Killoe (1962)

by L'amour, Louis

  Glancing into the basin below, I saw no one. Only the cattle, standing now with their heads up, staring, nostrils distended.

  Grinning, I lowered my rifle, and, knowing how a voice can carry in that still air, I called out.

  “You boys scared of something? A body’d think you all stepped on a hot rock!”

  “Dan? Dan Killoe?” That was Zeb’s voice.

  “If it ain’t,” I yelled back, “then Pa fed me for a long time for nothing!”

  They came out in the open then, and I saw that the woman on the horse was Rose Sandy, and the men were Zeb Lambert, Jim Poor, and Miguel. And then another came from the brush, and it was Tom Sandy!

  I let out a whoop and started to go down the mountain, then remembered that sheep.

  “Jim! Come on up here! I’ve killed me a bighorn!”

  He clambered up the slope. “You’re a better butcher than I am, Jim, so skin him out and I’ll talk to those boys and then come on up and help you pack it in.”

  The horse on which Rose was riding was the one Zebony had taken from that Indian he rode off behind. He had been well outside the circle of the fighting before his battle with the Comanche ended, and by the time he started back the rain was pouring down and the fighting was about over.

  The country was covered with Comanches and Comancheros, so he had found a place where a notch cut into the river bank and concealed himself there with the horse. He had put in a wet and miserable night, but at daybreak he saw some cattle to the south and started around to gather them, and then he met Rose and Tom Sandy.

  Miguel was with them, and in bad shape. He had been captured by the Indians, had killed his captors and escaped, but had been wounded again. These, though, were merely flesh wounds, and he had recovered quickly in the succeeding days.

  Banding together, they had rounded up what strays they could find and started off to the northwest, heading toward a limestone sink Miguel knew of. There they had found water and some friendly Lipans, who traded some corn and seeds they had gathered for a steer.

  Twenty miles west they had come upon Jim Poor. He was standing beside a horse with a broken leg … he had ducked to the shelter of the river bank, but caught a horse whose owner had been shot, and when the shooting died down, believing everyone in the camp was dead, he had started west alone.

  Nine days later we reached El Paso, a small town of one-story adobe houses, most of it lying on the Mexican side of the river. On the north side of the river there were several groups of settlements, the largest being Coon’s Rancho and Magoffinsille, the two being about a mile and a half apart. There was a third settlement, about a mile from Magoffinsville, around another ranch.

  Zebony came to me after we had found shelter and had our small herd, once more led by Old Brindle, gathered in a pasture near the town.

  “Dan, what are we going to do?”

  “What we started to do,” I said. “At least, I am. I’m going on, and I’m going to find us an outfit, and I’m going to use what cattle we have to start a ranch.”

  “‘And then?”

  “Why, then I’m going hunting. I’m going hunting for a man with a spider scar, a man named Felipe Soto.”

  Pausing for a second, I considered the situation. Around me I had a lot of good folks, and they had come west trusting to work for my father and myself, and it was up to me to see they made out. Yet there was scarcely more than fifty dollars among the lot of us, and cattle that we dearly needed. And to go on, we must have horses, gear, and supplies of all kinds.

  Ahead of us lay miles of Apache country, and where we would settle would probably be Apache country too. Being a slow man to anger, the rage against Soto and his Comancheros had been building up in me, and I feared it.

  There was in me a quality I had never trusted. A quiet sort of man, and scarcely twenty-three, I liked to work hard and enjoyed the pleasure of company, yet deep within me there was a kind of fury that scared me. Often I’d had to fight it down, and I did not want the name of being a dangerous man—that is for very young boys to want, or older men who have never grown up. Yet it was in me, though few of those about me knew it.

  Pa knew—he had been with me that time in San Antonio; and Zebony knew, for he had been with me in Laredo.

  And now I could feel it mounting. Pa was dead, cut down in the prime of life, and there were the others, good men all. They were men who rode for the brand, who gave their lives because of their loyalty and sense of rightness.

  Within me I could feel the dull fury growing, something I had felt before. It would mount and mount until I no longer thought clearly, but thought on of what must be done. When those furies were on me there as no fear in me, nor was there reason, or anything but the driving urge to seek out my enemies.

  My senses became super-sharp, my heart seemed to slow its beat, my breath seemed slower, I walked with careful step and looked with different eyes. At such times I would become utterly ruthless, completely relentless. And I did not like it.

  It was the main reason that I rarely wore a handgun. Several times the only thing that had saved me was the fact that I carried no gun and could not do what I wished.

  Twice in my life I had felt these terrible furies come over me, and each time it left me shaken, and swearing it must not happen again.

  Now there were other things to consider. We must find horses, a wagon, and the necessary supplies for the rest of our trip. Our herd was pitifully small, but it could grow.

  We had two young bulls and about twenty head of cows, mostly young stuff. The rest were steers, and a source of immediate profit, even if their present value might be small.

  Some of the people at Magoffinsville preferred to call their town Franklin. Others were already calling the town on the American side E1 Paso del Norte, but most still referred to the three towns by their separate names. At Magoffinsville I tied the line-back dun at the rail in front of James Wiley Magoffin’s place and went in. Zebony Lambert and Zeno Yearling were with me.

  Magoffin was a Kentuckian who had come to the area thirteen or fourteen years earlier and had built a home. Then he erected stores and warehouses around a square and went into business.

  When I walked through that door, I knew there was little that was respectable in my appearance. My razor had been among the things lost in the attack, and I had not shaved in days. My hat was a beat-up black, fiat-crowned, fiat-brimmed item with a bullet hole through the crown. I wore a worn, fringed buckskin shirt and shotgun chaps, also fringed. My boots were Spanish style, but worn and down at heel. The two men with me looked little better.

  “Mr. Magoffin,” I said, “the Comancheros took my herd. We’re the Kaybar brand, moving west from the Cowhouse to new range northwest of here, and we’re broke. We came into town with only our women and children riding, and the rest of us afoot.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “What do you want?”

  “A dozen horses, one wagon, supplies for seventeen people for two weeks.”

  His eyes were steady on me, then he glanced at Zebony and Zeno Yearly.

  “Women, you say?”

  “‘Yes, sir. The wives of two of my men, the widow of one, and there’s five children, and a single girl. She’s from New Mexico.”

  “Mind if I ask her name?”

  “Conchita McCrae.”

  He glanced over my shoulder toward the door, and I felt the hackles rise slowly on the back of my neck. Turning slowly, I saw Felipe Soto standing there, three of his men behind him. My fist balled and I swung.

  He had expected anything but that. Words … perhaps followed by gunplay, but the Texan or New Mexican rarely resorted to his fists. It was not, in those days, considered a gentleman’s way of settling disputes, while a gun was.

  My blow caught him flush on the jaw. Being six feet two inches tall, I was only a little shorter than he was, but half my life I’d been working swinging an axe, or wrestling steers or broncs, and I was work-hardened and tough. He did not stagger, he simply droppe
d.

  Before the others could move, Zebony covered them with a pistol and backed them up.

  Reaching down, I grabbed Soto by the shirt front and lifted him bodily to his feet, slamming him back against the counter. He struck at me, and I slipped inside of the blow and smashed a wicked blow to his belly and then swung to his chin.

  He fought back, wildly, desperately, and he was a huge man and strong, but there was no give in me that day, only a cold burning fury that made me ignore his blows.

  He knocked me down … twice, I think. Getting up, I spread my legs wide and began to swing, and I was catching him often. I drove him back, knocked him through the doors into the street, and went after him. He got up and I smashed a wild swing to his face, then stabbed a wicked left to the mouth and swung on his chin with both fists.

  He was hitting me, but I felt none of it. All I wanted was to hit him again. A blow smashed his nose, another split a lip through to the teeth. Blood was pouring from a cut eye, but I could not stop. Backing him against the hitch-rail 1 swung on his face, chopping it to a bloody mess.

  And no one stopped me. Zeno had a six-shooter out now, too, and they kept them off.

  Soto went down and tried to stay down, but I would not let him. I propped him up and hammered on him with both fists until his face was just raw meat. He fell down, and grabbed at the muddy earth as if to cling to it with all his might.

  He was thoroughly beaten, and Magoffin stepped forward and caught my arm. “Enough!” he said. “You’ll kill the man!”

  My hands were swollen and bloody. Staggering, I stepped back, shaking Magoffin’s hand from my shoulder. Soto lay in the mud, his huge body shaking with retching sobs.

  “Tell him,” I said to the Soto men, “that if I see him again—anywhere at all—I’ll kill him.

  “And tell him, too,” I added, “that I want my herd, three thousand head of cattle, most of it breeding stock, delivered to me at Bosque Redondo within thirty days.

  “That will include sixty head of saddle stock, also driven off. They will be delivered to me or I shall hunt him down and beat him to death!”

  With that, I turned and staggered against the door post, then walked back into the store. Magoffin, after a glance at Soto, followed me inside. Zebony and Zeno stood watching the Soto men pick up their battered leader and half drag, half carry him away.

  “That was Felipe Soto?” Magoffin asked me curiously. “I have heard of him.”

  “That was him,” I replied. My breath was still coming in gasps and my heart was pounding.

  “I should have killed him.”

  “What you did was worse. You destroyed him.” He hesitated. “Now tell me again. What was it you needed?”

  “You must remember,” I said, “I have only fifty dollars in money.

  “Keep it—your credit is good with me. You have something else—you have what is needed to make good in this country.”

  Conchita turned pale when she saw me, and well she might, for in the excitement of the fight I had scarcely felt the blows I received, and they had been a good many.

  One eye was swollen almost shut, and there was a deep cut on the other cheekbone.

  My lip was puffed up, one ear was swollen, and my hands had swollen to twice their normal size from the fearful pounding I had given him.

  “Oh, your poor face!” she gasped. Then at once she was all efficiency. “You come here. I’ll fix that, and your hands too!”

  She poured hot water into a basin with some salts, and while she bathed my face ever so gently, my swollen hands soaked in the hot water.

  It seemed strange, havin a woman fuss over me that way, and it was the first time it had happened since one time as a youngster when Tap’s mother had taken care of me after I’d been bucked from a bad horse.

  That started me thinking of Tap, and wondering what had become of him, and of Karen.

  The Foleys never talked of her around the camp, and what they said among themselves I had no idea. She had taken on more than she was equipped to handle when she followed after Tap, and it worried me.

  Everybody was feeling better around camp because Zebony and Zeno had told them about the deal I had made with Magoffin. Not that it was so unusual in those times, for a 1nan’s word was his bond, and no amount of signatures on paper would mean a thing if his word was not good.

  Thousands of head of cattle were bought or sold on a man’s word, often with no count made when the money was paid over. Because of that, a man would stand for no nonsense where his word was concerned. A man might be a thief, a card cheat, and a murderer, and still live in the West; but if his word was no good or he was a coward, he could neither live there nor do business with anyone there.

  “You reckon that Soto will return your cattle?” Tim Foley asked skeptically.

  “If he doesn’t, I’ll go get them. I have told him where he stands, and I shall not fail to carry out my promise.” “What if he takes to that canyon?” “Then I shall follow him there.”

  We had a camp outside of Magoffinsville. It was a pretty place, with arching trees over the camp and a stream running near, and the Rio Grande not far off. It was a beautiful valley with mountains to the north and west, and there seemed to be grapes growing everywhere, the first I’d ever seen cultivated.

  We sat around the fire until late, singing the old songs and talking, spinning yarns we had heard, and planning for the future. And Conchita sat close beside me, and I began to feel as I never had before. It was a different feeling because for the first time I knew I wanted a girl … wanted her for always, and I had no words to speak what I thought.

  Soon we would be on the trail again, moving north and west into the new lands. Somewhere up there was Tap Henry, and I would be seeing him again … what would be our relationship, now that Pa was dead?

  Tap had respected Pa … I did not think he had such respect for me. He was too accustomed to thinking of me as a youngster, yet whatever we planned, Tap could have a share in it if he would do his part to make our plans work out.

  I got up and walked out to where the horses were, and stood there alone in the night, looking at the stars and thinking.

  Magoffln would supply us with what we needed, but the debt was mine to pay. We had few cattle to start with, and such a small herd would make a living for nobody. Whatever happened, I had to have the herd they had stolen, or the same number of cattle from elsewhere.

  If Felipe Soto did not bring the cattle to me, I was going after them, even to Palo Duro Canyon itself.

  Conchita came up to where I stood. “Are you worried, Dan?”

  “They came with me,” I gestured back toward the people at the fire; “they trusted my father and me. I must not fail them.” “You won’t.”

  “It will be hard.”

  “I know it will, Dan, but if you will let me, I want to help.”

  Chapter Six.

  We came up the valley of the Mimbres River in the summer of fifty-eight, a handful of men with a handful of cattle and one wagon loaded down with supplies.

  We put Cooke’s Spring behind us and trailed up the Mimbres with the Black Range to the east, and on the west the wilderness of the Mogollons. We rode with our rifles across our saddle-bows, riding through the heart of Apache country, and we came at last to our Promised Land.

  The Plains of St. Augustine, a vast inland sea of grass, surrounded by mountains, made the finest range we had ever seen, with nothing in sight but a few scattered herds of antelope or wild horses.

  Our camp was made in the lee of a cliff close by a spring, with a bat cave in the rocks above us. We turned our cattle upon the long grass, and set to work to build a pole corral to hold our saddle stock.

  Cutting poles in the mountains, we came upon both bear sign and deer sign. Zeno Yearly stopped in his cutting of poles.

  “It is a fair land, Dan, but I’ve heard tell this is an Indian trail, so we’d best get set for trouble.”

  “We’re building a fort when we have the c
orral, but first we must protect our saddle stock.”

  The fort was not so much to look at, not at first. We made a V of our wagons, pointing it toward the open valley, and we made a pile of the poles for the corral along one side, and threw up a mound of earth on the other side, with the cliff behind us.

  Though it was not much of a fort, it was a position that could be defended.

  Three days later we had our Texas house built, with the Foleys occupying one side and the Stark family the other. We had also put up most of a bunkhouse, and had our cattle fattening on the long grass. We had scouted the country around, killed a couple of deer and a mountain lion we caught stalking a heifer from our herd.

  We were settling in, making a home of the place, but it was time I made a move.

  News was beginning to filter through to us. There was trouble down in the Mimbres Valley—a shooting or two, and the name we heard was that of Tolan Banks, the man Tap Henry had mentioned.

  And then one day they came riding up the valley, Banks and Tap, and a third man with them. It was the blond man who had ridden with Caldwell.

  Tap was riding a grudge, I could see that. He rode up and looked around. “What the hell is the idea? I thought you were going to settle down in the Mimbres with us.”

  “Before we talk about anything else,” I said, “you tell that man”–I indicated the blond man—“to start riding out of here. If he comes around again, I’ll kill him.”

  “He’s a friend of mine,” Tap replied. “Forget him.”

  “Like hell I will. He was one of those who ran off our cattle. He was in the attack on us when Pa was killed.”

  Tap’s face tightened. “I heard about that. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Zebony was standing by the corral, and Milo Dodge was in the door of the Texas with Jim Poor.

  “You tell that man to leave, Tap.”

  His face stiffened. “By God, kid, you don’t tell me what to do. I’ll—”

  My eyes held them all, but mostly the blond man. “‘You,” I said, “start riding. And keep riding. When I see you again, I start shooting.”