Saddle Tramps

by Owen G. Irons

  I tried to put a rough edge in my voice.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady. You must have me mistaken for someone else.’

  ‘No,’ she said, looking up at me. ‘No I don’t!’ She went on as I looked around nervously, wishing I were anywhere else in the world. Her hand tightened on my arm. ‘Your name is Corey Keogh. You’ve fallen in with a man who’s constantly heading for trouble. But you stand by him because he is your friend. Now you’ve had enough – you feel like you have to sneak away rather than hurt his feelings. We have to sneak away too. My sister and me. You are brave and you are loyal, Corey Keogh. That is how I know I can trust you.’

  Well, she had my head spinning. I don’t know how else to say it. She was right about a part of what she was saying, guessing at another part of it, totally confused about what kind of man I was. I never could shine as a hero. I was nothing but a saddle tramp and I knew it.

  ‘Please?’ she asked, standing so near to me that I could smell the yellow lye soap on her and something else – a hint of the lilac scent I remembered from the Grange hall.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving, lady, on my own. I’ve enough troubles.’

  ‘He’ll kill Eva!’

  ‘Who? Andy? He wouldn’t—’

  ‘No,’ she said desperately. ‘Not him – I know what Andy is – I mean Bull Mosely! Bull will kill Eva. She’s … shamed his manhood.’ Her eyes turned down and shifted away. I wasn’t sure that I knew what she meant, although I could have taken a guess.

  ‘There’s another man, Corey … with Eva, there’s always another man. She’s on her way to meet him. In Colorado.’

  ‘There’s no reason for you to go, is there?’ I asked more sharply than I intended. Her eyes flashed.

  ‘She’s my sister!’ she answered, and I knew that it was enough reason for her. The question in my mind was: why me? And what could she expect me to do? It was all quite ridiculous, and I told her so. I was a man alone with only a pony and a pocketful of .44s. I was no match for the long plains, the rough mountains ahead, the band of men behind us.

  ‘You’re safer here with the wagon train,’ I said.

  ‘No!’ She was emphatic. ‘Why would they fight for us? People they barely know? Bull will have a tale concocted – a runaway bride, something like that, and the men will laugh and let him take her away. Now Andy Givens has arrived! Bull can name him as the man who has run off with his woman. And you know Andy much better than I, but will he not let himself be prodded into a gunfight?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said soberly, ‘he would.’

  ‘Then we have three lives at stake here,’ the girl said to me from out of the star shadows. ‘Eva’s, Andy Givens’s….

  ‘And?’ I said.

  ‘And my own, Corey Keogh. If my sister, if Eva … if something happened to her, I wouldn’t be able to carry on alone.’

  And she began to weep. It was too much. I would have broken down and accepted her improbable proposition if I still hadn’t retained a crumb of common sense. Why do their tears affect us so? And can they produce them on demand to make their argument stronger? I backed away a step and said, ‘I’ve got to be going, girl.’ I shrugged out of her hands and stalked unhappily to the remuda where my weary roan pony had been staked out with the rest of the settlers’ horses.

  It took a while for me to find my saddle in the stack of leather the wrangler had built, but in fifteen minutes I was on my big horse’s back, breathing free, ready for whatever the long night ahead might hold for me. But there they were, ready and waiting for me before I had touched spurs to the roan.

  ‘Here we are,’ the young girl said. Eva Pierce flashed one of her brilliant smiles at me, and with sour curses boiling up inside of me, I led our party of three out into the dark distances of the long Kansas plains.

  FOUR

  An hoot-owl had dived low on broad wings and swooped at my head, mistaking it for some small prey. My pony was unresponsive to the reins. I had to argue with him to continue his sullen plodding. Eva Pierce who had spent an hour steadily talking about how romantic and exciting a showdown between Andy and Bull Mosely would be, now rode in a half-doze, swaying in her side-saddle, the furlined hood of her amber-colored coat obscuring most of her face. The young lady at my side continued her disconnected chatter. She had thanked me two dozen times for my heroism and I was tired of it. There was nothing heroic about being ambushed by two frustrated, frightened women and impressed into service. Maybe Andy could have handled this situation well. All I could feel was the weary striding of my roan and the grating of my nerves.

  ‘I didn’t expect you to be such a grumbly man, Corey Keogh,’ I was told by the young lady.

  ‘This is not exactly a pleasure, miss.’

  ‘I see….’ The woman was thoughtfully silent for a minute. ‘Your heart has been broken.’

  ‘What in— What do you mean?’

  ‘Somewhere, sometime, a beautiful girl shattered your dreams and now you have become….’

  ‘Grumbly.’

  ‘Exactly!’ she said, pleased with herself for having solved my condition. ‘Who was this girl? Do you want to talk about it?’

  ‘No. Look – Mary Lou, isn’t that what I heard your sister call you? I’d rather talk about how we’re going to survive, outrun Bull Mosely and his friends, make our way to Colorado—’

  ‘Marly,’ she interrupted. ‘Only my sister still calls me Mary Lou, though that’s my given name. Everyone calls me Marly.’

  ‘Do they? That’s fine.’ I was angry and not doing a good job of holding it in. ‘Look, Marly, a man alone out here has a chance. Game, enough graze and occasional water for his pony. One man can survive with luck. Then we have those—’ I lifted my chin toward the looming bulk of the great Rocky Mountains, stark and clear in the night with their 14,000 foot thrust despite the distance. ‘We have to consider how even to imagine we’re going to trek that mountainous country where game is not so plentiful, where winter comes early and hard.’

  ‘You are a pessimist!’ Marly said.

  ‘And a grump.’

  ‘That, too,’ Marly said. ‘For now, though, Corey Keogh, we had better just keep riding, for they are behind us. The men with the guns are on our trail again.’

  She was right. As we paused to let our horses breathe, I could see, even in that poor light, enough of the thin veil of dust rising off the plains to indicate a large body of men following in our tracks. I was no longer grumpy, just plain scared, for these men meant to ride us down and probably to kill me over an affair I had nothing to do with.

  Not for the last time I solemnly cursed Andy Givens and his rogue ways.

  As a rule of thumb, traveling through life, I have always figured that just when you think things can’t get any worse, they will.

  Now as we continued on our way toward the bulk of the Rockies we picked up some traveling companions I did not care for. Three prairie wolves, and these skulking strangers seemed to have their minds set on us as a possible prey. One snap of their jaws at a pony’s hock could leave it crippled and down, and us without a horse. Denver was a long way to walk.

  I had used my pocketknife to saw away the front flap of my holster now that I had switched it to my left side, but had no confidence in my ability to shoot accurately with my Colt in that fashion. A long gun was slow in positioning and aiming, and so the wolves continued to worry me as they slunk along behind us, waiting for some opportunity to disable one of the horses.

  My rule of thumb continued to prove its reliability in the next ten minutes. I did not expect it when it happened although I had been concerned with the possibility. In a rush the three silver wolves charged at us, their eyes excited with feral eagerness. In their blood was the knowledge of how to take down a bison, an elk with quick, vicious snaps of their heavy jaws to the animal’s tendons, and they surged upon us with that confidence.

  I pawed at my holster, failed to make purchase and heard the sh
ots from an unexpected quarter roar, the echoes rolling across the long prairie as one of the wolves went down. A second escaped on a crippled leg, the other skittered away in a loping run.

  Rule of thumb … Andy Givens drew up beside us on his lathered appaloosa pony and grinned at me, smoke still leaking from the muzzle of his revolver.

  ‘I told you that you just can’t get along without me, Keogh,’ Andy said. Then, holstering his weapon, he turned his eyes on Eva Pierce. ‘Hello, Honey. What made you take off like that?’

  ‘I don’t want any more trouble,’ Eva managed to say. Her eyes were fixed on the dead wolf, not on Andy. ‘Bull Mosely is trouble. But you … you’re all trouble, Andy.’

  Andy, being himself, only laughed. ‘That’s me, I guess! That doesn’t mean I’m not a good man to have around in a pinch. Ask my friend Keogh here.’

  All of which just seemed like banter, mild boasting. But, you would have had to be there. Even by the thin glow of starlight I could see Andy’s eyes as they shifted, refocused and came to rest on Marly. If Eva didn’t want him, the look said, maybe her little sister would take an interest in him.

  I wasn’t the only one to notice the look in Andy’s eyes. Marly deliberately eased her pony closer to mine and asked, ‘Should we keep on riding, Corey, or do you think that we should give the ponies a rest?’ Making it clear, I thought, that in her mind I was the boss of this little outfit.

  Andy, damn him, was grinning. ‘We’ve got enough of a lead on them. Let’s make night camp – no fire.’

  We walked our horses ahead a mile or so to be away from the wolf carrion and the predators it would attract, unsaddled and blanketed up, all of us uncomfortable, cold and feeling a little helpless. The land was vast and we had cut our ties with any support we might have expected.

  Eva sobbed for a little while as I tried to sleep. Maybe she was thinking about the man she intended to meet in Denver. I don’t know. I had my own problems. I hadn’t asked either of these females to ride with me; I hadn’t expected Andy to ride us down. Though I suppose I should have guessed that he would.

  I yawned, I slept. It was in the hour before dawn that I saw Andy working his way toward Marly’s bed.

  He made me think, inconsequentially, of one of those slinking prairie wolves. Silent, treacherous and deadly. I dragged my Colt into my left hand, an uncomfortable position, sat up and growled a warning:

  ‘You touch her and I’ll shoot, Andy.’

  He smiled, but it was not pleasant. Hatless, he walked to my bed and hovered over me. The youthful cheerfulness was not there in his eyes, around the corners of his mouth.

  ‘You can’t mean what you said, Keogh,’ he said in a low, warning voice.

  ‘I meant it.’

  ‘What’s the girl to you?’ he asked, crouching down beside me.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right. Nothing. What you said – I’ll take that as a mistake. A misunderstanding between friends. We will leave it at that, forget it.’

  ‘If you harm her, Andy, I will be on you.’ I was angry, determined and, yes, afraid at once. But I meant what I was saying.

  ‘Are you going to gun me down with that left-handed draw of yours!’ Andy laughed. ‘I don’t think you could hit a kitchen wall if you were locked inside the room.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, Andy,’ I said carefully. ‘My hand is broken up, but if you were to touch that girl I would come after you. With elbows, knees, skull and teeth if I have to. I’m telling you … leave her alone.’

  Andy laughed. ‘Why, sure, partner! I didn’t know she meant that much to you. I don’t need any woman that bad.’ He bent lower and his voice took on a menacing tone, ‘Remember this, Keogh – we will always be friends. But if you ever cross me again, I will shoot you dead.’

  He meant it. I could tell that he did. I did not sleep the remainder of the night, and rose early as the low sun burnished the mountain peaks and silvered the dew-heavy grass.

  Andy was gone.

  None of us was surprised, though there was not the relief we should have felt.

  Marley asked me, ‘What will he do?’

  ‘Andy? He’ll find the next town, the next woman, and forget us all within a week.’ That was what I told her, although I did not believe it myself. Andy Givens was not a man to be scorned, and he would believe now that not only had the women turned their backs on his advances but that his best friend had sided with them.

  I could do nothing about that. The land before us now began to rise and shape itself into folded hills, cut here and there with deep washes where freshets roared past through the pines and the Rockies loomed magnificently higher every morning. The nights were bitterly cold and without provisions other than the occasional game I could bring down with my awkward, left-handed shots, we began to suffer unimaginably. I will give the women this: they did not complain. Eva and Marly both knew that none of this was my fault. Had it been up to me, I would have just turned my pony’s head southward and tried to find some warm pastures in New Mexico Territory to winter out on.

  But day after day, Marly reminded me that it was all-important that Eva reach Denver where her true love was waiting for her. Both women were beginning to wear down now as we continued our brutal trek day after day. We had followed the Arkansas River until it fell away from our line of travel, skirted Bent’s Old Fort and continued on, the land rising higher and higher. Eva resembled a mere sketch of a woman, a simulacrum, her head bobbing as she clung to the saddle horn hour after hour, determined to reach her goal.

  ‘I never understood a part of this, back there in Tulip, I mean,’ I said to Marly as we traversed a lengthy spread of broken knolls. ‘I thought that Eva and Bull Mosely were….’

  ‘That is what Bull thought,’ Marly told me. ‘The truth is that Eva never encouraged Bull. He was just another man – like Andy – who was dazzled by her looks and believed that he could own her.’

  ‘It’s too bad Eva can’t find a way to make her intentions plainer to men,’ I said sullenly.

  ‘She can’t help it!’ Marly snapped. ‘She is that way – friendly and open and men take it wrong. All of you…!’ she ended on a critical note. I couldn’t think of an answer, so I let the miles pass in uncompanionable silence. The pine trees and cedars were beginning to grow more thickly around us, clotted with scolding blue jays and raucous crows, red squirrels bounding from bough to bough.

  ‘You are obviously devoted to your sister,’ I ventured to Marly as we waded our horses across a tiny, quick-running rill. ‘But what about you? Where is this all leading you?’

  ‘It does not matter,’ Marly said with an indifferent flip of her hand. ‘Eva is the promise of our family. The pretty one, the clever one.’

  ‘I see. Is that what you were always told?’

  ‘It’s clear, isn’t it?’ Marly asked. Her mouth, a lovely mouth I thought, grew tighter.

  ‘How old are you, Marly?’

  ‘Eighteen. What does that matter?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Except that you should be considering where your own life is leading you now.’

  Marly fell into a deep silence which lasted for a mile or so. When she was herself again she began to explain a little more about the two of them.

  ‘Father did not return from the War, Corey. Our mother used to pray all night for his homecoming. She left a lantern burning in the window for a full ten years after the surrender was signed at Appomattox. She became … not a mother, but a ghost among us living in a shadowy past. Eva and I ventured West. A man named Copperfield somehow remembered Eva from home – in Virginia – and he posted a letter to her. It was a very sweet, quite sad, lonely letter. I read it, of course. We had nothing left at home; Mother had lost her mind, you see. As young girls we did not know, but … that is not important. We came West, my sister and I, and have been continuing and continuing West. And there is just no end to it!’

  She didn’t cry, but it was close.

  ‘My sister,
you see,’ Marly continued, ‘is too much like my mother. She is not strong for all of her seeming confidence. She was content to sit at the window and only watch and wait for some white knight to appear. She must have read Copperfield’s letter a hundred times, but she was so frightened of uprooting herself even though all of our small world was slowly dying around us! Afraid to undertake the journey. The vast expanse of the land out here is so daunting!’

  ‘And so you took her by the hand and made her decision for her.’

  ‘Something like that,’ Marly replied. ‘Eva became ill along the way and so we laid over for a few weeks in Tulip. By the time she had gotten well, she had already become the belle of the town. But with this business concerning Bull Mosely, I knew we had to be traveling on again. Eva needs a quiet, settled life somewhere, and Denver may be the answer. This Copperfield seems to be the sort who can make her content.’

  ‘But for you, what is there in Denver? You are still only eighteen and quite alone,’ I commented. Marly ignored my question, looking away.

  ‘Copperfield will be a good man and true. I know this. And Eva will be happy….’ Then Marly did bow her head and cry. I remained silent, watching the far country.

  It was on the sixteenth of October – I know this because the man we asked for directions kept a calendar – that we entered the town of Pueblo, Colorado. Marly, a little slyly, told Eva and me that she had enough silver money secreted inside her garments to provide us all with a real hotel bed and a hot bath. She was a woman, this Marly, despite her years.

  Stabling the horses, I looked first for familiar ponies, scanned the main street for Andy’s appaloosa or a body of men who might have been from the Tulip mob, even the Pocono Ranch hands. It seemed, fortunately, that we had left all and sundry far behind.