FIVE
‘We’ve got more trouble behind us,’ Johnnie told Barney McLay, Mary-Lou, and the two Apaches with them. He had left his horse ground-tied out on the grass above them. ‘Can you get your other two fellows up here? We’ve got to get out of here smartly.’
‘Covering fire,’ Barney replied. ‘It’s the only chance they’ve got. What’s behind us?’
Johnnie told them.
‘Yeah, right,’ the sutler agreed. ‘You know, I could’ve stayed right on workin’ in my Pappy’s general store back east.’
‘Go on, Barney,’ Mary-Lou joshed. ‘You’re loving every minute of this.’
The spark of spirit pleased Johnnie more than he would have thought. If she could still come up with a quip after the pounding fate had handed out to her, perhaps this gently-bred lady might have some depth to her after all. Certainly the businesslike way she was handling his revolver, admittedly two-handed, suggested that she was fit to manage more than tea cakes and bone china.
He stood out on the grass, hidden from the people down in the canyon, and waved to the three men they had spaced out along the rim to the west. When he had their attention, he signalled for a burst of more concentrated fire.
The two Apaches caught below were quick to grasp the chance offered them. One wriggled out and recovered the bedroll from his dead horse, though he had to abandon the saddle. Then, as lead rained down on the cottonwood grove, temporarily silencing the gunmen hidden there, the pair loosed their remaining horse, and legged it for the next clump of cover down river. The horse tagging on behind them provided an additional shield.
Satisfied that they were in the clear, Johnnie called down for them to bring the rest of the horses up to the mesa. All the while the plunging fire from the guns on the rim, though now reduced, continued to force the rustlers to keep their heads down.
‘What are we doing?’ Barney asked.
‘I want to get us up-river of those rustlers,’ Johnnie explained. ‘When the Cheyenne or the Arapaho arrive, I want the rustlers between us and them.’
‘We’re a horse short,’ Mary-Lou pointed out.
‘Yeah, somebody will have to ride double,’ Johnnie nodded.
‘You and me,’ she suggested, her eyes cool and steady. ‘I’m lighter than anybody else, and you’ve got the biggest horse.’
Johnnie refrained from mentioning that he was heavier than anybody else. He could see that riding double with the widow lady wouldn’t be an unpleasant experience.
After shifting his bedroll to the back of Danny’s horse, he similarly fixed Mary-Lou’s behind Bobcat’s. Then he took those horses, and the one belonging to the Apache who was firing from along the rim, and placed them appropriately for their riders, telling them at the same time what he proposed.
When he circled back to pick up Mary-Lou, she scrambled up behind him, and settled herself on her bunched up skirts. Her long legs hung down behind his own. Where his were enclosed in stout canvas range pants, hers were covered by scalloped silk pantaloons to the ankle, with the bottoms tucked into dainty little high-heeled riding boots.
Barney looked away, blushing, but the braves made no bones about having a good look at what she was wearing. They gave each other droll grins, and shook their heads in mock despair. These white eyes sure liked to make their lives complicated.
The Apache who had been given Mary-Lou’s horse took off the side-saddle, and hid it down under the lip of the escarpment. One day she might be able to recover it. In the meantime, it wasn’t of much use to him. Nevertheless, he kept the underblanket, surcingle, and stirrups.
For a while the marksmen left on the rim allowed their rate of fire to slowly drop. The rustlers weren’t wasting as much lead as they had been. Everybody on both sides had to think about what ammunition was left.
Johnnie signalled for their fire to die away completely.
Only after a couple of minutes did one of the rustlers dare to show his face. Danny’s shot raised splinters inches from his head.
Several minutes passed before another man tried. This time he was allowed to walk out from under the trees, and then go back for his horse, before three bullets at once cut him down just as he settled in the saddle.
‘Now we go,’Johnnie said.
‘Later,’ Bobcat disagreed. ‘I come later.’
From nearly a mile up the bank, they heard Bobcat fire again, though even then, he still failed to follow them.
‘He’ll be along,’ Danny said. ‘He’s just making certain they don’t follow too close.’
‘Oh well, we’ll cut down here then,’ Johnnie replied. ‘I can see what I want across the river there.’
Mary-Lou’s arms, clasped so confidently about his waist, were very much in his awareness, but didn’t distract him from what needed to be done. He led the party down an easy slope into the bottom of the canyon, and continued on up the grassy flats until he came to a place where the river had swung in against the bluffs, leaving them nowhere else to go but into the water. A small sidestream was coming in almost opposite.
‘We go into the river here,’ he said, ‘but we don’t come out the other side. We hide our tracks by going up that little creek over there. There’s still something like twenty outlaws to come up behind us, so with any luck their tracks will cover ours over this last section, and hide the fact that ours don’t continue on the other side.’
Single file they threaded the smaller stream, and the arroyo it emerged from. By the time it levelled into a tree-studded watercourse incised into the barren high plains, they were well out of sight of anybody riding up the canyon, and far enough back to go unseen by any scouts riding the near canyon rim.
‘This will do,’ he said. ‘We’ll rest up here a spell. I’ll go back and see that Bobcat knows where to come.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Mary-Lou said. ‘I want a look at those rustlers as they go by. I want to be sure that I’ll know them if I see them again.’
‘You’ll get your boots wet.’
‘I’ll go barefoot. I’m used to it, and the bottom of this stream is sandy anyway.’
The lady was full of surprises.
‘I’m just glad it’s not mud,’ Johnnie told her. ‘Dirty water going downstream would be a dead give-away.’
To one side of the stream where it emerged into the canyon, the limestone was undercut into a shallow cave, screened by a fresh growth of fire weed. Lying prone, they could be seen from neither above nor below.
Mary-Lou promptly removed her bonnet. Its light colour was too easily seen. She shook her head to release a cascade of brown hair. It glistened where it fell across her shoulders. So did Johnnie’s eyes looking at it.
They had only been in position a minute when Bobcat appeared galloping along the far bank of the river below them. Johnnie drew his breath to yell to him, but Mary-Lou beat him to it. She put both her index fingers in her mouth, and blew a shrill whistle, which reverberated across the canyon, and lifted birds protesting from the scrub.
Bobcat looked around, obviously unable to tell where the sound had come from. Johnnie waved his hat over the top of the fire weed, dark against the limestone. He stood to his feet, and mimed to Bobcat that he wanted him to come up the creek bed.
While he watched the Commanche carefully easing his horse up through the shallow water, he said, ‘That’s sure some whistle, my lady.’
‘My brothers taught me. They whistle to control their dogs when out hunting.’
‘Still, not the kind of accomplishment one expects of the Cumberland Belle.’
‘Oh that,’ she sighed. ‘I think folks were just being a little sarcastic, calling me that. I guess I was a bit of a tomboy. Anyway, I’ve heard too, what they call you: Dryfe Sands Johnnie. You cut quite a swathe with the ladies down in Baton Rouge, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ he answered stiffly, and turned to speak to Bobcat just passing them in the watercourse.
‘How was the shooting?’ he asked.
&nb
sp; ‘One more,’ Bobcat shrugged.
‘Are they going to come back this way then?’
‘Soon,’ Bobcat said, and rode on.
‘The man is monosyllabic,’ Mary-Lou noted.
‘He’s also not very talkative,’ Johnnie said, and laughed when he saw that she thought he hadn’t understood her polysyllabic word.
‘You tease,’ she accused.
‘Not to hurt. Never to hurt.’
‘No, I hope not. We’ve got enough misery to cope with.’
‘Any help I can be...’
‘Yes, thanks. Somehow, I’m going to have to go back to my folks with my tail between my legs.’
‘That bad?’
‘Yes. They didn’t want me to marry Jamie in the first place. There were other beaus with better prospects. Now I’ve lost Jamie, and my dowry, and everything. Jamie’s what matters to me, but my family are going to look at all those cattle gone, the debts, the furnishings even. They’re all gone. I’ve no way of getting them back.’
‘The army...’
‘What army? They’ve got their hands full just helping folks who can help themselves a little. They’ve got a full-blown Indian war to keep them occupied. They’ve got no time for chasing a few cows.’
‘Your brothers ?’
‘What can they do in this country? They’re not Indian fighters.’
‘Well, there must be something ‘What hope have you got of getting back the cattle that have been stolen from your spread?’
‘I must admit that that doesn’t look too good any more. If we can’t call on the army, and there’s no other law to speak of way up here...’
He paused. She followed his line of sight.
On the far rim, perhaps two miles away, three horsemen were wending their way in and out of a crosscutting watercourse.
‘That’s the Cheyenne arriving,’ he said. ‘There’ll be other scouts over this side, and the main body down in the canyon. We’ll have to watch, because sooner or later some of them are going to pass along above us. I just hope they won’t be near enough to smell us.’
‘They can do that?’
‘Bobcat can.’
Then it was her turn to stiffen.
A party of horsemen had appeared riding along the canyon below them; the rustlers. They were in a hurry too. As Barney had said, they were mostly European, but at least one man was black, and two were Indians of some kind in European clothing. Twenty-two of them sat their saddles, even if some were bandaged and sat badly. Eight were tied on their mounts face down. Three riderless horses were being led. From the worried looks the rustlers were casting behind them, they plainly knew who and what was on their tails.
‘Can you see their faces all right?’ Mary-Lou whispered.
‘Well enough,’Johnnie replied in kind. ‘I’ll know some of them again.’
After the rustlers had gone by there was a space of about five minutes, before the Cheyenne scouts on the far rim came level.
‘Look, way, way back on the plains,’ Mary-Lou whispered.
‘Yes, more scouts,’ Johnnie said, eyeing the distant black dots brushing the horizon. ‘There’ll be more out beyond them again. Some could be twenty and thirty miles away.’
‘No wonder they don’t miss much. It’ll be hard to surprise them.’
‘If we had a regiment with us now, we’d have them.’
‘If…’
‘Now who’s monosyllabic?’
Cheyenne, a few Arapaho with them, began to appear in the canyon below, the first dozen or so single file, scanning the canyon walls as they went. After that the riders spread across the flats, a disorderly mob, except that the chief, surrounded by a clump of his more important braves, was up toward the front centre. Behind them the river flats became packed solid with mounted braves. Differences in hair styles and dress suggested more than one tribe being represented.
Most of them carried bows, with quivers of arrows slung behind their shoulders. A few carried long lances. Even fewer had guns, and those a strange assortment of muzzle loaders and carbines, and any other rubbish sharp traders could unload on to Indians who were unable to legitimately come by anything else.
‘How many men do you count?’ Johnnie whispered.
‘Far more than two hundred anyway,’ Mary-Lou replied nervously. ‘There’s more back in the trees yet.’
The first few riders were hanging from their mounts, arms flung over their necks, reading sign. They plunged into the river, and crossed to come out higher up where the rocks were still wet from the passage of the rustlers.
Thirty odd horses had churned up the ground there. Who was to say whether or not there were another nine still ahead of them? The braves paused, some looking back to their chief for the word to go on. Some were still busy with the canyon walls. One was signalling to the scouts on the rim. One was looking suspiciously across the river at the small stream Johnnie had led his party up.
It seemed that that one was about to come down and investigate it more closely.
There was an audible click as Mary-Lou cocked the Lefancheaux. Johnnie swallowed, and eased back the hammer on the Sharps. Perhaps they’d be able to hold the Indians back long enough to enable their friends to get away. There didn’t appear to be much hope of anything else.