the Daybreakers (1960) (5 page)

Back in the mountains I'd known few girls. Mostly I fought shy of them, not figuring to put my neck in any loops I couldn't pull out of ... only I had a feeling I was getting bogged down with Drusilla.

She was shy of sixteen, but Spanish girls marry that young and younger, and in the mountains they did also. Me, I had nothing but a dapple horse, a partnership in some mules, and my old Spencer and a Colt pistol. It didn't count up to much.

Meanwhile, I'd been getting to know the vaqueros. I'd never known anybody before who wasn't straight-out American, and back in the hills we held ourselves suspicious of such folk. Riding with them, I was finding they were good, solid men.

Miguel was a slim, wiry man who was the finest rider I ever knew, and maybe a couple of years older than me. He was a handsome man with a quick laugh, and like me he was always ready to ride far afield.

Juan Torres was the boss of the lot, a compact man of forty-three or four, who rarely smiled but was always friendly. Maybe he was the finest rifle shot I ever saw ... he had worked for Don Luis Alvarado since he, Torres, was a boy, and thought of him like he was a god.

There was Pete Romero, and a slim, tough young devil called Antonio Baca ... the only one who didn't have the Basque blood. It seemed to me he thought he was a better man than Torres, and there was something else I figured was just my thinking until Cap mentioned it.

"Did you ever notice how young Baca looks at you when you ride with the senorita?"

"He doesn't seem to like it. I noticed that."

"You watch yourself. That boy's got a streak of meanness."

That was all Cap said, but I took it to mind. Stories I'd heard made out these Spanish men to be mighty jealous, although no girl was going to look serious at me when there were men around like Orrin and Tom Sunday.

There's no accounting for the notions men get, and it seems to me the most serious trouble between men comes not so much from money, horses, or women, but from notions. A man takes a dislike to another man for no reason at all but that they rub each other wrong, and then something, a horse or a woman or a drink sets it off and they go to shooting or cutting or walloping with sticks.

Like Reed Carney. Only a notion. And it could have got him killed.

At the Little Arkansas we camped where a little branch flowed from a spring in the bluff and ran down to the river. It was good water, maybe a mite brackish.

After night guard was set I slipped out of camp with a rifle and canteen and went down to the Little Arkansas. Dark was coming on but a man could see. Moving down to the river's edge ... there was more sand than water ... I stood listening.

A man should trust his senses and they'll grow sharper from use. I never took it for granted that the country was safe. Not only listening and watching as I moved, but testing the air for smells. Out on the prairie where the air is fresh a man can smell more than around people, and after awhile he learns to smell an Indian, a white man, a horse, or even a bear.

Off in the distance there was heat lightning, and a far-off nimble of thunder.

Waiting in the silence after the thunder a stone rattled across the river and a column of riders emerged from the brush and rode down into the river bed. There might have been a dozen, or even twenty, and although I could not make them out I could see white streaks on their faces that meant they were painted for war.

Crossing the stream sixty, seventy yards below me they rode out across the prairie. They would not be moving this late unless there was a camp not far off, and that meant more Indians and a possible source of trouble.

When they had gone I went back to camp and got Cap Rountree. Together, we talked to Torres and made what plans we could.

Daylight came, and on the advice of Torres, Drusilla remained with the wagons.

We moved slowly, trying to keep our dust down.

It was dry ... the grass was brown, parched and sun-hot when we fetched up to Owl Creek and found it bone-dry. Little and Big Cow Creeks, also dry.

This last was twenty miles from our last night's camp and no sign of water, with another twenty to go before we reached the Bend of the Arkansas.

"There'll be water," Rountree said in his rasping voice, "there's always water in the Arkansas."

By that time I wasn't sure if there was any water left in Kansas. We took a breather at Big Cow Creek and I rinsed out Dapple's mouth with my handkerchief a couple of times. My lips were cracked and even Dapple seemed to have lost his bounce. That heat and the dry air, with no water, it was enough to take the spry out of a camel.

Dust lifted from the brown grass ... white buffalo bones bleached in the sun. We passed the wrecks of some burned-out wagons and the skull of a horse. In the distance clouds piled up enormous towers and battlements, building dream castles in the sky. Along the prairie, heat waves danced and rippled in the sun, and far off a mirage lake showed the blue of its dream water to taunt our eyes.

From the top of a low hill I looked around at miles of brown emptiness with a vast sweep of sky overhead where the sun seemed to have grown enormously until it swept the sky. From my canteen I soaked my handkerchief and sponged out the Dapple's mouth, again. It was so dry I couldn't spit.

Far below the wagons made a thin trail ... the hill on which I sat was low, but there was a four-mile-long slope leading gradually up to it. The horizon was nowhere, for there was only a haze of heat around us, our horses slogging onward without hope, going because their riders knew no better.

The sky was empty, the land was still ... the dust hung in the empty air. It was very hot.

Chapter
IV

Rountree humped his old shoulders under his thin shirt and looked ready to fall any minute but the chances were he would outlast us all. There was iron and rawhide in that old man.

Glancing back I saw a distant plume of dust, and pointed it out to Orrin who gave an arm signal to Torres. We got down from our horses, Orrin and I, and walked along to spell our mounts.

"We got to get that place for Ma," I said to Orrin, "she ain't got many years.

Be nice if she could live them in comfort, in her own home, with her own fixin's."

"We'll find it."

Dust puffed from each step. Pausing to look back, he squinted his eyes against the glare and the sting of sweat. "We got to learn something, Tye," he said suddenly, "we're both ignorant, and it ain't a way to be. Listening to Tom makes a man think. If a body had an education like that, no telling how far he'd go."

"Tom's got the right idea. In this western land a man could make something of himself."

"The country makes a man think of it. It's a big country with lots of room to spread out ... it gives a man big ideas."

When we got back into the saddle the leather was so hot on my bottom I durned near yelled when I settled down into my seat.

After a while, country like that, you just keep moving putting one foot ahead of the other like a man in a trance. It was dark with the stars out when we smelled green trees, grass, and the cool sweetness of water running. We came up to the Arkansas by starlight and I'd still a cup of brackish water in my canteen. Right away, never knowing what will happen, I dumped it out, rinsed the canteen and filled it up again.

Taking that canteen to Drusilla's wagon I noticed Baca watching me with a hard look in his eyes. She was too good for either of us.

The four of us built our own fire away from the others because we had business to talk.

"The don has quite a place, Torres tells me. Big grant of land. Mountains, meadows, forest ... and lots of cattle." Cap had been talking to Torres for some time. "Runs sheep, too. And a couple of mines, a sawmill."

"I hear he's a land hog," Orrin commented. "Lots of folks would like to build homes there, if he'd let 'em."

"Would you, Orrin, if you owned the land?" Tom asked mildly.

"Nobody has a right to all that. Anyway, he ain't an American," Orrin insisted.

Rountree was no hand to argue but he was a just old man. "He's owned that land forty years, and he got it from his father who moved into that country back in 1794. Seems they should have an idea of who it belongs to."

"Maybe I was mistaken," Orrin replied. "That was what I'd heard."

"Don Luis is no pilgrim," Rountree told us, "I heard about him when I first come west. He and his pappy, they fought Utes, Navajo, and Comanches. They worked that land, brought sheep and cattle clear from Mexico, and they opened the mines, built the sawmill. I reckon anybody wants to take their land is goin' to have to dig in an' scratch."

"It doesn't seem to me that Jonathan Pritts would do anything that isn't right,"

Orrin argued. "Not if he knows the facts."

Pawnee Rock was next ... Torres came over to our fire to tell us Don Luis had decided to fight shy of it. Orrin wanted to see it and so did I, so the four of us decided to ride that way while the wagons cut wide around it.

Forty or fifty men were camped near the Rock, a tough, noisy, drunken crowd, well supplied with whiskey.

"Looks like a war party," Rountree commented.

Suddenly I had a bad feeling that this was the Pritts crowd, for I could think of no reason why a bunch of that size should be camping here without wagons or women. And I saw one of them who had been with the Back Rand crowd the other side of Abilene.

When they saw us riding up, several got up from where they'd been loafing.

"Howdy! Where you from?"

"Passing through." Tom Sunday glanced past the few men who had come to greet us at their camp, which was no decent camp, but dirty, untidy and casual. "We're headed for the upper Cimarron," he added.

"Why don't you step down? We got a proposition for you."

"We're behind time," Orrin told him, and he was looking at their faces as if he wanted to remember them.

Several others had strolled toward us, sort of circling casually around as if they wanted to get behind us, so I let the dapple turn to face them.

They didn't take to that, not a little bit, and one redhead among them took it up. "What's the matter? You afraid of something?"

When a man faces up to trouble with an outfit like that you get nowhere either talking or running, so I started the dapple toward him, not saying a word, but walking the horse right at him. My right hand was on my thigh within inches of my six-shooter, and it sized up to me like they figured to see what would happen if Red crowded me.

Red started to side-step but the dapple was a cutting horse Pa had used working stock, and once you pointed that horse at anything, man or animal, he knew what his job was.

Red backed off, and long ago I'd learned that when you get a man to backing up its hard for him to stop and start coming at you. Every move he made the dapple shifted and went for him, and all of a sudden Red got desperate and grabbed for his gun and just as he grabbed I spurred the dapple into him. The dapple hit him with a shoulder and Red went down hard. He lost grip on the pistol which fell several feet away.

Red lay on the ground on his back with the dapple right over him, and I hadn't said a word.

While everybody was watching the show Red and the dapple were putting on, Orrin had his pistol lying there in his lap. Both Tom Sunday and Cap Rountree had their rifles ready and Cap spoke up. "Like I said, we're just passing through."

Red started to get up and the dapple shifted his weight and Red relaxed. "You get up when we're gone, Red. You're in too much of a sweat to get killed."

Several of the others had seen what was going on and started toward us.

"All right, Tye?" Orrin asked.

"Let's go," I said, and we dusted out of there.

One thing Cap had in mind and I knew it was what he was thinking. If they were watching us they wouldn't have noticed the passing of the wagons, and they didn't. We watered at Coon Creek and headed for Fort Dodge.

The Barlow Sanderson Company stage came in while we were in Fort Dodge. Seems a mighty fine way to travel, sitting back against the cushions with nice folks around you. We were standing there watching when we heard the stage driver talking to a sergeant. "Looks like a fight shaping up over squatters trying to move in on the Spanish grants," he said.

Orrin turned away. "Good thing we're straying shut of that fight," he said.

"We'll be better off hunting cows."

When we rode back to camp everything was a-bustle with packing and loading up.

Torres came to us. "We go, senores. There is word of trouble from home. We take the dry route south from here. You will not come with us?"

"We're going to the Purgatoire."

"Then it will be adios." Torres glanced at me. "I know that Don Luis will wish to say good-by to you, senor."

At the wagons Don Luis was nowhere in sight, but Drusilla was. When she saw me she came quickly forward. "Oh, Tye! We're going! Will I ever see you again?"

"I'll be coming to Santa Fe. Shall I call on you then?"

"Please do."

We stood together in the darkness with all the hurry around us of people packing and getting ready to move, the jingle of trace chains, the movement and the shouts. Only I felt like something was going right out from my insides, and I'd never felt this way before. Right then I didn't want to hunt wild cows. I wanted to go to Santa Fe. Was this the way Orrin felt about Laura Pritts?