The Chuckwagon Trail

by William W. Johnstone

  “Like you done before, David. You’re a good boy. I won’t be long. Me and this son of a bitch got some business to tend to.”

  “At the saloon?”

  Wilkinson tried to backhand his boy. David was too quick for him.

  “You don’t sass me. Now set yourself down and point this shotgun at the door. Anybody you don’t know comes through, you blow them to Kingdom Come.”

  The boy settled into the chair, looking as arrogant as his pa.

  Mac looked over his shoulder uneasily at the boy, worrying he might take it into his head to start shooting. He didn’t have any love for his pa, that was obvious, and Mac doubted he liked much of anyone else. He breathed a sigh of relief as he stepped out into the chilly night.

  “There’s the best place in town. I’m the only customer at times.”

  “That seems odd, doesn’t it? If it’s so good, why are you the only one there?” As soon as the words left his mouth, Mac knew he was on thin ice. The marshal didn’t understand why people in town would avoid him. Or maybe he did. No man wielded the power he seemed to without enjoying it and thinking on how to gather even more.

  “Nice place, ain’t it?” Wilkinson pushed through the swinging doors and went to the bar. He slapped his hand down a couple times and ordered, “Your best, Gus. Give me your best whiskey, and don’t be slow about it. I got a successful business deal to celebrate.”

  “Coming right up, Marshal.” A ruddy-faced man in an apron behind the bar poured a generous drink into a tumbler, then asked Mac, “What’s your pleasure?”

  Mac knew better than to answer that truthfully. He looked at the marshal, then his whiskey.

  “That looks mighty good. I’ve been on the trail so long it’ll take more than one to cut through the dust.”

  A moment later, he hoisted his glass and saluted the marshal.

  “To . . . business.”

  The marshal gulped his drink down in a single swallow, banged the glass in a demand for more. Gus obliged. Mac shook his head. He was still working on the first one.

  “I need some money for the drinks,” the barkeep said.

  “Right here, sir, right here.” Mac pulled a roll of greenbacks from his vest pocket and dropped them on the bar. “Keep the liquor flowing. I want to seal the deal with Marshal Wilkinson good and proper.”

  “Well that you should.” The marshal got another three fingers of whiskey poured into his glass. He showed no sign of slowing his drinking. “I’m gonna be four thousand dollars richer, Gus. This gent’s agreed to pay for passage for his herd.” Wilkinson frowned. “You got to bail out that trail boss of yours, first, don’t you?”

  “I’ll drink to that, Marshal. If he wasn’t such a good friend, I’d let him rot in your jail, but we need him on the job. Can’t have anybody slacking off, can we?”

  “Nope, no, sir, you can’t.”

  “It’s too bad your boy is such a lazy one.”

  “What? He ain’t!”

  Mac motioned for the bartender to give the marshal another drink. Wilkinson downed it and got another drink, his face fiery red now.

  “How’s he better than you, then?” Mac kept goading the marshal, finding the soft spots to poke hardest at. All he wanted was to keep the man drinking. Even a professional drinker like Wilkinson had a limit. Having a new antagonist in town spurred him on, but it still took a bottle and a half of the whiskey before he started to wobble on his feet.

  Mac moved slowly from foot to foot. The trade liquor he had imbibed took its toll on him, too, but the marshal had outpaced him three drinks for every one he swilled. Still, Mac had never been much of a drinker. He watched the marshal’s eyes try to track his back and forth movement. When the bloodshot eyes actually crossed, he knew he had succeeded in this part of his plan.

  He started to scoop up the money remaining on the bar, but Gus was quicker.

  “I know what you’re doin’. This is mine.”

  “You’ll have to come up with one hell of a story.”

  “I can think up the woolliest stories you ever did hear. Nobody in town much likes him or that snotty-nosed brat of his.”

  Mac nodded, got his arm around the lawman, and steered him for the door.

  “Don’t you pass out on me, you hear? We’ve got to get you back to the jailhouse so you can let my partner out.”

  “Why? You ain’t paid his fine. You ain’t paid nothin’.”

  “It’s in your office. On your desk. Don’t you remember?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure, I remember.” Wilkinson managed to stumble along under his own power. Mac trailed him.

  “David, it’s me, your pa. I’m comin’ on in, so don’t you shoot.”

  “Aw, come on in, then.” The boy sounded as if he had been awakened.

  Mac considered this even better. As the marshal opened the door into his office, Mac slid Wilkinson’s gun from its holster. The lawman never noticed.

  “Where is it? I don’t see the money.” He fell forward, braced with both hands flat on the desktop.

  “David took it,” Mac said.

  “What?” the youngster exclaimed. “I didn’t take no money!”

  Wilkinson lunged for his son, knocking the shotgun to one side. Mac stepped around and pointed the marshal’s gun at the boy.

  “Get the keys to the cells.”

  “You stole my money.” Wilkinson fell heavily across the desk and flopped onto the floor. “Gimme it.”

  Mac waited for Patrick Flagg to come from the cells in the back of the office. He took in the situation in a flash.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Get him into the cell, maybe one alongside his boy. The two of them might not get along together.” Mac pursed his lips, then said, “No, put them together. The town might enjoy a trial of one of them killing the other with his bare hands.”

  Flagg grinned wolfishly, dragged the protesting marshal into the back. He came back, grabbed the boy’s arm, and hauled him into the cell block as well. Keys clicked and cell doors slammed.

  “You’ve got something in mind. What is it?” Flagg asked when he came back into the office.

  “We need a trail boss something fierce right now,” Mac said. “Moving a herd at night isn’t something any of the others have any experience doing.”

  “How many miles do we have to go, do you think?” Flagg rummaged about in a drawer, found his gun belt and six-shooter. He strapped them on as he left the office.

  Mac started after him, then stopped. A stack of wanted posters showed no sign of having been examined. He hastily flipped through them, then stared at his own likeness peering back at him. Pierre Leclerc had convinced the New Orleans authorities to put up a hundred-dollar reward on his head for the murder of Micah Holdstock. He crumpled the poster and stuffed it into his pocket before following Flagg outside.

  “Where’s your horse?”

  “At the town livery, if Wilkinson didn’t sell it to someone.” Flagg climbed up behind Mac as they rode to the stable. Less than five minutes later, Flagg rode out and asked, “Where do we head?”

  Mac had gotten his bearings. He remembered what Flagg had claimed about Compass Jack Bennett and how the man never got lost. That ability would have served him in good stead now, especially since the herd was already on the move.

  “That way,” he said, pointing north out of town. He followed the pointer stars in the Big Dipper up to the North Star and refined his route.

  Once outside Lewiston, Mac tried to make a guess where the Rolling J longhorns might be by now. They had been on the trail almost two hours. He tried to get his bearings using the stars, but heavy clouds hid the sky and the constellations he depended on for nighttime guidance.

  “You know the Rolling J will never be allowed to come this way again?” Flagg’s tone was neutral.

  “There was no other way I saw to get you out of the hoosegow and save the herd.”

  “There’s one other thing I regret,” Flagg said.

  “
What’s that?” Mac felt on edge, waiting to hear.

  “I missed one of your meals with those biscuits.”

  Flagg laughed, surprising Mac. He hadn’t heard the trail boss in such high spirits in quite a while. It was time to bring him down to earth.

  “You’re missing more than the biscuits. I used most all the money you had in the bankroll for buying supplies.”

  Flagg sniffed.

  “At least you enjoyed a drink or two with the money. I’ve never seen a man quite as drunk as that marshal. How’d you know it would work, getting him so snockered?”

  “I didn’t.” Mac touched the marshal’s gun still tucked into his waistband. He drew it and sent it spinning into the night. It landed in a puddle, causing a small splash. “I smelled whiskey on him when we first met. That was all I had to go by.”

  “You’re going to have my job one of these days, Mac.”

  “What? And deprive you of your biscuits? Nobody in the outfit can cook half as good as me.”

  “Give Rattler your recipe and who cares what else he cooks, as long as he delivers on those heavenly hunks of cooked dough.”

  They joshed one another as they rode. Then they settled down. Mac had to ask, “How long do you think we’ve got before the marshal gets a posse on our trail?”

  “He’ll have to sober up first, but you’re right about him. No man with that sort of power lets anyone make a fool out of him. If it had been just him locked in the cell, we might be all right, but he lost face in front of his son. Wilkinson has to make good on catching us.”

  “Do you hear cattle up ahead?” Mac tilted his head and strained to hear the smallest sounds in the night. On this open prairie stretching northward, the loud sigh of the wind drowned out most normal sounds.

  “I do. That way.” Flagg looked up. “We’re catching a bit of luck.”

  A drop of moisture suddenly brushed Mac’s cheek. He knew he wasn’t crying, so he said, “Driving the cattle in a rainstorm’s good luck? How do you figure?”

  “Think on it, Mac. Wilkinson tries to find our trail, but the rain’s washed away all trace we were even here. That’s the good luck.”

  Heavy drops of rain began to thump against the brim of Mac’s hat. He peered into the murk and thought he made out silhouettes of longhorns moving away from him. What the trail boss said might be true. A posse wouldn’t want to brave a late-summer thunderstorm just to appease their marshal, but the weather posed its own problems.

  By the time they caught up with the back of the herd, it was raining to beat the band. Distant thunder made the cattle uneasy. Mac hoped they wouldn’t stampede.

  “I need to find who’s driving the chuckwagon. The hands will want breakfast whenever we take a break.”

  “Go on, Mac.” Flagg hesitated, then called out to him. “Hey, Mac!”

  “Yeah?” Mac was thinking about how to keep driving when the ground got muddy and the chuckwagon slipped and slid around. “What is it?”

  “Thanks.” With that Flagg trotted off.

  Behind him, in soaked clothes and with water dripping in an almost constant stream from the brim of his hat, Mac grinned.

  He knew they weren’t safe yet, not from the angry marshal and not from the chance of a stampede because of the storm, but for the moment he felt good. Damned good.

  CHAPTER 17

  “I’ll never be dry again,” Rattler grumbled from the seat of the chuckwagon. He pulled his yellow oilcloth slicker around him and kept his head down against the driving rain.

  “When you get to Hell, it’ll be hot enough to dry you off,” Mac said as he swayed back and forth on the seat beside Rattler, who was still handling the reins. He had to agree with the cowboy about the weather. Since he had sprung Flagg from the Lewiston jail and caught up with the herd moving into the storm, it had not stopped raining.

  A few times it looked like it was going to let up. It lied. After a pause, the rain pelted them even harder than before. Glancing up and swiping water from his eyes, Mac doubted he could see fifty feet. The only good thing about the rain was that it would wipe out their trail and maybe keep Marshal Wilkinson from following them. Other than that, Mac couldn’t find anything good to say for the incessant rain. It had been so bad, he didn’t know if it was still night or had turned to morning yet.

  From the way his belly grumbled, he had to bet on morning. He fished out his pocket watch and held it up to get a better look at it.

  “What time is it?” Rattler shouted over the drone of the rain hammering against their hat brims before running in tiny rivers down their slickers.

  “Nine. Don’t know if that’s night or morning.”

  “Got to be morning. When do you think Flagg is going to let us take a break? I’m ready to eat.”

  “Me, too,” Mac admitted, though he would need at least an hour of preparation before he fed the hands. Building fires and cooking anything in this downpour was going to be yet another obstacle to overcome.

  “No lightning in this storm. We’re lucky that way,” Rattler went on.

  “Some luck. We might be driving the herd in a giant circle and will end up back in town.” If that happened, Mac vowed to shoot it out with the law, even the younger Wilkinson. That one looked to be a real menace sooner rather than later. He had heard stories of gunmen who were barely into their teens. The boy fit the bill exactly and already had the arrogance of a killer.

  “Mac! Mac!”

  “That’s Flagg,” Rattler said. He slowed the team as the sheets of rain fell endlessly around them.

  A shape loomed up out of the murk and turned into a man on horseback. “I couldn’t find you,” Flagg said as he drew rein beside the wagon. “No sense trying to fix food. You got enough to serve cold?”

  “I do. Won’t be much, though.”

  “Better than nothing. I’m calling a halt to the drive for a while. The men are falling out of the saddle, and the cattle are getting cranky.”

  “Nobody wants a cranky longhorn,” Mac agreed. His humor was the only thing dry this morning.

  “Go on and dish up the food, then take a break. You’ve been awake as long as anybody.”

  “You, too,” Mac said.

  “I got some sleep in a nice warm cell, though the cot had bedbugs.” Flagg scratched to make his point. He grinned, his gold tooth shining in the dark. The smile faded. He wheeled around and galloped off to take care of yet another problem with the herd.

  With his usual thoroughness, Mac fixed what he could, cleaning out most of the dried fruits and jerked beef from the larder. The airtights he saved for later. If the rain didn’t let up, he’d have to serve the peaches and tomatoes for the evening meal.

  As the men came riding in and gratefully took whatever he dished out to them, the rain began to let up. By the time Flagg rode into camp, the rain had stopped, and the clouds were parting enough to show occasional patches of blue sky.

  Flagg dismounted and said, “I hate to do this, Mac, but can you ride out to the far side of the herd and see if you can find Billy Duke? Nobody’s seen him for more than an hour. Last anybody talked to him, he was fixing to chase after twenty head that had broken away from the herd.”

  “If I find him, do you want me to help him drive the cattle back?”

  Flagg nodded, picked up a plate with a scant assortment of dried food on it and began chewing on a tough piece of jerky.

  Mac cleaned up the best he could, then chose another horse to ride since the one he had pushed so hard during the night shied from him as he approached. It hardly seemed fair that the horses got treated better than the men who rode them. Being cook was hard enough, but having trail scout and now cowboy added to his jobs left him so exhausted he walked around in a daze most of the time. Flagg berated cowboys who slept in the saddle, especially during night herd, but Mac wanted to find out how they did it. There wasn’t likely going to be any other time for him to catch a few winks.

  When he found Billy Duke and they got the errant cows back to t
he herd, he would have to drive the wagon, do some scouting, and fix the noonday meal. With the ground the way it was, he likely wouldn’t be able to make more than a mile or two of progress. The chuckwagon’s wheels might even bog down in the mud until it was impossible to move.

  “When it happens, I’ll worry about it,” he told himself. He tipped his head down and let the rain drip off the brim. The horse lulled him into a half sleep that almost betrayed him. Only a loud shout woke him.

  “What? What? Billy?” Mac looked around, rubbing his eyes to get the sleep out of them. He saw the cowboy ahead of him, herding a dozen head of cattle.

  “Hey, Mac. I got ’em back. All of ’em.”

  Mac rode around and came up on the far side of the small herd to keep them together. The larger the number, the easier it was keeping most of them together. When the longhorns formed tiny bunches like this, they moseyed off, ignoring the others. Mac had never figured out how the cattle decided on a leader, but they did. Sometimes it was the biggest bull, but other times there seemed no rhyme or reason to which critter they followed.

  “How many were there?”

  “All these. A dozen. They wandered off in the middle of the storm. It took me forever finding them. They’d gone due west and were down in a hollow.”

  “Good work, Billy.” Mac used the end of his lariat to move two stragglers along. As he did so, he saw something out of the ordinary. He rode closer, bent, and wiped mud off the rump of the nearest heifer. “This isn’t one of ours.”

  “Of course it is, Mac. What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know brands, but this looks like 23. It’s not the Rolling J.”

  “A cow’s a cow. Don’t go gettin’ all prairie lawyer on me.”

  “The brand means it belongs to another herd. Did you see other riders?”

  From the glare Billy Duke gave him, he knew the answer.

  “You take the 23 branded cows back. I’ll see to getting ours into the herd. Flagg’s got them moving—”

  “No.”

  Mac turned on the cowboy. Billy Duke was a year or two younger, but his experience with cattle outstripped anything Mac claimed. In the pecking order of Rolling J riders, Mac had never figured where he stood. Flagg listened to him and sometimes even followed his ideas. But he wasn’t a cowpuncher. The others, ones like Rattler, joshed with him as they did others riding herd. But he was a substitute because of Northrup taking his men and hightailing it. The only thing he knew for certain was that he had been hired as the cook.