The Badlands Trail

by Lyle Brandt

  The only answer left to Bishop, then, was that the messenger behind the smoke signals had spied the herd, taken note of it, and was deciding what to do about it.

  Food was often scarce on reservations, and even when plentiful, its quality left much to be desired. Toby could easily imagine raiders cutting out some steers to feed themselves, maybe their families, willing to risk an armed encounter if their hunger pangs were sharp enough.

  And they were smart enough to steal livestock for profit, too, within a lawless territory where the likelihood of meeting U.S. troops was minimal, civilian law enforcement nonexistent. That meant a trail drive’s hands should stay alert and ready to defend their master’s living property around the clock.

  Business as usual, in other words.

  Assignments for the night watch had been served with breakfast. Bishop had the graveyard shift, from 2 a.m. till dawn, which meant a longer day than usual tomorrow. That was nothing new; he pulled that shift in regular rotation, roughly once per week, and had grown used to it, but that didn’t make the next day any easier. More coffee helped, but by the time they camped somewhere ahead, he might be having a one-sided conversation with his horse.

  The good news: He could say most anything and Compañero didn’t seem to mind.

  While focused mainly of the moving herd, he still took time to scan the western skyline, watching out for any telltale smoke. It stood to reason that the watchers might have crept around behind them in the dark one night, to shadow Dixon’s longhorns from the east, so he included that horizon in his scrutiny.

  So far, nothing.

  That should have put his mind at ease, but it did not.

  A fairy tale from childhood came to Bishop’s mind, about a mythic race of “water babies,” something close to gremlins, written by an author whose name Bishop had forgotten long ago. That lapse aside, one pertinent quotation still stuck in his mind: “No one has a right to say that no water babies exist till they have seen no water babies existing, which is quite a different thing, mind, from not seeing water babies.”

  And it was the same with hostile Comanches.

  You might not see them, but until you saw them not existing—physically impossible—a wise man kept his eyes open and weapons handy, just in case.

  When you’re up against red men on unfamiliar ground, your first mistake could be the last.

  “What do you think?” he asked his Appaloosa. “Have you spotted any water babies?”

  Compañero snorted back at him.

  “That’s what I thought,” Bishop replied.

  * * *

  * * *

  HUUPI PAHATI’S NAME translated into English as Tall Tree, although he wasn’t standing tall just now. In fact, he lay prone in the tallgrass, staking out a low ridgeline. His brown-and-white pony—what Spanish speakers called manchado, meaning “stained” or “dirty”—stood some thirty feet behind him, downslope, loosely tethered to a solitary hackberry.

  Tall Tree wore a buckskin shirt and matching trousers, supple moccasins handcrafted from the same material, a simple leather belt around his waist. His hair, shoulder length, was decorated with a single feather from a red-tailed hawk, symbolic of his role as a Comanche war chief. At his side, a single-shot Sharps rifle lay within arm’s reach, its barrel pointing eastward. Upon his left hip, sheathed, a cut-down cavalryman’s saber was suspended from his belt.

  Tall Tree knew little of his rifle’s history. If asked, he could not have explained that early Sharps rifles chambered .53-caliber rounds, later reworked to feed .45-70 government cartridges used by American soldiers. He cared only for the weapon’s range, rated effective to five hundred yards and capable of killing men at twice that distance, with judicious use of its “open ladder” sight, which helped a shooter calculate his target’s range.

  In essence, if Tall Tree could see something with naked eyes, he could send a slug weighing four hundred grams to destroy it, whistling downrange at a quarter mile per second. Nothing that one of his bullets struck would ever be the same again.

  He was not on a sniping mission now, of course. Today, he simply had to watch and wait, timing the trail herd’s progress between starting off in dawn’s pale light and stopping when the white men hired to move the longhorns found a likely place to camp.

  It would have been a simple task to creep among them anytime over the past four nights, eliminating one or two with no disturbance of the rest. In other circumstances, acting on his own, Tall Tree might have enjoyed that piecemeal slaughter, but a larger group of warriors now depended on him, and he would not jeopardize their trust in him by acting so impulsively.

  The war party was small, six braves besides Tall Tree. None had participated in the great Lakota uprising of two years earlier, when Lieutenant Colonel Custer and 267 of his bluecoats fell before thousands of Sioux under chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Now Crazy Horse himself was dead, murdered by soldiers in Nebraska barely seven months ago, and Sitting Bull was on the run, his army withered to a shadow of its former self.

  No matter.

  Tall Tree and his men had feigned surrender, acting docile long enough to learn their adversaries’ weaknesses, prepare themselves for what must follow next. He knew that all of them were bound to die, no hope of final victory by any leap of the imagination, but if each man in his band could kill one hundred whites—two hundred, better yet—their sacrifice would not have been in vain.

  And in the meantime, he could teach a lesson to the cowboys who presumed all land within their field of vision properly belonged to them.

  Two thousand longhorns, give or take, would feed natives on the Comanche reservation for a year or more, and if the bluecoats came to take them back, perhaps that final push would be enough to bring his people back from humble poverty, recapturing some measure of their former pride.

  But not today.

  The herd had far to go yet. And Tall Tree would follow them until he felt the time to strike was ripe.

  * * *

  * * *

  GAVIN DIXON DIDN’T like feeling distracted from a job at hand. Tomorrow it would be a week since he had seen smoke signals rising from the west of where his herd was passing, and while there’d been no further hint of any trouble on the wind, he couldn’t get the brooding threat out of his mind.

  If he was honest with himself, there was no clear-cut reason for concern. By choice, he lived in, raised longhorns in, and herded them to market through the heart of Indian country, bearing that name for an obvious reason. If he thought about it hard enough, Dixon could list six major tribes with reservations in the territory, and probably three dozen others penned on smaller areas within the district’s boundaries. In fact, the only place without at least one tribe in residence would be the so-called Neutral Strip or panhandle—and that was theoretical, wandering red men likely to be found on any part of it, but none allowed by treaty to consider it as “home.”

  He’d built the Circle K and raised his stock on land supposedly belonging to the Chickasaws. On trail drives, the long route between Atoka and Missouri crossed their land, then trundled on through land the government had set aside for Seminoles, Muscogee, Cherokee, and Wyandotte. In point of fact, you couldn’t take a step most places in the territory without leaving tracks on land the U.S. government had “promised” to some tribe, for all the good that did.

  After a couple of uneasy years, until he got the feel of it, Dixon had worried about constant trouble from the Comanches. He knew they hated white men moving in on them, after they’d been uprooted from ancestral homes and planted here against their will. Who wouldn’t, if the shoe was on the other foot? But for the most part it had been all right, the odd steer now and then donated to his closest red natives, cultivating friendship of a sort.

  It was the renegades who worried Dixon, and you never knew where you might come upon them, young bucks for the most part, d
rawn from one tribe or another, sometimes even mixing in a band that had it in for whites.

  God only knew what they were thinking, maybe dreaming they could change things back to how they’d been before cavalry and homesteaders infringed upon their sacred lands elsewhere. It was a hopeless way of seeing things, but what of it? Each year or two there would be what the fools in Washington called “incidents,” meaning that people of all colors lost their lives while brooding animosity lived on.

  No smoke signals today so far, and if they made it through a few more days without having to fight, they should be on Missouri’s soil. Not “safe” by any stretch of the imagination, since that state had discontented Indians as well, and white outlaws aplenty, still enamored of the late Confederacy, but at least they would have passed a major milestone on their journey.

  And then, assuming they could reach St. Louis with the herd intact, sell off the steers, and pocket decent money, all they had to do was turn around and make the trek back home.

  Some of them, anyway.

  There’d be Bill Pickering, of course, and likely four more year-round workers from the Circle K—Floyd, Hightower, Odom, and Mel Varney. Anyone of those was free to break away as he saw fit, of course, but Dixon thought they’d found a home of sorts with him.

  As for the rest . . .

  There were a few men that he wouldn’t mind keeping around his spread after the drive was done. Bishop for one, who’d showed himself a cool hand under fire and handy with the steers, besides. Melville and Sullivan would be two more welcome additions to the ranch, to supplement the half dozen he’d left behind and look after things while he and Pickering were gone.

  One that he wouldn’t ask to stick around was Graham Lott. Dixon appreciated piety as much as the next man but was also partial to the peaceful sound of silence every now and then. Lott seemed incapable of laying off the gab, and Dixon was aware of him occasionally getting on the others’ nerves, although the self-styled preacher couldn’t recognize that bent toward irritation in himself.

  No need to think about it now. Dixon had never shied away from telling men to hit the road after they’d done a part-time job; none of them had held a grudge so far—or none he was aware of, anyhow.

  He’d handle that chore when the time came, in St. Louis, and if his new hires ran true to form from other drives, most of the rest would want to stick around the city for a while, spending their hard-earned cash until they woke one morning needing more.

  By that time, Dixon would be gone and building up another herd five hundred miles away from what St. Louis citizens referred to as the Gateway to the West.

  And then, with any luck, after another busy year he’d do it all again.

  Just hold off on the smoke signals, he thought, and give us time.

  * * *

  * * *

  ANOTHER PROBLEM CAME along late in the afternoon while Mr. Dixon had Bill Pickering riding ahead of the advancing herd, scouting a decent place to spend the night. This time a couple of the steers crossed horns, with one getting the worst of it.

  Longhorns were known for being temperamental and contrary, sometimes lashing out with no apparent reason, on a whim. That might blow over quickly, but before the inner storm passed, horns and hooved could injure other horses, men, or, as in this case, other steers. Handling an animal that tipped the scales somewhere between fourteen hundred and twenty-five hundred pounds was challenging at the best of times, but when the critter had a mad on, it could plow through damned near anything before it like a wrecking ball.

  Bishop had no idea what set the steers to feuding on this afternoon and didn’t care. The good news: It was over quickly, without touching off a free-for-all among the longhorns—or, worse yet, a general stampede. He’d heard the bellowing, seen thrashing on the east flank of the herd, and steered his snowflake Appaloosa toward the scene of the commotion, conscious of a couple other drovers moving in to sort it out at the same time.

  The bad news: while it lasted, one longhorn, a bull, had gored the cow that set it off. One of the winner’s four-foot horns had torn a bloody furrow from the cow’s right hip down almost to her hock cap, so that she could barely stand on that leg, much less keep up with the moving herd.

  His grim work done, the bull had fallen back in line as if there’d been no trouble in the first place, four full inches of its left horn smeared with blood that would dry rusty brown before the herd had gone another quarter mile.

  Mr. Dixon rode up just as Bishop and Whit Melville were maneuvering the wounded steer aside, Boone Hightower keeping a sharp eye on the bull in case he started acting up again. Their boss observed the damage, cursed, and said, “She can’t go on this way.”

  “No, sir,” Bishop agreed.

  “All right. Toby, you ride ahead and tell Varney that there’ll be beef tonight. I’ll do what’s necessary here.”

  “You sure, boss?” Melville asked. “I don’t mind taking care of it.”

  “My loss, my job,” Dixon replied. “Leave me your lasso and I’ll get it back to you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bishop rode on to do as he’d been told, thankful he didn’t have to hang around and watch another steer put down. It might not seem like much, after the men they’d killed at Willow Grove, but it seemed worse to him somehow. Maybe the pained, confused look on the cow’s long face had struck a chord with him this time.

  * * *

  * * *

  WHY NOT TONIGHT?” Iron Jacket asked. His name in the old language was Puhihwikwasu’u.

  Tall tree answered, “We have time and need more preparation.”

  “They are only cattle,” Nadua observed. His name translated in the white man’s language to Someone Found.

  “That would be true if we were only after food for our small band,” Tall Tree replied. “But to collect enough animals for all our people on the reservation, we must wait and test our plan.”

  “The white men will fight back,” said Bright Sun, named Tabemohats at birth by his parents, both murdered on the Trail of Tears.

  “I hope so,” answered Bodaway—Fire Maker. “We ought to kill them all.”

  “Temper your rage with wisdom, brother,” Tall Tree cautioned. “They have us outnumbered two to one.”

  “White men are cowards!” Fire Maker insisted.

  Old Owl—born Mupitsukupu—added, “And murderers of women. They deserve to die.”

  “What of the black man who rides with them?” asked Tabemohats, Bright Sun.

  “What of him?” came the challenge from Great Leaper, born Gosheven. “White men once enslaved his kin and now he works for them? He is a traitor to his people and to life itself.”

  “Enough!” The tone of Tall Tree’s voice cut through their argument and silenced all of them. When every pair of eyes was upon his face, he said, speaking with one hand on his cut-down saber’s grip, “If you desire another leader, say so. Challenge me according to tradition. Otherwise, we follow the plan all of you agreed to.”

  No one spoke. After a minute passed, Tall Tree said, “Well?”

  “Hold to the plan,” Iron Jacket said at last. “But make it happen soon.”

  “In due time,” Tall Tree said, not backing up one inch from the position he had staked out for himself. “It works as well next week as if we tried tonight. Better, in fact, since the white fools will soon forget the talking smoke and fall back into carelessness.”

  “They still post guards at night,” said Someone Found.

  “As always when they move their animals to market,” Tall Tree said. “When the time comes, we will dispose of them and shift the numbers to our favor.”

  “But soon, rather than later,” Old Owl urged.

  “Patience, my brothers. While I go to scout the herd again, see to your weapons. Be prepared.”

  A weapons check would keep them busy fo
r a little while, at least, although they knew their arms by heart. No warrior could afford to enter battle unprepared.

  Their mobile arsenal was motley but effective. In addition to their war chief’s Sharps rifle, Iron Jacket had a foreign-made Albini-Braendlin rifle, Someone Found had a Mauser Model 1871, Fire Maker carried a Spencer repeater, and Old Owl packed a Greener double-barrel coach gun. Two others, Bright Sun and Great Leaper, were equipped with Colt revolvers, the Dragoon and Navy Model 1861. Each man carried a scalping knife, and most of them a tomahawk besides.

  And if they failed despite all his preparation, having followed Tall Tree’s orders to the letter, it must be the will of the Great Spirit who created all land, sea, and sky. At least, in that case, they could face their ancestors with pride.

  * * *

  * * *

  SIX MORE DAYS to Missouri,” Graham Lott remarked, his mouth half-full of pork and beans.

  “That’s if we’re lucky,” Bishop said, “and don’t run into any other snags.”

  “I’ve got a good feeling,” Lott said, after he’d swallowed.

  “And I surely hope you’re right,” Toby replied. “Just don’t go counting any chickens yet.”

  “You-all forgetting about the Injuns?” Leland Gorch asked from the far side of their fire.

  “Hoping the Lord will see us through,” Lott answered back.

  Gorch stared at him a minute, as if Lott was eating locoweed instead of Varney’s cooking, then dismissed him with a tired shake of his head. “Praying won’t help you when the arrows start to fly,” he said.

  “If Joshua could drop the walls of Jericho by blowing on a horn,” Lott said, “I reckon God can get us through most anything.”

  “Amen, señor,” said Paco Esperanza, off to Bishop’s left, and set a couple of the others laughing.

  Lott leaned in, lowered his voice, and almost silently mouthed, “Infidels.”

  “It takes all kinds,” Toby advised.