by Lyle Brandt
From them, he’d learned to take whatever edge might be available and run with it, showing no mercy when his life was on the line. That was a lesson he kept foremost in his mind, whenever tempted to let down his guard.
It hadn’t failed him yet.
* * *
* * *
Paco knew that his warriors were on edge. They had consumed the last meal of their liberated beef two nights before and were again reduced to hunting quail and rabbits to sustain themselves.
Paco felt natural, predictable impatience building up among his braves with every passing day. Even his own brother, Patamon, had begun to chafe against his elder sibling’s counsel of restraint until the perfect time arrived.
But would there ever be a perfect time to face a larger group of tsayaditl-ti and try to steal their herd? The sheer mechanics of it—first killing the drovers, then escaping with two thousand steers or more—made Paco wonder if he had bitten off more than a man, even a chieftain, could digest.
If he was just content to steal a few more longhorns, even one or two per week, it would be simpler, easier to carry off, and he suspected none among his band would criticize him harshly when they’d filled their stomachs. But as the days wore on without a sign of progress, nothing to suggest a victory impending . . .
Paco was conscious of the fact that any member of his band could challenge him for leadership, with victory decided by the death of one combatant or the loser’s plea for mercy, marked down as a coward and exiled to roam the land alone. Alternatively, if the whole group turned against Paco, he might be overwhelmed, assassinated, and left to feed the turkey vultures and coyotes of the plains.
Better, he thought, if that must be his fate, to lead them in a cataclysmic battle with the tsayaditl-ti, slaying as many as they could before the pale-skins cut them down. At least, that way, they were assured of a reunion with their ancestors and songs among their fellow tribesmen of the war that they had waged.
Paco knew he would not be ranked as equal with the Chiricahua chief Geronimo or Barranquito of the Mescalero, but in these days when the great war chiefs were either dead or hiding from the bluecoats, he was all the remnant his starved and slaughtered people had to call their own.
And Paco meant to make them proud, no matter what it cost him.
As shadows lengthened into dusk and Paco’s men began to set up camp, he called them to him, interrupting their collection of firewood and preparation of four rabbits they had caught the day before, dressed out for cooking in advance. The others gathered round him, watchful, waiting, and the war chief took his time before continuing.
“I have decided,” he informed them. Watched them hanging on his every word, expectantly. “We are no longer in the territory called New Mexico. Our enemies call this Indian Country, and where better to begin the reclamation of our land?”
A murmur made its way around the ring of braves surrounding him. This would have been an apt time for his adversaries to attack, but they were hanging on his words now, watching him.
“We wait no longer,” he advised them. “Tonight we strike.”
“And do you have a plan?” asked Helaku—“Full of Sun” in the white man’s tongue.
“Silence and speed,” Paco replied. “Once it begins, there may be time to liberate more steers, or there may not be. Either way, we fight.”
Now heads were nodding in agreement with his order. None saw fit to ask for any details at that moment, thinking only of the fight to come. Paco trusted each one of them implicitly, never considering that one of them would fail him when the time came.
Battle tested, all were killers primed for conflict against enemies who had demeaned, murdered, and degraded their people for generations, and tonight they could achieve a reckoning.
Whether they came out on the other side alive or not, Paco believed, was now beside the point.
One man’s hopeless gesture was another’s victory, and he would leave the final judgment to his ancestors.
* * *
* * *
So, Kansas coming up,” said Sterling Tippit as he sipped his strong black coffee.
Bliss Mossman nodded, finished mopping his plate with half of a biscuit before he replied, “Tomorrow with luck. Day after at the latest, if we don’t run into any snags before we hit the border.”
Crossing into the Jayhawker State was a milestone of sorts, though most of the journey would still lie before them. They’d still have some four hundred seventy miles yet to travel, but after the sandstorm and the tension that always came over him when passing through Indian Country, crossing an invisible line on a map would still feel like a victory of sorts.
Of course, they weren’t clear yet.
It was a rancher’s lot on trail drives to see problems where they might arise, even if none were evident. A wise man who’d accumulated property was constantly on guard against threats that could snatch it from him without warning.
Every stranger they encountered on the trail was a potential thief or scout for rustlers who might swoop down on the herd. A drifting puff of smoke—maybe a farmer burning leaves, a housewife cooking breakfast, or a wildfire sparked by lightning—might turn out to be a signal between bands of red men lying in ambush.
“A penny for ’em,” Tippit said.
“For what?” Mossman replied.
“Your thoughts, boss.”
Mossman clucked his tongue, then said, “The same as always on a drive. I wonder what in hell tomorrow may throw at us when our backs are turned.”
“We’ve done okay so far, considering,” his foreman said. “Even that storm could have been worse.”
“You’re right,” Mossman agreed. “And that’s the problem.”
“Meaning what?”
“I can’t relax until we’re at the stockyards. Till then, even when we hit a rough patch and get through it, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“At least Kansas is settled,” Tippit told him.
“So they say.”
Mossman knew better. Sure, they would be skirting towns along the way, but every settlement they passed was a potential nest of livestock rustlers. Dodge City had barely gotten off the ground when last year’s drive went through, but it was growing like a weed and had a wicked reputation for its gunfights and rowdy saloons. Great Bend was slightly older, founded back in 1851, but still on the wild side.
The other towns they’d pass, Salina and Topeka—“T-Town” to its residents—had law in place, but that was no insurance against trouble. Every human settlement from coast to coast, from New York City to the pueblo of Los Angeles in California, harbored its share of bad men, shady women, and peace officers who used a badge to lord it over folks they didn’t give a damn about.
That was the problem with humanity as Mossman saw it: everyone you had to deal with turned out to be human, all beset with faults that overcame them in the end.
Including me, he thought, and finished off the dregs of coffee that were going cold in his tin cup.
“We’ve only had a problem crossing Kansas that one time,” Tippit recalled, trying to put his boss’s mind at ease.
“And that was bad enough,” Mossman reminded him.
They’d been a day southwest of where Dodge City stood, a year before its first saloon and church were built, a pair of whitewashed monuments to sin and virtue. Three men had approached the herd, asking for work, but Mossman hadn’t liked the look of them, He’d turned them down, saying he had all of the hands he needed, wishing them good luck.
At that point, smiling to his face, the three strangers had tried to draw their pistols but fell short. Mossman and Tippit got there first, along with Rowdy Lathrop, one of that year’s drovers. When the smoke cleared, all three highwaymen were dead or dying, Lathrop had a bullet in his brain, and that had soured the drive for Mossman. Even when he got a r
ecord price for beef at Independence, it felt like blood money in his hand.
And sure, he’d gotten over that—mostly—but he’d learned one thing that afternoon that never left his mind.
Trust no one but your family and keep an eye on everyone in case they sell you out.
“You’ve got the night watch set?” he asked Tippit.
“All done, boss.”
“Right. Guess I’ll be turning in.”
“Tomorrow morning, then.”
His foreman nodded. Said, “I’ll see you then.”
* * *
* * *
How much longer must we wait,” Wanikiya whispered to Kuruk.
“Until Paco signals,” Bear replied.
Wanikiya refrained from answering, trying to swallow his impatience as the night wore on.
In English, his name meant “Savior,” though the young brave could not think of anything he had saved since he’d fled the reservation to become one of Paco’s raiders. Since then, he’d killed one white man and had witnessed half a dozen others being killed. Their deaths had not disturbed him as he first expected, thereby proving to his satisfaction that he’d been correct in choosing war over the settled, “civilized” existence that his parents had adopted.
Wanikiya’s problem: to his mind, waiting was not war. Only the thrill and heat of battle qualified in that regard.
Still, since he was not the band’s war chief and likely never would be, what else could he do but wait?
Paco had planned the strike in detail, starting with a signal he would issue in the form of a screech owl’s cry—a series of short whistles, rapidly accelerating, closing with a long trill falling slightly at end. The call was unmistakable, but not too hard to mimic. It should fool most tsayaditl-ti, but only one had to see past it for the plan to fall apart.
“If we are not successful—”
Wanikiya meant to say more, but Kuruk was quick to interrupt him, asking, “When has Paco ever failed us?”
That was fair enough, but Wanikiya could not quell his own misgivings. “He is only human, like the rest of us.”
“You’d take his place?” Kuruk inquired.
Wanikiya did not have to pretend surprise. The thought had not emerged from his subconscious previously, but Kuruk now forced him to consider it.
“I do not say so,” Wanikiya answered back.
“But you are thinking it. I know you,” his best friend replied.
“What does it matter? No one would support my challenge.”
Kuruk had his chance, then, to speak up and back Wanikiya’s half-formed idea. His silence, on the other hand, spoke volumes. If Wanikiya challenged Paco, he should not count on Kuruk to support him.
Kuruk was trying to compose an answer, something neutral but assertive in a subtle way, when both braves heard the screech owl’s call wafting above the longhorn herd and dozing camp.
“You wanted action,” said Kuruk. “Now it begins.”
Wanikiya tightened his grip upon the Sharps carbine he carried, rising from his crouch behind a thin line of mesquite trees. Kuruk stood beside him, met his eyes by moonlight, before both braves swung aboard their mustangs, riding bareback, braided buckskin ropes serving as reins.
Mounted, both young braves began advancing toward the herd. Wanikiya could not see any other members of their war party but knew they must be closing in as ordered once the signal came.
They would obey Paco’s instructions and his plan might prove successful. If it did, Wanikiya would be among the first to praise their war chief for his wisdom as a strategist.
But if it failed . . .
A loss would fuel dissent within their party, and if no one else stepped forward to contend for leadership, why not Wanikiya himself?
Why not, indeed?
Whichever way the plan worked out, he stood to profit from it, either by saluting Paco or by challenging his right to lead their band.
But first, Wanikiya knew he must make it through this night alive.
* * *
* * *
Art Catlin had the night off from guard duty and intended to relax.
With sixteen drovers on the duty roster, two men were relieved of night watch every third day on the trail. Tonight was Catlin’s turn and Danny Underwood’s, the latter seeming bent on sitting up to shoot the breeze until sleep overtook him. Catlin, for his part, had bedded down after a second helping of salt pork and beans, taking it easy on the coffee so caffeine wouldn’t keep him awake.
Time off from herd patrol was one thing, though; forgetting all about the risks they faced was something else entirely.
Underneath his blanket, Catlin had his Colt Navy six-shooter unholstered, within an easy six inches of his shooting hand. Off to his right, and also covered, as a hedge against whatever morning dew might manifest itself, his Henry rifle lay in readiness for any challenge that might face him overnight.
That habit, always being armed and ready for a spot of trouble, carried over from the days when he was tracking men with bounties on their heads. During those years, whenever someone challenged Catlin’s choice of lifestyle, his response had always been the same: he hunted men who preyed on others and were wanted by the law, even if lawmen never seemed to have the time or wits to run them down. Catlin regarded it as something of a public service, and the fact that he took money for it—payment volunteered by state authorities, no less—had never bothered him.
At least, it hadn’t till he faced the Grimes brothers last month, in Las Vegas, and one of them, not even meaning to, had killed a little boy.
From time to time, Bill Regner Jr. still turned up in Catlin’s dreams. He’d never seen the boy alive but saw him while he slept the same way as the child had looked when Catlin noticed him, his blood staining a weathered sidewalk’s boards.
If anyone had pressed him on it, Catlin would have said the accident—not even his mistake, in fact—had wrought no changes in his view of life and death. No boy could come of age out west without having grasped that life was fragile, likely to be snatched away whenever someone least expected it. Nor had he come to think that outlaws should be free to roam around the countryside at large while lawmen sat behind their desks and claimed that legal jurisdiction bound their hands.
The Bar X drive was simply a vacation from the life he’d led till now, no more, no less. He wasn’t counting on cowpunching as a new career, far from it. He was taking some time off, trying a little something new, and he could always go back to the other if and when he felt like it. But in the meantime, it was something new and different.
A screech owl’s raucous cry caught Catlin on the threshold of a dream and snapped him back to wakefulness before he could discover whether young Bill Regner might be waiting for him on the other side, silent and staring in the moment when a thunderclap snuffed out his sad, short life.
Catlin lay waiting for the owl to call again, but it had fallen still. Instead, he heard men talking near the campfire, Jaime Reyes singing softly to the longhorns, lulling them to sleep. Catlin wasn’t sure about the song, being in Spanish, but thought it sounded like a ballad, something on the mournful side. He couldn’t picture anybody dancing to it, maybe sitting at a bar somewhere and staring down into a whiskey glass.
Catlin had lived through days like that himself, but always managed to come out the other side intact.
So far.
Lulled by the tune, despite Jaime’s off-key delivery, Art closed his eyes again and drifted off to sleep.
* * *
* * *
Paco waited in darkness, watching as his braves closed in around the white man’s herd. Each warrior was within a few yards of the place assigned to him, not bad for moving over unfamiliar ground at night while trying not to make a sound.
So far they’d been successful. Only two cowboys watched over the
longhorns as usual, one of them softly crooning to the animals in Spanish while the white man on the far side of the herd rode silently among them, seemingly alert to any threat of danger.
But he clearly had not recognized it yet.
And any moment now, it would be too late for him to recover. He had almost reached the point of no return.
Paco had drilled the plan into his warriors’ minds: a shriek to signal the attack, and they would fall upon the drovers like a mountain rockslide, using every weapon they possessed to slash the odds against them. If their luck held out, perhaps they could annihilate the party and escape with enough livestock to sustain them in their flight, with some to sell for cash.
And if they failed? In that case, Paco would be reunited with his ancestors, proud to declare that he had not surrendered to the white men and their pony soldiers. Even dying, he could be a symbol of resistance to his people who lived on.
Paco carried a dead man’s rifle, lifted from a settler he had killed and scalped between Las Cruces and El Paso. It was a Winchester, the Model 1866 some whites referred to as the “Yellow Boy” because its receiver was cast from a bronze and brass alloy. Its magazine held fifteen rounds of .44-caliber rimfire ammunition, with a sixteenth in the firing chamber. All he had to do was cock the rifle’s hammer with his thumb—or, incidentally, strike hard objects with it, which could trigger the first shot by accident.
Before this moment, with his braves advancing on all sides, Paco briefly fantasized about slaying fifteen of the herd’s cowboys by himself, dropping each one in turn with single well-placed shots that struck them down before they realized that death had come to call. He knew that was ridiculous, if not impossible, but every man—regardless of his race—harbors at least one treasured dream unlikely to come true.
In fact, he would be satisfied if his war party could dispose of half the drovers in tonight’s ambush. The rest—their numbers whittled down, unable to seek aid from bluecoats or the residents of scattered settlements—would then be easier to finish off with long-range rifle shots, swift arrows in the night, or sharp knives drawn across their throats.
