The Independence Trail

by Lyle Brandt

  Or his life.

  Supper turned out to be a potluck kind of meal, with Piney Rollins dishing up his usual, the wagon train’s cook grilling venison, and the train’s several families adding a variety of dishes from their stores. Catlin had no experience to speak of with the foods of Scandinavia, but found that he enjoyed Norwegian pickled herring and potato dumplings known as kumla; Swedish meatballs, raggmunk (fried potato pancakes), and gravlax (dill-cured salmon); Danish stegt flæsk (fried pork-belly strips), kartofler (boiled potatoes), and karbonader (ground pork patties).

  Overall, he wound up eating more than usual and didn’t mind passing up the offered cup of aquavit that Mr. Mossman had forbidden to his men. At least a few of them would likely wind up sneaking it, and that was their problem if they got caught. Catlin’s only concern involved a sneaky drunk sharing his watch that night, putting the herd and Bar X hands at risk.

  What would he do if he caught on to someone being tipsy while on guard? Likely not much, beyond suggesting that the boozer trade his shift with someone sober and stay mum about the reason for it. If the souse in question balked at that, Catlin could only keep an eye on him and try to pick up any slack.

  The very last thing he would do was carry tales and tip Mr. Mossman or Sterling Tippit to a private lapse. That kind of snitching wouldn’t earn him any thanks and might just make his life a misery for the remainder of the drive. Worst-case scenario, the man he squealed on might get fired and wind up calling Catlin out for that, which meant that one of them would likely wind up dead.

  Art had no fear of any other Bar X drover shading him, but until you saw another man in action, fighting for his life, who really knew for sure?

  To hell with that, he thought, and focused on the loaded plate in front of him, black coffee on the side.

  With any luck, the night would pass without any untoward events that led to grief, and Catlin could preserve the memory of their time spent with the members of the wagon train as a pleasant surprise.

  So far, his life hadn’t served up many of those, and Catlin kept them filed away upstairs, retrievable as time and circumstance allowed. During a long night’s watch for instance, when a couple thousand longhorns on the verge of sleep ignored Catlin as if he were invisible.

  Someone had got a fiddle out, one of the Swedes who looked like he was in his thirties, with a halfway pretty wife and five children. Catlin couldn’t have named the tune that he was playing, even when another immigrant—one of the Danes, Art thought, but wasn’t sure—jumped in to back the fiddler with a Jew’s harp. Married couples started dancing, children getting in on it a moment later, while the Bar X men stayed out of it or clapped from the sidelines, nobody cutting in.

  So far, so good.

  Catlin sat watching, listening, until he’d cleaned his plate and finished off his coffee, then got ready to turn in. With luck, he’d have the better part of five hours to sleep before his turn on watch, and then the tag end of the night would pass without a ruckus that could force Art’s hand.

  Tomorrow was another day and he would take it as it came.

  * * *

  * * *

  Axel Bjorlin was not musical. He’d never learned to play an instrument of any kind, and when he tried to sing in church, it seemed to come out wrong somehow, causing other parishioners with talent greater than his own to wince as if in pain.

  His answer to that problem was abstaining from all musical pursuits. Back home in Halmstad, Sunday services were not required by law, but custom certainly demanded his attendance with the other members of his family. When time arrived for singing, Axel Bjorlin held the hymnal for his wife and moved his lips without making a sound.

  Rowan was onto his charade, of course, but never mentioned it. If other members of the congregation noticed, they refrained from giving any sign that might offend Axel, provoking angry words.

  Or possibly, he sometimes thought, they were relieved.

  Tonight, with supper done—they’d eaten köttbullar (meatballs seasoned with herbs) and a potato casserole with onions and pickled anchovies, known as Janssons frestelse, translated as into English as “Jansson’s temptation”—Rowan and Kirsten had cleaned the plates and cookware, leaving Axel to his pipe and rifle.

  He enjoyed a smoke around sundown. As for the firearm, while he hoped that it would not be needed, he had double-checked to make sure it was loaded, just in case.

  In case of what?

  He thought their campfire should keep any cougars and wolves at bay, although Bjorlin was not certain about bears. They’d seen one at a distance, midway through their third week out of Independence, and he didn’t relish facing one but thought he should be equal to the task with gun in hand.

  The night was reasonably warm—better than nights around Halmstad in spring, with chill winds blowing inland from the Kattegat—and with a pot of coffee on the fire, Axel believed he could remain alert throughout the hours of darkness to protect his family and all their worldly goods.

  If not, how could he even call himself a man?

  That train of thought reminded him of Rowan, bundled up in what passed for their bed since they had taken up residing in a Conestoga wagon, pushing off to face the wild frontier. He might have crept into their wagon then, awakened her to soothe him, but Bjorlin knew it would disturb the children and he didn’t need them eavesdropping.

  Granted, Swedish children knew the facts of life before they started school, but knowing something and observing it firsthand were very different.

  A sound he couldn’t place distracted Bjorlin from his reverie. He peered into the dark beyond his campfire’s fitful light, imagined he saw something moving there—or was it someone?

  Rising from the captain’s chair he’d carried from the wagon, Axel clutched his rifle, staring down the prairie night.

  * * *

  * * *

  How do your people carry all this food?” asked Piney Rollins, sitting on the tailgate of the travelers’ chuck wagon next to new friend Marlon Frank, the wagon train’s load cook.

  Frank was a slightly younger man than Rollins, maybe thirty-five or -six to Piney’s forty-something. He was half a head shorter than Rollins, carrying an extra thirty pounds or so that seemed to make his shoulders slump, pushing his head and face forward so that he generally looked inquisitive, about to ask some question that his tongue resisted voicing. Bald on top, he compensated by letting what hair he had grow longer on the sides and back, where it covered his collar.

  “Most of what they eat is smoked or canned and pickled,” Frank replied. “Seems like it lasts forever, though I wouldn’t always hazard trying it. Taters and such they pack like anybody else, but for that taste of home its brine or dill,”

  “You don’t cook for ’em, then, at all?” Piney inquired.

  “Nope. I’ve only got three customers besides myself: the wagon master with his scout, and Davos, what you’d call a jack-of-all-trades, fixing things.”

  “What kind of name is ‘Davos’?” Piney asked, before he shoved another spoon laden with beans into his maw.

  “Some other kind of European, not a Scandie,” Marlon told him. “I wanna say he’s Grecian, but I may not have that right. Talks English, though, and eats the same as anybody else you might run into.”

  Piney switched to something else that had been on his mind. “Your train’s smaller than what I’m used to seeing, passing up and down the Cimarron to Independence. Mostly, we’ve run into forty, fifty wagons, sometimes twice that many.”

  Frank nodded and bit off half a biscuit, but it didn’t stop him answering.

  “You got that right,” he said. “The boss—that’s Mr. Redden—normally leads more across, but this come to him through what he calls a broker.”

  “Ain’t familiar with it,” Piney said.

  “I wasn’t, neither. It’s some kind a middleman hooks pe
ople up with buyers, based on that they got to sell. This one, from what I gather, drums up newcomers and people sick of living in the eastern cities, sells ’em on a dream of going west, and steers ’em toward a wagon builder. Takes his piece o’ that and same thing when he books ’em on a westbound train. These Nordskis stick together, even if they ain’t all from the same place starting out, and Mr. Redden charged ’em extra to make up for the light load.”

  “So they’ve got money.” Piney stated it as given fact, not asking.

  “Seems like. Around them Scandie countries, people call it kroner, meaning ‘crowns’ as one of ’em explained it to me. Not identical from one place to another, but they kind a look alike if you ain’t watching close. I couldn’t tell you what that means in U.S. dollars, though.”

  “Nothing to me,” Piney replied. “But since you mentioned sticking close together, how’d they come to leave one wagon back?”

  “It’s funny you should ask that,” Frank replied. “A broken wheel, you’d normally expect Davos to fix it up, but herring chokers are an independent bunch. The fader of that family—that’s ‘father,’ but it sounds like ‘fodder’—reckoned he could do the job himself and didn’t wanna hold the others back. They bickered for a while, then took a vote and finally agreed with him. I can’t say Mr. Redden liked it, but he got half of their cash up front, so . . .”

  Instead of finishing the statement, Marlon rolled his shoulders in a shrug.

  “You think they’ll make it? Catch up with the train again?”

  “I couldn’t rightly answer that,” Frank said. “But either way, it’s no skin off my back.”

  The Comancheros were on foot, their horses left some eighty yards behind them to be watched by José Calderón, one of the outfit’s Mexicans and elder brother to Juanito. Moving cautiously and quietly, they’d closed within an easy gunshot of the wagon standing on its own, a man on watch outside, with the remainder of his kinfolk under cover.

  Oren Dempsey had been crystal clear about his orders before breaking camp and moving in to box their prey. Eleven strong without José along, they were to form a ring of sorts around the Conestoga, then let Dempsey say his piece before they went to work.

  “I want this understood,” he’d told them, while Jack Runyon and Ardil McManus doused their fire by peeing on its embers. “I intend to be the only one who talks first thing. Got that? Nobody pitching in to scare ’em, anything like that.”

  “You’re taking all the fun out of it,” Lubie Grant had said.

  “This ain’t a picnic,” Dempsey had replied, hard-eyed. “It’s business, people. I’m in charge, and anyone who can’t remember that should get the hell out here and now.”

  That stopped them grinning at him, and Dempsey accepted victory as no more than his rightful due. With that established, he’d tossed them a bone. “O’ course,” he’d finished up, “once we’ve disarmed Daddy, that don’t mean that you can’t enjoy yourselves a bit.”

  Now, closing on their target from the darkened plain, Dempsey could feel the old excitement that aroused him every time they carried off another job. It raised goose bumps along both arms and stirred the short hairs on his nape.

  From camp they’d come loaded for bear. Each Comanchero had a new Springfield model 1873 “trapdoor” rifle chambered for .45-70 Government rounds, part of a stolen army shipment, with the rest sold off to Indians with raiding on their minds. Each rifle measured fifty-two inches, sporting a thirty-two-inch barrel, and despite being a single-shot breechloader, they could get off eleven or twelve rounds per minute in skilled shooters’ hands.

  Besides the Springfields, Dempsey’s Comancheros carried various handguns they’d either bought or stolen in their travels through the West. That raised some issues where providing ammunition was concerned, with some of the exotic pistols being foreign made, but they had firepower enough to take one wagonload of travelers stranded along the westbound trail, abandoned and apparently forgotten by fair-weather friends.

  When Dempsey judged his men should be in place, he stepped out of shadows crowding close around the single wagon and its team, advancing until the lone man on watch could see him by the fading campfire’s light.

  He raised his voice, calling, “Hello the camp!”

  In front of him, the man apparently stood with a rifle in his hands, at what the soldiers liked to call port arms, slanting across his chest diagonally with its muzzle to the stranger’s left.

  “Vem är det?” the watchman asked, and then remembered to try English. “Who is that?”

  “A weary traveler, much like yourself,” Dempsey replied, smiling. “I saw your fire and wondered if you could abide some company.”

  “I must say no,” the gunman answered, sounding shaky. “We have nothing here to share.”

  “Okay, if you say so.” Dempsey smiled a little wider as he asked, “But who’s this ‘we’ you talk about?”

  The lookout stiffened. Said, “You must move on now.”

  “I could do that,” Dempsey granted. “Or, how’s this? If you don’t lay down that piece right now, me and my boys will shoot that wagon full of holes and see whose blood leaks out.”

  * * *

  * * *

  You’re sure they were Apaches?” Thomas Redden asked.

  “No doubt about it,” Bliss Mossman replied.

  They were seated by a blazing campfire, each boss with his second-in-command. The news of hostiles taking on the Bar X herd clearly had Redden worried for the families he was conveying westward.

  “And they killed one of your men?”

  “Before we wiped them out,” Sterling Tippit chimed in.

  “For sure? You got ’em all?” asked Chad Sturgis.

  “All of ’em that tackled us,” Tippit replied. “And we lost one man in the process.”

  “Any indication that the savages were part of something more? A bigger war party, let’s say?”

  Mossman nodded to Tippit, let him field that question.

  “Nothing to suggest it,” said the Bar X foreman. “One brave shot when they attacked our camp, and thirteen more when we caught up with ’em next day. I can’t swear that they don’t have friends lurking around, but no one from the raiding party got away. That’s fact.”

  “And you aren’t worried that we may be in for any kind of larger uprising?” asked Redden.

  “Not until we see ’em coming,” Mossman said.

  “All right, then. I suppose we’ll have to keep our eyes open and guns handy from here on in,” said Redden.

  “Good advice for anybody traveling along the Cimarron,” Mossman agreed. “Speaking of which . . .”

  “You want to ask about the family we left behind,” Redden predicted.

  “Now you mention it, I do,” replied the Bar X boss.

  “First off, know that it wasn’t my idea. First time I’ve ever rolled away and left a family like that, except the time three years ago. Those were Italians, twelve in all, who came down with the smallpox two weeks out from Independence. That came down to sparing the majority of fifty-seven families. They were supposed to turn around and head back to Missouri, but I asked around later and nobody knew any more about ’em.”

  “On this other deal . . .” Mossman prodded the wagon master.

  “Just a busted wheel,” Redden replied. “We could’ve all pitched in and fixed it for ’em, but that Axel Bjorlin is an odd duck.”

  “Meaning what?” Tippit inquired. Added, “In case we run across him later on the trail.”

  “He’s proud, for one thing,” Redden said, “but you could say that about all the Vikes. With Bjorlin, it was like, he’d handle any problems that his family might have, and if you offer help—what he’d call ‘charity’—he’ll go off in a huff.”

  “Pride’s one thing,” Mossman said. “But can he back it up?”

  Re
dden responded with a shrug. “He’s armed, I know that much. A rifle from back home, the old country. Whether he’s any good with it in an emergency, I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Any luck,” Sturgis chimed in, “he might not need to be.”

  “With any luck,” Mossman allowed. “But if his luck runs out . . .”

  “He’s screwed,” said Tippit. And the other three could only nod.

  * * *

  * * *

  Axel Bjorlin liked to think he was a man afraid of nothing and no one. He made a show of confidence, even bravado, but deep down he knew that most of that was just for show.

  And right now he was very much afraid—not only for himself, but for his wife and their three children, still too young to look after themselves.

  Counting the gunmen now surrounding him—eleven of them, all with evil etched into their sallow faces—Axel thought that this might be his last night on the planet. And if he went down, he did not even want to think about his wife and offspring, what they’d suffer afterward and how long it would last.

  Still, even now—outnumbered, hopelessly outgunned—he could not toss aside the mask he wore to face the world. By now, he knew that Rowan and the children would be listening with rapt attention, fearful, likely weeping. Bjorlin knew he must be strong for them, at any cost.

  “We have nothing to share with you,” he said again, eyes flicking from the outlaw leader, back and forth along the firing squad.

  “Well, now, you don’t know what we’re after, do you?” asked the raiding party’s spokesman. “And besides, it’s only sharing if we leave you some.”

  That made some of the other gunmen laugh. Axel could feel his cheeks starting to burn, a sign of rage that he could ill afford just now.

  “If you do this,” he challenged all of them at once, “the law will hear of it.”

  Their leader snorted. Said, “Hell, I’d be disappointed if they didn’t. We be worth more than their ‘Wanted’ posters claim, the way it is. I think we ought to rate a couple thousand at the very least.”