“Tomorrow,” he told Yellow Horse, “the reeds would be dry. We will go to the white man’s ranch and set fire to the brush and the bulrushes.”
“Now that we have more braves, we will need more cattle. We will need twice the number of fingers on my hands.”
“We will take four times as many cattle as there are fingers on your hands, Yellow Horse. And we will go far away so that the White Eyes do not follow us.”
That evening, Speckled Hawk and Black Feather rode into camp. They had been scouting the Lazy B Ranch, spying on the south pasture unobserved by the white men.
They reported to Silver Bear what they had seen.
“They burn the writing into the hides of the cows. They have many to catch and mark with the hot irons.”
“Ah, then we have more than one sun to catch the cattle and take them with us,” Silver Bear said.
“Maybe one more sun,” Speckled Hawk said. “There are many cattle that they must catch and take to their fires where the writing irons are burned.”
“In two suns, the bulrushes will be very dry,” Silver Bear said. “They will burn fast and set the grass on fire.”
The Cheyenne chewed on dried berries and meat that night.
But their bellies were still empty and their eyes sunk deep in their faces.
The women moaned in their sleep and the horses nickered like the whispering ghosts of dead warriors from the time of the white man and the loss of the Medicine Hat and the Medicine Arrows.
Chapter 7
Reese did not like the way the gather was going. The branding was slow and the men chasing their scattered cows were complaining about the heat, the dust, and the meanness of the cattle.
“George, what’s the tally so far?”
“You mean how many cattle we’ve gathered or how many we’ve branded?”
“Both,” Reese said.
“We’ve rounded up four hundred thirty head and branded almost all of those.”
“Can we head south by tomorrow?”
“We’ll come close,” George said.
Roy rode up and doffed his hat to wipe sweat from his forehead. “We’ll have near a thousand head gathered and branded by morning,” he said. “I got three fires goin’ and hot brands in every one.”
“Good,” Reese said.
He felt the pressure as he watched his men drive more cattle onto the south forty, but he was gratified to see that the branding was going well. The bawling of cattle resounded over the forty acres, and there was the whisper of ropes and the sizzle of hides that were music to his ears.
No one saw Vern Avery sneak up on Jimmy John’s horse when the rider left it to hog-tie a steer. Avery drew his knife and slit the horse’s leg from belly to hock with one slash of his blade. Then he snuck back to where the other hands were wrestling cattle and blended in, unnoticed.
The horse made a ruckus and danced sideways, blood streaming from its leg.
Jimmy John saw that his horse was lame and spraying blood on the ground. He ran over to it and saw the wound down the length of its left leg.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed, and grabbed the bridle.
The horse tossed its head and neighed in pain.
“What’s the matter?” Roy called over from the branding fire.
“Somebody cut my horse’s leg. Look at it.”
Jimmy John led his horse close to the other men. All could see the gash in its leg, a leg that dripped fresh blood.
“Who in hell could have done such a thing?” Roy asked. “That was no accident.”
“It damn sure wasn’t,” Jimmy John said.
He looked around, wondering which of the men had injured his horse. None of them looked guilty or suspicious.
“That’s a deep cut,” Lonnie Willets said as he stepped close to the injured horse. “He might lose that whole leg.”
Roy got up and walked over to the horse. “You’re going to have to put it out of its misery, Jimmy John,” he said.
“I—I can’t. Old Ned here is my best horse.”
“He’s lame and won’t make the drive,” Roy said.
Reese rode over to see what all the fuss was about. Jimmy John pointed to his horse’s leg.
“See what somebody done?” he said.
Reese swore when he saw all the blood. And the horse was limping as it walked around in a half circle.
“That looks like a knife cut,” Reese said. “And it’s deep.”
“Somebody sure as hell did it,” Jimmy John said.
Reese too looked around at the men. Some were holding down cattle next to the branding fire. Others were pulling on ropes to lead the cows to be branded.
He saw Avery pulling on a rope, seemingly oblivious of what was going on near the fire. But there were other men there too, and they all carried knives along with their pistols.
“Somebody’s tryin’ to cause trouble,” George said.
“Who?” Jimmy John asked.
“Somebody who don’t want us to make this drive,” Reese said. He dismounted and walked over to Jimmy John’s horse. He looked at the deep cut in the horse’s leg and shook his head. “You’re going to have to put him down, Jimmy John,” he said.
Blood suddenly began to spurt from the horse’s leg as a rip in a major artery burst wider. The horse went to its knees, then lay on its side. Jimmy John looked down at the spurting blood, and tears welled up in his eyes.
“You’re goin’ to have to do it,” Roy said. He touched the raw wound on his face and looked over at Avery. “You have anything to do with this, Vern?” he asked.
“Me? No,” Avery said. “I been too busy to mess around.”
“I wonder,” Roy muttered. The burn on his face was still raw and the memory of it strong in his mind. And he had his suspicions.
The horse was losing blood fast and appeared to weaken considerably.
Jimmy John drew his pistol. He cocked it and held the muzzle up to his horse’s head.
He pulled the trigger.
The explosion was loud and the horse’s head jerked as the bullet penetrated its brain. It kicked all four legs and then lay still.
Tears flooded down Jimmy John’s face. The other men around him hung their heads.
“Good-bye, Ned,” Jimmy John murmured, and holstered his pistol.
“One less horse in the remuda,” George said.
Reese’s jaw hardened.
The long shadows of afternoon crept across the pasture. Cattle bawled and milled as riders kept them hemmed in on the dry grass that had lost its green and turned brown.
“First thing in the morning, George,” Reese said. “Keep at it.”
“What we don’t brand with trail brands, we can catch up on the trail,” George said.
“Ready or not, we go at first light,” Reese said.
The longer they stayed on his ranch, he knew, the more precarious it became. Not only was there a threat from the Cheyenne, but he had every reason to believe that someone, perhaps Avery, was trying to prevent them from driving the cattle south to Cheyenne.
Past sunset and into the night, the hands, spurred on by seeing Reese was working alongside them, drove cattle to the branding fires. Gradually the herd began to expand until the final tally before dawn.
“We have purt near a thousand head,” George told Reese. “Jimmy John tallies more than nine hundred and we still got a bunch or two headin’ for the gather.”
“That’s more than I expected,” Reese said.
“Cattle have a way of multiplyin’, and we got good men out lookin’ for ’em,” George said.
“I’ll get the chuck wagon rollin’ by first light,” Reese said. “Make sure everybody who’s goin’ to Cheyenne is ready to raise trail dust. Once we start out, we won’t stop.”
Orville Birdwell, the co
ok, had already caught the fever by the time Reese found him loading up the chuck wagon.
“You got enough grub, Checkers?” Reese asked as he watched Birdwell wrestle a keg of flour into the wagon.
“Reese, ain’t no man goin’ to go hungry on this drive,” Checkers said. “Thanks to Louella, I got enough stock for two drives.”
“Well, there’s always the return trip to think about, Checkers.”
“I’m talkin’ about a return to home and then some,” Birdwell said.
He was barely puffing when Reese rode to the house to pack his duds for the drive and to say good-bye to Louella. She was awake and had coffee made with Arbuckle’s.
“Will you want breakfast before you leave in the morning?” she asked as she set two cups on the table, both filled with steaming coffee.
“No, I want to leave on an empty stomach,” he said.
“Why? You need your strength.”
“Old habit. I always hunted on an empty gut and I have a feelin’ we’re going to get into weather right soon.”
“Weather? What do you mean, Reese?”
“There’s a north wind buildin’,” he said. “When I come in, I could feel its bite.”
“Snow?”
“Maybe,” he said. “It’s nigh into October and we’ve got a stretch to go before the herd settles down.”
“I laid out your winter coat,” she said. “I figured you might need it in a week or so.”
“Might need it sooner than that.”
The coffee warmed him, but he had felt a chill just before coming into the house. He was sleepy and tired, but he was also keyed up about the drive south.
“Better pack your long johns too,” she said.
“Don’t want to take too much.”
“I want you to be warm, Reese.” She smiled and sipped her coffee.
“You’re a dear, Lou,” he said, and smiled back.
“What’s a wife for if she can’t take care of her husband?”
“You go beyond that with me.”
She reached across the table and touched the back of his hand with hers.
“I want you back home in one piece,” she said. “Not frozen up like a hibernating bear.”
He laughed at the image that sprang up in his mind.
Half an hour later, he kissed Louella good-bye and checked his saddlebags and the bundle tied in back of his cantle. Louella had thought of everything, even his hairbrush and straight razor.
When he rode to the south pasture, he followed Checkers in the chuck wagon. It rumbled along, heavy and fat, with two horses pulling and two on lead ropes at the rear.
He waved good-bye to Checkers after he circled the herd. The herd was bawling and restless.
“All set,” George told Reese.
“You got a final tally?”
“Better’n nine hundred head,” George said. “Jimmy John done counted nine hundred sixty, and I come up with a hair more’n that.”
“We’ll likely lose a few head before we get to where we’re goin’,” Reese said.
“That’s still a lot of cattle,” George said.
“More than I expected.”
The men started moving the herd well before first light. Reese watched the cattle begin to move and wet a finger. He held the finger up to test the wind.
They’d have the wind at their backs, he thought, as the chill struck his finger. It might not snow that soon, but he sensed a shift in the weather, even so.
Jimmy John rode point, and as Reese rode the left flank, his belly filled with butterflies. They were on the move with nearly a thousand head of cattle.
The drive was on.
Chapter 8
Black Feather heard the white men’s voices and listened to the bawling protests of the cattle as several head began moving. Even in the dark, he knew that the white men had started their drive.
He saw the dark shapes of cattle rising from their beds and start to walk from view as men on horseback rode among them with lashing quirts and shouts of “Get along, bossy,” and “Heeya.”
Black Feather had seen enough. He walked to his tethered pinto and lifted himself onto its bare back. He tugged on the rope bridle and turned the horse toward Silver Bear’s camp. He shivered in his light doeskin shirt as he rode over ground that the cattle had once occupied.
That’s when he saw the dead horse. It was just lying there, near one of the fire rings the cowhands had used to brand their cattle. He looked around, but all the cattle in his vicinity were gone. And he saw no white man.
The dead horse was food, despite its strong smell.
He dismounted and drew his knife. Quickly he gutted the horse and cut out its heart and liver. He skinned the rear haunch by a cut across its belly and then cuts to its flanks. He then cut the horse’s back from neck to rump and peeled the hide away from the backbone. He removed the hide on the left rump and laid it aside. Then he cut into the horse’s left flank and removed a large chunk of meat. He wrapped the meat in the hide he had removed.
When he was finished, he covered the carcass with sagebrush. He tucked the organs inside his shirt and carried the hip meat between his upper legs after remounting his pony. He rode away at a slow pace so that his pony’s hooves would not raise an alarm in case any of the white men were nearby.
He heard the rumble of hooves as the cattle began to run in thick columns away from the bone-dry pastures.
Black Feather widened the distance between him and the pasture where he had witnessed the branding and the gather for most of the night.
He kept shifting the horse’s haunch from one side to the other as his arms tired. Soon he was riding all alone in the night, the sound of the herd lost in the distance.
When he approached the Cheyenne camp, a figure rose out of the darkness.
“It is you, Black Feather, and you stink.”
“I have meat, Whining Dog,” he said to the warrior who had been on watch.
“Did you kill a deer?”
“It is a horse I have. The White Eyes killed it.”
“Ooh, that is good. Silver Bear will be happy.”
Silver Bear was awake when Black Feather rode up to his lean-to. He sat on folded legs outside, puffing on a pipe. “What news do you bring, Black Feather?” he asked.
“I bring meat and the White Eyes are driving their cattle away.”
“Meat?”
“The meat of a horse,” Black Feather said.
“Good. So the White Eyes take the cattle away.”
“Yes.”
“Then we must go and start the fires.”
“You will cook the cows on the hoof, then,” Black Feather said.
“I will destroy the white man’s ranch,” Silver Bear said.
Silver Bear and Black Feather woke up the rest of the camp. The women scurried off to gather up the dried cattails, and some of the men picked up the brush from the piles. They walked and rode in a procession toward the Lazy B Ranch.
They did not speak. They kept silent and walked very fast.
When they reached the ranch, all who carried brush and the women who carried the cattails knew what to do. The men set the brush on the edge of the west pasture at intervals of thirty feet apart. The women came and laid the cattails down on the ground near the brush.
Two of the braves began striking their flints on horseshoes. This sent sparks into the brush and the brush ignited. Soon there was a row of fires and the women stuck the cattails into the flames until they caught fire.
Then the braves took the firebrands and hurled them into the dry grass. Smoke spiraled upward from the burning field and soon the blazes connected and began to race across the prairie.
The wind fanned the flames and blew the smoke in a southeasterly direction.
Louella smelled smoke and
looked outside. To her horror, she could see a line of flames across the horizon. The fires were headed her way.
She grabbed a shawl and ran outside to the well. She began to draw water up from the well. When the bucket was full, she threw water on her front door, then on the wall.
She knew that she did not have much time and could not possibly save the house. But, she thought, perhaps she could save the front of it.
The grass fire drew closer and she looked off to the south, hoping Reese would come and save her. But there was no one in sight and she grew weary as she drew more water from the well.
To the south, one of the men riding drag turned and saw lights in the distance. Fiery lights.
The herd moved at a good pace and he wondered what he should do. The more he looked, the more he saw.
“Fire,” he yelled, and the herd drowned out his words.
The flames lashed at the night and he knew, finally, that someone had set the west pasture on fire. And the fire was raging, rushing toward the ranch house.
Calvin spurred his horse and galloped to the front of the herd.
“Jimmy John,” he yelled. “Look back there.” Calvin pointed.
Jimmy John swore when he saw the fire just barely visible to the north.
“Reese, Reese,” he called.
Way off on the flank, Reese heard his name. “Yeah, what’s up, Jimmy John?”
“Back there. Look. Fire.”
Reese turned and saw the glimmers of fire on the horizon. His heart sank like a stone from a cliff. He could not believe his eyes. He turned his horse and, without a word, spurred the animal into a dead run.
The fire was moving fast before the wind and he knew that his home was right in its path.
The closer he got, the more flames he saw. The sounds of the herd faded and he was alone in the darkness.
He thought of Louella, all alone. Probably asleep.
And she was in mortal danger.
Chapter 9
Louella’s crippled body gave out just as she turned to hear hoofbeats grow louder. Fear coursed through her heart because she could not see the rider. She froze and let the bucket drop through the tunnel of the well. The wooden pail hit the water with a loud splash.
Ralph Compton The Cheyenne Trail Page 4