All the while I kept a sharp eye out for people tracks, but found no sign. Of course, moccasin tracks do not make much impression and rarely last long. A boot heel can cut deep and sharp and the track may last for weeks, even months if in a sheltered place.
There wasn’t much point in my making a fire even if I could manage it. I’d nothing to cook and doubted the night would be that cold. Also, it might attract unwelcome visitors. Still, what visit would be unwelcome?
Something else came to mind. If that horse yonder had known and liked a man or woman before this, he must be familiar with campfires, and much as horses like the wild, some of them were people-horses, they just naturally liked to be with people as many a dog likes it.
Not that I was fooling myself. The chances of me catching myself a horse was about one in a hundred. With any horse but that one, one in a thousand. Yet I had it to think about and I’d done some mustangin’ as a youngster and knew something of how to trap wild horses.
If I did catch one I’d need a rope. If I could find an old campsite there was just a chance I might find a piece of cast-off rope. Maybe a dozen times I’d come on such things where somebody threw out a busted rope and just let it lay, or left a piece of it tied to a tree.
One thing I knew. If I got out of here at all, I’d have to use my head. There wasn’t any kind of settlement within a hundred miles in any direction, and in some directions, like north or south, it was more likely two to three hundred. Not that I knew for sure, but I knew enough to know I wasn’t going to walk out of here and make it.
Things surely didn’t shape up so good for me. Here I was twenty-two years old, worked hard all my life punchin’ cows around Beeville and then down Uvalde way, going up the trail from Texas to Abilene with a herd of mean steers and just short of town by two days’ drive I tangled with an ornery old Mossy Horn from down in the brush country and he hooked me in the side, tore me up some, and busted a couple of ribs and a collarbone. By the time I was up and around again my outfit had gone back to Texas and I was broke.
All I had was my saddle and a sore-backed bronc the boss left me. Whilst I was mending its back healed so when I got on the street I had a horse, anyway. A cattle buyer taken me on to ride herd on some stock he was holding on grass about twenty miles west of Abilene. When he sold his steers I had twenty dollars coming.
Standing on the street with that twenty dollars in my pocket I saw a young woman come into town riding a neat little filly and they surely did make a picture. She was settin’ sidesaddle, the way women-folks rode, and she had a gray riding outfit on.
Right alongside me a girl about fourteen stopped. She was walking with her pa, a gray-haired man with a white hat and a neat black suit. I heard this girl say, “Oh, Pa! Isn’t she beautiful! I wish I had a horse like that!”
“She is beautiful,” her father agreed, “and if we stay here I’ll buy a horse for you.”
That woman on the horse rode up and got down right close by and the old gentleman stepped over to her and said, “Ma’am, I will give you a hundred dollars for your horse.”
“Oh, no! I’d never sell her!”
“Two hundred?”
“I am sorry, sir. She is not for sale.”
Well, it seemed to me like opportunity was knocking. I taken off my hat. “Sir,” I said, “an’ Miss? For two hundred dollars I’ll find a more beautiful horse than that one and break him gentle.”
The man looked at me out of cool blue eyes. “There are very few horses I have seen west of the Mississippi for which I’d pay two hundred dollars,” he said, “and that horse wasn’t worth it, but my daughter wanted it.”
Now I looked like pretty much of nothing. I was wearing a pair of striped store-bought pants with a blue wool shirt, a buckskin vest I’d made myself, boots with run-down heels, and a .44 Colt on my hip. My hat was battered and had been stitched with rawhide along the crown to hold it together. Moreover, I was just nineteen then, and looked it.
“Sir, I been holding some cattle out yonder on the plains, and a time or two I had to ride out west huntin’ strays. Well, I seen the prettiest little horse out yonder you ever did see, proud, high-headed, and built like a dream. You should see that horse move! I started them a time or two just to see him run.”
“What color was he?”
COMMENTS: The Llano Estacado, sometimes called the Staked Plain, is a high plains area covering a good deal of western Texas and eastern New Mexico. One theory about the name was that it was so flat that early travelers used stakes driven into the ground to navigate across its expanse and to find water. Though cairns (piles of rock or debris) and possibly stakes may have been used as guideposts, it is more likely that the name came from the look of the mesa-like edges of the plateau, which resembled palisades or a stockade.
It’s very likely that the canyon that our narrator discovers is Palo Duro Canyon, in which the JA Ranch was established in the 1870s. Louis’s early experience with this general area came when he got a job skinning dead cattle on the Elwell Ranch, near Lubbock, Texas, in the mid-1920s. Later, his family traveled across the Staked Plain to reach eastern New Mexico, where they worked for some time.
The line about how the “polecat” took the letter containing the job offer near Wagon Mound suggests how and where the two men may eventually meet up again. It seems utterly in character for this conniver to take advantage of that particular opportunity. It’s also amusing to see Louis write an exchange about Methodists and Baptists. Dad was raised Methodist, though “gospel-shoutin’ ” was the last thing his family seemed to be!
I’m not sure what the “polecat” used to shoot our hero out of the saddle. Certainly the next time we see him he does not have a firearm and the narrator doesn’t seem to have been shot. Maybe he dropped the gun later when the horse was bucking, or maybe Louis or a good editor would have gone in and changed that section to make it a thrown rock. Obviously, the hero isn’t terribly injured, and I think it would have been funnier that way; his pride is wounded, not his body.
* * *
SHELBY TUCKER
* * *
The Beginning of a Western Novel
We hadn’t seen them for a long time, but we knew they were out there. We were belly down in the grass on top of a knoll and the sun was hot. We could smell the dusty grass, we could almost taste it, and above us was the wide sky, brassy with sun and heat.
It was mid-afternoon and the earth had the smell of death, because in all the world there was no help to come for us, nor anybody to ask after us or know that we had gone.
We were four men and a girl, all that was left of Mellin’s wagon train, we five surrounded on a hilltop, and around us were vast and empty plains as we lay waiting with the taste of fear in our mouths.
There was Tuthill, Constanatus, Pike, and me, Shelby Tucker. And there was Laurie Connor, seventeen and pretty, already a wife and already a widow, her tall young husband dead on the charred earth of the wagon circle.
Out there in the grass were thirty Kiowas, wanting our hair, and some of them fixing to die.
Twenty miles east of us the wagon train lay scattered and burned, a dead thing that had moved with life, its voices stilled, its heart no longer beating. The low rumble of wagon wheels and the creak of saddle leather were gone, and without them the world was empty, for these had been the song of our days.
Fifty-six men and women gone, and more than twenty children, their blood emptied to the grass, their homes to go unbuilt…and we, the last of them, pursued to this place of ending, to this hot and lonely hillside in the long grass.
We settled ourselves down, nothing to see but the wind, nothing to feel but the sun. The rifle was hot in my hands.
Nine of us had made a break for it when the last charge came, but four had died before they reached the draw. It had been Pike spotted that draw—Pike, who never went into a place without knowing a way out—and in the rush of the Kiowas after loot and scalps, we got away.
Until they found o
ur trail.
“Hold low, kid.” Pike looked over to me. “An’ take your time. They’ll be comin’ soon.”
“I’ll be all right,” I told him, and I would. Pike, he was a great one for giving advice, but a good fighting man. I was glad he was with us.
The four of us squared to the compass in an old buffalo wallow, with Laurie under the high edge and out of harm’s way. When I took my hand off the rifle to wipe it dry of sweat on my shirtfront, Laurie was looking at me, her eyes big and dark, so I smiled at her to keep her gumption up. After a moment, she smiled back.
Goes tough on a girl to lose her man that way, although to my thinking Lafe Connor was no catch. The Connors were a feuding outfit from the high hills, West Virginia folks…and Lafe a trouble-hunting man. If that Kiowa brave hadn’t taken him it was like to have been Pike or me, for he was pushing us, time to time.
Laurie was folks…mighty sweet girl, liked by all. Pike, he had been giving her the eye when Lafe wasn’t around, but she paid him no mind.
They came then, just a whisper in the grass, crouching low and running. My Spencer took the first, hitting him in the notch below the throat.
They were coming from all around and I could hear the others firing. An Indian loomed suddenly, scarcely beyond the muzzle, and I felt the gun jump in my hands but had no memory of squeezing off. The heavy slug went into his head over his eye and he was dead before he hit the grass.
Then they were gone, and there was an acrid smell of gunpowder. One suddenly came out of the grass trying to get further away, and my bullet split his tailbone. He went down…a bloody hand flew up, and I heard a low sobbing in the grass down there, then nothing more.
Pike turned his face around. There was blood on his temple. “Get any?”
“Three.”
“Two,” he said, “I got two.”
“One,” Tuthill said, “and maybe another.”
“Four,” the Greek spoke quietly, “all dead.”
Pike looked at him. “Figured you were new to this.”
Constanatus shrugged. “They are like Turks. I have killed Turks and Russkies since I was a boy.”
We waited then, not thinking of water, not thinking of anything. We had hurt them…worse than expected, no doubt. They would be arguing now, planning another attack. But ten down…that was shooting.
A cool breeze moved in the grass, and high near the sun a buzzard swung in wide, slow circles. Of us all, he was the one sure to win.
We had two horses when we slipped away during that final attack at the wagon train. Laurie rode, and the others of us took turns. We made fast time, but not fast enough. The Kiowas had stampeded our horses first thing, and even if we drove them off we were footloose in the midst of everything and nothing.
My mouth was dry and my head ached with a slow, dull throb. Lying there close to the ground I watched an ant working, felt a dry blade of grass brushing my cheek. When I looked around, Pike was watching Laurie and I could see the woman-hunger in his eyes.
Pike was a blond, lean-waisted, tough-walking man with scars to his hide. He wore one gun in sight and a hideout gun under his shirt. We met in Natchez-Under-the-Hill, him nigh to thirty, me just pushing nineteen. We teamed up, neither of us talking much.
Men walked shy of him, all but Lafe Connor. There was trouble coming between them, and we all knew it. Pike fancied himself with a handgun…and in Ash Hollow, on the way west, he had killed a man.
The sun declined and a low wind stirred the grass. The Kiowas came suddenly out of the sun moving with the wind, and they came shooting.
My first shot laid along the grass tops into a big, dark-skinned man. He went down, and I came up, shooting the Spencer from the hip. A Kiowa screamed…another fell. Behind me there was a thud of a bullet striking flesh, and I met the last Kiowa with an empty gun. But the muzzle jerked up hard to the soft spot behind his jawbone and his head jerked back, his scream choking on blood and dying with the dull thunk of my rifle butt against his skull.
Then there was quiet upon the grass, wind stirring and the sun low across the plains.
Tuthill was gone. He took one through the chest and one high through the shoulder, but dead. The Greek was kneeling and Laurie working at a bandage on his right arm. You could see the shock in his eyes.
Pike sat up and rolled a smoke, looking at me. “You an’ me now, kid.” His face looked gray, but the old hard light was there, and I was glad again that it was Pike, for he was a fighting man.
Not talking, I got Tuthill’s rifle and loaded it, took the ammunition off his body. Then I loaded the Greek’s rifle. When I put them down I took out my Bowie. It was razor-sharp.
“Watch for me,” I said. “I’ll be back.”
Then I rolled over the rim of the wallow into the grass. Behind me Laurie called my name and I heard Pike swear, but I was belly down on the ground and moving through the grass.
Pike, he figured himself for an old-timer, but me, I’d lost my parents when I was eleven on the Overland Trail, and lived three years with the Shoshones. At fourteen I was driving a freight wagon on the Santa Fe Trail and fighting Apaches in the Mogollons.
The Kiowas would know we’d lost a man…might figure there was two gone. And they knew Laurie was there. They wouldn’t be expecting me down among them, and the Shoshones had taught me how to move in grass.
Sweating, I was, and the dust from the grass itched my skin. Flat down I moved, snaking along until I saw brown skin, a startled face, a voice starting to scream. My hand choked it off at his throat and the knife went in twice, fast and slick. In and out, and I held his throat until he was dead. Only sound his heels kicking in the grass.
You can bet they heard it, though, and wondered. Then I was moving on…only now I had a bow and the arrows.
The next one I saw was a dozen yards off across a little cut in the slope. The Shoshones had taught me to use a bow, too. The arrow went into his kidney and he screamed, leaping up and dragging at the arrow-shaft. My second went to his throat….
A long time I lay still then. The Kiowas would be trying to figure what had happened. They were superstitious and they would not like this happening among them. One reared up as if to see and Pike’s Sharps put him down.
After a while I snaked it back to the wallow and rolled over the rim. Laurie, she looked at me big-eyed but Pike, he said nothing.
Not for a while. Then he said, “I think they’ve gone.”
“I think so, too.”
He looked to me again. He had me figured for a kid from the farms. “What happened out there?”
Me, I shrugged. Pike looked at the bow and the quiver of arrows. “Find a dead one?”
“He was dead when I took these off him.”
—
When dark came we started out, walking. Then we found four Indian ponies waiting for riders that would never come. We mounted up and rode west, and Pike, he began sidling up to Laurie.
“Lafe’s gone,” he said. “You should have you a man.”
Laurie said nothing, just looking between her pony’s ears at the low stars.
Me, I said nothing either, leading that spare horse. It was no time to be talking to that girl. If she had a lot of love for Lafe Connor it could surprise me, for he was a hard, unfeeling man. Nevertheless, he was a short time dead and she had been his wife.
“We’ll make it fine,” he said, “you an’ me. Good country west of here.”
She said nothing at all, only I could see the white of her face, looking to me.
“Leave it lay,” I said.
Pike’s head came around, sharp. “My business, kid.”
“Give it time,” I told him.
He said nothing for maybe a hundred steps, and then he agreed, “Maybe you’re right.” But, he added, “She might’s well get used to it.”
Darkness lay soft upon the land, coolness on our faces, and miles fell behind us with the turning of the stars and the night-walking moon. We’d no water, nor any food, and where
there was water there might be Indians. Yet when the sky was gray behind us, I saw a fringe of darkness in a low place…trees.
Dark trees and the smell of water. We moved toward them, taking it easy. A dozen cottonwoods, bunches of willows, and a pool. We drank, and we filled empty canteens, and Pike looked at Laurie. “We’ll bed down here,” he said.
Her face was pale in the vague light, her eyes large and frightened. I did not know what she was thinking. Only I said, “No.”
Pike looked at me again, and there was nothing nice in the look. “You crossin’ me, kid? Once too often.”
I just looked at him. He could sling a gun, all right, but so could I…and I had, an’ more than him. Only he knew nothing of that.
“Ain’t safe,” I said. “We got to move. This here place is a Comanche water hole.” I lied then. “I seen their tracks.”
He stood silent, not liking it, but not wanting to fight Comanches, either. Kiowas were bad enough. Comanches were worse…much worse.
We took out, riding west again, the rising sun at our backs, holding to the hills just below the ridges, keeping from being sky-lined, yet staying where the going was easy. All morning we rode, and Laurie, she was dropping in the saddle, she was all in.
“We got to rest, kid.” Pike was looking around. “Comanches or not.”
“Place up ahead. Water in a cave.”
Pike looked at me again, funny-like. He was puzzled, taking me as he did for a kid green to the West, and I’d never told him different.
First thing I saw was that twisted paloverde. Then the white gash in the cap-rock. We rode over the lip, the horses taking it easy-like, then down a long path toward the bottom of the canyon, but before we were halfway down we made a sharp double-back amongst some broken chunks of the whitish rock. The cave was there, like I remembered it, half-concealed by brush.
Volume 1: Unfinished Manuscripts, Mysterious Stories, and Lost Notes from One of the World's Most Popular Novelists Page 25
