The Ellsworth Trail

by Ralph Compton

“We’ve got to hold them to the north line,” Jock said.

  “Naylor told me to come find you. We need help. Calico Sal keeps turning right. The cattle are following her.”

  “How far?” Jock asked.

  “Maybe a quarter mile or more.”

  “All right. Tell Fred we’re coming.”

  “Hell, I don’t know if I can find my way back,” Purvis said.

  “Then stick with us. You probably can’t get there any sooner than us in this wind.”

  “I’ll lead us back,” Purvis said. “It’s just hard going is all.”

  Chad, Jock and Purvis rode on, the wind blasting them with sand and grit, the air thick with fine dust. Jock could barely see the cattle off to his right. He heard them and put together the image of them blindly walking, packed together. Maybe, he thought, the cattle had it better, some of them. They could hold their heads down and breathe better than he could.

  Finally, Purvis slowed and turned his horse. He beckoned to Jock and Chad. They followed him until more riders appeared, phantasms without faces or eyes, dust-covered as if they had risen from graves.

  “Cap’n Jock,” Naylor said, riding up close. Jock didn’t recognize him at all.

  “Yeah. Having a time of it, are you?”

  “That damned Sal keeps running off to the east. I’ve got men on the other side beating them back, but they all want to put this wind at their backs and I don’t think we can do a hell of a lot about it.”

  Naylor was almost shouting, but his words sounded as if they were spoken through cotton batting and Jock had to strain to understand him.

  “Well, we can put a rope on Sal,” Jock said. “But I’m not going to do that.”

  “There’s one steer that’s trying its best to kill some of us. He keeps at Sal’s heels and I think he’s pushing her.”

  “Take me over there, Fred,” Jock yelled.

  Calico Sal was surrounded by three cowhands, all trying to turn her back. They were waving their arms and yelling at Sal, but she was smart. She’d start one way and then quickly change course, always presenting her hind end to the sandpaper wind.

  Jock rode up to one of the hands and told him to stop trying to turn Sal.

  “Let her stay where she is,” Jock said. “We’ll let the herd bunch up here and bed down for the night.”

  “Sure, boss,” the hand said, and Jock recognized him as Vic Cussler. Dewey Ringler was there, too, along with a young hand named Cory Wingate. They all looked exhausted.

  “It’s not Sal I’m worried about,” Cussler said. “Watch yourself, Jock.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jock saw a dark shape moving out of the pack, its huge horns ticking with pelting sand. The steer charged straight at Jock, bellowing with a deep, chesty roar, its head lowered and its tail switching like a puma’s.

  “Here he comes again,” Ringler shouted. He spurred his horse to try to head the steer off. Jock dug spurs into his horse’s flanks and felt the animal bunch up its muscles and bound into the air. The sweeping horns, all six feet of them, narrowly missed the horse’s left flank. But the steer swung its head as Ringler approached and one tip caught him in the leg, shoving his boot out of the stirrup.

  Ringler threw up his hands as if trying to grab a ladder in the air. Instead, his horse bucked as the horn raked its left hind flank and Ringler ejected out of the saddle like a jack-in-the-box at the end of a coiled spring. He hit the ground hard as Naylor leaped from his horse and bulldogged the steer, clasping its horns on both sides and hanging on for dear life.

  The steer shook its head and bucked like a horse, swinging around and pawing the ground to shreds with its cloven hooves. Naylor went flying and the steer shook its brute shoulders, looking around for another target.

  Jock rode up on his horse and diverted the steer, then rode circles around it until it wore itself out and stood there, panting and snorting, coughing on sand.

  “You got him stopped, Jock,” Ringler shouted as he stood up and patted his pants, as if that would get rid of the dirt and dust.

  “I wonder,” Jock said to the men gathered around him, “if whoever cut that steer has still got both balls.”

  The men didn’t laugh, but turned their backs to the wind as the cattle herd came to a stop and milled around until their rumps faced west, into the brunt of the ferocious, dust-laden wind that ripped at them like a billion sharp-toothed insects sawing at their hides with tiny razors.

  Jock spit out sand and wiped granules from his lips. He was dying for a cigarette.

  Chapter 19

  Torgerson watched the tangle of cattle swarming in circles just before the first one slid off the hardpan and disappeared into a deep hole, where the current caught it and funneled the animal downstream. The other cattle dropped off the shelf one by one and, after being dunked into the same hole, were swept away by the rapid current. He saw these things happen through a curtain of blinding dust and then watched as more cattle clomped into the narrow ford, struggled for their footing and then slid off to flounder downstream, bawling and gasping for air.

  “Eddie, Jack,” Torgerson called out. He was looking toward two riders he could barely see in the gloom of late afternoon. They were the nearest drovers. “Come here, quick.”

  He felt as if his words were being swallowed up by the cloud of dust and blown back into his mouth by the wind. But the men heard him, evidently, because they turned their horses away from the slowly streaming column of cattle drifting down to the San Antonio River crossing.

  The two men bent over their horses’ necks like masked mendicants, their bandannas besmirched with sweat and dirt, their eyes thin slits flocked with grains of grit. Ed Timmons and Jack Colvin were two hands who had been with the Cross J and Torgerson since before the war. Two men he trusted, as much as he trusted any men—hard workers, good hands, loyal to a proverbial fault.

  “Yeah, Curt,” Eddie said. “We got our hands plumb full.”

  “No, look down there,” Torgerson shouted. “This is a bad ford.”

  “Holy shit,” Eddie said, his words muffled through the bandanna.

  Jack rode up for a look, craning his neck to see through the brown haze.

  “Damn that Cobb,” Jack said.

  Rufus Cobb was the man who had picked out that particular ford. Jack looked around as if to skewer the man with a dirty look, a look that he could not have delivered even if Cobb had been two feet away.

  “Rufus is on the other side,” Torgerson said, as if reading Jack’s mind. “I sent him over with the first bunch.”

  “We got to cut this bunch back,” Eddie said. “Those cows will drown for sure.”

  “I’ll help you,” Torgerson said, rifling his voice through the curtain of sand and wind by cupping his hands into a megaphone.

  The three men turned into the herd and took off their hats. They slapped at cows, bulling them with their horses to turn away from the river. They batted at their eyes and cursed at them with a rage born of fear and necessity. The cattle fought back, swinging their horns and bawling in protest, much like a human mob being turned away from a free lunch at a local tavern.

  Gradually, the herd began to turn. The three men pressed the leaders back into the herd, jamming them into those cattle that wanted to continue forward, those with the smell of water in their nostrils and panic in their hearts to escape the dust.

  Abel Kane rode up and joined in with the others to continue turning the herd back in on itself. It was a treacherous, muscle-straining task, made even more dangerous by the profusion of sharp horns twisting and jabbing so close to the flanks of the horses and the legs of the men. In fact, some of the cattle drew blood from Eddie and Jack’s legs, the tips of their horns raking their legs just above their boots, since they were burrowed so deep in the herd. The two men kicked at the encroaching cows, striking them on their bosses so hard that the animals backed up and helped clog the leading edge of the river-bound herd.

  Abel forced his way into the herd, maki
ng a wedgelike opening that allowed Eddie and Jack to escape being crushed by animals determined to forge ahead of their leaders and make it to the water.

  Eddie wove his horse through the narrow opening and stepped clear of the milling cattle. Jack was not so lucky. As he tried to follow Eddie out, one of the longhorns raised its head as Jack’s horse brushed past it, then lowered its massive boss. None of the men saw the steer’s head again until it rose up and swung left, then right. The cattle nearby moaned and grunted, then fell back against one another to get out of the way of the lethal horns. The steer charged straight at Jack’s horse, rising up off its forelegs with each forward lunge. Jack heard the commotion and turned to see what was happening. He was too late.

  The steer, bellowing and roaring, lowered his head again, then thrust upward with one horn. The tip caught Jack’s horse in the left flank. The steer twisted its head with a sudden, violent movement and, still charging, ripped through the bowels of the horse.

  The horse screamed in agony as its intestines fell like a sack of lead through a trap door on a gallows, and staggered to one side. The steer’s horn continued its deadly path and ripped into the horse’s rib cage, piercing a lung. The horse’s legs collapsed at the knees and it went down.

  Jack fought his left stirrup with his boot, trying to extricate himself. He kicked out of the right stirrup, which left him off balance. As the horse fell on its right side, Jack, his left foot still caught in the stirrup, slid out of the saddle and tumbled downward, pitching face forward onto the rump of the savage steer.

  Jack’s yell was cut short when he bounced off the steer and struck the ground. The fall knocked the breath from his lungs, and then the rampaging steer kicked both hind legs into the air. Its hooves smashed into Jack, one landing on the side of his head, the other ripping into his shoulder, shearing through his shirt and plowing a furrow into his flesh, leaving a raw, bloody wound. Jack swooned, his senses scrambled by the blow to his head. In seconds, the other cattle streamed over him, hooves slashing and pounding at his limp body.

  Abel watched through the brown scrim of dust and rammed his spurs into his horse’s flanks, causing the animal to bound forward into the onrushing tide of cattle that were burying Jack alive. He shouted into the wind, and started kicking at the cattle to drive them back and away, but they bulled forward, the blood smell strong in their nostrils, their fear blazing like candles in their distended brown eyes. The noise of their bellowing was deafening. Abel saw Jack lying there, inert, seemingly lifeless, and he leaned over in an attempt to reach him, to pull him from the ground. But his reach was far too short and his horse was being pummeled by horns and heads. It backed away from the sheer crushing force of the wild-eyed cattle surging en masse to either escape or attack whatever was in their path.

  Abel wrestled with his frightened horse. He kicked at the heads of cattle to drive them away from the fallen Jack. The cattle nearest him turned, choking off some of the surge. They trampled the dead horse, however, and the smell of blood threw those cattle into an even wilder panic. But they streamed past Abel and turned again toward the river.

  “Kane,” Torgerson yelled, “get the hell out of there.”

  “Come on, Abel,” Eddie pleaded. “You’re making it worse.”

  “Jack,” Abel yelled through his bandanna. That was the only word he could get out as he struggled to keep his horse from rearing or kicking at cattle with its hind legs. It was like riding a whirlwind, and his ears filled with the sounds of bawling cattle, the dust-laden wind and the shouts of the men trying to turn the outlaw cattle away from the treacherous river ford.

  Abel jerked hard on the reins, pulling his horse’s head downward, bowing his neck. Then he slid slowly from the saddle, still holding hard to the reins and stood beside Jack. He reached down as he bent over to shorten the distance of his reach, and slid a hand under Jack’s left arm. With a mighty effort, he tugged Jack up and then wrapped his arm around the man’s chest. Still grasping the reins, he got his weight beneath Jack and heaved him onto the back of his horse. The horse tried to move away from this unwelcome weight, but cattle blocked it from sidling out from under Jack’s limp body.

  Abel pushed Jack so that he bent like a horseshoe over the horse’s hind end. But his weight was balanced and when Abel was sure he would not slide off, he stuck a boot into the stirrup and, grabbing the saddle horn, hefted himself back into the saddle. He eased up on the reins. His horse snorted and bobbed its head as the bit cutting into the tender back of its mouth slid loose and eased the pain.

  Jack turned the horse in a tight circle. He leaned back and pushed down on Jack’s back with one hand so that he would not fall off. The horse lifted its rump and let fly with both hind legs, his hooves striking a longhorn in the side. Then Jack put his spurs to its flanks and the horse bolted from a standing position into a bound that carried it away from the thick clot of cattle at its heels.

  The horse pushed past the bunched cattle in front of it, squeezing itself through the milling pack and headed for open ground where Torgerson and Eddie sat gape-mouthed atop their horses, their hat brims flapping in the wind, their bandannas billowing out at their necks. Jack nearly slid off Abel’s horse, but Abel pressed harder on his back and he stayed on, still unconscious, but breathing. His hat had been knocked off and was now a shredded tatter of felt on the ground, kicked hither and yon by the cattle until it lost all recognizable shape.

  Eddie rode in close and put a hand on Jack so that Abel could ease up. Abel’s arm ached from the strain and he shook it to restore circulation to the muscles.

  “Let me drag Jack off and get him someplace we can give him some help,” Eddie said. “You’re lucky you didn’t get gored or chewed up by them cattle.”

  Abel was out of breath. He only nodded. Torgerson helped Eddie pull Jack off of Abel’s horse, and they held the injured man under his arms and rode away as if they had been doing such rescue work all their lives. Abel followed, glad to be away from the moil of cattle and those deadly horns and hooves.

  “Drop him,” Torgerson told Eddie. He let Jack’s arm slip from his grip and Eddie was holding a lopsided weight.

  Eddie could not hold Jack’s weight by himself, so he had to watch as his own grip failed. Jack fell to the ground in a crumpled heap, like some tossed-away, oversized doll.

  “Damn,” Abel said and rode over.

  Eddie looked at Torgerson as if to question his boss’s decision.

  “Get some more men up here, Eddie, and get these cows to a better crossing.”

  “Yes, sir,” Eddie said, and made his way through the wind and dust to call in helpers to aid him in his task.

  Abel swung down and lifted Jack up as he squatted down. Jack’s head hung at a crazy angle, and he did not respond. Abel leaned in close to the man’s mouth and listened. He heard a terrible wheezing sound and a kind of gurgling rattle. He peered at Jack’s neck and saw that it was sunken and bruised. Even in the dim light, he could see that Jack’s throat had been crushed.

  Jack gave out a rattling sigh and made no more sound.

  Torgerson looked down at the two men.

  “He’s dead, isn’t he, Kane?”

  “Yes, he’s dead.”

  “You were a fool to risk your own life to save that poor man, Kane.”

  “Hell, he’d have done the same for me.”

  “No, he wouldn’t have. I taught him better.”

  “What? What the hell do you mean, Mr. Torgerson?”

  “I mean,” Torgerson said, “that his death was written down in the book.”

  “What book?”

  “The book of life, son. You can’t change that book no matter how hard you try. Jack knew he was a dead man the minute he got off his horse. Best thing you could have done for him was shoot him dead the minute he hit the ground. So he wouldn’t suffer.”

  “I, I . . . damned if I believe that, Mr. Torgerson.”

  “Then, you are a fool, Kane. And you’ll die a fool. Now leave
Jack’s corpse be and get back to work.”

  Abel looked up at Torgerson, his eyes blazing with a deep hatred. Torgerson turned his horse and rode away, back toward the straying herd.

  “You sonofabitch,” Abel breathed, and the wind snatched away his whisper and blew it to pieces before it ever reached another human’s ear. Abel clenched his fists and felt the seep of hot tears spill onto his dust-encrusted cheeks.

  Chapter 20

  Haggard, red-eyed men emerged from the long night like bewildered escapees from an asylum. They rousted the X8 cattle from their beds, somnambulists in slow motion, waders in a dust-filled sea, bucking the current of wind as they slouched in their saddles. Cattle arose from the ground and shook off the dust and dirt, glared at the murky world of morning and sought out their leaders, their stricken companions. The lowing began almost immediately and rippled through the herd until its chorus rose up into the brown sky like a lament.

  “Wind is dying down,” Chad croaked. His voice was hoarse from his vomiting during the night, and was no more than a raspy whisper.

  “At least the cattle didn’t stampede.” Jock was trying to roll a cigarette, holding the paper and tobacco near his armpit, out of the wind. It was like trying to nail jelly to a wall. He was using just one hand, as usual, but the wind seemed to have fingers, and it sought the delicate paper and the brown shreds of tobacco. Somehow he managed to fold the paper around its cargo. He squeezed the quirly tight, twisted both ends, then licked the folded edge so that it stuck. He put the cigarette in his mouth, then wondered if he would ever get it lit.

  “They’re moving pretty well this morning,” Chad said as he looked at Calico Sal at the head of the herd, her followers fanned out and streaming behind her.

  “Chad, ride over to my windward side, will you? I want to try and light this stick in my mouth. Maybe you can lean over to block the wind.”

  The two men reined up and Chad maneuvered his horse, then leaned over while Jock cupped his hands and struck a match. A second later, a coil of smoke arose from the tobacco and Jock inhaled.