by Celia Hayes
“I’ll come with you,” Peter said, and Billy Inman rose also.
“So’ll I,” he said, then added defensively, “He was a stuck-up sumbitch, but he was damn good at what he done. An’ he was one of us.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Peter allowed, and Fredi nodded assent.
But before they could even draw fresh mounts from the remuda, a drover at the edge of the heard stood up in his stirrups, waving his hat and pointing towards something just out of sight of those in camp.
“What the—?” Peter ventured, for soon appeared a hatless man on foot, coming along the line of the creek bank towards them. “It’s Jack!” So it was, although he was much more thickly daubed with mud than any of the rest, as if he had been thrown down and rolled in it. He sauntered casually into the circle of bedrolls like a man out for a stroll on the promenade.
“Glory be!” Daddy Hurst exclaimed. Dolph unobtrusively placed the shovel back in the toolbox on the side of the supply wagon.
“I see you found my horse and saddle,” English Jack drawled. A broad grin split his unshaven and filthy countenance. At some point his nose had bled copiously into his beard, neckerchief, and shirtfront. “Don’t tell me you chaps had given up hope on my survival?”
Billy Inman whooped and thumped his shoulders.
Peter exclaimed, “Well, we did at that, Jack. We were just setting out to see to whatever might be left after the cattle finished riding over you last night! Where the hell were you, all this time?”
“Extraordinary thing.” Jack accepted a tin plate. “Thank you, Hurst. Coffee, too, if it’s not too much trouble. I spent the night in a most uncomfortable ditch.” Between ravenous bites of bread and bacon he added, “I see you were able to retrieve the herd. Excellent! ‘Straordinary lucky, that; well done, all the way around.”
“Yes, pretty much,” Dolph said. “But what happened to you—when we found your horse and not you . . . ?”
“You assumed the worst?” Jack grinned again. “Don’t blame you in the least. They broke and ran just about the place where I was, innocently and harmlessly sitting on Bonehead or Mush-for-Brains, or whatever my wretched horse’s stable-name is. Stupid beast panicked, too, and then compounded the folly by stumbling over a badger hole, or whatever uncouth burrowing animal makes its home out here—and throwing me clear. Interesting experience—I don’t think I’ve taken a fall like that in years.”
“But if you were in the middle . . . .” Billy Inman’s face was screwed up in an expression of baffled incredulity.
Jack continued, “When I came off my horse, I landed more or less astride the neck of one of the cattle, going at a fearful pace. As you may imagine, I hung on for dear life—steeplechasing in a mob doesn’t have a patch on the experience. Oh, thank you, Hurst.” He took a cup of coffee from Daddy Hurst, wrapping his fingers gratefully around it. “Truly ambrosial — that’s the stuff the gods drink, Billy. Where was I?”
“Riding a cow through a stampede,” Fredi answered. He was grinning also; even if they did not quite believe English Jack’s story, it was still a damn good yarn.
“So I was,” Jack continued. “And damnably uncomfortable it was for the both of us. Fortunately—I can only assume that bearing my weight must have had something to do with it—that particular cow fell back among the herd almost immediately. In very short order I perceived that I was being carried along at a point where it might be safer to abandon such a precarious position than to continue on. So with a prayer on my lips, and recollecting every blessed bit of advice I had ever received about disembarking at a dead gallop, I threw myself sideways. To avoid the hoofs—they say the trick is to cover your head in your arms and roll as soon as you hit the ground, you know. That being effected, nothing came to mind except try and curl up someplace out of harm’s way and wait until morning. I found a commodious ditch.” Jack shrugged elaborately, “Save for a small torrent flowing through the bottom, it was passably comfortable, although I confess I did not sleep all that well.”
“You ain’t gonna sleep all that well tonight, either,” Billy Inman warned. “The rain wet all the blankets.”
“And we’re still short at least twenty head.” Fredi stood up with a groan. “Which we must make an attempt to find, before moving on. Still, I can’t tell you how glad I am that you survived last night, Jack. I’d have been in a hell of a pickle, otherwise.”
“Oh?” Jack looked up from his coffee. “And how was that?”
Fredi answered, “I’d have had no idea of where to send all your things.”
Chapter Thirteen: Abilene, My Abilene
Over the course of the day after the stampede, Hansi’s drovers scoured the empty plains around their camping-place, while they left their mattress quilts and blankets spread on the grass in an attempt to get them thoroughly dried out. Dolph and Alejandro, of all the drovers most skilled at tracking, followed the trail of three cows for nearly fifteen miles. One of these presented Hansi with something of a dilemma upon their return.
“The heifer isn’t ours,” Dolph explained with considerable amusement. The cow in question was fawn-colored and leggy, ear-clipped and branded, but as wild as a deer. The newest brands on her looked to be recent, from the last spring round up. “And that looks like one of Withers’ brands. They run cattle near Lockhart. One of their boys was taking a herd up the trail – she must have got away from them.”
“It’s not like we can easily return her to Mr. Withers,” Hansi mused, “not knowing if they are ahead of us, or behind—as we would if we found a stray on our lands.”
“Turn it loose?” Fredi suggested, but Hansi shook his head.
“No, it is something of value to an owner, as a wallet of money would be. Only less easily transported, eh?”
“Might make a right good supper,” Billy Inman suggested. “‘Specially if everyone else is as tired of sowbelly as I am. The Withers boys won’t know ‘bout their stray and I ain’t planning to ever tell ‘em.”
Dolph shook his head. Hansi said, “I would not find a meal of someone else’s beef sitting well in my belly, whether the true owner knows or not. So here is what we shall do. Put that cow among our herd, and when we reach the brokers in Abilene, I shall sell it with ours but send the money paid for that cow to the proper owner.” Billy looked disappointed, but being that Hansi had the final say, he had no other choice but to obey.
The drive resumed the following morning, another endless string of days moving north, under a cloud of dust stirred up by the herd. Five miles or so in the morning, the same in the afternoon, letting the cattle graze as they wished, morning, noon and night. They did not stampede again so badly as that first time. Fredi spent hours out ahead of the herd, scouting for water and a good place to bed the cattle at nooning or at night, a place they could graze and not be tempted to wander from, with water close to hand.
In the middle of June, they swam the herd through the Washita River, fringed thick with cottonwood trees and thickets of willows with masses of bleached driftwood lodged high up in their branches. The leading cattle went into the water, swimming as confidently as waterfowl, with noses and horns just breaking the surface. Young Alonzo lost his hat when his horse went into a deep current-scoured hole in the middle of the river. The boy lost his hold on the saddle horn when his horse panicked and the river all but took them both. Fredi and Alejandro managed to pull them both to safety, with no loss save the hat.
Deeper into Indian Territory they ventured, that three-hundred mile long stretch through empty plains where no law held sway but the whim of those tribes who hunted there. Peter and those hands who owned long weapons took them from where they had been stowed in the cook or supply wagons and kept them close to hand in saddle scabbards. Those who did not possess such weapons polished and loaded their revolvers with great attention. The evening of their first night north of the Washita, Fredi put three men on night guard, fearing an attempt on the remuda.
“Those damned Comanche can no more k
eep their hands off horses than a drunkard can keep his from the bottle,” he explained when he ordered this.
“So Papa used to say.” Dolph agreed.
“Many a time, as I remember,” Fredi sighed. He looked into the fire and mused, “I wonder what he would have thought of this venture, Dolph. Would he have joined us with the same alacrity as Brother Hansi?”
After careful consideration Dolph answered, “Truly, I do not know, for Papa loved venturing into the wilderness, but he loved his own land just as well. I think he would have backed our venture, sending his own cattle north to market. But I think he would have contented himself with sending us and spent his own efforts in overseeing breeding stock and his orchard.”
“Leaving the hard work of it to us, then,” Fredi observed with a wry laugh.
Some few days of slow travel north brought Hansi’s cattle herd to another river crossing: the Cimarron River, or so said Fredi. Again, the herd plunged in almost eagerly, led by the big grey blunt-horned steer.
“I have half a mind to keep that one,” Hansi said, after he and Daddy Hurst themselves had crossed. At the crest of a grassy knoll above the Cimarron, they both looked back at the piebald stream of cattle crossing over.
Daddy Hurst chuckled. “Make him de bell-mare, Mistah Richter? Foah de nex’ time up dis ol’ trail?”
“And the time after that,” Hansi agreed, snapping the reins over his team.
The empty prairie rolled like an endless sea of grass spread out on either side and ahead of them, breakers and hillocks of grass, like an ocean billow frozen in the blink of an eye. The cattle plodded stolidly on, making little other noise than the creaking of their fetlocks as they walked. Sometimes they snorted or bawled a startled complaint as a jackrabbit started up out of the grass, a swift tan blur as it bounced away. Sometimes they saw the bleached white bones of buffalo, with the grass springing up lush and green between the bones.
“They say there used to be herds of buffalo, enough to cover all the country around,” Peter observed one morning when he and Fredi had ridden ahead on scout. They were careful to stay within sight of Hansi and Daddy Hurst, and the drovers following behind. “My mother said there were buffalo around Waterloo when she was a girl, but they were hunted out, long since. Did you ever see any when you trailed cattle to California?”
“No, lad. We took the southern trail; nary a buffalo to be seen. What’s this, then?” Fredi squinted against the dazzle of the sun. They had all gotten very brown and weathered, although Peter wondered just how much of the brown was dirt. Aside from being rained upon, and traversing a number of creeks and rivers, none of them had taken anything like a proper bath since crossing the Colorado below Austin.Movement stirred along the crest of the next rise in the prairie, the movement of men and horses, dark against the sunlit sky behind them. The silhouettes were of hatless men and lightly equipped horses.
“Indians.” Fredi whistled through his teeth. “They probably want something of us and don’t want to take the trouble of stealing it. Otherwise, we’d never have known they were there and watching.”
“And they would want?” Peter inquired, nervous in spite of all his care to seem confident. Late one evening, when he was a small boy, Uncle Carl had once been brought to speak of what he had seen in the Llano, of what the Comanche did to white men they found in their lands. No one knew that Peter was listening. Peter had nightmares for months, and his mother had been very upset.
“What do we have most of?” Fredi grimly answered. “So many that doubtless they think we could spare some. The Cherokee charge a toll for herds crossing their lands over the old trail to Sedalia, but they were the civilized sort. They all but presented a proper bill.”
One of the figures silhouetted against the sky raised an arm.
“Looks like they want to parley,” Fredi added, taking his hat in his hand and waving it back. “You stay here, within sight of Brother Hansi, then. I’ll see what they want.” Fredi chirruped to his horse and with trepidation Peter watched him ride to meet the Indian, whose horse was carefully picking its way down from the heights above. They met at too great a distance for Peter to hear what was said. He waited, sweating with unease, painfully aware of those eyes upon him, knowing that only Hansi with his stores-wagon and Daddy Hurst in the cook wagon were within sight and close enough to come to his aid. The other hands were farther behind, strung out along the flanks of the moving stream of cattle, lost in the dust and the lie of the rolling prairie all around them. Peter moistened his lips, which were always dry—but his mouth was suddenly dry as well, considering what a vulnerable position they were in. Thirty of their own men, but all strung out along with the herd and not a good match for twice that many Indians, even ones armed only with bows and spears.
He fixed his attention upon Fredi, who was shaking his head and holding up his gloved hand with one finger raised. The Indian held up two fingers, but Fredi was implacable and Peter thought no end of his nerve for holding to it. Finally, they seemed to come to an agreement. Fredi returned, saying, “They’re Kiowa, but inclined to be friendly. Ride back and tell Brother Hansi, I have agreed to give them one beeve in return for safe passage.”
“Only one?” Peter asked, with no little relief. “That is all?”
“They’re hungry,” Fredi answered, “and they look it. If this is their hunting ground, they’ve had damn little luck with it. Their chief says that their women and children are mighty hungry.” Peter thought that was just a story to elicit sympathy and maybe another cow.
Hansi said as much, when Peter relayed Fredi’s words to him. “Go and tell the boys to cut out a steer for them,” he said, “any but that blunt-horned grey beast. And not such a fat one; take one of those who straggles. We may as well get some good out of one of those which may not make it; not so?”
By the time Peter returned, driving a cow ahead of him, the wagons had caught up to Fredi and the patiently waiting Kiowa hunting party. Seeing them close up, Peter began to think Fredi right. These Indians appeared bony, ragged. Nothing of the proud warrior about this dusty straggle of weather-burnt men, and their ponies also looked hard-used. He drove the cow ahead of him, towards the half-circle of Indian hunters.
“One cow,” Peter said to Hansi, who lounged against the side of the supply wagon. “So what are they going to do? Just stand there and look at it?”
Before Hansi answered, Fredi took out his revolver. Holding it by the barrel, he handed it ceremoniously to the Indian, who took it with an air of someone who had handled such only rarely. The cow looked around incuriously and fell to grazing, hardly aware of the Indian taking careful aim. One, two shots and the cow fell with hardly a twitch. Fredi took back his revolver and the Indians commenced to skinning the fallen cow.
“I think they eat now,” Hansi observed with a shrug. With no little revulsion Peter saw that he was right. They were butchering it, cutting off strips of flesh and eating it raw. Hansi shook his head in pity at that. It was perfectly clear they had nothing to fear from these Indians, who paid them no more mind as they moved away, but gobbled the still-warm meat as fresh red blood ran down their faces and arms.
English Jack was on point that day. As he rode past Peter and the pitiful stripped carcass, with the hungry Indians clustered around like wasps around a savory blob of jam, he drawled, “I swear to you, Vining, we have all been most deceived in the Leatherstocking tales. Fennimore Cooper ne’er wrote of such a sight as this.”
“I’d guess not,” Peter answered. That evening, he quietly put away his carbine in the supply wagon, noting that the other drovers who had observed the scene were doing the same. A carbine in a saddle scabbard was one more awkward and unwieldy thing to bump against his leg, or against the side of the pony he rode, an extra weight at the best of times.
“Really, what have we to fear of the natives?” English Jack ventured that night, as they smoked and watched the sparks from their campfire rising to meet the stars overhead.
“Noth
ing much,” Peter answered swiftly, before Dolph or Fredi could take issue. As far as he knew, English Jack knew nothing about the uncertain fate of Hansi’s two small children, or the agonizing death of his sister-in-law. “’Less’n you’re a couple of children, or a woman all alone or a man unhorsed and unarmed. Grown men with plenty of firepower among us? That’s something else again!”
“How splendidly reassuring to hear so.” English Jack lit his pipe with a twig held into the fire and reclined against his saddle. “Still, a bit of a comedown, what?”
“Oh, that party would be quick enough, if they had an advantage on us.” Fredi took the twig from Jack and lit his own. “But they didn’t—have an advantage, that is. Still and all, keep a sharp eye out when you’re on loose herd.”
“Not to worry.” Jack contentedly puffed at his pipe and looked up at the stars, a jeweled spangle scattered across the dark velvet of the sky. The Milky Way was drawn through it, like a dark veil trimmed with gems as tiny as grains of sand. Again, as he had on so many other nights, Peter felt as if he could reach out his hand and pluck a star out of the sky, as easily as taking an apple from a branch above his head.
“It is a sight to see, yes?” Hansi spoke out of the dark at the edge of the cook fire. “The sky so large and the land so empty. My wife has always feared this. A good thing I do not, eh?”
“You’d never have left Friedrichsburg,” Peter answered. He had come to like Hansi during this long journey north. Peter had respected him before, not least for his ability to outwork men half his age. But now he liked him for his company on the trail, his knowledge of cattle, and his sure judgment of men as diverse as English Jack and young Lonzo Brown. If anything, it would be Hansi’s cast-iron will which would bring this venture through all hazards to a successful conclusion.
Now the big wagon-master chuckled. “I would have never left Albeck. Albeck—did you know of that place? A little place of four streets and a church, near to Ulm. I was born there and never left my father’s fields until I was drafted for service.”
