A Trail Too Far

by Robert Peecher

  Rab replaced his hat and looked to Rachel.

  "You ready to ride, Miss Cummings?" he asked.

  "I am, Mr. Sinclair."

  "Then let's get on with it."

  "Sure is good seeing you again, Rabbie," D.B. said. "I always think about you."

  "Good to see you, too, D.B. And you, Silas. Next time I pass this way I'll set a while."

  "Good luck to you," Silas said. "That's a whole lot of hair you've got under that hat. Do your best to hang on to it."

  Rab smiled and led Rachel Cummings out to the horses.

  "Talking about your hair," Rachel said. "He means for you to not get scalped. Is that right?"

  "That is his meaning," Rab said, hopping up into his saddle.

  He and Rachel turned their horses and started at a trot to catch up to the wagons.

  "Is that a fear where we are?" Rachel asked. "Getting scalped, I mean."

  "That is a fear where we are," Rab said.

  "But you lived among the Indians. Surely they would not hurt you."

  "They mightn't, if it was people from a tribe where I lived. Or they might. You never can tell with Indian folk what they might or might not do. Growing up, there were some I bested in a wrestling match, and they might still hold a grudge. There were others who I fished with, and I caught more fish than they did. They might still remember such a thing."

  "Mr. Sinclair," Rachel said, stifling a laugh. "These are not things that are worthy of murder."

  "For some they're not," Rab said. "A man catches more fish than me, I probably ain't going to kill him over it. But some folks hold on to things in a way that others don't. A Cheyenne boy gets beat in a wrestling match by a white boy, the other Cheyenne aren't going to let him forget that for a long time. And so he holds on to it. It could be the sort of thing that gnaws on him for years."

  "Were there many Indians you wrestled with?" Rachel asked.

  "Very many," Rab said. "Wrestling or horse racing or throwing spears or shooting rifles – it don't matter what it is, most of the tribes I ever knew loved to turn a thing into a sport. So at one time or another, I was involved in a competition with almost every Indian boy I ever knew."

  "And were there many of them that you bested?" Rachel asked.

  "All of 'em that I can remember," Rab said, and though it sounded like a joke, Rachel was not sure whether or not to laugh because Rab's tone was even as he said it.

  "You're an interesting man," Rachel said.

  "I just come up different from you," Rab said. "That's all it is. I come up different, so that makes me different. And different is sometimes interesting."

  They caught up to the wagons and rode across the open plain to get in front of them. Matthew was pushing the livestock along. Rab rode to the far side of the livestock and helped to keep them moving, and Rachel stayed with him.

  "I owe you an apology, Mr. Sinclair. I was very rude to you at supper the other night when I teased you about your ability to read."

  It was a hard admission for her to make. Rachel, who in many ways was her father's daughter, found it difficult to confess a mistake, and even harder to apologize for one.

  "Did you tease me?" Rab asked. "It may be that I'm just not smart enough to have realized it."

  "That's not true," Rachel said. "You know full well what I did. And you know that it was wrong of me. But you're too decent to say so."

  "I reckon it's not the sort of thing I care to pursue," Rab said. "If I was bested, I didn't realize it. So I don't hold it against you, Miss Cummings."

  Rachel smiled. "You were not bested."

  "You have a pretty smile, Miss Cummings," Rab said. "A lot of women, as they get older, they stop smiling. Worries. Children, mostly. All the troubles that life brings. They stop smiling. It would be a real loss if you were to stop smiling. Your mother, she smiles. I hope you'll be like her."

  Rachel blushed at the words.

  "Will you call me Rachel?"

  "I will, Rachel," Rab said.

  "And what should I call you?" she asked. "The men at the station called you 'Rabbie.' Do you prefer that or do you prefer Rab?"

  "Mr. Sinclair will be fine," Rab said.

  Rachel's face fell as she looked at him, but Rab's face cracked into a smile. Rachel laughed. "You're teasing me, now," she said.

  "I am. You can call me pretty much anything you like. I'll answer to Rab or Rabbie, either one."

  Rachel wrinkled her nose. "What is it short for?"

  "My name is Robert. My father, being a Scotchman, called things in his own way. He always called me Rabbie or Rab."

  "So it is a pronunciation of Rob?"

  "I reckon so," Rab said.

  "I like it," Rachel said.

  "Rabbie," she said, trying it out. "Do you mind if I call you Rabbie?"

  "Not at all," Rab said.

  He rode away quickly, over to one of the mules that had strayed to munch on some grass. He called to the mule and slapped his hand against his thigh, and using his horse directed it back toward the herd of livestock. Then he rode back over to where Rachel's horse was walking.

  Rab's concern was water. The livestock were numerous. The wagons were heavy. There were a lot of people. And in '59 and '60 there was a long drought on the plains.

  "The Cimarron could be dried up to a trickle," Rab said out loud. "We'll have to get our water at the Arkansas and make it last."

  "What's that?" Rachel asked.

  Rab laughed. "Oh, I'm just talking to the hawss."

  "Did you say something about water?" Rachel asked.

  "We're going to have some dry days in front of us," he said. "There won't be much water, and if there was any grazing to be had, we'll likely find it's all been blown away."

  They pushed the livestock and the wagons throughout the rest of the day, stopping only for a short while in the late afternoon to change out the teams and water the animals as the crossed the Pawnee River.

  The crossing was difficult because the drought had knocked the river down. The wagons rolled through the water easier, but the bank was too high to easily get the wagons up. Rab had to help the Cummings boys unhitch the teams and attach long chains to the wagons. Once the teams were up the bank, they attached the chains to the harnessed animals and with new leverage they were able to get the wagons up the bank.

  Rab was frustrated with the length of time it took to clear the Pawnee River, but it couldn't be helped.

  The whole while, Stuart Bancroft and Amos Cummings kept watch on the back trail, seeking any movement on the eastern horizon that might indicate that Mickey Hogg's gang of border ruffians had caught up to the Cummings party. But no one appeared on the horizon.

  Graham Devalt took the opportunity to sit with Rachel while she stretched out on a blanket and took a light meal.

  He was peevish.

  "Are you enjoying your ride?" Graham asked, and Rachel could not help but catch the derision in his tone.

  "I'm having quite a pleasant ride, actually," she said.

  "You should not get too close to that boy," Graham said. "It's inappropriate for a young, single woman to be riding about with that bumpkin. It's bad enough that you're going around in trousers and with that ridiculous hat. But the fact that you are riding with him is just too much. What would your friends back home say if they saw you?"

  Rachel felt her face get flush with anger, and she started to speak, but then she stopped herself. She thought of Rab Sinclair and the way that he answered criticisms and slights.

  "If my friends back home saw me, I suppose they would say that I've adapted quite well to the necessities of traveling the open prairie," Rachel said. "I've altered my fashion to adapt to my surroundings."

  Rachel grinned at her answer. She felt a certain satisfaction at her calm, easy answer.

  "Quite frankly, Rachel, you look absurd."

  Again, she held her temper.

  "The hat keeps the sun off my face and will protect my skin from turning into a mask of leather
," she said. "And the trousers allow me to ride with ease, and to move up and down the wagon at my leisure, and to walk without the grass annoying my ankles and legs. Perhaps on the streets of Philadelphia or Baltimore I might seem out of place, or even back home, but I think here in Kansas I must be the height of sensible fashion."

  Graham Devalt saw through what she was doing in the way she mimicked Rab Sinclair's easy way.

  "Don't make a mistake becoming too friendly with him. You will sully your reputation." Graham stood from the blanket and turned to walk away.

  "All that are here to witness my friendship with Rabbie are friends and family," Rachel said. "I trust my reputation to the opinions of my family. So I can assume only that it must be my reputation among my friends that is in danger. Would that not suggest that those friends are not the friends I thought them to be?"

  Graham did not respond but walked on toward the river where they were now bringing up the last of the wagons. He was having grim doubts about his decision to join the Cummings. If he had not been thinking of it before, Rachel's remark made him fully aware that when it came to friends and family, everyone else in the Cummings party was family. He was the only friend. Stuart Bancroft was Martha Cummings' brother, and so by marriage the Bancrofts and the Cummings were all related.

  He did not have the means to pay for a return trip by ship, but perhaps once they were in California he would see if he could persuade Amos to buy him passage. What he knew was that he did not want to make this miserable trip across the plains again, and he was growing increasingly convinced that he would not want to stay in California.

  It occurred to him, too, just how much Rachel Cummings had influenced his desire to come west. The sudden attentions she was paying to the guide had wholly disillusioned him. Now, he just wanted to go back home.

  Rachel folded up her blanket and returned it to one of the wagons.

  "Will you be joining me for the rest of the afternoon?" her mother asked.

  "Actually, I'm quite enjoying the ride with Rabbie," Rachel said.

  "Mr. Sinclair? Are you calling him 'Rabbie' now?"

  "He said I could," Rachel said.

  Martha Cummings, sitting on the driver’s seat of the wagon, leaned forward toward her daughter. "Remember what I said to you about being careful with the attentions you pay to two young men. Their feelings could get very hurt if you are not cautious."

  Rachel laughed. "Mother, I'm not sure Rabbie has any emotions at all."

  "That may be," Martha said. "Though I doubt it. But Mr. Devalt has feelings, and he walked away from your picnic just now looking very much like those feelings were hurt."

  Rachel dropped her eyes and nodded her head. "I should be more careful," she said.

  When the sun set, the wagon party pressed on, going by lantern light.

  Now Rab moved to the back of the wagon train, and he insisted that Rachel join her mother on the wagon.

  He allowed the wagons to get a ways ahead of him so that he wouldn't have to chew on their dust, and he kept an easy pace going so that the wagons began to outdistance him.

  His concern now was in being certain that the back trail was clear.

  Rab Sinclair knew it was too much to hope that they could simply leave those boarder ruffians behind, but when he wanted to be the first to know it when Mickey Hogg and his gang reappeared on their back trail. If possible, Rab wanted to know it before Mickey Hogg.

  20

  The four men walked into the station house late in the afternoon, almost at dusk. Two of them looked as if they'd been beaten pretty bad with bruises to their faces. One of them had two blackened eyes and his nose was smashed flat. Blood was still caked around his nostrils and was staining his front teeth.

  "Whiskey, old man," the one with the smashed nose said to Silas Carver.

  "We're a stagecoach relay station, not a saloon," Silas said.

  "We're hungry and we're thirsty," Mickey Hogg said, and he slid back a chair at the dining table and sat down. The other three men still stood just behind him. "Now you either fix us up some chuck and get over here with a bottle of whiskey, or we're going to get angry in a hurry."

  D.B. chanced a glance over to Silas Carver. Both men were plenty nervous. They'd both been in their share of scrapes – Indian fights, mostly; D.B. had served in a militia company in the War with Mexico but hadn't seen any fighting. And now they were both old men. At least, they were both old enough that they knew better than to try four rough men. D.B. nodded to Silas who nodded back.

  "I'll get the whiskey," D.B. said.

  "I'll get some victuals fixed up," Silas said, walking into the kitchen.

  D.B. got four glasses and a bottle of whiskey, and he set them down on the table in front of Mickey Hogg. Mickey ignored the glasses and picked up the bottle, thumbing the cork out of it.

  Mickey took a long drink from the bottle of whiskey. When he set it back down on the table he let out a yelp of pleasure.

  "That is good," he said. "Lord a' mercy, that is good. I've been too damn long without a drink."

  The others sat down at the table with him.

  "Where'd them emigrants get to?" Mickey asked. "They was camped right over there yesterday. I figured on them staying another day."

  "They never stay more than a night," D.B. said. "Always camp and then move on. These ones moved on, too."

  "I thought maybe with the trouble last night they might have decided to stay through the day," Mickey said.

  "What trouble was that?" D.B. asked.

  Mickey Hogg grinned at Pawnee Bill. "One of their women folk came to our camp in the middle of the night," Mickey said. "She said she was tired of them Eastern men and wanted to camp with some real men."

  "Well then that must be your horses and saddle in our stable," D.B. said. "The guide for that group, he left them here for you."

  Mickey poured some of the whiskey into a glass and then passed the bottle to Dick Derugy. Dick was still dazed from the hit to the head. He was dizzy and was having trouble staying awake. Even sitting up, he found himself nodding off.

  "I guess that was right neighborly of him," Pawnee Bill said. "Considering he stole those horses."

  "They weren't stole so much as borrowed," Silas said from the kitchen.

  "Either way, a man takes another man's horse and he's liable to get hung for it," Mickey said.

  Silas cut some strips of bacon that he cooked with beans. D.B. went out to the stable to saddle one horse and to put leads on the other two horses. He lingered out in the stable longer than was necessary, and was ashamed that he actually gave thought to riding out and leaving Silas alone with the four men. But eventually, D.B.'s sense of fate drove him back into the station house.

  Dick Derugy was laid out on the floor, unconscious. At first D.B. thought the man was dead, but he saw his chest rise and fall with breaths.

  "Your friend don't look good," D.B. said.

  "That damn guide that was with them," Pawnee Bill said. "He come into our camp to get that woman back. We'd have give her if he'd just asked, but he came in swinging his long gun like a club. Bashed both these men. Calls hisself 'Rab Sinclair.' You know him?"

  "I know him a little," D.B. said. "He's stopped here afore."

  Pawnee Bill rubbed his chin and studied D.B.

  "Which way was they headed? The Cimarron cutoff or are they thinking about crossing the Arkansas up to where Bent's Old Fort was?"

  D.B. chewed his lip, feeling some pressure under Pawnee Bill's gaze. Then D.B. had a good idea to mislead these ruffians and send them off the wrong way.

  "Cimarron cut," D.B. said.

  "Been awful dry to go that way," Pawnee Bill said, narrowing his eyes. "You ain't lying to me, are you?"

  "No, that's what they said they was doing," D.B. said. "They said they could tote water enough, and they wanted to move on quick."

  Pawnee Bill looked over at Mickey Hogg. Mickey had his glass up to his lips, the liquid inside just slipping through a little as
he relished the whiskey he'd been without for too long. Mickey didn't care what the old man was saying about which route the wagon train had taken, and he'd not hardly touched the plate of food in front of him.

  "Give me four bottles of whiskey," Mickey said.

  "We ain't a store," Silas said. "Our supplies is all for passengers on the stagecoach."

  "I don't care," Mickey said. "Give me four bottles of whiskey. In fact, give me six bottles. And do it now."

  "I'll get you a case, right now," D.B. said. "That'll be eight bottles."

  D.B. walked out to the storage room and got a box with eight bottles of whiskey and took it back. By the time he returned to the station house dining room, Mickey Hogg had cleaned his plate of the beans and bacon.

  "Chester, you tote that out to the wagon and then come back in here and help Bill get Dick out there. Make room for him in the back of the wagon. He's too stupid to sit a horse right now."

  Mickey stood up and looked at the two old men.

  "Now, what do we owe you for the food and whiskey?" Mickey asked.

  There was a tone to his voice when he said it that made D.B. nervous. D.B. had a gun on his belt, but he couldn't hope to outdraw these men, and even if he got his gun up before one did, the other was sure to get him. Silas kept a shotgun in the kitchen, but he wouldn't be of no use with it.

  "You don't owe us nothing," D.B. said.

  Mickey smiled. "That don't seem right. We want to pay our fair share. What do we owe you?"

  "Nothing at all," D.B. said.

  "We ain't thieves, mister," Mickey said. "We pay as we go. Now fix a price on the meals and the whiskey."

  Chess Bowman came back in. "Come on, Bill. I pushed some stuff out of the way so there'll be room for Dick."

  Bill was watching Mickey. Whatever tone D.B. had heard, Pawnee Bill heard it, too. He licked his lips as he watched Mickey and the old man argue.

  "Hang on," Bill said to Chess.

  D.B. eyed the shotgun hanging off Mickey Hogg's belt.