Kiowa Trail (1964) (9 page)

"It's wild, lonely country. Almost everything that grows there has a thorn. The mountains are rugged, bare rock, the country is desolate, yet beautiful - beautiful in a way you'd have to see to understand. There's wild horses, wild cattle, mountain lions, wolves, and rattlesnakes. There are deer, antelope, and javelinas."

"What?"

"Javelinas - wild pigs."

"My uncle told us you had lived with the Apaches," the girl said.

"Yes, ma'am. For most of three years."

Gradually, I began to realize that Mr. Sotherton had written them a good deal about me - about my parents being killed by the Indians, my captivity, and the education he had begun giving me.

Later that night, when we were alone, Sir Richard said, "The men who killed my son ... they had worked for him, I believe?"

"Yes, sir. They thought he was hunting hidden treasure ... there are rumors of Spanish treasure in the Big Bend. After he returned from New Orleans and spent some gold money, they came for him. He was dead when I got back to the ranch."

"I see. And the men who killed him? They were apprehended by the law?"

The law? There was no law west of the Pecos, only the long winds and the Comanche Trail.

"They were punished, sir," I answered. "At least, two of the three were punished. The other man is still missing."

For two years I went to school in England, and it was not an easy thing for me, for I had not the habit of study, nor did I know much of books. I did not have the background I needed for this but I struggled, and slowly I learned. Each vacation I spent with the Sothertons, but my thoughts kept straying back to my own wild land.

Often at night I lay awake, smelling the sage brush again, longing for the feel of the cool night wind off the mountain slopes, from over the broken hills, for the sight of Nine Mile Mesa shouldering against the skyline, for the sunlit flanks of the Chisos, for the purple loom of the Carmens across the river in Mexico.

Sometimes when I was studying I would put down my books and stare from the window, remembering a time when I rode up Rough Run to Christmas Spring, or another time when I camped in The Solitario.

At first, I made few friends in the school. There was one, Lawrence Wickes, a boy of my own age but who seemed younger, who had come to the school from India. He was the son of a British army officer stationed on the Northwest Frontier, and when we talked we found we had much in common. He was with me the day I had my fight. Most of the boys had been polite, but distant. Nor had I the words to speak with them, for their interests were not mine, and the things we knew were different The whole world of their conversation concerned topics of which I had no knowledge and with which I had no connection. The people they knew, and the places, these were strange to me, and if occasionally I blundered into some talk of my own past I would find them looking at me with frank disbelief.

Felicia had told one of the boys that I had been a prisoner of the Apaches, and the story went all over the school. There was one boy - his name was Endicott - who made several slighting remarks about me in my presence.

He was big, and was much thought of as a soccer player and a boxer, and he outweighed me by at least twenty pounds.

"You will have to fight him," Wickes said. "They are saying you are afraid."

"I don't want to, Larry. His father is a friend of Sir Richard's. I might hurt him."

"Hurt him?"

"It is a different thing, Larry. He has boxed, and I know nothing of boxing; but I have fought all my life - with Apache boys, with cowhands ... with men."

"They do not believe anything they have heard of you."

One day, in the presence of others, Endicott told me that I lied. I started to speak, and suddenly, without warning, he struck me.

It was a good enough blow, I suppose. No doubt he intended it to finish me, but he had boxed with boys in school, and I had fought with teamsters, cowhands, and plainsmen. In the West, a boy at fourteen or fifteen did a man's work, and walked in a man's tracks; and when he fought, he fought as a man fights.

Endicott's blow did not stagger me. It caught me on the cheekbone, and when I did not fall, I could see he was shocked. And then we fought.

He knew more of boxing than I, but not a bit of good did it do him, for I plunged in, all the bitterness and savagery within me aroused by the blow. He struck me again as I came in, but I did not circle and parry; I drove for the kill. My first blow missed, my second caught him in the ribs and I saw his jaw go slack.

He was soft ... in good enough shape for his time and place, but nothing like the ruggedness a man acquired working on the plains and the desert. There were others at the school who were better, I think, but they were awed by his size and his boxing skill. So I smashed at him with both hands, going under his left lead and whipping both hands to his body; then, stepping back, I smashed him in the face. It broke his nose, but I followed it up with two more blows, and he fell.

The fight had lasted less than a minute, but if I had expected to win their friendship by that fight, I would have been mistaken. The talk I heard afterward accounted for that. I had not fought like a gentleman. I was toorough. As for me, I had learned only one way to fight - to win. The following day I was dismissed from the school. When I was packing, Wickes came to the door. "Dury? Here's someone to see you."

There were three of them - Ashmead, Travers, and Alien. All of them were boys I knew only by sight.

Ashmead, a tall, blond, handsome boy, walked up to me and thrust out his hand. "Look, Dury, I am sorry to see you go. I think it dashed unfair of them."

"It is all right," I said. "I have been wanting to go home."

His eyes were bright with excitement. "Where is it you live? In Texas?"

So I stopped packing and sat down and told them about it. I told them about the country in all its wild beauty, about the killing of my parents, and my long captivity by the Apaches. I told them how the Apache made his bow and where he found his food, and about the Sierra Madre and my escape from there, riding alone across two hundred miles of wild country, in any mile of which I might have been shot by the Apaches for escaping, or by the Mexicans as an Apache.

"Is it true they carry pistols?" Travers asked.

So I opened up my bag and took out my own Colt army revolver, Model 1848. It was a .44 rim-fire six-shooter with an eight-inch barrel. "Be careful with that," I said as Travers reached to take it up. "It's loaded, and has a hair trigger."

He drew his hand back quickly, but they gathered around, staring at the gun as if it were a live thing. It was battered and showed its use, but it was a good weapon still.

"If they had known you had this," Ashmead said, "You'd have been out of school before this."

Suddenly I was a hero, regarded with awe. I had in my possession a genuine western-style pistol.

We talked until it was time to go to my train, and they came to the station with me, my three new friends and Larry Wickes.

There was nothing for it but to return to Sotherton Manor, and I did not want to go. I had not expected to return a failure. But nothing was said of it when I arrived.

It was not until later, when Sir Richard and I were alone in his study, that he said, "You hurt that boy. You beat him quite badly."

"Yes, sir."

"The headmaster said you attacked him savagely."

"He struck me, sir, and I whipped him."

"But did you have to do it so brutally?"

"I know of no other way to fight, sir. One fights to win. I would not know how to fight any other way. It was he who began the fight, and I had tried to avoid it - so much so they were saying I was afraid."

"Well," he said ironically, "they do not think so now." He studied me for a moment, and then asked, "What do you plan to do now?"

"Return home, sir. To Texas."

"We would like to have you stay. My wife and I, we would like it very much if you stayed."

"Thank you, sir. You've given me every opportunity, but I keep thinking of it back there. Whatever there is in life for me is back there. I - I am not cut out for this."

"This morning I was speaking to George Travers. He is an old friend of mine, you know. He told me you had a revolver."

"Yes, sir."

"Aren't you rather young to be carrying a weapon of that kind?"

"No, sir. In Texas I carried one from the time I was twelve. When one lives in Apache country one must go armed."

"May I see it?"

We went up to my room and I opened my luggage and took out my worn but well-oiled belt and holster. The walnut butt of the revolver was badly scarred and the gun showed wear, but it was clean and ready for action.

He took the gun in his hands and turned it carefully. "Now, there's no nonsense about that, is there?"

"It has a hair trigger, sir."

"Yes, I suspected as much." He handed the gun back to me. "Is it true they shoot as well as they say? One hears much talk of the gunfighters out there."

"Would you like to see me shoot, sir?"

"I would, indeed. Shall we go outside?" He watched as I dug into my luggage for ammunition, and then we went outside. Felicia saw us and followed along. At the back of the house I asked for bottles and received several from the cook. One of these I suspended by a string from the branch of a tree. We walked back twenty paces and, turning suddenly, I drew and fired, smashing the bottle.

Without waiting for any comment, I tossed another bottle into the air, drew, fired from the hip, and smashed the bottle, and then smashed the largest fragment as it fell. "May I try?" Sir Richard asked. He placed a bottle thirty paces off, took careful aim, and broke it.

He glanced at the pistol. "It does have a very light pull, doesn't it?"

Suddenly he smiled. "You are an excellent shot, my boy," he said. "I would never try anything like that. And had I not seen you fire from the hip, I should not have believed it could be done with accuracy." We walked back to the house, and for the first time since I had known her, Felicia was silent. I thought she was a bit awed. At least, I preferred to think that was how she felt, for I had had little enough luck at impressing her, and I had wanted to, very much.

Alone in Sir Richard's study, we talked for a while and then he glanced at me suddenly. "You spoke of my son's killers being punished. What was their sentence?"

"There was no sentence, sir, because there was no judge, no jury. There is no law in that region, sir, and very little in the region to which they fled."

"Then what happened?"

For an instant, I hesitated, wanting to avoid telling him, but I could not lie to this man. "I killed them, sir."

"Youkilled them?"

"Yes, sir, Jim Sotherton was my friend - the only friend I had, in fact - and they used him rather badly."

"I see." After a minute he said, "We will say nothing of this to anyone else - they would be shocked."

"And you, sir?"

He smiled at me. "Conn, I followed a Pathan tribesman for three weeks once, before I got a shot at him. He had killed a brother officer of mine."

He filled his pipe. "It is rather a different life on the frontier, isn't it, boy?"

Sir Richard had given me one more thing before I returned to my own country. He had given me an unforgettable year of travel on the Continent.

"My sister," he told me, "willed her money to James, and James left it to go to Felicia, but to be used as I saw fit, as a protection for us in the event we came upon hard times. So I want you to take money enough from that estate to see Europe."

He denied my protests, and said quietly, "You owe it to yourself, boy. Someday you may have a family of your own, and you will want to contribute to their education. Also, you owe it to James. He would have wished it so."

My protests were not very strong in the beginning, and that quieted them forever, so I accepted money and a drawing account, and spent the next year in traveling - without ever forgetting the West.

The only thing I did not like about it, Sir Richard insisted I leave my gun with him until I returned to England.

By the time I returned to the States I was nineteen years old; the year was 1858.

That year, for a short while I was not sure whether I wished to remain in the West, but that uncertainty lasted about as long as it took me to get a saddle on a horse, mount up, and feel the wind on my face and see the long grass bending under it

Now, riding back to the camp on the knoll, I tried to recall a Frank Shalett from those years before my trip to Europe, but I could not remember the name. So he must be someone I had known later, or the relative of someone I'd known.

In the camp there was much speculation on who McDonald and Shalett would have coming on the train.

"He'll round up some of those Bald Knobbefs," Harvey Nugent suggested. "There's aplenty of boys back in the Missouri hills who'd fight for wages."

Kate Lundy was waiting for me by her ambulance, face to the wind, a few strands of hair blowing. No getting around it, she was a handsome woman. Even among beautiful women in England or on the Continent she would have been considered so.