by Maryk Lewis
THREE
It was the wrong time of year for marauding Indians to be about, and even then foreign tribes should only be trespassing on this part of the plains if they were deliberately looking for trouble. Had it been autumn, particularly September, and the Indians Commanche or Kiowa, possibly Apache, then Johnnie wouldn’t have been too concerned about them. Such bands wouldn’t be bothering Texian settlers. They’d be heading south into Mexico for much easier pickings; a little spot of raping and plunder, without any repercussions from the blue coats.
‘What do you think their game is?’Johnnie asked his friends.
‘Could be,’ Danny suggested, ‘that they’re planning to let the rustlers drive our stock off Commanche territory, off Kiowa territory, and then hijack ’em. In the meantime, if we manage to bring the army in smartly, the rustlers catch all the grief, and these Indians, whoever they are, are left free to move in later and clean up whatever’s left.’ ‘How many do you reckon there are?’
‘Forty, maybe fifty. There’ll be scouts out. We haven’t seen their tracks yet.’
‘Outnumber the outlaws two to one then.’ ‘Outnumber us more’n a dozen to one at the moment, and we’ll be lucky if’n they ain’t got back markers watching us right now.’
‘Reckon they’ll try to drygulch us?’
‘Could do, but like the rustlers, they must know others will come up behind us following these stolen cattle and horses. All they can do is delay the pursuit, and gunning us down won’t help ’em much. We’re no immediate threat to ’em. They’ll be more concerned about the Commanche or Kiowa war parties that are sure to turn up eventually, if the blue coats don’t arrive first.’
‘We’ll go on then,’ Johnny decided. ‘We’re no worse off than we were just looking for the rustlers to be watching their back trail.’
‘Their bullets kill you just as dead,’ Bobcat observed, and shrugged.
They rode on, always with two of them reading sign, and the third studying the land as it came into sight far ahead of them. To the casual observer it all looked uniformly flat, unbroken grassland out to the horizon in all directions, except to the west where, far away, the broken tops of the Davis Mountains sawed at the cloudless sky. Odd scruffy plants, weeds, but not a tree, not a rock outcrop was in sight anywhere.
The uniformity was deceptive. In fact the land was cut, and re-cut, again and again by dry watercourses, streams, and even great rivers, all in deep, steep-sided channels in the land. All the trees were down in those. In between them were many low swellings and bumps to break what in fact was a quite imperfect flatness.
Whichever man was taking a turn at watching the distance, rode out to either side to take advantage of every little rise that would give him a longer view. Everywhere it was quite apparent that others had made the same use of the same rises.
Eventually Johnnie, on one of his side trips, spotted a distant rider far ahead of them.
‘I think it was one of the rustlers,’ he reported. ‘He was wearing a European hat, big brim to it.’
‘Some Indians wear them,’ Danny argued.
‘Old men,’ Bobcat said.
The other two nodded. If the rider ahead was an Indian, he would be a young one. Watching the back trail would be below the dignity of an older brave.
By the time they reached the point where the watcher ahead had been seen, he was long gone. His prints, though, were still there, and Johnnie recognized them. They were one of the sets that he had taken responsibility for.
‘Rustler then,’ he observed.
‘Yeah, and he didn’t just wait here for us to come up,’ Danny noted. ‘He came back to here looking for us.’
‘Then why didn’t he run into the Indians?’
An answer to that appeared inside the next mile. The Indians had turned off the trail of the stolen stock, and disappeared instead down a dry watercourse leading off toward a branch of the Red River, then lying far to their north-east.
It appeared that the rustler had come back as much to look for the Indians, as to look for the Dryfe Sands party. What the rustlers thought they were doing was still very much a mystery, but finding strange Indians behind them must have given them a nasty shock.
‘We’re not going to have any trouble coming up with the rustlers,’ Johnnie pointed out. ‘They’re just too slow to get away from us. I think it would be wise to check closer on the Indians.’
In consequence, the three of them also turned off the rustlers’ trail, and followed instead the tracks in the watercourse, one man down in the bottom of the gully, and one on each rim. There was less chance that way of suddenly riding into an ambush.
After several miles the Indians had switched from riding down the growing watercourse, and instead had begun to ascend a branch coming in from the left. In time that gully broke into smaller and smaller branches, with the Indians always choosing one that led north-west. Each joining involved one or other of the rim riders coming down into the watercourse in order to cross over to the rim of the next branch.
‘You know,’ Johnnie said to Bobcat on one such changeover, ‘this is going to bring us right out again in the path of the cattle drive.’
‘True,’ Bobcat agreed, and kept on riding.
A little later Danny called down, ‘Hey, you fellows, hold it! Come and look over here.’
Danny had gone up a shallow side branch, the channel not deep enough to leave his head below ground level unless he hunkered down. Both of the others joined him, and when they looked over the top of the bank, they were looking out across a gently sloping plain to the cattle drive going past, something like two miles away.
‘Well, we certainly didn’t lose those fellows,’ Johnnie said. ‘Where are the Indians?’
‘Somewhere out ahead of the cattle,’ Danny answered. ‘They must be setting an ambush.’
Strung out across a half mile of grassland, the cattle were ambling placidly along. At intervals of a hundred yards or so, riders accompanied them, some along each flank, and a bunch bringing up the rear. The remuda, the mob of stolen horses, the riders’ spare mounts, and several packhorses, were more tightly bunched and supervised ahead of the cattle. All but the leading horses were chewing dust, and dust hung in a cloud for miles back behind the churning hooves. Away in the distance single riders could be seen scouting ahead, while another was far behind in the clean air where the dust had settled again.
Of the Indians there was no sign.
‘Well, what do we do about that?’ Johnnie puzzled. ‘Do we want to interfere? If the Indians have a go at the rustlers, whichever side wins is sure going to be short of a lot of people, and the survivors are still going to be stuck with all those slow-moving cattle. All it does it make our task easier when the army finally catches up on us.’
‘We sure won’t do any good getting ourselves mixed up in their ruckus,’ Danny nodded.
‘The Indians must have something in mind to do with the cattle surely?’
‘Help if we know which Indians,’ Bobcat said gruffly.
For an hour they spelled their horses, peering over the rim of the watercourse, and letting the rustlers draw ahead of them. There was no indication that the rustlers were aware of their presence.
When the last man was safely out of sight, they resumed their tracking of the Indians. That only led to more puzzlement.
The marks left by the Indians took them down to the line of the cattle drive, and there disappeared. The cattle had been driven over the top of them.
‘Now the rustlers have to know that the Indians are in front of them,’ Johnnie pointed out. ‘Are they just going to follow their tracks, or what?’
‘They’d be no worse off that way,’ Danny replied. ‘No matter what the rustlers do now, the Indians can always set an ambush ahead of them.’
‘Indian tracks all gone,’ Bobcat commented. ‘That’s the point,’ Johnnie acknowledged. ‘If we hadn’t seen the Indians’ tracks up to here, we wouldn’t know that the Indians were there at all. Anybody c
utting across the tracks of the cattle drive from now on, wouldn’t know that the Indians were up ahead of them.’
‘Indians not know cattle are stolen,’ Bobcat mentioned.
‘Say, that’s right. They wouldn’t, would they, unless they were told. Nor would anybody else,’ Johnnie agreed. ‘What’s your point?’
‘Maybe Indians not interested in stealing cattle. Not worth losing braves for. Not want fight. Only want to use cattle to cover tracks.’
‘They’ve got to come out from under those cattle tracks sooner or later. Why should the rustlers keep following them?’
‘Why not?’ Danny suggested. ‘The line the rustlers are taking heads almost due north. If they keep going, they’ll cross the Red River, two branches of the Canadian, and then hit the Cimarron Cutoff of the Santa Fe Trail. There’s nowhere else for them to go till they get to there. They’ve got to cross the rivers where the fords will let them, so the route the Indians are taking is as good as any, and they’re in no more danger following the Indians, than in heading off any other way.’
‘Indians can lose themselves at rivers, or on Santa Fe Trail. Not leave tracks there,’ Bobcat said.
‘The fellows in the rustlers’ chuck wagon must be sweatin’ some,’ Danny suggested. ‘I wouldn’t care to be in their boots.’
The chuck wagon would be at that time several miles ahead of the trail drive, and most likely manned by a cook and a boy. After feeding all hands each morning, they had to clean up, and then catch up and pass the herd during the day, to move on ahead of them and select the next bedding ground, where they would have the evening meal prepared by the time the herd arrived. Finding a large Indian band coming up on them, while they were so vulnerable, must have been a somewhat unnerving experience.
‘I think we’d best leave this lot to it,’ Johnnie decided. ‘Whatever the Indians do, we’re still going to be able to find the herd again for quite some time to come. I think we’d best head for Fort Washita, and let the blue coats know that these Indians are involved. It wouldn’t be too good to have them come out to deal with a couple of dozen rustlers, and find that they’ve got an Indian war on their hands instead.’
‘I stay?’ Bobcat suggested.
‘No, come with us. Watching the rustlers now won’t make any difference.’
They cut back, still unseen, along the watercourse, and stayed with it all the way down to the Red River, which they found, next day, flowing swift between high banks clothed with mesquites, willows, and cottonwoods. The nearest ford was a good distance downstream.
‘Indians been here,’ Bobcat declared, when they came out on the far bank.
‘Yeah, that same band,’ Danny agreed.
The hoofprints were all headed into the water, going the other way, and had been made several days before.
‘They’re more or less on our route,’ Johnnie noted. ‘Let’s just back-track them a way, and see where they’ve been. Maybe we can pick up something to tell us who they are.’
Toward evening they found where the Indians had joined the Red River from a tributary coming in from the north. The Indians’ out-going prints were overlaid by those of a small party going up that stream.
Danny grinned when he saw them. ‘Them folks’re lucky they didn’t happen along sooner,’ he said.
Their own route still lay on down the river, but there was a day’s travel yet to get down to the fort. It was time to call it quits for the day. They wanted to finish with their campfire before full dark, so that it wouldn’t call unwanted attention to them.
As it happened, they were unsuccessful in that. While they were still cooking their evening meal, the Dryfe Sands cowpuncher Cab Phillips rode in on them. He was with Little Hawk, the other Commanche from the ranch, which was where both of them were headed. They were riding double on a very tired horse.
‘I thought you’d be with the soldier boys,’ Johnnie greeted him.
‘Fraid not,’ Cab replied. ‘Those soldier boys are out hunting Indians way up toward the Arkansas country. There’s Cheyenne, Arapaho, and others stirring up a bit of bother.’
‘Yes, we’ve been following forty or fifty of them.’
‘Oh, that’s only a part of ’em. One count made it more’n two hundred in one bunch alone, and there seems to be other lots as well. Several ranches have been attacked. There’s folk in from all over, lookin’ for the blue coats to help. They’re a-tryin’, but they’re full drawn. They done took our horses to mount some of the garrison troops.’
‘Where’s the old man, then?’
‘He’s headed north, still trying to find the army. There’s only a small garrison left at Fort Washita, mainly the wounded and sick. They won’t be comin’ out. Meantime, Ding Dong says Little Hawk an’ me... we’ve gotta go back to the ranch. He’s worried about your Maw bein’ there shorthanded.’
‘Perhaps we’d better do that too,’ Johnnie considered.
