The Amarillo Trail

by Ralph Compton

  “You see that sky?” he said to Bernie James, Al Corning, and Chet Loomis.

  “Yeah, we see it,” Chet said with a dry Texas twang to his voice. “Means we got a storm comin’ in the morning.”

  “That is what we in Sonora, we Mexicans, call a feo sky. Un cielo muy feo.”

  “You gonna start talkin’ Mex, Paco,” Al said, “I’m lightin’ out for Canada.”

  The men all laughed, including Roy Leeds, who listened with interest now that his small herd was bedded down and two other riders were already making the rounds on night herd.

  “That means that is an ugly sky, caballeros,” Paco said, a visible shadow playing on his lips.

  “He’s a-callin’ us caballeros,” Bernie cracked. “I think that’s somebody who shovels horse shit.”

  The men around Paco all laughed again, including Roy, but Paco kept his face impassive, except for that trace of mirth puckering his lips.

  “Laugh now,” Paco said, “because I am going to ask all of you to start rounding up a thousand head of Lazy J cattle and bed them down with this little herd right here.”

  “At night, with them black clouds blowin’ right down on top of us?” Al said as he looked up at the western sky.

  “Orders from the big boss, Jared. He wants a herd ready to move down to the Canadian and head east by sunup,” Paco said.

  “Shit,” Chet said. The others uttered similar epithets.

  “You will have plenty of light to see,” Paco said, “because you will be putting trail brands on those cattle before you bring them down here.”

  “Impossible,” Al said.

  The other men grumbled and shook their heads.

  “I will do the branding,” Paco said. “Murphy, our smithy, is making the irons right now. Roy here will help me.”

  He turned to Roy, who, though startled, nodded. “I’ll help you, Paco,” he said.

  “We got to organize this night gather,” Paco said. “Brand two heads at a time and run them down here in one long line until we have a thousand head ready to run up to Salina, Kansas. Now. We go.”

  With that, Paco led the procession up to the quadrant where more than a thousand head of cattle grazed or bedded down. Roy rode alongside him.

  “You’re asking a lot of your men, Paco, you don’t mind me sayin’ so.”

  “We will work all night, Roy, that is true. But I do not think we will drive a herd in the morning. We will be lucky if we can start on the trail by the afternoon.”

  “You mean the storm?”

  “Yes. The storm will be very bad. I have seen such storms before. Those black clouds are not only full with rain, but they will carry loud thunder and the big lightnings. I think it will be very hard to gather and brand that many cows by morning and drive them to this place.”

  “So why not wait a day? Wait until the storm has passed?”

  “Because Jared he say that we must get the herd to Salina before the first day of June. And we already see the month of April slip into May very soon.”

  “Where did you learn to speak English so good, Paco?” Roy asked.

  “Ah, you think I speak the English good, eh? My mother was a schoolteacher, first in Sonora, and then we moved to San Antonio. But I have two tongues and sometimes I think one is better to speak than the other.”

  “Your mother was American?”

  “She was half American, half Spanish. She was not Mexicana. She spoke the Castilian tongue, but she could speak the good Mexican as well.”

  “You are very fortunate, Paco,” Roy said.

  “Now you must tell me why everyone calls Mr. Blaine, the father of Jared, ‘Doc.’ Is he un medico—I mean to say, a doctor?”

  Roy laughed. “Not really. His name is really Delmer, but people started calling him ‘Doc’ during the war. In fact, at the end of the war.”

  “The War Between the States? The Civil War?”

  “Some call it a civil war. It wasn’t civil. Most Texans call it the War Between the States.”

  “Yes, I know. So, how did Mr. Blaine come to be called ‘Doc’?”

  “There was a big battle down on the Gulf. Some hill, they say. There was fighting on both sides of the border. Doc was caught in the cross fire. His captain was hit in the leg by artillery fire. They were pinned down for some days, I heard.

  “Anyway, Doc carried this big bowie knife and the lieutenant’s foot started to rot with gangrene. Doc cut off his foot and packed it with mud and stuff, and when the surgeons saw what he had done, they said he should have been a doctor. And so the men he fought with started calling him ‘Doc.’ The name stuck and so that’s what we call him.”

  “That is a good story,” Paco said.

  “And a true one.”

  They saw a fire in the distance, and when the two men rode up, they saw men standing around it. There were two branding irons buried in the fire’s coals, and a man wearing a leather apron and hobnailed boots, with a large mustache, carrotcolored hair, and twinkling blue eyes staring up at them.

  “Roy, this is Sean Murphy,” Paco said as they dismounted. “He is our blacksmith. He shoes the horses, makes the branding irons, and fixes the wagons.”

  “Roy, is it? You must be Doc’s segundo, from what these Irish ears are hearin’.” Sean spoke in a soft brogue that came from county Cork, and sported an impish grin that might have been inherited from a leprechaun. He was a short man with large hands and bulging arms that belied a somewhat sunken chest bristling with copper wires.

  “A pleasure, Sean.”

  “Ah, call me Paddy, Roy. To these Texicans, all Irishmen are Paddies. Dunno why.”

  Roy laughed.

  The other men rode up and Paco sent them out into the herd. Roy noticed that there was a chuck wagon parked nearby and a fire going there as well.

  “You ready, Paddy?” Paco asked.

  “Ready for what?”

  “For me and Roy to start putting trail brands on the cattle.”

  “Oh, sure, Paco, sure,” Paddy said. “See?” He pulled one of the irons from the fire and held it so close to Paco’s face he had to back away and hold up his hands in mock fearfulness.

  “A P?” Paco said.

  “Sure, a P for Perryton, and maybe a P for Paco. Jared wanted one letter of the blitherin’ alphabet and I could curl a P better’n I ever did the Lazy J.”

  “You are full of the bullshit, Paddy,” Paco said with a laugh.

  Paddy shoved the iron back in the fire.

  In a few moments, Roy heard the sound of approaching hoofbeats. Beyond the firelight he saw the bobbing heads of white-faced cattle coming their way braced by two flankers. He walked to the fire and slipped on heavy gloves he drew from his back pocket. He grabbed an iron and stood ready.

  Paco grabbed the other iron with his bare hands.

  “We will brand them as they come by. Paddy will hold them long enough to brand.”

  To Roy’s surprise, Paddy walked a few feet away and picked something up off the ground. It looked like a bracket made of iron. It was just wide enough to fit over a cow’s chest or boss. He stood with it between his legs, both hands gripping the long bars that jutted from one side of the bracket.

  “Ever done this before, Paddy?” Roy asked.

  “I tried it out this afternoon. Got knocked down a few times, but learnt how to brace meself and push. Like so.”

  He stopped the first cow and bent over, pushing as Paco slammed the iron onto the cow’s hip. Paddy pulled away and readied himself for the next one.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Roy said, and stepped up to brand a cow that ran into Paddy’s makeshift bracket.

  It was long, slow, torturous work and some of the brands were cockeyed and half burned into hide and hair. But the cattle kept coming and the rain clouds came closer.

  Far off, they could see the silent lightning stitching silvery latticework inside the bulging billows of dark thunderheads, and there, far off, was the faint muttering of thunder.

 
; Men kept the fire blazing and grabbed ham sandwiches off the chuck wagon and rode back into the darkness to round up more cattle as the clouds began to blot out the Milky Way and smother the moon until the sky turned pitch-black and the murmurs of thunder turned to loud rumbles that rolled across the sky like falling tenpins in an empty attic.

  Chapter 14

  Not long after Roy and Paco began branding, the two men halted. Several men on horseback appeared out of the darkness. They dragged two old high-sided wagon beds and placed them end to end near the branding fire.

  “Here’s that chute you asked for, Paco,” one of the men said when the beds were in place. “Should make it easier on old Paddy there, who looks plumb tuckered.”

  “You took your sweet time, Becker,” Paco said, a grin on his face.

  “Had to take the axles off when we come upon that sump back yonder,” Becker said.

  “You, Morris, Jesse, and Corny can lend a hand. Go find Al and tell him to start the branded cattle down to the range where the Slash B cattle are bunched. Then come back for more.”

  “Sure, boss,” Will Becker said. “Glad we could oblige.”

  Paco shooed him and the other riders away with a playful wave of his hand. Then he called out to Chet and the others, “We got us a chute, boys. Run ’em down here in bunches of ten.”

  The branding went a lot more smoothly with the chutes in place. Roy watched as Paddy worked a hinged board that stopped the cattle inside the wagon beds, which he could drop when they were all branded.

  A little after midnight, Jared showed up, riding a sleek black trotter with a blaze face and three white stockings. He had his bedroll wrapped in a yellow slicker behind the cantle of his saddle and was wearing work clothes and riding gloves of soft black kid, a black Stetson with a flat crown, two pistols, and a Winchester jutting from his saddle scabbard.

  “Howdy, boys,” Jared said as he swung down out of the saddle and ground-tied his horse. “Need an extry hand?”

  “You can spell Roy there, Jared, if you like,” Paco said.

  Roy’s face was orange in the firelight and his forehead gleamed with sweat. He grinned.

  “What makes you think I need to be spelled?” he said to Paco.

  “You branded Paddy in that last bunch,” joked Paco. “Square on his Irish rump.”

  Roy stepped away from the chute and planted his iron in the coals. Jared picked it up after a few seconds and held it up to the firelight.

  “That’s a mighty small P, Paddy,” he said.

  “It’s just a trail brand, Jared,” Paddy said. “We don’t need to kill the cows with a bigger one.”

  “What’s the ‘P’ for?” Jared asked.

  “Perryton,” Paddy said.

  “Are you sure?” Jared said. “Folks might mistake that ‘P’ for Paddy, you reckon?”

  “If you keep raggin’ on me, Jared Blaine,” Paddy said, “it’s a-goin’ to stand for ‘piss on you.’ ”

  Jared laughed louder than Paco and Roy, but he put the hot iron to two head of cattle in the chute and finished off the bunch.

  “You keepin’ a tally, Paco?” Jared asked.

  “I figger we got more than three hundred head wearing trail brands. We’ll get a better tally in the morning.”

  “Slow going,” Jared said.

  “It will go faster now that we have the wagon beds,” Paco said. He plunked the brand back in the fire and wiped the sweat from his face with a bandanna he kept in his back pocket.

  Pedro and Bernie ran another dozen head into the chute and held them in.

  “Take a break, boys,” Jared said. “We got enough hands now to finish before that storm hits us.”

  “Thanks, boss,” Bernie said. “The rest of the herd’s getting mighty restless what with the lightnin’ and the thunder.”

  Jared looked off at the sky. The thunder had grown louder and lightning streaked through the bowels of the black clouds. There was a smell in the air, a smell like the ocean at Galveston, and the wind was starting to pick up. Pieces of broken grass and little wisps of sand blew past them. The flames in the branding fire whipped and lashed with the stronger gusts.

  Paco and Jared finished branding the cattle in the chute. Paco held up his hand when Chet showed up with a half dozen steers. The cattle looked wild-eyed and spooked, tossing their heads and trying to turn and rejoin the herd. Chet checked their every move.

  “Take a break,” Jared told him.

  “You want me to run these into them wagon boxes?”

  “Run ’em in, but if they get out, we’ll let ’em go.”

  “I could use some hot coffee,” Chet said, eyeing the chuck wagon, its canvas top fluttering in the wind, a whitish glare in the dancing firelight.

  “We’ll join you,” Jared said. “I’m buyin’.”

  They gathered around the chuck wagon, drank from the tin cups Cookie had handed them. The smell of Arbuckles’ coffee was strong in the air, mingling with the heady scent of cow shit and steaming horse apples.

  Roy sat down on the ground, his back to a wagon wheel. He blew on his coffee, took a sip. He detected the faint taste of cinnamon and it was pleasurable. Arbuckles put a stick of cinnamon in every can and sack of their ground coffee.

  Jared sat down near him, stretching out his legs and scraping the ground with the blunt rowels of his spurs until he was comfortable.

  “You have a lot of hands, Jared,” Roy said. “More’n we got at the Slash B.”

  “Well, Pa don’t have as much land as me and not near as many cattle. He ain’t been doin’ so good the last coupla years.”

  “No, he hasn’t,” Roy said. “But he thinks this drive will help him pay off his mortgage and hopes he’ll take a bigger herd to Salina or Abilene maybe next year.”

  “I hope it happens,” Jared said wistfully. “But Pa won’t accept no help from me.”

  Roy didn’t say anything. He knew that Doc favored Miles over Jared and figured it had something to do with Miles’s wife and Jared’s notorious temper.

  He looked at the six-guns on Jared’s hips. They were .45 Colt revolvers and the grips looked to be mother-of-pearl, not ivory. Still, they were handsome pistols and the grips stood out against the black of Jared’s dyed denim work shirt.

  “You’re packin’ a lot of iron, Jared,” Roy commented as he brought the tin cup up to his lips again. “Expectin’ trouble on the drive?”

  “You met Will Becker?”

  “Yeah. Briefly.”

  “Becker just got back from Leavenworth. He’s got a sister there and she took sick. He said he had to dodge rustlers and renegade Kiowas all across Kansas. He talked to some of the ranchers and they were hoppin’ mad at the lawlessness. He said all the trails were dangerous, with bandits, Injuns, and highwaymen all lookin’ for easy prey.”

  “I wonder if Doc knows about this,” Roy said.

  “He knows some of it. But Will Becker just got back yesterday and his hair was still standin’ on end when he rode up.”

  “We’ll have to keep our eyes peeled,” Roy said. “You know which trail you’ll take yet?”

  “Yeah, I been over the maps. We’ll foller the Canadian with plenty of grass and water, then mosey up out of Oklahoma into Kansas, skirt Dodge, and head straight northeast to Salina.”

  “Lots of rivers to cross,” Roy said.

  “Can’t be helped none, Roy. Cattle got to drink and chew grass.”

  “You figure you can make it to Salina before the first of June?”

  “Well, we can’t run the cattle to death, but we ought to beat that deadline by a few days by my reckon’. It all depends on . . .”

  Jared didn’t finish his sentence. Instead, he sipped from his coffee cup and stared off at the western sky.

  A gust of wind blew a tumbleweed past the chuck wagon and it rolled to the makeshift corral and stuck there like some ghostly skeleton. Somewhere, off to the west, a coyote yipped and the fireflies disappeared into the night sky.

  Thunder
boomed, and pealed in a rolling rumble. Light streaked through the clouds in a dazzling silver display that raked the earth.

  “Might be hail in that storm,” Jared said. “That’ll play hob with us tryin’ to bed down the herd.”

  “I’ve seen rabbits and quail knocked cold by hail no bigger’n a dime,” Roy said.

  “And I’ve seen calves coldcocked by hail the size of baseballs, knocked plumb dead where they stood.”

  “I guess this will be our first big spring storm,” Roy said.

  Jared finished his coffee and stood up. “We better get to it. I give that storm another four or five hours before it hits us. It’s slow movin’ and we’ll likely have to swim out of it before it’s over.”

  Roy stood up and tossed the teaspoon of coffee still left in his cup onto the ground. He handed the empty cup to Cookie.

  “Let’s get to it, boys,” Jared said. “Get your thumbs out of your butts.”

  They all walked back to the branding fire. Paddy picked up the tumbleweed and flung it into the fire. It crackled and sparked and disintegrated into ash before it disappeared.

  The men all worked with precision and the branding continued while the wind began to roar and threaten to blow out the fire. Men came and went as they drove cattle down to what had become the main herd and returned for more.

  “You got a tally, Paco?” Jared asked as the first patters of rain began to spatter them.

  “I figure we’ve branded better than a thousand head by now, Jared.”

  “That’s what I figger. Paddy, you put out the fire, tell Cookie to roll that wagon down to where we got the herd bedded down.”

  “May the wind always blow at your back, Jared, darlin’,” Paddy said, and began to pull the irons from the fire.

  Jared, along with Paco and Roy, drove the last twenty head as the other men rode on to look after the herd.

  By the time they reached the bedding grounds, the rain was slashing at them in lancing sheets. Hats blew off and disappeared, slickers flapped like wet sails on a schooner, and the cattle moaned and bawled as riders kept them bunched and turned their backs to the wind.

  Puddles began to form on the ground, and rivulets of water ran into the herd, shining bright with every flash of lightning. Thunder deafened their ears, and bunches of cattle rose to their feet and had to be restrained from bolting for high ground that did not exist. No one spoke, but rode their horses hunkered over their saddle horns like monks in yellow robes begging for alms in a merciless universe that was black as pitchblende and electric with jagged streaks of lightning that could kill man, horse, or cow with a direct hit.