Moira, the waitress in the restaurant, knew what sort of girl Linda McDonald was. So did John Blake. And others must know. They also knew what kind of man Aaron McDonald was.
They knew what they had done, and they had expected an attack with violence, and it had not come. Neither had we gone away.
The column of faint smoke that marked our fire and the white wagon-tops were in plain view of the town, and this would not permit them to forget what had happened. Nor would it allow them to keep from wondering what we planned to do.
For a week the town must have been an armed camp, ready to resist an attack, and the longer we held off the more worried they would become, and the more on edge. Business must be at a standstill down there, for there is a limit to the amount of business a town of that small size can do with itself.
Only one other herd had appeared, and by now they must be aware that they were to have no business from it.
What were they thinking down there? What did they plan? What were they expecting?
On the morning of the eighth day we saw two wagons rolling out of town, headed westward. Kate borrowed my glasses and studied them carefully. Then she returned them to me. “Bannion,” she said. “He’s moving out.”
We saw several people standing in the street watching him go.
Matt Pollock sent his herd off to the west under half a crew. He kept the rest to lend us a hand, but he went with his cattle. He had left us a few beeves, and I killed a buffalo, so we had enough meat.
On the morning of the tenth day the first wagons arrived. One of them was filled with supplies – food, and a thousand rounds of ammunition.
There were three big freight wagons loaded with barbed wire and posts. One wagon went along dropping posts, and when the post holes were dug and the posts in place, a team pulled one end of the barbed wire out along the posts and the men followed with wire-stretchers and hammers. Eight or ten men with a couple of teams of horses and unbroken prairie on which to work can string a lot of wire.
And through the day they were watching us from the town.
It was mid-afternoon before John Blake rode out from town.
He rode a handsome black horse and he was dressed in his black broadcloth suit. He rode out and sat watching for a few minutes, missing nothing … and nobody.
Harvey Nugent was there, a professional fighting man who had fought through three Texas feuds and a dozen brushes with Indians. He was a gunfighter, and his reputation was known to John Blake.
“Howdy, John!” Nugent said cheerfully. “Heard you were around.”
“I never expected to see you throwing up fence, Harvey. What is this, anyway? A drift fence?”
Harvey gave him a slow grin. “John, you chose the wrong town this time. This here fence is on land Mrs. Lundy has leased from the railroad.”
John Blake studied the fence, and he needed to ask no more questions. He turned his horse and rode up the hill to Kate’s ambulance.
We’d rigged a sunshade of canvas for her, and she was sitting under that, watching the work.
“There’s coffee on the fire, John,” I said. ” ‘Light an’ set.”
He swung down and stood looking at the fence. “I suppose I don’t have to ask if you have leased land on the other side of town?”
“Now, just one side wouldn’t make much sense, would it? No, we’ve leased it on both sides, John. East and west, too.”
“You can’t bottle up a town like that,” he protested.
“Bottle up a town?” My voice indicated astonishment. “Why, who would do such a thing? Anybody can leave who wants to go.”
Putting down my cup, I added, “In fact, John, I was going to talk to you about that. There’s a new town – name of Hackamore – going up out west of here. They’ll be needing a marshal. Why don’t you look into it?”
“West?”
“Well … west and south. A bit closer to the herds coming up from Texas, and there’s good holding ground and good water there.”
“So that’s it.”
“That’s it, John.”
He glanced at Kate from the corners of his eyes, but Kate just sat there, watching the stringing of the wire.
“Ma’am?” he said. “Mrs. Lundy?”
“Yes?”
“I had nothing to do with that, ma’am, nothing at all. I made the rule, but I would never have drawn a gun on that boy.”
“I know it, John.”
“Are you going to strangle that town, ma’am? There’s good folks down there. Not all of them, but some.”
“They killed my brother.”
“That was Aaron McDonald and that crowd of blue noses, ma’am. What of the others?”
“They can pull out. The road is open, and they were moving when they came here. As far as that goes, our town is in a better location, with better water than this place.”
“You are a hard woman, ma’am.”
Kate turned her eyes on him. “Am I, John? That boy was my brother. He was almost a son to me, and my husband adopted him as his son, and Tom took my husband’s name. He was all I had in the world, John Blake, and they took him from me. They shot him down in the street. Your town does not deserve to live, and it shall not.”
He got slowly to his feet. “They’ll fight, ma’am. They’ll drive you from the country … or bury you.”
“I do not think so,” Kate replied. “This is leased land. I have every right to be here, every right to fence the land. I am not denying anyone the right to enter or leave – but I will not have trail herds crossing my property.”
“And the town was built to supply trail herds. They need the herds to live.”
Kate smiled. “Well, Mr. Blake, I am glad to hear you say that. I was wondering when they would come to understand that fact – a fact, I might add, they were apparently not thinking of when they killed my brother. A fact Aaron McDonald was not thinking of when he made his remarks about Texans.”
John Blake’s face was grim.
“There’s another point you might mention, John,” I suggested. “You spoke to Harvey Nugent. Now, you know Harvey, and so do I; but those people down there may not know him. You should tell them about him.
“If you’ll notice, I’ve got Meharry and Bledsoe here, too, and Red Mike has gone down the trail to Texas after two dozen more. We’re expecting trouble, John, and we’ll be ready for it. Not asking for it … just ready.”
Blake turned sharply around, his big head thrust forward, his face tight with anger. “You bring that crowd in here, you turn that bunch loose, and this will be the bloodiest grass in Kansas!”
Me, I was remembering Tom Lundy, so young, so proud, his bravery challenged, so unable to believe that he could die over such a thing.
“John,” I said, “there are peoples who believe that when a young chief dies he should go into the after world with the skulls of a hundred enemies to mark his passing. I never cottoned to such ideas, but you tell those folks down there they can sit right where they are, or they can move out; but if they move against that wire they will be met with rifles.”
He turned his horse and walked him away down the hill.
After a moment, Kate said, “Conn, will they come against us? Will they?”
“Yes, Kate,” I said, “they’ll come.”
Chapter 5
So we took up our rifles and patrolled the fence and waited for trouble to come. For now the spur was on the other boot, and it was we who felt the rowel of waiting, waiting for our enemies to come and not knowing when to expect them.
But we were men seasoned by years of trouble, men who had known little else from boyhood on. We were men who had fought wild cattle and wilder horses, who had lived by the gun, and each of us more than half expected to die by gun or stampede or flood.
As the days passed, other men rode in. There was Rowdy Lynch from the Live Oak country, and Teague from the Falo Pinto. Gallardo came from Del Rio, and Battery Mason from Cow House Creek. They drifted into camp by twos and threes and bedded down on the knoll, and when another day came they took their turn at riding fence, the lean, hard men of our Winchester brigade.
On the fifteenth day a train went through, a train of empty cattle cars, bound west for Hackamore, the town we had started in the bend of the river. From our knoll we could see the people come down to the station to meet the train, only to see it breeze on through.