Blood and Gold

by Joseph A. West

  “It’s something like that, Corwin,” I replied. “As I said, they’re only passing acquaintances.”

  “Strange though, Dusty, mighty strange.”

  “What’s so strange?”

  “That a nice young feller like you would be acquainted with Lafe Wingo and them. Those boys never done me no harm, mind, but Uncle Jonathan told me the whole passel of them are killers and outlaws.”

  “They are killers, Corwin. And Lafe Wingo is the worst of them, a sight deadlier with a gun than good ol’ John Wesley or Clay Allison or any of them.” I shrugged, forcing a smile, trying to make light of it. “And you’re right, I guess I do tend to have some mighty unusual acquaintances.”

  I could tell that Doan figured I was keeping something back, but he decided not to push me further. He looked out at the lashing rain and the black sky and said: “Dusty, the hotel is full with so many folks coming in, but you can bed down here for the night. The barn is warm and dry and it will still only cost you two bits and I have good strong coffee here in the morning.”

  “I’m obliged, Corwin,” I said. “I reckon I’ll walk over to the store and get me a beer and see the sights, then head back this way.”

  “Step careful, Dusty,” Doan warned as I made to walk into the rain and the gathering night. “There are some rough ones in town.”

  I waved a hand in acknowledgment and headed toward the general store, passing sprawling cattle pens, the blacksmith shop and the hotel.

  When I reached the front of the store, a long, peaked-roofed adobe building, I kicked off clinging mud from my boots on the flagstone steps, then walked inside.

  Doan’s general store was a single room, with piled-up merchandise of all kinds at one end and a rough-hewn pine bar at the other.

  The crowd had thinned out now the hour was growing late. A couple of tired-looking men in faded soldier blue gazed gloomily into the bottom of empty glasses and four punchers shared a bottle at one of the two tables in the place. A grizzled old-timer sat by the potbellied stove smoking a reeking pipe and Jonathan Doan, lord of all he surveyed, stood sentinel behind the bar.

  I tarried for a while at the merchandise, wondering at the breathtaking luxury and plentitude of it all.

  Spread before me were racks of gleaming new Winchesters, stacked boxes of cartridges and wide-brimmed Stetson hats brought all the way from Wichita Falls. Shirts in every color of the rainbow were neatly folded row on row and among them boots and shoes with a notice that read: FOOTWEAR SOLD AT COST. From the rafters hung great slabs of sowbelly bacon, salt pork and smoked hams and arranged around the floor stood kegs and barrels of molasses, vinegar, flour and soda crackers. Rounds and thick wedges of yellow and white cheeses under glass domes competed for space on the counter with jars of spices, sugar, pink candy canes and black-striped peppermint balls.

  The store smelled of plug tobacco, fragrant Virginia ham, the leather of boots and belts, fresh ground coffee, gun oil and the sweet, musty tang of calico and cotton cloth in bolts.

  Me, I was so enthralled, counting through the round silver dollars in my pocket and mighty wishful for more, that it took me a few moments to realize Jonathan Doan was talking to me.

  I turned and found him at my elbow. As his nephew Corwin had done, he said: “You’re late getting back, Dusty.”

  And as I had told Corwin, I said I’d been delayed in Dodge because of Simon Prather’s illness. I made no mention of the thirty thousand dollars or Lafe Wingo.

  “Well”—Doan sighed after I’d said my piece—“I take that news mighty hard. Simon Prather is a good man.”

  “Indeed he is,” I said, letting it go at that.

  Jonathan Doan was a small, bearded man with keenly intelligent, penetrating brown eyes and a gentle way about him. He was an Ohio Yankee but I didn’t hold that against him, and he was a Quaker, and I didn’t hold that against him either.

  “So what can I do you for, Dusty?” Doan asked, smiling.

  “I need supplies, Mr. Doan,” I replied. “But I figure those can wait until morning. Right now I could use a beer.”

  Doan, not a drinking man himself, nodded. “Then step right up to the bar.”

  I crossed the room in a sudden silence, my spurs chiming. The reason for the stillness became apparent when I noticed one of the punchers at the table, a huge man with a thick mane of yellow hair, looking me up and down, with downright mean belligerence in his bloodshot eyes.

  The others in the room, sensing as I did that the big puncher was on the prod and had sized me up as his victim, eyed me warily as I stepped to the bar.

  “What will it be, Dusty?” Doan asked. There was a concerned edge to his voice and I guessed he was also aware of trouble brewing.

  I ordered a Bass Ale, and while Doan bent down to find the bottle, I opened my slicker and moved it slowly away from my holstered Colt. I did it so casually I figured no one noticed, nor it seemed had they.

  One of the soldiers caught my eye and his glance held a warning. He nodded slightly toward the door, telling me I should leave. I ignored the man and turned to the bar as Doan proffered me my beer.

  “See any Apaches on your travels, young feller?” the old-timer by the stove asked, whether to break the tension or because he was blissfully unaware of what was happening I could not tell.

  “Uh-huh, tangled with a passel of them north of here,” I said, sampling the ale. It was cold and good.

  The big puncher guffawed. “Yeah, sure you did. Why, you ain’t old enough to have left your momma’s teat. You didn’t tangle with no Apaches. A passel o’ them my ass.”

  Now a couple of things displeased me about this man. The first was that he’d called me a liar, the second that he sported a fine, sweeping dragoon mustache that put to shame the fuzzy growth on my top lip.

  But I was in no mood for a fight, so I let it go. “Believe what you want,” I said, shrugging. “Makes no never mind to me.”

  I turned back to the bar and said to Doan: “Beer is real good, Mr. Doan.”

  I felt a rough hand on my shoulder that half-turned me round and the huge puncher stuck his face into mine, whiskey heavy on his breath. “Doan,” he said, “bring a bottle. I’m gonna teach this whippersnapper how to drink like a man.”

  “Let it be, Burt,” Doan said. “This boy means you no harm.”

  The man called Burt grinned, his eyes bright and cruel. “Aw, Doan, I won’t hurt him too bad. All I’m gonna do is pour some of your rotten whiskey down his throat.”

  I sized this man up as a mean drunk and a remorseless bully. He was huge, six inches taller than me and maybe sixty pounds heavier, the kind smaller men are all too willing to step around.

  But now I was getting good and mad and maybe he saw something in my eyes because he took a single step back and his grin slipped a little.

  “Mister, I don’t want your whiskey,” I said. “I’m wet and tired and I’m not here to borrow trouble, so let me be.” I moved my slicker again, clearing my gun. “You’ve been duly notified. Let me be.”

  At heart this man was a coward used to knocking around men who were weaker and scared of him. But I wasn’t afraid, and he knew it, because Burt dug deep, found no reserve of courage and retreated into bluster.

  “When I say you drink with me, you’ll drink with me,” he yelled, turning to his grinning compadres at the table, seeking their support. The man knew he had gone way too far to back down, and though I’d given him an out, his pride wouldn’t let him take it. He swung back to the bar. “Damn you, Doan, I told you to bring a bottle.”

  “Mister,” I said again, “I don’t want your whiskey. I’m not partial to it.”

  Burt jerked the bottle from Doan’s hand, pulled the cork and held the whiskey high. “Open your trap,” he said. “You’re either gonna drink like a man or be carried out of here with two broken legs.”

  Me, I’d had enough. I was tired and wet and as far as I was concerned this hoedown was over.

  Two things happened very
fast. First, Burt grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me toward him, the splashing bottle poised so he could ram it into my mouth. Second, I palmed my Colt and slammed the barrel hard against the side of his head.

  For a moment the man just stood there, looking at me with glazed eyes that rolled like dice in his head. Then he collapsed to the floor with a crash that shook the building, as though an anvil had just dropped on his head.

  I swung the Colt, covering the three punchers at the table, but not a one of them even twitched an eyelid. Three pairs of eyes regarded me in stunned horror, like I’d just scared them into salvation and Sunday school.

  “Yee-hah!” The old man by the stove sprang to his feet, spry as you please, and threw his arms into the air. “Man, oh, man,” he yelled, “I never seen nobody draw a Colt that fast. Boy,” he hollered at me, “you’re quick as double-geared lightning an’ no mistake.”

  I ignored the oldster and spoke to the punchers at the table. “The man at my feet was duly notified,” I said. “Any of you three have a problem with that?”

  The youngest of the punchers, a boy about my own age, shook his head. “We got no problem with you,” and after a moment’s hesitation, he added, “mister.”

  I nodded to the fallen Burt. “Then carry him out of here and let him sleep it off.”

  The three waddies rose as one and helped their limp, groaning compadre to his feet. I watched them carry Burt through the door before I turned back to the bar.

  Jonathan Doan was looking hard at me, a strange expression that I found difficult to read in his eyes. “You’ve grown up, Dusty,” he said finally. “I’d say you’ve grown up considerable since the spring.”

  He reached under the bar, found another bottle of Bass Ale and slid it across the bar.

  “This one’s on me, Mr. Hannah,” he said.

  Chapter 9

  I rose at first light and brushed straw from my hair and clothes, stepped down the ladder from the hayloft, then checked on the black. The big horse seemed rested and looked like he was ready for the trail.

  Corwin Doan was asleep in his office and I didn’t wake him. I found a tin cup, quietly helped myself from the coffeepot on top of the stove and stepped to the door of the livery stable.

  The rain had stopped for now, but a heavy mist hung over the Red, thick gray fingers spilling over its banks, probing among the buildings and corrals of the crossing so the cabins and fences looked like they were emerging from a cloud.

  I set the cup at my feet, rolled a cigarette, picked up the cup again and smoked and drank, enjoying the sharp morning tang of tobacco and coffee and the quiet tranquillity of the breaking day.

  Ten minutes later I saddled the black and rode to the general store. Jonathan Doan was already up and doing and he told me Burt, nursing a hangover and a busted head, had ridden out an hour earlier. He said he didn’t much care, on account of how he had no regard for the man, him being a bully and a no-account an’ all.

  I bought coffee, a little baking powder, cornmeal and flour. Bacon being expensive at that time and place, I settled for a slab of salt pork and my only extravagance was a small sack of the black-and-white peppermint balls I’d seen the night before.

  Before he made up my meager order, Doan poured me a cup of coffee and told me to help myself to some soda crackers and cheese. Thus I made an excellent breakfast before I took to the trail again, riding through a gray mist under a grayer sky.

  I figured I was due north of the SP Connected, but before I reached the ranch I must cross a hundred miles of broken, hilly country with two questions uppermost in my mind: Where were Lafe Wingo and the Owens brothers? And where were the Apaches?

  For these I had no answers, neither question being calculated to set a man’s mind at ease. When the rain began again, a steady downpour accompanied by the rumble of distant thunder, it only added to my gloom.

  Ahead of me lay both forks of the Wichita and beyond that, down to the Cottonwood Creek country about twenty miles west of the dogleg of the Western Trail, was the SP Connected.

  Before I reached the ranch, I had to catch up with Wingo and the others, dodge Victorio’s Apaches and recover the thirty thousand dollars. It was a tall order growing taller by the minute, and a nagging doubt that I could achieve it was gnawing at me, giving me no peace.

  I had no idea how I’d tackle a deadly gunman like Wingo if and when I caught up to him, but that was just another bridge I’d have to cross when I got to it. As for the Apaches, I determined to ride careful and take my chances.

  Always being of a mind to wed and bed pretty Sally Coleman, I’d saved my money and forgone the silver hatbands and conchoed saddles much loved by Texas punchers, so there was nothing about me that glittered and would catch the eye of a scouting Apache. My range clothes were much faded and muddy from the trail and the black horse I rode merged into the background of brown grass and deep-shadowed hills.

  At noon I sheltered for a while in a thick grove of shin oak and mesquite growing at the base of an outcropping of red sandstone that jutted up like the prow of a ship from the slope of a low hill. Enough rain had collected in a natural basin in the rock for me to fill my coffeepot and among the trees I found dry wood to start a small fire. I trusted to the oak branches to scatter what little smoke the fire made and I eased the girth on the black and let him graze on a patch of good grass behind the rock where he’d be hidden.

  Later, as I smoked and drank scalding hot coffee, I looked from the sheltering trees, my eyes searching beyond the teeming deluge to the west, where the Staked Plains stretched away forever, their vast distances now lost behind an iron gray curtain of rain and low cloud.

  My mind fell to remembering my first trip up the trail, when I’d seen the last of the buffalo on those plains, and the last of the free, wild Comanche.

  The Comanche had come out of that barren vastness one late afternoon under a burning scarlet sky and for a while they’d ridden alongside us, keeping pace, so we were maybe just a couple of hundred yards apart. Simon Prather yelled for us to keep our rifles handy and to bunch the herd and when I looked into his eyes I saw nothing but worry.

  The Comanche were strung out over a quarter of a mile, fifty or so warriors in the lead, proud lords of the plains with fine hands unsullied by manual labor. The warriors hunted and made war, knew only the lance and the bow; all else was left to the women. Unlike other plains Indians the Comanche wore no feathers, their long hair hanging loose over their shoulders or bound up in red-ribbon braids.

  Behind the warriors the young women, some in beaded buckskin, others in skirts and embroidered Spanish shirts, rode paint ponies that dragged travois, the thin pine poles hissing like snakes through the long blue grama grass.

  Next came the old people, wearily trudging on foot. The Comanche had no respect for the aged, figuring that a man who lived long enough to have gray hair and a big belly had not been a gallant enough warrior. On the plains, the truly brave died young. Old men were not listened to in council and in lean times were abandoned to starvation and the wolves. Old women, well past childbearing age and beyond their strength, fared no better. They were useless mouths to feed and as expendable as the men.

  Last came the slaves, overburdened and abused, staggering through the dust bent over from their heavy loads, Mexican mostly but with a sprinkling of white and black faces, all of them considered by the Comanche less than human and treated as such.

  Finally, as the day was just shading into night, five of the warriors swung out of line and rode up to Mr. Prather. They were ready for war, the bottom halves of their faces from the eyes down painted black. The Comanche made it clear by sign language and a smattering of Spanish that they wanted a dozen cows, but in the end Simon gave them six young calves he would have shot anyway since they couldn’t keep up with the herd, a side of bacon, salt and some lye soap.

  The Indians also wanted whiskey and ten dollars, but this they did not get.

  At full dark we kept the herd close
and stood to arms. I took up my rifle and waited by a wheel of the chuck wagon, listening to the dim drums throbbing in the distance of the night and the rise and fall of the wolf wail of the warriors.

  The Comanche hit us at dawn, but since there was a dozen of us punchers, all well-armed and determined, they were content to trade rifle shots at long range and no execution was done on either side.

  Through it all, Simon Prather walked among us, exhorting us to be steadfast in our time of peril and to keep our faces turned to the enemy.

  In the end, the Indians did drop one old cow that Mr. Prather let them have, telling us that it didn’t make no never mind because they would stop to butcher and eat the cow and not follow us. And indeed, that turned out to be the case.

  Now, as I looked out on their bleak vastness, the Staked Plains were empty of life. The long shadows of the buffalo were gone and with them those of the Comanche and neither had left a mark on the land.

  I finished my coffee, threw the dregs on the fire and swung into the saddle.

  By midafternoon I was riding back along the trail we’d made in the spring, crossing the divide between the Red and the Wichita. This was hilly country, the black soil heavy with salt, and I let my horse graze on a clump of salt weed for a spell before urging him on again.

  I found wagon tracks in the mud a few minutes later.

  The tracks were heading due south, and I figured they were of a four-wheel wagon drawn by two oxen. Judging by the way the iron wheel rims had dug deep into the mud, it was heavily laden.

  Teamsters sometimes traveled this route, carrying supplies to Fort Worth and other places, but they always cut across the Western Trail, heading west, not south.

  I swung out of the saddle and checked the footprints by the tracks, trailing the black behind me. The wagon was not far ahead because, despite the rain, the prints were still fresh.