Adelsverein

by Celia Hayes

  Even the yarns swapped around the fire were the same. Improbable tales and speculative adventures about women figured pretty highly, until the evening that English Jack—appealed to by Billy Inman—drawled in his impeccable chipped-glass British accent, “A true gentlemen does not talk about ladies, in such company.”

  Not very much put down, Billy demanded, “What about whores? Can we talk about whores in company?”

  “Of course not!” snapped English Jack, rolling himself into his blankets to signify that the conversation was quite definitely concluded.

  “Who the hell said we wuz gentlemen, anyway!” Billy had the final word. After a couple of weeks of living rough on the trail, Peter rather agreed with Billy’s assessment.

  They slept in their clothes with their horses close to hand, penned in a rope corral. Peter took enough turns on night-guard himself; tirelessly circling the massed cattle, dark against the moon-brushed prairie, listening to the call of night birds and alert with every sense for some sudden movement, some sound out of the ordinary. They talked and sang to the cattle, to soothe and reassure them when fractious and unsettled. Most of the drovers knew a vast array of slow lugubrious-sounding ballads to serenade the cows with. Fredi swore up and down that any number of gloomy German Christmas carols had the same soporific effect. English Jack recited something he claimed was The Iliad at them—in Latin.

  “Damn, these are going to be some eddicated cows!” commented Dolph when Jack enlightened him on this, one midnight when they passed, going in opposite directions as they circled.

  “Almost a pity to eat them, don’t you think?” English Jack answered, with a broad grin which could hardly be seen from the growth of beard on his face. “Ah, but that would negate the purpose of this exercise, wouldn’t it? Forget I ever entertained such a heretical thought!”

  “I would,” Dolph answered, as he rode on, “if I understood what the hell you just said.” He continued his lonely circular patrol. The night breeze kicked up a little, bringing with it the faint smell of rain. The distant northwest quadrant of the sky had begun to be blotted out by swiftly moving clouds, clouds that were becoming illuminated from within by brief pale flashes of lightning.

  “Storm on the way,” he said to English Jack, as they passed again. “With lightning,” he added. The other man swore softly. “The wind’s blowing it this way.” Dolph listened admiringly as Jack added another couple of comments. “That’s a right nice collection of cusswords,” he said, “Wasn’t a waste of education, I’d reckon. I’m going to waken Onkel Fredi, let him know to put on some more hands. They’ll be right jumpy as that storm blows overhead.”

  “Don’t take too long about it,” Jack advised. Dolph nodded, angling his pony away from the edge of the herd and towards the pale glimmer of the wagon covers. Hansi and Daddy Hurst had gone to bed long since; their last act before sleep being to pull the wagon tongues around to align on the North Star.

  The remuda ponies shifted and whinnied uneasily in their grass-rope corral, sensing the storm’s approach. Dolph slid down from his saddle as he approached the camp, that eccentric circle of bedrolls spread out around the quenched cookfire.

  “Señor?” A sibilant whisper from the cook wagon’s shadow and the faint metallic click of a Colt hammer drawn back.

  “Alejandro?” Dolph whispered in Spanish. “It’s me. There’s a storm coming. I’m waking up Fredi.”

  “Good,” Alejandro answered. “The horses, they are restless also. How many more riders, Patron?”

  “At least six,” Dolph whispered. “And if the cattle stampede, everyone!”

  “Ay, ya ya!” Alejandro sounded every bit as dismayed as English Jack. So far, they had been able to head off any potential stampede, quench any panic before it started and infected the entire herd. Fredi usually spread his bedroll near the supply wagon. Dolph found him, and gently nudged his foot. Gratifyingly, Fredi shot upright after a single shake.

  “Storm coming,” Dolph whispered; even more gratifying, his uncle needed no more than that and a swift glance at the sky. Very faintly, thunder grumbled in the distance, hardly louder than Hansi snoring, a few feet away.

  Fredi threw off his blankets. “Right. Go on back, lad, I’ll rouse—”

  The rest of his words were abruptly cut off by a clap of thunder that rent the air like a cannon shot, seemingly directly over their heads.

  “Ah, damnation!” said Fredi, as other sleepers also woke instantly, most with more colorful curses on their lips. His heart sinking within him, Dolph sensed a vibration in the ground under his feet almost before he heard the ominous rumble of distant hooves, and the bellowing of frightened cattle.

  “Stampede!” he shouted, flinging himself towards his saddle as Fredi erupted from his own blankets. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Alejandro running from the remuda, leading four horses after him, his hands full of grass-rope and leather reins.

  Peter shot out of dead sleep, instantly knowing what was happening. He caught up his hat with his good hand, and leaped for the reins of his horse. He had been supposed to relieve the night-watch at midnight, so his own horse had been saddled and close-hobbled at hand. Already panicking from the racket of the thunder and the noise of stampeding cattle, the pony danced restlessly as Peter tried to free it from the grass-rope hobbles.

  “Damn ye, hold still!” Peter gasped, and swore as the frantic animal dodged at arm’s length. There was no time for this; he wrapped the reins around his left arm and slashed the hobbles with his knife. He dropped the knife as he vaulted up—go back later to look for it, God if there was a later!

  There was a rider ahead of him, perhaps two behind him, no time to look around and see who they were. He raked the horse’s flanks with his heels, crouching low in the saddle as the beast obediently leaped ahead, oh God oh God, oh God, rough ground, broken with small gullies and animal burrows. If his horse put a foot deep into one, it was a broken leg for the horse for sure and a broken neck for him, hitting the ground at this pace.

  Regardless of that peril, he sent his mount careening parallel to the mass of cattle, a tossing sea of horns and backs as they ran, silvered by starlight and eerie greenish flickers of lightning, their hooves shaking the ground, shaking his heart in his chest. Catch up, catch up to that leading edge of the herd, catch up and turn them, turn them at a run, run them back on themselves, crashing and buffeting their horns together in a storm of dust.Peter raked his booted heels along his horse’s flanks again. Now there was a skein of horsemen flying alongside the herd; himself and Dolph, Billy Inman, and two of Porfirios’ boys, a fragile net to catch and turn the hurtling cattle, catch and turn before the panicky beasts harmed themselves, gored each other with their enormous horns, broke a leg in a prairie dog burrow, hurled over the side of a ravine, rim-rocked themselves. Oh God, oh God, catch and turn them before it was too late, before Hansi and Ma’am Becker’s investment turned into so much buzzard-meat, rotting in the hot sun.

  He and Dolph reached the leading edge, neck and neck, that dark and dangerous edge, a knife-edge. He could feel his mount’s ribs under his knees, shuddering with every willing breath, thanking God again that he was riding the better trained of his two, the paint-pony who minded the reins on his neck rather than the bit in his mouth. He had the reins wrapped twice around his arm just below his elbow, where his stump socketed into Mr. Berg’s clever wooden contraption. Moving the reins with his arm, rather than hand and fingers, he controlled with knees and heels. The paint-pony gallantly obeyed, plunging fearlessly toward that maelstrom of frantic cattle. Peter drew his Walker Colt from the saddle holster where he preferred to leave the heavy and unwieldy revolver. Shouting, he pressed the paint-pony closer, firing shots into the air, shots that he could barely hear.

  “Turn them!” Dolph shouted. “Turn them!”

  “Goddammit, I’m trying!” he shouted back. Another horse galloped by his flank, a horse with an empty saddle, flashing by in an instant and then out of sight in the dark
tumult around them. “Who’s horse was that!” he screamed into the dark, and Dolph shouted back, “I don’t know, but if they’re down in this they’re dead!”

  Wetness splashed on his arms, into his face. The storm had come upon them. Peter shouted curses at the cattle, at the wind rushing past, at the rain that fell chill and plastered his clothing to him as cattle and horsemen hurtled on into the darkness.

  “They’re slowing!” Dolph shouted. “Press ‘em hard, damn you! Press ‘em hard!”

  Peter fired over the cattle, fired into the air until the hammer of his Colt clicked on empty chambers. Someone at his back still had a full load, though. A fusillade of shots crackled like fireworks, like the skirmish at Rice’s Station in that last year of the war, the place where he took a bullet in his wrist. He shouted again, cursing, and Dolph shouted also. They pressed closer and closer. The mass of cattle, mindless and unreasoning, began yielding to their will, bending in their flight, turning to the right, turning again as they fled across the hummocky ground. A flash of lightning split the air, an eldritch and momentary light on the heaving wet backs of cattle and horses.

  “Damn you all, hold them!” shouted a voice at Peter’s back, then was lost in the crash of thunder. The cattle were mindless with terror, nothing could affright them even further after that, just men on nimble horses, waving their hats, shouting or firing their revolvers. After an eternity of galloping into the dark, it seemed to Peter that the mass of cattle had slowed in their headlong pace. They had run into a tract of wiry scrub. God only knew how far they had come, or where they were in relation to the camp, when they finally succeeded in turning the herd back in upon themselves. The land sloped gently uphill; Peter squinted into the dark, his face lashed by constant rain. He thought he remembered seeing higher ground to the west of them, just before they camped for the night. There was a seasonal watercourse on the far side of the sloping ground.

  “Where are we?” Billy Inman called, out of the dark. The cattle were quiescent now, uneasy but standing bunched together as if to shelter against the rain, their sides heaving like bellows from the exertion of their run. Water ran hoof-deep around them; their horses sloshed through churned-up mud.

  “I think we’re west of camp,” Peter shouted in return. “Who else is here? Call out your names, all who can hear me!”

  “To me!” Dolph shouted in Spanish. “Alejandro! Marcos! To me!” Out of the dark and rain, voices answered them: Alejandro, Marcos and Diego, Billy Inman, young Frank Brown and his cousin Alonzo. Nigra Jack splashed out of the dark, leading a riderless horse he had found straying among the mass of cattle. “Whose?” Dolph asked quietly.

  “Mastah Jack, de Englishmon,” the wrangler answered. “He had dis ol’ pinto, on watch ‘dis night.” The rain pelted down, fat water-drops as big as bullets. Peter could not see his cousin’s expression. He was already soaked to the skin. The brim of his hat hung waterlogged like a dead leaf.

  “I’d guess he was moving around, on the other side of the herd, when they broke,” Dolph said at last. “For I had just spoken to him, not three minutes before. They must have rolled right over him.” He did not have to say anything else about the fate of English Jack, unhorsed and on foot among eight hundred head of fear-maddened cattle.

  But Billy Inman said aloud what they all knew, in the tones of a man deeply shaken and only just beginning to recover himself. “Shit. They pro’lly stamped him as flat as a flapjack. Anyone know if he had anything on him worth going back and looking for?”

  “Billy, you shut the hell up,” Dolph spat. “And we’ll sure as hell go looking for him, no matter what he had in his vest pockets. The man deserves a decent burial.”

  “In a cee-gar box, if nothing else,” Billy replied. He barked a laugh in which humor warred with the kind of feelings that come from having survived some great exertion and terror.

  “That’s enough, Bill,” Peter commanded. “Help us get them settled down—we can’t look for him until it gets light anyway.”

  It wasn’t that Billy was heartless, Peter knew as he knew anything else. They had all been in mortal terror, pounding after the herd in the dark and rain, fighting the elements, fighting for control and knowing that in a split second they might be unhorsed and trampled, as dead as English Jack. No, Billy was just relieved to be alive as any of them—even soaked to the skin and lost somewhere on the night-darkened prairie north of the Red River.

  A cold wind followed on the storm, blowing out of the northwest, chilling them all—cattle, horses, and men indiscriminately. Peter thought longingly of his bedroll, then even more longingly of a dry bed in the shelter of the little cottage on Creek Street, as he and the others watched over the dozing cattle. The cold bit deeper if they remained still, so Dolph, Peter, and the others tried to remain in constant motion to generate warmth. It was with no small relief after many hours of this that they saw the eastern sky gradually begin to pale to a glowing primrose yellow, and those few rags of clouds remaining after the storm turned the livid color of bruised flesh.

  “How many are we missing?” Billy Inman asked.

  Dolph replied, “’Bout half. We’ll be all day searching them out and rounding them up.” A bright thread of sunlight peeped coyly over the distant horizon. Peter, his cousin, and a few of the others had ridden towards the higher ground in an attempt to see where they were and where they ought to take the herd.

  “Well, I reckon they’ll have been too tired to run much farther,” Billy observed, yawning hugely. As near as Peter could discern, the herd had run several miles west and north in a long arc, traced a line across the rolling prairie, mud and trampled vegetation left in their wake.

  “Can you see the wagons?” young Alonzo Brown asked worriedly, his fifteen-year old countenance blotched equally with specks of mud and freckles. “Or any of the other hands?”

  “Not to fret, ‘Lonzo,” Dolph answered, as the bright disc of the sun revealed more of itself above the far horizon. “I know they’re dead east of us, somewhere along that little stream we had set up camp by. Look there.” He pointed to a tiny, threadlike spiral of grey smoke rising from beyond a far line of dark green brush. “I’m thinking that’s Daddy Hurst’s cookfire and I could sure use a good hot breakfast, now.”

  “Me, all I care about is that it’s hot.” Peter nudged the ribs of his pony with his heels. The poor creature practically stumbled with weariness. “Let’s get these damned animals moving in a favorable direction, Cuz. You ride point, I reckon—you know the way at least as well as any of us.”

  Moving slowly from exhaustion as much as care, Peter, Billy, and the others assembled the remnant of the herd and began chivvying it towards that rising wisp of smoke. It was several hours of tedious labor to do this. Peter reflected all the while on how during the night they had so quickly come the same distance, seemingly in a matter of a few minutes. Only a trifle less cheering than the smell of hot food and the odor of coffee was the sight of a good few head of cattle, grazing peaceably in the night pasture from which so many had run in a panic not six hours before. Either they had not all stampeded, or the other hands had been able to cut the rearmost off from the main body and force their return. Not even the sight of their drenched blankets and bedrolls, left scattered on the ground where they had been abandoned, could entirely quench Peter’s feelings of relief and no little satisfaction at having retrieved something from a potential disaster.

  Fredi rose from where he had been sitting by the fire in close conversation with Hansi. He looked as wearied as they all felt, but smiled with much the same cheerful relief, until he noticed English Jack’s horse trailing after Alejandro.

  “Not a sign of him,” Dolph answered the unasked question. “We came back straight, though. As soon as I’ve had some breakfast, I’ll take two of the boys and scout along the way the stampede went. How many are we short otherwise, Onkel?”

  “About twenty head,” Fredi answered. “We can rest the herd here for a day or two, while we se
arch. I’ll send out everyone who isn’t minding the herd to go beating the bushes.”

  “Remember, lads,” Hansi added, “every one of those missing cows is worth a month’s wages in the cattle market in the north.”

  Daddy Hurst brought out hot bread, coffee lavishly sweetened with molasses, fat bacon, and apple duff made with dried fruit, which they fell upon as if famished.

  “It ain’t as if it’s the best cooking I ever tasted,” Billy Inman ventured with his mouth full, “but damn if it doesn’t taste prime!”

  “My grandfather used to tell us that hunger was the very best sauce.” Dolph reached out for the coffee pot and poured a full cup for himself. “But as cooks go—sorry, Daddy, I think Auntie Liesel sets a finer table.”

  “Yo’ auntie ain’t tryin’ to keep de fire alight, when it’s coming down like Noah’s flood,” Daddy Hurst scowled, turning over another rasher of salt bacon with a long-handled fork. “Dis ol’ nigra is all de cook you got, out here! You best ‘member dat, when you want seconds, Mistah Rudolph!”

  Peter nudged his cousin with his good elbow; it was never a wise idea to get on Daddy Hurst’s bad side. “Cuz,” he chuckled, “let me advise you of this one thing—never deliberately annoy someone who is alone with the food you are going to eat.”

  “One reason to keep your wife sweet,” Billy Inman said.

  Dolph retorted, “Fine advice from someone who doesn’t have a wife, or any likelihood of a sweetheart. Ah, well, Daddy, you mayn’t cook quite as well as Aunt Liesel, but you are right. You’re here and she’s not.” His face took on a melancholy cast, as he downed the rest of his coffee. “And we may have to trouble you some more, Daddy, for the use of your shovel.” No one needed to ask why. Dolph rose, tipping his plate and tin cup into the dishpan.