by Leon Loy
He was on the north side, where the bank was higher. The river spread out in numerous little streams over a broad bottom of orange sand, which stretched for a hundred yards to the opposite bank. Apart from the small grove of cottonwoods where he stood, there were no trees in view, other than scattered stands of scrub oaks and patches of reeds bordering the river. A breeze was rustling the tops of the reeds and the leaves of the oaks and cottonwoods; otherwise everything was dead silent.
The horse neighed again and strained against the rope holding it to the tree. This time, a movement near the river caught Caleb’s eye. He spoke to the horse, stroking its neck to calm it, and then slid his Winchester from its saddle scabbard. Stepping away from the sorrel, he levered a shell into the chamber. Staring at the thicket where he had seen movement, he lifted the carbine to his shoulder, ready.
He heard it now. A low, throaty snarl.
A flash of tan against the green of the reeds was followed by a high-pitched screech that set the small hairs on the back of his neck on end. The horse reared and screamed as a cat emerged from the reeds. Up over the bank it sprang, and through the grass toward them. It came so low to the ground that it appeared to be gliding on its belly.
Caleb pointed the muzzle toward the flash of tan and fired, all in one motion. The loud report of the carbine quickly drifted away in the wind and echoed against the far bank of the river. He worked the lever of the carbine, preparing to shoot again.
His bullet had struck the cat in its right flank, throwing it off its course, just yards short of the horse. The cat rolled, screaming ferociously as it tried to regain its feet. The sorrel bucked out toward it, eyes bulging with terror.
Caleb fired a second shot, taking careful aim this time. The bullet entered just behind the cat’s shoulder. It flipped in the air and fell to the ground, dead.
Caleb caught the reins of the sorrel and attempted to calm it. The smell of the cat was still in its nostrils, and it took some time before he succeeded in getting it settled down. His own heart was beating double time.
He walked over and examined the animal. It was a male panther, about five and a half feet long from its nose to the base of its tail, and two feet tall from its paw to shoulder. Had it reached the horse, it would have had no problem taking it down.
The sun had reached the center of the sky, warming the skin on his neck and hands. Though there was little shade left in the little grove of trees, Caleb and the sorrel would need more rest to continue. He dragged the cat toward the river, and rolled it off the bank.
A little later, after a dinner of oranges from a tin, he stretched out under the trees, his rifle within reach. As usual, when he closed his eyes, he could only see Sparrow. He imagined what she must be experiencing, once again a captive. He felt powerless, and not a small measure of guilt. He whispered a prayer for her.
Sheer exhaustion soon drove all thoughts from his mind, and he slept.
For the third time, Buck started toward the cabin, and for the third time, turned back to the campfire and sat down.
Joe watched him with dull eyes. “Buck, if you want a poke with that girl, wouldn’t no one blame you,” he said. “Least of all, me.”
Buck cast him a sideways glance, and spit at the fire. “I told Harold I wouldn’t. Not till he got back.”
It was the sixth day since Harold had left for Dodge City.
Joe pulled the coffee pot off the coals with a stick and set it down in front of him. “He’ll be back any day now.”
Buck knew this was true, and it made him even more restless. Ever since he had first caught sight of her on the boardwalk in Dodge City five months earlier, Buck had nursed an ache for her deep in his loins. For months, he had waited while planning the abduction. Now she was right here, just a few steps away, in the cabin.
“She’s your’n, now,” Joe said. “Ought to do with her as you please.” He poured coffee into a tin cup and handed it to Buck.
Joe was right, Buck thought. The way he saw it, she was more his, than Harold’s. It had been his idea to take her, and charge a ransom for her.
“By God, Joe,” he said, “I done waited long enough.” There was no clerk husband, no Doc Holliday or Wyatt Earp, or even Harold here now to stop him.
He started for the cabin again, this time reaching the doorway. He looked back at Joe who was grinning at him, revealing a mouthful of missing teeth. Joe hadn’t been the same since the Indian girl’s husband had beat him with an ax handle. It wasn’t that he was less intelligent—he never had much intelligence before he was hit in the head—it was more like he was bent.
Sliding through the burlap, Buck looked toward the bed. Sparrow was sitting up, watching him, like she knew he was coming. That took him off guard just a bit.
“I come to check that rope,” he said. She pulled on it, to let him see it still held her secured to the bedpost.
He approached slowly, skirting around the table. Her eyes followed him—not with fear—but with grim anticipation, like a seasoned soldier watching the advance of an enemy army, aware of impending violence.
He stopped in front of her. “You can take this easy, or hard. It’s up to you. There ain’t no one coming for you, or they would have come by now. This is how it’s going to be.”
“Caleb will come,” she said.
Buck laughed. “That husband of yours has done found someone else to bed with. He left you in Dodge City, didn’t he? You might as well face up to it. You are my girl now.”
Defiance lit her eyes. “I will never be your girl,” she said.
“Well, we’ll see about that,” he said.
He pulled off his boots and began unbuttoning his trousers. She noticed he wasn’t wearing his gun belt. He stepped out of his trousers, and stood in front of her. Knowing that she would only get in a good bite or two before he beat her unconscious, or killed her, she had decided to go for his jugular.
Outside, horses sloshed across the creek, and she heard Harold’s voice as he greeted Joe.
“Shit,” Buck said, grabbing his trousers and attempting to step into them. He lost balance, and fell onto the dirt floor. “Shit, shit, shit.”
The burlap parted, and Harold entered the cabin. “What the hell, Buck,” he shouted.
Buck was buttoning his trousers, still on the floor. “Did you get the money?” he asked.
Harold threw Dr. McCarty’s medical bag on the floor beside him. “It’s in there, all two thousand dollars. What’s this?” he asked, looking at Sparrow, and then at his brother, who was now pulling on his boots.
“It ain’t what you think,” Buck tried to explain.
“It sure looks like what I think.”
“I ain’t touched her. Ask her.”
Harold could see she was still dressed, and tied to the bed. Her eyes told him that she had not been molested.
“Looks like I got here at the right time,” he said.
Buck opened the bag. “You weren’t followed?”
“Naw. I took the doctor’s wife with me for a ways, until I could see they weren’t coming. Then I let her go. That fool doctor believes we’ll set Sparrow free.”
“He’s a son-of-a-bitch, like the rest of them Yankees,” Buck said. He grinned as he looked over the stacks of bills. For the moment, he forgot his passion for Sparrow.
“We did it, brother,” he said, “By God, we did it!”
Sparrow knew the answer before she asked, but she asked anyway. “You will let me go now?”
“Would it be so bad, if we didn’t?” Buck said. “What have you got to go back to in Dodge City? That clerk of yours? He ain’t even there.”
She did not believe what he said about her husband. Caleb did love her…she never doubted that. And he would come for her. She knew this, too. Perhaps he had not yet learned what had happened to her. It would have taken days, or weeks, before word c
ould have reached him, wherever he had gone. Even though she knew these things, her heart sank.
As her eyes dropped, she saw something that caught her breath. Lying on the floor, just inches from her toes, was Buck’s folding knife where it had slipped from his trouser pocket.
Easing her foot forward, she gripped the knife between her toes and dragged it back toward the bed.
“I ain’t ate since yesterday noon,” Harold said. “You have anything left from breakfast?”
“There’s a biscuit, and some rabbit, if Joe didn’t throw it out,” Buck said, glad to have the focus turn away from he and the girl. He darted through the doorway to the outside.
Harold looked at her, his eyes working from her head to her feet, and back again. “Sparrow, I almost forgot just how pretty you are. Buck didn’t…?”
“No. He has not touched me,” she said.
“But he would have, if I hadn’t come when I did?”
She nodded, and said, “Yes.”
“Come out of there, Harold,” called Buck just then from outside. Harold grinned at her in a way that made her skin crawl, and left the cabin.
As soon as Harold was out, Sparrow brought the knife up with her toes to the bed where she grasped it with her hands. Even though her wrists were tied, she had little difficulty in opening the small blade from its handle. It might not be long before Buck realized it was missing, so she worked fast. Her attempts to cut the rope around her wrists proved futile. She simply could not grip the knife in an angle to reach the rope. Freeing herself from the bed was much easier, and within a few minutes she had cut the lead rope.
She stood up. Now, what would she do, she wondered. It would be impossible to leave the cabin in daylight without being seen. The men were around their campfire between the cabin and the creek. The steep walls of the gulch behind the cabin were not climbable. Her only avenue of escape would be to cross the creek and reach the trail through the gulch, which led to the river. With her wrists bound, she would not be able to manage stealing one of the horses, so she would have to settle for escaping on foot. Regardless of the danger, she would rather risk walking alone on the prairie, even with her hands tied together, than stay any longer as a prisoner of these men.
If Buck discovered his knife missing and came looking for it before night, Sparrow was left with two options: use the knife and attempt to plunge it into his throat, or try to inflict a fatal wound to herself.
Outside, she heard horses crossing the creek, and a moment later Harold walked through the burlap. “Buck and Joe are going out to the river on a lookout just in case someone followed me. That brother of mine don’t trust nobody. I’m going to lie down here on the bed.” He grinned in that way which made the hair on the back of her neck stand up, and began removing his boots. “You just scoot over.”
“But you didn’t want Buck to sleep with me,” she said.
“Hell, Sparrow, I didn’t want Buck to be the first one. Not this time. You’re as much mine as his.”
“It is my time of month,” she said, holding her wrists over her crotch. The cut lead rope to the bed lay behind her. “I am not clean.”
Harold frowned first, and then grinned again. “That don’t make no difference to me.”
He took off his gun belt and set it on the table, then loosened the buttons on his trousers and proceeded to crawl beside her on the bed. She slid out of his way and he saw the cut rope. “What is this?” he asked.
With the knife clutched in her fist, she leaped on top of him, straddling him like a horse. She brought the short blade down into his throat, driving it with all her might. The force of the blow broke his wind pipe and the blade severed his jugular vein.
It was a fortunate strike, for she would not have gotten another one. Harold threw her off him onto the floor. He grabbed his crushed throat and thrashed about on the bed, choking in the gush of blood that filled his lungs and spurted up through his fingers.
Sparrow rolled to her feet and darted through the cabin, stopping to grab his gun belt before bolting out through the door.
15
For days, Eb traveled north and west. The Washita River crossing had been without incident, but he had nearly drowned crossing the Canadian River when the current took him and the horse two hundred yards downstream before the horse regained its footing. The torrent had ripped away his blanket and hat, but the moccasins and Hawken rifle he managed to retain. He had lost count of how many days he had been riding, and was wondering if the Kiowa had given him correct directions to Dodge City.
His marksmanship had improved on the Hawken. One morning, he shot a small pronghorn near a watering hole. He skinned it, cooked the backstrap, and fashioned a poncho from the hide to cover his shoulders and back.
In the afternoon, he came across the half-eaten carcass of a black-tailed rabbit. He salvaged enough of its hide to make a cap for his head, leaving the ears attached, which flopped around in the wind.
After the Canadian, the water grew scarcer, as did any sign of human habitation. Though he was glad there had been no more Kiowas to deal with, he thought he would have run into a white settlement, trading post, or homestead at some point.
One day, he woke up to find his horse gone. He had camped on a slight rise in the middle of a flat, dry prairie, and could see all around him for miles, but there was no sign of his horse. In the dirt, near where he had hobbled the horse, was a portion of rope. He could not tell if it had been cut, or had broken apart. He looked for tracks, or moccasin prints, but the ground gave no evidence that anyone had been there other than himself.
Eb picked up the piece of rope and threw it as far as he could throw, then tossed his head back and screamed every vile curse he knew.
When his voice gave out, he crumpled in the dirt, and cried. “I might as well have burned up in that fire with O’Riley,” he sobbed. “That fat bastard burned up all at once, whereas I’m burning up slow. God, if you hear me, strike me dead now. Please, God, please.”
The exertion left him so weak, he fell asleep.
The dentist and the doctor made no attempt to track Harold Hester, neither of them being experienced trackers. Doc Holliday had secured a roughly drawn map of the region, and knew if they set a course to the southwest, they would strike the Cimarron River. He had learned from the alcoholic ramblings of men, with whom he gambled in Dodge City, that the rugged strip of prairie between the Cimarron and the Beaver River to the south was known to be a hideaway for fugitives from the law. The plains between the rivers were barren and unpopulated, broken by arroyos and gulches, covered with thick brush. This area had come to be designated as “No Man’s Land.” The stretch of sharp cliffs near the river was referred to as the breaks. He believed that to be the most likely hideout of Buck’s gang.
At sundown on the second day out from Dodge City, the two men descended the northern bank into the sandy bed of the Cimarron. They dismounted, hobbled their horses on the grass at the edge of the river, and began making camp.
Dr. McCarty threw an armload of driftwood gathered from the river edge on the ground near Holliday, who was striking matches to tender. “This fire won’t give us away?” he asked.
“Down low like this should be concealment enough,” Doc said. “From what I’ve been told, the breaks begin further west, miles upstream.”
“I do hope you are correct about Buck taking her there. Otherwise…”
“Otherwise, this will have been an exercise in futility,” Holliday added. “I understand your skepticism, Doctor. To my thinking, they won’t be camped more than three or four days from Dodge, and the breaks fit that thought. Unless they headed out across the badlands to Colorado.”
“Colorado?” McCarty said uneasily. “Isn’t that where the troops are searching?”
“Yes, and they haven’t returned with her, which tells us they haven’t found them.” Holliday grinned. “Relax, Do
ctor. I feel we have set the right course.”
“Please call me T.L., John,” McCarty said. “There is no need for formalities between us.”
“They’ve taken to calling me ‘Doc’ since I resumed the dentistry profession in the Dodge House. In your company, that seems a bit presumptuous, however.”
“It appears you and I are the only men practicing medicine in Dodge City, who actually have earned degrees for our work,” McCarty said. “I believe I will continue to call you by your name, if that is alright with you.”
“T.L., you can call me whatever you wish.”
“I’ll get the tent,” McCarty said, as he moved to his horse.
“You can have it. I prefer to sleep in the open air.”
Dr. McCarty gathered the canvas and support rods and spread them out in the sand. “Are you sure that is wise, in your condition?”
Holliday scoffed. “I don’t presume anything I do is wise, T.L. And regarding my condition, the air inside the confines of a tent offers small comfort. It seems I’m a bit claustrophobic as well as consumptive.”
“It should be clear tonight,” Dr. McCarty said, noticing the stars beginning to sparkle in the twilight.
Holliday carefully set sticks of wood onto the fire he succeeded in creating, and rocked back on his heels. He seemed far away, silent, his eyes transfixed by the blaze.
Dr. McCarty finished setting up the small tent and sat down in the sand next to him. Both men gazed into the fire for a while, lost in their thoughts.
Finally, Dr. McCarty broke the silence. “I wish Caleb was with us. It should be him that rescues his wife.”
Holliday studied the man sitting next to him. The doctor was one of the few men he’d met who was honest and sincere to a fault. “You still believe she will be found alive?”
“I pray that she is alive, yes.”
“I wish I had your faith, T. L.,” Holliday said. “I lost mine a long time ago.”
