The Independence Trail

by Lyle Brandt

  Catlin couldn’t expect livestock, whether horses or steers, to understand the storm as such. The greatest danger, barring any injury the animals might suffer to their eyes or lungs from blowing grit, was panic spreading through the herd and turning into a stampede.

  And if that happened . . .

  He’d never sweated out a major sandstorm, so Catlin hadn’t experienced the charging aimlessly about, the being spooked by a sound or sudden movement, ranging from a gunshot to a rattler’s buzzing in the grass. But he had listened to some firsthand stories from survivors of such incidents, and was aware that once the longhorns started running, no lone man or horse could stand before them without being trampled into bloody pulp.

  He wasn’t even sure that seventeen of them could keep the herd in line, under a semblance of control, but they would have to try their best, knowing the stakes came down to life or death for all concerned.

  He glanced across toward where he’d last seen Underwood but couldn’t find the other drover now. Dismissing that, he focused on the herd, calling out to the longhorns through his mask, but in the howling wind Catlin could barely even hear himself.

  The steers were making frightened noises now. One brushed against his roan but didn’t use its horns, bewildered by the sudden loss of visibility and decent air to breathe. In fact, it wasn’t just the airborne grit that threatened suffocation; it was the howling wind that carried it, a primal force that made the simple act of drawing breath at all a daunting task.

  And how much time was left before that changed from being difficult to becoming an impossibility?

  * * *

  * * *

  Bliss Mossman hunched over his saddle horn, wind buffeting him and his flea-bitten gray gelding, trying to unseat him from his saddle. If he fell, he imagined it would be the end of him.

  That said, remaining mounted wasn’t solving any of his problems. He could barely see beyond his horse’s ears, the wind rush in his ears nigh on to deafening. It felt like riding through thick tule fog, except in that case he’d be chilled and damp, not sweating through his clothes and the kerchief hiding the lower portion of his face.

  Instead of chilling Mossman, though, the gale was stifling hot, as if a giant from on high had thrown the door back on a blast furnace—or possibly a hatchway leading into hell itself.

  That grim conceit fell through when Mossman realized that he was still alive, not roasting on a spit Downstairs for sins that he’d forgotten to atone for while alive. Whatever else this was, it damned sure wasn’t supernatural.

  Still, he could understand how ancient men, living in caves or scattered on the open planes, had looked to deities and demons for an explanation of the waking world around them, with its dangers crowding in upon all sides.

  Mossman’s predicament was relatively simple, once you pared away the risk of smothering, collapsing from his horse. and being trampled by more than a couple thousand longhorns, or remaining on his perch and going blind for life, his eyeballs scoured by flying sand.

  To ward that off, he’d narrowed his eyelids to slits, keeping his head down, trusting in his hat’s brim to protect his naked upper face. This wasn’t something he could fight and conquer, like a rustling gang or pack of hungry wolves. The storm was utterly devoid of conscious thought or feeling as it swept across the desert landscape, wreaking havoc.

  Totally insensate, right.

  So why did Mossman feel as if it hated him with a malignant passion normally reserved for feudists in a duel whose only end was death?

  If that were true, the rancher knew that he must be the one to die. No man could conquer nature, any more than he could reach into the midnight sky and capture distant stars to light his camp.

  The steers were making angry, frightened sounds now, building up a head of steam whose only outlet would be rushing toward disaster through the swirling clouds of dust. Mossman had trouble seeing them, but he could feel their agitation radiating outward, pushing back against the storm.

  For just a second it reminded him of when he’d lived in Texas, years back, near the Gulf of Mexico at Corpus Christi. He remembered wading out a few yards from the beach there, and the way the ocean water surged against him coming in, then sucked sand out from underneath his feet as it retreated. In that moment, Mossman knew that he was helpless against something vastly greater than himself. It could rise up and push him back to shore, or undercut him and, with its riptide, draw him out and drown him in the time it took to manage screaming once, or maybe twice.

  Except he’d heard somewhere that drowning was supposed to be a relatively peaceful death. No one could say that for a sandstorm flaying him alive.

  * * *

  * * *

  At first Catlin thought he’d imagined it, a hoarse voice shouting at the storm.

  The second time it reached his windburned ears, he realized it was a human voice in fact, but put it down to panic, someone who’d been pushed beyond endurance by the raging storm.

  The third time, though, he got its message, recognized it as a shouted order from Bliss Mossman, rallying his men.

  “Head off the herd!” Mossman was shouting, interspersed with fits of coughing. “Stop them running, for God’s sake! Corral them if you can!”

  The bad news: they had no corral, no fence or barrier of any kind to stop the herd from breaking into a headlong stampede. And one they started running in this storm there would be grievous injuries from falls and slashing horns. Beyond all that, some steers might run until their hearts exploded and they dropped, stone dead. Given the roiling clouds of dirt surrounding all of them, many might simply disappear.

  Disaster, if he had to boil it down into a single word.

  Catlin began to urge his roan forward, snapping the stallion’s reins and thumping with his bootheels, even though he wore no spurs. The horse responded, broke into a trot, but wouldn’t risk a gallop when it couldn’t see the ground six feet ahead.

  Whoever said that animals were dumb, thought Catlin, must be next door to an idiot himself.

  A pistol shot rang out from somewhere up ahead, around the herd’s front ranks, immediately followed by a medley of voices telling the shooter to put up his iron and stop acting a damned fool with longhorns already stoked up for a breakout. Catlin couldn’t recognize the windblown voices and he didn’t care to try.

  Men sometimes panicked in a storm, the same as livestock, sometimes worse. Loud noises frightened animals, but with their limited imaginations they, at least, weren’t prone to conjure devils in the dark.

  A good thing, too. Just now, the truth was bad enough.

  When Catlin reached the forefront of the herd, the longhorns were already slowing down, ranks telescoping from the southwest to northeast and crowding one another. Mounted drovers alternately shouted at the steers or spoke in what they hoped were soothing voices, sometimes barely audible above the storm. A few were brandishing their lariats like rolled-up bullwhips, stopping short of striking any steers but seeking to distract them from the gritty wind.

  And as he joined them, Catlin reckoned it was working. Slowly, by degrees, the longhorns pressed together, seemed to gather strength from numbers, and instead of running with it, hunkered down into a mass the sandstorm couldn’t blow away.

  Not yet, at least.

  But Catlin knew that situation wasn’t permanent, by any means.

  If the winds kept on blowing for the next few hours, maybe stretching into days as he’d heard tell of while he drifted through the Arizona Territory, even stolid animals would reach a breaking point.

  And if that happened, Catlin knew there would be hell to pay.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sunday, April 13

  The storm died around midnight, rolling over into Sunday morning, leaving everybody on the trail drive short of sleep.

  Art Catlin guessed the steers and horses were as
weary as the men in charge of them, but there was no escaping the fact that a new day was upon them and they had a full morning of work ahead before they even got around to breaking camp.

  Piney Rollins managed to pull off a minor miracle by having breakfast ready as dawn’s first light broke over the wind-scoured flats. Catlin tucked into it, expecting a side order of sand with his bacon and beans, but he was pleasantly surprised to find the simple fare unsullied by their recent ordeal.

  Mr. Mossman had the drovers eat in shifts, so half of them were riding herd and counting steers while their companions ate as fast as they could manage, gulping down hot coffee strong enough to clear the dust out of their heads.

  At least for now.

  Catlin had no doubt that the long night would catch up with him by noon, latest, but there was nothing he could do about it, no exemption he could claim for pulling his own weight along with every other Bar X hand.

  Bliss Mossman and his foreman clearly hadn’t caught a wink of sleep all night, but they set an example for the drovers, wolfing bread and bacon down while mounted, circulating to assess how the longhorns were holding up. Against all odds, none of the cattle present and accounted for at dawn were seriously injured, though a goodly number of then wheezed and coughed, still clearing dust out of their sinuses and lungs. Catlin imagined many of them would be bleary-eyed all day, as would their handlers,

  Once he had checked his guns for fouling dust and satisfied himself that his strawberry roan was fit to face another day, Catlin swung up into his saddle and joined Nehemiah Wolford on a search for any longhorns straying westward from the herd. More two-teams were headed south and east on that same errand, leaving ten men with the main herd, Jared Olney checking over mounts in their remuda as he got them ready for the trail.

  “How many would you guess we lost?” asked Wolford as they left the camp behind.

  “Guessing won’t get us anywhere,” said Catlin, “but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was a dozen, maybe more.”

  “Not bad, as many as we started with,” Wolford replied.

  “But money out of pocket for the Bar X, even so, meaning there’s less to go around.”

  “I guess we’d better try ’n’ find some, then.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Catlin agreed, already checking out the landscape for a longhorn’s silhouette.

  “You figure last night’s blow will be the worst we have to deal with?”

  “If we’re lucky,” Catlin answered. “But I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “Each day a new adventure, then.”

  “One way to look at it.”

  “And what’s another?” Wolford asked him.

  “Take a job and see it through, then move along to something else.”

  His problem being that he never knew what “something else” might be.

  Before he’d turned to bounty hunting, Catlin had spent six months working as a deputy in Abilene, before he ran into a rich man who believed he was above the law and owned the marshal Art was serving under. He had cleared that obstacle but found himself obliged to leave or face a term in prison on a framed manslaughter charge. From there, he’d found it easier to hunt men down without a badge or rule book to confine him, shrugging off the obvious disdain most people felt toward his profession, keeping to himself.

  Cowpunching was an honorable job, comparatively speaking, and the men it tended to attract weren’t known for prying into the affairs of strangers, which he liked. As far as making it a long-term occupation, though, Catlin couldn’t imagine it.

  The good news: he’d gone nearly three weeks now without a gunshot fired in anger, no one bent on killing him.

  Which meant nobody’s children in the line of fire.

  “There’s two of ’em,” Wolford announced. “Off to the left, there.”

  Sleepy-looking longhorns. Seeing them brought Catlin back to the here and now—the only time and place that mattered for the next two months or so.

  * * *

  * * *

  Bliss Mossman wasn’t happy, but he knew their situation could have been much worse.

  This morning’s head count told him seventeen longhorns were missing since the storm forced them to a halt, but Mossman had his fingers crossed, hoping that some of those, at least, would be recovered by midmorning, fit to travel on.

  Beyond that, thank whatever deity you chose, he and his hired men had come through the sandstorm without any lasting injuries. Jaime Reyes had fallen from the back of his smoky perlino mare but hung on to the reins, stopped it from bolting, and was back aboard as soon as he regained his bearings. Otherwise, the Bar X hands, horses, and chuck wagon all seemed to be in decent shape. Some men and beasts were still coughing and likely would be through this day, into the next, but that discomfort only proved that they were still alive.

  Mossman hadn’t gone out on the search for strays himself, believing that his presence with the main herd was required after their setback from the weather yesterday. He pulled his weight most days, except for standing watch over the sleeping steers at night, but that exemption was an owner’s privilege after the long years he’d devoted to carving a spread out of the wilderness, stocking longhorns, and nursing them through seasons when he didn’t have enough to market profitably, waiting for their numbers to increase.

  This made his fourth year driving herds to Independence, while the hands he’d left behind watched over bulls and cows handpicked to be the sires and dames of next year’s herd. Choosing the men who stayed behind had proved as critical as hiring others who would help him on the trail. And that, in turn, brought Mossman’s thoughts circling around to settle on his wife and son at home.

  Gayle Mossman had worked close beside her husband as they built their desert home with visions of an empire in the making. If anything, he would have said she’d worked harder than he had, since her basic tasks including cleaning up around the house they’d built together, cooking all the meals, and never once complaining that she couldn’t get it done.

  That kind of life inevitably took its toll, and they had given up on having kids until a happy accident presented them with Danny seven years ago. He was the light of Mossman’s life, intended heir of all his parents had achieved since settling in New Mexico—but if he chose another path when he was old enough to know his mind, Mossman had vowed to be supportive, not a stubborn obstacle.

  On trail drives, Mossman missed his wife and child through every waking hour and he sometimes dreamed of them at night. It troubled him, being so far away from them when there were mortal dangers to be faced at home, ranging from lawless men and hostile Indians on down the scale to wildfires, storms, and rattler bites. Mossman couldn’t protect them personally while he pushed their herd hundreds of miles away from home, which left only the element of trust.

  Bliss trusted Gayle to love and cherish him beyond question. He trusted Hardy to obey instructions, do his chores, and shun trouble as well as any boy could manage growing up. As for the men he left behind, Bliss trusted them to guard his wife, their son, their property, and sacrifice themselves if need be in that cause.

  If any of them ever let him down in that regard, they knew there would be hell to pay and no escaping it while they were drawing breath.

  He spotted Sterling Tippit riding toward him on his blood bay mare, calling from twenty yards away, “Four head recovered, Mr. M!”

  Good news after a rough patch.

  Now they only needed thirteen more to make the heard complete.

  * * *

  * * *

  A single longhorn wasn’t much, but on the other hand, Paco knew it could feed him and his braves for days on end.

  That spared them hunting deer and pronghorn antelopes or smaller game while granting more time to examine and pursue the larger herd that trespassed over land Paco’s ancestors had considered home, a sacred place wh
ere they could live in peace aside from periodic feuding with Comanches. There had been no peace since the tsayaditl-ti arrived—his people’s name for white men—and considering the losses that Paco’s nation had suffered since that time, he had no expectation of another day without some conflict preying on his mind.

  That was a warrior’s lot in troubled times, and he made no complaint, felt no resentment for the obligation handed down by elders of his tribe, all murdered now or caged on reservations that destroyed their spirits even if their bodies clung to life.

  Paco could feel his warriors growing more and more restive with each new sunrise. They craved battle, greater opportunities to strike back in retaliation for the pain and misery inflicted on their people by invaders from a land across the seas. He shared that eagerness and understandable impatience, but at the same time, as war chief, Paco was required to counsel patience, careful planning, and development of strategy.

  The steer they’d captured overnight was tethered to a hemlock tree inside a small canyon where Paco’s band was presently concealed from prying eyes. The braided rope around its neck allowed the beast to graze at will within a six-foot radius, its forage spared from blowing dust during the storm by yellow sandstone walls that boxed the canyon on three sides.

  The canyon was their desert sanctuary for the moment, but it could become a death trap if white cowboys should discover them. Paco believed that raging winds must have erased their tracks before the storm ended last night, but just in case, he’d posted Patamon and Kuruk—“Bear” in English—to stand watch atop the looming cliffs.

  “When may we eat, Paco?” a voice behind him asked.

  Turning to face Abooksigun—“Wildcat” as he’d been named at birth—Paco said, “After sundown, when the white men pitch another camp. This place will hide the fire we build, and afterward there will be smoked meat for the trail.”

  “And are we settling for just the one?”