sudden flooded so bad and ran so hard the steers couldn’t cross it. They said sixty thousand head piled up on the Texas side before the water eased up enough so they could push them through again.
North of the Red was the Indian Nations, and back then it was a whole different country, believe me— especially to a young fella like myself who’d never before set foot outside of Texas and had heard hundreds of hair- raising tales about wild Indians. One reason the outfits traveled so close together in them days was so they could help each other out in case of Indian trouble. The only Indians most of us had ever seen was the sort to be falling- down drunk in town alleyways, and they weren’t no more interesting than a mangy dog. The ones in the Nations was supposed to be peaceable, but everybody knew there was some bucks among them still prone to mischief. There were plenty of stories of how they sometimes spooked a whole herd into stampeding just so they could steal a couple of head. Now some of the redskins were demanding a tax on any cattle passing through their territory. Ten cents a head in some places, two bits in others, it depended on which Indians was doing the dealing. Some trail bosses paid the tax and some didn’t. Some who didn’t pay would anyway let the Indians have a beef, just to avoid trouble.
Naturally we all told each other we weren’t no more scared of a featherhead than we were of a feathered hen. Everybody did plenty of loud talking around the chuck wagon of what they’d do to any damn Indian who showed his red-devil face to them. Wes said he’d sooner eat a plate of horse apples than pay an Indian so much as a penny of tax or give him a beef. “Damn redskins want cows, let them go out and round up their own,” he said. I did my share of lip-flapping—but the truth is, I was almost as scared that we’d run into Indians as I was afraid we wouldn’t, if that makes any sense.
Two days later Billy Roy, who was riding swing, started hollering and waving to the rest of us just as we halted the herd to eat dinner. What he’d found a little ways off the trail was a grave mound. It didn’t look too fresh but wasn’t that old either. A wood cross made of wagon boards was stuck in it, and in pencil somebody’d writ on the cross piece, “here lies Bulshit bob—kilt by injuns.”
Well, the talk about Indians got really hot then. All through dinner we spit and growled about murdering redskins and how the only good Indian was a dead one. “I hope to hell they try to steal from us,” Alabama Bill said. “I’ll send the lot of them to the happy hunting ground before they can say ‘How.’” Jim said, “I’ll show them
That night at supper, though, the talk was generally quieter. Billy Roy wondered out loud if Bullshit Bob had a family somewhere, maybe still waiting for him, missing him, not knowing he wasn’t never coming back. Most of the boys sat up around the chuck fire later than usual that evening, staring into the flames and not saying much. I don’t believe I was the only one who had trouble sleeping that night, or who felt skittish all through my guard shift.
Speaking of skittish, something else I won’t forget about that drive is the damn wolves. Along the Chisholm south of the Red, the bounty shooters had about wiped them out. I don’t recall seeing even one the whole way up through Texas. But soon as we got in the Nations we heard their howling all around us. You hardly ever saw one except way off at a distance, but at night their yodeling sounded like it was coming right out of the nearest shadows. It got on your nerves so bad you were sure you could see their yellow eyes watching you out of the dark. The howls didn’t seem to bother the cows near as much as the horses, and Jeff Longtree had a hell of a time keeping the remuda from bolting. The worst night was when we butchered a steer for supper. We normally wouldn’t kill a cow on the trail because it was way more than the outfit could eat and it would mostly go to waste. But this one steer had been ornery from the time we left the Sandies. It kept breaking from the herd, making the swing rider have to run it down time after time. It was mean-tempered besides—always roughing up the cows around it and trying to stick a horn in them. Wes finally had enough, and soon as we made night camp he shot it and had Nameless butcher it. We gorged on beef that evening and to hell with the waste. But Lord Almighty, you should of heard the wolves! They smelled that blood on the air and raised a howling to stand your hair on end. That whole long night sounded like one big crazy house under the moon. If I live to be a hundred I don’t never want to hear nothing like that again.
We had our first run-in with an Indian near the South Canadian River. Or Wes did, I mean. While we were bedding down the herd he rode off over the near rise to see what he might shoot for Nameless’s supper pot. A few minutes later we heard the crack of his pistol and my brother Jim said to me, “Sounds like we got fresh meat for supper.” Not two minutes later we heard a second shot, and I said, “Sounds like we got plenty of it!”
Then here comes Wes riding hell-for-leather over the rise. He’s got a big turkey in one hand and his Colt in the other, and he’s yelling, “I got one! I got one!”
“I got an injun!” he hollers when he reins up beside us and tosses the turkey over to Alabama Bill, who near falls off his horse catching it. He was breathless and big-eyed with excitement. “Sonbitch tried to bushwhack me with an arrow but I was too fast for him and now he’s deader’n that gobbler. Come see, come see!” He told Alabama Bill to tell Nameless and Jeff Longtree to grab up their rifles and keep a sharp lookout on the herd, then the rest of us went galloping off behind him to see the Indian.
I don’t know what exactly I expected him to look like. All painted up in the face, I guess, with pointy teeth maybe, and feathers all in his hair and so forth. You know—
Wes said he never saw the Indian till after he shot the turkey and got off his horse to retrieve it. Then he felt somebody watching him. He pulled his pistol as he spun around and spotted the Indian crouching in the brush. “He was just starting to draw back his arrow,” Wes said. “If I hadn’t been quick,
Billy Roy wanted to take an arrow for a souvenir, but Wes said no, it’d be bad luck. He said we best hurry up and bury the body. Ben said he didn’t know why white men ought bother burying a heathen redskin anyway. Because, Wes said, if other Indians found this one with a ball in his brainpan they might get riled enough to stampede the herd. “Besides,” my brother Jim said—and I caught the quick wink he gave Wes—“some of them might slip into camp at night looking to take a scalp or two in revenge.” The thought of being scalped in his sleep made Ben go a little waxy in the cheeks, and he didn’t argue when Wes sent him back to the wagon for a spade and ax. Then me and Billy Roy dug a good deep grave with the flies buzzing all about us while Wes and the others kept a close watch for more Indians. I was thankful it was too dark to see good by the time we finished digging and rolled him into the hole, but I still ain’t forgot the feeling of dropping that first spadeful of dirt down on him.
Maybe we kept the killing a secret from the Indians, I don’t know, but it sure didn’t stay no secret on the trail. All next day the news traveled up and down from one outfit to another, and we had lots of visitors come by to congratulate Wes. One was Red Larson, ramrod of the herd right behind ours, which belonged to Peas Butler. Since the start of the drive, Red and Wes had got to be fast friends.
“I hear there’s one more good Indian in the world because of you,” Red said with a grin. They talked for a while over coffee, and he told Wes he was having trouble with the herd behind his, a big Mexican outfit that kept crowding him. Red was already short-handed and had lost a few steers crossing the Red River. If he got in a fight with the Mexes and lost even more cows, Mr. Butler might not be of a mind to hire him on again.
“Tell you what,” Wes said, “when we get to the North Canadian I’ll pull my herd over and you run yours ahead of me.” It’s just what Red hoped he’d say, and when we got to the North Canadian it’s just what we did. For some reason, though, the Mexes had got slowed down the day before and were well off behind us, so we didn’t have any trouble with them, not right away.
What we did have trouble with was more Indians. Three more times while we were in the Nations we were approached by redskins wanting a tax on the herd or a beef from it. The ones in the first two bunches looked even worse off than the one Wes had plugged near the South Canadian. They was bony, hangdog-looking critters, most of them with big sores on their arms and legs, and we run them off by firing our guns in the air and spurring our horses at them like we meant business. But the third time was different. They showed up one morning as we were closing in on the Kansas border, about a dozen of them, most carrying bows and arrows, a couple with lances. There wasn’t a bony one in the bunch. Their leader was a big honker with a white stripe across his nose and two feathers dangling from his hair. He sat straight on his horse and had a Bowie knife on his hip big enough to chop saplings with. His eyes looked like fireholes.
He signified through hand-talk that he wanted to cut a steer from the herd, but Wes rode up to him and
