When we rode in, I noticed that every man of the crew was wide awake. Wyatt Shafter, propped against his saddle with a carbine in his hands, said: “We heard shootin’.”
“That’s McAllister most likely,” I said. “We split up.”
The crew greeted the stranger laconically and to judge by their facial expressions they did not think I had been very clever to find him and bring him back. Mr. Smith fed him somewhat reluctantly. The girls stayed under the wagon, apparently lost in sleep. The stranger ate and drank with enthusiasm, but I noticed that he wisely did not over-eat. While this was going on, I watched the north-east and, after a while, I saw a light wisp of dust.
A short while after, to my relief, McAllister rode in on a thoroughly bushed horse. In answer to our enquiries, he told us briefly that he’d had a mite of Indian trouble, but nothing to write home about. There were only a few of them and they’d been on tired horses. Then he saw the stranger.
He stopped and he smiled. The stranger looked at him with some apprehension. I did not have to be told that this was one of the meetings that the man had been reluctant to make.
“Hello, Charlie,” McAllister said. “Where did you come from?”
At that moment, I could only compare the stranger with a man who had walked unexpectedly into a stone wall. He had the same stunned, amazed, hurt look. At the sight of McAllister, he had quickly gained his feet. He now shifted his weight from one to the other of them.
“Mr. McAllister,” he said.
“Boys,” said McAllister, obviously relishing the moment, “this is Drunk Charlie.”
There was not a man there who had not heard of Drunk Charlie. I doubt there was a man on the frontier who had not. I won’t take time out here to relate the whole of his misbegotten and colorful life. Suffice it to say that Drunk Charlie was the son of a white man and a Mohave Indian mother. He had been caught and raised by the Chiricahua Apaches from the age of two or so. He had, so it was said, the nastiest habits of all three races. No Indian wanted any part of him, except maybe his scalp. The whites only tolerated him for his superb skill in tracking. When sober there was scarcely a man in the west who could best him at the game. That was when McAllister had gotten to know him, while scouting against the Apaches. There had been a later acquaintance too. That was when McAllister had pitted his own skills against Charlie and had tracked him down after a particularly brutal killing in Fort Sumpter. Charlie had carved up a soldier and an Indian scout with a butcher’s knife. He had fled into the sierra and McAllister had gone after him, run him to ground and brought him in. The civilized world was all set to hang him when he escaped. That would be three or four years back.
While I knew this side of the story, I doubt anybody else in the crew did. I awaited with interest to see what McAllister would do.
“From the Comanches,” Charlie said. I had the feeling that he would not be as reluctant to answer McAllister’s questions as he had been mine.
“And what were you doin’ with the Comanches?”
“It’s more what they were doin’ with me.
“Such as?”
Charlie pulled up his tattered shirt and revealed his hard torso. There were many old scars on it—knife wounds, bullet wounds and the rest. But it was not those which caught and held our horrified attention. It was the marks which had been put there in the last week. I had heard that Charlie could deal out torture, but now I knew that he could also take it. The sight of his body was enough to turn a man sick to his stomach. They had used firebrands and hot iron on him. They had done so for a considerable time. There was scarcely an inch of that brown body which was unmarked. Charlie himself must have been made of iron to have withstood such treatment. When Charlie dropped his shirt over the sight, I was relieved.
He stared back at us stoically.
McAllister said: “They did a thorough job.”
One of the crew said: “Christ.”
Mr. Smith knocked out his pipe and said: “They’s animals.”
“Charlie,” McAllister said, “I’ll hire you thirty a month and found. How does that strike you? You chowse cattle, you ride and you use a gun. You do exactly as I tell you, no more an’ no less.”
Charlie nodded. “All right, Mr. McAllister.”
Our trail-boss told one of the boys to show our new recruit his string of horses. A carbine was found for him on the wagon. He was given a pocketful of shells for it. McAllister found a spare pair of moccasins for him, a blanket. He was given the saddle and bridle the dead Horace had been using. The expression on Charlie’s face did not change. I don’t know how long he had been at that water-hole without food, but I reckon it must have been several days. He caught up a horse, threw a saddle on it and went straight to work.
“Watch him, Matt,” McAllister said to me. “He’s the meanest bastard in creation. But we need him.”
I asked about the Indians who had jumped him and he grinned. “They didn’t jump me, old timer. I jumped them. Frightened them out of their goddam lives.” He would tell me no more.
Well, I suppose I dozed a little during the hot hours of the day, but not much. By the time night dropped down on us, I was ready for sleep, but instead was throwing a hull on my night horse and wondering if the Indians would creep in on us during the night. The girls were as bright as crickets, laughing with the boys like women happy to be back with their own kind. Mr. Smith had them up on the wagon with him and we hit the trail again. McAllister had decided that it would be too difficult watering the cows at the sink I had found, but he had found water of a kind to the north-east and that was the way we headed. We would, he said, reach the water sometime after midnight and would camp near, making no attempt this night to go any further. Resting in the cool would give the cows and horses some strength back, for they had all suffered over the past few days. The boys, too, would maybe catch up on some of their sleep. He wanted everything and everyone fresh for a fast push in the next few days.
Perfido rode point. I joined the swing, while Charlie and McAllister had roving commissions to keep their eyes sharp for Indians. McAllister’s own Indian instincts were working overtime and I guess he had a hunch that we would be hit tonight or at dawn. I think that was the real reason why he decided to stop at water. If you had to fight, it was best to fight with all the water you could want.
The cows stepped out pretty briskly that night. I think they had already sniffed the water. Old Carlos knew for sure. He put his head up, snorting and sniffing at the night air and he hit that fast walk of his that he could keep up all night.
Mr. Smith stayed really close to the moving column and every now and then I would catch the sound of the girls’ voices as they talked with Smith. They made a pleasant and strangely inappropriate sound. After a couple of hours, all visibility seemed to desert us and quite soon it started to rain lightly. We reached for our fishes. McAllister and Charlie came in closer, knowing they could do no good in the darkness away from the column. They might ride unexpectedly into Indians and get their throats cut out there.
As McAllister had promised, we reached water at about one in the morning. The same light rain was still falling and we slowly eased a bunch of twenty or thirty cows down to the water to drink. There were some rocks near the water. We used them and ropes tied together to make a temporary corral for the horses. It was almost three o’clock by the time we had watered all the cows and horses. McAllister had intended to move away from the water a mile or so, but when it came on heavily to rain, he changed his mind and had a shelter erected against the wagon for the girls. We tied our tarps together and made some kind of shelter for ourselves on the other side of the wagon. McAllister was very concerned to keep up the strength of the horses and they were not going to fill their bellies while they were caught up in a corral. So he took a gamble and put them out on grass. There were too many of them to hobble or tie so he put an armed guard on them all night. We were still thin on the ground where men were concerned, but it was a precaution that had to b
e taken. As luck would have it, I got the straw for the horse guard. Seeing me go on guard, old Jove threw it down in bucketfuls. In spite of the fish I wore, I was soaked through to the skin in minutes. So there I was on a moonless night, guarding horses I couldn’t see and sitting a wet saddle. I was without doubt the unhappiest rider in the world.
Eleven
DAWN DID NOT find me any happier. The reason? Why, old McAllister with the crew as tired as they were and with no men to spare had decided he could only ask his partner and nobody else to do an all-night stint.
When he came out to tell me to stand to just before dawn, I nearly took him for an Indian and came within a hair’s breadth of denting his skull with the butt of my Spencer. When I saw it was him, I wished I had.
“You son-of-a-bitch,” I said, “you just lost yourself a partner. Pulling a mean trick like this!”
“I never knew any other man who could keep guard all night and get through a day’s work after,” he said.
“A lot of damned excuses will get you plumb nowhere,” I said. I would have said a deal more, but just then there arose a cacophony of sound which would have scared the daylights out of the devil himself. Even old Remington nearly took leave of his skin. My night horse, good as he was, nearly stood on his head with fright.
I heard McAllister shout: “Stay with ’em, Matt.”
Then every horse near us took off. I heard the shrill screams of the Indians and then Old Patch was running.
Even as that wild run started, I remembered thinking that never in my life had I heard the order to stay with horses when they were being lifted by Indians. Horses are not like cattle. They do not necessarily stay together. They are apt to dart away from the edges of the bunch. There are always bunch quitters among a remuda of horses.
The second thing that came into my mind was that McAllister was still with me, turning his horse to the far side of the bunch and laying on the quirt. What the hell, I thought, when did a trail-boss ever leave his herd for horses?
Gray light suddenly revealed the remuda to me, strung out in every direction, necks down, eyes rolling, manes and tails flowing, kicking up a spray of mud, and looking as if they would run till kingdom come.
I looked back and wished I had not.
I glimpsed the wagon and the crew piling into leather. I saw the herd coming to its feet in one great heave, milling every which way, making up its mind which way to go when the panic really set in, which would be in a couple of seconds. I also saw the colors of the Indians, painted men and painted ponies. And they were coming on fast. The impression I gained was that they were all after the horses and were ignoring the cattle, but I could have been wrong.
I could not hear much above the din of the stampede, but I thought I heard the popping of guns. Again I could have been mistaken.
I concentrated on keeping Old Patch on his feet and staying in the saddle. The pace we hit sure called for concentration. But, I have to admit, a large part of my mind was back there with those Comanches.
Now, this was not the first time McAllister and I have had a bunch of horses lifted from us by the red gentlemen of the plains. No matter who had done it, Comanches, Kiowas or Cheyenne, there had been the same kind of a pattern to the action. Except when one lone Kiowa drifted a caballada away from us in Kansas one time. But that’s another story and I’m too ashamed to tell it.
The pattern usually was that a few horse-thieves, say two or three, would get the horses on the move and then the scattered animals would be gathered up by the main party of tribesmen a few miles from the camp where the horses had been. So, I reasoned, behind us were a few Indians and ahead of us were a sight more. Which, as you may imagine, did not do my peace of mind a whole lot of good. No, sir, a couple of minutes into that crazy run and my morale was about rock bottom.
I looked across at McAllister and saw that he was coming in across the front of the herd at an angle and I thought: My God, he’s trying to turn ’em. He’s trying to head ’em off from the boys up ahead.
I reckoned he couldn’t do it. They were too scared and they were going too hard. The Indians behind were still yelling their heads off to keep the animals on the move. I counted three of them. Then I saw another rider farther back and coming on fast, overtaking the Indians. This looked mighty like Drunk Charlie to me, but I couldn’t believe my eyes.
McAllister started firing his gun under the leaders’ noses. They darted away to the left and began to run west. Which could not be bad. I slowed Old Patch for a few jumps and tried to turn the drag of the bunch. This brought me mighty close to the three pursuing Indians. So I thought it was time to start a little shooting myself. Not that I do so well with a gun from the saddle of a racing bronc. Anyway, I unlimbered that old Colt of mine, cocked and sent a shot roughly in their direction. It took a couple more shots before the message got through properly to them. I could see that they did not have a firearm among them and that gave me a little courage.
Meanwhile Charlie was blazing away like a maniac and my real fear was that he would hit one of the horses or me—and the latter, as I’m sure you know, was more important to me. Either he had luck or he was good at shooting from the back of a running horse, because one of those braves looked as if he had been plucked from his saddle. He hit the dirt and lay still. The other two could take a hint as well as the next man. They turned their ponies east and quirted them off in that direction.
I rode clean around the drag of our horses and found myself riding towards a party of some twenty or thirty Indians.
Charlie must have swerved his horse after me. He came alongside me with a flurry of kicked up dirt and bawled at me: “Start shooting, damn it.”
I thought: Who the hell does he think he is? But I piled out of the saddle too, heaving my Spencer from its sheath, and dropped to one knee beside him.
For a couple of minutes, I suppose, the field was ours as they say; though all the time I knelt there I was thinking that very shortly it was going to be the reverse. I started levering and triggering as fast as I knew how. Suddenly, it seemed desperately important that I knock over as many Indians as I could in the shortest possible time. Maybe in the short-term that was good thinking. We certainly poured some lead into them at a distance at which not even I could miss. How many we hit, I’ll never know. But the effect was dramatic. That bunch of Indians who were pretty sure a moment before that they were going to have their hands on as nice a bunch of horses as they ever took, were suddenly men riding in fear of their lives.
They did what anybody else under the circumstances would have done. They ducked out of there. They spun their horses on the spot, like nobody but Comanches can, turned around and high-tailed it.
Charlie must have been through this kind of thing more times than I’d had hot dinners. He didn’t utter another word, but simply reloaded his rifle, shoved it away into the boot and vaulted into the saddle. He sent the animal running after McAllister and the horses. As I had no wish to be left solo on the plain with a large number of wild Indians not too far away, I did likewise, mounted Old Patch and rode.
McAllister had managed somehow to turn the remuda back for the wagon. We followed hard and pretty soon we could see that the boys had managed to contain the cows. The critters were moving around uneasily, lowing and bellowing, but they were held and knew it.
I heard McAllister yelling: “Fill the bastards up with water, boys.”
I turned for the wagon.
When I got there, Mr. Smith was standing guard with his ubiquitous shotgun and the girls were standing there all bright-eyed and excited.
“Oh, Mr. Chisholm,” said Janet, the redhead, “that was wonderful.”
I looked at her in amazement.
“No, ma’am,” I said, “it was terrible.” McAllister decided that the rain had made it possible to go on without further rest.
“This rain,” he said, “has saved the day for us. Enough fell last night to get us across the Plains.”
“It all fell o
n me,” I said.
Mr. Smith handed me a steaming cup of coffee. I sipped it appreciatively.
“You sure showed them Indians, Mr. McAllister,” said Janet. She seemed to have formed a one-woman admiration committee.
McAllister smirked and said: “Yes, ma’am, I sure did.” When I looked at him accusingly, he met my stare with a boldfaced grin. Yes, I reckoned I really hated that man.
He said to me: “You know this ain’t the time to come beggin’ cups of coffee off the cook, Matthew. Your place is out there with the herd.”
I said: “You sure you don’t want to clap a hull on me and ride me, too?”
As I walked away to my horse, I heard him say to the girls: “You’ll have to overlook that kind of thing from my partner, ladies. He sure is a mighty moody man. You can’t imagine what I’ve had to put up with over the years.”
That day we pushed on without sight of the Indians. Drunk Charlie was pretty pleased with himself. He was so pleased at having paid off some of his debt to the Indians that he went about with a kind of faraway look in his eyes and a silly grin on his face.
That night when we hit the blankets (just before I fell asleep on my feet, according to my estimation), McAllister said to me: “You watch that Charlie, Matt. He ain’t no good to man nor beast.”
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