Killoe (1962) (11 page)

At the nooning the ribs of the cattle stood out, and their eyes were wild. The brindle steer stared about for something to attack, and the weary ponies had scarcely the agility to move out of the way.

We made coffee, and the riders came back to the fire one by one, almost
fa
lling from their horses, red-eyed with weariness. Yet there was no complaint. Conchita was there, her eyes great dark hollows, but she smiled at me, and shook her head when I suggested she had done enough.

Foley came to me. "Dan," he said, "we're all in. The horses, I mean. We just made it here."

"'All right . . . let's load everything into two wagons."

Miguel hitched himself to the tail-gate of the wagon. "I can ride," he said. "I prefer to ride."

Nor would he listen to anything I said, and in truth it was a help to have him on horseback, although he would be hard put to take care of himself, without trying to help us. The goods, which had thinned down owing to our eating into the supplies, were loaded into two wagons, and the team of the abandoned wagon was divided between the other two.

The bitter dust rose in clouds from the feet of the cattle, the sun was a copper flame in a brassy sky, the distance danced with heat waves and mirage, The cattle grew wearier and wearier with each succeeding mile; they lagged and had to be driven on, slapped with coiled riatas and forced back into the herd.

Here and there an aging cow fell out of the herd, collapsed, and died. Our throats burned with thirst and inhaled dust, and our shouts mingled with the anguished bawling of the thirsty cattle. And there was no respite. We pushed on and on, finding no convenient place to stop until hours past noon.

We stopped then, and a few of the cattle fell to the ground, and one horse died.

The sky was a ceiling of flame, sweat streaked our bodies and made strange signs on the dusty flanks of the cattle.

As the suffering of the cattle increased, the tempers of the men shortened. Here and there I lent a hand, moving twice as much as any other hand, working desperately, the alkali dust prickling my skin, my eyes squinted against sun and trickling sweat.

It was brutal work, and yet through it all Conchita was busy. She did as much as any hand, and asked no favors. At times I even saw Miguel hazing some steer into line.

Wild-eyed steers plunged and fought, sometimes staggering and falling, but we pushed them on, and then I began moving out ahead of the herd, scouting for the poisonous water-holes of which I had been warned by Tap Henry.

. A thousand times I wished he had been with us, a thousand times I wished for an extra hand. For three days we did not sleep. We gulped coffee, climbed back into the saddle, rode half blind with sweat and dust, fighting the cattle into line, forcing them to move, for their only chance of survival lay in moving and getting them to water.

The brindle steer stayed in the lead. He pushed on grimly, taking on a fierce, relentless personality of his own, as though he sensed our desperation and our need for help.

And every day the sun blazed down, and long into the night we pushed them on.

Cattle dropped out, stood with wide-spread legs and hanging heads beside the trail.

How many had we lost? How many horses worked to a frazzle?

We lost all idea of
time
, for the cattle were almost impossible to handle, and we fought them desperately through the heat and the dust.

Pushing on alone, I found the Mustang Ponds, but they were merely shallow basins of cracked dry mud, rapidly turning to dust. There had been no water here in months.

It was the same with the Flatrock Holes, and there was nothing else this side the river, except far and away to the northwest what were known as the Wild Cherry Holes . . . but they were off our route, and of uncertain nature.

Staring into the heat waves, it came upon me to wonder that I was here. What is it that moves a man west? I had given no thought to such a thing, although the loneliness of the far plains and the wide sky around move a man to wonder.

We had to come west or be crowded. As for the Holt crowd, we could have fought them better there than on the road. Was not this move something else? Maybe we just naturally wanted to go west, to open new country.

There have always been wandering men, but western men were all wandering men. Many a time I've seen a man pull out and leave good grass and a built house to try his luck elsewhere.

Twice I came upon alkali ponds, the water thick with the white alkali, thicker than thick soup, enough to kill any animal that drank from it.

I pushed on, and topped out on a rise and saw before me the tar dark thread of growth along the Pecos. My horse stretched his neck yearningly toward the far-off stream, but I got down and rinsed my handkerchief twice in his mouth after soaking it from
my
canteen. Then we turned back.

We turned back, the dun and myself, and we had only some sixteen or seventeen miles to go to reach the herd.

It was a sickening sight, a dread and awful sight to see them coming. From a conical hill
beside the trail I watched them
.

Pa was off in front, still sitting straight in his saddle, although I knew the weariness, the exhaustion that was in him. Behind him, maybe twenty feet, and leading the herd by a good fifty yards, was that brindle steer.

And then Jim Poor and Ben Cole, pinching the lead steers together to keep them pointed down the trail.

Over all hovered a dense cloud of white dust. Alkali covered them like snow. It covered the herd, the riders, their horses . . it covered the wagons too.

Back along the line I could see cattle, maybe a dozen within the range of my eyes.

Two were down, several were standing, one looked about to fall.

But they were coming on, and I walked the dun down the steep slope to meet them.

"Pa, we'll take the best of them and head for the river. I dislike to split the herd, but if we can get some of them to water, we can save them."
Most of them were willing to stand when we stopped, but we cut out the best of them, the ones with the most stuff left, and, with Pa leading off, four of the boys started hustling them toward Horsehead on the Pecos.
The day faded in a haze of rose and gold, great red arrows shot through the sky, piercing the clouds that dripped pinkish blood on the clouds below. The vast brown-gray emptiness of the plain took on a strange enchantment, and clouds piled in weird formations, huge towers of cumulus reaching far, far into the heavens. Many a time I had heard talk of such things, the kinds of []clouds and the winds of the world, and I knew the wonder of it. But no evening had I seen like that last evening before Horsehead, no vaster sky or wider plain, no more strange enchantment of color in the sky, and on the plains too.
Pulling up alongside the wagons, I told Mrs. Foley, "Keep it rolling.
No stops this side of Horsehead!"

She nodded grimly, land drove on, shouting at the tired |ii horses. Frank Kelsey mopped the sweat from his face and grinned at me. "Hell,
ain't
it, boy? I never seen the like!"

"Keep rolling!"
I said, and rode back to where Miguel was coming along, with Concihita holding him on his horse.
"You, too," I said. "Pay no attention to the herd. If you can, go on to the river."

The crimson and gold faded from the sky, the blues became deeper. There was a dull purple along the far-off hills, and a faint purplish tone to the very air, it seemed.

We moved the remaining cattle into the darkening day, into the slow-coming night.

|

Under the soft glory of the skies, they moved in a slow-plodding stream, heads down, tongues lolling and dusty. They moved like drunken things, drunken with exhaustion, dying on their feet of thirst, but moving west.

The riders sagged wearily in their saddles, their eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion, but westward we moved. The shrill yells were gone, even the bawling of the cattle had ceased, and they plodded on through the utter stillness of the evening.

A heifer dropped back, and I circled and slapped her with the coiled rope. She scarcely flinched, and only after the dun nipped at her did she move, trancelike and staggering.

More cattle had fallen. Twice I stopped to pour a little from my canteen into the mouths of fallen cows . . . both of them got up. Some of the others would be revived by the cool night air and would come on because they knew nowhere else to go.

And then the breeze lifted, bringing with it the smell of the river.

Heads came up, they started to walk faster, then to trot, and of a sudden they burst into a headlong run, a wild stampede toward the water that lay ahead. Some fell, but they struggled up and continued on.

There was the hoofs' brief thunder, then silence, and the smell of dust.

Alone I rode the drag of a herd long gone. Alone, in the gathering night. And there was no sound then but the steady clop-clop of the dun's hard hoofs upon the baked ground, and the lingering smell of the dust.

The stars were out when I came up to the Pecos, and there our wagons were, and our fire.

When the dun stopped, its legs were trembling. I stepped down heavily and leaned for a moment against the horse, and then I slowly stripped the saddle and bridle from him and turned him loose to roll, which was all the care most mustangs wanted or would accept.

Zebony cane in to the fire. "They've drunk, and we're holding them back from the river."

"Good . . . no water until daybreak." Sitting down near the fire I took the Patterson from its scabbard and began to clean it. No natter what, that Patterson had to be in shape.

"'I want a four-man guard on those cattle," I said, "and one man staked out away from camp, to listen. This is an Indian crossing too. The Comanches used it long before any white man came into this country, and they still use it."

Mrs. Stark brought me a cup of
coffee
. "Drink this," she said. "You've earned it."

It was coffee, all right, laced with a shot of Irish, and it set me up somewhat.

So I finished cleaning my rifle, then went to the wagon and dug out my duffel-bag.

From it I took my two pistols. One I belted on, the other I shoved down behind my belt with the butt right behind my vest.

When I came back to the fire, Pa was there. He looked at that gun on my hip, but he said nothing at all. Tom Sandy looked around at me. "Never knew you to wear a handgun," he said, "you expecting trouble?"

"You're tired, Tom," I said, "but you get mighty little sleep tonight. I want all the barrels filled now."

"'Now?"

Tom stared at me. "You crazy? Everybody is dead tired.
Why, you couldn't-- "Yes, I can.
You get busy---every barrel full before we sleep." And they filled them, too.

It was past one o'clock in the morning when I finally stretched out, slowly straightening my stiff muscles, trying to let the tenseness out of my body, but it was several minutes before I could sort of let myself go... and then I slept.

The first thing I heard when I awoke was the water, the wonderful, wonderful sound of water. Even the Pecos, as treacherous a stream as ever was.., but it was water.

The sky was faintly gray. I had been asleep almost two hours, judging by the Big Dipper. lolling over, I sat up and put on my hat. Everything was still.

I pulled on my boots, belted on my gun, and walked over to the fire.

What I had believed to be trees and brush along the line of the
Pecos
was actually the shadow east by the high bank. The river at this point was destitute of anything like trees or shrubs. The only growth along it was a thin line of rushes. It lay at the bottom of a trough that was from six to ten feet deep. The river itself was about a hundred feet wide and no more than four feet deep at the deepest point. The plain above was of thin, sandy soil, and there was only a sparse growth of greasewood, dwarf mesquite, and occasional clumps of bear grass.

Zebony came up to the fire and sat his horse while drinking a cup of coffee. It was quiet.., mighty quiet.

The cattle, still exhausted, were bedded down and content to rest, although occasionally one of them would start for the river and had to be headed back.

"You going to lay up here?"

"No."

Tim Foley looked around at me. Tim was a good man, but sometimes he thought I was too young for my job. Me, I've never seen that years made a man smart, for simply getting older doesn't mean much unless a man learns something meanwhile.

"We're going to finish crossing, and then go upstream a few miles." I gestured around me at the row of skulls marking the crossing, and at the crossing itself. "We don't want to run into Comanches."

Zeb started to turn his horse and stopped. "Dan . . . I" Something in his voice spun me around. A party of riders were coming toward us. Near as I could make out, there were six or seven.

"You wearing a gun, Tim?"

"I'm holdin' one." That would be Zeno Yearly.

Behind me there was a stirring in the camp. I glanced across the river where the herd was lying. Four men would be over there . . . but what about the fifth man who was staked out? Had he seen these riders? Or had they found him first?