Blood and Gold

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.

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:

Oh! Young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the wide Border his steed was the

best,

And save his good broadsword he weapons had none,

He rode all unarmed and he rode all alone.

So faithful in love and so dauntless in war, There never was knight like the young Lochinvar.

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 acres, all of it good pastureland cut through by creeks.”

“I suppose you could keep enough cows on it to get by,” I said, “though it will take a strong back and some mighty hard work.”

Lila shook her head. “Oh, no, not cattle. Pa plans to farm the place.”

“That’s cow country, ma’am,” I said, my patience fraying fast, unable to believe what I was hearing.

“The soil is too thin and rocky for farming. Besides,” I added, then instantly regretted it, “we don’t take kindly to sodbusters down there.”

“Then you’ll just have to get used to us, won’t you, Mr. Hannah?” Lila snapped, annoyance flaring in her eyes.

That little gal had spirit and I let it go. “You go ahead and do what you must, ma’am,” I said. “But you’ll fare no better at farming in Texas than you did in Missouri and maybe a lot worse.”

Ned Tryon lurched toward us. “Ah,” he said, “the lovers’ first quarrel and all because of the poor, downtrodden farmer.” Tryon tilted back his head and yelled at the uncaring sky:

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans,

Upon his hoe and gazes at the ground,

The emptiness of ages in his face,

And on his back the burden of the world.

Tryon spat between his feet, then blinked his bleary eyes at me. “You’re so right, you know, gallant young Lochinvar. Farming is a life for a hog. It’s not for me, a poet, an artist . . . a philosopher.”

Lila rushed to her pa and took him by his thin shoulders. “Pa, you promised. You told me this time we’ll make it. Back in Missouri you said this was the fresh start we needed.”

The man pushed his daughter away roughly. “As a farmer, never!” His eyes wild, Ned Tryon clutched the jug to his chest. “That was your ma’s dream, Lila, never mine and in the end it killed her. Remember the endless poverty and me trying to wrest a living from land that grew only rock and weeds? Remember your ma looking at the catalogs, her eyes bright, wishful for all the nice things I could never buy her? Remember how she just faded away, worn down by hard work and harder disappointments?” He lurched back toward the wagon. “For God’s sake, leave me be, child, and let me drink myself into blessed release.”

Lila bent her head and I heard her sob. I was of a mind to say something hard to her father, but he had put a thief in his mouth to steal his tongue and I might as well stand in a storm and chastise the wind.

I stood there, awkward and lost, looking at Lila, trying to find the right words. They didn’t come to me, so in the end I said: “I guess I better get to fixing that wagon tongue.”

The girl nodded, her tearstained eyes made wetter by the rain. “I’ll find you the wood and a hammer.”

Lila stepped to the back of the wagon and I followed. She rummaged under the canvas tarp and I got a chance to see what they were hauling. All of it—an organ, a dresser, a rocking chair, china cups and plates and a tarnished silver tea service—was suited to a lace-and-lilac parlor in Missouri but not the rawboned cow country south of the Red.

A plow was tied to the side of the wagon, its steel blade bright, the handles not honed to a honey color by sweat and toil, but still raw and pine yellow. This plow had not seen much work and had rested in a barn more often than it had dug furrows in the soil.

Lila handed me wood, nails and a hammer and I unhitched the oxen from the yoke and brought the broken end of the tongue back to the wagon.

Thunder rolled across the sky and the lashing rain grew heavier as I set about making the repair. I’m no great shakes as a carpenter, but after I splinted the tongue with the wood Lila had given me, I straightened up and figured I had done a fair to middling job.

My work wasn’t pretty, but the tongue held when I hitched up the team again, and that was what mattered.

Ned Tryon had found the oblivion he’d sought, lying unconscious under the meager shelter of a mesquite bush. Lila took the jug from his hands and asked me to help her father into the back of the wagon.

The man was barely capable of walking and I had to carry him most of the way. I laid him in the wagon and Lila covered him up with the tarp.

“Dusty,” she said when the job was done, “Pa didn’t mean all those things he said. Since Ma died he . . . he just hasn’t been himself.”

Well me, I let that go. I was in wild country with a girl, a drunk and a slow-moving ox wagon and there were Apaches in the hills. Right about then I didn’t feel much like talking, so all I said was: “Let’s get this wagon rolling.”

For all her fragile beauty, Lila was no blushing prairie flower. When I whipped the team into motion and set to pushing on a wheel, she got on another and pushed right along with me, her shoes and the bottom of her dress deep in the mud.

The straining oxen pulled the wagon free and I let them rest for a spell and gathered up my horse. I handed the reins to Lila. “You ride him,” I said. “I’ll guide the team.”

I didn’t want the wagon to get bogged down again and the girl must have understood, because she made no objection. Lila hiked up her dress, showing a powerful amount of pretty leg, and swung into the saddle.

She touched the straw bonnet tied to the saddle horn. “Is this for your best girl?”

I nodded. “Uh-huh. Her name’s Sally Coleman and her pa owns a spread right close to the SP Connected.”

Lila flashed her white smile. “Is she pretty?”

Again I nodded. “As a field of bluebonnets in spring.”

The girl frowned, then sniffed. “I never thought bluebonnets were particularly pretty flowers.”

I saw where this conversation was headed and changed the subject. “Lila,” I said quickly, “come dark we’ll have to find a place where we can hole up for the night. The Apaches are out and we could be in a hell of a fix.”

The girl kneed the black alongside me as I walked beside the plodding oxen. She glanced down at me and said: “They told us all that at Doan’s Crossing. But the Apaches won’t bother us. We mean them no harm.”

I shook my head at her. “Lila, to the Apache, everyone is an enemy. That’s why they’ve survived so long. There’s no word for friend in the Apache language. If they want to call somebody friend, and that’s a mighty rare occurrence, they use the Spanish word amigo. To them, you’re either an Apache or you ain’t, and if you ain’t, then you’re an enemy.”

I flicked the bullwhip over the backs of the oxen. “You may mean the Apaches no harm, but they mean you plenty.”

I wanted to tell her they’d go out of their way to capture a pretty woman, but I didn’t because for the first time I saw uncertainty in Lila’s eyes.

“Dusty,” she said, “do you think we’re in danger?”

“I do,” I replied, deciding not to spare her the truth. “In a heap of danger, and with this wagon and your pa, we’re fast running out of room on the dance floor.”

Lila opened her mouth to say something, changed her mind and looked around at the rain-shrouded landscape. “Are they out there?” she asked finally, waving her hand at the surrounding hills.

“Could be,” I said.

And a few moments later, as thunder crashed above us, I smelled the smoke.