The creeks, when I forded them, were fringed with ice. The morning sun caused the long-grass plains to shed their snow, but early nightfall froze the land to an ice-sheathed, moon-shadowed wilderness again. I kept my pace steady. Now and then I would shift horses. The gray – the one Sad Sam had been riding – was obstinate and liable to treacherous moves. Like his owner, I mused. The lithe sorrel the other killer had used was smoother, but given to timidness when it couldn’t find the trail.
I would set them free soon, I decided. It was too much trouble leading them. I would let the Indians have them. That was the winter the plains were so empty of them, however, that I found myself almost wishing that they were back. The Nez Perce had all gone north to Canada to try escaping the wars; the other tribes – Cheyenne and Sioux – had followed their ancient pattern and drifted south to follow the buffalo with the onset of winter. Of course, there weren’t that many bison left even this far north, but the pattern was long-established and if they couldn’t find the big herds, they were at least travelling with the sun. For the time being I continued on with my small remuda.
By the third day I had reconsidered a few matters. After being attacked I had wanted to lose myself in the vastness of the empty land. Now, as my trail cut across the eastern leg of the Colorado Northern Railroad’s right of way, I wondered if I might not be better served following the tracks straight into New Madrid. It was a shorter, surer route, and there was the chance I would run across a way station along the line where a man could get some hot food … and that was what finally convinced me. My growling stomach had gotten spoiled with that timber-camp fare, three meals a day and plenty extra if it was wanted.
I started to follow the silver rails, straining my eyes into the distances, looking for some desolate depot where the locomotives could bring water and firewood aboard to fuel the great steam engines as they made their clanking rush westward.
It was nearly sunset again – cold, harsh and blowing – when I had my first bit of luck.
With the shadows long and crooked beneath my horses, I just picked out a faded streamer of smoke rising against the ragged skies. Paralleling the new-laid railroad tracks, the source of the smoke drew out of the shadows, proving to be a hastily built depot. The station house itself was low, strongly built of two-inch thick planks with only narrow slit windows cut into the wood. (Someone did not believe that the Indians were gone from the plains for good.) The water tank was green-painted steel mounted atop a framework of wood, its spout raised cobra-like to await the needs of the locomotives which would one day arrive. On the opposite side of the tracks was a newly built stable, the wood still clean from the distant sawmill. It wouldn’t take long for the north country winter to weather it to splintered gray. Near it, but far enough away to distance it from the stable smells, was what I decided must be a planned hotel and perhaps restaurant. Right now it was only a half-framed skeleton with a pile of new lumber sitting in a damp pile beside it.
I held my course for the depot structure where smoke rose to be whipped away in the gusting winds. It promised shelter and warmth and the probability of food. All that I could have wished for just then. I swung down and looped the reins of the black to the green wood hitchrail, glanced at the other ponies and then to the darkening sky where the sun dropped leadenly toward the Rockies in the far distance, appearing deep orange and suffering.
I scraped off my boots and went in the open door.
A narrow man with a pleasant smile and a full set of gray whiskers looked up at me, unsurprised, from the puncheon table where he had seated himself.
‘Saw you coming a mile out,’ he said amiably. ‘I sent Paco back to start some coffee.’
‘That’s kind of you,’ I said, as the man gestured me to a seat opposite his at the table.
‘It’s the least we can do. You’re the first man we’ve seen in three days. Paco and I get along all right,’ he lowered his voice, ‘but he don’t speak very good English.’
At that moment the man, Paco, emerged from a smaller space at the back of the depot, separated from the main room only by an Indian blanket that been hung as a divider. Paco was unsmiling, small, quick in his movements, and dark. I took him for an Indian, but he could have been Mexican. He placed tin cups of coffee in front of us and glanced at me quickly, his eyes barely meeting mine.
‘Put the man’s horses up in the stable, will you, Paco?’ my host said.
‘Yes, Mr Tagg,’ Paco answered. He looked at me again from the corner of his eye and then went outside, closing the door, leaving us in an amiable half-darkness. The coffee steamed. A lantern glowed dully on the wall above a counter of undressed lumber. There was nothing in the room by way of decoration, nothing to indicate its function.
‘I am, you might say, in on the ground floor,’ the bearded man said, noticing my inspection. ‘They practically built this place around me.’
‘Your name is Tagg?’ I asked, removing my hat to place it on the table.
‘Taggart. Paco doesn’t like to use more syllables than he’s forced to.’ He smiled and sipped at his coffee. I could hear the horses being led across the railroad tracks to the stable, their hoofs sounding against the crushed rock laid between the ties.
‘Lonesome out here,’ I commented, ‘and going to get more lonesome when the big snows fall.’
‘You are right there … pardon me, what did you say your name was, son?’
‘Ryan.’ He waited expectantly, but that was all I provided. Usually a man in the West didn’t give out his full name unless he felt comfortable doing so, or unless it was demanded. Neither case applied here. Taggart shrugged.
‘You’re right that it’s lonesome here,’ he said, tugging at his beard with his fingers before he sipped again at his coffee. ‘In earlier days, Ryan, I spent five months snowed in by myself in the high-up mountains. Beaver trapping I was. Somebody had convinced me that it was a way to get rich easy and quick when all those dandified people were mad for beaver top hats. Lonesome – now that was lonesome. And those Colorado mountain snows make Montana look like paradise. Drifts twenty feet high in front of the door of my shack … anyway, I have seen lonesome. It don’t bother me. Besides, I don’t have wife nor family; I’m too old to have a girlfriend back somewhere to moon over.’
Paco had come back in, a gust of cold devil wind following him through the door. He approached the table, said something I didn’t catch and wasn’t meant to hear to Taggart, and tromped off into the kitchen again.
‘He asked would you like a beef steak and some beans. I reckoned you would, so I sent him back to heat something up.’
‘I appreciate it,’ I said, drinking some of the rapidly cooling coffee.
Taggart leaned back in his chair, interlacing his gnarled fingers across his narrow waist. ‘So, Ryan, what was it you found to work at out West? I know you’re not a trapper and I didn’t see any prospecting gear.’
The question could have been intrusive, but it seemed the old man was just in need of some conversation, so I told him. ‘I was lumberjacking. When the snow started I decided it was time to collect my pay and head out.’
‘Wise of you,’ Taggart nodded. I noticed that Paco had emerged from behind the Indian blanket again, but he wasn’t carrying a tray. His hands were behind him. Taggart’s face seemed to draw slowly together, to tighten and grow hard.
‘You should have cut those horses loose, Ryan!’ he shouted suddenly, and I saw his hand drop toward his holstered belt gun. ‘They’re wearing railroad brands.’
I moved forward, not back. I hefted the heavy puncheon table toward Taggart and ducked low as Paco pulled a pistol from behind his back and began firing wildly. The table edge had pinned Taggart’s legs to the floor and he howled with pain. I could see his hand scrabbling at his holster and I kicked it with my bootheel, hearing bone crack.
Taggart howled again and I drew my own Colt, peering up over the upended table. Paco was dancing sideways along the wall with his smoking revolver in his
hand. There was unmistakable fear in his eyes, and if he had taken to his heels, I would have let him escape through the front door, but he turned, crouched and fired at me again. My bullet was a little quicker. It caught him in the throat and Paco pitched forward into a puddle of his own blood.
Taggart was cursing, keening and groaning all at once. I yanked his pistol from his holster and stood over him, panting. I glanced at Paco, but he did not move so much as an eyelid.
I looked down at Taggart’s fear-contorted face, cursed myself for my bad luck and picked up my hat.
‘Don’t shoot me,’ Taggart begged.
‘I’m not going to shoot you, you damned fool,’ I said angrily. ‘If you had let me talk, I could have explained it all to you. I’m no horse-thief and I’m no killer.’ Then I again shifted my eyes to Paco’s still form and told him. ‘It looks like it really is going to be a lonely winter for you now.’
I left him to his personal misery, collecting the two rifles and the revolvers I found scattered about the station. Then I stepped out into the gusting wind and blowing light snow, stamping my way to the stable.
I found the kerosene lamp hung on a nail inside the door and lit it. I threw the weapons I was carrying up into the hayloft, startling the horses that were stationed there, each in his dry stall. Paco had paused to give all of them a forkful of dry hay, apparently, for the gray and the sorrel after my brief interruption lowered their heads again to nibble at their fodder. Two other horses were there, looking at me with no apparent interest.
My own white-stockinged black, on the other hand lifted mistrustful eyes toward me as I entered. He knew what sort of perfidy I was capable of. Here he had just found a warm haven, had his saddle stripped and been given good dry hay and I had returned to demand who-knew-what of him. I set about brushing him down while he returned to his meal, checking hoofs and legs for soundness, because the animal’s instincts were right. We were going to be back on the trail sooner rather than later.
I had no way of knowing if Taggart had another hidden weapon I had not found, or if other riders might be approaching – either from the timber camp or from New Madrid. I gave the black a bucket of water and when he had drunk about half as much as he wanted, I placed his saddle blanket on his back, smoothing it. He gave me another evil look and then stood there resignedly allowing me to finish my business.
With the bit slipped in and my saddle cinched, I led the horse to the double doors at the front of the stable, blew out the wick of the smoking lantern and moved cautiously out into the cold, devil dark night.
The first hundred yards I covered quickly. Then I turned up my collar, patted the resigned black’s neck and continued on my way to New Madrid to have a few words with Mr Alton McCallister of the Colorado Northern Railroad company.
THREE
I didn’t freeze or starve before reaching New Madrid, but it seemed that both possibilities were near along the way.
New Madrid wasn’t much of a town, but it was bigger than any I’d seen for a time. The first thing that caught the eye was the gleaming locomotive with two attached Pullman cars sitting at rest before the two-story, gingerbread-decorated depot. They had painted the new building white with green trim. A balcony ran along the face of the upper story. Nobody was there, of course, since the trains had not yet started to run and would not until spring arrived and the Yellow Tongue Gorge trestle was finished, but just seeing the spanking new building must have brought some civic pride to the heart of the community. In those times having a railroad stop in your town meant that the outpost was destined to survive the tenuous life on the plains. Many a town after a hopeful beginning died quickly and mercilessly as the railroad bypassed it.
Main street was nothing special. Facing rows of low wooden buildings looking at each other across a muddy, snow-flecked and rutted road. At intervals there would be a false front rising to give the impression of a second story. There were four or five buildings with an actual second floor, and a low brick building that looked very stodgy. There was no sign on its blank face. A bank, I thought, or possibly a jail. Now and then there was an attenuated side street where planks were laid for people to cross without sinking into the mud. I passed something like two dozen wagons – Conestogas and freight rigs, parked every which way, and five times that many horses. There weren’t a lot of human citizens out in front of the buildings on this icy day.
They had clustered in the restaurants – I counted four – and in the saloons. I saw at least a dozen of these. One of them had a tinkly piano playing inside. Once I saw a large woman wearing something of shiny yellow showing all of her legs and most of her top, beckoning to me from an upstairs window. She looked wearier than I felt. I waved at her in passing.
As the weary black and I plodded along the muddy road, I reflected there was still no way that anyone could call New Madrid a beautiful mecca. It was miles short of a place like Denver where – I had been told – the silver and gold magnates had built opera houses and had indoor bathtubs with gold plated faucets. Still, it was far from the way I remembered it. In those times there had been nothing but a few squat sod houses and mournful cattle tramping through fields of withered corn.
The railroad, I could see by the number of new buildings, had brought in a conviction that was bursting to grow and blossom into a queen of the plains. It was the railroad, then, that held primacy. And it figured that the man I wanted to talk to would be New Madrid’s most honored resident. It wouldn’t do to stride up to Mr Alton McCallister in full public view, take him by the collar and demand my $74.50; I’d likely find myself jailed or lynched. Mr McCallister was a very substantial man and I was a wilderness tramp.
For the moment I put the consideration of how to contact him aside and decided to take care of first things first. I had one silver dollar and a stomach cramped with hunger. I swung down in front of the first restaurant I saw, tied up the black and went inside. The warmth was a glory. There were two waitresses bustling this way and that with trays of food and steam rising from the kitchen beyond the seating area, which was furnished with round wooden tables and stiff-backed wooden chairs.
The smell of food was overpoweringly tempting, the warmth a cozy blanket across my cold shoulders, the hard wooden chair a joy to my saddle-sprung legs. I removed my hat, rumpled my straggling hair and sat peacefully waiting to give my order. No one paid any attention to me. I guessed that almost everyone in was a recent arrival and they hoped for and expected more in the boom to come with spring when the trains would begin to run west.
People came and went, ninety per cent of them men, ninety per cent of them rough-looking and wild. New Madrid hadn’t been a town long enough to develop any sort of gentry.
I let my stomach know it hadn’t died on the vine. Ham and beans, apple pie and half a cabbage soaked in rich butter. I hardly glanced up. There was nothing more interesting to me at that moment after three days on the trail than what rested on the huge platter before me.
I did notice one man in brown trousers and white shirt wearing a dark coat over in the corner. He had a gray walrus mustache and seemed interested in me for some reason. Tilted back with his chair leaning against the wall, he studied me with weary eyes as I ate.
My first consideration was that he might have been a lawman – he had that substantial, somewhat sad look about him – but there was no telegraph wire yet running from the lumber camp or the railroad depot where the trouble had taken place, and so I dismissed the idea that he was looking for me. The thing was – as I have pointed out – that almost everyone in was a stranger to everyone else, so me being a new arrival couldn’t have attracted his attention that much either.
I shrugged it off mentally, paid my bill, received a few coins in change and pocketed them. I replaced my hat and walked across the plank floor into the bright, cold day. My black horse looked accusingly at me as if it knew more trouble was afoot. I surprised it by untying it from the rail and walking it up the muddy street to a shambly stable.
The man’s round face was red with excitement. His pouched eyes were a little wild.
‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘Is there trouble?’
‘Trouble? My wife’s delivering, mister. I got to get home and Isaac, my stablehand, didn’t show up!’
‘Want me to watch the place for you?’
He looked at me as if I were a godsend. ‘How much?’ he asked cautiously.
‘Just free lodging for my horse. And, if you think it’s fair, some hay for me to sleep on tonight.’
He didn’t hesitate. He had crammed a greasy hat on his head and briefly shook my hand. ‘Done! Just watch the place until I get back. I can’t miss the baby’s coming, but I can’t afford to shut down either. Isaac – I’ll strangle him!’
He was halfway to the door before he turned to say across his shoulder, ‘No whiskey, no smoking!’ And then he was gone and I was left alone in the shadows of the stable. It was warmer in there than it was outside. The horses gave off a deal of heat and the plank walls cut the cold north wind.
Smiling to myself, I decided that everything can’t always go wrong. I unsaddled the black, slipped its bit and rubbed it down as it fed on new hay and a bucket of oats I had borrowed – figuring that as part of the hasty deal I had made with the stable-keeper.
I raked some hay into an empty corner stall and lay down, my stomach full, the cold wind absent. No one was shooting at me and I was as comfortable as a man can be. It doesn’t take a lot to become comfortable when things have been so rugged.
The Drifter's Revenge Page 2