SEVEN
There was little more than bones left in the rags of clothing, and Johnnie and Danny had to lift carefully to avoid them falling apart, as they transferred them to a partly-burnt plank. The two Commanche went down to the river and brought back a load of cattail and mulberry saplings, leaves and all. Using a buckboard axle as a crowbar, and a broken plate for a scoop, the four men took turns digging a grave on a rise behind where the house had been.
They laid the skeleton, plank and all, on a bed of mulberry in the bottom of the grave. Bobcat and Little Hawk then sprinkled yellow cattail pollen on it, and placed the sunburst branding iron beside it. The cattail saplings went next, a green leafy shroud, while Johnnie recited what he could remember of the burial service. All the while Danny and the other two kept up a rhythmic chant in the Commanche tongue, of which Johnnie understood a little. Between them, their efforts should have helped James Quincy Edison to the happy hunting grounds on the other side, one way or the other.
Mary-Lou helped when they scraped the red-brown soil and limestone rubble back into the grave. She helped too, when they carried up broken brickwork from the fallen ranch house chimney and piled it over the top. There was no sense in allowing the coyotes and wild pig to dig up what they had worked so hard to bury.
‘I won’t build here again,’ Mary-Lou said. ‘There’s open range still to the south and west of here. It’s further from Fort Washita, but I can’t see that that makes much difference any more.’
‘Commanche that way,’ Little Hawk said. ‘You not need fort.’
Johnnie was anxious to get Mary-Lou away from that place. The other men were just as anxious to leave. Nobody said so, but all were hoping that Mary-Lou wouldn’t remember that other men had also died there. More unburied bodies had to be lying around somewhere. They would rather leave the burying of them until shovels and other tools were available. Proper respect for the dead was all very well, yet with so much time having passed already, a little more couldn’t make too much difference.
‘All the traffic went on past here up the river,’ Danny suggested.
They had paused momentarily to examine the tracks as they rode across them in getting to the ranch site. The Indian band had gone past. They had to assume that the rustlers were still ahead of them at that point.
‘Those Indians will want to rejoin their main body at some time,’ Johnnie said. ‘We’d better not get caught, if they come back past this way again.’ With that thought in mind, when they moved on, they set Bobcat and Little Hawk to scout the open grassland to either side, while the other three stayed with the tracks going up the river. Following them wasn’t difficult. The cattle had spread widely, obviously pushed on by only a few men, while the rest had stayed back to loot what the Indians had left of the homestead. Their passage was marked here and there by abandoned carcases, too many even for the ravens and coyotes to have finished cleaning the bones. Early in the drive, the rustlers must have tried to rush the cattle more than the calves could manage, trying to get quickly clear of the area.
‘Your husband seems to have had the cattle close in to the ranch,’ Danny commented.
‘Yes, he mustered them when we heard there were hostile Indians about. I guess that was just a gift to the rustlers.’
‘Had he branded the new season’s calves?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why that brand, the sunburst?*
‘It’s not a sunburst really. If you look, the circle is flattened on both sides, and the rays aren’t equal. What you have is a “Q” overlaid with a “J” on one side, and an “E” on the other.’
‘JQE,’Johnnie noted. ‘James Quincy Edison.’
‘The brand is something I’ll keep anyway,’ Mary-Lou declared. ‘Why do you have a winged spur?’
‘A tradition that dates back to Scotland. My ancestors helped the Johnstones to win a clan battle against the Maxwells. Since then my family have been granted the right to add the Johnstones’ symbol to our crest.’
‘A clan battle? How does that differ from a tribal battle, Indian wars?’
‘It doesn’t, does it? Perhaps one day our grandchildren’s children will claim Commanche totems.’
She glanced at him sharply, but he was leaning from his saddle to study the ground ahead.
Some miles up the river they came to the place the herd had reached, when the main group of rustlers, in a terrible hurry, had caught up on them. Those driving the herd had left their posts to join their fleeing confederates. Their tracks were still showing. The herd had scattered.
Over the rustlers’ tracks lay the ones left by the Cheyenne, and thereafter those were mostly what showed going up the river. Later, however, they found the rustlers’ marks superimposed once more, many with individual shoe prints they had learned to recognize.
‘Them’s very determined fellows,’ Danny opined. ‘They’ve shooken off the Cheyenne somehow, and come back for the cattle.’
That was so. All that could be quickly found of the herd had been gathered in again. At an arroyo nearby, they had been driven northward up on to the open plains, and then swung more westerly.
‘The Cheyenne, eh?’ Johnnie then suggested. ‘We follow them. We can always come back to the cattle.’
They followed the traces left by the Indians all the rest of that day, and part-way through the ' morning of the next, before they read of the next development in the marks. Evidently the rustlers had decided, during their first trip up the river, that they couldn’t go on for ever with the Cheyenne dogging their heels. The frequent stumbles, shown in the dragging hoofprints, indicated how tired the Indian ponies were getting, so the rustlers’ mounts couldn’t have been in any better shape. That the Indians hadn’t caught up on the rustlers, though, seemed more due to the fact that the Indians didn’t want to.
So long as they had the better weapons, the rustlers had too much of an advantage. The Cheyenne were waiting either for the rustlers to run out of ammunition, or for ground or other circumstances which might turn the bias their way. They wanted the rustlers’ guns and horses, yet not at any great cost to themselves. On the other hand, if they continued too far on the present course, they’d be drawing uncomfortably close to Kiowa villages, and that was a complication both rustlers and Cheyenne could do without.
Be that as it may, the rustlers on their first trip up the river found a place where they could call a halt to their flight. The river had cut an ox-bow in the plains, and then cut through the neck. The small mesa, not more than an acre, left in the loop, was in turn gashed by an arroyo, and that was masked in a growth of mulberry and cottonwood.
In the top end of the arroyo, there was just room to hold the horses out of reach of the pursuing Cheyenne. From the top of the mesa, the rustlers enjoyed an all-round field of fire, while the Indians had hardly a weapon among them that could match the range of those possessed by the defenders.
It was a stalemate. The rustlers couldn’t leave, while the Indians couldn’t get at them without a considerable loss of life. Against that, the rustlers had no water.
A moon lasting all night had enabled the situation to continue for at least a couple of days. During that time a full dozen men had been buried on the top of the mesa, so another four had died either from their wounds, or at the hands of the Cheyenne. Eighteen were left, along with thirty- two horses. Somehow, they had also lost one of their horses.
Then the situation had changed again. The Cheyenne had abandoned their siege, and left suddenly, riding away across the plains to the northeast. The rustlers would later drive the Edison cattle through that same area.
The reason for the Cheyenne’s abrupt departure was not then obvious, but while the Indians had gone north-east, the rustlers had crossed the river and taken off across the plains south-east. Eventually they must have curved to the north again, for Johnnie’s party had already seen where they had returned to collect the cattle again.
‘Where to now?’ Danny asked.
‘Well,
’ Johnnie summarized, ‘the way the Edisons’ rustlers are now headed, they’re going to come in behind the Dryfe Sands rustlers. Maybe they’re associated after all. There’s Cheyenne to the east and north east of here, and if nothing else has happened, there’s the Dryfe Sands rustlers and another Cheyenne band a little to the west of due north of us. I think we should swing around to the west of the Dryfe Sands bunch, and see if we can get some idea of what they’re doing.’
His proposal made sense to his companions, so they chose a route to take them out across the high plains to the north-west.
Hardly had they gone a mile than they crossed tracks headed north-east. Something like a couple of dozen horses were involved. They all dismounted to walk along the marks looking for clues as to who had left them.
‘Here,’ Bobcat grunted eventually, pointing to the dusty outline of a shod hoof. ‘Barney McLay.’
‘Ah, Kiowa Apache then,’ Johnnie nodded. ‘That’s why the Cheyenne pulled out in a hurry. The Cheyenne scouts must have spotted them nosing about.’
‘Apache scouts,’ Mary-Lou wondered. ‘Who’s behind them then?’
‘More Apaches or Kiowa,’ Johnnie replied. ‘That’s what the Cheyenne will be thinking. It suits us though.’
In fact they came across nobody else in the next four days. By then they had cut across the marks of the Dryfe Sands cattle still plodding steadily northward. Whoever was riding herd on them was riding the rustlers’ horses, but there was nothing to show just who was mounted on those horses. For all they could tell, the rustlers could be food for the vultures, their bodies left far back across the plains, while the Cheyenne now drove those cattle.
Cougars and coyotes were trailing the herd, but with the weak calves long since fallen by the way, no further free meals were being left for the scavengers.
With the idea of trying to get ahead of the herd again, to find a place to watch them go past, Johnnie continued a few miles west, and then swung north to ride parallel with the route the herders were taking. In this region the high plains were hardly plains any more, but gave way often to broken country, with hills and high plateaux standing above the level of the prairies. When he thought they had gone far enough, he began visiting each high point they saw along the way, hoping to get a distant view of the cattle plodding along.
Perhaps it was the number of times he did it, without seeing hide nor hair of the stolen cattle, nor the men who drove them, that made him a little careless. They came to a high point, high for the plains that is, that looked as if it would offer a distant view. At some time an ancient river had changed course, and left an old river terrace standing slightly proud of the dusty plains. A half mile short of it they saw a puff of smoke rise from the short grass on the crest.
‘Duck!’ Danny yelled, at the same moment that the sound of a rifle shot reached them. Then the bullet whirred through their group at shoulder height, and thumped up a cloud of dust a hundred yards or so behind them.