Tall Rider Read online

  Jess reckoned he was getting too old to keep up with the youngsters and made for home. Jake Calberson and Sam Carter, being married men, also decided to call it a day and came back with him.

  In addition to the news, Jess brought Bart’s share of the money raised by the sale of the horses. It came to over $1000. He had tried to make Calthrop pay the $500 from the race he had lost, but Calthrop had refused, saying he would not honour a debt to a man who had tried to kill him.

  All the family – Pa, Ma, Mary Sue and me – were all cut up, as you can imagine. Bart was a fine boy, good natured and straight as a die. I felt especially bad because, by rights, being older than him by two years, it was me who should have gone in his place. But it was decided that since I was a better hand at tending to the farm and he at breaking horses, it made most sense for him to go.

  We didn’t have his body to bury, so we held a memorial service for him and put a cross up in the cemetery so he wouldn’t be forgotten.

  The $1000 dollars Jess brought was welcome. It was why Bart had gone droving in the first place. We needed the money.

  At that time, Colorado was not a state. It wasn’t even a settled territory and a man couldn’t count on anything except himself. There was a lot of Indian trouble. But even if, like us Chandlers, you made peace with the tribes, you still had to look out for yourself. A man might put a fence around the claim he staked out, but that didn’t mean a thing in law because there was no law to recognize a man’s entitlement, not even to land he had cleared and worked. It was no different than if he was camping on it. Anyone with a gun could come along and send him and his family on their way if they were lucky, and to hell if they weren’t, and simply steal what he had built up. There were some who were more than ready to shoot their way onto a ranch, keep it if they fancied or take whatever would fetch a price in Kansas, but either way would line their pockets at the expense of pioneers who had done all the hard work. Anyone with a mind to putting land under the plough or building up a herd of cattle or sheep with a view to making a future for his family for when Colorado would become a civilized state, with laws and protection, had to be his own law and do his own protecting.

  The railroad had not reached us yet, so land-hauled tools and other equipment were at a premium, such as the firearms we would need once the government got round to opening up the territory for settling. Because when that happened, there would be even more danger. We would have to defend our property with bullets or lose it. Settling a new territory is always a troublesome time. In Kansas, they’d almost had a civil war.

  Maybe you’re thinking us Chandlers took Bart’s death a mite too easy, that me and Pa should have cleaned our guns, saddled our horses and gone after this Reuben Calthrop. I daresay some would have done it. But we were a God-fearing family. Besides, the farm couldn’t be left to the womenfolk. Every hand was needed. So it was just as if Bart had died a soldier on some far-off killing field. Except he had not been fighting in a war between governments but for his own folk. Way we saw it, he had fallen in the struggle for survival that dominated our lives and would get a lot worse before it got better.

  So as you can see, I was just a farm boy. Only thing I had ever killed was a rattler that frightened my horse or a prairie dog that got in among the cattle. Mind, I was never no Johnny Appleseed. I could look after myself. But I never went looking for trouble.

  All that was to change.

  In the spring after the fall when Jess got back, word went round that strangers had been seen spying out the land. They’d been asking enough questions for there to be no doubt: they were scouting out the valleys and plains that rumour said would soon be up for grabs in a free-for-all, winner-takes-all scramble for land when the politicians back East got round to fixing the settlement date. The people we knew, all our neighbours round about, started getting nervous. They thought about what precautions they could take. So did we.

  Our place, the Chandler Ranch, was big. We were cattle mainly but we had fields under the plough too. Jess agreed to stay on and Jake Calberson and Sam Carter brought their families and we took on any useful man who asked for a job. This gave us enough hands to run things and also to put up a fight if that should prove necessary.

  Our problem was still money for supplies. We needed it for wire to strengthen the fences bordering the ranch, for paying hired hands to do the job, and for more guns and ammunition.

  Pa called a general council where it was agreed that one of us should join a drover team going east, then maybe sign up with Russell & Majors like the other boys had done, or go trapping for beaver pelts that would fetch seven dollars a piece. Take less than a year to clear good money that way.

  Jess said no, he was too old and stiff. Jake and Sam said they’d left their families once and weren’t minded to do it again for so long a time. Besides, they weren’t family and in their opinion if money was to be raised for the Chandler Ranch then it should be done by a Chandler. Since Pa was the only one who knew enough to run the place, that left me, the farm boy.

  I said I would do it. But I wouldn’t go droving for hire. I said there’d be more money to be earned if we rounded up our own ponies and employed our own team of drovers. Their wages wouldn’t make much of a dent in the price we got for the stock. Pa agreed. So, for the next month and a half, four of us – me, Jake, Sam and a couple of hands passing through on their way west – chased down, roped and broke wild horses. In that time, we had rounded up near enough to 150 head and reckoned that would do us.

  Then we needed drovers. I reckoned we could manage with four men in addition to myself.

  Jake Calberson recommended a cousin of his, John. Eli Hook was back having had a losing streak in a poker game which had cost him near enough everything he’d earned fighting off Indians for forty dollars a month. He said he was in. That left two still to find.

  One day I drove into Cedar Bluff to pick up some stores. I was loading up when I heard a ruckus coming from the Silver Dollar saloon. There was always trouble there. Cedar Bluff was still a frontier town and a stream of pretty tough customers passed through, some on the way to the prospecting hills where it was said fortunes could still be made, and others on the way back, having found nothing and saying there was no more gold there than in a newly robbed bank. And the Lucky Strike was the sort of place where a man who had got little return for his efforts was only too ready to vent his feelings on anyone who crossed him, especially when the whiskey had been flowing.

  I joined some of the townsfolk who drifted towards the saloon in hopes of catching some of the fun. We didn’t have to wait long. There was a crash of breaking glass and then a panhandler in red pants, big as a mountain, comes staggering out the door backwards and falls over, a look of surprise on his bloodied face. He picks himself up, dusts himself down, and back in he goes. The next moment, Billy Rively flies head first through a window and lands at my feet.

  He was all for returning to the fray, saying how Cedar Bluff was his home town and how he wasn’t going to let any fly-by-night stranger stop him having a drink when he wanted one. But he was no match for the big guy with the red pants, so I calmed him down and told him I was looking for drovers. His feeling for his home town soon cooled at the prospect of getting out of the place (everyone knew he couldn’t stand his wife nor she him) and he said yes at once. He also introduced me to a friend of his, Pete Curtis, who was at that time looking for a berth. I had me a team.

  We set out on the trail at the end of May. Two outriders, one on the left and one on the right, steered the herd while another ranged free, tidying up and rounding in stragglers as we went. One of us took turn to drive the supply wagon, drawn by a pair of mules, which brought up the rear.

  At first, we made slow progress, the terrain being hilly and the going rough. But when we left the mountains and hit the plains, we picked up speed and it was easy work.

  Maybe too easy.

  A man can get careless. He can even nod off in the heat and the dust, lulled by the
steady lollop of his horse, and hypnotized by the flat unchanging country. When there’s nothing to see, you start thinking of nothing.

  I guess I was to blame as much as anybody else, but no one spotted the Indians creeping up on us in the long buffalo grass until they were within easy range of the herd. We were all taken by surprise when they started hollering and whooping and firing their guns. One moment the sun was shining down on a peaceful landscape. The next, the herd had stampeded and bullets, arrows and feathered lances were flying.

  It was hard to make out how many of them there were. Later, when I had time to count heads, there were about forty of them against the five of us.

  We were in the middle of a wide plain. There was no hill or slough or trees within riding distance that could give us cover. The Indians had chosen their spot well, for if we tried to make a run for it they knew they would surely have the legs of us.

  I was on wagon duty when it happened and I shouted for the others to forget the herd and join me. While they made for the wagon at a gallop, I cut the traces of one mule, led it to the left-hand side of the wagon and shot it through the head. It fell like it had been poleaxed. I did the same with the other, dropping it on the right-hand side. Then I dragged a couple sacks of flour from inside the wagon and propped them up at the back and front ends, not forgetting to smuggle a box of ammunition down between the wheels. We now had a kind of fortification and into it I crept. Resting my old Mississippi Yager on the belly of one of the mules, I succeeded in picking off a couple of the Indians who looked as if they would ride my comrades down.

  They were the first men I had killed. I can’t say I felt much about it one way or the other. There was too much going on.

  As they reached the wagon, the boys dismounted in a hurry, slapped their horses on the rump with the flat of their hands to chase them off so the Indians wouldn’t get them, and then joined me in our makeshift fort.

  Our attackers still hoped to finish us off quickly. Luckily they only had a few guns and mostly they had bows and arrows and lances. Their shots were wild and most went wide into the long grass. But the body of the nearside mule was soon as spiky with arrows as a pincushion with pins.

  ‘Let ’em have it, boys!’ I shouted, when the leading riders were no more than thirty yards away.

  They didn’t need to be told twice.

  The Indians’ charge was suddenly halted in its tracks as three or four of them bit the dust and stayed there without moving.

  We kept up our fire and got a few more of them. At this, our attackers, evidently puzzled at how to tackle a prey that had gone so effectively to ground, withdrew and gathered in a council, evidently deciding what to do next.

  What they did next was to circle the wagon, just beyond the rage of our Colts. From time to time, one of them would kick his horse with his heels and make as if to come up to us. But at the first shots, he would turn and gallop back to the rim of the circle. One came to grief when his horse took a direct hit in the chest. It fell, throwing him on to the ground, then rolled over. The brave’s gun was knocked from his hand and he ended up under his dead mount, trapped and out of action. But nothing else happened: it was a stand-off. After a while, at a given signal, they took up their previous station in front of the cart. The sun, now low in the clear sky, was at their backs. But it shone directly in our eyes.

  ‘I don’t like the look of this, boss,’ said Eli Hook. ‘They’ll wait a spell till the sun’s so low we’ll be blind. Then they’ll make their move. They’ll inch forward without seeming to and be on us before we know what’s happening.’

  ‘Got any more ideas, Brad?’ said Billy Rively. ‘Smart move turning the wagon into a dug-out. I never saw it done before. Where d’you get the idea?’

  ‘Never mind about that now,’ I said. ‘Anyone see what happened to our mounts?’

  Billy said he could make out three horses with saddles in back of us grazing quietly in the grass which had now begun to sway in the evening breeze which strengthened as it blew over our heads and into the sun. They must have stopped running pretty soon and when it all went quiet they had drifted back. They were too used to being with men to go far. Pete made out a fourth and also a dozen or so broncos from the herd that had tagged along with them for company.

  More than enough for a getaway.

  Maybe it was the new respect I heard in their voices which told me they now thought of me as more than a farm-boy, but I felt a surge of excitement. And suddenly I knew what my next move would be.

  ‘Right, boys. Here’s what we do.’

  The Indians were strung out in a line in front of us like the audience at a play, waiting for the sun to get low enough. Already they seemed a mite nearer every time you looked at them. With their minds on a stealthy frontal attack, they had not bothered to cover our flanks and rear. I told John Calberson to back out and open the keg of axle grease we carried and the others to grub up enough buffalo grass to make four or five torches. When they had enough, John smeared them with grease.

  ‘What next, boss?’ said Billy.

  ‘What are they doing now?’ I called to Eli, who was posted to keep track of their progress.

  ‘Still shuffling forward. But I guess it won’t be long now afore they charge. Wind’s getting up and making the grass blow about, so it isn’t easy to tell whether they’re stopped or advancing.’

  ‘Put a match to the torches. Then when they’re well alight, throw them as far as you can in a fan shape. We’re gonna put a prairie fire between them and us!’

  Each man took a flaming brand and hurled it at the Indians. The torches formed a wide arc in the sun-dried grass which quickly started to blaze up in the wind which carried billows of smoke towards the Indians who let off a volley of shots to vent their fury. But their horses snorted with fear and soon their riders turned and fled before the advancing wall of fire.

  I turned and saw grins on the faces of John, Pete and Eli who let go yippees to relieve their feelings. But of Billy there was no sign until Pete found him lying in the grass with a bullet through his shoulder. A stray shot had got him during that last wild salvo.

  While the boys rounded up the horses before they too got scared by the flames and smoke and took off, I stopped the bleeding, bound the wound tight and strapped his arm up. The bullet would have to come out. It lay awkwardly and was best left till we found a doctor. Meanwhile, Billy was as comfortable as I could make him. He reckoned he’d be fine on a horse so long as we didn’t move along too fast.

  Leaving Eli and the boys to finish patching him up, I decided to take a look at the brave who had his horse shot from under him. He lay where he had fallen, on our side of the wall of fire, and I made out his gun a few yards off in the grass. He was alive and his black eyes glared defiance as I approached slowly. One arm was invisible under the horse and the other was nowhere near any knife that I could see. I picked up the gun and unloaded it. I fetched my horse and hitched it to his dead pony and pulled it off him. While I kept him covered, he sat up and felt himself all over. He seemed to have come to no harm. I took his knife from his belt and stuck it in mine. To be sure he couldn’t do us any mischief, I tied him fast to one of the wagon’s wheel until we were ready to go.

  ‘What are you going to do with the Indian?’ asked John Calberson. ‘You can’t leave him here to die and I won’t have no truck with shooting a defenceless man. They’re only following their natures, same as us.’

  I felt exactly the same way. So when Billy had been sat on his horse and we were all ready to go, I cut the Indian free, gave him back his empty gun and threw his knife as far as I could into the long grass. Keeping him covered, I gestured that he was free to go.

  He looked at me in surprise, then grinned and placed one hand on his chest. Then he was gone, fused with the deepening shadow. I figured we’d be long gone before he found his knife. Even Indians can’t see in the dark.

  Then, leaving all the supplies we couldn’t carry to the coyotes and prairie dogs, we to
ok off into the gathering night sure in the knowledge that if the Indians wanted to get on our trail, they’d have to ride for many hours to get round the fire and backtrack.

  3

  BERRY’S CROSSING

  We headed off east, with the wind in our faces, across the plain, by the light of the rising moon.

  There was no need to hurry now since the Indians were as effectively trapped behind the flames as if a giant wall had just fallen out of the sky and kept us apart. They’d have their work cut out to stay ahead of the galloping flames and wouldn’t have much energy to waste thinking about us. We’d even had time to round up the broncos on our side of the burning barrier that had not run too far after the stampede. We gathered a couple of dozen or so. At twenty-five dollars a head or so, they’d give us a $400 stake, a hundred apiece. If we got to a town which was crying out for horseflesh, we’d get more, not a fortune, but enough to rent us a room and enough to eat until we figured out what to do next.

  We drove our small herd for four, maybe five hours, until the moon slid behind a bank of clouds. Then we stopped but did not make camp. The idea was we would just rest up a spell until it got light and then move on. You never know with Indians, and we’d left tracks they could follow with their eyes shut.

  Eli Hook had travelled this route maybe half a dozen times. By his reckoning, the next stop on the trail was Wattrass, maybe three, four days’ steady progress.

  ‘Too far,’ I said. ‘Billy’s going to need tending before then and get fixed up properly, or else we’ll have a case of fever on our hands and then blood poisoning. That wound’s not going to get better by itself. Any place nearer?’