He didn’t have to wait long. He saw motion at the edge of the basin by a low point in the wall, and a rider came into view. He was leading a steer. Johnny watched as the rider called out with “yeehaw” a couple of times and waved his hat at the steer. It seemed to Johnny this man had some experience at cattle work, but not a lot.
Johnny watched as the man rode down to the floor of the basin. He waited should the second rider arrive, but it became clear this rider was alone at the moment.
Johnny wasn’t here for a fight. He was here to stop these two men, and find out who they were working for. He intended to let the man come closer, and then get the drop on him.
He brought the Sharps to his shoulder where he sat on the rock. He hauled back the hammer. His horse looked up from where it grazed.
Johnny said, “Easy, boy. Don’t make any sound. Don’t give us away.”
The horse went back to grazing and Johnny sighted in on the rider. What he didn’t see was the snake that was lounging in the small shade provided by a juniper out on the basin floor. The rider’s horse did, though. The snake coiled and began shaking its rattle, and the horse reared up. Caught Johnny by surprise, and the rider even moreso. The rider slid back and out of the saddle and landed hard. The horse and the steer took off at a run.
The man was on his back, maybe three hundred feet from the alders. Johnny eased the hammer off, and then set the rifle down and drew his pistol. He advanced on the man, pistol ready. The man seemed to be awake, but was thrashing about like he had been injured.
When Johnny was thirty feet away, the man saw him and drew his pistol, but because he was hurt his motions were sluggish. Johnny ran the remaining distance and kicked the gun out of his hand before the man could fire.
“Don’t shoot,” the man said. “Don’t shoot. I think my leg’s broke.”
Sure was, Johnny thought. Looked like the man’s thigh bone had a joint in it, the way it was bent at an angle.
Johnny said, “I’m not gonna shoot you. But I’m gonna leave you here unless you tell me what I need to know. The sun’s gonna be hot, for a man laying there with a broken leg.”
“Can you at least fetch me my canteen?”
“Could. But I’m not going to. I want your name and the name of your partner. And I want to know who you’re working for.”
The man gave a long, weary sigh. He knew the game was over and he had lost.
He said, “My name’s Lawson. The man I’m riding for is named Jenkins.”
“Stu Jenkins?”
He nodded fast. “Yeah. You heard of him?”
“I’ve heard the name. A second-rate gunfighter and horse thief.”
The man named Lawson smiled. “You know what? You’re just about to meet him.”
Johnny heard the sound of a horse thundering down onto him. He turned to see the second rider at the floor of the basin and galloping straight toward him, not two hundred feet away. There must be a second entrance to this basin, one Johnny hadn’t seen, but he didn’t have time to think about it now. The rider had a pistol in one hand and was charging at Johnny and firing. Johnny felt the wind of a bullet as it passed his left ear.
Johnny brought his arm out to full extension and fired, and the bullet caught the rider in the chest. The man fell backward and rolled out of the saddle. At the saddle suddenly becoming empty, the horse turned and reared and started running off across the basin floor.
Johnny then heard the sound of a hammer clicking from the man with the broken leg. No time to question how he had gotten a gun. Johnny leaped forward, landing in a head-first roll as the man’s gun went off and the bullet cut through the air where Johnny had been standing. Johnny rolled to a flat-out, face-down position, cocking his gun as he moved, and fired and his bullet caught Lawson in the forehead. Lawson’s head snapped back and he laid out flat in the dirt.
Johnny cocked his gun again, in case either man was still alive and able to get off a shot. He climbed to his feet and found both men were dead.
Johnny hadn’t been afraid or even tensed-up, the way men get during a gun battle. He had felt a strange calm overtake him. The same strange sense of calm that always seemed to take him when bullets were flying.
He thought about what he had done. The maneuver he had pulled off. He hadn’t planned it, he had just done it. He was glad there were no witnesses, or men would be talking about it in cattle camps and saloons for years. Johnny was getting tired of his exploits becoming the stuff of gossip.
A writer from New York had sent him a letter over the winter wanting to interview him. Trying to turn him into a legend. Johnny had ignored the letter. If he let these people have their way, they would turn him into a legend, and he didn’t want to be a legend. He just wanted to be a man, living his life.
He dropped the two empties out of his gun and loaded in fresh cartridges and then slid the gun back into its holster.
He looked at the two dead men. One who had ridden down on him in what Johnny considered a foolish maneuver. To get an accurate shot like that from a galloping horse was difficult. Johnny had seen trick shooters do it, and he had done some similar trick shooting himself in his younger years, but to try it when the target is shooting back was to invite death. The man called Lawson still had his gun in his hand. A short-barreled Smith & Wesson he had apparently pulled from his vest. Johnny had failed to check the man for hide-away guns. A foolish mistake of his own that almost cost him his life.
Now that both of these men were dead, they couldn’t tell Johnny who had hired them. He searched them for papers or letters or anything that might indicate who was paying them to stop the trail drive. He found nothing. Whoever it was, these men took the knowledge with them.
He didn’t like to kill, but he had long ago taken the stance that if you drew your gun on a man, you had better be prepared to die. These men brought death on themselves. Though he knew there were now two more in the long trail of bodies he was leaving behind him as he moved through life. Two more faces he would see in his sleep.
Zack was at the chuck wagon eating a plate of beans when Johnny came riding in. Johnny was leading a horse, and two bodies were draped across the back of it.
“They the ones?” Zack said.
Johnny nodded and swung out of the saddle. “I’m hungry as a bear and those beans look good.”
Ches was trying to conserve water by not washing the plates. He scrubbed them off with dirt, and Johnny figured he would probably have a grain or two of sand mixed in with the beans, but he was hungry enough not to care.
Johnny told them what had happened, leaving out the part about the acrobatic maneuver he had done.
He said, “Those men weren’t trying to steal cattle, they were shooting them.”
“Shootin’ ‘em?” Ches said. “What in tarnation for?”
Zack said, “Any idea who they were working for?”
“None at all.”
Ches poured himself a cup of coffee. “Maybe we can figure it out. Who do you know who might have reason enough to cause this kind of trouble? Anyone who might benefit from this herd not reaching Cheyenne, and who can afford to hire two men?”
Johnny put some thought into it while he chewed on the beans.
He said, “My nephew Hiram, maybe. Out in California.”
Zack nodded. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Ches said, “I suppose he’d benefit from revenge.”
Zack said, “What’s your gut tell you?”
Johnny thought about it while he chewed on some more beans.
He said, “My gut says if Hiram was going to strike, he would have done so by now.”
Ches nodded. “Then, who?”
One name came to mind. Not for any rational reason, just that Johnny hadn’t liked the look in the man’s eyes. He said, “Bertram Reed.”
Zack let that roll around in his head for a moment. “You think so?”
Johnny said, “He had that man Chandler watching the ranch. He made an offer which we refu
sed, and he wasn’t happy about it. His man was meeting with men Falcone said were known cattle rustlers.”
“Probably the men we dealt with a couple of nights before we started moving the herd.”
Johnny nodded. “And there was the look in his eye. I’ve seen it before. He might not be a gunfighter, but he’s capable of killing.”
Ches said, “You mean, like shooting a man in the back?”
Johnny shook his head. “There’s more than one way to kill a man. Once we get this herd to Cheyenne, I think I’m going to pay a visit to Mister Reed. See what he has to say about all of this.”
29
While Johnny had been off hunting Lawson and Jenkins, Josh and the men had been searching for the cattle. The number recovered was now over nine hundred head.
The following day, Johnny joined them. He found a steer grazing by itself, and the animal saw him coming and decided to be contrary. It broke into a run and Johnny spurred his horse into a full gallop, and pulled his rope and got a loop going and dropped the loop over the horns.
The horse pulled the rope tight and the steer gave a pull and the horse gave a pull, but the horse had been through this before and the steer decided to throw in the towel.
Johnny led the steer back to the growing herd. He then rode out and found three more. He continued this as long as there was daylight. With the other men having about the same rate of success, the herd was now numbering near eleven hundred.
That night over the camp fire, Josh said, “Joe’s been gone two days, now. I hope he made it to Cheyenne okay.”
Zack said, “There ain’t many more capable on a trail than your uncle Joe. He’ll be all right.”
Johnny had a tin cup filled with coffee in one hand. “I figure Joe’ll be there in maybe another two days. Then he’ll be back in five or six days. That gives us seven or eight days more to round up strays. Then we’ll have to make a decision.”
Josh nodded. “Stay and continue with the round up, or take what we have and head to Cheyenne.”
“We stay too long, and we run the risk of not finding water between here and Cheyenne. All the water sources we found were from spring runoff. That little spring I found where those men were shooting our cattle wouldn’t be enough to water a herd this size. But if we go into Cheyenne with not enough of a herd, we won’t make the money we need.”
Taggart was there. He said, “Beggin’ your pardon, but haven’t you taken herds down this way before?”
Johnny shook his head. “Not along this route. We’ve taken ‘em southeast to railheads like Dodge and Wichita, but never directly south to Cheyenne.”
The following day, Johnny awoke to a sky that was again clouded over and before he finished his coffee, rain was coming down. Rounding up strays in the rain was a miserable job, but because they were pressed for time they didn’t have the option of waiting for the weather to clear. Johnny rode with a slicker down over his clothes and water dripping from the brim of his hat. He found one steer only that day.
Over another supper of beans, he said to Josh and Dusty, “At least the rain washed all of the soot off of us.”
The following day was cloudy but dry. Johnny found eight steers, but had to ride miles from camp to do so. The next day the sun was out and the heat of summer was on them. He rode with sweat soaking his shirt and dust clinging to his face, and found twelve more head.
Taggart was proving to be an able hand. He worked hard and didn’t complain about conditions. Kennedy was the same. They were pulling in as many head as Johnny was. They were not only rounding up strays, but looking for stray horses, and brought in five to be added back to the remuda.
Joe returned seven days later. He had made good time.
He said to Johnny, “I left the letter with the front desk at the hotel.”
At the campfire that night, Josh said, “We have almost two thousand head. That’s still whole lot unaccounted for. And we have most of the remuda now.”
Dusty had a plate of beans in one hand. He said, “We’ve been covering the countryside for miles in every direction. They ran far and wide. I don’t think we’re gonna find many more of ‘em.”
Josh looked to Johnny. “You’re the trail boss. What do you think?”
Ches said, “The longer we wait here, the more we’re gonna eat into our supplies.”
Johnny said, “All right. I say in the morning, we take what we have and light out for Cheyenne.”
PART THREE
The Attack
30
Charles had started working for Johnny McCabe a couple of years ago, and he fell in love with Bree probably the first time he saw her. She was pretty, sure, but it was more than that. There was magic in her eyes, her smile, the way she sort of cranked her mouth to one side in a crooked pout when she was trying to make a point. The first time he saw her, he couldn’t take his eyes off her.
What he didn’t count on was her falling in love with him. Proof to him that miracles did indeed happen.
His name was Jehosaphat Cole. They all called him Fat, and he was okay with it. Then Bree found out his name was Jehosaphat Charles Cole. She said she wanted to start calling him Charles. He liked that. But then she told everyone to start calling him Charles. When Bree said to do something, people generally started doing it. Folks thought Josh was the most demanding McCabe, but put her and Josh’s tempers up against each other, and Cole would put his money on Bree any day.
Her demand that everyone call him Charles kind of embarrassed him a little. He never liked attention. He had always been a little more comfortable trying to blend into the background.
This was always a little tough for him, because he was taller than pretty much everyone else in the room, no matter which room he was in. Tall and thin.
What a lot of folks didn’t know was that his name would mean something to anyone from high society in New York City. His father owned a townhouse there. And a vacation home in the Adirondacks. His father was the son of an investment banker from England, and had begun his own career as a lawyer working for a Wall Street firm. By the time he was forty, he owned the firm. The Cole family had money coming out of its ears.
His father was an esteemed gentleman as far as the investors on Wall Street knew. He belonged to a local club. He had played polo when he was younger, and he told Charles and his older brother that they had to learn, too. Saturday afternoons were often spent at the Polo Grounds rooting for one Polo team or another.
But Charles never had any interest in such things. His tastes were always more on the working class level. His brother Adolphus told him that he was an embarrassment to the family. But Charles found he would rather attend the baseball games that were played at a sports park called Elysian Field, rooting for the local team. The New York Mutuals.
What the fine folks of high society in New York didn’t know was that his father also drank his brandy a little too much when he was home, and when he did, he became mean. When Charles told him that he had no interest in polo, he was met with a backhand across the face. His father told him once that he would take the fireplace poker to him if he ever dared embarrass him in public.
However, Charles was fifteen and already taller than his father. Charles had been seen associating with some boys whose fathers worked in a local factory, and his father told him this was going to end, and punctuated it with his usual backhand to the face while holding a brandy snifter in the other.
Charles decided it was time to reply the backhands as a man would, and drove his fist into his father’s face. The old man was knocked back and into his velvet upholstered parlor chair. The brandy wound up soaking his smoking jacket.
“Jehosaphat!” Mother screamed.
Charles looked at her. Adolphus was standing there, three years older than Charles and with a brandy snifter in his own hand. Charles looked at him but said nothing, then turned and strode out of the house.
Adolphus followed him out onto the street. He called out, “Jehosaphat!”
Charles kept on going. He came from a family of tall men, but he was the tallest and his strides covered a lot of ground. Adolphus ran after him.
“Jehosaphat!” He grabbed Charles by the arm and spun him around.
Charles was ready to punch Adolphus, too, if he dared to raise his fists. But he didn’t.
“Jehosaphat,” he said. “You have to come back. You have to apologize to father.”
“I’m not speaking to him again. Ever.”
“Well, how to you propose managing that?”
“I’m not coming back.”
By the look on his brother’s face, Charles figured such a possibility had never occurred to him.
“Well, what will you do? Father will cut you off. What will you do for money?”
“I’ll get a job.”
Adolphus couldn’t hold back a chuckle. “A job? You mean, like a common laborer?”
Charles didn’t think it was funny. “The working people I have known are good people. Hard working and straight talking.”
“They’re poor is what they are. Be reasonable, Jehosaphat. You and I are the only heirs. The family fortune will one day be divided between the two of us. You’re dangerously close to losing your half.”
“I don’t want my half. You can have it all.”
Charles turned and walked away.
Charles was in a white shirt, dark pinstriped trousers and suspenders. He had left his coat and hat home, but refused to go back for them. He had no wallet, or money. Only the clothes he was wearing, but those clothes cost more than the average laborer made in a week. When he went to a local factory to ask for a job, he was laughed away. Not because of his height, but because of his clothes.
The foreman said, “Go home, rich boy.”
Charles spent the night in an alley. He ate dinner by robbing a garbage barrel, taking scraps that had been thrown away from a restaurant. He spent a second night in an alley. After that, he didn’t look so refined.
Trail Drive (The McCabes Book 5) Page 14