Saddle Tramps

by Owen G. Irons

  Andy was busy saddling his appaloosa pony and just slid me a glance.

  I said, ‘I heard a few words of that, Andy. Don’t tell me that she’s married!’

  ‘I guess so,’ Andy said, ‘but she doesn’t like him much.’

  Which justified her running away with Andy in his mind. To Andy the road to happiness was just following your impulses. I shook my head violently.

  ‘He might come after her, Andy!’ Which was just what we needed. It seemed we already had half the territory looking for our scalps.

  ‘You’re worried, aren’t you?’ Andy said, frowning. He stood with his arms folded, his back leaning against the flank of his tall appy. He shrugged. ‘You’re probably right, Keogh. Tell her to beat it.’

  Andy returned his attention to his pony. He had made a decision; that was that. He now expected me to tell the woman he had just seduced away from her husband to go home and forget it had ever happened.

  Callous when stated that way, it meant nothing at all to Andy. Carmen had come along voluntarily. She was old enough to know better. He had just changed his mind, that was all. A man has the right to change his mind.

  ‘I can’t do it, Andy,’ I said, looking toward the river where the brown-eyed, hopeful woman stood watching Andy, her savior, her way out of the dull, soul-strangling life she was leading in Tolliver. Andy didn’t argue with me. We seldom argued. He just gave me a look as if I was completely useless and started toward the girl while I waited with our horses.

  I heard nothing of the exchange. As I watched, however, Carmen’s eyes grew wide and panic overtook her. What was she to tell her husband? Her fingers clutched at Andy, but he shook her off. I could see the distaste on his face. Frowning, he stepped to the head of the buckskin horse, slipped the bit and unbuckled the throat latch. With Carmen clawing at him, pleading, Andy flung bridle and reins into the river, adjusted his hat and walked back toward me, leaving the astonished woman behind.

  ‘Now let’s see her follow us,’ Andy said, and he swung easily into the saddle and started his appaloosa away, across the river. I hesitated, but what could I do or say? I swung clumsily aboard my roan pony and followed Andy Givens across the Mariposa and up the Colorado trail.

  I don’t know why it came over me just then, as I walked my pony through the river shallows, his hoofs sending up silver fans of water, the long shadows across the land beginning to gather and the sunset light to dull and diffuse, but it did:

  I was going to die if I continued to ride the range with Andy Givens.

  THREE

  I thought about my problem all the long evening as we crossed the high-grass prairie, aiming toward the lofty purple mountains to the west. By the time we made night camp, the conclusion I had reached was inescapable. Andy was a wild man, literally. He was not malicious, but his utter disregard for civilized codes was leading us along a path of destruction. His rash courage, such a virtue on the untrammeled lands when herding cattle, taming wild mustangs or fighting Indians, proved to be his greatest fault in other environs.

  Among settled people he was, even without intention, only a rogue puma asking to be shot down. Or hung by his neck.

  There hadn’t been more than five minutes that day when I hadn’t been looking across my shoulder, expecting pursuit. By the people from Tulip, by Barry Slattery’s Pocono crew, by Carmen’s wronged husband. Our enemies, it seemed, were legion and Andy – careless and untamed – could only lead us into more grief.

  We had decided to risk a small fire. Again we had camped on a knoll to enable us to watch the backtrail. It had only been a few days, but it felt as though we were establishing a pattern for the rest of our lives. Men on the run, forced to avoid settlements, ready with our guns.

  My head throbbed. My arm flared up with pain each time the soothing influence of the laudanum faltered. I did not wish to see what my hand and wrist looked like under the bundle of dirty bandaging. My Colt rode awkwardly on my left hip in my right-handed holster. I wouldn’t even be able to put up a decent fight if the hunters came down upon us.

  ‘Buck up, Keogh!’ Andy said, pouring more coffee into my tin cup. ‘You look like you’ve been trampled down and left to soak in buffalo muck.’

  ‘That’s pretty much the way I feel, Andy,’ I said looking up at him through the flickering firelight.

  ‘Your hand is bound to heal up. A few more days and you’ll be your old self.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I answered miserably. It had to be said, so I plunged ahead with my thoughts. ‘Andy … we’ve got to split up. It’s better for both of us.’ Andy was frowning, meditatively turning his coffee cup in his hands. I went on. ‘If you’ll trust me with half the provisions, maybe let me have four or five dollars cash money, I’d be able to make my own way come morning.’

  I waited. For anything: an understanding nod, a slow, careful curse, an angry explosion, but when Andy’s answer did come it was just a roaring, pitying laugh. He leaned forward and patted my shoulder.

  ‘It’s that laudanum that the doctor gave you to take, Keogh. That’s what’s doing the talking. Corey Keogh, you’ve never been a nervous man before! You’ve got to stick with me, friend,’ Andy said, lowering his voice. I sensed a sort of uncertainty or nervousness in his voice that I did not entirely understand. He told me:

  ‘You can’t make it out here by yourself, Keogh. Not with that hand, penniless and hungry. No – I’m not splitting up the provisions, and I need what coin I have. You’re stuck with me, compañero. We ride together.’ Quietly, he added something even more disturbing, ‘I need a witness.’

  I rolled up in my blankets making my own plans. I was getting shot of Andy, I just hadn’t figured out how to do it – not out here in a thousand square miles of empty land, crippled as I was. The laudanum produced swirling, disturbing images in my mind, thoughts that struggled but could not force themselves into the shape of a proper dream and after awhile I fell into a merciful, pitch-black sleep.

  The angry voice brought me awake. I don’t know how many times the big man had shouted before his roaring incomprehensible words brought my drugged mind to alertness. I was aware of a broad-shouldered man in a tight-fitting Spanish suit standing over me. He had a wide-brimmed sombrero dangling down his back on a drawstring. He had a big-bored Colt .44 in his hand and his stubby thumb was drawing the hammer back as I sat up in bed, wildly searching for my own revolver which was not where it was habitually positioned.

  The man fired. I threw myself to the earth and tried to roll to my feet. Then the second gun opened up. Three shots, four, flame blossoming in the night, the peals of gunfire echoing like thunder down a canyon. The big man crumpled and fell unmoving to the dark earth.

  ‘He wasn’t much of a shot, was he?’ Andy Givens said, nudging the stranger with his boot toe. Neither of us knew, but we each had guessed who the interloper was. Andy commented dryly, ‘I guess Carmen won’t have to worry about him any more.’

  In the morning, after we had built a rough cairn to cover the dead Mexican, we again saddled and started on our way, the rising sun coloring the eastern skies crimson and stark purple. I had nothing to say on this morning. I had refused coffee, refused the pan-bread Andy had fried while Carmen’s spouse still lay visible, contorted next to our camp. It was Andy who broke our uneasy silence as side-by-side we continued our ragged odyssey across the western plains.

  ‘That should be a lesson to you, Keogh. Last night I told you that you couldn’t take care of yourself! Make up your mind that you’re stuck with me, old friend.’ His look was vaguely threatening. I didn’t understand it. Even when his blue eyes danced with merriment at the sight of a herd of fifty or so pronghorn antelopes making their bouncing way across our trail, I still felt the coldness behind his smiles.

  I was beginning to feel like a prisoner.

  It takes nothing to gun a man down and leave his unidentified body out on the plains, leave it to the scavengers and the buzzards, finally to the ants and even smaller guests at the
feast of the dead. It was an everyday occurrence out there, in those days. But it was sickening all the same.

  I had now adopted a new attitude and was sickened by that as well. Considering all that had gone before, desperate to survive, I found myself catering to Andy Givens, agreeing with any wild notion that might enter his head.

  And all the time looking for a way to escape his threatening company.

  On the fifth day of our run I could stand it no more and began unwinding the filthy, cumbersome bandages from my hand under Andy’s amused gaze. What I found underneath was a purplish swollen bundle of meat and bone looking something like a dead bloated crab. I didn’t even try to flex my fingers, not then. I left the gauze, the splint and the little blue laudanum bottle behind me on the prairie.

  ‘They’re still back there,’ Andy said that afternoon as we continued our trek toward the snow capped mountains which seemed to remain constantly distant, but to double in enormity with each passing day.

  I nodded. ‘I’ve seen them. They’re not gaining any ground, though,’ I said, looking back toward the group of dark riders, far behind us, indistinguishable so far as detail, but all the more menacing for that.

  ‘They’re waiting for us to stop somewhere.’ Andy squinted at me from the shadow of his hatbrim. ‘No more towns for us for awhile. Good thing we have plenty of provisions still. And no night camps! We ride as long as the ponies can find their way in the dark.’

  ‘If the horses give out,’ I told Andy. ‘We’re done.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he answered, ‘aren’t we?’

  Whoever it was that was following us, their horses would be as weary as ours, I was thinking. But they, of course, would have the option of trading for fresh mounts in some hamlet along the route, if one could be found. We could not stop now.

  To our surprise we now discovered that copper strands had been strung overhead along the road we were following. The telegraph had come to our primitive land almost overnight. The singing wire could already have sent word about us ahead.

  ‘It’s all that gold they’ve found in Colorado,’ Andy conjectured. He lifted his chin toward the strands of wire. ‘They said that they’ve dug up more gold and silver along the Comstock Lode than has been found in Africa and Europe for the last twelve centuries. These money traders in the East want to know what’s happening in Denver and Leadville.’

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know if Andy’s opinions were based on anything other than bunkhouse gossip. It seemed he might be right. It wasn’t, I discovered, the telegraph or the Eastern ore magnates that had captured Andy’s imagination and prompted his remarks.

  ‘They say that in Denver some of those mine bosses have built houses with indoor plumbing – and all of the fixtures are of solid gold, Keogh,’ he went on.

  ‘Seems a waste,’ I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  ‘Makes you think, though, doesn’t it?’ Andy turned slightly in the saddle. ‘On the plains a man might risk a stagecoach holdup, dying in a storm of gunfire if it goes wrong, for a measly five hundred bucks. One bank alone in Denver, they say, has a hundred million dollars in its vaults … that does make a man think.’

  If my mind hadn’t been made up before, it was now. I had to get shot of Andy Givens at any cost.

  At noon-high the next day I saw them. A body of sixteen wagons, I counted, just around forty head of cattle, six drovers and a couple of outriders rolling slowly westward. Andy was riding with his head down. We were both pretty beat up, the trail having been long and water spare. I didn’t think he saw the distant collection of pioneers. He gave no indication of it.

  It was in my mind, as I have said, to get shot of Andy and shake my shadow free of the trailing riders behind us, whoever they might prove to be. What better place to conceal myself than among the pilgrims on a wagon train? Once among the settlers I would look like anyone’s brother or husband, not stick out like I was now alone out on the long prairie.

  I kept glancing that way all into the afternoon, waiting for my chance to shed Andy and see if I could join up with the settlers who would likely welcome anyone with an extra gun to defend their wagons. At least they would have food and water. I had none of my own, Andy having put the shutters up on the pantry door. I waited to make my move, drifting carefully away from Andy as twilight began to settle across the plains. I might not have told you this directly, but Andy Givens was no man to underestimate. He had seen those wagons and seemed to have been reading my mind.

  ‘Suppose we go ahead and catch up with the wagon train when they’ve got their night fires lit, Keogh? We can slip away from whoever it is following on our back-trail. Come up with some story we can tell those greeners.’

  I only nodded, feeling my hope of escape flatten, fold and deflate.

  Near to sundown, Andy and I, still joined at the hip, veered from our trail and heeled our ponies toward the wagon encampment.

  ‘Gentlemen?’ the stranger with the shotgun said as we reached the busy camp where the settlers were setting up for evening meals, rounding up the kids and hushing the babies. Cattle, gathered into a circle, lowed quietly. These were mostly white-face steers, and a few milk cows, unlike the wild longhorns Andy and I had long argued with, and which were impossible to bed if they were not in the mood.

  People cows, not beef cattle. Herefords and a few Jerseys, not the wild-eyed Texas breeds. The settler with the scattergun who had stopped us seemed more like the longhorn steers we were accustomed to.

  I let Andy do the talking. He was born to shine people up.

  ‘Sorry if we’ve startled you, friend,’ Andy was saying. ‘My friend and I, Mr Corey Keogh here, were out mustanging with a few of our friends. Had us a fair-sized gather of wild ponies when we got jumped. Indians. Think it must have been some Cheyenne that strayed from the reservation. It was chaos, brother! Lost our wild horses and most of our friends back there. We’ve been dragging the line for close to three days now, and we sure would appreciate coffee and a place to bed for the night.’

  The story was neither too unusual or too wild to be believed. Especially not the way Andy told it, with his sincere eyes and frank smile. Me, I would have stumbled over my tongue on the lie and made a mess of things. The man with the shotgun was sympathetic.

  ‘I guess we can keep you. Stay away from the women and our horses, and you’re welcome.’

  ‘We aren’t that kind, mister!’ Andy said as if his character had been impugned. ‘My friend and I were three years in the cavalry helping folks like you across the plains.’

  He got away with that one, too. The man muttered an apology and let us pass. Andy gave me a broad wink. ‘My theory is, if it helps, tell ’em you’re the president’s brother.’

  We had settled into our blankets and were watching as the campfires burned low, safe within the ring of wagons, with no sign on the pursuing men on our trail. Our stomachs were full and the prairie night was almost balmy. That didn’t mean that our troubles were at an end.

  I had seen her too.

  You could not forget a face like Eva Pierce’s. I felt as if I had been hit between the eyes by a sledgehammer when Andy and I went strolling in the twilight and came across the two girls from Tulip. Sure enough, it was Eva Pierce and the girl I had taken for her sister back there at the Grange hall. The younger one smiled shyly, Eva quite brazenly, with the secret knowledge she held dancing in her eyes. Andy and I had merely touched our hats and walked on, but for a long while after he was deep in thought.

  ‘Well, well,’ he murmured once as we traveled on. ‘What do you think of that?’

  I thought it was the end of us. I reflected on our situation as I lay in my blankets, listening to the sounds of the settlers’ families as they made their night preparations, scolding a kid, making small complaints and sometimes a little love-whisper passing between them.

  Eva Pierce! And I had seen that look again in Andy’s eyes. I wondered – could it be that the men we thought were pursuing us were not
following us at all? Could it be that it was the girls they were chasing after? If so, that only meant that we were in a worse fix than before. Because if some of those farmers out of Tulip were chasing them down, Bull Mosely was bound to be at their head, and finding me and Andy among the settlers would only convince him that his crazy jealousy was justified.

  Then, too, his friend Miles Sturdevant had been killed in the melee and Mosely would feel obligated to avenge his death. All in all we seemed to have landed in a more precarious situation than we had started from. Tossing and turning in my bed as the night sounds quieted, with only the barking of the dogs when they responded to the yapping of prowling coyotes, the crying of one colicky baby, I became more determined than ever to break with Andy Givens. I had seen the way he had looked at Eva Pierce and noticed the answering signal in her eyes.

  I was riding a trail to perdition with the devil himself as my guide.

  After midnight I had determined what my course of action had to be. My only resources were my weary roan horse and whatever loads remained in my Henry repeating rifle and my Colt, slung ridiculously on my left hip, but I had lived off game and roots before – not well, but I had survived. I could do it again even crippled-up as I was.

  Andy was sleeping soundly, as he always did, deep in a conscienceless dream when I rolled out shortly after midnight, the stars silver-bright, gleaming in a cobalt sky. I didn’t bother to try rolling my blankets, but slipped away into the night with them folded over my arm. I wanted my roan and my saddle, nothing more. I crept from the wagon camp.

  And walked almost directly into the woman.

  ‘Please,’ she whispered, ‘take us, too.’

  It was the girl I had supposed to be Eva Pierce’s younger sister. Her eyes were starlit, her expression pleading. Her words were broken by emotion. I made no response. I had none to give. She was small, much tinier than I remembered. I could make out little of her features in the darkness. A small nose, generous mouth and expressive starbright eyes. Her hand was on my elbow and I shook it off. The night was still, and we were alone where we should not have been. She was a young woman terribly frightened of something.