His words ended in a shout and they slapped heels to their horses and charged, Rep’s packhorse on a lead coming behind them. Startled, the outlaws’ horses threw up their heads, nostrils wide, and saw four dark forms charging down upon them, the air ringing with yells.
Rep fired, and one of the herdsmen spun and dropped, staggered up, then fell again to one of Cris Mayo’s slugs. The other man fled from what he evidently took to be a cavalry charge. Shouting and firing, the three riders raced after the fleeing horses. From the hill behind there was a shot, and Cris ducked involuntarily, having felt the whip of the air as the bullet passed, and then they were gone into the darkness, driving the horses ahead of them onto the vast plain.
He could not believe it. They had brought it off, and for the time at least the outlaws would be unable to leave. Far into the night they drove the horses, finally losing them as the herd began to lag and scatter. They made no effort to keep the horses bunched then, just let them go, confident that few would find their way back.
At the camp in the hollow Justin Parley waited for the report, and it could not have been worse. “Three or four riders,” the lookout said, “and there might have been more. They got Wes Jackson with their first fire, an’ Noble, he cut an’ run.”
“The horses?”
“Scattered over the prairie, every blamed one! We’ll be lucky if we can round up half a dozen.”
“Noble?”
“He’s waitin’. Says he didn’t have a chance. Swears it was the U.S. Cavalry.”
“He’s a fool and a coward. Get rid of him.”
Silver Dick Contego glanced up from his coffee. “Give it some thought, Major.” Whenever Silver Dick wished to be persuasive he always used the title. “Noble has kinfolk down yonder in the Indian country. He’s half Cherokee, you know, an’ we’re ridin’ right into his home base. They’ll be askin’ after him.”
Parley hesitated only a moment. “Of course. We must not judge too harshly. By the time we reach the Cherokee country he may have given us reason to forget his error. In fact, we will give him a chance now. Noble?” he called.
The man was large, fat around the waist, heavy in the jowls. He was sweating as he walked forward, obviously frightened.
“You’ve allowed our horses to be stolen, Noble, but you’re a good man. So good that you’re going to prove it by going out there to recover them. Noble, I want you to leave now. Don’t come back until you have at least four horses. With that many we can recover the others.”
“But—”
“Now, Noble. This minute. I trust to your skill. Just bring them back to us.”
The big man hesitated, trying to find words that would get him off the hook, but there were none. He turned and stumbled toward the second campfire, a desperate and frightened man.
The hawk-faced man who called himself Murray, squatting by the fire, spoke up as Noble came near. “Pete, you take a walk over that direction. That gray of mine, he surely did take to that grass at our last camp. He’s apt to wander back there, and where he goes, others will.”
Pete Noble nodded gratefully. “Thanks, Murray. I’ll give it a try.”
He walked off into the night, and Murray finished his coffee and stood up. Sometimes, as now, he wished he was back in Hannibal, loafing along the river front.
He considered Noble. The man was all but useless, so he had better go himself. He gathered some rations and extra ammunition, and turned to the men at the fire. “We’ll need those horses. I’ll have a try myself.”
Let Pete Noble go on ahead; he would follow. Let Pete draw the fire. Pete would answer it while he could, and then Murray would get the horses.
“And then,” Murray said aloud, “I’ll—”
He let the sentence go unfinished, keeping his thought to himself.
Chapter 5
COLONEL THOMAS MCCLEAN leaned his shoulders against the stump. The ropes were tight and his wrists hurt abominably. His ankles, also bound, did not. The outlaws had tied the rope around his boots, and if they gave him a chance he thought he could slip his feet out and get away, but there seemed small chance that he would find the opportunity. He was closely watched. At least he wasn’t tied to the stump.
Yet something had happened at last, something that gave him hope. The horses had been stampeded and temporarily the renegades could not move. To try to leave here would put them out on the bald prairie, visible and vulnerable to searching cavalry and prowling Indians alike.
He eased his position a little. He had told them repeatedly that he was not Sherman, but some of them believed he was lying. That they planned to torture and kill him he understood; facing that, any development could raise a man’s hopes.
Yet he was puzzled. From talk in the camp—and nobody attempted to keep him from hearing—the horses had been stampeded by three or four white men. Who could they be? Not the Army, not yet. One of Parley’s gang had been shot, and now they had sent the man Noble off into the night after their horses, with Murray following him.
For a day, perhaps even two days, they would not dare to move. He considered that. They had told him that the telegraph wires had been cut, which he had guessed, and that they had torn up the track; but those were only temporary setbacks. His orders had been to report on conditions at once. He was known for his efficiency and speed of action, so when no report appeared, authority would begin to move at once. The disappearance of the train would be investigated from both ends of the track, the seizure of his person discovered, and several troops of cavalry or Indian scout detachments would move out.
Within forty-eight hours, surely, the search would begin; forty-eight hours in which Parley and his renegades had hoped to escape into Cherokee country, where they could scatter and become hard or impossible to find.
The stampeding of their horses had been a shrewd stroke on somebody’s part. Now they were immobilized and the situation altered.
The man called Silver Dick strolled over, tugged at the bonds to make sure they were secure, then squatted on his heels. “Don’t get your hopes up. This is just a temporary delay. Our men will be back with the horses in no time.”
“Perhaps.” McClean paused, then said, “Contego, I wish you would consider the situation. You believe, as Parley does, that I am General Sherman. I am not. My name is Thomas McClean, my rank is that of colonel.”
“You’re wearin’ a general’s insignia.”
“True. I was a brevet-general during the last months of the war, and that means, really, a temporary general. My permanent rank is only that of colonel. Actually, I am an inch taller than General Sherman and at least ten pounds heavier. My hair is darker than his. Only those who know neither of us well could mistake one for the other. The resemblance is superficial.”
Silver Dick was thoughtful. “Then I suspect, if that’s a fact, that they won’t chase after you the way they would the general?”
“Wrong,” McClean said. “Contego, the general is in command, and Sherman is not one to be laggard in such a case. I’d say that mounted patrols are already fanning out from a dozen positions, all of them hunting us. Partly because of me, but more, perhaps, because you stopped a train.”
McClean eased his position a mite. “Contego, you are an intelligent man. Please consider your position. Nearly twenty-four hours ago, a messenger must have left the station to report to Fort Sanders and the end of track. There are forty-five soldiers at the fort, at least twenty at Hell-on-Wheels, and they can be detached … or at least most of them can.
“When my report failed to reach headquarters, inquiries will have been made, and certainly the telegraph wires will have been repaired shortly after that. At least four troops of cavalry, with Indian trackers, will be headed this way. North and his Pawnee scouts will also be out. You made a bold gamble, but you’ve lost.”
“That won’t do you much good,” Contego said. “You’ll be dead.”
“I said you were an intelligent man, Contego. Dead, I am worth nothing to you. Aliv
e, I could at least speak for the man who spoke for me.”
Silver Dick studied him thoughtfully. He took out his fancy comb and ran it through his hair. “I’m not in command,” he said. “Parley is, and Parley wants you dead. Del Robb wants everybody dead, or at least he doesn’t care who he kills. We wanted Sherman. He wiped out some of our homes, he broke the back of the South. We got you. I believe you aren’t Sherman, yes, but, I reckon you were with him, so we’ll just have to give you what we planned for him, and catch up with him another time.”
“Think about it, Contego. You appear to be a shrewd, careful man … why not have an ace in the hole? If you get away, you have nothing to worry about. If you are caught, I can always say you protected me. It might make the difference between hanging or not hanging.”
Contego got to his feet. “Well,” he said, smiling a little, “I’ll admit one thing: that difference is considerable.”
It must be almost ten o’clock, judging by the moon, which was full. By now it was all beginning to happen. McClean knew the machinery so well that he could picture every step. What he did not know were several things of importance to him.
He did not know that his daughter had been one of the three riders who stampeded the horse herd, or that miles to the west an Indian woman, her child, and her wounded husband were nearing Fort Sanders.
Nor did he know that only a few yards away from him, Justin Parley, Del Robb and several others were grouped together talking earnestly. “Suppose he ain’t Sherman,” one man was saying, “he’s a damn Yankee anyway, so kill him an’ bury him. Nobody can prove nothing.”
“The girl saw me,” another said. “I wish we had her here.”
“I wish we had her, too,” the first man said, and chuckled.
Parley tasted his coffee. It was lukewarm. Irritated, he put the cup down. “Who’s after the horses besides Noble?”
Robb said, “Murray follered him. Noble ain’t much good, but Murray’s tough and he’s mean.”
“Noble’s a good tracker,” Parley said, “that’s one reason I let him go. He may be a slob, but he’s good at trailing, and he has no place to go unless he finds the horses.”
“What about him?” Robb said, thumbing in the colonel’s direction. “How long are you going to keep him around?”
“What’s the hurry?” Silver Dick said mildly. “We’ve got him. Let’s wait until we have some horses. If they should close in, we can trade him.”
“That makes sense,” Parley commented. He considered it. “The longer we keep him the more he’ll worry. He isn’t going to get away.”
PETE NOBLE FOUND the trail of the horses and walked along studying the tracks by the vivid moonlight. “Bunched,” he muttered. “This ain’t goin’ to be easy.”
Yet within the first mile he had isolated the tracks of the horses ridden by the unknown enemies, and had identified the prints of Reppato Pratt’s horse, as well as those of the horse that Rep had stolen from their herd. Recognizing a horse’s hoofmarks was no more difficult for him than for a bank teller to establish the authenticity of a signature, and he grunted with satisfaction. “Shoulda killed that Pratt,” he muttered, “knowed that all along.”
The other two horses were strange, both well-shod, and one of them with a long, swinging stride that ate up distance. He was envious. That was a horse! The fourth, which he soon knew to be a mare by its method of urinating, was also a fine animal.
Not many Western men rode mares, most preferring geldings; but this was a mare and ridden by someone of light weight. He had a hunch then, but it seemed so preposterous that his mind would not accept it. A woman? Not likely. Not in this country.
Pete Noble did not like to walk, but he could. In the country he had come from, walks of fifteen or twenty miles were not uncommon, and he had walked the hills many times, hunting. Luckily, no Indians seemed to be about and he strode on, making fairly good time.
The riders were not Indians, and the two strange horses had been freshly shod. There was no blacksmith nearer than Fort Sanders to the west, and not toward the east for at least a hundred miles. Hence, these horses had been shod some distance away, yet had been ridden no more than a few miles since then, for there was no sign of wear in the occasional sharp hoofprints he found.
He puzzled over this for awhile until the obvious solution occurred to him. These horses could only have been on the train. There had been a stockcar but they had paid no attention to it, being interested only in the car in which General Sherman was supposedly travelling.
Noble paused to mop his brow. Only two horses? Unlikely. Then there might have been a troop of cavalry, or maybe a squad, riding that train further up! Of course, there had been some soldiers, they’d seen them as the train passed, but had not suspected that there were horses too.
The conclusion to which he came was logical enough. There was a body of cavalry already on the trail of Parley and his men.
He was tempted to go back and warn them, but he had been told not to return without some horses. Moreover, if the cavalry caught up with Parley, Pete had no wish to be around. All Parley’s men scoffed at the Army but none of them wanted any part of a pitched battle with a bunch of seasoned Indian-fighting cavalry; least of all, Pete Noble.
It was nearing midnight before he reached the point where the horses had scattered. He searched around until he found the track of Murray’s big dapple gray and began trailing it and the half-dozen horses that accompanied it. The dapple gray was leading off, as Murray had suspected, toward their previous camp, for there was water and good grass there.
Shrewd as he was in the way of trails, Noble never suspected that he himself was trailed. He walked on now, sure of where he would find the horses. He would reach the place early tomorrow morning, allowing for a little rest now and again.
The three ridden horses with the lightly laden packhorse had left the herd shortly after the bunch broke up and began to scatter, but they were not his problem. Not now, at least. They had turned off toward the east, riding close together. There was a river over there, and they might be headed for that. They worried him little, for he would see them some distance off in the moonlight and there were buffalo wallows, crevices between rocks, clumps of brush, dips in the land, many places that would hide a lone man until he could bring them under his gun. And he was good, very good, with a gun.
REPPATO PRATT LED the way to the wooded valley near the river. “Ain’t no way wise to huddle up close around no spring or on no riverbank. Not if you’re on the dodge. Git what water you need and git back into close brush, where you can move several ways if need be.”
Cris listened with respect. He was in command here, he told himself, but he was no prideful fool and he recognized when somebody knew more than he did, and he was not only ready but anxious to learn.
“We got to keep sharp watch,” Rep said. “They’ll be huntin’ their horses and they’ll likely foller streams, knowin’ the horses’ll want water. Some of the critters are prob’ly headin’ back to their last camp, for it was a fine place to run stock.”
“What would they do if they found us?” Barda asked.
“Now, ma’am,” Rep said, “you’ve no need to hear the answer to that. They’d shoot us if’n we didn’t shoot first.” He looked over at Cris. “You done pretty good with that weapon. You used it much?”
“No, never. I just shoot where I look.”
“Ain’t no better way. You point your finger at something an’ you’re pointin’ right at it. You been doin’ it for years. It’s the same with a six-gun. You just point an’ shoot. The more you study on it, the more likely you are to miss.”
He stopped his horse at the river and let it drink. “Rifle-shootin’ when you’re settin’ off some distance, then you got to draw a fine bead. Use that sight, settle down an’ take a mite of time.”
When they had watered their horses they moved back into the trees, and settled down to rest in a small clearing. “No fire,” Rep said. “We ain’t more�
��n four, five miles from ’em now.”
Cris took off his hard square-topped derby and placed it on the grass beside him. He removed the black coat, which he had not shucked in a full day and more, and adjusted his sleeve garters comfortably and tucked in the tail of his shirt.
Pratt looked at him in amazement, for his shoulders and arms bulged with muscles under the striped shirt. “Man, what are you? A rassler? You ain’t carryin’ a pound of fat on you.”
“Me? I just worked hard. Farm work and fishing. Lifting, plowing, cutting the turf. I’ve wrestled some, and used me bare knuckles a time or two. I never had much time for setting about. It is fine land, in County Cork, but there’s much work to be done, many nets to be cast and drawn; and little time there is for standing about.”
He had been cutting and loading turf when he was eight, and every year since, and he had drawn nets from the deep water from that time too. Besides, his family had run to big bones and muscles, and he had been the strongest of them all, and of his village as well. By the time he was fifteen he had thrown every man who considered himself a wrestler in all the county around, and at seventeen had thrown a famous strong man from Wexford, and then another at a fair in Mallow who’d claimed to be champion of Donegal.
At eighteen he had whipped a pugilist they brought down-country from Dublin, and the following year, one from over the sea in Liverpool. He had a natural, easy way with his body, and understood his strength very well; and his uncle had taught him much about leverage and the importance of placing the feet. At nineteen he suffered three defeats in a row from a Cornish-style wrestler who possessed skills he had not heard of, but the fourth and fifth time they wrestled, he won.
He examined a long tear in his shirt. He had but two others, provided that he ever found his things again. And he had very little money left.
They dozed and waited through the long dark hours, and hands behind his head, Cris looked up at the sky and squinted at the patterns the stars made. Barda came over and sat beside him.
Novel 1973 - The Man From Skibbereen (v5.0) Page 6