The Smoky Years

by Alan Lemay

  "Sure sorry," he said, "that I didn't get to say good-bye to you. Didn't seem like you were any place around."

  For a second or two the familiar twinkle seemed about to come into her eyes. "Did you hunt real hard?"

  "Well maybe I didn't. I guess it kind of seemed like we'd already said everything there was to be said."

  "Maybe," she said slowly, "I didn't say everything I ought to have said."

  He waited. After a moment or two he snapped loose the black mule, restless on its lead; it moved forward six lengths and went to grazing.

  "I want you to know this," she said. "When you ride out of my life there isn't going to be anything left in it."

  "Jody," he said, "are you trying to turn me back now?"

  Her only answer was a little hopeless motion of her hands.

  "Your father and I put in four hours last night, roughing out the terms of my split from KingGordon. Think back yourself did you ever see me turned back from something I figured I ought to do?"

  She shook her head, and her face had even less color than before. "What did you say to my father?"

  "What did he tell you I said?"

  "That I - quit you."

  "Well-didn't you?"

  "Don't you know," she said crazily, "I wouldn't ever do that?"

  He was silent, his eyes on his buckskin gloves as he adjusted his rope, the buckle of his rifle boot.

  "I don't care anything about King-Gordon," Jody said. "I don't care whether you stay in KingGordon, or get out, or where you go, or what you do. I'd go with you if you wanted me to go; and if you don't know that you don't know anything at all!"

  "Jody you mean that?"

  Jody Gordon swayed her shoulders as she sat there in the saddle; he had seen her father weave like that, many times, when he was up against something hard. Only, it seemed a very different thing as Jody did it.

  "In King-Gordon you were on the way to big things. But I don't care anything about that. Let the break-up with my father go through. Quit King-Gordon without two bits to your name. Take the least outpost camp there is under the brand, and let him have the rest. I'll go with you, and stay with you; and I'll help you in every way I can to build something of our own."

  Ahead on the prairie, the black mule cropped at the sparse cover; working its way forward, slowly, it moved a full three lengths while still Bill Roper did not speak. He wanted to say something, anything; but he found he could not speak at all.

  Jody said, almost hysterically, "Aren't you ever going to say anything?"

  Bill Roper mumbled to his saddle horn, "Didn't know you felt that way... Wouldn't ever be any call any reason-for you to let go all holts like that."

  "Not any reason-?"

  "King-Gordon why, this outfit has a hold on the prairie all the way from-"

  "I hate the prairie!" She was flaming up again, but not in the same way as the night before. Her voice was that of someone coming to the end of a string. "I hate these God-forsaken, barren wastes! I hate the fool cattle, and the trail-gaunted horses, and the bare, lonely ranches where nothing good ever comes!"

  "Jody, some day we'll make this such a country as-"

  "Oh, I know! I can see it just as you see it just as you must see it. All the happy country, peaceful and quiet, some day, and no more long trails and no more wars-"

  He started to say, "But first there's a couple of things-"

  She was leaning toward him now, her voice gentle, coaxing, very tender. "Our own little old outfit - any outfit, any place don't you see what a happy place we could make that be? A place where we could plant trees near the water, and watch them grow into big trees; and we'd be there together"

  To the south the young sun crested the sand hills with long curving lines of gold, without seeming to bring any light. Through those sand hills threaded the long trail over which men pushed unhoping cattle, a long way and a hard way, full fifteen hundred miles. It was ill defined, many miles wide, like the tracks of ships at sea this dry, infinitely testing trail that Dusty King had been among the first to drive.

  For men who had never been on that trail, it represented romance; for men who had been on it only once it represented a memory of hell. Bill Roper knew it as it really was hadn't he been raised on it? He knew the long monotony, the endless blocking of misfortune with wits and inadequate means, which was the true trail. Before him that trail now stretched again. He would move faster than the cattle moved, but weeks would pass before he heard a human voice, months would roll out before he came to that long trail's end.

  And after that another trail, perhaps different, but perhaps so long that the long trail itself would be dwarfed to a stroll in the twilight, by comparison...

  Roper shot a quick glance at Jody, and immediately sent his eyes away again, as far as they could reach. Here was something he could not look at. It was as if everything men worked for, through drought, storm, night stampede, and fighting raid everything for which men ever endured was here in one small form, not a horse length beyond the touch of his hands. If he had looked at her again, perhaps he would have kicked his pony stirrup to stirrup with hers and picked her out of the saddle, and kissed her mouth, and kept her close to him-then, and forever. But he sat motionless on his waiting pony.

  "Look," he said at last "Look if you mean that, come with me. Come with me, now."

  He could hardly hear her as she said, "Don't you think you ought to tell me where you're going?"

  "Dry Camp Pierce is on his way, by a quicker way than mine is. If he don't fall down there'll be the start of a wild bunch waiting for me when I land in the Big Bend Country. I figure to take that bunch, and build to it, and add on. After that well, you know what comes after that."

  "And now, you're asking me to swing with that?"

  "Jody, I've already told you what I've got to do."

  The silence stretched out until you could have hung a saddle on it, and this time Bill's eyes were on Jody, and hers were on the saddle horn.

  Slowly she shook her head.

  After a minute he said, "I guess that settles it, doesn't it?"

  "I guess it does."

  Her face seemed blind, and she was like a ghost of Jody Gordon. Suddenly Bill Roper knew that if he did not take the trail he had chosen now, he would never take it at all.

  "You sure, Jody? You won't come?"

  Again she shook her head.

  A long, loose end of Bill's rope was in his hand, though he never remembered taking it down. Hardly knowing what he did, he struck the spurs into the buckskin pony. The snap of the rope's end knocked a flying gout of fur from the rump of the black pack mule, and they were on the trail the long trail, the dry trail, the trail of a hopeless war.

  HE men who rode with Roper saw Texas change.

  They could not have foreseen the quick, unprecedented expansion of the cattle business, which would presently crowd not only Texas but every foot of the Great Plains. Nor could they have foreseen the almost immediate incursion of barbed wire, which was about to take unto itself everything that was worth fencing.

  Yet they themselves, in no little part, forced the greatest change of all. They were fighting a thing they perhaps did not recognize as a national factor; but each, individually, had his own bitter motive. These men whom Roper now gathered about him hated a particular man, not only as lawless as themselves, but a man who was more than one man. Ben Thorpe was a thousand men; operating under Cleve Tanner in the south, and Walk Lasham in the north, his innumerable retainers filamented the plains from the Rio Grande to the Big Horn. That Roper's men hated Ben Thorpe was no coincidence; Roper had picked men of personal grudge. Most of them had first been outlawed because they had not suited a single organization-the organization of Ben Thorpe.

  Roper's wild bunch were assuredly lawless men; but they were part of a West in which law was thin and obscure. The Rangers, youngsters with no limit of courage, had a list of men to get, and some of Roper's men were on that list. But Texas was big, and the Rangers were f
ew, and most commonly absorbed with raids from Mexico, or with recalcitrant Indians still able to strike from Mexican fastnesses. Roper, sitting in the saddle, could look east, north, west, and know that as far as land reached there was no cattle-barring fence. Here was the open range, as yet unbought by scrip or partitioned by barbed wire; an empire wrought by horse and gun. Southward lay the Rio Grande, the international barriera hazard to legal-minded men, a boon to men whose values did not attune with a distant, unenforceable law.

  Into this vast open country, where every plant, animal, and rarely-seen man had its own particular sting, Roper now headed, to cut the roots of Ben Thorpe's breeding grounds. The men who rode with him, as befitted men who lived by gun, rope, and rawhide whang, worked with the conditions that they found.

  Up and down and across half of Texas, constantly in the saddle, Bill Roper threaded his new organization. Sometimes Dry Camp Pierce was with him; more often he traveled alone. He was working with men of his own age now. The trail bosses and range foremen with whom he had been thrown heretofore had been older men, who had attained to responsibility by an experience that had its beginning with the founding of the Chisholm trail itself. But the wild bunch was something else.

  These famous gunfighters and outlawed men whom Roper gathered were just youngsters, mostly. Some of them were true killers; some merely reckless kids who had got off on the wrong foot. All of them were badly wanted by what little law there was. Only Dry Camp Pierce, of them all, was much older than Bill himself. Because of his long and peculiar experience, he proved of infinite value; and yet at the same time was the most difficult to handle of all Roper's men.

  One night in early June, Dry Camp Pierce and Bill Roper sat in the back room of a saloon, deep in Texas. This was at Whipper Forks a place that is lost now; it consisted of only a store, a corral, and a bar. One other man was with them an unnamed kid who was there because Dry Camp brought him there.

  "It's funny," Pierce said; "I can't hardly place it. Here's you, a kid; and I guess you stand in the place of Dusty King. But-well, you know Dusty King was the best friend I had in the world; but didn't ever seem like-"

  "Didn't seem like he held with venting brands?" Bill Roper said.

  "Look," Dry Camp Pierce said. "I've stole cows until I could pave my way to hell with their hides. But - I don't know to steal cows for Dusty's kid"

  Bill Roper's teeth flashed clean in his grin. "Whose cows?"

  "I've stole cows-"

  "You're going to steal cows that belong to me, now."

  "Figure you own these cows?"

  "I'm half of King-Gordon, now split. I've taken, out of King-Gordon, seven camps without cows; now I'm claiming the cows that Thorpe took from Dusty King. And from some other men that we're going to lend a hand to, pretty soon."

  "I suppose nobody's got any better right-"

  "To hell with that. I heard you can raise hell with the brand on a cow. Either I heard wrong-"

  Bill Roper hadn't heard wrong. Dry Camp Pierce he was called that because he hated to camp too near to water went to work for Bill Roper as he had never worked before; and thus the king of cow thieves, the brand changer extraordinary, for once aligned on the side of the law that was not.

  "I got to have ten thousand advance," Pierce said. "I'll furnish my own boys, and I'll turn cattle to you that don't know their own mammies, or else you can slit my throat."

  "Won't do," Roper said.

  "What's wrong, it won't do?"

  "I've got to have ten camps the like of you and your gang. You can spot them, or I can, I don't care. God damn it, this is no chickenyard cut!"

  A slow, queer gleam came into Dry Camp's eyes. "You mean to back us, all the way through?"

  "I'll back you while I can. After that ride for the tall?" said Bill Roper without the least expression.

  "Twenty-five thousand advance," said Pierce.

  "Five thousand," Roper said. "You to get fifty per cent of what we can cash."

  In the end Pierce took fifteen thousand, Wells Fargo drafts, with Roper's word for a third split on proceeds of Dry Camp's wholesale scoops.

  Ten rustlers' camps hooked into Thorpe-Tanner territory...

  But Dry Camp also helped in other ways.

  A hot June dusk, five days after the meeting at Whipper Forks, found Bill Roper at the Dry Saddle Crossing, where he was to meet Lee Harnish; and this meeting, too, was arranged by Dry Camp Pierce, though by this time Pierce was far away.

  Here ran the broad, many-channeled river, dividing two countries-a river whose split wanderings made two miles of intermittent shallows. At this border of a vast, imperceptibly rolling prairie stood a narrow string of adobe shacks. That was the Dry Saddle Crossing.

  Two men Bill Roper and Lee Harnish-sat in front of one of those abandoned shacks, and tried to get together.

  "I've always understood," Roper said, "that you were acquainted some, below the line."

  Harnish's hard eyes studied Roper, and for a little while nothing could be heard except the mourning of doves in the willow scrub by the water. Next to Dry Camp Pierce, Lee Harnish was the oldest of those to join Roper; he was twenty-eight. He was tall and lank, sun-baked almost to the color of an Indian; his green eyes were curiously blank, impenetrable, and he liked to look his man in the eye with the peculiar fixity seen in the gaze of hawks.

  "I've been down there some," he admitted. "I've made a few drives into Chihuahua; one drive to Mexico City,"

  "If you had a big wet herd run to you just below the line, would you know how to get rid of it?"

  "I can't make out your hand," Hamish said. "King-Gordon never swung the long rope yet, that I heard of"

  "I'm not King-Gordon now. My stunt is to smash Cleve Tanner; and I don't care what it costs."

  "What's wrong with backing him into a shootout, if that's what you want?"

  "That comes later. If I bust Tanner I can bust Thorpe. But if Tanner is gunned before he's busted, Thorpe will take over in Texas, and the chance to break up his Texas layout will be gone."

  "You ain't going to bust him by running off a few head of cattle. This river crossing is slow work, kid."

  "I figure to cross five thousand head within the next three months," Roper told him.

  "Five thousand head won't even scratch the hide of Thorpe and Tanner, son."

  "I know that as well as you. What it will do, it'll draw Tanner to throw his warriors onto the border. That's what I want. Because by then I'll be working somewhere else."

  "And you want me to take 'em on the other side - is that the idee?"

  "I want three dollars a head, American gold, paid off as the cattle come out of the water..."

  Roper's ways of gathering his wild bunch were diverse, as diverse as the saddle men he gathered. One way or another, picking up a man here, three more there, he got all he needed, and more.

  But certain other things had to be done, in order that the wild bunch would have work to do, planned in such a way that something would be accomplished that would stay accomplished.

  On a steamy afternoon early in July, Bill Roper sat in Fred Maxim's San Antonio law office. Maxim was an attorney who, some thought, had worked under a different name, somewhere before; but here, assuredly he was in no one's pay.

  "I'm not asking the likes of you what's what," Bill Roper said. "I want to know who actually owns range rights on the Graham stand."

  The hard-bitten little man across the desk from Roper was still cadgy. "When it comes to ousting a man from possession-"

  "You know who `ousted' Bob Graham and his family from possession. Cleve Tanner took over that outfit by main horse-and-gun power, without decent cause or reason. Everybody knows that. I'm asking you now"

  "Taylor and Graves are already doing everything that can be done to regain possession of Graham's outfit," Maxim said, smiling.

  It was the smile that Roper liked. "Suppose I hold the Bob Graham lands, and Bob Graham's family are living on it. How long a delay can you give me in t
he courts? I mean, if Bob Graham, damn it, holds this land, will the Rangers interfere in behalf of Cleve Tanner?"

  "Bob Graham hasn't got possession," Maxim said.

  "Suppose he did have?"

  "Never could happen. Ben Thorpe-"

  "Shut up a minute," Roper said. "My time is measured out by the travel-trot of ponies, and God knows that's slow! I'm not asking you to put Gra ham back in possession of his range. I'm not asking you to save him from being put off again in the way he was before. What I want to know is, can you head off some cooked-up legal interference with Graham, after he's in possession again?"

  Fred Maxim thought it over. "I can only promise you that I can cause considerable delay," he said.

  "Months of delay?"

  "Years, maybe. Have to see how it would work out."

  "Start work," Roper decided. "I'll put up two thousand retainer. You go out and get an injunction protecting Bob Graham from molestation."

  "But this assumes possession."

  "I'll take care of that."

  "I'd like to ask one question," Maxim said. "Why is it that you're suddenly so interested in Graham?"

  "This isn't just Graham. If you can handle your end, this is only the first of many. There's going to be a lot of things straightened out between here and the Pecos, Fred."

  "After all," Maxim said; "after all-maybe it's time!"

  "You'll make a fight?"

  "Providing you can show possession I'll keep you clear until hell freezes."

  "That's all I want...."

  Still July, at Willow Creek-

  A barren range of hills, sand hills; golden in the dawn, purple in the twilight, barren always. Beneath them, what had been the Willow Creek camp of the old King-Gordon.

  A mud and wattle bunkhouse. A futile stamping of ponies in the round corral beside the shallow river. In the bunkhouse nearest the river, five men lounging around a little room.