Novel 1968 - Chancy (v5.0)

by Louis L'Amour

  I won’t claim that I didn’t think of being a big man in the eyes of that girl back yonder. Fact was, she occupied a good bit of my dreaming these days, though I’d little enough reason to think I mattered all that much.

  We made camp that night alongside a slow-moving stream with blackberry bushes, cottonwoods, and persimmons all about. It was a good camp, with a fine meadow of grass and firewood a-plenty. But when I rode up to the fire they all stopped talking, as if they had plans they didn’t want me to hear.

  Dishing up my food, I sat down away from the lot of them, but before I sat down I swung my holster around between my legs where the butt would be right at my hand whilst eating.

  “You ain’t a very trusting man,” Gates commented.

  “I’ve had small reason. But don’t forget one thing. You’ve got half your herd and a thousand dollars coming that you wouldn’t have, had I shot any slower. I could have been cold under the grass back yonder.

  “And let me say this,” I added. “The drive isn’t over. Not by a long shot. There’s rough country ahead, and some mighty mean Indians. If we get the herd through without trouble we’ll be lucky.”

  “Have you been through here before?” Gates asked.

  “No, but I’ve been through Kansas, and I’ve talked with men who drove up the trail from Texas. You folks are going to need me—you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

  They didn’t like it much, but Noah Gates was a mite more pleasant for a while. Over coffee he dug at me with questions about the country to the west. Just south of our route was Arapaho country, with Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas not far off. I didn’t hold back when I told them of what lay ahead. With the buffalo herds almost gone, those Indians would be hunting beef, and they knew how to get it.

  For the next two days we had good drives, with occasional flurries of rain. It was cold, wet, and miserable, but a sight better than some of the hot, dusty drives I remembered when the heat rising from the bodies of the cattle had been stifling.

  The weather was hard on the older men. Being young and tough and no stranger to work, I did more than my share. Meanwhile, I made a book tally of my stock. A man unused to working cattle might have the idea they all look alike, but a good cattleman will soon know every steer in a herd. My brands tallied to seven hundred and thirty-three.

  At the crossing of the Canadian we met our first Indians, a small party of Shawnees, living in buffalo-hide lodges. Three bucks mounted ponies and rode over to meet us. Turning the dun, I went out to them.

  Now, a long time back the Cumberland was Shawnee country, and a few of them had drifted back there to live, so I knew some of their lingo, and of course I’d picked up sign language from the Cherokees.

  It turned out I didn’t need either one. The youngest of them spoke American. We did some palavering, but I had my eyes on a buckskin pony I saw tethered near their lodges. Even at that distance, I could see it wore a brand, which meant that it might be a good cow horse. Anyway, I could see, plain enough, that it was a mighty fine horse.

  When I greeted them in Shawnee they wanted to know where I was from, and when I told them, they got all excited. They knew the Cumberland, and we talked about it some, about the country and the hunting.

  They had been a long time without meat, they said, and they asked could I let them have a beef. I told them that I’d swap…what did they have?

  Well, they trotted out moccasins, buckskin jackets, and an old worn-out Kentucky rifle, and a few other things. Finally I told them I needed a horse. How about that old, broken-down buckskin?

  At that, they blew up. The buckskin was not old, he was young. He was a fine horse, their best horse, and he was not to be traded.

  So I changed the subject. They wanted beef, and I needed an extra horse. I rarely smoked, but I carried tobacco, and now I dug out my pouch, passed it around, then rolled a smoke for myself. Meanwhile, I talked about the Shawnees, and about how my folks had come into Shawnee country among the first white men—how they had traded, traveled, and hunted with the Shawnees. I made out as if I’d forgotten all about any trading.

  Now, contrary to what folks have been led to believe, Indians are great talkers, and the old stories told by their people are fresh in their minds. We talked about how the Shawnees, once friends of the Cherokees, had been driven from the Cumberland by them, but that now they were friends once more.

  The cattle drifted by, moving slowly, as always, pausing here and there to graze a bit, then moving on. Finally I swung my horse as if to join the herd, and again the Indians asked for beef.

  “I’ll swap a fat steer for that buckskin,” I said.

  They refused, and I started off, but one of them called after me: “Three steers!”

  The horse was worth three steers to me because I was already overworking the dun, and once we got out on open grass we’d need three or four horses each to handle those cattle. Even that number wouldn’t be enough to do the job really right. Moving through the brush as we had been doing, there wasn’t much chance so far for the stock to stray.

  We bargained for a spell, and the upshot of it was that I got the buckskin for two steers. When I cut them from the herd, Gates looked mighty sour. “If you don’t make good on that note,” he said, “that buckskin belongs to us.”

  “What you’d better think about,” I told him, “is how much work he’ll save you. I’m already doing as much as any two of your crowd. The better horses I have to ride, the less your men will have to do.”

  That made sense, and it shut him up, and the others, too.

  In all that while I’d exchanged no words with the redhead. Oh, she was a pretty one, all right, with a feisty way about her, avoiding me, but never staying long out of sight. She knew what she had, and she wanted to be sure I knew it, too.

  The thing was, she was avoiding me without any need. I’d trouble enough, without giving them excuse to shoot me. If they did shoot me, I was determined that I wasn’t going to make it easy for them.

  The next morning we took the herd across the Canadian. It was low water, and we had to swim only a short piece. Mostly it was just crossing a wide, sandy wash. Now we were moving up onto the plains. The grass was brown but there was plenty of it; and because of the recent rains there were pools of water.

  Noah Gates was riding point when I came up to him. “The Chisholm Trail’s not far ahead,” I said to him. “We can ride north for Abilene.”

  There were nine of us, and the girl. Or should I say there were nine of them and one of me? For I stood alone. I knew it and they knew it. I’d thought that maybe I might win them over by hard work and doing more than my share, but their minds were closed against me.

  I had come among them a stranger. I had bargained when they were desperate and afraid, and they hated me because I had not been afraid, and because their fear had driven them to surrender. But my willingness to fight had been my only stock in trade. It was all I had to sell, and had I been killed not one of them would have wasted a thought on me.

  It worried me now to consider what lay before us. We were riding into Indian lands, and there’s nobody quicker to spot weakness in a man than an Indian. A brave man might ride through the middle of an Indian band, where a frightened man wouldn’t get twenty feet. And there wasn’t much doubt that we were going to meet Indians.

  It was almost noon when a brindle steer cut for the brush. I was riding the buckskin, which had proved to be a top cutting horse, and the buckskin went after that steer like a coyote after a jack rabbit. No matter which way he turned, the buckskin was right on him, so the steer headed back for the herd.

  Pulling up on the edge of the brush, I started to reach for my tobacco. There was a clump of brush nearby, and some cottonwoods. I was lighting a smoke when I heard a low voice call from the brush. It was the redhead. She was standing beside a big cottonwood, her horse alongside. “Come over here,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”

  Curious, I glanced around. The herd was gr
azing along, moving a few steps at a time. We’d come upon good grass, and Gates was letting them make their own pace. Turning my horse, I walked it over to where she stood.

  “Get down. I have to talk to you.”

  Swinging down, I took off my hat and went up to her. She came even closer. She was an almighty pretty girl, with the kind of a body that could have made even some of those oldsters feel like a boy. But I didn’t trust her.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked me. “Don’t you even have time to talk to me?”

  All of a sudden she threw both arms around me. Not around my neck, but around my arms, and even as she grabbed me. I heard a stir behind me, and as I struggled to throw her off, something crashed down on my skull. The next thing I knew I was on my face in the dusty grass and somebody was fumbling in my pockets.

  “It ain’t there, damn it!” someone said. The voice was not familiar.

  I started to move, but it was the wrong thing, because whoever it was clobbered me again, and I heard the girl laugh.

  The next thing I knew was the sound of rain falling on a hide tent, and the crackling of a fire. My eyes opened on a smoky firelight. I must have tried to move, for suddenly there was a face leaning over me, and I heard some muttered words in Shawnee. Then another face was there—this was the young Indian from whom I’d traded the buckskin.

  “You feel better?” he asked.

  “Where am I?”

  “Near the Washita.”

  It came back to me then—the redhead grabbing my arms, and somebody—a young man by the sound of his voice—clobbering me.

  “Where’s my hat?” I asked.

  I started to sit up, but pain hit me like a shot in the skull, and I fell back, holding my head with both hands.

  The young Shawnee brought me a hat. “That’s not mine,” I told him.

  “Pretty poor hat,” he said. “Maybe somebody took yours?”

  “You found me. What did the tracks look like?”

  He squatted on his heels, chewing on a chunk of jerky. “A girl waited. You rode up and got down. Somebody was behind a tree, waiting—he hit you—maybe two, three hours later we found you.”

  Carefully I sat up, my head swimming. I looked over at him. “Thanks,” I said.

  Grinning, he said, “Thank your hard head,” and we both laughed.

  “And you?” I said. “You are with the Shawnees, but your English is good.”

  “My full name is Jim Bigbear, and I am a full-blooded Indian. Trouble is, when I was only a boy I hired on with a cattle outfit as a horse wrangler. I’ve worked for cattle and freight outfits ever since, except one time when I scouted for the army for a few months. Anyway you look at it, I’m a maverick. I’m not a white man, but I don’t fit in with the Indians any longer, either.”

  “You belong with me,” I said. “We’re cut from the same hide.…And now,” I asked, “who was it hit me?”

  Jim helped himself to my tobacco and answered my question. “One of the men who followed your herd. A young man who rides a black horse.”

  I contemplated that. No young men were with our outfit, nor any black horses. Jim had said one of the men who followed the herd, and I knew of no such men.

  “Four men followed you,” he went on. “At night one comes up close, and sometimes talks with the girl.”

  Evidently at one such meeting they had decided to steal my contract with the drovers.

  Had they any connection with Noah Gates and his crowd? The more I considered the situation and their actions, the more I doubted it.

  “You will go after them now?” Jim asked.

  Then I explained to him about the cattle, and he listened with attention. “It seems to me you could use some help.”

  “I’d not turn it down if it comes, but I’d ask no man to buy in with me. If there’s trouble, it will be gun trouble.”

  “I’ve worked with cow ranches since I was kneehigh,” he said, “so whenever you’re ready to ride…”

  “We’ll eat,” I said, “then we’ll go.”

  We took a pack horse and two spare mounts and made our start, riding steady and hard until noontime. Then he made coffee and swapped horses. A little short of sundown we shifted our saddles back to the original horses and rode on until midnight. By the time we rolled into our blankets it was safe to say we had covered as much ground in one day as the cattle would in four.

  But there was no question about it. I was in no shape to ride. Three times I’d had to pause to throw up, and my head drummed all day long. Half the time I was only partly conscious, but I stayed in my saddle and kept moving.

  On the second day we eased the pace a mite, but started early and took a two-hour break to let the horses graze on some good grass. By sundown we had gained two more days on the herd.

  No sooner had we started on the third day than we saw the graves. They were fresh graves, and the names were familiar. Earl Williston had been the youngest of the crowd with our herd, and he had died here. Gene Brash I scarcely knew, but I remembered the name. There had been nine men and the girl. Now there were only seven left, and likely some of them were wounded.

  Jim was scouting around. “Kiowas…eight or ten of them, and they ran off some stock. Twenty, twenty-five head.”

  “Will they go far?”

  “Kiowas? Not on your life. They’re not worried, so they’ll ride off to camp by water and they’ll roast some beef. They know the cattle drivers will need every man they’ve got to hold the cattle.”

  We trailed the Kiowas west about six, seven miles before we smelled smoke. The cattle were grazing on a small meadow, and the Kiowas had butchered a steer.

  “I’ll spook their horses. You go after the cattle.”

  We got close, for the Kiowas weren’t expecting trouble—and they had their jaws full of meat. We cut loose with our sixshooters and stampeded horses and cattle right out of there. One Kiowa had a dead aim on me when Jim cut him down. We saw his rifle fly high, and then he hit the ground and rolled over.

  Three miles north of there we rolled the stock into a tight bunch and looked them over. Eight of the cattle were mine. We also had four Indian ponies, having lost the others somewhere out on the grass.

  We pushed on then, keeping the cattle to a steady trot for a couple of miles, then slowing them to a walk for a mile or more, and then to a trot again. They would be ga’nted up some, but we wanted to leave those Kiowas behind.

  The four riders were still trailing our herd, and it was still about five days ahead. By the time we reached the Salt Fork we had gained two more days by almost running the legs off our stock.

  Jim had been studying the tracks around the camps whenever we came to them, and he figured only five of the old men were able to ride, which meant that two wounded men must be riding the wagon.

  The night after we swam the Salt Fork in flood. Jim squatted over the fire and sipped his coffee until I’d finished eating. “I think we have great trouble, amigo. I think I know the track of one of the horses of those who follow the herd—the horse and the rider as well. He is what they call a Bald Knobber…a bad man. His name is Andy Miller.”

  The name meant nothing to me but I’d not spent much time in this part of the country. “Is he the man on the black horse?”

  “No. He rides what the Mexicans call a grulla…the color of a mouse. He has killed some men, that one.”

  This was pretty country seen at a sorry time. The blackjack leaves were crisp and brown, and they clung to the branches in spite of wind and rain. The trail was fresh, and we rode now with our guns loose in our holsters, momentarily expecting trouble.

  My headaches had dulled, but towards evening they grew worse. But I was never inclined to coddle myself, and figured it was better to be up and doing.

  We fought shy of cattle herds. Nearly every day we saw cattle, or the dust from moving herds. We held to low ground when we could, but the country was opening out around us, growing flatter as we went on, and concealment was impossible. T
his meant the four riders must stay even further back of the herd.

  Abilene was not far away. We were closing in on the town, and that also meant the day would soon be here when we must face up to our trouble.

  “You don’t have to take cards,” I said to Jim. “This here is my game.”

  He did not speak at all for a time, then he said, “You belong anywhere, Otis Tom?”

  “I can’t say that I do. I’ve got kinfolk around, but I never really met up with them. There’s a girl I cotton to, but she’s beyond me. That is, I’ve nothing to offer her. No, I can’t say as I belong anywhere.”

  “Me neither.”

  We turned in after that, and after I’d been lying there a while, staring up at the stars and contemplating, I said to Jim, “Can you read?”

  “Sure,” he answered. “A Moravian missionary taught me. As a matter of fact, I’ve had eight years of good schooling.”

  Well, now. Somehow I’d never thought of an Indian reading, but then I recalled hearing that before Jackson and Van Buren moved them west the Cherokees even had their own newspapers, written in their own language, a language written out by Sequoyah. The Moravian missionaries had done good work among the Indians from the earliest times, and many of them were very intelligent folks.

  This Indian, come to think of it, was the first friend I’d ever had, and in a lifetime a man is lucky if he has one good friend.

  He’d had a good bit more schooling than I had had, and more than likely from better teachers. Schooling for me meant riding over the mountain a-horseback, and I’d gone five or six years, but pa taught me a good bit at home, for he was something of a reader when he had time.

  In those times there were a lot of educated men in the West, and many a night I’ve sat up in saloons or bunkhouses and listened to the talk of cities and of other countries, of wars and weapons, of writing men and of music, and of many other things.

  I lay there thinking. If I could sell my cattle in Abilene and pay my note, I could buy some fine clothes and take time to read up on some of the things folks talked about; and then of an evening when men talked together, I might take part and put in a word or two. It was something to think on.