the Sky-Liners (1967) (7 page)

Blood and fur and buckskin were flying every which way, and then Galloway was up and bleeding but that cat just lay there. He looked at Galloway and then just gave up the ghost right there before us.

Galloway had his ribs raked and he carries the cougar scars to this day. But we skinned out the cougar and toted the hide and the side-meat home. We made shift to patch Galloway up, and only did that after he lay half naked in a cold mountain stream for a few minutes.

What I mean is, Galloway was nobody to tackle head-on without you figured to lose some hide.

Galloway, he just sat there a-looking at them, that long, tall mountain boy with the wide shoulders and the big hands. We two are so much alike we might be twins, although we aren't, and he's away the best-looking of the two. Only I can almost tell what he's thinking any given time. And right then I wouldn't have wanted to be in the shoes of any Fetchen.

"I'm going to leave this room, Fetchen," he said, "and when I please to. If I have to walk over Fetchens I can do it. I figure you boys are better in a gang or in a dark barn, anyway."

Black came to his feet as if he'd been stabbed with a hat pin. "It was you, was it?"

"Don't push your luck." Galloway spoke easy enough. "The only reason you're alive now is because I don't figure it polite to mess up a nice floor like this. Now, if I was you boys I'd back up and get out of here while the getting is good. And mind what I said, if one hair of that girl's head is so much as worried, I'll see the lot of you hang."

Well, they couldn't figure him. Not one of them could believe he would talk like that without plenty of guns to back him. He was alone, it seemed like, and he was telling them where to get off, and instead of riding right over him, they were worried. They figured he had some sort of an ace-in-the-hole.

Burr glanced around and he saw me standing back from the door, but on their flank and within easy gun-range - point-blank range, that is. I was no more than twenty or twenty-five feet away, and there was nothing between us. Not one of them was facing me. For all they knew, there might be others, for they'd seen us around with some of the Half-Box H outfit.

Black got up, moving easy-like, and I'll give it to him, the man was graceful as a cat. He was a big man, too, bigger than either Galloway or me, and it was said back in the hills that in a street fight he was a man-killer.

"We can wait," he said. "We've got all the time in the world. And the first preacher we come upon west of here, Judith and me will get married."

They went out in a bunch, the way they came in, and then I strolled over from the door. Galloway glanced up. "You have any trouble?"

"Not to speak of," I said.

We walked out on the street, quiet at this hour.

Somewhere a chicken had laid an egg and was telling the town about it. A lazy-looking dog trotted across the street, and somewhere a pump was working, squeaking and complaining - then I heard water gush into a pail.

A few horses stood along the street, and a freight wagon was being loaded. Right then I was thinking of none of these things, but of Judith. It seemed there was no way I could interfere without bringing on a shooting. She'd consented to marry James Black Fetchen, and we'd had no word from her folks against it. The law couldn't intervene, nor could we, but I dearly wished to and so did Galloway.

We knew there'd be more said about Tory Fetchen. That was no closed book. The Fetchens were too canny to get embroiled in a gun battle with the law when the law is such folks as Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and their like. West of us the plains were wide, and what happened out yonder was nobody's business but theirs and ours. We all knew that west of here there'd be a hard reckoning some day.

We saw them coming, riding slow up the street in that tight bunch they held to, Judith out in front, riding head up and eyes straight ahead, riding right out of town and out of our lives, and they never turned a head to look at us, just rode on by like a pay car passing a tramp. They simply paid us no mind, not even Judith.

She might at least have waved good-bye.

When they disappeared we turned around and walked back inside. "Let's have some coffee," Galloway said gloomily. "We got to contemplate."

We'd no more than sat down before Evan Hawkes came in. As soon as he spotted us he walked over.

"Have you boys made any plans? If not, I can use you."

He pulled a chair around and straddled it. "If we are correct in assuming that the Fetchen crowd stampeded and stole my cattle, it seems to me they win be joining the herd somewhere west of here. No cattle have been sold that we know of, beyond a possibility of some slaughtered beef at Fort Dodge. We now have about three hundred head rounded up that I was planning on pushing to Wyoming, but I mean to have my herd back."

"How?"

"Why not the same way they got it?"

Well, why not? Fetchen had stolen his herd, so why not steal it back? There was sense to that, for nobody wants to have nigh onto fifty thousand dollars' worth of cattle taken from under his nose.

"We're riding west," I told him. "We figured to sort of perambulate around and see they treat that girl all right."

"Good! Then you boys are on the payroll as of now - thirty a month and food."

He sat there while we finished our coffee. "You boys know the Fetchens better than I do. Tell me, do they know anything about the cattle business? I mean western cattle business?"

"Can't see how they could. They're hill folk, like we were until we came west the first time. Howsoever, they might have some boys along who do know something ... if they dare show their faces."

"What's that mean?"

"I figure they've tied in with some rustlers."

"That's possible, of course. Well, what do you say?"

Me, I looked at Galloway, but he left such things to me most of the time. "We're riding west, and we'd find the company agreeable," I said. "You've hired yourselves some hands."

We moved out at daybreak, Evan Hawkes riding point, and ten good men, including us. He had Harry Briggs and Ladder Walker along, and some of the others. A few, who were married men or were homesick for Texas, he paid off there. In our outfit there were, among others, two who looked like sure-fire gunmen, Larnie Cagle was nineteen and walked as if he was two-thirds cougar. The other was an older, quieter man named Kyle Shore.

Wanting to have our own outfit, Galloway and me bought a couple of pack horses from Bob Wright, who had taken them on a deal. Both were mustangs, used to making do off prairie grass, but broken to saddle and pack. Evan Hawkes was his own foreman, and I'll say this for him: he laid in a stock of grub the like of which I never did see on a cow outfit.

He had a good, salty remuda, mostly Texas horses, small but game, and able to live off the range the way a good stock horse should in that country.

The outfit was all ready to move when we reached the soddy where his boys had been holed up, so we never stopped moving.

Hawkes dropped back to me. "Flagan, I hear you're pretty good on the trail. Do you think you could pick up that outfit?"

"I can try."

There were still clouds and the weather was threatening. A little gusty wind kept picking up, and the prairie was wet without being soggy. Galloway stayed with the herd and I cut out, riding off to the south to swing a big circle and see what I could pick up.

Within the next hour I had their sign, and by the time a second hour had gone by I had pegged most of their horses. I knew which one Judith rode and the tracks of all her other horses, and I also knew which one was Black Fetchen's. It had taken me no time at all to identify them.

This was wide-open country, and a body had to hang back a mite. Of course, they were well ahead of me, so it was not a worrisome thing right away, but it was something to keep in mind. Of course, a man riding western country just naturally looks at it all. I mean he studies his back trail and off to the horizon on every side. Years later he would be able to describe every mile of it. As if it had been yesterday.

First place, it just naturally had to be that way. There were no signposts, no buildings, no corrals, or anything but creeks, occasional buttes, sometimes a bluff or a bank, and a scatter of trees and brush. As there wasn't much to see, you came to remember what there was. And I was studying their sign because I might have to trail the whole outfit by one or two tracks.

There was one gent in that outfit who kept pulling off to one side. He'd stop now and again to study his back trail, plainly seen by the marks of his horse's hoofs in the sod. It came to me that maybe it was that new rider with the scar on his jaw. Sure enough, I came upon a place where he'd swung down to tighten his cinch. His tracks were there on the ground, run-down heels and all. Something about it smelled of trouble, and I had me an idea this one was pure poison.

And so it turned out ... but that was another day, and farther along the trail.

The land lay wide before us. We moved westward with only the wind beside us, and we rode easy in the saddle with eyes reaching out over the country, reading every movement and every change of shadow.

Now and again Galloway rode out and took the trail and I stayed with the herd, taking my turn at bringing up the drag and eating my share of dust. It was a job nobody liked, and I didn't want those boys to think I was forever dodging it, riding off on the trail of the Fetchens.

Of a noon, Galloway rode in. He squatted on his heels with those boys and me, eating a mite, drinking coffee, then wiping his hands on a handful of pulled brown grass. "Flagan," he said, "I've lost the trail."

They all looked up at him, Larnie Cagle longest of all.

"Dropped right off the world," Galloway said, "all of a sudden, they did."

"I'll ride out with you."

"Want some help?" Larnie Cagle asked. "I can read sign."

Galloway never so much as turned his head. "Flagan will look. Nobody can track better than him. He can trail a trout up a stream through muddy water."

"I got to see it," Cagle said, and for a minute there things were kind of quiet.

"Some day you might," I said.

We rode out from the herd and picked up the trail of that morning. It was plain enough, for an outfit of nineteen men and pack horses leaves a scar on the prairie that will last for a few days - sometimes for weeks.

Of a sudden they had circled and built a fire for nooning, but when they rode away from that fire there wasn't nineteen of them any longer. The most tracks we could make out were of six horses. We had trouble with the six and it wasn't more than a mile or two further on until there were only three horses ridden side by side. And then there were only two ... and then they were gone.

It made no kind of sense. Nineteen men and horses don't drop off the edge of the world like that.

In a little while Hawkes rode over with Kyle Shore. Shore could read sign. Right away he began casting about, but he came up with nothing.

"The way I figure it, Mr. Hawkes," I said, "those boys were getting nigh to where they were going, or maybe just to those stolen cattle, so they had it in their mind to disappear. Somebody in that lot is almighty smart in the head."

"How do you think they did it?" Shore asked.

"I got me an idea," I said. "I think they bound up their horses' hoofs with sacking. It leaves no definite print, but just sort of smudges ground and grass. Then they just cut out, one at a time, each taking a different route. They'll meet somewhere miles from here."

"It's an Apache trick," Galloway said.

"Then we must try to find out where they would be apt to go," Hawkes suggested.

"Or just ride on to where they'll likely take that herd," Shore added. "Maybe we shouldn't waste time trying to follow them."

"That makes sense," I agreed,

"Suppose they just hole up somewhere out on the plains? Is there any reason why they should go father?"

"I figure they're heading for Colorado," I said. "I think they're going to find Judith's pa."

They all looked at me, probably figuring I had Judith too much in mind, and so I did, but not this time.

"Look at it," I said. "Costello has been out there several years. He has him a nice outfit, that's why he wanted Judith with him. What's to stop them taking her on out there and just moving in on him?"

"What about him? What about his hands?"

"How many would he have on a working ranch? Unless he's running a lot of cattle over a lot of country he might not have more than four or five cowboys."

They studied about it, and could see it made a kind of sense. We had no way of telling, of course, for Fetchen might decide to stay as far from Judith's pa as possible. On the other hand, he was a wild and lawless man with respect for nothing, and he might decide just to move in on Judith's pa. It would be a good hide-out for his own herd, and unless Costello had some salty hands around, they might even take over the outfit.

Or they might do as Hawkes suggested and find a good water hole and simply stay there. In such a wide-open country there would be plenty of places.