His voice had been different. Oh, he had roared like a bear, but Mathew had sucked in his breath when Dunson spoke. Each word had sent pain through the big man’s entire body, and Mathew had detected an urgency in Dunson’s voice. And something else.
Fear.
He shot Tess a look, but she did not see. She was staring at Dunson, too. So Mathew had left them in the back of the wagon, climbed into the box, flicked the lines, and forced the tired horses into the river.
Horses. They should have used oxen.
He remembered Tess telling him, several days later, how water had filled the back of the wagon as they crossed, how Tess wondered if the wagon might just sink, the horses drown, and the Red take them all to some watery graves. Briefly, she later conceded, she had feared this was Dunson’s way of revenge. Killing them all. Yet Dunson had scooped the water into his pale hands and brought his fingers to his lips. Muddy water. Carrying the earth with it. By then, they were closer to the Texas side, so Dunson felt as if he had been tasting Texas soil. It had given him strength.
When they crossed into Texas, came up the bank, found a good level place, Mathew again had stopped the wagon and came around to the back of the Conestoga. Dunson’s voice softened, and he asked Mathew to lift him out of the wagon.
He remembered the moonlight. How bright it had been. As bright as morning sun. He wondered if he looked totally absurd, holding this behemoth in his arms, carrying him like a child until Dunson asked to be lowered to the ground.
Thomas Dunson wanted to stand. Mathew didn’t think the old man would be able to, but he did. His feet touched Texas earth, and in the moonlight, the old man seemed alive again.
Dunson’s voice, Mathew remembered, sounded so far away. He said that this was Texas, and he had pointed off to the south. He said that he had come home. Mathew had said, his voice choking, that, yes, Thomas Dunson was home. Tess had said nothing. She just stood there in the moonlight. And cried silently.
As Thomas Dunson sank into the grass, touching the land he had loved, the land he had fought for, killed for, and car ved . . . even if most of that country, his ranch, his home, lay hundreds of miles to the south. But it was all Texas.
Thomas Dunson was home. Home at last. And he was smiling when he died.
* * *
“There ain’t even a tombstone, not even a cross no more,” Lightning said.
“There never was,” Tess said.
“Why not?” Tom asked.
“He got what he wanted,” Tess replied.
“Which was?” Tom asked.
She smiled. “To die in Texas. To be buried in Texas.”
“Y ’all could’ve put up a stone,” Lightning said. “Or even hauled him to Dunson City. Buried him back home.”
“In August?” Tess shook her head.
A blue jay screeched at a mockingbird, and a fish splashed in the river. The wind blew hot. Trees along the riverbank rustled. The horses stamped their hooves and began grazing on the weeds.
“What was he like?” Lightning asked.
“He was just a man,” Tess said.
More silence. Finally, Lightning muttered something underneath his breath and returned to his horse. “Never saw no need in talking to no dead person,” Lightning said “C’mon, Tom, we’re burning daylight.”
Tom looked at his mother, then his father, and with a sigh, he, too, returned to the horses. Lightning was about to call out to his parents, but Tom shook his head sharply. “We’ll see y’all back at camp,” Tom called, and turned his horse back toward the others. With another curse, Lightning followed his brother, leaving Tess and Mathew alone.
“I haven’t been here since . . . that day,” she said.
His head bobbed. At first, she thought he would say nothing, but two words escaped. “I know.”
They looked at the crumbling rocks. Some had been moved. She had to wonder if they had been carried away by wind or rain, or settlers needing a few rocks for a fire ring or maybe even to start a cabin. Or even some kids, or cowboys, who simply tossed rocks into the Red to hear and watch the splashes.
Mathew made no attempt to rebuild the cairn, cut the weeds, and there were no wildflowers to pick here, to place on the grave. Not that Thomas Dunson would have wanted any flowers on his final resting place. He had been buried with his boots on, with his old revolver, and his face had been covered with Texas sod. Enough for a man like him.
A bee buzzed past them. The Red flowed silently.
She had no idea how long they stood there, but at last, Mathew returned his hat to his head. His legs, however, remained stationary, until he turned toward her.
Tess said, “You loved him, didn’t you?”
He did not answer directly, but walked back to his horse. As he tightened the cinch, he finally spoke.
“Loved him. Admired him. Feared him. Respected him.” He dropped the stirrup, gathered the reins, and swung with ease into the saddle, and waited for Tess to mount her gelding. When she had, and after she pulled her hat down tight, Mathew spoke again.
“He made me what I am today.” The horse turned. They rode away, neither of them looking back.
“And sometimes,” Mathew told her, “for that, I still hate him.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Mathew Garth did not return straight to camp with his sons. Instead, he rode out to the herd. He could hear Reata’s rich bass, singing some old song, comforting the longhorns. John Meeker Jr. and Joe Nambel also circled the herd.
Down south, miles down this treeless country where timbers could be found only along the riverbanks, such as here near the Red, Mathew could make out the camping places of at least two other herds. And although he could see no dust rising after all the rains, he understood that more herds were coming.
He moved away from the herd, toward Red River Station, the best crossing place for miles. Crossed by so many cattle—millions of them—over the past years, a veritable canyon had been cut into the banks on both sides of the Red.
It had not been just cattle that crossed the river here. Old-timers and Indians could remember when buffalo swam the river here. It was only natural. Salt Creek fed into the river nearby, and the river made a sharp northward turn, which typically pushed the current to the south bank, and thus created a natural place to ford.
Yet it rarely proved easy. It never looked easy.
The river ran fast and high, but not as high as it had been yesterday. Two days more, maybe, three at the most, and they would be across the river and out of Texas. Into Indian Territory.
Mathew let out a heavy sigh. His mind raced back to that first crossing of the Red River with thousands of weary longhorns. At night. When the river ran higher than it was today. When Thomas Dunson demanded that they cross now, with exhausted men, played out horses, and confused longhorns.
Looking across the river, Mathew could see it all. As clear as it had been that night, and that had been like a nightmare.
The massive trunk of a cottonwood, half underwater, then exploding out of the river like some monster, or a torpedo, ramming right into the mass of horses, cattle, and men. Barney Saul and Grant Shallert disappeared, crushed by wood, gored by horns, smashed by hooves, or merely drowned with the force of uncontrollable waters. One minute they had been horseback, trying to keep the cattle from milling. And then . . . they were gone.
But that wasn’t all of it. For just minutes after witnessing that tragedy, Mathew had watched Little Slim Reeves, who had always said he feared drowning, get unseated while trying to get some steer out of a sandy spot in the river. Mathew could see Old Leather Monte trying to reach the boy, who was being carried away out of the shallows and into deeper, roiling waters. Old Leather had even tossed a loop toward the struggling drag rider. Slim Reeves had just missed catching hold of the loop. And then Thomas Dunson was screaming something, and Slim Reeves had been pulled under the Red.
Three men. Three good cowmen, one of them no more than a boy, had been killed that time. Dunson h
ad read over their graves, even if there had been no grave for Slim Reeves. No one had been able to find his body, just his hat, but the crew demanded a cross be put up—even if it was just over a soaking, torn hat.
So Dunson had preached another funeral. And fourteen men, including Mathew and Dunson, had stood, hats in hands, and listened. Fourteen. They had left South Texas with thirty.
Mathew looked across the river, at the tree-lined banks and beyond, through the rolling country of Indian Territory. He searched. He fought his memories. He tried to find the place, but he couldn’t.
A poet might call this irony, Mathew thought. But poets knew nothing about life, or death. Ironic? Hardly. It was pathetic.
Mathew could find Thomas Dunson’s grave. Yet the graves of those three cowboys—Slim Reeves . . . Grant Shallert . . . Barney Saul . . . ? Those were lost forever.
* * *
He knew they should wait another day, but Mathew could sense the restlessness of the trail herds waiting a mile or more back. The cattle had rested long enough, the weather already began to heat up, and Mathew did not like sitting around with notes due. He could feel Chico Miller breathing down his neck.
“We cross today.” His voice rang out in the darkness as soon as Groot had rung the triangle bell announcing that coffee was hot. His voice stirred more men that the harsh peals of the cast iron against cast iron.
“What?” Laredo Downs tossed off his soogans.
“You heard me. Eat quickly, boys. I want the lead steers in the Nations before the sun’s barely up.”
* * *
Again, they wrapped poles to Groot’s Studebaker and held their breath as the old cook and Tess guided the mule-drawn team across the fast-flowing river. Mathew rode his best-swimming horse on one side of the wagon, and Laredo Downs took the downstream spot.
“Don’t stop,” Mathew yelled as the wagon climbed up the rise on the northern banks. “I want this herd halfway to Monument Rocks by nightfall.”
The remuda crossed next. Joey Corinth was a wonder with those horses. And then Joe Nambel and Laredo Downs led the first steers into the Red.
They balked at first. Even the experienced steers, not bound for the slaughterhouse, did not like swirling waters. Shouts and curses rang out behind them. Horses reared. Cattle bawled. Pushing. Shoving. Driving the beeves into the river. Until the line formed, with cowboys swimming their horses from one bank and back again, whipping hats, nudging the animals back into line. Up to the next bank, leaving a watery trail as they climbed the slippery bank and disappeared over the rise.
A bridge of beef crossed the river, moving. Many times Mathew had wondered if a man—a younger man than he was by now, of course—with great balance, quick feet, and maybe a special pair of Joe Justin’s boots could run across the backs of the longhorns from one bank to the other and not get wet. He remembered back in ’79 when Brick Keever, now dead, and a young greenhorn named Shawnee Preston had bet that they would do it the next morning when they crossed the river. Of course, they hadn’t even tried.
It was, Mathew thought when the last of the stragglers were climbing up the bank and the winds of the Indian Nations had started to pick up, perhaps the smoothest crossing he had ever experienced.
He spurred his horse up the incline and looked at the long line of beef, weaving across the plains. Although broken to the trail by this time, the cattle had worn down, so Mathew had not promoted anyone to take over Alvaro Cuevas’s spot. Instead, he had moved Joe Nambel down to the other flank position opposite Yago Noguerra. No Sabe and Bradley Rush remained at swing, with Reata joining Lightning, Tom, and John Meeker Jr. at drag. Mathew would do any scouting, although he might also spell Teeler Lacey so that the old scout could check out campsites and water holes.
“I wish every river crossin’ was like that,” Laredo Downs said brightly as he reined in his mount next to Mathew.
Mathew barely nodded. “Best catch up to Teeler,” Mathew said. “He’ll need you at point.”
“All right. Ought to rest ’em. Get an early start tomorrow.”
Shaking his head, Mathew turned his horse. “Too many herds waiting behind us. Probably another will cross today. We keep moving.”
* * *
Move they did. Quick gulps of coffee near the blackjacks along Blue Grove, where they helped Joey Corinth and Tess gather up kindling and firewood that they tossed inside the strip of canvas that hung underneath the Studebaker. Through the rolling prairie to Beaver Creek for their first camp. They had made fifteen miles that day, practically unheard of. And they were up in the blackness of morning to keep driving north.
Past the mesa and its red sandstone boulders and rocks called Monument Rocks—without stopping to carve names or initials in the sandstone. Even Mathew had unfolded a pocketknife and left his initials on a slab back in ’69 on the piles of rocks cowboys had started tossing up as trail markers. Once, those two piles of rocks, roughly three hundred feet apart, had reached twice Mathew’s height, with a circumference of ten feet. Now both mounds had collapsed, and wind had left enough tumbleweeds—once unheard of during the early years of the trail—and dirt so that the markers looked like just a couple of natural mounds of earth and weeds.
Past Stage Station, through the oak grove that had been considerably charred and thinned by a prairie fire some years back. On to Rush Creek, and then across the Little Wichita.
By that time, they had forgotten all about the rains, the floods, the bogs, the storms. The sun turned so hot, the wind scalding, that they even began praying for rain.
Prayers went unanswered.
Driving on. Pushing on. Dust and dirt. Saddle sores. Bruises. Sunburns. Tempers turned raw. Groot’s cast turned brown. On some days, he could barely stand, so Tess did most of the cooking. She had never been much of a cook, one of the reasons she had hired Janeen Yankowski. Yet no one complained. They merely worked. Fourteen hours in the saddle was a vacation. Eighteen hours, even more, was a typical day. Three horses went lame, and two mules, but they used them when, at last, the delegation of Indians met them before the Washita River and asked for their payment, a tribute, a toll. The lame stock and two beeves that Mathew knew would not make it to the Canadian River satisfied the old chief and his two braves.
“Remember that tussle the Chickasaws give us?” Joe Nambel called out that night during supper. “Chickasaws. Supposed to be peaceable, even civilized. . . one of the Civilized Tribes—but damn if they wasn’t after our scalps that time. Remember?”
No one said anything. Not even Groot or Teeler or Laredo, and they had been in that fight. Even Mathew remembered it, for that’s when he had first seen Tess after Memphis.
Joe Nambel let it go and focused on the corn bread and beans, one cooked not enough, the other burned. He probably didn’t feel like telling the whole story anyway, Mathew guessed. Like everyone else, he was tuckered out.
He knew he would have to slow the pace. They couldn’t afford to lose any more horses, and the heat, the wind, the lack of water would kill them if he kept up this relentless drive. Yet when he rode back to check on the drag riders, he stared off to the south. More dust rose into the cloudless blue sky. A. C. Thompson’s herd. Plenty of others. All pushing north, then west for Dodge City. And how many herds were ahead of him, bound for the Cut-Off or taking the Western Trail?
Keep moving. Keep driving. Maybe it’ll rain.
They swam the Washita that afternoon at Rock Crossing between the red clay banks lined with willows. Well, maybe they didn’t exactly swim the river. In some years, the southern bottoms could be tricky, but the northern side was hard rock. On this day, the river was so low the cattle crossed water ankle-deep, then over sandy shoals.
He rode back and forth across the shallow stream that maps labeled a river, forgetting that often it turned crueler than the Red. Keeping the cattle in line, pushing them, slapping his hat, nudging them across.
When the drag riders were bringing the last of the beef across, he let his horse walk
, from water to shoal. The sun, he later determined, had baked his brain. He forgot a lesson he had learned about horses and water many years ago.
The horse stopped, began pawing at the sand. The bay gelding confused the sand, gleaming like water, with water. Instead of jerking up the reins, to lift the bay’s head, Mathew merely cursed the gelding, calling him a stupid son of a bitch. Actually, it was Mathew who was the stupid son of a bitch.
Thinking the shoals were water, the bay pawed at the sand, then started to sink into the sand, to roll over, to cool off.
A moment later, Mathew Garth found himself partly in water, partly on a shoal, his right leg under eight hundred pounds of horseflesh. He wasn’t hurt. Nor angry. And right then, he wasn’t even embarrassed.
He kicked free of the stirrup, let go of the reins, and lay back in the shallow water. And broke out in an uproarious cackle.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
Mathew opened his eyes and looked up at the voice. The bay rose and trotted off a few paces, lowered its head, and drank. Mathew moved his leg around and slowly pulled himself to his feet.
“Yes, sir,” Lightning Garth said, and looked over at Tom while Meeker and Reata kept the cattle moving across the river. “You was wrong, Tom. The old sidewinder ain’t forgotten how to laugh after all.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“Let them graze on the high ground,” Mathew called out. “Take advantage of the breeze.”
Not that the wind blew cool. But at least it blew.
He had always liked this part of the Indian Territory, this Washita Valley. In most years, the grazing was good. Here, he knew he could fatten up the cattle. Firewood, even wild plums, could be found along the creeks and streams. Cross the Canadian, the North Canadian, and the Cimarron. Gently push the cattle on to Dodge City.
By dawn, they moved again. Water holes became lower, the wind and sun hotter, the horses more skittish. Days ran together. Nights became too short. Across the Canadian, past Fort Reno, moving on, marking the miles with dust.
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