Novel 1964 - Kiowa Trail (v5.0)

by Louis L'Amour

  *

  SITTING THERE ACROSS the fire from Kate, I could not but wonder what they were thinking of down in the town. By now there had been time for second thoughts, for taking stock.

  They had murdered a fine young man who was simply going to call on a girl. True, he was breaking the local rule by crossing the street, or rather, by going north of it. But he had done no harm to anyone, nor planned any.

  Moira, the waitress in the restaurant, knew what sort of girl Linda McDonald was. So did John Blake. And others must know. They also knew what kind of man Aaron McDonald was.

  They knew what they had done, and they had expected an attack with violence, and it had not come. Neither had we gone away.

  The column of faint smoke that marked our fire and the white wagon-tops were in plain view of the town, and this would not permit them to forget what had happened. Nor would it allow them to keep from wondering what we planned to do.

  For a week the town must have been an armed camp, ready to resist an attack, and the longer we held off the more worried they would become, and the more on edge. Business must be at a standstill down there, for there is a limit to the amount of business a town of that small size can do with itself.

  Only one other herd had appeared, and by now they must be aware that they were to have no business from it.

  What were they thinking down there? What did they plan? What were they expecting?

  On the morning of the eighth day we saw two wagons rolling out of town, headed westward. Kate borrowed my glasses and studied them carefully. Then she returned them to me. “Bannion,” she said. “He’s moving out.”

  We saw several people standing in the street watching him go.

  Matt Pollock sent his herd off to the west under half a crew. He kept the rest to lend us a hand, but he went with his cattle. He had left us a few beeves, and I killed a buffalo, so we had enough meat.

  On the morning of the tenth day the first wagons arrived. One of them was filled with supplies—food, and a thousand rounds of ammunition.

  There were three big freight wagons loaded with barbed wire and posts. One wagon went along dropping posts, and when the post holes were dug and the posts in place, a team pulled one end of the barbed wire out along the posts and the men followed with wire-stretchers and hammers. Eight or ten men with a couple of teams of horses and unbroken prairie on which to work can string a lot of wire.

  And through the day they were watching us from the town.

  It was mid-afternoon before John Blake rode out from town.

  He rode a handsome black horse and he was dressed in his black broadcloth suit. He rode out and sat watching for a few minutes, missing nothing…and nobody.

  Harvey Nugent was there, a professional fighting man who had fought through three Texas feuds and a dozen brushes with Indians. He was a gunfighter, and his reputation was known to John Blake.

  “Howdy, John!” Nugent said cheerfully. “Heard you were around.”

  “I never expected to see you throwing up fence, Harvey. What is this, anyway? A drift fence?”

  Harvey gave him a slow grin. “John, you chose the wrong town this time. This here fence is on land Mrs. Lundy has leased from the railroad.”

  John Blake studied the fence, and he needed to ask no more questions. He turned his horse and rode up the hill to Kate’s ambulance.

  We’d rigged a sunshade of canvas for her, and she was sitting under that, watching the work.

  “There’s coffee on the fire, John,” I said. “’Light an’ set.”

  He swung down and stood looking at the fence. “I suppose I don’t have to ask if you have leased land on the other side of town?”

  “Now, just one side wouldn’t make much sense, would it? No, we’ve leased it on both sides, John. East and west, too.”

  “You can’t bottle up a town like that,” he protested.

  “Bottle up a town?” My voice indicated astonishment. “Why, who would do such a thing? Anybody can leave who wants to go.”

  Putting down my cup, I added, “In fact, John, I was going to talk to you about that. There’s a new town—name of Hackamore—going up out west of here. They’ll be needing a marshal. Why don’t you look into it?”

  “West?”

  “Well…west and south. A bit closer to the herds coming up from Texas, and there’s good holding ground and good water there.”

  “So that’s it.”

  “That’s it, John.”

  He glanced at Kate from the corners of his eyes, but Kate just sat there, watching the stringing of the wire.

  “Ma’am?” he said. “Mrs. Lundy?”

  “Yes?”

  “I had nothing to do with that, ma’am, nothing at all. I made the rule, but I would never have drawn a gun on that boy.”

  “I know it, John.”

  “Are you going to strangle that town, ma’am? There’s good folks down there. Not all of them, but some.”

  “They killed my brother.”

  “That was Aaron McDonald and that crowd of blue noses, ma’am. What of the others?”

  “They can pull out. The road is open, and they were moving when they came here. As far as that goes, our town is in a better location, with better water than this place.”

  “You are a hard woman, ma’am.”

  Kate turned her eyes on him. “Am I, John? That boy was my brother. He was almost a son to me, and my husband adopted him as his son, and Tom took my husband’s name. He was all I had in the world, John Blake, and they took him from me. They shot him down in the street. Your town does not deserve to live, and it shall not.”

  He got slowly to his feet. “They’ll fight, ma’am. They’ll drive you from the country…or bury you.”

  “I do not think so,” Kate replied. “This is leased land. I have every right to be here, every right to fence the land. I am not denying anyone the right to enter or leave—but I will not have trail herds crossing my property.”

  “And the town was built to supply trail herds. They need the herds to live.”

  Kate smiled. “Well, Mr. Blake, I am glad to hear you say that. I was wondering when they would come to understand that fact—a fact, I might add, they were apparently not thinking of when they killed my brother. A fact Aaron McDonald was not thinking of when he made his remarks about Texans.”

  John Blake’s face was grim.

  “There’s another point you might mention, John,” I suggested. “You spoke to Harvey Nugent. Now, you know Harvey, and so do I; but those people down there may not know him. You should tell them about him.

  “If you’ll notice, I’ve got Meharry and Bledsoe here, too, and Red Mike has gone down the trail to Texas after two dozen more. We’re expecting trouble, John, and we’ll be ready for it. Not asking for it…just ready.”

  Blake turned sharply around, his big head thrust forward, his face tight with anger. “You bring that crowd in here, you turn that bunch loose, and this will be the bloodiest grass in Kansas!”

  Me, I was remembering Tom Lundy, so young, so proud, his bravery challenged, so unable to believe that he could die over such a thing.

  “John,” I said, “there are peoples who believe that when a young chief dies he should go into the after world with the skulls of a hundred enemies to mark his passing. I never cottoned to such ideas, but you tell those folks down there they can sit right where they are, or they can move out; but if they move against that wire they will be met with rifles.”

  He turned his horse and walked him away down the hill.

  After a moment, Kate said, “Conn, will they come against us? Will they?”

  “Yes, Kate,” I said, “they’ll come.”

  Chapter 5

  *

  SO WE TOOK up our rifles and patrolled the fence and waited for trouble to come. For now the spur was on the other boot, and it was we who felt the rowel of waiting, waiting for our enemies to come and not knowing when to expect them.

  But we were men seasoned by years of
trouble, men who had known little else from boyhood on. We were men who had fought wild cattle and wilder horses, who had lived by the gun, and each of us more than half expected to die by gun or stampede or flood.

  As the days passed, other men rode in. There was Rowdy Lynch from the Live Oak country, and Teague from the Palo Pinto. Gallardo came from Del Rio, and Battery Mason from Cow House Creek. They drifted into camp by twos and threes and bedded down on the knoll, and when another day came they took their turn at riding fence, the lean, hard men of our Winchester brigade.

  On the fifteenth day a train went through, a train of empty cattle cars, bound west for Hackamore, the town we had started in the bend of the river. From our knoll we could see the people come down to the station to meet the train, only to see it breeze on through.

  When the next day came, two wagons rolled out of town.

  With Kate riding beside me, D’Artaguette, Meharry, Nugent, and I rode down to cut them off. Only one thing we wanted to know—was anybody riding in those wagons who had been among those who killed Tom Lundy.

  The man in the first wagon who held the lines did not move to pick up a weapon, for he was a wise man, and he knew that the tempers of men at such a time are on hair triggers.

  “You’ve played hell,” he said, looking up at Kate, and then at me.

  “My brother was killed.”

  “Yes, and I don’t hold with that.” There was genuine sympathy in his eyes. “You’ve my regrets, for whatever they are worth. I knew Tom Lundy…he traded in my store, and was a gentleman, but I said my say back there, and no thanks did I receive for it.”

  “Drive to Hackamore,” Kate said, “and tell Priest I said to show you a site for your store.”

  “Thank you.” He made no move to drive on. And then he said hesitatingly, “I guess we’ll be going on.”

  His wife thrust her head from the wagon. “You tell them!” she said. “You tell them or I will! They’ve got a lot of men coming in on the train,” she went on, “and they’re going to wipe you out.”

  “Who’s paying for them?” I asked.

  “McDonald and Shalett,” the driver answered. “They’re putting up most of the money.”

  “Shalett? I don’t believe I know him.”

  “He knows you. He ran the Prairie Dog—that saloon next to the bank.” The man was curious. “I’d say he knew you mighty well, sometime or other. It was his idea to bring in fighters, and he backed McDonald in everything he did.”

  “Shalett?”

  “Frank Shalett. A big, dark man…talks mighty little. Funny thing, him and McDonald getting together now. McDonald was all for running him out of town before he’d been there three months. Shalett had killed a man in a gun battle. He killed Port Rader.”

  The wagons rolled on, and we let them go.

  But Harvey Nugent spoke up. “I knew Port,” he said, “and he was a good man with a gun. Whoever this Frank Shalett is, he’s no tenderfoot.”

  Port Rader, like Nugent, had been a man for hire, a professional fighting man, brought in to fight rustlers, Indians, or nesters, and a tough man.

  But I could remember no Frank Shalett.

  *

  NO DOUBT I had forgotten much during the years I was away, traveling in Europe. When a man leaves behind all he knows and remembers, he tends to forget it, and there for a time I had left it all behind.

  The year I killed Morgan Rich was the year I was sixteen. It was 1855.

  When a boy is foot-loose and drifting, there’s no telling where he’s apt to end up, and about that time I was walking along the street in Santa Fe one day when I ran into Captain Edwards, the man to whom I had taken Jim Sotherton’s possessions after he was murdered.

  He caught my arm. “Dury, isn’t it? Conn Dury?”

  “Yes, sir. And you’ll be Captain Edwards.”

  “You know, Dury, I’ve a letter for you. I wrote to Sotherton’s family, and told them about you, and about the education you had been getting from their son. They want you to write to them.”

  We walked along to his quarters to get the letter. After he had given it to me, he asked, “You said something about hunting those other men. Did you find them?”

  “I found Morgan Rich. He’s buried over at Las Vegas.”

  “And the other one?”

  “Hastings…he dropped out of sight—probably some Indian killed him. There’s a lot of ways a man can die out here. Many such men nobody will ever know about.”

  “Dury,” Edwards said suddenly, “stay and have dinner with me. I am in command here, and the food is good. It will be a pleasure to have you.”

  He was full of questions at first about the means I’d used to hunt down Rich. Finally we got around to talking about Sir Walter Scott and some of the other writers whose works I’d read, but it seemed to me there was something else on his mind.

  After a time, while we were sitting over coffee, he said, “You know, Conn, I don’t know all that is in that letter to you, but I do know part of it. They want you to come to England.”

  At first I was not sure I’d heard him correctly, but then he explained. They had written him that they had the idea they should give me a chance to continue the education their son had begun, and they would, if I wished, send me to school over there, providing tutors to bring me up to date, and whatever was necessary to enter.

  “I think,” Edwards said, “it is in good part because they want to hear about Jim Sotherton. The things he said, the way he looked, all you can tell them about him. They would pay your way over and back, and your expenses.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “It is a rare opportunity, Conn.”

  So I went to England.

  At the last, Edwards warned me. “Be careful, Conn, about what you say. Remember they are no longer young, and they live in a country that has been civilized for hundreds of years. They are like the people who will come after us here; and when they hear of the West as it really is, they will not believe it.

  “They are used to curbstones, and to officers that one can simply call on to take care of malefactors. There is no place in their thinking for a land where a man carries the law in his holster. What I mean is, I wouldn’t tell them about Flange and Rich.”

  In England, they met me at the station, a tall, fine-looking old man with white hair and the erect carriage of a military past, and a girl perhaps a year younger than I.

  What they expected I do not know. Possibly they believed I would step down from the train in buckskins and a sombrero; but whatever it was, I do not believe it was what they saw.

  Although I was only sixteen, I was more than six feet tall, slim but strong. A friend of Captain Edwards had come down from West Point to help me choose the proper outfit, so there was nothing strange in my appearance, and the only way they could have known me was by my age and the darkness of my skin, browned by Texas sun and wind.

  The girl knew me at once, and came to me, her hand outstretched. “You must be Conn Dury. I am Felicia Kirkstone—James Sotherton was my uncle.”

  She was pretty, and pretty in a way I vaguely remembered from the years before my folks moved west.

  “How do you do?” I said. “Mr. Sotherton told me about you.”

  “Conn…Mr. Dury…my grandfather, Sir Richard Sotherton.”

  We talked a little of my crossing, which had been a wild one, due to the terrible storms of that year, and we walked to the open carriage that waited for us. Sir Richard drove, and we rode the short distance to Sotherton Manor behind a handsome pair of blacks.

  When the trip had been planned I was uneasy about it, for all I knew had been taught me by Jim Sotherton, aside from my earlier training at home; and I had never traveled.

  Sotherton Manor was a large, rambling old house of gray stone, half covered with vines. There was a wide stretch of lawn in front and a winding gravel drive that led to the door. It was far more grand than any place I had ever seen before.

  They asked me about my own country, the co
untry where I had worked for Jim; and looking around me, I wondered how I could make them understand. Everything around me indicated that this was a long settled land—the spreading lawns, the carefully planted trees, the green well-kept beauty of it all. Even the woodlands had definite borders, for this was a land where everything had been decided long, long ago.

  Here there was custom, tradition, and a common law built upon hundreds of years of living on the same ground, in somewhat the same way. And my land in the Big Bend of the Rio Grande was still wild, untamed. Nothing there was ordered and arranged, nor were there customs or traditions. Everything was raw and new, and the laws were the laws of the sun and the water holes, the wind and the sparse grazing.

  But that evening, after dinner, I tried to tell them.

  “When Jim Sotherton rode into the Big Bend,” I said, “there weren’t twenty men in the whole area, and most of them gathered at the old Presidio, a place they called Fort Leaton, down on the Rio Grande.”

  “How big an area is it?” Sir Richard asked.

  “The Big Bend? I don’t actually know, but it is larger than Wales…perhaps a third the size of Ireland. And this is only a small piece of Texas.”

  They did not believe me. I could see the doubt in their eyes, and knew it was a poor way to begin our acquaintance, though it was the truth. And I had promised to tell them.

  “It’s wild, lonely country. Almost everything that grows there has a thorn. The mountains are rugged, bare rock, the country is desolate, yet beautiful—beautiful in a way you’d have to see to understand. There’s wild horses, wild cattle, mountain lions, wolves, and rattlesnakes. There are deer, antelope, and javelinas.”

  “What?”

  “Javelinas—wild pigs.”

  “My uncle told us you had lived with the Apaches,” the girl said.

  “Yes, ma’am. For most of three years.”

  Gradually, I began to realize that Mr. Sotherton had written them a good deal about me—about my parents being killed by the Indians, my captivity, and the education he had begun giving me.

  Later that night, when we were alone, Sir Richard said, “The men who killed my son…they had worked for him, I believe?”