The Independence Trail

by Lyle Brandt

  It wasn’t hungry predators or deadly snakes that worried Catlin most, however. For his money, the worst threat they might face along the trail would come from other humans bent on stealing Mr. Mossman’s herd, attacking any drovers who saw fit to intervene.

  At least that was a problem Catlin felt equipped to deal with from his prior experience at hunting men.

  An hour past full daylight they were on the move: twenty-five hundred steers, seventy horses, counting spares in the remuda and four yoked to pull the chuck wagon, plus nineteen men. It made an awesome spectacle, the herd alone enough to make a person stare if any strangers had been passing by. Their shuffling hooves raised dust in clouds that might be visible from twenty, maybe thirty miles away against the azure sky, as if announcing, Here we come. Line up for plunder if you’re in a mood to rustle, rob, or just raise hell in general.

  What bad men, whether veterans or rookies, could resist that kind of bait?

  Thinking about Las Vegas, Catlin wondered if he’d made a change at all in how he made a living out of death. Suppose they made it through the whole trip without firing off a single shot in anger on the way. So, what? The steers still had no clue where they were going, or to what end—brained with a hammer, butchered, parceled out to end their days on dining plates.

  Looked at another way, they’d feed a major portion of America, from robber barons to the laborers in their employ.

  But if it came to gunplay down the line, at least Catlin was certain he could count on one thing.

  There would be no children in the line of fire.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Friday, April 11

  Can’t say I like those thunderheads,” Bert Mossman said, eyes focused to the north, miles off.

  “Could be a problem if they overtake us,” Sterling Tippit granted, “but they’re ten, twelve miles away, at least. I doubt we’ll even hear the thunder as it stands right now.”

  “It’s not the thunder that concerns me,” said the Bar X owner.

  Even as he spoke, a far-off bolt of lightning arced from the blue-black heavens to the earth below, and Tippit was correct. Mossman heard nothing of the thunder that always accompanied that kind of fireworks in the sky.

  “More what it sends us, then,” the foreman said.

  “You read my mind,” Mossman replied.

  “You’re thinking a dry thunderstorm?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Mossman.

  And dry thunderstorms were trouble all the way around.

  Those were the deadly storms that spawned thunder and lightning aplenty, while most of their rain evaporated in the atmosphere, never reaching the ground below. Since they occurred primarily in regions prone to drought, the lightning strikes often set fire to trees or grasslands, while their gusty surface winds fanned the flames and sent them racing miles away. And with no rain to speak of falling from the clouds, dousing those flames became a grueling task for humans—if they could be stopped at all.

  “Not much to burn out here,” said Tippit, once again anticipating what might have his boss on edge.

  Mossman responded with a question of his own. “But what about the wind?”

  “Well, shit.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Mossman wasn’t afraid of fire sweeping the desert, though “dry” lightning could do damage to a herd of stock all by itself. He’d seen longhorns cut down by lightning bolts as they grazed peacefully on open land, though it was rare, and Mossman personally had his doubts concerning claims of strikes that cut swaths of destruction through a herd as if some baleful giant in the sky were scything wheat. That seemed improbable to him, like stories of the giant fish that got away, though it was not impossible per se.

  “A dust storm, then,” said Tippit, sounding glum.

  “Just have to wait and see,” Mossman replied.

  But maybe not for long.

  He didn’t know the scientific lingo to describe it, but the rancher understood how nature worked against mankind. Or maybe there was no purpose behind it, just bad luck for anybody standing in the way.

  Aside from tossing arcs of lightning that could turn a forest into smoking ash, dry thunderstorms cooled off the air beneath its clouds, changing its weight and density compared to ground-level conditions. That cool air descended rapidly and fanned out when it reached the earth’s surface, spreading outward from the storm’s eye, picking up whatever dust or sand lay coating arid soil. Sometimes that grit was spun off into whirling dust devils, which could be frightening to man and beast alike but seldom matched the size or strength of a tornado.

  But a sandstorm could be bad enough, all on its own.

  Mossman had seen the desert’s rolling dust clouds form a front that towered anywhere from fifty to a thousand feet or more above flat land, attaining speeds of twenty-five to forty miles per hour within minutes. Flying grit could scour bark from trees and paint from buildings, bullet-sized pebbles smashing through windows and admitting clouds of dust to rural homes. Worse yet, for men and animals caught in the gale-force winds, sand clotted eyes, nostrils, and even lungs. That could result in blindness, fatal choking, or an aftermath of “dry pneumonia” that scarred lung tissue beyond hope of healing properly.

  If they were overtaken by a sandstorm, Mossman reckoned, that would be the real danger to his stock and to his drovers. It could spell disaster, and there wasn’t much that he could do about it.

  Nothing much but getting ready for the worst.

  “Best spread the word,” he told Tippit.

  “I’m on it, sir,” his foreman said, and galloped off to warn the Bar X hands that hell on earth might soon be overtaking them.

  * * *

  * * *

  The wicked dust is coming,” the muscular Apache told his fellow braves.

  His name, self-chosen, was translated as “Eagle.” He had been born Yuma, “Chief’s Son,” but since his father’s death in battle with the white eyes’ cavalry when Yuma was himself a child, he had outgrown that name, discarding it as certain Anglos laid aside the postnominal suffix “junior” when their fathers passed away.

  Today he was Paco, war chief of a fourteen-man Apache band whose members were oath-bound to spend their lives opposing any further white encroachment on the sacred land that once was theirs.

  Patamon, Paco’s younger brother, said, “Perhaps the storm delivers opportunity.”

  Paco nodded, agreeing with his sibling, but he felt compelled to add, “If we are cautious.”

  They had been following the white man’s trail drive for the past two days, attracted first by its dust cloud, keeping a safe distance and watching the herd’s progress from concealment atop mesas and peering from dry riverbeds. Paco’s plan of attack was still not fully formulated, but there was something to what Patamon proposed.

  A desert sandstorm might imperil warriors and their mustangs, but concealment mitigated that inherent danger. If the storm itself was not too strong, not too dangerous, Paco supposed his braves might seize the chance to raid the trail drive, claiming cattle to sustain themselves and even picking off a few whites in the process.

  All while hoping none of his own men were slain.

  * * *

  * * *

  Art Catlin was retrieving two stray longhorns, easing them back toward the main herd, when Sterling Tippit galloped up to him, the Bar X foreman riding on his blood bay mare. Catlin read unaccustomed agitation on the foreman’s face, at odds with his normal relaxed expression, but he kept his mouth shut, waiting for whatever bad news lay in store.

  “You’ve seen those thunderheads off to the north,” said Tippit—not a question, just assuming Catlin was aware.

  In fact, he had seen them and nodded a silent affirmative.

  “Boss reckons it’s dry thunder and it might be working up a sandstorm, sending it our way
.”

  Catlin was weather-wise enough to grant that proposition, asking Tippit, “What’s he got in mind?”

  “For now, just cover up the best you can before it hits us. If we need to pull the herd up short, I’ll be around again.”

  “Right,” Catlin said, and watched the foreman ride on to the next drover tracking the herd’s long northern flank.

  First thing he did was doff his hat and shift the chin strap forward, snugging it to keep the hat on if the wind picked up. The neckerchief he wore, knotted in back, was plain black cloth folded into a triangle and tucked inside Catlin’s open shirt collar like a mourning ascot, something he might don in preparation for a funeral. For now, he tugged it free and pulled it up until it masked the lower portion of his face from cheekbones to below his dimpled chin.

  “I must look like a bandit, pal,” he told his stallion. “It’s a good thing we aren’t passing by a bank.”

  The stallion, a strawberry roan, paid no heed to his rider, satisfied to whicker at the two errant longhorns and keep them ambling back in line with other members of the herd.

  The mask wouldn’t protect his eyes if they were assailed by a sandstorm, but he hadn’t thought to lay his hands on any goggles when he’d signed on for the drive. Worse came to worst, he could try pulling up the neckerchief and tilt his flat-brimmed hat forward, then squint his eyelids like an old man reading by dim light and hope that did the trick.

  Which it might not, he realized.

  Catlin had witnessed major sandstorms twice—one time outside of Texas, while running down a bail-jumper; the other one in Arizona Territory, when coming up on Tucson with a highwayman draped over what had been the outlaw’s skewbald gelding—but he’d never been enveloped by one, blinded, deafened, struggling to breathe.

  First time for everything, he thought, and didn’t like the ring of that inside his head.

  Dying, for instance, was a person’s first and only time—except perhaps for Lazarus of ancient myth.

  Catlin eyed the northern skyline, frown hidden behind his mask as he saw the thunderclouds shot through by lightning were advancing on the Bar X herd. Most times, a sight like that would come complete with blurriness below, a screen of pouring rain. This time, however, he could see a clear horizon line below the clouds, which told him that the clouds were wreaking havoc only with their static electricity and the roiling desert winds they’d generated.

  Even as he watched, twisters of sand and gravel rose, writhed, and collapsed, as if some huge primeval beast with tentacles in place of legs was clutching at the sky above it, tempting the storm with its living, flailing lightning rods. One finally succeeded, struck down by a blue-white shaft of energy, exploding silently, grit raining down.

  A monster that you couldn’t fight with guns or hope to run away from on horseback.

  He couldn’t calculate how fast the storm front might be traveling, but it was miles wide, growing as he watched.

  And there was no escape.

  Sterling Tippit felt the first raw gusts of northerly wind on his face as he finished his rounds of the herd. He’d spoken to each hand in turn, all riding alone or paired off, sharing idle conversation as they watched the steers. All had agreed to preparation for a storm, and as he eyed them from a distance now most had begun adjusting hats and neckerchiefs to meet the coming storm.

  And it was coming. Tippit had no doubt of that.

  His boss had called it, got the jump on Tippit that time, but the foreman felt no lingering embarrassment. Somebody always had to spot potential danger first, and if that job fell to Mr. Mossman . . . well, what of it?

  Tippit had seen the storm clouds but his boss had beat him to the interpretation of their danger to the herd, and that was fine. The only ones who needed warning now were Piney Rollins and Tim Berryman aboard the chuck wagon.

  Before he had a chance to speak, Piney called out to him, “Looks like a storm coming.”

  “I’d say so,” Tippit granted as he pulled up even with their bulky rig.

  “Saw you talking up the hands,” their cook said. “And I’ve been through these a couple times before.”

  “All battened down, then?”

  “I’ve got Little Mary on it,” Rollins said, and nodded back over his shoulder, toward where Berryman was making noise in back, under the wagon’s canvas cover.

  Looking at it from the outside, Tippit counted half a dozen places where the canvas had been patched with newer, lighter-colored bits of tarpaulin, secured by heavy stitches.

  “Reckon that will hold?” he asked Piney.

  “Whether it does or not, we can’t do anything about it now, out here,” the cook replied.

  “Just do the best you can,” Tippit replied.

  “Same as we always do.”

  Another gust of wind hit Tippit, threatening to blow his hat off if he hadn’t cinched its cord under his chin. This time, small grains of sand rattled against the Stetson’s crown.

  Frowning, he nudged his blood bay mare toward Mr. Mossman, riding at the herd’s vanguard. Nothing remained for Tippit now but to report that he’d done all he could.

  * * *

  * * *

  Maska—“Strong,” as translated to the white man’s tongue—cursed the approaching storm front that he feared would stall their raid upon the cattle drive. Delays were vexing to him, even though he knew that watchful patience was required.

  “We lose another day, at least,” he groused to Bodaway, rising beside him, to his left.

  “We can’t be sure of that,” Bodaway said. “Paco may have a plan.”

  Maska swallowed the complaint that came to mind, against their war chief for his way of holding back his plans until the final moment, listening to other options but rejecting any that conflicted with his own.

  “Maybe,” Maska said, letting it go at that.

  “You doubt it?” Bodaway inquired.

  A white man would have called him “Fire Maker,” the literal translation of his given name to English. Twenty summers old, bearing a knife scar on the left side of his jawline, Bodaway was better known among his fellow warriors for the fires he set in white men’s homes than for campfires over which their party roasted meat at night.

  And meat, Maska knew only too well, was presently in short supply.

  If they could not make off with one or more longhorns tomorrow or the next day at the latest, hunger would begin to sap their fighting strength.

  “The storm may be a gift from the Great Spirit in disguise,” he said.

  “How so?” Bodaway asked.

  “White men are clumsy, easily confused. Remember the last farm we raided?”

  Bodaway smiled. Said, “The old man got so excited that he shot himself.”

  “Only his foot,” Maska said.

  But that had been enough to leave the farmer helpless, with his wife and children screaming from the house. The woman had been younger than her husband by ten years of so, their son too small to fight effectively, their daughter still an infant in a cradle.

  Paco’s band had left none living as they rode away.

  “If there is wind and dust enough,” said Bodaway, “we should be well-fed for a week, at least.”

  “I’d rather wipe the white men out and take the whole herd,” Maska replied.

  “There are too many of them,” Bodaway reminded him. “At least nah-kee-go-nay-nan-too-ooh.”

  Counting the Apache way, in which two thousand was described as twenty hundreds.

  “So?”

  “We are too few and know too little about herding stock in such numbers.”

  “I don’t say we should keep them all,” Maska said.

  “What, then?”

  “Why not trade them to Comancheros for more guns and ammunition? Firewater or anything we want.”

  Bodaway ma
de a sour face. “I hate the Comancheros worse than settlers. We cannot trust anything they do or say.”

  “As long as their guns work, who cares?” asked Maska. “Someday we’ll deal with them as well.”

  “You wish to fight the world?”

  “Only the white man’s part of it.”

  “Be satisfied with what the Great Spirit has given us,” said Bodaway.

  “I try,” Maska said. “But it never feels like enough.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The storm caught up with them half an hour after Tippit circulated with his warning to prepare for it. Art Catlin saw a massive wall of dust advancing on the herd, an airborne avalanche of sorts but dirty brown and gray instead of blizzard white.

  Danny Underwood, riding beside him, muttered, “Here she comes, goddamn it!”

  And before Catlin could answer back or even think of anything to say, the tidal wave of grit and dust broke over them, enveloping the herd, its mounted guides, spare horses, and the chuck wagon trailing behind and offset to the south.

  Piney Rollins tried to avoid the worst trail dust whenever possible, but now he’d have to eat sand with the rest of them.

  At first, Catlin’s roan stallion sought to shy away from the onslaught, but there was no escaping it. Art knew the horse’s eyes, nostrils, and throat would suffer just as much as his—or worse, since there was no way he could mask the animal or shield its eyes from stinging sand. He did his best to calm the animal, keeping a right grip on its reins, but it could plainly sense his own distress and disturbance spreading through the herd.