The 7th Western Novel

by Francis W. Hilton

  “Lew, you can’t let him! You’ve got to get him back. Send someone in,” she begged. “You must!”

  He spoke gently. “Joy, when a man’s got something on his mind he has to work it out himself. Clay must know what he’s doing. I’m going to leave him alone.”

  “And if anything happens—” She stared at him. “And I knew you might have helped—”

  “I’ll take the blame,” he said. “I know.”

  Here was what he had understood that night in the Wichita hills. Above everything else there would be this loyalty to Clay. He saw her eyes go beyond him. He turned his head.

  Steve was coming toward them, walking fast, two high spots of color staining his flat cheeks.

  Quick and blunt, he said, “Lew, I’m going in to town,” and wheeled on to saddle up.

  He called out, “Wait a minute, kid!” following. “There’s plenty of time. We’re all going in tonight.” He sharpened his stare into the nervous eyes. “You knew about this?”

  “Not till just now, no.”

  “Then you can wait.” He started off and turned back. He felt no gentleness with Steve. “Don’t you try to skin out either! I’ll be on watch for that.”

  Later in the morning, as the herd moved from the bed ground and began the last fifteen miles toward the dark line of the Arkansas River, it was neither Steve nor Joy but a grim feeling of his own that made him change his decision. It was hard to believe that Clay had come to some rank treachery against the Cross T. Yet it was plain that he had wanted to block their march from the start. And now in town he would meet his friends, and those friends were Ed Splann and the Open A crew.

  It wouldn’t be the first treacherous thing, at that. It seemed a long jump now back to the Little Comanche and the night he had seen Clay make some crooked deal in Tom Arnold’s horses. But there it was. If something else like that was coming he might as well know.

  With the arrowhead shaped and grazing forward he rode back to Joe Wheat in the next swing position.

  “Joe,” he said, “I want you to work this out for me. You go in and see what Clay’s up to. Get a line on the Open A and its men—you know the joints in there better than any of us.”

  “Guess I do.” The old man grinned and rubbed his corded neck.

  “We’ll cross the river,” Lew finished, “and go into camp about five miles west of town. Get your news and come back there. That will be sometime late this afternoon.”

  If he could have his own way he’d pass Dodge without a stop. Time was crowding him, a threat always over his head. They still had six weeks until September first, the delivery date in Ogallala, but also four hundred long miles. He’d like to pass Dodge secretly and keep on. Yet even if Clay had not spoiled that he knew it couldn’t be done. No trail crew would stand for it. Dodge was a mecca, a safety valve. It was heaven with a rosy glow to any young hand who had never seen it; a little time of bright and dizzy forgetfulness to the older ones who had.

  They would have to go in for that. And they needed supplies. The chuck wagon was down to beef and beans, and so at noon he told Owl-Head Jackson, “You’d better use the bridge over the river. Lay in what you need at Wright and Beverly’s store and then come west to camp.” He saw the cook’s bald brown face light up.

  During the afternoon’s slow march black puffs of coal smoke drifted above the Arkansas River’s tree-tops where the railroad lay along the north bank. And later, when he least expected it, trouble struck at him from those two glistening lines of steel.

  The cattle and horses had forded the river’s wide, shallow bottom. Joy’s wagon had been pulled across without a hitch. But at the railroad the first longhorns suddenly humped their backs, dropped their heads, and wheeled. They had never seen a thing like that. It might have been snakes to them.

  The point swung against him before he could hold it. Swing men raced up to keep it turning. They caught the frightened leaders and held them and got the herd into a mill instead of a run.

  Ash Brownstone was riding next to him as they circled around the pool until it quieted. The old man gave his head a dubious shake.

  “Maybe, Lew,” he said, “we’re in for it. I had a time once trying to cross the TP down in Texas. You know what we had to do? We fought ’em for half a day, and you think those jack rabbits would jump the rails? No, sir. We had to take a piece of that track plumb up, ties and all.”

  “Now that’s a cheerful prospect, Ash,” he said. “You ever put those rails down again?”

  “We did, but not so good, I guess. Heard afterward a train run off.”

  He grinned.

  “Well, we’ll give it a try.”

  The longhorns had quieted. He moved them back a mile between the railroad and the river, turned them and let them walk forward slowly while the arrowhead shaped up. He found a late-born calf back among the drags, roped it, and pulled it, bawling, up in front of the point. The mother came running after her baby. Other shes began to crowd. Steers threw up their heads and trotted after him, wild-eyed. That was one sound that stirred a fighting instinct in range cows. He let his horse out faster, the calf loping along behind, and it was like a magnet pulling all the herd. He crossed the rails with the longhorns following him in leaping waves. They forgot all about the steel.

  There was no harm done except loss of time. He was an hour late, with the afternoon almost spent, when he swung the point off again to bring the herd into a milling stop on an open flat and saw the cook’s wagon and Joe Wheat arriving from town. Wheat came on, waving a signal.

  He rode out to meet the man alone.

  “Find him, Joe?”

  “He’s there.” Wheat nodded. “Been there all day. But I don’t figure it. Splann’s there and a fellow called Stoddard, said to be the Open A boss. First it was only them three, and Clay was putting up some kind of talk. They kept north of the tracks, drinking. Dodge still has that dead line. They don’t carry guns in that part. But along this afternoon five more Open A riders joined in. Clay’s drunk and they’ve got him south of the dead line now. Lew, I don’t know,” Joe Wheat’s usually sour face showed a deep concern. “Looks like they’re crowding Clay into something. They’ve got him cornered, and Clay’s still a Cross T man. What do you think?”

  He guessed old Joe was right. Clay was a Cross T man till he proved something else. He hadn’t done that yet.

  “We’ll ride,” he said. “Better not waste any time.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  In Dodge City

  In camp he told the men who had started to wash up for supper, “Don’t stop to eat.”

  Dripping heads came up as they stared at him. He didn’t explain.

  He wanted the best of this crew around him in town; some would have to stay here on guard. Owl-Head had already been in and showed it. There wasn’t much of a meal cooking on the pit tonight.

  For the others to be left he picked out Moonlight Bailey, young Jim Hope, and Steve.

  Getting Moonlight off alone, he said, “If Steve tries to skin out, rope him. I don’t want him in town at all.”

  He turned across to Joy’s wagon, found the canvas closed tight, and called inside.

  “We’re going off for a little while. I’m leaving Steve here with you.”

  Her voice came out to him with an even quietness. “I’m riding into town when you do. Will you saddle a horse for me?”

  “Later, maybe,” he said. “Not now.”

  The flaps parted. She held them together around her head. She was dressing. Her hair was brushed back smoothly and knotted at the nape of her neck.

  “I’ll go to a hotel,” she said, “and not be any trouble. But I’m going.”

  He knew that quietness in her voice; there was a will behind it. And he understood. Clay was in trouble, and all of a woman’s urge, and perhaps her intuition, was driving her to the man. He gave in
to that knowledge, saddled a horse, and brought it back for her to ride.

  She had come down from the wagon, standing at its end in a high-necked cream dress with pearl buttons from the throat to the tightly drawn waist. Over it she had put on a short gray jacket with a hood that covered her head. And as he moved the horse for her to mount she handed him a carpetbag heavy with her things.

  He looked at it, shaping a question which then he did not ask. He lifted her up to ride sidesaddle. She hooked her right knee over the horn.

  Half an hour’s loping travel brought the gray sod houses at the outskirts of the town. Even before that the voice of Dodge had been around them in a mingling of sounds that rose and fell and sometimes died away to a breathless hush. Once there came the far-off lonely whistle of an engine, and afterward the seven-car Transcontinental twisted west along the riverbank. Its coach windows made a chain of yellow jewels, and a shower of red sparks funneled upward into the sky.

  Charley Storms said, “All aboard for California! Man, think of that!”

  But most of the way there had been little talk. Joe Wheat, Quarternight, and Ash Brownstone made their older men’s group, riding together. Charley and Neal Good had paired off. He rode next to Joy’s stirrup himself, at no time trying to break the silence she had seemed to want.

  Beyond the soddies, with clusters of board houses beginning to outline irregular streets, he aimed toward a row of lights where Second Avenue, running north from the river, split the town in the middle.

  He leaned over to say, “I’ll take you to the Wright House. That’s the best.”

  She nodded. They rode on into louder waves of sound.

  There were shouts now above the wordless, growling undertone. Dogs barked, and off on some dark street a thud of hoofs drummed past. While over all this, the keynote of it, was the distant bawling of countless longhorns, held in the two miles of shipping-pens south of the railroad tracks.

  Then they had entered Second Avenue, coming at once out of darkness into the glow of square oil lamps on posts at the four corners of each intersection. Down at the avenue’s farther end he could see the plaza filled with dust and the moving swarms of horses and men.

  But the Wright House was two blocks back from that jammed center. He turned in front of it and stopped against the long hitching-rail.

  He said to the others, “Wait here,” and handed Joy down from her saddle. Whatever she planned he didn’t know and still held back his question while they entered the high, square lobby and found she could get a ground-floor room.

  But he took her arm as a Negro porter picked up her bag and started off.

  “What are you going to do?”

  She turned to face him. Her lips were pale. “Nothing. Find Clay. Tell him I’m here.”

  He looked at her, filled with a wretched pity for that belief, that all he had to do was tell Clay she was here.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll let him know.”

  Outside and mounted, there was one other thing he wanted to do first. He turned into a cross street and rode two blocks to Railroad Avenue, turned down that toward the river, and reached a section of warehouses, the depot, a huge barn with corrals sprawled behind it—Rachal Brothers’ livery.

  He said once more, “Wait here,” and entered the livery office.

  Pete Rachal was inside, sunk, deep in a brindle cowhide chair, a man grown fat and wealthy now, and yet an outlaw once whose rustled herds had pioneered the trail to Dodge. He was a Texan who could never go back. But any Texas cowboy, cleaned of his money, needn’t go hungry here nor sell his horse and saddle. Pete Rachal was their hock shop and bank.

  He lifted a stubby hand with its thumb missing and let it fall.

  “Burnet, how are you? Heard your Cross T was getting in.”

  “How’d you hear that?”

  “Horseback information. Someone dropped it off.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Some trouble I heard with the Indian Supply Company’s Open A. Bad?”

  “Bad enough,” he said. “That’s why I’ve come to you. How many of the boys have you got in soak here?”

  “Say!” Rachal put out his hand and moved an oil lamp on a table until it lighted a storeroom behind it. “Take a look.”

  Lew crossed to the doorway. Forty or fifty saddles were hung in there on pegs along the wall. He turned back, grinning a little.

  “They’ll never learn, I guess. Well, you know the men. You round up ten of the best and have them back here inside of an hour. I’ll pay their bills and give them jobs.”

  Pete Rachal’s blue eyes studied him over their heavy pouches.

  “Cow work?” he asked.

  “I’ve got enough men,” he said, “to handle the cows. We’re headed through to Ogallala. I don’t figure to be stopped.”

  “That bad, is it?”

  “That bad.”

  “You come back,” Rachal said. “I know the right ones for that.”

  “In an hour,” he promised and went out in time to hear Charley Storms’s rising complaint. “What’s he holding us back for?” And then, “Hey, Lew, how about some fun?”

  “Charley,” he said, “too bad, but you’ll have to wait.” Only Joe Wheat knew fully what they had come in for. He got into his saddle.

  “We’re looking for Clay. Joe, where was it you saw him last?”

  “They’d worked the Lady Gay and Mrs. Gore’s,” Wheat said, “and were drinking at Dutch Jake’s when I left.”

  “Likely moved on from there by this time. We’ll comb the plaza first.”

  He led out between the livery and the depot, entering at once into the open plaza two blocks wide and four long.

  Here in this dusty compound all the visible life of Dodge was centered, hemmed in by the high-fronted buildings with their plank walks and wooden awnings running from end to end. Along the south side, across the tracks, was a darker section without street lamps. But in this part the square oil burners on tall posts shed a brilliant light, drawing silvery clouds of moths from off the prairie, even as the town had drawn its swarms of men.

  From his saddle he could look down over the flowing streams of wide hats, cowmen almost exclusively filling the place. There were little groups of hoe-men in their bib overalls keeping apart and an occasional pair of troopers from the fort five miles east in their blue uniforms with yellow stripes down the legs.

  But the smell and talk and noise was all of cattle. For this was Dodge at the peak of the trail years, at a time when herds coming north could put a million dollars into circulation every month. Riding the eddying fringes of the crowd, he had no way of knowing then that he was listening to the death chant of this town. In not so long a time fire was to level these wooden buildings and the new Dodge City of brick and stone would not rise on this same spot again.

  He knew the horse Clay had ridden and watched for it among the three hundred or more saddle animals lined solidly along the gnawed hitching-rails. In the brighter fans of light from the windows of Delmonico’s Restaurant, a dozen barbershops, the Alamo and the Alhambra saloons, he watched the brown faces of men. They jammed the plank walk shoulder to shoulder in their moving stream. Some at the outer edge sat on rows of whisky barrels meant to be filled with water in case of fire. He had never seen them with any water. They made better seats turned upside down.

  Clay’s big shape was not in this crowd, and past the Long Branch Corner, boasting the longest bar in the world and fifty gambling tables, he said, “We might as well go across.”

  South of the tracks they rode into an immediate change. This was business of another sort. The streets were dark; sounds came mostly from behind closed doors and bamboo-curtained windows. Girls strolled the plank walks here in their short skirts and spoke to them as if they were old friends just getting home. Some stood in the doorways of their little dusty shacks. O
nly Mrs. Gore’s place was different, a neat white house with a garden of hollyhocks in the front yard.

  It always amused him a little, knowing that the roughest men coming up from Texas, some who could do no more than write their names, were paying for the education of Dodge City’s children. For out of levies on these houses south of the tracks a respectable Dodge north of them had built and maintained its schools.

  Where a block of saloons fronted on the toll bridge to catch the first trade from over the river, lamplight from doorways and windows made a brighter crossbar pattern along the street.

  But the hitching-rails were mostly vacant, and Joe Wheat said, “I guess he’s gone, Lew. This is where I saw his horse.”

  He nodded. “I’ll take a look.”

  Men drifted through these places, tried others, and came back again. He got down from his saddle and walked along, peering over the batwing doors. Dutch Jake’s place was empty now. In those farther on only a few drunks were propped against the bars. He had almost reached the corner, with open ground and the river crossing at right angles beyond, when he passed a man standing as motionless as a post against an un-lighted wall of the saloon front; passed him and halted and turned back to look at him again.

  Instantly the dark figure sprang out and ran the width of the street to a saddled horse. He hadn’t seen the man’s face, but it was plainly someone stationed on lookout duty.

  By the time he had run back and got into his own saddle there was only dust for him to follow. He gave no order; the others had seen and read that lookout sign. They poured behind him along the street. Then on the river’s open shelf he caught the drum of hoof-beats and saw the rider turn suddenly north beside the whitewashed shipping-pens. He swung that way. For a moment the figure was clear against the plaza lights where this street ended. But at the railroad tracks it turned once more and was out of sight.

  Taking a blind guess, he aimed across the depot yard before reaching the tracks himself and then was immediately sure which way the rider had gone. For the yard ended against the sprawling corrals of Rachals’ livery. There was only one outlet. He let his horse run unchecked past the long barn and curved in to a halt at the front.