Saddle Tramps

by Owen G. Irons

  ‘Do they have a doctor?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, friend.’ The little one-quart pot was already boiling. The visitor had put in only enough water for one cup of coffee. ‘Hear about the trouble back in Tulip?’ he asked, looking up abruptly. I saw Andy’s face tighten. My stomach drew in on itself.

  ‘No.’ Andy was definite. ‘We skirted that hick town.’

  ‘You should’ve stopped,’ the stranger said, and I saw that he had been eyeing my damaged wrist. ‘They have a doctor there.’

  ‘You talk a lot,’ Andy commented.

  ‘What trouble are you talking about?’ I asked. The stranger filled his tin cup with coffee, sipped at it and replied.

  ‘Man gunned down earlier back there. Got shot through a closed door. Bullet took him in the forehead. Damn shame,’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘Did he have a name?’ I asked. I could feel myself trembling. Andy’s eyes were wider than normal.

  ‘They called him Miles Sturdevant. Shot right through the door!’

  ‘You already said that,’ Andy growled.

  ‘Sounds like it was an accident then,’ I commented. The stranger looked at me over his coffee cup and smiled.

  ‘Does it? Back in Tulip they’re saying it was murder. Plain murder. Maybe whoever was shooting didn’t intend to do it, but it’s murder all the same. They’ll surely hang those boys if they catch up with them.’ The man tossed the few drops left in his cup on to the flames and watched the dregs sizzle and steam. Rising, he nodded his head and said, ‘Thanks for the hospitality, men. I hope you find a doctor, son.’ Then he touched the brim of his hat and we watched as he walked away into the night, his shadow merging with the long darkness of the night plains.

  Andy started to follow him. I grabbed his arm as he passed me and hissed:

  ‘No, Andy!’

  ‘He knows who we are.’

  ‘Sure he does, but he gave us warning, too. We’ve got to saddle up and ride.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave him behind to say what he knows,’ Andy said, and by the feeble starlight I saw a wolfish glint in Andy’s eyes. It was something new, a side of the wild cowhand I’d never seen before.

  ‘Andy,’ I said, tightening my restraining grip. ‘What happened back then – in Tulip – we both know that it was an accident. If you do what you’re thinking it will be murder, plain murder.’

  I don’t know if I had convinced Andy or not. The matter became moot as we watched the stranger turn his horse and ride away, disappearing into the cold night. ‘Let’s ride, Andy,’ I told him. ‘We have to put some miles under our ponies before we have other guests.’

  ‘All right. We’d better,’ he agreed. ‘Wouldn’t the boys back at the Pocono have a good laugh if we got ridden down and strung up by a bunch of farmers forking mules and plow horses!’ Andy laughed. He was his old cheerful self again. I smiled and started kicking my bed together.

  It was funny, I thought, that Andy had been thinking of the Pocono Ranch and the boys back there, because that’s exactly what I was thinking of again. Wishing that I was back there sleeping on my old swayed bunk, smelling man-sweat and tobacco.

  Instead of being a murderer on the run.

  TWO

  Tolliver, if that was the town we were looking at as we sat our tired ponies on a grassy rise overlooking the cluster of buildings below us, wasn’t anything its inhabitants were likely to brag about. A deeply-rutted main street with perhaps a dozen buildings on each side facing it like a nameless crowd, another twenty or thirty structures scattered at irregular intervals along a few rough side streets. There seemed to be no plan to the town, no common design to the buildings which were of adobe or brick or weather-grayed planks, some of them augmented by corrugated steel panels.

  ‘Threw it up with whatever they had at hand, didn’t they?’ Andy asked sourly.

  ‘Looks like.’ I saw no flourishing farms, only half a dozen cattle gathered near one of the larger white houses. No sign of industry. It was hard to determine why Tolliver had been built where it was at all. But there was a river that snaked its way across the long valley. Its silver glint was bright in the morning sun. Maybe the early settlers had topped out the rise where we now sat, weary from months on the overland trail, spied the river and said, ‘The hell with this pioneering. This is good enough for me,’ and just stayed on.

  I thought that the odds of the burg having a real doctor were slim, but I had to find out. I was feverish after our night ride. My hand was swollen so that my fingers looked like bloated crimson sausages and pain pulsed through all of my arm.

  ‘What the hell,’ Andy muttered. ‘They must have beer at least.’

  I wasn’t giving any thought to beer or any other refreshment. Even the deep hunger gnawing at my stomach had ceased, overridden by the demanding pain. I got little sympathy from Andy, but I understood it. No one pays any attention to another man’s toothache. Somehow, people aren’t built that way. To me, however, there was nothing else in the world that meant a thing beyond relieving the pain that I was carrying. I thought that if all else failed, there might be a barber with Chinese opium on his shelf alongside his leeches. It wasn’t unheard of. In many towns the barber was the only man of medicine to be found. And opium had comforted many a dying man on his trail to the grave.

  However, I had never seen a barber set a broken wrist.

  ‘Let’s get on down there, Andy,’ I said.

  The horses’ hoofs whispered through the long grass. The new sun was warm on my chilled back as it rose higher behind us. Dark shadows stretched out from the squat collection of buildings. In the far distance the line of snow-capped mountains reflected the morning light with the brilliance of mirrors.

  I heard a dog yapping somewhere as we neared the foot of the main street, saw two kids with fishing poles walking toward the river. A storekeeper was sweeping the section of plankwalk in front of his store. He glanced up in surprise as we trailed our ponies into town. Strangers, I considered, must be something of a rarity in Tolliver. I didn’t like that. We would be too easily remembered if anyone should come looking for us here.

  ‘You have a doctor in this town?’ Andy called out to the storekeeper and after a moment’s thought, the man lifted a stubby finger up the street. ‘Looks like you’re in luck,’ Andy said. He grinned. ‘And so am I!’

  He nodded toward the badly plastered adobe-block building across the street. Two horses stood patiently at its hitchrail and the door stood open. Above the doorway the word ‘saloon’ was inexpertly painted.

  ‘Andy—’ I cautioned.

  ‘I know! Be careful! Don’t start any trouble! Keogh, you always expect the worst of me.’

  He laughed and turned his pony’s head toward the saloon. I watched him go. He was right – I did always expect the worst where Andy was concerned. He didn’t set out deliberately to find trouble, but he had a way of drawing it to him like a magnet. I rode on, scanning each building, looking for the doctor’s office.

  When I found it, the front door was standing open – apparently the folks in Tolliver liked their fresh air. I called out, got no reply and, removing my hat, crossed the sagging plank floor of the gray room. There was a desk, a swivel chair with a leather back, a medical chart posted on the wall and a filing cabinet with a veneered-wood face.

  ‘What!’

  The little man at the interior doorway appeared startled to find me there. He was bent with age, white-haired and moved with a shuffling gait. In his hand he held a plate of ham and eggs which he carried to his desk and placed carefully down. He began eating without saying a word more to me.

  ‘Sir,’ I asked, ‘are you the doctor?’

  Without looking up from his plate he nodded. Glancing around I spied a spindly wooden chair and seated myself waiting for the old man to finish his breakfast. ‘What is it?’ he asked, sawing away at his thick slice of ham with a dull knife.

  ‘Broke my wrist,’ I said, holding it up.

  ‘I’ll lo
ok at it in a minute,’ the doctor answered. ‘A man has to eat. Now that sounds like nothing, but a lot of people don’t seem to be able to accept that simple fact.’ He went on some more about feeding the human form, but I wasn’t really listening. My broken wrist still commanded all of my attention. Finally, his utensils clattered down against his plate, and dabbing at his mouth with a napkin, the doctor pulled a pair of spectacles from his vest pocket, rose shakily, and came to where I sat waiting. He picked up my swollen red hand, turned it over and prodded it gently. I winced with the pain his fingers caused.

  ‘Shattered. You should have had it set yesterday,’ he said in a scolding voice.

  ‘There wasn’t a doctor around,’ I told him.

  ‘All right—’ He clicked his tongue. ‘We’ll see what we can do for you. I’m going to have to manipulate the bones, son. I’m afraid it will hurt.’

  ‘It already hurts,’ I said weakly.

  ‘This is going to hurt a lot more,’ he promised. ‘I’m going to give you some laudanum and when that starts to work its evil magic, I’ll proceed.’ He went to a glass-fronted case filled with apothecary jars and colored glass bottles, removed one of these and studied its label closely.

  ‘What do you do for a living, son?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m a cowhand.’

  ‘Not any more,’ he said dourly. I took it for a joke.

  ‘Not until this is healed, you mean?’ I said with an imitation smile.

  ‘Not ever,’ the doctor said. ‘Unless you can form a loop, rope a calf and tie it up with one hand.’

  ‘When my right hand is healed—’

  ‘Son,’ the doctor said bluntly, ‘that hand is never going to be useful again.’

  With my heavily splinted hand bound up with about six yards of gauze, a bottle of laudanum in my hip pocket and a dizzy, sick feeling on me, I went out of the doctor’s office to face the brilliant morning sunlight. I led my horse up the street where now a few men on horseback and a wagon taking on goods at the store populated the wretchedly rutted thoroughfare. There were two wooden chairs placed on the boardwalk in front of the saloon and in one of these sat Andy, tilted back with a mug of beer in his hand. I was pleased to see him by himself. Even Andy Givens has trouble getting into a scrape when he’s alone.

  ‘What’d the doctor say?’ Andy asked, as I eased myself into the other chair.

  ‘He told me that my cattle-working days are done,’ I said grimly. ‘Says that the plowboy smashed my wrist up good and proper.’

  ‘Tough,’ Andy said, and he took a sip of his beer. His boyish eyes flashed at me. ‘What do you figure on doing then, Keogh?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered dismally. ‘I’ll think about it when my mind is clearer. He’s got me doped up pretty good right now.’ I showed him the laudanum bottle and he nodded.

  ‘We’d better keep riding, Keogh. I wish we could stable up the ponies, but I don’t like this situation much. The horses are pretty beat down; I figure that what we can do is ride somewhere along the river, water them and let them graze.’

  ‘It’s all we can do,’ I agreed.

  ‘I’ll get us a gunny sack full of supplies at that little store we passed. We should avoid towns for a little while. That’s where they’ll look for us.’

  ‘You think they’ll keep coming?’ I asked worriedly. Inadvertently, I looked toward the head of town as if a posse of farmers might appear there at any moment. Andy nodded, placed his mug beside his boot on the plankwalk and answered:

  ‘They’ll keep coming. Maybe they’ll hire someone to come after us, but they won’t leave it alone, I don’t think.’

  I didn’t either, no matter what I hoped. Two days ago I had just been a laboring, disgruntled cowboy with two silver dollars in his jeans. Now I was a maimed killer on the run and my pockets were stripped bare. I had to tell Andy.

  ‘I gave the last of my ready cash to the doctor, Andy. I can’t chip in for the supplies.’

  ‘I figured as much,’ Andy said, stretching his arms high in the air as he yawned deeply. ‘Don’t give it a thought, Keogh. I’m the banker in this outfit.’ My eyes narrowed questioningly. Andy grinned and reached inside his blood-red shirt. Around his neck was the little leather sack he always wore there to carry his spending cash. Now he tugged the neck of the sack open and let a few coins spill out into the palm of his rough hand.

  The gold gleamed brightly in the slanting morning sunlight. Stunned, I could not say a word for a minute. Then, after Andy had tucked the sack inside his shirt again, I managed to stutter:

  ‘That’s Barry Slattery’s money, isn’t it!’

  ‘Not now, obviously,’ Andy said, getting to his feet. ‘Why’d you think I was in such a hurry to ride out of Pocono, Keogh?’

  ‘I didn’t think that you’d robbed Slattery!’

  ‘That’s the last time he’ll short me on my pay,’ Andy said firmly. ‘The man was a crook, and you know it, Keogh.’

  I had to scurry to follow him down on to the street where he had unlooped his horse’s reins and started walking toward the store.

  ‘The other boys—’ I said breathlessly. ‘That money was for their pay, too, Andy. Charley and all the boys out at the line camps.’

  ‘Slattery can make it up,’ Andy said carelessly. ‘He’s got thousands stuffed away in the bank.’

  ‘He’ll be mad as hell, Andy! So will the boys. All of the Pocono Ranch crowd will be looking for us!’

  ‘They’ll never catch us,’ Andy said confidently. ‘No one is going to catch up with us. Quit worrying, Keogh.’

  I followed his shadow wordlessly to the store, waiting with the horses as Andy tramped inside to make his purchases. My head was still whirling from the laudanum. Spinning and spinning. I couldn’t sort through it all. Why hadn’t Andy told me what he’d done? Now we not only had the town of Tulip after us but all of Pocono Ranch. Slattery would not take being robbed lying down. Nor would his foreman, the bad-tempered Titus Evers. For that matter the boys – our friends – would be sore as hell when their pay packets were empty, even if they did get their coin a few days, a week, later. I leaned my head against the heated flank of my horse and stifled a moan.

  I lifted my head as the sound of Andy’s boot heels clicking across the plankwalk sounded. Whistling, a sack of provisions over his shoulder, he looked quite pleased with himself. He was, of course. Andy, I had long known, was a rogue of a man, cocky and carefree, unaware of anyone else’s idea of what was proper and civilized. That was what made him fun to be around; he was engaging company, always quick with a laugh and handy with the girls.

  It’s just that this was the first time I had realized how utterly amoral he was, a man without faults in his own mind because he had long ago convinced himself that he was free of arbitrary bonds and entitled to whatever gifts life brought his way.

  Andy tied the provision sack on to his saddle horn and swung aboard his leggy appaloosa pony. I lifted myself clumsily into leather and followed him down the street.

  ‘Here,’ Andy told me as we again reached the saloon, and he started his horse up a narrow alley beside it. Shrugging, I followed.

  There was a woman in a striped Mexican skirt and white blouse worn off the shoulder behind the building, the reins to a buckskin horse in her hand. She smiled at Andy with lips that were a little too full. Dark eyes sparkled in her round face as she looked up at him. A quiver of foreboding swam through my dulled mind. I looked to Andy pleadingly. But I already knew….

  ‘Carmen is going with us,’ Andy said easily. ‘She’s tired of working in the cantina.’

  I had left Andy to his own devices for only half an hour, no more. Quite enough time for him to strike an alliance, charm a bored local girl stuck in a dull job in a drab town with no prospect of ever leaving.

  I didn’t raise my voice to protest. What would have been the point to it? The woman – Carmen – swung on to her buckskin horse, flashing a lot of leg as she did, and Andy guided us past the backs o
f the buildings and out of the small town, leading us toward an uncertain and unpromising future beyond.

  We camped that morning along the river which Carmen had told us was named Mariposa Creek and which eventually merged with the Arkansas River. Having eaten, I sat watching the horses munch grass. The sun was warm and soothing through the cottonwood trees and the narrow river made lulling sounds as it passed. With my mind numbed by the concoction of alcohol and opium the doctor had given me in Tolliver, the struggles, the long night ride, I wasn’t able to keep my eyes open any longer.

  Glancing at Andy and Carmen who were happily sharing a blanket near the bank of the river, I dragged my bedroll up into the shifting shadows beneath the trees where a light breeze blew, toying with the upper reaches of the cottonwoods.

  I slept for hours, but eventually the returning pain in my arm brought me awake and I had to sit up and reach for the little blue bottle of laudanum. Sipping it, I saw that Andy and Carmen were up and active, saddling the horses, so I dragged myself to my feet and started that way, glancing at the slowly descending sun, the distant Rocky Mountains.

  ‘Carmen says we can make Colorado in a couple of days,’ Andy said as I met him. He gave the cinch of my saddle an extra tug and stepped away from my roan, patting its neck. ‘You got me doing all the work, Keogh!’ Andy laughed. ‘Boy, I don’t know how you’re going to get along without me!’

  Carmen, leading her hammer-headed buckskin, walked toward us, her round head bowed, her skirt rustling in the wind. I said nothing as Andy started toward her. They bent their heads together in private conversation and I heard Andy laugh again – that reckless, wild laugh of his. Carmen, it seemed, was trying to encourage Andy to move faster, to hit the Colorado trail sooner rather than later. Andy was in no hurry. He seldom was.

  I heard a brief spate of Spanish from Carmen, saw her gesturing back toward the town. I don’t speak much of the language, but I was sure I heard the word esposa, which isn’t far removed from its English equivalent. I waited as Andy separated himself from the woman then sidled up to join me.