The Tall Men (10 page)

Nella Torneau, squinting to the same sun and south-reaching miles, saw only as far ahead as the easy swing of Ben Allison’s broad back, only as far behind as the blank set of Nathan Stark’s blunt-jawed face.

The man from Montana, peering expressionlessly southward, saw past and farther than any of them. Beyond Ben Allison. Beyond Fort Worth. Beyond the coming herd. And, seeing what lay there, nodded silently to himself.

All things come to him who rides last.

Nathan Stark was an old, old hand at handling the drag. The point and swing were for more reckless men, and simpler ones. Let them have it. Ride last, always last. Say much, mean little, do nothing. And wait.

The four o’clock daylight, running up gray and still from beyond the Sabine, made black skeletons of the maguey and cholla cactus. Its distant thinness brought the fading, farewell yelp of the last coyote retiring with the dawn.

The two horsemen sat their mounts on the low barranca overlooking the Big Bend flatlands of the North Trinity. Below them, as far into the river bottom mists as the peering eye could carry, restless with the spreading movement and musical bawling of the morning rise, the vast herd was getting to its feet.

Above the ground-deep rumble of the longhorn horde’s lurching, rump-first rise, the jingling tinkle of the bellmare echoed briefly: the night wrangler bringing in the day-mounts. Across the stirring herd, the mushroom string of the chuck and bedding wagons cleared and grew distinct against the silhouetting blackness of the river willows. Shortly, the cook’s breakfast fires were pushing back what little of the darkness remained in the Trinity’s sprawling bend.

Clint fought down the awesome ferment of a stomach which, like Lazarus, would not lie down and stay dead. He strained his tortured eyes once more across the packed ranks of the great herd, saw, unhappily, that the cattle were now beginning to mill and push out demandingly against the thin circle of cursing riders who sought to hold them hard
bunched in the bend, and to prevent them from breaking out and beginning to graze.

The wayward half of the Allison freres had spent the last night, none too figuratively, in Fort Worth’s ample bosom. He had ridden into the holding camp three blind staggers and a bourbon stumble ahead of the dreaded coming of the sun. He was, accordingly, in no mood and less condition to face a weanling calf, let alone three thousand tailed up, travel-ready mosshorns.

His cotton-mouthed inquiry of the nobler brother expressed the doubt succinctly, if somewhat sourly.

“Well, ’Sam,’ now you’ve gathered your three thousand precious goddam San Saba steers, you got any deathless bright ideas what in Christ’s everlastin’ name you want did with the bastards?”

“Just one,” said Ben Allison tensely, excited mind and sweeping gaze far from Brother Clint and the evil belly of the morning after. He straightened in the saddle, standing ramrod thin and tall in the stirrups. His glance swept for the last time across the angry bellowed, horn tossed dust of the bedding ground. Then, deep voiced, he flung the long delayed excitement of the order to the waiting cowboys below, his narrow face flushed and dark with a fierceness Clint had never seen there.

“Let ’em go!” he shouted wildly to the watching cowboys. Then, black hat swept off in wide-arched, armflung finality.
“Point ’em north—!”

That spring of 1866 was wet. Chickasaw Billings, at fifty the oldest man in the crew by twenty years, could remember nothing like it. Every stream was either up or on the booming rise, and the leaden, mud-slogged miles between rivers were literally
“waded” by the exhausted cattle. Clint, staying on his pony to grab his supper off the chuckwagon tailgate, rather than get down into the hub-deep slop washing past its wheels in the rain-driven darkness, chose a half-floating camp three days north of the Canadian River to open an impromptu forum of unprintable Texas opinion.

“This here, gents,” he called across the slash and winnow of the rain between him and his bedraggled companions, “is the first friggin’ herd ever to swim from the San Saba to Sedalia without techin’ bottom.”

“Shut up, and don’t git the salt wet!” snapped Saleratus McGivern, grabbing the battered shaker from Clint and sheltering it to his flour-sacked bosom.

“I allow,” continued Clint, unabashed by the dough wrangler’s assault, “that we ain’t seen their feet fer six weeks. But I kin tell you, gents, they ain’t clove no more. They’re webbed like a goddam mallard’s, and I seen three big dun steers yestidday was sproutin’ fins along their dorsal verteebrays and whippin’ their behinds from one side t’other like a bigmouth bass goin’ upstream in shallow water.”

“It’s the gospel,” solemnly averred Charley Stringer, a wizened hand from Uvalde County. “I went to strip a fresh heifer was bawlin’ to be milked this mawnin’ and so he’p me I got four and one-half gallons of grade-a cavvyair.”

“ ’Tain’t nothin’ to what I seen on night herd long about two
A.M.
yestidday mawnin’,” drawled Waco Fentriss, “You all know how blamed stubborn a damn steer is, how the bastards’ll lay down on you wherever you stop ’em, no matter what’s under ’em? Well, after a couple of circles I seen the main herd was purty well bedded down, there bein’ no more’n two
foot of water runnin’ acrost the high ground they was held on. But yonder out in the middle of the main bunch I seen a wide patch of water, open and clear it was, and a b’ilin’ and a bubblin’ away somethin’ fierce. Well, I pushed through to where it was and sure enough no sooner did I git there than my damn hoss stepped off the edge of an arroyo, puttin’ us clean under in ten foot of water.”

Waco paused, blankly eying the bounce of the rain in his empty plate.

Slim Blanchard, bone-wet, weary, suffering alike from the incessant rain and six weeks of greasefried food, belched the expected query more in relief to acid indigestion than interested curiosity. “Well, what the goddam hell is so remarkable about that?”

“Nothin’, nothin’ atall,” shrugged Waco pleasantly. “But I must allow it’s the fust time I ever see three hundred head of cows bedded down clean under water like that—and every last one of them sound asleep with a long stem of hollowjoint grass stuck in their mouths a’breathin’ out it atop the water. You see, it was them there breathin’-straws of their’s was settin’ all thet bi’lin’ and bubblin’ I seen out in thet open water.”

“If there’s anythin’ I cain’t stand,” lamented Hogjaw Bivins, “its a goddam, lamebutt Lampasas liar. No more imagination nor real understandin’ of the wonders of nature than a son-of-a-bitchin’ toad. Them three hundred steers
you
seen,” he sneered at Waco, “wasn’t usin’ them hollowjoint grass stems to breathe through. They was employin’ them to put oxyjen into the cussed water so’s them four hundred head I was holdin’ directly under your three hundred wouldn’t have to come up for air. Fact is,
old hoss, them steers of yourn was standin’ on the shoulders of mine.”

“Well, anyhow,” broke in mild-eyed Luke Easterday, a thirty-year “oldster” from Paint Rock, “I reckon neither of you got clean to the bottom of that draw or you’d have saw me and my eight hundred as was—”

“Likely,” Clint interrupted in righteous indignation to Luke’s claim, “you’re about to say you was the son of a bitch had them eight hundred standin’ on my twelve hundred. Now afore you fly up and puff out, jest remember we ain’t got but two hundred head left and the water’s gittin’ deeper all the time.”

“I reckon,” philosophized the defeated Waco, “that you are right, and that likewise the fust liar don’t stand a spavined chance. Besides, you’re Ben’s brother and couldn’t tell a lie. I do allow, howsomever, we kin all agree she’s been a tolerably moist spring."

So ran the trail, the good Texas tempers rising above the bad weather, the tough Texas owners of those mercurial spirits taking all that a northern God who was certainly no patron of once-Confederate traildrivers could throw at them.

There is little ground to be gained lingering over the trail-side evils which befell the first five hundred miles of Ben Allison’s adventure. The thunderstorms raged one atop the other, each new earth-shaking rumble and sky-forking lightning bolt starting a fresh stampede. What little of the way to Kansas the cattle didn’t swim, they ran. The grass, coarse and stemmy from the torrential downpours, would not make beef and the herd was soon rib thin and runny boweled from its reedy keep.

The only known trail up and across the panhandle plains was the one they presently followed, the Sedalia Trail, leading to Missouri and the Mississippi River markets.

It was Nathan Stark’s plan, soberly opposed by Ben, to follow this trail to the Kansas line before turning west and north. The Montanan argued that if they were to find themselves with a herd that could not be pushed farther, they could at least sell out to the Missouri buyers and avoid complete ruin. It was a hard business view, not to be argued down by a simple Texas cowboy’s hunch that the herd would have been better drifted straight across the unknown Indian Territory. Nonetheless, Stark, carefully fair about it, put the matter to a company vote. The drive crew, conscious of the raunchy, failing condition of both feed and herd, their eyes on their paychecks and the hell with making history, voted Ben down.

Now, nearing the Kansas line, the great herd slowed. Then, within two days, stopped altogether.

Ahead of them and on both sides, east and west, as far as dust-reddened eye could see, stretched an endless, milling jam of longhorns. The grass, for as many miles as Ben and Stark could ride in the late afternoon of that second day, was eaten to its dying roots, and the incessant, hoarse bawl of hungry cattle was as strident and miles distant at midnight as it was at high noon. Before dusk fell that second evening, Ben counted no less than twelve big herds damming the trail ahead.

After a wordless, hurried supper, he and Stark rode out to the nearest camp. Their blunt questions brought equally abbreviated answers.

The outfit they were talking to, and all of those in the trail beyond, were Texans. Clearly, Stark & Company had not been the only boys west of the Big Muddy with the idea of cashing in on the northern, greenback-belly for good beef. Every ex-Confederate cowman in the Lone Star state that was hale enough to straddle a cutting horse and could raise credit enough to put a herd on the road was currently holding his mortgaged cattle between them and the Kansas line. There were no less than two hundred and fifty thousand head packed in ahead of them, and some boys, who had ridden north to the last camp, guessed it at half again that many. Call it a quarter of a million, mister. You’d be on the safe side by sixteen herds and nobody calling you a liar.

And why, you say? Why all the jam-up? What had happened to the Sedalia trailhead? Simple, mister. Ever hear of the Jayhawkers?

Ben nodded darkly.

What Southerner hadn’t?

If Quantrill, Todd and Bloody Bill Anderson with their Missouri Irregulars had earned the gratitude of the South through their guerrilla operations along the Kansas border during the late war, and had earned in the process the dread title of Missouri Bushwhackers, certain sanguinary gentlemen from the free state of Kansas had rated equal bloody distinction serving the cause of the Union—and been dubbed for their efforts Jayhawkers.

Jennison, Jenkins and John Brown were names as dark with hatred of the South as were Quantrill and the others bright with Dixie’s misguided, guerrilla love.

The rest was grimly succinct.

The border war,
sub rosa
and savage, was still on.
The remnants of the southern guerrillas headed by the lately risen triumvirate of three unknown newcomers, Jesse and Frank James, and one Thomas Coleman Younger, were being hunted down throughout Missouri’s Clay and Jackson Counties. The Jayhawkers, outlawed alike with their Bushwhacker counterparts by the surrenders of Nashville and Appomattox, had sought eagerly and with quasi-official blessing, for southern fields upon which to vent their recently acquired trades of murder and extortion.

They had fallen upon a hell-sent, defenseless answer in the flood of Texas cattlemen rolling up the old Sedalia Trail.

There were probably a dozen jayhawking crews in operation along the line, numbering in the many hundreds of desperate membership. But the prime bunch was that headed by the sinister Alvah Jenkins.

Their game and its rules were simple enough.

For Texans, and any number could play, those rules were precisely, three. Rule One: a man could stay with his herd doing nothing, and watch it starve on the eaten-out range south of the blockade. Rule Two: he could pay a passage tax of two dollars a head and move his cattle on through to market. The third rule, which the hotheaded southern cowboys had instantly drawn up when faced with the first two, was the simplest of all. A man could, if unsettled enough between the ears, oil up his belt guns and drive on through, blue-belly bandits be damned and three cheers for the Stars and Bars.

Of the first six outfits which had played it according to Confederate Hoyle, one had outdealt the stacked Yankee deck and made it through to Sedalia. Five others were last seen starting north, had evaporated, along with all their cattle, somewhere
between Montgomery County and the Big Muddy. The odds were questionable, even for Texans.

Rule One being out, since no cattleman could sit by and see his stuff die for want of grass where there was aplenty of it thirty miles north, and Rule Three having been killed aborning, Rule Two, the pay-and-pass-on option, had been briefly tried. A dozen outfits had scraped up the bribe, gotten through to the Missouri and Iowa buyers above the line, found that their stock, watery-grass thin and grading three cents better than wolfbait, would not pay out the added two dollars a head.

The owners, madder and wiser and in hock over their sixteen-inch Texas boottops, had drifted back through the congested camps on their ways south. The word they cursed and left behind for what it was worth, was get out and go home and leave the goddam cattle where they stood. There were up to three hundred thousand steers log jammed against the Jayhawk deadline, and at two dollars a head they weren’t worth driving to the next creek let alone to St. Louie or Des Moines.

It was a darkfaced Ben Allison who sided Nathan Stark on the silent ride back to the wagons.

They were not only cut off and trapped in the backhouse. But if they didn’t move fast, and damn fast, they were apt to find the stinking shanty shoved over on top of them, with them left standing up to their ambitious ears in what was under it.