One set was small and neat, obviously made by a woman, the others those of a booted man.
Bullwhackers don’t ride on the wagon, but walk alongside the oxen with a whip to urge them on, and these two were no exception.
What a man and a woman were doing in this country in the middle of an Apache uprising I could not guess. But something, maybe the way the man’s prints now and then suddenly veered away from the wagon and slipped and slid all over the place, told me these were pilgrims and the husband, if that was what he was, seemed to be either staggering sick or staggering drunk.
If there were Apaches close, they would have seen those tracks and would know there was a woman with the wagon, a valuable prize they would use to while away a few pleasant hours before they killed her.
I swung into the saddle and followed the tracks. Ahead of me they led into a narrow valley between shallow hills before disappearing into gray distance and rain.
Heavy drops hammering on my hat and slicker, I reined in the black and looked around. The surrounding hills seemed empty of life, but that was no guarantee the Apaches weren’t around. It’s when you don’t see them you worry, and right now I saw nothing but the rain on the hills and the lowering blackness of the sky, lit up now and then by the flash of lightning.
The past weeks had taught me caution, and I eased my Winchester from the boot and laid it across the saddle horn.
A few yards ahead of me a covey of scaled quail, soaked and unable or unwilling to fly, ran from one mesquite bush to another, rattling the plants’ stick arms with their small bodies. Then the land fell silent again but for the hiss of the rain.
I leaned over, patted the black’s neck, and urged him forward. He tossed his head, his bit ringing like a bell in the quiet, took off at a canter, then settled back into an easy, distance-eating lope.
My eyes constantly scanning the hills and surrounding stands of oak and mesquite, I rode into the mouth of the valley. A quick glance at the sky told me there were at least four hours until nightfall. Until then, me and the two people who were walking with the wagon would be out in the open and dangerously exposed.
I slowed the black to a walk and rode alert in the saddle, my nose lifted, testing the breeze, but smelled only wet grass and rain and the dank, menacing odor of the dead silence.
Five minutes later, as I cleared the valley and rode into a mesquite-studded flat, I found the wagon.
I reined up when I was still a hundred yards away and stood in the stirrups and studied the wagon, the two people beside it and the lay of the land, not wishing to blunder into trouble.
My first glance told me this was a tumbleweed outfit and my second confirmed it. The wagon was old, the planks warped, the whole sorry wreck held together with baling wire, biscuit tin patches and string.
Off to one side two huge oxen trailed a broken wagon tongue as they grazed, still hitched together. A young girl in a hooded cloak stood by the front of the wagon, looking down helplessly at the shattered, raw stump of the tongue.
A small, bearded man, a jug in his hand, had his face upturned to the rain and sky, his arms spread, yelling words I couldn’t hear.
My first instinct was to shy clear of this pair and their troubles, but there are some things a man can’t ride around, and I knew deep within myself that this was one of them.
I kneed the black forward and rode to the wagon, the teeming rain running in sheets off the shoulders of my slicker.
The girl stepped toward me as I drew closer and I reined up and touched the brim of my hat. “Ma’am,” I said, my voice suddenly unsteady.
Even in a pounding rain, her black curls plastered to her forehead under the hood of her cloak, this girl was breathtakingly beautiful. She possessed a dark, flashing kind of beauty and I thought—treacherously, I admit—that it made Sally Coleman’s blue-eyed, yellow-haired prettiness seem insipid by comparison.
The girl’s eyes were huge and brown, framed by long lashes and her mouth was small but full-lipped and ripe in her heart-shaped face. That was a mouth made for kissing and I had the urge to swing out of the saddle and plant a smacker on her.
Of course I did no such thing, staying right where I was as I said: “I figure you’ve got yourself in a tolerable amount of trouble, ma’am.”
The girl nodded, and from what I could see of her gray wool dress under the cloak, she was slender and mighty shapely. “The wagon tongue just snapped.” She turned and pointed to where the wagon’s front wheels were almost up to their axles in mud. “We got bogged down and when Pa whipped up the oxen to pull us out, the tongue just broke.”
I saw tears start in the girl’s eyes, and being young and ardent and of a chivalrous nature, I swung out of the saddle and stepped close behind her.
“Don’t you fret none, ma’am,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do for your wagon.”
The girl blinked back tears. “You’d do that for us?”
I shrugged. “Name’s Dusty Hannah and since there’s no one else around, I guess I got it to do.”
At that, the man stepped from behind the wagon, saw me and let out a cheer, then yelled:
Oh! Young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the wide Border his steed was the
best,
And save his good broadsword he weapons had none,
He rode all unarmed and he rode all alone.
So faithful in love and so dauntless in war, There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.
The man stopped and blinked at me like an owl. “Well, young Lochinvar, are you come to save us or rob us?” He extended the jug. “Here, take a drink.”
I shook my head at him. “I don’t care for any right now,” I said.
The man shrugged. “Suit yourself. More for me.”
Then he put the jug to his mouth and drank deeply, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing.
“My name is Lila Tryon and that’s my father, Ned.” The girl’s eyes searched my face, as though trying to find the understanding she hoped for. “He . . . he’s not been well.”
Ned Tryon had the same dark brown eyes as his daughter, but what was beautiful in her was weak in him. They were the vague eyes of a dreamer, the eyes of a man unsuited to survive in the hard, unforgiving land that lay around us.
I stepped over to the wagon tongue and Lila came over and stood beside me. “Can it be fixed?”
I nodded. “If you have a hammer and nails in the wagon.”
“We do,” Lila said. “And there’s some sturdy oak wood if you need that.”
I stood there looking at the tongue for a while, then turned to the girl and asked: “Where are you and your pa headed?”
She eased her wet hood away from her face and gave me a dazzling smile that made my heart jump.
“We’ve come all the way from Missouri. We had a farm there”—her eyes slid to her father—“but it didn’t work out. Then Pa’s brother died and left us his ranch down south of the Clear Fork of the Brazos, just a few miles east of Beals Creek.”
I nodded. “Know that country well. It’s right close to my home ranch, the SP Connected.”
“Pa says his brother wrote to him once and described the place, a strong stone cabin on a hundred and sixty acres, all of it good pastureland cut through by creeks.”
“I suppose you could keep enough cows on it to get by,” I said, “though it will take a strong back and some mighty hard work.”
Lila shook her head. “Oh, no, not cattle. Pa plans to farm the place.”
“That’s cow country, ma’am,” I said, my patience fraying fast, unable to believe what I was hearing.
“The soil is too thin and rocky for farming. Besides,” I added, then instantly regretted it, “we don’t take kindly to sodbusters down there.”
“Then you’ll just have to get used to us, won’t you, Mr. Hannah?” Lila snapped, annoyance flaring in her eyes.
That little gal had spirit and I let it go. “You go ahead and do what you must, ma’am,” I said. “B
ut you’ll fare no better at farming in Texas than you did in Missouri and maybe a lot worse.”
Ned Tryon lurched toward us. “Ah,” he said, “the lovers’ first quarrel and all because of the poor, downtrodden farmer.” Tryon tilted back his head and yelled at the uncaring sky:
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans,
Upon his hoe and gazes at the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Tryon spat between his feet, then blinked his bleary eyes at me. “You’re so right, you know, gallant young Lochinvar. Farming is a life for a hog. It’s not for me, a poet, an artist . . . a philosopher.”
Lila rushed to her pa and took him by his thin shoulders. “Pa, you promised. You told me this time we’ll make it. Back in Missouri you said this was the fresh start we needed.”
The man pushed his daughter away roughly. “As a farmer, never!” His eyes wild, Ned Tryon clutched the jug to his chest. “That was your ma’s dream, Lila, never mine and in the end it killed her. Remember the endless poverty and me trying to wrest a living from land that grew only rock and weeds? Remember your ma looking at the catalogs, her eyes bright, wishful for all the nice things I could never buy her? Remember how she just faded away, worn down by hard work and harder disappointments?” He lurched back toward the wagon. “For God’s sake, leave me be, child, and let me drink myself into blessed release.”
Lila bent her head and I heard her sob. I was of a mind to say something hard to her father, but he had put a thief in his mouth to steal his tongue and I might as well stand in a storm and chastise the wind.
I stood there, awkward and lost, looking at Lila, trying to find the right words. They didn’t come to me, so in the end I said: “I guess I better get to fixing that wagon tongue.”
The girl nodded, her tearstained eyes made wetter by the rain. “I’ll find you the wood and a hammer.”
Lila stepped to the back of the wagon and I followed. She rummaged under the canvas tarp and I got a chance to see what they were hauling. All of it—an organ, a dresser, a rocking chair, china cups and plates and a tarnished silver tea service—was suited to a lace-and-lilac parlor in Missouri but not the rawboned cow country south of the Red.
A plow was tied to the side of the wagon, its steel blade bright, the handles not honed to a honey color by sweat and toil, but still raw and pine yellow. This plow had not seen much work and had rested in a barn more often than it had dug furrows in the soil.
Lila handed me wood, nails and a hammer and I unhitched the oxen from the yoke and brought the broken end of the tongue back to the wagon.
Thunder rolled across the sky and the lashing rain grew heavier as I set about making the repair. I’m no great shakes as a carpenter, but after I splinted the tongue with the wood Lila had given me, I straightened up and figured I had done a fair to middling job.
My work wasn’t pretty, but the tongue held when I hitched up the team again, and that was what mattered.
Ned Tryon had found the oblivion he’d sought, lying unconscious under the meager shelter of a mesquite bush. Lila took the jug from his hands and asked me to help her father into the back of the wagon.
The man was barely capable of walking and I had to carry him most of the way. I laid him in the wagon and Lila covered him up with the tarp.
“Dusty,” she said when the job was done, “Pa didn’t mean all those things he said. Since Ma died he . . . he just hasn’t been himself.”
Well me, I let that go. I was in wild country with a girl, a drunk and a slow-moving ox wagon and there were Apaches in the hills. Right about then I didn’t feel much like talking, so all I said was: “Let’s get this wagon rolling.”
For all her fragile beauty, Lila was no blushing prairie flower. When I whipped the team into motion and set to pushing on a wheel, she got on another and pushed right along with me, her shoes and the bottom of her dress deep in the mud.
The straining oxen pulled the wagon free and I let them rest for a spell and gathered up my horse. I handed the reins to Lila. “You ride him,” I said. “I’ll guide the team.”
I didn’t want the wagon to get bogged down again and the girl must have understood, because she made no objection. Lila hiked up her dress, showing a powerful amount of pretty leg, and swung into the saddle.
She touched the straw bonnet tied to the saddle horn. “Is this for your best girl?”
I nodded. “Uh-huh. Her name’s Sally Coleman and her pa owns a spread right close to the SP Connected.”
Lila flashed her white smile. “Is she pretty?”
Again I nodded. “As a field of bluebonnets in spring.”
The girl frowned, then sniffed. “I never thought bluebonnets were particularly pretty flowers.”
I saw where this conversation was headed and changed the subject. “Lila,” I said quickly, “come dark we’ll have to find a place where we can hole up for the night. The Apaches are out and we could be in a hell of a fix.”
The girl kneed the black alongside me as I walked beside the plodding oxen. She glanced down at me and said: “They told us all that at Doan’s Crossing. But the Apaches won’t bother us. We mean them no harm.”
I shook my head at her. “Lila, to the Apache, everyone is an enemy. That’s why they’ve survived so long. There’s no word for friend in the Apache language. If they want to call somebody friend, and that’s a mighty rare occurrence, they use the Spanish word amigo. To them, you’re either an Apache or you ain’t, and if you ain’t, then you’re an enemy.”
I flicked the bullwhip over the backs of the oxen. “You may mean the Apaches no harm, but they mean you plenty.”
I wanted to tell her they’d go out of their way to capture a pretty woman, but I didn’t because for the first time I saw uncertainty in Lila’s eyes.
“Dusty,” she said, “do you think we’re in danger?”
“I do,” I replied, deciding not to spare her the truth. “In a heap of danger, and with this wagon and your pa, we’re fast running out of room on the dance floor.”
Lila opened her mouth to say something, changed her mind and looked around at the rain-shrouded landscape. “Are they out there?” she asked finally, waving her hand at the surrounding hills.
“Could be,” I said.
And a few moments later, as thunder crashed above us, I smelled the smoke.
Chapter 10
The smoke smell was fleeting and uncertain, scattered by the rain and the gusting wind.
It could mean that there was a farm or ranch nearby—but it could mean something else entirely and much less to my liking.
Ahead of us the trail curved around a low, rocky hogback, its narrow rifts and gullies choked with mesquite and scrub oak. Wildflowers, goldenrod and primroses mostly, peeped shyly from the wet grass between the hill and us, and off to the left cottonwoods spread their branches beside a fast-running wash.
I halted the oxen and studied the ridge of the hogback.
There, I saw it, a thin smear of smoke rising into the air, very faint and soon shredded apart by the breeze.
Lila kneed the black alongside me. “Dusty, what do you see?”
“Smoke,” I replied, “over yonder beyond the ridge of the hill.”
“Is it a town?” the girl asked, something akin to hope in her eyes.
I shook my head. “No, there’s no town there.” I didn’t want to scare her, so I said: “But there are small ranches scattered among these hills. It could be smoke from a cabin.” I looked up at her. “Climb down, Lila. I’m going to take me a look-see.”
The girl swung gracefully out of the saddle and handed me the reins. I glanced at the rocks crowning the ridge of the hogback. Even if the smoke turned out to be a wildfire sparked by the lightning that now and then forked from the sky, there could be a sheltered place up there to spend the night out of the wind and rain and away from the prying eyes of any passing Apache.
I swung into the
saddle and slid the Winchester from the boot. Only then did I ride toward the ridge, my eyes restlessly scanning the land around me. The slope of the hogback was less steep than it had seemed from a distance and I was soon among the rocks, here and there stunted cedar and post oak writhing like the tormented damned between them.
Riding even more warily now, the Winchester across the saddle horn, I cleared the rocks and rode to the top of the grassy slope on the other side.
Now I saw what had caused the smoke and it brought me no comfort.
Below, too narrow to be called a valley, a gulch divided the hogback from another low hill beyond. A stream ran along the bottom of the gulch, rocks scattered along its sandy banks and on the slope opposite grew mesquite and a scattering of post oak and cottonwood.
A dugout cabin had been carved into the hill and to its right lay a ramshackle pole corral and small sod barn.
All this I saw in an instant, but what riveted my attention was the man who was suspended by his feet from the low branch of one of the cottonwoods growing by the creek.
A fire still glowed a dull crimson under his head, and a thin tendril of smoke rose from the dying coals. The body swayed slightly in the wind, the branch creaking, and whoever the man was, he had died hard and painfully slow.
I studied the land around me and only when I decided no one was there did I ride down the hill. The Apaches had been here until very recently, too recently for my liking, and I sensed danger, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.
Lila was still with the wagon, and vulnerable, but I had to take a chance on her not being seen. Later we could bring the wagon here, going on the assumption that lightning never strikes twice in the same place and that the Apaches would have moved on.
It was a gamble, but since the cards were stacked against me, it was a gamble I knew I had to take. It was better to spend the night here than out in the open.
With a surprised jolt of recognition, I discovered I knew the man whose brains had been slowly roasted over the fire. Even though his mouth was horribly twisted by his last, agonized scream, there was no mistaking the freckles and what was left of the bright red hair of Shorty Cummings.
Blood and Gold Page 9
