Cherokee

by Giles Tippette

  “Well, there’s women’s perfume.”

  “Aw, I meant stuff you got to smell on a regular basis. Not somethin’ you just get a whiff of now and then.”

  “Well, bread baking. Or a pie.”

  “Them are good too. But I don’t see how you can beat the smell of coffee and bacon fryin’ in the pan.”

  Hays had brought a big sack of biscuits that the cook must have made up special for him because they seemed middling fresh. I set the sack by the fire with the top open so you could just reach in and get a biscuit when you felt like it.

  Hays had made the fire out of dry mesquite, which cooks uncommonly hot, so I was obliged to keep turning my bacon with the point of the butcher knife to keep it from burning. I finally pulled the skillet back a little and then dumped in the two cans of beans. Of course the beans were already cooked. They come that way in the can. Same way you got tomatoes or peaches or whatever. Some day, I thought, I was going to have to find out how they did that. They couldn’t put the beans in the can and then seal them up—and I didn’t even know how they did that—and then cook them, or else the pressure would build up in the can like steam in a boiler and blow the whole damn thing apart. They had to cook the beans first and then put them in and seal them up. But Nora said that wasn’t the way they did it. She said they did it the same way she put up preserves in the glass bottles with the wire hooks that pulled the lids down tight and clamped them.

  The water was starting to bubble in the coffeepot, and Ray pulled it back from the fire so it would just simmer. Then he got up and went over to the pack right behind me to get out tin plates and forks and tin cups. I could hear him rattling around and heard him mutter, “Nails. Damn. Carrying nails.”

  I smiled to myself in the dark. I’d tell him sooner or later, and then he’d wish it was nails we were carrying. If he knew we were camped out on the bald prairie with $25,000 in gold, he’d get so jittery he’d never go to sleep. And not because he was worried about the money, but because he’d be worried that someone would know about the gold and come and try and take it and feel the need to kill him in the process. No, I was very definitely doing Ray a favor by letting him think we were hauling kegs of nails around the country.

  He came back and handed me my plate and cup and utensils. He said, “Say, ain’t we kind of close to El Campo?”

  I said casually, “Yeah. I figure we’re about ten miles short of it. I was planning on making it tonight and staying at a hotel.”

  He looked surprised. “You wuz?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How come us to draw up?”

  “You went to complaining about being hungry. I have never mistreated my hired hands yet and don’t mean to start with you.”

  I could see his face pretty good in the light of the camp fire. He was kind of chewing at his lip. I knew what he was thinking. He said, “Well, I never meant to interfere with yore plans with my stummick. I’d of just as soon rode on.”

  “No, a man has got to see his men are well fed.”

  He said, kind of clearing his throat, “Uh, uh, don’t guess you’d want to ride on in once we’ve eat?”

  I smiled at him. “What’s on your mind, Ray? You’re not thinking about that whorehouse in El Campo, are you? Or ain’t there two there?”

  “Three,” he said.

  I said, “Well, la-de-da. Ray Hays. You mean you are thinking of being unfaithful to Maybelle’s girls? Even the two fat ones? Give your business to an out-of-town establishment? Hell, El Campo is three times as big as Blessing. They don’t need your money near as bad as Maybelle’s does.”

  He got a kind of longing look on his face. “Don’t reckon we’ll be stopping there for any amount of time as we pass through tomorrow?”

  “We ain’t even going to be passing through there, much less stopping. We’ll go around El Campo to the east. I figure this time tomorrow night we’ll be camped near La Grange somewhere on the banks of the Colorado River.” Of course it was my intention to be camped in a bed in a hotel in La Grange, but I wasn’t telling Hays that. It was much more fun kidding him, making him think he might not see the inside of a town for however long the trip took.

  He said, “Whyn’t maybe we could make it to La Grange by tomorrow night? Can’t be but fifty miles up there. Maybe not even that far. Might even be less.”

  The beans were starting to bubble, and I knew the coffee was ready by the aroma. I took a big spoon and filled Hays’s plate and passed it to him. He was filling me a tin cup of coffee. I said, “Ray, you might as well make up your mind that there is gonna be damn little fun had by either one of us on this trip. Now eat them beans and bacon and be happy you got that. Here’s the biscuits.”

  The beans and bacon were just about all a man could want. That was all I could say about the business of camping out on the trail—it made the food taste so much better. If Nora had tried to give me a plain dish like bacon and beans at home, I’d of thrown a fit and demanded a steak or a roast or at least fried chicken. But out on the trail, with the night air getting a little nippy, wasn’t anything that tasted quite as good as what you were eating sitting around the fire with the stars for your roof and the moon your lantern.

  We cleaned up the bacon and beans, even wiping the skillet clean with pieces of biscuit, and then Hays took the plates and the utensils and the skillet down to the creek to give them a wash. I put a little more water in the coffee, added a half a handful of ground coffee beans, and set the pot back in closer to the fire. The fire had burned down until it was just glowing coals. We had some extra wood on hand, and we’d use that for light when we got ready to locate our bedrolls. The night was so quiet I could hear the sound of our horses grazing. Hays came back and I got out the bottle of whiskey. We poured the cups half full of coffee, and then I added some whiskey to mine for “sweetenin’ ” and passed the bottle across to Hays, who did likewise. After that we both leaned back against our saddles and sipped coffee and whiskey and thought our own thoughts. Mine were mainly concerned with the long trip ahead, and missing Nora, and how in hell I was going to find one man in the whole state of Oklahoma. Maybe he’d been elected governor and then he’d be easy to lay hands on. But other than that, I had no idea of how to go about the chore except start with the Tribal Council as Lew Vara had suggested.

  After a time we finished our second cup and Ray threw the balance of the dry wood on the fire. As soon as it blazed up we set about unrolling our sleeping bags and putting down the ground sheet so as not to be sleeping with the chiggers and ticks and whatnot. I took off my boots, loosened my belt, took my revolver out of the holster and put it handy, and then laid back on my blankets with my head on my saddle. Ray was just beside me, to my right. I closed my eyes and tried to get comfortable on the hard ground. Just about the time I was starting to relax Hays said, “Boss?”

  “What?”

  “Gimmee a thought to chew on so I’ll drop on off to sleep.”

  It was a habit he had that I had always found the strangest notion a grown man had ever come up with. But we’d been doing it for a number of years. He claimed if somebody else gave him a thought, it would keep his mind off his troubles and then he could relax and drift on off. He said if he came up with the thought it would invariably be about some of his troubles, and then he’d just agitate himself the whole night through.

  I said, “Hays, you beat anything, you know that?”

  “Come on, Boss, you’ll be wantin’ to git off early in the momin’. I need my sleep.”

  “Who does this for you in the bunkhouse?”

  “Oh, first one and then the other.”

  “They don’t make fun of you?”

  He sounded surprised. “What fer? Ain’t nuthin’ funny ’bout a man tryin’ to get a good night’s sleep.”

  I sighed. “All right, give me a minute.”

  I had been thinking about the Jordans and all the trouble they could make before I got back and just how Norris and Ben would handle it. I said, “You
can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your enemies.”

  He took it and got quiet. Hays slept on his back with his hat over his face. The fire was dying down, but I glanced over and saw him settling his hat more securely over his face. I never could understand how anybody could sleep with their face inside a smelly old hat.

  I was just starting to get relaxed again, and could feel sleep working its way through my body, when Hays said, “Boss?”

  “What!”

  “That do be true. An’ I never even thought of it before. You can’t pick yore enemies. They jest happen. If you could pick ’em, why you’d pick little old folks that couldn’t be much of a bother. Ain’t that so?”

  I said, with a threat in my voice, “You are damn well fixing to find out.”

  It took him a few seconds, but then he said, “Oh. I ain’t sayin’ another word. Not one word. You’ve heard the last out of me tonight.”

  “Fine.”

  “Unless they’s a commotion of some kind. Or it comes on to rain. Or—”

  “HAYS!”

  “Yessir. Not ’nother word.”

  We got a good early start, just taking time to make some coffee and eat a few biscuits and then we were back on the road. We jogged along, making El Campo around nine of the morning, and skirting it to the southeast, then turning back northwest once we were by it, and picking up the road to La Grange. Weren’t many travelers out and about. Before noon we met one farmer heading into El Campo with a load of pigs in his wagon, and a couple of solitary horsemen trotting along. They were just ordinary folk, going about their business, and ordinarily I wouldn’t have paid them the slightest mind. But there’s something about running around the country carrying $25,000 in gold that causes you to look at people in a different light.

  Just before we nooned Hays said, “Boss, that pack is working around.”

  I looked over at the packhorse. We were in a rack, a gait somewhere between a trot and a canter, and I could see that the weight of the kegs was causing part of the pack, the middle part, to slip and slide over the horse’s back. It wasn’t much, but it didn’t take too much of that kind of action to get a horse sore-backed. And a sore-backed packhorse is as useless as a sore-footed running horse. I said, “Damn! I was afraid of something like this.” And I had been afraid of using the nail kegs because of their unwieldy weight, but it had seemed like such a good place to hide the gold and hide the weight of the gold. But the nails I’d left in the kegs had just made the whole proposition too heavy. It wasn’t too heavy for the horse; it was just too heavy to keep from swinging around and pulling the pack all over the horse’s back.

  Up ahead I could see a little grove of trees, oaks, off to the left side of the road about two hundred yards. I swung us into the grass and pointed. “Let’s make a nooning in those trees and see what we can figure out.”

  We pulled into the trees, and Hays and I got down and loosened the girths on our riding horses so they could have a good blow, and took the bits out of their mouths so they could crop a little grass. Then together, we unfastened the girths on the packhorse and lifted the pack off. I ran my hand along his back, running it against the grain of his hair. “Yeah,” I said. “Seems to be chafing him, all right.” I could see little spots where the hair had worn down to the skin. That stiff canvas the pack was made of wasn’t an ideal material to put up next to a horse’s skin.

  Hays said, “Appears as if the pack is workin’ front to rear. You can see from the sweat marks on the girths, see how they movin’ backwards. Maybe a martingale might help.”

  “Might,” I said. I dropped the packhorse’s lead rope so he could graze along with the other two horses and said, “Let’s eat a bite and think about it.” Of course I was thinking about dumping the rest of the nails out of the kegs and just leaving the gold in the kegs. That would lighten each keg at least twenty pounds. The problem with that was we didn’t have a mallet to loosen the tops of the kegs, and they were hell to get off even when you did have a mallet.

  While Hays sliced off some smoked brisket and cheese I stood there staring at the horse’s back and looking at the pack and trying to think of a way to fix the problem. The biggest part of it was that folks just didn’t take kegs of nails and hang them on a horse and not expect trouble. Finally I turned and sat down on the ground where Hays had lunch all laid out on the ground sheet. We ate biscuits and cheese and the smoked beef and washed it down with water. Hays said, “I figured you was in too big a rush to build a fire so I didn’t figure on coffee.”

  “Who said we was in a rush.”

  He gave me a look. “Well, it’s either that or they is a hell of a wind at our backs judging from the pace you be a-setting.”

  “Maybe if we tie that pack off across the horse’s chest it will keep it from working backwards.”

  Hays was chewing. He said something I couldn’t understand.

  “What?”

  He swallowed and said, “Couldn’t hurt to try.”

  We finished the meal, and then got the saddle horses ready and turned to the packhorse. I said, “We ought to put some kind of saddle blanket on him, protect his back from that stiff canvas.”

  Ray looked around like somebody was fixing to hand him a saddle blanket.

  I said, “You didn’t think of a saddle blanket for this packhorse?”

  “Well, no, not actually.”

  “So we just got the two saddle blankets for the horses, the saddle horses?”

  “Well, yeah, I reckon you could say that.”

  “Let me ask you. If you’d been putting a packsaddle on this horse wouldn’t you have used a saddle blanket?”

  He swallowed. “Well, yeah, of course. But it didn’t seem necessary on account of all the pack we was using was cloth, not leather like a packsaddle.”

  “Canvas, not cloth. Stiff, hard cloth. That’s canvas. Would you wear a shirt made out of canvas?”

  “If I had to.”

  “Would you put an undershirt in under it?”

  “If I had one.”

  “Uh, huh. You are the assistant boss of the horse herd, right? That is who I’m speaking to. I mean, you draw wages for knowing more about horses than anyone except Ben, ain’t that about the size of it?”

  He swallowed again and just blinked at me, not speaking.

  I said, “And we just have the two blankets?”

  “Just the two horse blankets. Saddle blankets.”

  “None others?”

  He looked uncomfortable. He looked around the grove of trees as if the answer to my question might be written on one of the trunks. He finally said, “Well, they is the blankets in our bedrolls . . .”

  “Reckon one of them would help this horse’s back if it was between the horse and the hard canvas?”

  “Well, yeah . . .”

  “Then why don’t you get one?”

  We were facing each other across the back of the packhorse. I could see him shift from one foot to the other. He said, “Gonna kind of mess up the blanket. That horse is gonna get pretty sweaty. Wouldn’t be much use to a man at night.”

  “That’s all right, just get one.”

  “Whose?”

  I just looked at him.

  He said, “I know, I know. Let ol’ Ray Hays get his sleepin’ blanket and put it on a smelly horse. Let that poor sonofabitch get his blanket ruined.”

  He was kneeling by the pack, hauling out his bedroll and stripping one of the blankets out of it. It looked like an old olive-drab army blanket. I said, “Well, who was it forgot the saddle blanket?”

  He came back, waving off the words with his hand. “I know,” he said. “I know, I know. Don’t matter if old Ray Hays has a choice of sleepin’ cold or usin’ a blanket some horse has smelt up with horse sweat. Don’t matter, it’s jest ol’ Ray Hays.”

  “Hays, if you get any dumber we are going to have to cut you into cordwood.”

  He adjusted his blanket to the right size and then smoothed it over the packhorse’s bac
k. Then we took the pack and hung it on the horse. While Hays was pulling the girths tight I went up by the horse’s neck and took out my pocketknife. First I cut a couple of three-foot lengths off his soft lead rope. Then I punched a hole in each side of the pack just below the horse’s neck. I ran one end of one of the lengths through one of the holes, tied a knot, and then did likewise with the other end, pulling it tight but not so tight that it would bother the horse, just tight enough to hopefully keep the pack from sliding backwards. I did the same thing a little lower down, making another hold-back right across the middle of the horse’s breastplate.

  When I was done and Ray was done, I stepped back and looked at our work. We had that pack cinched in about as many ways as we could, but I still had the feeling it was going to work around and gall that horse’s back. See, you set a saddle on a horse and the leather skirts go down on each side and hold the saddle in place. The canvas was stiff but not like saddle leather skirts. And the weight hung too far down on each side. The pockets should have been snugged right up nearly to the horse’s back. As it was they drooped down nearly below his belly.

  I said to Hays, “I don’t like it, but it’ll have to do.”

  Hays said sourly, “Hope the damn horse appreciates my blanket.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he’s going to be mighty grateful.”

  We got mounted, and Hays took the packhorse on lead and we started for La Grange. But even as we rode I could see we still had trouble. If we tried for any speed at all the packs on each side of the horse would get to swinging back and forth, sometimes out of time with each other, and the poor old horse would get so confused he wouldn’t know which foot to put down first. By mid-afternoon it was becoming clear we weren’t going to make La Grange by dusk or by any time within reason. The poor old horse that had been pressed into service as a packhorse was well on his way to getting so confused on account of his burden that he was going to be ruined forever. The whole situation just made me angry all over again. Here I hadn’t figured to spend a single night out on the prairie, and now it was beginning to look like that was the only place I was going to be sleeping. Well, it just wouldn’t do. Besides, even if we did get to a hotel in time, how were we going to get the pack up to our room? One man couldn’t carry it; it wasn’t too heavy, but it was too unwieldy. And we couldn’t just take the kegs out and carry them through the lobby. Might as well carry a sign that said we were hiding something because I didn’t believe any two men had ever taken rooms in a hotel carrying a keg of nails each. And of course, we couldn’t leave the pack with the kegs in them in the livery; it was too risky. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred nobody will mess with your gear in a stable. But when you’re carrying $25,000 around with you, you just can’t take the chance and leave it unguarded. Of course I could always sleep in the stable, or make Hays do it, but that would just be like raising another flag. Here is the hotel and here are a couple of prosperous-looking men and one of them is sleeping in the stable with his gear.