Blood and Gold

Chapter 10

The smoke smell was fleeting and uncertain, scattered by the rain and the gusting wind.

It could mean that there was a farm or ranch nearby—but it could mean something else entirely and much less to my liking.

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.

But I vowed that responsibility would end come morning. They would have to make their own way as I would have to make mine, or else I’d have no chance of catching up with Lafe Wingo and saving the SP Connected from ruin.

Though, as I opened the door of the dugout and stepped inside, the unbidden thought came to me that my chances of getting back the thirty thousand dollars were mighty thin—and all the time getting thinner.

To my surprise, the inside of the dugout was clean and well kept. The dirt floor had been recently swept and the blankets on the three bunks had been pulled up and squared away.

A rusty potbellied stove, long gone cold, stood at one end of the dugout and there was a table with a couple of roughly made benches drawn up to it.

The Apaches must have taken what supplies Shorty and the others had, because the place had been picked clean. Only a scattering of tin cups and a small wooden box remained on the table. When I opened the box I found a couple of dollars in nickels and dimes, a timetable for the Katy Flier and a page torn from a tally book with a sketch of a steep grade where Shorty and the others had hoped to stop the train.

It seemed the outlaws had planned to graduate from robbing banks to robbing trains—that is, until the Apaches had put the final period on the last sentence of the last chapter of their lives.

Looking around me at the cramped, spare cabin, I figured the hunted, wretched existence of the three men lay about me like an open book. The only thing was, there wasn’t much to read. Like so many others who rode the owlhoot trail, the three had died too young and too violently and the greater part of the story of their lives must forever remain unwritten.

Oddly depressed, rainwater dripping from my slicker onto the dirt floor, I stood for a few moments in a joyless silence that whispered of other men’s lives, then opened the door and stepped outside.

Lila stood beside the wagon and I motioned her into the cabin. But she hesitated at the doorway and asked: “Dusty, what about Pa? We can’t leave him in the wagon.”

Oh yes, we can, I thought, but said: “I’ll help him inside.” I felt the soaking wet shoulders of her cloak. “You better get out of those wet clothes and later I’ll build a fire to dry them.”

Lila took a step back from me, her eyes shocked. “You want me to sit there stark naked?”

“Wrap yourself in a blanket,” I said. Then, lying through my teeth, trying to make myself sound a lot more worldly than I was, I added: “Hell, I’ve seen a naked woman before.”

“Have you now, Mr. Hannah?” Lila asked, her left eyebrow arching. “Well, you haven’t seen this one.” She thought things over for a spell, then said: “I suppose you’re talking about that Sally Coleman person.”

“Maybe,” I said, defiant as all get out, but beginning to wish fervently I’d never mentioned naked women in the first place.

“You’re quite the rake, aren’t you, Mr. Hannah?” Lila asked, frosting over like a corral post in winter.

I had no answer for that, so I retreated into confusion, mumbling: “I’ll go see to the livestock.”

As I walked away, I felt Lila’s eyes burning into my back. She was very young, little more than a girl, yet she had an assurance and poise that constantly kept me off balance. Sometimes it’s difficult to understand a woman, and this was one of those times.

Was Lila jealous of Sally Coleman?

I shook my head, dismissing the thought. Lila was pretty enough to have her pick of men. Why would she be interested in a forty-a-month puncher like me who couldn’t even grow a man’s mustache? It just didn’t make any sense.

Besides, I would wed Sally very soon. Sally, born and bred on the range, knew and accepted the narrow limitations of the puncher’s life, so the whole thing just wasn’t worth thinking about.

But as I stepped to the wagon, the face I kept seeing in my mind’s eye was Lila’s, not Sally’s, and that bothered me considerable.

Ned Tryon was sound asleep in the back of the wagon, his mouth open, trickling saliva, the whiskey fumes vile on his breath. I let him stay where he was and unhitched the oxen.

I didn’t have much experience with oxen, but when I turned them loose, the big animals immediately started to graze, so I figured they weren’t much bothered by the rain and I let them be.

The black I led into the barn, which was small but dry and warm. I unsaddled him and rubbed him down with a piece of sacking. The droppings told me there had been three horses there, no doubt taken by the Apaches, and the saddles were gone, too.

There was no hay but I found a sack of oats and I poured a generous amount into a bucket.

After that, I spent some time pulling up grass for the horse and laid an armful in front of him and only then did I go back to the wagon for Ned.

The man was still unconscious and I half dragged, half carried him into the cabin. I dropped him, none too gently, onto one of the bunks, then turned my attention to Lila.

Her clothes hung on a string the outlaws had tied from one of the cabin walls to the other, probably for this very purpose, and Lila sat at the table, a blanket drawn around her.

I figured she’d planned to do this all along, but had made all that fuss about being naked just to see me suffer.

She rose from the table and said: “I’ll take Pa’s boots off.”

Lila stepped to the bunk and pulled off one of her pa’s boots, then the other. But not before the blanket slipped from her shoulders and I caught a fleeting glimpse of a small, firm breast, creamy white, tipped with pink.

My breath catching in my throat, blood rising to my cheeks, I suddenly felt shabby and awkward in my faded blue shirt and down-at-the-heel boots and stepped quickly to the stove, muttering over my shoulder: “I’ll see about lighting a fire.”

“Yes, you do that, Dusty.”

The husky tone of Lila’s voice surprised me and made me turn. She was standing there, the blanket once again firmly in place, smiling at me, a bemused expression on her face I couldn’t read.

“Getting cold in here,” I said, the breath once again balling up in my throat. Had she let the blanket slip on purpose?

No, that couldn’t be. And yet . . .

“We have some bacon and flour in the wagon,” Lila said, interrupting my thoughts, and her smile was gone.

I nodded. “I’ll get it after I get the fire going.”

“What about the Apaches?”

“I figure they’ve moved on,” I replied. “I’ll keep the fire small and trust to the rain and wind to scatter the smoke.”

“You’re so wise, Dusty,” Lila said, smiling again, just a faint tugging at the corners of her beautiful mouth.

“I try to be,” I said, trying to regain control of the situation. “Now there’s got to be wood around here somewheres.”

There was a small stack of oak and cottonwood branches beside the stove and with them some pages torn from a woman’s corset catalog.

I fed paper and wood into the stove and within a few minutes had a fair blaze growing. Thankfully the wood was very dry and didn’t send up much smoke.

I’d told Lila that the Apaches were gone, but with Indians there were no certainties, just guesses. They were mighty notional by times and might just decide to ride back this way.

I filled the coffeepot at the creek and later fried up some bacon, adding thin strips of my own salt pork. I made a batch of pan bread, stirring flour and salt into the fat, then dished up the meal.

Lila crossed the room and tried to wake up her pa, but the man just thrashed and groaned in his stupor, and waved her away.

She came back to the table and I poured coffee for us both, my hand unsteady on the pot, the scented, woman closeness of her and the sight of her dark loveliness filling my reeling brain like a growing thing.

After we ate, Lila talked and I listened. Mostly, she spun sugarcoated dreams about how she and her pa would make their farm a success and how he would give up his drinking.

“All he needs is another chance in life, Dusty,” she said, touching the back of my hand with her fingertips, her slender arm exposed to the shoulder. “We tried to make it on one hardscrabble farm after another, but it just never seemed to work out for us. Then, after Ma died, Pa started to drink heavier and everything fell apart quicker than usual.”

Her eyes searched mine, pleading for something I knew I could not give. “You think we can make it this time, don’t you, Dusty?”

I went part of the way, unwilling to surrender more. “Lila, that’s hard country down on the Brazos. Maybe you can make it, maybe you can’t. But believe me, it won’t be easy.”

The girl nodded, reading more into what I’d said than was intended. “Thank you, Dusty. I needed to hear that, especially from you.”

She touched my hand, and again I found it hard to breathe.

Later, after Lila was bedded down on one of the bunks, I took up my Winchester and scouted around outside.

The rain had stopped for now. A waning moon rode high in the sky, hiding her face behind a hazy halo of silver, dark lilac and pale blue, and the air smelled of grass and the tang of distant thunder. The shadowed hills were still as things asleep and the fragile night silence crowded around me like broken glass.

I climbed to the ridge of the hogback and looked down at the trail below, seeing nothing but a wall of darkness.

Then I heard a muffled step behind me.