ELEVEN
‘Little Hawk?’ Mary-Lou asked. There were tears cutting tracks through the grime on her cheeks.
‘Gone,’ Bobcat told her, and went to turn over the body of his friend. A bullet ricocheting off the adobe had gone in through his cheek. He was stone dead.
‘Danny’s hurt too,’ she said, though her eyes were on the fallen outlaw. ‘That was deliberate, wasn’t it, killing his own man like that?’
‘He had to be killed to stop him from telling us something,’ Johnnie said to her. ‘He must have known what they intend to do with our cattle.’
Automatically, Mary-Lou continued the loading of her gun.
‘I’ll be all right now,’ she claimed, as Johnnie wiped her lips with his bandana. ‘Danny needs our help.’
They rose to their feet, and with Bobcat joining them on her other side, Mary-Lou, still trembling, led them back towards the livery stable where Danny lay. As they went, she asked, ‘Surely the rustlers didn’t come all this way just to get a drink?’
‘Likely they did,’ Johnnie argued. ‘It’s the only place with liquor available that I’ve seen this side of Kansas Town, and even then it shouldn’t be here.’ As both his companions knew, he was referring to the fact that it was against federal law to take liquor into or through Indian country. Everybody was well aware, however, that there were plenty of smugglers who did, and the makeshift saloon here had to be one of their outlets. The bootleg alcohol was sold not only to the Indians, but also to passing settlers headed further west, fur trappers, and the stray prospectors who haunted the area. There was big money in the trade.
‘They come to get a couple of barrels for their friends,’ Bobcat offered.
‘Yes,’ Johnnie agreed. ‘Those fellows are stuck on the trail with our beef for a long time. They’re not the sort to go dry for so long. Their leader would have to go to this much trouble just to keep his men happy. A lot of them would be likely to ride out on him otherwise.’
A rattle of hooves preceded the arrival of Dusky back in the open space in front of the saloon. He was looking for Johnnie, now that the shooting seemed to have stopped. Three of their other horses, including one of their packhorses, were hanging back shyly, still suspicious that more shooting might break out. When they saw some familiar humans gathering around Dusky, they came on again.
Danny had lost a lot of blood, but seemed to have no lead left in him. He’d most likely die in a matter of days if he did, and painfully too.
He recovered consciousness while they were bandaging him with strips torn from Little Hawk’s clean shirts.
‘You’ve bled clean,’ Mary-Lou assured him. ‘Nothing broken, but you’re not going to be good for much for a while.’
Bent’s Fort was their only option for a safe place to take him. They discussed it with him, and he was insistent that that was what they’d have to do. Nobody knew of a medico this side of Kansas Town, but there was a corporal at Bent’s Fort who was experienced in dealing with gunshot wounds.
It turned out that the saloon keeper, who also owned the livery, had a suitable wagon to hire them. Johnnie would drive it, while Mary-Lou rode herd on their remuda, which now included the horses the dead rustlers had been riding. Bobcat had another job.
‘I take Little Hawk to place to rest,’ he said. ‘Come back for him later.’
While some of the townsmen helped by getting Danny bedded down and comfortable in the wagon, and others rounded up their scattered horses, Mary-Lou held Little Hawk’s mount still, letting Bobcat and Johnnie arrange the Indian’s body face-down over its back.
When all was ready, Bobcat set off ahead of them to ride down-river, with two horses on leads, one his own, and the other carrying Little Hawk. The ground they were on was Ute territory. Bobcat would go down-river until he could cross into the Kiowa lands, and there he’d find a temporary grave for Little Hawk, until he could come back with his people and take him home for an honourable burial. Later Mary-Lou and Johnnie would meet up with Bobcat again at an agreed spot on the flanks of the Black Mesa, a place which their cattle would have passed, and one which was also on their way home. All three agreed that that was where they’d have to go next.
The rustlers now knew that they hadn’t frightened away the pursuit. Their outlet with the cattle was blocked by the military in all the directions it seemed possible for them to go. If the Cheyennes had indeed had enough, and were gone back north, while their erstwhile Arapaho allies were lying low, there could no longer be any objection to bringing in an armed citizen’s band, a posse comitatus, to deal with them. It was time to go back and fetch the posse which Ding Dong was supposed to have organized.
On their way down-river, during the next couple of days, a storm which had blown up in the mountains they were leaving behind, helped them on their way. Distant lightning flashes, and the rumble of thunder carried down on a following wind, helped Mary-Lou to keep all the loose horses going the way she wanted.
During that time they were passed by a surprising number of gold prospectors heading the other way. Apparently there had been a rich strike somewhere along the mountains to their north, and the hopeful newcomers were planning to try their luck in other places in the same region. One useful thing the travellers were able to tell them was that the Cheyenne troubles were over, and that the settlers, no longer held up, were flooding in greater numbers than ever along both branches of the Santa Fe Trail.
When they joined the trail themselves some miles short of Bent’s Fort, they certainly found the truth of that. Moving against the flow, they could spend little time actually on the trail proper, while people by the hundred, with all manner of stock and conveyances, made their plodding way in the opposite direction. They moved in fits and starts, each wagon train finding its own pace, with always at least one group somewhere in sight along the rutted track.
‘It will be worse for the rustlers when they try to take our cattle along here,’ Mary-Lou observed. ‘They’ll have to go a long way out to the sides to find any feed for them.’
‘They probably won’t even try to stay near the trail,’ Johnnie replied. ‘If it was me driving them, I’d make a bee-line across country a bit to the north.’
‘Once they start that, we’ll know where they’re heading,’ Mary-Lou pointed out.
‘Soon,’ Johnnie answered, ‘they won’t be able to avoid our finding out, no matter what they do.’
At the fort they had no trouble getting Danny admitted to the infirmary. He had been extremely weak, but rational, during the first part of the journey. Later, though, he had lapsed into unconsciousness and delirium, so they were glad to get him into a place where he could rest safely, and be cared for. The officer in charge, still the same stripling lieutenant, named a fee for a month’s treatment, and accepted some of their spare horses in part payment. For the balance Johnnie wrote a letter of credit on a bank in Baton Rouge. The corporal who’d be doing the actual nursing accepted his consideration in coin. He also undertook returning the hired wagon to its owner.
If they hadn’t had the horses they’d recovered from the rustlers, Johnnie would have been unable to find the ready cash. As it was, he and Mary-Lou had empty pockets when they rode out of Bent’s Fort.
Two days later they met up again with a worried-looking Bobcat.
The Comanche explained that after finding a suitable cave where he could leave Little Hawk’s body safely walled in, he had gone to look for the cattle. He had followed the marks of the combined herd up to the point where they had joined the northern branch of the Santa Fe Trail, and there had lost them.
‘Lost them?’ Mary-Lou echoed. ‘You can’t lose a herd that size.’
‘They go on trail,’ Bobcat told her, ‘and then other cattle go past driven over the top. Cattle, wagons, horses, all going west. I look a dozen miles each way for marks of rustlers, but cannot see.’
‘Surely,’Johnnie suggested, ‘the rustlers will have just taken our cattle across the trail, and will have gone north a littl
e bit?’
Bobcat shook his head, perhaps offended that Johnnie should see any need to ask.
‘Well,’ Mary-Lou reasoned, ‘all that could have happened is that they’ve gone more than a dozen miles one way or the other along the trail. We’re sure to pick them up again somewhere, once we get back with the men Ding Dong has raised. That many cattle can’t just disappear into thin air.’
There seemed little point in trying to pursue the cattle any further at that time and, in any case, their money exhausted, they couldn’t afford to, so the three of them turned their faces southward, heading for home. With them they had a spare horse each, and a single packhorse to carry their camping gear. They had hardly any food to speak of, so what they couldn’t shoot along the way would have to be done without.
For a route they had simply to follow the beaten trail their cattle had left on the way up. It would lead always to the easiest river crossings, and give them an open passage through the stretches of mesquite, blackjack oak, or other scrub country. Trail-weary, their horses ambled along almost without guidance. Until they returned to tackle the rustlers again, it was easy to assume that the pressure was off, the need for alertness was behind them.
Only Bobcat’s quick eye saved them from disaster.
By staying long hours in the saddle, they had crossed the crowded Cimarron Cutoff on the second day, and on the day after that had reached the slope leading down to the North Canadian. The crossing at that point was the best to be found for a considerable distance in either direction, and consequently several Indian trails converged there.
Bobcat called for a halt before they reached it.
‘Look at hawk circling,’ he directed, pointing to a distant speck in the sky on the other side of the river.
‘That’s a hawk? You can tell that from here?’ Mary-Lou wondered.
‘Tell by wing beat... way bird flies,’ Bobcat said. ‘Watch what bird does.’
As they studied the pattern of the bird’s flight, they saw that it kept returning to a particular clump of mulberry that overlooked the trail up out of the river on the other side. Each time the hawk approached the bushes, it wheeled up and banked away. Then it returned to the bushes again from another direction, to wheel up and bank away again.
‘Little Hawk say ambush waiting,’ Bobcat said.
Mary-Lou and Johnnie glanced at him sharply. Bobcat just nodded, confirming his words.
There was no doubt that the distant hawk was making it plain that there was something wrong with those bushes.
‘We swim horses across up there,’ Bobcat suggested, indicating the land upriver. ‘I know place can get out on other side.’
That was an important consideration. The far bank was steep, and the bluffs above it even steeper. Places to take horses up on to the mesa on that side were few and far between. Ways to get down to the river on their own side weren’t all that plentiful either.
Following Bobcat, they turned away westward.
Across the river three horsemen appeared from the clump of mulberry, and kept pace with them along the opposite rim.
‘Grey man,’ Bobcat claimed.
From that distance neither of the other two could confirm his identification, although one of the riders was certainly on a grey, and seemed to be wearing a shallow-crowned hat.
‘They’re trying to stop us from going back to Dryfe Sands,’ Mary-Lou said.
‘I should have thought of that,’ Johnnie agreed. ‘It’s his best way of delaying any further pursuit. All he’s got to do is stop us from crossing the river.’
TWELVE