The Independence Trail

by Lyle Brandt

  At the same time, the echo of a gunshot caught up with the bullet that had slain him, fired from what Denzhone supposed must be one hundred yards or more away.

  While those around him scrambled, seeking cover, Denzhone flattened on the grass, swallowed another groan of agony from that sudden exertion, and stared off to the northeast, seeking his mortal enemies.

  * * *

  * * *

  Art Catlin and the other drovers waited while their foreman took the first shot, lying prone and sighting down the barrel of his Sharps carbine. The weapon roared and bucked against his shoulder, by which time its .52-caliber slug weighing twenty-four grams flew downrange at some eighteen hundred feet per second.

  Catlin didn’t have the telescope and didn’t need it, as one of the Apaches standing upright crumpled and collapsed, leaving a pink cloud where his skull had been two heartbeats earlier. The booming gunshot rolled along behind its fat projectile, catching up just as the other hostiles went to ground, clutching whatever weapons they possessed.

  Catlin had time to pick a target from the dozen-plus Apaches still alive in camp. None bolted toward their horses, tethered off to one side at a cluster of mesquite trees. He chose a warrior who was kneeling with a long gun at his shoulder, aiming at the assailants who had overtaken his war party.

  Catlin almost felt that he had locked eyes with his enemy across the intervening distance, though he realized that had to be illusory. He could make out the warrior, roughly judge his weight and stature, but his features were a smudge devoid of any detail. That was fine, since when he fired at human targets from a distance, Catlin always tried to choose a spot mid-torso, which increased his chances of a hit with maximum effect.

  He took a deep breath, released half of it, and held the rest, hearing his pulse throb in his ears, his index finger taking up the Henry rifle’s trigger slack. The weapon kicked, but just a little, most of its recoil absorbed by stock and butt plate before nudging against Catlin’s clavicle and deltoid muscle.

  By the time that happened, Catlin’s .44 slug was airborne. It weighed eleven grams less than Tippit’s .52-caliber and traveled seven hundred feet per second, give or take, but it was still more than enough to drop a man if he scored any kind of solid hit at all.

  And so it did.

  Catlin would never know the hostile’s name, nor was he interested. Whatever he was called, the renegade had tried to murder Catlin and his friends last night, and this was the result of it.

  Don’t start a fight unless you were prepared to see it through.

  * * *

  * * *

  Paco lay belly down, aiming his Remington Rolling Block rifle toward the attackers a hundred yards out from his war party’s camp. He could see them at that distance, but could not distinguish one man from another at that range, in terms of faces or the clothing that they wore.

  On top of that, the riflemen shifted positions constantly, making it difficult for their Apache enemies to draw a bead on any one of them. Paco had fired three shots since the firefight began, and knew his rounds were wasted, flying past his targets, off across the prairie into nothingness.

  Now, with a fourth fresh cartridge in the Remington’s chamber, he had a paltry nine rounds remaining. When he had exhausted those, what could he do to help his warriors or himself?

  It was ridiculous to think of charging toward his foes across the intervening distance with his hunting knife in hand; he’d be cut down before he’d cleared a dozen running steps forward. On the other hand, Paco could not abide the thought of simply staying where he was, waiting to die.

  The Apache war chief cleared his mind of doubts and speculation, concentrating on his aim before he sent his next .50-caliber slug downrange, powered by seventy grains of black powder. His aim felt better to him this time, but he missed again, cursing as his target dropped to a crouch just as Paco’s finger depressed his rifle’s trigger.

  “Chi wat!” Furious, if only at himself, he cleared the weapon’s breech and thumbed another cartridge—two and one quarter inches long—into the firing chamber. Paco knew that he could still slay every foe who stood before him with the rounds remaining to him, but he had to make them count without wasting another single one.

  And firing from the safer prone position had not worked for him so far.

  All right, then.

  With his rifle primed and cocked, Paco rose to his full height, turned in profile toward his enemies, thereby making a smaller target of himself while simultaneously compensating for the Remington’s recoil. He could absorb the weapon’s kick, his upper torso rotating off-center, then come back into alignment with his targets by the time his bullet found its mark.

  Aiming his rifle, with its rear ramp and leaf sight and a blade sight at the muzzle, seemed to take forever, but Paco knew that in truth he’d barely spent two seconds on the process, maybe less. He chose a cowboy as the first man he would kill today, held steady on the distant form, and slipped his index finger through the weapon’s trigger guard—when something struck him in the chest and knocked him over backward to the ground.

  Paco had heard the white man’s words of wisdom more than once: You never hear the shot that kills you.

  Now he understood that was another of their countless lies.

  Sprawled on his back, his perfect shot wasted on fluffy clouds passing above him, Paco clearly heard the echo of the gunshot that had felled him. At the same time, when he tried to draw a breath, the sucking chest wound he’d received taught Paco how it might have felt to drown in warm, deep water.

  No. Not water.

  By the time he realized that he was drowning in his own life’s blood, Paco was beyond earthly help. His eyes locked open, no longer responsive to his brain’s commands, he watched the vast blue field above him dwindle to a fading speck of black and then wink out.

  * * *

  * * *

  I got one of the bastards!” Merritt Dietz cried out, exultant. “Any of you boys see that? Damn, what a shot!”

  Art Catlin thought Dietz had begun to dance a happy little jig of celebration for his marksmanship, but then he heard a soggy slapping sound and Merritt went down in a boneless heap, He landed on his right-hand side, giving Catlin a glimpse of bright blood pulsing from a blowhole in his throat.

  Maybe the gunshot’s sound reached Catlin’s ears a second later. He supposed it must have, but with all the firing back and forth, he couldn’t have sworn to it.

  “Dietz?” Tippit rushed over to the fallen Bar X hand and knelt beside him, feeling for a pulse along the jawline. When his fingers came back red and dripping, Tippit scowled and wiped them on the prairie grass.

  “Stay down!” he shouted to the six drovers still living, but he could have skipped that warning. All of them, Catlin included, were renewing their acquaintance with the sod beneath them, minimizing the silhouettes they offered to Apache rifleman trying to pick them off.

  Catlin was already more than halfway through his Henry rifle’s load, if he’d been counting properly since he and his companions brought the hostiles under fire. He’d started with a live round in the chamber, and he’d fired his ninth shot just as Dietz went down, meaning he had eight rounds remaining in the Henry’s magazine.

  Unlike the later Winchester repeaters, Henrys had no wooden forearm to protect a shooter’s hand when steady firing heated up the rifle’s twenty-four-inch barrel. Catlin compensated with a leather glove he’d slipped on when they spied the raiders’ campfire smoke, and therefore had no fear of blistering his left-hand fingertips.

  Not that it mattered now.

  With one man down, the half dozen members of the hunting party still alive were focused on elimination of their enemies at any cost, without further delay.

  It finally came down to blind luck, rage, and butchery.

  Despite their being one day short of three we
eks on the trail together, Catlin couldn’t say he’d known Dietz well or felt particularly close to him. They’d worked night watch together once, luck of the draw, and now he’d never hear the drover tell another of his odd off-color jokes again, supplying laughter on his own part when his fellow cowboys didn’t see where he was going with it. Now his rowdy voice was stilled for good.

  The rage derived less from a sense of loss than fear, Catlin supposed. He’d felt its like in other killing situations, desperate to be the last man standing when the gun smoke cleared, translating fear to anger that could serve him, rather than leaving him helpless in the face of mortal danger.

  In that moment, as at other times, Art understood how U.S. soldiers must have felt at Sand Creek, four years later on the Washita River, and during all the other massacres of red men, women, and their children over time. Sometimes, he realized, that feeling sprang from pure race hatred. Other times—at least for him, as now—it was a natural response to being frightened that the next minute or two could leave him dead and bleeding out, beyond all human aid.

  He fired and fired again, saw human targets dropping in the hostile camp downrange, and kept on pumping lead into those twitching human forms until the Henry’s hammer snapped down on an empty chamber and he either had to pause, survey the killing field, or else reload and start firing again.

  Their foreman’s voice spared Catlin from that choice.

  “Hold fire!” Tippit commanded, pushing to his feet and peering through his spyglass at the now-silent Apache camp. Then said, “They’re down. Come on with me, and let’s make sure.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The hostile camp was still as Tippit led his men across green grass toward turf now sprayed and spattered crimson from the thrashing dead. Seeing his adversaries laid out of the ground in twisted shapes repulsed him, but it also sparked another feeling in the foreman’s chest.

  He felt relief.

  Why not?

  He was alive, with all but one of his subordinates. He’d followed Mr. Mossman’s orders, done his job, repaid a raid against the Bar X herd, and made damned sure the men responsible would threaten no one else.

  Tippit remained alert as they drew near the camp, in case one of the warriors had decided to play possum and try one last shot at members of the Bar X crew before they finally finished him off. None stirred as he and his companions passed among them, though, and Tippit finally relaxed his guard, easing the hammer down on the Sharps carbine in his hands.

  Men slain by violence collapse in different ways. Tippit preferred the facedown posture to those lying on their backs or sides, some with dead eyes fixed open, staring through and past him to the dark void of eternity. He knew they couldn’t see him, much less raise a hand against him, but the gaping stares were so damned creepy that they made his skin crawl.

  Someone’s walking on my grave, he thought, an ancient superstition from his childhood, but the image still required him to suppress a shiver as he moved beneath the warm sun overhead.

  You ain’t dead yet, he told himself. And no one knows where you’ll be planted, come that day.

  All true, but still not reassuring as he walked the killing ground.

  “What should we do with ’em?” Linton McCormick asked.

  “Nothing,” Tippit replied. “We’ll take their guns and any ammunition back with us so no one else can use them. Turn the mustangs lose and let’s get moving.”

  “No graves, then?” Nehemiah Wolford asked.

  Tippit stared back at him as if Wolford had lost his mind and answered with a question of his own.

  “You think they would have buried you?” With no response forthcoming, Tippit said, “I didn’t think so. We need to finish here and pick up Dietz, then get back to the herd.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Friday, May 2

  Ford County, Kansas

  Nineteen days northeast of Santa Fe and the herd was making fair time. Ford County was a sparsely settled area for 427 residents for its 1,099 square miles of area at the last census, three years earlier, most of those inhabiting Dodge City and the immediate environs.

  What that meant for Arthur Catlin and the Bar X cattle drive was ample grazing land watered by springs and streams that kept the county green through spring and summer, rife with game, including elk, whitetails, mule deer, and pronghorn antelopes. The predators they had to watch out for ranged all the way in size from foxes to coyotes, wolves and pumas, black bears, and a few grizzlies that farmers hadn’t managed to exterminate so far.

  Again, as elsewhere on their chosen route of march, the greater danger would be posed by humans. Mr. Mossman planned to pare that threat by staying well outside Dodge City, barely one year old this spring, already with a reputation for attracting gamblers, pimps, and harlots, spawning drunkenness and fights that often ended up with one or more men lying dead.

  Catlin had never been to Dodge and didn’t see that as a detriment. He’d seen enough towns like it in his bounty-hunting days to figure that he wasn’t missing out on much of anything. The trail drive’s hands might not agree, but they were under orders from their boss. Whoever strayed to wet his whistle or whatever in Dodge City might as well keep riding when he’d finished and forget about his job with the Bar X, including any pay he’d earned to date.

  Hard rules for a tough journey through an unforgiving land.

  Job Hooper sidled up on Catlin’s left, aboard his liver chestnut mare. He asked, “You seen that, Art?”

  Instead of asking what he meant, Catlin followed the drover’s gaze farther along their path and knew immediately what Job had in mind.

  “That dust, you mean?”

  “What do you reckon that to be? Another herd?” asked Hooper.

  “Heading in the wrong direction if it is,” Catlin replied. “It’s coming our way, not to any market hereabouts.”

  “So, what then?”

  Only one other answer came to Catlin’s mind. “Likely a wagon train,” he said. “They follow this route westbound, headed to New Mexico and west from there, far as the California coast.”

  “Sodbusters,” Hooper said dismissively.

  “Most anything, I guess,” said Catlin. “Miners, shopkeepers, take your pick.”

  “Or painted ladies?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Be funny, wouldn’t it? The boss won’t let us make a side trip into Dodge, but what if someone brings the doxies out to us?”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Catlin cautioned him,

  “Did anybody ever tell you you’re a spoilsport?”

  “It’s been said of me,” Catlin allowed.

  “There’s nothing wrong with hoping, is there?”

  “Not a thing,” Art said.

  Thinking, At least until it lets you down and leaves you flat.

  * * *

  * * *

  As foreman of the Bar X and its present trail drive, Sterling Tippit had his orders from the boss. Specifically, he was supposed to ride ahead and meet whoever was approaching them this afternoon, either confirming Mr. Mossman’s hunch that it must be a wagon train or, failing that, bringing back other news.

  Now, as the train came into view, he realized that Mr. M was right again, as usual. All that remained now was for Tippit to forewarn the wagon master, making sure his train and Mossman’s herd didn’t collide and make a mess of things.

  As wagon trains went, in his personal experience, this one didn’t impress Tippit much. He counted thirteen Conestoga wagons rolling one behind the other, with a smaller chuck wagon behind them, bringing up the rear. He took for granted that the leading vehicle would be the wagon master’s home on wheels, maybe shared with his scout, and guessed that meant a dozen families en route to settle somewhere in the open West. Some trains he’d seen or read about had anywhere from fifty to a hundred wagons
trailing, strung across a mile or more of countryside. This outfit, by comparison, was small indeed.

  Approaching slowly while a scout rode up to meet him, Tippit wondered if the train had fallen on hard times since leaving Independence on its long trek into the unknown. Not Donner Party trouble, or the gruesome Mountain Meadows kind, but still . . .

  Reining his mare in while he waited for the scout to reach him, Tippit went back over what he knew of long-range wagon travel in his mind.

  Each Conestoga, also known as a “prairie schooner,” was constructed as a mobile world unto itself. To start, each was like a ship of sorts, its floor curved upward at each end to stop the wagon’s contents shifting, tipping over, each end slanting to prevent a family’s belongings spilling out while climbing or descending hills. The average wagon, including its tongue for the team that hauled it, measured roughly eighteen feet in length, depending on the craftsman’s preference, while being four feet wide. Its height—tough canvas fastened over curving arches patterned after the ribs in a ship’s keel, but open at front and rear until a flap was closed at night or during storms—stood some eleven feet in height. Each wagon’s body seams were caulked with tar to stop leaks when they forded rivers and progressed through rain or snow.

  Conestoga wagons were built to transport loads that might top out around twelve hundred pounds, including occupants, their furniture, and various supplies—multiple water barrels, food for weeks on end, a toolbox and a feed box for the team—all of which determined how a wagon master charged his customers for time and distance traveled. That could vary, Tippit knew, depending on the obstacles expected while in transit, but the average was something like one dollar per mile traveled, after acquisition of a wagon and supplies that might exceed one thousand dollars prior to starting out. On top of that, a fully loaded Conestoga would require six draft horses or two oxen to haul it overland, which sold for twenty dollars and upward per head.