“Hell of a storm,” Duvarney said, “and there’s more on the way.”
“You think so? We’d about come to the notion it was over.”
“Don’t you believe it. Hold your stock right here. You’ll see all hell break loose within the next few hours. Worse than it has been.”
“Light and set,” the man suggested. “You boys look played out.”
They swung down and edged up to the fire, where a cowhand with a square, tough face gestured at the pot. “Help yourself,” he said. “It’s hot and black.”
It was, hotter and blacker than the sins of the devil himself. But it tasted right.
Duvarney glanced over at the man who had spoken first, the oldest of the lot. “You want to sell some horses? Or swap? We’re going to need some horses that can stand the gaff.”
“You runnin’ from something?” The old man eyed them sternly.
“Runnin’ at it,” Spicer said. “There’s been some shootin’, and there’s like to be more.”
“You ain’t Taylors?”
“No, but we saw Bill Taylor in town. They freed him from jail, and he risked his neck helpin’ womenfolks to the courthouse.” Spicer looked at them over the brim of his cup. “I’m thinkin’ you’ve seen the last of Indianola.”
They stared at him. “Half of it’s floatin’ in the street now,” Spicer went on.
The boy was interested. “You said there’d been shootin’?”
“This here’s Major Tappan Duvarney,” Spicer said; “he’s partnered with Tom Kittery.
We were taking no part in the feud, but they murdered one of our boys, and when we were helping womenfolks to get to the courthouse they came up on us. Four of ‘em.”
“Four?” The short puncher looked doubtful.
“The Major here, he taken two of the Munsons, shot ‘em right out of the saddle. I taken one of them with my Winchester, and the other was of no mind to fight.”
Welt turned suddenly. “Major, we done forgot all about him. He must’ve slipped off.”
Spicer swore. “Major, that was my fault. I was s’posed to watch him.”
“Forget it. I don’t know what we’d have done with him anyhow.”
“You can have the horses,” the stockman said. “You want two?”
“Six,” Tap said, “if you can spare them.”
Over coffee and corn pone with sow belly they worked out a deal. Welt Spicer roamed restlessly, his eyes on the country around. Much of it was above water, but was a sea of mud. Water swirled in all the low places, dark brown under the somber sky.
When the bargain had been made, and Tap had paid the money, the rancher filled his cup again. “Major,” he said, “ain’t you the man who is driving north with a trail herd?”
Duvarney explained about the herd he had sold, and where it was, then added that Kittery’s cattle had been scattered by the Munsons … or so he had heard.
“My name is Webster, Major, and I’m holding about two hundred head here, and I’ve got about thirty head of saddle stock. How about me throwing in with you for that drive?”
Tap considered. Undoubtedly, if the Munsons had told the truth, his herd was scattered, yet some might still be together, and despite the conditions he was in no mood to quit. The check he had in his pocket represented a part of his investment, but only a part. If he could round up some of the cattle-and those alive would surely be bunched on high ground and easy to find-he could start a drive anyway.
“Fine!” he said. “I’ll tell you what, Webster. When the water is down enough to move, you start for Victoria. Camp on the first big bend of the Guadalupe above the town, or as near there as practical, and we’ll join you there. I’ve an idea I’ll be driving Brunswick’s cattle too.”
The day was nearly gone when they moved out again, holding to high ground and scouting for cattle. Here and there they found a few Rafter K steers, and several bearing Duvarney’s own brand. Moving them on, he was driving about thirty head of steers when he drew rein about a mile from camp. Against the dark clouds he could see a thread of pale smoke mounting … the camp was there.
Welt rode up beside him and began to build a smoke. The hills were dark with evening, the low-hanging clouds turning all the shadowed hills and hollows into black and gray. The cattle were concealed in the brush and so could not be seen; the brush itself was all a uniform blackness.
“You know, Welt, take a man like Jackson Huddy, now. He’d be apt to scout around hunting us out. He could find that herd now, couldn’t he?”
“I reckon so.”
“And being the kind of man he is, what would he be likely to do? Figuring you were him, with his make-up, what would you do?”
Welt Spicer’s cigarette glowed in the dark. After a moment, he answered. “Why, I’d locate the cattle and leave them be. In this sort of weather, they ain’t goin’ no place I couldn’t find ‘em. So I’d move out somewhere and hole up and wait for you.
After all, you’re one of the men I’d want to kill.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Duvarney said. He studied the terrain ahead of them.
“Being that kind of man, where would you lie up to wait?”
In the light that remained, they studied the layout of the country around. The low ground between the ridges and knolls was flooded, the small lakes like sheets of polished steel in the gray light. Trees and brush merged together into the darkness of the land.
The camp could be anywhere out there-not in the flooded lowlands, but on the slopes.
Suddenly he made up his mind.
“We aren’t going in, Welt. We’ll bed down and wait right here.”
“It ain’t far,” Welt said. “I had my mind set on hot coffee and a meal.”
“I picked up some grub from Webster back there,” Tap said. “We’ll stay here. My theory is, never walk into an opponent when he’s set. It’s better to circle around and get him out of position. In this case he can come to us if he wants to.”
The place they found was ideal. It was on an open slope under a brow of sand. Sixty feet out from the bank they built their fire. The sand ridge had been scoured by wind until the overhang seemed ready to collapse at any moment, but the site they chose was just beyond the limits of where the sand would come if it did fall. Certainly nobody could approach the edge of that bluff without sending the sand, and himself, tumbling down the bank, and that insured them of safety from behind.
Before them the slope fell away, covered with sparse grass for the hungry horses and cattle. Most of the night they would be moving about on the slope between the fire and any approach from below, effectively blocking any attack from that side.
The fire they built was small, and was partly shielded by a mound of wet sand they built up for the purpose. There they made coffee and fried bacon. They had little enough, but they were hungry, and when they had eaten the bacon they wiped up the grease with chunks of bread that Webster had given them.
“You sleep, Spicer,” Duvarney advised. “I’ll call you after a bit.”
Welt hesitated. Tap had seen that Spicer was half dead from fatigue, so he blocked any protest by adding, “I’m not tired yet, Spicer, and I’ve got to do some thinking.
You get some sleep.”
When Spicer was asleep, Tap added a few sticks to the fire and moved back from it to a spot partly sheltered by a hummock of sand and brush. The truth of the matter was he was half dead from weariness himself, but he did have thinking to do.
His plans had been shot to pieces by feud and storm. If he hoped to save anything from the wreckage, he must have another plan. Brunswick could no longer make a shipping from Indianola, and the chances were that all the Gulf ports had suffered. The thing to do, he knew, was to make a drive to Kansas, as originally planned.
The only way he could do that, even with Brunswick’s help, was to strike south quickly, round up all the cattle he could find that wore his brand or that of Kittery, and then start north at once. This country would be weeks
if not months recovering from the disaster, and if he moved swiftly he might even get away before any more serious fighting developed.
But, whether he liked it or not, he had to get Jackson Huddy before the killer got him. For one thing was certain: Huddy would try. Duvarney was no longer an outsider, for now he had killed Munsons.
He carefully considered every move, and then when the skies were thickening again, he shook Spicer awake.
“Can you spell me? I’ve about had it,” he said.
Welt Spicer rolled out and slipped on his slicker. He took his rifle and slung it, muzzle down, from his shoulder. Duvarney rolled into a half-wet blanket under a tarp, and was almost instantly asleep.
Awakening suddenly, feeling the tap-tap of rain-fingers on the tarp, he lifted the edge ever so little, inhaling deeply of the fresh, rain-cooled air, and listening.
He could hear the hiss and crackle of the small fire, but unless he moved he could see only the light cast by the flames, not the fire itself. He felt a curious reluctance to move, as if some subconscious warning had come to him in his sleep, awakening him.
He slid his pistol from its holster under the tarp and hooked his thumb over the hammer, easing the gun up, chest-high and ready for firing.
His ears captured no sound, his eyes could see nothing but the firelight. The wind, which had almost died away, suddenly guttered the fire, and rustled among the leaves of the brush. Ever so slightly, he tilted back his head and opened the tarp a little more. A cold drop of rain fell from the edge to his arm and trickled from his wrist toward his elbow.
Welt Spicer was seated at the fire, just far enough back to be out of its light, and his head was hanging down. Even as Duvarney saw him, Spicer’s head came up. He shook it, trying to clear it of sleep, and stared all around him, holding his eyes unnaturally wide as a man does in trying to ward off sleep. He eased his position, and soon his head lowered again.
At that moment, and for no apparent reason, Duvarney glanced up toward the rim of sand that hung above their camp. His bed was made so that his feet pointed toward the bluff, and now, as he looked, he saw something round and white rising above the rim. A gleam of light appeared and vanished … a rifle barrel?
The spot of white lifted, and now he could make it out better. There was just enough light from the fire to reflect from the face of the man who was some yards off on the rim of sand.
For a man was there, rising up to his knees to aim his rifle into the camp. But his position was not quite what he wanted, and he hitched one knee forward. The movement was his undoing.
He was already on the very lip of the sand, and the move put his knee down on the overhang. Instantly the sand gave way and the man came tumbling down, accompanied by a great mass of sand. He hit bottom floundering, and as he struggled to his feet, Duvarney lifted himself on one elbow and shot him.
The fall of sand made only a heavy whush in the night, but the shot startled the animals to their feet and brought Welt Spicer up standing.
“Watch yourself, Welt. There may be more of them.”
Where Welt had stood, there was emptiness, then his quiet voice came. “Sorry, Major, I must have fallen asleep.”
“You were dozing. It’s all right, I was awake.”
“Who was it?”
Duvarney pointed. “He was drawing a bead on you from the rim, but he changed position a mite, and it toppled with him. I took his action as unfriendly, so I put the brand on him.”
Duvarney remained where he was, but after a moment he ejected the empty shell from his gun and reloaded.
“I figure this man was scouting and saw his chance. Now, they heard that shot but they don’t know whose it was-he might have shot one of us, or we might have shot him.”
“They’ll think he got one of us,” Welt said. “They might not even know there was two of us here.” Welt was close by now, only a few feet from Duvarney. “They’ll be expectin’ him back, you know.”
Tap considered that. It would give a man a chance to walk right up on their camp.
He could work near to it in the darkness, then just stand up and walk in. If he came right up to their fire they would be sure it was their own man, returning from whatever he had set out to do.
“I’m going down there,” Tap said, “and see if Huddy is around.”
“You want comp’ny?”
“They’ll be expecting one man. You sit tight … and take care.”
Duvarney took his rifle and went down the slope. When he found their fire he saw that there were five men seated by it, or lying around, talking. They seemed unworried about the possibilities of attack, which meant they had hit Tom Kittery hard.
He went on down, making no pretence of being quiet. At the edge of the fire he saw seven saddled horses.
They looked up as he came near, and one man started to speak; then he saw Duvarney.
“Sit tight, boys,” Duvarney said. “I don’t want to kill anybody unless I have to.”
One of them was the man who had escaped from them in Indianola. “Do what he says,” this man said. “This is Duvarney … the one I was tellin’ you about.”
Suddenly Tap’s mind registered the significant fact that there were five men here.
He had killed one up at his camp, and yet there were seven saddled horses … where was the other man?
“Where’s Jackson Huddy?” he asked.
One of the men grinned. “Don’t try to find him. He’ll find you.’
“I hear he’s something of a man hunter,” Tap responded, “but as near as I can find out he never met anybody in a fair, standup shooting match. Anybody can run up a score hiding out in the brush.”
It was a deliberate taunt. He wanted Jackson Huddy to hear it. He wanted to anger him, to jar him out of his usual pattern. He wanted that slow, meticulous, careful man to be jolted into acting quickly.
“Man, you’re askin’ for trouble!”
“I shouldn’t really ask, I expect,” Duvarney said carelessly. “From all I hear, he’s so used to crawling on his belly in the grass that he wouldn’t know how to stand up and fight.”
“Jackson Huddy never went after a man yet that he didn’t get,” one of the men said.
“You’ll be the next, mister.”
“Well, you just tell him I was around. And don’t forget the name. I wouldn’t want him to miss seeing me… . And you tell him that if he doesn’t want to meet me face to face I’ll do a little stalking myself.”
He backed off into the darkness, still holding the rifle easy in his hands.
Returning to his own fire, he told Spicer briefly what he had done, and doused water over the coals.
“I want to get him out of the brush if I can, but I’m not going to wait. I’m going after him … now. He’ll be over there somewhere near our camp, but let’s scatter those other boys, anyway.”
They rounded up the small bunch of cattle they had. He let out a whoop and fired his pistol. It needed only that to start them running, and he headed them toward his other camp, right across the slope where the Munson fire was.
They heard the cattle coming, and in the dim light Duvarney saw them scattering, horses and men. Only one shot was fired, and then the cattle went storming through the camp, churning the fire into the ground, and men and horses fled.
One man had caught up his rifle, and now he tried to swing it around to bear on Duvarney, but Spicer rode down on him. Too late, the man tried to wheel to fire at Spicer, and then the charging horse hit him and knocked him rolling in the mud.
They went up the slope on the run, and Duvarney’s riders came rushing out, ready for a fight.
“Mount up,” he said, “and keep moving.” Crouching low in his saddle, he skirted the dark brush, hunting in the gray light for tracks where a man might have gone in.
If the seventh man was Huddy, as Tap suspected, he had to be hidden somewhere in the brush where he could wait for a shot at Duvarney. It would be natural for Duvarney to return to his campfire an
d his men, and a man might by searching find a good spot from which to shoot at his target.
A moving target would be something of a problem, for any hiding place that Huddy might crawl into that would allow him to get in sight of the camp would be in dense brush where swinging a rifle would be difficult, and finding a clear field of fire in more than one direction would be impossible.
Twice Tap stopped on the windward side of the brush and, digging beneath the surface of the leaves, sought for some dry enough to burn. He did not hope for a real fire, wet as it was, but for a good smoke, a smoke that might drive him out.
“He’s afoot, anyway,” Lawton Bean commented. “The way you scattered their horses, that whole outfit is afoot.”
The fire smoked and, blazing a little, ate away at the edges of the leaves, fighting against the dampness. The smoke drifted through the brush, as he had hoped it would.
Duvarney considered the situation, and liked none of it. The rain would undoubtedly put out the feeble fires he had started, probably before they had developed sufficient smoke to drive Huddy, if it was Huddy, from concealment. The smoke might cause him some discomfort, but nothing more. In the meanwhile, it might be a long wait, and Huddy might find a place where he could get a good shot at them. And all this time Tom Kittery was in trouble to the south, and that was where the cattle would be.
From the very beginning, he was thinking, nothing had gone well. He had hoped to land in Texas, find a gathered herd ready to move, and start at once for Kansas.
Instead, he had found his partner involved in a killing feud to the point where all business had been neglected; and to be on the safe side Tap had had to recruit his own men. They had gathered cattle, only to be interrupted by the storm, yet he had sold cattle and had the check in his pocket.
Now, like it or not, he was involved in the feud. One of his men had been killed; he himself had been attacked, and he had killed in return. Yet he wanted nothing more than to be on the trail to Kansas.
The cattle would be, he surmised, on high ground. Bunched by the storm, they would be ready for a drive. He was torn between the need to find Kittery, to round up a herd, and to locate Huddy and force him into a showdown.
Matagorda (1967) Page 12
