by Lauran Paine
The land was beginning to buckle a little, to stand up from its eternal flatness in a series of lifts and rises. There was an occasional tree and, farther along, the ubiquitous mesquite, whose beans had furnished the Indians with food, and whose tough and wiry wood served Indians and whites alike with firewood. There were also mayhaws and red bark, ash and elm, and, still farther on, there was the swale that held Lansing’s Ferry.
Here, topping out upon a rib of flinty soil, Ben had his first view of the crossing in something like a year. This view confirmed part of what he’d heard, too. There were close to thirty buildings down there, where before there had been only old Ewell Lansing’s post, his barn, and his smithy. There were canvas tops down there as well, checked and scarred from the overland crossing, their huge wheels sunk-set in the springtime earth.
And there were people. He saw them standing clear of their homes and stores watching his flowing herd pour forth from the southern reaches, a rusty tide of red backs breaking for the creek-side shade and grass. He watched Bass Templeton loosely loping along to turn aside the foremost critters well away from the village’s southernmost homes. He was surprised when a quiet voice spoke from behind him.
“If they’ve got whiskey down there, I reckon we’ll do without a fit meal for another hundred miles.”
Ben turned to consider Case Hyle sitting there, gloved hands lying easy upon his saddle horn, and he said: “If you got nothing better to do than talk, lope on down there and tell Bass to keep three men between the herd and the village until the critters settle down.”
Hyle eased forward and went along without saying anything else or looking back. When he came to the leveled off area though, he slowed to a jog and looked back over his shoulder.
From where he watched, Ben could not see his expression, but there was something about Hyle’s backward glance, his easy and calm riding stance in the saddle, that said very plainly he considered Ben Albright no more and no less a man than he himself was.
Ruben set up the wagon clear of the creek and began preparing the cooking fire. Bass Templeton positioned riders as Hyle had said Ben wished them placed. Ferdinand Haight, a thin and wiry man with a bubbling chuckle and a reckless eye, sat quietly giving stare for stare with the settlers who had come along to the plain beyond their village to stand and impassively consider this first Texas herd of the spring.
Ben watched all this from his little eminence. He saw Atlanta dismount over near Case Hyle and slap her leg with her hat. He saw how Bass rode close to the two, saying something to Hyle and then passing on. He saw the youngest of their crew, Will Johns, lean from the saddle to speak with a settler in a shaggy blanket coat and high boots. He kept his pale gaze upon these two as the settler raised an arm to gesture north and east, and, eventually, toward the south.
When this conversation ended and Will settled back, looking unconcerned, Ben shifted his attention to the herd itself. There was no danger of his longhorns going into that settlement. They were not homesteaders’ critters that cried plaintively to be fed morning and night. They were not even cattle a man on foot could get within a quarter mile of. Ben had bought them from cane-bottom ranchers and others up along the Cimarron. They were more than half wild, and if they were approached, they would flee, but if they could not get away, they would drop their ugly long heads in a twinkling, paw once, and charge. They had survived this long by being competent fighters. They had scars upon them from peccaries, wolves, coyote packs, and cougars. They would molest a settler only if he first molested them.
Ben shook out his reins. Ruben’s supper fire was merrily popping now and he had put up his sign to the riders. The men knew what this meant. It was if Ruben were saying: Men, the creek is one hundred paces both ways. It takes water to make your coffee and clean up your dishes. If you want to eat, pick up a bucket on your way to the creek and fetch it back.
Bass had gotten the cattle well away from Lansing’s Ferry to the south and east. The riders were drifting in — all but the guard — to eat and rest a spell before alternating with one another on the night watch. In Ben’s view, everything was as it should have been, except for those unmoving people at the outskirts of their village, watching the movement of the Texans and their herd. This did not trouble him, though, as he loped to the corral and turned out his horse. He was not a man who sought trouble and he had learned from many years of observing, that this also applied to most other people.
Atlanta came on to meet him, to turn and saunter back toward the chuck wagon with him. This time he said aloud what he’d noticed with some surprise other days on this drive.
“You never seem to get worn down, girl. I like that. Particularly in a woman.”
“Haven’t the women you’ve known, Uncle, been like that,” she said right back, looking up into his face.
He reddened for no reason he knew of, and then he said: “It’s uncommon in a female is all.”
She let it die right there, for this obviously was his wish. Then she said: “Why don’t you like Case Hyle?”
“What? Who said I didn’t like him, girl? This here is a cattle drive. There’s work to be done. If I am a mite short now and then, it’s because that’s my way. But I don’t dislike Hyle. If I did, believe me, I’d pay him off right here and now.”
Atlanta walked another hundred paces before thoughtfully saying: “Uncle, will we move away from here tomorrow?”
“I expect,” answered Ben. “After we buy a few things and have the wagon ferried across.”
“Uncle?”
“Yes?”
“The settlers aren’t going to sell us any provisions.”
Ben turned half around and halted in a brusque manner. This was his habit for the facing of unpleasantness when it came abruptly. He put his dead-level pale gaze fully upon Atlanta as though she were a man, and he stood there without saying a word, just waiting.
“Will talked with their mayor,” she explained. “He told me he said we’d get no supplies at Lansing’s Ferry, and that the sooner we moved along the better his people would like it.”
Ben listened to this carefully and turned it over in his assessing mind. Then he resumed his onward way again, sighting Ruben Adams at the supper fire and making for him in an unwavering line.
Bass Templeton and Ferdinand Haight were slouching up against a wagon wheel. They both watched Ben’s thrusting long stride as he came up to the wagon. Then they exchanged a knowing look and bent to fill tin cups with black coffee from a battered graniteware pot, looking grave as they did so.
“Ruben.”
Adams got upright and stood stiffly facing Ben. “Yes, sir,” he said, his voice quick and nasal.
“Do you need supplies?” Ben asked.
Ruben looked past where Case Hyle and Will Johns stood back a distance. He saw Atlanta coming on slowly in her uncle’s wake.
“Yes, sir,” he said, shuttling his eyes back to Ben Albright. “We always provision here. Can’t haul more’n ’nough flour and dried fruit in our one wagon to go much beyond Lansing’s. You know that...sir.”
Ben stood rock-like for a moment longer, then he removed his riders’ gloves, pushed them into his belt, and stooped to take up a cup of coffee. No one said anything. Ben sipped and slowly turned to gaze ahead where the village was. Finally, looking at Johns, he said: “Will, just exactly what did that homesteader say to you?”
Johns was a youth in his late teens. He was normally an irrepressible spirit. He had come to Texas from Tennessee after the war like many another orphaned drifter, but the scars of a difficult early life did not seem, at this stage in his life, to be very deep, or likely to be very lasting. He was handsome in his boyish way, with unruly corn-colored hair and good features. Now he was grave and careful, when he spoke, and uneasy under all those watching eyes.
“He come up to me, Mister Ben, and he said his name was Charles Connelly, and that he was
mayor of that there town, and that him and his folks didn’t want no Texas herds crossing over their land, and that they wouldn’t ferry our wagon on over, and that they wouldn’t have no truck with us at any of their stores.”
Will Johns drew back a sweeping breath after getting all that out without stopping to take a breath. He shot a look to each in the group from beneath his curled hat brim and lowered his head self-consciously to examine something that was floating in his coffee cup.
Ruben Adams made a loud grunt, bobbed his head up and down, and resettled himself upon one knee at his cooking fire, muttering derogatory sentences under his breath and gazing with long-faced gloom at his cook pans.
Bass Templeton strode forward to dunk his empty cup in a bucket of water and hang by its handle from a bent wire. He carefully examined the backs of his hands and shot a speculating sidelong glance at Ben. Several times on this drive he had tried to talk to Ben about seeking a new way over the Llano Estacado, not that he had the least fear of homesteaders — he didn’t have — but because he was a man with a mind that never lost sight of a goal, and the goal of an Albright drive was now, and had always been, to get safely onto the Kansas plains with the cattle.
Bass knew how Ben felt. He had served with Ben under fire and he’d been up this same trail with him five times as well. Ben was being torn by the antagonism they all felt toward these Yankee newcomers, and he was also being plagued by his sense of duty, which was closely allied with something inherent in him. Ben Albright had never been backed down by a living man or a foreign principle. He could not, with any conscience, back down now.
Chapter Three
The men all took their turns on the night watch, except for Ben and Atlanta. She had a pallet inside the wagon while her uncle and the others slept upon the ground not far from the dying cook fire.
There was rarely any visiting after supper on an Albright drive; the men were astride by five o’clock in the morning — four o’clock in summertime — and they worked through heat, storms, river crossings, stampedes, and hours of monotonous dust. When daylight ended and they had eaten, they ordinarily went straightaway off to their blankets.
This night was like most others; a little ripple of drowsy talk passed for a short time between those bedded-down riders. Then there was quiet. Ruben’s fire dimmed down to cherry coals, and one by one these winked out, too.
Occasionally a steer bawled. There was a rustling sound along the creek where critters rubbed, or hooked willows in their horns, drew them carefully down, then walked out to their ends to eat the tender buds and leaves. A constant soft sound of animals at the water went on, and yonder a distance, where Lansing’s Ferry lay, were orange pin pricks of lamplight and sounds of distant gaiety.
* * * * *
Dawn came early upon the springtime land. First was the pastel stain of diluted blue. Then a steady brightening pink. And finally a golden flash of light standing up from over the rind of the plain to dapple the high heavens with its silence and its fragile beauty.
Will Johns, who had the dawn watch, came jogging into camp where he got down slowly from his saddle, and pushed faggots into the buried coals of Ruben’s fire. Like fireflies, sparks flew, followed by a pale tongue of flame. Will’s face looked cherubic in this firming brightness. He briefly warmed his hands, looked around until he located Ruben Adams’s sougans, and went over to push a spurred boot into the inert flesh there while quietly saying: “Ruben, your fire’s lit. Dawn’s here and daylight’s comin’.”
Adams blinked and sat up to expectorate. He never awakened feeling good and this morning was no exception. He called Will a name, then said: “You got to always kick folks up in the mornin’, you damned Tennessee cotton-picker?”
Will hustled away, a smile on his face as he led his horse. Out where the corral was he stopped a moment to gaze ahead at Lansing’s Ferry. He wished he might go down there. He’d wished he had that evening, before Ben had said they would all stay away from the settlers until he’d had a chance to talk to this Charles Connelly. Will’s horse nickered. He wanted to be released to roll and drink at the creek and browse a little. Will began off-saddling. He saw nothing in that time of silence and stillness and he sensed nothing. Then his horse faintly snorted and rolled an eye. Will turned to look around, perplexed. He saw Case Hyle coming toward him from the creek, freshly washed and shirtless.
Will said: “You’re up right early.”
Hyle came on, saying nothing until he was close. Then he grinned. “When you’re the first man stirring on drives like this, you get your pick of the saddle animals,” he said as he began shrugging into his shirt.
He was a tall, broad man. Thirty years earlier, Ben Albright had looked the same. Hyle was flat; he had the hard angularity of men who made their living with saddles, horses, ropes, and cattle — and sometimes with guns as well. His flank was lean, his waist small, then his chest flared upward and outward into mighty shoulders. He was a smiling man full of poise and confidence and there was something else to him, too — an air of command, an aura of quiet and superior competence. Will felt it now, but, like Bass Templeton, he could not define it. It was just there, around Case Hyle, part of his moving and his breathing.
“Have you roused up old Ruben?” Hyle asked, without looking along to the cook fire.
“I did,” said Will, turning his animal loose, “and like always he cussed me out.”
Hyle chuckled. He had white teeth set evenly in the layered sun browning of his rather handsome face. He turned to put a gaze far out where the cattle were up and moving, some toward the creek, some farther out upon the plain in search of fresh grass.
“Sure wish we could ride into that little old town and ease off a mite before ridin’ on,” stated Will Johns. “Ruben says we won’t hit no more towns until we’re into Kansas...or near the border anyway.”
Hyle considered Lansing’s Ferry. It lay somnolent in the pale freshness of the new day. He shrugged. “Ben’ll ride in. Maybe he’ll take you along.”
But Ben didn’t suggest that later, when they were all eating by the chuck wagon. He leaned upon the tailgate, sipping the last of his coffee and weighing each of his men carefully from beneath his tilted hat brim. Then he gave out the morning’s orders: “Bass, you and Case come along with me into town. The rest of you get camp struck and the cattle lined out to push over the creek. Ruben....”
“Yes sir, Mister Ben,” said Ruben Adams in his quick, sharp voice.
“Hold the wagon by. If we strike some kind of an agreement, I’ll send Case back for you. Then you can come on in and load up on supplies.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be plumb ready and waiting.”
Atlanta stepped around the far side of the wagon in a white blouse and fawn colored riding skirt. She was booted, spurred, and ready to ride.
The men smiled and seemed to come more alive in her presence, wishing her a good morning, one by one. Ruben took her coffee and food on the least dented of his tin plates. He seemed so entirely different from his usual morning self, smiling and eyes twinkling at the beautiful girl, that Ferdinand Haight and Bass Templeton, after exchanging a brief look, both chuckled quietly. Then Ben put his cup down, hard, and that briefly averted masculine attention swung instantly back to him.
Ben did not greet his niece, but when he was occupied with solemn thoughts, he never observed amenities, anyway.
“Bass, you and Case saddle up,” he ordered. He had already rigged out his own animal. It stood behind him half asleep and waiting with a good saddle horse’s endless patience. “Ferd, you and Will and Owen get the drive bunched along the creek. But don’t cross it. Wait until I get back and give you the word.”
When Bass and Case returned astride, Ben stepped over leather and led out toward the village.
As the three of them passed around the rope corral, Ben said: “Listen to me now, you two. If those settlers are hostile, just re
member we’re in their town. I know how it is. They’re damned Yanks. But the war’s long over...and, anyway, we’re way outnumbered. So, if they’re of a mind to make trouble, don’t forget we’ve got a spooky herd of wild two-year-olds.” Ben paused before adding: “A stampede could cost us.”
Ahead, in Lansing’s Ferry, men came out into their roadway to stand facing south and watch the herd. Then these same men hastily broke up into little groups and faded out among the byways of the village.
Later, as Ben and Bass and Case were approaching the southernmost buildings, these same men accompanied by at least fifty others, all armed but not all fully attired, drifted clear of buildings and roadways to form a solid phalanx across their settlement.
“Well now,” said Bass Templeton, drawing up a little. “Ben, I’d say those folks are plumb hostile.”
Albright kept on riding, saying nothing. Case Hyle looped his reins, took out a tobacco sack, and began twisting up a smoke. He lit up, let the cigarette dangle from his lips, and slitted his eyes against the upcurling smoke. He was silent and watchful and looking speculative.
The same shaggy-bearded man who Ben had seen the day before speaking to Will Johns, wearing the same old blanket coat, moved out ahead of that silent, armed crowd of settlers, stopping to lean upon a U.S. Springfield arsenal rifle. He was not as tall as any of the three Texans, but he was easily as broad as the sturdiest of them. He had booted legs set wide and his shoulders pushed forward as though bracing into a high wind.
After Ben drew rein and nodded gravely to this man, he said: “You must be Mister Connelly.”
“And you,” said the bearded man in a rumbling tone, “would be Ben Albright.”
“That’s right. Now then, Mister Connelly, it’s been my habit for some years to cross my wagon at Lansing’s Ferry and to re-provision here. Old Lansing and I were close friends, and if you’ll let me, I’d like to extend that same feeling toward you and your folks here. I’ve always paid the going price for victuals, and a dollar for crossing over my wagon.”