[Texas Rangers 03] - The Way of the Coyote (27 page)

"Not likely. But in the dark it's hard to tell who your friends are." They rested the horses until the stars were out. Andy and Billy passed closely enough to smell the smoke of the campfire and of meat roasting over it. Billy said, "I sure am hungry."

Andy was too, but he had learned long ago to ignore hunger when other considerations pressed harder. "We'll get a-plenty to eat at the Monahan farm."

"That's still a long ways off."

Andy heard laughter from the camp, and a voice raised in a shout. He brought Long Red to a stop and listened. He was almost certain he heard some words in English.

"Billy, those may be white men."

"Let's go see."

"Not too fast. We'll work our way up close and make sure." Andy was uneasy. It did not seem reasonable to encounter white men up here in what was essentially a Comanche stronghold. Perhaps they were soldiers, making an extended scout. Or they could be frontier guards like Captain Burmeister's ranger detachment.

He dismounted and led Long Red but motioned for Billy to stay mounted. Billy's horse was too tall and Billy's legs too short for him to mount without help. They halted fifty yards from the firelight. Listening intently, Andy discerned that the men were indeed speaking English.

By himself he might have moved on, hungry or not. But the boy had had little to eat all day except a bit of pemmican, which he had forced down. "Billy, we're goin' to take a chance. Let me do the talkin'."

He led the two horses to within twenty yards of the fire. He shouted, "Hello the camp!"

Instantly several men jumped away from the campfire's reflected light. Someone shouted back, "Who's out there?"

"Just two of us. We're white."

"Show yourselves, but come in slow."

Andy could not see the weapons aimed at him, but he could feel them. He led the horses as near the fire as they would go. He raised both hands.

A voice demanded from the darkness, "Where's your guns?"

"All I've got is a rifle." He raised it so the speaker could see.

A man emerged from the night, into the flickering light. He carried a pistol aimed at Andy. "You talk white enough, but you both look Indian to me."

Andy said, "There's a reason. We got away from a Comanche camp. He looked toward meat roasting over the fire. "The boy is awful hungry. That's why we came in."

The man's suspicions were not yet satisfied. "You got names?"

"He's Billy Gifford. Comanches stole him from his folks a little while back. Mine's Andy Pickard. They took me when I wasn't no bigger than he is.

The man lowered the pistol. "Lift the boy down. You-all help yourselves to some buffalo haunch."

Other men emerged from the darkness. Andy saw six altogether. They were a ragged bunch. If there was a comb or a razor in camp, it must have lain undisturbed for days in the bottom of a saddlebag. One man wore what remained of a Union Army coat. Another wore patched Confederate gray trousers. If nothing else, the outfit appeared to be politically neutral.

The one in gray complained, "Jake, we come to trade with the Comanches. They won't take it kindly, us helpin' these runaways."

Andy said, "They don't need to know about it. Me and Billy sure ain't goin' to tell them."

The complainer said, "Indians got ways of knowin' everything. Claim spirits come and whisper the news in their ear."

Andy started to deny it but could not. Despite his years in the white man's world and many earnest sermons by Preacher Webb, he had not become convinced that such spirits did not exist. He was almost certain he had felt their presence in certain sacred places.

Nothing about this place struck him as sacred, however. He said, "I doubt there's any spirits watchin' us here."

Jake said, "We've got nothin' against you boys. But you have to understand, we're out here to try and strike a trade with the Indians. We can't afford to stir them up."

"Then just let us have a little somethin' to eat, please sir, and we'll be on our way. Nobody'll ever know we was here."

The trader considered. "No, you're here, and you'd just as well stay all night with us. No tellin' what you might stumble into out in the dark."

Andy was so intent on eating, and on watching Billy wolf down a big chunk of roast, that he paid little attention to the appearance of the camp. But as his appetite began to be satisfied, he looked around. He realized there were no wagons. A string of pack mules was tied to a rope picket line beyond the firelight. The packs lay on the ground in the middle of camp. From what he could see, they contained mostly bottles and jugs.

Whiskey runners, he realized.

The
Comancheros
had used liquor mainly as a come-along to help them dispose of their trade goods. With these men, liquor was the trade goods.

Jake plied him with questions about himself and Billy. He seemed particularly interested when Andy told him about the offer James and Evan had made to the
Comanchero
about ransoming the boy with horses. The man's eagerness made Andy uneasy. He wished he had not talked so much.

His stomach full, Billy's exhaustion caught up with him. He fell asleep and slumped over onto the ground. From one of the packs Jake brought a blanket and spread it. "The boy's wore out. I expect you are, too. You'd best get yourself some sleep."

Andy was tired, but he was suspicious, too. He lay beside Billy on the blanket but tried to fight off weariness. He could hear several traders huddling with Jake near the fire, talking in low tones. He heard just enough to sharpen his suspicions, then to stir fear.

Jake suggested that they should take the boys home and demand that the Monahan family give them as many horses as had been proposed to the Comanchero. The smuggler in gray argued if they took the boys back to the band from whom they had escaped, the Indians should be grateful enough to take the whole cargo of whiskey off their hands at an even higher price in horses.

Jake seemed not to have thought of that. "Adcock, you got a good head on your shoulders."

Andy felt chilled at the thought of going back to Fights with Bears. He doubted that Steals the Ponies, tied down by Comanche tradition, could do much to help him or Billy.

The traders made considerable use of their own merchandise in premature celebration of the profit they were to realize. One finished off a bottle and tossed it into the fire. Almost immediately the bottle exploded with a flash of bright flame.

"You damned fool," Adcock yelled, "you could've put somebody's eye out."

The answer was a rough curse. The two men fell into a violent quarrel until Jake put a stop to it. "No more throwin' bottles into the fire, and no more of this damned fightin'. Else I'll knock somebody in the head."

The two fell back, mumbling dire but empty threats until they descended into a blind stupor.

The other traders were not so besotted that they forgot their plan. They made their beds in a protective rough circle around Andy and Billy. Andy was sure this was not to guard them from outside danger but to prevent them from escaping. Any desire for sleep fell away as he contemplated the dark prospect of falling into the hostile hands of Fights with Bears.

He had purposely avoided encountering Indians, but a false sense of security had brought him willingly into the camp of white men treacherous enough to sell out him and Billy for a price. He dwelt bitterly on the irony of his bad judgment.

He waited until the sounds of even breathing indicated that the men were asleep. He raised up slowly, intending to make his way to the picket line. He would retrieve his and Billy's horses, then come back for Billy.

Jake spoke roughly, "Better do it in your britches, boy. Out in the dark, somebody's apt to blow a hole in you."

Alarmed, then frustrated, Andy muttered, "Wasn't goin' nowhere."

Billy stirred just enough to turn over on the blanket. Andy lay back down beside him, his stomach knotting with worry. His eyes remained open. He tried to think of a way that might allow him to get Billy out of this camp. If they could just reach their horses, they would not have to worry about saddling up. Neither had a saddle. They had been traveling bareback.

He thought about the explosion of the empty bottle. In the dim light of the smoldering campfire he could see the traders' packs of goods. He wondered what would happen to full whiskey bottles or jugs if they fell into the coals. He had had no experience with liquor. It might burn. On the other hand, like water it might simply put the fire out.

If it did burn, it should cause enough excitement to create a momentary diversion. After all, some people called it fire water.

He crawled to the edge of the blanket to see if he would be challenged as before. He was not. Jake seemed to have gone to sleep. Andy crawled a few inches more and paused, expecting someone to stop him. No one did.

He wriggled up against one of the packs that the men had opened earlier and from which they had imbibed freely. He could barely see, but his probing hands found several jugs. They seemed to be of clay. He got his arms around three of them and carefully crawled back, setting them on the ground within reach of the fire. He returned for more. Before carrying three additional jugs away he uncorked those that remained. The whiskey softly gurgled out onto the canvas.

He waited, listening for an indication that he had disturbed anyone. Then he placed the jugs in the fire and crawled back to the blanket. He pulled the edge of it up and over himself and Billy as a shield against flying pieces of clay in event the jugs reacted as the bottle had.

A cork blew free with a sound like a small-caliber gunshot. Enough whiskey spouted out behind it to ignite a large bluish flame. The jug exploded with a loud pop, the flames blazing high. One by one the other jugs began to blow.

The camp came awake as if a thunderbolt had struck. Confused men shouted and cursed, trying to scramble away from flames that lighted up the night. Coals and firebrands flew in all directions. One landed on the canvas where Andy had spilled several jugs of whiskey. A second blaze flared up, almost as large as the first.

Andy grabbed Billy, who seemed too groggy to grasp what was happening. For the moment the traders were too involved in trying to escape the fires to pay any attention. He ran for the picket line. There the horses and mules reared and kicked, panicked by the noise and the flashes of fire.

Andy plopped Billy up on top of his horse and freed the reins from the picket rope. He untied his own reins and swung up onto Long Red. He wished he could cut the picket line and free the rest of the horses to run away, but Jake had confiscated his knife as well as his rifle. He had neither the time nor the inclination to try to retrieve them.

"Let's see how fast these horses can run," he said.

Billy was still bewildered. He had no inkling of the danger they had been in. But he followed Andy's lead.

"What started all the fire back there?" he wanted to know.

Andy said, "Maybe lightnin'."

"Shouldn't we ought to stay and help put it out?"

"They got all the help they need." Andy looked at the sky to be sure he was traveling in the right direction. He made a little correction and said, "You're doin' just fine, Billy. First thing you know, you'll be home."

F
or two days Captain Burmeister's rangers had followed the whiskey runners. Rusty and Len Tanner rode in front as trackers, though any man in the group could have read the trail as easily. The contrabanders seemed to have had no concern about being followed. They had no reason to suspect that a sharp-eyed settler had tipped the rangers about their passage.

The farmer had lost family members to raiding Indians. He had told Burmeister, "If there hadn't been half a dozen of them I'd've lit into them runners myself. They don't give a damn about the trouble they cause. They'll get some Indians drunk and cheat them. That'll make the Indians mad, and they'll come raidin' honest folks."

Burmeister had promised, "We will stop them if we catch them before they pass out of Texas."

"How will you know where the border line is at?"

Burmeister's gray mustache had wiggled. "We won't."

The settler had ridden along the first day but felt he had to drop out and return to protect his family. "If you catch them," he said, "bring them back to my farm. We'll throw the biggest barbecue you ever seen. And if you're lookin' for a place to hang them runners, I've got a grove of live-oak trees that ain't bein' used for nothin' but shade."

Burmeister had promised to remember the offer.

Tanner was a little bothered. "The thought of hangin' always kind of chokes me up," he told Rusty. "The captain wouldn't really do that, would he?"

Rusty shook his head. "I don't think the law calls for hangin' whiskey smugglers. They'll just get room and board awhile at the state penitentiary."

"Not too much room, I hope, and not much board."

Most of this second day Tanner had said so little that Rusty had begun to be concerned about him. Ordinarily Tanner seldom gave his jaw much rest. If a bird flew in front of him he would speculate for half an hour on what kind it was, what it ate, and what its mating habits were.

Rusty asked him, "You feelin' all right?"

"Nothin' wrong with me. It's you I been worried about."

"Why me?"

"Because you ain't said nothin' about Andy. Yesterday and today I ain't heard you mention his name."

"What can I say that I haven't already said? God only knows where he is or what he's doin'." Rusty bit down on the words and did not finish speaking all of his thought. If he's not been killed already ...

Tanner said, "After we catch up to these runners, maybe me and you ought to take leave and go huntin' him."

"You have any idea how much country we might have to cover? We could ride 'til our whiskers got tangled in our stirrups and still never find him."

Rusty wished Tanner would drop the subject.

But Tanner always had another word, or several. "Better than waitin', wonderin'. Think about it anyway."