The lone horseman had met the point of the herd. Ordinarily he would never have found those tracks, because the following herd would have wiped them out; but after the meeting, the herd had been stopped, and turned back again to the south.
“South?” I exclaimed.
“That was the way of it, Conn. And to me it spells trouble.”
That lone rider might have been somebody from the herd itself, somebody who had gone ahead to look out for a good holding ground, and for water. I suggested as much.
“No, that rider was George Darrough, that buffalo-hunter friend of McDonald’s. I’d know that horse of his anywhere. He rides an appaloosa he swapped from some Indian some time or other, and that horse has the smallest, prettiest feet I ever did see. I’ve seen those tracks before. That rider was George Darrough.”
“What do you think, Rowdy?”
“Why, I’ve been studying on it, all the way in here. Me and Gallardo figure we’ve put a loop on the idea. Darrough came out to pick up a herd.”
“To ship from the town?”
“Maybe.” He paused. “Conn, you ever seen what a stampeding herd can do to a wire fence?”
He was right, of course. A stampede of cattle could sweep such a fence out of existence. It could also trample anybody guarding that fence … trample them, churn them into mud.
“We’ve got to go back, Conn.” D’Artaguette’s face was pale. “God almighty, they’ll run the herd right over the boys!”
“Not if they are where they should be,” I said, “and not if they shoot down some steers for a barricade.” But Kate…
I was scared to death. If we rode, starting now, we could make it. The tracks were only a few hours old, and it would take time to move a herd, even a herd that maybe was being hurried along.
“Here comes Flanagan,” somebody said, and looking around, I saw the red-haired telegrapher coming across the street.
He grinned, and shook a yellow sheet at us. “If you boys are hunting a scrap,” he said, “you’ve bought yourself a mean stack of chips! There are fifty men and horses on that train. It’s due in here at daybreak tomorrow … due to unload here.” Fifty men!
“That sort of story goes all down the line,” Flanagan said. “Everybody knows something is up. Any time fifty men and fifty horses with a wagon for supplies and ammunition is put aboard a train, we know there’s going to be hell to pay.”
“Who are they?”
“Ozark Mountain boys. Hillbillies from Missouri and Arkansas.”
Fifty men … fifty riflemen – dead shots, or they’d not have been chosen. They would pick us off like squirrels.
“Conn,” D’Artaguette said, “what about that herd?” For a long moment I stood there, hesitating, and then I said, “Well have to trust it to Kate and the boys. We came out here to do a job, and we’re going to do it.”
“To fifty men?” D’Artaguette protested.
“That’s only eight apiece,” Rowdy said, “with two spares. Conn, you leave me one of them spares, will you?”
The saloon door opened. “You boys goin’ to eat?” a voice called. “I got it on the table!”
It was full dark now, a soft prairie night, and the stars were out. Soon the coyotes would be calling.
Chapter 8
Flanagan joined us at the table, glad to have company. His was a lonely job, and it needed a man of a very special kind of courage. He sat at his telegraph key in the small station with a pistol only inches from his hand, a shotgun and a Sharps .50 buffalo gun close by.
Twice he had been completely isolated – once when Indians had torn down his wires to make copper ornaments of them, and again when buffalo, that used the posts to scratch themselves, pushed over several of them.
We had all kinds in the West. D’Artaguette and Meharry were college men; the former had been educated in Paris and Quebec, the latter in Dublin and London. All the education Rowdy Lynch ever got he picked up in the middle of a horse’s back. I’d never even seen him read a newspaper. As for Battery Mason, he had been a tough kid in the slums of New York and had drifted west because that’s where people were drifting, and he stayed on to become more western than the native-born westerner.
Gallardo was a special case. His family had come to New Mexico with the first settlers. They had schools and churches there before Captain John Smith landed in Virginia, and they had grown children before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Gallardo had attended a church school in Santa Fe for several years, when not punching cows on his father’s ranch.
I looked around the table, and was glad it was these men I had with me.
“Flanagan,” I said, “you know your railroad. I need a place back up the line where there’s a grade steep enough to slow a train down, a place where we could board the train without stopping it.”
“Sorry, but there’s nothing like that within the distance you could ride in the time you have. Nothing I can recall, at least.”
“Why not here?” Meharry suggested. “When they start to leave the train.”
At such a time, there was confusion and it might be done, but there was risk. Undoubtedly some would be half asleep, but a few would be awake enough to resist; and once it started, the others would be quickly alerted. We could hurt them, but we could not win; and nobody needed to tell me how difficult it is to get out of a fight once one is involved … that would be hardest of all.
I felt no certainty about what was best to do. Nobody felt like talking, and when supper was over, I walked outside.
It was very still. A few crickets talked from the grass at the side of the building. Near the station, a pile of ties was stacked, and strolling over, I hoisted myself up and sat down on them. Only a little time remained, and I hadn’t an idea of what I was going to do.
If the men we had ridden here to stop managed to get past us and reach the town, then we must withdraw, our fight at an end. Even at this moment, back there at the town, our friends might be fighting a last-ditch struggle against the townsmen, for the latter would surely try to cut the fences while we were absent.
Those men back there with Kate, like these with me, were men who rode for the brand. When they accepted a man’s pay they not only worked for him, they fought his battles. It was as simple as that. Life offered them no other loyalties than their country, the man they worked for, and the men they worked beside. When they went into the fight they would go trusting me, and I hadn’t a plan.
Getting up, I prowled restlessly among the buildings. We might be able to take the men by surprise, for they would not be expecting us here. But there would be others riding on the train, I wanted no reckless shooting.
Somewhere out in the darkness, miles away but drawing nearer every moment, was the train bearing fifty armed fighting men. Somehow or other, I had to come up with a plan.
Yet at this moment I could not marshal my thoughts, and they went back to that Texas morning, with Kate standing beside the fire in the bleak dawn, the smell of charred timber in the air, mingling with the smoke of the fresh fire and the smell of coffee. That was the morning when she had told me she was not leaving – that they had come to settle, and settle they would.
What arguments had I to offer to such a woman? Yet I tried.
“Mrs. Lundy,” I said, “you’d better give it some thought. Right over there, only a little way off, is the Comanche Trail – the route they follow on their raids into Mexico. And this is Apache country too. Believe me, this is no place for a lone man, let alone a woman and a youngster.”
“We’re going to stay,” Kate said. “This is our home.”
Home? It was a rock-ribbed valley in a country borrowed from the leavings of hell.
There was water, and there was grass, and there were some cottonwoods to rustle their leaves for her, but there surely was nothing else, and it was a hundred or more miles to the nearest white man … and God only knew where there was another woman.
The burned-out house could be fixed up to live in for the time being, and there was a piece of stone corral her husband had started to build. That was all.