Panhandle

by Brett Cogburn

  “The Comanche had always been bad in that part of the country, but with most of the men of fighting age gone they got worse. My brother and I slept out in the timber away from the house when the moon was full and the Comanche were raiding. He wanted to join one of the companies of Rangers, but he had me to take care of.

  “When I was ten we put in a watermelon patch and made a fine crop. We hitched up our wagon and set out to take a load up to town to see if we could sell them. We had been out of just about everything for a year, and hadn’t any hard money to buy what we couldn’t make. A bunch of Comanches came upon us on the prairie, and it was a good mile to the nearest timbered bottom.

  “My brother had an old rimfire Henry rifle that Daddy had left with us and he leveled it on the bunch, but was afraid to shoot unless they were close, since we had only one full magazine of ammunition to our names. They scared off for a while, and stayed back out of easy rifle range whooping at us and scaring us silly. We tried to drive on with our oxen, but they raced in and stuck them full of arrows.

  “We decided to make for the shelter of the timber, and started in that direction with my brother walking backwards with his rifle leveled the whole way. The Comanches set in on us about two hundred yards from the timber, and both of us were hit with arrows more than once. My brother picked his shots carefully, and every time he squeezed the trigger one of those braves took some lead. He may have been short of full grown, but that long Henry rifle in his hands kept the Comanches from overwhelming us. He was about the bravest man I ever knew, even if he was still a big kid himself.”

  Billy stopped, and I heard him take a deep breath, and steel himself for the rest of what was to come.

  “We made the timber with both of us carrying arrows in our bodies and took shelter behind the first tree we came to. My brother was hard hit and dying, but he laid his rifle up across a limb and dared them to keep coming. They rode off out of shooting range and had them a powwow about how to get hold of us without my brother putting a bullet in their briskets.

  “While they were talking my brother died and left me alone just before nightfall. There wasn’t a shell left in the Henry, but I kept pointing it at the Comanches as they rode back and forth in the dusk, and they finally gave it up and rode off. I think if they had known it was just me left they would have killed me. I watched our wagon burn in the night, and took off walking for Henrietta, thirty-five miles away.

  “Folks at the settlement pulled the arrows out of me and doctored me up some so I could lead them back to the body of my brother. They buried him, but there wasn’t much more they could do to help me. A good family took me in as an orphan, and I went with them when they moved back to Fannin County that year. A lot of folks were going back east a bit to get away from the Comanches until the men came home from the War. Within a year there wasn’t one family left in that whole settlement.”

  Billy stopped his story and seemed to study on whether he should go on. You can’t speak of the hard things in life without reliving them just a little bit, and maybe more than a little bit. However, Billy seemed bound to finish what he started, and he continued his tale.

  “By the time the War ended those people who were looking after me decided to move to Arkansas, and I didn’t go with them. A man named Bob Lee came home from the War, and he kind of took me under his wing and his family gave me work. I thought he was just about the finest man I ever saw, and although I was only twelve, I took to wearing a pistol in a sash around my waist and a feather in my hat just like him.

  “That part of Texas had too many Unionists before the War, and Reconstruction was damned bad there. The carpetbaggers, Union Leaguers, and homegrown ne’er-do-wells seeking favor with the government thought Bob’s family had a little money they could steal, arrested him on trumped charges to blackmail him, and hounded him in about every way they could. Everybody who claimed to be a Unionist with a grudge against the Lees had free rein to do as they pleased. Davis’s State Police and Union troops had control of the country, and no ex-Confederate officer like Bob had a leg to stand on with the government.

  “Bob and his family were proud, and they took on all comers. They didn’t ask for quarter, nor gave any either. Bob hunted his enemies and shot them down where he found them, and he didn’t hide the fact. The night riding got so bad in that country that we never stayed home for the Union men to find us, we just slept out in the woods, and folks brought us supplies at arranged places. Many of those foolish enough to sleep at home were called out in the night and shot down on their porches, or hanged. Just being seen talking friendly to Bob and his family was enough to get you killed.

  “To be arrested by the state police or the soldiers meant you’d never make it to jail, because they would shoot you down or hang you by the roadside for the womenfolk to see. Bob said I wasn’t old enough to fight, but I held the horses on many a night while he and his friends tried to even the score a little.

  “The odds were too long against him, and they shot Bob down from ambush while he rode down the trail from home in ’69. A lot of his kind stayed a while to fight, but his good name had kept us in favor with much of the public while he was alive. After he was gone it was only a short time before every last man that had fought on Lee’s side was either killed or left the country.

  “I was known to be a Lee man, but I hadn’t killed anybody, and was too young for them to come after me if I stayed out of their sight. There wasn’t anything left for me in that country, but Bob had been awful good to me. I reckoned to settle a few of his accounts before I headed for other parts.

  “The Comanches had showed me how to use the full moon, and on one such night I made the rounds and paid call to the house of a family that had given Bob hell. I called two men out and shot them down in their yards with my Navy Colt, and I got another down the road apiece, going to his well for water that morning. The law came after me hot and heavy, but by the time they knew what I’d done, I’d thrown away my desperado sash and plumed hat, and was halfway to South Texas on the back of a horse too fast to catch.

  “I changed my name, and hired out with a trail herd being put up for a drive to Abilene. I took the name of Billy Champion, because I was young enough to like the sound of it, and the state had put my name on the wanted list. The state police were looking for a boy that didn’t exist anymore, and I never looked back, not once. I just kept following trail herds and wearing out horses until I was sure the Law had forgotten about me, and I was another person entirely.”

  I waited for Billy to continue, but he was silent in the growing dark.

  We often assume to know our friends best simply by the fact that they are our friends, and accordingly their souls must be most apparent to our detection. I learned that day how little I knew of my friend. Perhaps you never really know anybody any more than a face, a voice, and a loose sum of jumbled assumptions.

  I could tell Billy had lost whatever urge had moved him to talk, but I was too full of questions to leave it alone.

  “The Law ain’t still wanting you after all this time, are they?”

  “I saw my given name a couple of years ago in one of those criminal books the Rangers carry.”

  “East Texas might as well be in another state. That’s been long enough ago that everybody, including the Law, probably forgot about you.”

  Billy turned to me, and from his voice I knew he was giving me that faint, tolerant smile of the kind normal folks often grant the imbecile.

  “Like I said, you’re still new to Texas. We’re taught here from birth never to forget a wrong until we get the chance to make things right. The Rangers won’t forget a crime, they just ain’t found me yet.”

  We were five miles from home and it was getting time we headed back, but I couldn’t bring myself to move if Billy had more to say without me pumping him. He didn’t, and after several minutes he rose to his feet to walk to the horses. I followed him and we rode all the way home in silence, and turned the mules and horses loose in the
corral.

  I started with Billy to the house for supper, but he stopped at the edge of the lamplight spilling weakly out of the windows on the yard. He stood there and stared up at the full moon glowing bright in the sky above.

  “I don’t know why I told you all that,” he said.

  I had no answer for him, because I didn’t know why he had told me either, except maybe we were still good friends despite loving the same woman.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Times were changing indeed, and I couldn’t seem to keep up with the pace. It seemed like no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get ahead for going backwards. My teamster business was just enough to keep my family fed, and it was going to be a long time before I had enough cattle, if ever, to make my living with them. The interest rates that Caldwell banker was charging me threatened to put me under even before I got started as a cattleman.

  I was too long getting over the pneumonia, and missed a lot of business that summer. I had a bank loan to pay off that fall, and didn’t have one red cent set aside for it with only two months until it was due. Worry was riding me with the devil’s spurs, and if I could have donated the time I spent worrying about money to more constructive thoughts, I could have solved half the world’s problems in a matter of days.

  To top things off, Barby told me she was pregnant again, and that I could expect another child in late winter.

  That was just another big log thrown on the fire burning under me, and I cast my fortunes back on the prairie with my mules before the banker started sending folks by to see if I was going to work. As usual I cast one last glance back at my home before I drove out of view, and wondered if I’d ever make it look like I’d promised Barby it would. Maybe I had some long lost uncle who had died and left me a fortune that I didn’t even know about yet. Or maybe it was just going to be one long, hard pull to get where I wanted to go.

  Long and I were making a trip together down to the Tule Ranch when we heard a pack of dogs coming our way just north of the Washita. We stopped our wagons and studied the prairie for signs of the bawling animals, or for whatever they were chasing. Before long, six long-legged, grizzled mutts of a kind I’d never seen before came racing out of a canyon at speeds I didn’t think a dog capable of. A coyote was running before them, and he was just managing to keep a lead on them.

  A rider came loping behind them in the distance, and I soon could tell it was Billy. He rode up to us just about the time those dogs latched on to that coyote right in front of our wagons.

  “Ain’t those dogs something?” Billy was all smiles, and I noticed he was already toting a damned big coyote pelt across his saddle swells.

  “Those ain’t your dogs, are they?” I asked.

  “No, they belong to Archie.”

  I noticed for the first time that Billy was riding a horse with a Rocking Chair brand.

  “When did you go to work for them?”

  “Not long ago. It ain’t a bad outfit.”

  “Did Andy hire on too?”

  Billy looked back the way he’d come. “He’s back behind me somewhere. Archie’s horse tripped in a prairie dog hole, and Andy stopped to help him.”

  “I heard some Englishmen had bought that outfit.”

  “Yeah.”

  Word had already spread all over the country about the change in operation at the Rocking Chair Ranch. The new owner, or representative of the owners, was a fellow named Archibald. He didn’t know a thing about cows and grass, but he ran a loose ship, and didn’t get in his hands’ way when they went about their work. What’s more, he loved to gamble and drink, and thought nothing of his hands doing the same. He was confident that his foreman would see that the books showed a profit, and spent most of his time chasing coyotes with his dogs, or sitting at a poker table in Mobeetie.

  “Isn’t Archie some kind of royalty?”

  Billy just shrugged. “He’s all right. He says he’s Duke Archibald or something, but the boys all call him Archie.”

  A duke must have his vassals, retainers, and men-at-arms, so without regard to efficient payroll, Archie traveled with a cavvy of cowboys everywhere he went. It wasn’t long before just about every cowboy in the country wanted to work for the Rocking Chair. The pay was no better, but the allotment of fun sure seemed abundant.

  A lot of the boys working for Archie were a little on the wild side, and rumors soon sprang up that many, if not all of them, were taking advantage of the loose management of the ranch and rustling cattle. Not just Rocking Chair cattle, but everything they came across. The Mobeetie crowd loved Archie, but a lot of folks were beginning to think that it wouldn’t be long before the Association was sending word back to England notifying them to check their books, talk to their man here, and look over their operation in Texas.

  I watched the growling pack of dogs wool that coyote around from several directions. It was a vicious game of tug-of-war. An especially big, yellow dog latched on to the varmint’s chest and crouched over his victim while looking up at us with proud eyes and a bloody muzzle. His tail was wagging, and I heard bones crunching in his massive jaws. The last breath went out of that coyote in a ragged wheeze. Despite the fact that he was dead, the excited wolfhounds continued pulling at him.

  “That yellow dog’s a tough one,” Billy said.

  “I’ve never seen dogs like those.”

  “Archie gave a lot of money for that set. That lean, silky-haired red one is a Saluki cross. They’re fast as greased lightning, and supposed to be all the way from Egypt.”

  “It sounds like he’s a man that likes his dogs.”

  Billy lifted the fresh pelt from his saddle. “Look at this. We caught a damned wolf about an hour ago. This big old lobo was too much for the dogs to finish off, and I had to shoot him.”

  “I ain’t seen a wolf in a while.”

  “That’s because somebody is beating you to them. That five-dollar wolf bounty has half the cowboys in the Panhandle ruining good horses chasing wolves.”

  “I thought all you had to show to claim a bounty was their topknot with the ears on.”

  “I would have scalped him, but Archie wants to have his hide tanned to hang on his wall.”

  “I heard you sold your racehorses to some rich sugarcane man from Louisiana.” Long was keeping an untrusting eye on the dogs, as if they might jump on him when they were finished with the coyote.

  “That fool loved a fast horse even more than I do. He gave me three thousand for War Bonnet alone, and another two for the rest of my racing string.”

  I knew from Billy’s own mouth that the sale of the trail herd he had driven the summer before had netted him a tidy sum, despite the troubles and delays he’d experienced.

  “That’s a lot of money,” Long sighed.

  Billy was once again a mere cowboy, albeit one with a gambler’s roll of bills big enough to choke a horse stuffed inside his boot top. His name was going to be the toast of many a cowboy bellied up to a bar by that fall.

  “What about you, Long? Are you still making whiskey?” Billy rode his horse among the wolfhounds, hoping he could scatter them and retrieve the coyote.

  “No, Fawn made me promise to quit selling the stuff over in the Indian Nations.”

  “That must be hard on your pocket.”

  Long still ran just the wagons he could operate himself, but he contracted his own loads. He might have been a one-man gang, but he continued to make money hand over fist.

  “I’ve got me a new line of business.” Long said.

  “Is that so?”

  “Long’s going to be the biggest farmer in the Creek Nation before too many more years,” I said.

  “I thought you had to be a tribal member to own land over there.”

  Long grinned like a wolf himself. “I’ve got a cousin who married into the tribe and that got him a big chunk of fine farmland. I put up the money for him to plow it in and seed it.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been busy,” Billy said.

  �
��I also hired me a white lawyer out of Kansas City to act as my front man. He formed me a little company and got me a contract supplying Fort Reno and Fort Sill with corn.”

  “You old black devil.” Billy sounded truly impressed.

  “If the white folks knew half of what I’m doing they’d come string me up.”

  Billy looked back again for Andy and their employer. There was still no sign of them. The dogs were finally done with the coyote, and he stepped down and grabbed it up by the hind legs. He tied them with a thong and hung the animal on his saddle horn.

  “I’d best go find the rest of my bunch.”

  We all shook hands and watched him ride away with the worn-out dogs following on his heels. The dead coyote bounced against his leg with its tongue hanging out and flopping in time with the horse’s stride.

  It seemed that while I followed rutted trails to an uncertain fortune, Billy and Long were rapidly outpacing me up the financial ladder. While Billy was chasing coyotes, playing poker, and no doubt adding to his wallet, I just kept chugging along, determined that hard work would see me through. A month before the interest on my note was due I paid a visit home to spend a few days with my family. I tried to let on like all was well, but Barby pried my worries out of me. No black-hooded torturer of the Inquisition ever made easier sport of a man’s mind than that woman did with me.

  She suggested I borrow the money from Long, as he was our friend, and we could have him paid back by mid-winter if I kept the road hot. Long would have loaned us the money, but he was gone to the Creek Nation delivering his first government contracts, and besides, he was bound to be strapped from the investment in his farming operation, or so I told her. It wasn’t right of us to lay our troubles off on him every time he turned around. Ashamed as I am to say it, it bugged me some that a black man was doing far better than I.