Hell on the Prairie (6 page)

“
Did, eh? Well, you just hang onto
them things.”

Chill Craven, one of the drovers, sidled his
horse over to where he could see the big man’s face. “I know that
rannie,” he said. “Know him to see him, anyways. That’s Orville
Hicks, little brother to Melvin Hicks. Some say you get on the
wrong side of one of them Hicks, you gotta deal with them all.”

“
He come thieving my cows,” Brodrick
said. “He got some of what he deserved.” He reined his stallion
around. “Leave him lie,” he said. “And Craven, you come with me.
We’ll go have a look at the horse Billy shot. The rest of you help
Billy and Reckon get back to the chuckwagon. The herd’s quiet. Soon
as I get back, we’ll move ’em five or six miles north.” Brodrick
and Craven rode off, leaving Reckon and Billy with one horse,
flanked by Jerry MacGuire on one side and Terrel Davis on the
other. The Old Woman had hot coffee on when they got to the
chuckwagon, but then, if the wagon wasn’t moving, the coffee pot
was always hot.

Billy put Berry back with the remuda, where
he caught and saddled another of his string, a lineback dun he
called Wellan, and rode out to help with the herd. The Old Woman
would take care of Reckon, but the cows needed someone to look
after them. That’s what drovers were for.

Broderick came back to camp with a saddle
and blanket, a Henry rifle and scabbard, and a Shawk and McClanahan
percussion pistol, .36 caliber. “We’ll keep the saddle, Billy,” he
said. “You want this Henry? Got a decent saddle scabbard. Never
hurts to have a long gun, and this one uses the same cartridge as
your short gun.”

Billy picked up the Henry. It was a heavy
gun for a 15-year-old, but it felt good in his hands. “You gonna
just give this here Henry rifle to me, boss?”

“
You earned it,” Brodrick said. “And
from now on, you ride swing east of the herd, you hear?”

“
I hear you, boss.” Billy couldn’t
help but smile. He was out of the dust cloud the herd raised when
it moved. Well, almost out.

Brodrick let out a holler. “Get to it. We
gotta get this herd to Wolf Creek.”

4

Brodrick paid the Cherokees a dime a head so
they’d let the herd pass through the Indian Nations. He never tried
to track down the beeves cut out by the Hicks gang. “Be more
trouble than it’s worth,” he said. “Bound to be gun play if we
catch up to them, and it’s more important to get these beeves to
Wolf Creek anyways.”

Reckon Willis was back to driving the herd
by the time they reached Wolf Creek, not far into Kansas.

The Old Woman parked the chuckwagon next to
a stand of box elders. Billy gathered firewood, as he’d promised
back when the Old Woman gave him the leather for a holster. It
wasn’t a fancy one, but it kept his converted Remington Army in
easy reach, and he’d had a little time to practice with the
six-gun. Nothing special, and Billy had no intention of becoming a
pistoleer, but he’d use the Remington if he had to, like he’d used
it at Red River.

Billy released the paint into the remuda.
For once, he didn’t have a night watch. He went and stood on the
bank of Wolf Creek. On the far side, there was hardly anything to
see. Holding corrals. A couple of tents. A frame building of some
kind.

When Billy got back to the chuckwagon, a
stranger stood talking to Brodrick. He was a straight-standing man.
Maybe a soldier, or someone who’d been a soldier. After Billy got a
plate of beef and beans from the Old Woman, he sidled over close
enough to hear what the man was saying.

“
Walt, I tell you. This is gonna be
the closest place to load beeves for Chicago. There’ll be a
railhead here early next year. Kirt Evans –he’s a railroad man
–told me.”

“
I hear you, McElroy. But I got cows
here right now. Cain’t hold them here for a year or
whatever.”

“
Look. I told you I’d buy your beeves,
and I will. Like I said, I’ll give you forty bucks a head. I just
can’t give all of it to you at once.”

“
So how much are we talking about?”
Brodrick didn’t look pleased at McElroy’s statement. He stooped,
plucked a long stem of foxtail, and started chewing at the
end.

“
Twenty bucks now. Twenty more when
you come with another herd next year.”

“
Shit.”

“
Not a bad deal, I’d say. What’d you
pay for the beeves? Four dollars? Five? Even if I welched on the
second twenty, which I won’t, you’d make a good return on your
herd.”

“
Shit.”

“
Walter Brodrick. How long have you
known me?”

“
Since West Point.”

“
Have I ever lied to you?”

“
No.”

“
I’m not going to start now, either.
Even if you did wear gray and me blue.”

Brodrick tossed the chewed foxtail stem
away. With his head bowed, he kicked at a clod and sent it
skittering out into the dark. He heaved a sigh. “I’ll do it,
McElroy, just because it’s you.”

“
Good,” McElroy said. He shoved out a
firm hand.

Brodrick shook it. “We’ll start moving the
beeves across Wolf Creek in the morning.”

“
Put them in the holding pens,”
McElroy said.

“
You got it,” Brodrick said. “Have
your counters ready. The steers’ll be there before
noon.”

“
Good enough. I’ll be waiting.”
McElroy tossed the dregs in his tin coffee cup into the fire. “Good
cuppa, Sullivan,” he said. He tossed the cup in the dishpan and
saluted Brodrick. “Walter,” he said.

“
Daniel,” Brodrick said, giving him
the same salute.

McElroy mounted a big dappled sorrel and
splashed across the creek.

“
Sullivan?” Billy laughed. “Sullivan?
That McElroy man called you Sullivan.”

“
Mind yer own business,” the Old Woman
said.

Billy chuckled. Every chuckwagon cook was
the Old Woman. “I’ll never call you by that name,” he said. He put
his tin plate in the dishpan and went to look for a soft place to
bed down.

To Billy, it seemed he’d no more than closed
his eyes than the Old Woman was beating on a pan and hollering for
everybody to get up and eat or he’d toss breakfast into Wolf Creek.
Billy had his bay horse saddled and ready, so all he had to do was
grab a couple of biscuits, pull them apart, add three slices of
bacon each, and climb aboard.

Taking bites of biscuit and bacon, Billy
steered the bay remuda horse out and around the grazing herd, two
thousand head and some, spread out and cropping at buffalo grass,
covered a pretty big chunk of territory. Billy had not yet reached
his eastern swing position when he heard Brodrick’s deep voice ring
out.

“
Roll ’em. Roll ’em. Get these lazy
critters across Wolf Creek. We ain’t got all morning. Roll
’em!”

Billy shoved the last hunk of biscuit and
bacon into his mouth, loosed the leather strap that held his
lariat, and gathered the hard rope into his chapped and callused
hands. He slapped the lariat against his chaps. “Heeyah.
Heeyah!”

The nearest steers moved away from the bay,
but immediately went back to cropping buffalo grass. Billy kneed
the bay around, keeping him pushing the steers north toward the
Wolf Creek crossing.

Dust began to rise.

Months up the trail first opened by Jesse
Chisholm, and there had been no rain to speak of. Lucky. No rain
means no lightning to scare the spooky longhorns into a stampede.
Besides the little run started by the Hicks gang back at the Red,
Brodricks’ herd hadn’t stampeded even once. Despite walking nearly
a thousand miles all told, the longhorns didn’t have the gaunt look
of a hustled herd. They had meat on their bones. McElroy was
getting a good herd.

“
Heeyah. Heeyah.” Billy slapped his
coiled lariat at a laggard steer. The big longhorn turned his head
and gave the bay horse the bad eye. Billy slapped him again. “Move
on there, you brainless hunk of meat. Heeyah. Heeyah.”

The steer decided picking up his pace was
the better part of valor. He lifted his tail and trotted off,
leaving splotches of manure in his wake.

Billy chuckled. They’d been trailing the
herd so long that they knew every steer by sight and hand tagged
many with disrespectful names. The one that had just splotched the
grazing ground with green shit was exactly that –Shitface, and he’d
be Shitface until the day he went under the butcher’s knife. Billy
wondered for a moment if the steer’s meat would carry the fetid
aroma of his manure. “Heeyah. Heeyah.” He slapped Shitface
again.

The first steers waded into Wolf Creek
crossing. The stream ran fast, but was no more than ten inches to a
foot deep, and the bottom was gravel rather than shifty sand like
that of the Red River crossing.

About an hour after the lead steer stepped
into Wolf Creek, Billy reined his remuda bay into the crossing as
well. The steers walked readily across, as there was nothing to eat
in the creek and lush grass beckoned on the far side.

The bay stopped and took a long drink of
creek water. “That’s a good boy,” Billy said. “Drink up. The
water’s free.”

“
Heeyah. Heeyah.” Drag riders pushed
the last of the herd into the creek as Billy’s bay humped up the
far bank.

“
We’re gonna hafta cut ’em up,”
Brodrick shouted. “Four holding pens. A quarter of the herd in each
pen. Roll ’em out!”

He rode up to Billy. “You ride through,
Billy. Cut the herd in half. Move.”

Billy turned his bay horse into the herd. He
used his lariat on the longhorns coming up on him, tapping them on
the forehead and making them flinch back and turn inward. The drag
riders had stopped pushing at the rear end of the herd, so those
Billy turned back milled into a compact mass. They stopped and went
to cropping at the buffalo grass.

On the far side of the herd, Billy turned
back. He and the bay pushed the forward half of the longhorns
toward the holding pens. Two had gates open, so it wasn’t hard work
to haze about five hundred steers into each.

McElroy’s men straddled the pole corral
fences, counting longhorns as they came through the gates.

“
Five oh three,” one
shouted.

“
Five sixteen,” hollered
another.

“
All right,” Brodrick said to the
drovers. “Let’s get the rest of ’em.”

In all, Brodrick’s herd counted out at two
thousand and thirty-two head of Texas longhorns. All twenty-five of
the steers he’d bought from Billy were among them.

Daniel McElroy’s operation was housed in a
place with plank walls and a canvas roof. That’s where Brodrick
paid his drovers. As he was youngest, Billy came last. Brodrick sat
at a long wooden table with benches on each side. “Billy, I figure
you at a month riding drag and nigh on to two months on swing. I
put your pay at ninety-five dollars and I’ll round that out to an
even one hundred, because of the grit you showed at Red River. You
can keep the Henry and two of the horses in your remuda string.
That good with you?”

Billy stammered. “Sh . . . sh . . . sure.”
He had no idea swing riders got more than drag riders.

Brodrick put four gold eagles on the table,
then an eagle, a half eagle, and some folding money. “You take
care, son. People here know you cowboys got paid, and they’re gonna
try their level best to get that money from you, and they don’t
care a lick about being fair about it.”

“
Yessir.”

While he was outside getting Paint, his
first choice from the remuda, Billy took a minute to make sure no
one was looking. He pulled the Henry, shoved the four gold eagles
into the end of the saddle scabbard, and put the rifle back.

The frame building turned out to have a
saloon on the ground floor and rooms on the upper. There was even a
bath out back, shielded by canvas.

The first place B Bar riders went was the
frame building. Most went straight for the saloon. Billy and
Reckon, who still had a limp, opted for a bath, even though they
had no clean clothes to change into. After that they went to the
saloon. The sign said it was the Lucky Break. “Hey, Reckon. You
ever been in a saloon?” Billy asked.

“
Hell, yes. Um. Well, I looked in the
door to one.”

“
Shee-it.”

“
All the B Bar hands is in there, I
reckon. Let’s go get in on the fun.”

Only ten B Bar cowboys in the saloon, but
they made enough noise for twice their number and more. Two were
bucking the tiger at the roulette wheel. Three were in a game of
cards at one of the tables. Three scattered along the bar with
women by their sides. Women!

Billy remembered what Long Tom said about
the girl in San Antone, the one called Rose. He looked again, and
sure enough, Long Tom stood at the bar with a woman pressing up
against him.

Reckon bellied up to the bar like a seasoned
drinker, even though it was no more than a plank laid across three
barrels. Billy stood next to him.

“
What’ll it be?” a man asked from
behind the bar.

Billy looked at Reckon. “Couple of whiskeys,
I reckon,” Reckon said.

“
Good thing,” the man said. “Whiskey’s
all we got.” He used a dipper to get whiskey from an open barrel
and put two fingers worth in two glasses. “A buck fer the two,” he
said.

Reckon paid him with paper. “You get the
next round,” he said to Billy, “bottoms up.”

Reckon opened his mouth wide, tossed the
contents of the glass inside, and swallowed. Tears came to his eyes
and he coughed against the back of his hand. “Not bad,” he said
when he was able to speak again. “Not bad.”