All hands waited impatiently for daylight, hoping that Dusky’s tracks could be followed back to where he had escaped from. Pride of place was accorded to Bobcat, their best tracker, but Johnnie stayed close on his heels, while everybody else hung back so as not to lose any other marks which might be there to be found.
‘You fellows watch out,’ Ding Dong had ordered. ‘There could be somebody coming the other way, tracking this horse in an attempt to catch him before he reaches us.’
As it happened, there was somebody coming the other way, Danny Long Knife, braced awkwardly in the saddle, holding his horse to a gentle walk on the Santa Fe Trail.
Bobcat had by then led the posse back along Dusky’s tracks past where the riderless horse had branched from the trail to come down to their night camp. He was anxious to trace the horse back as far as possible before the marks became lost under the traffic that would pass that way when the settlers began their daily stint. Some five miles on they found Danny coming towards them.
He looked sick, weak, a dreadful grey colour.
‘What in hell are you doing on that horse, man?’ Ding Dong demanded. ‘You should be still lying up.’
‘I guess so,’ Danny agreed weakly. ‘Can yuh help us down? I can’t seem to manage that meself no more. I’m kinda stiffened up, eh.’
‘How long have you been in that saddle?’ Johnnie asked, as willing hands lifted the wrangler down.
‘Coupla nights,’ he wheezed. ‘Poor ol’ hoss, he’s hardly stopped walkin’.’
‘You’re mad,’ Ding Dong told him. ‘What’d you want to be doing this for?’
‘Found something out,’ Danny managed a weak grin. ‘Weren’t nobody else I could get to come an’ tell yuh all. Feller as took your beef... his name’s Dismal Dacre. He’s sellin’ ’em a cow at a time to the gold prospectors.’
‘He surely can’t get rid of the whole herd that way, two herds even?’
‘Sure can. There’s thousands of them prospectors from here to way up past Pike’s Peak. One count’s fifty thousand’ve ’em. Even iffen it’s on’y half that number, they’ll eat both herds in a coupla weeks or so.’
While everybody chewed over Danny’s information, Bobcat, with a dozen men behind him, was sent on to stay with Dusky’s backtracks for as long as he could. Meanwhile a camp was set up where Danny and his horse could rest. The man was something of a mess after his long hours in the saddle, and he needed to be bathed down completely, rebandaged, and dressed in borrowed clothing, before Ding Dong would allow him to continue with his story.
‘Now, how did you learn these things?’ Ding Dong asked when he was satisfied with all that had been done for Danny.
‘Feller rode into Bent’s Fort on one of my hosses, a young un’ I ain’t got around to brandin’ yet. I reckernized it though. This feller, he lives up with the Utes, eh; trades for them. Brings stuff out from Kansas Town that the Indians can’t get fer themselves. Anyway, I got the sojers to tackle him, like. What’s he doin’ on my hoss?’
‘The soldiers took your word for it?’
‘Yeah, they know me now, eh?’
Piece by piece the story came out. The trader had bought the horse from Dacre, whom he had known as a squatter down near Kansas Town. Dacre had seen the number of prospectors heading west, not only along the Santa Fe Trail, but also on the Oregon Trail further north. He had sold dried beef to them, and later some of them had come back looking for more. Food was short on the gold fields, and the wild game in the vicinity had soon been shot out. A huge market for beef had opened up, and Dacre had been one of the first to recognize it.
He had rounded up his own herd, and driven it up the Oregon Trail to the South Platte River, which he had followed in towards its headwaters. On the high edge of the plains he had trailed it south into the semi-desert country opposite Pike’s Peak, a sort of no-man’s-land between the Arapaho Indians and the very different Ute people who inhabited the mountains where the gold prospectors had struck lucky. There he had found an area of reasonable grazing along the Big Sandy Creek which drained water from those mountains. From there, his herd had been broken into small mobs for delivery piecemeal to all the places where gold was being worked.
The prices he could command for his beef had made him a rich man in a matter of weeks. By going back to Kansas Town and buying up what beef he could from his former neighbours, he made himself even richer, but in the meantime his source of supply dried up. Soon there was no more beef to be bought. What he hadn’t taken already, had been bought at high prices by the settlers moving west. Dacre had a ready market, and no beef to fill it.
He could have stopped at that point with a fortune greater than any of the gold prospectors ' were ever likely to make, but he was greedy. He wanted more, and as the Bells had good reason to know, the Dacres were a family from the north of England, who had for centuries stolen cattle from across the Scottish border. Cattle reiving would come naturally to a Dacre.
This scion of that ancient breed promptly paid off his honest ranch hands, and recruited a motley crew of rascals from among the failed prospectors retreating starving from the gold fields. Knowing that the Cheyenne and Arapaho were bent on raiding their Indian neighbours to the south, Dacre had taken advantage of their marauding, and skirting the disturbed country, had made his own raids, like them, on his own kind. The Dryfe Sands herd, and Mary-Lou’s JQE beasts, were just in the right places at the right times to fill his needs.
‘He’s still got to keep us off his back until he can sell them though,’ Ding Dong pointed out.
‘Yes, but you’re all,’ Danny argued. ‘The rangers couldn’t follow him through Indian country, the military were too busy, and the Kansas Town people too concerned with their own affairs. There jest ain’t no law where he’s gone. All he’s had to do was slow you down until he could make them cows disappear, and they’d all be sold and eaten before you could work out where they’d gotten to.’
‘They sure have disappeared,’ Ding Dong admitted. ‘Out from Pike’s Peak some place you say. Now how did he manage to get them there without leaving tracks?’
‘I think I know,’ Johnnie said. ‘I think I’ve seen it. The way that fellow loves using water to hide his tracks, I should have noticed where there’d been enough water to hide the marks of a whole herd.’
They had taken Danny and his exhausted horse down to a box canyon somebody had discovered facing onto the Arkansas River. There they made their friend comfortable, with plenty of food and water close to hand, and left him to sleep. His horse wasn’t likely to move away from the good forage. If nobody returned for him during the next few days, he was sure he’d be able to make his own way back to Bent’s Fort.
Bobcat, when they caught up on him, still had Dusky’s tracks in view, but lost them soon afterwards. Until then they had continued to come from the west along the trail. A wagon train moving out had covered them, and by the time they had overtaken and passed those particular settlers, another train still further ahead had been for some time on the trail.
‘We’re pretty sure Dusky has come down from the north,’ Johnnie said. ‘We should pick up his tracks again on that side of the trail. I think I know where.’
Sure enough, when they eventually reached the place, Dusky’s tracks once more were where he expected to Find them, in the broad, sandy valley coming down through the burnt-over land to the north of the trail.
‘Hell, we’ve been twenty miles up there,’ one of the cowhands swore. ‘There weren’t a mark to be found.’
‘No, and there’s why,’ Johnnie replied. ‘That valley’s been flooded side to side. The floor being so sandy is what fools the eye. It dries out fast, and the wind blows away the riffle marks, but I should have remembered, all this was flooded just after we had the gunfight up at that Pueblo place. We saw the storm up behind us that day.’
Dusky’s tracks lay clean cut in the sand. Accompanying them were half-a-dozen other sets of marks.
‘Them rustlers,’ Bobcat com
mented, ‘they’ve follered Dusky this far, an’ then given up on ’im when they saw they couldn’t catch ’im. See, there’s Dismal Dacre’s tracks, an’ that one there, he was nearby when Rastus was killed that first day when the herd was stolen.’
‘They’ve gone back up the river,’ Johnnie suggested.
‘I’d say so,’ Bobcat agreed.
‘They’ll be waiting for us,’ Ding Dong said. ‘There’ll be an ambush set somewhere up there.’
‘And meantime Dacre will be trying to sell off our cattle as fast as he can,’ Johnnie nodded, and rubbed his chin. ‘He’s not going to be with that ambush. He’s going to be up in the mountains selling cattle.’
‘And Mary-Lou?’ Ding Dong asked.
‘Well, Dacre can’t be dragging her about with him, so she must be being held somewhere in behind that ambush. What say I leave you to tackle the ambush from the front, while I try and go around it with a few men, and see if we can get her out.’
‘Just see you don’t get her killed in the attempt,’ Ding Dong replied.
Johnnie took Bobcat, Cab Phillips, and several other men away to the east in an attempt to come in from an unexpected direction on what might be left of their herds. Dusky, trail-worn and sore, stayed with them. Leaving the horse to run loose, unburdened, was the best thing that could be done for it.
Cab Phillips more or less invited himself on the party. He was regretting not having gone with the rancher’s son in the first place, and wondered if Little Hawk would still be alive, if there had been another experienced man there to back him at the time. Cab wasn’t too happy about how much responsibility was being heaped on young Johnnie’s shoulders, and was determined that this time he’d be there if he was needed.
Far out across the plains they circled, until they were due east of Pike’s Peak, and then cut in on a line directly for that unmistakable marker. Eventually the party would come onto the upper reaches of the Big Sandy Creek at a point that had to be upstream of the outlaws’ main camp.
Meanwhile Ding Dong split the rest of his force, sending half of it under the command of Caleb Moore to follow up the same river from the downstream end, but riding about a mile to the west of it. Ding Dong’s party kept pace with them about a mile to the east of it. When both those parties set patrols to either side of themselves, they were advancing north on a front of nearly three miles.
The land was almost bare. What little fresh growth there had been, since the prairie fires of the previous season, was sparse and widely spaced. Only along the river were there any places where the rustlers could conceal themselves. There the limestone underlying the plains had been exposed where the turns and twists of the river had cut into the banks in one place or another. Among the resultant tumble of rocks a few desert plants had been able to escape the flames. Everywhere else just the low rise and fall of the country between drainage channels offered any concealment, but at least that did mean that horsemen a mile apart could be out of sight of each other, if they kept to the lower ground.
There was no hope that their approach could be hidden from gunmen lying in wait. All that could be achieved was to disguise their numbers, and have as many as possible remain unnoticed when contact was eventually made.
With the spread of men Ding Dong had put out, somebody had to run across the expected ambush somewhere, and they did.
At long last the rancher had caught up on the outlaws who had shot up his people, and stolen his cattle.
SEVENTEEN