“Matt,” I asked Kirby, “do you know Lost River?”
“Ought to, I fished along it as a youngster.”
“Awhile back,” I said, “a fellow was making talk one night and he said there were a lot of wild cattle down there, and that almost nobody lives down there now.”
Kirby thought that over. “Well, there’s a lot of big meadows down there, always ran to rich grass, and that’s mesquite country. I’d say it was top country for cows. But I ain’t been there since I was a boy.”
We had word from the north. Belser and Chance Thorne were working the swamps along the Sulphur like they had never worked them before. Joel Reese was guiding them, but so far they’d found nothing but a couple of abandoned camps, unused for months. And not ours, either. But what bothered me was word they had been watching the home of Katy Thorne.
One other thing we learned. Two men had come with a horse for the wounded man and had taken him away. She was not molested.
We went back to work on the cattle around Lost River. It was rough country, but a mighty handsome land, too. We had better luck there.
The first white men to come into Texas before the colonies’ fight for independence had found wild cattle in the thickets and along the river, most of them descended from cattle left behind by Spanish travelers in the area. Later, cattle had escaped from ranches and fled to the brush, and during the War between the States thousands of cattle had gone unbranded and had run wild to join the herds already there.
Within the thickets there was grass, water and leaves for additional feed. The cattle had worn their own trails through the brush and had become wild animals, and some of them were as fierce as anything that walked, and incredibly huge. Why, down in those thickets I’ve seen many an old mossyhorn that stood seventeen hands and had a spread of horns better than six feet. Some have been found that I’ve heard tell of that were ten or eleven feet across.
Kirby knew many of these trails, and I’d scouted around the thickets some on my own. Working that Lost River country we rounded up three hundred head of cattle the first week, and with six hundred head we started north. We had us a big corral spotted.
This corral was in the brush itself, and had been made long since by some Mexicans who had interwoven the surrounding brush into a solid fence strong enough to hold an elephant. We drove our herd north and into that corral. There was water there, and grass enough for a while.
We were on the edge of the Big Thicket now, and we knew exactly where we were going. We entered the Thicket again at a place where a big old cypress leaned above a stream, and we took a dim path, used by game and wild cattle. We rode single file with brush snagging at us on both sides, and we rode armed and ready. This here was going to be war, and believe me, we were ready for it.
The air was stifling. A rabbit started almost from under the feet of the horse I was riding and several times we heard wild hogs grunting in the brush, but we didn’t see any. Right then I wasn’t wanting to meet a cross old boar right in that narrow trail—a wild boar can be a mean customer at close quarters.
We made a fireless camp that night in a small glade, and we didn’t talk above a whisper. There was a hint of approaching thunderstorm in the air, and we spent the night cleaning guns and getting set. Sam Barlow had asked for trouble when he came north and now we were taking it to him.
My Spencer and two Colts were my weapons, aside from a twelve-inch bowie knife I always carried. For the time and the job it wasn’t much to carry. Some of the Barlow men carried five and six pistols, for a cap-and-ball pistol can be a problem to reload, and a man needed fire power.
When I was with the Quantrill crowd that time for a few days I saw many men who carried several pistols stuck into their waistbands, in holsters and on their horses. That young horse thief called Dingus who was with Weaver when I rode away from them had carried four or five pistols. He had red-rimmed eyes and nervous affliction that kept him batting his eyes like an owl in a hailstorm. Nowadays they are talking of him as an outlaw. His rightful name is Jesse James.
It was past noon when we mounted up. The men we were hunting would have eaten and it was siesta time. When we got close to their camp I drew rein.
“We ride in shooting.” I said.
Somewhere in the brush ahead of us a woman screamed and a man laughed loudly. Somebody else swore at them to be quiet.
We could see a corral filled with horses and there were a couple of cookfires going, and men lazing about in the shade. Mostly they were watching one man in the center of the group who had a young girl by the arm and a whip in his other hand. “Try gittin’ away from me, will you? I’ll give you a whuppin’ to remember me by. Nothin’ like a well-whupped woman, I always says.”
There were nearer thirty men present than the fourteen our scout had led us to expect, but several of the horses were damp from hard riding so a party must have just arrived.
“Quite a passel of them, Cullen,” Longley commented casually, “but we wanted ’em, didn’t we?”
“One shot each,” I said, “and then we go in. Make the first one pay.” It was at least fifty yards from where we peered through the leaves to the opening into the clearing. “Looks like this will be all the Barlow men we get this time, so don’t waste any.”
Touching my heel to the horse I started him walking. It was very still except for the laughter from the clearing and the bullying talk of the man with the whip. From each hoof-fall a tiny puff of dust lifted.
It was very hot. Sweat trickled down my cheek and I dried a palm on my jeans. Somewhere off over the thicket a crow called, cawing into the still afternoon. Saddles creaked, and we swung into line opposite the opening, and we were a mere handful to the men inside, but we had wanted a fight, and there was such a thing as surprise. As we swung into line we were within view of at least a third of the men in the clearing, but they were intent upon the struggle between the man and the girl.
Raising my pistol I dropped it dead center on the chest of the man with the whip just as he drew it back for a blow. “All right,” I said conversationally, and shot him.
The sharp
bang
of sound was lost in the crashing volley that followed.
The man with the whip dropped the girl’s arm and fell on his face in the dust. A man quicker of apprehension than the others rose up sharply from under the trees and dropped in his tracks in the volley that cut him down and several others, and then we went into the clearing at a dead run and swung into two ranks of four each and circled the clearing, shooting.
Men broke and ran in every direction. One who grabbed a shotgun took a bullet in the teeth and fell. Longley leaned from his saddle and grabbed a burning branch which he hurled into the roof of the nearest brush shelter and it went up in a puff of roaring flame.
We scattered out, firing at every target we could see, but the clearing had emptied as though spilled over the edge.
Bob Lee caught up the girl who had been about to be whipped and swung her to his saddle and went out of the camp. Matt Kirby tore open the gate of the corral and stampeded the horses. A shot came from the edge of the clearing and three bullets smashed back a reply, and a man walked from the brush and fell on his face to roll over and stare up at the sun.
And then we were gone, and running. Behind us the Barlow camp was a shambles. The place was a mass of roaring flame, and what cattle and horses they had we drove ahead of us down the trail. Surprisingly, another woman ran from the brush and called out for help. Held prisoner, she had seen her chance, and Bickerstaff held one of the horses for her and she swung aboard with a manner that showed she was not new at riding bareback.
By nightfall we were out of the thicket and headed toward the Louisiana state line. The girl pointed out three cows and a horse that had belonged to her father and we cut them out and gave them to her. Once started we swung up a creek and then went up a road and headed for Forth Worth and the corral enroute where we had left the rest of our cattle.
The girl with her horse and three cows had started home, but she turned back. She had straight, proud eyes and a good, honest way of looking at a man. “Who shall I thank the Good Lord for?” she asked.
“This here is Bob Lee,” I said, “and I’m Cullen Baker.” Then I named off the others, and she looked at each of them in turn.
“Folks say Cullen Baker is worse than Sam Barlow.”
“Don’t you believe it,” Bill Longley said. “Cullen’s honest, but he’s driven. The carpetbaggers give us no rest,” he added, “and it was Cullen who brought us down here to teach Barlow to stay south of Caddo Lake.”
“Thank you,” she said, “it’s most fittin’, what you done. I shall tell folks that it was you saved me.”
“You get along home,” I said, “or make a new one if yours is gone. This trouble will pass,” I added.
We rode to Fort Worth and some of our stock we sold along the way. But most of it we sold in Fort Worth itself.
Several days it had taken us, but we rode careful and stayed shy of the traveled roads, but we traveled less fast than the news of what we had done. In Fort Worth there was already talk of it, and folks were telling that Cullen Baker with fifty men had wiped out a camp of Barlow men. And most folks were pleased.
Actually, there were but eight of us charged the Barlows, and nary a man drew a scratch. We’d been less than three minutes inside that clearing and the surprise had been complete. It was the first time anybody had attacked a Barlow camp—or even found one.
Nor did we wipe them out. Near as we could figure no more than seven were sure enough killed, but we must have wounded that many more. They lost a lot of supplies, clothing, blankets and weapons as well as what stock we drove off.
“Must be a thousand people in Fort Worth,” Buck Tinney claimed. He was astonished, a body could see that. Buck, he had never seen a big town before.
“There’s bigger towns,” his brother Joe said. “New Orleans now, she’s bigger. So’s Natchez, I reckon.”
“Don’t seem possible,” Buck replied.
We hired us rooms, and bought baths, shaves and haircuts. Comin’ into town we looked a likely bunch of curly wolves, but when we got ourselves fixed up we all shaped up like a bunch of dudes.
The fort on the bluff was inside a picket fence, but the building had been abandoned. The log structure that had been the commissary had been taken over by civilians, and the buildings around it had been surrounded by more than a hundred small camps, tents and wagons. There was a blacksmith shop, supply store, saloon, a livery stable and various other businesses. Several dozen wagons loaded with bales of cotton were drawn up in the courthouse square.
We stopped on the corner by Haven’s hardware store and looked around. The Tinney boys watched the crowd with excited eyes, while Bill Longley went over to the window of Bateman’s grocery, nearby.
“Come sundown we meet at the hotel,” I suggested. “If things look good we’ll stay over, otherwise we light a shuck.”
There was something vaguely familiar about a man across the square and it worried me. We wanted to see nobody we knew, although with herds of cattle coming in or passing through any of us might be seen. There were more around who knew Bob Lee and the others than knew me, but they’d be apt to make a connection if they recognized any one of us.
So when we scattered out Bob Lee went across the street with me for a drink. “I could use a decent meal and some clothes,” I said to Bob Lee.
My clothes looked miserable and I’d been thinking of that. The cattle paid off in good money and I was feeling it. Also, good clothes would be a sort of disguise, for nobody had ever seen me in any, leastways not around here.
“Ever think of going West?” I asked it suddenly, so it surprised even me.
“My family are here,” Bob Lee said, after a minute, “and we’ve a difficulty with the Peacock family. No telling when it will end. Yes, I’ve thought of it, or maybe Mexico.”
“I was thinking about it.”
“You’ve nobody here.”
“Nothing but a tough reputation.”
“Is that why you wanted this drive? To get money to go West?”
He never got an answer to that one because right then I lifted my glass and looked down the bar into the eyes of John Tower.
My left side was toward the bar and my left-hand gun was under the edge of the bar and out of easy grasp. It was my right hand held the drink.
Tower started along the bar toward us, and Lee caught my expression, knowing there was trouble. “Stand easy,” I whispered, “it’s the man rides for Lacy Petraine.”
“Who used to ride for Belser.”
Tower was carefully dressed in a black broadcloth suit, and was clean-shaven but for his mustache. “Having yourselves a blowout?” he asked.
“Looking around,” I said. “We may open a ready-to-wear.”
Bill Longley had come in. “Or a funeral parlor,” he said. “Could be a lot of business in that line.”
John Tower glanced at Longley. “I might contribute a little, myself. But don’t start business my way. I’m not a trouble-hunting man.”
“Neither are we,” I said.
“There’s a story around town that somebody named Cullen Baker cleaned up Barlow’s guerrillas, and you would be surprised how much friendly talk it started about Cullen Baker. A few more operations like that and he could run for governor.”
He put down his glass. “By the way, Mrs. Petraine is in town, and she’d like to talk to you.”
“Later,” I said.
Matt Kirby came up the street with the Tinney boys. “Dud Butler’s in town,” he whispered, “and four or five with him.”
Butler I remembered. It had been him I’d seen across the street. He had been one of the boys with Chance the first time they set on me, but lately he’d been reported riding with Sam Barlow. A big, dirty, oafish boy he had grown into a man of the same sort.
“It’s my fight,” I said.
“He knows me,” Bob Lee said. “He rides with that Peacock outfit.”
In a tailor shop we got ourselves fitted into black broadcloth suits, and Tower came in. “You would do well to talk to Mrs. Petraine,” he said. “She particularly requested you come to see her.”