“I never asked for help. I ain’t likely to.”
That was all we said. When she was gone I threw a leg over the dun and hunted my path down the trail.
I was going to come back, all right. I was going to come back and face up to Martin Brimstead and Stud Pelly. And then I’d go calling … I’d go calling on Kitty Dunvegan.
Chapter 3
Under the low gray sky, under the swollen clouds, our cattle moved westward. The narrow trail led between thickets of blackjack brush mixed with sumac and tangled blackberry bushes, with here and there a clump of prickly pear.
It was a raw, rough land, brown and sad beneath the lowering sky. The wind worried my hatbrim, and my face was occasionally splashed by huge drops, seemingly out of nowhere.
Thunder muttered sullenly above the low hills, and lightning played across the sky. I had seen such storms before this, and the dun was not a nervous horse. I had more than a storm to think of, for I was riding among enemies.
Four days we moved westward, making eight miles the first day, then twelve, then six, and finally a mere five. The cattle were badly strung out, but they were easy enough to handle. There was little opportunity for straying, for the blackjack thickets were almost impenetrable for miles.
Needful as it was to keep a wary eye for trouble, my thoughts kept straying. If we could get these cattle to market, I could pay my note and have several times a thousand dollars left over. With that amount of money, if I was to handle it right, I could soon be a well-off man.
It was in my mind to become rich and then return to the mountains and show them what a Chancy could do.
The saddle is a place for dreaming when there’s hours of trail ahead, or when night-herding. And it came over me that to be rich was not enough. A man must win respect, and not the kind that can be bought with money or won with a gun. My pa always taught me that a man should strive to become somebody. He never made it himself, but that was nothing against him, because he tried. He just never held the right cards. With me it would be different.
I won’t claim that I didn’t think of being a big man in the eyes of that girl back yonder. Fact was, she occupied a good bit of my dreaming these days, though I’d little enough reason to think I mattered all that much.
We made camp that night alongside a slow-moving stream with blackberry bushes, cottonwoods, and persimmons all about. It was a good camp, with a fine meadow of grass and firewood a-plenty. But when I rode up to the fire they all stopped talking, as if they had plans they didn’t want me to hear.
Dishing up my food, I sat down away from the lot of them, but before I sat down I swung my holster around between my legs where the butt would be right at my hand whilst eating.
“You ain’t a very trusting man,” Gates commented.
“I’ve had small reason. But don’t forget one thing. You’ve got half your herd and a thousand dollars coming that you wouldn’t have, had I shot any slower. I could have been cold under the grass back yonder.
“And let me say this,” I added. “The drive isn’t over. Not by a long shot. There’s rough country ahead, and some mighty mean Indians. If we get the herd through without trouble we’ll be lucky.”
“Have you been through here before?” Gates asked.
“No, but I’ve been through Kansas, and I’ve talked with men who drove up the trail from Texas. You folks are going to need me—you’re going to need all the help you can get.”
They didn’t like it much, but Noah Gates was a mite more pleasant for a while. Over coffee he dug at me with questions about the country to the west. Just south of our route was Arapaho country, with Cheyennes, Comanches, and Kiowas not far off. I didn’t hold back when I told them of what lay ahead. With the buffalo herds almost gone, those Indians would be hunting beef, and they knew how to get it.
For the next two days we had good drives, with occasional flurries of rain. It was cold, wet, and miserable, but a sight better than some of the hot, dusty drives I remembered when the heat rising from the bodies of the cattle had been stifling.
The weather was hard on the older men. Being young and tough and no stranger to work, I did more than my share. Meanwhile, I made a book tally of my stock. A man unused to working cattle might have the idea they all look alike, but a good cattleman will soon know every steer in a herd. My brands tallied to seven hundred and thirty-three.
At the crossing of the Canadian we met our first Indians, a small party of Shawnees, living in buffalo-hide lodges. Three bucks mounted ponies and rode over to meet us. Turning the dun, I went out to them.
Now, a long time back the Cumberland was Shawnee country, and a few of them had drifted back there to live, so I knew some of their lingo, and of course I’d picked up sign language from the Cherokees.
It turned out I didn’t need either one. The youngest of them spoke American. We did some palavering, but I had my eyes on a buckskin pony I saw tethered near their lodges. Even at that distance, I could see it wore a brand, which meant that it might be a good cow horse. Anyway, I could see, plain enough, that it was a mighty fine horse.
When I greeted them in Shawnee they wanted to know where I was from, and when I told them, they got all excited. They knew the Cumberland, and we talked about it some, about the country and the hunting.
They had been a long time without meat, they said, and they asked could I let them have a beef. I told them that I’d swap what did they have?
Well, they trotted out moccasins, buckskin jackets, and an old worn-out Kentucky rifle, and a few other things. Finally I told them I needed a horse. How about that old, broken-down buckskin?
At that, they blew up. The buckskin was not old, he was young. He was a fine horse, their best horse, and he was not to be traded.
So I changed the subject. They wanted beef, and I needed an extra horse. I rarely smoked, but I carried tobacco, and now I dug out my pouch, passed it around, then rolled a smoke for myself. Meanwhile, I talked about the Shawnees, and about how my folks had come into Shawnee country among the first white men—how they had traded, traveled, and hunted with the Shawnees. I made out as if I’d forgotten all about any trading.
Now, contrary to what folks have been led to believe, Indians are great talkers, and the old stories told by their people are fresh in their minds. We talked about how the Shawnees, once friends of the Cherokees, had been driven from the Cumberland by them, but that now they were friends once more.
The cattle drifted by, moving slowly, as always, pausing here and there to graze a bit, then moving on. Finally I swung my horse as if to join the herd, and again the Indians asked for beef.
“I’ll swap a fat steer for that buckskin,” I said.
They refused, and I started off, but one of them called after me: “Three steers!”
The horse was worth three steers to me because I was akeady overworking the dun, and once we got out on open grass we’d need three or four horses each to handle those cattle. Even that number wouldn’t be enough to do the job really right. Moving through the brush as we had been doing, there wasn’t much chance so far for the stock to stray.
We bargained for a spell, and the upshot of it was that I got the buckskin for two steers. When I cut them from the herd, Gates looked mighty sour. “If you don’t make good on that note,” he said, “that buckskin belongs to us.”
“What you’d better think about,” I told him, “is how much work he’ll save you. I’m already doing as much as any two of your crowd. The better horses I have to ride, the less your men will have to do.”
That made sense, and it shut him up, and the others, too.
In all that while I’d exchanged no words with the redhead. Oh, she was a pretty one, all right, with a feisty way about her, avoiding me, but never staying long out of sight. She knew what she had, and she wanted to be sure I knew it, too.