Talon & Chantry 07 - North To The Rails (v5.0) (4 page)

Riding the blue roan and leading the dun, he started for the camp on the Vermejo. He told himself he was ready for anything, and he was still telling himself that when he spotted the camp under some cottonwoods.

There was already a good gathering of cattle, and he could see various riders bringing in more. He passed near one rider, a tall, lean man with red hair, but the rider seemed not to notice him, although Chantry spoke.

He rode up to the chuck wagon and swung down. French Williams was leaning back against his bedroll, smiling. And it was not a pleasant smile. It was taunting, challenging, showing, something that might be contempt, and might be curiosity. As Tom Chantry walked forward and started to speak, a man came from behind the chuck wagon. He stepped out and stopped, waiting.

The man was Dutch Akin.

Chapter 4

F
OR A MOMENT all action was suspended. Tom Chantry could feel the heavy pounding of his heart, and his mouth was dry, but when he spoke his voice was clear and steady. “Hello, Dutch. Want some coffee?”

This was what Chantry had not expected, yet it was what he might have expected from French Williams. And it was an indication of the extent to which Williams was prepared to go.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Dutch said.

Chantry picked up the pot and filled Dutch’s cup, then his own. “Sorry about the other night, Dutch,” he said, “but I had no reason to kill you, and I had no wish to die.”

Dutch shrugged uncomfortably. Sober, he was not a belligerent man, nor was he given to talk. If you had a job to do, you did it. If you had a man to shoot, you shot him. But talking about it made him uneasy, wanting to be away and finished with it. “ ’S all right,” he said, gulping the coffee. “I got no argument with you.”

French Williams sat up. If he was disappointed it did not show, and Tom Chantry doubted that he was. It had been in the nature of an experiment, and had they killed each other he would have been no more disturbed.

Chantry indicated the cattle. “They’re in good shape. Some of your stuff?”

“Uh-huh,” French said. “They’ve been held in the high meadows where there’s lots of good grama.” He glanced toward the horses. “I see you got yourself some horses. Two won’t be enough, you know.”

Chantry’s expression was bland. “I had an idea you’d already selected some mounts for me, French, so I only bought two.”

“You’d ride a horse I’d pick for you?”

“Why not? Well, let’s just say I’d try.”

The other hands who had been loafing about, obviously to see what would happen when he met Dutch Akin, now drifted off about their work. Tom Chantry drank his coffee slowly, studying the various men, watching the work, and enjoying the brief respite from what was to come.

He was no cowhand and would not attempt to compete with them on their own ground. He could round up cattle, he could read brands, and so could make himself generally useful. He would not be an idler. It would be wise to move slowly at first, to see who could do what, and generally become acquainted.

He had gained no ground by facing Dutch. He had simply done what had to be done, and he knew the hands would be waiting to see what kind of a man he was—and most of them, he felt sure, had made up their minds about that.

As he watched the cattle the enormity of what he had undertaken slowly came over him. His own capital he was free to do with as he saw fit, but he had gambled a large sum that belonged to Earnshaw and Company. Therefore there was no choice. The herd must go through, and it must arrive in good shape and be sold to advantage…no matter what the cost to him.

Riders were bringing in small bunches of cattle from draws and breaks. Saddling the dun, he rode out and helped here and there, at the same time noting the brands. All of those being held had come from French Williams’ own outfit. Some of the brands were fresh, but he saw no evidence of reworking.

At daybreak he was on the range with the others, and was there when Lee Dauber’s cattle began to arrive. They came divided into three herds for easy handling, and Dauber moved them along at a good clip. These were big, rangy steers, older than most of Williams’ stuff, and in not as good shape.

During the following days while the cattle were being brought together for the drive to the railhead, he worked hard, harder than he had ever worked before. He was up before the first streak of light in the morning sky, and tumbled into his bedroll when supper was over. With the others he stood night guard, and in many ways that came to be the best time.

Only three men rode night guard at a time, and they were scattered, meeting only at intervals as they rode around the sleeping herd. It was a time for thinking, a time for remembering. Yet, oddly, he rarely thought of Doris, and rarely of his home in the East. His thoughts kept reaching back into his boyhood, before his father was killed.

He remembered the hot, still hours in the town, walking barefooted up the dusty street, seeing the tall, still-faced men in boots and spurs sitting along the boardwalk in front of the hotel, or seeing them leaning on the corral bars, watching the horses.

The parched brown prairie, long without rain, the tumbleweeds rolling before the wind under dark, rain-filled clouds, the blue streaks of a distant rainstorm viewed from far off…the call of quail at sundown…his father washing his face and hands in the tin basin outside the kitchen door, sleeves rolled up, showing the white of his arms where the sun never reached.

He remembered the Indians who came to the ranch, squatting around near the corral, and his father feeding them, carrying the food to them himself…and the night the wounded brave had ridden up to the house, clinging one-handed to his horse’s mane. That was on the old ranch, before Pa lost it in the big freeze…where had that ranch been, anyway? His memories were mostly from the later period when Pa was marshal.

They had gone back to the ranch once, all of them, driving in a buckboard. “There it is, Helen,” Pa had said, “fifteen years of brutal hard work and a lot of dreams, all gone in one freeze.”

Tom Chantry remembered the tall old cotton-woods around the house, the log cabin his father had built, then added to…the cold water from the hand-dug well. “I planned all this for you, Tom,” his father had said, “but I reckoned without the snow and the cold.”

The old ranch had been somewhere east of here, he believed. A boy doesn’t have much sense of location when he is six.

Suddenly, he remembered The Hole. At least, that was what he called it.

There had been a small spring about a mile from the ranch, and he had ridden over there once when he was about six. The spring came down from under an overhang of rock, about two feet off the ground, and the water fell into a rock basin, trickled over its lip and down into the meadow below, where it was again swallowed up.

Some dirt had fallen into the spring from one of the overhanging banks, and he was scooping it out with his hands when at the back of the spring where the water ran down from the darkness under the rock, he saw The Hole.

Actually, it was where the water came from, but the opening was much bigger than the space taken up by the trickle of water. Peering back into the deepest shadow, he could see the hole was about three feet across and almost that in height. He stood barefooted in the cold water, and could look back into the hole, but could make out nothing. Looking down at his feet, he could just see the light across the water.

Evidently spring rains had shot out of the hole with some force and had gradually worn the rock back until there was space enough for a boy to stand. With a long stick he poked into the darkness. There was a pool of water where it trickled over the edge, but his stick could not reach either wall or roof. Later, with a longer stick he probed the darkness and succeeded in touching rock on the right side of the stream. Overhead he could find nothing, but there was a rock floor on the left of the stream.

From outside there was no indication of anything like the cave. There was only a dip in the prairie, a natural runoff for water, and a slab of rock was exposed from under which the water ran. Anyone stopping by for a drink would suspect nothing. Although a man might enter the opening once he knew of it, only a child or a small animal would be likely to find it.

He named the place The Hole, and told his father about it.

All that was long ago…he had not thought of The Hole for twenty years that he could recall.

T
OM CHANTRY GAVE no orders. If he saw anything that needed doing he did it himself, or reported it to French. He had no friends in the outfit, although French talked to him occasionally. Chantry was puzzled by him. Of French’s background he knew nothing, but somehow the man gave him the impression that he had education, and a better background than most of the men in the outfit, but French volunteered nothing, and Tom Chantry knew better than to ask.

In general, the men ignored him. Oddly enough, when he did begin to make a friend it was Dutch Akin, of all people.

It began casually enough. He was riding back to the chuck wagon when he saw another rider following a route that would bring them together. Not until they were too close to turn aside did either recognize the other. It was Dutch.

“Beautiful country, Dutch,” Chantry said.

Dutch merely grunted, then after a few minutes of silence he said, “You better not rest too easy. French is a holy terror. He’s a good man to work for, gen’rally speakin’, but he’d rather stir up trouble than eat. You let down one minute an’ he’ll be all over you.”

“Thanks. He’s not an easy man to understand.”

“That he ain’t,” Dutch agreed dryly, “but he knows cows and no man alive is better on a trail than him.” Then he said, “Mr. Chantry, I ain’t one to stick my nose in, but if we all come up to trouble, you’d best run it. French will shoot you right into a range war…he’s quick and he goes hog-wild an’ mean. I’ve seen it.”

“Thanks again.” The horses walked a dozen yards before Chantry spoke again. “Dutch, do you think I’m yellow? I’m asking a question, not trying to invite a fight.”

Dutch grinned, and then he said soberly, “No, I don’t think nothin’ of the kind. I might have. But not after the way you come up to me back there. I’d say you used better judgment than me back in Las Vegas.

“The only thing is,” he added, “you not carryin’ a gun makes a lot of them think you’re scared…and believe me, it won’t keep you out of trouble.”

“But we’re both alive, Dutch.”

“Uh-huh, and if it wasn’t for you one of us would be dead, but that cuts no ice. You just plain lucked out with the Talrim boys…they’d shoot you soon as look at you.”

When they rode into camp together several heads turned, but there was no comment. French noticed it, without smiling. He gave the impression of being coiled, ready to lash out.

He was eating when suddenly he put his plate down. “We got twenty-two hundred head, Chantry. You want more?”

“No…let’s move ’em out.”

“Daybreak?”

“Yes.”

“For Dodge?”

“No.”

They all looked up then, surprised. French was the most surprised of all, Chantry thought, for until that time Chantry had left all the handling of the cattle to him.

“We’ll take the longer route,” Chantry said, “by way of Clifton House.”

He realized he could not hope to compare his information about the area with that of French Williams, but they would not know how much or how little he knew, and must proceed accordingly.

“Have it your way,” French said mildly. “There’s more water, easier drives.” He grinned at him. “And it will take longer.”

Tom Chantry lay that night, looking up at the stars, and, tired as he was, there was little sleep in him. The way they would follow had been traveled by cattle herds occasionally, more often by pack trains, army commands, and mountain men, but every foot of it was alive with danger and trouble.

The men with whom he rode were silent toward him. They did not trust his courage, and were not prepared to respect his leadership. Most important, perhaps, he had a partner in whom he must trust to some extent, but who had everything to gain by not getting the cattle through on time, or at all.

Lying there in the darkness, he felt suddenly very much alone, but he remembered something his father had said. “Don’t ever be afraid of being alone, boy. The strongest man is he who stands alone.”

And then Pa had added, “To just that extent that you lean on somebody, or rely on them, to that extent you are a weaker man.”

Chapter 5

W
HEN THE HERD moved out in the morning Tom Chantry rode on ahead.

The stars were still in the sky, and the cattle were a bobbing mass of black without shape or substance. Then as the gray sky grew paler, here and there a horn glistened in reflected light, or a balky steer moved out from the herd and had to be shoved back.

Slowly a few of the cattle moved out ahead and the herd strung out along the trail, not an impressive sight to anyone who had seen buffalo in their great masses on this same grass, but this slim north-pointing finger was a symbol of change in the West.

The cattle could not exist here until the buffalo were gone, but in their time many of the cattle would go, too. Even as they displaced the buffalo, the forerunners of their own replacements were building shacks and stringing fences west of the Mississippi. Lone cabins appeared, with occasionally a barn, and a field plowed up.

Better than the others, Chantry knew what that meant, for he had lived in the East. The buffalo had to give way to cattle to feed the growing population of eastern cities; in their turn the cattle would go because farmers wanted to grow crops, they wanted to plant corn, wheat, and rye on the ground where the grazing grass grew.

Nor could the Indian, free-roving as he was, compete in his hunting and food-gathering existence with the farmer, for the Indians needed thousands of acres for even a small group to exist, and on much less ground the farmer could grow crops for himself and for shipment east.