The 7th Western Novel

by Francis W. Hilton

“Time!” he said. “With the girl?”

  “They’ll wait for that,” said Willy. “Take a white man now and he’d risk his hide to stop. But Crazy Bear, he’ll want to parade her in camp first and maybe get some buck to fight him for her. Seems like an Indian has always got to mix it up with fighting. Well, this nigger don’t know why.” He looked north up the creek, nodding. “You ride on now, easy.” He stepped back into the willows and was gone.

  This was no time to doubt old Willy Nickle. Yet it wasn’t the way he’d get on the hunt himself. He’d find the trail and ride it. But he knew that Willy was half Indian in most things by now, wise to all their tricks and able to understand the language of any plains tribe. Once he had said, “Knowing their talk has been this old coon’s hair preserver. So it has!” In a little while a canyon stream came down to join North Fork. He was standing on its bank.

  “They turned up here,” he said and pointed. “See, they’re leaving sign.” Little twigs and a few green leaves knocked from the oaks farther up were floating down the water. “Means they don’t think they’re followed. That’s a heap careless for Cheyennes. Must be likker in ’em yet. Well, it’s plain where they’re headed.”

  He waded the stream in his greased moccasins and kept on along North Fork.

  “Willy,” Lew said, “I’ve got to know.” He crowded up close. “There’s the trail; why don’t we follow it? Where you going now?”

  “Same place they are.” Willy trudged on. In a moment he said, “By different ways. Ate dog in camp with them same Cheyennes last night.” He peered up at the Wichita slope and turned his head around. “Not bad for dog either. Stewed with sego root. Here now.”

  A dry canyon had opened. He turned up its narrow groove.

  It wasn’t cussedness in Willy; Lew knew that. It was only the old fellow’s habit of never telling another very much of what was in his head. Good enough habit, too, for any man most of the time. But as he rode at a slow walk, held back by Willy’s effortless pace, his own need for action and the ugly pictures in his mind made his body itch all over. Night was not far off.

  A deeper grayness filled the narrow canyon swiftly. Still ahead of him, old Willy’s thin figure trudged on unhurried, with his needle gun bundled beneath one arm and his long chestnut hair swinging gently under his limp flat hat.

  When he halted it was with a sudden warning gesture, turning and patting his mouth. Lew swung off his horse and went to him afoot. They had come to a low divide at the top of the canyon. A little slope went gently down toward a big meadow that made a lighter pool of gray in the dark basin of trees. They were not more than fifty yards from the first of many Indian camps.

  Their fires rimmed the meadow halfway around. But all of those in the farther darkness seemed deserted except for women and children. Only this one close below them had men. Suddenly he gripped old Willy’s arm.

  “Like I thought,” Willy whispered. “This camp is Crazy Bear’s. It’s where he’d bring her then.”

  A stolid procession of bucks moved into the firelight. They had the girl. Their lodges made a little circle around the bright flames, not the gaudy skin tepees of Cheyennes in the north, but the canvas imitations that the government handed out. They were dirty and torn and loosely fitted on willow poles. The bottom edges were rolled up a foot from the ground.

  He watched Joy. She walked in front of Crazy Bear, who led the line. Her arms were down stiffly at her sides; her back was straight; he knew the defiance that blazed in her eyes. Near the fire Crazy Bear reached out and touched her. She struck his hand away.

  Then a swarm of women crowded up to them, filling the air with an angered talk.

  Quietly old Willy said, “Let’s work down.”

  The oak trunks sheltered them. They worked into the black shadow of one of the lodges and came in behind its cone shape.

  Around Crazy Bear the squaws’ high-noted talk was getting wild.

  Willy craned his neck and listened and whispered in a moment, “Ain’t they laying it into him though? They say he promised meat and brings back nothing but a girl!”

  Lew nodded. He didn’t blame these women for lighting into Crazy Bear. No meat hung from the poles in front of the lodges; nothing cooked over the fire pit. There were no dogs left. Still the squaws were fat enough. Under their loose red or green or yellow reservation dresses they bulged like barrels. But the children drew a sudden pity up inside of him. They looked hungry. Their stark-naked little figures were all bones with the brown skin stretched tight.

  Crazy Bear was trying to get away from all that talk. Lew couldn’t understand one word of it himself and Willy was too busy listening. But it seemed to him that when a woman got on the peck at a man it was the same in any language. These squaws were plenty sharp with their tongues. There was one, Crazy Bear’s wife most likely, standing up close to him and screaming to get her say in above the rest.

  It was this one who suddenly turned on Joy and slapped her across the face. The girl reeled. The squaw caught her and shoved her hard into the doorway of a lodge. At the same time Crazy Bear made a grab for the big woman and pulled her back. It was getting to be a bang-up family fight.

  “Willy!” Lew touched the old man’s side.

  Beneath the tepee next to the one in front of them he could see Joy crouched against the rolled-up skirt.

  Willy nodded. He half rose and then bent down. “When you hear a cat cry and the horses running you go in. Head back the way we come.” He crept off silently through the trees.

  Lew waited, his legs drawn up beneath him, his boot toes pressed hard against the ground. He was a spring ready to unbend. Old Willy must have known where the horses were kept, and they must have been left standing in a bunch. For his wait seemed only a moment when a wildcat screeched from out toward the meadow.

  All the women suddenly shut their mouths. The bucks stood rooted. There was that instant of dead hush; and then the kick and thud of frightened animals broke it, a rattle of nostrils and a drumming run. The squaws were yelling again, a different kind of yell, as they swarmed after the bucks who had bolted into the dark to stop their herd. He could see only the children left. His long legs drove him in a flat dive toward the tepee’s rolled-up skirt.

  He spoke her name quickly. “Joy!” he said, “this way!”

  She jerked around on her hands and knees. The firelight showed his face. The willow poles were close together. He had to break one with a shove of his arms to get her out. It went off like a pistol shot, and a little boy saw him and raised the cry. But he had pulled her through the opening; he was lifting her up and pushing her on.

  “Straight back!” he said. “Run!”

  The women had seen him now. They screamed. He didn’t see the old buck until it was like a long black shadow leaping at him from the tepee’s side. He dropped his right fist and rammed it forward and struck the Indian in the loins. The figure doubled over on top of him, falling. He rolled free and ran with a horrible stench in his face.

  Out in the dark, he had to call her name again to find her. She hadn’t known which way to go. Then he had her by one arm and was running with her up the gentle slope. Behind them the camp’s noise was like a stirred-up nest of jays. But the horses were more important than anything else to an Indian, and old Willy must have done a good stampeding job.

  Over the low divide he dropped to a walk and went on that way to keep from giving his buckskin a fright. Once he heard it snort ahead of him in the dark. Yet the reins were down. The little pony had been taught to think he’d pull his neck off if he jerked against dropped reins.

  They hadn’t spoken. In the dark he could see only the set mask of her face. It was hard to tell what these hours had done. But she wouldn’t break. Then the buckskin’s vague shape moved and he said quietly, “Easy, boy.”

  The moving stopped. He put his hands under her arms and forked her into the saddle. Whe
n he lifted the reins the pony jumped. He brought its head all the way around, grabbed the horn and swung up behind the cantle. Then he let the little animal go.

  After the canyon’s first straight dip for a mile or so there was nothing in the absolute dark to let him find the route himself back through the maze of forks. Yet he had confidence in the pony. Buckskins must have been crossed with hound dogs somewhere. He’d backtrack his own trail if anything could. Even now he was winding along in a sure way.

  Lew pressed his arms together. “All right, Joy?”

  Her answer was faint. “I’m all right.”

  He did not ask again; but traveling on for better than an hour, he could feel the sag of her body, a heaviness leaning back against him in spite of her grip on the saddle horn. His own fatigue had turned him numb at that point where it seemed he could go on forever. That was a bad sign. He knew the danger for them both of trying to stay too long. There had been no chase behind them. Indians wouldn’t come on afoot in the night. It was safe enough.

  He pulled off in the dark and let his horse stop against the canyon wall.

  “We’ve got to rest,” he said.

  “I can make it, Lew.”

  “No, we’ve had enough, both of us.” He stepped down and lifted his hands for her and felt her stumble when she tried to walk. “Here,” he said and leaned his back against an oak trunk, bent his knees and brought her into his lap.

  The night was cold with the fog’s dampness. They couldn’t risk a fire. He unbuttoned the loose front of his cowskin coat and was working out of it when she stopped him.

  “Don’t take it off. Hold me inside.”

  It almost reached around her. He held her close.

  She looked up and shuddered. “They smell so bad!”

  His arms tightened. He grinned a little. It seemed strange to him that that one thing was what could sicken a woman’s mind. A single wracking tremor ran through her body. That was all, as if all the horror of these hours had been released from her then. She turned a little and lay with a heavier weight against him, looking up.

  Softly she said, “Lew.”

  Her warmth was racing in his blood. A power that he fought was drawing him to her. It could bring no good. And then he could no longer fight it. The fear that had hounded him, the ache and loneliness of these days and nights swept aside the warning of his brain. His hard arms drew her up. He kissed her and felt the sudden strength of her own arms pulling him down.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Critical Crossing

  Those few hours, until dawn let them travel again, was a time set apart. He knew it for what it was. Fear and relief and their being alone together had made it. Knowing her strict codes, he understood how little change there could be. She had already given her promise to another man. And yet this knowledge of how strongly she loved him was like a new force in himself.

  He had half expected, riding from the Wichitas that dawn, to find Willy Nickle ahead of him along the North Fork or out on the plain. But there had been no sign of Willy, and he knew the old fellow might even have stayed in camp with the Cheyennes, his trickery unknown to them. He had met, instead of Willy, Joe Wheat and the cavalry troop under young Lieutenant Eaton riding in an all-night search.

  It was clear enough then why the boyish lieutenant offered to escort them on north. There were few women of Joy’s kind in his frontier life. For six days he rode beside her wagon seat and paid his gallant attention to her in the night camps. But on the banks of the Canadian he gave it up and turned east with his men toward Fort Reno.

  Now the Indian trouble was more than a week behind the Cross T herd, and except for one thing only a loss of two hundred cattle had resulted from that bad time.

  The one holdover was in Clay Manning.

  Watching Clay this week, puzzled, Lew remembered how the big blond stared at them the morning they came back—one long look, turning away afterward without a word even to Joy. He had thought it was only Clay’s jealous temper.

  But it was more than that. For a moment’s hot jealousy could not go on eating a man day after day, turning him, as Clay had turned, neither sullen nor violent, but aloof and quiet almost to being docile. It was a thing hard to understand in his loud and full-blooded nature. In the night camps during the short rest hour after supper he sat alone with his huge shape hunched, his blond head propped on a doubled fist like a man lost in deep thinking, and Clay had never been a thoughtful man. As the herd rolled northward across a well-watered country, growing fat on the headed grama grass and easily handled, the men could laze along in groups, talking away the hours. Yet he saw Clay riding an isolated swing position, holding apart now even from Steve.

  He knew he was not the only one watching him, puzzled. But he heard no talk until, drifting along in front of the point late one afternoon, Quarternight brought it up.

  “Something,” the old man offered, “has made a steer out of him. He used to be a bull.”

  “More than that, John,” he said. “Looks more like something’s cut his mind.”

  Quarternight nodded. “Well, sure. You know there’s some men should never get a good look at themselves. They’d better stay blind. Didn’t you ever notice,” he asked, “how a man that runs the biggest bluff folds up mighty small when someone calls his hand?”

  “You think Clay’s had his hand called then?”

  “He did,” Quarternight said, “twice. He lost his head there among the Indians. It could have happened to any man. You get a split second of time and you do the wrong thing. But we all saw it and Clay knows we did. He could have grabbed Joy from the wagon. Instead he charges the horses and then you’re the one who makes the rescue. His sort can’t stand that.”

  That was something, sure. It was the kind of show that Clay fed on, and he had missed his biggest chance.

  “Then there’s the will Tom left,” Quarternight was saying. “Clay’s our foreman, and yet that will showed the old man didn’t trust him any. With it brought right out in the open like that he hasn’t much face left. I hate to see it. As long as a man blows around big and loud you can about tell what he’ll do. But let him turn inside himself and you never can.”

  “Well, sure,” Lew said. “I guess you’re right.”

  Still he felt it was only half the answer. Clay’s conceit could have built itself up again.

  Whatever Joy might be seeing and feeling about this he had little chance to know. For in these longest days of the year he was keeping himself and his men in their saddles for fifteen hours without a stop. They ate at night with their bedrolls open and dropped asleep too bone tired for talk.

  Yet this was a part of the trail, he knew, that all of them would remember afterward; an unpredictable time which came somewhere in every drive, when weather and land and all of nature seamed to give them the best there was. June days were hot but not too much for a southern Texan; nights were soft and cool. There was water and grass, and over the gently rolling country was laid a carpet of pale blue Indian hyacinth, sweeping away in every direction to the darker blue of the sky.

  Across this the great arrowhead of cattle cropped its way steadily to the north.

  He thought it couldn’t last. But dawn after dawn broke clear and untroubled. Rivers were down to wading water; they were alone far west of the trail in virgin land. On the Fourth of July they crossed the Cimarron and entered the state of Kansas—and that meant Dodge. It was a high anticipation to buck them up through the endless hours.

  If there had been any sign of what was brewing in Clay Manning’s head before they reached the Mulberry he missed it, seeing him so little these days and not at all at night, when the first guard was already out before he came into camp himself.

  An extra-long drive brought them to Mulberry Creek after dark, angling in from the southwest and converging now upon the main trail. Off eastward during the afternoon he h
ad seen the dust clouds layered above advancing columns. It had set him to figuring. The Open A could be among those outfits. Perhaps the Cheyennes were satisfied with two hundred head of Cross T beef; or half a dozen herds could have joined up and forced their way through the Nations. He would know tomorrow. This was the last camp south of Dodge.

  Even as he rode for a little while settling the longhorns that night he could see the lights of the town glowing through the darkness across fifteen miles of level plain. While southeast along the Mulberry there began to break out the dotted campfires of other arriving herds. Later, on the far side of the quieted cattle, he saw Clay ride out with Joe Wheat and Neal Good on their first guard and passed him in the dark still later at the change of watches when he began his own second guard from eleven until two; so that his first sense, when Owl-Head Jackson’s rough hand awakened him in the morning, was one of refusing what he heard.

  Bent above him in the half-light, the cook was saying, “Lew! Hey there! Something’s missin’. We’re short a man.”

  He sat up in his blankets. Clay, his bedroll and his war bag were gone.

  He still refused it.

  Drugged with a heavy sleep, he said irritably, “All right, all right. I see. Never mind.”

  But afterward, dressed, he walked out through the picketed night-guard horses and found that Clay had taken the one he had ridden last. Following fresh tracks on the dewy grass, he traced them to the creek and across it and saw they were aimed for town.

  All the camp was aroused and knew of it by the time he got back. Owl-Head’s busy tongue was letting them know. He saw Joy crouched at the parted wagon flaps, her long dark hair sleep-tossed, a quilted blanket around her.

  She called to him, and going over, he spoke first, “It’s all right now. Nothing’s happened.”

  “But where has he gone?”

  Her voice was quick. Fear haunted the soft sleepiness of her eyes.

  “Into town,” he said. “I don’t know why or anything about it. It’s his own business.”

  Her hand came out to him and gripped his arm hard.