double-geared lightning an’ no mistake.”
I ignored the oldster and spoke to the punchers at the table. “The man at my feet was duly notified,” I said. “Any of you three have a problem with that?”
The youngest of the punchers, a boy about my own age, shook his head. “We got no problem with you,” and after a moment’s hesitation, he added, “mister.”
I nodded to the fallen Burt. “Then carry him out of here and let him sleep it off.”
The three waddies rose as one and helped their limp, groaning compadre to his feet. I watched them carry Burt through the door before I turned back to the bar.
Jonathan Doan was looking hard at me, a strange expression that I found difficult to read in his eyes. “You’ve grown up, Dusty,” he said finally. “I’d say you’ve grown up considerable since the spring.”
He reached under the bar, found another bottle of Bass Ale and slid it across the bar.
“This one’s on me, Mr. Hannah,” he said.
Chapter 9
I rose at first light and brushed straw from my hair and clothes, stepped down the ladder from the hayloft, then checked on the black. The big horse seemed rested and looked like he was ready for the trail.
Corwin Doan was asleep in his office and I didn’t wake him. I found a tin cup, quietly helped myself from the coffeepot on top of the stove and stepped to the door of the livery stable.
The rain had stopped for now, but a heavy mist hung over the Red, thick gray fingers spilling over its banks, probing among the buildings and corrals of the crossing so the cabins and fences looked like they were emerging from a cloud.
I set the cup at my feet, rolled a cigarette, picked up the cup again and smoked and drank, enjoying the sharp morning tang of tobacco and coffee and the quiet tranquillity of the breaking day.
Ten minutes later I saddled the black and rode to the general store. Jonathan Doan was already up and doing and he told me Burt, nursing a hangover and a busted head, had ridden out an hour earlier. He said he didn’t much care, on account of how he had no regard for the man, him being a bully and a no-account an’ all.
I bought coffee, a little baking powder, cornmeal and flour. Bacon being expensive at that time and place, I settled for a slab of salt pork and my only extravagance was a small sack of the black-and-white peppermint balls I’d seen the night before.
Before he made up my meager order, Doan poured me a cup of coffee and told me to help myself to some soda crackers and cheese. Thus I made an excellent breakfast before I took to the trail again, riding through a gray mist under a grayer sky.
I figured I was due north of the SP Connected, but before I reached the ranch I must cross a hundred miles of broken, hilly country with two questions uppermost in my mind: Where were Lafe Wingo and the Owens brothers? And where were the Apaches?
For these I had no answers, neither question being calculated to set a man’s mind at ease. When the rain began again, a steady downpour accompanied by the rumble of distant thunder, it only added to my gloom.
Ahead of me lay both forks of the Wichita and beyond that, down to the Cottonwood Creek country about twenty miles west of the dogleg of the Western Trail, was the SP Connected.
Before I reached the ranch, I had to catch up with Wingo and the others, dodge Victorio’s Apaches and recover the thirty thousand dollars. It was a tall order growing taller by the minute, and a nagging doubt that I could achieve it was gnawing at me, giving me no peace.
I had no idea how I’d tackle a deadly gunman like Wingo if and when I caught up to him, but that was just another bridge I’d have to cross when I got to it. As for the Apaches, I determined to ride careful and take my chances.
Always being of a mind to wed and bed pretty Sally Coleman, I’d saved my money and forgone the silver hatbands and conchoed saddles much loved by Texas punchers, so there was nothing about me that glittered and would catch the eye of a scouting Apache. My range clothes were much faded and muddy from the trail and the black horse I rode merged into the background of brown grass and deep-shadowed hills.
At noon I sheltered for a while in a thick grove of shin oak and mesquite growing at the base of an outcropping of red sandstone that jutted up like the prow of a ship from the slope of a low hill. Enough rain had collected in a natural basin in the rock for me to fill my coffeepot and among the trees I found dry wood to start a small fire. I trusted to the oak branches to scatter what little smoke the fire made and I eased the girth on the black and let him graze on a patch of good grass behind the rock where he’d be hidden.
Later, as I smoked and drank scalding hot coffee, I looked from the sheltering trees, my eyes searching beyond the teeming deluge to the west, where the Staked Plains stretched away forever, their vast distances now lost behind an iron gray curtain of rain and low cloud.
My mind fell to remembering my first trip up the trail, when I’d seen the last of the buffalo on those plains, and the last of the free, wild Comanche.
The Comanche had come out of that barren vastness one late afternoon under a burning scarlet sky and for a while they’d ridden alongside us, keeping pace, so we were maybe just a couple of hundred yards apart. Simon Prather yelled for us to keep our rifles handy and to bunch the herd and when I looked into his eyes I saw nothing but worry.
The Comanche were strung out over a quarter of a mile, fifty or so warriors in the lead, proud lords of the plains with fine hands unsullied by manual labor. The warriors hunted and made war, knew only the lance and the bow; all else was left to the women. Unlike other plains Indians the Comanche wore no feathers, their long hair hanging loose over their shoulders or bound up in red-ribbon braids.
Behind the warriors the young women, some in beaded buckskin, others in skirts and embroidered Spanish shirts, rode paint ponies that dragged travois, the thin pine poles hissing like snakes through the long blue grama grass.
Next came the old people, wearily trudging on foot. The Comanche had no respect for the aged, figuring that a man who lived long enough to have gray hair and a big belly had not been a gallant enough warrior. On the plains, the truly brave died young. Old men were not listened to in council and in lean times were abandoned to starvation and the wolves. Old women, well past childbearing age and beyond their strength, fared no better. They were useless mouths to feed and as expendable as the men.
Last came the slaves, overburdened and abused, staggering through the dust bent over from their heavy loads, Mexican mostly but with a sprinkling of white and black faces, all of them considered by the Comanche less than human and treated as such.
Finally, as the day was just shading into night, five of the warriors swung out of line and rode up to Mr. Prather. They were ready for war, the bottom halves of their faces from the eyes down painted black. The Comanche made it clear by sign language and a smattering of Spanish that they wanted a dozen cows, but in the end Simon gave them six young calves he would have shot anyway since they couldn’t keep up with the herd, a side of bacon, salt and some lye soap.
The Indians also wanted whiskey and ten dollars, but this they did not get.
At full dark we kept the herd close and stood to arms. I took up my rifle and waited by a wheel of the chuck wagon, listening to the dim drums throbbing in the distance of the night and the rise and fall of the wolf wail of the warriors.
The Comanche hit us at dawn, but since there was a dozen of us punchers, all well-armed and determined, they were content to trade rifle shots at long range and no execution was done on either side.
Through it all, Simon Prather walked among us, exhorting us to be steadfast in our time of peril and to keep our faces turned to the enemy.
In the end, the Indians did drop one old cow that Mr. Prather let them have, telling us that it didn’t make no never mind because they would stop to butcher and eat the cow and not follow us. And indeed, that turned out to be the case.
Now, as I looked out on their bleak vastness, the Staked Plains were empty of life. The long shadows of the buffalo were gone and with them those of the Comanche and neither had left a mark on the land.
I finished my coffee, threw the dregs on the fire and swung into the saddle.
