The Tall Men (6 page)

“You, stranger—” She turned on Stark, her short words giving no lie to the dislike of him already forming in her. “Get off your dead end and go help Tom tote in some limbs. Don’t strain your milk now. Let him heft the heavy ones.”

Fascinated, Nathan Stark followed Tom out into the trees. He could not get his eyes or his mind off the strange, tall girl who talked like a logging camp bully, yet moved about with a sinuous, she-wolf voluptuousness more wantonly female than any woman he had ever seen.

Long after Ben and Clint had lost themselves in the blood and sweating blasphemy of the mule butchering, and Nella Torneau had forgotten him in the work of preparing the fireside against the rewards of that butchering, his eyes continued to follow the girl. He had never been this close to her kind before, nor in fact close to any woman before. Nathan Stark was twenty-eight and had never had a woman of any kind. There had been no time for one in his grubbing, heavy-handed quest to make of himself a rich and powerful man.

Now, suddenly, he wanted Nella Torneau more than all the gold in Alder Gulch—or as close as he could come to wanting
anything
more than gold.

And he decided as quickly, and in his blunt-jawed, inexorable way, that he would have her. Peculiar to that willful, blind way, and to his seeing in it only the purposes and ends of his own insatiable hunger for self and success, the decision itself was tantamount to possession.

The girl
was
his.

No one else should ever have her.

The ravenous disappearance of the first fifteen pounds of half-roasted mule tenderloin, plus a stout, bitter brew of willowbark tea concocted by the wilderness-wise Ben, brought the lowered spirits of the starving emigrant party back to the halfmast of rearoused hope. The presence of the two tall Texans, both clearly born to and masters of the heartless country surrounding them, worked an additional palliative of its own. Confidence and good humor alike returned, and within the hour the full story of the camp’s desperate plight was out.

They were Kansans, as Ben had suspected. Their goal had been Oregon but owing to the risk of late winter storms inherent in the calculated gamble of a February start from the settlements, they had taken the southern route of the Smokey Hill Stageline. They had planned to leave it and turn north along the Rockies, hoping an early spring would catch up with them en route. Nella Torneau had joined them at the last stage station on the Smokey Hill run, before that road turned south. She had left the stage for reasons of her own, neither asked nor offered. She had simply sought and paid well for passage north. And she had proved the sole stroke of good fortune encountered on the journey. There was no mistaking the sober respect with which the emigrant men acknowledged the fact, nor the grateful nods with which their womenfolk agreed to it.

But the luck of Nella Torneau was not enough.

The expected spring weather failed to match miles with their weary progress. The feared late winter storms closed the Denver and old Fort St. Vrain wagonroads, driving them back south and forcing them to seek refuge at the nearest known outpost—Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas. They had missed the Bent’s trail somewhere south of the Smokey Hill road, had wound up four days ago at Ludlow’s Bend and Timpas Creek.

To Ben’s mind, the story left but one clear course: get the party back into its wagons, guide them on into the fort as soon as the snow melted off. There was plenty of mulemeat and no question of anybody going hungry short of that melt-off.

Nathan Stark at once objected.

“We’ve got to get on, Ben,” he insisted with patent seriousness. “Why, it may be days after the weather breaks before the snow goes out to where wagons and weak mules can get through.”

“No matter,” said Ben flatly. “We ain’t leavin’ these folks.”

“Nothing,” added Clint, eying Nella, “could persuade us to such purfidjous ideas.”

“Don’t be damn fools,” said Stark angrily. “I’m not suggesting we abandon these people. We can send a pack outfit to bring them in. They can be safe in the fort twenty-four hours after we get there.”

There was no denying that, and Ben knew it. Knew, too, that he would have thought of it himself had his mind not been so full of that slinky girl. “It figgers,” he admitted. “We’ll head out soon’s the snow lets up.”

“Which won’t be long,” added Nathan Stark tersely.

Ben caught his glance, followed it up through the
naked blackness of the willow and cottonwood branches.

The twisted limbs still bent and writhed to the wind’s lashing violence. But beyond their tortured web, above the thinning drive of the snow, high and clear and black over the brooding stillness of Timpas Creek Grove, a narrow window of clean sky opened briefly.

The angry wind gathered in a bellyful of flying snow and instantly and howlingly slammed that window shut. But Ben had seen the distant, lightquick dance of the stars. Stark was right. The blizzard had blown its guts out, would bleed itself to death sometime during the night.

“We’ll go with first light,” he said to Clint and Nathan Stark. Then, turning to the waiting, hopeful members of the little emigrant band, he nodded softly. “Folks, you kin turn in and sleep easy. The wind’s about done. Come mornin’ she’ll be bell clear and lamb quiet, fur as you kin see up or down the Arkansaw. We’ll make the fort ’fore noon. Your troubles will be plumb past, come sundown tomorrow night.”

With the reassurance, the camp was soon asleep, the emigrants in their covered slatbed wagons, Ben and his companions rolled in their blankets by the fire. The minds of the former were at rest with the clearing weather and Ben’s guarantee of their troubles being over by nightfall of the following day.

Their sleep might well have been less sound had they known how eternally right was the tall Texan’s prediction. For the troubles of the gauntfaced Kansas pilgrims would indeed be over with sundown of the next day—and over for all the sundowns that would ever follow.

The buffalo skull is the signpost of the prairie.

Upon it the prowling wolf and the skulking coyote void their spattered stain, leaving yellowed word of warning to their next of passing kin that the territory is already preempted. Trotting sorefooted in their wake, the sad-eared settlement hound hangs back behind the dust of the last wagon to scar the prairie sod with stiff thrusted scratches of his hind feet and to void, in disdainful turn, his leg-hoisted contempt of the wild brother’s warning. The twelve-year-old boy, out-riding the head of the next train with his watchful father, tarries a moment to dig in homespun trousers’ pocket for precious bit of charcoal, and to scrawl upon the whitened bone his own small footnote to a larger history.

Lastly, there are others of the wasteland’s wanderers to whom the whited skull is both signpost and signal station. It was of these last two-footed nomads Ben Allison was thinking as he sat his lathered black ten miles east of Timpas Creek Grove.

“What you think, Clint?” He broke his eyes from the buffalo skull with the question, sweeping the empty stillnesses of the valley, east and west.

Clint studied the skull. About it were the freshly manured tracks of many unshod ponies. From around it to the level of the brown earth upon which it rested, the burying snows had been carefully banked and pushed back. Above the right eye socket a crude human hand, palm down and fingers pointing to the ground, had been daubed in gaudy vermilion. Above the left eye, starkly drawn in black charcoal grease-paste, was a Sharps buffalo rifle, the barrel broken away from the stock at the point of the breech, and pointing abruptly earthward. Below
the eye sockets, across the bridge of the foreface, was what appeared to be two human ears connected by a straight, slashing line in garish ocher yellow.

Clint shook his head. There was no grin lighting his handsome features, no customary easy softness in his tightlipped drawl. “By Gawd, I dunno, Ben. The hand and the busted gun read clear enough. They couldn’t mean but one thing, no matter the tribe that drawed them. But son of a bitch if I kin figger the yeller scrawl.”

“Nor me,” said Ben. “But likely we’d better figger it. It’s their road brand, that’s certain. Jest as certain, we’d best know what herd they’re cut out’n.”

“Well, I kin tell you two things,” nodded Clint. “It ain’t from no Kiowa nor no Comanche herd.”

“Thanks,” said Ben, “for nothin’.” Then, quickly. “Git Stark over here. He jest might know.”

“Now mebbe he jest might,” Clint agreed. “I allow it’s about time he knowed suthin’. Fer a man that’s so big in Montana he’s sure been gradin’ short yearlin’ south of his home range.”

“Give him time,” advised Ben. “He’s four-year-old beef. Jest new to the trail, I judge. Git him over here.”

Clint grunted something Ben didn’t hear, but that sounded as if it had son of a bitch and Montana mixed up in it somewhere, and spurred his mare on back to where Stark waited in the main trail.

“Twist your two-bit tail,” he called cheerfully. “We need a educated man up here that kin read summat besides Kiowa and Comanche billy-doos.”

Stark took one look at the pictograph on the bull’s skull, lost a layer or two of his fresh pink color, used a single agonized word both to justify Ben’s faith in his Indian higher learning and to let the Texas
brothers know upon whose tribal crossroads they were trespassing.

“Sioux
—
!
“ he gasped unbelievingly.

“The hell!” challenged Clint, not caring for the startled diagnosis. “I thought this here Arkansaw basin was Cheyenne country.”

“It is,” said Nathan Stark. “From the river, north to Fort Laramie and the Oregon Road. But that signature is Oglala Sioux.”

“You certain sure?” asked Ben.

“No chance I’m wrong. I’ve not studied their signs much, never had to in my business. But I do know that yellow symbol. Saw it splashed on the tailgate of a wagon burn-out up on the Bozeman last summer. I had one of Colonel Carrington’s Army scouts with me, and he read it off for us. That long slash connecting what look like ears, there, is a knife cut. That’s what the Oglala call themselves—the Throat Cutters.”

He broke off, frowning at the bright red hand and broken gun as Ben and Clint exchanged looks, then added, puzzled. “What does the rest of it mean?”

“The hand,” recited Clint with mile-wide irony, and as though reading it for him from the prairie primer on the facts of life in the far West, “if drawn upright with the fingers pointing to the sky and the palm outward, means peace. The gun, if in one piece and also aiming at the great blue beyond, indicates the selfsame Christian intention.”

Stark was looking to Ben, as he had from the outset, hearing Clint’s hardbitten recital but waiting for the older brother’s less caustic seal of acceptance.

He was not kept waiting overlong.

“The rest of it,” repeated Ben Allison slowly,
“means war.”

The discussion grew swiftly bitter.

“I don’t give a damn what you say” rapped Nathan Stark. “Our best bet is to go on to the fort. Those pony tracks are heading west. Our course is east.”

“My course is where I say it is,” said Ben. “And I say it’s back to that emigrant camp.”

“Ben, be reasonable,” pleaded Stark, placing a friendly hand on his shoulder. “There’s only ten or twelve of the Indians. They’ve nothing to gain by attacking those poor devils back there. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Don’t it?” smiled Clint easily. “Take a look at that north sky, mister.”

Stark glanced nervously at the greasy mushroom bed of clouds growing rapidly beyond the river, then defiantly back to Clint. “All right. The clouds are coming in heavy again. Where’s the difference? We can beat them to the fort.”

“The Sioux,” nodded Ben, pale eyes narrowing, “kin likewise beat ’em to the grove.”

“I don’t follow you, Ben.”

“Well, follow this!” Clint shoved his mare into Stark’s studhorse. “You said you didn’t know much about Injuns. Mister, you don’t. They ain’t partial to snowstorms no more’n white men. It’s damn seldom how few times you’ll bump up agin a war party out joggin’ a blizzard jest fer the fresh air. Also, they got bellies jest like us. They git hungry and they got to eat. You know how much game we’ve seen the past week. You kin lay they ain’t seen no more where they come from. It jest ain’t the weather fer game. She all adds up, mister.”

“To what, for God’s sake?” demanded Nathan Stark angrily.

“To Timpas Creek Grove and them five emigrant mules,” said Ben quietly. “I reckon we got to go back.”

“Yeah,” muttered Clint, reining the mare sharply. “And sometime ’fore spring would be nice.”

“Well, you reckon wrong,” declared Stark, still angry. “And without me. I’ve got ten thousand dollars in these saddlebags and it’s going to get to Fort Worth, emigrant mules or no emigrant mules.”

“What about emigrant jennies?”
said Clint innocently, letting his slack grin loosen with the question.

Stark knew he meant the girl, and
what
he meant about the girl. But he covered his hand. “I won’t waste words with an idiot,” he snapped loftily. Then, wheeling his stud to face Ben, flatteringly, “Ben, you’re a man that makes sense, and understands it as well. I’m appealing to you now. Use that sense, man. Think! Why we can—”

“You’re bellerin’ inter the wind,” muttered Ben. He kicked his gelding around. “You comin’, Clint?”

Clint held the little sorrel in, making no move to send her after the black. “Not jest yet,” he said, hardfaced.

“You stickin’ with Stark, Clint?”

The straight-eyed, too soft way Ben said it let Clint know his refusal had caught his brother like a knife in the kidney. But his own face lost no line of its hardness.

“Stark,” he answered, just as low,
“and our ten thousand dollars.”

It was the difference in them, that Ben had made nothing of Stark’s mention of the money. But Clint’s reminder of it was something else again. Something even Ben couldn’t miss, nor ignore, nor even blame.

“Likely, you’ve got a good point. Leastways,” he shrugged, “the way you see it.”

There was no bitterness in the words. Clint knew none was intended. Ben was like that. Still a man knew what store his brother set by certain things. Knew, in that line, that ten times ten thousand dollars could not have kept Ben from going back to help those poor bastards on Timpas Creek.

“We’ll git to the fort and back quick as we kin,” he muttered awkwardly. Then, harshly, to Stark, “Kick that studhorse in his blue-blooded butt, mister. We got miles to make.”

Ben watched them go. He heeled the black gelding once more and finally around.

With the slap of the reins, the right spur raked the black’s side, leaping him into an ears-flat gallop. Behind him, as he raced the narrow trackline of the Sioux war ponies, came the first of the returning blizzard’s sleeted forebreath. Crouched atop him, Ben was thinking they had some miles to make, too. And knowing they wouldn’t make their miles on
blue
blood, but red!