Blood on the Moon

by Luke Short

  “No ma’am,” Ted said stubbornly. He didn’t even pause to consider it, and Carol knew it was a hopeless thing to try to persuade him.

  “But it’s only to Nellie Cavan’s, Ted!” she cried.

  Nellie Cavan was the schoolteacher; her house was a half mile from the Roan Creek school, some three miles on the road to Sun Dust.

  But again Ted shook his head. “If they’ll shoot at Miss Amy they’ll shoot at you. Besides, it’s orders.”

  Carol knew despair for a moment and tried to keep it from showing in her face. Suddenly she thought of something. “But I’m going to stay all night.”

  Ted considered. “Then I’d better take the buggy, hadn’t I?”

  “Oh no,” Carol answered quickly. “I’ll just put my things in a saddlebag. Do you still want to go?”

  “It’s orders,” Ted reiterated.

  “Thank you,” Carol said acidly. “It’s a comfort to be so well protected you haven’t any privacy.”

  She went back to the house for her things, and Ted led the horses over to the porch. He waited there, sober and unhappy, scuffing leaves with his boot toe and watching the door. When Carol came out with her packed saddlebag Ted stepped over to her horse and offered to help her up. He was refused coldly.

  That next half-hour was one of the most uncomfortable Ted Elser had ever spent. He was a man with an inclination to solitude. His work here at the Blockhouse had been humble and lonely enough, and he was less concerned with what went on at the house than any of the other hands. But the times Carol came out to the corral to accept her horse and passed the time of day with him were the times he lived for. He could remember them all, everything about them, down to the slightest detail of Carol’s dress. He had never seen a woman so beautiful, so regal and, when she wanted to be, so gracious. His love for her was something he could no more help than the color of his hair. The times she smiled at him were treasured; the times she frowned were pondered and examined and always explained, always with tolerance for her and blame for himself. Until he admitted bleakly that she didn’t know he was alive and didn’t care. Like today, like now.

  Carol neither looked at him nor spoke to him during that ride. He watched her with the hunger of a lost man in his eyes, and he was sorry to see Cavan’s place. It was a stone shack under a lone cottonwood tree on the lip of the long slope that led down into Roan Creek Valley. A homesteader had abandoned it, and the county had taken it over for the schoolteacher.

  When they rode into the yard Ted saw that Nellie Cavan’s corral was empty. Carol saw it, too, but said nothing. She rode over to it, turned her horse inside and strode toward the house.

  Ted followed her afoot and didn’t speak until Carol had reached the door.

  “You want me to wait, Miss Carol?”

  Carol turned on him, irony in her voice. “I think I’ll be able to lock the doors and hold them off until help comes from town.”

  Ted looked down at his feet, not wholly satisfied. “I could wait.”

  Carol stamped her foot. “But why must you be so stupid! Let me alone! Go home!”

  Ted touched his hat and walked back to his horse. On his way he heard the door slam viciously. His face was hot with a deep humiliation, and he stepped into the saddle and started back toward the Blockhouse. But an uneasiness was upon him. Lufton had told him never to let Carol or Amy out of his sight away from the Blockhouse. Lufton wouldn’t have said it if he hadn’t believed they were in danger. And here he was, riding back and leaving Carol alone in a strange house.

  Over the ridge he pulled up and considered, but his mind was already made up. Women were reckless, unthinking, willful. Because they were was no reason for him to shirk his orders. He kept behind the ridge until it petered out among the growth along Roan Creek. Once in the shelter of the trees, he made his way upstream and dismounted, turning his horse out on picket. He squatted down in the growth of the far bank, where he could see the schoolteacher’s house, and brought out a sack of tobacco, prepared for a long, lonely wait.

  He was still rolling it when he looked up, and his fingers were motionless. Carol had left the house and was half walking, half running toward the corral. Ted watched her lead her horse out, mount and put her horse south, crossing the road and disappearing into the scrub cedar hills beyond.

  He dropped the half-made cigarette and rose. It was what he had not allowed himself to suspect: Carol never had any intention of visiting Nellie Cavan.

  Ted went back to his horse, already knowing what he must do. He cut her sign at the road and swung in behind her, his pace leisurely. He was both worried and curious, but the memory of Carol’s anger kept him from overtaking her. He could watch her in his own fashion without her knowing it.

  Carol’s trail cut across these hills and finally dropped down and picked up a wagon road through the Orphan Valley that Ted knew led eventually to Chet Avery’s homestead. That didn’t make sense, since Chet Avery’s wife was no friend of Blockhouse. Ted lost her trail once where the road crossed a shale upthrust of a mile’s hard going. He came back and found it, but it took him an hour, and now he was convinced that Carol wanted to cover her trail. She had abandoned the road now and was headed west, following the shale until it petered out, and then she pointed southwest. There was nothing that way except a nester’s place, for the land began to tilt away into the Long Reach Desert beyond, through which the first nesters had entered.

  He came to a stretch of malpais and saw where Carol had picked up a trail that crossed it and wound into the canyon country that was almost the south edge of the Basin’s proper grazing country. He went more cautiously now, for they were close to one of these nester outfits. Finally he came to the lip of a canyon and paused, thrusting back into memory. The trail beyond was a series of switchbacks that led down to the canyon floor, where there was a house, he recalled.

  Ted dismounted and approached the canyon edge cautiously. The whole wedge of the canyon opened out onto the amber grass beyond, but close, almost below him, was the log shack. Carol’s horse was in the yard, and she was sitting on the porch. Ted Elser groped in his memory for a long moment, trying to place this shack, and then he had it. It was Bice Fales’s place—or used to be, that is. It was Tate Riling’s now.

  He sat down, cross legged, and sifted gravel through his fingers, his mind seeking a way to interpret this. It just didn’t make sense—Carol Lufton, daughter of the Blockhouse owner, camped on the porch of her father’s bitterest enemy. He refused to try to fathom it finally; he watched and listened, and the sun heeled over as he waited.

  Carol’s patience had long since worn thin; he could tell. She was pacing the yard now, looking up every so often at the trail above. Finally, toward sundown, she mounted her horse. Ted drew back a little, waiting to move until she hit the lower switchbacks on the trail up. But she didn’t take the trail; she left the canyon and lined out west.

  Ted came down the trail, not liking this. Over west was the crossed herd, where trouble would be. It was no safe country for anyone connected with Blockhouse. Besides that, it was getting dark. It wasn’t impossible that a half-dozen men had seen her entry into this country. Ted Elser had a bad few minutes then as he lost sight of Carol ahead of him across the flats in the twilight.

  Finally he came to his decision and didn’t like it, but he stuck to it. He touched spurs to his horse and lined out in a long lope after Carol. It was almost dark when he saw her pull up, hearing a horseman behind her, and wait.

  He put his horse into a walk and came up to her, watching her face in the dusk and unable to see it.

  “Is it—Ted?” she asked.

  “We better turn back, Miss Carol,” Ted said.

  Carol sat utterly motionless in the saddle; he could get no clue to her temper.

  “How long have you been following me?” she asked. Her voice was unsure, frightened.

  “All afternoon.”

  “Then—you saw me at Riling’s place.”

  “Yes’m.�
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  Carol tried to laugh and failed, and Elser weighed its meaning and was curious.

  “What do you think of it?” Carol asked slowly.

  Ted shifted uncomfortably in his saddle. “That’s your business, I reckon.”

  Carol didn’t speak, and Elser waited out his time and then said doggedly, “I think we better ride back.”

  Carol didn’t object, didn’t speak. Docilely she pulled her horse around, and they started back for the canyon. They reached it and made the long climb up the switchbacks and at dark crossed through the malpais. Still Carol hadn’t spoken. There was something wrong, Elser knew, and he kept silent and wondered.

  The pressure on Carol broke finally. She reached out and seized the bridle of Ted’s horse in the dark and hauled him up savagely.

  “This can’t go on,” Carol said in a tight voice. “I’ve got to know.”

  Ted didn’t answer her, didn’t help her.

  Carol said impatiently, swiftly, “Ted, you’re in love with me, aren’t you?”

  The shock in his face wasn’t visible to Carol, nor the slow readjustment as he tried to stop his hands trembling. He said in a reluctant, miserable voice, “Yes.”

  “You’d do anything in the world to save me from hurt, wouldn’t you?” Carol went on brutally. “I know you would because you’ve done it today. It’s in your eyes, in the way you talk. Isn’t that true?”

  Ted nodded now, unable to speak.

  Carol moved her horse closer to him and reached out and laid a hand on his. “I thank you for that, Ted. I need your help terribly.” She paused and she could feel the muscles in his hand iron-hard and trembling beneath her own.

  “I want you to forget this afternoon,” Carol said, her voice hard. “I don’t care what you think, but I don’t want anyone ever to know. No one, Ted—no one! Do you love me enough to promise that?”

  “More,” Ted said. He said it in a dry, ironic voice that surprised Carol. Coming from this stubborn, dull man, it was a revelation. She had always supposed him incapable of irony, of understanding.

  “Then I have your word, your promise?” she asked.

  “Till death do us part,” Ted murmured. He moved away from her then, waiting for her to move. She had won his promise, Carol knew, but in an obscure way she knew she had lost something else. And strangely enough this troubled her as she touched spurs to her horse and they rode on into the chill night.

  Cap Willis reached the north herd across the Massacre before dark, gave his orders to the five men there without dismounting and then pushed on to Ferg Daniels’ herd, arriving late.

  A night herder took him into camp and stirred up the fire, then left, and the crew came out of blankets. As soon as Willis told them they’d move tonight the horse wrangler drifted off in the dark and the rest of the crew pulled on boots. The fire was built up, and Cap Willis squatted beside it, conferring with Ferg Daniels as to the best route for the drive. The herd was bedded down in a shallow valley that fingered off among the pines to the south and west and was on the short plateau that lay between the mountains and the river flats.

  Cap Willis knew this country as he knew the lines of his face, and tonight, for the first time in weeks, he felt as if he was counting for something. Up to now Lufton had figured, and rightly so, that his lowliest punchers could ride the brush and gather his herds. Cap had been kept at Blockhouse because it was in the Basin that Lufton figured the trouble would start. It hadn’t, and Cap had been a general without any army. Tonight he was in command again, and it suited him. He was an abrupt man, sure of himself, shrewd in the ways of his work. At times he had the deceptive appearance of a cow-town banker gone to belly; his quick and authoritative manner of speech and the saddle of thin hair that he plastered across his skull heightened the impression. But his ability to size up cattle—count, weight, condition, age, asking and selling price—had been acquired in a half a hundred trail camps and towns where a man was never far from violence. He was a formidable barroom brawler who went about it in businesslike unconcern, and to him this fight had the earmarks of a barroom brawl.

  He asked Ferg Daniels now, “Added anything to your count?”

  “Cruver came in with jag he found in a box canyon yesterday. Makes eight hundred and fifteen.”

  Cap Willis nodded. He had six men here, counting himself. Once they got the stuff shoved off the plateau into the canyons they could drive them fast, and the tallow be damned. He rose, and Ferg rose with him. Out in the rope corral beyond the chuck wagon, where the remuda was corraled, the horse wrangler was swearing mildly. A puncher had built a second fire on the other side of the chuck wagon to help the light from the lone lantern swinging from the wagon top.

  Cap started toward it, and Ferg fell in beside him and was saying, “You must be pretty sure of Riling if you make this—”

  He paused, and so did Cap. A lone gunshot had sounded off to the southwest. And as they were looking at each other, wondering, a wave of gunfire broke out. It rolled out like an artillery salvo.

  Cap wheeled and ran for his horse, yelling, “Head ’em toward the river.”

  Already he had sized up that this was a raid, that there would be a stampede and that at all costs they must head them toward the river.

  When he swung onto his horse he heard the sound. It was one he hated, one that still held fear for him. It was the muted thunder of cattle roused from sleep to terror and running. And these cattle were close. Their frightened bawling rose above the thunder of their running. Now, facing away from the fire, he could see the flashes of the guns spaced like fireflies beyond the herd. They were to the east and south, and they were driving the cattle this way.

  And then, riding out, Cap met the herd leaders. He pulled his gun, angling toward the west, and began shooting at the ground, trying to turn them. He tried to hold his horse at them, but the horse was panicked. He turned now with the leaders, and they were headed straight for the camp. Cursing wildly, Cap put his horse against the leader and shot right beside the steer. But even the weight of the horse and the surprise of the shot didn’t alter the steer’s course. He was headed straight for the camp.

  Cap had two shots left. He rose in the saddle and looked across the backs of the herd and then saw what he was waiting for. A strange rider at the opposite side of the herd and a little behind him let go with a volley intended to counteract Cap’s shooting. Cap raised his gun and sent two snap shots at the man, and he heard a wild howl above the stampeding of the herd. And now his attention was turned to camp.

  The crew, afoot and with no time to get their horses, saw the oncoming rush of cattle and broke for the timber behind the camp. The horse wrangler yanked down the last of the remuda ropes and was running. Only Ferg Daniels had stuck, and he was fighting a spooked horse with only a hackamore. Cap yelled to him to run, and then the whole camp lay spread out before him, abandoned by the men.

  Cap was almost in the vanguard when the herd hit the camp. The leaders split to dodge the fire, throwing themselves against the others. The drive of their change of direction was communicated over to Cap’s horse. The leaders charged against his pony, and too late Cap saw the chuck wagon. His horse staggered, lost footing and crashed into the chuck wagon. Then the force of a hundred fear-driven beeves slammed into his horse. The near wheels of the wagon lifted and tilted, and Cap kicked free of his screaming horse and lunged. The wagon went over on its side, and Cap clawed out of the saddle, grabbing for the sideboard. He pulled himself over it and fell to the ground on the other side, and then the wagon came all the way over on him, resting on its high chuck box in the rear, wheels in the air.

  In that small space left between the bed and the ground Cap lay and watched the camp go. He saw Ferg Daniels, who had been too stubborn to leave. The cattle hit him, bowling him down out of sight. His horse was rearing in fright, and the impact of the fear-maddened herd sent him over on his back, neighing wildly, and then he was lost too. The fires were trampled out as if some giant hand ha
d smothered them. The wagon rocked under the glancing impact of the cattle who hit it, and Cap felt the ground under him quivering as if alive.

  In a few minutes the last of the herd had passed into the timber, crashing into that darkness where they would run in a thousand directions until they dropped with exhaustion.

  Cap wearily climbed out from under the wagon. The remuda, of course, was taken away in the stampede too. It was blacker than soot now, and Cap stood there helplessly. It was useless to shout yet, for the cattle were making too much noise out in the brush. It was, in fact, useless to do a damned thing, Cap thought bitterly. Automatically he set about looking for wood with which to build a fire and survey the damage. The sideboards had fallen from the wagon and had been splintered by the trampling herd. Cap gathered up an armload and then got a fire going.

  By the time the blaze had taken hold the crew came straggling in from the timber. Someone hallooed out in the night, announcing himself, and then came into camp on horseback. He was a night herder, his horse lathered and trembling from the run. The rest of the crew was cursing bitterly, or else they were glum and afraid to look at Cap.

  Cap counted noses. Daniels was missing. He reluctantly left the fire and made his way over to where he had seen Daniels go down. Presently he returned and salvaged a tarp out of the tangle of bedrolls and took it out to Daniels and covered what was on the ground there.

  When he came back nobody spoke. Cap said, “How’d it start?” to the night herder.

  “I couldn’t stop it, Cap. They waited till I was on the other side of the herd and began shootin’. I didn’t even see one.”

  Cap grunted and stared bitterly into the fire. “Nine days to make the deadline. Hell, it’ll take two weeks to round up that stuff in this brush.”

  “What about horses?”

  Cap grunted and said to the night herder, “You come back with me and bring out a new string.”

  They nodded, and still they said nothing about Daniels. It was what they were thinking about and not talking about. There wasn’t a man here but who imagined that death, had imagined it many times. It was the old trail death and it had come into their midst again tonight.