The Way Of The West

by Elmer Kelton

  THE WAY OF THE WEST

  ELMER KELTON

  COTTON SMITH

  MAX BRAND

  LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Part 1 - Long Ride, Hard Ride by Elmer Kelton

  Chapter I - “The Wagons of Munitions”

  Chapter II - “The Gun”

  Chapter III - “The Girl from Albuquerque”

  Chapter IV - “Arsenal”

  Chapter V - “Hostage”

  Chapter VI - “Coward”

  Chapter VII - “Deal with Death”

  Chapter VIII - “‘Here They Come’”

  Chapter IX - “Last Man”

  Part 2 - The Morning War by Cotton Smith

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Part 3 - The Desert Pilot by Max Brand®

  Chapter I - Pegasus and the Ox

  Chapter II - A Kindly Buzzard

  Chapter III - With Tears in Her Eyes

  Chapter IV - Around the Corner from Now here

  Chapter V - A Gent With a Gun

  Chapter VI - Talking Was His Business

  Chapter VII - They Didn’t Need Him

  Chapter VIII - In the Hands of the Lord

  Chapter IX - Keeping the Secret

  Chapter X - The Mystery of Work

  Chapter XI - ‘Without Losing No Dignity’

  Chapter XII - The Seventh Day

  Chapter XIII - Things in General

  Chapter XIV - Muy Diablo, After All

  Copyright

  ONE FALSE MOVE

  Out of the corner of his eye Overstreet saw the lithe young woman reach into a slat bonnet that hung from the wall. She swung around with a gun in her hand. It was an old-fashioned horse pistol like Overstreet had used so many times as a boy.

  “Now, you thieving tejano,” the girl snapped at Hatchet, “you put down that box.”

  Hatchet’s stubborn, bearded chin was low. “You ain’t got the nerve to shoot anybody. But I’d break your arm.” He turned toward her.

  “I told you to stand back, Hatchet,” Overstreet said again. “That’s an order.”

  He stepped toward Hatchet. The girl swung the pistol around to cover him, too. “You promised us, Lieutenant. I’d just as leave shoot you as anyone of your sticky-fingered renegades.”

  Overstreet stopped. So did Hatchet. The lieutenant swallowed hard. One nervous twitch of her finger could kill either of them as completely as a Yankee cannonball. And the fire in her dark eyes showed she would do it . . .

  —From Long Ride, Hard Ride

  Long Ride-Hard Ride

  I

  “The Wagons of Munitions”

  There could be no doubt about the sudden volley of gunfire that echoed from the ragged mountain pass to the south. For more than an hour the sixteen soldiers in gray had watched the mirror flashes on the high points. They had seen the blue-clad Yankee cavalry patrol trot into the defile.

  The rattle of gunfire tapered off. For a terrible ten minutes there was silence, a quiet as awesome as had been the screaming sound of death at Valverde on the Rio Grande, or Apache Canon in the Glorietas.

  Lt. Miles Overstreet, Confederate States of America, unfolded his spyglass with trembling hands and trained it on the pass. He stood tall, a lean, angular man in dusty gray, with futility weighing heavy on his shoulders. His hand-sewn uniform was frayed and stained from a thousand miles and more of riding and fighting and sleeping on the ground. A thousand miles since San Antonio. A thousand miles of sweat and thirst and blood.

  The Indians came then, fifty-odd of them, riding northward in single file. The clatter of their ponies’ bare hoofs on the rocks came clear as a bell on the sharp morning air. Exultant yelps ripped from red throats like the cries of demons in a child’s nightmare. Behind them the red men led a dozen riderless horses, not wild mustang Indian ponies, but well-bred mounts of the U.S. cavalry.

  Overstreet’s leathery skin stretched even tighter over his jutting cheekbones. Despite the knife-sharp chill left from the night air, a trickle of sweat worked its way down through the streaked dust and the rough stubble of whiskers. He lowered the glass and looked at the remnant of his command. Fifteen men, flat on their bellies in skirmish line.

  “Load up,” he said. “We’re next.”

  For this was New Mexico Territory in April of 1862, torn by civil war, with white man against white man, and red men against them all. Less than a year ago, fiery Col. John R. Baylor had led his 2nd Texas Mounted Rifles up from captured Fort Bliss to take New Mexico for the newly formed Confederacy. Then had come Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley and his huge brigade. These men were ill-clothed, ill-fed, poorly armed, but through eight months of struggle and privation they had ridden to one victory after another—Fort Fillmore, San Augustine Springs, Valverde, Albuquerque. At last, they had raised the Confederate flag over Santa Fé itself and envisioned a daring sweep across to California, to the gold fields, to the open sea.

  Then came disaster in one flaming day at Glorieta Pass. Grim men in tattered gray turned their faces southward toward Texas, the sweet taste of victory now bitter ashes in their mouths. Men like Miles Overstreet, who had known the dream and now stood awaiting the futile end of it, had been wasted under a savage onslaught that no one had even considered.

  He listened to the click of captured Yankee single-shot carbines as his men prepared for a battle that could end but one way. He saw one soldier flattened out in fear, without a weapon.

  “Vasquez,” Overstreet called to a dark-skinned trooper from the brushy cow country below San Antonio, “give Hatchet back his gun. His little mutiny is over.”

  His men! The thought brought an ironic twist to his cracked lips. The sorriest soldiers in Sibley’s Brigade, and Major Scanling had saddled him with them. A thousand times he had cursed the day he stole a victory right under the pointed nose of the glory-hunting major. Scanling’s lips had smiled as he read the communication. But his eyes never masked the anger that simmered in him. Scanling transferred Overstreet then. Gave him these men, prisoners all, to relieve their guards for action.

  “We need a good officer like you to handle them,” he had said, his yellow eyes gleaming. “Take them. Delay the federals long enough for the main body of troops to get away. Hold every pass as long as you can, then drop back and hold another. We’re buying time with you . . . with you and these miserable scum who call themselves soldiers. Go on, Overstreet. Go on and be a hero.”

  He had hated the major then, and his hatred swelled a little more every time he’d been forced to use his own gun to keep half the men from running away. Now, this looked like the end of it.

  Beside Overstreet, young Sammy McGuffin rose on his knees and lowered his head in prayer.

  “Better flatten out there and spend your time getting ready for those Indians, son,” the lieutenant said curtly.

  The boy looked up in surprise. “You don’t believe in prayer, sir?”

  “I believe in a man taking care of himself.”

  The Indians stopped three hundred yards short of the Confederates’ position. They shouted defiance and waved muskets and Yankee guns and showed the fresh scalps that dangled beneath the firearms. Then they wheeled their ponies and galloped away into the morning sun, shouting their victory to the mountains.

  Overstreet stood watching open-mouthed, hardly believing, hardly daring to believe.

  Sammy McGuffin’s high-pitched voice spoke out, almost breaking. “They’
re leaving. They’re letting us live. But why?”

  The answer came in a gravel-voiced drawl from a thick-shouldered, middle-aged Texan with a stubble of black beard coarse as porcupine quills. Big Tobe Wheeler said: “That’s the way with Indians, boy. To them killing is a sport, kind of. Without they really got their blood hot, they’ll generally kill just enough to satisfy their appetite. They’ll count a few coups and have them a victory to brag about in camp. They’ll pull out before they start to taking a licking themselves. Maybe tomorrow they’ll get the itch again and come looking for us. But not today.”

  The trooper named Hatchet was already on his feet and making for the horses. “Well, they ain’t going to be finding me here.”

  Overstreet yelled at him, an edge of anger in his voice. “You hold up there, Hatchet. You’ll ride out when the rest of us do.”

  Hatchet turned and glowered at him with eyes the light blue of a shallow stream, disturbing eyes that never stopped moving. As was his habit when he was angry, he gripped his right arm with his speckled left hand. The faded gray sleeve showed where a sergeant’s chevrons had been torn away. Hatchet was a thief. He had lost his rank after he had left a battle to hunt for loot in a bullet-scarred town.

  “Look here, Lieutenant, you know we’re whipped. Between them damn Yankees and the redskins, we ain’t got a chance. Now let’s hightail it like the rest of the brigade and get back to Texas with our hair.”

  Overstreet’s long back was rigid, and his lips were tightly drawn. “We’re heading for Texas like the rest, Hatchet. But we’re going like men, not like whipped dogs. Any time we get a chance to take a lick at the federals, we’ll do it. Try to run away again and I’ll gun you down.”

  Deliberately he turned away from Hatchet’s silent fury, half expecting a bullet in his back. One day the bullet might come. And if it did, he knew that probably every man in the outfit would swear he had died by enemy fire.

  “Mount up,” he ordered his scalawag band. “We’re moving south.”

  He rode out in the lead, tall and straight in the saddle, just as he had once ridden with the Texas Rangers, before secession. He held his shoulders squared. But within him was a certainty that Hatchet was right. Wasted, gone for nothing, were all those hard miles they’d fought. All those days they’d ridden until their tail-bones were numb and their dry tongues stuck to the roofs of their mouths. All those men they’d lost. Good men, fighters. They’d died bravely, most of them. But they’d died for nothing.

  A dull ache worked through his shoulder, and for the hundredth time his mind dwelt on the angry words of that girl in the makeshift hospital in Albuquerque. Shaffer, her name had been, and she was a Union supporter all the way. A refugee from farther south, someone had said. Her name was American, and so was her speech. But proud Spanish flowed in her raven hair, her piercing brown eyes almost black, her oval face in which even her hatred pointed up her strong-willed beauty. She was helping in the hospital only because wounded Yankee prisoners were being treated there along with the Texas soldiers.

  Always he remembered the sharp odor of the nitric acid before it was swabbed onto his wound to cauterize it, and he remembered the caustic words she had spoken after he had half fainted from the searing agony.

  “Remember this well,” she had said. “It wouldn’t have happened if you téjanos had stayed home. This is Union land. Maybe you’ve taken it, but you’ll never hold it. You were beaten before you started.”

  She was right. They were beaten. It was a painful thing to run away, leaving so much unfinished, so much hope unfulfilled. Yet it might not be so bad, he thought, if they could win just one more victory, one more triumph as a final gesture. With all his soul he longed for that one last chance.

  Out of his fifteen men there were two whom he trusted more than the rest. Before riding into the pass, he sent Vasquez and big Tobe Wheeler up on either side to scout for ambush. When they hipped around in their saddles and waved their hats, he moved on in.

  They found the Union soldiers heaped like rag dolls, scalped and mutilated. At a glance Overstreet knew the Indians had stripped them of guns and ammunition. A few months ago the sight would have made him turn away, sick to his stomach. Now he only grimaced and rode on in.

  His gray eyes sought out the body of the commanding officer. Spotting captain’s bars on the shoulder of a bullet-torn uniform, he swung down and knelt beside the dead man. There might be papers.

  Inside the coat pocket he found an envelope, the corner stained a sticky red. Opening it, he became aware of the onetime sergeant methodically searching the pockets of the Union soldiers. “Hatchet,” he thundered, “do you even have to rob the dead?”

  The trooper’s pale eyes flitted over him, then away. “They must’ve been trading-post Indians, Lieutenant. Leastways they knew what money’s for. They ain’t left a two-bit piece in the whole bunch.”

  “Get back on your horse, Hatchet,” Overstreet ordered.

  He took the letter out of the envelope. Reading it, he felt his heartbeat quicken. There was a sudden eager tingling in his fingertips.

  He had hoped for another chance, all but begged the devil for it. Now here it was, delivered by a bloody band of paint-smeared savages. He read the letter again, half afraid his imagination had run away. But it hadn’t. This was an order for the Union captain to take a detail of cavalry and proceed to the Walton Shaffer ranch west of the Rio Pecos. There he was to prepare for shipment a store of rifles and ammunition that had been hidden by Union forces fleeing northward from Fort Stanton the year before.

  A train of ten wagons will be dispatched on the 10th instant, and should reach the ranch within two days after your arrival. Shafter, his daughter, and household should also have returned by this time. The family abandoned the ranch and took away the cattle upon the approach of the secessionists.

  You will render all possible service and show utmost courtesy to them. Shafter was a loyal scout for the forces of General Kearny fifteen years ago. The family has been of much aid in this campaign.

  I do not have to tell you how badly any and all munitionsare needed if we are successfully to push the rebellious Texans from our borders.

  Martin Nash

  Colonel, Commanding

  Overstreet clenched his fists, crushing the order. Ten wagons of munitions. Not enough to wage much of a war, but enough for one good battle, if judiciously used. And who could say? It had taken just one battle, that awful fumble at Glorieta Pass, to turn back the gray tide that had all but engulfed New Mexico. Ten wagons of munitions. Pitifully little, but who could say they might not halt the retreat, and launch the gray legions on a new drive that could carry all the way to California?

  II

  “The Gun”

  A quivering trooper named Brinkley spoke up and penetrated the spell.

  “For God’s sake, sir, can’t we get out of this place? My flesh is crawling like a barrel of snakes.”

  Overstreet led the men on beyond the grisly scene in the pass. He reread the letter, as he rode, and wished the Yankee colonel had been more specific in locating the ranch. But probably the captain had known.

  A name leaped out at him. Shaffer. Shaffer, his daughter . . . should have returned. He remembered the dark-haired, dark-eyed girl in the hospital. Shaffer had been her name, too. The same? It couldn’t be. The haunting beauty of her face had been with him ever since he had left Albuquerque. But he knew he would never see her again.

  South of the pass they stopped to breathe the horses. Trooper Brinkley took off his coat, a worn gray coat with a big blue patch on the right elbow. “How long to Fort Bliss, sir?” he asked. “A week? Ten days?”

  Overstreet fingered the letter. This was as good a time as any to break the news. Watching sullen anger swell in many of the men’s eyes, he told them about the Yankee colonel’s order. He had expected some trouble, but he hadn’t expected it to come so suddenly. Eyes wide with fright, Brinkley swung into his saddle and started backing his horse away.r />
  “Not me, Lieutenant. I wouldn’t stay in this country for ten wagons of gold.”

  He touched spurs to his horse’s sides. Another soldier leaped into the saddle and clattered after him.

  Overstreet reached for his holster and brought up the Colt Dragoon he had used with the Texas Rangers. He fired the shot, just over the men’s heads.

  The two soldiers hauled up short. They came back, their faces sickly pale even beneath the dirt and whiskers.

  “Take their guns away, Vasquez,” Overstreet ordered the dark-skinned trooper. “They’ll go to Fort Bliss when the rest of us do.”

  He felt Hatchet’s washy eyes upon him. “You’re a long way from home, Lieutenant,” the trooper said casually, so casually that Overstreet felt a chill work down his back.

  He remembered a hellish afternoon a week ago when they had turned back a Yankee troop in a rock-strewn canon. A bullet had whipped by his ear and into a boulder, burning his face with rock dust. It hadn’t come from Union guns. He had whirled and seen Hatchet lowering a carbine. But with all that shouting around them, what could he ever prove?

  The coldness still on him, he cut short the rest stop and pushed the men on. They rode in stolid silence, the talk long since burned out of them. Before sundown they stopped to cook a light supper, then moved on a few more miles to a dry, fireless camp.

  A pink tinge was creeping over the east when Tobe Wheeler shook Overstreet’s shoulder. “Two men gone, sir.”

  The lieutenant leaped to his feet and quickly looked around him in the cold semidarkness.

  Wheeler rubbed his bushy jaw. “Brinkley and Thallman, sir. Short-handed like we was, we had to let Brinkley have a gun to stand guard last night. We put Thallman with him to see he didn’t run away. By the way she looks, I’d say he talked Thallman into going with him.” Wheeler’s rough face twisted in a scowl. “Worst of it is, sir, they took a lot of our rations along with them. And we got little enough as it is. You want to trail them?”