The Trail Driver

by Zane Grey

  “Fine night to be home sparkin’ my girl,” joked Rolly Little.

  “Rolly, boy, yu’ll never see home no more, nor thet flirtin’ little redhaid,” taunted Deuce Ackerman, fatalistically.

  “Come to think of thet, all redhaids are flirty an’ fickle,” philosophized Texas.

  Reddie heard, but for once had no audacious retort. She was obsessed with gravity.

  “Tex—Dad—it ain’t natural,” she said, nervously.

  “Wal, lass, whatever it is, it’ll come an’ pass, an’ spare us mebbe, please God,” rejoined the cattleman.

  “Boss, is it gonna be one of them, storms when electricity runs like water?” queried Texas.

  “I don’t know, Tex, I swear to goodness I don’t. But I’ve heahed when the sky looks like a great white globe of glass with a light burnin’ inside thet it’ll burst presently an’ let down a million jumpin’ stars an’ balls an’ ropes an’ sparks.”

  Texas got to his feet, dark and stern. “Fork yore hawses, everybody. If we’re goin’ to hell we’ll go together.”

  They rode out to join the four guards already on duty.

  “What’s comin’ off?” yelled Less Holden, as the others came within earshot.

  “We’re gamblin’ with death, cowboy,” returned Texas Joe.

  So indeed it seemed to Brite. The weird conditions imperceptibly increased. It became so light that the faces of the drivers shone like marble in moonlight. There were no shadows. Darkness of night had been eliminated, yet no moon showed, and the stars had vanished in the globe overhead.

  “We can hold ’em in heah onless they stampede,” said Texas. “What’s the stock doin’, Less?”

  “Not grazin’, thet’s shore. An’ the remuda is plumb loco.”

  Brite followed Reddie over to the dark patch of mustangs, huddled in a compact drove under the west wall. This embankment was just steep and high enough to keep the mustangs from climbing. A restless nickering ran through the mass. They trooped with low roar of hoofs away from the approaching riders.

  “Just a little fussy, Dad,” said Reddie, hopefully.

  “Cain’t yu sing them quiet, Reddie?” asked Brite.

  “I’ll try, but I shore don’t feel like no nightingale tonight,” replied Reddie. “I haven’t heahed any of the boys.”

  In low and quavering tones Reddie began “La Paloma,” and as she progressed with the song, her sweet and plaintive voice grew stronger. The strange atmosphere appeared to intensify it, until toward the close she was singing with a power and beauty that entranced the listening cattlemen. When she finished, Texas Joe, who seldom sang, burst out with his wild and piercing tenor, and then the others chimed in to ring a wonderful medley down that lonely valley. The remuda quieted down, and at length the great herd appeared chained to music.

  The trail drivers sang in chorus and in quartets, duets and singly, until they had repeated their limited stock of songs, and had exhausted their vocal powers.

  When they had no more to give, the hour was late, and as if in answer, from far down the range rumbled and mumbled low thunder, while pale flashes of lightning shone all over the sky.

  The drivers sat their horses and waited. That they were uneasy, that they did not smoke or sit still, proved the abnormality of the hour. They kept close together and spoke often. Brite observed that Reddie seldom let her restless black move a rod away.

  The rumble of thunder and the queer flashes might have presaged a storm, but apparently it did not come closer. Brite observed that the singular sheen became enhanced, if anything. The sultry, drowsy air grew thicker. It had weight. It appeared to settle down over stock and men like a transparent blanket.

  Suddenly the sky ripped across with terrific bars of lightning that gave forth a tearing, cracking sound. Rain began to fall, but not in any quantity. Brite waited for the expected clap of thunder. It did not materialize. Then he recognized for a certainty the symptoms of an electrical storm such as had been described to him.

  “Boys, we’re in for a galvanizin’,” he called. “We’re as safe heah as anywheres. We cain’t do nothin’ but take our chance an’ try to hold the cattle. But if what’s been told me is true they’ll be scared still.”

  “We’re heah, boss,” boomed Texas, and a reassuring shout came from Pan Handle.

  “Oh, Dad!” cried Reddie. “Run yore hand through yore hawse’s mane!”

  Brite did as bidden, to be startled at a cracking, sizzling sweep of sparks clear to the ears of his horse. He jumped as if he had been shot. Brite did not attempt that again. But he watched Reddie. Electric fluid appeared to play and burn with greenish fire through the black’s mane, and run out on the tips of his ears and burst. The obedient horse did not like this, but he held firm, just prancing a little.

  “Lass, the air is charged,” said Brite, fearfully.

  “Yes, Dad, an’ it’s gonna bust!” screamed Reddie as the whole range land blazed under the white dome.

  Hoarse shouts from the drivers sounded as if wrenched from them. But after that one outburst they kept mute. Brite had involuntarily closed his eyes at the intense flare. Even with his lids tightly shut he saw the lightning flashes. He opened them upon an appalling display across the heavens. Flash after flash illumined the sky, and if thunder followed it was faint and far off. The flashes rose on all sides to and across the zenith, where, fusing in one terrible blaze, they appeared to set fire to the roof of the heavens.

  The remuda shrank in shuddering, densely-packed mass, too paralyzed to bolt. The cattle froze in their tracks, heads down, lowing piteously.

  No longer was there any darkness anywhere. No shadow under the wall! No shadow of horse and rider on the ground! Suddenly the flash lightning shifted to forked lightning—magnificent branched streaks of white fire that ribbed the sky. These were as suddenly succeeded by long, single ropes or chains of lightning.

  Gradually the horses drew closer together, if not at the instigation of their riders, then at their own. They rubbed flanks; they hid their heads against each other.

  “My Gawd! it’s turrible!” cried Texas, hoarsely. “We gotta get oot of the way. When this hell’s over, thet herd will run mad.”

  “Tex, they’re struck by lightnin’,” yelled Holden. “I see cattle down.”

  “Oot of the narrow place heah., men,” shouted Brite.

  They moved out into the open valley beyond the constricted neck, and strange to see, the remuda followed, the whole drove moving as one horse. They had their heads turned in, so that they really backed away from the wall.

  The chain lightnings increased in number, in brilliance, in length and breadth until all in a marvelous instant they coalesced into a sky-wide canopy of intensest blue too burning for the gaze of man. How long that terrifying phenomenon lasted Brite could not tell, but when, at husky yells of his men, he opened his eyes, the terrific blue blaze of heaven had changed to balls of lightning.

  Here was the moment Brite believed he was demented. And these fearless cowhands shared the emotion which beset him. They gaped with protruding eyes at the yellow balls appearing from nowhere, to roll down the walls, to bounce off and burst into crackling sparks. It appeared that balls of fire were shooting in every direction to the prolonged screams of horses in terror.

  Brite took the almost fainting Reddie into his arms, and held her tight. He expected death at any instant. Zigzag balls of lightning grew in size and number and rapidity until the ground was criss-crossed with them. They ran together to burst into bits or swell into a larger ball. Then to Brite’s horror, to what seemed his distorted vision these fiendish balls ran over the horses, to hang on their ears, to drop off their noses, to roll back and forth along the reins, to leap and poise upon the rim of his sombrero. Yet he was not struck dead, as seemed inevitable.

  All at once Brite became aware of heat, intense sulphurous heat, encompassing him like a hot blanket. Coincident with that the rolling, flying balls, like the chains of lightning before them, coalesced
with strange sputtering sound into a transparent white fog.

  The air reeked with burnt sulphur and contained scarcely enough oxygen to keep men and beasts alive. By dint of extreme will power Brite kept from falling off his horse with Reddie unconscious in his arms. The men coughed as if half strangled. They were bewildered. The herd had been swallowed up in this pale mysterious medium. The hissing, crackling sound of sparks had ceased.

  Slowly that fog lifted like a curtain to disclose to Brite’s eyes the dark forms of horses and riders. Cooler air took the place of the heat. A vast trampling stir ran through the herd. It seemed likewise to revivify the trail drivers.

  “Pards, air we in hell?” shouted Texas, huskily. “Or air we oot? … Boys, it’s passed away. We’re alive to tell the tale. …Ho! Ho! Brite’s ootfit on the Canadian! … The herd’s millin’, boys!—Bear in!—Ride ’em, cowboys! … By Gawd! our luck is great!—Not bad, but great! … An’ shore we’re drivin’ on to Dodge. …Ride ’em, men!—Charge an’ shoot to kill! … The night’s gone an’ the day’s busted.”

  “Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!” screamed the drivers as they drove the leaders back.

  In the gray of dawn Brite supported the swaying Reddie in her saddle back to camp.

  “Oh, Dad—my remuda!—where air they?” she sobbed.

  “Inside, lass, inside thet line of fire-eaters,” replied the old cattleman. “An’ they’ll hold!”

  Only the reality of the sunrise, the calm morning with its sweet clarified air, the solid earth under their feet and the grazing stock, could ever have dispelled the nightmare of those hours of brimstone.

  Texas Joe rode in to fall off his horse and limp to the camp fire. He stretched wide his long arms, as if to embrace the fresh sweetness of the dawn.

  “On our way, men! The herd’s pointed,” he called, his voice thick and shaky. “Gimme aboot a gallon of coffee if there ain’t any likker.” He fell on a pack, favoring his lame leg. “Wal, my sins air shore wiped oot. All the hell I ever deserved I got last night.”

  Five watchful, strenuous, endless days later Brite’s outfit drove across the North Fork of the Canadian River to camp on Rabbit Ear Creek.

  The day before they had passed Camp Supply in the middle of the morning. Texas Joe was too wise to make a halt. Brite rode in with the chuck-wagon.

  This camp was teeming with soldiers, Indians, cowhands, and bearded men of no apparent occupation. It was also teeming with rumor of massacre of the wagon-train Hardy had hoped to join at Fort Sill, of trail herds north and south, of bands of rustlers operating in Kansas and rendezvousing in the Indian Territory, of twenty million buffalo between the Canadian and Arkansas rivers, of hell itself let loose in Dodge and Abiline. Brite had kept all this to himself. The boys were somber enough, and somehow they might make the drive through.

  “Aboot what time is it?” asked Whittaker, dreamily, as some of them sat in camp.

  “Sundown, yu locoed galoot,” retorted Ackerman.

  “Shore. But I mean the month an’ day.”

  “Gawd only knows. …An’ I don’t care.”

  “I’ll bet my spurs Holden can figger it oot. He’s a queer duck. But I like him heaps. Don’t yu?”

  “Cain’t say thet I do,” returned Deuce, gruffly. Brite had noted more than once how devoted the Uvalde cowboys had been to each other, and how Ackerman appeared jealous of his partner Little, now that the others were gone. Loss of San Sabe had been hard on Deuce.

  “Wal, I’ll ask him, anyhow,” went on Whittaker. “Less,” he shouted, “can yu figger oot what day this is?”

  “Shore. I’m a walkin’ calendar,” rejoined Holden, with self-satisfied air, as he pulled a tobacco-pouch from his pocket. “But don’t tell Tex. He says to hell with when an’ where it is.” He emptied a handful of pebbles out of the bag and began carefully to count them. When he had concluded he said: “Gosh, but they add up! Fifty-six. …Fifty-six days oot an’ today makes fifty-seven. Boys, we’re just three days shy of bein’ two months on the trail.”

  “Is thet all!” ejaculated Whittaker.

  “Then it’s near August?” queried Ackerman, ponderingly. “We ought to make Dodge by the end of August. … I wonder aboot thet Fort Sill wagon-train. …Boss, I forgot to ask yu. Did yu heah any word of thet wagon-train Doan expected from Fort Sill?”

  Brite could not look into the lad’s dark, eager eyes and tell the truth.

  Next day, halfway to Sand Creek, Texas Joe stood up in his stirrups and signaled the news of buffalo. Day after day this had been expected. Somewhere north of the Canadian the great herd would swing across the Chisholm Trail.

  Soon Brite saw the dark, ragged, broken lines of buffalo. They appeared scarcely to move, yet after an interval, when he looked again, the straggling ends were closer. Texas Joe halted for dry camp early in the day. What little conversation prevailed around the fire centered on the buffalo.

  “Nothin’ to fear drivin’ along with the buffs,” vouchsafed Bender.

  “Thet’s all yu know.”

  “Wal, mebbe they’ll work back west by mawnin’.”

  “But s’pose they keep on workin’ east—acrost our trail?”

  “Trail drivers never turn back.”

  “An’ we could be swallered up by miles of buffalo—cattle, hawses, chuck-wagon, riders an’ all?”

  “I reckon we could. …Boss, did yu ever heah of thet?”

  “Of what?” asked Brite, though he had heard plainly enough.

  “Ootfit gettin’ surrounded by buffalo.”

  “Shore I have. Thet happens often. Stock grazin’ right along with the buffalo.”

  “Ahuh. Wal, what’d happen if the buffalo stampeded? … Thirty million buffalo all movin’ at once?”

  “Hell, cowboy! It ain’t conceivable.”

  “I’ll bet my last cigarette it happens.”

  So they talked, some of them optimistically, others the opposite, all of them reckless, unafraid, and unchangeable. Morning disclosed long black strings of buffalo crossing the trail ahead.

  All day Brite’s herd had shaggy monsters for company, short lines, long thin strings, bunches and groups, hundreds and twos and fours of buffalo, leisurely grazing along, contented and indifferent. Sand Creek offered a fine camp site and range for cattle. The mossy-horns appeared as satisfied as their shaggy brothers. They bedded down early and offered no trouble. The guards slept in their saddles.

  All next day the trail followed Sand Creek. The drivers were concerned about the booming of needle guns to the east and south. Hunters on the outskirts of the herd or trail drivers coming! That day a long, black, thick line of buffalo crossed behind Brite’s herd, and turning north crept along parallel with it. This line had no break. Behind and to the west the black wave, like a tide of broken lava, rolling imperceptibly, slowly augmented and encroached upon the cattle herd. How insignificant and puny that herd of six thousand long-horns now! It was but a drop in the bucket of the Great Plains.

  But the west and north remained open, at least as far as eye could see. Brite thought he had crossed directly in front of the mass of buffalo. They might travel that tranquil way for days; and again the whirl of a dust-devil, the whip of a swallow on the wing, might stampede them into a stupendous, rolling avalanche.

  Sand Creek merged into Buffalo Creek, a deep, cool, willow-bordered stream where all the luxuriant foliage of the prairie bloomed. Texas made camp at the point where the creeks met.

  “We’ll rest up heah a day or two,” he said. “Somebody knock over a buffalo. Rump steak would shore go great. …Reddie, do yu want to kill a buff?”

  “No. I’m too tender-hearted,” she replied, musingly. “I see so many cute little buffalo calves. I might shoot one’s mother.”

  “Tender-hearted?—Wal, I’m dog-goned!” drawled Texas, mildly. He had greatly sobered these late days of the drive and seldom returned to his old raillery. “We-all had it figgered yu was a killer.”

  “Aw, I don’t count redskins, greasers, stamp
eders—an’ now an’ then an occasional cowhand.”

  “I savvy. But I meant a killer with yore gun—not yore red curls, yore snappin’ eyes, yore shape thet no boys’ pants could hide.”

  Reddie promptly vanished physically and vocally into the empty air. That was all the pleasantry in camp on this night.

  “I wish thet Hash Williams had stuck with us,” Texas mused.

  “But, Tex, what the hell difference does it make now?”

  “Wal, a lot, if we knowed what the pesky buffs would do.”

  “Ump-umm! I say, since we gotta drive on, to keep goin’.”

  “But mebbe the buffalo might drift by.”

  “What? Thet herd? Never this summer. They are as many as the tufts of gramma grass.”

  “What yu think, boss?” queried the foreman, showing that he needed partisanship to bolster up any of his judgments.

  “Wait till mawnin’,” advised the cattle-owner.

  Certainly the morning brought to light fewer buffalo and wider space, yet to east and south and west the black lines encroached upon the green. Only the north was clear.

  “Point the herd!” ordered Brite, driven by fears and hopes.

  “I was gonna do thet, anyhow,” drawled Texas Joe. “We can only die once, an’ if we have to die let’s get it over. This dyin’ by days an’ hours is like tryin’ to win a woman’s love.”

  If Joe had but known it—if he could have seen the light in Reddie’s eyes as Brite saw it—he would have learned that that could be attained by the very things he thought so little of.

  So they drove on and the buffalo closed in black all around them. Herd, remuda and riders occupied the center of a green island surrounded by rugged, unbroken waves. This island was a couple of miles long by about the same in width, almost a circle. It kept that way for hours of suspense to the drivers.

  Long-horns had no fear of buffalo. Brite remembered how the mossy-horned old bulls bawled and tossed their mighty horns at sight of buffalo coming close. But to the vast herd these cattle and horses were grains of dust under their feet.