José nodded. “Yes, I heard him.”
“Are you saying you won’t ride with me?”
“We will ride with you if that is what you want, but I ask you to think on this.”
All eyes were on Papa. None of the vaqueros had hired on to fight Indians, but they were loyal to Papa for some reason unknown to me. Still, they were all looking at the ground and trying to act like they weren’t hearing what was being said.
Joseph came and sat close to me, his hands working nervously at the rope in his hands. “Your papa will go after them, won’t he?”
“Sssshh. Everything is going to be all right.”
The problem was, I didn’t believe a word I told him.
Chapter Eighteen
Papa was sitting on the wagon tongue staring at the campfire coals when I fell asleep, and he was still sitting there when Gunn shook me awake the next morning. I guess Papa wrestled with himself all night.
Until we had eaten our breakfast and saddled our horses none of us were sure what he would do. The herd had already drifted well to the north, and without instruction from Papa, we all fell to our trail positions. José took the point, and the herd was slowly swung to the northeast. Papa had saddled Shiloh that morning, which he didn’t normally do when he intended to be handling cattle. The Thoroughbred was way too high-strung to be any good as a stock horse, and Papa usually saddled him only when he had a long trip to make or he was going to war.
He didn’t even stop to pass the time of the morning with Gunn and me, or even to say good-bye when he rode past us. He stopped for a moment at the point of the herd to speak with José, and then we watched him until he disappeared to the north.
“He’s going hunting those Kiowa,” Gunn said to me.
“Yes.”
“Do you think he’ll come back?”
I was a little surprised that Gunn didn’t seem bothered by Papa’s decision. “Going off after those Kiowa isn’t going to bring Mama back.”
“That ain’t what Papa’s after.”
“What is it then?”
“Revenge. Hurting them what have hurt you, and maybe for a little bit of time not feeling like you’re helpless.”
“And you? Don’t you still want revenge?”
“I dreamed last night that I went with Papa and we came up on a camp of those Kiowa. They were all painted with ashes and their eyes and mouths outlined in soot, and there were clouds everywhere. You know, low down like fog, with things moving inside it. One of them was wearing something around his neck, and I went forward to see if it was Mama’s necklace.”
“Was it?”
“Yes and no. He had bones hanging from his neck—all kinds of them. He took hold of one of them and shook it in front of my face. It was my arm bone.”
“How do you know it was yours?”
“Just did. He had it strung on a leather thong. Kept talking to me without his mouth moving, but I couldn’t understand all he was telling me. Guess it was Kiowa talk.”
“How could you dream in Kiowa if you don’t speak it?”
“It was a dream, okay? He finally quit shaking my arm bone and one of the others handed him a skull that he showed to me. The top of it was busted out and he reached inside and pulled Mama’s necklace from it.”
“What did he say? The part you understood?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’re kidding me. You told me all of that, and then you say you don’t want to talk about it anymore?”
“I shouldn’t have told you what I did. You think I’m crazy or making this up, don’t you?”
“We all have crazy dreams.”
“Not like this one.”
“It was only a dream.”
“Then why are you bothering me about it?”
“Talk to that old man, Rodrigo. José says he can tell fortunes and interpret dreams.”
“I already did this morning.”
“What did he say?”
“Same thing I thought.” Gunn turned his horse away and headed to the other side of the herd.
“What did he say?” I called after him.
“What I thought. It ain’t worth it.”
We stuffed grass in Old Speck’s cowbell to keep it from clanging, swung well to the east for a day, and pushed the herd hard and never saw a sign of that Kiowa camp. There was no trail in those days, and José simply kept us pointed north, crossing rivers and creeks with no names known to us, blazing our way following the North Star. If there was a railroad up there somewhere we were bound to strike it.
The weather had been especially fine up until that point, but on the fifteenth evening since Papa left us, a big wind blew up from the south. Before long, the whole sky was a wall of low gray clouds with little smoky tendrils hanging below it and dancing around like wiggling worms. By the time we made camp, lightning was crackling and the thunder booming so loud it felt like the earth shook. The cattle were restless and wouldn’t bed down, and José kept us all on guard. None of us really minded, for it began to rain so hard that we couldn’t have slept anyway.
Somewhere around midnight, lightning struck a lone cedar on the edge of the herd. The whole night was lit up, and before it went dark again I saw the shadows of dead cattle all around that tree and a staggering horse with an empty saddle.
That was all in the instant before the herd stampeded and my horse took off after them. You’ve never done anything until you’ve run a horse flat out in the dark with the rain coming down so hard it stings your face, and not knowing when you’re going to find a hole or a gully that will send you end over end, either to get your fool neck broke or trampled to death by several thousand hooves.
You could feel the electricity in the air. I know that’s probably not an educated way to say that, but it’s the only thing that comes to mind. Sparks and little runners of lightning played across the cattle’s backs as they ran, and twice I saw blue balls of fire on their horn tips.
There are those that will say that cowboys popped their pistols to turn a stampeding herd, but whoever started that tall tale didn’t know a thing. Shooting off your popper is the last thing to calm a running bovine. The second thing you’ll hear is how good hands could turn the herd back into itself until the run was broken and all the cattle were milling in confusion. I’ve seen that happen with a nervy man who knows his stuff, and a herd that was only half a mind to stampede. But with a stampede like we had that night, you don’t do anything but run with them. Those steers were running so scared they were blind to anything, and there was nothing to do but stick with them and wait them out. Clench your teeth and keep your backside down in your saddle seat and pray that they don’t run forever.
The horse I rode was a little black that I used only for my night horse. He was sure-footed and steady, and never once did I appreciate that more than when he carried me that night. The country was fairly open, but every drainage, branch, and gully was lined with cedars or elm and oak brush. Those steers didn’t slow down for anything, and every time we busted through or sailed over one of those spots, with me clawing to stay in the saddle, I thanked the Lord that my black kept his feet.
We eventually hit a long stretch of rolling prairie, and I was shocked to discover that somehow I had ridden almost to the leaders. Lightning lit up the sky again, and I caught a quick glance of someone riding on the other side of the herd. It was little Joseph, swinging a blanket over his head, trying to turn the herd. He was riding a horse we called Crazy Man, a big gray that could outrun anything in our remuda. He belonged to Papa’s string, and I don’t know what Joseph was doing riding him.
We must have run for another mile or two. The rain slackened to a gentle downpour and the lightning was all in the distance. I had no clue where Joseph was, for it was too dark to see much of anything.
Sometime later, the herd slowed to a high lope, and then later to a trot. It might have been five minutes, it might have been half an hour, I don’t know. My horse was heaving, but he
kept along with the flow of the herd.
By daylight, I found myself with a small bunch of spent steers—maybe two hundred of them. There was nobody else in sight, and I didn’t know where I was. I looked at the rising sun and took a guess which way was south. The steers were so tired that they gave me little trouble, more than content to walk, and some of them trying to lie down.
I soon saw something ahead of me in a wash. When I got closer I saw that it was Crazy Man’s white belly that had caught my eye, and he was lying on his side in the gully in about six inches of running water. Joseph sat on the muddy bank above him, hatless and covered from head to toe in red clay.
“He never saw the gully,” Joseph said in monotone. “We were falling before I even knew what hit us.”
I studied how the horse lay. One of its front legs was broken until the bone showed and its head was twisted at an odd angle. “Looks like he broke his neck. At least he didn’t suffer.”
Joseph looked up at me. “He did. Took him a long time to die, and I didn’t have a pistol to put him out of his misery.”
“Climb up here behind me.”
“What about my saddle?”
He was right. We might not ever find our way back to get it. I dismounted and slid down the gully to him. With both of us tugging and straining and digging, we managed to get the saddle out from under the horse. By then, we were both covered in mud.
It took Joseph two tries to climb out of the gully. The clay pulled his boot off once, and he had to slide back down the bank to retrieve it. We stacked Joseph’s saddle on top of mine and walked beside my horse, doing our best to move the cattle in front of us on foot. Joseph was still holding that muddy boot in one hand, and the limp it gave him reminded me how comical we both must look.
We hadn’t gone far when we began to meet stragglers from our crew, some of them bringing in more cattle. Gunn loped out to meet us.
“You don’t look any worse for the wear,” I said.
Gunn pulled his horse up and lifted one leg over his horse’s withers and hooked the back of his knee on his saddle horn. There was a great big welt across his cheek that looked like a limb had slapped him in the face. The smile he tried to hide ended up as a smirk. “Hamish, Joseph, is that you? My horse almost spooked out from under me when he saw you. He thought he was about to be attacked by mud people.”
“Funny.”
“What happened to your horse, Peckerhead?”
“He tripped and fell and broke his neck,” Joseph said.
“He was riding Crazy Man,” I said.
“Who told you to ride him?” Gunn asked.
We all knew that Gunn had begged Papa to let him have that horse, but the gelding was a vicious bucker when you first stepped on him, and no kind of horse for a boy—no kind of horse for a one-armed boy was what Gunn probably thought Papa didn’t say.
“I didn’t ask. I thought it wouldn’t hurt if I rode him easy,” Joseph said. “Do you think he’s going to be mad?”
“Papa?” Gunn said. “You’ll be lucky if he doesn’t give you to some farmer when we get up to Kansas.”
“Don’t listen to him,” I said.
“Papa never wanted you,” Gunn said. “She just felt sorry for you.”
“Don’t you bring Mama into this,” I said.
“You forgive her if you want to.”
“Forgive her? For what? Adopting Joseph?”
Gunn turned his back on me and rode off. Joseph was staring at me like he always did, with that look that I never could put my finger on.
“It’s all right. I know I’m not your real brother.”
“I told you not to listen to Gunn. He likes you. It’s other stuff that’s bothering him and he’s taking it out on anybody he can.”
“I never should have taken that horse.”
“Papa will be mad when he comes back, but he’ll get over it. I promise you I’ve done worse.” It dawned on me then that I was assuming Papa would come back.
“Like your papa leaving and going after those Kiowa? I don’t think he gets over things.”
There it was again, that look he gave me. Who was this kid always staring with those big, wise eyes that didn’t belong on his face? I started to tell him to forget about it, but I would have felt like a hypocrite. There were things I couldn’t forget and never would—things so big that it was all I could do to hold them in. And all I had to talk to was a big-eyed kid who wouldn’t understand any of it.
Chapter Nineteen
It took us two days to gather our herd again. Even then, we were short about thirty head, either missing or crippled during the run. Several of our horses were also lame, but it was the burial of the man that was struck by lightning that hit us the hardest.
After we buried him and rode our horses over the grave to pack the soil so that maybe the coyotes wouldn’t dig him up, José drove a big stick at the head of the grave and hung the man’s sombrero on it. I thought we would sing some hymns or someone would say a few words in eulogy, but they all seemed in a hurry to get as far from that place as possible. The vaqueros made the sign of the Cross and went to their horses without a word. I can’t even remember that man’s name that we left in the Indian Nations, but he was a good man. He had no wife or children or family that any of us knew, but he was a fair hand with a fiddle and kept us all entertained until he couldn’t play anymore.
Another week went by, more rivers to swim and more places we had never seen, following the North Star. Gunn and I even got to ride scout ahead of the herd a couple of times and helped drive off the buffalo in our way.
We had it good, for not once did we hit high water at one of those river crossings, and we had Old Speck, gentle and sure, to lead our herd across. The rest of those steers fell in right behind him, trusting because he never hesitated, and following the dull ringing of that bell on his neck.
Gunn never liked it if we hit swimming water. I’d never thought about it until the first time it happened, but sitting in the saddle on a swimming horse or floating alongside it and letting it drag you across must have been a scary proposition for a boy with one arm. He used to swim like a fish, but that was before Texas.
On the morning of our twenty-fifth day on the trail we came across a set of wagon ruts baked into the hard ground and stretching into the distance ahead of us—the first sign of civilization we had seen in a long while. Trails always lead someplace, and that trail pointed due north to Kansas. All of us felt a little better for seeing it.
Later, we learned that the wagon trace we came across was made by a freighter and half-breed trader by the name of Chisolm. And things happened that day that kept us from dwelling on stuff like that, anyway. For it wasn’t another mile up when we found Papa walking down the middle of those ruts with his saddle on his shoulder.
He had a bullet wound high on his chest that he had stuffed closed with a piece of his shirt, and the last two fingers on his left hand were gone, either torn away by another bullet or cut free with an arrowhead. He was so thirsty that he wouldn’t put down the canteen that José offered him until he had drank most of it and poured the rest over his head.
“Where’s Shiloh at?” I asked when I thought he looked like he was ready to talk.
“Gone.”
That was all he said; nothing more, at least to me, about where he had been and what he had done. I knew not to ask again, for there were some things Papa wouldn’t talk about. I guess he thought I wouldn’t understand.
Chapter Twenty
That Joseph McCoy might have been a Blue Bastard Yankee, but he knew how to put a town on the map. He sent riders down into the Indian Nations to tell any herds they might meet about the new shipping point in Abilene and all the cattle buyers he had there waiting. I heard later that he went so far as hiring Texas cowboys to rope some buffalo for him, and he shipped those animals to Kansas City and Chicago to promote his business venture.
We were the second herd to arrive on the outskirts of the little town. Another
herd bound for California had detoured there once they got word of the new market. It wasn’t much of a town yet, and the pale oak planks of the new stockyards they had built were the most noticeable thing, except for the three-story hotel McCoy had finished only weeks before.
Abilene means “city of the plains” if you read the Bible, and that part was true. Most of the few buildings were simple log cabins set along the banks of Mud Creek. I heard that stream used to be named after one of the town’s early comers, but those abolitionists renamed it when that fellow joined the Confederacy at the start of the war.
We held our herd on grass as high as a horse’s belly while Papa rode into town to see if there were really cattle buyers willing to spend Yankee gold on Texas steers. One thing Kansas had plenty of was grass. Grass like you’ve never seen.
Two men smoking big cigars and driving a new buggy soon came back with Papa and bought the entire herd for thirty-eight dollars a head. It all seemed too good to be true.
Being the promoter he was, that Joseph McCoy himself paid us a visit and talked Papa into cutting off a little bunch of steers and driving them right through town. Seems like McCoy had several newspapermen in town and wanted to show out for them and the local merchants.
We boys and half the crew got to go, and you would have thought we were riding in a parade, no matter that our clothes were about worn to rags and we looked like something the cat drug in. Gunn, he took the point on that little bunch of steers without asking or anybody telling him he could. He stared straight ahead, and with his empty shirtsleeve pinned up and the floppy brim of his oversized sombrero bobbing with each stride of his horse, he looked like some kind of raggedy boy revolutionary or bandito. People stared and a few of them were so rude as to point at him. I guess we were the first Texas men some of those Jayhawkers ever saw. Then again, my brother Gunn was one of a kind.
Even more of the crowd were impressed with Joseph, maybe because Gunn and I were at least three-quarters grown, while the sight of a half-pint kid sitting on a Texas bronc with his little legs barely long enough to hang below the saddle skirts and packing a fifty-foot rope in his hands like he was born with it was quite a novelty.
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