Said the old man, “Name’s Lamar. Wildcat Lamar. This here’s me boy, Robin.” Slowly the old man rose, knees popping like gunfire, reaching for the front wheel to help him find his feet. His boots were caked with reddish mud. “Got coffee boilin’. Jerked venison and cold biscuits. Ain’t much of a feast to celebrate survivin’ that eternal storm of yesttiday, but it’ll keep yer belly from rubbin’ ag’in yer backbone.”
The younger one’s blue eyes danced. “He’s a right fair hand at cookin’.” Then he, too, started moving away from the wagon, boots splashing in the puddles that even the parched patch of land had not yet soaked in.
James rolled out from under the wagon. It was huge. Even the rear wheels stood over his head. The eight-feet-high wheels had to be six inches wide, and the tires had been double-rigged, to prolong their wear. Sixteen feet long, the wooden sides of the wagon stretched up at least ten feet, and although the big freight wagon had the bows for a canvas cover—like one of those old prairie schooners from the Oregon Trail days he had read about—the ribs were empty. It was no Conestoga, but bigger. Considering the lack of cover, whatever those two folks were carrying in the back, was soaked from the hail and rain.
“Help yerself to the grub.” Wildcat Lamar slurped some coffee from a tin cup. “Got a heavy load, so we ain’t goin’ nowheres till the ground dries a mite. Don’t fancy gettin’ stuck out here.”
James rubbed his head, shifted the rifle to his left hand, and looked up at the wagon. “You could fit a stagecoach in there,” he marveled.
“Two more ’n likely.” Lamar finished his coffee and tossed the cup to James.
He fumbled with it, dropped it, and knelt to pick it up, but not before making sure Robin Lamar wasn’t ready to jump him.
After that incident in the Fort Worth–Denver City boxcar, James wasn’t trusting anyone.
“Ain’t got an extry cup to share,” Lamar said. “Didn’t expect to have no comp’ny payin’ us a visit.”
Robin moved around James, giving him a wide berth, and squatted beside his father. “How come you landed underneath our wagon?”
James scanned the countryside, puzzled.
The old man laughed. “Twister run off our oxen, iffen that’s what yer lookin’ fer.”
“It is,” James admitted, and moved toward the fire. The smell of coffee proved more than he could stand. He filled the cup, sipped some, and finally relaxed.
“How come you landed underneath our wagon?” Robin asked again. He piled two biscuits and some huge bits of jerky on a plate, and slid the plate across the slick grass toward James’s boots.
“The twister dropped me here.” James smiled as their eyes widened. “I’m kidding.” The biscuits practically broke his teeth, and the jerky felt even harder.
He kept trying to make himself more presentable, but the ripped shirt and everything else about him made that impossible. Before long, nothing mattered. The coffee, even the tough food became his sole focus. He didn’t speak further until he had cleaned the plate. Neither the old man or his boy spoke, either.
“I’m bound for Fort Smith,” James said at last.
Coughing, Robin spit out a mouthful of coffee, and his father leaned forward, mouth agape. “Afoot?” the old man roared.
The coffee tasted finer than even the chicory Ma brewed. But after all that time without food or anything other than hard water, anything would have tasted good. Well, maybe not the granite-like biscuits and jerky.
James lied. “Lost my horse a ways back.”
Old man Lamar seemed to accept that, nodding. “It’ll happen. Lost yer way, eh?”
James eyed the man curiously.
Wildcat laughed and found a pouch that hung from the belt over his waist. He opened the piece of fringed leather and pulled out a twist of tobacco, from which he bit off a sizeable chunk and began softening the chaw with his gums. “Ye ain’t followin’ no knowed trail to Fort Smith,” he explained after a moment.
“Yesterday’s storm,” James offered as an explanation.
Again, the old-timer took that lie as gospel, too, and looked at his son. “What you think, kid?”
Robin shrugged.
After spitting tobacco juice into the fire, Wildcat wiped his mouth with the back of his buckskinned sleeve, and nodded. “Ya can ride along with me and my boy.” He laughed. “We’s bound for Fort Smith, ain’t we, son?”
The kid rolled his eyes. “Eventually.” Robin sighed.
First, of course, they had to find the oxen—eight in all—that pulled that large wagon. The old man decided to break camp, sending Robin and James out after the beasts, hoping the animals had not strayed too far during the storm.
The sun dried out James’s clothes quickly, but after an hour, James had his doubts. They had found only one animal, and it was dead. He and Robin spread out, trying to cover more ground, although he would have preferred sticking close, just for the conversation. Robin looked to be about James’s age, slimmer, fairer, and with the worst haircut he had ever seen. Even the drunkard at the tonsorial parlor in McAdam, who only cut hair part-time (his main source of income being the postmaster, if that was a full-time affair in a place like McAdam), gave a better haircut that the one Robin Lamar had been given. It looked as if Wildcat had cut his son’s hair with a knife, a dull knife at that.
Another ox had been killed, too. They saw the turkey buzzards circling before they found its carcass.
James begin to realize how lucky he was to be alive. “Did you see the twister?”
Robin stood just a few feet from him, the two of them looking down into an arroyo, still running with water, and what once had been a beast of burden.
“Heard it,” he said. “Storm come up on us so fast, didn’t have time to find shelter or nothin’. We’d just turned the stock loose, and we leaped into the back of the wagon.” He looked away from the dead animal, and at James. “Didn’t hear you when you come in, else we’d have invited you inside.” He grinned, a wonderful smile, full of life. “Don’t want you a-thinkin’ we ain’t hospitable.”
James laughed. “I’m surprised the tornado didn’t haul your wagon off.”
Robin shrugged, moving on, calling out the animals’ names. “It’s heavy enough,” he said after walking several rods, and then his head shook. “If any more of our oxen is kilt, we won’t be haulin’ nothin’ nowhere.” That gave him a moment’s pause. “Which might not be a bad thing.”
“What do you mean?” James had just caught up with the lad.
“Nothin’.” Robin changed the subject and pointed at James’s ripped clothing. “I gots a shirt you can wear. Yer a mite bigger ’n me, so it might not fit that good, but it’s better than what you’s wearin’.” Without waiting for a reply, he started walking across the plains. “July! August! Where are you knuckleheads?”
By dusk, they had found July and August, November and March. They had been driven into another arroyo, miles south of where the Lamars had been forced to camp, and the narrow slit in the ground had likely saved those four oxen from joining April and October in death. Not bad graze down in the little cut, either. The four animals were obedient, and November took the lead, so that all Robin and James had to do was clap their hands and let out a whoop every now and then to keep the oxen moving. The other two beasts they never found. Robin said four would have to do.
“Too late to make much progress,” Wildcat said when they returned to camp. “Let the sun bake the ground some more.” He staked the animals a ways from camp and began to get the fire going again.
“Sorry about April and December, Mr. Lamar,” James said as he accepted the coffee the one-eyed man had poured. “And the two we just couldn’t find.”
“October,” Wildcat corrected. “December was their ma. She got called to glory back in Missouri.”
“Right.” James sipped the brew. “October.”
“Four’s enough,” Wildcat said. “They’s good oxen. Can pull six tons, I’d bet, and we ain’t haulin’ tha
t much—jus’ enough to make our trip profitable. And them other two . . .” He gestured toward the flat expanse of land. “This country swallers things up, all the time.”
“What are you hauling, sir?” James stared at his cup. Anytime he looked at Wildcat Lamar, his eyes almost immediately locked on that hole where the man’s right eye should be.
“Supplies.” The answer was curt and final.
“For Fort Smith?”
“We’ll get there directly. We’ll make some stops in West Cache Creek, Elm Springs, old Fort Holmes and some places.”
Those names meant nothing to James, but he nodded as if it all made sense to him.
The man kept on talking. “Sell some of our wares there. Good profit to be made in Indian Territory, but it can be dangersome. So I’m glad we got you and your Winchester cannon.”
Maybe that was why they had invited James to accompany them on their journey to Arkansas. They needed an extra gun for protection. James swallowed, and almost told Wildcat that he lacked any shells for the repeater. After all, they were decent enough to let him ride along with them. If fate hadn’t led James to their wagon, he’d probably be feeding carrion like October and March. No, April. Yet something stopped him. He just couldn’t trust these two merchants. Not yet. He didn’t know why.
Wildcat spit juice into the fire, and continued. “Cross the Arkansas River again and pret’ much jes foller it out of the Nations and to Fort Smith. Big town. Mighty fancy.”
James wanted to ask more questions, but didn’t want to show them—especially Robin—just how green he was.
Robin told his father to fetch an extra shirt for their new companion.
James expected the supper to be unappetizing as the biscuits and jerky, but as dusk fell, Robin disappeared into the back of the wagon and came out with a double-barreled shotgun, toting the gun and a sack slung over his left shoulder. “I’ll see if I can’t rouse up a grouse or some pheasant.”
Relaxing, James eased his hand away from the rifle’s lever, wondering what he would have done had Robin trained those long twelve-gauge barrels on him. Club him? Run? Beg for his life? Wet his britches?
The old gun’s barrels were enormous, almost four feet long, but Robin seemed experienced holding such a huge weapon.
The shotgun belonged to another age, probably before the Civil War. It was a muzzleloader, the barrels, affixed to the stock by barrel keys surrounded by egg-shaped escutcheons of German silver, were dark brown and rough from a life of abuse.
“Got yer caps?” the old man asked.
Robin pulled a capper, full of the copper percussion caps, from the pocket of his vest.
“Birds.” The old man cursed and shook his head. “Well, maybe with James a-joinin’ us with that big ol’ Winchester of his ’n, we’ll eat us some antelope or a mule deer afore too long.”
Suddenly, James frowned. The coffee didn’t taste that good anymore, and he hated himself for fooling these good people. Even if he couldn’t quite trust them completely.
He went to bed with his stomach full and wearing a new blue-checked collarless shirt, a little tight on him, especially after savoring the taste of sage hens. Robin proved a good shot with that old shotgun, and the old man could cook after all. Roasted sage hens, sourdough biscuits, and fine coffee. He felt as if he had been treated to a supper at the eating parlor in McAdam.
When he woke the next morning, he crawled out from underneath the wagon and found the Lamars hitching the team to the wagon.
“Hungry?” Wildcat asked.
“No, sir,” he answered honestly. “Not really.”
“Good thing, on account that we et last night.” He moved with the harnesses, chains, and curved wooden yokes like a dancer, with ease, unaffected by having lost one eye. “An’ we gots miles to make up.”
“Can I help you?” James asked, hoping the old man would say no.
“Nope. ’Bout done here anyhows. But take the spade from offen t’uther side of the wagon, and make sure that fire is out. Cover it good. Like we was never here. Do that fer us?”
“Sure.” He walked to the end of the wagon, found the spade, and went to work.
Like we was never here.
Fat chance of that happening, James thought, staring at the giant wagon with its massive wheels, pulled by the four behemoth oxen. Anybody would be able to follow that trail.
Suddenly, he paused, and a shiver raced up his spine. Even Pa.
“Hey, boy!”
The old man was calling him, so James took the shovel with him and hurried to the front of the wagon.
“Spade goes yonder,” Wildcat ordered. “Then come back here.”
When he had finished returning the tool to its proper spot, James found that no one sat in the driver’s box. For the first time, he realized that he would not be riding to Fort Smith.
They would be walking alongside the oxen and wagon.
All the way across Indian Territory.
The end of a long blacksnake whip dragged on the ground in front of Wildcat’s boots. “Ever skint a mule, boy?” the one-eyed man asked.
“No, sir,” James answered honestly.
“Well, we ain’t got mules. Just mule-headed oxen. Ever driven one of ’em ignorant beasts?”
“No, sir,” he said again.
Wildcat handed the whip, handle first, toward James. “Time ya learnt.”
CHAPTER NINE
Denison
Link McCoy picked his room at the Draper House Hotel perfectly. On the second floor right above the hotel’s bar, which brought in travelers and cowhands and railroad workers and gamblers and had the loudest, most out-of-tune piano in the county, played by a drunk whose two thumbs had been cut off by a soiled dove five years earlier down south in San Angelo. Nobody ever wanted that room. Nobody could get a good night’s sleep in such a place—which was why Link McCoy picked it.
Above the din, he laid the Denison newspaper on the dresser, right in front of the pistol-grip Winchester shotgun, and motioned the others to get closer. When everyone, including Jeff White, had gathered around, he tapped the end of his unlighted cigar on the story.
LONE STAR CATTLEMEN
NEGOTIATE GRAZE LEASE
Below that, in a smaller point size
TEXANS AGREE TO PAY HEFTY SUM TO HEATHENS
And then in slightly larger type and italics
$25,000 in Gold Going to Chickasaws
He waited as Zane Maxwell read the headline and the story to Tulip Bells, who grinned.
“It’ll have to be easier than robbing banks,” Zane Maxwell said. “I reckon we learned that in Arkansas.”
“Same as Jesse James and his crew learned in Northfield,” Bells said, “and the Dalton boys learned in Cof-feytown.”
“Coffeyville,” Maxwell corrected.
“I know that. I was jokin’.”
Jeff White merely took another pull on the bottle of rye.
“We do run the risk,” McCoy said, “of riling a bunch of Texas ranchers.”
“And Chickasaws,” Tulip Bells pointed out.
“Indians we can handle,” Maxwell said. “Texans can be another matter, and we won’t be far from the state.”
“Where’s the money go?” Jeff White finally spoke. “It don’t say that in the story.”
“The Bank of Tishomingo,” McCoy replied. “In the Chickasaw capital.”
White stepped back. “How you know that?”
McCoy grinned. “I have sources.”
“You know when?” Maxwell asked.
“It won’t be until after the cattlemen’s association finish their meeting in Fort Worth,” McCoy said. “That’s where they’ll be collecting the grazing fee for the Indians. They’ll take the train up through here, I expect, then escort their money across the Red River and to Tishomingo. That’s where we’ll hit them. That money won’t reach Tishomingo.”
Downstairs in the saloon, a fight broke out. Some chirpy screamed. Men cursed. Glass shattered.
&n
bsp; “In town?” Tulip Bells sounded as if he had had enough of committing armed robbery in towns. The incident at Greenville, Arkansas, had put the fear of God—or, rather, the fear of farmers and city folk with rifles and shotguns—in him.
“South of town,” McCoy said, and saw the faces of White and Bells relax. Even Maxwell nodded his approval.
“At Fort Washita,” McCoy said.
“A fort!” Jeff White took another pull on the bottle.
Below in the saloon, a shotgun roared. The Denison law had come in to break up the fight. More curses, a few shouts, and then someone below told the piano player to get with it.
“A fort, but no army,” Maxwell said. “Bluebellies gave up that post twenty years ago. Probably even longer than that. Indians have been using it since then.”
“So have the whiskey runners,” McCoy said.
Tulip Bells was the first to understand everything. He snapped his fingers. “Yeah. I’ve bought me some Choc beer there before. And whiskey, too.” He laughed and slapped his thigh. “Those Texans, those devils. So that’s their plan.”
White frowned. “I don’t get it.”
McCoy didn’t expect the blowhard to have understood. He grinned, and had to speak up. The piano player was hammering out “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”
“Get the Indians liquored up,” McCoy said. “Cheat those Chickasaws out of that twenty-five grand.”
“And those Texas waddies riding guard for the cattlemen’s association,” Maxwell guessed, “will be roostered pretty good by then, as well.”
“Maybe,” McCoy said.
“Easy pickings.” Jeff White had come around.
“Don’t go spending that gold before we’ve got it,” McCoy cautioned. “Any number of things can go wrong, and I’m not going through another massacre like Greenville again. This is my last score. After this, I’m taking my share and riding to Mexico. Figure on buying me a hacienda and sitting back with nothing to do but drink tequila and watch Mexican women feed me grapes.”
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