“Yeah, well, I didn’t mean now,” Boswell said. “I was thinkin’ about maybe later.”
“Don’t think,” Van Arndt said. “I’ll do the thinkin’ for all of us.”
It was nearly supper time when Cal spotted the rider coming toward the camp.
“Smoke, someone’s coming,” Cal said, pointing toward the north.
“Anybody we know?” Pearlie asked.
“I’ve never seen him,” Cal said. “How about you, Smoke? Have you ever seen him?”
“No,” Smoke replied. “But if he was looking for trouble, I don’t expect he come in to the camp riding like this.”
“No, I don’t think so either,” Pearlie agreed.
“Hello the camp,” the rider hailed.
“Come on in,” Smoke invited.
They studied the rider as he approached. He looked to be in his sixties at least. He was bony and angular, almost to the point of emaciation. He had a white, stubby beard, not one that was purposely grown, but the result of going several days without shaving.
“We’re just about to have our supper,” Smoke said. “You’re welcome to join us.”
“Well, now, I thank you kindly for that,” the rider said as he dismounted. “I ain’t never one to turn down a free meal.” He pulled out his own mess kit and handed it to Cal, who reached for it. “The name is Taylor. Bogardus Taylor, though I don’t normally tell folks my first name. I take it that one of you boys would be Smoke Jensen?”
“That would be me,” Smoke said. Smoke squinted his eyes. “Do I know you?”
“No, sir, I don’t reckon that you do know me,” Taylor said. “But I know you. At least, I know about you. Sometime ago you was ridin’ shotgun guard for my brother, Puddin’. Some men tried to hold up the stage. Puddin’ said if it hadn’t a’been for you, he would’a been kilt for sure.”1
Smoke chuckled. “Puddin’ Taylor, yes, I remember him. He got shot in the arm as I recall. How is he doing?”
“His arm still troubles him somewhat when it gets cold. But other than that, he is getting’ along just fine, thanks to you,” Taylor said. “Which is why I’ve come to tell you.”
“You’ve come to tell me what?” Smoke asked, just as Cal passed the kit back filled with beans, bacon, and a biscuit.
“Uhmm, this is mighty tasty,” Taylor said shoveling a spoonful into his mouth. “You know a feller by the name of Van Arndt? He’s a real pale feller.”
“Yes, I know him.”
“Well, sir, he and some more fellers is a’plannin’ to attack you tomorrow mornin’. What they are figurin’ on doin’ is killin’ the three of you and then take your herd.” He took a bite of the biscuit. “This biscuit is just real good. Who made it?”
“I did,” Cal said.
“Sonny, you’d be a fine man to camp with. You ever get a hankerin’ to look for silver or gold, come look me up. I’d be just real happy to take you on and learn you all about prospectin’. Most especial if you can cook like this all the time.”
“How many of them are there?” Smoke asked.
“I beg your pardon?” Taylor asked, so involved with his eating now that it was almost as if the life-and-death discussion of ambush, robbery, and murder was no more than casual conversation.
“You said Van Arndt and some others are planning on killing us and taking the herd. How many of them are there?”
“Oh, there’s about eight of ’em, I reckon. They’re holed up back at the Silver Strike Saloon in Putrid Wells.”
“Putrid Wells?” Cal said. He chuckled. “What kind of a name is that?”
“Hey, I know that place,” Pearlie said. “It’s a town just ahead of us by a couple of miles.”
“It was a town,” Smoke said. “It grew up around a silver mine, but when the mine played out, there was nothing to keep people there any longer. Especially given he fact that the water is bad. That is what gave the town its name. It’s a ghost town now.”
“Well, it ain’t rightly what you would call a ghost town,” Taylor pointed out. “A ghost town means there ain’t nobody there at all, but there is a feller by the name of Nippy Jones that runs him a bar and café there in Putrid Wells. And they’s folks that drop in on him from time to time, them bein’ mostly travelers and the like.” Taylor held his cup out. “You reckon maybe a feller could get hisself another cup o’ that coffee?”
“Sure thing,” Cal said, using his hat as a heat pad and taking the blue metal pot from the fire to pour another cup of coffee for the old prospector.
“I thankee there, sonny. I thankee right kindly,” Taylor said.
“Mr. Taylor, I believe you said Van Arndt and the others are holed up in Putrid Wells?” Smoke asked.
“Yes, sir. I heard Van Arndt tell the others he plans on them spendin’ the night right there in the saloon tonight. Then what he plans on doin’ is, he plans on comin’ after you boys and the herd around mid-morning tomorrow.”
“Unless we go after them first,” Smoke said.
“Go after them? What are you talking about, Smoke? Didn’t you hear Mr. Taylor say there were eight of them?” Cal said. “That is what you said, isn’t it, Mr. Taylor? That there are eight of them?”
“Eight, that’s right. And one of ’em used to work for you. You know a feller named Keno?”
“Keno?” Pearlie replied. “Oh, yes, sir. We do indeed know a fella named Keno.”
“He’s one of ’em,” Taylor said. “He claims to be somethin’ special with a gun.”
“He is good with a gun,” Pearlie said.
“Is there some bad blood betwixt you boys and this feller Keno?”
“Why do you ask?”
“From listenin’ to him talk, seems like he has a particular hard spot for the lot of you. I could be wrong, but that’s the way it sounded to me.”
“You aren’t wrong, Mr. Taylor,” Smoke said.
“So, how are we going to go after eight? There are only three of us.” Cal asked.
“Four, if you count me,” Taylor said.
Smoke reached out and put his hand on the old prospector’s shoulder. “Thanks for the offer, Mr. Taylor,” he said. “But you’ve done enough for us already. Anyway, there aren’t three of us, there are fifteen hundred and three.”
“Fifteen hundred? Ha!” Cal said. “I don’t know where you get fifteen hundred, unless you are countin’ the cows.”
“Don’t you think they have a stake in this?” Smoke asked.
Cal laughed. “Well, I reckon they do,” he said. “But I’m not sure how you plan to get them into the game.”
“I’ll show you,” Smoke said without further explanation.
They had gotten their herd under way before dawn, and now, nearly two miles into the day’s drive, the sun was barely above the eastern horizon. The early morning light picked up the blanket of dew on the meadow and flashed it back in a million sparkling points of color. From their position on the crest of a hill, Smoke, Pearlie, and Cal stared down toward the little ghost town of Putrid Wells.
“I hope they’re still here,” Cal said.
“They’re here. See the horses down there?” Smoke said.
“Ha! They’re probably plannin’ on just how they are going to hit us,” Cal said.
“I reckon we’ll be upsettin’ those plans somewhat considerable,” Pearlie said.
“Are you boys ready?” Smoke asked.
Pearlie nodded. “We’re ready.” He giggled. “It’s funny, because the thing you want to watch out for most on a long drive is a cattle stampede. And now here we are, planning on gettin’ one a’goin’.”
“The herd is well watered and well fed,” Smoke said. “I don’t expect they’ll run too far.”
The herd, having been moved up this morning, now stood motionless. The only movement within the herd came from those few animals who, not understanding why they had stopped so soon, and sensing that it was time to be under way again, were walking around as if expending nervous energy. Even they would ma
ke no effort to move until urged to do so, for with the water and graze that was available, the herd would be perfectly content to remain here indefinitely if not prodded.
Smoke, Cal, and Pearlie moved their mounts into position behind the herd. Cal and Pearlie had blankets in their hands and Smoke was holding his pistol. When all were in position they looked toward Smoke in expectation.
There was a long moment of waiting as Smoke held his hand up. Then he fired the gun into the air. “Now!” he called out, his shout concurrent with the firing of the pistol.
Almost immediately after his shout and gunshot, Cal and Pearlie began waving blankets, and the herd, startled by the sudden fury of noise and activity, broke into a rapid, lumbering gait, headed down the hill toward the little scattering of buildings below.
“Yee hah! Yee hah!” the three men shouted at the top of their voices, riding back and forth behind the herd. They had put away their blankets, and were now waving hats at the cattle to urge them into greater and greater speed.
Inside the Silver Strike, Van Arndt and the others were still sleeping off the effects of all the whiskey they had drunk the night before. Only Keno was up, a full bladder having awakened him. He stepped outside the front door of the saloon and, rather than walk across the street to the toilet, began relieving himself in the street right in front of the saloon door.
He thought of the sight he must make, standing here in front of a building, relieving himself on the main street of a town, and he found the thought funny.
“Ha,” he said. “What I’d like to do is take a piss, just like this, in front of Longmont’s back in Big Rock. Wouldn’t that be a picture now?”
Keno said the words aloud, even though there was nobody there to talk to. Then, just as he was finishing, he heard thunder. Surprised by that, Keno looked into the sky. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen.
Then, looking to the north, he saw something that first puzzled, and then startled him.
It was cattle! An entire herd of cattle was running hell-bent across the plains! He looked at them for a moment, unable to believe his eyes. Then he realized that they weren’t just running, they were stampeding, and they were heading right for him.
“What the hell?” he asked quietly. Then, shock gave way to panic as he realized that he was in danger. “My God, my God, it’s a stampede! Stampede!” he shouted at the top of his voice. He ran back into the saloon. “Stampede!” he shouted again.
“Keno, what the hell are you carrying on about?” Jeeter asked, sleepily. Jeeter had pulled two of the tables together, and he was lying across them with his hat over his face. “You’re dreamin’. Go back to sleep.”
“The cattle are stampeding!” Keno said. “There are thousands of them and they are coming right for us.”
“What do you mean they’re coming right for us?” Shardeen asked irritably. Shardeen was lying on the floor near the bar. “What cattle?”
“Look outside, you’ll see what I’m talking about!” Keno shouted.
By now, the sound of sixty thousand hooves drumming on the ground had grown loud enough for everyone to hear.
“What the hell is that? Thunder?” Kingsley asked. He got up from the table and walked over to look through the window. At that moment the herd was less than one hundred yards away. An outhouse on the outskirts of the settlement went down under the onslaught of the thundering herd.
“Holy shit!” Kingsley shouted.
Kingsley’s shout alerted the rest of the men, though his warning wasn’t really necessary, for by now the thundering sound of the stampede had become almost deafening, waking even the most hungover of all the sleepers.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Kingsley shouted running toward the door.
“Kingsley, you fool! Get back in here!” Van Arndt yelled, but his yell went unheeded. The terrified man ran outside only to find himself trapped in the open with an ocean of brown crashing toward him. He tried to get back to the relative safety of the saloon, but it was too late. He was run over and crushed by the stampeding cows.
Those inside the saloon shuddered in terror as the ground shook around them. Now and again, the horns of one of the bolting cows would hook into the crusted adobe walls of the Silver Strike, gouging out large chunks of mud and dirt. With a crash, the window frame was pulled out, leaving a large, gaping hole in the wall. Through the hole, the terrified men could see a seemingly unending stream of wild-eyed cattle.
One corner of the wall came tumbling down, bringing the roof down with it. The men inside screamed, and fell to the floor with their arms over their heads. They gritted their teeth and cried in fear and felt the earth shake as the herd continued to rumble by. Finally the shaking stopped and the sound began to recede.
Then it was quiet.
“What…what the hell was that?” someone asked.
“I’ve never heard of cows stampeding through a town like that,” another added.
“They weren’t just stampedin’ through the town,” Keno said. “They was drove through the town.”
“What? What do you mean they was drove through the town?” Van Arndt asked.
“I mean they was drove through the town,” Keno repeated. “I seen Smoke Jensen, Pearlie, and Cal, all ridin’ behind the herd, urgin’ them on. Them cows was drove through here of a pure purpose. Those sons of bitches tried to kill us.”
“How did they even know we was here?” Shardeen asked.
“I don’t know how they knew, but they did. And they used them cows to try and kill us,” Keno answered.
“Where’s Kingsley? Does anybody see him?” Van Arndt asked.
“He’s still out there,” Boswell said, nodding toward the window. “The cows got him. He’s deader than hell.”
Van Arndt walked up to the door and looked outside. He could see the bloody pulp of what was left of Kingsley’s body.
“What are we goin’ to do with him?” Boswell asked.
“What do you mean, what are we goin’ to do with him?”
“We can’t just leave him there, can we?” Boswell said.
“Why not? The dumb shit brought it on himself. Anyone so damn dumb they would run out in front of a stampede don’t deserve nobody to worry over them.”
“Still, it don’t seem right,” Boswell said.
“You want to bury the son of a bitch, bury him,” Van Arndt said. “I ain’t stoppin’ you.”
“What do we do now, Van Arndt?” Peters asked.
“Did our horses survive?”
“Yeah, they all run off when they heard the herd stampedin’ toward them,” Keno said. “Fact is, they’re all comin’ back now.”
“Good. What we do now is, we leave here.”
“Are we still goin’ to take the herd?” Keno asked.
“No. That’s not possible now.”
“So, are we givin’ up?”
“Depends on what you mean by givin’ up? We ain’t goin’ to try and take the herd,” Van Arndt said. He smiled. “I’ve got a better idea.”
“What’s that?” Shardeen asked.
“Think about it. If we had taken the herd, we’d still have to drive it to Frisco. Why not let Jensen and his boys do all the hard work for us. We’ll wait until he delivers the herd—then we’ll take the money.”
The others smiled.
“Yeah,” Jeeter said. “Yeah, I like that a lot better anyway. Let Jensen and his boys do all the work.”
Chapter Twelve
Frisco was a busy place when Smoke, Pearlie, and Cal brought the herd into town. Two trains were standing in the depot. One was a passenger train taking on passengers for its run to the East. Even though the engineer was at rest, the fireman wasn’t. He could be seen through the cab window, shoveling coal into the firebox, working hard to keep the steam pressure up.
In contrast to the fireman’s toil, the engineer was leaning out the window of the highly polished green and brass locomotive. Serene in the power and prestige of his position, the engineer was smo
king a curved-stem pipe as he watched the activity on the depot platform.
A score of passengers were boarding or leaving the train as the conductor stood beside the string of varnished cars, keeping a close check on the time. Over on the sidetrack sat a second train, this one a freight, with its relief valve puffing as it opened and closed to maintain the delicate balance of steam pressure while it waited. The passenger train had priority over the “high iron,” as the main track was called, and not until it departed would the freight train be allowed to move back onto the main line in order to continue its travel west.
Two stagecoaches and half a dozen carriages were also sitting at the depot, while out in the street behind the depot a horse-drawn streetcar rumbled by. Although pushing cattle through the town was not unheard of, it was a rare enough condition to cause everyone to look on. Of course, they had little other option, since fifteen hundred cattle filled Poindexter Street from side to side, and stretched out from Miners Creek to the feeder on the other side of Ten Mile Creek where the gate was already open and two of Davencourt’s employees were counting the cows by putting a knot in a piece of string for every twenty-five head that passed by.
Davencourt came down to the holding pens and stood there for a while, watching as the cattle were moved into the pens.
“Mr. Jensen,” he said. “If you have someone who can keep an eye on things for you here until all the cows are in the pen, why don’t you come on over to the saloon with me and let me buy you a drink? Afterward, we’ll walk down to the bank and I’ll draw out the draft for you.”
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Smoke said. “Pearlie,” he called. “I’m going with Mr. Davencourt. When you’re finished here, take care of our horses and get us a couple of rooms over at the hotel.”
“Sure thing, Smoke,” Pearlie said.
Smoke turned the reins of his horse over to Pearlie, then walked with Davencourt down to the Twin Branch Saloon.
The place smelled of whiskey, beer, and tobacco. There was a long bar on the left, with towels hanging on hooks about every five feet along the front. A large mirror was behind the bar, but the images Smoke could see were distorted by imperfections in the glass.
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