“And you can cook.” Ruth laughed at this and turned to kiss his shoulder. “You’re so different from every other man in this town.”
“There’s your pa. Climb on down.”
“Let’s ride up like this. I want—”
He shifted his weight and caught her off balance. She yelped as she tumbled off. Hanging onto his waist kept her from falling, but it took her a moment to get her feet under her. By then, he had maneuvered his horse a few feet away. If the preacher saw how she was clinging to him, he didn’t show it.
“Ruth! Thank the Lord, you’re safe!” He grabbed her and hugged her so hard he threatened to crush her. She fought free and held him at arm’s length.
“You should thank Mac instead. He saved me. And he shot that terrible man. He killed him before he . . . before . . .”
“She’s safe, sir,” Mac called. “The marshal ought to know what happened and fetch in Langdon’s body and his horse.”
Pastor Hunnicut didn’t look at Mac. Instead he gave his daughter a thorough looking-over to be sure Mac wasn’t lying.
“He didn’t touch you?”
“Mac rescued me before that!”
“I meant him.” The reverend looked hard at Mac.
“No! He was a perfect gentleman. He kept Langdon from doing anything.”
“Thank you, young man.”
“Do come on in and have a drink of water. You must be thirsty after so much . . . excitement.” Ruth’s come-on was obvious, even to her pa. Especially to him.
“You need to get back to your herd.” The reverend spoke in a flat tone.
“It’ll be mighty good if we can find the right trail.” Mac knew he shouldn’t say such a thing, but he wanted to get on with the cattle drive as soon as possible. “If we don’t move on right now, we’ll have to stay around town for a spell.”
Ruth squealed with glee at the prospect of the herd lingering in the vicinity. This decided her pa.
“I need to counsel Mr. Slausen and his family.” He took Ruth by the arm and swung her about, almost frog-marching her to their small house set behind the church. She looked over her shoulder, not understanding what was going on.
Mac smiled and waved, then kicked at his horse to get it galloping away. As he rode around the church to where the social had been held, he saw that the owner of the borrowed wagon had already pulled out with all his kettles and pans. He got to the road and reached the herd in less than a half hour. Flagg already had the cowboys spread out around the herd, at point, at the sides, and many more than usual behind the herd to keep them moving.
Flagg rode alongside him and asked, “Where the hell have you been, Mac? That fella from town brought out your pots and pans so Rattler could put them back in the chuckwagon, but he didn’t know where you were.”
“There was some excitement after you left.”
Flagg’s forehead creased in a frown. “More trouble?” His tone sharpened even more. “Something to do with that Ruth filly?”
“Yeah, but not what you think. The important thing is that the reverend is going to talk to that farmer who’s in our way.”
“Talk? That’s all?”
“Get the herd moving,” Mac suggested. “The reverend has a new reason to be on the side of us clearing out.”
Flagg looked at him curiously, then yelled out his orders. Bullwhips cracked above the longhorns’ heads. The cattle lowed and began to stir. Then the entire mass surged with movement.
“Where’s the chuckwagon?”
“Rattler’s already on the trail.” Flagg laughed. “He surely did have a high opinion of how good you are at convincing people. He even bet a few of the suckers in the outfit that you’d get us moving through that farmer’s field.”
“I hope he made a fortune.” Mac hesitated, then asked, “How much did you make?”
“I don’t bet on things like that,” Flagg said. As he rode to the head of the herd, he called back, “Twenty dollars!”
As the drive passed within view of the church an hour later, Mac thought he saw Ruth standing in the field where they had held the social, but he didn’t slow down to pay his respects. That would only make matters worse for all of them. She was a young girl and would find a beau one day that her ma and pa approved of.
And if she didn’t, she should leave town and find a bigger city with more prospects. She certainly deserved better than a cook for a trail drive.
As Mac thought that, he felt a touch of pride. He knew what he was, and he liked it. Back in New Orleans he had had no idea what to do to earn his daily bread. It hadn’t mattered, as long as Evangeline Holdstock was by his side.
But now he fit into a group that was tighter than a family. The cowboys relied on each other and risked their lives for each other and knew who their best friends in the world were.
Ruth Hunnicut would have been a good choice to take him away from a life of being a drifter, but as long as he was with the Rolling J outfit, he knew he had a job and wasn’t randomly wandering. They had a destination, a daily job and purpose. Delivering the herd fed thousands of people back East and kept even more in business down around Waco. What he did was important.
He caught up with Rattler just a bit to the east of the Slausen farm.
“Good to see you decided to join us,” the lanky cowboy greeted him. “I’m getting sick and tired of driving this here buggy. I need a sturdy pony under me.”
“Keeps your knees from knocking, you bowlegged son of a gun. Get out of my wagon!”
“Why not? I done et everything in it worth eating. And there was damned little.”
“That’s because you can’t even boil coffee.”
Mac traded his horse for the driver’s box on the chuckwagon. He settled down, reins in hand, and felt at home.
“Is it true you made a killing betting I’d convince the farmer to let the herd cross his land?”
“Why else would I bother keepin’ your wagon in such good shape? Good to have you back, Mac. And the gossip was right? You did get his permission to cross?”
“Let’s not dally. I’ll lead the way, and you see that Flagg doesn’t let any strays get loose. That farmer’s got an itchy trigger finger.”
Mac had to wonder what else of Slausen’s anatomy itched. He obviously did whatever Mrs. Hunnicut told him. Such thoughts were not too charitable, but Slausen hadn’t missed with his shot by more than a couple inches. Mac doubted the man was that good a shot. It might have surprised the farmer that he missed at all, not that he almost hit his target.
“Up ahead. That’s the farm.” Mac pointed. Rattler let out a whoop and galloped away to let Flagg know it was all clear.
Mac hoped that it was. As he drove the wagon past the front gate and into the furrows left after the final harvest, he saw Slausen and his two boys out in front of their house. The preacher was talking to them, alternately pointing and praying. Then Mac lost sight of them when the chuckwagon hit the furrows and began bouncing him all around.
Keeping the team pulling across the field took all his skill. From the clatter in the rear, he doubted Rattler had secured all the pots and pans properly. If the kettles and other implements used for the social had been piled in somewhere, he’d be satisfied. A touch of nostalgia warmed him. He remembered some of the socials he and his family had gone to in Missouri. Neither his ma nor his pa had been overly religious, but they attended when they could and had insisted that he be baptized.
Would the pastor who had done the baptism condemn him for the life he’d lived so far? Probably. But Mac didn’t feel like he had done anything wrong. Shooting Langdon had been more than an act of self-defense. He had rescued a kidnapped girl and saved her from being violated. Whatever a court decided in the matter of Langdon, if he had gone to trial, wouldn’t have been enough. Hanging was too good for a man like that.
“If that’s blasphemy, so be it,” Mac said. He snapped the reins, got the team to pull the chuckwagon over one last furrow, and wide-open space stretched before
him. With as much speed as possible, he raced across the prairie. There was a lot of time to make up.
* * *
The drive’s luck ran out on the fourth day after crossing the Slausen farm. The herd had cut up the ground, making it easier for the farmer come springtime planting, but Mac doubted if the man had thought about that at the time. His ears had burned from the preacher’s exhortations that this was the proper thing to do, the neighborly thing. Mac would have bet a brand-new hat that Reverend Hunnicut had never mentioned getting a certain chuckwagon cook out of the county.
Not too surprisingly, Mac didn’t miss Ruth one bit. He did miss Billy Duke and Huey Matthis and others who had died along the route. Their absence came back to haunt him every day, not only because he felt a pang of guilt over his part in those deaths but also because they had pulled their own weight in the outfit. Doing the cooking, scouting, and occasional night herd was wearing him down to a nubbin.
And now he brought the chuckwagon to a halt because a dozen grim-faced men armed with rifles blocked the road. He sat and stared at them for a minute. They stared back. No one spoke until Mac decided it was up to him.
“Is there a reason you fellas are blocking the road? You don’t have the look of road agents since you aren’t wearing masks.”
A wiry man came over, his step quick and nervous so that he almost crow-hopped like a horse in a snake pit. He looked up with sharp eyes and an expression that brooked no argument.
“You’re scouting for a Texas herder, ain’t you?”
“I am. The Rolling J herd is three or four hours behind me. Now if you’ll kindly step out of the road, I’d like to find an open area to set up so I can feed the men before they bed down the herd for the night.”
“Turn ’em around.”
“What’s that? You want the men to go back?”
“Don’t bring that damned herd through here. Go back to where you come from.”
Mac looked at the posse. Fighting it out with so many men amounted to foolishness. Even if he’d had his S&W strapped on, six was the most he could hit. Twice that many would return fire with rifles, even if each of his rounds found a target.
“There’s more of us in town. Lots more, and we’re all determined to keep your poxy herd away from our livestock.”
“The Kansas border’s not too far north, is it? What if we keep on driving through the night and got into Kansas?”
“Your cows are sick. We don’t want them even passing by us.” The man swung his rifle around and aimed it at Mac.
Quickly, he held up both hands, palms outward.
“Whoa, hold on now. Don’t go shooting the cook. And our Rolling J longhorns aren’t sick. Every last one of them is healthy enough to have made it all the way from Waco.”
“So you’re sayin’ the sick ones died along the trail? That means they infected the ones still on their legs. Turn around. Leave.”
“I’m not the one you need to talk to. Our trail boss can assure you the cattle are healthy. All of them. He’s an expert.”
“The only way he’d get to be an expert is if he saw enough cases of Texas fever.”
“You folks stay right here. I’ll be back with Mr. Flagg before you know it.”
“Don’t bother!” The man shook his rifle in the air like a Comanche getting ready to attack.
They watched Mac like a hawk as he turned his chuckwagon around and headed back down the road. He found Flagg after only a short time since the trail boss rode at the front of the herd.
Mac explained the trouble. “I tried to convince them we don’t have any sick cows, but they wouldn’t listen. And there was a powerful lot of them to keep me from making them listen.”
“They might have reason to block a herd. If another infected herd’s already passed by, they have every right to think trailing herds will be carrying splenic fever, too.”
“I told them you’d palaver with them. You’ve dealt with fearful men like them before.”
“Hell, I’ve dealt with worse than that. I keep you and the rest of the outfit from shooting each other every single day.”
“I’d never shoot any of them.”
“No, you’d poison them.” Flagg pursued his lips. “You get on a horse and come back with me. They’ll recognize you and maybe not kill me outright.”
“Should I wear my gun?”
“Won’t hurt.”
Flagg impatiently waited for Mac to find his gun belt and get it settled around his waist. Swapping horses with the first rider who came by was as good a solution as possible, though Mac didn’t like an inexperienced cowboy driving his chuckwagon.
“It’ll be all right,” Flagg assured him. “What can Caleb do to it you haven’t already done?”
“Break an axle. Hit a rock and throw a wheel. Let the team spook and run away. Or—”
“Shut up, Mac.”
He shut up.
They rode in silence until they reached the blockade where Mac had encountered the posse. The man he had spoken to before walked out in front. Mac looked around and counted noses. They had called in reinforcements. More than a dozen new rifles had been added to the blockade, and each man looked fiercer than his neighbor. For the first time, Mac feared for not only his life but for that of Patrick Flagg as well.
“I’m the trail boss,” Flagg announced himself as he and Mac reined to a halt. “My cook tells me you’ve got the wrong idea about our herd.”
“Not wrong,” the spokesman declared with emphatic confidence. “Infected. Texas fever. You keep them cattle away from ours. We don’t want to start shooting to protect ourselves, but we will if we have to.”
“No need to get riled up. My herd’s clean. We haven’t had a single case of splenic fever—”
“Texas fever,” the man corrected.
“Sickness since we started out from Waco,” Flagg said. “On the trail, I haven’t heard of any other outfit with diseased cattle, either. Let us pass through, and we’ll be gone before you know it.”
“One cow falls over, it’ll infect all ours!” The man’s harsh rhetoric agitated the others. They began cocking their rifles.
Flagg shrugged his shoulders. The men might not have noticed, but Mac saw how this moved the trail boss’s gun hand closer to the butt of his Colt. He shifted in the saddle so he could throw down on the posse, too, but he knew that if lead started flying, he and Flagg would end up ventilated. The best they could hope for was to take a few of the locals with them.
“Inspect our herd,” Flagg suggested. “Get a vet out here and have him look over every cow. He’ll see that there’s no sickness to be found.”
“I suppose you got a vet with you what’ll state that?” The man spat. “That’s no solution.”
“The solution,” cried another toward the back of the assembled townspeople, “is for them to turn around and go home. Let their damned, diseased cows die somewhere else.”
“I see you folks have a strong opinion on the subject. Do you have a vet in town, too?”
The man stared at Flagg, not understanding. Flagg went on, “You bring your own vet out and check our longhorns. He’ll find they’re clean.”
“Why would we go and do a thing like that?” The man was suspicious, but Mac saw cracks forming in his resolve.
“Because I’ll donate five heifers to your town for the biggest shindig you ever did throw.”
“Our vet?”
“Your vet,” Flagg said, nodding. “Get him out and examine the herd. The sooner he does, the quicker we’ll be on our way.”
Mac inwardly groaned. He was bone tired. If the vet came out later, the men would have to move the herd through the night. That meant no dinner for them. And it meant he had to press on and scout the trail in the dark. If he found traces of earlier herds coming through, that would solve the problem. The West Shawnee Trail wandered all over this area, splitting up into splinter routes that converged back in Kansas for the final drive into Abilene.
But here? He had some
fancy trailsmanship ahead of him. After the vet gave his approval.
“Doc Wilson don’t work for free.”
“We’ll pay his fee—if he finds even one cow that’s infected.”
“If he don’t?”
“You’ll pony up his due. The offer of five cows stands. You can sell one of them and pay him without having to dip into the town treasury.”
The posse leader looked from man to man, then pointed. The indicated vigilante hopped onto his horse and raced off toward town.
“He won’t be an hour.”
“That’ll give me time to get my herd settled down.”
“Not here! Keep ’em away!” The cry went up through the posse.
“We’ll just bed them down where we are, then,” Flagg said. “We’re a ways out of town, so you don’t have anything to worry over.” He muttered under his breath. Mac hoped none of the vigilantes heard what he called them and their town.
When no bullets came flying their way, he relaxed. They would lose a day on the trail, but he could fix a proper dinner for the men while they waited for the vet to arrive. After a night to rest, the herd could be moving again with the dawn.
Time lost wasn’t good, but this worked out the best all around for Mac. He might even get a decent night’s sleep if he didn’t get tapped to ride night herd for a couple hours.
They settled down to wait for the vet to reach them so they could escort him to the cattle.
CHAPTER 23
“Infected.” The word came flat and hard out of the veterinarian’s thin-lipped mouth.
Mac and Flagg exchanged surprised looks, then the trail boss exploded.
“What the hell do you mean, infected? There’s not a trace of disease in any of the cattle!”
Dr. Wilson closed his bag and stood, moving away from the longhorn he had examined. He locked eyes with the trail boss and never flinched when he repeated his verdict.
“Infected with Texas fever. I’d recommend the entire herd be killed. Douse them all with kerosene and light it.”
The Chuckwagon Trail Page 20
