The Big Corral, page 12
“Some day,” Emlong warned, “you’re goin’ to shoot off that mouth a’ your’n once too often, Karth. When you do— smearin’ grease on yore back won’t help none.”
It was a wild land now through which they struggled, and desolate. The Nations. Forbidden territory by the laws of either white man or red. Here a dozen tribes prowled, quarreling among themselves, but all united and fiercely vindictive against the whites. But at this season the cowboys saw no sign of hostiles as they penetrated deeper into this storm-swept wilderness. Spring and summer was the time for fighting. Winter a time for huddling in well banked tepees against the cold. North had counted on that in making his plans.
Overnight the rain turned to snow. The land brown and sere at dusk, was white in the dawn, so that the horizon was false, the sky closing above them like a weight. Yet there was no relief in the change. The snow was wet, sodden, melting on man and beast, the wind relentless and unyielding. Cook-fires at the lee of the wagons smoked and spluttered, and the cooks were hard put to it to serve up hot food. There was nothing else hot in this cold land. No warm place anywhere. It seemed to Doll that he had never been warm.
No man had shaved since leaving Texas. They looked shaggy as bears, and their tempers matched their looks. Winter was definitely upon them now. The snow had ceased to be wet, but even that was something to look back to with regret. At least it had been warm enough for it to melt. Now it was hard and flinty, and getting so deep that the cattle had difficulty in finding grass.
“I seem to be having the devil’s own luck,” North growled. “This is the earliest snow, this far south, that I’ve ever seen or heard tell of. If it keeps up this way—”
He left the sentence unfinished, but Doll needed no elaboration. Unless they had better weather, the cattle would starve. And so would the men. Supplies were running dangerously short. Not only were they traveling slower than they had counted on, but it seemed that everything was against them.
“We’ll get fresh supplies as soon as we cross the Canadian,” North promised. “There’s a trading post back in there—run by a man name of McQueen. He’s been on the good side of the Indians—had to be, of course, to live there. And most of his customers have been outlaws, men who’ve hid out in the Nations and beyond. But he’ll sell to us, and we’ll be in fine shape then.”
That promise was like a beacon. Doll suspected that it was all that held them together as an unwieldy crew. But for the hope of it, many of them would have risked North’s wrath and the dangers of the trail behind to turn back. But if there was food ahead, that was what they wanted. What they must have.
“Reckon a man can keep alive on stew an’ beefsteak.” Rowe commented distastefully. “Anyway, we’re doing it. But ef’n I ever get to the place where I don’t have to eat stew, I reckon I’d be plumb likely to murder a man that suggested it to me.”
Which seemed to pretty well sum up the feeling of all of them. Pleasant alone did not complain. He was no better, but he hung onto the thin thread of life like a spider to its web. Even Karth grudgingly admitted that North was doing all he could for the sick man. He visited with him two or three times a day, discussing plans for the ranch Pleasant would have alongside his own spread in Kansas. North painted a picture which glowed brighter by contrast with the conditions surrounding them, and Doll suspected that it was all that kept Pleasant alive.
They sighted the Canadian. Ordinarily it was a turbulent stream and a dread name to men driving a trail herd. Here it looked peaceful but cold. Ice fringed either shore, but the water was clear and shallow. There seemed no likelihood of trouble as they started across.
Long since the two herds had been merged again as one. It was easier to keep one bunch on the move in such weather, requiring fewer men for night duty. Even so, animals and men alike stumbled with weariness, and it was that factor which added up to near-disaster at mid-river. A cow stumbled and went down, and her hoarse bawl of terror and despair set those close at hand to milling in blind panic. In a matter of seconds it had infected half the herd.
Normally, even then, it would not have been bad. The river was not deep nor swift enough to bother much. But the wagons had started across, a little way down-stream. All at once the wave of the herd was surging, threatening to engulf them.
Emlong yelled at his team, though they needed no urging. The wiry cayuses knew their peril as well as he did. A wagon could be overturned in such a melee, and then, caught in the middle of a milling jam, man or horses would be helpless. Behind the seat Pleasant half raised up in his blankets, conscious that something out of the ordinary was happening.
One horse, plunging wildly, went off into a deep hole. The next instant the wagon overturned, spilling on its side.
North was the closest of the men on horseback. He spurred hard, forcing his horse toward the melee, reckless of the menace still exploding out from the packed mass of the herd upstream. He saw Emlong working to get the team on their feet again, hopeless as that seemed with the wagon dragging at them. But back in that confusion of canvas and box was Pleasant, trapped and helpless.
The milling mass of the herd was around him now, horns raking wildly, hoofs churning. Emlong did the onlv thing he could, as one horse kicked itself loose from the harness. He caught it and managed to get on its back. It was still touch and go whether the cayuse could keep its feet and save itself and its rider. The wagon and the supplies it contained were hopelessly lost.
North had a knife out, the blade opened. He slashed at the dragging canvas, ripped a slice of it away. Then he grabbed, and had Pleasant in his grasp, still wrapped mummy-like in the now sodden blankets. A heave of the lurching wagon, with cattle crowding it hard, almost sent it toppling over him, but his horse backed away, biting viciously at the animals in its path. North clutched his burden in front of him.
Other riders were driving in among the milling herd, beating them into a semblance of order again. North’s cayuse plunged through a red sea of heaving backs and thrusting horns, then there was open water. He reached the shore, rode to where the other wagon was drawn up, and stripped the icy blankets off Pleasant. Karth, working to start a fire, stared curiously at the now pallid face of the invalid.
“Looks like he was near finished, this time,” he said. “You won’t have to share with him.”
“Get that fire going, damn you,” North ordered. “Bring some dry blankets, and jump! We’ll get him warm—get him to McQueen’s. Mebby that’ll help him.”
Karth backed away, tripped, and sprawled headlong. But he was up again like a scared rabbit at the look in North’s face, grabbing wildly for blankets, scuttling to use their last precious bunch of dry wood to feed the blaze along.
- 20 -
McQUEEN’S! That was the slogan now. To reach the trading post, there to get help for Pleasant, to obtain fresh supplies. With only one wagon left and half their scanty stock of food gone in the hungry maw of the Canadian, it had become doubly necessary now. McQueen’s was like a lodestar on the long trail to the Arkansas.
No one, not even North, knew exactly where McQueen’s was located. Somewhere back in these wild brakes, on a tributary of the river. And not far ahead now—two or three days, maybe a week. Not far as miles went.
Wolves skulked openly on the outskirts of the big herd, waiting to pull down stragglers, to feast on the weak. They grew daily more bold, keeping just beyond the line of accurate gun-fire by day, coming in close at night. Men, riding night-guard, would see green eyes which blazed and faded only to reappear again not far off. Their ghostly serenade had a savage quality to it.
Two days later, Karth disappeared. With him went a horse and a sack of desperately needed supplies. North called Ames.
“Take two men,” he instructed. “Trail him—to hell, if necessary. Bring him back—or kill him!”
“He won’t be brought back alive—not after what happened last time,” Rowe prophesied, watching his friend ride away. “Leastways, I wouldn’t—not if I was him.”
Pleasant was still alive. That was about all that could be said for him. He lay now, mostly silent, uncomplaining, a wraith of a man. He had been shaken by chills, following that immersion in the river, until, as Emlong complained, he shook the wagon. It had taken a long time to get him warm again. Even now he didn’t look warm. Warmth was something to dream about, but never quite to attain.
North worked harder to keep a spark of life in Pleasant than he had ever done for himself or to move the herd. He seemed to have centered all his will here, that Pleasant should live. Some found it incomprehensible.
“If Pleasant dies, North’ll have his herd back, just like that,” one man muttered. “And he stole it in the first place—”
“He didn’t know the shape Pleasant was in,” Doll explained. “He’ll fight a man that’s able to hit back, and give no quarter. But he’d give up half the herd to put the old man on his feet again, and do it without turnin’ a hair.”
It was this quality in North, perhaps, which Marian Breen had sensed and liked. Because of it, Doll had sided him where otherwise he would have pulled back. But unless they found this place called McQueen’s, it was not alone Pleasant who would be in bad shape.
North had grown increasingly silent. He rode aloof from the rest of them, and what his thoughts might be they could only conjecture. Only he talked to Pleasant—talked like a son, and joked. With the rest of them he was driving, always driving—men and horses and cattle alike. He was tireless, possessed of a rocky endurance to match his face. But the land was empty before them.
That emptiness was the worst. The cold and the snow could be endured. But now it seemed as though they had left all of life behind. Even the sun, symbol of warmth, was remote and becoming more so. This might be a near-paradise by summer. It was wasteland by winter.
There was no sign of Ames nor the men who had gone with him. The ever moving wind wiped away tracks in a matter of minutes, or hours at most. Where Karth traveled it was like following a wraith, and where this town of McQueen’s might be was equally hard to guess. Until, all at once, the sun came out dazzlingly white across the snow, and they saw it ahead.
For a moment even Doll doubted his eyes, wondering if it was some sort of a mirage. A low ridge of hills reared just short of the horizon, and several buildings, mostly ‘dobe, clustered at their foot. This would be McQueen’s. It could be nothing else.
Even the cattle seemed to catch the pulse of excitement. They pressed ahead with new interest, and it was not until they were nearing the place that fresh misgivings smote the men. No smoke arose from any chimney. Nor was there a break in the unbroken snow along the single street.
North fought down a feeling close to panic. This was McQueen’s. It answered the description he had heard of the place, and there was no other town or trading post in all this whole section of wilderness. But that something was wrong was doubly evident as a coyote slunk away at their approach.
The buildings had an air of having been lived in, and not long before. Neither dust nor desertion had left a settled imprint. But they contained only emptiness now. And in the main building, the store, there was a note waiting for them —lying on the counter, boldly written.
“You’re too late, North. Now you can starve—and freeze! But they say it’s warm in hell!”
That was all. North stared at it with burning eyes, swept his gaze across the bare shelves. Emptiness! They had crossed the Red, had beaten off attack, had plodded the endless miles against mounting odds. But here, where he had least expected it, enemies had been ahead of them, had won a bloodless but decisive battle.
McQueen of course had been persuaded to sell out, for a price. A renegade to start with, such an act was in keeping with his character. The emptiness of the place testified to it. Every man who had habited the town had departed, and they had taken everything which might be useful. There was no food on the shelves of the store, nothing to sustain life. What had been here might be cached a mile away, or a hundred. There was no track in the shifting snow, no way of telling.
A thorough search failed to reveal anything which they could use. North looked at the bleak, dismayed faces of his crew, and gestured.
“They sold out,” he said shortly. “They think they’ve got us licked, but we’ll fool them. We’ll live without their help. But when the rats that have nested here get ready to come back—they can have some of their own medicine. Burn what you can and smash the rest.”
In that hour, North was a leader. Somehow he infused his own spirit into the men. They were almost jaunty in their defiance as they went on.
It was the next day that the blizzard struck. This was a norther—a true blizzard, sweeping down from Canada, gaining in ferocity as it marched. It began with a keening wind and blinding snow, and soon the storm had shut away the herd so that each man found himself alone in a world of choking white. As it increased the air grew colder, until, despite all that could be done, the big herd was turning tail, drifting with the storm, and men could only follow, taking such care as they were able that not too many should be lost, where to stop moving meant to freeze.
For twenty-four hours there was no lessening in the fury. Eighteen inches of fresh snow fell, and now starvation faced the herd as it did the men. Hunger and cold. Then it cleared, and here was a new and worse hazard, aftermath of the storm.
Driving continually, the snow had crusted heavily on the backs of every animal. Now they saw that it had done more than that. It was across their faces as well, an icy sheath which crusted closed eyes. The herd, still stumbling along uncertainly, was blind.
Here was an added job for men so bone-weary that they could hardly keep going. Unable to see, the cattle did not sheer off at their approach. But it was a formidable job to seek out cow after cow, to rap them sharply across the head a time or so and crack that mask of ice loose. Yet it had to be done.
Probably it was hopeless. The snow was too deep now for them to find grass, save where the wind had swept it aside, piling huge drifts at the expense of these barren stretches. Drifts in which faltering stock would plunge and then stand helplessly to freeze if men were not constantly on guard to prevent it and to pull them loose.
But there was nothing to do but point them into the northwest again and keep moving. Keep moving till they died. There was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. Even those who hated North knew that their only salvation lay in sticking with him. He’d bring them through, or they’d all die together.
“Two days,” Emlong grunted, and fumbled icicles from his mustache and sent the ice shivering against his dying fire. “Two days, and we’ll scrape the bottom of the barrel. Noth-in’ left then but stew, an’ nothin’ in the stew but beef—if you can call them bones beef.”
“Two days is as long as they’ll be able to stagger without more grass than they’re getting,” Doll retorted grimly. “So the one evens the other.”
“Yeah.” Emlong climbed into the wagon, shaking his head. Then he stuck it out again, his voice raspy with an added gruffness.
“One man’s lucky,” he said. “Pleasant. He’s gone on to greener pastures.”
- 21 -
THEY managed a shallow grave, there in the frozen wastes. With a big flat stone which it took three men to move, to lay above it. That would serve as a marker, would keep the wolves away. It was an unlooked-for ending, this concern for a man from whom North had originally stolen a herd.
But there could be no doubt in any man’s mind now that Pleasant had touched the one soft spot in their employer. He helped with the digging, and from somewhere he dug out a dog-eared Bible and read a few words while the wind whistled its own dirge and the dark closed down again. And tears closed on his cheeks.
“Dust to dust,” North said, and closed the book. “But he was named right. Pleasant. . . . I never knew my own folks. If I’d known my father—and if he’d been a man like him—”
He left the thought abruptly unfinished, turning away, but men understood. With the dawn, however, bones seemed to creak like the ungreased wheels of the wagon. Discouragement was in every man, every beast. One of the crew voiced it dully, looking down at the new-made grave, already one with the rest of the land in the drifting snow.
“Reckon he’s lucky,” he said. “Most of us won’t get that much—or a stone to keep the wolves from feastin’.”
North, swinging heavily into his saddle, faced around at that.
“Who’s talkin’ of dying?” he asked harshly. “This is no land for quitters—and we’re not quitting! Storm, or cold, or the devil himself can’t stop us here! We’ll reach Kansas! Make no mistake about it! When the grass grows green, we’ll be there with it!”
Somehow he goaded them to movement. One plodding foot in front of another, as the hours dragged by. Agony for man and beast. It came up from the throats in a tortured lowing, like a dirge. But they moved—moved to keep from freezing where they stood, and they moved north toward Kansas.
At mid-day, as though the fates relented, they came across a man. The storm had closed around them again, thick and blanketing, so that he rode among them before he was aware that they were there. The wind had swept away the sound of the bawling herd, for he rode with it where they faced its cutting edge. And a heavy scarf tied over his ears further blanketed them.
Doll saw him first, but North was beside him as the man stared out of glazing eyes and tried belatedly to swing. North caught him, heavy fingers closing crab-like on a shoulder, wrenching the man around. One who rode with well fed look to him.
“What’s the hurry, stranger?” North demanded. And then: “Who might you be?”
It was the terror, so plain to read in this man’s face, which told him more than the jerky words.
“Why, I—I’m Cowan. I—”
North reached then, his own hand unmittened, and jerked away cap and muffling scarf, revealing the bright carroty red of the newcomer’s hair. His voice, surprisingly, was a chuckle, but utterly without mirth.
