by J. Lee Butts
Billy thought that over for a second. “Old Bear’s dead on. This spot inside is located almost in the exact center of the place. There’s a deep depression in the sandstone walls that would be a great place to put up a fight, whether you’ve built yourself a stronghold down there or not.”
Lucius turned reasonable again, blew out another cloud of heavy smoke, and asked what must have been on his mind for some time. “What the hell were you boys thinking when you decided on this trip? Didn’t anyone sit down and plan this out before we left Fort Smith?”
Billy, Carlton, and I busted out laughing at the same time. I said, “Hell, Lucius, if we’d of given it too much in the way of thought before we left, we’d all probably still be in Fort Smith right now. Carlton could be having a lemon pie with his buddy Barnes Reed down at the Napoli Café; Billy could be trying to carve a sailboat out of a stick of stove wood; and I could be eating dinner with my beautiful wife and looking forward to a much-desired night in her arms.”
Once we’d all got a good snicker in at his expense, I went on. “We had a crude idea of what we’d face here, but nothing definite. Couldn’t really make much in the way of serious plans because of that. And besides, you’ve already seen that nothing ever happens out here the way we expect or want. For all intents and purposes, fate won’t let go till we get back to civilization. It’s just the Nations, Lucius. Just the Nations.”
Carlton picked it up from there. “Truth has always been, from the very beginning, that we don’t know what Big Eagle’s got cooked up for us down there—if anythin’. All we’ve heard is stories. Have to wait till we get inside tomorrow and take a look-see for ourselves. By then, we should have a pretty fair idea of what we’ll have to do, and how to go about it.”
I know he probably didn’t plan to do it, but Carlton even got serious on him for a bit. “You can bet all them pistols strapped on Hateful’s back that whatever’s in Red Rock Canyon, it won’t be an easy fight, and some of us might not come back from it.”
Everyone in the circle, except Charlie Three Bones, glanced around at his friends, then snapped his eyes back to the drawing on the ground. After a second or two of silence, I got us going again with: “Here’s what we know for certain, boys. Big Eagle has some kind of hidey-hole either in the canyon, carved into one of the sandstone walls, or on a hill nearby. Whichever it turns out to be, that’s why we brought the heavy artillery. If the past is any indication, Big Eagle can most likely count on an unknown number of accomplices and cohorts who accompany him. We’re fairly certain one of those men is Smilin’ Jack Paine, and there’s the distinct chance that W. J. McCabe, the louse Lucius came out here looking for, is there too. God only knows what kind of other scoundrels, miscreants, and malefactors we’ll find once we get inside.”
Each of my fellow lawdogs nodded. I went on. “There might be one small complication we haven’t had a chance to discuss.” Fleeting looks darted back my way. “Before we left Fort Smith, I developed a piece of information that led me to believe Big Eagle might be holding a woman against her will. Her name is Birdie Mae Blackwell.”
That one dropped right into the middle of everything like one of Carlton’s Ketchum grenades. Billy didn’t waste any time getting his feelings out in the open. “Good God, Hayden. If that’s true, what’ll we do if they threaten to kill her? Or what if they start torturing her? What the hell are we gonna do then?”
“We’ll just have to play it by ear, Billy—’bout the same way as everything else that’s happened up till now. We’ll take care of those problems any way we have to when the necessity arises. You’ve done the same thing a hundred times before. This won’t be any different.”
He snatched the hat off his head and spun it around on the end of his trigger finger. “It’s always a problem any time a woman gets involved in this kind of thing. You know I’m right on this one, Hayden. Hell, it’s bad enough we had to bring Judith along with us, but we couldn’t leave her back there on the trail with her dead family. Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not complaining. It’s just that women always make matters worse than they already are when the shooting gets cranked up real good. Once the air fills with gunpowder and quick death, men tend to careful up enough to get themselves killed when a woman plops down in the middle of everything.”
Carlton, who’d been pretty quiet up till that point, hooked his thumbs in his pistol belt, kicked at a spot on the ground, and said, “Take my word on this ’un boys. We don’t have to worry over much about Miss Karr. She don’t need a whole lot of lookin’ after. Pert sure she can take care of herself. Hand that feisty little gal a pistol, and you’d better hold on to your sombrero, amigo. She’s a shooter, if I ever seen one.”
Course none of the rest of us had any idea where his testimony came from, and all of us could tell it didn’t come anywhere close to satisfying Billy. But he let it go anyway. Man wasn’t blind or stupid. He could see the attachment that had grown up between Carlton and the girl. Their growing affection for one another was absolutely obvious to our entire party. It tended to be a daily source of speculation and discussion among the rest of us who either held out hopes for such female fondness for ourselves, or whose hearts secretly pined for the women who awaited our arrival back in Fort Smith. The kind of love those two were seriously working at was always envied by other men in the wild places. Leastways, by any man in his right mind.
We spent the rest of the afternoon, and that night, in preparation for what we could only guess awaited our arrival in Red Rock Canyon. Everyone made sure all his weapons got cleaned and loaded. Took Lucius longer than the rest of the party put together, what with all the weapons he dragged around. A man has to expend a lot of time and effort to clean and load ten pistols and a rifle. He oiled and wiped for hours, and was still at it when I turned in for the night.
Civilized roosters slept like week-old chicks when we struck out at first light. A cloudless night had left heavy dew on the grass that rose up and caressed the bellies of our animals. My boots and pant legs were soaked in less than ten minutes.
For all the dime-store cowboys out there who never got any closer to a horse than a mounted cop, you should know that dragging an iron-barred wagon—like a tumbleweed—around the Nations never could be described as anything that resembled a simple proposition. Add a cannon and caisson to the mix, and things got considerably harder. But once you got west of the spot on the Canadian that ran almost due north for a ways, the countryside out there changed so dramatically as to be almost unbelievable.
Good thing about it, our progress from that point was considerably easier. The dark, dense woodlands, and real mountains of Arkansas and the eastern Nations, vanished as a swaying curtain rose from the rolling prairie to reveal an ocean of grass that stretched before you in endless waves that seemed to heave and ripple to the other side of the world.
Handsome Harry had studied that kind of stuff at one of those well-known universities back east. Harvard or Yale, I think he said. Called himself an amateur botanist. Whatever in hell that was. He never missed a chance, before his untimely passing, to instruct me on what we saw as our animals tromped it into the ground. And he claimed that what all us ignorant jaybirds simply referred to as grass was comprised of several different varieties, and had actual names. Little bluestem, big bluestem, foxtail, cord grass, and others I can’t even remember. Course, I recognized Indian grass and buffalo grass when I saw it anyway. So it didn’t come as any real surprise that some poor goober, with not much of anything to do, used up his life hanging tags on every stem, berry, twig, rock, tree, and bush we passed in our deadly travels.
An observant and mildly educated man who crossed that barren place could spend a good part of his storytelling endeavors doing the most fleeting description of the flora and fauna of a mile long stretch of what now makes up western Oklahoma. But back then, we didn’t give a hoot in hell what kind of grass lapped at us like waves on a peaceful sea, or what kind of trees grew in the depressions, cuts, gullies, an
d canyons.
Bad men demanded our presence in those places. Those men of blood would murder any one of us, just like Sneed and his bunch killed Harry, and they wouldn’t lose one wink of sleep over it. Lawlessness, gunfire, and death followed everywhere we went and, to be totally forthright about it, my concern, or thought, for the passing scenery at the time, amounted to little or not a goddamned bit at all.
Billy took us north of our objective by several miles. Once we got past our final destination a bit, we turned back south, and approached the canyon’s entrance from the west. Pulled everything to a halt behind a nice rise about half a mile from our target, and spent most of several hours before the sun started down squinting through our long glasses at anything that moved. Just before full dark, Old Bear and Charlie Three Bones snaked their way up to the entrance, disappeared inside for about an hour, and came back later with a surprise.
We all sat close and talked in whispers that night as he told us what they found. “No guards at entrance. Made our way to gorge floor. Saw no one.”
“Well, at least that’s something,” Billy muttered.
Then came the downside. “But plenty of movement and noise up near the spot we picked out on Billy’s map. Did not get all the way there. Sounded like at least a dozen men. Charlie Three Bones thinks maybe more. We backed out. Quick as we could.”
Lucius groaned. He hadn’t been able to roll ‘and smoke ‘since the sun went down, and was well on the way to being edgier than a pistol-toting pig in a meatpacking house. “Well, I say we take it to ‘Indian-fighter-style. Let’s blow in—all guns blazing—and let God sort ‘out when the last one stops twitching.”
Think everyone else knew we couldn’t do it his way. I’d been mulling around about it all night, and had my mind made up on how we’d tackle the problem, if we could. “Look, Lucius, we can thank a merciful God they must not know we’re here—at least not yet. Pretty safe bet these ole boys expected us a week or so ago. All our delays, and side trips, might well have worked to our advantage. Appears our luck has come back, and this bunch has got a bit sloppy. You can bet your unspent reward money for W. J. McCabe, everyone down there knows we’re out here somewhere. So, here’s what we’ll do.
“Tomorrow morning, when it’s just coming light, you, me, Billy, Old Bear, and Charlie Three Bones go in first. We’ll make our way in one at a time, and form a solid wall at the base of the entrance. Once we get established, Carlton can bring the cannon down. We’ll do what we can to muffle it down some, but it’ll still be noisy and sure to wake someone, who’ll put the rest on alert. By then, if our luck holds, it’ll be too late. Once we get inside, they’re done for.”
Carlton glanced at Judith and said, “What about the tumbleweed and Miss Karr, Hayden?”
“We’ll leave the tumbleweed here. No point trying to take it with us. It’d be too much trouble and way too hard to maneuver around. Miss Karr can guard Bully. Wouldn’t want him to raise a ruckus after we leave, now would we?”
The girl’s boldness showed itself an instant before Carlton was about to object. “Leave me a pistol and rifle, Marshal Tilden,” she said. “No one will get to me, long as I’m armed, and if Bully gets restless or starts yelping, I’ll see to it he quiets down.”
Carlton’s prisoner had been trying to hear everything we’d said since we pulled up behind the rise. Didn’t matter to me if he knew what we had planned or not. Long as he stayed chained to the floor of the tumble-weed and kept quiet, I made sure no one bothered him. But I also let him know he’d better keep on his best behavior.
“You make a sound, Bully, or manage to give us away somehow, and I’ll turn Old Bear and Three Bones loose on you. Trust me, you wouldn’t like the result. Couple of days staked out on an anthill with some carefully applied wounds calculated to help you slowly bleed out, and you’ll wish you’d never seen any of us.” I stood less than ten feet from him—and he heard every word. He made it a point to let me know I didn’t have anything to worry about from his filthy corner of our rolling prison.
“Oh, don’t you worry none ’bout me, Marshal Tilden. Ole Bully’ll be the quietest man alive till you tell him to talk again.” He made a clamping motion over his lips with his fingers, and made out like he’d snapped a padlock closed on his mouth.
’Bout that time, Charley Three Bones got to making frantic signs and jabbering away at Old Bear. The two of them made shussing motions at everyone, and darted over to the north side of our camp. A dozen weapons came out cocked and ready for action. Bully May flopped down in his corner and crawled under the pile of clothing, bedding, and other stuff piled up there. Pretty soon, it got so quiet, the only thing I could hear was crickets making love in the grass.
I stayed all wound up and ready for action so long that my hands and arms started cramping up on me. Then Old Bear and his friend led a huge figure into camp. Old Bear whispered, “Guess you look hard, you find almost anything out here.”
Barnes Reed reached around him, grabbed me by the arm, squeezed, flashed a toothy grin, and chuckled. “Been missin’ you boys. ’Fraid there for a while that I wasn’t ever gonna find you.”
Carlton popped out of the dark and they hugged each other like family at Christmas dinner. “Damn you, Barnes. What the hell are you doing out here?” He slapped his friend on the back, and led him to the center of our gathering.
“Cain’t be away from my favorite pie-eating compadre for long, and besides, I got me to figurin’ that if this here roost of robbers was as infested with scumsucking vermin as everyone claimed, you children might need another gun or three. Besides, I missed my chance at Martin Luther Big Eagle ’bout a year ago. He owes the United States of America some of his sorry hide for murdering an Arkansas whiskey drummer named Balthus Smoot over at Winding Stair. Cut the man’s heart out with a hatchet.”
The only way he could have been a more appreciated sight and sound, to me, was if he’d brought Elizabeth along for the ride and had her hid somewhere in his war bag. His surprising arrival seemed to have the most profound effect on Billy. The boy was so happy, he looked like a two-tailed puppy about to wag himself to death.
Unfortunately, by the time we explained our situation, and told the story about Harry Tate’s death again, Barnes Reed’s cheery deportment had abandoned him. Course he hadn’t known Harry as well as the rest of us, but that didn’t matter. Anytime another member of the brotherhood of the badge went down, we all felt it. But I’ve got to hand it to him. Barnes was a professional, and immediately set out to take our minds off the bad news.
“Came out here thinking I’d meet you boys on the way back to civilization. Figured what with your cannon and all, you most likely had Big Eagle and his boys whipped down by now. Talked with some folks at McAlester’s Store, and found out you’d split up and gone in different directions. Kept after Billy and Carlton. They was just naturally the easiest to follow, what with dragging that piece of artillery around behind ‘and all. Discovered the spot where you camped over on Big Cougar Bluff yesterday. Realized then you’d finally hooked up again. When I didn’t hear any gunfire, or shelling from the cannon, figured I could still catch you in time to make it to the dance.” He almost laughed into the sleeve of his shirt, but caught himself and squeezed it off to a short bearlike snort of pleasure.
Didn’t take him long to get a handle on the situation, and from all indications, he was itching for a fight. “Hey, I been wantin’ to put another hole in Smilin’ Jack ever since that little fandango over at Drinkwater’s near the Arbuckle Mountains. Hayden owes him for Thunder, and I owe him for not falling when I put at least one slug in his sorry hide as he made his getaway.”
Might have got about ten winks of sleep between us that night. We were all so tired, I don’t think any of us would have woke up at the time we wanted if it hadn’t been for Barnes. When we set out that morning, I remember thinking how I felt like one of those Plains Indians, who’d lived and hunted there a hundred years before, as we silently snaked our way
through the waist-high grasses and crept up on the men below. Light from another blazing sun carved a gleaming red slit across a wine-colored sky above Red Rock Canyon. It crept across the surging, grassy plains on silent padded feet and, just about the time we all arrived at the gloomy entrance, some of it spilled over on to the chasm’s bloody pockmarked western wall.
Beneath the light, though, it was like looking into a well. A misty gray fog hovered over the creek below, and we had to walk our horses down the twisting trail that led us into darkness. Somewhere at the bottom, hidden from view in the murk and fog, unseen and perhaps only a few feet away, fate awaited our arrival. Open-armed, wings spread, he looked a lot like death in my dreams.
10
“THE BATTLE OF
RED ROCK CANYON”
LUCIUS BY GOD Dodge rode beside me as we eased our animals over the lip of that fog-shrouded crater and started down the short twisting trail to the bottom. He leaned in his stirrups and whispered, “Darker’n midnight under an iron skillet in there, Hayden. Be getting up toward seven or eight o’clock ’fore this mist burns off and we’re able to see everything we really need to see.” His assessment hit that horseshoe nail right on its boxed head. Martin Luther Big Eagle could have had an armed killer behind every bush, tree, or rock, and I wouldn’t have been able to see any one of ’em.
Sank into the gloom and shadows in pairs. We’d kind of reshuffled our order of movement what with Barnes showing up and all. Old Bear and Three Bones led. Lucius and I followed them. Billy and Barnes came behind us, and Carlton brought the cannon up as quietly as he could.