The Badlands Trail

by Lyle Brandt

  Was that enough?

  Pickering tried to pump the rifle’s lever, felt an unidentified resistance from it, no time to assess the problem while the whooping brave in front of him was bent on lopping off his head. He tossed the briefly useless weapon at his enemy and saw it strike the buckskin-covered chest before Bill reached down to his hip and drew the Colt New Line revolver holstered there.

  It was the perfect range for pistol fighting, no more than a yard and change between them as he cocked the pistol’s hammer, lining up to drill his would-be killer with a .41-caliber slug. An easy shot at that distance, impossible to miss, but the saber whipped around once more and rang against the pistol’s four-inch barrel, jarring it aside and nearly forcing Pickering to drop it.

  He nearly lost the Colt, his fingers tingling, wrist smarting, but managed to hold on to it. The hammer wasn’t cocked yet, but he backed away, two lurching strides, and got that done. The native warrior, maybe sensing victory, rushed forward for another swing.

  Grinning without being aware of it, Bill Pickering triggered a shot into the red man’s groin.

  * * *

  * * *

  TALL TREE HAD suffered pain before, but nothing of this magnitude. It was debilitating, dropped him from an upright stance into a wounded fetal curl, clutching himself with bloodied hands.

  Not dying, necessarily, but stripped of his ability to fight.

  Or was he?

  Wheezing through clenched teeth, Tall Tree stretched out one red-stained hand to reach the saber that had fallen from his grasp a moment earlier. The white man with his smoking Colt loomed over the Comanche war chief, peering down at Tall Tree with a visage of unbridled hatred.

  “You ain’t gonna make it, redskin,” he observed. “I give you points for trying, though.”

  A fragment of a plan occurred to Tall Tree. Looking past the gunman, as if noting someone coming up behind him, he remembered to use English as he called out, “Yes! Kill him!”

  Instinctively, the man who’d shot him half turned from his fallen enemy, to face a creeping adversary who did not exist. At once, Tall Tree lunged for his army saber, blood-slick fingers closing on its handle, with its branched D-pattern handguard, grasping it and using his free hand to push off from the ground.

  That effort cost him more pain, and a spurting gout of blood below. He tried to get one leg beneath him, helping lift his weight, but that was too much effort, forcing him to cry aloud from agony.

  As he slumped forward, head hanging with long hair fanned about his face, the war chief waited for his enemy to fire another shot and finish him. Gunfire crackling around them, two eternal seconds passed before he realized that something had delayed the cowboy’s obvious next move.

  But what?

  Could it be weakness? Had his foe run out of ammunition? Had the white man’s weapon jammed?

  Tall Tree might be dying but he was not finished yet. He knew enough to seize the moment and react, even if he could not stand up and face his would-be killer as a man.

  The saber in his hand could be of service to him yet.

  Clutching its grip and calling on the minimal reserve of strength that still remained to him, Tall Tree prepared to hurl the cavalryman’s sword from where he was, hunched on his hands and knees. The drover might well kill him, but one last act of defiance should assure Tall Tree’s acceptance by his ancestors as one who’d fought defiantly to his last breath.

  Drawing a deep breath he assumed would be his last, Tall Tree reared up, teeth clenched against another crippling wave of pain, and hurled his saber overhand toward the drover whose bullet meant the death of him.

  But on that vital point, he was mistaken.

  Even as the sword flew from his hand, twirling through the dusk blade over pommel cap, another bullet struck him from an unexpected quarter, slamming Tall Tree to the turf and through it, into darkness everlasting.

  * * *

  * * *

  THE LAST THING Toby Bishop had in mind during the fight was rescuing Bill Pickering from being skewered by a flying sword. Still, when the opportunity arrived, he couldn’t let it pass him by.

  The red man Pickering had shot was nearly down and out, but he’d recouped enough strength in his final moments to try taking down the Circle K’s foreman. Bishop had no idea where a Comanche had obtained an army saber and it didn’t matter as the warrior made his pitch from fifteen feet or so.

  It would be hard to miss a man-sized target at that range, although Bill might survive a hit from the peened tang instead of being run through by the saber’s blade.

  No point in taking chances, either way.

  Bishop was less than twenty feet out from the warrior when he fired his Winchester into the hostile’s bloodied buckskin tunic. Impact slammed the red man over on his left side, shot through one lung, maybe both, and possibly his heart as well. He barely twitched on impact with the trampled grass.

  Bill Pickering, by contrast, ducked and spun around, reminding Bishop of a man who’s felt a hornet scrabble down between his collar and his skin. The airborne saber missed him by an inch or two and twirled off into prairie dusk, Bill nearly toppling over, saving himself at the last instant with a breathless imprecation on his lips.

  Sudden silence signaled that the fight was over. Pivoting with his Winchester poised to fire, Bishop found Whit Melville the last combatant standing, other than himself and Pickering. Around them, scattered on the grass, lay seven warriors, only one of them still twitching through his death throes.

  “Looks like they got into it before we found ’em,” Melville said, jabbing his Henry toward one body marked by obvious stab wounds.

  “No honor among thieving savages,” said Pickering. “Hey, Toby—”

  Bishop felt a thank-you coming and he cut it short. “Forget about it. You’d have done the same for me.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Was that disappointment in their foreman’s tone at being interrupted? Pickering recovered in a heartbeat, saying, “We should round these longhorns up before they wander off to hell and gone.”

  As much time as he’d spent around them, cattle were inscrutable to Bishop. Last night, nineteen hundred of them had stampeded at the sound of gunfire. Now these twenty-seven, while disturbed a bit and wandering away at random, showed no vestige of their former panic from the hostiles’ raid.

  Bishop guessed that it would take them twenty, maybe thirty minutes to collect the steers and get them headed north, back toward the larger herd, which would have gained nine or ten miles on them by dusk.

  Whit seemed to read his mind, asking Bill Pickering, “You wanna move them out straight off?”

  “I do,” the foreman said, “unless you’d rather spend the night among dead Comanches.”

  “No, thanks,” Melville replied. “I’d just as soon let the coyotes have ’em.”

  “Right, then. Best we saddle up and get a start on it.”

  Moving off toward his snowflake Appaloosa, Bishop realized the latest killings hadn’t fazed him, wondering if that said something bad about him.

  Or, he thought, maybe it just feels good to be alive.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IT TOOK A full night and day’s riding before Bishop, Pickering, and Melville caught up with the trail drive at its campsite, shortly after sundown on day twenty-seven of their journey. Now, midmorning on day thirty, they were making decent progress through south-central Missouri, all the drovers in a state of high alert.

  Experience had taught them that they couldn’t be too careful this time out.

  So far, they’d seen no more Comanches—nor another white man either, save for one slump-shouldered farmer slogging over grassland, wrestling with his mule-drawn plow. Bishop remembered plowing from his youth and didn’t miss it—though, if pressed, he couldn’t honestly describe cowpunching as a better, more upl
ifting life.

  One upside to it, though, was seeing great swaths of America beyond the boundaries of a homestead claim.

  Along with the steers stolen by the raiders, Pickering and company had come back with the war party’s firearms and four of seven ponies, having lost the other three while battling their late riders. With the bodies, they had left behind one longbow, sundry knives and hatchets, although Pickering carried the saber that had nearly cut him down, suspended in its metal scabbard from his saddle horn.

  A sort of trophy, Bishop guessed, for having felt Death’s cold breath on his cheek and lived to tell the tale.

  Other than the obvious recovery of Mr. Dixon’s stock, there’d been no great palaver as to how the Indians had fought and died. Pickering gave the basic numbers to a campfire congregation mourning its own losses, three men down from when they’d left Atoka on a sunny April day.

  One-fifth of what they’d started out with, already dead and gone, while they were still the best part of a month out from St. Louis. Already they’d exceeded what was the normal length of a trail drive, where the odds of losing steers exceeded any fear of leaving dead men in their wake.

  And murdered men at that. The worst losses of all.

  As Toby reckoned it, without a map to verify it, they were probably in Christian County, named not for the church, as he recalled, but for a Continental soldier from Virginia who had traveled west after the Revolutionary War and service as an officer under George Washington to stake his claim on virgin land. That placed them some two hundred and thirty miles southwestward of St. Louis, with at least three weeks to go—and very likely more—until they reached their destination.

  Some boys of Rudy Knapp’s age, Bishop knew, joined drives with high hopes of adventure. Veterans knew better, teenage dreams dashed by hard work’s reality, leavened by periods of boredom on the trail. Ironically, the times that seemed least tedious were often those when cowboys ran a risk of getting killed.

  Not me, thought. At least, not yet.

  “Strays on the west,” their foreman shouted. “Bishop! Thorne! Get after ’em!”

  Bishop tugged at his Appaloosa’s reins and started after three longhorns who’d paused to crop some grass, then struck off on their own as if they’d tired of traveling in lockstep with the herd. He saw Thorne riding back to join him, having traveled farther toward the drive’s front ranks, taking the deviation from routine in stride.

  Bishop supposed the crew that still survived was adequate to see their journey through, but if their numbers suffered any more attrition, it could wind up being touch and go.

  Every man must remain vigilant, not letting down his guard on watch or any other time, except the hours when he slept.

  And even then, if he could sleep with one eye open, he’d be better off.

  * * *

  * * *

  THEY’VE CALMED DOWN pretty well, I think,” Bill Pickering averred.

  Dixon kept his tone even, neutral, as he asked, “You mean the steers or the men?”

  “Feels like both ways to me, boss. Course, you give longhorns time to walk a mile or so, they won’t remember anything was ever wrong to start with. Drovers, on the other hand—”

  “I hear you,” Dixon cut his foreman off. “Only a fool would say we’ve seen the worst of it this time around.”

  “Kind of a gloomy outlook, boss.”

  “I’d call it common sense,” Dixon replied. “What we’ve been through so far . . . I know some people in Atoka who might say that snowstorm was a bad-luck omen.”

  “Messing with tarot cards, are they?”

  “Not hardly. Most of ’em would say it’s life experience.”

  “I’d say we’ve done all right,” Pickering answered back. “I mean to say you have, keeping the Circle K on track and going strong.”

  “You’ve been a big part of it, Bill.”

  “Well . . . thanks for saying that. But there’s a reason you’re the boss. Keeping it all corralled together in your head.”

  “Maybe. One thing I know for sure.”

  “Which is?”

  “If we lose any more drovers, I’ll need to find a town somewhere and hire some men to see it through.”

  He half expected Pickering to naysay that but got no argument from his foreman. Instead, Bill simply cautioned him: “You know the risk in that, boss.”

  “Sure. Hiring ringers who’ll smile to your face and stab you in the back.”

  “Not saying that it has to be that way, o’ course.”

  “But could be. I’m aware of it.”

  “And best to do without them if we can.”

  “What did I just say, Bill?”

  “Sorry. Can’t help agreeing with you, boss.”

  “Appreciate it.” Staring past his foreman, to the northeast, Dixon frowned and said, “Now, what in hell is this?”

  Pickering turned and followed Dixon’s gaze, spotting small shapes on the horizon. After taking out his spyglass, Bill extended it and peered in through its narrow end, taking a moment to recapture what he hoped to see in close-up.

  “Riders, boss. Four of ’em.”

  “Let me see that,” Dixon ordered, holding out one open hand.

  He took the pocket telescope and found the riders, who were moving closer on an intercepting course with his longhorns. Three of the mounted men appeared to be in their late twenties, maybe early thirties, while the one out front looked at least fifteen years older, gray hair visible beneath his Stetson’s wide, flat brim.

  Dixon had seen that style of hat before, on men and in the Stetson catalog, where it was called “Boss of the Plains.” A certain attitude seemed to accompany wearing that style of headgear, if not universally, at least in men Dixon had personally met, from Tucson right across Texas and into Indian country.

  “Can’t say I like the look of ’em,” he told Bill Pickering as he returned the foreman’s telescope.

  “Trouble, you think?”

  “I wouldn’t want to borrow any, but we’d better go and find out what they want.”

  “I’ll back whatever play you make, boss.”

  “Taking that for granted, Bill. Don’t give offense if you can help it, but that said, keep your Colt handy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And I’d suggest the other men do likewise, just in case.”

  “I’ll spread the word,” said Pickering, and galloped off to do just that.

  Dixon reached down to free the hammer thong on his holster, freeing up his Remington six-shooter for a fast draw if the need arose.

  Before he met the strangers riding out to greet his herd, most of the other hands should be easing into position for a fight. That was the last thing Gavin Dixon wanted, after all that they’d gone through to reach this point, but neither would he shy away from it if trouble wouldn’t let them pass.

  * * *

  * * *

  HEBRON STARK WAS fifty-one years old, a self-made man, to hear him tell it, never mentioning the funds his Boston Brahmin father had provided when they’d split for good, thirty years earlier. Hebron had turned his back on the family’s shipbuilding business, determined not to waste his life cooped up inside a State Street office, overshadowed by his forebears in a manse on Beacon Hill.

  He hadn’t spoken to his old man—long dead now—after they had split, each raging at the other, but for all his muddleheaded boasts of seeking independence, Stark had still been wise enough to take the minor fortune ceded to him as a kind of parting gift and insult rolled up into one.

  His father was convinced that Hebron wouldn’t last a month outside of Boston. Hebron took the payoff with the intent to make a go of it beyond the old man’s reach or influence, convinced it would be easy.

  Both, as sometimes happened in a quarrel, were dead wrong.

  Stark hadn
’t glimpsed the sea in thirty years and didn’t miss it—hadn’t even gone home for his father’s funeral two days before Fort Sumter pitched the sundered nation into civil war. He’d found a rustic backwater that needed cash and a strong guiding hand, staked out a massive prairie claim that covered much of Christian County, and began eliminating anyone who challenged him. For outsiders who didn’t know the rules of play, he offered curt instructions one time only, then removed them from the world he’d made his own.

  By now the process had become routine. Stark saw no reason to believe that it would ever change.

  Today he reined his white Arabian stallion to stand some fifty yards in front of the approaching longhorn herd. He’d been expecting it since Tuesday, when the first scout brushed against a radius of his extensive spider’s web, reported by a tenant farmer who’d been paid five dollars for the news.

  Now here it was. Stark felt his pulse quicken, prepared to start the game anew.

  His three companions, chosen for their reputations and ability to back them up with action, sat astride their mounts ten feet behind Stark. All three were armed, as Stark himself was, but they kept their weapons holstered. None of them would speak or intervene unless Stark ordered it by word or with some gesture they’d rehearsed.

  The stage was his.

  Stark took for granted that the lead horseman approaching him must be the herd’s trail boss. The other two would be employees of whatever spread the longhorns hailed from, doubtless ordered to stand by and listen while their leader spoke for them.

  “Morning,” the trail boss said.

  “Closer to noon,” Stark answered back.

  The stranger let that pass. “Name’s Gavin Dixon,” he explained. “And you are . . . ?”

  “Hebron Stark. I own this land you’re trespassing across.”

  “That so?” The trail boss didn’t sound impressed so far.

  “It is. Ask anyone around the neighborhood.”