Bitter Trail and Barbed Wire

by Elmer Kelton

  Stub added, “So that’s the reason we ain’t had any wire. And not apt to get any unless we go fetch it ourselves.”

  Doug Monahan drew his lips in tight and smashed his fist into his hand. “Then we’ll go get it ourselves. And we’ll haul it right through the main street of Twin Wells!”

  Stub frowned. “That’s askin’ for trouble.”

  Angrily Doug replied, “We already got trouble. That’s just telling them we can take care of it.”

  He left Stub Bailey to oversee the post-setting job, Dundee to continue his watch. He took the five Blessingames and three wagons. And, because he wanted to go, Vern Wheeler.

  Vern had come back from town with his anger at last expired. He had apologized and asked to be allowed to help. A husky boy, he had made a good hand ever since, digging holes, tamping posts, throwing in where the hottest and the hardest work was. Some deep-seated determination seemed to be driving him. He was setting a strong pace for the rest of the men to follow.

  They left as soon as darkness had lifted enough that they could see the wagon trail. Doug and Vern rode horseback, the Blessingames on the wagons. The morning was uneventful, but about midafternoon a rider broke over a hilltop and spotted them. He sat there a while, watching, then pulled back and disappeared over the hill.

  By the time the wagons groaned into Stringtown the second day, Monahan was positive they were being followed. Several times he had glimpsed a rider far behind them. The man never got any closer or dropped any farther back. Now, as they loaded their wagons at the depot, he saw a man sitting his horse across the dusty street, watching. When the rider turned away, Monahan caught a glimpse of the R Cross on its hip, stamped with the small horse iron. He looked questioningly at Vern Wheeler.

  “Name’s Bodie,” Vern said. “Kind of a strawboss for Archer Spann sometimes. If Spann has got any friends atall, I reckon Bodie’s one of them.”

  Starting back, Doug knew within reason that they would find a reception committee somewhere on the trail. He wished they had Dundee and the other men with them. But he couldn’t afford to leave the Wheeler place without protection.

  “We’ll just have to face up to it ourselves,” he told the men. “Seven of us, and burdened down with loaded wagons.”

  Foley Blessingame spat disdainfully, leaving a string of brown tobacco juice in the dust. “Don’t you worry none, Doug. You got thirteen men, the way I see it. Them four kids of mine will count for two men apiece, and I’ll count for three.”

  “Thirteen’s an unlucky number, Foley,” Doug pointed out.

  “For whoever tries to tamper with us.”

  They rode watchfully, guns never far from reach, but nothing happened the first day. In camp that night, two men were on guard all the time, and others were never deeply asleep.

  Nothing came that night, and home was not too far away. As they broke camp, Vern Wheeler pulled up beside Monahan.

  “Doug, I been thinking where I’d go to stop a string of wagons, if I was Archer Spann and wanted to. It just occurred to me that Drinkman’s Gap would be the best place on the whole trail to do it.”

  Doug remembered the gap, although he hadn’t known what it was called. It was a place where the trail passed through a line of small rocky hills too rough to go around in a wagon. It was nothing like a mountain pass, but it did provide a place where a few men, well-positioned in the mouth of the gap, might halt a string of wagons. Horses could move freely enough up the hillsides, but a loaded wagon could move only through the pass.

  “If they’re of a mind to stop us,” Vern said darkly, “I reckon they could do it. We couldn’t move these wagons off the road, and they’ll likely block it with men.”

  “Then,” replied Doug, “if we can’t get the wagons off the road, we’ll just have to get the men off of it.”

  The gap came into sight at mid-morning. Doug rode out in front of the wagons for a look-see. Sure enough, men waited down there, sitting on the ground, smoking, holding their horses. He counted nine, perhaps ten. At sight of him they stood up. Most of them swung leisurely into their saddles.

  They didn’t move after him. They plainly preferred to meet him on their own ground. They couldn’t have chosen a better place.

  Doug rode back to the wagons. He saw Vern Wheeler checking his six-shooter. “I don’t want you using that, Vern. Not to shoot anybody, anyway.”

  “They’re blocking the trail. How else we going to get through?”

  “We’ll get through, and we shouldn’t have to shoot anybody.”

  He dismounted by Foley’s wagon. He lifted down a heavy spool of wire and eased it to the grass. “Hand me that pair of wire cutters in there, Foley.”

  This wire was a different brand from the one he had used before. This one did not have the coat of red paint. Pulling up one end of the wire, Doug held it out to Vern. “Here, take ahold.” Then he pushed the spool along on the ground, unrolling a piece which he judged to be about twice as long as the gap was wide. He snipped the wire off, then doubled it back. While Vern held the two cut ends, Doug twisted the wire.

  “Double thickness,” he said, “will be strong and a lot easier to handle than just one strand.”

  He coiled the doubled wire, lifted the rest of the spool back into the wagon and remounted his horse. “All right, let’s go. We’ll take it slow at first. Let them think they’re going to stop us. Then, when I give the signal, let those mules have everything you’ve got.”

  He motioned Vern to ride beside him. They moved out twenty or thirty paces ahead of the wagons. They held their horses in a walk, so the wagons could keep up with them. Slowly they drew closer to the gap, where the R Cross waited. Most of the men were a-horseback, but a couple stood afoot, holding their horses.

  “That’s Spann, isn’t it?” he asked Vern.

  Vern nodded, and his blue eyes were hard. “That’s him.” His fingers flexed, and Doug knew the boy itched to get his hands on Spann.

  “Take it easy,” Doug said. “We’re not aiming to kill anybody, no matter how bad he may need it.”

  They rode closer. The men in the gap were at ease, confident that all they had to do was wait, and the wagons would fall into their laps like ripe apples out of a tree.

  “It’s time now,” Doug said. He handed Vern one end of the doubled wire. “Take a wrap on your saddlehorn and pull yonderway with it. Then spur for all you’re worth.”

  Vern nodded, face taut. He comprehended for the first time what Doug Monahan planned to do.

  When they had the wire stretched out tightly between them, Doug looked back over his shoulder and gave Foley Blessingame the nod. Then he yelled and spurred his horse. He heard old Foley’s voice rise behind him like the angry squall of a panther. He heard the rattle of chains, the sudden clatter of the mules’ hoofs on the hard ground as the lead wagon jerked forward.

  For a few seconds there was confusion among the riders at the gap. They stared in consternation. Then they saw the barbed wire, stretched between the two horsemen, coming straight at them.

  There is something about barbed wire that strikes dread in those who know it. A man stretching fence always has his nerves keened by realization that the wire may snap and lash at him with its sharp and wicked barbs. A man running a horse alongside a fence, chasing down a runaway cow, knows the fear of falling, of hurtling helplessly into the ripping wire.

  These men saw the wire coming, and it loosed a sudden panic among them that guns might not have done. They spurred up the hillsides, out of the way.

  Archer Spann stood afoot in the middle of the gap, shouting at them, cursing, so angry he did not realize his own situation. Seeing it then, he tried to swing into the saddle and run. But the excitement had carried to his horse. The animal reared, jerking the reins from his hands. It loped up the gap, head high in panic. It stepped on one of the dragging reins and nearly threw itself to the ground. The horse turned aside from the trail then and started up the hill.

  Spann stood rooted to the sp
ot, watching helplessly as the wire flashed toward him between Monahan and Vern Wheeler, the wagons hurtling along behind. He started to run, saw he couldn’t make it, then dropped to the ground as the wire sang over his head. Heart pounding, he heard the hammering of the mules’ hoofs and the rumble of the heavy-laden wheels. Desperately he rolled over in the dust, got to his knees and scrambled out of the way.

  The wagons rolled past him, leaving him choking in the cloud of dust that the heavy iron rims had raised from the hard ground. He got to his feet and watched the wagons pulling away. He ripped off his hat and hurled it to the ground, cursing and stomping.

  Slowly his men worked back down from the hillsides and gathered around him.

  “Washerwomen!” he shouted. “I ought to fire every blessed one of you!”

  “Archer,” offered the one called Bodie, “we could still catch them.”

  “And do what?” Spann demanded. “You had them right here, the best place on the whole road, and you scattered like a bunch of quail.”

  The men sat red-faced, smarting under the tongue-lashing he gave them.

  Bodie finally put in, “You don’t know what that bobwire can do, Archer.”

  “I know what it’ll do to this country if they ever put it up,” he exploded. “About half of you hombres’ll be riding the chuckline.”

  One of the men left the group—gladly—and caught Spann’s horse. By the time he brought him back, Spann had cooled a little.

  “The R Cross has always meant something in this country,” Spann said, calmer now. “It’s not something that people laugh at. But they’ll laugh when they know what happened here.”

  His face twisted as he looked down the gap to the dust of the wagons. His knuckles went white, the way he clenched the leather reins. More than anything else, more even than the idea of Noah Wheeler’s fence, he hated the thought of ridicule.

  “They won’t laugh long,” he gritted. “Not very long.”

  * * *

  DOUG MONAHAN MOVED out to one side to drop the twisted wire out of the way, then eased up, letting the wagons go past him. He loped along behind them, looking over his shoulder for reassurance. Then he touched spurs to the horse again and pulled up beside the wagons, one by one.

  “Slow them down now. They’re not coming after us.”

  The Blessingames sawed on the lines, gradually bringing the heavy wagons to a stop. The ground was softer here, and dustier. Doug pinched his eyes shut as the dust from the wheels drifted past him. He sneezed once and turned his face away.

  Foley Blessingame was laughing and slapping his knee with a hand as big as a Percheron’s hoof. “Did you see that feller’s face jest before he hit the ground? You never saw a madder man in your whole life!”

  “That,” Doug told him, “was Archer Spann.”

  Foley’s eyebrows lifted. “So that was him. Well, we give him a nice remembrance, I do believe.”

  Vern Wheeler was grinning, but it was a bitter, vengeful sort of grin. “I wish we could’ve rimfired him with that wire. It wouldn’t have been any more than he deserved.”

  “It would have killed him,” Doug pointed out.

  Vern said flatly, “There’s not much wrong with that.”

  The Blessingame boys were off, patting their mules, talking gently to them and calming them down.

  Foley Blessingame said, “Well, Doug, you still aim to take these wagons right through town?”

  Doug’s jaw had a firm set to it. “Right through the big middle!”

  Their arrival in Twin Wells could not have attracted more attention if they had brought a brass band. People came out and stood in front of houses and stores to watch them pass. Dogs trotted along, barking at the mules, and kids ran beside the heavy wagons. Some people smiled, some frowned with disapproval. Many just watched silently, withholding judgment or, if they had made it, hiding it.

  Paula Hadley stood in front of her picket fence. Vern Wheeler pulled his horse over toward her. He reached down and gripped her hand a moment, and the look that passed between them said all there was to say.

  Doug Monahan caught this, and he smiled. He had heard a little, and he knew now that there was even more to it than he had heard.

  Sheriff Luke McKelvie strode out from under the heavy old live oaks in the courthouse square. There was something of resignation in his crow-tracked eyes as Doug Monahan pulled over beside him.

  “Still not taking any advice, are you, Monahan?”

  Doug shook his head. “Not yours, McKelvie.”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t. But I thought a little discouragement or two along the line might make you listen to it, anyway.”

  Resentfully Doug said, “We wouldn’t have had to go after this wire if you hadn’t thrown a scare into my freighter. Why did you do it?”

  “Like I said, I hoped a little discouragement would slow you down till you had time to do some thinking.”

  “I’m not breaking any law, McKelvie. What business is it of yours?”

  “I’m a peace officer, Monahan. It’s been a peaceful country, in the main. I do what I can to keep it that way.”

  “The only thing I can’t understand is why the captain didn’t send somebody over to destroy the wire in the Stringtown depot.”

  McKelvie shrugged. “Mainly, I guess, because he didn’t know it was there.”

  Surprised, Monahan demanded, “You didn’t tell him?”

  McKelvie shook his head. “Like I said, keeping the peace is my job.”

  12

  With the wire on hand, the fencing job began to show some real progress. Doug and his crew started by burying a big rock “dead-man” anchor for the corner posts, then bound the wire securely around these posts and started stringing it from the corner. The wooden spools were built with a hollow center. Two men would shove a crowbar through it. Then, one on either end of the bar, they would walk up the fence-line, the wire unrolling itself as they went.

  They had no regular fence-stretching equipment. Instead, they would block up the axle of a wagon, secure the wire to a stick wedged between the spokes, and turn the wheel by hand, drawing the wire taut against the posts. They drove sharp staples into the hard cedar posts, fastening the wire solidly in place.

  This was a faster job than setting the posts, so Monahan left most of the crew on the digging and tamping job, trying to keep ahead of the wire stringers. With the winter lull in his own field chores, Noah Wheeler spent most of his time with Monahan’s crew, helping at the work and joying in the strong fence that shaped in his hands.

  The crew worked well together, broken in to the hard labor now. Foley Blessingame and his four sons kept the men in good humor with rowdy jokes and rough horseplay that stopped only a fraction short of broken arms and legs. Old Foley was an everlasting wonder to Doug—how any man that old could do so much hard work. He would wear a young man into the ground and then do the work for both of them.

  Then at night, under lanternlight in the barn, he would play poker with anyone who still had the courage to sit in against him. Almost everybody in the crew except Stub Bailey had tried him, and to a man they had lost.

  Every once in a while Foley would make a try for Stub: “Why’n’t you come on and play me a game? You can git your fun and eddication at the same time.”

  But Stub always turned him down with a grin. “I never was much of a hand at poker. You better stick to the experts.”

  Some of the crew who had considered themselves as experts were reappraising themselves after a set-to with old Foley. That he cheated was common knowledge. Just how he did it was a mystery. At penny ante it wasn’t too expensive, and the men started choosing up to see who would play against him each night while the others watched, trying to catch him in a trick. They never did.

  The only misfit in the bunch was Simon Getty, the cook. His cooking was decent enough the first few days, but he finally got the “rings,” as the cowboys called it. He grumbled and carried on about everything and everybody. Foley Ble
ssingame and those “kids” of his ate more than ten men decently ought to. That Dundee thought he could ride into camp any old time he felt like it and eat. Didn’t he know that dinner was ready at twelve o’clock, and not at one or two or three? That saddlegun he toted around didn’t make him any privileged character.

  And those men Dundee had brought out—some of them didn’t know enough to wash their hands before they shoved them into a man’s Dutch ovens. That Stub Bailey, sneaking a bottle out of his bedroll these cold mornings and lacing his coffee on the quiet. Doug figured the cook’s main objection here was that Stub hadn’t offered him any of it.

  And Doug Monahan himself—why couldn’t he buy a man something decent to cook in? A man couldn’t cook for a pack of pot hounds with the equipment this outfit furnished him.

  Doug took it quietly. He knew a cowcamp cook’s temper served to keep the rest of the crew in its proper place. But sometimes a man could overdo a thing, even if he was right.

  Simon Getty made his big mistake one cold morning as the Blessingames came up under the tarp for breakfast. Faces flushed from the raw chill, they approached the chuckbox with a raging hunger. They found Simon Getty ringier than usual. He must have been cold too.

  “Damn you, Foley Blessingame, stop kicking sand into the ovens. Lift up them big feet before I take a singletree to you.”

  Normally Foley would have retreated, for few men ever tampered with the cook. His revenge would be certain and hard to swallow. But this time Foley stood his ground, his mouth setting in a hard line. The cook had jumped him just one time too many.

  Getty growled, “Five growed men without no better manners than a heathen Comanche Indian! The whole bunch of you swarm around them ovens like a passel of razorback hogs. Pity you don’t fall in that crick and drown.”