A Frontier Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  Fitch lay sprawled flat on the ground, stunned, groaning. Honest Bob and Sefton carried him to the wagon and rolled him under it, out of the sun. Half-Shot joined them. They stood for a moment looking down at Fitch, who lay twitching and breathing heavily through his mouth.

  They turned, looking east across the wide open plains. Sefton pushed back his hat brim, wiping the sweat from his forehead on his shirtsleeve.

  “What was that you was saying before about trust, Bob?” Half-Shot asked slyly, starting up. He was a needler. He liked to pick at people if he thought he could get away with it. He was not unlike Lank on that score. “Something about trust and gunrunning, I do believe?” he pressed.

  Honest Bob cut him a sharp side glance but then condescended to reply. “I was about to make some remarks on that subject, now that you mention it.”

  “Looks like your proposition got shot down along with Lank.”

  “How so?”

  “Lord knows Lank wasn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with, but he and Fitch seemed to get on all right. Yet Fitch burned him down quick as winking!”

  Sefton spat. “What choice did he have? Lank was reaching. What the hell!”

  Half-Shot flinched, fearing he might have irked Sefton. He wasn’t one you wanted to rile. He was moody, unpredictable. He stalked off, to Half-Shot’s evident relief.

  Honest Bob caught the play, chuckling. The other’s momentary fright put him in a good mood. “Fitch gunning Lank proves my point.”

  “Which is?” Half-Shot asked.

  “Trust is the basis of the gunrunner’s trade.”

  “You’re loco, Bob,” Sully said, walking up. “What a damn fool thing to say!”

  “What’s got you in an uproar, Sull?” Honest Bob asked mildly. “It sure ain’t Lank getting killed. You never had any use for him.”

  “Lank was an idjit, pulling a damn-fool stunt like that on Fitch. But at least Fitch had a skinful of hooch,” Sully said, spitting out words like a snapping turtle going after live bait. “What’s your excuse?”

  Greatly amused, Honest Bob gave Half-Shot a wink that only he could see.

  “Trust?” Sully said. “Trust? Maybe you forget who we’re dealing with!”

  “I ain’t forgetting nothing, Sull.”

  “Comanches, that’s who! Them red devils would cut all our throats given half a chance, and you talk about trust!” Sully went on, warming to his theme. “Never mind about them heathens, though. Take a look closer to home. Look at Fitch killing Lank over a bottle of rotgut whiskey . . . and not even a full bottle, neither! Trust? Hell, we don’t even trust each other!”

  “Speak for yourself. Personally, I trust all the boys. Trust them with my life. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here now.” Honest Bob smiled.

  “Sometimes you talk like a politician,” Sully sneered.

  “There’s no call for that kind of abuse,” Honest Bob said sharply.

  “That was out of line, I admit,” Sully said, backing down.

  “See that it don’t happen again.”

  “Sorry.”

  Two more of the gang, Melbourne and Chait, drifted over to see what all the jawing was about, as did Santa Fe Comancheros Felipe Mercurio and his pistolero bodyguard Rio.

  Honest Bob was mindful that he was drawing an audience and began playing to them. “You know what your trouble is, Sully?”

  “I’m sure you’re gonna to tell me, Bob.”

  “You’re a man of little faith. Me, I trust the Comanches!”

  That provoked a lot of loud protests from the others, dirty laughs, groans, eye-rolling expressions of disgust.

  Honest Bob held up his hands to quell the noise. “Let me explain, let me explain. You’ll all admit that the Comanche wants guns. That’s plain to see. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t true. Them red rascals want guns and ammunition. Want them bad. And that’s good, by Heaven, because we’ve got them!”

  “Damn straight,” somebody shouted.

  “I’m talking about the real goods here, the quality. We ain’t foisting no castoffs on our Indian friends—no rusty out-of-date smoothbore muskets, no pieces with broke firing pins, jammed actions, and bent barrels. No, sir.” Honest Bob went on. “We got new guns . . . and like-new guns,” he conceded. “Like new I said. Barely used, in good condition. We got long guns and carbines, famous name brands like Winchester, Sharps, and Henry! Repeaters! Repeating rifles! We’ve got them.

  “Why, most of the cavalry out West ain’t even outfitted with repeating rifles yet! Mostly, they’ve got outdated single-shot jobs.”

  “They got repeaters at Fort Pardee,” Chait said pointedly.

  “Sure, and look at all the trouble they had getting them,” Honest Bob countered. “Their first shipment was hijacked out from under their noses before they ever took delivery. They had a devil of a time getting them back.”2

  “They got ’em now,” Chait pressed, his buddy Melbourne at his side, urging him on. They were a pair of professional guns, gunslicks hired for the protection their skills could bring.

  They weren’t beholden to Honest Bob or any of his Hog Ranch crowd. Like the man said, they didn’t give a damn whether school kept or not, and they didn’t care who knew it.

  “Look at all the trouble they have holding onto them! Troopers are always deserting, going over the hill with a repeater and a good horse,” Honest Bob said. “But never mind about them Fort Pardee blue bellies nohow. They’re at less than half-strength and stretched mighty thin, too.

  “From what I’ve heard tell, they ain’t gonna be a problem for much longer,” he added darkly in an aside. Those who knew what he meant didn’t react to it.

  “Here’s my point. When it comes to guns, Mr. Comanche can’t get a better gun nowhere,” Honest Bob went on quickly.

  He noticed Mercurio standing nearby, listening intently. “Now before I go on, let’s give credit where credit is due. Fact is, we wouldn’t have these fine guns if not for Señor Mercurio here and our good friends in Santa Fe.”

  Mercurio was a stocky middle-aged man with thick black hair and a bushy mustache. He was a member of the Santa Fe Ring, longest established and most powerful Comancheros in the territory. He nodded, acknowledging the other’s words.

  “To continue,” Honest Bob said, “here’s a question. What do Comanches like more than guns?”

  The outlaws shouted various answers.

  “Horses!”

  “Horse stealing!”

  “Women!”

  “White women!”

  “No, no, amigos,” Rio said, standing at Mercurio’s elbow. He was Mexican American, one of a group of Hispanics associated with the Hog Ranch gang. Rio was a dangerous man. “What does the Comanche love best of all? Killing.”

  “That’s it! Killing is what those heathens love best!” Sully cried. “They’d like nothing better than to take our scalps.”

  “If they could,” Melbourne said meaningfully, patting his holstered gun to show what he meant. He fancied himself quite the gunman.

  Honest Bob nodded agreement. “That’s it! Eagle Feather and his bucks would like nothing better than roasting any and all of us over a slow fire. Sure, they’d kill us if they could, but not before putting us through an almighty hard time first. Never mind that that would kill off the best source of guns they’ve got or will ever have.

  “Or take our late friend Lank. Now you just don’t go stealing a man’s redeye. Everybody knows that. It ain’t done. But Lank couldn’t help himself. He just naturally liked getting folks riled up. That was his nature.

  “That’s the bedrock truth of my calculations. People are gonna do anything you can’t stop them from doing. I trust in that and act accordingly. I trust the Comanches to kill us if we don’t outgun them and outsmart them

  “That’s why I say trust is the basis of our business,” Honest Bob concluded.

  “I don’t know about that, Bob, but there is one thing that you’ve proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.”<
br />
  “What’s that, Half-Shot?”

  “That you sure ’nuff like the sound of your own voice!”

  Half-Shot’s crack got a laugh from some of the men.

  “Of that there can be no doubt,” Honest Bob said, laughing along with the others to show that he was a good sport. He wasn’t, not really. But he could fake it when he had to. It was all part of being a leader of men, he told himself

  The group started to break up into smaller knots, going about their chores.

  “Keep your eyes open and your guns handy, boys. Eagle Feather will be along directly,” was Honest Bob’s parting comment.

  Sully didn’t much care for company, not even his own. Still, he wanted to be off by himself. Not too far off, though. It wasn’t safe. Comanches were beyond masters at taking stragglers and making them disappear.

  Sully’s path took him past a freight wagon nestled at the foot of a cliff. It was the wagon under which Fitch lay in a moaning stupor.

  The gun wagon.

  Guns and ammunition were in wooden crates in the hopper. The wagon team had been unyoked and corralled with the rest of the horses to prevent the Comanches from stampeding a harnessed team and running away with the wagon and its precious cargo of firearms.

  Ricketts sat up on the front box seat, pale-eyed and swarthy with bristly beard stubble like steel wool. He flicked the edge of a thumbnail against the phosphorus-coated tip of a wooden matchstick. A lucifer type incandescent match, self-igniting. The tip sputtered, hissing into flame.

  Sully recoiled, thunderstruck. “The hell you doing, Ricketts?”

  “What does it look like?” Ricketts asked mildly.

  “Like you’re fixing to get yourself blowed up and me along with you!”

  Ricketts waved away his concern. “I’m lighting my cigar, Sully, ya danged fool.” He spoke as if talking to a child, a slow child.

  The hot plains air was very still in the lee of the cliff. Ricketts had no need to cup a hand around the flame to protect it. He held the fire to the tip of a fresh cigar clenched between his teeth and puffed away, setting the cigar alight.

  “Don’t you know not to play with matches around gunpowder?” Sully demanded. “You’ll blast us all sky-high!”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Ricketts said chuckling. “That’s why they got me playing nursemaid to this here gun wagon and its combustible insurance policy.”

  The “insurance” was a desperate last resort against Comanche treachery. In the wagon behind the seat stood a big keg of gunpowder lashed in place, a length of quick-burning fuse cord coiling out of a hole in the barrel lid.

  Ricketts’s job was to light the fuse to blow up the wagon and its contents if the Comanches tried a cross and jumped the gunrunners.

  “Quit your fussing, Sully. Danged if I’m gonna lay off cigars just cause you’re fussing like an old woman.” Ricketts touched a fingertip to the match. It was cold. He broke the matchstick in two, tossing the fragments at Sully. Sully scuttled away, cursing.

  Ricketts laughed. But he stopped laughing when he glimpsed a dust cloud in the east.

  The site was on a flat. Ricketts was raised up higher than the others by virtue of being perched up on the wagon box seat. “Hey! Hey, you all. Looky there!” he shouted, rising up, pointing at the dust cloud in the distance. “It’s them! Here they come!”

  The outlaws turned to see what Ricketts was pointing at, studying on the dust cloud some miles away. It wasn’t much. Just a thin brown smudge floating in the air a few degrees above the horizon. A dirty fingerprint on the rim of the upside-down, yellow-white bowl of sky.

  The gunrunners were stung into action. They scrambled, grabbing up rifles and gathering closer together. There was a lot of peering, craning, and neck-stretching. A couple men climbed up on boulders to improve their vantage point.

  They looked . . . and wondered.

  “Is it them?”

  “Don’t look like much.”

  “Don’t take much to kick up dust out there.”

  Honest Bob moved among them. “Look sharp, boys, and step lively. The scalp you save may be your own. Or even better, mine.”

  They were gunrunners and Comancheros—Honest Bob and Sully, Mercurio and Rio, Fitch, Hump, Half-Shot, and all the rest. They numbered a baker’s dozen in all, unlucky thirteen, a gang of whites and Mexicans who sold guns and ammunition to the Comanches. A dangerous trade.

  They were gathered in the barren wastelands of the North Central Texas plains on a hot afternoon in the fall of 1866 for a meeting with a Comanche raiding party.

  The War Between the States had been over for a year and a half. Yet that titanic conflict between North and South was but a brief moment in time compared to the centuries-long struggle for the frontier.

  The War for the West was an epic clash between Indians and Caucasians for dominance of that part of the planet.

  Paramount among all mounted Plains Indian tribes were the Comanches. They were Lords of the Great Plains, masters of a vast prairie expanse in the center of the American heartland bounded on the east by the Mississippi River and the west by the Rocky Mountains.

  The Comanche broke the back of the Spaniards’ northward thrust out of Mexico, limiting their Great Plains holdings to a few scattered fortress towns—Santa Fe, San Antonio, and a handful of others.

  Next came the Anglos, English-speaking Texas settlers the Comanches called Tejanos. An irksome folk, they were numerous and land-hungry.

  For long years, tribesmen kept the Texans bottled up east of the ninety-eighth meridian, a longitudinal line running north-south through such settlements as Dallas and San Antonio. They tormented the Tejanos with relentless raids of rape, robbery, torture, and murder. The ninety-eighth parallel marked the limiting line of westward American expansionism.

  Yet the Texans were stubborn. Worse from the Comanche point of view, the Texans were adaptable. Slowly but surely, they learned the ways of making war on horseback, Indian style. The frontier conflict, always fought with bitterness and cruelty on both sides, was fast becoming a war of extermination.

  Then came secession and the war between the Union and the Confederacy. Frontier expansion was halted for the duration. The whites were so busy trying to kill each other that their war against the Indians was neglected.

  The War was finally over and American westward migration was once more in full flood, greater than ever. Comanches once more felt the pressure as hordes of returning whites nibbled locust-like westward, crowding past the ninety-eighth parallel to the hundredth parallel.

  Longitude 100 degrees west now marked the frontier. It was the dividing line between civilization and wilderness.

  Part of the line ran north-south through Hangtree County, Texas.

  The gunrunners’ meeting place was some fifty miles west of the line, where the bounds of Hangtree County blurred with the beginnings of the Llano Estacado. The Llano, “Staked Plains” to the Spaniards, was a vast wilderness misnamed by some early American mapmaker as “The Great American Desert.”

  It wasn’t, not really. Subsequent events would soon prove the contrary. But its endless expanse of emptiness sprawling under the big sky tended to have an unnerving effect on travelers. There was a sense that here was the rim of the abyss, the edge of darkness.

  The Llano was prairie flatland, hundreds of square miles in area. It had water and grass enough to support the buffalo in all their teeming masses. In time, it would prove equally capable of supporting great cattle herds and then the great land rush would be on.

  But not yet. Not while the Comanche still held sway over the region.

  The meeting place was set at Bison Creek under Boneyard Bench.

  The Llano, though flat, was not without distinctive landforms—cuts, rises, folds, rock spurs, outcroppings, ridges, hills, and more.

  The Bench was a limestone plateau rising out of the flat, a shelf-like scarp whose eastern edge featured a sharp twenty-five-foot drop. Its eastern face of cliffs ran nor
th-south for dozens of miles.

  A solid, impenetrable wall, there were no gaps and passes. Riders went around it. On a horse, there was no way to climb the cliffs. They formed a giant wall or bench set amid the flat.

  Gravity is a useful thing. The Comanche set it to work by stampeding buffalo herds eastward across the plateau and over the edge, causing them to fall to their deaths. Descending to the flat, the braves would harvest the carcasses.

  Long years of such practices had littered the foot of the cliffs with the skeletal remains of hundreds, if not thousands, of buffalo. Heaps and mounds of clean-picked bones glared whitely under the midday sun where the gunrunners waited.

  Thus the name given to the site by whites—Boneyard Bench.

  Cracks in the cliffs held springs, which issued streams of water. Buffalo routinely drank their fill during wanderings.

  The largest such watercourse was Bison Creek. It was an ideal spot for those wishing to conduct their business far from prying eyes. It was well-watered. Sheer, unscalable cliffs shielded against attack from the west. Rockslides, boulders, and fans provided plenty of cover.

  The gunrunners were massed in a shallow basin at the foot of the cliffs south of Bison Creek.

  A cleft in the cliffs served as a makeshift corral, its open end roped off. Guards were posted to keep watch over it.

  Comanches were passionate horse thieves. If they could steal the gunrunners’ horses, they would, and damn the consequences!

  The unhorsed gun wagon stood in the center of the basin. Men were grouped around it in a half-circle facing east, the cliffs protecting its rear from the west. The gang was well-armed with repeating long guns and six-guns.

  The Comanches appeared not in the east where the dust cloud had first been sighted but in the south near the cliffs.

  “Looky there!” Half-Shot cried, indicating a second dust cloud to the south. It showed near the cliffs several miles away, much closer than the dust to the east.

  The south cloud moved north toward them while the east cloud stayed where it was. Strong sunlight streamed down from overhead, gilding the southern dust plume. At its base rode a knot of mounted men, ten in number. They came on at a steady walk.