By midafternoon I was riding back along the trail we’d made in the spring, crossing the divide between the Red and the Wichita. This was hilly country, the black soil heavy with salt, and I let my horse graze on a clump of salt weed for a spell before urging him on again.
I found wagon tracks in the mud a few minutes later.
The tracks were heading due south, and I figured they were of a four-wheel wagon drawn by two oxen. Judging by the way the iron wheel rims had dug deep into the mud, it was heavily laden.
Teamsters sometimes traveled this route, carrying supplies to Fort Worth and other places, but they always cut across the Western Trail, heading west, not south.
I swung out of the saddle and checked the footprints by the tracks, trailing the black behind me. The wagon was not far ahead because, despite the rain, the prints were still fresh.
One set was small and neat, obviously made by a woman, the others those of a booted man.
Bullwhackers don’t ride on the wagon, but walk alongside the oxen with a whip to urge them on, and these two were no exception.
What a man and a woman were doing in this country in the middle of an Apache uprising I could not guess. But something, maybe the way the man’s prints now and then suddenly veered away from the wagon and slipped and slid all over the place, told me these were pilgrims and the husband, if that was what he was, seemed to be either staggering sick or staggering drunk.
If there were Apaches close, they would have seen those tracks and would know there was a woman with the wagon, a valuable prize they would use to while away a few pleasant hours before they killed her.
I swung into the saddle and followed the tracks. Ahead of me they led into a narrow valley between shallow hills before disappearing into gray distance and rain.
Heavy drops hammering on my hat and slicker, I reined in the black and looked around. The surrounding hills seemed empty of life, but that was no guarantee the Apaches weren’t around. It’s when you don’t see them you worry, and right now I saw nothing but the rain on the hills and the lowering blackness of the sky, lit up now and then by the flash of lightning.
The past weeks had taught me caution, and I eased my Winchester from the boot and laid it across the saddle horn.
A few yards ahead of me a covey of scaled quail, soaked and unable or unwilling to fly, ran from one mesquite bush to another, rattling the plants’ stick arms with their small bodies. Then the land fell silent again but for the hiss of the rain.
I leaned over, patted the black’s neck, and urged him forward. He tossed his head, his bit ringing like a bell in the quiet, took off at a canter, then settled back into an easy, distance-eating lope.
My eyes constantly scanning the hills and surrounding stands of oak and mesquite, I rode into the mouth of the valley. A quick glance at the sky told me there were at least four hours until nightfall. Until then, me and the two people who were walking with the wagon would be out in the open and dangerously exposed.
I slowed the black to a walk and rode alert in the saddle, my nose lifted, testing the breeze, but smelled only wet grass and rain and the dank, menacing odor of the dead silence.
Five minutes later, as I cleared the valley and rode into a mesquite-studded flat, I found the wagon.
I reined up when I was still a hundred yards away and stood in the stirrups and studied the wagon, the two people beside it and the lay of the land, not wishing to blunder into trouble.
My first glance told me this was a tumbleweed outfit and my second confirmed it. The wagon was old, the planks warped, the whole sorry wreck held together with baling wire, biscuit tin patches and string.
Off to one side two huge oxen trailed a broken wagon tongue as they grazed, still hitched together. A young girl in a hooded cloak stood by the front of the wagon, looking down helplessly at the shattered, raw stump of the tongue.
A small, bearded man, a jug in his hand, had his face upturned to the rain and sky, his arms spread, yelling words I couldn’t hear.
My first instinct was to shy clear of this pair and their troubles, but there are some things a man can’t ride around, and I knew deep within myself that this was one of them.
I kneed the black forward and rode to the wagon, the teeming rain running in sheets off the shoulders of my slicker.
The girl stepped toward me as I drew closer and I reined up and touched the brim of my hat. “Ma’am,” I said, my voice suddenly unsteady.
Even in a pounding rain, her black curls plastered to her forehead under the hood of her cloak, this girl was breathtakingly beautiful. She possessed a dark, flashing kind of beauty and I thought—treacherously, I admit—that it made Sally Coleman’s blue-eyed, yellow-haired prettiness seem insipid by comparison.
The girl’s eyes were huge and brown, framed by long lashes and her mouth was small but full-lipped and ripe in her heart-shaped face. That was a mouth made for kissing and I had the urge to swing out of the saddle and plant a smacker on her.
Of course I did no such thing, staying right where I was as I said: “I figure you’ve got yourself in a tolerable amount of trouble, ma’am.”
The girl nodded, and from what I could see of her gray wool dress under the cloak, she was slender and mighty shapely. “The wagon tongue just snapped.” She turned and pointed to where the wagon’s front wheels were almost up to their axles in mud. “We got bogged down and when Pa whipped up the oxen to pull us out, the tongue just broke.”
I saw tears start in the girl’s eyes, and being young and ardent and of a chivalrous nature, I swung out of the saddle and stepped close behind her.
“Don’t you fret none, ma’am,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do for your wagon.”
The girl blinked back tears. “You’d do that for us?”
I shrugged. “Name’s Dusty Hannah and since there’s no one else around, I guess I got it to do.”
At that, the man stepped from behind the wagon, saw me and let out a cheer, then yelled:
The man stopped and blinked at me like an owl. “Well, young Lochinvar, are you come to save us or rob us?” He extended the jug. “Here, take a drink.”
I shook my head at him. “I don’t care for any right now,” I said.
The man shrugged. “Suit yourself. More for me.”
Then he put the jug to his mouth and drank deeply, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing.
“My name is Lila Tryon and that’s my father, Ned.” The girl’s eyes searched my face, as though trying to find the understanding she hoped for. “He . . . he’s not been well.”
Ned Tryon had the same dark brown eyes as his daughter, but what was beautiful in her was weak in him. They were the vague eyes of a dreamer, the eyes of a man unsuited to survive in the hard, unforgiving land that lay around us.
I stepped over to the wagon tongue and Lila came over and stood beside me. “Can it be fixed?”
I nodded. “If you have a hammer and nails in the wagon.”
“We do,” Lila said. “And there’s some sturdy oak wood if you need that.”
I stood there looking at the tongue for a while, then turned to the girl and asked: “Where are you and your pa headed?”
She eased her wet hood away from her face and gave me a dazzling smile that made my heart jump.
“We’ve come all the way from Missouri. We had a farm there”—her eyes slid to her father—“but it didn’t work out. Then Pa’s brother died and left us his ranch down south of the Clear Fork of the Brazos, just a few miles east of Beals Creek.”
I nodded. “Know that country well. It’s right close to my home ranch, the SP Connected.”
“Pa says his brother wrote to him once and described the place, a strong stone cabin on a hundred and sixty
