Bitter Trail and Barbed Wire

by Elmer Kelton

  Foley’s bearded face changed color a couple of times. He said abruptly, “Speaking’ of fallin’ in the creek, I don’t recollect as I’ve seen you take a bath since you been out here. Right now would be as good a time as I know of.”

  Before Getty could draw away, Foley had him by the shoulders, his huge hands holding the cook as helpless as a baby calf. A couple of Foley’s sons grabbed the cook’s legs, and they packed him down to the creekbank like a sack of bran. Without ceremony, they heaved him in.

  The first two times the cook crawled out cursing. They pitched him back. The third time he got out on the opposite side, so busy shivering and moaning and coughing up water that he couldn’t say much. Presently Getty circled clear around the spring and came back on the other side, blue with cold. He went directly into the barn, took off his wet clothes and crawled into his blankets. He lay there sulling like a possum.

  The news brought no cheer to Doug Monahan, even though it didn’t surprise him much. “Well, Foley,” he said, “since you ran off the cook, it’s up to you to finish the breakfast.”

  He knew he would have to send Getty back to Stringtown. What would he do for a cook now?

  Trudy Wheeler gave him the answer. “What were you paying him?”

  “Forty dollars a month.”

  “And furnishing the food?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pay me that and I’ll take the job.”

  Doug didn’t know if she was serious or not. “Thought you didn’t like this fencing project.”

  She shrugged. “You’re not going to stop it, and men have to eat. If you’re paying, I’d just as well get some of that money as see someone else take it.”

  Doug was pleased. A woman’s cooking would go over a lot better with these men than that of a camp cook, no matter how good he was.

  “You wouldn’t like cooking out in the open like this,” he pointed out.

  “I’d cook in the house, on the big woodstove.”

  Doug felt relief. Trudy Wheeler was softening. He had thought he saw it after Vern Wheeler had come home fighting. Now he was sure.

  “Then you’re hired,” Doug said. He extended his hand, and she took it. “You can start right now, and fix dinner.”

  * * *

  CAPTAIN ANDREW RINEHART paced the scarred pine floor of his office with the slowed step of an old man. An uneasiness creased his weathered face as he looked at Sheriff Luke McKelvie.

  “What else is new in town?”

  It wasn’t the question he wanted to ask, McKelvie knew that. The captain would bide his time, but he would get around to that question eventually if the answer didn’t come of its own accord.

  “Not a great deal,” the sheriff said, dropping cigarette ashes into a chip-edged old saucer. The captain never had ash trays around. Too strong-willed to indulge himself in life’s smaller pleasures, the captain made no allowances for those who did.

  McKelvie said, “Gordon Finch has left. Dumped the ranch, livestock and all, right into the bank’s lap. Just rode off and left it.”

  The captain nodded in satisfaction. “It’s what I told him to do.”

  “Albert Brown’s wringing his hands. He says he’s a banker, not a rancher. He don’t know what to do about it.”

  The captain frowned. “Funny he hasn’t come to me. I’d buy it, he ought to know that.”

  McKelvie stared reflectively at the captain. A thought came to him, but he kept silent about it.

  The captain evidently sensed McKelvie’s thought anyway. His frown deepened. “You think maybe he don’t want to sell to me?”

  The sheriff shrugged, not wanting to make a definite answer. “I wouldn’t know, Captain. I haven’t talked to him about it myself.”

  The captain paced some more, pausing to look out the window. “They’re talking in town, aren’t they?”

  McKelvie said, “They’re talking.”

  The captain shoved his hands deeply into his pockets. His voice was defiant. “Let them talk, then. It’s my town. I built it. I don’t care what they say.”

  But by the dark worry in the old man’s face, the way the gray head was bowed, McKelvie could tell that Rinehart did care. He had been the patriarch, the bell-wether, much too long to stop caring now.

  McKelvie said, “It was just a little place in the old days, Captain. Everybody in town worked for you or owed you something. But it’s not that little anymore. There are lots of people in it who don’t believe they owe you a thing. They think they can get along without you.”

  Rinehart gave him an angry, raking glance. “Who are you working for, Luke, them or me?”

  Not attempting to answer, McKelvie switched his gaze to Archer Spann, standing gravely by the door, out of the path of the captain’s restless pacing.

  “They’re talking about you, too, Archer,” the sheriff said. He caught the quick resentment in Spann’s narrowed eyes.

  “What’re they saying?” Spann demanded.

  “Laughing, mostly, about that incident over at Drinkman’s Gap.”

  Spann colored. Mouth hardening, he sat down stiffly in a straight chair covered with a stretched, dried steer hide, the red hair still on it. Spann seemed to submerge in his own dark thoughts, losing himself from the other two men. It was almost as if he had left the room.

  The captain said, “The ranchers are all with us, that’s what counts.”

  “Are they?” asked McKelvie. “I heard Archer made the rounds, trying to work up all the opposition he could against the fence. I heard some of them turned away from him.”

  Stubbornly the captain said, “They’ll come in with us when they realize what this fence will do to the country.”

  McKelvie considered awhile before he made any comment. “I’ve spent a lot of time asking myself what that fence means to the country. It could bring some good things, Captain.”

  Captain Rinehart stared incredulously. “Luke,” and there was shock in his voice, “are you turning against me?”

  The sheriff looked at Rinehart. “I’m not against you, Captain. I’ll never fight you,” he said in a hurt voice.

  The captain walked back to the window and stared out awhile, a growing tension in the ceaseless flexing of his nervous, rope-scarred hands. “What’s that story they’re telling about the Wheeler boy, and three hundred dollars?”

  McKelvie replied, “All I know is what I hear. You better ask Archer.”

  Spann glanced up sharply at mention of his name. “It’s a lie. It’s just something they made up to swing people against us. You know I took the cash out to that boy. You counted it off to me yourself, Captain.”

  The captain said, “He’s right, Luke. I counted it out. The R Cross doesn’t steal from its men.”

  McKelvie kept his eyes on Archer Spann. “No, the R Cross wouldn’t.”

  Tiring, the captain sat down at his desk. He was silent awhile, his mind running back to other times and other places. He opened a drawer and took out a small object. He gazed at it a moment, then extended it to McKelvie.

  “Ever see that, Luke?”

  “Arrowhead, isn’t it?”

  The captain nodded. “I caught it on the Pecos, a long time ago. Packed it around in my shoulder twelve or fifteen years. Maybe I was still carrying it when you were on the ranch here, I don’t remember. It finally worked close to the surface, and I had it taken out at Fort Worth.”

  There was a strange gentleness to the captain’s voice as he talked of the olden times.

  “Quite a souvenir,” McKelvie commented.

  The captain took it back and gazed at it with something akin to reverence. For a while, then, he forgot the worry of the present. He talked of things that had happened in those early days, of a time when he was in his element. Of a time of open range and freedom and plenty of opportunity for the man who had guts enough to try the impossible and make it work. A time when he had youth and vitality and a driving ambition.

  It had been years since McKelvie had heard the captain talk li
ke this, and he knew it for what it was. Sensing that time was inevitably closing in upon him, sensing the trouble that already had begun and could no longer be stopped until it had run its course, the old cowman was taking momentary refuge in the past.

  “Those were the real times, Luke,” the captain said. “They’re gone now. There’s a new breed of men in the country, men that don’t know what we went through in the old days. They want to tear down all we built. Can you blame me, Luke, for wanting to keep it the way it used to be?”

  McKelvie shook his head. “I can’t blame you, Captain. But I will tell you this: you can’t stop them. You’d just as well go out there and try to stop the river. You may slow the thing down, you may destroy some people. But in the end, Captain, they’ll get you. They’ll destroy you.”

  The captain stared unbelievingly, his face drained a shade lighter. Finally he pushed wearily to his feet, as if he carried a huge weight on his shoulders. His heavy-browed eyes were more sad than angry. His voice was pinched with hurt.

  “I reckon you’d better go, Luke. If that’s the way you feel, I don’t want you around here anymore.”

  Luke McKelvie blinked back a burning in his eyes. The old cowman had been like a father to him. Now McKelvie yearned to go to him and put his arm around the old man’s shoulders and help him see it through. But he realized that the way was hopelessly blocked, that it had been blocked from the beginning by stubborn pride and an old man’s deep-etched memories of a time when he had been king.

  “Captain,” McKelvie said, “think hard before you do anything.”

  “Go, Luke. Just go.”

  Luke McKelvie picked up his hat and walked out of the room without looking back. He moved with his head down, the hatbrim crushed in his strong, unfeeling hand.

  Sarah Rinehart was waiting for him at the front door. Seeing the look in his eyes, she knew. “You quarreled?”

  McKelvie nodded. “I’m sorry, Sarah, I did the best I could. I knew it was going to happen, though, sooner or later.”

  “I know,” she said. She brought a handkerchief out of her old lace sleeve. “What’re we going to do with him, Luke?”

  “I don’t know, Sarah. He’s getting set for a big fall. About all we can do is wait and try to help him up again.”

  Sarah said, “A lot of it’s Archer Spann. Oh, I know Andrew barks at him sometimes, to remind him who’s boss. But he’s getting old, and he thinks he sees something of himself in Archer. He lets Archer influence him more than any man ever has before.”

  Luke McKelvie took Sarah Rinehart’s thin hand. He could feel more strength in the old fingers than had been there in a long time. “I’m glad to see you looking better, Sarah. You’ve got to take care of yourself for his sake. One day soon, he’s going to need you. You’ve got to be here.”

  She said, “I’ll be here, Luke.”

  In the office Archer Spann stood at the window, watching Luke McKelvie mount his horse. “They’ve bought him off, Captain. He’s sold out.”

  Captain Rinehart sat heavily in his big office chair, his hands hanging limply. Weariness settled in his eyes, and he closed them. He rubbed a hand over his forehead, wondering why Providence had chosen to set Luke McKelvie against him. He knew his friends were dwindling in number day by day, but Luke McKelvie was one he had counted on.

  He knew Spann was wrong about McKelvie. Luke would never sell out. He just looked at the thing differently, that was all. But whatever the reason, he was in the enemy’s camp now. And that camp was growing.

  Spann said, “Time’s getting short, Captain. The farther they go with that fence, the harder it’s going to be to stop them.”

  Rinehart was only half listening. He was thinking of other days, of happier days when Luke McKelvie had been an R Cross cowboy, one of the best the captain had ever known. Losing him now was almost like losing a son.

  Times like this, Rinehart wished he had had a son. Everything else he had wanted in life had been provided him. But this he had always been denied. Once Luke McKelvie had come close to filling the need. Of late, it was Archer Spann.

  “What about it, Captain?” Spann pressed with a trace of impatience.

  “I’ve told you, you can do whatever you want to about that fence and about Monahan.”

  “We need to go farther than that. You don’t stop a snake by cutting its tail off. We need to hit Noah Wheeler, too. Hit him with all we’ve got, and we’ll stop this thing for good.”

  The captain shook his head. “No, Archer, I’ve told you that, too. We’re leaving Noah Wheeler alone.”

  Spann rubbed his hands nervously behind his back as he looked out the window again. “Do you mind telling me, Captain, what it is about Noah Wheeler that makes him so special? What’s the hold he’s got over you?”

  The captain frowned and stared at his rough old hands. “It goes back a long, long way. We were in the war together, Archer. Maybe you don’t see him as much except a quiet old farmer, but I know differently. I can remember.

  “We were both in Hood’s Texas Brigade. I had a commission—still got it put away in an old trunk somewhere—and Noah Wheeler was one of my sergeants. We went through some hard times together—Gaines Mill, Second Manassas.” He smiled faintly, calling up memories. “We had a marching song then, called ‘The Old Gray Mare Came Tearing Out of the Wilderness.’ I’ll never forget Noah singing that song as the men went marching down the road.

  “Then we came to Antietam. You never saw a hungrier, dirtier bunch of men in your life. They put us up against Hooker and his federals, and it was murder. It looked like the Yanks had us whipped when Hood ordered us to charge. Up through the cornfield we went. It was the nearest thing to hell there’ll ever be on earth, the bullets whistling like hornets, the shells screaming in. But we kept on going.

  “I caught a bullet in my leg and went down right under a Yankee gun. They had me. I was looking death in the face, and there wasn’t any way out. But Noah Wheeler came and stood over me and put that gun out of service while the bullets ripped by him like hail. Noah Wheeler brought me out of that battle alive, Archer.

  “That’s why I’m not going to hit him. I owe him my life.”

  13

  Dundee was getting impatient. “I’m beginnin’ to think I never will be able to get in a lick,” he complained to Doug Monahan as they sat on the edge of the Wheeler porch, eating supper. “Two miles of fence already strung up and they’re not makin’ a move against it. All I do is wear out my saddle lookin’ at the scenery.”

  Doug gulped a big swallow of black coffee. “We ought to take that as a blessing. Or maybe you just like fighting a lot more than I do.”

  Dundee shrugged. “I wouldn’t exactly say I like it. It’s only that I seem to thrive on trouble. Always did, even when I was a kid. Others could go fishin’. Me, I always had to go get in a fight. Things got too quiet, I got restless, started looking for something to muddy up the waters a little bit. I generally managed to find it.”

  Doug said, “Maybe you were born a few years too late. You ought to’ve been in the army, fighting Indians.”

  Dundee shook his head, smiling. “About the time the fightin’ started, I’d’ve been in the guardhouse for hittin’ an officer. I never did cotton to takin’ orders.”

  “You’ve taken them from me.”

  “If I hadn’t liked ’em, I wouldn’t have took ’em.”

  They were the last ones to eat. Since Trudy had taken over the cooking job, the men came up to the house for their meals, filling their plates from food piled high on the kitchen table. They usually sat on the porch outside to eat it, for the house would be uncomfortably cramped with that many men sitting around on the floor.

  Stub Bailey was finishing up, rubbing his stomach in satisfaction. He had been back to the table the second time. Watching Stub, Dundee said, “That girl’s cookin’s goin’ to cost you a heap extra, Doug. One thing about Simon Getty, he wouldn’t make a man overstuff himself.” He smiled then. “Of course, I r
eckon there’s more to it than just the cookin’. Most of ’em go back the second time just to take another look at that girl.”

  Dundee’s eyes touched Doug Monahan’s for a moment with a hint of shared secrets. Doug knew Dundee was including him, too. Dundee had a way of standing off and shrewdly sizing people up, and he wasn’t often wrong.

  Funny the way it was with Trudy. After all she had said earlier about the fence, she had loosened up and become friendly and easy-mannered to the men of the fencing crew. There wasn’t one of them now who wouldn’t have charged hell with a bucket of water if she had asked him to. Maybe she had belatedly caught some of her father’s enthusiasm about the fence.

  Dundee finished first and walked off toward the barn. Doug sat on the porch, eating the last of a big slice of gingerbread. Trudy walked out onto the porch with a large pan in her hands. Leaning over Doug, she dropped another piece of gingerbread into his plate.

  “Whoa now,” he said, “I’ve had enough.”

  “There’s too much to throw away and not enough to keep,” she told him firmly. “Eat it.” She ran her kitchen in the ironclad manner of a wagon cook, and she made the men like it.

  Doug smiled, remembering how wrong his first impression of her had been. That day she had ridden into his fencing camp with her father, he had her figured as a quiet, shy little country girl who would never speak above a whisper. He had missed by about a mile and a half. There was something of steel about Trudy Wheeler. It might be hidden most of the time, but stress would bring it out.

  Doug knew he was thinking too much about her. It wasn’t that he wanted to. But whenever she was anywhere in view, he found himself watching her, hoping she didn’t notice.

  Doug Monahan had never been in love in his life, and he didn’t want to be in love now. There was too much else to worry about.

  * * *

  HE COULDN’T TELL for sure what was wrong that night. An uneasiness came over him as darkness settled down, a prescience he had felt at other times, one he had learned to respect. He watched the men crawl into their blankets in the barn, but he didn’t go to bed himself.