The Independence Trail

by Lyle Brandt

  “My plan remains unchanged,” Paco replied. “We strike again when circumstances favor our success.”

  “To take more cattle,” Abooksigun declared.

  “To teach a lesson that the whites will long remember,” Paco said, correcting him. “To make them bleed and learn to live with fear.”

  * * *

  * * *

  That look like three to you?” asked Nehemiah Wolford.

  Catlin had to spend a moment longer staring down into the weed-choked gully that had been a creek’s bed sometime in the past. At least two steers had tumbled down its bank during the storm last night and never made it out again, covered in dust and grit that smothered them and now served as a shroud of sorts.

  “It’s two, for sure,” he told Wolford.

  “I’m counting legs and I get nine.”

  “I grant you eight,” Catlin replied.

  Pointing from where he sat aboard his grulla mare, Wolford said, “No, I’m pretty sure that’s nine.”

  A closer look told Catlin he was right. A ninth hoof, with its dew claw and a portion of its hock, protruded from the drift of sand, as if the longhorn in extremis had attempted to escape the crushing weight of other blinded strays who’d stumbled down on top of it.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Nine hooves, it has to be three steers.”

  “All dead,” said Wolford, squeezing in the obvious.

  “No doubt about it.”

  They had collected three live steers so far that morning, but discovering three dead ones now brought Catlin’s spirits down.

  “Should we just leave ’em here?”

  “What’s the alternative?” Catlin inquired.

  “Try fetching one of ’em, at least, before they start to rot. Means beef for supper and a few more meals besides.”

  Catlin glanced back at the three longhorns idling twenty feet away from them and frowned. “We try to drag one up and butcher it while they stand watching us, they could take off again. Besides, where would we put the meat?”

  “So, how about one of us rides back to the camp and takes these three along. Fetch Piney and his kid back here and bring that sled they haul around for fetching firewood and the like? The other waits here, so they spot him coming back, and that way keep the buzzards off ’em, too.”

  It made good sense to Catlin. “Fine by me,” he said.

  “You wanna flip a coin for who does what?”

  “No need,” Catlin replied. “I’ll stay and stand watch over them. Just get back here quick as you can.”

  “Well, if you’re sure . . .”

  “Go on ahead.”

  “Okay, then.”

  Wolford didn’t delay for further conversation, and rode over to the three stray longhorns, urging them back toward the camp and herd located half a dozen miles northwest of where the desert gully had become a makeshift tomb. Catlin watched man and animals recede into the distance, then checked out the clear sky overhead for any vultures circling a potential breakfast.

  So far, he and his strawberry roan were alone with the dead.

  That situation wouldn’t last long in the desert, nor would fresh meat on the carcasses from last night’s storm. Insects would find the longhorns first, predominantly ants and flies, but as the morning passed there might be foxes and coyotes; maybe something larger would home in on the smell of blood and death.

  Nature let nothing go to waste, and if the plan for salvaging at least one steer proved viable, it meant Piney Rollins, maybe with his adolescent aide, would have to shake a leg and claim whatever they could carry before serious decomposition set in. Beyond that point, contaminated beef could be life-threatening to any cowboys who partook of it.

  Catlin surveyed the land around him, saw no scavengers as yet, and figured he should let Rollins decide if they could use the beef or not. If Catlin doubted its digestibility, he could beg off at suppertime, sticking with beans and bread.

  They doubtless would face other hardships on the trail to Independence, and he didn’t plan on going down from any self-inflicted injuries.

  * * *

  * * *

  Sterling Tippit rode from camp with Piney Rollins, traveling southwestward with two horses from the drive’s remuda trailing them. In place of saddles, Jared Olney had draped blankets on the spare equines, to cover each between its withers and its croup, better to drape each animal with slabs of beef while sparing them from injury.

  Rollins had brought along a fair selection of his cutlery wrapped up in chamois cloth. Tippit had watched him pack a butcher’s knife, a meat cleaver, a boning knife, a skinning knife, and a sharpening steel to employ if a blade lost its edge while he worked.

  Three dead steers was a blow to the herd and to Tippit’s employer, but if they could salvage a supply of beef for eating on the trail over the next few days, at least the sacrifice would not have been a total waste.

  They spotted Catlin waiting for them at a distance of two hundred yards, not able to make out his features yet, but Tippit recognized the drover’s horse and reckoned no one else would be that close to where Wolford had placed him on a map scratched in the dust. To play it safe, though, just in case, Tippit released his holster’s hammer thong and let his right hand rest atop the curved butt of his Colt Dragoon.

  When they were close enough to speak without straining their vocal cords, Tippit backed off preparation for a fast draw, telling Catlin, “Wolford says you’ve got three down.”

  “We came to that by counting hooves that we could see,” Catlin replied. “I doubt there’s any more than three. The gully isn’t deep enough.”

  Peering down into it from horseback, Tippit saw that he was right. If any more longhorns had fallen in, their bodies should be lying in plain sight.

  Turning to Rollins, Tippit said, “Okay, Piney. What happens now?”

  Dismounting from a sorrel mare, Rollins removed his wrapped-up tools and peered up into Tippit’s face. He said, “I gotta get in with ’em, see what shape they’re in. Whichever ones we salvage, you two pass me down your lariats with running nooses tied in both of ’em. I’ll fasten them to one steer at a time, around the horns if I can manage it, then you-all drag ’em up on top. From there, I’ll dust ’em off and see what’s what before I start in cutting.”

  Catlin had his noose tied seconds before Tippit did, and both men tossed the ropes to Piney, watching as he caught them. After setting down his cutlery, still bundled up, Rollins slid down the gully’s nearer bank and grappled with the steer on top, working both nooses over its long, curving horns.

  When he was set, their cook backed off and signaled with a liver-spotted hand. In unison, Tippit and Catlin backed their horses from the gully, lariats gone taut and straining as hemp took the steer’s deadweight. It took a good five minutes before they had landed it on level ground, then they repeated the procedure to exhume a second lifeless animal. Instead of going back for number three when that was done, Piney released their lariats and watched the mounted drovers reel them in.

  “Two’s more ’n we can handle as it is, roped to the extra horses. Nothing more for you to do until I’m finished skinning ’em and figuring which cuts to take.”

  Tippit finished coiling up his lariat and tied it to his saddle with a rope strap dangling from the horn. Catlin was finished tying up his own a moment later, and they turned to watch Rollins at work.

  It wasn’t pretty, but for anyone who’d ever set foot in a butcher’s shop, there was no mystery or shock involved. First, Piney skinned one of the steers, then gutted it before he started etching out a side of beef for taking back to camp. When that was done, it proved a three-man job to put each slab in place atop one of the riderless remuda horses, taking care that neither one was laden down so heavily that it might suffer muscle strain or other injury.

  When that was done, Tippit asked Pin
ey, “Do we have to make a round trip from the camp and go through all of this again?”

  “No point, sir,” Rollins said. “Too much and I can’t cook it fast enough to keep it fresh. Don’t want it going ripe and stinking out the wagon.”

  “No,” Tippit agreed. “We don’t.”

  “We’d best be starting back, then, or the boss might think we’re lost and give Tim Berryman my job.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The final word on longhorns scattered by the sandstorm came to three dead, thirteen brought back to the herd, and one still missing when they broke camp, pushing on.

  Bliss Mossman reckoned that the one who’d disappeared without a trace was also dead, its carcass lying someplace that his search parties had missed. If it was still alive, odds were that it would either turn up at some local homestead craving water or would die from causes unrelated to the storm—raw thirst, a rattler’s bite, or drinking from a waterhole contaminated with some creature’s rotting corpse or arsenic that leached out of the desert soil.

  One down after a full week on the trail was something Mossman understood as natural attrition, often unavoidable. If they were spared from any further freakish weather, the landscape should be more forgiving once they’d crossed the border into Kansas. That might lead to other problems, though, of the distinctly human sort, including thieves and interference from survivors of the Civil War who’d hung on to their lives but lost all claim to common decency.

  And that would mean the kind of fighting Mossman had been hoping to avoid.

  At least, the Bar X owner thought, they would be having beef tonight for supper, with more coming for the next couple of days. He hated losing any steers in transit—and the money that it took out of his pocket at trail’s end—but if he couldn’t save the steers, at least he’d make good use of them.

  They’d lost time on their trek today, as Mossman had expected, waiting for stray longhorns to be found and brought back to the herd, waiting while Piney Rollins butchered two that hadn’t made it through the night and rode back with sides of beef draped over horses pulled from the remuda. By the time the herd moved out, they barely had a half day’s light remaining, and he’d sent Tippit ahead—no rest for foremen on a cattle drive—to find a likely campsite for tonight.

  The spot selected offered water from a running stream, with forage adequate to keep the longhorns happy overnight. They would eat damned near anything, from scrub grass up to Juneberries and big sagebrush, but it needed to be devoid of native hazards such as locoweed and toadstools. Overall, the spot struck Mossman as a decent place to overnight and let the herd recoup some of its energy that the storm had blown away.

  They should be fine if nothing else cropped up to spoil his plans.

  And that, as Mossman knew from grim experience, was one big if.

  * * *

  * * *

  Paco’s Apaches ate their stolen beef, cooked on a spit, but even with their mouths full they continued planning for a raid against the white man’s cattle drive.

  Each brave had his opinion, naturally, and Paco allowed each one of them to speak in turn, while never letting them forget that his plan was the final word. Debate helped vent frustration, but as war chief, he was careful not to let it shift from a sharing of ideas into a deadly argument.

  And sometimes, unexpectedly, he heard a fresh idea that seemed to him more useful than his own.

  Maska and Kuruk favored an attack by night, catching most of the cowboys in their bedrolls, killing them before they had a chance to wake and arm themselves. Paco had counted nineteen members of the trail crew altogether, thus outnumbering his band by five, but a surprise assault could shift those odds dramatically. From his surveillance of the herd before the sandstorm, Paco knew that three riders stood watch in shifts, two hours each, thereby allowing every man to sleep before they broke camp in the morning and moved on.

  Also, a night strike could be doubly effective since most whites seemed to believe Apaches feared to join in battle after sundown. Some fool had convinced them that a morbid dread of dying after dark, and thus losing direction to the Happy Hunting Ground, prevented braves from mounting night campaigns.

  Unfortunately for the white men who relied upon that superstition, nothing could be further from the truth.

  Against the plan advanced by Kuruk, Maska, Bodaway, and Yuma suggested an assault upon the herd at dawn. Their notion did not spring from dread of darkness, rather noting that white men were generally at their worst and weakest as they roused from sleep, trying to clear their eyes of grit, their minds of last night’s dreams. If Paco’s braves could close in on the camp unnoticed, choosing easy targets as the first light of a new day broke, they might annihilate enough cowboys with one quick fusillade to swing the battle in their favor.

  But if they were spotted moving in . . .

  Hototo (“Spirit Who Sings”) and Biminak (“Slick Roper”) suggested following the herd without an actual assault against its drovers, picking off a few more longhorns each night, possibly dispatching sentries individually. Such a gradual, prolonged engagement should spread fear among the white men who survived, seeing their numbers dwindle night by night, unable to retaliate against elusive enemies.

  Paco listened to each idea in turn, including a suggestion raised by Dichali—“Speaks a Lot”—that they leave the herd alone and go in search of other targets, isolated trading posts or homesteads that they could surround and plunder without facing nineteen hostile guns. While no one else among his braves endorsed that cautious plan, Paco was pleased that all refrained from branding Dichali as a coward, thereby touching off a lethal brawl.

  When everyone had spoken and consumed his fill of beef, Paco explained why they must follow his original decision.

  First, raiding the herd would send a message to white men at large, kindling fear inside their hearts and minds. Second, although the odds favored their adversaries slightly, they were only tsayaditl-ti and thus inferior to native children of the soil.

  And finally, his plan prevailed because it was his plan. Paco was their war chief and would remain so until he was killed in battle, either by white men or by a challenger from his own band.

  He left that part of it unspoken, scanning faces by their campfire’s light until he satisfied himself that none were yet prepared to face him down for leadership.

  And so the plan was settled. They would strike again when he decided it was time, with Paco in the lead, riding to triumph or to death, whichever was their destiny.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Saturday, April 25

  The Bar X herd was crossing its first borderline since setting off nearly three weeks ago. There was no marker on the trail, no striking change in the landscape, but Bliss Mossman had shown his men a map last night and pointed to the spot where they would cross a short time prior to noon.

  Officially, they were no longer in the Territory of New Mexico. Their route to Kansas and beyond cut through the far western corner of Indian Country, crossing the tip of what scattered white settlers liked to call the panhandle.

  And the change, at least to Arthur Catlin’s mind, meant they should be on watch for danger from all sides.

  For starters, as its name implied, Indian Country had been set aside—at least in theory—for defeated native tribes uprooted from ancestral homelands far and wide. Catlin hadn’t made a study of it, but he knew that some of the resettled tribes included Cherokee and Chickasaw, Choctaw and Creek, Cheyenne and Kiowa, even some Seminole driven from southern Florida. Officially, all were confined to reservations mapped out by the U.S. government, but no one with a lick of common sense believed that every native dropped there with a military escort was abiding by the Great White Father’s rules.

  Congress had passed various laws to keep potential enemies in check—no liquor sales, restrictions on the ownership of firearms, hunting reg
ulations—but those august men in Washington still hadn’t bothered to make the region a territory, overseen by an appointed governor and ruled by courts of law. The nearest court was located in Fort Smith, Arkansas, dispatching U.S. marshals to patrol some seventy thousand square miles, either singly or in pairs. Against that widely scattered force, the district teemed with outlaws of all races and extractions, confident that the odds weighed heavily against their capture.

  And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the so-called panhandle was marked on Mossman’s map as a “Neutral Strip,” assigned to no tribe, where intrepid settlers drawn from Texas and New Mexico, Kansas and Colorado, had arrived and put down roots on land that Uncle Sam had seemingly forgotten on his westward rush.

  And “neutral,” in this context, often meant no law at all. It was the Wild West in a nutshell, and a man with property of any value—like a cattle herd—had best be ready to defend it on his own.

  If that meant cowboys fighting for their lives and for their boss’s stock, there were no referees, no heroes in blue uniforms arriving in the nick of time to save their hides.

  With that in mind, Catlin was glad he wouldn’t be on guard duty tonight. Rotating shifts were parceled out among the drovers, Mr. Mossman spared from any, while his foreman took an occasional turn, but on a given night two drovers were excused from lookout duty and allowed two extra hours of sleep.

  Catlin was looking forward to that respite from routine, but he would not forget about his duties to the Bar X and its stock. He couldn’t literally sleep with one eye open all night long, but he would keep his weapons handy, tucked under his blanket, just in case.

  And if someone should ask, “In case of what?” he wouldn’t have an answer for them. All he knew was that a man caught sleeping and unarmed was ripe for killing. On three occasions from his bounty-hunting days, Catlin had managed to surprise fugitives sought on warrants charging murder, robbery, and horse theft. One had given up without a fight; the other two had tried to kill him but wound up taking their last ride draped across their horses, trailing Catlin’s stallion.