The Ellsworth Trail Read online

  Jock kicked the head off its perch, grabbed one horn and rolled it over until the skull was facedown. Flies boiled up in a swarm as Jock turned his back on the desecrated shrine.

  He walked over to the carcass and knelt down to examine it. The cow had been gutted expertly, the liver and heart removed, its stomach and entrails lying beside it in a grotesque puddle. The stench of the intestines rose up and assaulted Jock’s nostrils.

  The Apaches had begun cutting into the cow’s haunch. The tendons and muscles were partially severed. Jock passed his hand over the hide on the cow’s hip and then leaned over, checking the brand. He looked at it hard, then looked again. He stood and walked back to his horse. He took the reins from Horky and mounted up.

  “Any of you see that brand?” Jock asked.

  The men all shook their heads.

  “Well, it’s not an X8.”

  “It ain’t?” Beeson said. “What is it?”

  “It’s a Cross J brand.”

  Jock rode over to the dead white man with the others following. He looked down at the man’s face, what was left of it. He had been shot in the head and so the features were distorted. But there was a clean, black hole where the bullet had entered, and streaks of blood that were now dried almost black.

  “Anybody know this jasper?” Jock asked.

  He reined his horse away from the dead man so that the others could file by and look at him. Dub Morley hung back and was the last to pass next to the corpse. But he hardly gave it a glance, Jock noticed.

  “That looks like Pip Boggs,” Quist said. “Can’t be sure, though.”

  “P. P. Boggs. Yeah, I thought that’s who he looks like,” Beeson said. “Didn’t you and him used to work together on the old Rocking R, Dub?”

  “It don’t look like Pip,” Morley said.

  “Look again, Dub,” Jock said.

  Morley turned his horse around and forced himself to look at the dead man.

  “I don’t know,” Dub said.

  “Well, you shot him, didn’t you?” Jock said.

  There was a stretch of silence. All the other scouts looked at Dub Morley. Their looks were accusatory, hard and searching.

  “I thought he was with them Apaches,” Morley said lamely.

  Jock looked at the other men. His eyes glittered like crushed diamonds in the sunlight. “Did any of you think this man was with the Apaches?”

  Some of the men nodded quickly. Others, more reluctantly. Morley was the first to nod, perhaps because Jock still had him fixed with his stare like a butterfly to a piece of cardboard.

  “I see that Boggs’s pistol is still in his holster,” Jock said. “He didn’t have his rifle out, either.”

  His words drew only silence from the men. Jock knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere with these men, who were still rattled from the encounter with the Apaches.

  “Quist, you and Horky track down those Apaches. See where they’re going. Be careful. I think this bunch was just part of a bigger one.”

  “If they are,” Quist said, “we can’t do much.”

  “No,” Jock admitted, “you can’t. Nor do I want you to engage them. I think Torgerson met with these Apaches and sent Boggs to bribe them with a cow.”

  “Why?” Quist asked.

  “Two reasons,” Jock said. “One, Torgerson didn’t want to lose a bunch of cattle to Apache raiders. Two, he wanted them to go after the X8 cattle. Boggs probably told them where we were and offered them even bigger rewards. Maybe even some help.”

  “You got it all figured out, have you, Kane?” Quist asked, a sarcastic snarl to his words.

  “I know the Apaches didn’t steal that cow. It was a gift, and Boggs was the messenger.”

  “Maybe,” Quist said. “You don’t have a hell of a lot of proof.”

  “I can put two and two together,” Jock said. “And maybe I can come up with some more numbers to add in. Now, wear out some saddle leather and report back to me in two hours.”

  “What about Boggs?” Beeson asked. “Shouldn’t we bury him?”

  “I’ll take care of Boggs,” Jock said. “Now, get going. The Apache tracks should be easy to follow.”

  The men turned their horses. Quist led the scouts, who fanned out and followed. Jock watched them go, wondering how many of them he could trust. Morley was the one to watch. He had shot Boggs dead without hesitation—a man he knew. And Jock had a pretty good idea why Dub had killed Boggs: He was afraid Boggs would give him away, give up a secret about Morley that Dub didn’t want known.

  Jock’s mind was swarming with suspicions. He knew he couldn’t prove that Dub was in the pay of Torgerson, but things were beginning to add up that pointed in that direction. Torgerson would stop at nothing to beat Chad Becker into Ellsworth, even resorting to bribery of the Apaches. So, why wouldn’t he also have a man in his service who was in Becker’s camp?

  Sooner or later, Jock thought, Dub would tip his hand, would give himself away. He had already shown that he was probably trying to delay the drive, and now he had killed a man, a man he had known well, just to keep Boggs’s mouth shut.

  As he caught up the dead man’s horse, Jock knew he had to find a way to expose Dub. The question was, he mused, was Dub the only one? Who else among the hands working for Becker might be in Torgerson’s employ? One, or several?

  Jock stood down from his horse and led Boggs’s horse over to the dead body. He waited a few minutes, talking to the horse, a sorrel gelding, patting his neck and rubbing his withers.

  “You hold steady, boy. You’re going to carry your master back where he belongs.”

  The horse whickered softly in response to Jock’s tone of voice.

  After the horse settled down and stopped its wide-eyed inspection of Boggs, Jock reached down and picked up the body. It was starting to stiffen and it smelled of death and feces. He laid Boggs over the saddle, facedown, then unlashed his lariat. He hog-tied the dead man to the saddle, running the rope through the stirrups and wrapping it around him. He tightened the rope and tied it off beneath the horse.

  Then Jock mounted his own horse while holding the reins of the other. He rode eastward toward where he figured Torgerson’s herd would be.

  “Let them bury the man,” he said to himself.

  Two hours later, the sorrel gelding whickered in recognition. Jock spotted the wranglers at the tail end of the herd, driving the extra horses. He reined up and pulled on the reins of the sorrel. Then he slapped it on the rump and watched it trot off toward the remuda. He turned his horse and rode away, back to the X8 herd.

  “Torgerson will have something to talk about tonight at bed-down,” Jock said to his own horse, then put the spurs to it and galloped off, knowing he had a long ride ahead.

  Jock rode with even more determination than he’d had when he started the drive. He had not wanted to trail boss the X8 herd, but he needed the money. Now he had even more incentive to drive the herd to Ellsworth.

  He wanted to beat Torgerson, make him sorry he had ever tried to cheat Chad by the foulest of means. Torgerson was now his enemy, as well as Chad’s. And Jock meant to conquer Torgerson and hand Chad a victory when they reached Ellsworth ahead of the Cross J herd.

  Chapter 16

  Curt Torgerson seethed with murderous rage when he saw the body of Pip Boggs, still tied to the saddle of his horse. He glared at Chaco Vargas, the wrangler who had brought him the news. He stared daggers at Merle Fellows, the head wrangler, who held the sorrel’s reins in his hand.

  “Somebody’s going to pay might dear for this,” Torgerson said, his lips flared back from his teeth in a tiger’s snarl, his fists bunching up like fleshy mallets. “Who in hell brought Pip in like this? Who in hell killed him?”

  “We don’t know, boss. That’s for sure,” Fellows said.

  “You didn’t see anybody? You mean the horse just trotted on back to you with Pip all tied up like a damned Christmas package?”

  “No, sir,” Fellows said, his voice just a tone o
r two above a respectful whisper. “Some body trailed Pip up close and prodded his horse so’s it run up on us. The feller was just too far away for us to see who it was.”

  “It wasn’t an Apache, was it?”

  “No, it was not an Apache,” Vargas said. “The man looked like Jock Kane.”

  “Kane did this?”

  Vargas shook his head. “I do not know.”

  “Chaco, you ride up to the tack wagon with Pip and get a shovel and you bury him. This herd is going to keep moving, no matter what.” Torgerson’s rage seemed to wither those around him. He rode off, leaving the men to wonder what their boss would do next. They were used to his boiling temper, but none had ever seen him so angry.

  Torgerson had been driving the men and the herd mercilessly, said some, while others said it was better than sitting around whittling on a poor man’s porch. He rode away from his foiled plan at a full gallop, whipping his palomino with his rein tips and raking his spurs into the animal’s flanks until it quivered beneath him like a sack full of coiled springs, its muscles rippling, sweat oiling its hide to a high sheen.

  There were two men Torgerson wanted to talk to and he knew just where they were—where he had put them so that they could guard the left flank of the herd, near the tail end of it. If trouble was to come, that was where he figured it would come first. He had picked those men because he knew they would follow orders and shoot to kill if anyone threatened the herd or the drovers.

  He caught up to Dan Fogarty first, spotting him in the sheets of dust that seemed to hang along the left flank of the herd. The drovers were pushing the cattle at his orders, pushing them hard off the grass, yelling each day until they were hoarse and working their horses into a frothy sweat that kept the wranglers busy changing mounts.

  “Ho, D.F.,” Torgerson called. “Hold up.” Fogarty turned his horse and stared in Torgerson’s direction. A faded blue bandanna covered the lower part of his face, the cloth saturated with grit and dust, indented over the mouth from inhalation.

  “Yo, Mr. Torgerson,” Fogarty said as the two met.

  “Where’s Randy?” Torgerson asked.

  “Oh, he’s up yonder a ways, eating dust same as me.”

  “Let’s catch up to him. I want to talk to you two boys.”

  Randy Clutter was the more dangerous of the two men, the more aggressive. Torgerson had kept the two men away from Abel Kane on purpose. Kane rode up in front, as a kind of secondary point man, where Torgerson could keep an eye on him. He thought of Abel as being on a kind of probation until Torgerson could see how he handled trouble and followed orders. Clutter and Fogarty were born hardcases, and both had reputations decidedly on the unsavory side. They might not have notches on the butts of their pistols, but everyone knew they had killed men before and were always one step ahead of the law.

  “What’s on your mind, Mr. Torgerson?” Fogarty asked.

  “I got a job for you two boys.”

  “We can do most anything you want.”

  “I’m counting on it,” Torgerson said as they rode on through the strong smells of cattle and the gritty veils of dust.

  D.F. was one of those callow young men whose family had been broken up by the war. His father was killed at Corinth, and his mother had taken up with his uncle and several other men who had not gone to war, leaving Dan feeling abandoned and neglected. He had gotten into an argument with his uncle, Jesse Fogarty, and had shot him dead. His mother backed his claim of self-defense and D.F. had gotten out of that scrape. But the young man had found killing to his liking. He probably felt the government owed him something because they had taken away his father and made his mother into a whore. So he took to the owlhoot trail, along with his friend, an orphan kid whose parents had both been killed, and whose older sister had been abducted by Comanches during the war.

  Randy was an entirely different breed, however, than the likes of Dan Fogarty. Randy was smart, wise as a cur dog who knew how to rob and steal without getting seen or caught, and he had perfected his skills over time so that he always had money and food. But Torgerson knew Randy longed to be accepted by society, and while he taught D.F. and Abel Kane how to rob and steal, he secretly wished to earn a living as a rancher. When Torgerson caught him rustling cattle some years before, he had given the young man a piece of advice when turning him loose without hanging him or calling the law down on him.

  “If you ever want to join the society that cast you out, son, you come and see me. I’ll give you a job and teach you how to raise cows so you won’t never have to steal none ever again.”

  Apparently the advice had stuck because Randy now worked for him, and he had brought two good men with him, Abel Kane and Dan Fogarty. But Torgerson hadn’t hired him out of altruism, or any generosity connected with human kindness. He had hired Randy because of his larcenous past, just for this drive, because he wanted to beat Chad Becker and pursue his own path toward personal wealth. Torgerson, in a moment of self-examination, realized that he and Randy were both cut out of the same bolt. If Torgerson had been orphaned, he might have followed the same path as Clutter. But Torgerson had grown up with money. His father was a horse thief, and a good one, and when he was finally caught and hanged for his crimes, he left his family with two invaluable assets: land and money.

  Before he died, Olaf Torgerson had told his son that he stole horses for the thrill of it. “But I also wanted you and your mother to be proud people, to own land and to acquire monetary wealth. You’ve got the means, son; now make it count.”

  Torgerson had followed that advice, but he had also realized that, in the process of acquiring land and wealth, a man who had scruples was definitely handicapped. There were a lot of ways to steal, he had learned, which were not strictly against the law. To Curt Torgerson, money was power, and with power a man could steal without ever getting his hands too dirty.

  “I made money from nothing,” Olaf had told his son. “I sold horses to the army during the war. They never asked where I got them and I never told them. That was making money out of nothing, like picking wild grapes and making wine. But when you have money, that money can be used to beget more money. Down the line, nobody will ever ask you where you got your money. They won’t care. Money makes more friends than it does enemies. Money begets money. So that’s what I leave you, Curt. Money and land. They are your tools. Grow food on the land and people will give you more money. The more money you have the more land you can buy. The more land you have, the more things you can grow, whether it be cattle or cotton or corn.”

  Torgerson never forgot his father’s words, and he remembered them now as he formed a plan in his mind—a plan that would add to his wealth while keeping his own hands clean. With money, he could hire people who would dirty their hands while his remained clean. It was as simple as that, in Torgerson’s raging mind.

  “What is it you want us to do, Mr. Torgerson?” Clutter asked.

  “Let’s ride off farther from the herd so we can be by ourselves,” Torgerson said.

  The two young men followed Torgerson. He rode some distance from the herd, even though there was nobody near enough to hear them over the lowing of the cattle and the faint rumble they made as the drovers pushed them ever northward.

  When Torgerson reined up, the other two crowded their horses in close, eager to hear what he had to say. Torgerson could tell that they were proud to be singled out for a private conversation.

  “D.F., Randy, I’ve been keeping an eye on you two boys, and you make fine hands. But I’ve got a job for you that carries a lot more responsibility, and maybe some risk. Interested?”

  Randy and D.F. nodded.

  “I know you two are tight with Abel Kane, but I don’t want him to know anything about this just now. That all right with you?”

  “We don’t tell Abel everything we do,” Clutter said.

  “No, sir,” D.F. said.

  “Good. Because I’m going to make you two my bounty hunters. Do you know what that is?”
r />   Both Clutter and Fogarty shook their heads.

  “You got to be real good at this, but I think you two can handle the job all right. I’m going to pay you five dollars apiece extra for every X8 hand you bring down. How’s that sound to you?”

  “What do you mean ‘bring down?’ ” Clutter asked.

  “I want you to use your long rifles and shoot Becker’s drovers. Pick them off one by one, without getting caught.”

  “Oh boy,” D.F. said, his words more expressive of shock than pleasure.

  “That don’t seem like much for such a job, Mr. Torgerson,” Clutter said. “A man’s life ought to be worth more than five dollars. A sawbuck would sound a lot better to me.”

  Torgerson smiled. He knew he had them.

  “All right, Randy. Ten bucks for each X8 cowpoke you shoot.”

  “You want us to kill them, right?” D.F. said.

  Torgerson didn’t answer. Clutter looked at his friend and shook his head in disbelief.

  “Yeah, D.F., he wants us to put their lamps out.”

  “Oh, sure,” Fogarty said.

  “I’ll need proof,” Torgerson said.

  “Scalps?” Clutter asked, deadly serious.

  “No, of course not,” Torgerson said. “Just something that let’s me know you did your job.”

  “How about we bring you their shirts with a bullet hole and some blood on them? That do it?” Clutter said.

  Torgerson nodded. “Yep, that would do it,” he said. “I’ll give you ten dollars a shirt.”

  Clutter grinned. “When do you want us to start?” he asked.

  “You got plenty of ammunition for those long rifles?”

  “We got enough,” D.F. said. “And we’re both damned good shots.”

  “Then you two drift off by yourselves, head south. Find that X8 herd and start work. Don’t come back for a week. When you do and you bring me those shirts, I’ll pay you on the spot.”

  “Oh, boy,” D.F. said, this time, with glee.

  “And if you want to earn extra money, boys,” Torgerson said, “you bring me the shirt and hat of Jock Kane and I’ll pay you fifty dollars for them. I’ll pay you fifty dollars for the shirt and hat of Chad Becker, too.”