“I came here to kill you, Jess Teveler.” He never took his eyes off Teveler, even when he addressed the others. “This is between you and me. You others have no part in this. But if you take a hand”—his head tilted back to the south—“and my men and A. C. Thompson’s ride in to kill you all.”
Teveler laughed. “You’re a damned fool, Garth. You seem to forget that I got a winnin’ hand right here. Your son. Your real son. And your wife. So here’s what you’ll be doin’. You fetch us horses. And we ride out of here. Because if you don’t, I kill your only son. And Creede here . . . he makes you a widower. You was a fool, Garth, to come here alone.”
Now Mathew did look away from the killer. His eyes locked on Lightning’s. “I didn’t come alone,” Mathew said.
“Kill them!” Teveler screamed in panic, or rage, or both.
“No!”
* * *
Lightning didn’t remember screaming. He didn’t even remember whipping the Russian from his holster. Yet it bucked in his hand, and Creede was staggering back, tripping over his spurs, and toppling over . . . dead from the bullet Lightning had put in his back.
“Lightning!” Tess jumped as Teveler palmed his revolver. She stretched out, trying to cover Tom’s body.
Lightning turned the barrel of his smoking .44 toward Teveler, and then the breath whooshed out of his lungs as something hard tore through his back. Addison . . . standing behind him . . .
He dropped to his knees, but paid no attention to Addison or Kennedy or Benson. He aimed the revolver at Jess Teveler, squeezing the trigger as a second hammer slammed into Lightning’s back.
* * *
Tess found the pistol Creede had dropped. Covering Tom’s body as much as she could, she brought the pistol up, cocked it, fired at the man called Addison. In the corner of her eye, she saw Lightning, on his knees, then pitching forward. She screamed, cocked and fired the pistol again, and waited for Jess Teveler to put a bullet in her brain.
* * *
Mathew levered the Winchester, aiming from his hip. He saw Tess diving over Tom, finding the pistol dropped by the man Lightning had killed. He saw Lightning falling. Saw Jess Teveler shifting his Colt to kill Tess. Then Teveler was buckling from a bullet fired by Lightning.
The Winchester roared, and Mathew knew he had to spin. Dropping to a knee, he shot the man with the scattergun, then riddled the canvas covering of Groot’s Studebaker, splintering the wooden frame. After jacking another round into the carbine, he turned back and put two more bullets into Teveler’s falling body. Again, he aimed at the wagon.
His ears rang. Cattle bawled, but the worn-out longhorns had not stampeded. He could vaguely make out the sounds of galloping horses, and knew Thompson, Laredo, and even old Groot were charging to join the fight.
But the fight was over. Mathew looked at the wagon, but no movement came from inside the chuck wagon, and he decided that the gunman hiding in the Studebaker was dead. He spun around, wondering about the Chickasaws, decided they had skedaddled. The outlaws lay dead . . . and . . . maybe . . .
Dropping the empty carbine in the dirt, Mathew ran.
* * *
Tess reached him first, rolled him over as she sank onto her buttocks and gently lifted Lightning’s head, which she cradled in her lap. A shadow crossed Lightning’s paling face, and then Mathew knelt beside them, took Lightning’s hand in his own.
“Mama . . .” Lightning’s eyes, filled with tears, opened. She saw him as she had seen him years ago, the time he had broken his arm jumping out of the barn. Scared. Just a scared boy. “I don’t want . . . a new pair of boots, Mama,” he wailed. “I just want . . . you.”
“I’m all right, Lightning.” Tess could barely see now herself. Tears blinded her. “It’s all right, son. Everything is fine. Everything will be fine.”
“Mama . . .” Lightning coughed. “I love you.”
She smiled. “I know that, Lightning. I’ve always known that. And I’ve always loved you.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Men, women, kids lined both sides of the boardwalks of Caldwell, Kansas, as three thousand longhorns rode down the street—just like in those olden times, that long-ago past that had ended last year. Or so the farmers that had taken over the once-lawless town had thought.
The cowboys seemed behaved, exhausted, and the steers, practically played out, looked gentle as milch cows as they moved slowly down the street to the railroad tracks and the shipping pens that had been empty all year.
One of the railroad men opened the chutes, and the cattle began moving into the pens.
At the point, Mathew Garth swung from his horse and wrapped the reins around a hitching rail. Laredo, Teeler, and one of A. C. Thompson’s men began moving the cattle. A man in a white shirt with a paper collar climbed up and began counting the steers as they moved into the pens.
They had debated that back in the Unknown Lands, but Mathew said since Teveler had a buyer waiting in Caldwell, they might as well give him the business. At least see what kind of price the buyer had in mind. Besides, Mathew wanted to meet Jess Teveler’s partner, although by now he had a good idea who it was. So A. C. Thompson had sent some of his boys to help Mathew’s crew get the beeves those last sixty miles. A.C. was even riding flank.
“Your name Teveler?” a bald man with a sack suit called out.
Mathew stared at the man. “Garth,” he corrected. “Mathew Garth.”
The man stepped back. “Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Garth. We were told you wouldn’t be making this drive.”
Mathew looked beyond him. “I’m here,” he said.
“And Caldwell’s glad to have you, sir. Welcome. You’ll likely be the last herd ever shipped out of this town. And one of the last Texas herds, everyone’s been saying, to ship out of the state of Kansas. Even Dodge City, folks say, might be seeing the end—”
Mathew stopped him. “Who’s the buyer?”
“Armour packing house,” the man answered with suspicion. “Out of Kansas City. I’ll send for him. Didn’t you . . .”
“And the price?”
“That’s up to the Armour representative.”
Mathew hitched up his gun belt.
“And where is my pard, mister?” he asked.
“Blaine House,” the man answered. “It’s over on . . .”
“I know where it is.” Mathew turned. “Nice dogs you got there.”
* * *
When Chico Miller opened the door in his second-story room at the hotel, Mathew busted his jaw. The banker fell backward, knocking over a chair, landing on his bed, and falling onto the chamber pot the maid hadn’t gotten around to emptying this morning. A Remington derringer fell out of the banker’s coat pocket and onto the urine-soaked rug.
Mathew was inside the room, shutting the door, as Chico rolled over.
“Your dogs are at the shipping pens, Chico,” Mathew said. “What brings you to Caldwell?”
The banker couldn’t answer.
“Surprised to see me, Chico? Like I’m a bit shocked to see you here . . . this far from Dunson City and all.”
It made sense, Mathew decided. Now. He even thought back to when the Mexican rustlers had set up that ambush. Remembered one of the bandits had dog crap on his sandals. Chico Miller took those pretentious, but cowardly, hounds everywhere . . . even to Caldwell, Kansas. And he remembered the cigar Teveler had been smoking, and the ones they had found in his bloody vest pocket. Havanas.
Chico Miller’s mouth opened. His sweaty right hand fell on the .41, but did not move . . . yet.
“You give me a loan,” Mathew said, “but you figure I’ll never make it to market. You did everything you could to keep me from completing the drive. The way I see it, even though it went against your grain, you even sawed through the axles that killed Milt Blasingame. I underestimated you. You figured you’d have yourself a nice ranch property on the Rio Grande. And you figured to split the profits from a stolen herd with a murderer named Jess Teveler. Maybe—since
a lot of folks still think of me as the man who stole Dunson’s herd—I can appreciate that. But then you have the gall to try to turn our son against Tess and me. Well, sir, I’m giving you the same chance I gave Jess Teveler. Bullet or a rope, Mr. Banker. You call the tune.”
Folks later said civilization came to Caldwell on that August afternoon in 1886. The last Texas cattle herd was sold and shipped out of Caldwell, at $33.25 a head.
And the last gunshot was fired in the city limits.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Grass grew high along the Red River, and the air smelled of rain.
Typically, Texas cowboys would not do any work that they could not do on horseback, but that evening, no one complained. They cleared the patch of earth of weeds, nailed whitewashed wood together, and fenced in the top of the knoll overlooking the river to the north, and Texas to the south, east, and west. They placed the granite marker on the grave.
Mathew Garth took off his hat and studied the tombstone. No birth date, not even a year, for Mathew just didn’t know. He knew the year Dunson died, of course, but as for a date, that he could have only guessed. Besides, Dunson would have thought this better than just some R.I.P. with a name and some years.
“I should’ve put this up twenty years ago,” he said. “A man should be remembered.”
“He’ll never be forgotten,” Tess said.
HERE LIES
THOMAS DUNSON
Who Lived and Died
For Texas
“You want to read over him?” Groot asked.
Mathew’s head shook. “That I did . . . twenty years ago.” He replaced his hat and looked at the men surrounding him. Usually, after a trail drive, most of the hands would stay in town until they had spent all their money in the saloons and cribs and bathhouses. But this time, everyone had left Caldwell together. Since Caldwell was civilized now and didn’t really want to deal with a bunch of drunken cowboys. A. C. Thompson and his men had returned to Indian Territory to finish their own drive, one of the last, folks were saying, that Dodge City would be shipping out.
No Sabe stood next to Laredo Downs, who stood slightly in front of Teeler Lacey, who stood to the right of Joey Corinth. Groot Nadine leaned against the fence, and parked near Groot’s Studebaker, Tom Garth, with one arm still in a sling, sat in the buckboard, scratching the ears of one of the Olde English Bulldogges.
Birthday presents, Tess had decided, for her two sons. Mathew didn’t know what good dogs like that would be on a ranch, but he had not argued.
In the back of the wagon, Lightning Garth leaned against a pillow. The other bulldog licked his face, and their son laughed.
Tess came over to Mathew, pulled his hand into hers, and squeezed.
“This is nice,” she whispered. “You think you’ll be coming up here again sometime?”
His head shook. “No. Things are changing. They were saying even in Caldwell that the days of the long drives are over. We’ll be shipping from Denison. Or Fort Worth.” He chuckled. “Maybe even Dunson City.”
“What are you gonna do with yourself then?” Laredo Downs asked.
Mathew put his left hand on his back and strained. The wounds from Reata’s pistol still ached. “I’m getting long in the tooth for this,” he told the foreman. “I might turn the ranch operation over to our two sons.”
Groot spit tobacco juice into the grass. “How in hell would you spend your time if you wasn’t workin’ cattle?”
Mathew grinned. “Well, I’m on the board of directors for the bank. Which needs a new president.”
Somewhere on the other side of the Red River, a coyote yipped. The two dogs began whimpering.
“Let’s go home, Ma,” Lightning said.
“Yeah, Pa,” Tom said. “Let’s go home.”
Mathew looked at the grave one more time, then gazed into Tess’s eyes of jade.
“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I don’t remember when I first saw Red River—probably in high school—but I did take a date to watch when it played as a student union feature my freshman year at the University of South Carolina. I probably came across a copy of Bantam Books’ mass-market paperback 1948 release of Borden Chase’s novel Red River, originally titled Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail and serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, when I was in my twenties.
Anyway, I’ve watched Red River countless times, reread Chase’s novel probably three or four times, but never imagined writing a sequel until Gary Goldstein, about as knowledgeable a film buff and western editor as they come, approached me with the idea.
Which became Return to Red River.
Director Howard Hawks’s film version of Red River and Chase’s novel have differences—especially in the outcomes of some major characters. I frequently turned to Chase’s book but avoided the movie while writing this. Even so, when a friend asked whom I imagined as Mathew Garth while writing the book, I had to concede: “Well, an older Montgomery Clift.” And the voice I heard in my head whenever Dunson showed up in flashbacks was always John Wayne’s. Groot, however, wasn’t Walter Brennan, but Wally Roberts, a cook who has fed me on a few trail rides—the last of which left me with two fractured ribs. Thanks, Wally. But you are a much better cook than Groot Nadine, and you’re not bald.
I’d also like to acknowledge:
Nonfiction writers Frank Clifford (Deep Trails in the Old West), David Dary (Cowboy Culture), Harry Sinclair Drago (Great American Cattle Trails), Wayne Gard (The Chisholm Trail), J. Marvin Hunter (The Trail Drivers of Texas), Sam P. Ridings (The Chisholm Trail), and Don Worcester (The Chisholm Trail), for their source material.
Kim and Patricia Chesser of Burnt Well Guest Ranch in Roswell, New Mexico; and Roxanne and Galyn Knight and their sons of the K5 Ranch near Springerville, Arizona, for letting me experience cattle drives firsthand. It’s not a job, by the way, that I’d care to do full-time.
The New Mexico Children’s Foundation asked me to use a person’s name in my next novel as an item in its annual fund-raising auction. Janeen Yankowski won. I’ve never met Janeen, but appreciate her generosity, and the foundation’s, for funding nonprofit children’s organizations throughout the state.
When I mentioned this project to Ol’ Max Evans, author of The Rounders and Goin’ Crazy with Sam Peckinpah and All Our Friends, he told me about when he met Borden Chase while trying to find a screenwriter for The Rounders (Burt Kennedy eventually got that job). As a tribute to Max, a true cowboy, friend, and mentor, and Borden Chase, I recast Max’s remembrances of Chase and his “pretentious” dogs that kept getting bushwhacked by coyotes.
Finally, the scene where the horse mistakes shoals for water and lies on Mathew Garth came from Jay Wolpert. The screenwriter of The Count of Monte Cristo (2002) shared that memory in a tribute to our mutual friend, Cotton Smith. Jay witnessed something like that happen to Cotton, about as good a horseman as you’d find, on a trail ride near Wickenburg, Arizona. Like Mathew in my novel, Cotton laughed when it happened to him. I’d witnessed a similar incident on a trail ride in Texas. And it almost happened to me once in New Mexico. I wasn’t laughing.
Cotton Smith, author of Ride Away and many other westerns, was a great friend. He died unexpectedly while I was working on this novel, which I dedicated to him. After all, Cotton and I talked about Red River countless times. He’d say, “John Wayne should have won the Academy Award for that performance,” but I’d counter, “He was great, but if anyone was robbed that year, it was Humphrey Bogart for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.” And we’d laugh.
When he asked me what I was working on, I told him: “You’ll probably never speak to me again, but it’s a sequel to the novel that became Red River.”
“That’s great,” Cotton said. “You’ll do a fantastic job. Can’t wait to read it.”
I don’t know if I did a good enough job, but I’m sorry Cotton didn’t get to read this. He was, as cowboys used to say, a man to ride the river with.
> Santa Fe, New Mexico
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