The 7th Western Novel

by Francis W. Hilton

  Those attacks were no longer in open warfare. They had settled down to trail raids from the Wichita canyon mouths. For what chance did the Indian have against the white man now? Poor devils, he thought, not much.

  He’d always had an admiration for the terrible courage of those tribes. He knew that talk of the white man’s supremacy was a lie. Their supremacy lay only in one thing, a matter of time. The Indian could never quite catch up. While he was afoot the white enemy had horses. When the redskin finally was mounted, to become the most expert rider the world had ever known, the white man had pistols and breech-loading guns against his bow and arrows.

  Now once more a lag in weapons was all that saved the Texas herds. The Indians, too, had guns by this time—the old breechloaders. Texans had the new repeating Springfield-Allin rifles.

  Well, he thought and shrugged and lifted up his tired animal’s head, he was going to be plenty thankful, maybe, for things the way they were. There were ten Springfield-Allins in his crew.

  He was back in the mesquite belt again, almost through it toward the bald open hills, when some alert instinct warned him. He halted.

  Perhaps it was the way his horse’s pointed ears had twitched a little forward, or only a feeling that a man has suddenly and afterward cannot explain. But it held him motionless with a cold certainty that he was not alone here, even though a dead hush was unbroken by any sound.

  It seemed minutes before he first heard the distant talk of men’s voices and still more time before there came the thud of hoofs. Their pace was a quick trot, and by the mingled beats he judged five or six riders in the bunch. He moved a little, not to be caught at close quarters in the mesquite, until, past the thin screen of fernlike leaves, he saw the men.

  There were only two. But they were leading four heavily packed horses. They were coming out of the southwest, and seeing that direction, he wondered.

  From the Cross T’s last camp? He had his answer in a moment.

  Down in the fold between the hills they cut his trail, halted and faced toward the brush that hid him. He drew his gun, waiting; yet some need for haste was driving them on. With only a short pause they continued their quick trot up the next hill and vanished to the north.

  He shoved the gun down into its holster and sat a little longer to make sure they would not turn back. He had his answer. One of the men was Ed Splann. Splann’s bedroll from camp was lashed on one of the packs.

  Heading on west, he turned the meaning of their fast travel over in his mind and was certain of only one thing. They were not following the Cross T herd now, but Splann’s presence was sign enough that they intended to meet it somewhere up the trail. In his cool thinking now he felt that firing the man back there at the river might have been a bad mistake. He could no longer watch what Splann was doing, and it had set Clay Manning’s antagonism in a new and more dangerous way. He’d rather have a man blow off his surly temper any time.

  His horse loped on with an easy rhythm, and the smooth green land and the warm sun laid their peacefulness upon him; and it seemed a strange thing now that he couldn’t condemn Clay altogether. Time was when he would have hated the big blonde’s hair. Age, maybe. He was twenty-five last month. And he knew himself what jealousy could do. But that didn’t explain it all either. Clay was caught with his tail in some kind of a crack. Jealousy over a girl wouldn’t account for the three-cornered tie-up between Clay and Splann and Steve.

  Twilight dropped swiftly; full darkness caught him at the edge of the hills. He turned north with a far-off point of light to guide him in. Yet by the time he had ridden the three or four miles the fire had died to embers and the camp was wholly silent.

  Pulling off his saddle, he could see the dark bed of longhorns and the dim shapes of three of the night guard. All others must have fallen dead asleep at sundown. His horse rolled in the dust and grunted out its satisfaction, and he thought even that hadn’t wakened the camp. But as he walked past the end of Joy’s wagon the flaps parted. Her voice reached him in a little wordless cry, only half-uttering his name.

  He turned toward her.

  “Lew!” she said again, and then, “Where have you been?”

  She was crouched at the foot of her bed with a coat pulled across her shoulders over a high-necked gown. Its ruffles tied with ribbon lay white against her dark skin, and her hair was soft and loose around her head. He could tell by her wide-open eyes that she hadn’t been sleeping.

  One hand reached out and tugged him close.

  “You’d gone and nobody could tell me where.”

  He put an arm around her. She laid her head against his coat.

  “I’ll always come back,” he said. “Don’t you worry.”

  “I know.” She waited. Then her voice came with a desperate pleading. “I thought you went because of Clay. Something happened between you south of the river about Ed Splann. I saw it. What has Clay done?”

  He shook his head above her quiet one. “I don’t know. He’s following his own trail somewhere, looks like. That’s all anyone can tell.”

  “Yes, and you’ve got to help him.” She moved her cheek gently. “You’ve got to. Don’t you see?”

  He did, and the ache in him to do for her sank away to its lonely depths. With her father gone there was but one man she wanted to turn to for a woman’s security. There would always be Clay.

  He tightened his arm and let her go. “You’ll have to get some sleep.”

  She nodded, drawing up from him, and past the canvas flaps he saw the small box against the wagon’s side.

  He reached in and raised the cover, saying, “There’s an account book in here I’d like to have.”

  She watched with no question as his hand touched the old leather-bound book and drew it out. He did not open it then.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Spotted Horse

  There had never been a time on the Cross T or on this trail when Tom Arnold’s presence had not been like a strong controlling pressure over all the crew. It was a thing Lew had felt even in these weeks when Tom had tried to keep himself in obedience to his trail boss. Now that pressure was suddenly gone. He could feel the release definitely around him; and for two days, while they crawled northward up a rising plain with the dark Wichitas ten miles east, he watched a change.

  Among the older men it showed only in a deeper quietness for a little while and in their talk. Death had been a frequent part of their experience. That in itself was not new. From the moment you were born there was this old boy down the line always, no telling how far. You didn’t want to meet him but you might as well ride along. When he threw his loop he never missed. They felt better, talking it out like that. And each liked to parade some memory of Tom Arnold, what they had done and said together, their minds going back to the best they knew; until Quarternight, who perhaps had known him longer than any, clinched it with an epitaph that might have been carved on his gravestone.

  “Hell,” said old Rebel John, “he was a man!” They wouldn’t change much. He could still depend on that part of his crew. And Joy’s change would not show much on the surface; her loss and whatever it did to her she would keep to herself. He was proud of the way she held to the usual trail routine, the long dull hours of driving, doing her chores in camp at night, eating with the men and showing them a poker face. He could see her often now. For as long as they crossed through Indian country he kept the herd in close formation, with the wagons up at the front.

  It was Steve he fell to watching mostly these two days, as the Red River Valley vanished behind them and a brackish stream, the Salt Fork, began to curve in on the west, forcing them over toward an arm of the Wichita Mountains, thrust out dark and knotted onto the plain. Steve, for the first time in twenty-one years, was no longer under the restraint of a stern, forceful man.

  He was like a young bull, Lew thought, that has chafed and bellowed and horned at the
pasture bars and then, suddenly free, runs out only to stop, head up, uncertain, as if he can’t tell what it was he wanted after all.

  Even at twenty-one he’d had little experience with which to carry off this new freedom easily and less to give him any knowledge of how to walk in his father’s boots. They didn’t fit. It would have been only amusing, his young and exaggerated importance now among men who had fed him from a bottle, if his growing sense of ownership had stayed within the limits that even Tom Arnold had put himself. But he was that young bull, outside, head up, looking for an older one to challenge. And it was plain enough that he was being urged on.

  It was a habit of his how to leave his swing position whenever he chose to, and late this second afternoon he came riding to the point, frowning down his long straight nose.

  “Lew,” he asked, “why we keeping so far off the trail?”

  “Better grass over here.”

  “You call this grass?”

  He nodded. “Best there is.”

  They were out of the curly buffalo and bluestem now, in the grama of these middle plains. It was short, hardly more than six inches, and dry even in this month of June.

  “Don’t look at it from your saddle,” he said. “Get down and rub some of the tops in your hand. You’ll find a lot of little black seeds. They’re as good as corn for putting tallow on a herd.”

  Steve pulled off his hat. His light curly hair sprang up. He put the hat on again.

  “Same grass over there, I’d say.”

  “Sure,” Lew said, “and too many longhorns eating it down.” He grinned a little. “What else?”

  “We’re losing time over here, that’s what. The trail was made for a man to follow. It’s shorter. We’d better get back.”

  He shook his head. “Too thin, Steve. You didn’t think all that up by yourself. Clay’s advice?” He gave his own answer. “I guess. But I’m not taking it. No mutiny either.” He grinned again to ease what he wanted Steve to understand. “Mutiny in a trail herd is the same as mutiny on the ocean. I’m captain of this ship.”

  Their horses carried them forward through a silent time. His grin died.

  He could see an odd struggle against words that in the end had to come out.

  His scowling eyes turned from him, Steve said, “It won’t be mutiny, Lew. We’ve been talking it over. You know this leaves Joy and me—”

  “Now wait,” he said. “Wait a minute! Let’s get one thing straight. From here to Ogallala I’m trail boss of this outfit. There’ll be no change.”

  The light brown eyes jerked across to him. “That’s talk.”

  “Talk,” he said, “that I can back up. Steve, you’ve got no fight with me. Don’t let anyone rib you into it. You’ve got too much at stake. You’re headed toward all that a man could want. You’ve never asked me about this new land you’ll have in Wyoming. You want to know?” He went on without an answer. “It’s paradise,” he said, “for cattle. No dry years up there. You’ve got mountains at your back door and a river in your front yard, the Powder, and a sweet-grass country as far as you can look.”

  His own vision of that valley at the head of the Powder stirred in him a vital warmth of feeling.

  “Steve,” he said, “you’ve got the biggest chance there is!”

  Something like a sneer had come across the thin wide lips, pulling them downward in a disdainful look and yet in a bitter way.

  “A pretty picture,” Steve said, “but not for me.” His head came up in a high arrogance. “Me, I’m not tying myself to any cow ranch. I’m through with that!” He swung his horse and rode back down the herd.

  Riding his own slow pace beside the point, Lew turned his head and watched him go; and in the arrogance and the swaggering roll of the young shoulders was all the conceit of those men who held themselves above the common man of work. You saw them idle in the saloons and in the towns and sometimes caught them out in the hills. They flashed in a big way for a little while, those riders of the wild bunch. You couldn’t blame a boy who’d been held down so long. If he didn’t know Steve better he could let it go at that. But Steve talked the loudest when he was scared. He always had.

  The slow grazing pace with time dragging let him think it out in circles, which brought him back in the end to where he had started. Steve was a rattlehead, maybe, but no fool. It was hard to put two things together, his exaggerated importance of owning the Cross T and this talk of being through with cows, without getting only one answer. You can’t make any good plan for the future if you’re scared of your past.

  He saw Steve ride with Clay much of that afternoon and knew the showdown wasn’t settled. It was bound to come.

  Early in the evening they crossed a small creek and watered there, trailing on a mile afterward to camp on open ground. He bedded the longhorns in close, hobbled some of the horses so the herd wouldn’t stray, and strung a rope corral between the wagons for the night guard mounts. Horses were like scented bait to Indians.

  There had been no Indian sign either along the creek or over against the black Wichita range. It was as lonely a country as he had ever seen.

  With Moonlight Bailey and Jim Hope riding guard until the first watch went out, all the other men were in camp, washing up at Owl-Head’s water keg. It was not quite dark, that moment of shadow like a thick layer across the land with the sky still blue. He finished at the keg himself, picked up a flour sack towel and turned to look south.

  Ten or fifteen vague mounted figures were coming from the creek.

  He swung back and spoke quickly to Joy near the campfire.

  “Get inside,” he said. “Pull down the flaps.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  He nodded south. She saw then. Her face went white.

  Around the water keg the men were hurriedly drying their hands.

  Someone joked, “Guess the party opens. Boys, watch your hair!” They pulled their Springfield-Allins from saddle scabbards propped against their bedrolls.

  But then, watching the riders take shape, he knew it was not a war party. Indians out for trouble would not come on like this, bunched and at a slow walk. They’d spread and make a running charge and haul up short just before hitting camp. That would be to show their strength and see how the white men took it; He could count them now, fourteen, and the men around him had started to grin at the way these Indians were dressed. Some wore pants but were naked from the waist up. Others wore brown reservation shirts with only a loincloth under the long tails. A few had on old felt hats with the tops of the crowns cut out. But mostly they were bareheaded, their black hair hanging in double braids.

  In spite of their half acceptance of civilized clothing he knew by the way they rode that these men were all plains warriors. They used neither saddles nor bridles. A rawhide rope looped in the horse’s jaw, passed up over his neck and tied at the jaw again made the reins. Another length of rawhide was wound three times around his middle and fastened tight. Each Indian sat with his legs straight down, his moccasined feet twisted into these loops at the ankles. Like that they were as good as tied onto their horses’ backs, with their hands free and able to stick through the darting, wheeling way in which they fought.

  He had missed one of the group who wore both shirt and pants. When the little party halted off fifty yards from camp a black-and-white-patched pinto came on, carrying this broad, heavy shape of a man, old and fat. Halfway in, he reached the firelight’s brighter circle, stopped and lifted his left hand. He was unarmed.

  Lew gave his rifle to Rebel John, saying, “I’ll go.”

  He walked slowly forward, halved the distance that remained and halted.

  He said briefly, “Friend!” and stretched both arms in front of him, palms up.

  For his age and weight the Indian came to the ground with surprising ease. He, too, exactly halved the little distance still left, waiting then
for the white man to finish the approach.

  It was a ritual that Lew understood. He might stand rooted and make the Indian come to him. It showed in a way one’s supremacy over the other. That didn’t matter now. He closed the gap and saw the black eyes faintly indicate that knowledge.

  The man was even older than he had seemed from a distance, a Comanche by his broad features and surely a chief. For there was that strong pride in his face and the heartbreak of a beaten people behind the arrogance of his eyes. His two braids came across his shoulders with strips of yellow wool cloth twisted into the ends. Looked like the stripes off some trooper’s pants, Lew thought. Probably was.

  He waited, saying nothing, while the black eyes, deep in their folds of dark skin, gave him a long appraisal.

  Then in perfect school English the old man said, “I am looking for Lew Burnet. Tell him Spotted Horse is here.”

  “I’m Burnet,” he said and had a sudden queer feeling.

  Spotted Horse. That was a name they used to scare naughty children with. Spotted Horse will get you if you don’t be good! Here on these plains and far south into Texas men oiled their guns when they heard that Spotted Horse was leading his Comanches again. Now he faced that dreaded chief, a fat old man with a quiet, kindly voice.

  Spotted Horse nodded. “Good. I have come to talk. Your friend, Long Rifle, is my friend. Man-Who-Walks-Alone,” he added, giving both of Willy Nickle’s Indian names.

  It was about time he knew where old Willy was.

  “I am glad to hear you speak of my friend,” he said. “We have meat in camp. You and your men are welcome.”

  He turned and saw his crew grouped clearly in the firelight, standing in front of the shut flaps of Joy’s wagon.