Ramrod

by Short, Luke;

  The new sound came to him distinctly; he recognized it immediately. It was the faint sound of a gun coming onto cock. Without looking Dave lunged for the horses, and he had not taken two steps before the sharp flat crack of a rifle shattered the silence. The horse ahead of him and in line with him screamed thinly and reared up, and then its hind legs seemed to cave and it came over backward. Dave tried to dodge him and could not, and ran glancing into him, and was knocked savagely to the ground so that his breath was driven from him.

  He rolled and came to his knees, gagging for breath, and heard the sound of the panicked thrashing of the downed horse behind him drowned by the second shot. Now he lunged for the protection of the other horse, which was plunging wildly and throwing his head back, trying to free himself from the picket rope.

  The third shot—this one calculated—caught the second horse, knocking him sideways into Dave, and again Dave went down, rolling away from the horse as it crashed down on its side. He half crawled, half dived for the shelter of the horse, and hit the ground with a violence that jarred him to his bones.

  The horse lay on its side, and he flattened himself along its back, face in the dirt, and dragged great gusts of choking dust into his mouth. The horse was kicking rhythmically as the next shot jolted into it, and Dave grabbed its mane and pulled himself closer and buried his face in the dirt, trying with a sick desperation to get his breath. The warm butt plate of his gun, which he still held, bit into his palm so that it hurt, and he smelled the sweet, rank odor of the horse’s mane as he sucked in great gusts of air.

  The horse was still when the next shot came, and he jarred heavily under the impact. Dave moved closer against it, and all he knew or cared about then was that the dead horse was between the rifleman and himself. He lay there and got his breath, his face flat against the ground and the mane coarse and sharp in his mouth, and now the thin chill danger of his position came to him as his panic faded.

  He rolled slowly over on his side, and the next shot, kicking gravel behind him, drove him flat against the warm back of the horse again. He looked carefully around and saw the bank behind him was too steep to climb without spending fatal seconds.

  He would have to get out of here, he knew. If the rifleman kept him down, it would be only minutes before he maneuvered around in back of him or to the side for an open shot. Dave weighed his chance coldly and knew he must take it, and he waited patiently for the next shot. The interval needed by the rifleman to lever in a shell was all he needed. The shot came, then, tentatively under the heck of the horse, and Dave came to his knees and vaulted the horse and dove sprawling for the protection of the second downed horse, lying now near the pool yards away. He briefly saw the rifleman’s hat outlined above the rim of the depression as he dove for the cover of the horse. The rifle cracked again, and too late. It was wet here, and he felt the warm blood of the horse seeping through his shirt as he lay there.

  He was cornered, he knew, and the rifleman would not wait for darkness. Ivey had rigged a simple ambush, and he had walked blandly into it, and now he was cornered. Once he had accepted that, it was easier to think. He lay with his back against the horse’s back and watched in both directions, and it came to him, as the minutes ribboned away and darkness lowered, that there was only one thing to do. He could not lie here and wait for the rifleman to circle him and finish this. Moving, any kind of moving, was better than that.

  He felt no anger now, only a murderous and implacable urgency. He put two shells in his gun, so that all the chambers were full, and observed now that the dusk was fast deepening. He raised his foot above the back of the horse, and no shot acknowledged it. Maybe the rifleman was biding his time or was moving around the rim.

  Dave did not wait longer. He gathered himself and lunged to his feet and came over the horse, and then he saw to his left the quietly stalking figure of a man on the rim, black in the dusk. He cut toward him, running, firing twice in succession. He saw the man’s rifle come to his shoulder, saw the flash, and then something hit his body with stunning force and knocked him sprawling to the ground. He came to his knees quickly, running again, and he saw the man shoot again and this time he shot in answer, and the man went down out of sight beyond the rim. Dave was on the slope now, racing up it, and he knew that unless his lucky shot had killed the rifleman, he would be waiting for him to top the rise. He did not check his stride as he approached the rim, only bent his body a little. And then, his legs driving him steadily up the slope, he dove on his belly over the rim, his gun held ahead of him.

  The blast of the rifle was almost in his face. He was blinded by its flash and the sting of the gravel thrown in his face by the bullet, and he landed heavily on his belly. He shot blindly then, emptying his gun with closed eyes, and he cursed doggedly and furiously. And nothing answered him. He lay still a bare second, blinking the hot, smarting tears out of his eyes, and slowly, as if seen through deep water, the shape of a man lying on his face not six feet away from him took shape in his vision.

  He pushed to his knees and half achieved it, and his arm seemed to give way and he pitched forward on his face. This angered him, and he tried again, and this time he could not push himself up, and now he thought of this with a kind of startled anger. He lay there a moment, watching the man who did not move, and he saw it was Red Cates.

  Now he put his attention on rising, on moving his arm, and he found that he could not. The arm of the hand that held his gun was strong; his left arm was numb and useless. He sat up now, feeling his chest and belly warm with a wet stickiness, and he put his hand inside his shirt. Now the ache was here, slow at first as he felt his shoulder. There was a steady seep of blood there that startled him, and the ache was increasing to a hot and searing throb in his whole shoulder.

  He rose now, and stood unsteadily, feet planted wide, and felt the flow of the blood down his side and his leg, and he was suddenly furiously thirsty. He went over to Red and looked down at him a moment, and then turned away and went down the slope toward the pool. Oddly, he was having trouble making his knees take his weight at each step. When he got to the pool, he knelt and drank and, his body tilted forward now, felt the flow of blood trickle down his neck into the water.

  He knelt there then, and again felt his shoulder, and this time it was as sore to his touch as the end of an exposed nerve. The pain of it shocked him into an awareness that his blood was steadily soaking his clothes, and that he must stop it. He tried to rip off his shirt and could not move enough without stirring the pain into something raging and sickening, and still kneeling, he beat his mind for some way to stop the bleeding.

  He rose now, aware of his own unsteadiness and faintness, and tramped past Lea and the two horses to Lea’s bedroll. Inside, as he expected, was a sack of grub. And in the sack was a smaller sack of flour. He plunged his hand into its cool whiteness and scooped up a handful and plastered it on the spot below the collarbone where the open mouth of his wound was seeping blood.

  He looked about him then for a bandage, and then he thought of Red’s bandage, clean and white across his nose. Picking up the sack of flour, he trudged back to Red, and now felt a weariness that stopped him twice with its leaden weight. Once beside Red, he knelt and rolled him over and ripped the bandage from his face, and then plastered great handfuls of flour on his wound. Much of it clung to the blood and checked its further flow, and when he was certain of this he plastered the bandage over the wound. Then he ripped Red’s shirt from his back and stuffed it atop the bandage, so that it made a great thick bulk over his shoulder when his sodden shirt was buttoned again.

  Now he sat down, his back to Red, and put his good arm on his knees and his head upon his arm, and when he closed his eyes, the whole world of dancing lights behind his lids seemed to spin and whirl. His shoulder ached now with a viciousness that he fought with a thin and wicked anger.

  Behind the pain, he tried to think. The first job before him was to reach his horse. The second was to get aboard him, which seeme
d a monumental task in his mind now. The third was to get some attention for his hurt, and he thought immediately and unswervingly of Rose Leland.

  He gathered the deep threads of his will in one assault that put him on his feet and sent him pitching out into the night, and it carried him to his horse, at whose feet he fell. He did not know how long he lay there, but he was wakened by his horse nosing his leg. When he moved, his whole body was afire, and he ground his teeth together and lunged to a sitting position. From there, he maneuvered his horse around and got hold of a stirrup and fought himself to his feet, leaning heavily against the saddle.

  Now, when rest seemed to do no good, he plotted out his try and began it. It was easy to grab the horn, easy to put a foot in the stirrup. But his legs would not lift him. He tried once, and almost fell. The second time was fruitless, and he wondered, resting afterward, if he had not tried in his mind only, and not physically. He was finding it hard to remember things now that had happened only seconds before. His horse was restive, moving in a slow circle that seemed destined to push him over backwards.

  Finally, when he felt his hands slipping from the horn, he knew that he must make it now or lie here until help came and it would not, he knew. He summoned up a kind of desperation that drove him up, knotting his weary legs with cramp, and finally pitched on his belly across the saddle. His arm rammed into the horn now, and the pain it roused made him cry out.

  It was only this pain, driving him to a frenzy, that gave him strength to drag his leg over and slack exhausted into the saddle, beaten and sick and sweating. And it was in this condition that he turned his horse back onto the trail and settled down for what must come.

  15

  Young Link Thoms was up before daylight and made a quick check of the brush corral where the half dozen horses were penned. Afterward, he had cold grub and tepid coffee, while squatted over the coals of last night’s fire which still held a little heat. He wore a blanket thrown over his shoulders against the morning chill that lay heavy over the horse camp, and so fortified, he rolled his first cigarette of the morning and was content. His scout had turned out better than he’d hoped for, since six of the seven horses in Connie’s string, which he had been ordered to bring in, were now here in the brush corral. The seventh—that golden bay Connie had never liked so well—was probably up in the salt meadows above the foothills, and he anticipated hell’s own trouble in catching him. None of this had been exactly easy, Link reflected, and would have been impossible if he had not kept his eyes open these past weeks. For Connie’s string, all except two, had been turned loose to summer grass in the Federals, and they liked their freedom.

  He finished his smoke and pinched it out and threw it in the fire. Rolling his blankets, he cached them and the rest of his meager gear underneath a tree, and then went over to his horse, which was on picket.

  At bare dawn he left camp, shivering a little in the chill morning and whistling, too, because it helped against loneliness. For Link Thoms was younger by far than any hand at D Bar, and he had not yet earned the right to call himself their equal. His apprenticeship was hard and he was cheerful about it because the events of the Bench never troubled him. And like all young men he had a dream. Some day, so the dream ran, Red Cates would have run enough cattle on the side to justify his own outfit, and he would pull out of D Bar. Ben would be old by that time, and he would confer with Connie before any move was made. And then one morning when Connie called the crew together for the day’s work, she would give them their orders and then say, “By the way, boys, you’ll get your orders from Link from now on.”

  It was just a dream, and sometimes young Link changed Connie’s words about, or put the setting in a different place or different time, but Connie was always in it and she was always his boss. This morning, thinking of it, the dream was not perfect. It hadn’t been for days now, ever since the afternoon he had hauled the Mexican woman and some of Connie’s stuff over to 66. Bunkhouse talk, which he had already learned to discount, had it that Connie and Ben had quarreled. Nothing was perfect, Link knew, but he could not envision a catastrophe such as this. He had already made it right in his dream: Connie and her father had quarreled and Connie had moved out, but when a sickness laid Ben low, Connie came back to stay, and 66 was graded down to a line camp. It was always Connie and D Bar, because Link, with the straight unquestioning wisdom of his years, loved them both, and Connie especially.

  He cut up through the lifting hill and took the trail into Hondo Canyon. Deep into it, the trail cut close to the side and began to lift. Link’s black wanted to stop for a blow, but Link touched spurs to him and swore mildly, knowing to a nicety the difference between his horse’s need and its sense of humor. The shelving trail rose and, presently, skirted the shoulder of rock on Link’s right. He looked down into the dark, steep-sided canyon and saw on the far slope the faint gray shape of a jackrabbit humping awkwardly among the brush. The day was coming reluctantly, and Link looked back once to see if there was color in the sunrise, and saw there was not.

  Where the trail achieved the level on top, Link left it and clung to the lip of the canyon, and was soon in timber. He rode into it, picking with a sure knowledge the trails that ribboned it, and finally came out in midmorning to the open expanse of the salt meadows. These were a series of small parks that raised a salt grass all animals liked. Link rode through them, methodically examining the two springs in the middle park and a seep in the far one for horse tracks. Besides some deer and cattle tracks, there were the tracks of only one horse, and it unshod. The bay had shoes, and it was therefore evident to Link that he had guessed wrong in this instance. The bay had moved on up.

  He sat there on his horse at the seep in a deep, a profound disgust, and knew what he would have to do. He couldn’t leave the horses down below in the corral, waterless for another night. Since he had them, he might as well take them on in and come back for the bay.

  Accordingly, he started back down the way he had come, grudging every minute of his misspent time. It was cool here in the timber, however, and he soon forgot his impatience and was content with the present.

  He was almost down out of timber sometime in early afternoon when he heard the bawling of cattle. He reined up to listen, and judged the cattle were in herd and being driven. Both Bell and D Bar had cattle in the mountains now, but they would stay here for another month until the first snows. He rolled himself a cigarette, speculating idly on the identity of the cattle, and their bawling was moving slowly down the slope off to his left. And then, starting as a whisper and growing ever louder, was the rumble of the herd beginning to run. Link, cigarette halfway to his mouth, sat motionless, wondering about that. You didn’t run the tallow off cattle if you were driving them out to sell, he knew.

  Now the sound was almost in front of him, hidden from sight by the timber, and a curiosity and uneasiness came to him. He halted an uncertain moment longer, and then put his horse around and cut over toward the edge of the timber. The rumble of the running cattle was almost dead ahead of him, and some urgency made him spur his horse and lift it into a dead run through the timber.

  And then, as the timber began to thin out, Link, by lying low in the saddle and peering under the trees, saw the herd at last and they were at a dead run. And they were streaking for the trail down into Hondo Canyon, the yelling of the punchers hazing them on.

  Link pulled over swiftly now and climbed a rise where the timber was sparse, and he had a look at the head of the trail, a deep uneasiness within him. That was dangerous.

  Then he saw the herd, shaped like a rippling brindle wedge, pour onto the flat at a dead run, heading straight for the trail and hazed into it by a pair of punchers. On one side of them lay the rising shoulder of rock, on the other the canyon’s edge. Link stood in his stirrups, involuntary protest in his face. The brown wedge kept driving into the narrowing head of the trail, and then Link saw it all happen. One side of the herd, as if sheared off, began to fall off sideways into the canyon
and disappear from view. But the rest kept on, jamming into the narrowing trail, and the farther they got the more the wedge was narrowed by the cattle overside. They hit the trail now at full tilt, and the leaders tried to stop and were bowled over, and the pile-up on the trail began; the following cattle, flowing blindly around them, seemed to float off the edge and disappear below into the canyon.

  It was all over in seconds, and only a scattering of cattle in the rear, brought to a halt by the heap of bawling downed cattle that choked the head of the trail, shied off and fought its way back. Two punchers came into sight now, and rode over to the edge of the canyon and held their nervous horses there long enough to look over.

  Link Thoms knew the thin cold touch of fear, then. By instinct, he seemed to understand that he had seen something not meant for anyone to see. And yet, not knowing whose cattle these were or who the punchers were, the wanton cruelty of it enraged him. He pulled back into shelter that would screen him and tied his horse and set off at a run through the timber, dodging from tree to tree, trying to keep to cover, and the distant bawling of the hurt cattle rose in an insane chorus from the canyon’s depths.

  At last, clinging to the timber where it edged nearest the flat, Link came to the last trees, and now he crawled on his stomach up to a vantage place behind a tree and looked out. Some of the cattle, a pitiful handful, were in front of him, their heads turned toward the canyon listening uneasily to the din. They blocked his view and Link moved over, and then the two mounted punchers were in plain sight.

  They were Tom Peebles and Bailey, and the remaining cattle were all freshly vented and branded Circle 66.

  Peebles rolled a smoke without looking at Bailey, and only when he lighted it did his eyes lift to the Indian’s face. It was sober, tired-looking, but then that was natural. Bill Schell had been in such a hurry to get this done while Nash was away that he’d ordered them to ride half the night, and at daylight they had started the drive from Relief.