Kiowa Trail (1964)

by L'amour, Louis

  “South?” I exclaimed.

  “That was the way of it, Conn. And to me it spells trouble.”

  That lone rider might have been somebody from the herd itself, somebody who had gone ahead to look out for a good holding ground, and for water. I suggested as much.

  “No, that rider was George Darrough, that buffalo-hunter friend of McDonald’s. I’d know that horse of his anywhere. He rides an appaloosa he swapped from some Indian some time or other, and that horse has the smallest, prettiest feet I ever did see. I’ve seen those tracks before. That rider was George Darrough.”

  “What do you think, Rowdy?”

  “Why, I’ve been studying on it, all the way in here. Me and Gallardo figure we’ve put a loop on the idea. Darrough came out to pick up a herd.”

  “To ship from the town?”

  “Maybe.” He paused. “Conn, you ever seen what a stampeding herd can do to a wire fence?”

  He was right, of course. A stampede of cattle could sweep such a fence out of existence. It could also trample anybody guarding that fence … trample them, churn them into mud.

  “We’ve got to go back, Conn.” D’Artaguette’s face was pale. “God almighty, they’ll run the herd right over the boys!”

  “Not if they are where they should be,” I said, “and not if they shoot down some steers for a barricade.” But Kate…

  I was scared to death. If we rode, starting now, we could make it. The tracks were only a few hours old, and it would take time to move a herd, even a herd that maybe was being hurried along.

  “Here comes Flanagan,” somebody said, and looking around, I saw the red-haired telegrapher coming across the street.

  He grinned, and shook a yellow sheet at us. “If you boys are hunting a scrap,” he said, “you’ve bought yourself a mean stack of chips! There are fifty men and horses on that train. It’s due in here at daybreak tomorrow … due to unload here.” Fifty men!

  “That sort of story goes all down the line,” Flanagan said. “Everybody knows something is up. Any time fifty men and fifty horses with a wagon for supplies and ammunition is put aboard a train, we know there’s going to be hell to pay.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Ozark Mountain boys. Hillbillies from Missouri and Arkansas.”

  Fifty men … fifty riflemen - dead shots, or they’d not have been chosen. They would pick us off like squirrels.

  “Conn,” D’Artaguette said, “what about that herd?” For a long moment I stood there, hesitating, and then I said, “Well have to trust it to Kate and the boys. We came out here to do a job, and we’re going to do it.”

  “To fifty men?” D’Artaguette protested.

  “That’s only eight apiece,” Rowdy said, “with two spares. Conn, you leave me one of them spares, will you?”

  The saloon door opened. “You boys goin’ to eat?” a voice called. “I got it on the table!”

  It was full dark now, a soft prairie night, and the stars were out. Soon the coyotes would be calling.

  Chapter 8

  Flanagan joined us at the table, glad to have company. His was a lonely job, and it needed a man of a very special kind of courage. He sat at his telegraph key in the small station with a pistol only inches from his hand, a shotgun and a Sharps .50 buffalo gun close by.

  Twice he had been completely isolated - once when Indians had torn down his wires to make copper ornaments of them, and again when buffalo, that used the posts to scratch themselves, pushed over several of them.

  We had all kinds in the West. D’Artaguette and Meharry were college men; the former had been educated in Paris and Quebec, the latter in Dublin and London. All the education Rowdy Lynch ever got he picked up in the middle of a horse’s back. I’d never even seen him read a newspaper. As for Battery Mason, he had been a tough kid in the slums of New York and had drifted west because that’s where people were drifting, and he stayed on to become more western than the native-born westerner.

  Gallardo was a special case. His family had come to New Mexico with the first settlers. They had schools and churches there before Captain John Smith landed in Virginia, and they had grown children before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Gallardo had attended a church school in Santa Fe for several years, when not punching cows on his father’s ranch.

  I looked around the table, and was glad it was these men I had with me.

  “Flanagan,” I said, “you know your railroad. I need a place back up the line where there’s a grade steep enough to slow a train down, a place where we could board the train without stopping it.”

  “Sorry, but there’s nothing like that within the distance you could ride in the time you have. Nothing I can recall, at least.”

  “Why not here?” Meharry suggested. “When they start to leave the train.”

  At such a time, there was confusion and it might be done, but there was risk. Undoubtedly some would be half asleep, but a few would be awake enough to resist; and once it started, the others would be quickly alerted. We could hurt them, but we could not win; and nobody needed to tell me how difficult it is to get out of a fight once one is involved … that would be hardest of all.

  I felt no certainty about what was best to do. Nobody felt like talking, and when supper was over, I walked outside.

  It was very still. A few crickets talked from the grass at the side of the building. Near the station, a pile of ties was stacked, and strolling over, I hoisted myself up and sat down on them. Only a little time remained, and I hadn’t an idea of what I was going to do.

  If the men we had ridden here to stop managed to get past us and reach the town, then we must withdraw, our fight at an end. Even at this moment, back there at the town, our friends might be fighting a last-ditch struggle against the townsmen, for the latter would surely try to cut the fences while we were absent.

  Those men back there with Kate, like these with me, were men who rode for the brand. When they accepted a man’s pay they not only worked for him, they fought his battles. It was as simple as that. Life offered them no other loyalties than their country, the man they worked for, and the men they worked beside. When they went into the fight they would go trusting me, and I hadn’t a plan.

  Getting up, I prowled restlessly among the buildings. We might be able to take the men by surprise, for they would not be expecting us here. But there would be others riding on the train, I wanted no reckless shooting.

  Somewhere out in the darkness, miles away but drawing nearer every moment, was the train bearing fifty armed fighting men. Somehow or other, I had to come up with a plan.

  Yet at this moment I could not marshal my thoughts, and they went back to that Texas morning, with Kate standing beside the fire in the bleak dawn, the smell of charred timber in the air, mingling with the smoke of the fresh fire and the smell of coffee. That was the morning when she had told me she was not leaving - that they had come to settle, and settle they would.

  What arguments had I to offer to such a woman? Yet I tried.

  “Mrs. Lundy,” I said, “you’d better give it some thought. Right over there, only a little way off, is the Comanche Trail - the route they follow on their raids into Mexico. And this is Apache country too. Believe me, this is no place for a lone man, let alone a woman and a youngster.”

  “We’re going to stay,” Kate said. “This is our home.”

  Home? It was a rock-ribbed valley in a country borrowed from the leavings of hell.

  There was water, and there was grass, and there were some cottonwoods to rustle their leaves for her, but there surely was nothing else, and it was a hundred or more miles to the nearest white man … and God only knew where there was another woman.

  The burned-out house could be fixed up to live in for the time being, and there was a piece of stone corral her husband had started to build. That was all.

  “That’s a fine-looking boy,” I said, deciding to outflank her on the arguments. “He will need an education.”

  “Ihad a very
good education,” she replied, “and I can teach him myself.”

  “There will be no pretty clothes down here, no balls or parties, or talking with other women.”

  “I shall miss them.”

  “If it is money you need,” I began carefully, “I -”

  “No,” she said firmly, “it is not money. I have a little - it is not that. We adopted a course of action, Mr. Dury, and my husband chose this place. It is wild, but there are cattle for the taking, and for a time at least there will be nobody to argue ownership. And by the time we are ready for it, the country will have built up to us.”

  “If you’ll pardon me, ma’am,” I said gently, “you are either a very wise and very brave woman, or a bit of a damned fool.”

  She smiled for the first time, and it was a lovely smile. “I wish I knew which it is, Mr. Dury. I really do.”

  It was true there were wild cattle if you could get the twine on them, but how she figured to do that I had no idea. Roping, tying, and branding wild cattle is a job for a man with hair on his chest. I said as much.

  She looked at me in that cool way she had, and she said, “How’s your chest, Mr. Dury?”

  I did not answer that, but I said, “You’ll have to have a house, and that one isn’t in the right place.”

  “I know,” she replied quietly, “but my husband knew little of such things, and he was trying very hard. I thought it better to help than to criticize.”

  The hell of it was, I found myself admiring her nerve, and I was a bit puzzled by her, too. What kind of a background had built such a woman as this? Woman? She was scarcely more than a girl.

  “I was just riding through,” I said, “going no place in particular. I’ll help until you can find some hands.”

  She seemed amused. “Will you stay that long, Mr. Dury?”

  She knew as well as I did that it would be a hell of a long time before she could hire anybody down here. It could be months, maybe a year, before anybody even passed this way.

  “Tom,” she said, turning to her brother, “get some more wood. I am going to make some fresh coffee for Mr. Dury.”

  While she was making it I scouted around, and before very long my respect for her husband began to grow. One of them, and it might have been him, had picked out a spot that would have been hard to beat in many ways. Admitted, the house was in a position that could not be defended, but there was water, grass, fuel, and from a nearby knoll, good observation and an excellent field of fire.

  It was a small butte, actually, about an acre in extent, and a part of that was taken up by a huge pile of boulders. In among those boulders I found a spring with a nice flow of water. Bending down to drink, I felt a cool, pleasant breeze against my face, a really good draft of air coming through a hole among the rocks. The air was drawn through the hole and past the falling water of the spring.

  I climbed on top of the boulders and looked around. Several of them were almost flat. In two places the surface of the butte below me was deeply cracked, one of the cracks leading out toward where Kate Lundy bent over her fire.

  I knew then where I was going to build the house. But it was going to be brutally hard work.

  Maybe this was just what I needed, for I’d been on the run when I crossed the Rio Grande. I was coming up out of Mexico with a killing behind me.

  Luckily, most of the supplies the Lundys had brought into the Big Bend were still in the wagon, or stacked on the ground beneath it. There were tools, and a good bit of food, and it was not long before I added to it by killing a young heifer, and later a deer.

  As time went on we saw nobody, and it was just as well, for we were working hard.

  There was a meadow near the cottonwoods and a seep with a little standing water, and I built a crude fence around the meadow from dead-falls among the cottonwoods, and from brush and rocks. Then I rounded up some of the wild cattle and turned them in on the meadow. Picking the best ones I could for breeding stock, I branded everything I could dab my loop on. And every morning and evening I worked a bit, with young Tom helping, to get started on the house. I planned to include the spring in it, and to use the boulders around it.

  Three good-sized rooms and a lookout tower would be built on top of the boulders themselves, and the rest of the house would be fitted into them on three sides. The fourth side was a sheer drop of about forty feet - straight, smooth rock without a hand-hold anywhere.

  It took me two weeks to complete the first room, and when that was done we moved up there, with Tom and me bunking outside.

  Working with a crowbar, and later with blasting powder, I cleared away every bit of cover within firing range of the house. At the same time I paced off distances to various objects within sight to get the exact range for accurate firing. Utilizing the deep cracks in the butte itself I built an undercover route that would take us to the stable and the corrals down below.

  By the time we hired our first puncher, a Mexican renegade from across the border, we had a second room started on the new house, the original place was turned into a blacksmith shop, and we had a good stone and adobe corral finished. Meanwhile we were holding thirty head of selected breeding stock on the meadow.

  It was the Mexican who saw the Comanches.

  There were a dozen in the party and they were riding carelessly, not expecting to see anyone.

  They saw the Mexican and he saw them at the same time, and they opened fire. He turned his horse and lit out for the ranch at a dead run. They killed his horse, but he sprang free and killed one of them as they charged down upon him. By that time both Kate and I were in action and we covered his retreat to the house.

  That was the first of nine brushes with Indians during our first year, and we started a graveyard for warriors killed. By the end of that year there were seven graves up there, and the Indians used to come by to count them … we would sometimes find their tracks in the morning.

  Each grave was marked with a coup stick or with the weapons of the departed.

  Now and again the Mexican rode off across the Rio Grande, and then one time he did not return. We never knew what happened to him, but he had been a good man.

  By the end of the second year we had four hands in the bunkhouse, and Red Mike was one of them. Kate found him on the Strawhouse Trail coming from the river, and he had three bullet holes in him, several days old.

  We brought him to the house, nursed him back to health, and he stayed on. He never offered to explain the bullets, and we did not ask. It was simply not a polite question in that country, at that time.

  By then there were thirteen Indians buried on the Trail, and we rarely saw any Indians around. At least, we saw no Apaches.

  Apache attacks ended the day I found Alvino cornered by four Comanches in Paint Gap. His horse was dead and they had Alvino without water on a sparsely covered hillside, with only three cartridges and half a dozen arrows left. They had him, and they knew it and he knew it.

  Red Mike and I were riding south after crossing Tornillo Creek, with the Paint Gap Hills off on our right. We had it in mind to spend the night at a spring near the base of Pulliam Bluff when we heard the first shot. After a minute, there was another.

  Alvino had made a desperate try to escape from the trap, but had failed. We caught the last of it, and I recognized that odd run he had, for I’d played and fought with Alvino in the Sierra Madre when I was a prisoner. He was the son of an Apache by a captured Mexican girl, and he had become a top warrior among them. As a boy he had broken his leg, and it was badly set. Although he could use it, it was always shorter than the other.

  “Injun fight,” Mike commented. “Good riddance.”

  “That’s Alvino,” I said, “he was a friend of mine when I needed one.”

  So we pitched in and fought him out of his comer, and when he saw who I was and knew where I was living, it ended the Apache attacks on the Tumbling B.

  Not that I expected it, for it wasn’t in Indian nature; and Mexican mother or not, Alvino was an India
n all the way through. During a fight in the Apacherancheria where I was so long a captive, Alvino had pitched in and helped me, and now I had returned the favor. Taking him up on my horse, we rode back to the ranch and I roped a pony for him from our own small gather of wild stock.

  The Comanches still gave us a whirl once in a while, so we had no chance to become less wary, but there were no more Apaches. In a sense, they still regarded me as one of their own, as a fighting man, at least; and my victories were something of which they could be proud, believing they had taught me the way of the warrior.

  The War Between the States had been over only a few months when I rode into Kate Lundy’s camp and became her foreman, and in the almost ten years since that time we had claimed over half a million acres of grazing land and we had a brand on thousands of cattle roaming over that country.

  But in some ways I knew Kate no better than when I first came. One day, several weeks after I had saved Alvino from the Comanches, she asked me, “What did you tell that Apache about me? I saw him question you.”

  “He asked me if you were my woman.”

  There was a long moment of silence, and then she asked, “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him you were. He wouldn’t have understood anything else.”

  Her eyes avoided mine. “No … no, I suppose not.”

  That had been long ago, but it was all still clear in my mind. Thinking of it now, though, was not getting me any nearer to the solution of my problem, but remembering Alvino made me wonder how an Apache would have approached it.

  The best thing I had been able to think of was to get on the train when they were all half asleep and get the drop on them before they suspected. That would be the easiest way, but Flanagan had said there was no such grade as we would need to board the train while it was moving. Had he lied? Or had he, perhaps, merely implied there was no such grade?

  Flanagan was friendly, and no doubt sincerely so, but he worked for the railroad, and in his own way he no doubt rode for the brand - the railroad’s brand in this case.