Bitter Trail and Barbed Wire

by Elmer Kelton

  “What’s the matter, Doug?” Stub Bailey asked.

  “I don’t rightly know. Just got a queer feeling.”

  “So’ve I, but it was just that third slice of gingerbread. It’ll be all right in the morning.”

  Doug went outside and walked restlessly in front of the barn. He smoked half a cigarette, then flipped it away. It didn’t taste right.

  It was dark outside, except for the brittle winter starlight. He didn’t like it, and he wished the moon would rise. Then he remembered it was time for the new moon.

  Restlessness still needling him, he saddled his horse and rode down the steadily lengthening fenceline. His horse nickered, and another answered from nearby in the darkness. Doug kept his hand on his gun until he assured himself that the other horseman was one of the two guards he had constantly riding the fence.

  “Who is it?” a stern voice demanded. Doug heard a hammer click.

  “Me, Doug.” He rode up slowly. He had to get close before the man could be sure of him in the darkness. The rider relaxed then and slipped the gun back into its holster.

  “Just checking up, Milt,” Doug said. “See or hear anything?”

  “Nope, quiet as a church. Just like it’s been every night.”

  “How long since you’ve seen Wallace?”

  “Passed him ten minutes ago. He was ridin’ along on the other side. He’ll make a vuelta and be back directly. Somethin’ wrong?”

  “Nothing I can put my finger on. Just a feeling.”

  He found the other guard presently and got the same sort of answers. Doug was almost ready to concede that it was too much gingerbread and go back to the barn. But, to satisfy himself, he decided to make a short swing of a mile or so out in the direction of the R Cross headquarters.

  The horse picked them up first. How a horse could unerringly find others of its kind in pitch darkness had always been something of a mystery to Doug. His mount perked up its ears and turned its head a little. Doug stood in the stirrups, looking and listening. He could hear and see nothing. He swung out of the saddle to get away from the constant creak of leather and stood off at the reins’ full length from the horse.

  He began to hear it then, the muffled thud of hoofs in the dry grass, a fragile tinkle of spurs and bit-chains in the crisp night air.

  They were coming.

  He swung back into the saddle and spurred into a long trot, hoping the sound would not carry to the oncoming riders as their own had come to him. The sharp breeze was in his favor. He hurriedly found his two guards.

  “Riders on their way,” he said. “Wallace, you ride back to the barn and pick up the rest of the crew. Milt, you and I’ll go down to the end of the fence.”

  They struck an easy lope down the fenceline. Doug wished for good moonlight, but he knew there would be little of it. They wouldn’t see their enemy until the men got close. But that worked both ways. The fencing crew wouldn’t be easily seen, either.

  He wondered why he hadn’t thought of the new moon before. The R Cross probably had checked the almanac to be sure of coming in the dark of the moon. With a little thought, Monahan would have known they’d come on a night like this, if they were coming at all.

  At the end of the fence were stacked the spools of wire and most of the cedar posts which hadn’t been used yet. Down here the R Cross riders could do more damage in ten minutes than they could elsewhere in half the night, laboriously snipping away at the finished fence.

  Saddlegun in his lap, Doug sat his horse quietly and waited, the blood pounding in his temples. Maybe Dundee would get his satisfaction tonight.

  He heard a faint hum in the fence. Somewhere above, someone had cut a strand and eased the tension of the wire.

  Doug’s hand tightened on the gun. All that hard work, and they were setting in to destroy it! Listening hard, hearing the sharp gnash of cutting edge against cutting edge as the steel cutters bit through the wire, he felt growing in him the same anger that he had known the day Paco Sanchez had died.

  But this time there was a difference. This time he was not helpless.

  The horses were coming down the fence. Doug stepped out of the saddle, squatting low in the brittle grass so he could see the riders against the skyline. The sky was almost as black as the ground, and he could make out only the blurry outlines of the men as they reached the corner posts. He tied the ends of his split reins together and looped them over his arm.

  “Here’s the end of it,” a man said in a low voice. “Them spools have got to be here someplace. Fetch up them kerosene cans.” There were three riders, maybe four; it was hard to tell. That others were still busy up-fence, Doug was certain.

  He lifted the muzzle of the saddlegun just enough so the slug would clear the men’s heads, and squeezed off the shot.

  His horse jerked back, almost throwing Doug to the ground. A couple of the raiders’ horses squealed in panic. The wire stretched and sang as a horse hit the fence. Doug flinched at the sound. He heard the solid clank of a small kerosene can hitting the ground as some rider turned loose of everything and concentrated on staying in the saddle.

  Doug moved so the men could not pinpoint him by the flash of the gun. For a moment or so there was confusion among the riders. Their horses danced excitedly, and Doug thought he heard a man hit the ground. Hoofs clattered as a horse broke in terror out across the prairie. One man afoot, Doug thought.

  Somebody fired in Doug’s direction, but it was a wild shot, more an angry gesture than an earnest attempt to hit him. The riders backed off.

  He could hear men cutting the fence farther up. And there was a louder noise. The top strand of wire sang loudly. Staples sprang out of the posts.

  “What’re they doin’ up there?” Milt asked worriedly.

  “Tied on with a rope, I think. Trying to jerk down as much wire as they can in a hurry.”

  “Shouldn’t we go stop ’em?”

  “No,” Doug replied, “we got to guard these stacks till the rest of the bunch gets here.”

  He fired again in the direction of the fence cutters. Someone shouted. He knew he was hitting close to home.

  Then came the sharp rattle of gunfire farther up the fence. His own crew was coming now. They were shooting wild, trying to scare the raiders back from the fence. The guns moved nearer as the fencing crew strung out. Doug and Milt joined in, firing into the blackness until their gunbarrels were too hot to touch.

  “Doug,” a voice shouted, “where you at?” It was Dundee’s.

  “Here, at the corner.”

  He heard the roll of hoofbeats from across the fence. The raiders were retreating in hasty confusion. The wild, indiscriminate fire from the strong fencing crew was hard to face. There was no cover anywhere along the fenceline, no protection from the bullets that came whining by in the black.

  The R Cross men were not gunfighters, and they were not getting gunfighter pay. They were drawing wages as cowboys, twenty-five to thirty-five dollars a month, depending on what they were worth for solid cow work, done a-horseback. No frills, no fancy stuff. They might be good men, top cowhands, but most of them probably had never been shot at in their lives, and they found this first time hard to take. So they were leaving.

  It was the smart thing to do, Doug conceded. In their place, he would have done it himself.

  Dundee came loping up. The fencing crew was strung out behind him. “We got ’em on the run,” he shouted. “We could maybe catch up and give ’em somethin’ to really remember us by.”

  “No,” Doug said, “it’s too dark. They’ll remember us, all right.”

  Dundee was shaking with the excitement of a high-strung Thoroughbred horse which has just finished its race and still wants to run. For a moment he acted as if he’d go along anyway. “I say we ought to go after ’em!”

  “No,” Doug replied firmly, “if we push it any farther, somebody’s liable to get killed. We ran them off, that’s all I aimed to do.”

  Dundee accepted the decision with
reluctance and shoved his gun back into the holster. “They’ve done us some damage. We oughtn’t to just let it go like that. They get the idea we’re an easy mark, they’ll be slippin’ back in here every night, cuttin’ wire and makin’ a nuisance.”

  “We’re not just letting it go by,” Doug told him, although he wasn’t sure yet just what he was going to do about it.

  Then Foley Blessingame brought him his answer. “Lookee here what me and the kids found,” he said jubilantly. He pushed in close enough so Doug could see a man afoot at the end of a rope. “Feller lost his horse out yonder,” Foley explained.

  “Who are you?” Doug demanded.

  The cowboy gave him a go-to-hell look.

  Young Vern Wheeler came to see who it was. “Howdy, Shorty,” he said. The R Cross man softened a little at the sight of Vern. “Howdy, Vern.”

  Vern said, “He’s Shorty Willis. We worked together some while I was on the R Cross. Let’s go easy on him. He’s a pretty good feller.”

  “We don’t aim to hurt him, Vern,” Doug promised, “unless he gives us a reason to. Right now I’d just like to get a little information out of him.”

  “I got nothin’ to tell you,” Shorty said.

  Doug glanced quizzically at Foley Blessingame. “Reckon he’d change his mind if you dunked him in that icy creek?”

  Foley grinned. “You mean like we done that grouchy cook? I expect it’d loosen up his tongue a little. It sure made the cook talk.”

  The cowboy looked pleadingly at Vern Wheeler. Vern said, “You better tell ’em what they want to know, Shorty. They’ll make you talk sooner or later. You’d just as well do it now and save yourself a soaking. That’s mighty cold water.”

  Shorty Willis shrugged. “I ain’t paid to do no swimmin’. What do you want to know?”

  “Who-all was on the raid, and how many?” Doug asked.

  “Big part of the R Cross cowboys, all that Archer Spann could round up without havin’ to drag ’em in from the line camps. He got some of Fuller Quinn’s bunch in on it, too. Quinn’s been itchin’ to do somethin’ about this fence, only he ain’t had the nerve to try it by hisself.”

  “Were Quinn and Spann both out here?”

  “Yep. Spann was giving’ the orders, though. He allus does. It’s a funny thing to me, Quinn bein’ a ranch owner and all. When Spann’s around, Quinn lets him give all the orders, and Spann don’t even own a good horse, much less a ranch. Somethin’ about him that naturally makes a man sit up and take notice, I reckon.”

  “What was his plan?”

  “He figured on cuttin’ and rippin’ out all the wire you’d strung. We was goin’ to burn all the posts and wire you had stacked up out here. Cripple you good, he said, and you’d quit.”

  Doug said, “It didn’t get very far, though, did it?”

  Willis shook his head. “The dark had us boogered some to begin with. Spann said there’d be nothin’ to it, that you’d fold up like a wet rag. But it’s a creepy feelin’, movin’ into somethin’ like this and not bein’ able to see what’s ahead. You-all could’ve been settin’ up an ambush for all we knew. And when the guns opened up and them slugs started whinin’ around, it was too much. A few of the boys started pullin’ back, and then all of us was scatterin’ like a bunch of quail. Archer Spann was fit to tie, but he couldn’t stop it.”

  The cowboy rubbed his hip. It evidently was sore. “One of them wild bullets got my horse. Spilled him right on top of me. I hollered for somebody to pick me up, but everybody was so excited I guess they didn’t hear me. Nobody except”—he nodded his head at the Blessingames—“them big oxes there.”

  Foley Blessingame grinned. “I always taughts my boys to give a man his money’s worth.”

  Doug asked Willis, “Were you going to meet again somewhere after the job was through?”

  Willis nodded. “Spann didn’t seem to have any doubt we’d do the job up right. He said if we got scattered to meet at the Lodd line camp. He left some whisky there and said when we got back ever’body could celebrate.” Willis grimaced. “Some celebration!”

  Vern said, “I thought it was against R Cross rules to have whisky on the place.”

  “What the old man don’t find out about won’t hurt him any.” Willis shook his head. “Funny about Spann. Never touches a drop hisself. He’s as straitlaced as the old man. But he’ll buy it for somebody else if it suits his purpose, and that’s somethin’ the captain never would do.”

  It would be a different kind of a whisky party than Spann had anticipated, Doug figured. They’d be drinking to quiet their nerves and drown the ignominy of the rout.

  “Let’s mount up,” Doug told the men. “We’re going to drop over to that line camp and join the party.”

  14

  The fencing crew sat their horses in a live oak motte above the line camp and looked down through darkness at the dim outline of a little frame house. This had been built as some small rancher’s home, before the captain had bought him out. Or run him out.

  “I don’t hear any celebratin’,” Stub Bailey commented dryly. “I thought they were really goin’ to hang one on.” There was no light in the window.

  Doug Monahan smiled, but it was a grim one. “Wasn’t much to celebrate. I imagine they tanked up and hit their soogans. How many horses down there in the corral, Dundee?”

  Dundee had just come back from a short exploration afoot. “Ten, maybe twelve. I don’t figure the men all stayed. Some of ’em likely just wanted to go home and hide their heads.”

  Doug nodded in satisfaction. Ten or twelve men would be all he wanted to try to handle anyway.

  “Cold up here,” he said evenly. “Let’s go down where the fire is.”

  They moved down out of the motte and across the open stretch of tromped-out ground in front of the corrals. Doug’s ears were keened for any noise down there which would indicate they had been seen. But he doubted there would be any. Whoever was in that house now would likely be too groggy to see or hear anything.

  Nearing the house, he made a motion with his arm, and the men fanned out into a line. He could barely see the men on the ends, it was so dark. He stepped out of the saddle and motioned Dundee and Stub Bailey and Foley Blessingame to come with him. Vern Wheeler dismounted and held their horses. Doug drew his gun and moved carefully to the creaky front porch.

  Quietly he pushed the door open and stepped inside, quick to get out of the doorway. Dundee and Bailey followed suit. Foley Blessingame was a little slow, standing there and blocking the door until Doug caught his arm and gave a gentle tug.

  The place smelled like a distillery.

  Doug gripped the gun tightly, listening and watching for movement. Someone turned over and groaned beneath blankets on the wooden floor. Doug leveled the gun on him and held it there until the man began to snore.

  His eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he made out a kitchen table in a far end of the room. On it sat a lamp. “Cover me,” he whispered, and moved slowly toward the table, careful not to step on any of the sleeping men. Lifting the glass chimney, he struck a match on his boot and lighted the wick. He slipped the chimney back in place.

  Someone halfway across the room rose up on one elbow and rubbed his eyes. “Put out that damned light,” he said irritably, blinking. He stiffened then as it penetrated his brain that the man at the lamp didn’t belong here.

  The lamp was smoking. Gun in his right hand, Doug trimmed the wick with his left. “Just take it easy,” he said. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  The light and the sound of the voices stirred some of the other men. But Doug’s fencing crew was coming in the door. As each man woke up, his sleepy eyes beheld someone standing in front of him, holding a gun in his face.

  “You boys just get up quiet and peaceful,” Doug said evenly.

  Dundee and Vern Wheeler made a round of the room, picking up guns wherever they found them.

  It took a while for the full meaning to soak in on some of the
men, and it wasn’t hard to tell why. Several empty whisky bottles lay scattered about the room. One sat overturned on the table, a big stain around it where the whisky had spilled out unnoticed.

  “Looks like you boys were having you a little party,” Doug said. “Well, I kind of like parties myself. I got another one planned for you.” He motioned with the gun. “Get your clothes on, all of you.”

  The men fumbled around, trying to pull on their clothes. Two cowboys got their boots mixed up, and each of them wound up wearing one of the other man’s, along with one of his own.

  To the one that looked the clearest-headed, Doug said, “Where’s Archer Spann? Thought he’d be here with you.”

  The cowboy started to shake his head but stopped abruptly. It hurt. “He was so mad he didn’t even stop. Just kept on ridin’.”

  Doug turned to Vern Wheeler. “They all R Cross?”

  Vern nodded. “Most of them. Those four aren’t. They’re some of Fuller Quinn’s bunch.” He squinted, looking in a corner. “By George, that’s Fuller Quinn himself.”

  It was indeed Fuller Quinn the range hog, the man who was always crowding his cattle onto somebody else’s grass. He glared belligerently, his red-veined eyes glassy with drunkenness. He reminded Doug of Gordon Finch.

  Doug had hoped for Archer Spann, but he would take Fuller Quinn as a substitute. He had always disliked range hogs. Today, Doug thought, he’d make Quinn put out sweat for the free pasturage he had stolen from Noah Wheeler in the past.

  Dundee was poking around, looking over the R Cross guns. Suddenly he spoke up happily, “Well now, look what I found.” He held up a .45 and rubbed his hand over it fondly. “Looks just exactly like one somebody took off of me that day the R Cross raided Monahan’s fencin’ camp. Same scratches, same feel. Even got the same initials carved on it.”

  His eyes sharply searched over the men. “Anybody claim it?”

  Nobody answered. Nobody would have dared to. At length Dundee said, “Well, if it don’t belong to anybody, I reckon I’ll just keep it,” and triumphantly shoved it into his waistband.