The Omaha Trail

by Ralph Compton

  “I got some jerky and hardtack still in my saddlebags, Concho, from when we was spyin’ on Mr. Kramer and Paddy and all.”

  Concho grinned and threw the chewed cheroot onto the ground. He slapped Randy on the back.

  “Now get crackin’, kid,” he said.

  Randy hesitated. “Concho?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Since you want me to call you Concho, would you mind callin’ me by my given name? Randy.”

  “Not at all, Randy,” Concho said, and waved the young man away.

  He walked toward the Prairie Dog Saloon, where he had called a meeting of the men he had assembled.

  It was getting close, real close, to that large herd hitting the trail north. By now, all his men should be packing their gear and loading their saddlebags with trail grub he’d had Lem Norton buy over a period of days from Christianson so as not to arouse too much suspicion about his intentions.

  When Randy returned with the news that Kramer’s herd was moving, he and his men would be ready.

  Concho licked his lips.

  He couldn’t wait to do the job Throckmorton had hired him to do.

  He relished the thought of killing a man and stealing a large herd of cattle.

  What more could a man ask for?

  Chapter 15

  All of the Circle K hands, the drovers and wranglers, the two cooks, and the ranch foreman, Paddy O’Riley, were all assembled on the Two Grand range when Dane made his announcement.

  “Men,” he said, “we break trail before sunrise tomorrow morning. I’m counting on each one of you to give your best on the long drive to Omaha. It’s nearly five hundred miles, but there should be good grass and plenty of water along the way.”

  Some of the men applauded and soon were joined by all the others as Dane paused.

  “Paddy will be trail boss of the first herd, around two thousand head. I will be leaving the next day, with Len Crowell acting as trail boss.”

  There was some laughter. Some nervous titters in the more than twenty men assembled.

  Dane held up both hands to silence the outburst.

  “We’ll be right behind you. Oh, we may stray a little if the first herd gobbles up too much grass, but we won’t be far behind.”

  “I’m ready to leave right now,” one man called, out and the others laughed.

  “Hold your horses,” Dane said. “We have plenty of time, so we don’t want to rush this. The main thing is not to lose any cattle and to keep the weight on as much as we can. You will all get grub along the way and pay when we hit the stockyards in Omaha. Paddy will tell you which bunch you’re in. I’ll see those on Paddy’s drive in the morning when you leave.”

  Men began to raise their hands, some begging to be in the lead herd, others wanting to go with Dane and Len. They crowded around Paddy while Dane walked to his horse with Crowell.

  “I should be able to pick my own men if I’m trail boss,” Len said.

  “You should, but that’s not the way it works. We’re the leftovers. If you don’t like any of the men riding with us, you let me know and I’ll see to it that you don’t have to deal with them.”

  “I guess that’ll work,” Len said.

  “Anything will work if you make it work,” Dane said.

  That day, he and Len went over the maps and when Paddy joined them, they looked for alternative routes they might take if they ran into troublesome landowners, hostile Indians, or rustlers. They all sat at the table in the ranch house while Thor listened from his chair.

  “So, we got the Chinaman as cookie,” Paddy said at one point.

  “That’s right,” Dane said. “Any objections?”

  “Ain’t none of us tasted his cooking,” Paddy said.

  “Just tell him what you want to eat and he’ll fix it for you,” Len said.

  “Can he make bear claws?” Paddy asked.

  “Better’n any you ever tasted,” Len assured him.

  “Let’s not get into a squabble over the grub right now, men,” Dane said.

  In affirmation, Thor thumped his cane on the floor. The men at the table ignored him.

  “I wish I could be in two places at once, Paddy,” Dane said, “but I can’t. If you run into anything you can’t handle, send a rider back and I’ll come a-runnin’.”

  “Fine with me,” Paddy said.

  Then he leaned back in his chair and regarded Dane with an odd look.

  “Onliest thing I’m worried about, Dane, is you. You never said anything when you got through lookin’ around that bog the other day. But I walked over later and saw your tracks and read what you saw.”

  “So?” Dane said.

  “So someone was a-watchin’ us and you never said a word.”

  “No, I didn’t. No reason to.”

  “Know who it was a-spyin’ on us?” Paddy asked.

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea. Why?”

  “It was that kid, wasn’t it? Randy.”

  “Maybe. One of ’em might have been.”

  “That little sneak,” Paddy said. “Now, why in hell…”

  “Paddy, don’t you fret over that. You got enough on your plate you don’t need to be reachin’ toward the middle of the table.”

  “I just don’t like to be spied on,” Paddy grumbled, somewhat mollified.

  “It’s Throckmorton, ain’t it?” Len said, and the room went dead silent.

  Dane leaned over and patted Crowell on the shoulder to reassure him.

  “Throckmorton’s got money tied up in our herd,” Dane said. “He might be lickin’ his chops a little early, but you don’t need to worry about him.”

  “I know what he done to me,” Len said.

  “Well, he’s not going to do it to me,” Dane said. “Don’t worry. I’m going to keep my eyes open, and the men riding point, those ridin’ flank, and the ones on drag will all be eagle-eyed just in case.”

  Len and Paddy exchanged looks, but neither man brought up the subject again.

  The next morning, while it was still dark, Dane and Len rode to the Two Grand to see Paddy and his hands off. The evening before, he knew, Paddy had divided the men up and told them which drive they’d take, so the ones who were riding with Len and Dane were still asleep in the bunkhouse.

  Dane looked over the men. He held a lantern burning coal oil in his hands and stared at each orange face.

  “I don’t see Joe Eagle here, Paddy,” Dane said. “I thought you might pick him.”

  “I wanted him, but I thought you might need him more than me. You said somethin’ about an eagle eye, and Joe’s one what has it.”

  “Good. I was hoping Joe would ride with us.”

  “Well, you got him. These are good men in my bunch.”

  “You can start anytime you’re ready,” Dane told Paddy.

  Paddy ordered his men to saddle up.

  “I got me a lead cow all picked out and I’ll ride up and get her started,” he told Dane. “See you in Omaha, if not before.”

  Dane watched Paddy’s foreman mount up and ride to the front of the herd. He disappeared in the darkness.

  He and Len watched as the men took up their positions at the rear and flanks. In the distance, they heard a faint shout from Paddy.

  “Forward, ho,” floated back to them on the night.

  Then, very slowly, the herd began to move. The cattle jostled and shouldered the ones next to them. One or two bolted and the flanker ran them back in. Gradually, the ranks of the cattle began to thin and move faster as the lead cattle broke trail.

  To Dane, it was a glorious sight to see all those cattle moving. He listened to their moans and bellows and began to feel good about the start of the long drive to Omaha.

  Len seemed enraptured too as the cattle streamed past them, their horns glinting in the moonlight, their white faces like foam combers upon a rolling sea. It was a magnificent sight and brought a longing in both men to be among the drovers.

  Dane felt as if he were onshore watching a great sh
ip leave the dock and sail into the blackened sea. The lantern flickered in his hand and he held it high to light the cattle nearest them begin to pick up the pace as if they could not wait to get to a new range.

  “I can’t wait until we leave tomorrow,” Len said.

  “It’s tough to just stand here when you see all these cattle on the move,” Dane said.

  They heard hoofbeats. Both men turned around.

  Joe Eagle emerged out of the darkness and rode up to them. He swung out of the saddle before his horse had stopped.

  “Mornin’, Joe,” Dane said.

  “Hunh,” Joe grunted.

  “We’ll do this tomorrow.”

  “Me know. Good cows. Go far.”

  “Yeah,” Dane said.

  The three men stayed until the dawn broke on the horizon and the last switching tail vanished into the distance. It was suddenly quiet. Then they heard the cattle in their herd lowing in the distance. It was a mournful, sad sound.

  “They know, don’t they?” Len said, his voice just above a whisper.

  “Animals communicate in ways we can’t understand,” Dane said. “They know.”

  “Know heap,” Joe said. “Cow smart. Horse smart. Dog smart. Make talk, arf, arf, moo, moo, whinny.”

  Len laughed. Dane did not. He knew that Joe Eagle believed that all things were alive and that animals talked to each other. He said that they could see inside a man’s mind and tell what a human was thinking. He believed that everything was alive: water, rocks, trees, clouds, sky, the stars, the moon, the sun.

  Len shook his head but said nothing. When Joe walked back to his horse to ride back to the bunkhouse, Len watched him go.

  “That’s some Injun,” he said.

  “He’s a half-breed, Len. And he can talk better than that. The way he talks lets him keep separate from the rest of us.”

  “He got something against white men?”

  “Not any more’n I do, Len. He just keeps to himself. If people think that he only knows a few words in the white man’s language, he learns more by just listening.”

  “Kinda spooky, ain’t it?”

  “No more spooky than my pa. Sometimes he looks like he ain’t got good sense, but my pa hears every word said in that house and he’s a good judge of men. Like Joe Eagle. If a man ain’t right, Joe can tell, and if he thinks I need to know he’ll tell me.”

  “Sounds like a good man to have around,” Len said.

  “That’s why I have him around.”

  The two men climbed into their saddles. They rode toward the rent in the horizon that had turned to a soft cream. Their horses began to cast shadows, and there was a breeze that cooled their faces.

  Dane’s blood was churning. It had been a thrill to see two thousand head of cattle he had helped raise start off on a long trail.

  As his pa had often said to him:

  “The journey’s the reward, son.”

  Dane thought that was true. It was not the goal that swelled a man’s heart. It was the getting there.

  Chapter 16

  Randy awoke to the sound of thunder.

  He scrambled out of his bedroll on the abandoned property next to the Two Grand range with the expectation of lightning and rain. Instead, he knew he heard only the sound of thousands of cloven hooves and horses pounding the ground as the herd broke trail.

  He quickly rolled up his bedroll, secured it behind the cantle of his saddle, and hauled himself up on his horse.

  In the distance, he saw shadows and the silhouettes of horsemen taller than the rolling sea of dark cattle. He rubbed his eyes and blinked to clear them of the granules sticking to his eyelids.

  “Oh boy,” he breathed.

  He saw the flashing horns and listened to the moans and grunts of the cattle as they picked up speed. He saw the rise and fall of their curly-haired backs and the ghostly pallor of their white faces, and something tugged inside him. He thought, for a fleeting moment, that he could have been part of that migration, and he saw himself on a horse chasing after the cattle and halting the breakaways with a surefooted cutting horse or an agile cow pony. A feeling of deep longing engulfed him when he saw the cattle leaving their home range and venturing into the unknown, toward new grass and flowing rivers and little towns along the way and then the big city, where men would laugh and drink and recount grand and grandiose tales of treacherous fordings on raging rivers and nightmare stampedes at midnight.

  The feeling passed, but Randy felt very alone at that moment. He had no friends on the Circle K, and he was working with men who could not be trusted, men who indulged in suspicious activities. He was working with a greedy little martinet who had ice water in his veins and devilment in his mind.

  He waited until all the cattle had deserted the Two Grand and the rumble of their hooves subsided before he headed for town. The eastern sky was opening up with a soft mellow light, and in the west, the sky was changing from black to blue and erasing the stars. Only the silvery glow of Venus still shone and flashed against the fading darkness and the faint jewels of the Milky Way.

  Randy rode slowly into the sleeping settlement of Shawnee Mission. A few lights burned orange in some of the houses, and the rest looked drab and deserted. The saloon was closed, as he knew it would be, so he tied up at the hotel next door and entered the lobby.

  A sleepy desk clerk finally came to the bell and regarded Randy as if he were an unwelcome intruder, an orphan off the street begging for a handout.

  “Can you tell me the number of Mr. Larabee’s room?”

  The clerk, an old man with white whiskers and a shiny bald head that glistened in the salmon glow of the oil lamp, looked over the top of his pince-nez and frowned. “You a friend of his, sonny?”

  “Well, I, uh, kind of. I got an important message for him.”

  “You can write your message and I’ll put it in his box. He ain’t awake yet.”

  “Uh, no, he wants me to tell him somethin’ real important.”

  “He’s in room seven, down the hall. You better not wake up nobody but him, though.” The clerk looked up at the big clock on the wall of the cubicle. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “No, sir, I don’t, but I got to see Mr. Larabee right away.”

  “Number seven,” the clerk said, and walked through a door and left the desk area deserted.

  Randy walked down the hall on the thin carpet. There was no light and he had to stare at the numbers on tiptoe when he passed each door.

  He tapped lightly on number seven.

  No answer.

  He knocked again, more loudly.

  He heard a rustling when he put his ear close to the door.

  Again, Randy knocked, this time louder and longer.

  “Who in hell is it?” came Concho’s voice through the door.

  “It’s me, Randy Bowman,” the young man said in a loud whisper.

  “Who?”

  “Randy.” This time he said his name aloud. He heard feet hit the floor and then the pad of those same feet approaching the door. He stepped back.

  “Damn, it’s still night out, kid. What you doin’ here this time of mornin’?”

  “Concho, they’re movin’. The herd has done taken off.”

  “Get your sorry ass in here, kid.”

  Randy stepped inside and Concho pulled the door shut.

  It was then that Randy noticed that Concho had a pistol in his hand. It had been in his hand all the time, just out of sight behind his leg. His bare leg. He was wearing only undershorts and a plain wool shirt. He was barefooted.

  Concho walked to the table and pulled out a chair.

  “Set down,” he gruffed.

  “Yes, sir,” Randy said, and sat down.

  Concho walked to the bureau and picked up a sack of tobacco, a packet of cigarette papers, and a small box of matches. He sat down opposite Randy and began to roll himself a cigarette. “Tell me all about it. How long ago and who all was with Kramer? How many hands?”

  �
�I couldn’t make out who all was ridin’ with the herd. Too dark. But there was a passel of cows headin’ north.”

  “Randy, get me that map over on my nightstand.”

  Randy walked back to the rumpled bed. The room was Spartan, with a bureau, wardrobe cabinet, a table, and three chairs. He took the map to Concho and sat down. He was trembling and hoped that Larabee wouldn’t notice. Most of the shakes were inside him. He licked his dry lips and watched as Concho laid out the map and began to scan it.

  “Likely, they’ll head up to the Canadian and cross it or head east. So we got time. Randy, go knock on door number six and roust Lem out of his bed. Tell him I said to round up all my men and have ’em here in a half hour. Can you remember all that?”

  “Yes, sir. I got it.”

  “Now, scat,” Concho said, and he shooed Randy toward the door.

  A half hour later, Concho’s room began to fill with sleepy-eyed men. Most were unshaven and had shadows on their faces. All were grumpy at that early hour, but Concho had ordered in a large pot of fresh coffee and several tin cups. The men went to the table and poured coffee. Most of them sat on the floor, or the bed. Randy sat next to the wardrobe while Lem took a chair at the table with Concho.

  “Men, this is it,” Concho said. “Kramer’s movin’ his herd north. We got time to get ahead of him and look for a prime chunk of country to waylay him and turn them cows back to the Circle K.”

  “When do we leave?” asked Lyle Fisk, a lean whip of a man with carefully trimmed sideburns and a hawk nose, beady brown eyes.

  “Within the hour. We’ll do some campin’ before this job is done. But I want everything set by the time that herd crosses the border into Kansas.”

  “Everything’s set,” Lem said. “Just have to throw our saddles on our horses and pack our saddlebags and bedrolls.”

  “Everybody got plenty of ammunition for both rifles and pistols?” Concho asked.

  The men grunted and nodded in assent.

  “We won’t follow the herd directly,” Concho said, “but some of you will be outriders who will keep the cattle in sight. Anybody here know what Dane Kramer looks like?”

  “I do,” Mitch Markham said. “I rode for his brand oncet ’bout a year ago.”