The Tall Men (15 page)

They lost another three days at Fort Reno while Stark fretted over the advice of his friend Major Randall, Randall’s opinion was that of Colonel Lamine at Laramie, ominously compounded.

Lamine had given them a slight chance, Randall gave them none.

He did, however, give them tacit permission to move on to Fort Kearney. It was first suggested by him and agreed to by Stark that a courier be sent to Kearney seeking Carrington’s clearance to that point. Ben, sensing a risk in this, argued weather with Stark. It was October 18. They could not chance an hour’s delay. It was the fractional uncertainty of the Sioux against the dead-zero sureness of a deep snow.

Stark, looking at the herd and seeing thirty-five dollars every time he saw a fat steer, folded. He went back to Randall and put the pressure on.

The old army game already had a long beard in 1866. You played it no differently, using the same weary buck and tired pass thereof. Nathan Stark was a big man; a political power in the territory with friends up to the rank of major general strung through the chain of command from Leavenworth to the Powder and beyond to Carrington himself.

The herd moved out for Fort Phil Kearney and Colonel Henry Carrington.

But after a long night of trying to sleep with his unauthorized decision, the good major wrote a covering
letter and dispatched it to Kearney. He had, reluctantly, the report stated, permitted a Mr. Nathan Stark of Virginia City, Montana, to pass a herd of three thousand mixed breeding and beef cattle with clearance to Fort Kearney on the basis of the fact that Colonel Lamine had cleared the herd up the Bozeman from Laramie and that his, Randall’s, authority could not take precedence in the matter without written direction from Carrington. There had been, further, some concern of a personal friendship with the commander at Kearney brought forward by the Montana civilian. Major Randall expressed his regrets and respects and requested further orders.

The courier was an old hand and a wise one. He rode only by night, and a roundabout course. Result of this Sioux circumspection was that an infuriated Carrington received news of Stark’s approach only when Ben had the herd sixty-two miles north of Reno and a short seven south of Kearney.

Further result was that the wary Texan, outriding his point by four miles, rode up over a saddleback rise in the trail three miles from the fort, squarely into Company F, Troop C, Second United States Cavalry, Captain William J. Fetterman, Commanding.

Fetterman was a career officer, very impressed with his two silver bars, his unrecognized genius as a cavalry tactician, and his oft expressed disdain of the red brother. It had been his repeated boast that with fifty troops he could ride through the entire Sioux Nation. Accordingly, a simple company should be ample to halt three thousand cattle and thirty cowboys.

As a matter of record, it was.

Ben received Fetterman’s version of his superior’s
ultimatum, along with the unauthorized sneer which came with it, calmly enough. A man had eyes, he had ears, he had, anyway, a part of a brain. There was the pompous little red-haired captain. There were his twenty nervous, green troopers. There were Colonel Henry B. Carrington’s angry orders. A man could take them or leave them.

Ben compromised.

He took the orders, left Captain Fetterman and his down-faced boys in blue.

But when, twenty minutes later, he galloped into Stark and the head of the herd, he was anything but calm. “We’re up agin another blockade,” he rasped. “This un ain’t goin to be no run-around like the Jayhawkers.”

“You’ve seen Carrington!” ejaculated Stark, thinking he had been to the fort and back.

“Naw, a sawed-off captain named Fetterman. He’s the colonel’s boy, howsomever. Brought us a billydoo from headquarters, likewise.”

“Well, man, what is it?” Stark scowled. “Don’t tell me they’re not going to let us through?”

“It ain’t mine to tell you nothin’, savin’ what Fetterman told me. You kin take it from there, and to Carrington, I allow.”

“Go on, for God’s sake.”

“We been give a quarantine line three mile south of the fort. Colonel needs the grass past that point fer his own stock. We ain’t to set a heifer’s hoof acrost thet line.”

The herd was held up at once, thrown off the trail and onto graze. Stark departed for the fort. He was back by nightfall and, as Clint soberly put it, “You could see the dust from his cussed tail a’draggin’ a mile off.”

Fetterman hadn’t told them the half of it.

And Stark, ahead of that, in reporting the number of troops Carrington had at Kearney, had told them twice too much.

In the half-finished stockade ahead were less than three hundred men, a good part of them civilian packers and supply troops. Of regular troops, and most of them grass-green replacements, there were not over two hundred. Any question of a military escort up the Bozeman was grimly out. The order to halt the herd and not move it a stray head north of the three-mile line was official. And friendship or no friendship between him and Nathan Stark, Carrington would not hesitate to use his two hundred troops to enforce it.

Now they all knew where they stood.

In the middle of Wyoming, with winter coming on.

This time Stark took no vote. The grass and water were excellent where they were. There was good shelter from the high hills to the north, east and west. There was plenty of sizable timber within short hauling distance. And there were two hundred U.S. troops standing official guard only three miles away.

The Montanan continued to make his hard points as the cowboys gathered to listen in nodding silence.

They still had from three weeks to a month of open weather, barring a squaw winter. Lodgepole pine for corral rails stood by the slim thousand along the near hills. Heavier timber for sod huts and shelter sheds stood mixed in with it. By hard work and careful herding they could hope to winter through with reasonable losses. Then, with spring, they could backtrack, going over South Pass as originally suggested by Stark.

Clint, scowling at the stress on the last point, knew exactly what Stark meant.

The big slicker was going over Ben’s head again, getting to the men, putting the blame on his trailboss, saving none of it for himself. Again, he would have braced the Montanan on the spot, but once more Ben interceded, defending Stark. Before the call for fair play was decently out of Ben’s mouth, Stark was concluding his rationalization with the customary deft touch. With that touch, to Clint’s cynical satisfaction, he proved three points.

To Stark’s kind the end gain was everything. He was a considerable man, hard and tough as they came. He was a pretty square man, too, for the most part. But then, for the most part, he could afford to be. It’s not hard to be easy on the whip when you’ve got a six-horse hitch on a downhill drag. But when you hit the steep spots, when your wheelers start to lay down on you, your swing team won’t pull and your leaders will neither gee nor haw, look out.

Stark had set out to bring a herd of longhorns from Texas to Montana. If, in that process, he had to cut the guts out of Ben Allison, or anybody else, you could consider those guts cut.

He could have made his winter camp without blaming Ben for it. That wasn’t his way. Stark was a leader of men, not a brother to them. When a mistake was made, the charge had to be put to somebody else’s account. Otherwise, the leader might fall. In the present case, if Ben were left blameless the men might rally to him and his views instead of Stark and his. They had done so twice before. The Montanan’s colddeck credo, money before morals and the hell with who got hurt, simply demanded they be given no third chance. The knife came out and Ben got cut.

That was point one.

Point two was that Clint understood point one.

Point three was that Ben didn’t.

For two days Ben worked the crew, getting up the main holding corral for the beef stock and a second, smaller enclosure for the draft and riding stuff. Twenty-four-hour guard-shifts were run. There was, ominously, no interference from the Indians. And this despite the fact that a big band of hostile scouts had hung off their flanks all the way up from Fort Reno.

On the morning of the 21st, with the corrals completed and the stock safely in them, Ben rode to Fort Kearney. He was gone all day but when he rode in after dark that night he had the answer to what had been bothering him—where were the Sioux all the time they were throwing up those corrals?

The simple answer—the Sioux had been busy.

He got his information from the same source he had used at Laramie; the post’s enlisted and civilian scouts. His prime informant this time was one Pawnee Perez, variously known as Portugee Phillips and Wyoming John, a halfbreed civilian scout born among and reared by the Oglala Sioux.

Perez had just come in off a scout into the Wolf Mountains and along the Tongue River north of the fort. On the Tongue he had found a warcamp of eight hundred lodges. By frontier rule-of-red-thumb, two warriors to a lodge, this added up to at least fifteen hundred braves in that one camp, alone. He had seen two other, smaller camps of about one hundred fifty lodges, each. And in the week he had been gone, no less than five hundred Indians were in daily operation around the fort itself.

And not wasting their time.

In the three days since Fetterman had halted the herd, Carrington had lost twenty men out of three wood-cutting and hay-hauling parties outside the fort, and had had every last head of saddlestock, saving Fetterman’s forty troop horses, run off by the constantly raiding and retreating red-men. Other than Fetterman’s few mounts and perhaps eight or ten hitches of wagon mules, the Colonel’s own Kentucky thoroughbred was the sole saddle animal left to the Kearney command.

And more.

Constantly harassed and piecemeal butchered by the sharpshooting Sioux, the wood and hay details had not been able to get in enough of either fodder or fuel to carry the garrison through December.

Carrington’s two hundred infantry would be lucky to finish the fort before Crazy Horse’s five hundred advance cavalry finished its builders. And the red commander had two thousand reserves squatting along the Tongue not thirty miles north!

It was Pawnee Perez’s opinion, grimly returned to Stark & Company by its worried trailboss, that with the fort now cauterized and sewn off, the Sioux would turn their leisure attention to the three thousand spotted buffalo and thirty Ride-A-Heaps below that fort.

The liberal Indian education of the Texas cowboys and their Montana herd owner had by this time progressed to the point where their knowledge of the colorful Sioux patois was amply sufficient to allow them to translate Ben’s use of Perez’s vernacular into no uncertain personal terms.

The silent riders looked first at Stark, then at one
another. Not a man bothered to put words to the obvious.

To the Sioux, the multi-colored Texas longhorns were simply “spotted buffalo.”

Accepting this Oglala definition of the cattle, the dullest witted of their big-hatted chaperons encountered no difficulty guessing who the “Ride-A-Heaps” might be.

Spell it any way you wanted—Sioux, Sedalia, Laramie, Reno, Fort Worth or West Texas—you didn’t pronounce it any different. The accent was on the “C” and the second syllable was “scared.” Put it all together, it came out one word. Cowboy.

That was you, mister!

An hour after Ben made his report, the herd camp returned to an uneasy quiet. What riders were not on herd guard or picket duty remained around the chuckwagon fire, Saleratus McGivern, for once forgetting to complain about it, kept the coffee kettle constantly replenished, taking time out only for repeated nervous checks beneath his floursack apron to make sure his ancient Walker Colt was still stuck in the waistband of his Levis, ready, there, for commissary duty not concerned with the baking of biscuits or the brewing of mocha beans.

Ten o’clock passed, and eleven. Still no man sought his blankets. If they were waiting for something without knowing exactly what, their uncertainty was soon resolved.

Nathan Stark pulled out his engraved pocket watch for the third time in ten minutes. “Nearly midnight,” he said to Ben. Then, to the waiting riders, “You boys better catch-up. You go out in five minutes.”

The cowboys nodded, drifting away from the fire in twos and threes, moving for the saddled night horses picketed around the woodwagon’s tailgate. The first of them was stepping up on his mount when the sound of drumming pony hoofs checked his swing-up.

The approaching rider slid his horse into the firelight and stepped down. It was Slim Blanchard.

“What’s up, Slim?” said Ben quickly. “Where’s the Kid?”

The Kid was Curly Blanchard, Slim’s nephew, a pleasant drawling youth of eighteen, youngest rider in the crew and by all odds the apple of its hardbitten eye.

“It’s whut I dunno,” said Slim tersely. “We was ridin’ the main corral gate, him north, me south. I passed him five minutes ago and all was quiet. Jest arter he’d gone by I heered some kind o’ scuffle back over ahint me. I doubled back and bumped inter the Kid’s hoss in the dark. They wasn’t nobody on him.”

“Let’s go,” said Ben, and ran for the black.

They found Curly thirty yards from the corral fence. They hadn’t had time to scalp him or cut him up. There was only one mark on him and the Sioux skinning knife that made it was still sticking in it—from behind.

“I reckon,” said Ben, “we ain’t time fer no formal services.”

“I’ll fetch a wagon tarp,” said Waco Fentriss.

Slim Blanchard said nothing, and was joined in it by the remaining trap-jawed dozen of his fellow Texans.

They got the boy into the tarp, back to the fire.

“Where’ll we put him, Ben?” asked Slim, dry-eyed.

“In the lead wagon.”

“They ain’t room,” muttered the tall cowboy.

“There will be,” said Ben. “Waco, Chickasaw—Heave the rest of them Remin’ton boxes out’n there. Hogjaw, you and Charley knock ’em open. Save the wood. Mr. Stark, you and Saleratus strip them rifles. Git the grease out’n their barrels and rack ’em up here alongside the chuckwagon. The rest of you git
on out to the herd. Tell them other boys to hump their butts back in here.”

As the cowboys began legging-up, Ben stepped to the stirrup fenders of a darkbearded rider from Fort Worth. “Tex,” he nodded, “take two boys and snake yer ropes onto them first three lineposts on the north side. Pull out that fence and git them cattle on the trail.”

“She’s pulled,” said Tex Anderson.

“Clint’s on guard over to the workstock corral,” added Ben. “Send a boy fer him and have him take over the herd. Tell him Stark’ll pay him overtime, past midnight.” The grin which flashed behind the last comment would not have been recognized as such unless a man was familiar with what might strike a quarter-blood Comanche as funny.

The cowboys were already fading into the darkness before Nathan Stark caught up with Ben’s timed-fire directions. He had only time to digest the idea of his herd being thrown on the trail in the middle of the night and in the heart of Sioux country, and to get the first three words of objection out of his startled mouth, when Ben cut into him colder than an ice saw.

“Mr. Stark,” said the Texan, stepping into him and holding his voice down for Montana ears alone, “you’d best git the far hell out’n my way. You want to stay here and winter through by yerse’f, you jest do it. I don’t aim to stand by and see our boys knocked off one-by-one. Me and the herd’s movin’ on.”

Nathan Stark stood back. By this time he knew the Texas tempers. He saw the look on Ben’s face. He had seen the look on young Curly’s. And the looks on the hard faces of his fellow cowboys when they
brought the dead boy in. If ever on the fifteen hundred long miles from Fort Worth there had been a time for following the drag and keeping well back out of the dust, that time was right now.

Stark knew that. And with the exercise of his monumental control, he once more held his hand.

He looked past the fire and past the darkness beyond it. He saw his three thousand steers and six wagonloads of supplies going up in the warsmoke that waited along the Tongue River beyond Fort Kearney. Still, he knew he could not stop Ben and the Texans tonight. A man could only guess what lay in the big trailboss’s mind. But he didn’t have to guess too hard. The uncrating and stripping of the Remingtons could mean but one thing. Ben intended to outflank Fort Kearney and Carrington’s absolute orders, to take himself and Stark and their low-voiced argument past the chance of the colonel’s interference, and to gamble his guts and thirty Rolling Block rifles against Crazy Horse and three thousand Indians.

It was a hard commentary on Nathan Stark’s own quota of courage that his reply to Ben Allison’s blunt warning was an even blunter one of his own.

“Ben,” he said quietly, “this time you’ve gone too far.”

“Not half so far,” answered Ben, pale-eyed, “as I aim to go.”

“All right,” nodded Stark. “It’s your saddle. Ride it the way you see it.”

“She’s rode,” said Ben, and went for the black gelding.

They traveled far that night. In the five hours before the false dawn they pushed the cattle ten miles
beyond the fort. And in the two hours remaining before full daylight they forced them another five.

Behind them, in the cold October darkness, lay Big Piney Creek, Squaw Pine Ridge, Peno Creek Bottoms. Beyond them lay the grass-grown ruts of the abandoned Bozeman Road. And beyond the road waited the distant Tongue; beyond it, again, the yet more distant Big Horn.

They could not know the names—Big Piney, Squaw Pine, Peno Bottoms. They passed them swiftly in the frosty starlight. Yet within two months those names would be known to them and to all western men. But Captain Theodore Ten Eyck was still sixty days from gazing horror-stricken from the heights of Squaw Pine Ridge, down across the brooding silence of the Peno Bottoms and the frozen bodies of Captain William J. Fetterman and his eighty mutilated men. And the two thousand Sioux who would stream up at Ten Eyck from the bloodied forks of the Peno, driving him back to Kearney with the ghastly news of the Fetterman Massacre, were still in their fire-banked tipis along the Tongue.

When Ben and his Texans passed that grim way in the early morning hours of October 22, only the far-off call of a hunting wolf and the nearby mutter of the nightwind in the stunted timber disturbed the eerie quiet of Squaw Pine Ridge.

The herd was put on tightly guarded graze at seven o’clock. The weary crew gathered at the chuckwagon while Saleratus stirred a bag of Arbuckle’s into the coffee kettle and turned the smoking steaks in their tubsized frying pans. Ben let the men eat first, then, with the third tins of mocha poured and the oilskin pouches of longleaf Burley coming out, he put it to them.

“Boys,” he shrugged, “it’s jest as simple as you seen it worked last night. Every night we drive. Every day we hold up and keep the wagons circled. An Injun dearly hates the dark and he don’t know how to fight in it, ceptin’ to sneak in and cut singles out’n the herd like they done with Curly. Beyond thet, iffen we drive hard by night and watch out sharp by day, I allow we kin make it through.”

He paused and when none of them spoke, went on.

“The other way was what we was doin’ down yonder. Settin’ and waitin’ for ’em to carve us off, one-by-one. With all winter to do the carvin’ I reckon you don’t need no diagrams to figger the shape they’d have our rumps cut into by spring.”

“I reckon,” nodded old Chickasaw Billings, “that we one and all kin see where we was last night. Ain’t nobody got no argiments with thet, Ben. Question is, boy, where are we this mornin’?”

“Right where you want to be, or where you say you are,” grunted Ben. “My say is this here road and Montany Mr. Stark’s is thet there winter camp and Fort Kearney.”

Again he paused and again the men waited.

“Speakin’ of Mr. Stark,” he went on slowly, “I got suthin’ I want got straight by all of you. He’s treated me and all of us fair and square. The way he sees the Sioux it made sense to go inter thet camp below Kearney and wait ’em out. The way I see ’em, it don’t. There ain’t no more to it than thet. I ain’t buckin’ him on who the cattle belongs to, nor on who’s payin’ yer wages. I’ve tooken his orders right along and I mean to take ’em yet—providin’.”

He stopped short on the last word and Stark, listening carefully as he had gone along, watching the men and their reactions as he always did, now only
nodded calmly and asked. “Providing what, Ben?” He was playing it safe again, passing the raise, wanting to know for sure where the men stood before upping the ante.

“Providin’ thet from here on you stick to yer set of trace chains and don’t step over mine.”

“Make sense, man.”

“You handle the money, leave me point the cattle.”

“I’d say that was up to the men, wouldn’t you?”

“It ain’t up to the cows,” said Ben. “Let’s git on with it.”

“I reckon there ain’t no call to git very fur—”

It was old Chickasaw Billings again, stepping forward and facing his fellow riders.

“One vote fer Ben Allison and Virginy City.”

“Second the motion,” said Waco, coming up off his heels and lounging to Chickasaw’s side. “All them not in favor signify by raisin’ yer right hand"—he underlined it with a soft pat of his worn holster—
“with a Colt in it.”

“I allow I kin outdraw ye, Waco,” drawled Hogjaw Bivins. “But not on thet proposition. Three votes fer Little Benjamin and his mother-friggin’ Bozeman Road.”

“Four,” added Slim Blanchard. “And one fer Curly makes five.”

“Six,” corrected Charley Stringer. “The returns from Uvalde County jest come in.”

“All any o’ you bastards know how to do is eat,” growled Saleratus McGivern. “You none of you never learnt to count. Seven.”

“Eight,” amended the spade-bearded Tex Anderson. “And damn if the polls didn’t jest close.”

One of the cowboys, a youngster from John Bell
Hood’s Texas Brigade and a war comrade of Clint’s, grinned easily. “Fair enough, Tex. We-all will mark our ballots and send ’em back from Montany. Three cheers fer the Confed’racy!”

One of the bowlegged constituency cut loose from the back row with an ear-piercing Rebel yell. It was picked up and improved upon by twenty-odd loyal Texas throats and old Chickasaw broke up the meeting with six shots through the canvas spine of the woodwagon and a thigh-slapped “P’int ’em north by Gawd! And six bits reeward fer the fust Sioux sca’plock plucked barehanded!”

None of the suddenly rejuvenated cowboys had noticed Clint Allison standing back from the fire, failing to take part in the vote.

They noticed him now. Him and his flat, soft voice. And his faraway, vacant leer.

“Sorry to bring you the bad news from the west, boys,” he sneered uglily. “But San Saba, Texas, jest seceded from the Union.”

Wheeling on him, Ben’s pale eyes narrowed.

You knew Clint, you knew that damn-nasty sliteyed sneer. And where it came from.

Somewhere, somehow, between midnight and daybreak, Clint had found a bottle.

He was dead drunk.

The stillness held. Clint steadied himself against the wood wagon, Ben stood facing him, feet spread, arms hanging loosely. None of the others moved or spoke.

Clint was a dangerous-when-wet proposition. Enough of the watching men had found that out in the bistros of Old Fort Worth before starting the drive. Those who hadn’t took their first look at him
now, and didn’t need to be told to stand back and stay wide. On the frontier you learned young to read roadbrand and earmarks on a bad drunk.

“Clint,” said Ben gently, “you crazy or suthin’?”

Clint laughed, and it was not a pleasant sound. “I may be suthin’,” he said hoarsely. “But I ain’t crazy.
You
are, big brother!”

“What’re you sayin’, boy?”

“Jest this,” growled Clint. He was not laughing nor loose-grinning anymore. “I’m peed so full of you and Stark and the dumbhead way you’re lettin’ him play you thet my back teeth are floatin’.”

“Clint—!”

“Shet up, Ben. I’m gonna say it. You’re gonna hear it.”

“Keep talkin’, son,” said Ben soothingly. “I’m listenin’.”

“Stark’ll git to you, Ben.” Clint seemed to sober in one of those wide-eyed, fleeting seconds of lucidity a very drunk man will show. “He’ll do it and you’ll never feel it goin’ inter you. Watch the son of uh bitch, you hear me, Ben—
watch him!”

“Clint, boy.” Ben said it softly, pointing the course of the small stream along which the herd was being grazed. “Yonder’s a stretch of cottonwood. Hunt yerse’f some shade and sleep it off. You’re talkin’ wild.”

“Ben—” The smile faded back, quick, loose. The staring look of the intense blue eyes grew dark, steadied uncertainly on Ben. “I’m comin’ off this wagon. Don’t be in my way.”

Ben was standing very close to him. He didn’t move. “Where’d you git the whiskey, Clint?” he said quietly.

“Git out’n my way—”

Ben stepped into him. He seized him, blocking his right arm with his hip, twisting him back against the wagon. “Where’d you git it!” he snarled. “Goddam you, Clint Allison, don’t put off on me!”

Clint didn’t move. His dark face writhed, turned strangely pale. The hushed men scarcely heard his harsh whisper.
“Ben! Git your hands off’n me!”

Ben knew he should not have touched him. Knew the Comanche craziness that got into him when he was drunk and anybody laid hands on him. But this. This miserable, bastardly luck. To have beaten the south plains rains, the Jay-hawk blockade, the hell’s heat of the Platte Valley, the Sioux raid at Reno, Carrington and his three-mile line—the whole lousy fifteen hundred miles of it—for what? This, for God’s sake? To end up with Clint drunk and Crazy Horse waiting over the next ridge? With three hundred miles and two thousand Sioux ahead of you, and your righthand gun so slobbered he couldn’t stand up without a wagon behind him!