by Zane Grey
Travel along the Old Trail had lesser problems than Indian attacks, but for all that they were important. Water for man and stock absolutely could not be packed. And after a long pull in the dust, under the sun, the stock needed drink. So that whenever obstacles like the intruding buffalo herd caused delay it was a serious matter.
That night the caravan was eight hours behind and had to camp at another of the unfrequented water holes. In this particular instance, however, the delay was fortunate, because next morning, when they were well under way, they met Pawnees, who after one shot from Ireland’s cannon gave them a wide berth. At the regular camp, some miles farther on, the scouts found unmistakable signs that the Pawnees had waited in ambush for them.
When Hatcher was told this he threw up his hands with a curse. “Looks like every band of redskins on the plains was layin’ for this caravan.”
Clint inclined to the same opinion. The mood of the men grew more grimly laconic and defiant as their dangers and troubles increased. For years they had boasted of what might be expected on the Old Trail some day. And in their own particular case the dawn of that day was not remote.
Next morning they were getting well down into the heave and bulge of the last rolling country before the vast level of the prairie land proper. Creeks bisected the region, and from the timbered bottoms thin blue columns of smoke rose against the pale green. They did not sight any Indians, but Hatcher voiced Belmet’s conclusion that many a pair of dark savage eyes had watched the caravan from the ridge tops.
This portion of the Great Plains had always been singularly stirring for Clint Belmet. It was the most beautiful and wildest section between the Rockies and the Missouri. Clint was nearing the lonely graves of his father and mother, of Uncle Jim Couch, and of Tom Sidel, the one close friend of his youthful freighting days—the boy who had saved his life.
Afternoon of the day following, so far significant in that no Indians had been sighted when they were known to be in the neighborhood, brought to the far-gazing eyes of Clint Belmet the purple and gray mass that was Point of Rocks. Its peculiar shape made it a landmark to those familiar with the country.
Southward from the position of the rolling caravan the plain ran off into escarpments, some of them rugged, dark with brush, others winding down in gray wavering lines to the blue prairie. Every mile or two a gully opened out of this vast slope, and a green line of willows and cottonwoods wound out to vanish in the level. Northward the last shelf of the mountains sloped endlessly, its grays and purples merging into the distance, which was like a desert or sea.
From the present position of the caravan it was a day and a half of easy travel to Point of Rocks. Sharp Indian eyes must already have sighted the caravan and concluded that the next camp would be at Alder Creek.
Belmet’s glass at last located what he had long searched for. From a high ridge dark round puffs of smoke floated from behind the brush. They had a singular regularity. Belmet’s teeth set. He knew a crafty Indian was standing over a fire, covering it with a blanket, which he raised at regular intervals to let out a puff of smoke. Somewhere miles away other Indian eyes, sharp as those of a prairie buzzard, saw these signals, and knew that the caravan was passing a certain point.
“Jim Whitefish told the truth,” mattered Clint, in gratitude to that outcast friend of the whites. “We’re supposed to go in camp at Point of Rocks tomorrow night. An’ before mornin’! . . . Well, we’ll do a little ambushin’ on our own hook.”
Belmet sent a scout back along the line to tell every freighter of the signals and that the order was to drive slowly until dark, then briskly on to Point of Rocks. Hatcher sent word forward to Belmet that he had seen an Indian lookout ride across a brow of hill, sit his horse and watch. And the conclusion of Hatcher’s message was: “There’ll shore be hell to pay an’ we want to make Point of Rocks before daylight!”
Toward sunset a marvelous clear light shone over the plains, a beautiful transparent colorless medium, strangely magnifying, and gradually tinging to gold. It still wanted an hour till the setting of the sun. The sturdy horses plodded on, bobbing their heads; the patient oxen wagged their yokes from side to side; the wheels rolled round and round.
Eastward above the gently undulating prairie, where the grass waved in shining ripples, rose the low mound that was Point of Rocks. Clint saw his long shadow moving ahead of him, grotesque and sinister. Away to the south the escarpments ran down dimly into the golden obscurity.
No sign of life! The birds and beasts of the prairie were not in evidence. Over the plains brooded solitude and melancholy, and peace that was an illusion. The sun set behind the caravan, and to the east sky and horizon met, gold and rosy, then paling to gray, and at last dark along the immensity of the level land.
But death lurked out there, like the empty barren distance, so palely gray now, with edges of twilight creeping up from the hollows. The Great Plains! Never had Clint Belmet seen them so vast, so clear, so incredibly old. Long reach after reach, up over the rising bulge toward the ranges, gray and cold as clay, their eternal monotony inescapable and tremendous.
For fifteen years Belmet had watched this phenomenon of changing prairie land—the gold turning gray, the gray to stone, and at last the clear mystery of night over the sea of grass. But this time it seemed more than potent of the purpose of nature and the futilities of man.
At three in the morning Belmet and Hatcher drove their caravans under the dark lea of Point of Rocks, completing the longest drive either of them had ever made. The oxen stood the long haul, but the horses were exhausted. A double circle of wagons, with narrow gateways, at two sides, left only a few acres of grass inside. The horses were fed grain, something always reserved for emergency. The oxen were unyoked and turned loose inside the corral. Scouts were dispatched out on all sides, and Clint Belmet went with Henry Wells to take a look at the bottomlands. All was dark over the wide expanse of timber where the two streams joined, and likewise up the forks. But neither Belmet nor Wells trusted that darkness. They waited, turning strained ears to the low country, listening for Indian dog or horse. A lonesome wolf mourned and a plains owl hooted dismally; the wind rustled the leaves of the cottonwoods, and the soft murmur of water floated by.
Dawn broke. Deer trooped down off the prairie to enter the thickets. Buffalo waded across the shallow streams to climb out on the level.
Wells returned to where Belmet sat. “Buff, if there were any reddys hidin’ in the thickets them deer would act different. So would the buffalo. An’ we could hear horses a mile. An’ by this hour Injuns would be up.”
“Henry, we’ve beat them here,” declared Clint.
“Shore have. Let’s go back an’ get a bite to eat.”
Fires had not been lighted. The men had cold buffalo meat, biscuits, and coffee, which had been cooked and brought on for this contingency.
Hatcher came down off the high part of Point of Rocks.
“I left Moore up there with the glass. We can spot them comin’ down both creeks, miles away. But nothin’ yet.”
The last scout rode in late. He had been ten miles to the north.
“Seen suthin’ movin’ out on the prairie, but couldn’t say whether it was Injuns or buffalo,” he reported.
“Wal, if the stock wasn’t dead on its feet we could pull out of this,” remarked Hatcher.
“Boss, we’d never get far,” protested Wells.
“Hell! shure we ain’t goin’ to pass up a foight?” demanded Benny Ireland.
“Buff, I’m goin’ round an’ ask every man what he thinks about tryin’ to travel,” said Hatcher.
“But it’s poor sense, Jim,” declared Belmet, earnestly. “The horses are all in. They’ve got to have rest. If we started out now they’d drop, one an’ two at a time. We couldn’t go far before the Indians would catch up. Then we’d be worse off than we possibly can be here.”
“Hatcher, he’s dead right,” declared Wells, and the opinion of this old plainsman carried weight.<
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“Wal, I’ll make a canvass, anyhow,” replied Hatcher, gloomily.
Henry Wells showed a surprise he did not speak. Jim Hatcher had never before leaned to a decision like this. Nor did Clint Belmet speak his mind, which he felt at that moment was weighted with catastrophe. In his judgment they absolutely could not go on for at least twenty-four hours.
“Wal, I’ll tell you, Buff,” spoke up Henry Wells. “It’s no shore thing thet we’ll be jumped hyar.”
“I hope we won’t, but I’m afraid we will.”
“But we can’t be surprised an’ thet gives us such an advantage we’ll drive ’em off fust charge.”
“Henry, if Blackstone an’ Murdock are leadin’ Kiowas to attack us we’ve got to surprise them or be massacred.”
“Blackstone an’ Murdock?—Charley Bent, you mean? Who’n hell said they was headin’ this deal? An’ Kiowas, too!—Buff, have you an inside tip on this?”
“Yes. Jim Whitefish told me. You know him. Keep your mouth shut about him. But tell the men whom to expect.”
“Gawd Almighty!—Buff, them road agents never tackled a caravan yet they didn’t get. Thet’s why we never had no proof on them. They haul wagons away an’ the white men they kill. An’ bury them far off the trails.”
“Yes, Henry. Caravans just disappear. It used to be only Indian attacks, wagons burned, an’ white men left naked, scalped an’ cut. . . . If Blackstone an’ Bent lick us here nobody will ever know what became of us. An’ the most valuable load we ever hauled!”
“Wal, by Gawd! Blackstone an’ Bent will never lick us!”
“So say I. Go among the men an’ tell them who we suspect is after us.”
In a very few moments that camp hummed like a hive of angry bees.
Clint soon climbed to the top of the rocky eminence, where he relieved the man on watch.
“Plenty of deer, buffs, an’ coyotes, but no redskins,” he reported, relinquishing the field-glass.
“Reckon they have all day to get here if they’re comin’,” said Clint, half to himself. He sat down to study the lay of the land across the junction of the two streams, and the shallow meandering valleys which wound to south and east. With his glass he could command fully five miles of the trail that came from the south and perhaps three up the other to the east. It was logical to conclude that Indians bent on ambushing Point of Rocks would come down by one or both of these trails, because if they traveled on the road they risked detection, and to the north there was no water to camp near. Moreover, the escarpments with their rugged gullies lay to the southward.
“Well, if we see them first they are gone goslins,” muttered Belmet.
There would be ample time to formulate a plan and carry it out, after the Indians showed up in one or both of the winding valleys. No doubt they had camped at the head of these creeks and were on the march now. The possibility of their not coming stood very remote in Clint’s mind. He would have wagered anything on Jim Whitefish’s veracity and accuracy. The Kiowa knew. One of his relatives in the tribe or a Pawnee who had drunk firewater with the crafty outcast had revealed the secret of a long-planned raid, the genius of which had its inception in the subtle heads of renegades. Then the presence of Indians all along the trail, the time and the place, seemed to foreshadow fatality.
Blackstone and Murdock must run their bloody race sooner or later. No desperado of their ilk could long survive the frontier at this period. During the war the stage of the Great Plains had been set for a monstrous drama which was now being enacted. Clint reflected that more caravans had been destroyed in the last two years than in ten before. He tried to recall the number massacred or broken up or vanished or reported lost, but when he got to thirty-three he gave up, appalled. Would this be the last caravan Buff Belmet ever led across the plains? Courage and defiance and reasoning united in a negative, but there was a strange vague presagement set against these, and it intimated that Point of Rocks was to be the end of his overland freighting trail. He endeavored to cast off the shadow, but it continually returned. Like Hatcher, he divined events that cast somber shadows before.
Every moment or so he would lift the glass to his eyes and scan the whole visible length of the south fork of the river, then that of the east. A hundred times or more he scrutinized the valleys, then on the hundred and first his whole frame leaped with a vibrating rush of blood. A thick dark moving band of mounted warriors had turned into the gray valley on the right.
In leaps and bounds he clattered down the rocks to the camp of waiting freighters.
“Men, they’re comin’—a big force!” he said, sharply. “Down the right-hand creek, five miles or so up. . . . Hatcher, take seventy-five men an’ the cannon. Wade across. Plant the cannon just this side of the cottonwoods an’ hide your men all around in the willows. They’ll stop there to wait for us an’ night. But don’t you wait! When they all get bunched in the grove, shoot! Keep to your hidin’ places an’ shoot. . . . Ireland, you an’ Copsy stand by the cannon, with another man to back you up. Pick your first shot. Make it count heavy. Then load like hell and keep shootin’.”
“Wal, thet suits me, Buff,” replied Hatcher, with a gleam of pale fire in his eyes. “What’ll you do?”
“I’ll take twenty-five men an’ go up the left draw. For if Blackstone is to meet Bent an’ his Kiowas here he’ll come down that draw. If he’s late comin’ an’ we hear you shootin’, we’ll run back.”
“Good! But keep under the bank a little an’ come up behind us,” said Hatcher. “Wal, thet will leave forty-odd men here to guard the wagons. Suppose another bunch of Injuns would sneak in from this other side?”
“They could come, sure, but sneakin’ wouldn’t help much. They’d be seen long before they got near. An’ I reckon our fight over across the creek will be short an’ sweet.”
Hatcher got his men moving promptly, and twenty or more of them handled the brass six-pounder as if it were a plaything.
“Wells, you take charge of the men left here,” went on Clint. “Have a scout on top, but hidin’ mighty low an’ careful.”
Hatcher, with two revolvers in his heavy belt, which was full of shells, and carrying a Colt’s rifle in each hand, approached Clint for a final word.
“Buff, if anythin’ happens to me you’re to have the money on me,” he said.
“Same in my case—if you come out an’ I don’t,” replied Clint.
“It’s jest as well we haven’t any folks. I often wondered what I was savin’ up money for. To quit the plains an ’take a rest! But, by Gawd! I’ve a hunch I waited too long!”
What tremendous import of tragedy in Hatcher’s simple words! And Clint felt that his own mental state had some similarity to the old freighter’s. These early plainsmen were wont to make light of toil, fight, bloodshed, and death. They had undertaken a task well-nigh impossible, and that was to transport across the Great Plains supplies to the forts and trading-posts, and return with the valuable pelts and furs. In the beginning of this business the Indians were more disposed to trade than to fight. But injustice, cheating, broken treaties, murder for nothing, and the slaughter of their buffalo, and at last an army of soldiers sent against them, had made them bitter, ruthless fiends. The white man, of course, owing to numbers and improved weapons, and the spirit characteristic of the pioneer, would conquer in the end. But before that day came there would be many a caravan burned on the prairie, many a brave man dig his toes in the dust.
Clint Belmet’s deadly wrath seemed centered more on the renegade desperadoes like Blackstone and Charley Bent. Indeed, the latter was the Simon Girty of the plains. Indians were simple-minded, easily roused, and more easily led. Whatever the crime of the pioneer against them—and it was great—that of the renegade was heinous and unforgivable. Bent had often led his red demons to the destruction of a caravan without risk to himself. Clint believed that this time Bent—or Lee Murdock, as he always thought of him—had overreached himself, and if he were on the way to Point of Rocks
he was riding to his doom. Seventy-five freighters, under command of an old frontiersman, each armed with two seven-shot rifles and two six-shot revolvers, and also loaded down with extra ammunition, and lastly the murderous slug-shooting cannon, all ambushed in thick cover, would deal destruction to any force of Indians.
Hatcher’s men had disappeared in the willow thicket bordering the right-hand fork of the stream. Clint’s men waited for him on the bank. He dared not hold back much longer, but he wanted the last moment possible, in case the scout up on the rock sighted Indians or Blackstone’s band, coming from the east fork. And Belmet was tightening his belt when Stevens came sliding down the slope. Rocks rattled ahead of him. With one hand he held aloft Clint’s field-glass, and with the other he retarded his descent by clinging to the brush. When he thumped to the ground and looked at Clint with glinting eyes there was hardly need of words.
“White men—comin’ down the—left draw,” he panted. “Eighteen of them, ridin’ two abreast!”
“How far?”
“Less’n two miles.”
“Good work, Stevens. Go back up an’ lay low. Don’t forget to keep an eye peeled all around.”
Clint, with a rifle in each hand, ran back to join his men.
“White men comin’ down this left-hand creek,” he said. “Eighteen of them, ridin’ two abreast. Must be Blackstone’s outfit. Come.”
The twenty-five freighters waded behind Clint across the shallow stream and followed him along the sand-bar under the bank for a quarter of a mile. Then Clint mounted the low bank and headed into the willow thicket. It was dense and tangled. At high water this sand-flat, which came to an apex where the two streams joined, was inundated. It sloped up, however, to more open ground where the cottonwoods began. Coming to a well-trodden trail Clint halted, waiting for his men to cluster round him.
