The Amarillo Trail Read online

  “Maybe I ought to ride back home and see what I can do for poor Caroline.”

  “You’ll see your pa in Salina, Miles. He’d want you to bring this herd there.”

  “Yeah. And I sure want to talk to Jared when we meet up.”

  “You may not have long to wait on that. He was three or so days behind you, but I reckon by the time we get to the Little Arkansas or maybe Great Bend, he’ll be in your back pocket.”

  “Another two or three days, maybe.”

  “Maybe,” Norm said.

  They caught up to the herd as the sun dipped lower in the western sky. Miles was silent for a long time and then he told Tad about Caroline.

  “I’m real sorry, Miles. I never liked that Rawson kid.”

  “I could kill myself for hiring him.”

  “You can’t cry over spilt milk, Miles,” Tad said. “A kid like that will do it to someone else. If he’s got a problem with the Barleycorn, he won’t do much and likely’s goin’ to have a short life.”

  “If I ever see him again, his life will be real short,” Miles said.

  He gritted his teeth and tried not to cry, but the tears squeezed out anyway. He thought about Caroline and Jared, his ma and pa. Everything seemed to be crashing down on him and he had nowhere to turn. He couldn’t go back home. He had a herd to drive and a deadline to make.

  What was it his pa had told him a long time ago?

  He remembered it now.

  “Fix the things you can and let the rest go hang, son. Otherwise you’ll worry yourself into an early grave.”

  Miles drew a deep breath and wiped the tears from his cheeks. He said a silent “thanks” to Doc, his father, and the sky glowed like the stained glass windows in a cathedral, with all the colors of the rainbow painted on clouds and the distant horizon.

  Chapter 24

  The pace Jared had set was brutal for men, cattle, and horses. But the drive was gobbling up nearly twenty miles a day, and the days were long. Jared did not bed the herd down until long after sundown and he had the herd moving well before sunup.

  “You’re pushing the herd pretty hard, Jared,” Roy said one morning when cows and horses were still stumbling through the dark, the Arkansas a slate ribbon glistening past with stars in its ripples.

  “You don’t like it, Roy, you can ride back to the Slash B,” Jared retorted, his ire rising to the surface like the first bubble in a pot of boiling water.

  “Hey, don’t be so damned touchy, Jared. I ain’t a quitter and I take anything throwed at me, hard or soft.”

  “Well, you ain’t the only hand gripin’ about the pace. Some of the others are startin’ to look like mutineers.”

  “We’re makin’ good time. If it’s the deadline you’re worried about, forget it. We’ll beat June first by a week at least.”

  “It ain’t the damned deadline, Roy. It’s Miles. I want to beat him to Salina and it’s plain that’s where he’s headed. I get sick just lookin’ at his tracks.”

  “Hard to make up two days in this heat,” Roy said.

  “Cattle are not losin’ weight that I can see, and there’s grass and water all the way.”

  “Some of the cattle are losing weight, Jared. This keeps up, you’ll be drivin’ skeletons to the railhead.”

  Jared laughed wryly. He chased a cow back into the herd that had wandered off-track, and then he returned to riding drag with Roy.

  “We get paid by the head, not the pound, Roy,” he said.

  “But you know Doc wants to make a good impression on the buyer. He’s thinkin’ about next spring, not just this one measly little drive.”

  “We’ll do all right. I just want to see my brother’s face when I ride up on his sorry ass.”

  Roy kept silent, but later that day, when they were stopped for a quick bite of grub at noon, he heard Jared talking to Paco.

  “I want you to send one of the men up ahead to scout Miles’s herd.”

  “I can do that, Jared,” Paco said. “But why?”

  “I want to know just how far ahead of us he is.”

  “You’ll be takin’ a man out for three, maybe four days, round-trip.”

  “We can handle it,” Jared said. “The herd’s as tame as Granny’s house cat by now.”

  “Yeah, the herd’s doin’ just fine,” Paco said. “As long as the weather holds and we don’t get a Kansas twister, or run across a bunch of angry farmers, and it don’t rain. . . .”

  “I get the point, Paco,” Jared said. “Send your best rider and tell him to ride his ass off and come back with the information on where Miles is and how long it’s going to take to catch up to him.”

  Paco chose Will Becker as his scout. Will was the strongest man in the outfit. He had a good strong horse and knew the country. He knew how to avoid trouble, as he had proven when he went to Leavenworth, and he knew how to take care of himself in a fight.

  “Jared wants to know how far ahead of us Miles is, and if we can catch up to him. Can do?”

  “I can,” Becker said.

  “Stock up with grub you can eat in the saddle and get some toothpicks to hold your eyes open. You ain’t goin’ to sleep on the ground, so you don’t need your bedroll. Got it?”

  “I got it,” Becker said, and rode to the chuck wagon. In moments, he was off at a gallop, heading north along the Canadian.

  Roy watched until Becker disappeared and then saw that Jared had been watching him too.

  Jared fixed Roy with an icy stare.

  “You got something to say, Roy?” Jared demanded.

  “Not a thing, Jared,” Roy said, and that ended it as far as he was concerned.

  Jared meant to beat his brother any way he could, in love or war. It would be suicide, he knew, for any man to come between them in their private and personal fight.

  But Roy was filled with a deep sense of dread. If they managed to meet up with Miles, and there was a strong chance that they would, he wanted no part of that quarrel.

  For Roy wanted to come back from this strange drive, not only in one piece, but alive and breathing.

  It was, he knew, going to be another long, long day, and there would be another long day after that.

  He braced himself inwardly, and thought about what Paco told Becker.

  He might need some toothpicks himself before this drive was over.

  Chapter 25

  The Rocking M herd stopped dead in its tracks.

  Tad Rankin was the first to notice that the herd was no longer moving.

  “I wonder what’s wrong,” Miles said. “Who’s riding lead?”

  “I put Joadie Lee up there,” Tad said.

  “What do you think?”

  “Well, we ought to be purt near at Great Bend by now. Him and Curly Bob are probably scoutin’ for a place to ford.”

  “I’d better go up and check,” Miles said. “You hold the rear, will you?”

  “Sure, Miles.”

  Miles rode off along the length of the stalled cattle.

  Tad cocked a leg up and nestled the saddle horn on the underside of his knee. He tipped his hat back slightly and pulled a sack of tobacco from his pocket. He rolled a cigarette, licked it, and stuck it in his mouth. He scratched a match on his boot heel and lit the quirly, drew smoke into his lungs.

  It was a fine afternoon, he thought. They had lost some time that morning when some of the cattle got into a nest of rattlesnakes. They burst from the herd like a covey of startled quail and it took him and three other men over an hour to run the snakes off and round up all the strays. Wexler had wanted to shoot the snakes, but Tad held him in check.

  “You want to have a full-blown stampede on your hands, Lenny?”

  Wexler shook his head and holstered his pistol.

  “I always wanted to shoot the head off a rattler,” he said.

  “Save it for another time, Lenny.”

  So they had lost a couple of hours, but Tad knew they could make Great Bend that day, regardless. However, he was going by a
map, crudely drawn at that, and mileages were uncertain if not downright wrong. He just knew that the Little Arkansas would cross their path and Great Bend was supposed to be the best place to cross. After that, they would have little water and probably not as much grass.

  Several minutes later, long after Tad had finished his cigarette, rolled the butt into a ball, and tossed it to the ground, he saw Miles riding toward him at a fast gallop. The herd grazed and spread out, but so far none had drifted too far from their course.

  “We got trouble, Tad,” Miles said when he rode up.

  “You at the bend?”

  “I—I think so, but there’s armed men up there. They got rifles and they say we got to pay a toll. I don’t know what to do.”

  “How much toll?” Tad asked.

  “Two bits a head.”

  Tad swore.

  “That’s if we pay them hard cash right away. If we try and cross somewhere else, they said they’d foller us and we’d have to pay four bits a head.”

  Tad swore again.

  “How many men they got?” he asked.

  “I counted twenty. They’re a rough-lookin’ bunch. The leader’s a man named Pete Boggs. There’s a ferry there and he says he owns it.”

  “It’s a holdup,” Tad said. “Outright robbery.”

  “I know. I told him we didn’t have no money. You know what he said?”

  “No, but I guess he didn’t like it.”

  “He said unless we paid, we couldn’t cross. Nowheres.”

  “So, what are you aimin’ to do, Miles?”

  “I want you to come up and talk to Boggs. Tell him we’ll give him a tally and pay him on the way back.”

  “Did you tell him that?”

  “I just now thought of it,” Miles said.

  “I’ll go up with you and talk to the man,” Tad said.

  “Let me get someone to hang on to the tails of these cattle.”

  Tad called to Pedro as they rode near him.

  “Pedro, you go back and ride drag,” Tad said.

  “The herd is not moving,” Pedro said.

  “Just watch the tail end while I’m gone, will you?”

  “Sure, Tad. I will watch their butts if you say so. I ain’t doin’ nothin’ here anyway.”

  The cattle were lining up at Great Bend, drinking. On the other side of the Little Arkansas, there was a line of men on horseback, all with their rifles pointed skyward, the stocks braced on their legs or pommels. Close to the near shore, a large raft lay at the harbor, ropes tied to wooden posts. A half dozen men leaned against the railings, rifles braced against their legs. They all wore pistols and their cartridge belts bristled with brass bullets.

  “That’s Boggs there, standing in front of the ferry,” Miles whispered to Tad. “The one with the mean face.”

  “They all got mean faces, Miles,” Tad said.

  Boggs walked toward them. He was the only man there who was not carrying a rifle. He wasn’t tall, nor did he appear muscular. He had a ferret face that was covered with black stubble from chin to mouth. His eyes were small and close-set, and his hat bore grease stains and a few moth holes. He wore coveralls and a gun belt, work boots with large heels as if to make himself taller, but Tad knew they were farmer’s shoes and would not slip from stirrups. The man’s shirt was a faded blue denim streaked with sweat and he wore a red bandanna around his throat.

  “This your foreman?” Boggs asked Miles as he walked up.

  “He represents some of the cattle from another ranch,” Miles said.

  “You boys come up from Texas?”

  “We did,” Tad said. He climbed out of the saddle and walked up to Pete Boggs. He looked down on Boggs. “I’m Tad Rankin, and I ride for the Slash B brand.”

  It was plain to see that Boggs wasn’t impressed.

  “You headin’ for Salina, I hear,” Boggs said.

  “We have a contract to sell our cattle there,” Tad said as Miles looked on from the saddle.

  “You probably got a deadline too, ain’t ye?”

  “We do,” Tad said.

  “Well, we got ourselves a deadline here. Ain’t nobody, leastways nobody from Texas, crosses this river without payin’ the toll. Two bits a head.”

  “I think Mr. Blaine here told you that we have no money, Mr. Boggs.”

  “Then you don’t cross with these here cows.”

  “I have an offer for you, Mr. Boggs,” Miles said. “A suggestion.”

  “Yeah?” Boggs looked up at Miles, squinting in the glare of the sun.

  “Yes,” Miles said. “You can count our cattle and figure the toll, and we’ll surely pay you twenty-five cents a head on our way back home from Salina.”

  Boggs laughed and turned to the men on the ferry. “Did you hear that, boys? They say they’ll pay the toll on their way back home. Should we trust ’em?”

  The men on the raft all yelled, “No.”

  “There you have it, gents,” Boggs said. “We don’t trust nobody. In particular, we don’t trust Texicans. Now you either pay my toll or you turn right around and go back where you come from.”

  Boggs fixed his gaze on Tad. He took a straw from his pocket and stuck it in his mouth. He began to chew on it as he waited for an answer from the cattlemen.

  “We—we’ll have to talk it over,” Miles said. “Among ourselves. Give us some time.”

  “Longer you wait, the higher the toll,” Boggs said.

  “Why?” Miles asked.

  “That’s just the way we work it. You ain’t the first to try and sell Texas cattle up in Kansas. We’re poor farmers. We don’t live in big houses and have Negro servants like you folks down south.”

  “We don’t live in big houses and we don’t have servants,” Miles said.

  “Ain’t no use arguin’ about it, Mr. Blaine. You pay the toll or you don’t cross.”

  “Let’s go, Tad,” Miles said. “We’ll have to figure something out, Mr. Boggs. This is unexpected and, like I said, we don’t have that much cash among us.”

  “Makes no never mind to me, Mr. Blaine. You take all night for all I care. You come talk tomorrow, it’s four bits a head, and the day after that, it’s six bits, and then a whole dollar. You suit yourself.”

  With that, Boggs turned and walked back to the ferry. He climbed aboard and ordered his men to untie the ropes and pole them back across the river.

  Tad saw the men on horseback watching from the farther bank. They looked like guerilla troops ready to start a war.

  Curly Bob, who had been listening, spoke to Tad and Miles.

  “It’s a damned standoff,” he said.

  “Curly Bob, you just shut up,” Tad said. “We don’t need no tempers just yet.”

  “Sorry, Tad. I just feel like, well, like we can’t let a bunch of Kansas sodbusters boss us around and put guns to our heads.”

  “We’ll figure out something, Curly Bob. You just hold tight and keep an eye on this herd. Them jayhawks just might fire off them rifles and start a stampede.”

  “Yes, sir,” Curly Bob said. “I’ll keep my damned trap shut.”

  As Tad rode away with Miles, he looked back at the armed men and the ferry. He didn’t count them, but he knew they were outnumbered.

  “This could get real ugly,” he told Miles when they were alone.

  “It already is. What do you think we ought to do? Find another place to cross?”

  “Them jaspers would foller us up- and downriver and we would never get this herd to Salina.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  Tad drew in a breath.

  “We may have to fight ’em,” he said, somewhat startled at his own words.

  There were almost eighteen hundred head of cattle in the herd. He couldn’t even figure the toll at two bits a head, but he knew they couldn’t pay it. They could only wait and think while Boggs had them by the throat.

  One thing Tad knew for sure. The herd could go no farther that day, and might not move by tomorrow.

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sp; He didn’t see any way out of it. Either they could turn back or they could fight their way across the river.

  And if they did that, he knew, the river would run with blood.

  Chapter 26

  Will Becker rode into his second night on the lone trail like a sleepwalker, or in his case, as he thought to himself, a sleep-rider. His horse, a gelding he called “Jock,” had begun to stumble and as the night wore on, Becker detected a slight stagger in the animal’s gait.

  He had dozed only fitfully and now, in the darkness, his mind began playing tricks on him. Every shadow and shape seemed a threat and every sound an alarm in his brain. But Will was a determined man and rode on, a sagging exhausted hulk in a saddle that had become like iron so that his butt was numb and his legs useless appendages that he massaged often to restore circulation in his veins and arteries.

  The drone of the frogs along the riverbank lulled him into a stupor until he heard the undertones of crickets sawing their orchestral pieces in an annoying contrapuntal discord. Then mosquitoes boiled up out of the grasses and tide pools, nipped at his cheeks, set off a zinging in his ears as they circled for a blood strike on his jaw. He slapped at them, which only raised welts on his face that made the blood draw even easier for the pesky insects.

  These noises and bitings served to keep Becker from dozing off, but his eyelids seemed to grow heavier and it was difficult to keep his eyes open. Jock was just plodding along, swinging legs that were weary and fly-bitten, caked with streaks of dried blood. His hooves barely made a muffled sound on the grass that swished against his long, lean legs.

  Earlier, bullbats had cut invisible swaths in the evening sky and now they were gone, taking the dim silver dollars on their wings with them, and only a few small bats plied both banks of the river, lapping up mosquitoes and gnats with unerring accuracy despite their poor eyesight.

  Every muscle in Will’s body had gone beyond ache and he felt as if all life had gone out of tissue and bone, sinew and muscle. He slapped at insects and drew blood when he made a direct hit. They swarmed around his face, which helped keep him awake. Jock’s neck quivered as the hide rippled to shake off the biting insects, and the horse tossed its head and blinked its eyes to escape the swarm of hungry mosquitoes that circled him in plastic black clouds.