by Jon E. Lewis
“They are Apaches!”
Those behind broke away and to the left, and passed below the knoll, circling to re-form and roar up again toward the knoll top. Brown oiled bodies hard down on the off-side of ponies, galloping into the teeth of the dawn wind. And the men on the knoll saw them now for the Gresham massacre party, for there were yellow stripes on the legs of some, with the seat and the front cut from the trousers; and there were sabers and yellow silken neckerchiefs and the brass buckles of belts and bandoleers.
Round again and up again frantically into the flaming scythe of Cohill’s fire. And again, as they took it, breaking and circling, but this time raggedly bunched, with free ponies racing among them. Cut down to half their number. Torn and bleeding, whirling across the whitening dawn. Battered in their strength, broken and hacked into. Shrieking now in anger and the primitive hurt of animals – frustrated tigers of the Plains.
The raucous brass file of the trumpet scratched across the gunmetal of the new day, and Nathan Brittles’ main body came up out of the bottoms of the Mesa Roja branch, splashed hoof-deep across the lower ford and charging as foragers, struck them on their shattered flank, parched sabers drawn and drinking. There was a long and racing moment down the bottoms, horse to horse and man to man, below Cohill’s knoll. A red moment of fury. Steel and flesh and livid madness with the black lash of the devil in it to whip it to frenzied crescendo.
Cohill stood above, his shirt black with sweat, watching the bitter finish, the last flaming action and the last free pony pistoled off its flashing hoofs. Below him on the knoll there was a writhing Apache hurling himself up off his dead hips and legs, thrashing his upper body in madness to free himself from the icy shackles of his broken spine. Noiselessly thrashing, like a snake dismembered. And to the left, there was Corporal McKenzie, lying blue-faced and quiet, his hands close to the feathered shaft that was sunk deep in his right side below the ribs – hands rising and falling with the last of his breathing. And Skinnor, with the twisted bloat of his leg stretched out naked before him, smoking evenly on his black-stubbed pipe watching the sun wash that reddened the horizon.
“Mr Cohill, you did that well.” Nathan Brittles swung down and plunged his face and hands in the wet grass to clean them and freshen himself. He opened his matted shirt to the waist and tugged it over his head. “You may do. In time.”
“You knew they were Apaches yesterday at sundown . . . and you knew they were camped on the mesa top, sir?”
“Mr Cohill,” – Brittles swabbed his bare chest with his shirt-tail – “Apaches fear only man. They camp as high as they can get, no matter how far it is from water. Had you pushed forward to Mr Gresham’s slope, you would have found Mr Gresham, not sleeping buffalo. Had your eyes been sharp, you would have seen this between the slope and last evening’s bivouac.” Brittles dug a hand deep into his pocket and tugged out a blood-hardened shred of Apache headband of red flannel and handed it over. “Commit it to your diary and your brain.” Brittles pulled on his shirt again, “And had you been a plainsman and suspected the Apache, you would have looked at once for smoke at sundown on the highest ground – Mesa Roja.”
Cohill’s quick admiration was in his eyes, in his blurted words, “You came straight here, sir, to hole them out and pay them off for Gresham. You had no intention of anything else, from the start, but to force the fight.” He grinned. “You even had Utterback fooled, until you turned north.”
The captain stood quite still for a moment, looking Flint Cohill over very carefully, as if he had never seen him before. “The essence of command is timing, Mr Cohill. A successful commander keeps his own counsel until the right moment. At that time he tells his subordinates everything they should know to do their part of the work properly. Nothing more. My intention was to fool no one. Sergeant Utterback is a soldier. He keeps his mouth shut. The facts are these: My point, temporarily bivouacked at dawn today, came under sudden enemy attack. Fortunately, it was able to hold until I arrived with the main body.”
Cohill drew himself up and bowed slightly. “I understand that, sir, perfectly. I am familiar with departmental standing orders which allow defensive actions only, and expressly forbid the attack.”
“And yet” – Captain Brittles’ eyes never wavered from Cohill’s – “they are in direct violation of cavalry tactics, for cavalry is very weak on the defensive. It can defend itself well only by attacking. Most young lieutenants will agree with that, whether or not they examine the reasons.”
“I am desperately sorry, sir.”
“Mr Cohill, never apologize. It’s a mark of weakness. There is a captain out here who tried it once to escape a Benzine Board. He escaped it, but he’s been ashamed a little bit ever since. He will die a captain, in spite of his apology. The man who did for him could have worked with him and made him a soldier, if his humanity had been large enough. Mr Cohill, I’m going to make a soldier out of you, if you don’t break. You may present my respects to General Cohill when next you write your father. Mr Cohill, take morning stables.”
FRANK BONHAM
Burn Him Out
FRANK BONHAM (1914–1988) was born in Los Angeles, California. He wanted to be a writer from his earliest childhood, and sold his first story, a mystery, in 1936. Soon afterwards he became secretary (in fact, ghostwriter) to the pulp writer, Ed Earl Repp. After three years the relationship ended, and Bonham became a prolific contributor to the pulp and digest magazines in his own right, often writing as many as half a million words a year. Bonham, however, was more than prolific: by the 1950s there was no finer writer of formulary Westerns to be found. In addition to his hundreds of short stories, Bonham also wrote eighteen Western novels – among them Lost Stage Valley (1948) and Snaketrack (1952) – and contributed storylines to such classic TV Western shows as Tales of Wells Fargo. Bonham was also an accomplished author of teenage fiction (his 1965 novel, Durango Street, was awarded the George G. Stone Centre for Children’s Books Award), and detective stories.
“Burn Him Out” was first published in the digest magazine Argosy in 1949.
WILL STARRETT SQUATTED before the campfire in the creek bottom, drinking his coffee and watching the other men over the rim of his tin cup. In the strong light from the fire, the sweat and the dirt and the weariness made harsh masks of their faces. They were tired men. But pushing up through their fatigue was a growing restlessness. Now and then, a man’s face was lost in heavy shadow as he turned away to talk with a neighbor. A head nodded vigorously, and the buzz of talk grew louder. To Starrett, listening, it was like the hum a tin of water makes as it comes to a boil. The men were growing impatient now, and drawing confidence from each other. Snatches of talk rose clearly. Without the courtesy of direct address, they were telling Tim Urban what to do.
Starrett swirled his cup to raise the sugar from the bottom and studied Urban coldly. The man leaned against the wheel of a wagon, looking cornered. He held a cup of coffee in his hand and his puffy face was mottled with sweat and dirt. On his hands and forearms was the walnut stain of grasshopper excrement. He was a man for whom Starrett felt only mild contempt. Urban was afraid to make his own decisions, and yet unable to accept outside advice. The land on which he stood, and on which they had worked all day, was Urban’s. The decision about the land was his, too. But because he hesitated, so obviously, other voices were growing strong with eagerness to make up his mind for him. Tom Cowper was the most full-throated of the twenty-five who had fought the grasshoppers since dawn.
“If the damned poison had only come!” he said. “We could have been spreading it tonight and maybe had them stopped by noon. Since it ain’t come, Tim –” He scowled and shook his head. “We’re going to have to concoct some other poison just as strong.”
“What would that be?” Starrett struck a match and shaped the orange light with his hands.
Cowper, a huge man with a purplish complexion, badger-gray hair and tufted sideburns, pondered without meeting Starrett’s eyes, and answered withou
t opening his mind.
“Well, we’ve got time to think of something, or they’ll eat this country right down to bedrock. We’re only three miles from your own land right now. The hoppers didn’t pasture on Urban’s grass because they liked the taste of it. They just happened to land here. Once they get a start, or a wind comes up, they’ll sweep right down the valley. We’ve got to stop them here.”
Will Starrett looked at him and saw a big angry-eyed man worrying about his land as he might have worried about any investment. To him, land was a thing to be handled like a share of railroad stock. You bought it when prices were low, you sold it when prices were high. Beyond this, there was nothing to say about it.
When Starrett did not answer him, Cowper asked, “What is there to do that we haven’t already done? If we can’t handle them here on Tim’s place, how can we handle them on our own?”
They all knew the answer to that, Starrett thought. Yet they waited for someone else to say it. It was Tim Urban’s place to speak, but he lacked the guts to do it. Starrett dropped the match and tilted his chin as he drew on the cigarette. The fire’s crackling covered the far-off infinite rattling of the grasshoppers, the night covered the sight of them. But they were still there in every man’s mind, a hated, crawling plague sifting the earth like gold-seekers.
They were there with their retching green smell and their racket, as of a herd of cattle in a dry cornfield. Across two miles of good bunch-grass land they had squirmed, eating all but a few weeds, stripping leaves and bark from the trees. They had dropped from the sky upon Urban’s home place the night before, at the end of a hot July day. They had eaten every scrap of harness in the yard, gnawed fork-handles and corral bars, chewed the paint off his house and left holes where onions and turnips had been in his garden.
By night, four square miles of his land had been destroyed, his only stream was coffee-colored with hopper excrement. And the glistening brown insects called Mormon crickets were moving on toward the valley’s heart as voraciously as though wagonloads of them had not been hauled to a coulee all day and cremated in brush fires. And no man knew when a new hatch of them might come across the hills.
Starrett frowned. He was a dark-faced cattleman with a look of seasoned toughness, a lean and sober man, who in his way was himself a creature of the land. “Well, there’s one thing,” he said.
“What’s that?” Cowper asked.
“We could pray.”
Cowper’s features angered, but it was his foreman, Bill Hamp, who gave the retort. “Pray for seagulls, like the Mormons?”
“The Mormons claim they had pretty good luck.”
With an angry flourish, Hamp flung the dregs of his coffee on the ground. He was a drawling, self-confident Missourian, with truculent pale eyes and a brown mustache. The story was that he had marshaled some cowtown a few years ago, or had been a gunman in one of them.
He had been Cowper’s ramrod on his other ranches in New Mexico and Colorado, an itinerant foreman who suited Cowper. He did all Cowper asked of him – kept the cows alive until the ranch could be resold at a profit. To Hamp, a ranch was something you worked on, from month to month, for wages. Land, for him, had neither beauty nor dimension.
But he could find appreciation for something tangibly beautiful like Tom Cowper’s daughter, Lynn. And because Starrett himself had shown interest in Lynn, Bill Hamp hated him – hated him because Starrett was in a position to meet her on her own level.
Hamp kept his eyes on Starrett. “If Urban ain’t got the guts to say it,” he declared, “I have. Set fires! Burn the hoppers out!” He made a sweeping gesture with his arm.
Around the fire, men began to nod. Urban’s rabbity features quivered. “Bill, with the grass dry as it is I’d be burned out!”
Hamp shrugged. “If the fire don’t get it, the hoppers will,” he said.
Cowper sat there, slowly nodding his head. “ Tim, I don’t see any other way. We’ll backfire and keep it from getting out of hand.”
“I wouldn’t count on that,” Starrett said.
“It’s take the risk or accept catastrophe,” Cowper declared. “And as far as its getting out of hand goes, there’s the county road where we could stop it in a pinch.”
“Best to run off a strip with gangplows as soon as we set the fires,” Hamp said. He looked at Starrett with a hint of humor. Downwind from Tim Urban’s place at the head of the valley was Starrett’s. Beyond that the other ranches sprawled over the prairie. Hamp was saying that there was no reason for anyone to buck this, because only Urban could lose by the fire.
Starrett said nothing and the opinions began to come.
Finally Cowper said, “ I think we ought to take a vote. How many of you are in favor of setting fires? Let’s see hands on it.”
There were twenty men in the creek bottom. Cowper counted fourteen in favor. “The rest of you against?”
All but Starrett raised their hands. Hamp regarded him. “Not voting?”
“No. Maybe you’d like to vote on a proposition of mine.”
“What’s that?”
“That we set fire to Cowper’s ranch house first.”
Cowper’s face contorted. “Starrett, we’ve got grief enough without listening to poor jokes!”
“Burning other men’s grass is no joke. This is Urban’s place, not yours or mine. I’m damned if any man would burn me out by taking a vote.”
Bill Hamp sauntered to the wagon and placed his foot against a wheelhub. “Set by and let ourselves be eaten out – is that your idea?”
“Ourselves?” Starrett smiled.
Hamp flushed. “I may not own land, but I make my living from it.”
“There’s a difference, Hamp. You need to sweat ten years for a down payment before you know what owning an outfit really means. Then you’d know that if a man would rather be eaten out than burned out, it’s his own business.”
Hamp regarded him stonily and said, “Are you going to stand there and say we can’t fire the place to save the rest?”
Starrett saw the the men’s eyes in the firelight, some apprehensive, some eager, remembering the stories about Bill Hamp and his cedar-handled .45. “No,” he said. “I didn’t say that.”
Hamp, after a moment, let a smile loosen his mouth. But Starrett was saying, “I’ve got nothing against firing, but everything against deciding it for somebody else. Nobody is going to make up Urban’s mind for him, unless he agrees to it.”
Urban asked quickly, “What would you do, Will?”
It was not the answer Starrett wanted. “I don’t know,” he said. “What are you going to do?”
Urban knew an ally when he saw one. He straightened, spat in the fire, and with his thumbs hooked in the riveted corners of his jeans pockets, stared at Cowper. “I’m going to wait till morning,” he said. “If the poison don’t come – and if it don’t rain or the wind change – I may decide to fire. Or I may not.”
Information passed from Cowper to Bill Hamp, traveling on a tilted eyebrow. Hamp straightened like a man stretching slowly and luxuriously. In doing so, his coat was pulled back and the firelight glinted on his cartridge belt. “Shall we take that vote again, now that Mr Starrett’s finished stumping?” he asked.
Starrett smiled. “Come right down to it, I’m even principled against such a vote.”
Hamp’s dark face was stiff. The ill-tempered eyes held the red catchlights of the fire. But he could not phrase his anger for a moment, and Starrett laughed. “ Go ahead,” he said. “I’ve always wondered how much of that talk was wind.”
Cowper came in hastily. “All right, Bill! We’ve done all we can. It’s Urban’s land. As far as I’m concerned, he can fight the crickets himself.” He looked at Starrett. “We’ll know where to lay the blame if things go wrong.”
He had brought seven men with him. They got up, weary, unshaven cowpunchers wearing jeans tied at the bottoms to keep the grasshoppers from crawling up their legs. Cowper found his horse and came back, mounted.<
br />
“You’ll be too busy to come visit us for a while.” His meaning was clear – he was speaking of his daughter. “As for the rest of it – I consider that a very dangerous principle you’ve laid down. I hope it never comes to a test when the hoppers have the land next to mine.”
They slept a few hours. During the night a light rain fell briefly. Starrett lay with his head on his saddle, thinking of the men he had so nearly fought with.
Cowper would sacrifice other men’s holdings to protect his own. That was his way. Urban would protest feebly over being ruined with such haste, but he would probably never fight. Hamp was more flexible. His actions were governed for the time by Cowper’s. But if it came to a showdown, if the hoppers finished Urban and moved a few miles east onto Starrett’s land, this dislike that had grown into a hate might have its airing.
Starrett wished Cowper had been here longer. Then the man might have understood what he was trying to say. That land was not shares of stock, not just dirt with grass growing on it. It was a bank, a feedlot, a reservoir. The money, the feed, the water were there as long as you used them wisely. But spend them prodigally, and they vanished. Your cattle gaunted down, your graze died.You were broke. But after you went back to punching cows or breaking horses, the grass came back, good as ever, for a wiser cowman to manage.
It was a sort of religion, this faith in the land. How could you explain it to a man who gypsied around taking up the slack in failing ranches by eliminating extra hands, dispensing with a useless horse-herd, and finally selling the thing at a profit?
