Riders of Judgment

by Frederick Manfred

  The fiddlelike heads of two bay horses came into view of the fire then. The trotters swung sideways, to reveal a light two-seated green wagon behind with blurring sparkling wheelspokes. Three faces showed up out of the dark: high-headed darksome Jesse Jacklin, mean handsome Link Keeler alias Hunt Lawton, and red-faced Peter Caudle, Earl of Humberwick, the owner of the Derby. What caught the eye was the contrast between the black curling walrus mustaches on Jesse’s and Link’s faces and the shaven smoothness of Lord Peter’s upper lip.

  “Lord Peter in a democrat!” Cain whispered. “Who’d a thought His Lordship would finally come to that? Must’ve lost his carriage-and-four and his servants in a loaded poker game.”

  Staring at the three new faces, Dale slowly turned white. “Link! This puts us in a real bind.” Dale dropped his hand on his .45.

  Cain laid a hand on his brother’s arm. “Steady now, Dale. Cattle first and feelings after.”

  Harry paled some too. “Jesse,” he said softly. “I didn’t expect to see him here.” Harry gave Cain an odd troubled look; then glanced around behind him.

  Cain said, “Remember now, you waddies, first things first. You can count cattle but not regrets.”

  “That’s a gut, “ Timberline grunted. Timberline placed a hand on the shoulder of Dale, who had half-gotten up, and pulled him down. “Pull in your hosses a bit, my laddie.”

  Dale said, “I think we should slide for home.”

  Cain said, low, intense, “No, no. Set a spell. We’ve bluffed them so far and I think we’ll come out. We still got Hambone on our side.”

  “What? With the prime minister of England himself present to make it legal in case they decide to hold a necktie party?”

  Cain let some of it go then. He said, low, hoarse, “My hands are clean and I’m stayin’. Alone if need be.”

  Dale started to get up again, still wild to do something. “But what about Link?”

  “Sit!” Timberline said, jerking Dale back to the ground.

  Cain said, “The whole trick is to make’em play the cards our way. It’s our deal.”

  The light green wagon stopped at the very edge of the log fire. The bay trotters were lathered with sweat. Curls of slobber dropped from their mouths. They champed nervously, fawncing on their bits, still running in their heads.

  Jesse, sitting on the near side, threw down the reins to Mitch. “Here, hold these ribbons while I help Lord Peter.” Jesse stepped across the front wheel and climbed down. Limping badly on his left leg, he went around to the other side and helped the Englishman down. Link followed Jesse out and stood to one side, elbows nervously hoisting up his gun under his long black coat, staring at the faces around the fire. Link’s dark-edged gray eyes glittered in the jumping orange fire.

  Jesse came limping around to the fire with slim blond Lord Peter in tow. Lord Peter walked with his toes out and quite knock-kneed. His gait was in direct contrast with bowlegged pigeon-toed Jesse’s.

  Jesse spotted Four-eye Irish and Peakhead Jim. “You two, go around and unload His Lordship’s tent and rigging.” Jesse spoke in a drawling yet hard voice. “There’s a cot in there and a table and cases. Set the tent facing the fire. And make sure there ain’t no rattlers underfoot.“ Jesse rubbed his sore leg. “And you, Ringbone, unhitch the trotters and rub’em down.” Jesse glanced over to where Hambone still sat smoking and musing to himself under the canvas fly, a smile working his old leather-stiff face. “Hambone, how’s for chuck?”

  Hambone removed pipe from mouth, slowly. “Wal, I reckon I still got a few whistleberries left. Some son-of-a-bitch stew mabbe. A few shot biscuits. Plus a couple a slabs of His Lordship’s beef. Later on I was plannin’ on servin’ a treat.”

  “Good enough. Dish it out and set it on for His Lordship when the boys’ve got his tent up.”

  “Table for three?” Hambone asked, the smile wrinkling up his face even more.

  At that Lord Peter came to. “Oh, I say, I’m not accustomed to eating with the help.”

  Jesse flushed. His dark face almost blackened with it. He said, “Serve His Lordship separate.” He bent down to rub his knee again, as if to hide his mortification. Then he said, “Me? I always eat with my boys. Always have and always will. Oh yes, the earl will want his hot tea after.”

  “Tea!” Hambone exploded, rearing up his humpback. “Tea? Well, I never.”

  “Yes, tea!” Jesse commanded.

  “Wal, we’ll see. Clutchbelly stew I’ll serve His Bullship. But tea, I’ll be durned ifI’ll set around watching him sip from a cup like he thought it was hot sodder. He can have black java like the rest of us Americans.”

  “I say …” blond and imperial Lord Peter began, blinking.

  With a gesture of impatience, as if to suggest that to argue with a cook out in the wilds was the most ridiculous thing he ever heard of, Jesse jerked out a long brown cigar and offered it to the earl. The earl accepted, and casually lit up.

  Cain hadn’t seen Peter Caudle, the Earl of Humberwick, in some time, not since the day when he and Harry and Timberline had helped Jesse skin the earl. So far as Cain could see the earl hadn’t changed much. He still dressed in breeches buttoned at the knee, with high-topped polished boots and hard black derby and oaken cane and pigskin gloves. Cain remembered how in the old days whenever Lord Peter met a lady, he’d stop, catch his cane under an arm, lift his derby, clap himself hard on the head, and move on—all in the way of a formal greeting.

  When Lord Peter first came West, he was about as green as a greenhorn could get. Slim, blond, he’d just arrived from Siouxland where he’d visited an English “pup farm” north of Le Mars, a place where the nobility of England sent their socially outcast members, “the troublesome pups.” The pups were remittance men, that is, they depended for their existence upon the remittance of money from their families overseas. Lord Peter had been knocking around America looking for fun, when he heard that the pups played very good polo and ran top hounds as well. So out of nostalgia he went to the pup farm. What he found there was not a piece of Old England at all but “a hole with terrible terrible manners” and almost complete debauchery. Lord Peter wandered on, and came to Cheyenne. And there, in the sumptuous Cactus Club, coming across the latest quick-money scheme, cattle, Lord Peter really got bit. For all his hardheaded British caution in matters of finance, he was hardly a match for the shrewd Westerners. The plainsmen outwitted him at every turn. He was cleaned when he bought out Jesse’s great ranch; he was cleaned when he let Jesse run it for him as general manager.

  Yet Lord Peter kept at it. He maintained a grand summer ranch house just outside Antelope. He imported furniture, speaking tubes, great clocks, carriage and four, leather-bound books, chefs and valets, hunting and fishing friends, and a pair of mean liver-spotted hounds. He also kept a couple of Boston floozies—he couldn’t abide any kind of female coming from west of the Connecticut River. “Lousy. Nits and whatnots, you know.”

  The Earl of Humberwick always remained very suspicious of American doings. He was especially leery of the cowhands he found working for him. In a letter to his banker he termed them “a real simon-pure, devil-may-care, roistering, immoral, gambling, revolver-heeled, brazen, light-fingered lot.”

  Curious to know just how he was being raped—it had begun to dawn on him after a time—he began to tromp around a bit on his own. He refused a guide in the belief that the guide would carefully steer him away from questionable ranch practices. The result was he got lost every now and then, and Jesse had to send out a cowboy to bring him back to camp. The Earl of Humberwick’s always getting lost got to be a joke and hardly a day went by but what some valley wit would come riding up to the chuck wagon or headquarters and bawl out, loud: “Anybody seen Lord Limber-prick around today?”

  Lord Peter had autocratic ways. One time his liveried servant Jeems was asked how come His Lordship took him along on roundup. “Why, to curse me, sir, when he stumps his toe.” Another time, on a hot day, Lord Peter ordered Jesse to
tell his boys to throw a couple of pails of water over the pup tent every hour or so. Jesse had been very forthright in his reply. “Ask them rannies to get a pail of water from the crick for you? Here in America? Listen, you better not ask that out loud or they’ll rope you by the udder and run you off the ranch. Even if it tis your own.”

  Four-eye Irish and Peakhead Jim soon had Lord Peter’s pup tent set up and cot and table laid out. They lighted a lantern inside for him, and Lord Peter disappeared within. Presently Hambone brought him his chuck. Jesse and Link alias Hunt, high headed, alert, sat near the entrance as if on guard. They ate their supper from plates set in their folded legs.

  The coming of Lord Peter into the cow camp was like the throwing of an odorous moth ball onto an ant heap. Every face around the jumping orange fire became a sober one, even a stunned one. Every puncher sipped his coffee in silence. Eyes, however, flashed under wide hat brims.

  Then Jesse caught sight of Cain and his two brothers and waddy Timberline. He started to his feet as if shot upward. “Well, I’ll be go to hell. Look who’s here. Mitch, since when did they begin working for us?”

  Mitch growled something too low for anyone to hear but Jesse. Every puncher in the circle sat up stiff. Some set down their cups, ready for whatever might come up.

  “Cain, yes,” Jesse said. “I was hopin’ he’d come in. But his brother Harry, never.”

  Again Mitch growled something meant only for Jesse’s ear.

  Jesse limped over to Cain, standing over him. “So you ain’t quite ready to throw in with us yet?”

  With a slow easy motion Cain set down his cup of coffee. A corner of the cup rested on a bent wisp of bunch grass and it almost spilled. He had to quick catch it. “No. I’m still in with the little stockman. Because this is still little-man country.” A crack on the knuckle of his trigger finger itched. “Throw a drift fence across a pass and the little man has his little spread.”

  “Well, what the blazes you doin’ here then?”

  “Wal, Jesse, maybe you don’t know it. But your boys jumped the roundup startin’ time a whole week early. And some of my strays had the misfortune of getting lost in your bunch. So I’ve come to rep for myself and make my cut tomorrow.”

  Jesse rubbed his sore leg. He grumped, once. Then he looked down at side-kick Timberline. “And you, you big red grizzly, what’s your excuse?”

  Timberline blinked up little red eyes. “I’m here helpin’ my frien’ Cain. And to get back some of our beef that had the misfortune of getting lost in your bunch too. About two hundred head, I’d say.”

  The mention of a specific number, two hundred, checked Jesse. Everybody knew what Timberline meant. Jesse straightened ever so little. “Durn this leg,” he said finally.

  Harry asked, blandly, “What happened to your leg?”

  “Ohh … got thrown a month ago and it still ain’t healed. Still festering on me.”

  “Better go see a sawbones.”

  “What? And have him cut it off?” When Jesse wasn’t rubbing his leg, he had the easy gestures of a man who’d used the plains sign language. “Not on your tintype. No, I’ll walk it off.”

  Jesse called over to Link alias Hunt. “Hunt, I want you to take a good look at these pilgrims here. There’ll be more doin’s with them later and I don’t want you to forget the way they button their pants.”

  Hunt’s cold smile deepened. He shifted his gun around under his black coat. His hands moved with a velvet deftness. He said in his high piping voice, “I see’em.” Hunt pointed at his high narrow forehead. “I’ve already got’em memorized here.”

  “Good.”

  Someone gestured—it was Mitch—and then Jesse turned to look at the tent. There in the door flap stood Lord Peter, blond head leaning out, taking it all in, face as expressionless as the impassive face of an iron lion.

  Jesse clammed up, and limped back to his spot beside the fire. Cain and his boys also shut up, and went back to their eating. The affair between them settled into a looking contest.

  Fire slowly blackened and grayed the popping logs. Light fluttered gold then purple in the cottonwood leaves overhead. The chill wind flowed down from the mountains. The wind brought with it the smells of newly fallen snow and frost-freshened pines. The stars overhead sparkled like brilliants, just barely out of reach. The horses in the cavvy nickered, and kicked and snapped at each other. The great herd of cows slept on the high bed ground. Behind it all, like a low accompaniment on a mouth organ, water ran murmurous in the stony brook.

  Hambone broke up the stiff silence. He did it with a single word. He uncovered a big Dutch oven at the edge of the fire and lifted out five steaming round pans and bawled: “Pie!” Everyone knew pie had been coming. The wondrous aroma of sweet raisins baked with dried apples had been in the air for some time. But the single word did it. In an instant a line formed. Casual joshing started up again. When Hambone gestured for Cain and his boys to come up for their share, no one seemed to think it out of order.

  Hog Johnson held up the line arguing for a bigger piece. “Well, now, coosie, it’s this way. I was out on the range shootin’ a broke-leg bull the last time you had pie. So I really got two slices comin’. By rights.”

  Hambone denied it.

  One of the men at the end of the line, twitching with impatience, hollered out, “Fire and fall back, Hog. We’d all like a sniff of that spotted pup.”

  Finished, the punchers dropped their plates and tools in the wreck pan, and went back to the fire for a last smoke before turning in. Hambone meanwhile scraped all the leftovers into the squirrel can and set up the washpan on the cupboard lid and got the hot water.

  When Cain saw no one was going to offer to help Hambone, he stomped out his smoke in the red dust and strolled over. “Where’s your swamper, Hambone?” Cain was referring to the day wrangler whose duty it was to help the cook in the evening.

  “Horses too restless tonight, I guess.”

  “And the louse, where’s he?”

  “You know Jesse never allows greenhorns around come roundup time.”

  “Got a towel handy?”

  “Why, now, blamed if I ain’t. That’s right nice of you, Cain.”

  After a bit, Lord Peter came out of his pup tent and drew up a canvas chair to the fire and also had himself a last good-night smoke.

  By this time the punchers had gotten used to the moth ball in their midst a little. Talk began to flow again. Gradually it built up into firelight taling.

  Jolly Hog began it. “Seein’ His Lordship here tonight, too bad we ain’t got us a fiddle or two around. Or a mouth organ. We could a held us a stomp dance in his honor. Or a bullfrog sing.” Hog sucked on his homemade cigarette. “Been a long time since I heard me some music.” Hog sucked some more. “Fact is, the last time I heard some, come to recollect, was when I passed Lonesome Tree. Down along the Bitterness there. Where the Sioux bury their dead on scaffolds. Some brave must a fancied him a mouth organ because when I passed by, the wind was just right and I heard one aplayin’ in the branches of that tree. Kind of shivery it was. Made me wonder if mabbe there wasn’t something to it that a chief’s hant hangs around a while after death.”

  Ringbone Sam pawed his whiskers and had a windy too. “Yep. Seein’ His Honor’s pup tent here minds me of the time some ranny friends a mine bought themselves one. To live in while on roundup. They’d made up their minds they wasn’t gonna get soaked in their blankets under the stars no more come a night of rain. Nosiree. You probably remember them. They used to work with this outfit. Sore-toe Tex, Gimpy Smith, and that long-legged country jake they called Blowing Florence. Well, they got along first rate the first week. No trouble atall. It rained twice and they woke up in the morning as dry as a cork and as fresh as a daisy while the rest of us had to fight our way out through a rind of mildew. Well sir, the second week, trouble started. One night one of the men began to yell. He claimed somebody had fouled his bed and demanded justice. He made such a commotion he woke up t
he whole camp, till finally the boss got up and held kangaroo court right then and there. It was Gimpy who’d hollered and he claimed Blowing Florence had done the job. Well sir, with the boss holding Judge Colt in his right hand, it was finally decided that the man who’d first discovered the fouling was the man who’d done it. Gimpy. The next morning the boss told Gimpy to roll his bed and get.’Poor Blow,’ the boss said,’he’s already got enough against him without adding that.’ Gimpy rode away with never a word. He didn’t even bother to sell his share of the tent.”

  Dried Apple Bill had something to tell. “Speaking of greenhorns—that was you, Hambone—I remember when I first rode out to camp to begin my career punchin’. I’d bought me a mare, and when I showed at camp, the cook took one look and wanted to know if she was stumpbroke. I didn’t catch, of course, but I didn’t let on I hadn’t either. The cook was a sly devil if there ever was one. He offered to show me where I could picket the mare overnight. Well, in the morning, all the punchers at breakfast claimed I’d lied. They said she wasn’t stumpbroke atall and I’d better get her out of camp afore there was a accident. I left camp right after breakfast all right and went straight to town and sold her. What I’d done coming to camp with that mare was a case of mighty poor manners. It took some careful listening in four different saloons to find that out, though. I was just a kid then and wasn’t expected to know such stuff. At least not until I’d picked up a few wrinkles of my own on my horn. The mare is hoodoo to a cavvy. Besides being a possible accommodation for some lonesome ranny to lean against, the mare is a bunch quitter. Worse yet, she upsets the geldings. The geldings don’t know what to make of her. She just ain’t normal to their way of thinkin’.”

  Surly Mitch tossed a piece of wild sage in the sagging fire. Mitch always had a story handy that was bigger, better, and windier. “Well, you kin talk agin mares all you want. But I had me one onct that I dearly loved. Rabbit was her name. She was my night horse. I was helpin’ a man named Hobie Parker bring up a bunch of longhorns from Denver. We had good luck until we hit the North Platte and then all hell commenced to let loose. One stompede after another. One night I’d just laid down, it was rainin’ hard, and I had my little mare Rabbit staked near me, when there was a terrible crack of thunder, and before I could raise from my suggans, the longhorns was up and going, headed straight for me and Rabbit. I forked her in the dark in my underwears and let her run. I let her pick the way through them wild critters. By jiggity, it was dark that night! Why, it was so black that night you couldn’t find your nose with both hands. I been out many a night when it was so black the bats stayed to home, but this night was blacker. Well, pretty soon I could hear we was in some kind of breaks country, because there’d be a crash of horns into rock alongside me, and then horrible groans behind and far down. Was I scared? Well, I’ll tell a man. I was already afraid of badger holes and such, where Rabbit could break her leg in, and throw me. But here was rough country t’boot. So I let her have her own sweet head. She’d stop; start up again; stop; start up again, turning, slewing around, cutting to this side and that. She did that for what seemed like ages. Steers was bellering all around me, every now and then cracking into something, and then disappearing with a horrible groan behind us. Man, I had all I could do to hold on. I stuck on like a lean tick to a dog’s ear. Pretty soon I forgot to worry about the longhorns. It was just me and my hoss and my skin. Finally, she stopped dead, and wouldn’t go a step further. So I got off and it being dry where I lit, and it still being as dark as Jonah’s pocket when he was still inside that whale, and me all petered out, I decided to sleep right there for the rest of the night. I slept. Every little while my little mare would come over to where I was laying and smell me over to make sure it was me and that everything was all right. Then she’d go back to grazing. Around three o’clock she lay down at my feet an hour. I could hear her snore. Well, when light showed, Rabbit nudged me awake and I found out where I was. On a point of a cliff. A point only ten feet across. Where it joined the main mountain it wasn’t more’n a horse hoof in width. Man, I tell you, when we rode along that back trail, when I saw all them crevasses and gullies and holes we missed, with dead beef to all sides in the bottoms, I sweat me big drops of old spoiled vinegar. I tell you, that was one mare that was a hoss, and the first son-of-a-gun that says she wasn’t can begin his spiel right now.”