The Tall Men (16 page)

Ben took his hands away. He touched him lightly on the shoulder, stepped slowly and carefully back. “I’m sorry, boy,” he murmured. “I reckon I never figgered you’d fold on me.” Then, still quiet but with the flint back in it. “Where’d you git the whiskey, Clint?”

He got his answer from Nathan Stark, moving belatedly forward, his pink face flushed.

“Ben, it’s my fault. He must have seen me putting it with my things in the lead wagon. It was a quart of Kentucky Blend. I got it from Fetterman at the fort. He insisted I take it, and—”

“Then goddam
you,”
said Ben through his teeth. “Don’t you know no better than to leave whiskey
where an Injun kin get at it!” He didn’t say it funny. Nobody took it that way.

He turned to Clint.

“What’re you meanin’ to do, boy? Pull out?”

“And far out!” muttered Clint thickly. “I hired on as a wetnurse fer you and yer crazy scheme. Where you’re headin’ now you won’t need nothin’ but a undertaker and that’s out’n my line. Move back, damn you, Ben. Quit inchin’ up on me. I mean it!”

“I won’t stop you, boy,” said Ben. “But we’re almost to Montany son. Nigh to the Gallatin. She’s jest acrost the Yellerstone yonder, Clint. Don’t chuck her, now—”

“You’re stallin’, Ben.” The laugh was there again, short, wild. “Brains ain’t yer play, not never. Leave ’em to yer lousy friend yonder.” He jerked a big thumb at Stark. “But don’t worry about little Clint—goddam you, Ben, stay where you are!”

Ben stopped. He felt his belly pull in. He knew he had pushed him as far as any man could. Knew he was not going to get in close enough to grab him again. Knew that he would have to go for him now, gun or no gun.

And Clint was watching him. Watching him with the blank stare of the professional gunman, and watching him, beyond the stare, with the ageless, dangerous cunning of the very drunk. In the last second, Ben hesitated. In that same second, Clint’s Army Colt was out and in his hand. And in the next was pointing Ben’s belly.

“One vote,” snarled Clint, thick lipped, “fer Fort Kearney and Fetterman’s footlocker.”

He swung the sundance of the Colt barrel around the nervous ring of men beyond his brother.

“Any of you sons uh bitches want to contest it?”

Ben knew it was too late, then. He made no more move than the last tightfaced cowboy behind him.

“Stark!” Clint flicked the gunbarrel across Nathan Stark’s beltbuckle. “You’re the financial genius hereabouts. Git figgerin’ my cut. And lemme fill yer flush—”

He stepped into the Montanan, jammed the Colt’s muzzle hard into him. “Some of us Allisons ain’t the unedicated bastards others is. This un learnt to count.”

“Clint,” said Stark, jaw set, “be reasonable. Do as Ben says. Go sleep it off. We’ll forget the whole thing, you have my word on it.”

“Now, me,” continued the drunken youth, ignoring him with his heavily drawled conclusion, “I learnt to count clean up to ten. Yes suh, I kin do anythin’ up to and includin’ ten. Add, subtract, multiply—
and divide by three.”

Stark turned away from him. “Ben,” he said angrily, “what in God’s name is he talking about? What does he want of me?”

Ben moved forward, away from the others. He dropped his voice, meaning it for Stark alone.

“He wants one third of ten thousand dollars,” he said quietly. “Give it to him.”

“Ben! By the Lord, I’ll not do it!”

“I said give it to him. It’s his and comin’ to him. Write him a draft, you hear, Mr. Stark?”

“Ben, we can’t turn him loose to go back to the fort. I don’t care about the money, you know that. But we’re only fifteen miles from Carrington. Suppose Clint starts drinking again back there and it gets out we’ve driven on? Fetterman’s cavalry could catch us in six hours!”

“I allow I know that,” said Ben. Then, with sudden
slowness. “I thought
you
was the one all hot fer Fort Kearney, yerse’f. Mr. Stark.”

“Nonsense! I’m with you and the men,” replied Stark stoutly. “They want to go on, and that’s all I ask. But you know we can’t turn Clint loose on a drunk like this. Nor is there a man in the crew who wouldn’t agree with me on that. You know that too.”

Ben knew it for sure.

“Give him the draft,” he repeated flatly.

Stark threw up his hands, spun on his heel, went angrily for the lead wagon. He got out his papers, wrote hurriedly.

“Gimme it,” said Ben.

He took the draft, turned to Clint, waiting behind them with the Colt.

“Here’s yer money, boy,” he nodded soberly. “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

Clint grinned, reached carelessly for the note. Just as carelessly, Ben let go of it just before Clint’s fingers closed on it. The draft fluttered, fell earthward. Involuntarily, Clint started to bend forward. He realized his mistake in the process of making it. He checked his reaching hand, threw his eyes and his Colt back up onto Ben.

Ben’s own Colt flashed, the arc of its swinging barrel glittering in the sun.

There was the dull sound of steel on bone. Clint followed the flutter of the fallen banknote, soundlessly into the dust of the Bozeman Road.

Chickasaw and Waco ran forward, the others crowding behind them. At Ben’s nod, they picked Clint up, headed with him toward the creek and the cottonwoods.

Ben slowly holstered the .44.

He reached down into the dust, retrieved the
soiled draft, folded it carefully and tucked it away in his cowhide vest.

He looked at Nathan Stark.

“Clint never could hang on to his money” was all he said.

For the second time that day, the Texas cowboys bore an uncomplaining burden toward the cottonwoods. They worked quickly with the mattocks and spades, opening the rich earth of the creek’s meadow. It was, in the words of the old song, “a narrow grave, just six-by three.” And no loner prairie ever waited to receive “the pallid youth at close of day.”

When they at last stood back from their labors, the sun angled low across the Bozemen, lighting the little grove with its last rose-red candle.

Ben nodded, and Waco and Chickasaw took up the crudely nailed box. They lowered it carefully, grimacing at the hollow sound of it going home in the shallow earth as they were forced to drop it the last few inches. The spongy clods rattled down, quickly obscuring the stenciled requiem legend staring up from the pine crating top of the rough box:
THE REMINGTON ARMS COMPANY, ILLION FORGE, NY.

The dirt was soon shoveled in, the covering sod, painstakingly removed in the beginning, was tamped carefully back in original place. The excess earth was as swiftly carried away and consigned to the moving waters of the little stream.

Ben stooped slowly. He wedged the last of the rifle-box boards deep into the cairn of creek rocks headmarking the hidden grave. The prowling coyote could not read; the dead would rest in peace. And a man felt better, somehow, to mark the place
and the memory with something beyond a pile of prairie stone.

They stood back, then, looking at Ben’s marker.

After a moment, Waco awkwardly removed his dust-caked hat.

Hogjaw coughed and shifted his run-over bootheels.

Behind them, Chickasaw fumbled clumsily with his bandanna, first wiping his face with it, then blowing his nose.

“I reckon,” said Slim, low voiced, “somebody ought to say a few words.” He looked around the silent company of bearded and booted mourners. Hogjaw shifted his feet again, Waco fiddled with his battered hat. Chickasaw cleared his throat, thought better of it, shrugged helplessly, dropped his eyes guiltily under the waiting appeal of Slim’s glance.

The cowboy turned in last hope, toward the slim figure of Nella Torneau, standing behind Ben in the shadow of the crowding cottonwoods. “Miss Nella?”

“Thank you, Slim.”

They all saw the little Bible, now, held to her breast beneath her pilgrim cloak, and only Ben was not surprised. He remembered now. Among the scattered, golden moments he and this wonderful girl had shared there had been his question about the little engraved carbine she had killed Crazy Horse’s pony with at Timpas Creek. And her answer came back now. Her father had told her as a little girl: a girl’s born in Texas she’s got to carry two things all her life, and learn to use them—a rifle and a Bible.

He had seen her use the rifle, now it was the good book. She read from the Twenty-Third Psalm, voice low, violet-blue eyes downcast:
The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want. He leadeth me to lie down in green pastures . .

She finished, and Ben swallowed hard. He looked quickly away, squinting into the low sun. “I allow the herd had best be got moving,” he said softly. They turned away, no further prayer offered, no added farewell finding spoken word. Shortly, the packing case board and its knife-cut remembrance was alone with the dying stir of the evening wind in the cottonwoods.

GEORGE FRANK BLANCHARD

OCT. 1866

Ride easy, Curly

By dawn and forced drive they were thirty-five miles north of Fort Kearney. Clint, disarmed and in the informal, embarrassed custody of Waco and Chickasaw, had ridden the night away fighting down the last of the whiskey quease in his churning belly. And fighting, too, to bring some sense of where he was, and why, into the throbbing ache of his head.

All through the long hours of following daylight, he kept to himself and to his thoughts of himself.

Then, at dusk, with the coyotes beginning to tune up and the men bunching the herd to move with full dark, he found Ben alone at the chuckwagon.

The latter had ridden in but minutes before, from a near daylong scout of the next fifteen miles ahead. He was presently putting down a cold steak and tin of lukewarm coffee, against the weary proposition of climbing back in the saddle to try and get a few hours sleep across the jolting cradle of a jogging horse’s back.

“Howdy, Ben ”

“Pull yerse’f up a cup of java and set down, boy.”

Clint poured a cup, squatted alongside his silent brother, staring, with him, into the smoking coals of Saleratus’s supper fire.

“I reckon I been a damn fool, agin.”

“Runs in the fam’ly, boy.”

“I aim to make it up to you, Ben.”

“Fergit it. You et?”

“Belly wouldn’t hold down a hoss-shoe stake.”

“Better eat, regardless.”

“ ’Druther talk, I reckon.”

“Your deck. Deal ’em.”

Clint nodded. He talked low and quiet. And there was nowhere in it a grin, or a laugh, or a dark, wild look.

“Ain’t no use, I reckon, to say no more on Stark.”

“I reckon not. We see him different, boy, that’s all. You been set on callin’ him since we h’isted his poke in thet Alder Gulch crickbottoms.”

“I allow. I hate his smooth guts. It’s mainly why I got to say where I’ve come to. I reckon you know there ain’t no whiskey workin’ in me now.”

“I reckon. You still aim to pull out on me?”

“Not on you, Ben, for Christ’s sake. You’re the reason I
am
cuttin’ my stick. All my goddam useless life I been friggin’ up ev’rythin’ you set yer hand to. I know what this here herd means to you and what store you set by the chanct you allow it’ll give you to amount to suthin’. You and thet high-special gal you got yonder in thet lead wagon. She’s really suthin’, Ben. Like no gal I ever seen nor heered tell of. I purty near ruint it all fer you and her, yestidday Happen I don’t git out, I’ll manage it yet, too.”

“I’ll chance it, boy. Saddle up and ride along with me tonight. Come mornin’ we’ll take another look at it.”

“I reckon it’ll be a tolerable fur look, Ben.”

“You know I ain’t smart, Clint. Don’t riddle me.”

“I’ll be long gone up the trail by then.”

“Up
it, Clint?”

“And fur.”

“Thought you was all fer Fort Kearney?”

“Thet was the whiskey talkin’.”

“Likely,” said Ben slowly. Then, frowning.
“Up
the trail is nothin’ but Injuns.”

“More or less whut I had in mind, old son.”

Clint’s grin was suddenly back home around the corners of his wide mouth.

“Meanin’?”

“Meanin’ you jest rode in off yer last scout on point fer this herd. Beginnin’ in five minutes, yer little brother takes over thet department.”

“I reckon not,” said Ben, shaking his head. “It ain’t the job you kin ask another man to do fer you.”

“Don’t recall you askin’ nobody,” grinned Clint. “Goddam you, Ben, a man wants to be a hero, don’t you put off on him, you hear? You ain’t the only hecoon in the Allison fam’ly’s holler tree.”

Ben scowled, not saying anything for a long time. Finally, he nodded. “I reckon I tail yer drift. How’ll you ride ’er?”

“Git on out tonight. Stay out, less’n I see suthin’ worth ridin’ back about. Thet way, yer point’s bein’ rode by a expert and me and yer fat-butt business partner is bein’ kept out’n forty-four range of one another.”

“I reckon you got a fair idee of whut’s up there?”
With the statement, Ben thumbed the thickening night to the north.

“Takes a Injun to skin one,” shrugged Clint. “I reckon I’m a better Comanche than you’ll ever be.”

“Well,” now it was Ben’s rare smile softening the fire-light, “you
act
more like one anyways, you goddam Kwahadi slit-eye.”

“Oh, bless you, noble white brother, fer yer straight tongue and yer big, thick head. I reckon I could never live with myse’f again, less’n I went ahead on and finished wetnursin’ you inter the goddam Gallatin.”

He got up, face relaxed now in the old, happy, wide-eyed half-smile. “Th’ow me some of thet cold beef inter a flour-sack whiles I kick thet haybelly sorrel of mine out’n thet Wyomin’ buffler browse she’s bogged in, yonder.”

“Hold on,” said Ben, coming to his feet in easy turn. He felt in his vest, brought out the crumpled wad of Stark’s bankdraft. “You still want this?”

“Nope. Jest dig my Colts out’n yer duffle. You keep the draft. You kin give it to me over yonder where the Bozeman peters out.” He waved into the northwest darkness, toward Montana and Virginia City. “Thet’s where I’ll be mainly needin’ it, you kin lay. Me and thet hefty-chested blond heifer!”

“I hope so, Clint boy.” Ben said it under his breath, and after his brother had turned lightheartedly away. “I sure and only hope so—"

The first attack came at the crossing of the Tongue. At this point in its high course, the stream was not large, but narrow and in spots deep, and over all possessed of considerable current. A night crossing became an unwarranted risk. Ben’s decision, taken
at four o’clock of a cloudy afternoon, was to put the herd on trail an hour early, try to time its crossing for the last hour of daylight.

It had been two days since Clint had ridden on up the trail. He had not returned and Ben, knowing his brother’s ability to take care of himself in Indian country, had assumed he had found no Sioux sign ahead, had ridden on across the Tongue. He put the lead steers into the water at ten minutes after four.

At a quarter of five, with the gray daylight failing and eight hundred cattle still to be brought over, the Sioux struck.

They came in from the east bank, out of a low range of hills flanking the crossing to the northeast. There were about three hundred of them, picked warriors, Ben figured, from the compact way they rode and the absence of preliminary warning warwhoops. He was on the east bank with Waco, Charley Stringer and Chickasaw, circling and hazing the drag up and into the Tongue.

“Leave ’em!” he yelled to Chicksaw, nearest him. “Git acrost to the wagons! They ain’t after cows this trip!”

Chickasaw waved, shouted the order on to Waco and Charley. “Ben says jump the river! Last one acrost’s a baldheaded cowboy!” Baldheaded, his two companions assumed, by courtesy of a Sioux scalping knife, and lost no second digging their fresh night horses for the rocky channel of the Tongue.

On the far side, as Ben and his companions hit the water, Nathan Stark, taking over from the absent Clint as Ben’s strawboss, already had the wagons going into a good circle. Ben noted that, only thinking to himself that Stark, though he might be somewhat less than he had figured him, was considerable more
than Clint had. One thing was certain. The blondbearded Montanan had guts enough to stuff two four-year old steers, with a sizable handful left over to start on a third.

By the time he and the drag riders slid their mounts through the last gap in Stark’s circle, the first of the Sioux were screaming their ponies across the Tongue. Seconds later some six or seven of them were still screaming—but not on their ponies. The Rolling Blocks spoke, and spoke again, and then spoke yet a third and a fourth and even a fifth time, before the last of the Sioux were well into the water.

With the addition of Waco’s, Chickasaw’s and Charley Stringer’s rifles, snatched on the bowlegged run from the tailgate of the lead wagon, there were twenty-five of the new Remingtons in breech-slamming action. With Ben’s and Nella’s sharp-barking little Henry carbines cracking over the deeper roar of the Rolling Blocks, it meant that a fire of nearly one hundred rounds per deafening half minute was getting into the charging warriors.

Red squaw had not yet groaned in smokestained cowhide tipi with the labor pains of the man-child who would make warrior enough to take that weight of lead and keep coming.

The Sioux split, right and left, up the west bank of the Tongue. They were gone back into the gathering dusk as swiftly, if less numerous by eight braves, as they had come out of it.

There were three crawlers among the eight downed Indians. The cursing cowboys killed them with riflefire from the wagons, not bothering to move in close and make it neat with handguns.

There was no time for such niceties. There had been three hundred of them and there might be
three thousand more where that three hundred had come from. Miles were the idea right now. Herd miles, cowboyed and ropewhipped out of the milling cattle, as many of those miles and as far and long of them as might be driven under by first light.

In the last remaining twilight of the 25th of October, under the wagon-entrenched rifles of Stark and ten of the cowboys, Ben and the other fifteen riders put eight hundred cattle across the Tongue River in less than half an hour.

By six o’clock and full dark, the herd was moving due west for Montana and the southward sprawling forks of the Big Horn.

Jogging his black through the darkness a hundred feet ahead of the lead steers, Ben heard the light, quick chop of the approaching pony’s singlefoot, knew without looking back who it was riding up on him. He knew everything about her—even the sound of her calico mare’s sun-dancy way of going.

“Evenin’, girl,” he smiled. “How’s the patient?”

The patient was old Chickasaw, who had taken a smoothbore Sioux ball through the crown of the two things he held most dear in life: his mildewed beaver hat, his proudly long thatch of bristly gray hair.

“It’s the damn hat that’s fretting him,” laughed Nella. “He wouldn’t let me touch his ornery old head till I’d dug out the sewing kit and run a new band around that verminy hat. He’s all right. Just a tolerable clean skull scratch. We’ll never bury that old mossyback, but I’d purely admire to put that godawful hat about six foot under. Ughh!”

Ben eased back in the saddle, reached over and sought in the darkness for her hand. “Good to hear you laugh agin, Nella. I reckon it’s what keeps a
man out in front of his cattle and squintin’ the trail beyond.”

She didn’t answer for a minute, then asked softly, “What do you see out there, Ben?”

“What you mean?”

“’Out there.’” she said, gesturing into the night. “In the beyond.”

“Meanin’ fer you and me?”

“For all of us, Ben. You, me, Clint, Stark, the whole mixup. What’s out there?”