The Tall Men (14 page)

He stood up then, but she did not free his hand. Instead, she arose with him, stood watching him, waiting and wordless. He hesitated a moment, helpless in that last dead silence after a man has offered his heart, only to have it handed back, and before he can bear to take it again and turn away.

“Thanks,” he said at last, “for listenin’ and lettin’ me know.”

There was no cynicism, no reproach in the way he said it. It was just goodbye in the best, honest way he knew to say it. “Git some sleep now, Nella, and don’t fret about the Injuns, you hear? We beat ’em once, you and me. I reckon we kin do it agin. And jest fergit the rest of it, girl, you hear now?”

The moon was angling above the wagonsheets, then, slanting its waning light across his lean face. She saw the shadow of the remembered grin, felt its slow-turning edge twist in her heart.

“I reckon, Nella,” said Ben Allison softly, “you don’t have to shove the backhouse over atop me to run me out’n it.”

He saw her smile, then. The old, quick, bright smile. And saw behind it in the same unbelievable moment, the moon-glitter of the black-lashed tears.

“Oh, Ben! Ben! You’ve still got it just as backwards and blind-wrong as ever. The moon’s in my eyes,
boy, look at me, Ben, look at me! Do I have to tell you—”

“Mebbe you do, Nella,” he muttered hoarsely, hearing and seeing her, not able to believe it, or not daring to. “You said you didn’t want to hurt me no more. I—”

Her hands slid to his shoulders, the soft weave of her body coming into him, warm-close and full. The tears were running now, racing the hollows of the shadowed cheeks, choking the throaty catch of her voice. “My Ben,” she sobbed. “My sweet, dumb, wonderful, big Ben! You’re making me say it, boy. You’re tearing it out of me—”

The slender arms tightened convulsively as she pulled herself swiftly up and into him.

“I love you, Ben. God forgive me, I love you—!”

The badlands of central Wyoming began in brooding earnest some miles south of old Fort Reno. For most of the remaining way the Bozeman Road skirted their fringe, being relatively level and open. Nearing Reno, however, the road veered sharply into them, the last fifteen miles below the fort being a trap of crossridges and timbered hills of considerable elevation.

It was this country into which Ben nervously eased the herd at five o’clock the morning of October 15.

Nothing happened.

By noonhalt they had seen no hostile sign whatever. The only things silhouetting the crowded hills were the stunted yellow pine and native hemlock of the region. The sole alien force sweeping down from them upon the restless Texas herd, was the lonely sough and whistle of the autumn wind.

With the cattle back on trail at two o’clock, moving briskly with the smell of water ahead and with Reno and the Powder River but eight miles, four hours, ahead, Ben eased back in the saddle. For once Stark had been right. Apparently they did indeed have the herd too close to the military for Sioux comfort.

The scouts at Laramie had done their best for Ben in the few hours the big Texan was available to them. But you don’t teach the more delicate shadings of Sioux culture in a few hours, regardless how
hard the student listens. Ben’s Indian education left off a little short of Fort Reno, Wyoming Territory.

About four miles short, to be exact.

At precisely 3.30
P.M.
by Nathan Stark’s fine gold pocket watch.

There was no warning.

No orthodox gathering atop the nearest hill, to form a line of painted ponies and eagle feather war bonnets.

No accepted protocol of hurled insults and dire predictions of the brief and bloody shrift facing the rash white brother, ahead of the warwhooping charge.

And, in fact, not even any warwhoops to begin with.

One minute the herd was passing peacefully around the precipitous flank of a curving, timberless ridge. The next second a silent, crouched double horde of ocher-smeared tribesmen was bombarding its unshod ponies over the southern shank of the ridge and down onto the straggling drag.

Perhaps “horde,” historically, was an overstatement. It only seemed like one to the startled cowboys hazing the drag. They could see nothing but herd dust, stampeding cattle, flashes of piebald horsehide, the bob and whip of feather headdresses and, now that they were full into the herd, the harshly screaming faces of the hostile riders.

Actually, there were only about fifty of them. But to the dumbfounded cowboys of the drag, four in number, under the dour chaperonage of old Chickasaw Billings, they seemed like fifteen hundred.

Technically, they may as well have been. The Indian never sends a papoose to do a brave’s work. These dark-skinned Wyoming missionaries were
long years off the cradleboard. They did their work quickly and with honest pride.

Three thousand cattle on drive, no matter you’re nervous and have them bunched as close as they will walk, cover a lot of trail. Ben, riding point with Clint and Stark, was a full mile north of the point of ambush and well out of sight of it around the bend in the ridge, when the distant shrill of the first war cries stood his ash-blond hair on end.

By the time he raced his black clear of the ridge and could see what was happening, it was no longer happening.

The hollow boom of the Indian trade muskets and the staccato bicker of the cowboy Colts died as suddenly as it had started. He could see only the dust hanging over the rear of the herd. In the time it took him to gallop the black back along the bawling cattle, picking up the eight swing riders on the way, that dust had begun to lift and he could see a little more. Enough, at least, to let him see what was under it.

And what was under that dust was—nothing.

The drag was gone.

He slid the black to a stop, legging off of him and running to where Chickasaw crouched over the two white men on the ground. He was in time to get the old cowboy’s dry-cursed story, and to verify it with his own squinting glance along the southern spur of the ridge.

Just disappearing over that ridge at stampeded tilt, howled on their way by the wheeling red riders behind them, were the two or three hundred cattle of the drag.

The two cowboys stretched in the trail were not dangerously wounded, but they would never see Montana that fall. One had an arrow through his
left side, low down and in the flesh and missing the bowel, but driven clear through. The other had taken a smoothbore musket ball where it hurt his dignity as a worthy son of Texas more than it endangered his immediate future among the living.

It was Clint’s hard-grinned guarantee that he wouldn’t “likely set a saddle in any notable degree of comfort till the grass turned green agin.”

Stark, even amid the uproar, holding bluntly to business as usual, insisted the first duty lay with the injured riders. Ben, sparing a quick look at the degree and nature of their wounds, and exchanging dry Texas diagnoses with their indignant sufferers, allowed they wouldn’t die short of sundown and, with the entire cursing agreement of the stricken twain, reckoned the prime responsibility lay with the missing cattle.

Stark at once bucked him. When he did, western good humor in the face of adversity lost its earthy salt and turned alkali.

“By God,” said Ben slowly, “you go ahead and squander your time ridin’ to the fort and fetchin’ back your army ambulance. These boys ain’t goin’ to expire, less’n it’s from shame. But happen we don’t git them cattle back and stomp them damn redguts into the dirt, expirin’ is apt to git wholesale hereabouts. You onct leave a Injun run over you, he’ll stampede you silly, you hear me?”

“Ben!”

Stark jumped it at him, bulldog jaw outthrust.

“I don’t want any pursuit of those Indians. I say it’s a trick to draw us away from the trail. Let them have the cattle, we can spare them. We’ll drive on right now. That’s an order, Ben.”

“Why, yes sir,” said Ben soberly “I’ll take thet order jest as soon’s I git back, too. You see iffen I don’t.”

He broke away from Stark, wheeled on the gathering cowboys.

“Chickasaw, Waco, Hogjaw, Slim, Charley—you go along with Clint and me. The rest of you git back around the herd. Hold it right where it damn stands. Bunch the wagons and make these two heroes comfortable. Mr. Stark—” he spun back to the Virginia Citian—"you give my regards to Major Whoozis at Fort Reno. And git the goddam hell out’n my way.”

He took the black from Clint, who had been holding him, swung up and kicked him into a gallop. He did not look back at the men he had named. The five stared after him a minute, ran for their reins-trailing ponies. Boarding them on the fly, they slapped the Petmakers home, bunched in a sod-showering gallop on Ben’s rear. Their surprise wasn’t anchored in the gangling trailboss’s all-out hurry, but in his unexpected, back-to-the-wagons direction. Chickasaw voiced their company confusion the minute he could spur his rawboned gray alongside Ben’s big black.

“Whut in the name o’ Christ you aimin’ to do, Ben? Change inter a goddam pink coat and set o’ lilywhite draws, and mebbe set out a dish o’ blighty tea ’fore we up and dash off arter the friggin’ fox?”

“Suthin’ like thet,” grinned Ben.

The weathered Chickasaw had noticed that the time these Allison boys went to grinning on you was along about the stretch most others would be weeping themselves red-eyed. Especially this damn, sobersided, six-and-a-half foot Ben, who never seemed to smile unless it was raining and the herd washing away down the river.

“Sech as suthin’ like what?” he shouted sourly.

“Foxes,” waved Ben. “Them’s tolerable big ones, I reckon. And a right sizable pack of ’em. I ain’t aimin’ to run ’em down with Sam Colts and slow-loadin’ muzzleguns.”

Chickasaw peered at him. Most of the boys carried Colts only. The few who packed saddleguns had either old Civil War carbines or even older, whipstick muzzleloaders. “Hell!” he snorted. “They’s only fifty o’ the bastards!”

Ben slid the black up to the lead wagon. “Save your breath, oldtimer,” he laughed. “Gimme a hand with these here boxes.”

It was the first time Chickasaw or any of the boys had seen the five big packing boxes. Even Clint was getting his first eyeful of them.

But in a land where a man’s best friend is his gun, and his next best, his horse, and dogs didn’t even come close to it, the stenciled legend along the narrow sides of the five boxes was in a language they could read as clear as the click of a Colt hammer. “THE REMINGTON ARMS COMPANY, IL-LION FORGE, N. Y.” was a tongue understood and accepted in the West, second only after that of “COLT PATENT FIREARMS COMPANY, HARTFORD, CONN."

It was seven o’clock and full dark when Ben first caught the telltale red stain against the night sky off to their left. “Jest like I thought,” he grunted to Clint. “They didn’t allow they’d be shagged.”

“Yeah,” nodded Clint. “I bet they ain’t bin really slapped down since the damn army let ’em bluff it inter closin’ the Bozeman. You know what thet blunthead, Stark, told me, Ben?”

“How’s thet?”

“That goddam Carrington’s got six hundred men up to Kearney and another two hundred down to Reno. Kin you imagine thet many whites knucklin’ to two, three thousand Injuns?”

“Well,” grinned Ben, “there’s herd-run whites, and then there’s Texicans.”

“You jest said a mansize mouthful,” laughed Clint. “Leave us git on along and live up to it.”

“At the same time,” broke in Waco Fentriss acidly, “leave us remember the dear, sainted Alamo.”

“Yeah,” breathed Charley Stringer uneasily. “Even Texicans kin be outnumbered.”

“Bushway!” growled Chickasaw, sticking manfully to his earlier estimate. “They’s no more’n fifty o’ the bastards.”

“Agin seven,” drawled Ben, reining the black westward, toward the fire’s glow. “And a box of Remin’ton Rollin’ Block rifles.”

“They shore load like a dream,” was Hogjaw’s irrelevant comment. With it, he headed the others after Ben and Clint, pushing his horse forward into the darkness.

Twenty minutes later, the seven cowponies were standing, reins trailing, in a slash of pine fifty feet below the skyline of the last ridge. And their baker’s half-dozen bow-legged riders were bellied down in the pine needles and rimrock of its crest.

Below them, sharp and clear against the spark and boom of a victory fire, not seventy-five yards away and with their red paunches sleepily swollen with good Texas beef, squatted thirty Sioux braves.

The missing twenty-or-so of their fellows were undoubtedly bedded down and sleeping off the
gastronomic fruits of heavy Oglala industry. In any event, what time Ben and his companions felt they had at their disposal was not squandered in guessing games as to the whereabouts of the missing score of red celebrants, but in laying a calm Texas eye down the barrel of a new Remington rifle onto the thirty victors then present—and soon to be accounted for.

Even in the dark, the new rifles loaded delightfully.

“Son of a bitch!” shouted Waco, flipping the falling block back and dropping in his third shell. “They go in like antelope tallow to a dry hub!”

“You ain’t jest whistlin’ Dixie!” chortled old Chickasaw, one up on Waco and slamming his fourth round, closed “And, mister, do they hold tight! Watch thet bastard runnin’ to the left, yonder—”

Waco, presently drilling his third Sioux out of the yelling mill of startled redmen below, had neither time nor inclination to observe Chickasaw’s called shot. Had he, he would have seen the thirteenth Sioux grab his belly and bounce into the sagebrush.

It was that wild and that short, from start to finish.

Within five minutes after the firing broke out along the darkened ridge, there wasn’t an Indian within buffalo-gun range of the stolen herd below.

Having but one way to estimate the numbers of their attackers—by the rapidity of their fire—the Sioux could only assume there were at least two dozen white riflemen along the ridge. These were not odds to the Oglala liking, and an every-redman-for-himself exit was in instant order.

Ben and his triumphant Texans had only to blow out the hot barrels of their new guns, amble down and board their ponies, put them over the ridge and into the level draw beyond, leisurely collect their borrowed cattle and head for home.

Well, there were one or two other little things.

Of the thirteen braves seen to drop, they could find but five. They were left to figure that the hostiles, as they always did when sheer guts and superb horsemanship could bring it off, had somehow gotten the other eight aboard ponies and carried them off. The “one or two other little things” came in when it was discovered that two of the braves left behind were still alive.

Chickasaw did the honors, with a hand well trained in such basic courtesies from thirty years, and more, of life beyond the fringe of white settlement life in West Texas.

When Ben ordered him out and away, to join the other boys with the cattle, himself lingering behind to kick out the fire, all five of the red brothers were long past pain: the final two of them staring peacefully up at the Wyoming stars around a powder-burned hole between the eyes.