Kiowa Trail (1964) (5 page)

When the three men who were standing the first guard had drifted out to their positions, Kate and I sat over the last coals.

Maybe Tom Lundy hadn't used good judgment in getting himself in a stew over Linda McDonald but, after all, he wasn't the first man to get involved with the wrong woman ... and no one could deny that she was pretty.

Trouble might have developed without that. When there is so much underlying bad feeling, it takes small reason to start trouble, and in the past some of the Texas boys, sore over the defeat of the South, had been only too ready to start shooting again. And there were always hotheads ready to shoot back.

Men like McDonald, with their precise, narrow way of looking at things, could not know what it meant to a bunch of men, all of them young and full of vinegar, to let off a bit of steam. By the time they'd been three months or so on the trail north, eating the dust of the drag, chasing strays, fighting Indians, stampedes, and ornery broncs, working from before daylight until after dark, they were ready to let go a little.

One time I had heard a cowhand asked what a chuck wagon looked like, and he said, "How would I know? I never saw one in the daylight!"

Moreover, I couldn't find it in me to blame Tom. The good Lord knew I'd done my share in making a fool of myself, and had no patent on the idea, either. If McDonald had just let the thing alone it would probably have all been over by now. As it was, men might die before it was settled.

The night on the plains was a time of quietness. Only a far-off coyote, complaining to the listening stars, caused a faint break in the stillness, and his voice seemed only to make the silence more silent still.

The dull red of the coals were a somber light in their small pocket of heat. From time to time their seeking heat seized upon some overlooked bit of drywood, and then a tiny blaze would leap up briefly, consuming the wood.

"I'd like us to be moving before daylight," Kate said, "and if we pull out toward the west we can swing wide around the town. That way we can avoid trouble, and we might see something of that country out there."

We sat there, talking quietly, but all the while my ears were straining into the darkness, listening for sounds I hoped not to hear.

"I never knew you were a Union man, Conn," Kate said. "You've never talked much about yourself."

"You've heard enough stories."

"But you never know which ones are true. After all, I know nothing of you except that you were a gun-fighter or something. You just came riding up when I needed help, and you stayed. I wouldn't know what to do without you, Conn."

That made me feel the fool. Kate would get along, for there was a resilience in her like fine-tempered steel. She reminded me of a Toledo blade, a rapier I saw once in Spain. She had great strength, but she wasn't rigid ... like McDonald, for example.

It was she who had built that ranch, built it from the grass roots up, and it had taken some doing. In my way, I'd helped.

"There's little enough to tell about me," I said. "They tell me I was born back on the Rapidan River in Virginia, but my folks moved to Texas. When I was nine the Apaches wiped them out and carried me off into Mexico. For three years I was an Apache, then I stole a pony and rode out of the Sierra Madre and back to Texas."

Pa had walked to the spring for a bucket of water, and I had taken the axe and was hitting a couple of strokes at an old mesquite stump in the yard. It was a big old thing, and without a stump-puller it would be a long, hard job getting it out - and there was much else to do. So Pa left an axe sitting beside it, and any time one of us passed we worked at cutting the tap root or other roots to loosen it up.

Ma was inside putting up her hair, for this was Sunday, and when Pa returned from the spring there was to be a Bible reading.

It was a fair time for us all, for there'd been little else but work from the time when Pa first decided to settle on the creek. On Sundays, though, after the Bible reading, Pa and Ma would read from one of the other books we had, and lately I'd taken my turn. I liked best the poems "Marmion" or "Lochinvar," but some of the others were good, too - like "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

All of a sudden Ma called from the house, and there was something funny about her voice. She said, "Conn, come in here right away ... don't argue."

The way she spoke scared me, for it wasn't like Ma at all, so I turned and started for the house, still carrying the axe.

Ma had the door open a crack, but the creak of the window swinging out made me look that way, and it was just in time to see Pa's rifle thrust through the window. It went off with a loud bang and I turned, looking for what Ma was shooting at, and then there was another bang and the whiff of an arrow ... and Ma was dead.

Afterward, learning what I did learn, I was glad it happened that way. When I broke and ran for the door it was already too late, and when somebody came running up behind me I turned and swung with the axe. It was caught and wrested from my hand, and I looked up into the face of an Apache.

Hours later, when we were over the border in Mexico and heading for the Sierra Madre, I could see the face of my father as I had last seen it. When they led me away we went past the spring and he was lying there, three arrows in him. One was in his back, the other two in his chest. He had turned and faced whatever it was attacking him, and if he'd had a gun he might have made a pass at defending himself.

Folks had warned him about moving around without a gun, but Pa had never seen a live Indian up to then, and he made light of the danger. That was why, my life long, I never went without a gun.

They drove off fifty head of cattle, some horses, mules, and a few sheep. The sheep they ate right off because they couldn't keep up, and the mules next, because Apaches favor mule meat.

It was a far place in the Sierra Madre where they took me, near the head of the Bavispe River. It was the wildest, most terrible and beautiful place I have ever seen. We climbed trails I wouldn't have expected a squirrel to climb. Here and there a steer slipped off the rim and fell on the jagged rocks far below, but the Apaches paid little attention.

The Bavispe was a cold, clear stream, running down from a virgin forest of pines. It was country that was magnificent in its wildness and grandeur, and there, for three years, I lived like an Apache. And never once did I take my mind from the idea of escape.

Not that I showed it. An old mountain man who had stopped by our place one time said the only way to get along with Indians was to live their life and to be a better Indian than they were. So I pitched right in with them, and after a while they tried to help me. By the time I was twelve I was a fair tracker, hunter, and trapper, and was a better rider than any Apache I'd seen. They were never horsemen in the way the Kiowas or the Comanches were. And then one day a big war party left on a raid north of the border, and two days after they left I stole a pony and, taking a trail I had discovered while hunting, I lit out.

East was the way I went, deciding they would not expect that.

For two weeks I lived off the country the way the Apaches did, and then I crossed over the Rio Grande, swimming my horse.

Half starved, wearing only a breechclout and a stolen coat much too large for me, and riding a worn-out Indian pony, I rode up to a lonely camp not far from the river. There were three men in that camp, and two of them had guns on me before I could speak. The third man just sat there on the sand and looked at me.

"Apache!" one of the men said. "By the Lord, it's an Apache!"

"Sir," I said, "my name is Conn Dury, and I've been a prisoner."

"All right, old chap," the man on the ground said. "Get down and come up to the fire. There's plenty to eat."

His name was James Sotherton. He was only a few months out of England, but he had a period of army service behind him, with service in India and on the Northern Frontier.

When we had eaten, he got my story from me, and had many questions about the way of life of the Apaches, and by that time only an Apache could have known it better than I did.

"And now what?" he asked.

"I must find work," I said, "and get some clothing."

"And an education, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes, sir."

"Have you no relatives? No friends?"

"None, sir."

"Well, we can take care of the job right here. I'll need help with my stock."

One of the others, a big, dark man with a beard, interrupted. "I'd think about that, Mr. Sotherton. This boy may have escaped, like he claims. Or he may be a spy for them redskins."

"I have thought about it." Sotherton spoke with finality. "You're hired, Conn. Now get some sleep." The man with the beard was named Morgan Bich, and he was a man I would never forget. Bob Flange was his shadow, and both had hired out to Jim Sotherton in San Antonio.

What inspired Sotherton to take the course he did, I could never guess, but he was headed into the Big Bend country, the wildest country in Texas, which at that date was still seventy-five per cent wild. More than likely it was simply a love of wild country for its own sake that headed him into the Big Bend, but before long I got the impression that Morgan Bich and Bob Flange believed he was riding there for another reason.

It so happened that I knew aplenty about the Big Bend country, for the Indians with whom I had been a prisoner, traveled that route and knew that country. Time and again they had fought the Comanches there, and when the going got rough they always knew how to disappear.

The Apache whose prisoner I was, and who seemed to really like me, had told me a good deal about the Big Bend.

Aside from the pony I rode and a torn piece of blanket, the only thing I had been able to bring away from the camp was a pistol. It was an almost new gun that I had picked off the body of a dead Apache after a fight near the Bavispe. He must have taken it off a body during the fight earlier that day, because nobody went around looking for it after he was found dead, as they would have had they known of it.

I had hidden the gun under a rock, and I waited until the time came to make my run for the border, then I recovered it.

The three men and I built a rock hut at the foot of Burro Mesa near a spring, and there we settled down. We built corrals, started a small vegetable garden which it was my job to care for, and hunted wild horses. We caught a few, but most of them were not worth the trouble.

Every now and again we all rode out of there and went to San Antonio. On one of those trips Morgan Bach and Bob Flange quit.

It was after we got back to the ranch that Jim Sotherton started my education.

Somehow or other we got on the subject of poetry and I quoted him some of "Marmion" that I recalled from the readings at home. After that, there was a change.

While I taught him to track and to live off the country like an Apache, he taught me all he could think of about English literature, history, and other subjects. At some time or other he had been an instructor in a military school in England - I think it was Sandhurst - and he knew a good deal about teaching.

We spent a good bit of time riding over the country, and from time to time we went to San Antonio or to Austin, and then one day to New Orleans. There we went to a bank and Sotherton picked up some money, quite a lot of it, in gold.

Then he bought some books and some new equipment, and he bought me a Henry .44 rifle.

It was the day after we got back to the place at the foot of Burro Mesa that I found the tracks-and they were not Apache tracks. Somebody had been around the place while we were gone.

Every man's track is distinctive. A man's trail is as easily recognized as his signature. In my own mind I was sure one of the men whose tracks I saw was Morgan Rich.

When I told Sotherton what I thought he merely nodded and made some comment to the effect that the men had probably come back hunting a job ... maybe they would show up again.

I felt sure that Rich had thought Sotherton was hunting Spanish treasure ... gold.

And I found out later that when we came back from New Orleans - where nobody knew we had been - and Jim started spending gold money around, Rich and Flange had heard about it.

"If anything ever happens to me," Sotherton told me one time, "you mail this letter."

He hid the letter behind a loose brick in the wall, and I thought no more about it.

It was shortly after we returned from New Orleans that Sotherton sent me out to check on a water hole to see if wild horses had been drinking there. It was a long ride, and when I got back it was almost night.

There had been three of them this time. Morgan Rich, Bob Flange, and a stranger. And what they had done to Jim Sotherton was worse than Apaches would have done.

They must have had it in their minds that he had found Spanish treasure, and they had tortured him to make him tell ... which, of course, he could not do.

The gold he had had been taken. His guns were gone, his outfit and mine, as well as the horses.

The way it looked, they had come up shortly after I left, and of a sudden it came over me that they might be still about, so I grabbed up what I could and hightailed it for the hills, where I waited until daybreak. Then I made a wide sweep.