Kiowa Trail (1964)

by L'amour, Louis

  “You will have to fight him,” Wickes said. “They are saying you are afraid.”

  “I don’t want to, Larry. His father is a friend of Sir Richard’s. I might hurt him.”

  “Hurt him?”

  “It is a different thing, Larry. He has boxed, and I know nothing of boxing; but I have fought all my life - with Apache boys, with cowhands … with men.”

  “They do not believe anything they have heard of you.”

  One day, in the presence of others, Endicott told me that I lied. I started to speak, and suddenly, without warning, he struck me.

  It was a good enough blow, I suppose. No doubt he intended it to finish me, but he had boxed with boys in school, and I had fought with teamsters, cowhands, and plainsmen. In the West, a boy at fourteen or fifteen did a man’s work, and walked in a man’s tracks; and when he fought, he fought as a man fights.

  Endicott’s blow did not stagger me. It caught me on the cheekbone, and when I did not fall, I could see he was shocked. And then we fought.

  He knew more of boxing than I, but not a bit of good did it do him, for I plunged in, all the bitterness and savagery within me aroused by the blow. He struck me again as I came in, but I did not circle and parry; I drove for the kill. My first blow missed, my second caught him in the ribs and I saw his jaw go slack.

  He was soft … in good enough shape for his time and place, but nothing like the ruggedness a man acquired working on the plains and the desert. There were others at the school who were better, I think, but they were awed by his size and his boxing skill. So I smashed at him with both hands, going under his left lead and whipping both hands to his body; then, stepping back, I smashed him in the face. It broke his nose, but I followed it up with two more blows, and he fell.

  The fight had lasted less than a minute, but if I had expected to win their friendship by that fight, I would have been mistaken. The talk I heard afterward accounted for that. I had not fought like a gentleman. I was toorough. As for me, I had learned only one way to fight - to win. The following day I was dismissed from the school. When I was packing, Wickes came to the door. “Dury? Here’s someone to see you.”

  There were three of them - Ashmead, Travers, and Alien. All of them were boys I knew only by sight.

  Ashmead, a tall, blond, handsome boy, walked up to me and thrust out his hand. “Look, Dury, I am sorry to see you go. I think it dashed unfair of them.”

  “It is all right,” I said. “I have been wanting to go home.”

  His eyes were bright with excitement. “Where is it you live? In Texas?”

  So I stopped packing and sat down and told them about it. I told them about the country in all its wild beauty, about the killing of my parents, and my long captivity by the Apaches. I told them how the Apache made his bow and where he found his food, and about the Sierra Madre and my escape from there, riding alone across two hundred miles of wild country, in any mile of which I might have been shot by the Apaches for escaping, or by the Mexicans as an Apache.

  “Is it true they carry pistols?” Travers asked.

  So I opened up my bag and took out my own Colt army revolver, Model 1848. It was a .44 rim-fire six-shooter with an eight-inch barrel. “Be careful with that,” I said as Travers reached to take it up. “It’s loaded, and has a hair trigger.”

  He drew his hand back quickly, but they gathered around, staring at the gun as if it were a live thing. It was battered and showed its use, but it was a good weapon still.

  “If they had known you had this,” Ashmead said, “You’d have been out of school before this.”

  Suddenly I was a hero, regarded with awe. I had in my possession a genuine western-style pistol.

  We talked until it was time to go to my train, and they came to the station with me, my three new friends and Larry Wickes.

  There was nothing for it but to return to Sotherton Manor, and I did not want to go. I had not expected to return a failure. But nothing was said of it when I arrived.

  It was not until later, when Sir Richard and I were alone in his study, that he said, “You hurt that boy. You beat him quite badly.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The headmaster said you attacked him savagely.”

  “He struck me, sir, and I whipped him.”

  “But did you have to do it so brutally?”

  “I know of no other way to fight, sir. One fights to win. I would not know how to fight any other way. It was he who began the fight, and I had tried to avoid it - so much so they were saying I was afraid.”

  “Well,” he said ironically, “they do not think so now.” He studied me for a moment, and then asked, “What do you plan to do now?”

  “Return home, sir. To Texas.”

  “We would like to have you stay. My wife and I, we would like it very much if you stayed.”

  “Thank you, sir. You’ve given me every opportunity, but I keep thinking of it back there. Whatever there is in life for me is back there. I - I am not cut out for this.”

  “This morning I was speaking to George Travers. He is an old friend of mine, you know. He told me you had a revolver.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Aren’t you rather young to be carrying a weapon of that kind?”

  “No, sir. In Texas I carried one from the time I was twelve. When one lives in Apache country one must go armed.”

  “May I see it?”

  We went up to my room and I opened my luggage and took out my worn but well-oiled belt and holster. The walnut butt of the revolver was badly scarred and the gun showed wear, but it was clean and ready for action.

  He took the gun in his hands and turned it carefully. “Now, there’s no nonsense about that, is there?”

  “It has a hair trigger, sir.”

  “Yes, I suspected as much.” He handed the gun back to me. “Is it true they shoot as well as they say? One hears much talk of the gunfighters out there.”

  “Would you like to see me shoot, sir?”

  “I would, indeed. Shall we go outside?” He watched as I dug into my luggage for ammunition, and then we went outside. Felicia saw us and followed along. At the back of the house I asked for bottles and received several from the cook. One of these I suspended by a string from the branch of a tree. We walked back twenty paces and, turning suddenly, I drew and fired, smashing the bottle.

  Without waiting for any comment, I tossed another bottle into the air, drew, fired from the hip, and smashed the bottle, and then smashed the largest fragment as it fell. “May I try?” Sir Richard asked. He placed a bottle thirty paces off, took careful aim, and broke it.

  He glanced at the pistol. “It does have a very light pull, doesn’t it?”

  Suddenly he smiled. “You are an excellent shot, my boy,” he said. “I would never try anything like that. And had I not seen you fire from the hip, I should not have believed it could be done with accuracy.” We walked back to the house, and for the first time since I had known her, Felicia was silent. I thought she was a bit awed. At least, I preferred to think that was how she felt, for I had had little enough luck at impressing her, and I had wanted to, very much.

  Alone in Sir Richard’s study, we talked for a while and then he glanced at me suddenly. “You spoke of my son’s killers being punished. What was their sentence?”

  “There was no sentence, sir, because there was no judge, no jury. There is no law in that region, sir, and very little in the region to which they fled.”

  “Then what happened?”

  For an instant, I hesitated, wanting to avoid telling him, but I could not lie to this man. “I killed them, sir.”

  “Youkilled them?”

  “Yes, sir, Jim Sotherton was my friend - the only friend I had, in fact - and they used him rather badly.”

  “I see.” After a minute he said, “We will say nothing of this to anyone else - they would be shocked.”

  “And you, sir?”

  He smiled at me. “Conn, I followed a Pathan tribesman for thr
ee weeks once, before I got a shot at him. He had killed a brother officer of mine.”

  He filled his pipe. “It is rather a different life on the frontier, isn’t it, boy?”

  Sir Richard had given me one more thing before I returned to my own country. He had given me an unforgettable year of travel on the Continent.

  “My sister,” he told me, “willed her money to James, and James left it to go to Felicia, but to be used as I saw fit, as a protection for us in the event we came upon hard times. So I want you to take money enough from that estate to see Europe.”

  He denied my protests, and said quietly, “You owe it to yourself, boy. Someday you may have a family of your own, and you will want to contribute to their education. Also, you owe it to James. He would have wished it so.”

  My protests were not very strong in the beginning, and that quieted them forever, so I accepted money and a drawing account, and spent the next year in traveling - without ever forgetting the West.

  The only thing I did not like about it, Sir Richard insisted I leave my gun with him until I returned to England.

  By the time I returned to the States I was nineteen years old; the year was 1858.

  Chapter 6

  That year, for a short while I was not sure whether I wished to remain in the West, but that uncertainty lasted about as long as it took me to get a saddle on a horse, mount up, and feel the wind on my face and see the long grass bending under it

  Now, riding back to the camp on the knoll, I tried to recall a Frank Shalett from those years before my trip to Europe, but I could not remember the name. So he must be someone I had known later, or the relative of someone I’d known.

  In the camp there was much speculation on who McDonald and Shalett would have coming on the train.

  “He’ll round up some of those Bald Knobbefs,” Harvey Nugent suggested. “There’s aplenty of boys back in the Missouri hills who’d fight for wages.”

  Kate Lundy was waiting for me by her ambulance, face to the wind, a few strands of hair blowing. No getting around it, she was a handsome woman. Even among beautiful women in England or on the Continent she would have been considered so.

  “What will they do, Conn?” she asked.

  “It isn’t what they will do. It is whatwe must do. We’ve got to stop that train before it gets here. We’ve got to turn it around and send those boys right back to where they came from.”

  “They’ll fight.”

  “Sure - if we give them the chance.”

  That outfit we had, they were ready for it, I could see that, and man for man I’d match them with any bunch of fighting men anywhere. Only we were spread out too much. Priest and Naylor were over at the new town. Red Mike was off down the trail somewhere, rounding up more fighting men. Our fence ran down both sides of the town, so my force was split in two by the enemy. And that wasn’t good at all, for the fence must be guarded or they’d get out there and cut our wire.

  So far, we had turned away several herds, and I could imagine what they were thinking down there in town. Some of them would quit and go, especially the ones who had never favored McDonald or his ways, but there was no quit in Aaron McDonald himself.

  “I’m going to head them off, Kate,” I said. “I’m going to take a few of the boys and head them off before they are ready for us.”

  D’Artaguette I wanted. That Frenchman would stand hitched, come hell or high water. Red Mike wasn’t here, but I’d take Meharry, Rowdy Lynch, Gallardo, and Battery Mason. That should do it.

  Yet the whole setup worried me because we were spread so thin, and those men down there in town were not fools. Most of them were fighting men, and many of them had bought lots or built houses and so had at stake something more than merely a desire to fight.

  “Kate,” I said, “we’re going to get some wire cut; and we’re going to have to stand for it.”

  Her face hardened, for Kate Lundy was a fighter, too, and there was no more give in her than there was in McDonald.

  “While I’m gone they might mount a real attack,” I went on, “and we’re outnumbered, so I want you to pull the men off the wire. On this side of town, bunch them here, well dug in and ready to make a stand.

  “Over on the other side they can pull back to that pointed hill where the rocks are. By day the wire can be pretty well covered from those two places, so let them hole up and keep to those places until I get back.”

  The trouble was, of course, that we did not know what McDonald was thinking, and I knew better than to lowrate the man.

  By day Kate Lundy missed nothing. She left the direction of the struggle in my hands, but her suggestions when she made them were good, and to the point. For as long as I had known her, I had never seen her quite like this, and much as I had respected her before, I felt even greater admiration now.

  Bedded down as I was, night after night, not far from the ambulance where she slept, I knew that she lay awake, her light burning into the small hours, and sometimes I heard those low sobs as she wept alone.

  For she was truly alone now - her husband killed so long ago, and now Tom gone.

  These had been her family, these had been her all, and around them she had built her world. If she managed to make her ranch from nothing into a great success, it was more for Tom than for herself … and now Tom was gone.

  Within me there grew a tiny fear, but it was one that grew as the days went on: what would she do, what would become of her when this battle was over?

  She had always been strong. Her slender body, shaped as beautifully as a man could imagine, was nonetheless like whipcord and whalebone. During those first years there had been only two of us, although Tom made a riding hand very quickly. Together we rebuilt the burned cabin, we built parapets of defense and cleared a field of fire around us. We cleaned out the spring, dug a stone-lined trench to bring the run off nearer the cabin, and built a stone corral.

  There were both wild horses and wild cattle in the country around, and we worked from early morning until late at night rounding them up, roping and branding. We held one small herd in a grassy valley close by, trying to select from all we found the best breeding stock.

  At night she gave Tom his schooling, to which, in a small way, I contributed.

  Now, sitting off to one side of the fire, we talked over the tactics of the coming days. We would ride to the small station and water tank where Delgado had sent off his messages, and attempt to intercept the train there, or just beyond. We would be gone three or four days and, because we were undoubtedly spied on, the people of the town would know we were gone and would choose their time to attack.

  Harvey Nugent shrugged. “Don’t worry, we’ll handle it.”

  I cannot say that I particularly liked Nugent, but he was a fighting man, and one I preferred having on my side. Every one of them had sand … they would stay the fight through.

  Only during a lull in the talk, while we ate, I kept wishing I’d see Red Mike show up over the hill with the rest of the men we had sent for. We were going to need them.

  It was an hour shy of daylight when I drew up outside the ambulance to say good-bye to Kate. She was standing beside her wagon, and she held up her hand to me.

  “Conn … Conn … I can never tell you how much I owe you. I could never begin to tell you how much it has meant to me to have you with me.”

  We’d known each other a long time, and only once before had she said anything like that. For a moment I could not answer her.

  “I’ll do my best, Kate,” I said then, and added, “Be careful, Kate. McDonald would kill a woman as soon as a man. Like John Blake said, he’s a witch-burner, and there’s no sentiment in him.”

  “All right, Conn.”

  Nugent was there, standing by, tough, battle-scarred, a man who lived to fight. I knew that, once he’d accepted a job, he rode for the brand. There was no sell-out in him.

  “Don’t you worry none, Dury,” he said now, “we’ll hold up our end.”

  “You al
ways have, Harvey,” I said, and there was a flicker in his eyes at the praise.

  “You know,” I said in a low voice, “I’d not want to leave here if I didn’t know you were here.”

  He threw me a look of astonishment, and then he spat, and said roughly, “You boys ride along. We’re all right.”

  We took two head of horses per man, so we could ride harder and faster, and we went off up a draw that led away from the camp. Then we held to low ground so as not to skyline ourselves against the horizon stars. When we were a couple of miles off we came out of the low ground and headed off across country, toward the east.

  We went quietly, to leave no dust to mark our passing, for they might have scouts in the country around, and even if dust cannot be seen, the smell of it hangs in the air. We rode off to our own small destiny, six battle-hardened men, to meet an enemy whose numbers we could not know except that they were sure to be greater than our own.

  How many times had western men, men such as we, ridden off to their forgotten, unwritten battles? There was a stone I had seen once, a stone in which was scratched the small story of five men who dared the western mountains in search of gold, five who went where no one had dreamed of going before, and when the final message was scratched, three were already dead and two were dying.

  The names were scratched there, but who ever heard of any of them? Had they relatives, friends? Who waited for their return? Did anyone ever know what happened? And how many other such stories were there, stories never found on stones, of men who had no time to write messages?

  These men who rode beside me were such men as had fought the ancient wars, such men as had followed their loyalties to bloody death or bloody victory since time began. If this was my time to die, then I could go in no better company.

  The rolling hills and the prairie lands over which we rode were wide, and we rode the night away, until the red dawn came in the sky. At noon, when the sun was high above us, we drew up in a tiny hollow among the hills, and while one man watched for the Indians that might come upon us, we switched our saddles and remounted again.

  The place toward which we rode was a lone stop on the railroad where there was a station, a telegrapher, and a saloon, a few cars standing on a side track - and nothing more.