a talk with Massey, might be a coincidence. Johns was the sort who might try to kill anyone, and with slight provocation. If that fight had been an effort of Massey’s, the dark, handsome Clive had been grievously disappointed.
He was, he decided, building fantastic suspicion upon nothing at all. There was no way in which Massey could hope to gain.
The warning in the stable might have come from someone who had tried for a place in the train and been refused.
At the next stop the situation might reveal itself more clearly, for then the elections would be held to determine the captains of the four companies.
In his own group, aside from his two wagons driven by Shedd and Tolliver, there were the wagons of Murphy and Ban Hardy, Aaron Stark with one wagon, Rabun Kline with one, and the three wagons of Lute Harless. Each of the latter was driven by a son of Aaron Stark.
Still another wagon had joined them when they moved out that morning. Curiously, he dropped back alongside to see who was the driver. A big, wide shouldered man hunched on the wagon seat, a man with a wide smile and a ready laugh. But as he looked at Matt his eyes were shrewd, intense.
He waved to Bardoul. “You in command?”
“Nobody is. The election is tonight.”
Matt touched the dun with a spur and cantered ahead until he drew alongside Murphy’s wagon. The big mountain man grinned at him. “Reckon this route will take us by the Stone Cup? Never forget the place. Holed up there three days once, standin’ off some thievin’ Crows.”
“Be good to get back,” Bardoul agreed, “I like the Big Horns.”
“Wonder where at that gold is? I’ve been runnin’ it over in my mind, an’ I can’t seem to figure it out. I never seen none, my own self.”
“You weren’t looking for gold, Buff. It could be there, all right. Personally, I don’t care. I’ve an idea of finding myself a ranch over in the basin and runnin’ a few cows.”
“Who does know where we’re goin’, I wonder?”
“Coyle, probably. Certainly Pearson an’ Massey. Then Lyon has been there, and Portugee Phillips will have been told. We’ll get the lowdown tonight, but until then nobody is supposed to know. Frankly, I haven’t even tried to guess.”
Murphy glanced at him. “Seen that girl of Coyle’s a few minutes ago. She was ridin’ a mighty pretty spotted pony. Said Clive Massey gave it to her.”
Matt offered no comment, and Murphy lighted his pipe and settled to driving. All morning Matt had avoided thinking of the girl, feeling that whatever consideration she might have given him had been erased by last night’s discussion at the hotel. Clive Massey, much in her father’s favour, would have all the advantage, nor was he a man likely to lose any time in making the most of the opportunity.
Studying his own position, Matt Bardoul could see that it was scarcely enviable. Colonel Pearson had studiously avoided him, which was understandable,
for Matt alone knew of the man’s fearful incompetence. Brian Coyle, who had been Matt’s one friend among the leaders could be considered a friend no longer. As for Massey, he knew the man would like nothing so well as to see Bardoul out of the wagon train.
When they pulled up for a brief lunch, Bardoul loped the dun down to the fire. It had been Stark’s suggestion, eagerly accepted by the others, that his girls do the cooking for all, and that they have a community cooking, with each bringing a share.
Stark was sitting on a log near the fire when Matt swung down from the saddle and began loosening his cinch. “Howdy!” Stark called. “Who’s the feller tied on behind?”
The man walked up just in time to hear the question. He looked around the group, smiling widely. “Name of Ernie Braden! Mornin’ folks!” he boomed. “I reckon we’re all friends here! So you just call me Ernie!”
Stark glanced at his empty hands, took his pipe from his mouth and spat, but said nothing.
Braden picked up a cup and held it out to Sary Stark. “How’s about some coffee, Ma’am? From those purty hands of yours, it’ll seem plumb sweet!”
Lute Harless walked up with the three Stark boys. Jeb sat down on the log beside his father. “Wished night would come. I’d sure enough like to know where we’re headed!”
Braden looked around and winked. “I could give you a hint,” he said knowingly, “You ever hear tell of Shell Creek? That’s my bet!”
Buffalo Murphy stared at the fire, then he lifted his eyes, squinting at Braden. “You ever been to Shell Creek?”
“No,” Braden admitted, “I ain’t. Only,” he winked, “I hear a few things.”
“You tell ‘em, too, I reckon,” Jeb Stark said.
Braden seemed not to hear. He glanced around at the group, slapping himself emphatically on the stomach. “Well, tonight’s the big night! Election! Don’t reckon there’s any party lines here, but it’s a mighty big thing, choosin’ a leader. A captain, that is. We sure want to pick somebody who has the confidence of the leaders of this outfit. Then everything will go along much better.”
Novel 1950 - Westward The Tide (v5.0) Page 6