The Pistoleer (18 page)

After a fine dinner of roast pork and yams, I took my dogs down to the creek to let them splash around and see what they might flush out of the reeds. As soon as we got there they spotted a rabbit and took off after it in the brush and that was the last I saw of them. So I just skipped rocks on the creek for a while before starting back to the house. Then I spotted Wes and Jane coming my way down the path, walking hand in hand. They hadn’t seen me, and I didn’t want to intrude on their privacy, so I slipped into the heavy bushes and stood real quiet to let them pass by unawares. As they ambled on by, I heard him talking low but couldn’t make out what he was saying. You should of seen her face. If there’s such a thing as a look of love, Jane Bowen sure had it then. They stopped on the path about ten feet beyond where I was and Wes pulled her gentle into his arms and kissed her. I can still see the way her hair shone in the late afternoon light coming through the trees. They stayed that way for a time, and I never moved a muscle nor took a deep breath. She whispered something and Wes chuckled low and tightened his hold on her and they kissed again. I don’t think I ought say any more about it. Except she surely did have pretty hair.

W
e moved our two herds out in early March. Besides me and Jim, the hands in Wes’s crew were Alabama Bill Potter, Ollie Franks, Billy Roy Dunn, and Big Ben Kelly. Nameless Smith was the cook and Jeff Longtree was the wrangler. Except for Nameless we were a young and fairly inexperienced bunch. Only Nameless and Ollie and Big Ben had rode the trail before, and they seemed to get a good deal of pleasure from telling us about cowhands they’d seen killed by lightning and drowned in wild rivers and trampled to stewmeat in stampedes. Such tales were scarifying but made me proud to be a cowhand, if you know what I mean.

In ’71 the whole of the Chisholm Trail was one long and mighty river of cattle steadily flowing north. There was so many outfits moving steers to Kansas that year, the herds ran one right behind the other as far as you could see in either direction, even from up on a rise. Our little herd of twelve hundred head stretched nearly a mile from lead steers to stragglers. Manning’s herd, just ahead of ours, was average size and twice as long. Hell, I’ve seen herds belonging to Shanghai Pierce that stretched five miles! It was thousands and thousands of longhorns on the trail. You never saw nothing like it.

Nor heard nothing like it either. All them cows bawling and smacking horns, their joints cracking loud as wood. Horses snorting and blowing. Cowhands calling “Ho cattle, ho ho ho!” and cussing and hollering back and forth to each other. Wagons clattering and clanking and their tarps slapping against the frame rails. But mostly it was the sound of cows squalling and whining and rumbling the ground under you the whole day long. They raised a great thick cloud of dust a mile wide from one end of the trail to the other. Even if you wore your bandanna over your face—which you damn sure had to do when you rode drag if you didn’t want to choke to death—that evening you’d still be spitting mud and digging dirt out of your nose and ears. The whole world smelled of cowshit.

But damn, the nights were nice. The dust would settle and the stars would be so many and so bright and looking so close you thought you’d burn your fingers on them if you reached too high. At night the ground felt strange, it was so still. The cows were bedded down and resting easy, ripping long farts and groaning sad and low. You’d see the other outfits’ fires flickering like fallen stars all the way to the north and south ends of the world. You never got enough sleep, what with having to stand a guard shift every night—but hell, that didn’t matter. It was so peaceful and quiet while you were on watch, you felt like the world was all yours. If you had a good night pony he’d do most of the work, watching and pacing along your side of the herd and cutting back any restless steer that seemed of a mind to stray off. You didn’t have to do nothing but sit easy in the saddle and gaze up at the stars and sing soft to the cows. The night guard on the other side of the herd would be singing his own songs and pretty much in his own world too.

Nothing I’ve ever done since has let me feel so free and happy as those five, six years when I was trail driving—and that first time was the one I remember best, which is only natural, I guess, since it was all new to me. I saw buffalo for the first time and more antelope and turkey and such than I’d ever see so many of again. We didn’t lose any hands or cows in the river crossings, and we didn’t have even one stampede—things that happened more than once in drives I made in later years. But that first drive surely had its share of excitement, and the main reason was Wes.

W
e laid up just outside Fort Worth for a day. Fort Worth’s always been the sort of town to encourage a fella to have a high time, and that’s just what we did. When we pushed off again next day, Alabama Bill was sporting two black eyes and Ollie Franks had a big bite mark on his arm and Billy Roy was missing a front tooth. All of us was a good bit red in the eyes, but nobody’d got put in jail, and we were all feeling finely refreshed.

We were just shy of the Red River when as bad a hailstorm as ever I saw came pouring down on us. Some of the stones were big as chicken eggs and hit hard as rocks. There weren’t no trees to take shelter under, so we had to use our folded-up blankets to protect our heads. Everybody was yelping like dogs from getting hit on the arms and legs. The hailstones spooked the remuda bad, and horses scattered every which way. Once the storm passed we spent a couple of hours helping Jeff Longtree round them up. It was a wonder we only lost two of them jugheads. It was an even bigger wonder that only a couple of dozen cows broke away from the herd and we got them all back with not too much trouble. If the whole herd had stampeded, we’d of been hunting cows all over North Texas for a week. The worst casualties among the hands were Alabama Bill, who got a knuckle broke, and Wes, who had a knot like a walnut raised on his cheekbone. “Son,” Nameless Smith told him, “you don’t never want to look
up
in a hailstorm.”

I
t was a lucky thing we crossed the Red when we did. Three days after we went through it, the river all of a sudden flooded so bad and ran so hard the steers couldn’t cross it. They said sixty thousand head piled up on the Texas side before the water eased up enough so they could push them through again.

North of the Red was the Indian Nations, and back then it was a whole different country, believe me—especially to a young fella like myself who’d never before set foot outside of Texas and had heard hundreds of hair-raising tales about wild Indians. One reason the outfits traveled so close together in them days was so they could help each other out in case of Indian trouble. The only Indians most of us had ever seen was the sort to be falling-down drunk in town alleyways, and they weren’t no more interesting than a mangy dog. The ones in the Nations was supposed to be peaceable, but everybody knew there was some bucks among them still prone to mischief. There were plenty of stories of how they sometimes spooked a whole herd into stampeding just so they could steal a couple of head. Now some of the redskins were demanding a tax on any cattle passing through their territory. Ten cents a head in some places, two bits in others, it depended on which Indians was doing the dealing. Some trail bosses paid the tax and some didn’t. Some who didn’t pay would anyway let the Indians have a beef, just to avoid trouble.

Naturally we all told each other we weren’t no more scared of a featherhead than we were of a feathered hen. Everybody did plenty of loud talking around the chuck wagon of what they’d do to any damn Indian who showed his red-devil face to them. Wes said he’d sooner eat a plate of horse apples than pay an Indian so much as a penny of tax or give him a beef. “Damn redskins want cows, let them go out and round up their own,” he said. I did my share of lip-flapping—but the truth is, I was almost as scared that we’d run into Indians as I was afraid we wouldn’t, if that makes any sense.

Two days later Billy Roy, who was riding swing, started hollering and waving to the rest of us just as we halted the herd to eat dinner. What he’d found a little ways off the trail was a grave mound. It didn’t look too fresh but wasn’t that old either. A wood cross made of wagon boards was stuck in it, and in pencil somebody’d writ on the cross piece, “here lies Bulshit bob—kilt by injuns.”

Well, the talk about Indians got really hot then. All through dinner we spit and growled about murdering redskins and how the only good Indian was a dead one. “I hope to hell they try to steal from us,” Alabama Bill said. “I’ll send the lot of them to the happy hunting ground before they can say ‘How.’” Jim said, “I’ll show them
how.
”

That night at supper, though, the talk was generally quieter. Billy Roy wondered out loud if Bullshit Bob had a family somewhere, maybe still waiting for him, missing him, not knowing he wasn’t never coming back. Most of the boys sat up around the chuck fire later than usual that evening, staring into the flames and not saying much. I don’t believe I was the only one who had trouble sleeping that night, or who felt skittish all through my guard shift.

Speaking of skittish, something else I won’t forget about that drive is the damn wolves. Along the Chisholm south of the Red, the bounty shooters had about wiped them out. I don’t recall seeing even one the whole way up through Texas. But soon as we got in the Nations we heard their howling all around us. You hardly ever saw one except way off at a distance, but at night their yodeling sounded like it was coming right out of the nearest shadows. It got on your nerves so bad you were sure you could see their yellow eyes watching you out of the dark. The howls didn’t seem to bother the cows near as much as the horses, and Jeff Longtree had a hell of a time keeping the remuda from bolting. The worst night was when we butchered a steer for supper. We normally wouldn’t kill a cow on the trail because it was way more than the outfit could eat and it would mostly go to waste. But this one steer had been ornery from the time we left the Sandies. It kept breaking from the herd, making the swing rider have to run it down time after time. It was mean-tempered besides—always roughing up the cows around it and trying to stick a horn in them. Wes finally had enough, and soon as we made night camp he shot it and had Nameless butcher it. We gorged on beef that evening and to hell with the waste. But Lord Almighty, you should of heard the wolves! They smelled that blood on the air and raised a howling to stand your hair on end. That whole long night sounded like one big crazy house under the moon. If I live to be a hundred I don’t never want to hear nothing like that again.

W
e had our first run-in with an Indian near the South Canadian River. Or Wes did, I mean. While we were bedding down the herd he rode off over the near rise to see what he might shoot for Nameless’s supper pot. A few minutes later we heard the crack of his pistol and my brother Jim said to me, “Sounds like we got fresh meat for supper.” Not two minutes later we heard a second shot, and I said, “Sounds like we got plenty of it!”

Then here comes Wes riding hell-for-leather over the rise. He’s got a big turkey in one hand and his Colt in the other, and he’s yelling, “I got one! I got one!”

“I got an injun!” he hollers when he reins up beside us and tosses the turkey over to Alabama Bill, who near falls off his horse catching it. He was breathless and big-eyed with excitement. “Sonbitch tried to bushwhack me with an arrow but I was too fast for him and now he’s deader’n that gobbler. Come see, come see!” He told Alabama Bill to tell Nameless and Jeff Longtree to grab up their rifles and keep a sharp lookout on the herd, then the rest of us went galloping off behind him to see the Indian.

I don’t know what exactly I expected him to look like. All painted up in the face, I guess, with pointy teeth maybe, and feathers all in his hair and so forth. You know—
fearsome.
But he was a sore disappointment. He was laying beside a bush with a hole in his forehead and flies flocking in his open mouth and ants already in his eyes. There wasn’t a bit of paint on him nor a feather on his head. He wasn’t any taller than me and looked a good bit punier, like he’d been eating poorly for some while. Wes got off his horse and rolled the Indian over with his foot. There was a hole in back of his head big enough to house a squirrel—and the flies quick swarmed over the thick red mess on the ground where his head had lain.

Wes said he never saw the Indian till after he shot the turkey and got off his horse to retrieve it. Then he felt somebody watching him. He pulled his pistol as he spun around and spotted the Indian crouching in the brush. “He was just starting to draw back his arrow,” Wes said. “If I hadn’t been quick,
I’d
be laying here now, with feathers sticking out one ear and an arrowhead poking out the other.”

Billy Roy wanted to take an arrow for a souvenir, but Wes said no, it’d be bad luck. He said we best hurry up and bury the body. Ben said he didn’t know why white men ought bother burying a heathen redskin anyway. Because, Wes said, if other Indians found this one with a ball in his brainpan they might get riled enough to stampede the herd. “Besides,” my brother Jim said—and I caught the quick wink he gave Wes—“some of them might slip into camp at night looking to take a scalp or two in revenge.” The thought of being scalped in his sleep made Ben go a little waxy in the cheeks, and he didn’t argue when Wes sent him back to the wagon for a spade and ax. Then me and Billy Roy dug a good deep grave with the flies buzzing all about us while Wes and the others kept a close watch for more Indians. I was thankful it was too dark to see good by the time we finished digging and rolled him into the hole, but I still ain’t forgot the feeling of dropping that first spadeful of dirt down on him.

Maybe we kept the killing a secret from the Indians, I don’t know, but it sure didn’t stay no secret on the trail. All next day the news traveled up and down from one outfit to another, and we had lots of visitors come by to congratulate Wes. One was Red Larson, ramrod of the herd right behind ours, which belonged to Peas Butler. Since the start of the drive, Red and Wes had got to be fast friends.