like me he was always ready to ride far afield.
Juan Torres was the boss of the lot, a compact man of forty-three or four, who
rarely smiled but was always friendly. Maybe he was the finest rifle shot I ever
saw … he had worked for Don Luis Alvarado since he, Torres, was a boy, and
thought of him like he was a god.
There was Pete Romero, and a slim, tough young devil called Antonio Baca … the
only one who didn’t have the Basque blood. It seemed to me he thought he was a
better man than Torres, and there was something else I figured was just my
thinking until Cap mentioned it.
“Did you ever notice how young Baca looks at you when you ride with the
señorita?”
“He doesn’t seem to like it. I noticed that.”
“You watch yourself. That boy’s got a streak of meanness.”
That was all Cap said, but I took it to mind. Stories I’d heard made out these
Spanish men to be mighty jealous, although no girl was going to look serious at
me when there were men around like Orrin and Tom Sunday.
There’s no accounting for the notions men get, and it seems to me the most
serious trouble between men comes not so much from money, horses, or women, but
from notions. A man takes a dislike to another man for no reason at all but that
they rub each other wrong, and then something, a horse or a woman or a drink
sets it off and they go to shooting or cutting or walloping with sticks.
Like Reed Carney. Only a notion. And it could have got him killed.
At the Little Arkansas we camped where a little branch flowed from a spring in
the bluff and ran down to the river. It was good water, maybe a mite brackish.
After night guard was set I slipped out of camp with a rifle and canteen and
went down to the Little Arkansas. Dark was coming on but a man could see. Moving
down to the river’s edge … there was more sand than water … I stood
listening.
A man should trust his senses and they’ll grow sharper from use. I never took it
for granted that the country was safe. Not only listening and watching as I
moved, but testing the air for smells. Out on the prairie where the air is fresh
a man can smell more than around people, and after awhile he learns to smell an
Indian, a white man, a horse, or even a bear.
Off in the distance there was heat lightning, and a far-off nimble of thunder.
Waiting in the silence after the thunder a stone rattled across the river and a
column of riders emerged from the brush and rode down into the river bed. There
might have been a dozen, or even twenty, and although I could not make them out
I could see white streaks on their faces that meant they were painted for war.
Crossing the stream sixty, seventy yards below me they rode out across the
prairie. They would not be moving this late unless there was a camp not far off,
and that meant more Indians and a possible source of trouble.
When they had gone I went back to camp and got Cap Rountree. Together, we talked
to Torres and made what plans we could.
Daylight came, and on the advice of Torres, Drusilla remained with the wagons.
We moved slowly, trying to keep our dust down.
It was dry … the grass was brown, parched and sun-hot when we fetched up to
Owl Creek and found it bone-dry. Little and Big Cow Creeks, also dry.
This last was twenty miles from our last night’s camp and no sign of water, with
another twenty to go before we reached the Bend of the Arkansas.
“There’ll be water,” Rountree said in his rasping voice, “there’s always water
in the Arkansas.”
By that time I wasn’t sure if there was any water left in Kansas. We took a
breather at Big Cow Creek and I rinsed out Dapple’s mouth with my handkerchief a
couple of times. My lips were cracked and even Dapple seemed to have lost his
bounce. That heat and the dry air, with no water, it was enough to take the spry
out of a camel.
Dust lifted from the brown grass … white buffalo bones bleached in the sun. We
passed the wrecks of some burned-out wagons and the skull of a horse. In the
distance clouds piled up enormous towers and battlements, building dream castles
in the sky. Along the prairie, heat waves danced and rippled in the sun, and far
off a mirage lake showed the blue of its dream water to taunt our eyes.
From the top of a low hill I looked around at miles of brown emptiness with a
vast sweep of sky overhead where the sun seemed to have grown enormously until
it swept the sky. From my canteen I soaked my handkerchief and sponged out the
Dapple’s mouth, again. It was so dry I couldn’t spit.
Far below the wagons made a thin trail … the hill on which I sat was low, but
there was a four-mile-long slope leading gradually up to it. The horizon was
nowhere, for there was only a haze of heat around us, our horses slogging onward
without hope, going because their riders knew no better.
The sky was empty, the land was still … the dust hung in the empty air. It was
very hot.
Chapter IV
Rountree humped his old shoulders under his thin shirt and looked ready to fall
any minute but the chances were he would outlast us all. There was iron and
rawhide in that old man.
Glancing back I saw a distant plume of dust, and pointed it out to Orrin who
gave an arm signal to Torres. We got down from our horses, Orrin and I, and
walked along to spell our mounts.
“We got to get that place for Ma,” I said to Orrin, “she ain’t got many years.
Be nice if she could live them in comfort, in her own home, with her own
fixin’s.”
“We’ll find it.”
Dust puffed from each step. Pausing to look back, he squinted his eyes against
the glare and the sting of sweat. “We got to learn something, Tye,” he said
suddenly, “we’re both ignorant, and it ain’t a way to be. Listening to Tom makes
a man think. If a body had an education like that, no telling how far he’d go.”
“Tom’s got the right idea. In this western land a man could make something of
himself.”
“The country makes a man think of it. It’s a big country with lots of room to
spread out … it gives a man big ideas.”
When we got back into the saddle the leather was so hot on my bottom I durned
near yelled when I settled down into my seat.
After a while, country like that, you just keep moving putting one foot ahead of
the other like a man in a trance. It was dark with the stars out when we smelled
green trees, grass, and the cool sweetness of water running. We came up to the
Arkansas by starlight and I’d still a cup of brackish water in my canteen. Right
away, never knowing what will happen, I dumped it out, rinsed the canteen and
filled it up again.
Taking that canteen to Drusilla’s wagon I noticed Baca watching me with a hard
look in his eyes. She was too good for either of us.
The four of us built our own fire away from the others because we had business
to talk.
“The don has quite a place, Torres tells me. Big grant of land. Mountains,
meadows, forest … and lots of cattle.” Cap had been talking to Torres for some
time. “Runs sheep, too. And a couple of mines, a sawmill.”
“I hear he’s a land hog,” Orrin commented. “Lots of folks would like to build
homes there, if he’d let ’em.”
“Would you, Orrin, if you owned the land?” Tom asked mildly.
“Nobody has a right to all that. Anyway, he ain’t an American,” Orrin insisted.
Rountree was no hand to argue but he was a just old man. “He’s owned that land
forty years, and he got it from his father who moved into that country back in
1794. Seems they should have an idea of who it belongs to.”
“Maybe I was mistaken,” Orrin replied. “That was what I’d heard.”
“Don Luis is no pilgrim,” Rountree told us, “I heard about him when I first come
west. He and his pappy, they fought Utes, Navajo, and Comanches. They worked
that land, brought sheep and cattle clear from Mexico, and they opened the
mines, built the sawmill. I reckon anybody wants to take their land is goin’ to