Blood and Gold

by Joseph A. West

  I opened my mouth to speak, failed, then tried again. “My paint?”

  The man shook his head. “Big buckskin. I found him out there in the hills. I whistled an’ he came to me, nice as you please.” My rescuer frowned. “Here, are you telling me he ain’t your bronc?”

  I shook my head slightly, a movement that caused me considerable pain. “My horse was stole.”

  Right then I didn’t know if I could trust this man, and I guess it showed in my eyes because he pulled his yellow slicker aside, flashed the badge pinned to his coat and said: “Name’s Bass Reeves. I’m a deputy U.S. marshal for Judge Isaac Parker out of Fort Smith with jurisdiction over the Indian territory.” He smiled. “Does that set your mind at ease, boy?”

  “What . . . what are you doing out here?” I asked, understanding nothing.

  Bass Reeves shrugged. “Hell, boy, out here is where the desperadoes be.”

  I glanced around me. The rain had stopped and I was back in the shallow cave at the base of the gypsum hill. Beyond Reeves’ wide shoulder the cobalt blue sky was streaked with bands of gold, lilac-colored clouds building high above the horizon. The fire crackled and I smelled wood smoke and bubbling coffee.

  I struggled to rise, but Reeves pushed me back with a firm but gentle hand. “Best you lay there still for a spell, boy,” he said. “I think maybe your head might be broke.”

  Gingerly, I reached up to feel my wound, but my fingers touched only a thick bandage.

  “Spare shirt I found in your blanket roll,” Reeves said. “I tore it up for bandages. Used it on your ribs too. Figure they might be broke as well.”

  That shirt was brand-new. It had cost me three dollars in Dodge and I’d expected to wear it and cut a dash when I met Sally and commenced to courting her. That Reeves had ripped it apart chapped my butt, but I didn’t think it polite to tell that to a man who’d saved my life.

  Instead, I said, “How did you find me?”

  The lawman jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Found three men out there. Two of them dead, all shot to pieces, one half-dead.” Without even a hint of a smile, he added, “The half-dead one was you, of course.” Reeves sat back on his haunches and rolled a cigarette. “You smoke, boy?”

  “Name’s Dusty Hannah,” I said. “And, yes, I smoke.”

  Reeves nodded. “Smoking is bad for a young feller, Dusty. Stunts his growth and takes his wind.” He lit his cigarette with a brand from the fire, the scarlet flame casting bronze shadows under his eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks. “Want to tell me about it?” he asked.

  “Are you asking me in your capacity as my savior or as a deputy U.S. marshal with jurisdiction over the Indian territory?”

  Reeves nodded. “A little of both, Dusty. A little of both, I’d say.”

  I was irritated that Reeves was so obviously enjoying his smoke and hadn’t thought to share, but I fought that down and in as few words as possible told the lawman the story of how I came by thirty thousand dollars only to lose it to bushwhackers.

  Reeves listened in silence, and when I quit talking he nodded and said, “The man who shot you is Lafe Wingo. He’s a sure-thing killer for hire and he’ll gun any man, woman or child for fifty dollars. Ol’ Lafe now, he has maybe twenty killings under his belt and he’s trying real hard for more. Mostly he carries a scoped Sharps, but he’s fast enough with the Colt when put to it.”

  Reeves took off his hat, revealing sparse curly hair, wiped off the band and settled the hat back on his head. “Last I heard Lafe was running with the three Owens brothers, Hank, Charlie and Ezra. Of the three, I’d say the oldest, Ezra, is the meanest, but that don’t mean the other two are any kind of bargain. All three of them can shoot and they’ve killed their share.” Reeves thought that through for a spell, then added, “More than their share.”

  A silence stretched between us; then the lawman said, “How did you get tied up with this Simon Prather feller?”

  I fetched up on one elbow and this time Reeves didn’t stop me. “I were just a younker when the cholera took my folks,” I said. “I was taken in by my pa’s brother, Ben, who has him a tumbleweed ranch down on the Neuces River country.

  “Uncle Ben was all right I guess, but he had a son four years older than me by the name of Wiley, and me and him used to go at it with our fists, buck, tooth and hangnail.

  “Over the years, Wiley beat me 173 times and I beat him once—the last time.”

  “You mean you kept count?”

  “Uh-huh. Scratched each time we fought on the inside of the barn wall with a nail, and when I’d make ten, I’d put a line through them lines and start all over again.”

  My hand strayed to my shirt pocket for the makings, but Reeves threw me his own, an act that made him rise considerably in my esteem.

  I rolled a smoke, lit it, then said: “Maybe it was my last fight with Wiley that helped Uncle Ben make up his mind. That night he drew me aside and said real thoughtful that he couldn’t afford to feed me no more on account of how I could eat my weight in groceries. And besides, he said, the ranch would go to Wiley one day and there would be no place for me.

  “Then he said: ‘Dusty, I got two daughters and I’ll have to find dowries for them both, so you see how things are with me.’

  “Well, I said I did and then I said on account of how I’d finally pummeled Wiley, there sure didn’t seem much point of me staying around anymore.

  “As it turned out, Uncle Ben did all right by me. He gave me five dollars, his third best pony, a .44.40 Winchester and a new Colt. And even Wiley came through. He said I’d given him a black eye and his nose was broke but he had no hard feelings and he gave me his lucky rabbit’s foot and fifty cents he’d saved.”

  Reeves nodded. “Rabbit’s foot can bring a man luck, if he’s real careful and steps light around trouble.”

  “Maybe so, but up until now, that’s sure not been the case with me.”

  “So how old were you when you signed on with Prather down to the Red River country?”

  “Fourteen,” I replied. “And since then, I’ve been up the trail three times.”

  Reeves let that pass without comment and asked, “How do you feel?”

  “How do you think I feel? My head’s busted and I think my ribs are busted. I feel like hell.”

  The lawman smiled. “You were lucky, boy. If ol’ Lafe’s bullet had hit another inch to the left, you’d have been a goner for sure.”

  He hesitated a few moments and asked: “How come Prather didn’t carry the money back to Texas his ownself?”

  I was rapidly getting too tired to talk, but I lay back and made the effort. “In Dodge, after he sold the herd, something broke inside Simon’s chest. He woke up one morning with his left side paralyzed and his face all twisted. Later that day he called me into his hotel room, where a doctor was attending him, and asked me to take the thirty thousand back to Ma. He said I was like a son to him and Ma and I was the only one of his riders he could trust. That’s what he said, and I figured he meant it too.”

  “Hell, he should have just stuck his money in the bank,” Reeves said.

  I shook my head, very slightly. “Simon don’t trust banks. He said all banks do is try to cheat a man. That is, when they ain’t being robbed or getting caught on fire. He don’t trust the boxcars either. He told me there’s no place to run when you’re riding the cars and I’d lose the money to train robbers for sure.”

  I shrugged. “Mr. Prather made it plain to me that he set store by his money and that’s how it happened I was heading back the way I come, down the Western Trail. And I already told you,” I added, a bitter taste in my mouth, “how I let Simon’s money be took from me.”

  Bass Reeves pondered this doleful intelligence for a few moments, then said: “Judging by the tracks I saw, Lafe and the Owens boys are trailing south, back into Texas, where they can spend the money on women and whiskey at their leisure.”

  “And I’m going after them,” I said.

  The law
man shook his head. “You ain’t fit, boy. You’re all broke to pieces and the bullet that creased your head has addled your brain”—Reeves shrugged—“unless, of course, you wasn’t too smart to begin with.”

  “I’m riding at first light,” I said, stepping around that last remark as I tried to sound a lot braver and more determined than I felt right at that moment.

  “Well,” Reeves said, taking his makings back from me, “there’s another complication that’s muddying up the water.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, knowing the news I was about to hear would be bad.

  The lawman lit his smoke. “The Warm Springs Apaches are out and they’re playing hob. The warriors are led by a young war chief by the name of Victorio and he’s mean as a curly wolf. Since you’ve been gone he’s been killing, burning and looting all over west Texas.”

  Reeves shook his head and smiled. “That Indian sure hates the white man.”

  I felt a sudden pang of fear. The SP Connected was southwest of the Red, and if what Reeves was telling me was correct, the ranch was right in the Apaches’ path. Ma was there with the cook and a couple of stove-up old hands, good enough men, but too few and too stiff to stand off a Mescalero war party.

  I sat up and when my head stopped swimming I asked: “Where are the soldiers?”

  Reeves shrugged. “The Ninth and Tenth Cavalry with their Navaho and Apache scouts are out after them. Buffalo soldiers”—he said this last without noticeable pride—“but they won’t catch Victorio. He’s way too smart for horse sod’jers.”

  “Ma Prather and the SP Connected are in west Texas,” I said, giving voice to my fears.

  “Then she’s in a hell of a fix, ain’t she, boy?” Bass Reeves said.

  Chapter 4

  Only when Reeves stood did I realize how big he was. He was well over six feet and I guessed he weighed about two hundred pounds. He was big in the chest and shoulders with muscular arms and long, powerful legs and he had the Western rider’s narrow waist and hips. His knuckles were large and knotted, scarred all over from dozens of rough-and-tumble fistfights, and his nose had been broke more than once.

  I was told later that Bass Reeves could whip any two men in a bare-knuckle fight, and by the time I met him, he’d already killed twelve outlaws in the line of duty, either with his .38.40 Colt or his same caliber Winchester.

  Now he looked down at me and asked: “Hungry, boy?”

  To my surprise I found I was. I nodded and said: “I could eat.”

  Reeves nodded toward my sack of supplies. “What you got in your poke?”

  “Bacon,” I said. “And some corn bread.”

  The big lawman nodded. “I got me a slab of salt pork and a few three-day-old sourdough biscuits, so we’ll have ourselves a feast.” He smiled. “Good for you, boy. Build up your strength.”

  After we’d eaten I did feel better, though I was still very weak and my head was pounding.

  Reeves said he’d ride with me as far as the Red, but that was where his jurisdiction ended and he would go no farther.

  “Maybe we’ll catch up with Lafe Wingo and the others by then,” he said. “Maybe not. But we’ll give it our best shot.”

  At first light we saddled up and headed south.

  It was raining again.

  Reeves’ big red stud was a sight to see. Montana-bred, he went more than eighteen hands and had a right pretty white blaze. The horse’s powerful legs with their four white stockings stepped high, his long, rangy stride eating up distance. But the buckskin was game and kept right along with him.

  I was still very weak and dizzy and couldn’t wear my hat because of the fat bandage on my head. But after the rain soaked that bandage through, I tossed it away, replacing it with my hat, even though the tight leather band threatened to punish me for days to come.

  Bass Reeves was a personable man and I enjoyed his company. In the past, I had ridden with a number of black punchers and they did their work well. They were uncomplaining, even riding the drag, and I never had any problem with them.

  There was a stillness in the big lawman—a kind of serenity, I guess—and when he reached for a thing his hand did not tremble. He pointed out things of interest along the trail that I’d never paid no mind to before. Maybe he was trying to keep my spirits up, because right then I was mighty glum, worrying about Simon Prather’s money and how I’d get it back.

  Reeves showed me the deep holes of the little burrowing owls, the only owls that eat fruits and seeds as part of their diet, mainly gathered from the tesajilla and prickly pear cactus. He pointed out where rutting elk had rubbed their antlers against trees, stripping the velvet as they prepared for combat. He said to listen close because their challenging bugles could echo for miles through the gulches between the bluffs and mesas.

  Reeves could put a name to just about every bird and plant we saw and he told me about a cave to the east of us where millions of bats roosted during the day, then took off in a spiraling funnel cloud that filled the sky at nightfall.

  “I reckon it takes maybe thirty minutes for all them bats to leave their cave,” he said. “Dusty, pretty soon the sky is full of them, filled with flapping black dots as far as a man can see. Some college feller told me one time the bats eat ten tons of insects every night, and that’s how come the sodbusters love them so much.”

  Bass Reeves taught me a lot of things during those days we rode together.

  When I happened to let it drop that I was no great shakes with the rifle, he showed me how to hold the sights of my Winchester real still on the target, told me when to inhale and when to hold my breath and how to get a clean break on the trigger so I didn’t jerk the gun.

  “Rifle shooting is all in the mind,” Reeves said, “and that’s why it takes every bit of your concentration. It’s like when you tie a line to a fishhook, you direct all your focus on the knot. Dusty, you should use the same amount of concentration when you fire a rifle. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition.”

  Keeping in mind what the lawman told me, I was hitting every target I shot at pretty soon, and then he made me work on my speed, cranking and firing the Winchester from the shoulder so fast that I sounded like a one-man army.

  Once I dropped a whitetail buck with a shot from my rifle at a distance of two hundred yards and that night, as we broiled venison steaks, Reeves said I could unravel a Winchester bullet as well as any man and maybe a shade better than most.

  The big lawman was impressed with the speed of my draw from the holster and he said he’d seen maybe just two or three faster, including his ownself, but it was an uncertain thing and not one he’d care to put to the test.

  “In any case, we’ll leave it alone, Dusty,” he said. “When it comes to the Colt’s gun you don’t need any advice from me.”

  Maybe so, but very soon I was to see Bass Reeves use his Colt and I realized then that the black lawman could teach me plenty about shooting a short gun, and then some.

  Reeves and me cleared the Gypsum Hills and crossed the Canadian. The riverbed was about six hundred yards wide but there was only about forty feet of water not more than a foot deep. We splashed through a shallow elbow of the Washita, then headed south again in the direction of the Antelope Hills across high tableland dotted here and there with post oak, stands of tall timber growing in the deep ravines.

  Although we could see far across miles of country, there was no sign of Lafe Wingo and the others.

  Reeves led the way as we rode on across rolling country, here and there rugged, flat-topped mesas rising dramatically more than two thousand feet above the level. Numerous small creeks, cottonwoods and willows growing along their banks, cut through the land around us, and the grass was good and plentiful. Juniper, pine and hickory crowned most of the hills, and here and there spires and parapets of weathered red sandstone jutted from their slopes.

  Now the rain had stopped, we stowed our slickers behind our saddles. The days had become hot and still, and often the only sounds were the m
uffled fall of our horses’ hooves and the hum of bees among the wildflowers.

  Four days after my first meeting with Bass Reeves, we camped for the night at a bend of Cottonwood Creek, a fair-sized stream with many twists and turns, the leaves of nearby tall trees reflecting dark green in the millpond water over which even greener dragon-flies hovered.

  I broiled up the last of the salt pork and venison steak, and not much of either, and we washed down this meager fare with a half cup of thrice-boiled coffee and were wishful of more.

  At times Reeves was a deep-thinking man, and we sat in silence and smoked, each occupied with his own thoughts, as the darkness gathered around us and an owl questioned the night from somewhere deep in the hills.

  The big lawman, with ears long attuned to even the smallest sound that could signal danger, suddenly sat straight up, his body tense.

  I opened my mouth to question him, but he held a finger to his lips, motioning me into silence. Reeves rose to his feet in one graceful, athletic motion, his gun coming up fast.

  From out in the darkness I heard a faint, rhythmic creak . . . creak . . . creak. As my eyes finally penetrated the gloom, I made out the pale glow of a yellowish-orange light bobbing toward us.

  I was never one to be afraid of the boogerman and ha’nts and such, but I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as the creaking grew louder, now joined by the noisy clank of metal, and the light bobbed ever closer.

  I drew my own Colt and was aware of Reeves fading like a ghost back into the shadows.

  The creaking and clanking suddenly stopped and the light bobbed to a standstill.

  The silence around me grew and out in the darkness I heard a horse stomp the ground and blow through its nose.

  “Hello the camp!”

  I looked around and found Reeves at my elbow.

  “Come on in real slow, and keep your hand well away from your gun,” he yelled.

  “A gun?” echoed the voice from the gloom. “Is my name not Amos Rosenberg and am I not a harmless peddler? What do I know from a gun?”