by Jory Sherman
“Dan, better get cracking,” Jed said.
“I’m up,” Dan moaned, his voice low in his throat.
Jed laughed. He swung down from Jubal and groundtied him as he walked over to the small fire and hefted the pot. It was full of water but had not yet begun to steam.
“Coffee’ll be ready in a few minutes,” Colter said, buttoning up his trousers. “Herd all right?”
“Where in hell is Julio?” Jed asked.
“You askin’ me?” Colter said.
“Who else? He rode out to bring you coffee last night. Haven’t seen hair nor hide of him since.”
“He brought the coffee and walked back here, I thought.”
“Dan? Did you see Julio come back?”
“Naw. I fell asleep before you did, Jed.” Dan rose up from his bedroll and ran dry fingers through his damp hair. He ran his hand over his beard. It had been stippling his face ever since they left Baxter Springs and was starting to curl into wool.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Jed said. “Maybe we’d better look for him. I don’t see his bedroll. Maybe he slept out where he hobbled the horses.”
“I think he prefers horses to people,” Colter said, as the coffeepot began steaming. “Why don’t you ride over and take a look? You know where the horses are.”
“I’ll do just that,” Jed said, scowling at Colter. “Since you don’t seem to be worried much.”
“I’ve got other things on my mind this morning.” Colter picked up his tin cup and poured coffee into it. “Like some coffee, for one thing.”
Jed snorted and rode off to where Julio had hobbled the small remuda of six horses, plus his own. Dan was pouring coffee into his cup when Jed left and rode over a small rise upstream where he had last seen the horses when he saddled up Jubal.
The horses were all there, including Julio’s mare, Chiquita. She was still saddled, and Julio’s bedroll was still tied on behind the cantle, the leather thongs still tightly knotted. Puzzled, Jed rode over and checked more closely. He tilted his hat back and scratched a spot just above his left temple. Julio had never returned to unsaddle the mare, that was plain to see. Jed realigned his hat and looked around as if Julio might come strolling up from that empty plain that surrounded him.
“Julio,” Jed called, a rasp in his throat as dry as parched cornhusks.
There was no answer. Jed rode around, looking at the ground for boot tracks. There were some, but not enough. Just those of Julio leaving the remuda and walking to camp. Going, not coming back. Jed felt a flurry of moths in his stomach, the first pangs of fear. Fear not for himself, but for Julio. He knew Julio was not coming back. But where was he? Where had he gone? The fluttering in his stomach subsided and was replaced by something else, a hard anger, balling up inside him like a fist of iron.
Jed rode back to camp. Dan was drinking coffee with Colter. Both of them looked up at him as if he were someone they had never seen before. Jed dismounted, picked up his cup from near his bedroll and poured coffee into it. Then he set the cup down near the fire and walked over to Colter.
“Well, did you find Cardoza?” Colter asked.
“You know damned well I didn’t find him, Silas.”
“What in the name of Mildred’s off-ox are you talking about, Brand?”
“I mean you were the last person to see Julio last night. After he gave you your damned coffee, he never came back. Chiquita’s still under saddle and his bedroll is still tied down tight.”
“Where’s old Julio?” Dan asked, a dumbfounded expression on his face.
“Ask Silas there, Danny.”
“Ask all you want, Dan,” Colter said. “I don’t know where that dumb Mexican wandered off to. And I don’t give a damn.”
“Well, maybe we could look for him,” Dan said.
Colter doused his coffee into the fire. He shot Dan a withering look that made Dan turn his head away from Colter.
“Saddle up, Dan. We’ve got to get this herd moving and we’re a man short. Jed, you’ll have to wrangle those horses after we get the cows headed out, so don’t dawdle none.”
“Colter, I’m just about out of patience with you. You’re responsible for Julio and I say we look for him. He didn’t just wander off.”
“There’s only one man in charge here, Brand. And that’s me. If we spot Cardoza along the way to Abilene, we’ll pick him up. Otherwise, he’s just another lost stray as far as I’m concerned. There’s money on the hoof here and I mean to cash it in.”
“You keep pushing me, Colter, and that’s not all you’ll cash in,” Jed said.
“Make your play, Brand. Or shut up.”
“Jed, don’t go doin’ nothin’ hotheaded now, hear?” Dan said.
Colter threw his tin cup down on the ground and turned to brace himself, one hand floating just above the butt of his Colt. The cup rattled against some pebbles and then it grew quiet as Jed squared off.
“You call it, Colter,” Jed said, his right hand sliding through the air toward his own pistol. “Maybe now’s the time we see things come to a head between us.”
“Jed, no,” Dan said, starting toward his brother. “Don’t be a fool. Think of our poor mama back in Waco.”
“Yeah, maybe you’d better think of a lot of things, Brand, before you go for that six-gun on your belt. I’m game to go either way. You want boot hill, I’ll give it to you, son.”
“Stop calling me son, Colter,” Jed said. “I ain’t no kin to you.”
“Your choice, Jed. Walk away and I’ll forget this incident. Make your play and I’ll punch your ticket.”
Dan grabbed his brother and held both of his arms. He looked into Jed’s eyes, pleading with him. “Jed, just calm down. There ain’t no call to get yourself killed. Not over no Mexican.”
Jed lifted an arm and swept his brother away. But he didn’t go for his gun.
“Colter,” he said, “I’m fed up with you, but we’re just about to part company anyway. We’ll get your herd up and running, but stay the hell out of my way until you pay us off in Abilene.”
“Fair enough, Brand. Which reminds me. As I told you last night, I can’t go into McCoy’s with you. You and Dan take the herd in and you’ll be met by a man named Malcolm Trent, or one of his agents. It’s cash on the barrelhead, fifteen dollars a head. Just wait for me in the sale barn there and I’ll pay you boys off and we can all have a drink on me at the Drover’s Cottage.”
“We’ll do ’er, Mr. Colter,” Dan said. “Whatever you say, boss.”
Jed started to say something, but thought better of it. He nodded to Colter, who reached down, picked up his coffee cup and walked toward his bedroll. He put the cup inside it and rolled it up, hefted his saddle and bridle over his shoulder and walked toward the remuda.
“Dan, will you empty that pot and pack it for me?”
Colter said as he passed the two men.
“Sure, Mr. Colter. I’ll be right with you.”
The Brand brothers watched Colter until he disappeared over the rise.
“Jed, you almost got us both killed. Take it easy, will you? Ma always said your hot temper would get you into trouble one day.”
“Dan, you haven’t even seen my temper yet. I just wanted to see how far Colter would go. And now I know.”
“Yeah, he’d kill you as soon as look at you, if you press him.”
“True, and it tells me something else, too, Danny.”
“What’s that?”
“Colter doesn’t give a damn about you or me. And I think he knows a hell of a lot more about Julio than he’s letting on.”
“You don’t know that, Jed. Why would he want to hurt little old Julio? Julio never hurt a dadblamed fly.”
“That’s what worries me, Danny.”
Dan and Jed got the lead cows moving and, along with Colter, ran in the rest of the herd. Jed rode back and roped up the remuda so he could lead them and not have to worry about any of them running off. He used a long lead rope in case he had to drop
it to chase cows. All the time, he was looking everywhere for some sign of Julio Cardoza. But somewhere in the deepest pit of his mind, he knew he would never see him again. A man like Julio didn’t just disappear off the face of the earth.
He was pretty sure that Colter had killed him sometime during the night.
But, like Danny, he was asking himself that same question.
Why?
CHAPTER
4
THE SKY WAS TRYING TO MAKE UP ITS MIND ALONG the eastern horizon. The sun fought to gain a foothold on the thick clouds that drifted and changed color from pale yellow to amber to gray. But Jed knew the sun would eventually have its way as it rose higher in the morning sky and the clouds began to break up and drift ever northward and eastward.
The cattle were strung out for most of a mile, but holding to the trail, bunched close by Colter and Jed. Colter was keeping the column to a width of 150 yards or so, while Jed and the remuda prodded them from the dusty rear.
He was still fuming over his brush with Colter earlier that morning. And he now had another worry, or at least a concern, over something else Silas had said to him when they were riding close together getting the last of the herd on its feet.
“One other thing, Brand,” Colter had said. “You should not mention my name to the buyer. Just tell him yours.”
“Why?”
“When I sent him a telegram from Waco I didn’t know if I was coming up to Abilene right then. I had just had my drovers run off and leave me stranded, so I used your name in case I couldn’t go.”
“You sure as hell take a lot of liberties, Colter.”
“It was the expedient thing to do at the time.”
Expedient?
No, Jed was sure there was more to it than that. Colter had so many cards up his sleeve it was hard to tell if he had a real arm in there. The man was as slithery as a snake, and as hard to nail down as jelly.
What had bothered Jed from the beginning was that Colter was driving too many cattle with too few hands. He didn’t have a chuck wagon or a cook. Colter hadn’t wanted to hire Cardoza to wrangle the remuda; hadn’t even wanted the Brands to bring extra horses.
Jed had no doubts that Colter was the kind of man who would think nothing of riding a horse into the ground if he got what he wanted out of it. It was no wonder all of his drovers from the Rio Grande Valley had quit in Waco, or somewhere along the way. If that was, indeed, what had happened. And no telling how many head he had started out with. Cattle drives in those days gathered thousands of head and the drovers had to fight farmers and landowners in Missouri whose domestic cattle were dying from the ticks brought in by the Texas longhorns. They called the disease Texas Fever or Spanish Fever without knowing it was the ticks causing it. Later, when they found out, they banned all longhorns from entering the state and the farmers formed vigilance committees and were waiting at county lines to drive the Texans back at every opportunity. So, the cattle ranchers in Texas started driving their herds along the borders up into Kansas and then even Kansas wouldn’t let any longhorns in until after the war.
Colter, by driving just a few head at a time, or so he said, could avoid a lot of trouble from Kansas settlers. And he was getting a pretty fair price per head, but there was something suspicious about a man driving only a few hundred cattle that far. A man would have to make a lot of trips to make enough money to make the venture pay.
If they hadn’t needed the money, he and Dan would never have signed on with a man like Colter. But Jed’s mother, Ellen, was in poor health. He had seen gray come into her hair twenty years before her time. Their father had left them when both boys were in their teens. Jed and Dan had both had to work to help support their mother through the lean times of the war and afterward. She worked, too, but it sapped her youth and vitality. She scrubbed and ironed clothing, did sewing and needlework. The pay for each of them was low and they barely scraped by as it was, so Colter’s offer of fifty dollars a month and food was a boon to the family, or so their mother thought. Dan, as well. Both of them had closed their ears to Jed’s arguments against signing on with Colter, and reluctantly, Jed had relented and gone on the drive. But it had been a fight with Colter all the way.
The herd moved slowly, grazing as it ambled north toward Abilene. Some of the cattle were lowing and grumbling when they had to leave a patch of grass as those behind kept pushing forward. It was a slow process, and sometimes Colter had to let the herd fan out so that all the longhorns could eat.
Shortly after the last of the herd got to its feet and joined the column, Jed looked up. Something had caught his eye. A buzzard flapped lazily over a place some five hundred yards from him, then floated on invisible currents of air, scribing slow circles in the sky. As he watched, he saw other buzzards flying toward that same region, and then he saw the first buzzard spiral down to earth. As it landed, another buzzard leaped into the air, flapping its wings hard before settling down again.
More and more buzzards came from different directions until they looked like leaves in a windstorm, floating in circles above the spot where others on the ground were feeding on something. Something that was dead, or dying.
“Ho, Colter,” Jed called, pointing to the sky.
“I see ’em. Turkey buzzards.”
“Hang on to this rope while I go see what’s out there, will you?”
“Brand, we haven’t got time for you to check out what every buzzard’s having for breakfast.”
Jed rode up and handed the rope to Colter. Colter took it, but his frown said that he didn’t like it.
“I’ll be right back,” Brand said, and turned Jubal toward the place where the buzzards were congregating.
Colter led the horses to the rear of the herd and watched for straying cattle. But he also watched where Jed was riding, and, when he was sure no one was looking, he reached over and grabbed the stock of his rifle jutting out of its boot. He slid the rifle up and eased it back down into its sheath to make sure it could come free easily in case he needed it. As Jed rode over the horizon, the earth seemed to swallow him up, leaving only the crown of his hat showing from where Colter sat his horse.
Jed saw the cluster of buzzards hopping around something dark on the ground. They were fighting among themselves, jabbing at each other with their beaks, their wings flapping in protest and to escape injury. Some stood nearby the object, watching, waiting, while others descended on silent pinions from the sky to join the feeding frenzy.
The sun cleared the eastern clouds and blazed hot and bright on the dark shape lying on the sparse grasses trying to gain a foothold on a patch of ground that had been washed away by flash floods too many times to count.
As Jed rode up, the buzzards, looking like a gathering of ungainly undertakers, hopped off and took flight, their wings beating sounds out of the air that sounded like a woman whacking rugs on a line with a flat straw broom.
The buzzards had picked out the eyes, and now there were only two vacant sockets staring up at Jed, sightless and black as coal. Julio’s throat was wide open, gaping, the blood dried to a dark brown. His mouth was open as if he had tried to scream in that last moment before his voice was cut out of him with one swift slash of a knife blade as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel.
Jed dismounted and turned Julio over. He had seen the drag marks and the back of Cardoza’s body confirmed that he had been dragged by his feet to this spot and left for the vultures.
He rolled Julio’s body back over and left it as he had found it. A sickness roiled in Jed’s stomach as he looked at the dead face turning ochre in the splash of sunlight, turning to dried leather as the fluids inside his skin evaporated in the boiling heat.
“Sorry, Julio. Rest in peace, amigo.”
Jed’s voice was alien to him in that grim moment when mortality rushed up to him like a fist in the gut. The lifeless body seemed so small and pathetic, like some rag doll tossed from a passing wagon, a scarecrow stuffed with straw and left in a field.
�
�I wish I could bury you, Julio,” Jed muttered, feeling helpless against the wall of desolation that rose up between him and the dead man. “Vaya con Dios.”
That was the only prayer that Jed knew in Spanish and it was really a way of saying good-bye to a friend. Julio had not deserved to die and he did not deserve to lie out here waiting for the buzzards and the coyotes to pick his bones clean as if he had been nothing in life and was now nothing in death.
Jed got up slowly and mounted Jubal. He touched a finger to the brim of his hat in a gesture of final farewell and turned the horse to head back to the herd. He put the spurs to Jubal’s flanks and rode up on Colter and the remuda at a gallop.
He took the rope from Colter and glanced at the knife jutting from its scabbard on Colter’s belt. It showed no sign of being used or bloodied, but Jed had no doubt in his mind who had murdered Julio Cardoza.
“Find anything?” Colter asked, with an airy casualness.
“Naw,” Jed said. “Just an old sick coyote that died of old age, I reckon.”
“See? A waste of time.”
“Yeah. I reckon.”
“Keep pushing this herd. They don’t need to feed all morning. I want to get to Abilene.”
“OK, Boss,” Jed said, tightly. He couldn’t look into Colter’s eyes, because he knew if he did, that hate inside him would explode and he’d do something he might regret for the rest of his life. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. But now was not the time and this was not the place. He had no proof, but his hunch was so strong it was like something true etched in stone.
Colter rode off to the right flank of the herd. It would be so easy for Jed to jerk his rifle from its sheath, lever a cartridge into the firing chamber and put a bullet right between Colter’s shoulder blades. For a fleeting moment, Jed considered doing just that. But he knew he was not a backshooter and more than that, he wanted to see the truth of the murder in Colter’s eyes and make him squirm before dying at the end of a rope, or under the slice of a blade, or from a lead bullet burning through his flesh.
