Ralph Compton The Convict Trail

by Ralph Compton

  “Sam, start loading the prisoners,” Kane said wearily, a sudden tiredness in him. “Buck, let’s me an’ you move the kid’s body away from camp.”

  “Coyotes around.”

  “They don’t eat their own kind.”

  The drover shook his head. “Death on a drive has always boogered me. I never did know any good to come from it.”

  But the dying wasn’t over.

  Not that night.

  Chapter 10

  Sam Shaver had just ordered the prisoners to their feet when Bennett Starr made his break.

  Starr had been quiet and uncomplaining since he’d left Texas, which caught Sam and Kane by surprise. He was a small, thin man with dark, brooding eyes, his nose and cheekbones cobwebbed by red, broken veins, and his teeth were few and black.

  The man hobbled away from the cottonwoods, desperately seeking the cover of darkness. Like the others, his ankle chains were long enough to allow him a shuffling walk, but too short for running.

  “Starr!” Sam yelled, and fired a shotgun blast over the prisoner’s head.

  The man kept on going, glancing fearfully over his shoulder as he took quick, choppy steps along the creek bank. Lightning splashed around him and now, for the first time that night, thunder rumbled. Ahead of Starr the looming darkness was a welcoming cloak ready to shelter him.

  But he was destined never to reach it.

  Kane ran after the man, then stopped and drew his gun. “Starr, halt right there!” he yelled. “Or I’ll shoot!”

  Starr ignored the warning, his ankle chains chinking as he staggered forward.

  The marshal raised his Colt to eye level and fired.

  For a moment Starr kept going. Then his legs buckled and he fell flat on his face and lay still. Kane walked to the man’s side and rolled him over with the toe of his boot. Starr’s eyes were open . . . but he was staring into nothingness.

  The marshal grabbed the dead man by the back of his shirt and dragged him into camp. Kane’s teeth were bared under his mustache, his eyes ablaze with a terrible anger. The prisoners were lined up at the rear of the wagon and he hauled Starr’s body in front of them, then let the man’s shoulders thud to the ground.

  Straightening, he yelled, “This man tried to escape. Now he’s dead. From this moment onward I’ll kill any man who tries to make a break.” He looked at the sullen, angry faces of the convicts. “Do you understand that?” There was no answer and Kane said, “Stringfellow, do you understand that?”

  “You shot him in the back,” the man growled.

  “He gave me no choice. Now answer my question, damn you. Do you understand what I just told you, told all of you?”

  Stringfellow looked along the line at the others. Then he answered for all of them. “Yeah, Kane, we understand you only too well.”

  The marshal turned his head slightly, his glare still fixed on the prisoners. “Sam, load these men into the wagon. Get them out of my sight.”

  The red mist had cleared from Kane’s eyes and his burning anger had cooled, leaving only a sickly, tangle of loss in his belly and the realization that his killing of Bennett Starr had not been a victory.

  “He made his play and he lost.” Kane said it to Mae, who was looking at him in horror. “If he’d reached the darkness he could’ve got down on his belly and crawled for miles. I would never have found him.”

  “No, Marshal, you know you didn’t have to kill him. I saw what happened and it—it was cold-blooded murder.”

  Kane’s voice was level, almost reasonable. “Ma’am, like the rest of them, Bennett Starr was a killer—a wild, dangerous animal. Ask Sam what he and Stringfellow and the others did to a Cherokee farmer’s wife and daughter up in the Territory. You don’t take a chance on men like these gettin’ loose among decent folks. You go after them and if you have to, you kill them.”

  Kane saw shutters close in the woman’s eyes. She turned on her heel and walked away toward the awning at the side of the chuck wagon.

  He had the feeling that when it came to Buff Stringfellow and the rest of them, Mae would believe nothing he said.

  Kane saw that Buck was looking at him, an expression on his face that could have been fear. The old puncher shook his head. “Hell has come to this place,” he said.

  The marshal smiled without humor. “Old-timer, I got the feeling hell was riding drag for this outfit long afore I ever got here. Now, help me put this body beside the other one.”

  “No, Marshal,” Buck said. “Lay out your own dead.”

  Kane took the first watch and let Sam sleep. Mae St. John was wrapped in her blankets under the awning and Buck was stretched out near the chuck wagon. Ed Brady was still with the herd, but Mae was due to spell him in a couple of hours. Now that she was down to two hands, the woman seemed determined to pick up her share of the work. Kane had overheard her tell Buck that, against the accepted practice of a trail drive, tomorrow his wagon would take the point and she and Brady would ride flank, dropping back every now and then to cover the drag.

  It was a far-from-perfect arrangement, but Kane was sure that if anyone could make it work, it was Mae St. John. She was a strong, capable woman with only one flaw to the marshal’s thinking—a blind spot when it came to Buff Stringfellow. Where that might lead, Kane did not know, but it continued to worry him.

  Kane sat with his back to a tree near the creek where he had an unobstructed view of the camp, his rifle across his belly. The thunderstorm had passed quickly, with only a few drops of rain. The blushing moon was covered and uncovered by scudding clouds, driven by a belligerent wind, performing a shy dance of the seven veils for the heedless night.

  Carefully keeping his eyes away from the fire, Kane built a smoke. The camp was quiet, the cries of hunting coyotes but distant yips in the stillness. The marshal inhaled deeply and listened into the darkness. Wood crackled in the fire, shifting now and then, sending up a shower of sparks that briefly winked red, then died.

  The tall, rangy shape of Sam Shaver emerged from the darkness and walked around the circle of the firelight, moving stiffly. He carried his shotgun, a holstered Colt, on his hip. The old man stepped to Kane’s left, not wishing to obstruct the marshal’s view of the camp.

  Kane’s eyes lifted. “Can’t sleep, huh?”

  “No, I reckon not. There’s something in the wind I don’t like, Logan. It’s telling me things I don’t understand.” He shook his head. “It’s like there’s a ghost at my elbow, whispering in my ear.”

  “Old-timer, we’re all on edge tonight. Still fur to travel an’ one of the prisoners dead already. It’s a time for a man to trouble his mind thinkin’ about haunts an’ sich. Maybe so.”

  As Sam squatted on his heels, Kane asked the question uppermost on his mind. “Was I right to gun Bennett Starr?”

  Sam made a show of thinking about an answer. He said, “ ‘In the performance of his duty, and only if the appropriate warnings to halt have been issued and ignored, a marshal has the right to bring down a fleeing fugitive by any and all means necessary.’ Them’s ol’ Judge Parker’s words. I heard him say that with my own ears.”

  “What do you think, Sam?”

  “I just done tole you what I think.”

  “No, you told me what the judge thinks. What do you say?”

  The old man reached out, took the cigarette from between Kane’s lips and inhaled. He passed the smoke back to the marshal and said, “What I say don’t matter.”

  “It matters to me.”

  The words he was about to say seemed painful to Sam Shaver. He grimaced as though they were stuck like rocks in his chest. “I don’t think you needed to kill that man. Starr was hobbled with chains an’ I reckon you could’ve gone after him afore he got too fur. Seems to me you could have buffaloed him, then drug him back to camp.” The old man hesitated a heartbeat. “That’s what I think, Logan. Fer what it’s worth.”

  Beyond the campfire, the prison wagon creaked, then creaked again, louder this time. Kane look
ed in that direction. “What’s going on over there?”

  Sam shrugged. “Somebody stirring in his sleep, I reckon. Them boys won’t give us any trouble while they’re locked in the wagon. They know I could up my rifle an’ clear that cage quicker’n scat.”

  Kane ground out his cigarette butt on the grass beside him, then immediately began to build another.

  “You riled at me, Marshal?” Sam asked.

  “No, Sam. I asked you to speak your mind an’ you spoke it. But I’m studying on something. Stringfellow, Joe Foster an’ them others, when you get right down to it, I’m no different from them, am I?”

  The old man said nothing.

  Kane thumbed a match into flame and lit his cigarette, his eyes distant. “Afore I signed on with Judge Parker, I killed men for money. The better the money, the more men I killed. I didn’t give a damn about their wives or children or if they was in the right or in the wrong. I was hired for gun work an’ I did it to the best of my ability.

  “One time, down to Old Mexico, I gunned a man at the door to the mission where he was about to get hitched. His bride was a-standin’ there, watching, wearing a veil an’ a white dress. She looked at me like I was some kind of animal. To my dying day I’ll never fergit her eyes, how they judged and condemned me.”

  “Logan, you don’t—”

  “Wait, Sam, let me finish.” Kane spoke through a cloud of blue smoke. “Oncet, when I was ridin’ the grub line for the first an’ only time in my life, I held up a Bain and Company stage down on the Concho. This gambler feller objected to bein’ robbed of his money an’ watch an’ drew down on me.” Kane dragged on his cigarette. “I killed him too.”

  He turned his head to look at Sam. “I’ve been sitting here thinking that I’m no better and maybe a sight worse than the men in the cage over there. A tad luckier maybe, but no different.” Now Kane’s gaze searched the old man’s face. “Is that how it be, Sam?”

  He could see by the still pools of Sam’s eyes that he was not hunting in his mind for an answer. The old man rose to his feet. “I only drive the wagon, Marshal.” He looked down at Kane for a moment. “Stretch out, get some sleep. I’ll keep watch for a while.”

  “Sam, I reckon that’s how it be.”

  “Get some sleep, Marshal.”

  The dream came to Logan Kane that night, while Sam kept watch and the tossing trees were alive with wind.

  The four of them stood outside the old sod cabin where he’d been born and raised: Ma in the patched calico dress she always wore; Pa in his overalls, his black beard fanning over his chest; his twin sisters, the way he remembered them, two years younger than he, Patience and Prudence, both pretty as pictures.

  But they were all dead these twenty years, taken by the cholera.

  They stood still, looking at Kane, eyes accusing in faces as white as bleached bone.

  As always it was Ma who spoke. “Logan, why did you leave us?” she asked. “Why did you just ride away?”

  “I was scared, Ma, scared of the cholera.” Kane tried to walk toward his mother and take her in his arms, but he couldn’t move. A gray mist was gathering, coiling around him.

  “We don’t lie in the earth, Logan,” Ma said. “It ain’t right for Christian people not to lie in the earth.”

  “I’m sorry, Ma,” Kane said. He felt like he was tightly bound with rope. “You were all dead, Ma. I didn’t know what to do no more.”

  “Son, you should have buried us decent,” Pa said. “Our bones lie on top of the ground, scattered by coyotes. We will be forever denied our eternal rest until we sleep in the good Texas earth.”

  The mist drifted over Pa, then all of them. From somewhere in the shifting grayness, Kane heard his mother’s voice calling out to him. “Logan . . . don’t leave us. . . . Don’t leave. . . .”

  “I’ll be back, Ma!” Kane yelled. “I’ll find you! I’ll find you!” The echoes of his last shouted words still echoed around camp as Kane jerked upright, his heart hammering in his chest, sweat hot on his face.

  He looked around him. Mae St. John had been saddling her horse and now she was looking at him, her eyes wide and startled. Over by the chuck wagon, Buck was propped on one elbow, staring across camp, a man just rudely wakened from slumber.

  Kane saw Sam stride toward him, concern on his face. “Marshal, you were callin’ out in your sleep again like the gates of hell had just opened up fer you.”

  With trembling fingers, Kane reached into his shirt pocket for the makings. “I’m fine now, Sam. Thanks. Yeah, just fine.” He’d tried to keep his voice steady, but he knew he’d failed.

  The old man squatted and took paper and tobacco from the marshal’s trembling hand and quickly built his cigarette. He handed the rolled paper to Kane and said, “All you got to do is lick it.”

  Kane did as he was told and Sam lit the smoke for him. “Sit quiet, Logan,” he said. “You weren’t asleep for no more’n an hour afore you started hollerin’.”

  Across camp, Buck had rolled in his blankets again, but Mae was still looking at Kane, the look on her face hard to read. Then she swung elegantly into the saddle and headed out for the herd at a canter. She had not said a word.

  “You got demons haunting you, Logan,” Sam said. “I’m only the driver, but this much I’ll say to you: find your folks, anchor them deep in the earth an’ you won’t search for them in your sleep no more.”

  Kane nodded. “I will, Sam. One day soon I will.” Sam smiled. “I bet ol’ Buck will be glad to hear that. He’s a mite tetchy about his rest gettin’ disturbed, an all.”

  Chapter 11

  At first light Ed Brady rode in from the herd and he, Buck and Kane buried the dead. Mae St. John, as was her right and duty as trail boss, read the prayers from the Book. No one had anything to say, good or bad, about either man. Mae sang “How Firm a Foundation,” the hymn sung at the funeral of General Robert E. Lee, then noted that both men were now with God. Then it was over.

  After Sam fed the prisoners, Kane poured himself coffee and stepped over to Mae, who was standing near the chuck wagon talking to Buck.

  He had thought about apologizing for crying out in his sleep, but had dismissed the idea. What was done was done, and in any case he didn’t have the words to explain it.

  The marshal touched his hat. “Mornin’, ma’am.”

  Mae’s eyes were cool, so distant they were unreachable. She said, “What can I do for you, Marshal?”

  “Me an’ Sam figgered we might throw in with you, at least until we reach the Ouachita peaks. I guess you’re planning to head west an’ drive the herd around them.”

  “No, I’m going over all the mountains in my path between here and Fort Smith, Marshal. As to throwing in with us, it’s a free country and you can do as you please. But I’d rather you didn’t. I can’t afford to lose my remaining hands.”

  Kane let that slide. “Ma’am, you’re headed for some rough country filled with road agents, rustlers and outlaws of every stripe. You might be grateful for an extry rifle by the time you reach Fort Smith.”

  “We can make it alone, I assure you, Marshal,” the woman said. “Both Buck and Ed are accomplished marksmen, so I really don’t think we have anything to fear from road agents and cattle rustlers.”

  Kane recognized defeat when he saw it and his talking was done. He touched his hat. “Well, good luck to you then, ma’am.”

  “Wait,” Buck said, his old eyes shrewd. “You ever work cattle, huh?”

  “Some. I went up the trail for the first time with Charlie Goodnight when I was fourteen and twicet after that with different outfits. One time ol’ Charlie his ownself told me he reckoned me a fair hand.”

  Buck turned to Mae. “Boss, you an’ Ed will have problems aplenty driving the herd. If this feller is even half the puncher he claims to be, we can sure use him.” He looked at Kane. “You willin’ to ride drag?”

  Punching cows was not quite what Kane had in mind when he offered to ride with the herd, but with
the Provanzano brothers and Jack Henry somewhere along his back trail, there was a measure of safety in numbers, few though they were. “Me an’ Sam was going to do that anyway, drop back and keep our eyes on what’s behind us, like.”

  Mae bit her lip and thought that through. Kane believed she was a practical woman who was already well aware of the problems facing her. She was headed into the high plains, and beyond soared the rugged barrier of the Ouachita Mountains. She must know that, shorthanded as she was, the herd could get strung out for miles crossing high rim country and in the end she might lose most of them.

  The woman lifted her eyes to Kane. Even at this early hour of the morning she was enough to take a man’s breath away. Her full breasts pressed against the thin stuff of her shirt and morning sun was tangled in her hair.

  “What about your”—Kane saw her momentary reluctance to use the word, but then she said it—“prisoners?”

  “Sam Shaver keeps a Greener scattergun up on the box. He ain’t likely to be troubled.”

  Mae made up her mind. “A dollar a day, Marshal. To be paid in full when we reach Fort Smith. Take the drag and keep the herd closed up. If a cow gives birth, shoot the calf and drive the cow back to the herd. Any questions?”

  “No, ma’am. I’ve rode drag afore.”

  “Good. You can ride Hyde Larson’s string.”

  The woman dismissed Kane with her eyes. “Buck, Ed, let’s move ’em out. Buck, keep the remuda on point with you. From time to time I’ll check in to see how you’re doing.”

  Sam had been standing by the wagon and Kane told him of his arrangement with Mae St. John. The old man’s only comment was to look glum.

  “Out with it, Sam, what’s eatin’ you?” the marshal said.

  The old man cocked his head like a bird. “You really want to know?”

  “That’s why I’m askin’.”

  “First thing, riding drag ain’t no job fer a white man, and it sure ain’t fer one of Judge Parker’s deputy marshals an’ his teamster.”