Ahead of us the trail curved around a low, rocky hogback, its narrow rifts and gullies choked with mesquite and scrub oak. Wildflowers, goldenrod and primroses mostly, peeped shyly from the wet grass between the hill and us, and off to the left cottonwoods spread their branches beside a fast-running wash.
I halted the oxen and studied the ridge of the hogback.
There, I saw it, a thin smear of smoke rising into the air, very faint and soon shredded apart by the breeze.
Lila kneed the black alongside me. “Dusty, what do you see?”
“Smoke,” I replied, “over yonder beyond the ridge of the hill.”
“Is it a town?” the girl asked, something akin to hope in her eyes.
I shook my head. “No, there’s no town there.” I didn’t want to scare her, so I said: “But there are small ranches scattered among these hills. It could be smoke from a cabin.” I looked up at her. “Climb down, Lila. I’m going to take me a look-see.”
The girl swung gracefully out of the saddle and handed me the reins. I glanced at the rocks crowning the ridge of the hogback. Even if the smoke turned out to be a wildfire sparked by the lightning that now and then forked from the sky, there could be a sheltered place up there to spend the night out of the wind and rain and away from the prying eyes of any passing Apache.
I swung into the saddle and slid the Winchester from the boot. Only then did I ride toward the ridge, my eyes restlessly scanning the land around me. The slope of the hogback was less steep than it had seemed from a distance and I was soon among the rocks, here and there stunted cedar and post oak writhing like the tormented damned between them.
Riding even more warily now, the Winchester across the saddle horn, I cleared the rocks and rode to the top of the grassy slope on the other side.
Now I saw what had caused the smoke and it brought me no comfort.
Below, too narrow to be called a valley, a gulch divided the hogback from another low hill beyond. A stream ran along the bottom of the gulch, rocks scattered along its sandy banks and on the slope opposite grew mesquite and a scattering of post oak and cottonwood.
A dugout cabin had been carved into the hill and to its right lay a ramshackle pole corral and small sod barn.
All this I saw in an instant, but what riveted my attention was the man who was suspended by his feet from the low branch of one of the cottonwoods growing by the creek.
A fire still glowed a dull crimson under his head, and a thin tendril of smoke rose from the dying coals. The body swayed slightly in the wind, the branch creaking, and whoever the man was, he had died hard and painfully slow.
I studied the land around me and only when I decided no one was there did I ride down the hill. The Apaches had been here until very recently, too recently for my liking, and I sensed danger, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.
Lila was still with the wagon, and vulnerable, but I had to take a chance on her not being seen. Later we could bring the wagon here, going on the assumption that lightning never strikes twice in the same place and that the Apaches would have moved on.
It was a gamble, but since the cards were stacked against me, it was a gamble I knew I had to take. It was better to spend the night here than out in the open.
With a surprised jolt of recognition, I discovered I knew the man whose brains had been slowly roasted over the fire. Even though his mouth was horribly twisted by his last, agonized scream, there was no mistaking the freckles and what was left of the bright red hair of Shorty Cummings.
Shorty had once been a puncher for Simon Prather and I recalled that he’d pulled his weight and did his job without complaint. But the lure of easy money had attracted the little man to the outlaw life and he’d soon hooked up with a couple of hard cases out of El Paso. The last I’d heard, the trio had robbed a bank down on the Peg Leg Crossing country and shot their way out of town, a stray bullet killing a ten-year-old girl as they made their escape.
Riding slow and careful, I circled around Shorty’s body and headed toward the dugout, the rain-lashed hills around me waiting in patient silence for what was to come. A dead man lay on his back a few feet away from the door and another hung, head down, over the top rail of the corral.
The Apaches had caught all three out in the open and quickly killed the two El Paso hard cases. I reckon Shorty must have been born under a dark star because he had been the one unlucky enough to be captured alive.
I rode back to where the little man’s body hung. The fire was now dead, extinguished by the rain and by Shorty’s brains, which had run out after the heat cracked his skull wide open.
It had been a terrible way to die, and I vowed right there and then that no matter what happened, I wouldn’t let the Apaches take me alive. Or Lila either.
I found my knife and cut Shorty loose and he fell to the ground with an ungainly thump, legs and arms splayed, ugly and undignified in death. I swung out of the saddle and dragged the man into a clump of long, bluestem grass beside the creek where he’d be hidden from sight. That done, one by one I looped my rope around the feet of the other two outlaws and dragged them behind my horse and laid them beside Shorty.
There was no time for a burying, and I figured this way Lila would not see the bodies and be disturbed by them.
After stretching out the last outlaw, I straightened up and worked a crick out of the small of my back. I swung into the saddle and rode to the ridge of the hogback. Lila was down there, looking for me, her open hand shielding her eyes from the teeming rain. I waved to her, indicating that she should bring up the wagon. The girl cracked her whip and soon the ox team was plodding toward me, heads low as they leaned into the yoke and labored up the slope.
Scouting around, I found a clearing among the rocks and waved Lila toward it. The oxen reached the ridge and headed into the clearing where Lila halted them.
“What did you find?” she asked, looking up at me with eyes that were wide and just a tad frightened.
“There’s a dugout cabin on the hill opposite this one and a barn where we can put up my horse and the oxen.”
“People?”
I shook my head at her. “No people,” I lied. “Who ever lived here probably moved out when the Apache scare began.” I smiled, trying to reassure her. “Lila, we can spend the night in the cabin if the place is halfway decent. At least we’ll be out of the rain.”
Doubt clouded Lila’s eyes and for a moment I thought she knew I was lying to her. But to my relief she said: “I was just thinking about Pa. This journey has been hard on him and he’s not as young as he used to be.”
Well, I let that go. If, as I suspected, Ned Tryon was always as drunk as a hoedown fiddler, no wonder he was aging so fast.
Lila took my silence as agreement because she glanced up at the darkening sky and said: “He’ll be all right when we get to the new place. There’s still time to put in a crop.”
“Maybe so,” I muttered, not wanting to pursue the matter further. Then, more brusquely than I intended:
“I’m going to check out the cabin. Bring the wagon down, but be careful. The slope is slippery from the rain.”
Without waiting for a reply I swung the black around and headed back down the hill.
My brief conversation with Lila had disturbed me deeply. Pinning all her hope for the future on her drunken father was bucking a cold deck. Ned was too far gone in drink and dreams to make it as a farmer. Changing locations would not change the man, and soon the two of them would be running again, leaving one defeat only to chase another.
I hadn’t been lying to her when I told her the thin soil of the Brazos country wasn’t good for farming. But that was something she’d have to find out for herself, and the thought saddened me.
I was just eighteen that spring, yet as I swung out of the saddle and stepped wearily toward the dugout, I felt years older than both Lila and her pa and, in a way I couldn’t fully understand, responsible for both of them.
