Return to Red River

by Johnny D. Boggs

  “Well, I’ll be payin’ his wages. Plus any bonus you promised the boys in Dodge. And that family’ll never go hungry as long as I’m livin’.”

  Thompson did not wait for a reply, but turned toward the picket line. His men followed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  After two days, the weather broke, the sun reappeared, and North Texas began drying out, again. Two more days, and the herds had been separated, the losses totaled, and Mathew Garth pushed his beef toward the river. A. C. Thompson decided—wisely in Tess’s opinion—to wait another day or two before moving on toward Red River Station to ford the river, partly to stay clear of Mathew, but also for practical reasons. After all the rains, any trail crew pushing north would have to wait for the water level to fall before they could cross into Indian Territory.

  Mathew Garth knew that, too, but he was not about to wait in line for other herds to swim the Red.

  They reached the banks first in line, bedded down the herd, and Mathew helped Groot into the chuck wagon, then looked around and ordered Tom to fetch his horse and tag along.

  Understanding, Tess smiled, but that did not last long.

  “Why can’t I go to town?” Lightning asked.

  “Shorthanded already,” Mathew answered. He said nothing else. Lightning started to protest, but Tess put her hand on his arm. A warning. For once, Lightning did not argue.

  “Should be back before dark,” Mathew said as he released the brake. “You got enough grub to cook for the boys?”

  “I’m no Janeen,” Tess said, “but—”

  “You ain’t no Groot Nadine, neither,” Groot snapped. “Best remember that.”

  “She’s not only a better cook than you, Groot,” Teeler Lacey said, “but she looks a damned sight better, too.”

  “I’ll remember you said that, Teeler, lessen that pill-roller in town saws off my leg and I die.”

  “We’ll remember you, too, Groot,” Teeler said, “if that happens. Thankin’ the good Lord ever’ time we eat.”

  Mathew flicked the lines before Groot could fire back another retort. Instead, the cook wailed as he leaned forward to grip his leg. Turning toward camp as they rode out, Mathew called out to Teeler Lacey.

  “Keep a lookout.”

  Understanding, Lacey nodded. They had not seen the man who had been trailing them for the past couple of days.

  By the time Tom caught up with the wagon, they had hit the track that passed for a road and Groot had stopped his screaming and cussing.

  “You’ve never been to Spanish Fort, have you?” Mathew said.

  “No, sir,” Tom answered. He rode his zebra dun, the one mare in his string. “Two times I went on a drive, we always took the Western Trail . . . Lightning, too.”

  “Ain’t missed nothin’.” Groot spit tobacco juice.

  * * *

  Spanish Fort had changed.

  The first signs were the strands of barbed wire that fenced off fields of tall corn or smaller gardens of tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, pumpkins, and turnips. Twice, they passed two farmers who stood behind their fences cradling heavy shotguns, scowling but not speaking as the chuck wagon and rider passed.

  “Reckon they don’t get so many cattlemen no more,” Groot said.

  The Cowboy Saloon still stood right on the town square, though, and at least four horses stood tethered at the hitching post. Mathew spotted two other familiar buildings, yet he also found two churches, one Baptist, the other Methodist, and a log building where children played out front on two seesaws and a swing before a petite woman with her hair in a bun began ringing a bell and telling the boys and girls that recess had ended. At least the schoolmarm—unlike the farmers—smiled as they passed.

  “Grown some,” Mathew said.

  “So’s that.” Groot pointed to the cemetery.

  Folks said a giant Indian village had once stood on these grounds. Wichitas or Taovayas, most likely. The Spanish and French had come through here, with Bibles or bullets, but after the Indians had moved on, the town wasn’t settled until around the 1850s and didn’t begin to boom until a few years after Thomas Dunson’s first cattle drive to the railhead. First, the speck on the map had been called Burlington, till citizens tried to get a post office and had been told to come up with another handle, that Burlington had already been taken. So they looked at the old ruins of the old Indian camp and chose Spanish Fort.

  Spanish Fort grew as a supply outlet for cattlemen and a watering hole for cowboys—the last stop in Texas. Now that most drovers were using the trail farther west, the town had . . . evolved? Was what the right word? Mathew wondered.

  Years back, in the late 1870s, the town had been able to support four doctors. In fact, the doctors were so skilled at gunshot wounds—fairly common in a town like Spanish Fort—folks came from as far east as Gainesville and as far west as Henrietta to get patched up, if they didn’t bleed out or die of lead poisoning first. But with fewer cowboys getting drunk and angry inside the Cowboy Saloon, most doctors had moved on. Only two remained, and since Doc Allen was out treating a sick family of sodbusters south of town, they left Groot, moaning between curses, in the hands of a rail-thin Missourian named Becker, and stepped onto the warped boardwalk on the square.

  “Maybe,” Tom said, “we ought to check with the livery, see if they have a wagon for sale.”

  “Wagon?” Mathew asked.

  “Replace the hoodlum wagon,” he said.

  Mathew smiled. “We don’t have anything to put in the hoodlum wagon, Tom. But there’s one place you need to go.”

  * * *

  His name was Herman Joseph Justin—the sign above his shop said H. J. JUSTIN—yet everyone called him Joe.

  A young man not quite thirty, Joe Justin had left his home in Indiana back at age eighteen and went to work repairing shoes in Gainesville. A short while later, not liking working for somebody else, he moved to Spanish Fort, where, with only $5.25 to his name, he went to work emptying spittoons and heating water for a barber. Eventually, the barber grubstaked him thirty-five dollars.

  That barber, John P. See, remained in town. He got a new pair of boots every Christmas and wore his pants legs stuck inside those beautiful boots to show them off. He had helped make Joe Justin a rich man, and Joe Justin always paid his debts.

  After starting in a one-room frame building that always smelled of leather and wax, Justin had expanded, buying two neighboring buildings and knocking out the walls. Yet his shop still smelled of leather and wax. Boots in various stages of finish sat on just about every inch of space. That surprised Mathew. He had figured that with trail herds off to the west, Justin might be hurting for business.

  Inside came the din of men speaking Spanish, English, Italian. A woman said something. Hammers rang out. Sewing machines spun. Mathew found at least three men working on boots.

  “Should have known better,” he said.

  “How’s that?” Tom asked.

  “Man with his reputation . . .” Mathew didn’t finish, for Joe Justin, wearing an apron and holding a hammer, stepped away from one of the cobblers he had been instructing. Dropping the hammer, he strode across the room and stuck out a hand marked with scars.

  “Mathew Garth.” He did not look at Mathew’s face more than a second. His eyes dropped to the floor. Clucking his tongue and shaking his head, he turned and stared at Tom’s boots.

  “Those are disgraceful.” He looked up and put his hands on his hips.

  “That’s why we’re here.” Mathew tilted his head toward Tom and introduced him.

  “He had a birthday some time back. His mother thought we should treat him to a pair of the finest boots in Texas.”

  “In the world.”

  Pointing to an empty chair, Joe Justin walked to a desk on the other side of the office, where he grabbed pencil and pad and a cloth measuring tape.

  “Sit down,” Mathew told Tom, “and take off those boots, but keep your socks on.”

  “You get a pair of boots,” Ju
stin said as he placed Tom’s right foot on the pad, “from a store. You put them on. You soak them with water. They break to your feet. Wet leather shrinks as it dries. That’s not the way I do it. Not the way it should be done. Boot-making is an art. I’m an artist. Boots shouldn’t have to be broken in. They ought to fit you like a glove. You got small feet. Most cowboys come through here would kill to have small feet like yours.” He looked at Mathew. “Never figured out why in hell a cowboy wants to wear boots that are two sizes too small for him.”

  Mathew shrugged.

  “Your father,” Justin said as he took out the measuring tape and began measuring Tom’s right foot in various places, “got feet the size of an elephant.”

  Tom ordered a pair of black boots, eighteen inches high, with white stars inlaid into the uppers, mule-ear pulls, and heels shaped to fit a stirrup.

  “Way it works is like this,” Justin explained after writing a few notes in the corner of the traces of Tom’s feet. “You take your cattle to Kansas. When you come back here, you pick up your boots. Don’t you buy no damned boots in Dodge City. I know John Mueller. He’ll charge you eighteen bucks for a pair of boots that don’t fit worth a damn. You come back here. You pay me that fifteen bucks then. Now . . .” He pointed to a case of five shelves of various boots. “You go over there and pick out a pair. Your feet. Bottom shelf. To the left. You find one that fits, and you walk out with them on. The ones you wore in here, they aren’t fit for a trash can. Go on. Your pa’ll pay five dollars for those. Shop-made, but they’ll last you to Dodge and back. Last you for years. Won’t fit like the ones you’ll pick up in a couple of months, but a young whippersnapper like you needs two pairs of boots. Those rags you come with, they won’t last you across the river. Go on. I’ll measure your daddy.”

  “You’ve measured me before, Joe,” Mathew said.

  “You haven’t been here in five, six years, Mathew. Feet change. Just like people.”

  * * *

  After buying a few supplies and checking the post office for any mail, they made it back too late for supper, which was fine with Groot. He knew what to expect from a trail crew, and the next morning, the cowboys proved him right.

  They made fun of the hard cast on Groot’s ankle, and Groot, as was his nature, responded by spitting tobacco juice precariously close to their coffee cups or plates of bacon and fried potatoes.

  “Yes, sir,” Laredo Downs said, “that’s about as fine a boot as Joe Justin’s ever made. But how come you didn’t get but one boot, Groot?”

  “This boot I did get,” Groot said, “can stove in your head whilst you’s sleepin’, Laredo.”

  “Let me serve, Groot,” Tess said.

  “No, ma’am. Next thing happens after that, Mathew puts me out to pasture.” He lifted his busted leg and shook it feebly. “Damned thing already itches somethin’ fierce.”

  “I like Tom’s new boots better,” Joey Corinth said.

  “New boots?” Lightning had not even noticed. Now he stood, putting his plate on a stump, and walked over to where Tom squatted by the fire.

  “I ride nursemaid on a bunch of smelly beef, and you ride into town to get a new pair of boots?”

  All banter ceased.

  “Lightning,” Tess said, “it was a birthday present. Tom’s eighteenth.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Tess’s eyes turned cold. “You got a pair of boots in Dodge two years ago, Lightning. When you turned eighteen.”

  “Yeah. After I finished the drive.”

  Mathew rose from his seat, leaving his plate and cup on the ground. He started to say something, but his lips flattened, and he stared ahead. Within moments, everyone followed his gaze, and everyone wearing a gun rested his hand on the revolver’s grip or hooked a thumb in the belt near the holster.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “I wondered when you’d find time to pay us a visit.” Mathew turned away from the man who had ridden into camp and picked up his coffee—with his left hand. His right remained near the holstered Colt.

  “You knowed who I was, eh?”

  “Just figured it to be you. What brings you to camp?”

  “Saw that grave a few days back. Thought you might be hirin’.”

  It reminded Mathew of what Jess Teveler had said after Milt Blasingame had been killed, but he dismissed the thought. Although the ex–buffalo soldier wore a battered campaign hat, Mathew could tell that he had shaved his head again, most likely this morning, or last night before he went to bed. Or had he gone to Spanish Fort? Maybe trailed them yesterday? Spanish Fort still had a barber, and the salt-and-pepper mustache and goatee looked neatly trimmed.

  The clothes weren’t new, and he kept his gun and D ring bowie knife stuck inside the green sash he had been wearing back in Comanche, when he had joined the sheriff’s posse that was chasing Teveler.

  Mathew said: “Didn’t know cowboying was your line of work.”

  “Man’s gotta eat.”

  Mathew sipped coffee and made a slight head gesture at the coffeepot resting on a tripod over the fire.

  “Coffee and grub we have. We can talk about a job later.”

  That was the invitation. The big black man dismounted with ease, picketed his horse in the grass, and crossed toward the wagon in a bowlegged gait. He extended his right hand. “They call me Reata. But my name’s Chet. Chet Chase. I like Reata better.”

  He had manners. Mathew had to give him that much. He swept his hat off his head and bowed when he saw Tess, and waited in line till all the other hands had gotten their breakfast.

  “Late breakfast,” he said absently as he sat alone beside the wagon tongue.

  “River’s too high to cross today,” Mathew said.

  “Boys ain’t in town?”

  “I don’t like towns. On cattle drives.”

  Reata smiled, forked a chunk of potato into his mouth, and finished eating in silence. Afterward, he deposited his dishes in the wreck pan, wiped his mouth with a fairly clean yellow handkerchief that he fished out of his back pocket, and said:

  “I rode with the 9th Cavalry from ’68 to ’83. Barbered a spell in Scabtown down by Fort McKavett, then done some liveryin’ in Comanche.”

  “For Paul Ransom?”

  His head nodded. “Yes, sir. You know him?”

  “I do indeed.”

  Reata smiled. “He’s a man to learn from, that’s for sure.”

  “He teach you how to trail a man?”

  The smile widened. “If I was trailin’ a man, I wouldn’t be followin’ you. Because Teveler ain’t been around. I know that much.”

  “But you think he might just show up.”

  “It strikes me as fairly good odds. You know him. He visited your camp before. I read that much in your eyes.” He nodded toward Tom and Lightning. “And theirs. Read worry, too. Which told me that this here Teveler . . . well . . . he might just come visit y’all again sometime.”

  Mathew sipped coffee. “Paul Ransom teach you that?”

  He laughed. “No, sir. I learnt that on my own. Fifteen years of hoss-soldierin’, that teaches a man other things.”

  “Like riding?”

  His head bobbed. “I can ride.”

  “The man we buried, he was a little wiry thing. Vaquero. You get his string. Biggest one isn’t nowhere near the size of that monster you rode in on.”

  “I’ll ride what you give me, boss. Gots to be better ’n what the army stuck us on.”

  “You’ll ride drag.”

  The grin vanished, but he did nod.

  “Maybe I’ll get promoted up to somewhere that ain’t quite so dusty.” Eventually, the smile returned. “After all, I was a sergeant when I left the 9th Cavalry.”

  “I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, since your horse is saddled, you might as well ride out to the herd. And keep them company.”

  “So y’all can talk behind my back?”

  “Or you can ride out now. Pay’s a dollar a day.”

  He rose, and sh
ook Mathew’s hand. “With . . . maybe a bonus?”

  “If the herd brings a top price.”

  The black man let out a rumbling laugh as he walked to his big horse. “Or . . . maybe . . . a couple of beefy rewards for Jess Teveler.”

  When Reata had ridden out, Laredo Downs walked to Mathew. “Teveler rides into our camp, there’ll be gunplay. You know that.”

  Mathew shrugged. “Or maybe if Reata’s with us . . . Teveler doesn’t ride into our camp.”

  “You didn’t hire Jess Teveler,” Lightning said, “after Milt got killed. But you hire that saddle tramp?”

  “We lost Alvaro,” Mathew snapped, “and there was no cowhand to hire in Spanish Fort. I need that man . . . if I’m to get these beeves to Dodge.”

  He was moving then, dropping his dishes in the basin, telling Joey Corinth to bring out horses from Mathew’s, Tom’s, and Lightning’s string, and saddle a good one for Tess.

  “Where we going?” Lightning asked.

  “To see a man.”

  * * *

  After six years, Mathew wondered if he could find it. The way he remembered, that had proved difficult in 1880. The floods a couple of years back could have washed away everything, including the remains, weeds and saplings could have overgrown the site, or some sodbuster might have filed a claim and tried to farm this country.

  He reined up, twisted in his saddle, hooked a leg over the horn, found the makings, and began rolling a cigarette. Eventually, Tess, Tom, and Lightning caught up with him.

  “Where we going?” Tom asked.

  “You’ll see,” Tess answered.

  It did take longer to find the marker. Weeds had grown higher, and the Red had taken away the elm tree that had always been his landmark. They slugged through mud, up the little knoll, and eventually Mathew dismounted, handing the reins to Tom, and kicked down the high grass until he saw the cairn.

  “Watch for snakes,” Mathew said, and removed his hat.

  * * *

  The Conestoga arrived at the banks of the Red River in the evening, hours after they should have made camp, when they never should have left Abilene at all. Mathew told Thomas Dunson that they would cross in the morning, but Dunson barked out that they would cross tonight. Now.