I heard the sound of a small rock falling down the hill and froze where I stood, listening and looking off to my left. I heard very little, but saw some movement through the trees. I moved Archie back into deeper cover with me, and then put my hand over his muzzle to help deaden any sound he might make. In another minute, I saw a small band of Apache warriors walking single file and leading their horses along a narrow trail on the steep hillside below me. I didn’t move a muscle and had to remind myself to breathe as they passed through. I counted six warriors as they filed past. Their eyes were mostly down on the trail before them and they seemed to be looking for signs of any other traffic on the trail. At one point the Apache in the lead raised his hand and they stopped silently behind him for a few minutes, listening and watching. Time crawled while I waited them out. Finally they moved on, thankfully without noticing me in the trees above them. I waited a good half hour after they were out of sight, then mounted up and headed back for the trail toward the Santa Fe Trail. I wondered if they were looking for a gold miner up in those mountains.
Darkness was falling when I reached the Mountain route of the Santa Fe Trail. Luck was with me, because I soon ran across a party of fifteen people or so travelling down the trail. There was strength in numbers, so they invited me to join them for the balance of their trip as far as Cimarron. They would continue on from there, but that was my final destination and I was welcome to join them for that part of the trip. They offered me some dinner and I gladly accepted. I rolled up in my blankets soon after the meal, looking up at the stars and thinking about my last experience on this trail.
We had taken this same northern Mountain Route, planning to stop around the Cimarron area and settle down on a ranch my folks hoped to start there. The southern route was called the Cimarron cutoff and people sometimes mistakenly assumed that route passed through the town of Cimarron. Only the Mountain Route went through the town, after passing over the Raton Pass. The altitude made the route a little more difficult, but it was the best way to avoid Indian attacks in those days.
My mother had developed a fever as we came through the Kansas territory. We were never really sure what brought it on—maybe just the distance and difficulty of the trail wore her down. She didn’t improve as the days went by, but there wasn’t much choice but to keep moving ahead. Dad made her as comfortable as he could in the wagon and drove on ahead, hoping to reach Cimarron and find a doctor for her there. It wasn’t to be. Her fever had steadily worsened, and we buried her just off the trail about a hundred miles from Cimarron. I didn’t seem to have any tears left when I thought about it, but I knew that loss would affect me for the rest of my life.
Our party was on the move by daybreak, and we were all anxious to reach town. We pushed steadily along as the morning wore on, stopping only briefly for a little bit of lunch. By early afternoon we saw a small collection of buildings in the distance, and about an hour later pulled into the town of Cimarron. It looked nothing like I remembered, but I considered that I was home. I thought about the small number of gold coins left in my pockets after buying my guns, supplies, and Archie. I figured that first I would find a place to stay, and after that, look for a job of some kind to tide me over while I got my bearings and made plans for my future.
Chapter Three
Cimarron was still an inviting little town, in my opinion, and I was anxious to call it home again. It sat on the bank of the river it was named after, and the Cimarron River fed the Canadian River, which stretched out for nine hundred miles through this part of the country. The town was bigger than I remembered. Wagon trains passing along on the Santa Fe Trail had created a demand for general supplies. To a lesser degree there was a call for mining supplies, and sometimes folks just wanted to stay a night or two in a hotel or eat in a café after spending so much time traveling in a wagon and living along the trail. The population now stood at around 275 people.
I had stayed at the Last Chance hotel last night. The name appealed to me for obvious reasons, though I’d given only my last name when anyone asked. I thought it might be to my advantage if people didn’t remember me from my boyhood years here, and it turned out later that I was right. At one dollar per night, I figured I could stay there a couple weeks without working if I didn’t eat too much, but then again, eating was one of my favorite things. I walked up and down the main street in the morning sun with the collar of my coat lifted to protect me against the chilly wind. At 6,500 feet elevation, mornings were generally chilly at best, and this late spring morning was no exception.
I took stock of the town as I walked up and down the street. Here and there the doors were boarded up on a place, but in general the town seemed to be thriving. I found about what I expected in terms of establishments—one hotel, one boarding house, two cafes, a general store, a mining supplies store, a few other small businesses, and of course, two saloons. I stopped at one of the cafes for a late breakfast and gave some thought to my money situation. I found that I wanted to look for a short-term job—maybe just for a couple weeks—while I sized up what was happening around town and whether or not I wanted to work at any of the ranches in the general area. My own personal history had made me cautious about who I worked for and associated with.
It seemed to me that a saloon might be a good place to look for some temporary work. They often needed help with tending the bar, cleaning up, or hauling barrels in the back. Turnover in a town like this was an accepted fact. I walked out of the café and back down the street to the sign that had rung a bell when I had walked by earlier—Bart’s Saloon. When I lived in the area before, the owner’s name was Sam. Why the name was still Bart’s Saloon, I had no idea and Sam probably didn’t either. I knew that Sam had known my father, but I didn’t plan to use that to get some work. In fact, I hoped that Sam wouldn’t recognize me. I’d never gone into the saloon with my father, and had only seen Sam a few times in the street some fifteen years ago. Few people even knew my first name in those days. Dad had just called me “Boy-o” in that Irish brogue of his. We’d gone by the true family name of O’Reilly, but I’d found it easier just to leave it as the Army version of the name and generally introduced myself as Reilly.
I climbed the steps to the saloon and passed by a mixed breed hound sunning himself in the dust by the door out front. He managed to wag his tail a couple times without actually lifting his head to greet me. I pushed open the batwing doors, stepped inside and gave myself a few seconds to let my eyes become accustomed the lack of light inside. There were only a few people there, which was to be expected. It wasn’t yet noon. A few men sat around a table by one of the windows, playing cards and apparently not drinking just yet. The windows were clean enough to let a small amount of sunlight in, but actually seeing anything through the windows was going to be a different story. One man sat by himself at the bar with a whiskey in front of him. One other man wore a well-used apron and was washing some glasses behind the bar. A toothpick hung from his lips, and he wore a rather sour expression. If memory served, this was Sam. I sat down on a stool at the bar in front of him.
“I’m looking for some work,” I told him. “I can serve drinks, sweep up, clean tables, and haul barrels, anything you need.” Sam looked up from the glasses and glanced at me briefly. “You got a name?” “Reilly,” I told him. The toothpick shifted to the other side of his mouth, but he hadn’t blinked yet, so far as I could tell. “How about a first name? You got one of those too?” “Chance.” I looked at him for any sign of recognition. There was none. “Ok” he said after he’d looked me over a little. “I’ll give you a try. I can’t pay you much—only seventy-five cents a day, but I have a spare room where you can sleep for free. Take it or leave it.” I reached out and shook his hand. “When can I start?” I asked. He told me he had some things to be moved around in the storeroom and I could start any time. I asked him for a few minutes to check out at the hotel and bring my bag over. I left Archie where he was at the livery stable at the end of town and came back to the sa
loon to get started.
Several days went by pretty uneventfully as I settled in to a bit of a routine at the saloon. Sam liked to get an early start, or at least it was an early start for a saloon. He came in at about ten o’clock and started cleaning up from the previous day. He kept the glasses washed and the floor swept, which was more than you could say for a lot of similar places. Things stayed pretty slow until the early or mid-afternoon, and he generally gave me a couple hours at around 11:00 to do anything I needed to do.
There were two things in particular I wanted to get done before I left Sam’s place and moved on to something more permanent. The first I took care of during those hours off in the mornings. I generally took several empty beer bottles from out back, put them into my knapsack along with my gun and holster, and then went down to get Archie from the livery stable for a ride. Nobody thought twice about seeing me take out my horse for a morning ride. I always rode out to the west and to the cliffs that overlooked the town. A half hour’s ride along a lightly used trail into the woods brought me to the same clearing every morning.
I tied Archie to a log several yards away from the clearing, then went to one end of the space and set up my empty beer bottles on another log that ran across the edge for several yards. I stepped off thirty paces across the clearing, then took my pistol from the knapsack and strapped it on. I began to practice drawing and firing the pistol at the beer bottles. When they were all broken, I set up some more. I considered speed to be important but not vital. What I knew was vital was the ability to hit the bottles on the first shot. I kept drawing and firing until I could break six bottles with six bullets. I kept it up for a good half hour. That was my morning routine, and I was becoming accustomed to the weight and feel of the Colt.
My father, being from Ireland, hadn’t been much interested in wearing a pistol. He had a shotgun he used for hunting birds and a rifle he carried with him on the ranch. He used the rifle for hunting deer, and protecting himself from bears and mountain lions. He wasn’t naïve enough to think he would never have a need for it in dealing with thieves and outlaws, but he hoped he wouldn’t. He considered it part of my education, though, to know how to use a pistol, so he’d bought me one and made sure I practiced with it. “Boy-o,” he would say, “it seems to me that the most important thing is to hit what you’re aiming at. And never draw that gun against another man unless your life depends on it. You don’t want a reputation as a gunman. That just brings around another gunmen looking to test himself against you. Get familiar with that gun, draw it smoothly and hit what you’re aiming at. No more, no less.”
I scraped together the broken bottle remains and buried them, then walked back over to where I’d left Archie. He seemed to have gotten used to this morning routine and was grazing quietly when I came over. He nuzzled me for the half an apple he knew I’d be carrying. I gave it to him and stroked his neck while I thought a bit more about my dad and the ranch we’d established up here. I found it hard to believe that was now twenty years ago.
It was just the two of us when we arrived in Cimarron. The area was settled pretty sparsely back in 1856, so we had just homesteaded several hundred acres several miles to the north of where I was now standing. Dad was from the old country and a little suspicious of how he would be treated as a foreigner. As it turned out, the things we were doing would have allowed us to make a claim to the land just a few years later. The Homestead Act was passed in 1862, at which point we would have lived on the land for more than five years, worked the land, and made improvements to it. All dad would have needed to do at that point would have been to file a claim for the land with the government. It didn’t work out that way for us.
I was too little to be of much help at first, but I rode with him when he went out to check the cattle and work the fences. As I got a little older I could help him drive the cattle from the upper pastures to the lower pastures when winter began to set in, and I could haul feed to them and even work a few fence repairs. When Dad needed help to drive some cattle to market or do some of the heavier work, he could generally find someone down at Bart’s saloon with time on his hands and the need for a little money. I also remembered a neighboring rancher who had helped him on a few occasions, but couldn’t bring that name to mind now.
Several years had passed in this fashion, and it was a good life. I suppose it had been exactly what my parents had in mind when we came to this country. We had some prime property backed up to the river on one side, with lush lower pastures, and in the summer we could drive the cattle to the high pastures, up against the mountains. A stream cut through the upper pastures to give them water, and the cattle had access to the river in the lower pastures. Dad saved some money, and the rough cabin we’d started out with when we’d first arrived became a pretty nice ranch house with a barn and corral.
It was the summer I’d turned thirteen that I first realized trouble might be coming. Three brothers had come to the ranch and talked to Dad. I knew enough to know they were asking Dad to sell the ranch to them, and to know that he’d refused. They’d become louder and more insistent, and Dad had responded in the same way. Their name I remembered: Carson. The one who did most of the talking was Jack Carson. I never did catch the names of the other two brothers. A couple weeks later they rode back up to the house, and Dad met them in the yard carrying his shotgun. He told them to leave the property and not come back. They’d eyed the shotgun for a moment, and then they rode away. We’d hoped that was the end of it.
A few weeks later Dad had ridden out to check the cattle in the high pasture. He’d left me back at the ranch house to do some work. Night fell without him returning. I’d spent the night tossing and turning and checking out the window. At daybreak I rode out to the upper pasture and looked around without finding him. I spent several hours covering and recovering the same ground, calling out his name. By noon I knew I needed help and rode into town. The sheriff and four others rode back with me to the high pasture and spread out to look for tracks. Near the western edge of the pasture they found some recent tracks leading into a stand of trees. They followed the tracks for a few minutes until they emerged at the edge of a cliff. The tracks stopped there. When they looked over the edge of the cliff, they saw Dad lying on the rocks several hundred feet below. His horse was nowhere to be found.
The sheriff had eventually ruled it an accident. They speculated that Dad’s horse might have been frightened by a mountain lion or other animal, thrown him, and bolted. In my mind that never answered the question of what he’d been doing at the edge of a cliff. He’d gone up there to check the cattle and wasn’t in the habit of going to look at the sights. The sheriff had nothing else to go on, though, and didn’t have the time or inclination to start an investigation. I was obviously too young to stay there on my own. We didn’t have a claim to the land, anyway. The Sheriff took me back to the ranch and had me gather up my things. Then he took me into town, where an older couple in Cimarron had taken me in for a few weeks. They asked me about relatives, and I told them about my aunt and uncle in New York. When they had made contact with my aunt and uncle, it was decided that I would go back to live with my relatives. The cattle and horses on the ranch were sold and the money was given to me to take along with me to help cover expenses. Then they sent me east by wagon and train to New York.
Archie’s ears came up and he snorted, startling me back to the present. I slid my Winchester out of the scabbard and scanned the area around me. I heard and saw nothing. Eventually Archie relaxed and went back to cropping grass. I mounted and rode back into Cimarron.
That second thing I wanted to get done while working at the saloon had entirely to do with the death of my father. I wondered whether the Carson brothers were still in the area. I was undecided whether to try to follow up on how my father had died. A lot of years had gone by. I also wondered what had happened to our ranch after I came east. We had no legal claim to the land, so I suppose anyone could have moved onto it. I started to ask Sam about it a co
uple times, but always held back, preferring that for now no one else knew about my past ties to the area.
Afternoons at the saloon saw business slowly picking up. An occasional cowboy or traveler came in for an afternoon beer, and then as the afternoon became evening, the card players began to show up and business picked up at the bar. The orders at the bar were only two things: beer and whiskey. If they ordered anything else, they were out of luck because Sam didn’t have anything else. There was a piano in one corner, and an old-timer generally came in around eight to do what passed for piano playing. He kept a tin cup on top of the piano for donations, but it never had much money in it. After I’d heard him play on the first night I knew why. It got busiest between around ten o’clock at night and midnight, and after that Sam closed the place. If anybody objected to that too much, Sam kept a shotgun behind the bar to help convince them.
This evening was going as they generally went. Around ten the place was filling up and business was good. Sam asked me to go the back for more whiskey glasses. As I was coming out of the storeroom with the glasses, I heard somebody yell: “Hey Jack, where you been?” It was a common enough name, but I came slowly back through the hallway and looked out into the saloon. I waited for a few people to move and give me a clear view of the room, then stared through the cigar smoke. It had been several years and I had only been a boy, but there was no mistaking it—those faces were only vaguely familiar, but I felt sure I knew what I was looking at. All three Carson brothers were still here.
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