This last was twenty miles from our last night's camp and no sign of water, with another twenty to go before we reached the Bend of the Arkansas.
'There'll be water,' Rountree said in his rasping voice, 'there's always water in the Arkansas.'
By that time I wasn't sure if there was any water left in Kansas. We took a breather at Big Cow Creek and I rinsed out Dapple's mouth with my handkerchief a couple of times. My lips were cracked and even Dapple seemed to have lost his bounce. That heat and the dry air, with no water, it was enough to take the spry out of a camel.
Dust lifted from the brown grass ... white buffalo bones bleached in the sun. We passed the wrecks of some burned-out wagons and the skull of a horse. In the distance clouds piled up enormous towers and battlements, building dream castles in the sky. Along the prairie, heat waves danced and rippled in the sun, and far off a mirage lake showed the blue of its dream water to taunt our eyes.
From the top of a low hill I looked around at miles of brown emptiness with a vast sweep of sky overhead where the sun seemed to have grown enormously until it swept the sky. From my canteen I soaked my handkerchief and sponged out the Dapple's mouth, again. It was so dry I couldn't spit.
Far below the wagons made a thin trail ... the hill on which I sat was low, but there was a four-mile-long slope leading gradually up to it. The horizon was nowhere, for there was only a haze of heat around us, our horses slogging onward without hope, going because their riders knew no better.
The sky was empty, the land was still ... the dust hung in the empty air. It was very hot.
Chapter IV
Rountree humped his old shoulders under his thin shirt and looked ready to fall any minute but the chances were he would outlast us all. There was iron and rawhide in that old man.
Glancing back I saw a distant plume of dust, and pointed it out to Orrin who gave an arm signal to Torres. We got down from our horses, Orrin and I, and walked along to spell our mounts.
'We got to get that place for Ma,' I said to Orrin, 'she ain't got many years.
Be nice if she could live them in comfort, in her own home, with her own fixin's.'
'We'll find it.'
Dust puffed from each step. Pausing to look back, he squinted his eyes against the glare and the sting of sweat. 'We got to learn something, Tye,' he said suddenly, 'we're both ignorant, and it ain't a way to be. Listening to Tom makes a man think. If a body had an education like that, no telling how far he'd go.'
'Tom's got the right idea. In this western land a man could make something of himself.'
'The country makes a man think of it. It's a big country with lots of room to spread out ... it gives a man big ideas.'
When we got back into the saddle the leather was so hot on my bottom I durned near yelled when I settled down into my seat.
After a while, country like that, you just keep moving putting one foot ahead of the other like a man in a trance. It was dark with the stars out when we smelled green trees, grass, and the cool sweetness of water running. We came up to the Arkansas by starlight and I'd still a cup of brackish water in my canteen. Right away, never knowing what will happen, I dumped it out, rinsed the canteen and filled it up again.
Taking that canteen to Drusilla's wagon I noticed Baca watching me with a hard look in his eyes. She was too good for either of us.
The four of us built our own fire away from the others because we had business to talk.
'The don has quite a place, Torres tells me. Big grant of land. Mountains, meadows, forest ... and lots of cattle.' Cap had been talking to Torres for some time. 'Runs sheep, too. And a couple of mines, a sawmill.'
'I hear he's a land hog,' Orrin commented. 'Lots of folks would like to build homes there, if he'd let 'em.'
'Would you, Orrin, if you owned the land?' Tom asked mildly.
'Nobody has a right to all that. Anyway, he ain't an American,' Orrin insisted.
Rountree was no hand to argue but he was a just old man. 'He's owned that land forty years, and he got it from his father who moved into that country back in 1794. Seems they should have an idea of who it belongs to.'
'Maybe I was mistaken,' Orrin replied. 'That was what I'd heard.'
'Don Luis is no pilgrim,' Rountree told us, 'I heard about him when I first come west. He and his pappy, they fought Utes, Navajo, and Comanches. They worked that land, brought sheep and cattle clear from Mexico, and they opened the mines, built the sawmill. I reckon anybody wants to take their land is goin' to have to dig in an' scratch.'
'It doesn't seem to me that Jonathan Pritts would do anything that isn't right,'
Orrin argued. 'Not if he knows the facts.'
Pawnee Rock was next ... Torres came over to our fire to tell us Don Luis had decided to fight shy of it. Orrin wanted to see it and so did I, so the four of us decided to ride that way while the wagons cut wide around it.
Forty or fifty men were camped near the Rock, a tough, noisy, drunken crowd, well supplied with whiskey.
'Looks like a war party,' Rountree commented.
Suddenly I had a bad feeling that this was the Pritts crowd, for I could think of no reason why a bunch of that size should be camping here without wagons or women. And I saw one of them who had been with the Back Rand crowd the other side of Abilene.
When they saw us riding up, several got up from where they'd been loafing.
'Howdy! Where you from?'
'Passing through.' Tom Sunday glanced past the few men who had come to greet us at their camp, which was no decent camp, but dirty, untidy and casual. 'We're headed for the upper Cimarron,' he added.
'Why don't you step down? We got a proposition for you.'
'We're behind time,' Orrin told him, and he was looking at their faces as if he wanted to remember them.
Several others had strolled toward us, sort of circling casually around as if they wanted to get behind us, so I let the dapple turn to face them.
They didn't take to that, not a little bit, and one redhead among them took it up. 'What's the matter? You afraid of something?'
When a man faces up to trouble with an outfit like that you get nowhere either talking or running, so I started the dapple toward him, not saying a word, but walking the horse right at him. My right hand was on my thigh within inches of my six-shooter, and it sized up to me like they figured to see what would happen if Red crowded me.
Red started to side-step but the dapple was a cutting horse Pa had used working stock, and once you pointed that horse at anything, man or animal, he knew what his job was.
Red backed off, and long ago I'd learned that when you get a man to backing up its hard for him to stop and start coming at you. Every move he made the dapple shifted and went for him, and all of a sudden Red got desperate and grabbed for his gun and just as he grabbed I spurred the dapple into him. The dapple hit him with a shoulder and Red went down hard. He lost grip on the pistol which fell several feet away.
Red lay on the ground on his back with the dapple right over him, and I hadn't said a word.
While everybody was watching the show Red and the dapple were putting on, Orrin had his pistol lying there in his lap. Both Tom Sunday and Cap Rountree had their rifles ready and Cap spoke up. 'Like I said, we're just passing through.'
Red started to get up and the dapple shifted his weight and Red relaxed. 'You get up when we're gone, Red. You're in too much of a sweat to get killed.'
Several of the others had seen what was going on and started toward us.
'All right, Tye?' Orrin asked.
'Let's go,' I said, and we dusted out of there.
One thing Cap had in mind and I knew it was what he was thinking. If they were watching us they wouldn't have noticed the passing of the wagons, and they didn't. We watered at Coon Creek and headed for Fort Dodge.
The Barlow Sanderson Company stage came in while we were in Fort Dodge. Seems a mighty fine way to travel, sitting back against the cushions with nice folks around you. We were standing there watching when we
