Instead, gently, Tom urged, “Come on, son. I want you to ride with me.”
There was a moment of remaining stubbornness and challenge, and then he felt that Steve could find no way to meet his father’s strangely quiet urging. In the outer rim of firelight the old man laid one arm across his boy’s shoulder. They vanished into the dark like that, walking slowly.
Charley Storms and Neal Good had some clownish secret. A grin had been growing on Charley’s broad, flat-nosed face. While Neal Good’s humor, that hardly ever showed in his reserved half-Spanish features, was beginning to crack through.
They left their bedrolls and, passing behind Joy, Charley bent close to her ear and whispered something that made her giggle. They disappeared together beneath Owl-Head’s wagon top.
Lew uncrossed his legs and stretched them out and, making a cigarette in brown corn paper, he offered idly, “Anyone short on tobacco? I laid in a supply.”
He saw Clay swing his broad back to the table and sit there as if listening off into the night. But no sound came from that direction, south, where the longhorns, well-watered and fed, were sleeping peacefully. And there was nothing to see. Clouds had blotted out the stars, filling the world with absolute blackness beyond the circle of firelight. In a moment Clay stood up and went to the pit and kicked another log onto the blaze. It was a restless act; the brief upward glow caught the irritation on his face. With all the other men quieted by a good meal something was driving this big blond and wouldn’t let him rest.
He swung back almost as if a hand had gripped his shoulders and turned him with a sudden violence.
“It’s my guard, Lew. I’m going out. The others needn’t come till they’re ready.”
“Plenty of time,” he said. “Take it easy.”
But Clay’s huge plunging gait was carrying him on. He got up and followed, urged by a quick, yet unshaped suspicion. “Wait a minute.”
He caught up off in the decreasing light. There was no heat in him, only a dull outrage against this man who had so much and was using it so badly. He could still see Joy’s look, grave and strange and sweet, promising all that a woman could promise, and yet Clay could go on in his bullheaded secret way surely toward some kind of ruin.
“There’s four men out now,” he said. Moonlight and Splann had not come in. “Why are you going, Clay?”
The answer came in a surly growl. “There’s a storm blowing up. You can see that yourself.”
He could, but that wasn’t it. He waited, letting his eyes probe through the dim light and seeing the ruddy face turn more and more strained with its controlled temper. He let his words drop quietly.
“Yes. If that was all. What is it?”
“What else do you think?”
“I think you’d better use your head. Clay, wake up! You haven’t covered your tracks so much. You’ve left a trail ever since we started—and it’s crooked as the devil!”
He saw Clay’s ruddiness flood suddenly dark, and then that color ebbed and all the loose lines of his face were drawn tight. Something charged and desperate was like a strong force held violently inside him.
Joy was coming toward them.
“Lew.” She nodded him aside and raised her hands against Clay’s chest. “You can’t go now! Aren’t you going to dance with me? Owl-Head promised to play his fiddle—after the show.” She laughed; her hands gave him a quick pat. “Now you come on!”
She pulled him back to her wagon and raised her arms for him to lift her inside. A keg made a seat in front of the low cabinet organ. The bellows wheezed, pumping in air, and then she pressed out a long chord.
Charley Storms’s muffled voice came from beneath the chuck-wagon canvas. She changed at once into the Blue Danube Waltz.
The wagon flaps parted. Neal and Charley jumped out into the firelight, joined hands and curtsied. Their long hair was brushed straight down. They had reddened their cheeks with some kind of juice. Imitating the dresses of Rowdy Kate’s girls in Ox Bow, they had opened their shirt fronts; long-legged underwear made pantalets beneath the saddle blankets they had fastened around themselves like very short skirts.
In waltz time they began to dance with each other, coyly, like those girls of Kate’s, teasing the men.
Young Jim Hope took it with a whoop. Lew watched the older men’s faces. Joe Wheat and Ash Brownstone looked suddenly sheepish and embarrassed. He felt that even Quarternight was blushing beneath his leathery skin until, with his rebel yell, old John grabbed Charley Storms, hugged him up and began to stamp the dust. Brownstone took Neal Good, and watching them, grinning, he admitted these old boys hadn’t forgotten anything. They seemed to be feeling they had real girls from the dance halls and they were not remembering that Joy Arnold had never seen men go it at Rowdy Kate’s.
Then he saw Clay start toward her, his face angered. But when he reached her wagon she laughed him aside. She finished the waltz, and as she dropped her hands from the keys, still flushed and shaking with that laughter, there came a far-off clapping across the sky like applause from some distant audience.
Someone said, “Listen! Thunder.”
Lew turned his head outward to the blackness and waited, hearing Joe Wheat say, “Give me a jig, girl, and I’ll show these pullets a dance!”
The next instant, as if that thunderclap had been a signal, he caught the repeated spurts of light low down on the earth, even before the rattle of guns reached him.
He jerked back to face the camp. Afterward, with that picture stamped so clearly on his brain, it seemed that all of them must have been frozen there many minutes. He saw Joy’s lips parted, her laughter halted and set, and Clay looking up at her, his face gone wholly blank. Neal Good and Charley Storms stood with their shirts disarranged in front of the old men they had been dancing with, and Owl-Head Jackson was eating a piece of pie.
It seemed minutes, and yet he knew it could have lasted only a fraction of a second, while the earth jarred beneath them and the air shook with the drumming of four thousand longhorns on the run.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Stampede
His horse was close to camp and he was first in the saddle, with the others delayed in running out to their picketed animals. Alone, he plunged into the night’s blackness.
There had been no more shooting after that ragged volley. No more was needed. It had jumped the four thousand longhorns in a single startled mass. Slow and awkward as they looked, they could outdistance even a good horse for a little while in any sudden fright. He could only follow them, guided by the rattling drumbeat of their split hoofs.
He felt his horse stumble on the roughened bed ground; a blacker line of creek-bottom trees loomed suddenly. By it he knew the herd was running west. They had crossed in a mass, leveling the brush and smaller willows. But there were larger trunks that some of the cattle had struck. The horse lifted him over a motionless shape and raced on.
Beyond the creek they had continued running straight. He could feel the flat, unbroken land and judged they were aimed along the shelf between the low hills and the river. Riding loose, giving the animal beneath him every chance to keep on its feet, he waited for a certain time. Running was not a natural pace for cattle. When the drumbeat fell into the longer rhythm of a gallop he knew they were tiring. Slowly he began to overtake the rear that was like a dark wave rolling on in front of him.
Working off to the left, he listened backward to catch any sound above the pounding roar. But it was not those men coming from camp that he wanted to locate. They were safe enough unless a horse stumbled. It was the others who had been with the herd when it jumped that gave him a cold dread.
He had forgotten the storm. If there had been another thunderclap it was drowned by the rattling jar in his ears. A crooked flash close in front of the longhorns was his first warning.
Against its white light all of the widespread herd stood out b
riefly, caught in tossing waves, gone too soon for him to locate any rider. The air turned suddenly hot and charged with electricity. Two points of blue flame rose from his horse’s pricked-up ears. He saw them work back and forth in the heavier darkness after the flash, the little animal using all of its keen senses to feel its way.
A strange sheet of light ran flat toward him, to spread out into a great lake of phosphorescent glow from the hides and hair of the longhorns brushing together. He understood it, and yet its ghostly shine over the skeleton backs chilled him.
Someone was close before he heard the pounding thud of hoofs. Then the rider was alongside, Jim Hope’s high young voice yelling, “Lew!”
“All right,” he yelled back. “Any more coming?”
“Somewhere. What you want me to do?”
“Swing off and stay clear! Don’t ride too close.”
The fading voice came gleefully, “Ain’t they a spooky sight?”
He was alone again, holding his own running pace beside the herd. Their growling complaint had risen now above the clack of horns and hoofs. It was like sounds jolted out of them at every lumbering step. They were tired, and yet the mass fright drove them on.
Gradually he worked forward and thought he must be near the front, when up ahead the galloping rhythm broke. There was nothing for him to see on the black earth. But his horse dug in suddenly, trying to stop, let himself go, and leaped. The fall was long and they struck hard. The saddle horn rammed his stomach. It bent him over as the horse lunged on up a steep bank.
It was a little time, running on again with the breath knocked out of him, before he could look for the cattle. He turned his head and saw them beneath the lightning’s repeated flashes, pouring into a narrow gully and wiggling out like worms. He looked for Jim Hope and couldn’t find him. He started to wheel back. A split bunch of longhorns cut him off. The gully had broken up the herd.
He felt a man’s bleak helplessness in that moment, swept on by the wild rush of the cattle’s overwhelming numbers. There was no chance now for the thing he had hoped. Eight or ten men might have turned them and got them milling. One alone could do nothing at all.
The lightning’s quickened flashes blinded him; its thunder made a bursting pressure in his ears. And then he thought they had collided head on with a solid pillar of white fire. His horse recoiled and squatted as if hit. Its heart pounded beneath his leg. His own body had gone numb and slack. Instinct made him lock his hands on the saddle horn, his eyes wholly blind from that vivid whiteness, while he was aware of a strange dead hush and a smell of burned powder and hot ash.
How long that daze lasted he couldn’t tell afterward. He was moving. The cattle were around him. A waterfall had opened over his head.
With the rain there was no more lightning, only the steady downpour that turned the gumbo earth sticky and slick. It slowed the longhorns. Working out of them, he could hear their hoofs slap the mud as they lumbered on, at a walk now, but in their stubborn, relentless way.
He reached the edge and rode hunched over, letting time pass. The warm rain soaked through to his skin.
Steam rose from his laboring horse. Sound was his only guide. Off in the dark he could hear the longhorns come almost to a stop, and then, scary from their first stampeding fright, they would bolt heavily into a short run. He didn’t try to turn them. Better wait until dawn.
In the dragging hours their runs became shorter. The rain stopped; a little light began to show his world. It was suddenly as if fatigue had hit the cattle on their bony heads. They seemed to halt between one step and another, with only their panting breath rising and falling over the dark mass.
He let them rest while daylight came on, until he could estimate four or five hundred in this bunch. They were as gaunt as wolves from the night’s run. Tongues lolled and their big eyes bulged in their sockets. It would take weeks to get back the pounds they had lost in these few hours.
Spent and tamed, they moved as quietly as barnyard cows when he began to crowd them with his horse. Mud balls clogged their hoofs. He turned them east, and as daylight pushed the ragged edges of his world farther and farther from him he followed that retreating line with a dread both of what he might and might not see.
The morning star was up, large and yellow, straight ahead, and dawn was green in the sky when he saw the first of other bunches coming out of the hills to the south. There were more along the river, north. He felt better. And as those straggling lines converged with his on the flat shelf and he could see men with each one, that dread left him.
Joe Wheat, Ash Brownstone, and Charley Storms were the first to join their cattle in. They rode back. He saw that Charley hadn’t stopped for his pants but had ridden the night in his long-legged underwear.
“Charley,”—he grinned—“you forgot something. That’s no way to ride with cows.”
“Plumb shameful,” Charley agreed. “But they didn’t know it. You ever see a blacker night? A fellow couldn’t find his nose with both hands!”
He laughed, feeling the relief of talk. They trailed behind the herd. Farther on, when Quarternight and Moonlight Bailey angled in from the river with their strays, he rode up to shape the point with Rebel John. The herd was growing. Ahead, Neal Good waited with a smaller bunch. Four men were still missing, Clay and Ed Splann, Steve and Tom Arnold.
The longhorns’ run had taken them far west, and it was not until after two hours of steady, speechless riding that he saw Owl-Head Jackson’s camp smoke lift from the junction of the river and its tributary creek.
He searched along the creek’s growth for the trampled part where the herd could cross. Something halted his drifting gaze. He brought it back. An icy coldness crept over his skin.
“John,” he said and pointed, “I’d better go look.”
It was a riderless horse. Even from half a mile oft he knew by the way the animal was standing, crookedly, with a tired patience, that it had broken a leg. Closer, he saw the saddle under its belly. Its head raised a little as he approached but dropped again. He drew his gun and put the muzzle close behind one pointed ear and felt sick as he pulled the trigger.
Dragging tracks led toward the creek. He followed them, steeled against a thing he had looked upon before and yet chilled even by those memories. His shot had brought two riders starting out of the distant river trees near camp. He couldn’t tell who they were.
Then suddenly his horse snorted, spread its legs, and stopped. The trampled swath of creek-bottom willow lay beyond the low bank. He looked where the animal’s ears pointed and in that first moment felt no shock. All of his senses seemed to have gone dead.
In that strangely suspended feeling he turned back, fired his gun in the air, and waved the men on from the herd. They loped toward him. When they saw the horse he had shot no one asked for the rider.
He said, “It’s Tom,” and saw their faces, haggard from the night’s work, only set a little more.
The two from camp were close now, Clay and Splann, hurried on by his second shot. It struck him that they didn’t look worn out like the rest of the men.
Clay pulled in beside him. “Who is it?”
He jerked a nod toward the creek. “Over there.”
Clay rode over and sat there and took his time about coming back. All expression on his full, ruddy face was veiled by an oddly smoothed-out look. He shook his head.
“Tough. I’ll go in, Lew, and tell Joy.”
“No,” he said, “not yet.”
Clay’s huge body straightened up in the saddle.
“Why not?” His voice carried a new power.
“There’s no use,” he said. “Not till afterward. We’re too far from civilization to go in for that kind of a burial. It will have to be here, right now. Let Joy have some other memory. Where’s Steve?”
In a little silence, with his question unanswered, he knew something was co
ming that had been shaped already in his own mind. But he hadn’t expected it would come so soon.
Then Clay said, “Steve’s in camp. I’m going in. This makes a difference, Lew. A big one. You might as well know that.”
“Not one bit!” He swung his horse over close. “What you’re figuring on hasn’t happened. You’ll take my orders till it does.” An outraged sense turned him as bitterly hard as he had ever felt. “What a time you pick!” He backed off, holding the hot stare of Clay’s blue eyes. “John,” he said, “you come with me.” He flung a last look at Clay. “The rest of you stay here.”
Riding on, out of hearing, Quarternight growled, “There’s a hyena for you!”
“Let him bark,” he said. “It’ll take more than that.” But Clay’s meaning was clear enough. With Tom Arnold gone, Joy and Steve would be the Cross T owners. And since Steve wore the pants he could take charge—if that was put in his head. Clay could put it there.
From the river bluff he saw the water had dropped a number of feet. It was still high, but the churning flood was gone. Long red sand bars were uncovered out in the middle.
No matter what happened, the longhorns had to go on. He made an immediate plan for that.
Then near camp he said, “You go in, John, and get tools from the cook’s wagon. Don’t be seen if you can help it. Go on back ahead of me.”
He pulled in and waited until Quarternight rode out of the trees with a canvas bundle under his arm. Only Steve was there when he went in, squatted at the fire pit, drinking coffee. His head turned at the sound of the horse. His cheeks that never took much tan were smooth and rosy and he seemed all at once, in this moment, too young for what was coming.
“Lew,” he said, “where’s the others?”
“Up the creek, Steve. Joy here?”
“Asleep.”
“Then come on with me.” The thing he had to tell him made him quietly gentle.
Even Steve’s quick, “Say, I’ve ridden enough! Can’t you let a man rest?” didn’t change that.
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