The Palo Duro Trail Read online

  The young man broke down in tears, crumpling to Dag’s feet.

  Dag looked at the shirt, saw that it was spattered with blood. The blood was still wet.

  “You just take it easy, Little Jake.”

  Jimmy ran up then and hunkered down to see what was wrong with Little Jake.

  Dag stepped over to the dark shape and saw that it was a man’s body slumped over a rock, an arrow sticking from his back and another through his neck like a skewer.

  “Jesus,” Dag muttered and knelt down beside the body. Something about it looked familiar. The pale blue chambray shirt, the faded duck trousers, the worn boots, heels rounded, the battered spurs with one rowel missing on the left one.

  Jimmy got up, leaving Little Jake to sit there, holding his head in his hands, all slumped over, and shivering like a dog passing peach seeds.

  “Do you know who it is, Dag?”

  “Yeah. Luke Pettibone from the Box M, Barry Matlee’s spread. Christ.”

  “Egod, Luke. Ah, boy. Barry won’t like it none. Luke had him a wife and kid.”

  Jimmy was right, Dag thought. Matlee would have to provide for the widow and her little girl. It wasn’t the law, just the custom.

  “Jimmy, you pull that Sharps out and keep an eye out for me,” Dag said, “ ’case they’s any redskins still lurkin’ about. I’m going to see if I can pry anything out of Little Jake.”

  Jimmy mounted up and pulled his rifle from its scabbard, a Sharps carbine he’d gotten from Dag when Dagstaff returned from the war and that last battle at Palmito Hill on the Rio Grande. He rode a wide circle around the gully where they had found Little Jake and Luke, looking in all directions as mist rose from the earth like smoke lingering on a battlefield.

  Dag pulled Little Jake to his feet, shook him gently to snap him out of fear and self-pity. Little Jake was sobbing, whimpering, cowering.

  “Be a man, Little Jake. You got the pants scared off you, but you’re whole while Luke lies there dead. I want to know what happened here.”

  “I-I c-can’t.”

  “You can, son, and you will. Now damn it, pull yourself together and give me an account of all this.”

  When Little Jake kept blubbering, Dag drew back his right hand, swept it back over his shoulder. Little Jake’s eyes widened, and he cowered, waiting for the blow, dropping his head down like some defeated prisoner standing on the gallows.

  Dag slapped Little Jake with the back of his hand. Little Jake’s head snapped to one side as the blow took effect.

  “I’ll beat it out of you, if I have to, Little Jake. Now straighten up, son, and tell me what the hell happened with you and Luke. Damn it, I haven’t got time to fool around with you.”

  There were white streaks on Little Jake’s face where Dag’s fingers had landed, left an impression. The young man raised his head and looked at Dag with watery eyes, sucked in quick breaths to overcome the sobbing. Dag shook him again and Little Jake straightened his back and drew in another deep breath and held it for a moment.

  “Me ’n’ Luke was out early, after a cow and calf,” Little Jake said in a string of halty words that poured from his mouth, “and we saw this cow a-runnin’, like somethin’ was a-chasin’ it. Luke thought it was a coyote or maybe a bob-cat. We took after it to see if we could spy a brand on its hide, and that’s when we saw a bunch of red Injuns with some cattle and one of ’em chasin’ after that cow. We turned tail, but the Injun follered us, and when we got here, I mean, we come here to hide from him and that Injun just rode up with a bow and slung an arrer straight at Luke. Then, before I could figure any of it out, the Injun shot another arrer and hit Luke right in the neck. I screamed bloody murder and the Injun lit out. I must’ve scared him or somethin’.”

  “You made noise,” Dag said. “How many Indians were in that bunch you and Luke saw?”

  “A dozen at least, maybe more.”

  “You’re lucky they didn’t all jump you, damn Comanches.”

  “They was Comanches all right. And fearsome as all get out.”

  Dag turned away, looked upward, toward the rim of the gully.

  “Jimmy, you see anything up yonder? Little Jake’s and Luke’s horses?”

  There was a pause before Jimmy answered. “I see something out there. Light’s still weak. Looks like horses, maybe.”

  “I’ll send Little Jake up there.”

  Dag turned to the young man. “Little Jake, get on my horse and ride up to where Jimmy is. Catch up yours and Luke’s horses and I’ll stay here and get these arrows out of him.”

  Little Jake was happy to go from that place. He climbed into the saddle on Dag’s horse and rode up out of the gully.

  Dag squatted down next to Luke’s body. He lifted the dead man’s head and placed a rock under it to hold it up. He grabbed the front end of the arrow at the neck and clamped it with his thumb and index finger. He picked up another rock and set it against the nock, squaring it and holding it firm. He pushed from the nock end as hard as he could. The arrow slid through the wound until the feathers were buried in Luke’s neck. Dag set down the rock and scooted around, then pulled on the blood-wet shaft until it came free, sending Dag back on his haunches. The arrow was marked with symbols beneath the smears and streaks of blood.

  Dag threw the arrow down and got up. He turned Luke’s body over until it lay flat on the ground, backside down. Then he lifted him by the boots and dragged him out of the gully onto level ground. He was puffing from the exertion by then, and stood hunched over as he regained his normal breathing rhythm.

  He looked around and saw Jimmy and Little Jake riding toward him, leading the two horses that had wandered off during the fracas with the Comanche. Comanches down this far along the Palo Duro meant trouble. It also meant they were hungry. They must have seen the chuck wagons and the cowhands riding around and figured out that it was getting close to roundup time. Even a dozen Comanches could mess up the spring roundup, the bastards. Dag cursed them roundly in his mind while he waited for the two riders.

  The three men lifted Luke’s stiffening corpse and draped him over the saddle of his horse, with some difficulty. The horse, a bay mare, rolled its eyes and sidestepped every time they hoisted the body up to the saddle. It sidled stiff-legged in a half circle trying to avoid taking on the cargo. Its ears stiffened to twin cones, and Dag could have sworn its mane bristled just like the hair on the back of an alarmed cat. Finally, they got Luke’s belly into the cradle of the saddle and both Dag and Jimmy bent him over it like a soft horseshoe, then took Luke’s rope, which was tied with leather thongs to one of the D rings on the saddle, and tied his feet and hands together underneath the belly of the skittery mare.

  “Little Jake,” Dag said, “you take the reins and pull this horse. Hold on tight. Jimmy will ride drag and I’ll lead us over to the chuck wagon where y’all spent the night. Is Matlee over yonder with y’all?”

  “Yes, sir, he come in last night.”

  “Save you a long ride to the Box M. Barry can take care of his own. He got other hands there?”

  “Yes, sir, there’s—”

  “I don’t need a list, Little Jake. You still camped over to Rattlesnake Creek?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Let’s switch horses, son. You might get used to riding Nero.”

  Little Jake climbed down from Dag’s horse and took up the reins of his own. The two men mounted their horses and Dag led out, with Little Jake on his own horse, Luke on his, and Jimmy following atop the buckskin pony.

  “Wait a minute,” Dag said. “I better bring those arrows.”

  “What for?” Jimmy asked.

  “Proof, I reckon.”

  There were men milling around the chuck wagon, horses snorting steam and pawing the ground, whickering at the approaching riders and whinnying like a clutch of old women at a Sunday school picnic. Some of the men held coffee cups and a couple were smoking cigarettes and stamping their boots to get their circulation up and the cold out of their toes.
Two of the men were pissing into the creek and making a faint yellow steam rise from the cold waters.

  Those standing around the fire went silent as Dag rode up. They shifted their gaze to Luke, astraddle his horse. Disbelief shimmered in the quivering muscles on their faces. Barry Matlee stepped forward. Behind him loomed the bulky figure of Deuce Deutsch, his forbidding scowl visible even in shadow.

  “Dag, what you got there? Is that Luke?”

  Dag handed him the arrow shafts.

  “Son of a bitch,” Matlee said.

  The sun inched above the horizon, sent golden streamers across the land and flared on the dark statues of men who bore the deep silence that comes in the presence of death. One of the Matlee men choked up and let out a soft unmanly sob.

  Matlee looked up at Little Jake, his eyes blazing with a sudden anger.

  “I ought to kill you, you little bastard,” Matlee said, his right hand streaking for the pistol on his hip.

  In that one terrible moment, time seemed to stand still as the sun raged ever higher, setting the high, thin clouds afire in its rising.

  Chapter 3

  Dag leaned over from the saddle and grabbed Matlee’s forearm. He dug his fingers into the soft flesh of the muscle and pushed downward so that the rancher couldn’t draw his pistol.

  “There’s plenty of death to go around as it is, Barry. You back off. Little Jake didn’t have nothing to do with what happened to Luke.”

  “I told them two not to go out alone this morning,” Matlee said, relaxing his hand’s grip on the butt of his pistol. “Damned if I didn’t warn them both.”

  “Ain’t no matter now,” Dag said, his voice as soft as the disappearing dawn. “Could have been me or you, Barry. Me ’n’ Jimmy was up and out awful early. Ten minutes sooner, we might have wound up like Luke there. Settle down, son.”

  Matlee looked up at Dag and nodded like a man too numb to speak. There was a sadness in his eyes. It flickered like a shadow darting in and out of sunlight.

  “Which way did the Comanches head?” he asked.

  “North. Jimmy and I camped way north of you. They got a good head start.”

  “How many head did they get?”

  “I don’t know,” Dag answered. “I don’t think Little Jake knows either. He was pretty shaken up.”

  “Ain’t enough we got rain comin’ tonight or tomorrow. Now we got Comanches stealin’ stock.”

  “I don’t figger they got more’n one or two head, the way they lit out. Probably a single head and they got it butchered by now.”

  “Shit fire, Dag, we’re in a stretch to come up with enough head to drive to Cheyenne and you picked a trail what ain’t no good no ways.”

  Dag stepped out of the saddle.

  “Are you backing out, Barry?” Dag asked.

  Matlee hesitated. Deuce stepped forward and waddled his considerable weight over to where Dag and Matlee were standing.

  “I’m pulling my herd out, Dagstaff,” Deuce said. “This is the kind of thing I worried about ever since you told me about this drive.”

  “Deutsch, you’re making a big mistake. You have more at stake than the rest of us. Pulling your cattle out will leave me way short.”

  “We’re just getting started with the roundup, and already a man dead we have, and cattle stolen right from under our eyes.”

  “A few hungry Comanches, Deutsch, that’s all. We’ll probably never see them again. Besides, we’ll have enough men and cattle on the drive, we can hold off a Comanche raid.”

  The other men, from the various ranches, including his own, gathered around, listening to every word. Dag didn’t look at them, but he knew they were probably just as skeptical as Deutsch, and he granted that they had good reason. The roundup was starting off badly. His idea had been to separate the cows with fresh calves and just take the hardiest cattle up the Palo Duro and then drift them to the Goodnight-Loving Trail. Deutsch had been the hardest to convince that the drive would be both successful and profitable.

  Jimmy dismounted, as well, but Little Jake remained on his horse, looking down at the assemblage in abject wonder.

  “You won’t drive a single head of Rocking D cattle on your wild-goose chase,” Deutsch said. “I will not risk it.”

  Matlee cursed under his breath. “Dag, we ain’t got enough head between us to go all the way to Cheyenne and come up empty.”

  “That’s true,” Dag said. “Deutsch, you promised. You accepted my offer. Are you backing out now?”

  “I am. I said I would let you drive my cattle to market if you had sufficient head and there was no danger of loss.”

  “There’s always a danger of loss in anything,” Dag said, realizing his argument was weak. But without Deutsch’s cattle, none of them would earn a cent. The contract called for thirty-eight hundred head of prime beef stock and he could not make the drive with less than four thousand head, factoring in losses along the way.

  “I will not take that risk,” Deutsch said. “My cattle the drive will not make.”

  When he was angry, Deutsch always put his English in German grammatical form. And he was angry. His face was puffed up and red as a sugar beet. The cords in his neck wriggled like writhing snakes and the veins stood out like blue earthworms.

  “You’re awful quick to call this,” Dag said. “You’re hurtin’ almost as bad as the rest of us, and we can’t rub two nickels together. What you got up your sleeve, Deuce, besides an arm?”

  “To Sedalia, in Missouri, we will drive my cattle, Felix.”

  “The Shawnee Trail?”

  “We call it the Sedalia Trail, but the same it is, yes.”

  “You won’t get the price I can get for you,” Dag said.

  “No. The thirty-five dollars a head we will get and that is enough for my herd. It is the safe way, sure.”

  Dag looked down at the ground and began working the toe of his boot into the dirt, scraping a smooth spot as if clearing his own mind in that same way. He tilted his foot and scraped with the edge of his boot. Then he looked up, stared into Deuce’s eyes.

  “Sounds to me like you already made up your mind before you came to roundup, Deuce.”

  “I make my mind up now.”

  Dag searched the faces of the men standing around them. He looked at one man, stared at him hard. The man was Sam Coker, Deuce’s segundo. Coker bunched his lower lip up against his upper, then shifted his gaze to another part of the landscape.

  “That right, Coker?” Dag asked. “You didn’t know anything about this change of plan?”

  “I go with what Mr. Deutsch says.” Coker still avoided Dag’s gaze.

  “You were going to use us all to help you with roundup, Coker, and all the time you and Deuce had no intention of honoring our agreement.”

  Coker sucked in a breath.

  No one spoke a word.

  Dag looked back at Deutsch, an expression of contempt on his face. His eyes narrowed to dark slits.

  “All right, Deuce, you called it. That’s my chuck wagon there. You and your hands clear on out of here. You’ll get no help from me with your damned roundup.”

  “But we have always done roundup together,” Deutsch protested. “Who is to regulate?”

  “I’ll regulate our cows. You regulate your own. Now clear out.”

  Coker stepped forward, a scowl on his face. “Dagstaff, you’re violating the law of the range here.”

  “You’ve got a nerve, Coker. Deutsch backed down on his word. Out here a man’s word is the law.”

  “You’re not leavin’ us out, Dagstaff,” Coker said. “We got as much right to check cattle as you do.”

  “Yeah? Well, not anymore, Coker. Pack it up.”

  Coker’s rage surged up so quickly nobody there was prepared for it. He balled up his fists and rushed toward Dagstaff. He drove a fist into Dag’s face, knocking him backward. Blood spurted from Dag’s nose and he reeled under the impact. Then all hands erupted and joined in the fray. Coker drove in for another blow,
but Dag shook off the pain and slammed Coker with a roundhouse right that caught him in the left jaw, staggering him.

  Deutsch went after Dag, a fist cocked to hammer a blow to his face. Dag moved his head and Deutsch’s fist grazed his chin, knocking his head back slightly. Dag drove a fist into Deutsch’s paunch, saw the man quiver and absorb the blow as he expelled air from his lungs.

  Fists flew from every direction after that. Men yelled and pummeled one another with flailing arms. There was biting, clawing, and kicks to the groin as the fight turned into a wild melee. Matlee squared off with Coker and the two exchanged punches. Blood squirted from noses and ears. Dag grappled with the heavier Deutsch, who was trying to wrestle him to the ground. Breathing heavily, Dag drove a fist into Deutsch’s groin. The man grunted in pain and doubled over. Dag hit him with a powerful uppercut, but the two went down, rolling away from the center of the fight, both men lashing at each other with their fists and open hands.

  Jimmy Gough smashed Coker with a straight right to the throat. Coker gasped for air, and a wheezing sound issued from his throat, while his lips started to turn blue. Jimmy felt someone climb on his back and turned, trying to shake the man off. He felt arms wrap around his neck. He drove an elbow into his attacker’s gut and heard a groan. He shook himself free and stepped away, drawing his pistol.

  Jimmy fired into the air.

  “That’s enough,” he yelled. “I’ll shoot the next man that throws a punch.”

  The men stopped fighting and looked at Gough, whose eyes blazed like red-hot coals.

  Jimmy swung the snout of his pistol toward Coker. “You’ll be the first to die, Coker,” Gough said. “Now you heard Dag. Clear out, or you’ll join Luke draped over your own saddle.”

  “Don’t shoot, Jimmy,” Coker said. “We’ll go, but you watch your back, hear?”

  “So you’re a back shooter, eh, Coker? Well, if you want to call it, call it now. I’m ready to open the ball, you son of a bitch.”

  The ensuing silence told Dag that the fight was over—unless somebody made a terrible mistake and called Jimmy out. He could see that Gough was ready to shoot the first man who made an aggressive move. He dusted himself off, slapping his trousers and shirt.