by W R. Garwood
“Hey now!” the first man shouted. “Thought you were part of that war party. They wuz here this very mornin’ but we made th’ red buggers clear off. Saw the bunch of you up past the pines but couldn’t make out who wuz who, since I busted my spyglass.” Zuñi Jack’s English was passable enough, but it sounded sort of like he had a mouthful of hot mush.
“They was here before?” Kirker asked, while rubbing his black chin whiskers. “Well, they didn’t git nuthin’ from us, except a drink. And that reminds me, we need us some supplies.”
Jeff followed the Zuñi into the trading post’s dim interior. I tagged along a few steps behind, as did the other Indian, who’d turned our mounts into the corral.
“Other trouble around here?” Jeff asked the portly proprietor of the Blak Bare Tradin Stashun, which was the way the crudely daubed sign read across the adobe building’s front.
“Naw! Hardly never see a soul, red nor white, since th’ wagon trains are takin’ th’ old Mormon Battalion route southwest inter Californy.”
“Why’s that?” I horned in.
“U.S. dragoons keep that route open mostly, since that talk about th’ gold strike,” Zuñi Jack explained, fiddling with the stub of an ear which was all the bear had left him on the left side of his head. “You headin’ that way? Y’can pick up an escort of soldier boys down ter th’ Pima Tradin’ Post as they ride through once a week or so on the scout fer hostiles. like them damned feather-sproutin’ Comanches.”
I knew what Kirker would reply before he opened his mouth.
“Oh, we’re goin’ around the old north route,” Jeff answered shortly, then ordered another round of Mexican beer from Zuñi Jack’s squaw, who hovered near the rickety bar, looking for all the world like the spitting image of her lord except for a red skirt and two whole ears.
By the time we’d taken on board half a dozen bottles of warm beer, Jeff Kirker had expanded into his usual talkative self, insisting we’d got the best of the Comanches in a little swap. He had me show the tintype to Zuñi Jack and his help. “Look-it that! A genuine five-dollar tintype for an old Bowie knife and a blamed gimcrack of a greaser medal,” Kirker crowed. “If that ain’t tradin’ them red devils outta their clouts, I don’t know about it. And like I say, you can always git the best of a dumb. . . .” He suddenly shoved the bottle at his open mouth, and I knew he’d recalled what he’d said about Zuñi Jack’s so-called shrewdness.
Zuñi Jack took up the tintype, looked long at it, then wagged his head. “Ugh huh!” His voice sounded as if he’d a couple of mouthfuls of hot mush, so I figured him sort of roused up. “Ugh! I know that there pitchure, leastwise I know that little gal.” He tugged at his starboard, good ear. “Ugh!Todo correcto. And now I know why that blamed Comanche looked familiar when he rid in here this mornin’ with his compadres. He’s th’ very one I took a shot at when I was scoutin’ fer some Mexican Lancers out at San Pascual, where we caught them red-tailed rascals a-burnin’ a wagon train.”
“Blamed rascal yourself, ridin’ with them black-hearted Mexicans,” Kirker commented, and ordered another round of beer for all, winking at me.
“You saw this little girl?” I found it hard to believe but Zuñi Jack had no reason to lie. “What happened to her?”
“Don’t know for certain.” Zuñi Jack helped himself to our beer. “Do know she was th’ only one of that whole train to keep her scalp. She might have been turned over to th’ sisters at one of them convents, but which one’s anybody’s guess. Californy’s got nigh as many as oranges.”
I put the tintype back in my shirt pocket and went with a limber-legged Kirker to fill our water cask at Zuñi Jack’s spring out back of the corrals. Jeff had paid on the nail for our supplies—fatback, hardtack, and another bottle of whiskey—and without any fuss. The warm beer had put him in a peaceful and forgiving mood.
When we rode off north, Zuñi Jack bowlegged down the trail a piece and called after us: “Watch them Comanches! They could still be hankerin’ for your shootin’ irons!”
We both waved at Zuñi Jack, then dug in and rode steadily for the next three hours, pulling up near sunset in a great stand of piñon pine atop one of the foothills of the San Francisco peaks.
It wasn’t long until I had a fire going and sowbelly sizzling in the pan while the sun was burning out in a smother of blood-streaked cloud banks. For some reason I couldn’t figure, the sight of all that scarlet and red flaming out there on the rim of the world gave me a case of pure goose bumps. A mournful wind was whistling its way through the pines, so I laid my feelings to that as much as to an odd-looking sunset.
Jeff had just come back from tending to the animals, which were staked out about fifty yards off on an open piece of mesa and had taken up his tin cup of coffee.
“Well, kid, a couple of days and we cross San Juan River, swing west again for a hundred miles, and we’ll hit the old Spanish Trail straight inter California,” he said, then laughed deeply and happily as he sipped at the hot java—and those were the last words he ever spoke, but four.
A musket cracked out and Jeff Kirker gave a grunt, folding over into the campfire, spilling skillet and coffee, and knocking ashes and brands galley west!
Chapter Five
I was clawing for ground before that shot quit racketing through the trees. Rolling over, I grabbed Kirker, hauling him from the fire, batting flames off his clothing.
“Where’re you hit?”
He didn’t answer; then he lifted his head to gasp: “That coin. Red Rosita. . . .” His eyes rolled up, he stiffened, and was dead.
There was nothing but brittle, hissing quiet; even that mournful breeze seemed to have died the same instant as Jeff Kirker. I stared bug-eyed at him, seeing blood spread on his chest. There was some on my hands and I hurried to wipe them on my shirt. It was the same color as that sunset. And in that bloody light there came the sudden screech of a war cry, and I knew Big Wolf was back to finish his trading.
Jeff’s Tige rifle was still strapped to his bay on the mesa, and all I had to fight with was my Walker Colt. I rolled back, tugged the six-gun out, and waited, not moving and scarcely breathing, searching the dark pines and scarlet mesa for movement.
Nothing stirred until three Indians came leaping out from somewhere and running toward the staked-out animals, a trio of devils darting through the blazing sunset.
I cocked the Walker, leveling down on the leading Indian—Big Wolf. The hammer clacked. No explosion. Damp powder in the chamber, or that dead hand was still big medicine.
I expected Comanches to be right on top of me by the time I’d cocked the weapon again, but instead they’d grabbed our two horses and were already astride, loping down the hill, while the third Indian dog-trotted behind, toting a sack of supplies.
I lowered the Walker and waited, then saw the whole bunch riding away as hard as they could lash their mounts. As Jeff used to say: Comanches knew when to fight and when to let well enough alone. Besides, they had what they’d come for—both riding horses and Kirker’s rifle.
I leaned back against a tree, near Jeff’s body, mighty glad I hadn’t fired. I really wasn’t any sort of an Indian fighter, and I knew it.
When the last crimson glints died in the ashy-blue west, I tugged Kirker back a piece, covering him with a section of canvas from the pack mule—the only live company left me.
I let the fire go on out, for, if those Indians should come back, I didn’t want any light showing.
Rolling up in my blanket, I waited it out until morning, shivering and shaking and filled with the kind of dreams I don’t like to remember.
It was a long and lonesome night.
* * * * *
Gray dawn drifted through the trees before I fell into a hard sleep, worn out with the turns and tumbles of the night. If Big Wolf had come back for my scalp, he’d have had it half off before I’d come to.
When I finally came back to the land of the living, the sun was high over the pines and some hellish commotion w
as ringing in my ears. I stumbled up, pawing for my pistol, only to realize my pack mule was out there on the mesa, braying its disgust and lonesomeness.
Moving the mule into the shade of the trees, near some grama grass, I looked over what Big Wolf had left me. The water cask was still filled and there was just about enough supplies to get under way to the north. I thought of going downtrail to Zuñi Jack’s, but the thought that those Comanches might be lurking below didn’t set too well. It was a case of once burned, but never twice.
For a spell I lingered out in the hot sunshine for a chill remained deep in my blood from thoughts of last night and what waited for me in the blue shadows of the piñons—Kirker’s body!
I hadn’t looked toward Jeff since scrambling to my feet at the tremendous racket of the pack mule’s lament, but I finally turned and went back to our dead campfire. My poor saddle pardner lay beyond those cold ashes near a pile of upthrust boulders.
I walked over and tugged the piece of canvas off the stiffened corpse. Kirker still wore a surprised look, and for the life of me I couldn’t keep from wondering if the six men of Jeff’s squad had the same look when those bandits had knocked them from their horses. Kirker had been the lucky seventh man, but his luck had finally run out—with a bang.
Thinking of the robbery over in California, and all that bloody gold, fetched back Jeff’s last words: That coin . . . Red Rosita . . ..
Much as I hated to go through Kirker’s clothing, I knelt and shoved his cold eyelids down over that vacant stare, then rummaged in his vest and discovered something. Kirker was wearing a money belt, stained and stiff with his dried blood, and it was chockfull of $10 gold pieces. I slipped it off him and tossed it aside, then went on searching. In his vest pocket I found a map as well as what looked to be the same coin he’d let me look at for a moment at Albuquerque. There were some odd scratches on one side, seemingly made with a knife point, but that was all. I stuck it into my pocket and looked over the ground. That pile of rocks and boulders would have to do, for I had no shovel or any means of digging out much of a grave.
I got to work on the pile of rocks, then took Jeff’s Bowie knife from his boot and dug as hard as I could at the earth until I had a fair-sized hole hollowed out. It wasn’t very fancy but it would keep Kirker from coyotes and other critters.
I tugged him over, wrapped him up as good as I could in the canvas, and covered him with stones and rocks until I had an adequate cairn built. Taking the knife, I whittled out a crude marker from a fallen limb and carved his name and the date. He’d never mentioned relations, so I didn’t know who to tell. Maybe this Rosita, whoever and wherever she might be? I’d wait and see.
It was odd but I’d worked up a mighty good appetite from all the lugging and digging. When I’d finished with the marker, I cooked myself the rest of the fatback, boiled a pot of coffee. Jeff wouldn’t have minded, I thought, for his last happy moment was spent swigging down that hot java.
When I was finished, I picked up the money belt and counted all those brightly gleaming eagles—without doubt a share of that bandit loot.
When I was done stacking those gold pieces along the ground beside the fatback skillet, I’d exactly $720—more money than I’d ever seen since I was born. And it gave me such a warm feeling it completely burned away that deathly chill of the night just past.
It was certainly time to be moving on, and I packed as fast as I could, for I was still jumpy and seemed to hear the pounding of Indian ponies in every sound from the rap-rapping of the white-striped woodpeckers in the trees to the rattle of some wind-tossed branch.
Before I rode away from that pine grove, I went back to the mound of rocks that covered the seventh man—unlucky Jeff Kirker. Standing there in the green gloom of the pines, I bowed my head for a moment and said a silent prayer, for he was a right enough fellow, though he’d been a turncoat highwayman with plenty of blood on his hands. But he’d been straight with me.
* * * * *
Riding the pack mule I’d christened Comanche, I traveled from water hole to water hole for the next week, skirting cañons and sticking it out through patches of pure desert hell. I lived mainly on what was left of the hardtack and what small game I could snare or knock over. At last I hit a branch of the Old Spanish Trail, so marked on Jeff’s map, north of the Kaibab Plateau in northern Arizona, and turned westward toward California proper.
Near the Horserock Valley, where I saw what seemed to be thousands of buffalo drifting along like a sea of brown boulders, I struck another small trading post. This lonely station, run by a white man and his wife, was called Vermilion Cliffs from the towering rock formations of orange and green that loomed behind the buildings. It was a pretty run-down affair, but the owner, Whitmore, did have a fair string of horses.
“Ain’t seed that kind of kale since me and Mert come out two years back.” Whitmore rolled a quid in his lean cheek with emotion. “Don’t git us much trade these days. Jest a few buffaler hunters and some traders, as most of the movers are usin’ the south route inter Californy these days. More Army around to keep the Injuns behavin’. Would ’a’ thought you’d gone that way.”
“Don’t you go a-scarin’ this boy!” Mrs. Whitmore leaned on her broom, tucked up her mousy hair, smiling at me as she smoothed her shabby calico Mother Hubbard.
“Guess I can get to where I’m going without too much commotion,” I said, finishing loading Comanche, the mule, and adjusting a battered saddle on my new mount.
I steered clear of mentioning the run-in with the Comanches and Kirker’s death, not wanting to spook the Whitmores, who still seemed to be tenderfeet. But that was the way things were going ever since we’d taken half of the entire Southwest away from Santa Anna and his Mexican amigos. The Easterners were flooding in upon this wild and brutal land, without a single idea of just what they were letting themselves in for.
Waving my Mexican sombrero, I rode away, leaving my hosts to stand lonely and lost in front of their shabby cabin. The Whitmores and folks like them would need plenty of luck to survive, and so would I, when I came to think of it, but I was young and full of frijoles, and still believed the world was my private oyster, if I could just wrestle that shell open.
And I still had $50,000 in gold waiting for me—if I could find it. That was enough to keep me on my way.
So it went day after day, moving on westward, in a lot better shape than I’d been before my stop at the Vermilion Cliffs. Now I was aboard a nice little riding horse, a black with two white-stockinged feet, with a decent U.S. Army carbine and ammunition.
Riding on toward California, I kept that blustering wind at my back that swept the vastness, and my thoughts clean of troublesome worry. I was shed of Indians, it seemed, and that was one reason I sang to my defenseless animals as we drifted before that ceaseless wind, though I kept on the look-out for ambush sites.
Jeff’s map guided us across grinding hot deserts, with their miles of cholla and Joshua, and then through countless reaches of waving buffalo grass. There were, from time to time, great cañons to skirt, God-awful slashes in the deep earth that must have been made in the earliest days by the claws of some crazy animals hundreds of miles high!
Once in a while I, my horse, and my pack mule enjoyed fording a clear-running creek, for the watercourses still wandered down from the distant mountains, though they were shallowing as the days wore along into deep summer.
My best time on the trail came at sundown, when the wind went to sleep, and the orange-scarlet of my fire bloomed out into the silvery twilight, putting to shame the faint green and amber of the dying sunset. Oh, I was mighty poetical like, all by myself, and I had to admit I’d have swapped a pile of eagles for the company of some pleasant young lady until daybreak—anytime.
But I was all by my lonesome, save for my animals staked out beyond the firelight. Both cropped at the buffalo grass and watched me shift and reshift my shining gold pieces, while the frosty blaze of a heaven jam-packed with stars rivaled and
even outshone my glittering hoard.
Chapter Six
Night following night I camped along the lonely trail, nearly always serenaded by coyote choruses and roused out each dawn by the rusty braying of my pack mule, Comanche.
Once up, I cooked my sparse rations, washed them down with a pot of ink-black coffee, tended to my animals, and then struck on to the west, pushed forward by the unceasing wind, a wind that wandered in from out of nowhere with each sunrise and kept at its busy work until nightfall.
Following Kirker’s rough but accurate map, I made my way to the rickety ferry at the Colorado crossing near the Riverside Mountains and was in California at last. Jeff had been a great help to me, though he lay in a hidden grave hundreds of miles to the east, for his location of definite water holes had kept me alive.
And now I traveled on the deeply lined tracks that remained after nearly three hundred years—the trail that Escalante’s steel-suited troops and other old, hard-bitten conquistadores had also traveled.
Riding onward through the vast stretches of the empty land, with only the restless wind for company as it rustled the grass and tugged the gaudy yellow paper flowers of the mesas and whispered through the sword-blade leaves of the ocotillo, I found myself missing Jeff Kirker. So I fell into the habit of humming and singing along with the wind out of sheer lonesomeness and the need to hear any voice, if only my own.
I was singing along, pretty off-key, around noon in early July, putting my own words to an old-time hymn tune, when I got to thinking of food. It was a subject always close to my mind, what with spending nigh onto four weeks eating fatback, occasional jack rabbit, and hardtack, boiled, fried, and pounded into mush, and washed down with coffee so mean-strong it bit back.
What wouldn’t I do for some buckwheat cakes, like those I used to get back in good old Mason County? I’d have done just about anything. And I sang: