The Omaha Trail

by Ralph Compton

“What for?” Paddy asked.

  “There’s a bar in there and a bunch of cooks hard at work.”

  “Whooeee,” Paddy shouted, and walked over to the hands standing at the fence.

  The hands all whooped and shouted, and some threw their hats into the air and stomped up and down as if they were dancing Irish jigs.

  Then Paddy came back and handed his clipboard to Dane.

  “I didn’t add up the lines,” Paddy said, “but there’s a whole bunch of pages with lines crossed out.”

  “I’ll take that,” Hank said, and reached for the clipboard.

  Paddy handed the papers to Hank.

  “Oh, and one more thing, Paddy,” Dane said. “But keep it to yourself.”

  “Sure, Dane. I ain’t one to flap my jaw like a washerwoman.”

  Dane leaned over and whispered something in Paddy’s ear. Then he clamped a hand over Paddy’s mouth.

  “If you let out a yell, I’ll choke you, Paddy,” Dane said aloud.

  “Mum’s the word, boyo, mum’s the very word.”

  Dane laughed.

  “Get all your boys and follow us,” he said.

  As they reached the gray building, Otto stopped and asked Dane a question. “What did you whisper to your trail boss, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I told him that tonight was payday,” Dane said.

  “You no tell me,” Joe said.

  “Your payday is next week, Joe,” Dane said, then slapped him on the back.

  “You make the joke,” Joe said. “I know.”

  “You’ll get paid first, Joe.”

  They all entered the building as dusk fell over the cow pens and the sky paled before turning black.

  Paraffin lamps glowed in a large room. There were tables set up and candles lit. Men cooked on iron stoves and bartenders in white aprons braced themselves for the onslaught of men who had not seen anything like it for a very long time.

  “Welcome to Omaha,” Otto shouted as the men stomped onto the hardwood floors.

  The men let out a loud yell and headed for the bar.

  “Follow me, Dane and Joe. We have our own private table over in that far corner. There’s whiskey, rye, gin, and wine at our table, and waiters will bring us beefsteaks with all the civilized trimmings.”

  “I feel like whooping myself,” Dane said. “No, I think I’ll just have a swaller of whiskey to wash away the trail dust.”

  “I’ll join you,” Otto said.

  For the first time in months, Dane felt right at home with all the men at his table. He would not sleep on stones or hear coyotes howl this night. He would not have to listen to the nighthawks singing off-key and off-tempo. Tonight, he would celebrate and maybe give a toast or two to the men he had lost on the long drive through grand country.

  Chapter 46

  Dane rode Reno into the mist of an autumn morning. It was quiet at that hour and there was a zesty tang to the air as he listened to the sussurance of the horse’s footfalls in the dew-wet grass and the lowing of the cattle in the near pasture. The sun was just peeking over the horizon in the east, a golden red disk with the aura of an ancient god emerging from darkness to peer over the windowsill of the waking world.

  He headed for the creek where the trees were sporting their autumnal garb, the maples with their deep magenta leaves, the poplars and dogwoods with their pale mottled colors dripping from forlorn branches, the yellow leaves of the birches, the browning leaves of the oaks.

  Joe Eagle rode away from the creek over fallen leaves, driving a cow and her frisky calf ahead of him onto pasture. The calf shook its tail and its body, throwing off sunlit beads of water. Dane had heard its cries from the stable while he was saddling his horse.

  Joe’s horse, Swoghili, pranced like a Tennessee walker as it tailed the cow and calf as if they were its special charges, nudging the air with its nose and whickering softly.

  “Calf fell into the creek,” Joe said. “Had to rope it and drag it onto the bank.”

  “I heard it,” Dane said. “It sounded like a hurt child.”

  “It wasn’t hurt, just scared,” Joe said.

  “I’m glad you dragged it out of the creek. It’s running full after that rain yesterday.”

  Joe broke off as the cow and calf romped off to join the herd grazing a few hundred yards away.

  “Poor little tyke,” Joe said, with uncommon tenderness.

  “Want to come up to the house? Pa’s up and sitting in his chair. Ora Lee has made coffee and is cooking breakfast.”

  “Sure,” Joe said. “Coffee would be fine at this hour of the morning.”

  The two changed course and rode toward the house.

  “I noticed that since we got back, Joe, you’re talking like a white man, not an Indian.”

  “I could always talk like a white man, Dane. I just didn’t want to.”

  “Why?”

  “My talk set me apart. It was where I wanted to be.”

  “What changed your mind?” Dane asked.

  “The drive. At night I would listen to the other men talking and I realized something. Something about them and about me.”

  “What was that, Joe?”

  “They all spoke differently, but somehow all the same. They spoke like Americans. They all had different accents, but they talked the same language. I wanted to be like them. I was an American too. I spoke to Carlos and Alfredo and Rufio about their being Mexican. They told me that only their Mexican accents set them apart from other Americans. They were trying to fit in and overcome their Mexican accents because they said the minute they opened their mouths, other men looked down on them and called them names.”

  “I know what you mean, Joe. But the way we talk tells something about where we were born and raised. You can never shuck that.”

  “Yes. I am part Cherokee, and the Mexicans come from Mexico. The language, the way they talk, is like their skin. It cannot be shed. But I do not want to be looked on as odd or stupid, because I am neither.”

  “I think you’re right, Joe. We can’t help being who we are, no more than that cow and calf can help being what they are.”

  “The herd is looking good,” Joe said. “The calves will be yearlings next year, and then the yearlings will grow into cows and your herd will grow large once again.”

  “It gives me a good feeling,” Dane said.

  They reached the house and stepped down from their horses, tied their reins around the hitch rail.

  They both looked back at the pasture with its rising mists and the dewdrops sparkling on the grass. There was the smell of new-mown hay from the barn, and some of the hands were out of the bunkhouse and standing at the water pump to wash their faces and hands before breakfast.

  “I own it all, Joe,” Dane said. “And when we go to south Texas and look for a seed bull or two, I’ll have longhorns to crossbreed.”

  “You paid off the bank, then.”

  “I didn’t pay Throckmorton. I paid off my mortgage after he was arrested and taken to jail.”

  “What will happen to him?” Joe asked. “Will he hang?”

  “I don’t know. I just think how misguided he was. He thought that land was the basis for all wealth. But people can’t eat dirt. They eat beef, and cattle represent the future for me. Oh, I’ll buy more land, but only to raise more beef. We can feed the world, Joe. Land is meant to be tended, to grow things on, not generate money for fat bankers.

  Joe laughed. “I am learning a lot from you, Dane.”

  “We all learn from each other,” Dane said.

  The two men walked into the house.

  Thor banged his phallic cane hard against the floor as the two came through the door.

  He was smiling, and so was Ora Lee, who stood next to his chair.

  “Set,” she said, “and I’ll bring you both some coffee.”

  “Hens set; people sit,” Joe said with a smile.

  “My, my,” Ora Lee said, “but aren’t we takin’ on airs?”

 
“We sure are, Ora Lee,” Dane said as he and Joe sat down to hear what Thor had to say on such a fine morning in autumn.

  Read on for another exciting Old West adventure

  TUCKER’S RECKONING

  A Ralph Compton Novel by Matthew P. Mayo

  Available in hardcover and e-book from

  New American Library in November.

  Despite the creeping cold of the autumn afternoon in high country, and the feeling in his gut as if an irate lion cub were trying to claw its way out, Samuel Tucker reckoned that starving to death might not have been an altogether unpleasant sensation. Of course, the warm light-headedness he was feeling might also have had something to do with the last of the rotgut gargle he’d been nursing since he woke up.

  He regarded the nearly empty bottle in his hand and shrugged. “No matter. Finally get to see you again, Rita, and little Sammy. My sweet girls…”

  Even the horse on which he rode, Gracie, no longer perked her ears when he spoke. At one time a fine mount, she was now more bone than horse. The sorrel mare plodded along the lush valley floor, headed northward along the east bank of a river that, if Tucker had cared any longer about such things, he would know as Oregon’s Rogue River. All he knew was that he’d wandered far north. And he didn’t care.

  His clothes had all but fallen off him, his fawn-colored tall-crowned hat, a fine gift from Rita, had disappeared one night in an alley beside a gambling parlor in New Mexico. The top half of his once red long handles, now pinked with age and begrimed with Lord-knew-what, and more hole than cloth, served as a shirt of sorts. Ragged rough-weave trousers bearing rents that far south had invited welcoming breezes now ushered in the frigid chill of a coming winter in high country. And on his feet were the split, puckered remnants of boots. These were the clothes Tucker had been wearing the day his Rita and little Samantha had…

  At one time, though, Samuel Tucker had cut a fine figure around Tascosa, Texas. With his small but solid ranch, and with a wife and baby daughter, he’d been the envy of many. But that was in the past, before the sickness…. Mercy, thought Tucker, two years and I can’t think of it without my throat tightening.

  “At least I don’t have to worry about being robbed,” he said aloud. His laugh came out as a forced, thin sound that shamed him for a flicker of a moment; then once again he no longer cared.

  The land arched up before him in a gentle rise away from the river. Here and there trees close by the river for the past half mile had been logged off some years before, leaving a stump field along the banks. Ragged branches long since cleaved from the vanished timber bristled upward among still green undergrowth seeming to creep toward him. He traveled along the river and the gradually thickening forest soon gave way to an upsloping greensward just beginning to tinge brown at the tip.

  He was about to pitch the empty bottle in the rushing brown flowage off to his left when the crack of a gunshot halted him. It came from somewhere ahead. Even Gracie looked up. Two more shots followed.

  Curiosity overrode his drunken lethargy and the pair, man and horse, roused themselves out of their stupor and loped up the last of the rise. They found themselves fifty yards from an unexpected sight: two men circling one. The man in the center, a wide-shouldered brute wearing a sheepskin coat, sat tall astride a big buckskin. He held in one hand what looked to be a substantial gun, maybe a Colt Navy, but appeared to have trouble bringing it to bear on the two men who took care to keep their own horses dancing in a circle around the big man. He tried to do the same, tugging feebly at his reins.

  What is wrong with the man? Tucker wondered. Is he drunk? He acted as much. And then Tucker got his answer. The man jigged his horse again; the big horse tossed its head and stepped hard. Then Tucker saw the red pucker, blackened at the edges. The man had been shot in the back.

  One of the other men shouted, then shot the big man’s hand. It convulsed and the pistol dropped. The shooter’s companion, thin and sporting a dragoon mustache and flat-crowned black hat with what looked like silver conchos ringing the band, laughed, looking skyward. As he brought his head back down, his laughter clipped short. He leveled his pistol on the big man in the sheepskin coat.

  One shot to the gut and the victim hunched as if he were upheaving the last of a long night’s binge. He wavered in the saddle. The man looked so fragile to Tucker. It did not seem possible that this was happening right there before him.

  The first shooter howled this time; then he rode up close, reached out with his pistol barrel like a poking finger, and pushed the man’s shoulder. That was all it took. The big man dropped like a sack of stones to the grass. The buckskin bolted and the black-hatted man leveled his pistol at it, but the other shouted something and wagged his pistol in a calming motion. Then they let the beast run. It thundered off, tail raised and galloping, toward where Tucker had intended to ride. How far was the man’s home place? Was he even from around here?

  With a bloodied hand planted in the grass, the big man forced himself up on one knee. He gripped his gut, his sheepskin coat sat open, puckered about his gripping hand. From beneath the clawed fingers oozed thick blood that drizzled to the grass. Where did the man get his strength? He was as good as dead but hadn’t realized it yet.

  The man lost his hat in his fall, and a breeze from the north tumbled it a few strides away. His head was topped with a thick thatch of white hair trimmed close on the sides, but the face beneath was a weathered mask, harder than leather, as if carved from wood. And it was the big man’s face that froze Tucker. The man had been backshot, gutshot, and more, but his expression bore unvarnished rage. Bloody spittle stringed from his bottom lip, his eyes squinted up at his attackers, both on horseback a few feet away, staring down at him.

  Tucker was too far to hear their words, but he heard the jabs and harsh cut of their voices. These were angry men, all three. But a gut feeling told Tucker that the man on the ground had been wronged somehow.

  Surely I should do something, say something, thought Tucker. Then he realized that if he did, he too would die. Gracie was a feeble rack of skin and bone, as was he. His only possession, clutched in his hand, was a green glass whiskey bottle. Empty. He didn’t dare move. Felt sure that if they saw him, he’d be a dead man in short order.

  Isn’t that what you want? he asked himself. Isn’t that what you’ve been hoping for these past two years now? Tapering off your days until there is so little left of you that you’ll eventually dry up, become a husk rattling in a winter breeze?

  And yet, as he watched this big man struggle to live, to fight these attackers, who were darting in and yipping at him like wild dogs prodding a downed deer, Tucker knew he had to help this man. But how?

  His decision was made for him when the thicker, shorter of the two men leveled his pistol across his other forearm at the big man swaying on his knees, squinted down the barrel, and touched the trigger. The pistol bucked and the big man jounced again, flopped partly onto his left side and lay in the grass, hands clutched tight beneath him.

  Tucker watched as the two killers circled the man in opposite directions. He tensed when at the last minute it seemed as if he might be seen. One of the men had a peculiar habit of jerking his head at an odd angle, a nervous condition, no doubt. The smaller man hopped down from his horse, said something to his companion, then rummaged in the big man’s coat. He pulled out what looked like a folded white paper. It looked as though the man was smiling. He stuffed the paper into his own coat, then mounted up.

  Tucker kept silent and unmoving, and the men soon thundered off in the direction the dead man’s horse had traveled. Long minutes passed, and all sign of the riders dissipated into the chilling air, leaving Samuel Tucker shivering atop his horse. He listened for a moment to the soughing of the breeze through the treetops and staring at the back of the big sheepskin coat. Dead for sure, but Tucker didn’t dare move.

  He thought about the man and his killers. They had been the first sign of humans he’d had in several days—how many
he did not know. Finally, he tapped Gracie with his heels and she walked forward, eager, he figured, to sample the green grass before them.

  A meadow such as this, bound to be a ranch nearby. Maybe they would know who the man was. As he approached the body, Tucker’s shivering increased. He knew it was for more than just the cold creeping in between his thready clothes and the goose-bumped skin beneath. When he was some yards from the body, Tucker reined up, slid off the horse, who grunted and dipped her head to the grass and began nosing and cropping with gusto. He let the hackamore reins trail. He had long ago given up worrying if Gracie would wander off—he fancied she was as tired and as uncaring as he.

  If that man’s coat had been gray, he thought, stepping carefully, shifting his glance up toward the direction ahead where he’d last seen the two riders recede into the landscape, it might well have been mistaken for a great rock marring this otherwise cleared meadow. He ventured forward another step, realized he had the bottle clutched tight in his hand, and held on to it. Not much of a weapon, but it would be better than nothing should those shooters decide to double back to admire their handiwork.

  He drew closer, tried to stop the thoughts occurring to him—despite the blood and the hole in the back, how warm that coat would be. If not for the man’s wide shoulders and obvious girth, Tucker suspected he was of similar height. Any bulk and muscle he had once had—and it had been enough to fill out and keep solid his thick frame—had in the past couple years of wandering dissipated to a tall, gaunt man, unshaven and sunken eyed. But try as he might, he could not think of anything other than that warm coat now.

  He cut wide around the body and looked down at the man. He saw no breath rise from the mouth, saw no movement of the chest. What he did see was a man lying on his left shoulder, large hands gripping a belly glistening with blood. The shirt’s belly had once been a checkerboard pattern of white and sky blue, but now it was a knot of bloody hands and sopping red cloth.

  Tucker turned his back on the direction he’d been so cautious about looking, and knelt before the hunched form. Seeing that big white-haired head, the clean-shaven face, the nose that had been broken a time or two, the jutting brow and the windburned cheeks—it all reminded him of his father, dead long years ago, and buried by Tucker’s own hand back in Texas. He’d laid him to rest beside the woman he’d pined for all of Samuel’s life, the mother Samuel never knew, lost to them both from a fevered sickness.