The Palo Duro Trail

Chapter 1

There it was again, that black pit in his gut, roiling with a nameless fear. It happened every morning when Jimmy shook him awake, bringing him out of the dark dreams, in which he was always riding in an unknown land, chasing after senseless cows in every shape and color imaginable, and being chased by nameless men with mangled, twisted features that defied identification. Men with guns and knives riding dragon horses with scales and talons, calling out his name, hunting him down to take away his life, to take away his soul.

“Come on, Dag,” Jimmy said in his slow, deep drawl. “Horses are under saddle and the coffeepot’s burpin’ like a fartin’ colt.”

“I’m awake, Jimmy. It’s my bones that are still gettin’ shut-eye.”

“You ain’t gonna like sunrise, Dag. The sky, I swear, is bloodred.”

Felix Dagstaff had been plagued by bad weather all spring. It had been the wettest he had seen since coming to Texas fifteen years before. It was hard enough getting a herd together in rugged country, without battling water, mud, lightning, and the flurries of flash floods that roared through Palo Duro Canyon.

Dag cursed softly as he sat up, then shoved the blanket into a puddle of wool at his feet. When he stood up, both of his knees cracked, and a needling pain shot through cartilage and bone. The knees would be all right after he walked a few steps, but they stiffened up on him every time he sat or lay down for a spell.

He felt the chill right away. A fresh breeze was blowing out of the northwest, and when he turned to the east, he saw the crimson sky Jimmy Gough had warned him about. The horizon over toward Quitaque glowed like the coals in a banked furnace. It was cloudless yonder and Vulcan’s flames spread as far as the eye could see from horizon to horizon, north to south.

“Damned red sky in morning,” Dag muttered as he walked toward the smell of coffee and the blazing fire Jimmy had made with green mesquite and whatever dry wood he had been able to find the night before.

Gough stood silhouetted against the fire, tall and lean as a buggy whip, his battered hat the only indication that he was human and not a torn-down split-rail fence. Jimmy had a steaming tin cup in his hand, and the vapors floated up to his face like steam rising from a creek on a brisk morning.

“Here’s your cup,” Gough said, stretching out a long, lanky arm.

Dag took the tin cup and poured coffee into it, almost to the brim. He liked his coffee hot and strong. They always used Arbuckle’s, which had a cinnamon stick in it. He didn’t know if he could taste the faint cinnamon flavor, but he imagined he could, and that was good enough.

“I saw mares’ tails in the sky yesterday evenin’,” Gough said.

“Yeah, I saw ’em too. Won’t rain today, though.”

“No, not today. Might be a gully washer tonight, though.”

“You can damned nigh bet on it, Jimmy.” The coffee burned Dag’s mouth and warmed his throat and stomach. The fire helped lessen the hurt in his knee joints. He flexed his legs, pumping each up and down in place. The joints no longer creaked, anyway. One knee felt like it was going to give out before the day was done, however. “Coffee’s right bad, Jimmy. What’d you make it with, horse apples? Tastes like it’s got some tar mixed in it.”

“You like it strong, Dag. You can float a ten-penny nail in this batch.”

“Any sign of Little Jake?” The minute he asked, Dag knew he was whistling in the wind. If Little Jake had ridden in last night, he’d be out there with him and Jimmy, cracking his lame old jokes.

“Nary,” Gough said. “Maybe he went on home.”

Dag blew on his coffee, drank a sip. It was still boiling hot.

“No, not Little Jake. He don’t even go home to get a whuppin’ no more. He cut them apron strings last year.”

“Yeah, the ornery rascal,” Jimmy said. “He done made our bunkhouse his kip. The boys keep runnin’ him off, but he turns up every evenin’, just the same.”

Little Jake was a homeless boy who wandered from ranch to ranch, looking for work, looking for his mother. He was bewildered most of the time and some of the hands thought he was addled. But he was a hard worker and good with cattle. He was better with cattle than he was with people, Dag thought, even though he was fond of the boy. He felt sorry for the boy, too.

Big Jake had gone off to war and gotten himself killed. Little Jake’s ma had taken up with Big Jake’s brother and then they up and left one day, the both of them, without saying a word to Little Jake. They just left him, saying they were going to San Antonio and would be back in a month. Neither of them ever returned, and Jake had been waiting for them for two or three years. His family name was Bogel. His ma’s maiden name was Sandora Lovitt. Jake’s uncle, Dan Bogel, was a worthless piece of shit if ever there was one, Dagstaff thought.

“Well, we got to get back down into that gully this mornin’,” Dag said. “I know I heard calves bawlin’ down in there.”

“I didn’t hear nothin’,” Jimmy said. “The damned wind howlin’ down the Palo Duro, maybe.”

“Maybe you heard your own asshole singin’, Jimmy. You ‘bout gassed me to death down in that gully.”

“Them beans we had yesterday mornin’ must have been refried more’n once or twice.”

Dag kept at his coffee, lest it should get cold on him. He felt the liquid warm him from the center of his stomach outward, seeping into his extremities. He turned away from the fire because his pants were getting hot; he looked again at the dawning sky, that deep scarlet rash on the eastern horizon. The last whip-poor-will broke off its leathery song with a snap as if a steel door had slammed shut and the silence rose up with all the dawn scents as the fragrances of the prairie were released by some mystical force before the dew evaporated from the wildflowers and the prickly pear cactus.

Even Jimmy seemed to revere the silence that sprang up between the two men, and Dag could hear him draw in a breath through his nostrils as if to inhale all the aromas of morning. Somewhere, far off, a cockerel crowed and the moment passed. The carnivorous maw of the sky bled out, turning to a paler crimson, and where the stars had been moments before, a yellow sky built momentum like some encroaching desert reflection in a celestial mirage.

“You still set on doin’ this, Dag?”

“I am.”

“It’s not goin’ to work. None of it.”

“Look, Jimmy, we been all over this coon. I rode it last year. I got a buyer. I know the way I’m goin’, and I got others throwin’ in with me.”

“You didn’t ride it with four thousand beeves, Dag—all of ’em hungry and thirsty and a whole hell of a lot more.”

Dag wasn’t tired of dreaming of the trail drive. He was tired of talking about it, though. He had made up his mind. He knew it would work.

“What more, Jimmy?”

“You goin’ up the Palo Duro still?”

“All the way to Amarilly, Jimmy. Purt nigh.”

“Comanches still own the Palo Duro. A lot of it. The Rangers ain’t drive ’em out and no one else neither.”

“We’ll handle that if it comes up.”

“You’re leavin’ way too early,” Jimmy said.

“We may be gone a year or two. I don’t know.”

“That’s just it. You don’t know. This time of year, them rivers are goin’ to be swolled up like a plantation mammy’s black belly. You’re goin’ to drown beeves and drovers and wind up with nothin’ but an empty skull with long horns.”

Dag sucked in a breath. Jimmy always sang the same old tune. He was a horse wrangler and didn’t know much about cattle. And he hadn’t ridden up to Cheyenne with Dag last year.

“Abilene would be better. Closer. Or even Sedalia up in Missoura. You’d get top dollar either place.”

“The buyer in Cheyenne’s offerin’ me more.”

“He won’t buy cattle what ain’t there, Dag.”

Dag sipped more of his coffee. He was beginning to itch inside. Impatience. That was something he always had to fight against. He had been over the whole drive in his mind so many times, it often seemed as if he had already driven a large herd up to Cheyenne and come back flush with cash.

“Let’s finish the coffee up and get after it, Jimmy. We should finish the count by noon and then I can call in the other hands for the gather.”

“That’s another thing, Dag. You can’t count on nobody. Nobody round here, leastways.”

“I got commitments from a bunch of good hands.”

“I’m not talkin’ bout them so much as Deuce. That hombre’s got greed writ all over him. And he don’t trust nobody ’cept hisself.”

“Deuce will fill out the herd with his own cattle. We’ll meet the requirements of the Cheyenne buyer.”

“He wants thirty-eight hunnert head, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, right now, you’ll scrape the brush from here to the Rio Grande to come up with thirteen hunnert head.”

“Deuce says he wants to run up twenty-five hundred. I plan on rounding up another four or five hundred head. We’ll drive over four thousand head up, and wind up, maybe, with the number the buyer wants.”

“Ha!” Jimmy snorted. “You could lose that extry five hunnert in one little old stampede. Not to mention them what drowns or gets snakebit, breaks their legs in prairie dog holes and such.”

“I’m mighty grateful for your optimism, Jimmy. It really warms the cockles of my heart.”

“Your heart ain’t got no cockles, Dag. And your head ain’t got no sense, neither. You watch. Deuce is a-goin’ to put the boots to you, one way or another.”

Dag had thought about that too. Adolph Deutsch was a hardheaded German who had built up a pretty fair herd of nearly ten thousand head of cattle. But he was a suspicious man and difficult to deal with. The cowhands had trouble with his last name and called him “Deuce,” but there was another reason of the appellation—one that said something about Deutsch’s character, perhaps. Adolph ran a mercantile store, a kind of trading post. He carried supplies for a lot of the outlying ranchers, but his prices were on the high side. People who bought from him said if something was marked a dollar, he would say the price had gone up and double it. “He deuces everything,” the ranchers and cowhands said, and they weren’t far off, Dag admitted.

The sun was edging up over the eastern horizon when Dag finished his coffee. He set his cup down. Jimmy took a final swallow and tossed the rest of his on the ground, next to the fire ring.

“We’ll come back and maybe cook some breakfast,” Dag said, starting toward his saddled horse.

Then the silence was shattered by a high-pitched scream that curdled the air and lifted the hackles on the backs of both men’s necks.

That was when both Jimmy and Dag stopped dead in their tracks.

“Egod, Dag, that sounded like Little Jake.”

“Shit,” Dag said, and then he was running toward his horse.