“That’s it! Killing is what those heathens love best!” Sully cried. “They’d like nothing better than to take our scalps.”
“If they could,” Melbourne said meaningfully, patting his holstered gun to show what he meant. He fancied himself quite the gunman.
Honest Bob nodded agreement. “That’s it! Eagle Feather and his bucks would like nothing better than roasting any and all of us over a slow fire. Sure, they’d kill us if they could, but not before putting us through an almighty hard time first. Never mind that that would kill off the best source of guns they’ve got or will ever have.
“Or take our late friend Lank. Now you just don’t go stealing a man’s redeye. Everybody knows that. It ain’t done. But Lank couldn’t help himself. He just naturally liked getting folks riled up. That was his nature.
“That’s the bedrock truth of my calculations. People are gonna do anything you can’t stop them from doing. I trust in that and act accordingly. I trust the Comanches to kill us if we don’t outgun them and outsmart them.
“That’s why I say trust is the basis of our business,” Honest Bob concluded.
“I don’t know about that, Bob, but there is one thing that you’ve proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
“What’s that, Half-Shot?”
“That you sure ’nuff like the sound of your own voice!”
Half-Shot’s crack got a laugh from some of the men.
“Of that there can be no doubt,” Honest Bob said, laughing along with the others to show that he was a good sport. He wasn’t, not really. But he could fake it when he had to. It was all part of being a leader of men, he told himself.
The group started to break up into smaller knots, going about their chores.
“Keep your eyes open and your guns handy, boys. Eagle Feather will be along directly,” was Honest Bob’s parting comment.
Sully didn’t much care for company, not even his own. Still, he wanted to be off by himself. Not too far off, though. It wasn’t safe. Comanches were beyond masters at taking stragglers and making them disappear.
Sully’s path took him past a freight wagon nestled at the foot of a cliff. It was the wagon under which Fitch lay in a moaning stupor.
The gun wagon.
Guns and ammunition were in wooden crates in the hopper. The wagon team had been unyoked and corralled with the rest of the horses to prevent the Comanches from stampeding a harnessed team and running away with the wagon and its precious cargo of firearms.
Ricketts sat up on the front box seat, pale-eyed and swarthy with bristly beard stubble like steel wool. He flicked the edge of a thumbnail against the phosphorus-coated tip of a wooden matchstick. A lucifer type incandescent match, self-igniting. The tip sputtered, hissing into flame.
Sully recoiled, thunderstruck. “The hell you doing, Ricketts?”
“What does it look like?” Ricketts asked mildly.
“Like you’re fixing to get yourself blowed up and me along with you!”
Ricketts waved away his concern. “I’m lighting my cigar, Sully, ya danged fool.” He spoke as if talking to a child, a slow child.
The hot plains air was very still in the lee of the cliff. Ricketts had no need to cup a hand around the flame to protect it. He held the fire to the tip of a fresh cigar clenched between his teeth and puffed away, setting the cigar alight.
“Don’t you know not to play with matches around gunpowder?” Sully demanded. “You’ll blast us all sky-high!”
“I know what I’m doing,” Ricketts said chuckling. “That’s why they got me playing nursemaid to this here gun wagon and its combustible insurance policy.”
The “insurance” was a desperate last resort against Comanche treachery. In the wagon behind the seat stood a big keg of gunpowder lashed in place, a length of quick-burning fuse cord coiling out of a hole in the barrel lid.
Ricketts’s job was to light the fuse to blow up the wagon and its contents if the Comanches tried a cross and jumped the gunrunners.
“Quit your fussing, Sully. Danged if I’m gonna lay off cigars just cause you’re fussing like an old woman.” Ricketts touched a fingertip to the match. It was cold. He broke the matchstick in two, tossing the fragments at Sully. Sully scuttled away, cursing.
Ricketts laughed. But he stopped laughing when he glimpsed a dust cloud in the east.
The site was on a flat. Ricketts was raised up higher than the others by virtue of being perched up on the wagon box seat. “Hey! Hey, you all. Looky there!” he shouted, rising up, pointing at the dust cloud in the distance. “It’s them! Here they come!”
The outlaws turned to see what Ricketts was pointing at, studying on the dust cloud some miles away. It wasn’t much. Just a thin brown smudge floating in the air a few degrees above the horizon. A dirty fingerprint on the rim of the upside-down, yellow-white bowl of sky.
The gunrunners were stung into action. They scrambled, grabbing up rifles and gathering closer together. There was a lot of peering, craning, and neck-stretching. A couple men climbed up on boulders to improve their vantage point.
They looked . . . and wondered.
“Is it them?”
“Don’t look like much.”
“Don’t take much to kick up dust out there.”
Honest Bob moved among them. “Look sharp, boys, and step lively. The scalp you save may be your own. Or even better, mine.”
They were gunrunners and Comancheros—Honest Bob and Sully, Mercurio and Rio, Fitch, Hump, Half-Shot, and all the rest. They numbered a baker’s dozen in all, unlucky thirteen, a gang of whites and Mexicans who sold guns and ammunition to the Comanches. A dangerous trade.
They were gathered in the barren wastelands of the North Central Texas plains on a hot afternoon in the fall of 1866 for a meet with a Comanche raiding party.
The War Between the States had been over for a year and a half. Yet that titanic conflict between North and South was but a brief moment in time compared to the centuries-long struggle for the frontier.
The War for the West was an epic clash between Indians and Caucasians for dominance of that part of the planet.
Paramount among all mounted Plains Indian tribes were the Comanches. They were Lords of the Great Plains, masters of a vast prairie expanse in the center of the American heartland bounded on the east by the Mississippi River and the west by the Rocky Mountains.
The Comanche broke the back of the Spaniards’ northward thrust out of Mexico, limiting their Great Plains holdings to a few scattered fortress towns—Santa Fe, San Antonio, and a handful of others.
Next came the Anglos, English-speaking Texas settlers the Comanches called Tejanos. An irksome folk, they were numerous and land-hungry.
For long years, tribesmen kept the Texans bottled up east of the ninety-eighth meridian, a longitudinal line running north-south through such settlements as Dallas and San Antonio. They tormented the Tejanos with relentless raids of rape, robbery, torture, and murder. The ninety-eighth parallel marked the limiting line of westward American expansionism.
Yet the Texans were stubborn. Worse from the Comanche point of view, the Texans were adaptable. Slowly but surely, they learned the ways of making war on horseback, Indian style. The frontier conflict, always fought with bitterness and cruelty on both sides, was fast becoming a war of extermination.
Then came secession and the war between the Union and the Confederacy. Frontier expansion was halted for the duration. The whites were so busy trying to kill each other that their war against the Indians was neglected.
The War was finally over and American westward migration was once more in full flood, greater than ever. Comanches once more felt the pressure as hordes of returning whites nibbled locust-like westward, crowding past the ninety-eighth parallel to the hundredth parallel.
Longitude 100 degrees west now marked the frontier. It was the dividing line between civilization and wilderness.
Part of the line ran north-south through Hangtree County, Texas.
The gunrunners’ meeting place was some fifty miles west of the line, where the bounds of Hangtree County blurred with the beginnings of the Llano Estacado. The Llano, “Staked Plains” to the Spaniards, was a vast wilderness misnamed by some early American mapmaker as “The Great American Desert.”
It wasn’t, not really. Subsequent events would soon prove the contrary. But its endless expanse of emptiness sprawling under the big sky tended to have an unnerving effect on travelers. There was a sense that here was the rim of the abyss, the edge of darkness.
The Llano was prairie flatland, hundreds of square miles in area. It had water and grass enough to support the buffalo in all their teeming masses. In time, it would prove equally capable of supporting great cattle herds and then the great land rush would be on.
But not yet. Not while the Comanche still held sway over the region.
The meeting place was set at Bison Creek under Boneyard Bench.
The Llano, though flat, was not without distinctive landforms—cuts, rises, folds, rock spurs, outcroppings, ridges, hills, and more.
The Bench was a limestone plateau rising out of the flat, a shelf-like scarp whose eastern edge featured a sharp twenty-five-foot drop. Its eastern face of cliffs ran north-south for dozens of miles.
A solid, impenetrable wall, there were no gaps and passes. Riders went around it. On a horse, there was no way to climb the cliffs. They formed a giant wall or bench set amid the flat.
Gravity is a useful thing. The Comanche set it to work by stampeding buffalo herds eastward across the plateau and over the edge, causing them to fall to their deaths. Descending to the flat, the braves would harvest the carcasses.
Long years of such practices had littered the foot of the cliffs with the skeletal remains of hundreds, if not thousands, of buffalo. Heaps and mounds of clean-picked bones glared whitely under the midday sun where the gunrunners waited.
Thus the name given to the site by whites—Boneyard Bench.
Cracks in the cliffs held springs, which issued streams of water. Buffalo routinely drank their fill during wanderings.
The largest such watercourse was Bison Creek. It was an ideal spot for those wishing to conduct their business far from prying eyes. It was well-watered. Sheer, unscalable cliffs shielded against attack from the west. Rockslides, boulders, and fans provided plenty of cover.
The gunrunners were massed in a shallow basin at the foot of the cliffs south of Bison Creek.
A cleft in the cliffs served as a makeshift corral, its open end roped off. Guards were posted to keep watch over it.
Comanches were passionate horse thieves. If they could steal the gunrunners’ horses, they would, and damn the consequences!
The unhorsed gun wagon stood in the center of the basin. Men were grouped around it in a half-circle facing east, the cliffs protecting its rear from the west. The gang was well-armed with repeating long guns and six-shooters.
The Comanches appeared not in the east where the dust cloud had first been sighted but in the south near the cliffs.
“Looky there!” Half-Shot cried, indicating a second dust cloud to the south. It showed near the cliffs several miles away, much closer than the dust to the east.
The south cloud moved north toward them while the east cloud stayed where it was. Strong sunlight streamed down from overhead, gilding the southern dust plume. At its base rode a knot of mounted men, ten in number. They came on at a steady walk.
“That’s them all right,” Melbourne said. “Dirty stinking redskins!”
“They’re not so bad,” Hump Colway said.
“The hell you say!”
“Not as bad as some white folks. At least they don’t try to rub my hump for luck.”
“Is that lucky?” Chait asked, genuinely curious.
“Not for them,” the hunchback said. “The last few who tried, I shot them to pieces. Lucky for me, though,” he added. “Must be.”
“How do you figure?”
“I’m still here,” Hump said.
“Is that so great?” Melbourne said, snickering.
“To me it is. Beats being dead,” the hunchback said.
The Comanche riders narrowed the distance, closing on Bison Creek hollow.
“Huh! They don’t look like much,” Sully said, disdainful.
“Reckon you don’t look like much to them,” Hump said. “You don’t look like much to me.”
Sully knew better than to mess with Hump and kept his mouth shut. He was worried about the Comanches, not Hump’s slighting remark.
The Comanche riders were short stocky men riding small scruffy horses. But they were killers, horseback warriors. The horses were Indian ponies born of a long line of wild mustangs with endurance far beyond their more domesticated cousins.
The braves were Quesadas, most aloof of all Comanche tribes, making their home deep in the Llano. They generally shunned not only whites and their works but their fellow red men as well. Their standoffishness served them well, protecting them from catching the whites’ diseases such as smallpox.
Somewhere in the Llano’s trackless wastes lay their homeland, its whereabouts unknown to whites. It was hidden somewhere in the expanse but where, no living white man could say.
The brave at the point sported a lone feather rising vertically from the back of his head, held in place by a headband. He was Eagle Feather, leader of the band. He raised a hand, signaling a halt. The Comanches reined in, watchful and waiting.
Honest Bob motioned for them to advance and they rode in.
The braves showed wide faces, high cheekbones, dark watchful eyes. Thick, greasy, shoulder-length black hair was worn loose or in braids. Most of them wore white men’s shirts—plaid or patterned, open and unbuttoned—and knee-high moccasin boots. Some wore breeches, others loincloths.
A few bows and arrows, war hatchets, and a lance or two were seen among them, but were far outnumbered by firearms. Firearms were the weapon of choice. Some were armed with long guns, rifles, and carbines. A few had pistols tucked into their belts.
The gunrunners were wary, restive.
“Easy, boys, easy,” Honest Bob said. “This ain’t the first time we’ve been to the fair. Don’t get trigger-happy and we’ll get through this fine just like we’ve done before.” He readied himself to start forward. “Stand ready, Ricketts!” he called.
“I’m ready!” Ricketts sat perched on the wagon’s box seat puffing a cigar. His hand was closed around a line of fuse cord, its end curling out the top of his fist.
Honest Bob gave him a two-fingered half-salute. He turned, facing the Comanches. “Sefton, you come with me. I’m gonna meet Eagle Feather halfway.”
“All right, Bob.” Sefton was a fast draw and a cool-nerved customer.
“You men cover us,” Honest Bob told some of the others.
“Right!”
Honest Bob and Sefton started forward. Honest Bob was empty-handed, carrying no rifle. He wore twinned belt guns and could get at them fast if he had to.
Sefton held a rifle cradled against his chest, muzzle pointed skyward. He could get it into action quick enough. That went double for the gun holstered at his side. Others were faster—Melbourne and Chait, for sure—but Sefton had better judgment.
The Comanches sat their horses, watching the duo approach. The braves were motionless, stock-still. Masklike faces were cut deep with hard lines. They were stoics with good poker faces.
Their horses were well-trained, but the nearness of Bison Creek water made them restless. Their long faces and snouts were powdered with dust. No doubt they’d been ridden a long way between waterings.
Honest Bob halted a few man-lengths from the Comanches, Sefton stopping alongside him. Honest Bob held up his right hand palm out in the I-come-in-peace gesture. “Howdy, Eagle Feather!”
Eagle Feather nodded, some of his men grunting as if to themselves, the lines in their faces deepening into scowls.
That was all right with Honest Bob. He didn’t give a dam
n if they liked him or not. Not that there was much chance of them liking any white man unless he was on the business end of a scalping knife. But they liked the guns he sold well enough, and that was what counted.
“You got guns, Honest Bob?” Eagle Feather asked. He always called the gun dealer by his full moniker of “Honest Bob,” whether in mockery or not was known only to himself. Comanches held little faith in the honesty of whites, period.
“Got gold?” Honest Bob countered.
“Ugh.” Eagle Feather nodded. Yes.
“You can see the wagon for yourself. We’re ready for business, so let’s get to it.” Honest Bob indicated the dust cloud in the east. “Your friends out there can come in, too. We’re not afraid. We’ll give them a warm welcome.”
“You trade horses for guns?” Eagle Feather asked, thrusting his hatchet-faced head forward. “They good horses. Fast, strong.”
Honest Bob shook his head no. “You know my policy, Eagle Feather. I only trade for gold or cash money. Gold, silver, or jewelry.”
“Eagle Feather know. We catch plenty horses, by damn! Good horses!”
Stolen horses, Honest Bob knew. Presumably the eastern dust cloud was made by them and the braves tending them. Maybe. Or maybe it was the rest of a war party standing by waiting for the signal to attack.
“Eagle Feather tell braves stand off. Honest Bob no want horses,” the Comanche said, indicating the eastern dust cloud.
“That’s the way of it,” Honest Bob said.
“When you go, we water horses here at Bison Creek, yes.”
“When we go, you can do what you damn well please for all I care.”
“No want horses, good horses?” Eagle Feather pressed.
“No stolen horses, thanks,” Honest Bob said, shaking his head. “I don’t want to hang.”
“You look good that way, by damn!” Eagle Feather’s eyes gleamed and the corners of his wide mouth quirked upward in grim amusement. A rare show of emotion for him.
“You’d like to see me hang, wouldn’t you, Eagle Feather,” Honest Bob said. It was not a question.
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