The Palo Duro Trail

Chapter 14

Caleb Newcomb finally reined in his horse after the shouts from Jubal and Felix reached his ears and sank in. But he didn’t stop, only slowed his mount to a fast, butt-pounding walk until the trail boss and rancher could catch up to him.

“What the hell, Caleb?” Flagg roared. “You tryin’ to kill that horse right from under you?”

“You gotta see,” Caleb said. “There, just over that rise.” He pointed to a point on the horizon some five hundred yards ahead of them.

“Remember this, Dag?” Flagg asked.

“No, I rode t’other side of Palo Duro. What is it?”

“It don’t look good,” Flagg said. “We must be a mite off track.”

Caleb waited for them as they rode up the rise. They all heard a far-off, high-pitched whistle. Then the three riders cleared the top of the rise.

Dag saw them. The air was filled with those same piercing whistles and then they were gone.

“Damned prairie dogs,” Dag said.

“Ain’t just that,” Flagg said. “That’s a prairie dog town. Biggest I ever saw.”

Caleb found his voice, finally. “I never saw such a sight,” he said. “Far as you can see. I come up on ’em and them whistles spooked my horse. He reared up and whinnied to beat hell. I near fell off. One minute they was hundreds of them standin’ like statues and then they all went into the ground and it got so quiet I wondered if I was dreamin’.”

“Not hundreds,” Flagg said, surveying the little piles of dirt in every direction. “Millions.”

“We’ll have to go around,” Dag said. “Don’t you think, Jubal?”

Flagg didn’t say anything for several moments. Instead, he looked across the vast expanse of plain that was dotted with dirt mounds thrown up by the prairie dogs when they dug their intricate network of tunnels underground. Then he looked off to the west, to the gorge that was Palo Duro Canyon, with its steep sheer walls. He had been in the canyon before, had marveled at its bright bands of layered colors: yellow, brown, orange, red, maroon, gray, and white.

He had seen fossilized imprints of long-extinct animals and plants embedded in the rocks, and he knew the canyon had good grass growing between the majestic pinnacles, buttes, and mesas, each layered over and protected by sandstone or other kinds of rock that protected the outcroppings from erosion. The floor of the canyon was dotted with several kinds of good grasses, as well as nopal, the prickly pear cactus, yucca, mesquite and juniper. It would be treacherous to drive the herd through there, but it might cost them several head of cattle and perhaps some horses if they tried to cross the prairie dog town with its treacherous holes that could snap an animal’s leg like a twig at any misstep.

“Dag, we’ve got to turn the cattle into the canyon,” Flagg said.

“How in hell do we get down there?”

“We’ll have to find a place where the land is eroded, a small pass through where we can herd ’em in.”

“All right. Let’s start lookin’ before that herd catches up with us.”

Flagg turned to Newcomb. “Caleb, you ride back and tell Manny Chavez to slow down the herd until we get back there.”

“You want him to stop the drive?” Newcomb asked.

“Just slow ’em down some. Now wear out some leather, son.”

Caleb rode off, whipping his horse with the ends of his reins and digging spurs into its flanks.

“I swear,” Flagg said, “he’ll founder that horse if he don’t have sense enough to grab another’n out of the remuda.”

Dag was already turning his horse toward the canyon, nearly two miles distant.

“When we get there,” Flagg said, “we’ll split up. You go south and I’ll go north.”

“Watch out for prairie dog holes,” Dag said.

And that was what they did, weaving their way in and out of the maze of earth mounds marking the dangerous holes. At the canyon’s edge, both men reined up. They each looked both ways, north and south.

“I don’t see anything right close,” Dag said.

“You holler if you find a break, Dag.”

Dag turned left to the south and Flagg rode in the opposite direction.

He did not have to ride far. He turned and saw that Flagg had not gone far either.

“Jubal, down here,” Dag called. “I found a place.”

Flagg turned his horse and headed back toward Dagstaff. Dag rode up to the place he had spotted. It appeared to be a long playa where dozens of flash floods had washed a fissure in the canyon walls. Perhaps a hundred yards wide, it sloped down into the canyon. He saw something else too, and it made his blood turn to ice in his veins. Dag waited for Jubal.

“That’s a good spot,” Flagg said. “Wide enough, I think. We’ll just funnel the cattle down there and drive on past that prairie dog town and hope to hell we can find a place along the wall where we can get ’em up on top again.”

“Jubal, look at those tracks.”

Dag pointed and Flagg sat up straight in his saddle as if he had been struck by a wet mop across his face.

“Be damned,” he said.

“Unshod pony tracks,” Dag said, “and cow tracks. Maybe that same bunch of Comanches that ran off some of my cattle.”

“Comanches or Kiowas or Apaches maybe,” Flagg said.

“I don’t like it none,” Dag said.

“We get down in that canyon and we’ll be sitting ducks for Injuns up on the rim.”

“So what are we going to do, Jubal?”

“Ain’t got no choice. I see there’s plenty of grass down there and water running beyond that little butte. See it?”

Dag looked and saw a flashing ribbon of silver in the sunlight, just beyond a small butte. And there was plenty of grass. There might be something else down there too: Comanches or Kiowas or Apaches—maybe all three kinds of Indians.

“I see it,” Dag said. “All right, we’ll send scouts ahead of us once we get the herd down there, if you agree.”

“I agree. You wait here and look things over, Dag. I’ll ride back and turn the herd. This is a good place and the cattle don’t have to cross any prairie dog holes.” Flagg turned his horse and rode off to the east.

When he was gone, Dagstaff felt very alone. But was he? He looked all around and listened. Only the sound of the wind sighing down the canyon. Palo Duro. The Spaniards had named it. It meant “hardwood,” and there were hardwoods in it—and cactus, lizards, rattlesnakes, armadillos, and roadrunners.

He rode down the playa into the canyon, marveling at the exquisite beauty, with all the striated colors along the canyon walls, the greenery. It was like riding into an oasis, into a secluded paradise that was almost magical. It fair took his breath away.

He rode past the small butte and looked at the stream. It was sluggish but moving. He wondered how far up it ran and when it would peter out. Be hell to get caught down here, he thought, if a big storm came up and rained into it. A flash flood in the canyon would wash away and drown everything in its brutal path.

The pony tracks led north, up the canyon toward Amarillo—or toward a Comanche camp. He knew the Indians camped down in it and had heard tales of how well they could hide and fight off soldiers or rangers who went down there to hunt them. It gave him the willies to think that he was down here and everything so quiet, so innocent-looking.

The canyon, at that place, was four or five miles wide and there was a bend to the north, where it narrowed some. Maybe, he thought, they were avoiding one danger with the prairie dog holes and riding right into an even greater one.

Dag knew he was in an ancient world, and it was haunting, as if he had dreamed it all once, long ago. In the rock layers, he saw ages past, dirt piled upon dirt, rock upon rock, and the weather, over time, had sculpted the canyon and hidden it below the plain as if God had wanted to shield its beauty from all but the bravest and hardiest. It looked old and it smelled old, even with the new grasses and flowers of spring, the blossoms on the nopal, the delicate wires of the cholla, and the stately yucca with its pale yellow adornments. He heard a quail pipe in the distance and saw it sitting atop a yucca, warning its flock, a lone sentinel with a long view from its perch on the tallest plant.

There were deer tracks and coyote tracks and the heavy track of a wolf. A lizard splayed itself on a rock that caught the sun, the rays warming its cold blood. Its eyes blinked at Dag and its head moved slightly, a quick motion that suddenly froze. Snake tracks crossed the playa, then disappeared among the rocks.

Dag drew a deep breath and wondered how long he dared linger in that solemn old place, where the breeze whispered secrets in a language he could not understand. The raw beauty of the place was intoxicating and he knew the real danger was that a man might go down into it and never return, never want to return.

Dag turned his horse and rode back up the playa to the world he knew, the vast plain stretching as far as the eye could see. He rolled a cigarette, lit it, and let the smoke warm his throat and burn his lungs. There was peace here too, but it was another world, wide-open, as big as the blue sky above him. He could see a long way there, but he knew he could not see as much.

After a time, he heard the lowing of cattle, the growls of thirsty animals that could not yet smell water. He looked to the south and saw Flagg waving to him; behind Flagg, the herd streamed at a brisk lope, with cowhands yelling at them, waving their hats at the slow ones and at the ones that drifted away from the herd.

Dag had long since finished his cigarette, but the tobacco taste still lingered. He rode toward Flagg and saw Caleb Newcomb and Manny Chavez riding behind the other man, turned the herd toward the opening in the canyon.

“Like the boy rabbit said to the little girl rabbit, Felix,” Flagg said, “ ‘This won’t take long.’ ”

Dag laughed. “You got here right quick. Them cattle are plumb parched.”

“Well, they’ll have water and I can send out scouts once we have ’em down in the canyon. You go in there?”

“Yes.”

“See anything?”

Dag took a breath. “Naw,” he said. “I didn’t see a damned thing. It’s pretty quiet, so far.”

Flagg looked at him in disbelief, but let it go. He had seen that same look on the face of a man watching a burning sunset or a fiery dawn and, sometimes, in a church when the spirit gripped a man clean down to his socks.

Some things, he knew, a man kept to himself.