The Badlands Trail

by Lyle Brandt

  Tonight, if the Great Spirit smiled upon them, Tall Tree and his braves were going to make history.

  * * *

  * * *

  IF BISHOP HAD been scheduled for a later shift on watch, he would have missed the start of near disaster for the herd. But as it was, he found himself immediately in the thick of it with Sullivan and Esperanza.

  When it started, Paco was singing a corrido, one of those narrative ballads that served unlettered peasants in his homeland as alternatives to newspapers, bridging the gap between cantina entertainment and delivery of late-breaking events, protests, or revolutionary propaganda. Tonight’s song, falling somewhere in the middle, was “La Cucaracha”—“The Cockroach.”

  That might sound funny, but it worked as music and the longhorns seemed to find it soothing. Bishop wasn’t sure exactly why or how, but he still smiled along as Esperanza’s lisping voice drifted across the herd and camp.

  Bishop didn’t understand it all, but he was still enjoying it when suddenly all holy hell broke loose.

  It started with a warbling shriek that could have done a cougar proud, though obviously uttered by a human voice. Another cry responded, emanating from another spot some fifty yards away, and then a rifle shot rang out, apparently not aimed at anyone but fired into the open air.

  Bishop spotted the muzzle flash and had his snowflake Appaloosa galloping in that direction, shouting out to any drovers in the camp who weren’t already scrambling from their bedrolls, when a second shot echoed across the plains, followed immediately by a third and fourth.

  And Mr. Dixon’s longhorns did the rest.

  Whatever else the gunmen might have had in mind, they’d started a stampede.

  Unless you had lived through one—not simply watching it but caught up in the very midst of it—you would have found it difficult to grasp the chaos and destructive power of a herd in total panic.

  Anything could start a herd of longhorns running aimlessly: a rattler’s whir, striking a match, a tumbleweed propelled by gusting wind, on up to lightning bolts and thunder.

  Not to mention gunfire in the middle of a lazy night.

  Once it began, a stampede could destroy most anything that stands before it—fences, man-made structures on the small side, not to mention horses and their riders or hapless pedestrians. Depending on geography, the mad rush could destroy a herd itself, cattle or mustangs charging off a cliff and plummeting through space or diving headlong into rivers where large numbers of them drown.

  In short, utter catastrophe.

  And sometimes that was planned.

  When buffalo were still abundant on the plains, some native tribes stampeded them deliberately, as a callous form of hunting, claiming those that died or were disabled in the melee, thereby saving cartridges, arrows, and energy.

  To slow or halt a stampede that was already under- way, cowboys had to attempt to turn a dashing herd into itself, so that the stock began to run in circles, forced to slacken its pace and pull up short of lethal obstacles. Shouting and cracking whips or waving lariats could help; pistol fire was normally the best approach, shocking the frightened animals back to a grudging consciousness of time and place.

  Of course, that didn’t always work—like now, when hostile fire launched the panic in the first place.

  Toby Bishop and his fellow drovers faced two problems now, at equal risk of death or injury from both. The raging herd was one. The other, getting shot by whoever in hell had started the stampede.

  * * *

  * * *

  IRON JACKET RAISED and triggered his Albini-Braendlin rifle in a strong one-handed grip, the single-shot weapon angled toward distant stars.

  He did not know the gun was made in Belgium—didn’t know, in fact, where Belgium was or even what it was. The rifle had belonged to a white settler killed and scalped, his rural homestead looted afterward, and so far, it had served Iron Jacket well.

  Tonight, perhaps, it would dispatch another white man to his ancestors.

  The longhorn herd was running as anticipated, cattle making panicked noises, their hooves thundering like U.S. Army drums in a parade that had degenerated into raving lunacy. Riding his pony bareback, feeding the Albini’s open breech a fresh 11mm cartridge—the equivalent of a .43-caliber—Iron Jacket watched for the other members of his band, spotting them by the muzzle flashes of their gun.

  It would be relatively easy to assassinate Tall Tree in the stampede’s confusion, but Iron Jacket was postponing the war chief’s elimination; he was focused now on the successful culmination of their plan. When they had gathered up enough survivors of the white man’s herd to suit their purpose, then and only then would he challenge Tall Tree and best him honorably, in accordance with their tribe’s tradition, fighting to the death, hand to hand.

  When he became war chief, Iron Jacket wanted no taint on his name.

  Around the trail drive’s chuck wagon, cowboys shocked from dreams were on their feet or seated on blankets and tugging on their boots. The faster ones among them were already racing toward their horses, none as yet saddled, most straining at their tethers, spooked by the stampeding cattle.

  It was nearly perfect.

  Iron Jacket saw his opportunity and seized it. With his pony standing almost placidly beneath him, well away from the stampede’s direction, he shouldered his rifle, cocked the hammer with his thumb, and aimed along its thirty-four-inch barrel past the iron sights. He used the campfire as a backdrop, picked a shadow as it moved between him and the flames, and fired.

  A hit!

  The stricken cowboy lurched backward, his legs betraying him, and fell into the fire. His cry of pain was music to Iron Jacket’s ears, three of his fellows rushing to extract him from the flames.

  Reloading his weapon, Iron Jacket left them to it, satisfied that with the act of wounding—maybe killing—one, he had in fact prevented four from riding out to head off the stampede.

  For now, it was enough.

  Iron Jacket tugged his pony through a half turn, urged it to a gallop as he rode to join the other members of his war party.

  * * *

  * * *

  IS HE ALIVE?” asked Gavin Dixon, watching three drovers deposit Boone Hightower near the chuck wagon.

  “Hit bad, boss,” Isaac Thorne replied. “And burned some.”

  Dixon didn’t bother cursing. They were past that now, compelled to act immediately if he hoped to save the herd and rout whoever had stampeded them.

  “Leave ’im to Mel and Rudy,” Dixon ordered. “Anything that they can’t manage is beyond us. Rest of you, get saddled up and run the stampede drill. Spot someone shooting who ain’t one of us, try blowing off his goddamn head!”

  They answered, “Yes, sir!” in a garbled chorus, sprinting off toward the remuda, lugging guns and saddles. Abel Floyd was there ahead of them, untying tethers, handing off the mounts first come, first served.

  The air was full of thunder, longhorns running, bleating. Gunshots punctuated it, some fired by raiders still unseen, others by Dixon’s three drovers on watch. The slug that had drilled Hightower, he supposed, had been steered by either dumb luck or some decent marksmanship.

  Dixon felt suddenly exposed, a target in a shooting gallery, but ducking under cover never crossed his mind.

  He had a job to do, a herd and ranch to save.

  And failing that, he might as well just pick a compass point at random, traveling until he found someplace where he could start from scratch.

  At forty-seven, pushing forty-eight, Dixon knew that the odds of that were slim to none.

  Bill Pickering ran past him, tugging at his belt and gasping, “On my way, boss! Bastards caught me watering the bushes.”

  Dixon would have laughed at that in other circumstances, but he didn’t have it in him now. “I’m right behind you,” he told Pickering, j
acking a round into the chamber of his Winchester ’73.

  He got to the remuda seconds after Pickering, found Abel Floyd holding their horses for them while the other cowboys scattered, galloping away to try turning the herd or to engage their enemies, whichever they could manage best.

  Once both their mounts were saddled, Dixon and his foreman mounted up, and Bill looked to him for orders.

  Dixon didn’t hesitate. “The herd has got to be our top priority,” he said.

  “With people shooting at us, though—”

  “I didn’t say it would be easy.” Dixon cut him short.

  “No, sir!”

  “We do our best. If someone you don’t recognize gets in your way—”

  “Kill ’im,” said Pickering, without a heartbeat’s hesitation.

  “That’s exactly right,” Dixon replied, and steered his brindle mare off toward the head of the stampede, already better than a hundred yards due west, no sign of slowing down.

  * * *

  * * *

  ESTES COURTWRIGHT HADN’T dealt with a stampede before, blind luck perhaps, and now, caught in the path of one, he wished he could have put it off forever.

  But his wish came too damned late.

  Courtwright wasn’t entirely sure how he had come to be ahead of the longhorns. His sable gelding was a swift horse, granted, and he’d spurred it close to top speed in the mad dash out of camp, trying to do what he’d been taught by older, wiser hands—namely, to get as far in front of a stampeding herd as possible and fire over their heads to slow them down at first, then turn them back.

  To that end, he was brandishing his Colt Pocket Navy revolver, a .36-caliber weapon larger than its name might suggest. He held his fire until he’d caught up with the leading longhorns in the panicked herd, his hat blown back and slapping at his shoulders, dangling from its rawhide chin strap while the wind rush whipped his longish sandy hair around his face. Some of it slapped across his left eye, stinging him, but Courtwright wouldn’t rein the sable back from running full tilt over moonlit sod.

  So far, he was the only hand in a position to prevent the herd from rushing on to hell and gone.

  Reaching the point position, Estes mouthed a curse and steered his mount across the path of onrushing destruction, only then cocking his Colt and squeezing off a shot back toward the general location of their camp. No problem there. His aim was high, and even when his slug eventually fell to earth, the other drovers should be well clear of its path.

  And if some of them weren’t . . . well, who would know the difference when this was all behind them, anyhow?

  He didn’t know who’d started the stampede, presumably the Comanche who’d tried to steal from them a few days back, but none of them seemed to be firing at him now, which was a blessing in its way.

  Now all he had to fret about was horns, hooves, and the tonnage of some nineteen hundred steers and change, thundering toward him like a tidal wave.

  And bearing down on him right now.

  Courtwright got off a second shot before the wave of flesh and bone enveloped him. His horse gave out a squeal of pain as it was gored inside its stifle, roughly corresponding to a human’s knee, ripping through muscle and tendons, snapping bone. Estes tried to bail out of his saddle as the horse went down but wasn’t fast enough. It landed on his right leg, rolled, and then it was his turn to scream.

  He’d never felt such pain but reckoned that it wouldn’t last much longer. Trying for a third shot with his Colt, he found his gun hand empty, trigger finger curling uselessly around thin air.

  And that was when the longhorns trampled over him, hooves staving in his gelding’s ribs, snapping its neckbones, shattering its skull. One of those hooves came down on Courtwright’s twisted pelvis, snapping it in two, before the longhorn flicked its head and gored him underneath his chin, piercing his soft palate and brainpan like a javelin hurled at a watermelon.

  Courtwright didn’t feel it as his corpse was wrenched out from beneath his fallen mount and carried off downrange, dangling and flopping from the horn that finished him as if he were some ghoulish ornament.

  * * *

  * * *

  THE AIR WAS filled with leaden hornets, buzzing after Tall Tree and his raiders as they drove two dozen longhorns, traveling southwestward from the point where they had set the white man’s herd fleeing in terror. Tall Tree had been hopeful for a larger haul, but under fire and riding pell-mell through the night, he settled for the steers in hand.

  Aside from parting shots beyond effective range, the white men did not follow in pursuit. They would be more concerned about collecting their remaining stock, driving the winded steers back toward the camp they had deserted when the first gunfire surprised them out of drowsiness. That might require another hour, likely more, and it would still be dark when it was finished, every man still fit to ride on guard duty for the remainder of the night.

  Tomorrow morning, when the sun rose, there would still be work for them to do collecting strays, tending to any injured men or steers, deciding who was fit to travel on. Some badly damaged cattle might be shot. Drovers in urgent need of medical attention would require an escort to the nearest prairie town, some fifteen miles away.

  And through all that, Tall Tree’s Comanches would be traveling, herding their stolen livestock back across Missouri’s border and beyond the reach of local law. When the white men got their wits about them and decided what to do, if any of them cared to track the raiders who’d humiliated them, it should prove to be a futile enterprise.

  And even if they did succeed in following the war party, what of it?

  Most would certainly remain to tend the shrunken herd. The handful that gave chase might spend a day or more on Tall Tree’s trail, only to find themselves outnumbered and outgunned if they made contact.

  Free longhorns and dead white men. It would be reckoned as a double victory.

  The only major problem facing Tall Tree now was Iron Jacket.

  Victory against the trail drive would have undercut the traitor’s popularity among the other braves. Tall Tree had planned the raid and seen it carried out as a cooperative effort. If Iron Jacket tried to press his case now, he’d be arguing from weakness, trying to present himself as an alternative to a war chief who’d proved himself in battle.

  But Tall Tree had no intention of allowing it to go that way, much less allowing someone who had betrayed him to select a given time and place for settling their feud. When they had put enough miles in between themselves and the remainder of the longhorn herd, he would confront Iron Jacket, take him by surprise, and force the issue on his own.

  Whatever happened next, tradition had decreed that only one of them should live to fight another day.

  Tall Tree fully intended that the honor would be his and his alone.

  * * *

  * * *

  YOU KNEW IT was bad when seasoned cowboys cried. Not sniffling just a little, as at weddings when they’d had too much to drink, but when hot tears cut through the dust coating their cheeks.

  Bishop was not among the weepers, and in truth he only counted two of them, but who was he to judge?

  Their losses from the raid: two men, one horse, and an uncertain number of longhorns. Surprisingly, none of the steers had died or suffered crippling injuries, and while a head count couldn’t be completed until after sunrise, once the final stragglers were retrieved, Bishop and Sullivan had both seen faceless riders breaking off into the night, driving longhorns ahead of them. They had fired after the escaping thieves, without success, but hadn’t ridden after them since Mr. Dixon had arrived, bellowing orders that retrieval of the herd came first.

  Their dead were Boone Hightower, shot through his right lung and scorched in places when he fell into the campfire, and soft-spoken Estes Courtwright, gored and trampled almost beyond recognition by stampeding c
attle.

  That meant two more graves to mark their route of travel, while the horse that had died with Courtwright would be stripped of tack and left behind to nurture scavengers, the prairie’s cleaning crew.

  And then what?

  Mr. Dixon was addressing that subject right now, standing behind the bodies of his trail drive’s most recent fatalities.

  “The bastards put one over on us, men,” he said. “Those close enough to see them reckon they were Comanches, likely the same ones from before who murdered Graham Lott. Now they’ve got three lives on their conscience that we know of—that is, if they even have a conscience they can divvy up between ’em.”

  “Are we going after them?”

  “Some of you are,” Dixon replied, “but only after daylight, when we’ve finished rounding up whatever stragglers from the herd that we can find.”

  Bill Pickering held up a hand, as if he were a boy in school. “Boss, when you say some of us . . .”

  “It’s exactly what I mean, Bill. You’ll be riding point on that with two men of your choosing, while the rest of us push on northward.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t need to chase ’em far,” Dixon pressed on, as if his foreman hadn’t tried to interrupt him. “All of ’em mounted, with the steers they stole, it shouldn’t be a problem picking up their tracks. But listen good now. If you don’t catch up with ’em inside a day, or two at most, forget about it and we’ll eat the loss. Ride back and join up with the herd fast as you can. I got a feeling we’ll be needing every man and gun from here on out.”

  The foreman clearly didn’t like that order, but he bobbed his head and swallowed it, saying, “Yes, sir. Just as you say.”

  “It’s settled, then,” their boss declared. “Mel, get some food on, will you? We’ll have no spare time to waste come sunup, in between the strays and digging graves.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN