Panhandle

by Brett Cogburn

  You could tell that he was reminiscing about the good old days. He had sort of a savage, dreamy look about him as he thought about raiding and pillaging. From what I’d been able to see, about all Indian men did was hunt and fight. The government wouldn’t let them fight anymore, and had killed off their main source of meat. There wasn’t much to do except reminisce.

  One of the boys the chief had spoken to returned astride the yellow horse I wanted. I hadn’t even mentioned the particular animal I sought, but the chief knew. He worked on finishing off my makings while I got up and looked the animal over.

  The palomino horse was as cute as a button. He had a long white mane and tail, and his coat would have been dark gold except for the bleaching of the sun. All four legs were covered by white stockings, and a broad blaze reached from eye to eye and all the way down to his nose. The boy rode him around some while I watched. The little gelding seemed gentle and willing.

  “Do you like the horse?” Blue Knife asked.

  “He’s close to what I’m looking for.” I sat back down on the buffalo robe and pretended to lose a little interest.

  “What have you to trade, Tennessee?”

  I had come prepared, and I motioned for him to wait while I went to my horse. I led Dunny back to the brush arbor and pulled two pouches of Bull Durham tobacco from my saddlebags, a pound sack of Arbuckle coffee, and a brand-new pocket knife. I placed them on the robe before the chief. He put the tobacco in his lap along with the coffee, and then opened and closed the knife a few times before laying it back down.

  “What else have you brought?”

  “That looks like a fair trade to me.”

  Blue Knife appeared to consider my offer while shaking his head somberly. “One of my women rides that horse. She likes him very much.”

  “I’ll just bet she does.”

  “She will get very mad if I trade him to you. She has a bad temper, that woman.” For a warrior that had sent more than a few fellows to the happy hunting grounds, he made a passable attempt at looking scared.

  “Have we got a trade?” I asked.

  “No trade. What else have you got?”

  I knew I should sit down and wait him out, but I was an impatient sort, and was anxious to take that palomino to Clarendon. I went to my saddle and brought back the Winchester Billy had traded me. The chief was now paying a lot of attention; in fact, he rose to his feet and met me halfway. I handed him the rifle and he worked the lever a few times and examined the ejected cartridges. He shouldered the rifle and sighted down it before setting himself back down with the barrel across his thighs.

  “Good trade.” He motioned me to take the horse.

  “No trade. What else have you got?”

  The way he looked at me for a minute I was glad he didn’t have any whiskey.

  “The rifle was given to me by a friend and he will get mad if I trade it to you. He has a bad temper,” I said.

  Surprisingly, the old savage laughed loudly and motioned me to sit back down with him. I ended up trading the rifle and the other plunder for the horse, a good Gallatin saddle with a fancy braided Mexican bridle, and wool blanket thrown in to boot. God only knows where the saddle came from. I put it on the palomino and led him to my horse. We mounted up and made ready to leave.

  Blue Knife walked out to our horses and placed his hand on Dunny’s neck. “I think your heart is good, Tennessee. Come back and smoke with me sometime.”

  I nodded and turned my horse away. As I was riding off I heard him say, “Cry when you are sad, or you will let it live in your heart and it will eat you. Come here when you need to, and we will show you how to mourn.”

  As we were riding off H.B. said, “You paid too much for that horse. Now if old Dutch was still operating we could show you how to come by a horse the proper way.”

  We passed the mourning squaws on our way back. The sight of the wretched women made me turn to H.B. “Those Indians were bloody fighters, and they were constantly trying to wipe one another out until we come along and whipped them all. They don’t know any other way than war, and somebody always has to lose.”

  H.B. just nodded his head. “I reckon that’s right.”

  I pulled up my horse and looked back at the village with its mutilated women, rotten meat, and skinny, potbellied kids. “I’d be damned if I was them if I wouldn’t take up my gun and try and kill every white son of a bitch in the country—man, woman, and child. I wouldn’t live like that.”

  Charlie Russell, back before he quit cowboying and got famous painting pictures, said that the Indians had lived in paradise until we came and ruined it. He said that a cowboy was about the closest thing to an Indian, and I guess he wasn’t too far off the mark. We lived about like them, and there would come a time when civilization would be trying to shut us up somewhere. They’d run us down and starve us out, and in the end they would parade the last of us up and down the street to lament our passing while they fired a cannon shot for Old Glory. In the end, it was just a simple matter of geography. We needed a lot of room, and the country was just growing too small for cowboys and Indians.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The smile of a truly happy woman is a thing to behold. When I rode into Clarendon and showed Barby Allen what I’d brought her she squealed like a little girl, and wrapped her arms around that palomino horse like he was her long lost baby. If I was to live ten thousand years, the sound of her laughter would ring just as clear in my mind as it did that day.

  When I looked at her there was no understanding of her, any intuition, or supposition of what was in her soul. The smallest things she did held me spellbound, and yet she shed no light on the mystery that she was to me. I simply beheld her and knew that I wanted her. The wanting of her was almost more than a man could bear; there was nothing I wouldn’t have done to possess her.

  “Is he gentle?” Her hand took up the bridle reins.

  “Oh yes.”

  She took a quick look back over her shoulder into the store, and I couldn’t make out her father anywhere in the windows. “I couldn’t take such a gift. It wouldn’t be proper.”

  “I wouldn’t be proper, or your daddy wouldn’t approve?”

  Her spine stiffened, and she met my challenge eye to eye. The stubborn look on her face changed in an instant to a mischievous one. She made a study up and down the empty street on which we stood, and for some reason I was already beginning to feel part of some secret that I was not yet privy to. I took up Dunny’s bridle and followed her as she led the yellow horse around the corner into a narrow alley beside the store.

  “Tighten the cinch for me.” Before I could even reach the horse she had disappeared into the store’s side door.

  I hadn’t even finished tightening the cinch when she reappeared. She was carrying a metal washtub, and with little aplomb she plopped it down beside her horse, who was no less startled than I. I was getting a little red around the gills at the thought of her riding astride, but I have to admit that I had enough foresight to have shortened the stirrups for her before I’d even made it to town.

  “Get up on your horse and close your eyes.”

  Who was I to argue? I stepped right up on my horse and sat there with my eyes squinched shut. I felt silly and excited at the same time. I heard that tub thump, and the stamp of her horse’s hooves as he shifted under her weight.

  “All right.”

  I opened my eyes and she was sitting her horse before me. She had managed to arrange her skirt around the saddle as good as could be expected. I didn’t know where to look or not to look. Before I even had time to make up my mind she took off down the alley at a lope, and I had to hustle to follow her.

  I had seen skirted women ride astride before, but it’s a whole hell of lot different when it’s some old granny or little girl riding to the neighbor’s house. At first I was feeling kind of bashful, but I ended up feeling pleasantly wicked. I was determined to match her nonchalant daring, and I quickly gained a position beside her and
stared straight ahead while we made our escape from the peering eyes of town. I didn’t want her to think I hadn’t seen a woman’s calves before, even if never so lovely a pair.

  We loped over the plain in silence for miles with the hot wind to our faces, and the sun behind us. When our horses had worked up a light sweat we settled to a walk, and still we said nothing to each other. We wandered aimlessly the dips and folds of the land with both of us caught up in the silence of our own pleasures.

  When we had ridden down the sun, and the shadows started to crawl across the land we stopped atop a rise and sat our horses where we could watch the lights of town glowing on the horizon. I wanted to say something, but nothing seemed to fit, and everything I thought of seemed like only small talk. I took in her shadowed profile there beside me, and I drank it in like I was dying of thirst.

  She turned her head to me, and her face was all but hidden in darkness. “Do you think me too bold to go riding off with you like this?”

  “I don’t know what to think of you.” I meant every word.

  “And how should I take that?” Her voice was filled with mock indignation.

  “Take it the best way.”

  She seemed to think on that for a moment. I rested my forearms on my saddle horn and waited. My mind raced with the idea that there was something I should do or say before the moment was lost. The fortunes of a man in love and war are made at such moments when courage cannot fail.

  “I’ve never seen anything as pretty as you.” I fully expected her to flee for the safety of town, but she held her ground.

  “Are you making love to me, Tennessee?” And again there was that playful hint to her voice.

  “I’m doing a poor job if you have to ask.”

  She was silent, and I knew that I was right. I made up my mind then that I’d already waded in up to my neck, and I might as well go ahead to swimming.

  “I’ve thought about you a lot since the first time I saw you on that stage.” I sounded like I was taking an oath instead of confessing.

  “It must be hard to pay attention to your work with all that on your mind,” she said.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Maybe you are a little too serious at times.”

  I guided Dunny over alongside her horse until my leg was right up against hers, and our faces were close in the dark. She didn’t pull away, and I looked at her for a long count of three while I built up my courage.

  “I haven’t begun to get serious, yet.” I leaned out toward her, ready to steal a kiss.

  I admit to having thought about kissing her on more than one occasion, and I guess you could say that I was determined. When our faces were only inches apart she laughed and rode away. I was left behind with a goofy shape on my lips, and a humming down in my drawers. It didn’t take me long to set in after her. She was hard to catch, but like I said, I was determined.

  I caught her on the outskirts of town, or rather she pulled up and let me catch her. The chase had my blood up and I turned my horse crossways before her like some bandit blocking the road.

  “I’m dead set on kissing you.”

  She must have taken me seriously, because the play was gone from her voice when she spoke. “All right, you can kiss me.”

  Well, there it was, and I began to falter. She sat her horse calmly, staring at me, and acting like she was waiting on the coffee to boil. I managed to position myself back alongside her, but I was taken aback. I leaned close to her again, but she made no effort to ease my discomfort. She kept her face to me, but she made no move to meet me halfway. I hung up there almost to her lips with that goofy-lipped feeling coming over me again.

  I cussed, and then cussed again for cussing in front of her. I drew back, not sure at all what to do, and feeling defeated. The tide of the battle seemed to have turned against me, and I was at a loss what to do about it. She kept looking at me, and that was making it worse. What the hell did she expect?

  “Well?” she questioned.

  “Well what?” I snapped.

  I made to turn away, but the old devil started coming up in me. I leaned out quickly and kissed her. It was no more than a peck, and I barely felt her lips. I reared back just as quickly as I had closed in on her, and I wasn’t at all satisfied with my actions. Before I could make up my mind to have another go at it, she reached out and grabbed me. She pulled me slowly to her, and I guarantee you I could feel her lips that time.

  When she pulled back I was too busy readying myself for another go at it to talk. Her hand on my chest held me off, and I halted my assault. I could feel her hand slightly quivering against me, and the warmth of her was still on my mouth. I pushed lightly against her, but she stepped her horse away until there was space between us again.

  “I’d better get home.”

  That couldn’t have been any farther from my thoughts. “Ride with me some more.”

  “Don’t follow me home. I’m probably in enough trouble already.”

  “Ride with me.” I pointed my horse away from town, and beckoned her with my hand.

  “I think there is more trouble in what you ask.” She stepped her horse near again, and her hand once more touched my chest, if only briefly.

  She started off toward home, and I made as if to follow her. She turned in the saddle and held up a hand for me to stop. I sat and watched her ride away into the darkness, and long after she was out of sight I listened for the sound of her horse. When I could no longer hear her I turned and rode east with my heart outsized in my chest, and a smile on my face. I began to whistle a silly little tune to the jig of Dunny’s feet on the trail. I was still whistling it the next morning when the sun climbed up out of the ground to the east, and I was forty miles long gone from her.

  H.B. and I went to riding for the Horseshoe outfit south of the Canadian. We spent the latter part of the summer over in the Cherokee Strip receiving and working trail cattle on the T5, another ranch owned by the same syndicate. The cattle were all from down below the tick line, and the managers planned on wintering them in the Strip and then moving them to the Horshoe the following spring. Folks will tell you that we didn’t know what caused Texas fever back then, but just about every good cowman had the right idea by that time.

  The South Texas cattle had built up immunity to the fever, but stock they mingled with farther north invariably got sick and died. It was the ticks those southern cattle were carrying that spread the disease. Nobody had the whole thing figured out, but most had learned that once the southern cattle were wintered in our country they no longer spread the disease.

  The Panhandle Stock Association was barring passage to all herds from that “way down” part of Texas. Trail herds coming north had to pass to the east of the Association members’ land holdings by going up the Western Trail, which was the original trail to Dodge City. Once a trail herd made it north of the Cherokee Strip, the going got tougher. The settlers were growing thicker every year. It wouldn’t be long until a man couldn’t drive a herd through western Kansas without stomping on somebody’s crops. It had already proven true with the trails farther east.

  The Texas Land and Cattle Company, the “Syndicate” as we called them, was a Scotch outfit, and they were big operators. However, the T5 wasn’t much to brag about. The cattlemen occupied the Strip on a lease basis, and not much was put into improvements in those camps. Their hands were a rough, outlaw bunch, better at stealing horses and robbing travelers than they were at handling cows. They had some fellow’s skull with a bullet hole in it hanging on a peg in the bunkhouse, and liked to hint around about the killing. Later on, it was a couple of T5 hands who helped Marshal Henry Brown and his deputy rob the bank at Medicine Lodge, Kansas. They killed the president and a teller, but were soon caught and hanged.

  I won’t say every man on the T5 was of that sort, but I figured that those who weren’t outlaws were at the least well-wishers to that sort of thing. I hadn’t any use for the outfit, and was glad when we were released to go back to the H
orseshoe. H.B. and I took our time riding back, because we wanted to see some new country. We rode from camp to camp all the way across the Cimarron and the North Canadian.

  H.B. noticed me scratching at the back of my neck. “You eat up with them too?”

  “I feel like I’ve got mattress critters crawling all over me.”

  “Let’s stop and turn our clothes wrong side out.” H.B. got down off his horse and proceeded to undress.

  “That ain’t going to get rid of them.”

  H.B. stomped his spindly, fish-belly-white legs out of his long handles, and stood there studying the ample curve of his belly. He scratched around and came up with a big gray louse and cracked it between his fingers.

  “It won’t get rid of them, but it’ll get us some relief for a while.”

  I jumped down and started peeling off my clothes. The insides of my shirt were crawling with lice and various other parasites. I went over myself thoroughly, and hunted down as many of the little varmints as I could.

  “I ain’t ever been eat up like this,” I said.

  “I waited out a blizzard in the Winter of ’76 in a dugout on the Concho with a bunch of buffalo hunters. I got me the worst case of seam squirrels I’ve ever had in my life. That spring I found me a camp of Mexican sheepherders, and bought a set of clothes off of them. I burned everything I’d been wearing, and paid one of those peons to peel off all my hair with a set of sheep sheers.”

  “I’m gonna burn mine when we get somewhere to replace them.” I gave all my clothes a good shaking and then started putting them back on wrong side out.

  “Somebody’s coming.” H.B. stood in all his radiant splendor and scratched at his balls while he studied the wagon coming down the trail about a quarter of a mile off.

  “Shit!” I fumbled hurriedly at my clothes.

  H.B. didn’t seem bothered or hurried. By the time we were dressed and up on our horses I saw that a man and his wife were sitting on the seat of the little covered wagon. I was wishing H.B. would veer off the trail and go around, but he rode right up to them.