by Peter Grant
Walt rose to his feet and poured himself a tin mug of coffee from the pot bubbling at the edge of the coals. He added sugar and milk, and sipped it appreciatively. “These new Arbuckle’s tins of roasted beans have sure made camp coffee taste better,” he observed to Ezekiel.
“Dey sho’ has, suh.” The cook rolled his eyes. “Man, de trouble we used t’ have, roastin’ our own green coffee beans in a fryin’ pan! You wuz never shore you hadn’t overcooked ’em. De only way to find out was to drink de coffee. If everyone hollered an’ threw things at you, you knew you’d burned ’em.” Walt had to laugh. “Dese cans o’ roasted beans, dey much easier to use, an’ dey allus taste good.” Zeke nodded towards the crate of coffee tins on the tailgate of his wagon.
“Yes, they do. I’m willin’ to bet, if the Arbuckle brothers ever run for office, they’ll get the votes of everyone who’s ever had to drink bad coffee on the trail.”
Walt wandered among the teamsters, making sure everyone had had enough to eat and that their wagons and teams were in good order. He found his newest recruit, Isom Fisher, a former buffalo soldier from Fort Davis in Texas, sitting quietly against a wheel of his wagon, a little further away from the fire than the others.
“Evening, Isom. Is all well?”
“All’s well, suh,” the veteran replied, making as if to come to his feet. Walt waved his hand in negation and squatted on his haunches next to him.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on you. You’re handling your wagon real well, and you sure know your way around a six-mule team. With you having been a sergeant in the 9th Cavalry, I reckon you’ll be in charge of one of our wagon trains before long.”
“Thankee, suh.” Fisher hesitated. “You was Army too, right—the Rebs?”
“Yeah, I wore gray during the War. I was a scout in the First Virginia Cavalry, and a sergeant too.”
“Uh-huh.” Fisher ran his eyes curiously over his boss’s tall figure, his slim waist rising to broad shoulders and well-muscled forearms. His face was strong, with dark brown eyes beneath lighter brown hair and eyebrows, hiding what went on behind them. “Ah… if you’ll allow me, suh, there’s one thing I’d like to ask. I cain’t help but notice a lot of your teamsters are black, like me. How come a man who fought for the South, and for slavery, hires so many blacks?”
Walt shook his head. “I never fought for slavery. I fought for states’ rights. My family never owned a slave. My wife married a man who owned one, but she was brought up in Louisiana near the Cane River, where there were plenty of free blacks. After her first husband was killed, she freed his slave and kept him on as a paid hired hand. He worked for us, later. We met up with him again last year, when we went back east for a holiday. Ol’ Mose is getting on in years, but he’s still working for my sister and her husband.
“I guess I had a lot of the usual feelings about your people, growing up in Tennessee. Three things changed that. The first was Gen’ral Robert E. Lee. Near the end of the war, he wanted to form black units to fight for the South. He wanted freedom for every slave who enlisted, and for their families at the end of the war if they served faithfully. He reckoned that had to go hand in hand with freeing all the slaves, over time. Weren’t no other way, he said.”
Fisher sat up, startled. “I never heard o’ that before, suh.”
“Oh, it’s true. His letter was talked about in the Richmond papers. I read them in the field. It made me think. Most of us pretty much worshipped the ground Gen’ral Lee walked on. I reckoned, if a man like him could say things like that, we’d best listen. ’Course, a lot of my fellow soldiers disagreed, but they were from further south than I was. The politicians didn’t listen, anyway, and we lost the war soon after, but his words stayed with me.
“Then, I married Rose. Like I said, she grew up knowing free blacks in Louisiana. She treated blacks like human beings, not like dogs. I guess I soaked up some of that from her. She made me look at you folks with different eyes.
“The third thing was, I hired Samson and his friend, Elijah, off a steamboat in St. Louis to come out west with me. Elijah was killed by Cheyenne on the way to Denver. He was a damned fine man, and Samson is too. Working and riding every day with them, and fighting alongside them, I came to realize it doesn’t matter what color your skin is. It matters what color your heart and soul are. ’Cordin’ to the Good Book, your soul’s got to be white—not this kind of white,” gesturing at his forearms below his rolled-up shirt sleeves, “but white like paper, white like snow. I don’t know about you, but mine’s nowhere near as clean as that!”
Isom grinned, his white teeth gleaming in the twilight against his dark lips. “I dessay mine ain’t either, suh.”
“Yeah. As for your heart, it’s got to be big and bold and red with courage. There’s enough evil in this world that a man’s got to take a stand against it, and for what he believes in. If he won’t, I guess he isn’t good for much at all. Samson’s all heart. He’s stood alongside me with his guns against outlaws in Missouri, Kiowa on the warpath in Kansas, and Cheyenne raiders in eastern Colorado. He owns a quarter of my freight business, and he earned it the hard way. He’s like a strong right arm to me. I’ll trust him with my life any day of the week, and twice on Sundays. I don’t think about him being black anymore. He’s proved himself. That’s all I need to know.”
“I don’t know him as well as you do, suh, but he seems like a real good man.”
“He is. That’s how I came to hire so many black teamsters. I told Samson that if he said someone was worth hiring, I’d take his word for it. I didn’t care about the color of their skin. That’s why you’re here. He said you were a good man, so I agreed to meet with you. I liked what I saw, and I figured he was right, so I hired you.”
“I’m thankin’ you, suh. I won’t let you down.”
“I’m counting on that.”
“How about your white teamsters, suh? Didn’t none of them object to workin’ with so many blacks?”
“Some did at first. I’ve told them all what I just told you. A few of them are Irishmen out of New York City. I reminded them that back there, before and durin’ the war, some places put up signs saying things like ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish’. I told them that if their kind was treated that badly back there, why were they trying to put on airs out here, where a man’s real measure is what he can do and how well he does it? Most of them could see sense in that. I made sure to hire only men who thought the same. My teamsters generally get along with each other. They aren’t necessarily friends, you understand, and they don’t live together—I have separate sections for whites and blacks in our bunkhouse, because I asked them what they wanted, and they voted for that—but they work well together. If anyone causes problems, Samson or I make sure he doesn’t stay on the payroll long enough for it to matter.”
Isom grinned again. “I’ll make sure to keep that in mind, suh.”
Walt laughed. “You were a sergeant, like me. You know how it is. I’m not worried about you like that.” He indicated the polished steel hook that the other man wore strapped to his right forearm. “I see you’re wearing a gun on your left side. Can you shoot it well?”
“Now I can, yeah.” Isom stroked the hook absently with his left hand. “I was right-handed, but after a Comanche bullet hit my hand, gangrene set in. The post surgeon at Fort Davis cut it off at the wrist.” He shivered. “That weren’t no fun at all. He’d run out of ether. He gave me half a bottle o’ whisky, then cut it off with me awake an’ screamin’, held down by six men.”
Walt winced. “I saw that in the war sometimes. Some died under the knife. They were already weakened, and the pain was just too much for them to bear. I’m glad you made it.”
“You an’ me both, suh! Lieutenant-Colonel Merritt was real good to me. He told me he’d have to discharge me ’cause o’ my injury, ’cause Army regulations said so; but he let me train new recruits at the fort for three months before he did, to give me time to heal up an’ get used to doin’ things one
-handed. He had the saddler make me a left-hand holster. I practiced a lot with my revolver. It was hard goin’ at first—I was real slow an’ unsteady, and I missed the target a lot—but I kept at it.”
“How did you cope with reloading?”
“That was my biggest problem. A cap-an’-ball Army Colt needs two hands for that. I got a couple o’ recruits to help me, loadin’ guns while I emptied another one. A visitin’ officer showed me one o’ these new-fangled Smith an’ Wesson American revolvers, what they call the Number Three model. It fires a .44 cartridge, an’ the barrel an’ cylinder tips up to kick out the empty cases. If you stick the barrel in your belt or hold it between your legs, even a one-handed man can reload it easy enough. I had some money saved, so I ordered one. After a lot o’ practice, I’m almost as good with it in my left hand as I was with an Army Colt in my right.”
“Mind if I look at it?”
“Sure.” Isom drew the nickel-plated revolver from the open-topped holster at his left side, reversed it, and held it out butt-first.
Walt had him demonstrate how to open and unload it. He hefted it thoughtfully. “I used a Smith and Wesson Model Two, the .32 caliber, during the last years of the War, along with a couple of Colts. This Model Three feels like a bigger, heavier version of that. The break-open action isn’t real strong, though. You can’t hit someone over the head with the barrel of this gun, or the earlier model, without the risk of breaking something. I can with my Remingtons. Their top strap reinforces the barrel. Also, the Remingtons have a safety notch in the cylinder for the hammer, so you can carry them with all six chambers loaded. This doesn’t, so you have to leave one chamber empty and lower the hammer on it.”
“I reckon you’re right, suh, but I had one real big problem to solve—reloadin’ with only one hand. This gun’s got all the others beat for that.”
“Yeah, when you put it like that, I guess you’re right. What about a long gun?”
“I still ain’t figured out a way to hold a rifle steady enough for long-range work. Right now, I’m usin’ a twin-barrel twelve-gauge Parker shotgun.”
Walt’s eyebrows rose. “That’s a pricey gun.”
Isom grinned. “Didn’t cost me a penny. I took it off a gambler who tried to cheat some of my soldiers at cards. I called him on it. He went for his gun an’ missed. I didn’t—hit him in the knee. A big fight blew up in the saloon over that. The table got upset, an’ my boys couldn’t pick up all their money afore I had to get ’em out of there; so I took ’em down to the boardin’ house. It was the only one in town, so I knew the gambler had to be stayin’ there. We went through his things before they carried him back to his room. We took enough to make up for what my boys had lost, an’ then some. I kept his shotgun for my trouble.”
Walt nodded. He couldn’t help but remember the riverboat gambler and his sidekick who’d tried to kill him in St. Louis, back in ’65. “I’ve had a few run-ins with crooked gamblers myself. Sounds fair to me.”
“Yeah. It turned out to be real useful after I lost my hand. Y’see, it’s opened by a lever on the bottom of the frame, in front of the trigger guard. I can push it up with the back of my hook, or bang it against my saddle horn, to open the action an’ reload it. I fixed a little ring under the fore-end, so I can slip the point o’ this hook into it an’ pull it back into my shoulder. I had the stock shortened, and the barrels cut back to twenty inches, to make it lighter an’ handier. I can aim it well enough to use buck-an’-ball out to thirty yards. I load the cartridges myself, with a big .69-inch musket ball, paper-wrapped to fit the bore, topped with three double-aught buckshot.”
Walt made a wry grimace. “I’d hate to get hit with that! I’m glad you’re still able to use your guns. I expect my wagonmasters to keep them handy at night on the trail, along with a loose-saddled horse. If there’s trouble, they just tighten the saddle girth, then they’re ready for anything. I also have at least one person keep watch through the night—two, in bad areas.”
“Sounds like you have a lot o’ trouble, if you’re on guard like that.”
“I figure at least once on every trip. Near towns, mostly it’s just petty thieving, people wanting to see what they can sneak out of a wagon; but sometimes, on the trail like this, it might be a cougar or bear or wolf after a horse or mule, or thieves trying to steal our teams. With all the mining camps and farms and ranches springing up everywhere, there’s a big demand for them. Several times my wagonmasters have had to chase after thieves to get back their stock.”
“An’ did they?”
“Most times, yeah. Trouble is, outside the cities—and sometimes even in them—the law often isn’t good for much. Too many of them take bribes, or a cut of the loot, so I told my wagonmasters to deal with the thieves themselves whenever they could. The word soon went around that it isn’t healthy to steal stock from Ames Transport wagons. That helped. We’re in a new area now, where that word probably hasn’t spread yet, but it will soon enough.”
Isom sniggered. “I guess it will. It’s rough justice, but this is a rough land. It was the same with horse thieves an’ cattle rustlers in Texas—they hung or shot ’em on the spot if they caught them. Should I stand ready at night like that?”
“Might not be a bad idea to get used to it now. You’ll be doing it as a wagonmaster in a few weeks, bossing your own teamsters and wagons.”
“I’ll start tonight, then. I got my saddle in the wagon, but I had to sell my hoss in Denver ’fore I got this job. C’n I use one o’ the spares?”
“Sure, tell the wrangler I said to help yourself.”
“Thanks, suh. Are you standin’ ready, too?”
Walt nodded as he rose. “A fine boss I’d be if I didn’t set an example for the others!”
“Yeah. I guess you lead from the front, like Colonel Merritt did. I like that in a man.”
“As long as you do the same when you’re in charge of one of my wagon trains, you and I will get along just fine.”
* * *
In the small hours of the morning, Walt was jerked out of a sound sleep by a sudden rush of hoofbeats from the direction of the picketed horses and mules, and a wild shout of alarm. Even as he sat up, grabbing for his trousers, he heard three gunshots, a scream of pain, and the neighing and snorting of panicked animals.
“What the–?” he heard Rose say, startled, from beside him on their bed in the ambulance.
“Trouble!” he snapped. “Wait here. I’m going to see what’s happening.”
He dressed hurriedly and jumped down from the light wagon, stamping to settle his feet into his boots and putting on his hat. He checked the Remington revolvers in his holsters, a straight-up draw on the right and a cross-draw ahead of his left hip, making sure they were fully loaded. Rose handed down his Winchester Model 1866 rifle as a teamster hurried up, leading his trail horse, its saddle carrying everything he might need for a couple of days’ hard ride.
“I’ve tightened the girth, boss. He’s ready to go.”
“Thanks.” Walt slid his rifle into the boot, swung into the saddle, blew a kiss to Rose, then turned the horse and headed for the picketed wagon teams.
Samson was already there, shouting orders to the teamsters to secure the startled, frightened animals. A knot of men, illuminated by a lantern, was gathered around a still, silent figure on the ground.
“What’s going on?” Walt called as his horse slid to a halt.
“Hoss thieves, boss,” Samson replied, looking up at him, his face and voice angry. “They came out o’ the dark an’ tried to drive our teams away; but they were picketed, so they couldn’t run. Young Will was on watch. He tried to stop ’em, and they shot him. Before he died, he said there was five of them. They took his horse, then cut half a dozen picket ropes and drove off those horses, too.”
Walt cursed bitterly. Will had been a promising youngster. “Which way did they go?” he demanded angrily.
“Sounded like they headed up into the hills, but it’s too dark to trac
k ’em.”
“All right. You and Rose will go to that meeting in Colorado City at seven in my place. Whatever deal you two make with the local storekeepers, I’ll back it. I’m going after those bastards. I want three men with me. Who’s ready to ride?”
“Lewis an’ Sandy are here. I’ll find a third.”
“That’ll be me,” they heard Isom say as he rode up astride a roan gelding. He glanced across at the group of men around the body. “He cashed?”
“Yeah, he’s dead,” Walt said. “We’re going to make sure the men who killed him end up the same way. Samson, did they take any mules?”
“No, suh, just hosses.” As he spoke, two more mounted men rode up to join them.
“Then all our wagons still have their teams, and we have enough spare teamsters to drive them all. After you meet with the storekeepers, bury Will decently in the Colorado City graveyard, fix up a headstone for him with the undertaker, then head for Pueblo. You and Rose know what to do. We’ll catch up with you there.”
“Yes, suh!”
“Bring four spare horses for us, with lead ropes, so we can ride relay.”
He turned to the three mounted men. “I’ve been scouting this area for a couple of years, preparing for this move, so I know it. I reckon those thieves will head for Ute Pass. From there it’s a short run to Park County, with its farms and ranches, and mining towns like Fairplay. They’re far enough from here that word of the theft won’t reach them in time to make them suspicious, and they all need horses badly enough to buy ’em quickly, before someone else does.
“There’s only one trail between here and there. It goes straight up into the hills for about twenty miles, then turns west to the Pass for about five miles. I know some short-cuts across farms an’ ranches. We won’t catch up to those men before dawn, an’ by then the light will help us find the short-cuts. I reckon we can get around and ahead of them, and ambush them before they reach the settlement at the top of Ute Pass—the one they call the Divide. They won’t expect that.”
