The Travelers 1

by Lee Hunnicutt

  When they had Two Feathers back in his bedding, Beth said, “Did he do what I think he did?”

  “Yeah,” laughed Sonny “he sure did.”

  “Whoa, Two Feathers. Way to go! I’d do the same thing myself but I’m not equipped for it.” she laughed.

  The boys laughed and Jack said, “It’s 11:30. We have about five and a half hours to sunlight. If we’re going to sleep, we had better do it now. One of us will have to stay awake so we’ll have to sleep in shifts. Any suggestions?”

  Sonny said, “I think two of us should stay awake at the same time. If there is just one of us awake, then whoever it is will go to sleep for sure. But if there are two awake then they can keep each other awake.”

  Beth said, “What if we do it in one hour shifts? Surely anyone of us can stay awake for one hour.”

  Jack said, “We’ve been sleeping like the dead and we will be dead if we go to sleep and either one of those two clowns get untied. Maybe we all should try and stay awake. Surely all three of us won’t go to sleep at the same time. Besides even though I know I should be sleepy, I’m as wide awake as I’ve ever been.”

  Beth said, “So am I. Let’s do try and stay awake all night.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Sonny. “I’m like you. I don’t feel sleepy either. I feel pretty pumped up.”

  Jack said, “We need to check Curly Bob and Slim at least once an hour to make sure their knots are still tied. When we do that, we do it in pairs. One will check the knots. The other will hold a pistol to Curly Bob’s and Slim’s head. We can’t give these guys a break. We have to be hard. We have to be tough. If either one of them tries anything or makes a move on us, we can’t hesitate. We have to shoot them and we shoot to kill. We have to be clear on this. Beth? Sonny?”

  “I’m clear on it,” said Sonny.

  “You know my opinion Jack. I think we should kill them now so don’t worry about me. I’ll shoot them if they pass gas at the wrong time,” said Beth.

  Both boys were a little surprised at Beth’s cold attitude but then they hadn’t had Curly Bob’s knife pressed to their throats.

  Jack picked up a canteen and said to Sonny “Let’s go check them now. Get your pistol ready.”

  Sonny pulled his pistol out of his belt and they went over to Slim.

  Jack set the canteen down and began checking Slim’s bindings. Jack used his flashlight in order to see the knots.

  The flashlight puzzled Slim but he didn’t say anything about it. Instead he asked “Wha.. what was Curly Bob screaming for?” referring to when Two Feathers peed on Curly Bob.

  “Don’t worry yourself about that,” said Jack. “Let’s just say that Curly Bob will have to wear a hat for the rest of his life. That’s all.” Jack smiled in the dark. Sonny snickered.

  “Oh Jesus Christ,” whined Slim “you said you’d let us walk outta here alive if Curly Bob let the girl go.”

  “Yeah, I did but I didn’t say that you had to have all of your hair,” said Jack.

  After he was satisfied that the knots were OK, he picked up the canteen and gave Slim a drink.

  Jack said, “We are going to check these knots ever so often throughout the night. If I find that they are loose or that you have tried to untie them or have tried to get away, I’ll cut your throat. Is that clear?”

  “Yeah, yeah!” stammered Slim.

  The boys went over to Curly Bob. Jack bent down to check the knots and said, “Whew Curly Bob do you stink! Why, if I didn’t know better, it smells like somebody pissed all over you. You know if you bathed more often, you wouldn’t smell this way. You need to think more to your own personal hygiene.”

  “Yeah, Curly Bob, cleanliness is next to godliness,” said Sonny with a straight face.

  All Curly Bob could do was grind his teeth, which he did.

  Jack told Curly Bob the same thing he had told Slim about trying to get away. But when Jack asked him if he understood Curly Bob said nothing. He just sneered.

  Jack put his face a few inches from Curly Bob’s, pulled out his sheath knife. Held it up so Curly Bob could see it and said through his teeth “You may not have noticed, Curly Bob but you don’t have the upper hand anymore. You’re not able to kick people’s ribs in and bully three twelve-year-old kids.”

  “Twelve-year-old kids! Twelve-year-old kids! I let twelve-year-old kids get the drop on me.” He wanted to scream. He wanted to beat his head against the tree. All he could do was clench his eyes shut and make choking, strangling sounds.

  It spoiled the effect that Jack was trying to convey to Curly Bob so he stood up and sheathed his knife. He turned to Sonny, shrugged his shoulders and said, “I think Curly Bob is having a moment of crisis. Maybe we should leave him alone with his thoughts.”

  Sonny grinned and they walked back to the fire.

  Beth had watched all of this and asked what had happened to make Curly Bob react that way. Sonny explained it to her and what Jack had said to Slim about letting them leave but not with all of their hair.

  Beth gave a musical laugh and said, “They’re not having a good day are they?” This for some reason struck her as funny and she started laughing harder and holding her sides.

  All this did for Curly Bob was make him grind his teeth harder.

  Beth was still whooping with laughter when Jack reached over to the coffee pot that had been put on the fire nearly six hours ago. He picked it up using his handkerchief. The water was nearly boiled away so he went to the river and refilled it.

  When he got back, Beth had gotten control of herself. Sonny was adding more wood to the fire. It was getting cold.

  He put the coffee pot on to boil and sat down. He let out a sigh. “At last we can relax. What a night.” he said.

  They wrapped themselves in their poncho liners. They leaned back on the bundles that had come off the pack animals and started recounting what had happened to them from the time they ran into the men on horseback until they sat down for coffee. They went over it again and again, bringing in details that they forgot to tell the time before. At times they were serious when they recounted how close they had come to death. Other times they laughed when they recounted Two Feathers pissing on Curly Bob and Curly Bob coughing and sputtering.

  Ever so often Jack and Sonny would get up and check Slim and Curly Bob’s knots. Apparently both of them had taken the boys seriously. The knots didn’t looked tamper with and the men were as tightly bound as when they were first tied up.

  They went through pot after pot of coffee and seemed to never tire of telling their stories. At one point, Beth, who was sitting near Two Feathers got up and came over and hugged each boy and said, “I thought I was dead. I’ve never been so scared in my life. Both of you were so brave. Thank you. I meant it when I said you were my heroes. I know it sounds corny but you are.” Tears were in her eyes. She bent over and kissed them.

  Both boys were embarrassed and started going “Aw shoot, Beth.” They started squirming around and looking down at the ground.

  Jack was the first to speak “Beth, I wasn’t brave. I was terrified, scared to death. I was more afraid that that scumbag would hurt you than I was of dying. In fact, I didn’t think of dying. I was too scared to. I would have done anything to keep him from hurting you. You were the brave one. When I had Slim’s gun on Curly Bob and he said that he would cut your throat, I almost panicked but you called out and told me what to do. That was real courage. He might have cut your throat then and there.

  And Sonny taking Slim out of play, that was gutsy. All I did was hold the gun.”

  “I don’t think Dirty Earl would agree with you,” said Beth pointing with her chin at Dirty Earl’s corpse.

  “We were all scared. We just did what we had to do. I’m with you Beth. I’ve never been so scared in my life. But now that it’s over and we are all alive and not hurt, I’ve never felt so alive in my life.”

  “Yeah,” said Beth “exhilaration, that’s what I feel. How about you Jack?”

 
; Jack smiled and said, “I guess so but I’ll take a slow day fishing over this any day. You can keep all of that adrenaline for yourselves.”

  And so they talked throughout the night.

  As dawn began to break Sonny said, “What are we going to do with them?” indicating the two men tied to the trees.

  “I think that we get everything ready to go before we let them go,” said Jack. “We have to pack the horses and make a travois and at the last moment we untie them.”

  Beth said, “The untying will be the dangerous part.”

  “How so?” said Sonny.

  “Well,” she said, “they’ve had all night to think up how they are going to get out of the mess that they are in and they just might try something.”

  “We’re just going to have to see that they don’t,” said Jack. “And I have an idea on how we can do that. We untie their feet then stand them up. Then we untie their hands. Their necks will still be tied to the tree so they won’t be able to do anything. Besides they’ll be stiff from being tied to a tree all night so they won’t be moving too well anyway. Then we retie their hands. We can even put a hobble on their legs if we want to.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” said Sonny.

  “We can’t just let them go,” said Beth. “We tie them up the best we can and let them walk back to Hard Luck tied up. I don’t want them following us on foot and cutting our throats as we sleep.”

  “Beth has a point,” said Sonny.

  “I even have a way to tie them up so they will have a devil of a time getting out of it,” said Beth. “I’ve been thinking about it all night.”

  “OK,” said Jack. “Then it’s tie ‘em up and send them on their way but for right now, how about breakfast?”

  There was enough light to see by and Beth found a large iron skillet. They found a bag of corn meal and they had used a sack of flour as a backrest so they had flour.

  They mixed a canteen cup of flour with a canteen cup of corn meal and poured just enough water into in to make a thick mush. They added salt and sugar to the mush. They then sliced and cooked up about two pounds of bacon. They made patties out of the corn mush and fried the patties in the bacon grease.

  Beth took a plate of corn fritters and some bacon over to Two Feathers. All he could eat was one corn fritter and a couple of slices of bacon. His lack of appetite worried Beth but she was encouraged when he drank a full canteen of water.

  Jack mixed up four more batches of corn fritters and fried them. They were to be eaten on the trail later.

  Curly Bob could smell the bacon and it made him ravenous. He called over “What about us? Are you gonna feed us?”

  “If we have any leftover we’ll think about it. Now shut up,” said Jack.

  Jack thought “There’s no way in Hell that I would talk to an adult like that back home but here the rules have changed. I’ve got to show that SOB who’s in charge. And if I can, I’ve got to make him fear me.”

  Now that it was daylight they started to take inventory of what was unloaded from the packhorses. Mainly there were food stuffs, flour, corn meal, beans, blankets, six 1866 Winchester repeating rifles, eight Smith & Wesson 44 caliber revolvers, a case of 44 Henry rifle shells and two cases of 44 S&W American pistol cartridges. There were saddle holsters for the rifles and pistol belts. There were also four cases of whiskey, three axes, a couple of shovels and a pick ax.

  After they had stacked everything together, they went over to Dirty Earl’s body. They stopped and looked down at it. No one wanted to touch him.

  They could see the terrible damage Jack’s first bullet did to his arm and there was what looked like a huge hole in his back.

  Beth suddenly bent down and grabbed Dirty Earl’s right shoulder and started to roll him over.

  “Well, just don’t stand there with your teeth in your mouths. Give me a hand.”

  The boys sprang into action. Jack pushed on Dirty Earl’s hip as Beth pulled on the shoulder and Sonny pulled on the right knee. Earl flopped over on his back. His eyes were open staring blankly at the sky. Compared to the ruined back the hole in his chest was small with very little blood.

  They rummaged through his pockets and pulled off his boots. He had ten dollars in his pockets. He had no pistol in his boots but when they rolled him back over to go through is back pockets they lifted up his coat and found that Dirty Earl had a 38 pistol in a holster in the small of his back. They took his holster, his money, his belt knife and a folding knife that he had in his front pocket and the gun.

  All total they had nine Winchesters, three from the men’s saddle holsters and six from the pack bundles. They had sixteen 44 pistols and two 38s.

  Beth stood up and said, “I’ll round up the horses. You guys start making the travois.”

  It took them about two hours to make the travois, saddle the horses and load the packhorses.

  They talked it over and decided not to bring the whiskey. They had read too much about the wild effect whiskey had on Indians. If they were going to return Two Feathers to his tribe, they didn’t want to face the added complication of drunken Indians who might not like white kids.

  They attached the travois to the packhorse that had the lightest load. They then transferred Two Feathers to the travois.

  After all was ready, they sat down and had their last cup of coffee before setting off.

  “Well, it’s time to face Curly Bob and Slim,” said Jack.

  “I have an idea,” said Sonny. “Let’s get them drunk. We tie them up and make them drink a bottle of booze and then leave them. It’ll take them hours to sober up plus they might be too drunk to untie themselves. By the time they sober up and get untied, we’ll be long gone.”

  “It’s a good idea Sonny” said Beth “but I want to get on our way. I don’t want to wait two or three hours while these clowns sit around getting drunk.”

  “Yeah,” said Jack “we can’t make them chug-a-lug it. There’s a good possibility that they would just barf it all back up and then would not be as drunk as we would want them to be. I’m with Beth. Let’s get going.”

  It hurt Sonny’s feeling that his great idea had been turned down but he knew he was out voted and what they said made sense.

  Beth said, “I know how we should tie them up. I’ve given it a lot of thought. We tie their hands in front of them and then run a line from their hands through their legs, up their backs and pull it tight around their necks. This way they can walk but will have a hard time bending over and a hard time untying each other.”

  “I have an idea!” said Sonny.

  He ran over to one of the packhorses and started tugging at something. He pulled out and ax and said, “Wait just a minute. I’ll be back.”

  He ran to the edge of the woods and walked along the side of the woods for about fifty feet. He then went into the woods.

  Beth and Jack heard chopping sounds from the trees. They hadn’t a clue what Sonny was up to.

  Sonny emerged from the trees dragging a four-foot-long tree trunk that was about four inches in diameter.

  Beth smiled. “I know what he’s doing. What a great idea!”

  “What?” said Jack. But before Beth could answer, Sonny was standing in front of them beaming.

  “We tie a length of suspension line to each end of the log and tie one end of the log to Curly and the other end of the log to Slim. We put notches around the log at each end so the suspension line can’t move or slip off. This way they can’t get to each other to untie themselves.”

  Jack smiled, shook his head, slapped Sonny on the back and said, “Great idea Sonny. You notch the log and Beth and I will get Slim and Curly Bob ready.”

  Beth said, “I’ve been thinking. We’re gonna have to take that Whiskey with us part of the way.”

  “Why?” said Sonny.

  “Because if we leave it here they just break one of the bottles and cut the suspension line.”

  Jack said, “Never thought of that. OK when we get Slim and Curly Bob t
ied up in their traveling clothes, we’ll pack the whiskey.”

  “Let’s get a move on,” said Sonny.

  “OK, let’s go Beth. You hold the pistol on them as I tie them up.”

  Beth pulled the hog leg out of her belt, smiled and said, “My pleasure.”

  It took a while to get the men on their feet. They were stiff and cold. It was painful for them to stand and it was even more painful when circulation was restored to their hands and feet. It was especially painful for Slim. The wound in his right buttock had stiffed and it would be hard for him to walk.

  Beth and Jack untied their hands and feet but left their necks tied to the tree. Beth stood behind and to the side of Curly Bob with her pistol cooked and pointed at his head. Curly Bob could feel the muzzle of the pistol behind his ear.

  He wanted to say something. He wanted to curse and thrash around but all he did was stand still and let Jack tie him up with his hands between his legs and a loop around his neck. To say that Curly Bob was frustrated was an understatement. He was in a rage, a cold fury and he could do nothing about it.

  When Jack untied Curly Bob’s neck from the tree, he looked into Curly Bob’s eyes and saw pure hatred.

  Slim was compliant. He looked like a beaten dog and gave them no trouble.

  Neither Beth nor Jack felt any pity or empathy for them. All they felt was anger and contempt.

  By the time that they had tied Slim and Curly Bob, Sonny had the log notched and two lengths of suspension line tied to the notches.

  Beth and Jack prodded Curly Bob and Slim over to where Sonny was waiting with the log. The men were hunched over, shoulders rounded and heads pulled back trying to keep tension from the suspension cords off their necks. Jack had pulled the cord running from their necks as tightly as he could without cutting the circulation to their heads. Although he wasn’t too concerned about their wellbeing, he didn’t want them to pass out and die from lack of blood to the brain.

  They debated where to tie the log to the men and settled on tying it around their waists instead of their necks. They tied the log as tightly as they could to each man’s waist. The log rested in the small of Curly Bob and Slim’s backs and on their hips.