The Palo Duro Trail

Chapter 9

Dag saw the orange glimmer of a fire along the ragged line of dogwoods. He held up his hand to halt the drive, spoke to the man riding a few yards behind him.

“This is where we stop,” Dag said.

The cattle fanned out over the grasslands as dawn was breaking. Off to the left, the hands could see the fire by the creek. They all figured that it meant the end of a long night and the lead rider, Caleb Newcomb, a D Slash hand, flanked the lead cow and started turning the herd to bunch it up and let it water at the creek. Dag looked back at the outriders and signaled for his men to let the herd graze. They had covered nine or ten miles during the night. The men and the stock were tired and hungry.

Little Jake rode up to Dag on the point, met him as he was riding toward the fire and smoke.

“I hope that chuck wagon catches up pretty quick, Mr. Dagstaff,” Little Jake said.

“You still got butterflies in your belly, Little Jake?”

“Heck, I got butterflies, moths, crawlin’ spiders, and doodlebugs, sir.”

“Well, you cracked your cherry last night, son.”

“Huh?”

Dag laughed. “Just a joke, Little Jake. Let’s see what we got over here. I see cattle by the creek. Must be Flagg’s bunch. Go over yonder and holler at Lonnie and tell him to bring the D Slash irons.”

“Yes, sir.” Little Jake rode off to tell Lonnie Cavins to fetch the branding irons.

Don Horton was puffing on a quirly when Dag rode up. He looked disheveled, red-eyed. The herd around him had swelled, but Flagg was there too, helping the others keep the outlaw cattle from joining the main herd.

“You get a head count?” Dag asked.

“Flagg says we got over forty head,” Horton said. “I was catching some shut-eye when he brought in this last bunch.”

“Better put some more wood on that fire, Don. We got irons comin’.”

Lonnie Cavins carried the D Slash branding irons in his saddlebags. He had four of them in the fire by the time Flagg rode up to talk to Dagstaff.

“You done good, Jubal,” Dag said.

“It’s a start. There are some more wild cattle just over that hillock there. Followed us in like sheep early this morning.”

“How many?”

“Upward of fifty, I reckon. Some folks don’t tend their ranches like they should.”

Dag let out a low whistle.

“You mean you rounded up over a hundred head last night?”

“At least,” Flagg said.

“I’m plumb flabbergasted,” Dag said.

“Cows are herd animals. You just got to let them know where the herd ought to go. You got to be slow and patient. But when you’re roundin’ up outlaws, it works the same. When we run these into the main herd, they’ll think they’re home for good. It don’t take long.”

Dag knew that, but he had never seen it work like this. He knew that he had made the right decision in hiring Flagg as trail boss.

The morning sun bleached away most of the shadows and lit the grasses and cacti with a shower of golden light. Dew sparkled like tiny jewels on the plain, and the scent of cactus flowers wafted to Dag’s nostrils. The cholla and the nopal were in bloom, the aroma from them heady in the air like some exotic perfume.

The chuck wagon pulled up and stopped nearby a few moments later. Finnerty set the brake as his daughter, Jo, hopped down. He began to set up his cooking irons while Jo cleared ground for a firepit. As he was driving the irons into the ground, she gathered firewood and stacked it next to the place she had cleared. Then she gathered rocks and made a fire ring while her father set up a bench using two sawhorses and a two-by-twelve board. As Jo started the fire, Fingers began mixing flour and water for flapjacks, cracking eggs into the mixture and stirring it with a wooden ladle.

Jo began helping her father after the fire was burning well. She was seemingly oblivious to all that was going on around them. The hands were bulldogging the unbranded outlaw cattle, and four men were pressing hot irons on the hips of the downed cows. The air was filled with the smell of burning hair and flesh. The men grunted and cursed, trying to ignore the smell of food less than a hundred yards away.

Little Jake and Paco led the branded cattle into the main herd, set them to grazing. Caleb Newcomb worked one of the D Slash irons, while Jorge Delgado and Ricardo Mendoza held down the cow to be marked. Dag branded while Ed Langley, another of his hands, and Ricardo Mendoza sat on a squirming steer. Lonnie Cavins branded the cows held down by Chavez and Horton. Flagg and Doofus Wallace kept bringing in a half dozen or so cows at a time, then rode back and rounded up more, dragging some in with ropes, herding those they could.

Fingers held off cooking the flapjacks until all the cows were branded and run into the herd. But he set two large coffeepots with spouts on the fire. Then he started pouring the mix onto large skillets while Jo flipped the flapjacks. There were maple syrup hauled in from Corpus Christi, fried potatoes, and sausage from hogs raised on Finnerty’s spread, recently butchered and barreled in brine.

Fingers rang the triangle and the hands who weren’t tending the herd streamed over to the chuck wagon like ants to honey. Some of the hands already had empty coffee cups in their hands, the aroma of coffee hung in the air like the delicious taste of chocolate.

Jimmy Gough finished securing the remuda and sauntered over to the group around the chuck wagon and poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Boy,” he said, “I can smell the bacon, Fingers. Sugar-cured, I’ll bet.”

“Just like you, Jimmy,” Finnerty cracked.

“How do you keep all them hogs from runnin’ off, Fingers?” Wallace, one of the D Slash cowhands, asked.

“You got to know how to build fences, Doofus. Somethin’ you cowpokes can’t do. That’s why you’re always chasin’ your cattle.”

“And how do you build your fences, Fingers?”

“Only one way to build a fence in this country,” Finnerty said, “horse high, pig tight and bull strong. I use oak, Doofus, for my fences and for paddles to spank cowboys.”

Everyone laughed and Wallace’s face turned a pale rose.

Amid the clatter of plates and forks, Jo Finnerty walked over with her plate and sat beside Dag, who had taken one of the planks from the wagon and laid it out over the rocky ground.

“Hello, Dag,” she said. “Tired?”

He looked at her. She looked fetching in her colorful calico dress and light sweater, which was blue to match her eyes. She wore a blue ribbon in her hair, as well. Her smile was as warm as the rising sun.

“Yeah, Jo, plumb tuckered.”

“We can pull the wagon into the shade and you can sleep underneath.”

“I’m not real sleepy. I slept in the saddle some last night.”

“Well, suit yourself. I don’t want to spoil you.”

“Oh, I can be spoiled real easy, Jo.”

“Then maybe I will,” she said, her voice low and throaty.

Dag thought it had the quality of silk being rubbed by soft hands. He could see why Laura would be jealous of her. She was a beautiful young woman. She kept herself neat and clean and she always smelled like flowers. He could smell her now as she drank her coffee and picked daintily at her plate. But he had known her since pigtails and it was hard now to think of her as a grown woman. Yet she was grown, and he knew she didn’t have a beau. They had always been close, but now he knew that something had changed between them. He could no longer sit her on his knee and tousle her hair, or lift her by her arms and swing her around him like a girl on a carousel.

“What was the name of this hog, Fingers?” Lonnie Cavins asked. “It tastes mighty good.”

“I don’t name no pigs I plan to eat, Lonnie. But if I was to have named this ‘un, it might have been Lonnie.”

More laughter and the talk among the hands floated around Jo and Dag as they sat together, both of them silent, as if each were wrestling with unspoken thoughts.

“How come you don’t keep milk cows, Fingers?” Chad Myers asked.

Finnerty was still making flapjacks, shoveling them onto empty plates. “I keep milk cows. Put the milk in the feed for the hogs every mornin’.”

“The trouble with milk cows,” Carl Costello said, “is they don’t stay milked.”

They all laughed at that. Carl had hands that were cracked and blistered. He had milked cows since he was old enough to grasp a teat.

“You ought to know, Carl,” Myers said. “I shook hands with him once’t and he stripped every dang one of my fingers to see if they had any milk left on ’em.”

Jo had scooted closer to Dag so that her leg touched his. Dag didn’t notice it at first, but when his leg started to heat up, he knew that she had done it deliberately. No harm in that, he thought. But he felt the pressure and moved his leg slightly. It still burned.

“Felix,” she said, “do you remember that time we went fishing in that catfish pond at Daddy’s?”

“Yes, I remember it. About five years ago, wasn’t it?”

“It was just after a spring rain,” she said, “and the banks were muddy.”

“And slippery.”

She laughed.

“You warned me to be careful, but I didn’t listen. I was eager to catch the first fish. We had dug worms on the way there and I grabbed the can away from you.”

“You were a scamp, all right, Jo.”

“I climbed up on the bank and was about to sit down and put a worm on my hook, when I slid down the smooth bank and fell into the water. I screamed and beat the water. I couldn’t swim.”

“Yeah. You were quite a sight, Jo.”

“You dove in after me and lifted me up in your arms. I fought you because I was scared of drowning, but you got me to the bank and pulled me out. You helped me up to the top and onto dry ground. You held me tight because I was shaking like a leaf.”

“I built a fire and you finally dried out.”

“I know,” she said. “But sometimes, often really, when I’m in bed at night trying to sleep, I can still feel your arms around me, just like they were on that day.”

“Jo, you shouldn’t talk about these things. Not here. Not right now.”

“Why? It’s how I feel, Felix.”

“I know. But I’m married.”

She bit her lip, locking out what she wanted to say. Her hand touched his leg. He looked up at her.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I just wanted you to know about that. Because it happened again last night. You were so near, out there with the cattle, yet so far.”

“Jo . . . don’t.”

She took her hand away and sighed.

A few yards away, Horton watched them with narrowed eyes. He sighed too. With satisfaction.