The Long Trail (The McCabes Book 1)

by Brad Dennison

  “Don’t know exactly what to do with that buckskin shirt, but your trousers and union suit are clean and dry. And I took the liberty of patching the hole that was in the knee.”

  Franklin also threw in a haircut and shave, though Dusty accepted the shave only. He had grown accustomed to longer hair during his years on the run with the Patterson gang. Once he was on his own, he paid for a short haircut, but after so many years of hair falling to his shoulders, he found he didn’t like the feeling of a draft on his neck. While Dusty sat in a wooden upright chair that served as a barber’s chair, Franklin slid a straight razor through soapy foam he had applied to Dusty’s face.

  “I used to be a barber, back east,” Franklin said, while he lathered Dusty’s face and sharpened the razor on a leather strap. “What seems like a lifetime ago.”

  “A barber? How’d you find yourself running a general store? And doing gunsmithing?”

  “Out here, a man does anything and everything to survive. Last summer, I earned a few dollars putting a new roof on Miss Summers’... shall we say...establishment. And I’ve helped Hunter move a shipment of freight, more than once.”

  “A jack of all trades, eh?”

  Hunter had told Dusty to buy some clothes, too, so after the shave, Dusty did some shopping.

  “The way things are going,” Dusty had said to Hunter, “I’ll have such a big debt to you that I’ll be a whole year working it off.”

  “That’s the idea,” Hunter said with a smirk. “I’m thinkin’ seriously about Franklin’s breakfast idea. I want to keep you around as long as I can, considering what you can do to a steak.”

  Dusty had to admit, he needed the clothes. He walked out of Franklin’s store in a new pair of levis, a white shirt, and with a second pair of levis and another shirt in boxes under one arm, and his buckskin shirt rolled under the other.

  Before he left the store, his gaze had fallen upon a rack of rifles and shotguns standing behind the counter. Mostly weapons Franklin had acquired in trade, from customers who had no cash, and Franklin did not know them well enough to extend credit.

  One weapon in particular caught Dusty’s eye. A Spencer lever-action rifle.

  Franklin handed it to Dusty, who brought it to his shoulder and sighted in on an imaginary target. A Spencer was loaded through a tubular magazine in the center of the stock, and the trigger guard acted as a lever that could be jacked, like a Winchester, to eject a spent cartridge and chamber a fresh one.

  “This is a beauty,” Dusty said. He also thought, but did not say, this would be the perfect rifle to have on his ride to Oregon. “What are you asking for it?”

  Franklin shrugged. “I haven’t put a price on it, yet. Spencers are out of production, and everyone is using Winchesters and Springfields these days. I doubt I could get much for it.”

  “It’s in almost new condition. Not a scratch on it. I bet it hasn’t been fired more’n a couple dozen times.” Dusty jacked open the chamber, and was admiring the clean, slightly oiled steel.

  “Don’t matter. The market isn’t defined by quality. It’s defined by people’s wants. It cost me three sacks of coffee and a can of beans. I didn’t really want it, because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get rid of it, but the customer really needed the coffee and the beans. What can you offer?”

  “Not a thing. All I have is my horse, my saddle, my six-shooter, and my clothes. And most of my clothes were paid for by Hunter. I spent my last cent down in Nevada, many miles ago.”

  “Well, not to worry. This thing has been here a year already. I’m sure it’s not going anywhere soon.”

  The idea of hiring a professional cook had never occurred to Hunter. But on Wednesday morning, a couple of hours before the noon stage was due to arrive, Hunter said, “Dusty, if I ran down to Franklin’s and got us a couple big pots and a load of potatoes, how fast do you suppose you could put together potato and steak dinners for the passengers?”

  “Are you thinking on getting into the restaurant business?”

  “Why not? Them passengers, they have real cash, like Franklin said. Start with dinner today, and maybe tomorrow morning we’ll open for breakfast.”

  “But I already have a noon job. Hostler, at the livery stable.”

  “I can take care of that. Old Arthur, who runs that stable, he owes me for so many beers he’ll never be able to pay up.”

  Sam Patterson had said once folks just take naturally to some things more than others. With some it’s business, like running a store. With others it’s working with livestock. With some, it’s painting or sculpting, or singing. With Dusty, it seemed to be two things - shooting a gun, and cooking.

  Dusty had never considered himself to be more than a simple trail cook, throwing together whatever ingredients were available and trying not to poison anyone. But people did seem to rave about his cooking, so what the hell? A little time out of the saddle might make for a welcome change, he thought.

  When Wednesday’s customers boarded the stage, they did so with full, happy bellies. As the stage pulled out of town, Hunter sat in a back room counting his newly acquired cash, and Dusty found himself permanently relieved of his hostler duties.

  “Hey, Hunter,” Dusty called out, while he sat at a table enjoying a cold beer Hunter had told him to pour for himself. “How about we expand the menu a bit? Add Texas toast, maybe, and some homemade bread? And I can do a thing or two with a frijole, if I can find the ingredients.”

  Hunter called from the back room, “A frijole? Hell, I haven’t tasted one in years. You can make those?”

  “If I can find what I need. When this beer’s gone, I’ll take me a walk down to Franklin’s.”

  Hunter stepped into the doorway. “How’d you learn to make ‘em?”

  “Just somethin’ I picked up along the way.”

  Dusty did not want to tell him the actual way he had learned to make Mexican food. When he was nine, the Patterson gang had holed up in a canyon a few miles south of the Mexican border, and they would ride into a nearby town to whoop it up at a saloon, and with some of the women who worked the barroom. Dusty, much too young for such festivities, helped an older woman in the kitchen of a restaurant in the little town, and learned of the magic of cayenne and chili peppers.

  Thursday’s hotel customers found Hunter offering a traditional western breakfast of steak and eggs, all they could eat for a reasonable price. Hunter undercut the price charged at the hotel for breakfast, and he included two other items the hotel did not have access to. A pig farmer a couple miles from town owed Hunter for some beers, so Hunter found himself able to include bacon on the menu. And it turned out, Dusty made the lightest, most wonderful homemade bread Hunter had tasted in a coon’s age.

  “Reminds me of the bread made by my momma,” he said.

  One cowhand in town for the morning, said, “Shit, Hunter. I didn’t know you had a momma.”

  “I didn’t. But if I did, her bread would have tasted like this.”

  The stage customers at noon found Texas toast on the menu, and slices of Dusty’s bread were included with the steak dinner. The pig farmer also kept a small flock of chickens, so Dusty fried up a basket full of drumsticks and wings to offer the customers some variety.

  Hunter was actually able to pay Franklin in cash for the items he had bought Wednesday, including Dusty’s clothes. Franklin chuckled, almost giggled, with delight. “Prosperity is coming. Just around the corner. I know it.”

  Saturday morning, while Hunter was savoring a breakfast of steak and eggs, with a thick slice of toasted bread oozing with butter, he said to Dusty, “Tonight will be the start of what I originally hired you for. You ever tend bar before?”

  “Yeah, for a short time, down in Nevada. Nothing fancy, just pouring beer and whiskey.”

  “That’s all we do here. If someone asks for a beer, you fill a mug from the keg behind the bar. If they ask for a cold beer, you go to the keg in the root cellar. And the bottles of whiskey are all lined up behind
the bar. Nothing to it at all.”

  Later in the afternoon, after the Saturday stage had departed and Dusty and Hunter had cleared away the dishes and cooking pots and kettles, Hunter suggested Dusty grab a little rest before the evening crowd started trickling in. Dusty carried a straight-backed chair out to the boardwalk and sat in the afternoon sun, rocking the chair back on its rear legs until the straight-back touched the wall. He lowered his hat over his eyes and reflected about what an unusual week this had been. It had been a good week, which he supposed was why it had been so unusual.

  He had begun the week as an unemployed cowhand with a gunfighter’s past that he preferred to keep hidden, riding on a fool’s quest to find the father he had never known. A quest that had begun originally in Arizona, and had brought him clear to Montana Territory. He was ending the week with a job as a professional bartender and cook. Now, would you have cared to lay odds on that?

  Working for Hunter was giving him a much needed distraction from his troubles. During the long ride from Arizona, he had had each entire day to think about first his mother, and then after he had left Nevada, his thoughts had turned to his father. What would he be like? How would he react when Dusty introduced himself? And there were evenings by a campfire, roasting rabbit, sometimes listening to coyotes howl from somewhere off in the darkness, and he would wonder what the flesh-and-blood Johnny McCabe would be like.

  He had seen Wild Bill Hickok once, and remembered how oddly human he seemed, compared with the legendary figure developing in stories told in cattle camps and saloons. Hickok had been tall, with long flowing hair and a buckskin jacket, and a red sash tied about his middle, into which two revolvers were tucked. And he carried himself ramrod straight with his gaze fixed directly ahead, as people watched him ride by. He struck Dusty as being fully aware of his larger-than-life status. But he was just a man, not a god. And when he was putting on a shooting exhibition, which he charged admission for, he was accurate enough, but he was not particularly fast with his guns. Dusty could have easily equaled his shooting feats, and done so much more quickly. Dusty remembered feeling a little disappointed. He wondered how Johnny McCabe would compare to the stories told about him.

  Hunter’s job had given Dusty a week’s worth of distractions from the original reason he was in Montana, and he thought he might indulge in these distractions a while longer, while he decided what to do. Whether he should ride out to the ranch and introduce himself, and risk the disappointment if things didn’t go well. Or just head on out to Oregon.

  His long trail had begun a year earlier, when he had written to the family of an elderly couple he had lived with for a short time, before he had gone to live with Patterson. He had written to learn if anything had ever been mentioned of his mother.

  Actually, he mused, this had all begun twenty years earlier, with a saloon woman named Rosie giving birth to a bastard child. According to the bartender Lewis, Rosie had given the child to a family of traveling missionaries, who were returning east. It wasn’t that she did not love her son, but rather it was that she loved him too much to see him grow up in a saloon. He had then been delivered to a family named Stowell - Methodist missionaries who were living in Missouri.

  Sam Patterson had gone west and settled in Texas, and had spent a little time riding with the Rangers, fighting Comanches, who were master guerrilla raiders. So, when he volunteered to fight for the Union, with a feeling of loyalty for the country that was stronger than his loyalty for Texas, he was made commanding officer of a guerrilla unit. Their primary task was to attack and burn farms in Missouri that were owned by Confederate loyalists, and to burn bridges. Anything to hinder the Confederate Army.

  The war ended, and while a former band of Union guerrilla raiders called the Red Legs were considered war heroes, and one member named Hickok went on to acquire almost legendary status, Confederate raiders like Jesse James and William Quantrill found themselves despised. Patterson found that, even though he and his men had fought on the side of the Union, they were somehow lumped together with Quantrill and the James brothers. Patterson figured it was because no other band of Union raiders acted with such methodical efficiency, and the Army and perhaps the country itself were afraid of them. They found they were unable to find work, as no one wanted one of Patterson’s raiders on their payroll. So, they simply continued their exploits, now for personal gain rather than a war effort. Soon the group, renamed the Patterson Gang, found themselves on reward posters in Kansas, Colorado and Texas.

  As Sam told it, he and his men had ridden onto a farm one night, intending to steal some stock and raid the house for supplies. They struck after dark, and after they had done their damage, they took a torch to the house, as the chaos would better cover their getaway. However, one little boy had not screamed or cried. One dark eyed little boy, seven years old, had simply stood his ground with fists clenched and his jaw locked in determination as the house that had been his home erupted in flames, and riders swirled about, shooting and driving off horses and cattle.

  Patterson reined up in front of the little boy and their gazes met. The boy would not break the eye contact. He would not give ground.

  “Run!” Patterson shouted. “Get the hell out of here!”

  The boy would not move. Patterson aimed a pistol at him, intending to frighten him away lest he be accidentally trampled by one of the horses. The boy held his ground firmly.

  Patterson never knew quite it was about the boy – maybe the boy reminded him of himself, somehow. Finally, he scooped the boy up and sat him in front of the saddle, to keep him safe until the insanity ended. But when it was time to ride away, the building in flames and the man of the house lying dead with a bullet in him, and no other adult in sight, Patterson found he could not simply set the boy down in the middle of that kind of devastation and ride away.

  Patterson asked the boy’s name.

  “Dusty,” was all the boy would say.

  Patterson had intended to deliver the boy to a church or some such place at the first opportunity, but somehow that opportunity never presented itself. The boy was wary of him at first, but as the family he had been with were dispassionate, never really knowing how to make a seven-year-old orphan boy feel welcome, and he did not even remember his mother, Patterson soon found himself becoming the boy’s parental figure. A bond began to form between the two, Patterson often claiming Dusty was the son he never had.

  Dusty grew, and he remained with the Patterson gang. Many of the men objected, but they were afraid of Patterson’s temper and his skill with a gun, and so Dusty remained. Sam never allowed Dusty to participate in a raid or a robbery, and so his name was never included on any reward posters. At fifteen, Dusty took the chance Sam offered, and rode away with his name clean.

  Dusty made a life for himself, working on ranches in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. First as a wrangler, then as a cowhand. Once he rode shotgun for a stagecoach company. But in the back of his mind were always the questions – where was he from? Who were his parents? Patterson had said once the farm where he found Dusty was the Stowell place, and that old man Stowell had been some sort of Methodist missionary, come west to save the heathen Indians. So, from a bunkhouse on the Cantrell spread, Dusty had written letters to Methodist organizations in Missouri giving them the name Stowell. They replied with names and addresses of the Stowell kin, who all still lived back east, and it was from them he obtained the name Rose Callahan, a saloon woman from Carson City who had given her poor, fatherless child away. And so Dusty’s journey began, the long trail that eventually brought him here, to the chair he rocked back in, on a boardwalk in front of a saloon in Montana Territory.

  He sometimes wondered what might have happened to Sam and the boys. About a year earlier, news of their exploits had stopped making the word-of-mouth circuit. Some said they thought Patterson might have been killed, but there was no official confirmation, and the reward posters remained up.

  Dusty was brought out of his reflections by the s
ound of hoofbeats. He had dropped the brim of his hat over his eyes, and he now reached up with one hand to lift the hat enough to give him a view of the street, and the rider approaching. A thin man, forty-ish, in a wide brimmed hat, and a white shirt with suspenders strapped over his shoulders. He wore no gun, indicating he was probably not a cowhand – Dusty had yet to meet a cowhand who carried no gun at his side. The man rode easily, and swung out of the saddle with an ease and sureness that told Dusty that, even though he was not a cowhand, this man was an accomplished horseman. He gave the rein a couple turns about a hitching rail, then ambled onto the boardwalk, gave Dusty but a fleeting glance, and pushed his way through the swinging doors.

  Dusty noticed the horse carried a brand that was a roughly drawn letter M, inside an equally roughly drawn circle. The Circle M. Dusty wondered if this man was a McCabe rider.

  “Fred,” he heard Hunter say from inside.

  “You open for business?”

  “Only for my best customers. How about a cold beer? Just got the keg tapped.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Inside, Fred bellied-up to the bar and waited while Hunter climbed the ladder down to his root cellar, and the keg of cold beer. Shortly, he returned with two mugs of foaming brew. Hunter set one on the bar before Fred, and the other he kept for himself.

  “Looks to be a quiet night, for a Saturday,” Fred said. “Josh won’t be here to liven things up.”

  “When’s he due back from the round-up?”

  “Another week.” Fred took a sip of beer. “And did he ever catch hell from Aunt Ginny the next mornin’, after whuppin’ Reno. His face was all bruised up, and on top of that, he and the new men he hired rode out the following morning, without even waiting until after church.”

  Hunter shook his head, his shoulders shaking with a silent chuckle. “Josh is braver than I am. I would never want to get that little woman all r’iled up at me.”

  “Say, Hunter. Who’s that boy settin’ out there on the boardwalk?”

  “His name’s Dusty. Works for me. I hired him Monday. He’s my new cook and bartender.”