Brand of the Hunted

by John Glasby

  Brand of the Hunted

  John Glasby

  © John Glasby 1963, 2003

  John Glasby has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1963 by John Spencer Ltd.

  This edition published in 2016 by Pioneering Press.

  Table of Contents

  1. Brand of the Hunted

  2. Danger at Noon

  3. Trail West

  4. Stampede!

  5. Twin Creeks

  6. Night Ride

  7. Vengeance in Gunsmoke

  8. The White Menace

  1. Brand of the Hunted

  At first the trail to the east had been deserted, empty as far as the eye could see, but now there was a small, scarcely seen cloud of dust in the far distance where it came in out of the mountains, to cross the wide, stretching wilderness of the dusty plain.

  Neil Roberts sat easily in the saddle, hands resting loosely on the pommel, eyes narrowed a little against the glare of the sun now climbing up swiftly from the eastern horizon, red turning yellow, soon to become white as it approached the zenith, when the waves of heat would lift over the range and the dust-devils would cavort and whirl madly around the buttes.

  He was a limber man with a rider’s looseness about him, about every move of his tall, lean body the grey eyes half-hidden beneath the lowered lids, the crinkly hair just showing beneath the wide-brimmed hat that kept some of the sunlight off his face. All of his features were angular and solid, and his shape was lean and stringy, the shape of a man who lived in the saddle, whose home was the great rolling distances of the prairie and whose ceiling was the sky.

  The rising whorls of dust, perhaps ten, maybe fifteen miles away, drew closer, the only evidence that whatever it was out there was moving. But as they drew closer, it was possible to make out some form of shape in the grey dust.

  The tiny dots, barely seen at first, drew themselves out from the shimmering heat waves, moving slowly in single file, big wagons each drawn by four powerful horses.

  From that distance, it was impossible to make out how many there were in the train, but he guessed there must have been close on sixteen or twenty of them, heading west along the trails which cut through almost a dozen states, through some of the roughest and most dangerous country in the world; not only dangerous because of the miles of arid, alkali desert, high mountains that had to be crossed, great rivers in full flood; but because of the other dangers which lay hidden in that country. Men who would stop at nothing to destroy the wagon trains, the big cattle bosses whose cattle roamed the wild wilderness of the prairie, and then the border gangs, the men who lived off the wagon trains, murdering and plundering.

  And at the end of the trail, for the fortunate few who made it, the Promised Land — California, a land so they said flowing in milk and honey, where gold nuggets as big as a man’s fist were to be had for the taking, and where the soil and climate were so good that whole cities were springing up virtually overnight as people moved in from the east.

  He forced a quick grin. He was a man who could grin whenever the going became tough, whose smile was inclined to touch not only his mouth but his eyes too. Yet he was also a brooding man with something that often showed at the back of the cold, grey eyes; as if a hidden devil lay somewhere in their depths from which it would sometimes leap up unbidden, naked and threatening, only to sink down again behind the veiling lids.

  A quick glance at the sun told him that the wagon train would not reach him much before early afternoon, even if they pushed their horses to the limit, which did not seem likely.

  He put his mount down the gentle slope towards the bank of the river, where there was shade from the tall trees that grew along the water’s edge. Alighting, he lay flat on his belly upstream from his horse and drank deeply of the cool water, then filled his canteen, an action born of long years in the desert when each drop of water was a precious thing.

  Going back towards the trees, he seated himself in the shade of the tallest, resting his back and shoulders against the broad trunk. In the distance, his mount moved lazily along the river bank, drifting to graze. He pulled his hat down over his eyes, stretching his lean body out.

  He woke when the heat of the sun shone full on to his face again, sat upright, looking about him, knowing that he had been asleep for some hours. The sorrel was still there, twenty yards away, grazing peacefully and, in the distance, the dull cloud that almost shrouded the wagon train was now less than a couple of miles away. He could just make out the faint calls of the drivers and the outriders as they urged their flagging horses forward to the river.

  Back to the east there lay only desert for more than fifty miles and Neil knew that the horses in the train, and the cows they were bringing too, would have smelled the water by now, would be straining at the traces.

  Standing up, he whistled to his mount, swung himself up into the saddle, then put the horse into the water. In the middle of the river, where the current flowed strongest, he could feel it push against the horse’s chest as it breasted the current, at times forced to swim across.

  On the other side, he rode towards the lead wagon, giving the sorrel its head. Down a slight slope he went, reining as he came alongside the wagon, staring up at the barrel-chested man who rode it, sitting easily on the lip of the seat. A big man of sinew and muscle and bone, with flaming red hair and a beard to match, reddish and ragged. The floppy, wide-brimmed hat was pulled down well over his forehead, but sweat ran in rivulets down his face and the white alkali dust, burning and stinging, had worked its way into the folds of his skin, mingling with the perspiration until it formed a streaky mask from which his eyes peered out, black and piercing under the thick, tufted brows. There was a rifle, a Winchester, Neil noticed, thrust into a leather scabbard on the side of the wagon within easy reach of his huge hands.

  ‘Clem Jackson?’ Neil called, as he turned the sorrel, riding alongside the other, his mount easily matching pace with the wagon.

  ‘That’s my name,’ growled the other in a deep voice that seemed to come booming all the way from the lowermost depths of his chest.

  ‘Mine’s Neil Roberts. Perhaps Weston mentioned my name before you left.’

  ‘Roberts.’ The other nodded slowly, ponderously. ‘We were warned to keep a look out for you, didn’t expect to run into you so soon.’

  ‘I figured you might run into trouble around this neck of the territory and came along as fast as I could. There’s bad country ahead.’

  ‘Figgered that might be so.’ The other’s glance strayed towards the Winchester. ‘Didn’t intend taking any chances. We’ve put all we got into these wagons, and we don’t aim to let anybody take them away from us without a fight. We’re headed for California and, by God, that’s where we’re going.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll make it, but it won’t be easy. In the meantime, you’ve probably noticed there’s a river dead ahead, less than a mile further on. You could make camp there, plenty of water for your horses and cattle, and I could have a pow-wow with you. There’s a lot of things I ain’t got quite straight in my mind yet, and if I’m in to take this train through the country up ahead, I’d like the answers to some questions.’

  For a moment he saw the hesitation in the other, then the huge frame relaxed and the man grinned.

  ‘I like you, Roberts,’ he growled. ‘You’re the kind of man I could trust. They told me that much when we started out, but I never take a man on trust, no more’n I’d take a horse or a wagon. I like to look them over first and make up my own mind.’

  He flicked the bull-hide whip over the horses, urging them on, but by now the animals had got the scent of water and
needed no urging. The Conestoga wagons rumbled forward, wheels creaking on their axles as they bumped and swayed over the rough, uneven ground. Up ahead the water shone and glistened in the bright, harsh sunlight and the whooping of the men riding scout told that they had already reached it.

  Half an hour later the wagons had been drawn up in a wide circle on the eastern bank of the river. They would not ford it until the horses had been watered and everything had been checked. The river was deep in the middle and the current strong.

  Seated opposite Clem Jackson, Neil ate the beans and bacon which had been handed him on a plate slowly, chewing easily on the appetising food. He had lived for so long on jerked beef, eaten cold, washed down with water, that this food, and the hot coffee that went with it, filled his stomach well.

  ‘You reckon’s there’s a chance of getting through along this trail, Roberts?’ asked Jackson suddenly. He glanced up and eyed Neil shrewdly with his dark, brooding eyes. ‘They warned us that it wouldn’t be easy this way, that we ought to have taken the northern trail. But that would have added a hundred days to the journey, and it’s bad country there, especially if we’re caught in the winter.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Neil nodded in agreement. ‘But I ought to warn you of what lies ahead of you if you still want to take this trail.’

  He waved a hand almost negligently towards the east, back along the trail they had just come. There was a grim trace of amusement in his tone as he said:

  ‘Back there you drove these wagons across more than fifty miles of alkali desert, and most of you probably figgered that if you could do that, you could do anything. But that was nothing compared with what lies in that direction.’ He jerked a thumb to the west.

  ‘Doesn’t look too bad to me once we ford the river,’ muttered a short, dark-haired man.

  ‘Maybe not. But it ain’t the country you’ll have to fight there. Plenty of water between the big rivers, plenty of grazing, too. And plenty of trouble. Mebbe you never heard of the Shermans and the Hollards.’

  ‘Nope, can’t say I have,’ went on the other with unconscious arrogance.

  His words sounded too sharp and distinct, the tone just a mite too clear for Neil’s liking. But he kept his temper, knowing that a Western man had a looser and easier way of speaking. He guessed this man came from way back east, maybe thought he knew everything there was to know about the west and wasn’t inclined to accept advice.

  Neil smiled in a wintry way, eyes deliberately as bleak as his voice.

  ‘This is cattle country, mister. Stretching for the next three hundred miles to the west and more than twice that distance to the south and north, is all cattle land. Probably a hundred thousand head of prime beef cattle, all belonging to one of two men — Jesse Sherman or Matt Hollard. They don’t like nesters, or even men like yourselves just passing through. This is their land, even though you might say that it was got illegally. But they hold it by force of arms, they have got their own bands of outlaws, hired gunmen whose job it is to shoot down anybody trespassing here and stop anybody like you from moving through.’

  He grinned faintly.

  ‘I suppose it’s true to say that most of the time they’re at each other’s throats, rustling and killing. But they’ll band together to fight any wagon train that tries to make its way across their land.’

  ‘Then we’ll fight,’ grunted Jackson.

  He reached out, picked up the long-barrelled Winchester holding it tightly in his hairy fists, the knuckles of his hands showing through the skin, glistening in white bone with the pressure he was exerting.

  ‘Do you think that you can fight those men, professional fighting men, the scum of a hundred towns, men wanted by the law from here to the Mexican border, but safe so long as they work for these men?’ He shook his head very slowly.

  ‘Are you suggesting that we turn back, or maybe that we try to go around them?’ asked Jackson tightly. He met Neil’s steady glance with a brief show of impatience.

  ‘If you don’t want to turn back — and I figger that ain’t likely seeing that you’ve come so far — then we’ll have to go straight ahead. No point in trying to drive this wagon train around that territory. It would take the best part of seventy days to do it, and there’s no guarantee you’d be safe even then.’

  ‘So we drive straight on,’ growled the big man.

  Very slowly he relaxed his grip on the rifle, let it fall to the soft earth beside him. He picked up his mug of hot coffee, tilted it savagely to his lips and drank deeply of it, some of the scalding liquid splashing over his arms and bare chest, but he did not seem to notice it.

  ‘Just so long as everybody in the train knows what they’re letting themselves in for,’ said Neil quietly, and evenly.

  ‘They knew the danger before they agreed to join the train,’ muttered Jackson thickly. ‘They all agreed to come along and they elected me to be wagon master. They take their orders from me now. That’s the way it’s got to be.’

  ‘Can you speak for all of them?’ Neil glanced at him in surprise.

  ‘That I can.’ He nodded his head ponderously. ‘And I say that we drive straight across this territory, and to hell with the Shermans and the Hollards, and their hired gunmen.’

  Neil shrugged negligently.

  ‘Very well.’ He drained his coffee. ‘If that’s the way you want it. Better rest up your horses for the rest of the day out here. We can ford the river first thing tomorrow morning.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ agreed the dark-haired man. ‘Ain’t no sense in putting tired horses into that current.’ He threw a quick glance at the sky, clear and cloudless. ‘Weather’s going to stay fine. Ain’t likely to get swollen in the next few hours.’ The big man paused, then nodded, got heavily to his feet and went over to sit on the wagon tongue.

  In the heat head of the afternoon, a deep and clinging silence lay over the camp. It was possible to make out the gurgling of the water over the smooth stones near the bank where the river ran faster. Lowering very slowly to the west, the prairie sun threw down the heat that was reflected from the desert in dizzying waves.

  Men and women forsook the open for the shade inside the wagons, but even here there was a deep and sullen heat, nowhere was it possible to escape from it. It was something that had been their constant companion since they had entered the desert to the east some four days earlier.

  Not until an hour before sundown did the heat pressure ease. Then the wind came sighing in from the north-west, blowing off the tall hills in the distance where they stood out on the skyline, a cooling wind that brought the men and women out of the wagons, around the fires which had been lit in the open. Down by the river’s edge Neil Roberts washed some of the dust from his face and neck, feeling the cold water sting his skin where it had been burned by the sun, rubbed raw by the alkali dust.

  Around the fires they were cooking bacon, boiling coffee in the big pans, ladling it out into mugs, the smell of the steaming liquid lying over everything.

  Neil pulled the lashing of his jacket tighter about him to keep out the cold night air. He rubbed a broad thumb against the butt of the Colt at his waist, stared across through the leaping flames at the leader of the wagon train.

  ‘You said you had some questions you wanted to ask, Roberts,’ boomed Jackson loudly. ‘Go ahead. Ask them. I’ll tell you all I can.’

  ‘There’s not much.’ Neil shrugged, chewed reflectively on a strip of bacon. ‘I know where you’re headed — California. But why do you want me to lead you?’

  ‘You’re a fast man with a gun,’ said the other bluntly. ‘They told us that if necessary you shot first and talked later. You’re the kind of man we need on this journey if they spoke the truth. Some of the dangers you’ve told us of, but there are bound to be others. We’ve heard something of what happened to the other trains that tried to get through. Some of ‘em didn’t even get as far as this. We passed some on the way here, back there in the alkali.’

  Neil nodded, narrowi
ng his eyes a little. For a moment he wasn’t listening to the big man seated on the opposite side of the fire, and his eyes were fixed eastward on the flat, rolling face of the desert where the whiteness of the alkali seemed to shine eerily in the fading light of evening. He, too, had seen the remains of the small wagon trains that had tried to push their way westward and had met their fate out there in the terrible, heat-wavering wilderness where the days were scorched slices of hell, and the nights, long hours torn out of the arctic cold. The small trains, perhaps half a dozen wagons, had tried to cross without sufficient water, possibly without any real idea of what they were facing, of the only way to go; and they had died. Months later men had come across the remnants of the wagons, with the bleached bones lying beside them, all that was left of men and animals.

  Now, any wagon trains heading west were larger, more than a score of wagons, plenty of water in the barrels they carried, all of the men armed with the latest weapons, repeating Winchesters, Colts, ready to meet trouble along the way.

  ‘You can consider yourselves lucky if you’ve managed to get this far without trouble,’ he said flatly. ‘The going isn’t likely to be as easy from now on.’

  ‘We’re ready to meet anybody who tries to stop us,’ said the big man quietly. ‘If we have to fight these hired killers you speak of, then we’ll fight them. We’re not looking for trouble, but if it comes … ’

  He left the rest of his sentence unsaid, but there was a tightening in his tone, a hard, grim determination.

  ‘It will come, take my word for it.’

  Neil glanced at the man beside him, then beyond the men at the fire towards the women and children clustered around the wagons drawn up around the fire. Perhaps the men were ready to fight it out with hired killers and the border gangs, he thought tightly, but what about them? His grey eyes were cold as he allowed his gaze to wander around the camp.

  Night closed in swiftly from the east. For a brief moment the setting sun, hidden behind the mountains, touched the crests with a flash of red light as if a fire had been lit at the rear of the world. Then the darkness swamped it out and the stars were clear and crisp in the heavens overhead.