by Lauran Paine
RECKONING AT
LANSING’S FERRY
RECKONING AT
LANSING’S FERRY
LAURAN PAINE
Copyright © 2017 by Lauran Paine, Jr.
E-book published in 2017 by Blackstone Publishing
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-5047-8888-5
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-5047-8887-8
CIP data for this book is available from
the Library of Congress
Blackstone Publishing
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Chapter One
That empty plain ran on, wide and lonely and steeped in its own particular great depth of silence. Texas land in a great roll, spreading in seeming endlessness toward a dim merging with the vault of heaven. Where creek water flowed, one encountered plum thickets, willows, and cottonwoods, bois d’arc from which the Comanches, who had formerly owned this land, had made their deadly bows and arrows.
This was the Llano Estacado — the Staked Plains — a wind-scourged emptiness in winter, a place of listlessness and orange-yellow sun smash in summer. But in the spring, which was settled now, the Staked Plains appeared as an Elysium with its brome grasses, its minute wild flowers standing straight in the profusion of rich forage, and with its fresh as water air and overhead pale blue sky.
In the Texas spring the Staked Plains were something to see. Hundreds of miles of good ground, greasy-fat wildlife standing sleek and sassy in belly-high grass, with the warm winds of Mexico holding sway and that winter cold from the north sheathed for half a year yet to come.
A good warmth lay over this monstrous land; buffalo calves stood fresh born, wet and shaky, scenting the promise of life. Wild horses with matted manes and tufted snarls of winter hair sloughing off, flashed past full of the vigor that short, wiry forage provided. Overhead, heralding the arrival of this warm time of year, wild geese passed in clean and miraculous triangles calling down in their harsh and haunting way to the humans and the animals.
A few lodges of the Teyuwit Comanches were still to be found, hidden now from seeking eyes, or an occasional lodge of a Ho’is or Cross Timber Comanche, but generally this was an empty domain, an abandoned kingdom waiting with endless patience in good sunlight for its new masters to appear.
They came with the second-growth grass — the first growth was poor and watery. It weakened their animals and robbed them of vitality.
They came up from the south, driving wickedly horned, slab-sided, mean-eyed wild Texas cattle, a breed of lank and reckless men with the yeastiness of an uncertain future and a bloody past inherent in them. They came, mostly, fresh from their Lost Cause; fresh from the ragged ranks of a heroic Confederacy overwhelmed and vanquished, and they sat their Texas A-fork saddles believing stubbornly that they had not actually been defeated; believing instead — and it was largely true — that their Confederacy had worn itself out whipping an enemy who never stopped coming.
They pushed their herds on to the Staked Plains and took full advantage of the springtime richness which was abundant here. They threw down their bedrolls, chocked the wheels of their chuck wagons, set up rope and willow corrals, and for a little time rested while their animals fattened, gaining strength and stamina for the long drive yet ahead up out of Texas to the plains of Kansas.
And yet, as the Comanches had also clashed with foreigners in a fight to the finish for sovereignty of this grassland empire, the Texans crossed trails with an emigrant invader, too — settlers from the Yankee North. Union soldiers who had been rewarded by their victorious Federal Union with grants of free land. Texas land.
For a time, there was no open hostility. The Plains could accommodate all who came to populate them, but in the hearts of Texans lay a smoldering, a bitterness deep in the remembering blood. They passed those tent towns, those settlements along their waterways, those plowed plots in the heartland of their grazing domain, and they could not help but be struck by the difference existing between these newcomers and themselves. Differences not solely of origin, beliefs, attire, and bearing, but even of their common spoken language, and of their law, for at Phantom Hill and Pecos and Quanah, blue-belly Federal soldiers enforced the harsh edicts of a triumphant Union. Martial law existed, Yankee patrols scourged the land, and a Texan could do no right while a settler could do no wrong.
Ben Albright drove on to the plains with the warm winds of Mexico at his back. He came with six saddle-warped riders and a niece of his dead sister, pushing ahead of him two thousand dull red, two-year-old longhorn steers bound for Dodge City’s booming beef market up in Kansas. Ben Albright knew the Staked Plains from the river Arkansas to the river Pecos. He had cursed gypsum drinking water from the Canadian to the Washita. He had driven over the white-oak bluffs to the chinaberry lowlands. He had savagely fought the Comanches, the killing blizzards, and the droughts. He had taken thousands of cattle up Pecos Valley, “graveyard of the cowman’s hopes,” and nothing had ever deviated unrelenting Ben Albright from the trail he had pioneered, and every mile of which was more familiar to him than the yard of his ranch back in Lipan County.
Ben Albright was a sere, lean, and dauntless fifty-five. He was tall and quiet-spoken and as deadly a man as had ever faced up to struggle and hardship. His eyes possessed that habitually drawn-out-narrow look of men accustomed to looking far out. His hair was grizzled gray and his mouth was a bloodless slit set across a blunt width of granite jaw. He had survived perilous times by adhering to a pair of cardinal virtues. Ben Albright never bluffed and he never threatened. He wore his guns as every man does who is familiar with their power and their finality. He had grown to manhood using guns. First, to provide himself with food. Then to protect himself and the things he believed in. And finally, to destroy those things that endangered the success of his enterprises. Ben Albright was a typical Texan of his times, and yet now, having passed the orders to his herd boss, Bass Templeton, to make camp there beside the sluggish Trinchera, Ben had another of those twinges of helplessness that had come to trouble him often during this drive.
He had never before taken a woman up the trail. In fact, he’d never heard of any other big drive being accompanied by a female, except for the Mexican girls, who sometimes went along with their particular cowboys. But this was entirely different. This was Atlanta Pierson, his niece, the daughter of his sister who had died on the eve of Ben’s northward departure. There had been no one else to leave the girl with, and there had been no time to make arrangements to board her out.
Ben got down to stand in the warming sunlight at his horse’s head, watching the herd fan out, scuffing dust up along Trinchera Creek, a tributary of the Río Grande. He saw how easily the men did their work, how routinely they took the mules off the chuck wagon, began making their lariat corral, threw down bedrolls and war bags, and off-saddled in the shade of the willows. He heard their musical calls rising over the duller sounds made by thirsty cattle. And he saw Atlanta sitting up there in her long, rust-colored riding skirt and full brown blouse, looking as fresh as though she had not just completed thirteen miles in the dusty drag pushing along the lagging and leg-weary longhorns.
At seventeen, Atlanta looked uncommonly as her mother had looked at that age, Ben thought. She had her mother’s same great wealth of soft wavy black hair. The depthless dark eyes of gun-metal gray were also the same, and that wide, lush mouth with its ripe fullness, even to the f
aintly upcurving outer corners, was identical, too.
But Atlanta was taller than her mother had been. She was slightly larger at breast and hip, and there was a sturdiness to her, also, which Ben’s sister had lacked. He had never known her father very well. Samuel Pierson had died in the Confederate triumph at Shiloh. But Ben thought now, for the hundredth time, that Atlanta’s durability must have come from her father, because her mother had never been robust.
When Bass Templeton approached, spurs making soft music, Ben put aside these thoughts to listen to his herd boss’ report.
“Camp’s set up,” stated Templeton, standing easy there, confident and calm in the face of his employer and their long-time association, the long length of him dusted and sweaty. “Ruben’ll have supper ready directly. I’ll go now and care for Miss Atlanta’s horse.”
“No,” said Ben, glancing over where Atlanta had dismounted. She was stretching and spanking trail dust from her skirt. “She’s seventeen, Bass...when my sister was seventeen, she was looking out for herself.”
Templeton trailed his eyes over to the girl, balancing something in his mind but not quite up to saying it to Ben. He cast a long look out where the cowboys were drifting into the shade of the willows along the creek, for the time being free to relax. One of those men particularly caught and held Templeton’s attention.
“That Case Hyle,” he said eventually, then paused to fit the right words to his thoughts. “He knows the country...like he said when we hired him on back a ways. I’ve got a feeling about him.”
Ben Albright looked outward for the man Templeton had referred to. He found him, not over in the shade but pacing along toward Atlanta with his rider’s stride and his easy manners, clearly intent upon relieving the girl of caring for her horse.
“What kind of a feeling?” queried Ben, watching that tall silhouette stop close by Atlanta, thinking back to how Case Hyle had come riding alone into an evening camp sixty miles back asking for a rider’s job, and how Hyle had impressed him with his quiet answers and his capable look. “He’s good with stock,” Ben said as much to himself as to Templeton. “He gets along with the men. He’s not lazy around camp. What else do we have to know about a man, Bass?”
Templeton continued his onward gazing and said no more for a long time. A wisp of fire crackled down by their chuck wagon. Watery blue smoke stood straight up in this late afternoon’s utter stillness.
Bass pulled off his gloves, poked them absently into his gun belt, and said: “Maybe it’s just me. Anyway, I can’t put my feeling about Hyle into words, rightly.”
He started away and Ben brought his glance close in to follow Templeton as he progressed ahead toward the chuck wagon. He thought he knew what was in Bass’s mind and it was in his own mind, also. Case Hyle always managed to be on hand when Atlanta’s horse had to be cared for, or when she needed companionship, even when she was thirsty on the trail, or when she required a screening rider to shield her from the dun dust.
But gallant manners were nothing to condemn a man for. Besides, Atlanta appeared in Ben’s wise and knowing eyes to favor Bass over the stranger, anyway. Maybe a little jealousy might even inspire a little gallantry in Bass. There was room for that kind of improvement, Ben knew, for Bass had been going up the trail a long time now, and before he could hope to win Atlanta’s full and acquiescing favor, he’d have to change from being a terse, rough, and bull-voiced herd boss.
What irritated Ben right then, as he turned to unsaddle, was the basic fact that Atlanta was along in the first place. A cattle drive was no place for a girl. It was hard work with long hours in the saddle. Men became lonely and restless. An innocent smile from Atlanta could very easily be misinterpreted.
Ben flung down his saddle, removed the bridle, and gave the horse an unnecessarily hard slap. He cursed and blew out a long breath. The last kind of trouble he needed on this drive was the kind that came with a beautiful girl in a land populated largely by lonely men.
He removed his hat, swiped sweat from the unnaturally pale skin of his forehead, tugged the hat back on again, and strode forward bound for the creek. Ahead at Lansing’s Ferry there was an excellent chance of trouble. He walked now, thinking of this and pushing his concerns about his niece and other things from his mind.
For five years, the Albright herds had crossed their wagon at Lansing’s. They’d re-provisioned at old Ewell Lansing’s trading post, camped there a day or two, and had then gone on, swimming the cattle in that one still water, big pool where the Trinchera was least treacherous.
But old Ewell Lansing was dead now. Ben had been informed two months earlier, and others owned his ferry and trading post. Lansing’s Ferry was now, in fact, a settler village of plowed fields, log homes a-building, mud-wattle soddies for those without the means for hauling logs from distant hills, and daily arrivals of new emigrants.
There had been some trouble, too. Jasper Higgins’s herd had been turned away at the crossing. West Texans driving up the herd of Colonel Travis Bee had tangled with settlers and four men had died. The way Ben heard this, was that some of Bee’s cattle had stampeded over a settler’s melon patch, frightened by wash that was hung to dry from a wagon tongue and being whipped by a little wind. The settlers had gone to Colonel Bee’s camp armed and in strong numbers demanding restitution. Travis Bee, Ben recalled from other days, had been a fiery, proud man, and when the smoke cleared, Bee and his herd boss were down dead, along with two of the Yankees.
Ben kneeled at the side of the creek, dropped his hat, and scooped up water. He sluiced dirt from his face. He filled his hat and trickled water over his head and down his neck inside his shirt until he felt refreshed. Then he eased back in the solitude of this little place, mottled with green willow shade, and lit a thin cigar. He would face tomorrow when tomorrow came. It had never been his habit to brood. He lived life for each of its separate moments, and, like most direct men, he found his greatest pleasure in the little things that made for each man the richness of his earthly existence.
He was still sitting there, quietly pensive, when Atlanta came along, carrying her hat, freshly scrubbed so that her golden flesh showed. She halted and smiled down at him, the darkness of her liquid gaze striking hard and deep down into Ben, reminding him of her mother.
“You look lonely,” she said to her uncle.
He smoked on, comfortable and unchanging. “It’s a good feeling,” he told her. “In the evening of the day, as in the evening of a man’s life, being alone lets the pattern of a man’s recollections flow evenly with no single high moment standing out more than the lesser moments.”
She dropped down beside him at the creekbank. He saw how her skirt drew taut at the hip curving where her strong thigh curved; how her blouse fell outward under strong pressure as she leaned there trailing a hand in the water. And how the reddening light of dying day deepened that healthy golden color of her smooth throat and lovely face. It did not seem possible to him that this was the same awkward child he’d visited between trail drives years before. It didn’t seem the same because she had so thoroughly changed that he could not, for the life of him, find anything to say to her now. She might have been a stranger. In fact, he thought as he sat there, she was a stranger. He hadn’t seen her in six years, before this drive. In that time, she had altered completely, and if seventeen seemed young and immature in his mind, this extraordinarily handsome young woman with him now, profiled so that he saw the rise and fall of her breasts, the knowing lilt of eye and lip, was anything but immature.
Ben let his cigar die out. They sat on, saying nothing, just relaxing and uncertain, each in the presence of the other.
Chapter Two
From that camp at the Trinchera’s creek-like southern estuary the Albright herd passed along northerly, following the waterway until its widening, deepening current began to hasten and murmur and show white-water rapids. Here, Ben knew, and said as much to Bass Templ
eton, it was likely they would meet the first settlers of the Lansing’s Ferry village. He wanted the men to be especially alert here, particularly careful and prudent.
Here, too, Atlanta came along to ride stirrup-to-stirrup with her uncle, bringing to Albright’s steady, hard gaze the flash and the pride each strong man feels and shows in his own way in the presence of a beautiful woman.
“Ruben told me about the trouble with the settlers yonder,” she said. “I’ve been wondering why we had to trail this way, Uncle Ben?”
“I always have,” he said. “It’s our habit to cross the wagon here and re-provision with flour and what-not.”
He put his gaze upon the wagon where it jolted along under Ruben Adams’s hands. Ruben was Ben’s own age. He was a crippled cowboy with all the ignorance, the superstitions, and the garrulousness of old Texas hands. He had been with Ben in the war, as had two of the other men on this drive — Bass Templeton and Ferdinand Haight. Except for this, Ben would never have put up with Ruben’s constant nagging, his eternal meddling, and his annoying habit of secreting whiskey — and turning up gloriously drunk when they were a hundred miles from the nearest replacement for a cook. But Ruben was a fine camp cook, too. He could make sourdough biscuits in a wind storm and wild plum upside-down cake under circumstances that made simply boiling water a near impossibility.
“I suppose he told you of Bee’s trouble there, and the way those people turned Higgins back.”
“And,” said Atlanta sweetly, “other things, too.”
Ben snorted. “What other things? Ruben’s a chronic gossip. He doesn’t know any more about those people than you or I do, Atlanta. He hasn’t been up here since he made the drive with me last spring.”
He turned his head to look at his niece. He saw how she was considering him. He thought she was gazing upon him skeptically, wonderingly. It annoyed him, so he spurred ahead and called a pointless order to Templeton, then reined along until he was even with the new man, Case Hyle, on the far-right wing of the drive.