the Thundering Herd (1984) (30 page)

"Ahuh. The deal's made. Shake on it," said Follonsbee, extending his hand.

Pruitt met it halfway with his own.

"Hank, we stuck together for aboot two years, an' I reckon we're a good team."

"How about the girl?" suddenly demanded Follonsbee.

Their backs were turned to Milly, who heard this query with the sharp ears of expectation. She was fortified by her own resolve and the still hidden presence of Catlee.

"Wal, if I didn't forgit aboot our black-eyed wench!" ejaculated Pruitt, slapping his leg.

"Toss you for her--or cut the cards?" asked Follonsbee, with his sleek, narrow, beak-like head lowered.

"No, you won't. Yo're shore too lucky. . . . We'll share the girl same as the rest of the outfit."

"All right. It'll be a two-man outfit, half of everythin' for each-- even the girl. Then we can't squabble. . . . But say, we forgot Catlee. Where the hell's he been?"

"Reckon he was scared. Mebbe he's runnin' yet."

"Nope. I tell you, Andy, your hate of Yanks has got you figgerin' this Catlee wrong," protested Follonsbee.

"That farm hand!" retorted Pruitt, with infinite disgust.

"Farm hand nothin'," replied the other bluntly. "I don't know WHAT he is, but he's got me figgerin'. We'd better give him a hoss an' pack an' turn him loose."

Pruitt pondered this suggestion for a moment and then somberly shook his head. That idea did not appeal to him, while at the same time it manifestly introduced another and uncertain element into the situation.

Milly heard quick, rustling footsteps behind her. Catlee appeared round the wagon, with a gun leveled low in his right hand.

Follonsbee saw him first and let out a startled exclamation.

Pruitt jerked up. Then he froze.

"Howdy, men!" was Catlee's greeting, in voice these companions evidently had never heard him use before.

Follonsbee uttered a gasp of amazed conviction.

"Andy! I TOLD you!"

Pruitt scarcely moved a muscle, unless in the flicker of an eyelash. He did not change expression. He hissed out, "Who'n hell are you NOW?" That was his swift acceptance of Follonsbee's reiterated hints.

"Small matter," replied Catlee, as with weapon quiveringly extended he sheered round squarely in front of Pruitt, "but if it'd please you to be acquainted with me at this late day--you can bow to Sam Davis."

"Ahuh! Late pard of the Youngers," retorted Follonsbee, going white in the face.

"Reckon I'm used to hard company," whipped out Catlee, stingingly, "but never yet took to sharin' innocent little girls!"

Pruitt suffered no suggestion of Follonsbee's weakening to the power of a name, whatever it was. The leveled weapon, covering him and his comrade, was the great factor in his reaction. Not for the slightest fraction of a second did he take his dancing, furious gaze from Catlee. The uselessness of more words seemed marked in his almost imperceptible gathering of muscular force. All the power of sight and mind was transfixed on Catlee's eyes, to read there the intent that preceded action. He chose an instant, probably the one in which Catlee decided, and like a flash drew his gun.

As it left his hip and snapped, Catlee's gun crashed. The force of the bullet knocked Pruitt flat.

"Hur-ry Hank!" he yelled, in fierce, wild tone of terrible realization, and flinging the empty weapon he had forgotten to load he lurched like a crippled panther to get his hands on Jett's rifle.

Milly saw only the intrepid Pruitt, but she heard Catlee's second shot and the sodden thud of Follonsbee falling. He made no outcry.

Pruitt's actions were almost too swift to follow--so swift that Catlee missed him, as with spasmodic dive he grasped and carried Jett's rifle over the mess box. Up he sprang, grotesque, misshapen, yet wonderfully agile, to discharge the heavy rifle even as he received Catlee's fire square in his chest. Staggering backward, he dropped the weapon, his arms spread, and he seemed falling step by step. An awful blankness blotted out the ferocity of his crooked face. Step by step, he fell backward over the bank into the river. A sounding splash followed his disappearance.

Milly's set gaze wavered. A silence intervened. Her lungs seemed to expand. The appalling fixidity of her attention broke with a shock and she looked for Catlee. He lay on the ground beside the camp fire. His hand twitched--released the smoking gun. Milly leaped out of the wagon and ran to him.

She knelt. His hat was off, his face vague, changing. The gray storm of his eyes seemed fading.

"Oh--oh--Catlee!" cried Milly, poignantly.

"Good luck," he whispered. His lips set, his eyelids fluttered-- all his body quivered to a relaxation. He had been shot through the breast.

"My God! how awful! . . . He's dead! They're all dead. I'm left-- alone. It's over. . . . Brave Catlee! Oh, he saved me! . . .

But what can I do? I--"

Milly's outburst was silenced by the shrill neigh of one of the horses hitched to the wagon. It was a neigh that heralded sight or scent of another horse. Wild and sharp then pealed out a whistling answer from across the river.

Milly bounded erect to peer out under the cottonwoods, thrilling with joy. But her joy sustained a bewildering check, and it died when steadier glance revealed mounted Indians riding down into the river. For one moment Milly stared, biting her fingers in her horror; then the spirit born of these trying hours ran through her like a white flame, and climbing to the seat of the wagon she whipped up the reins.

Her instinct was to escape. She had no time to think of a better way. And the horses, restive, not wholly recovered from fright, needed no urging. They broke into trot, dragging the saddled animals behind the wagon. Out of the clearing, into the brakes they crashed, and were hard to hold. Road there was none, but a wide lane of crushed weeds and brush marked where Jett had driven the wagon in, and later had ridden to and fro on horseback. The team followed it and they tore through the bending clumps of brush that hung over it and bumped over logs. Branches of trees struck Milly as she passed, blinding her for a moment. When she could see clearly again the horses were no longer in the lane through the brush. They had swerved to one side or the other, she did not know which. But she kept her sense of direction: to the right was down river, and to the left was the prairie, the main herd of buffalo, and the camps of the hunters.

She must get out into the open quickly. If the Indians had not heard her drive away there would be a little time before they would strike out on her trail through the brakes.

"Oh, I forgot," she cried. "They heard the horse neigh." And with a sinking of her daring spirit she let the horses have free rein.

They quickened their gait, but showed no sign of bolting. They wanted to get out of that jungle, and they broke a path through thickets, over rotten logs, and under matted hanging vines. Milly had all she could do to keep from being torn from her seat.

They got by the worst of the brakes and Milly saw light ahead low down through the trees, but it seemed to be in the wrong direction.

She should turn more to the left. Her efforts to head the iron- jawed team in that direction were unavailing. They kept to a straight course, out into the light. But this open had deceived Milly, and probably the horses also. It was a wide bare strip of sand where a tributary of the Pease flowed in wet season. Here the horses slowed to a dragging walk, yet soon crossed the sand to enter the brakes again.

Here in the shade and dust, and the mOlTe of threshing branches round her face, Milly lost all sense of the right direction. She realized her peril, yet did not despair. Something had always happened; it would happen to save her again.

Suddenly a crashing of brush in front of her stopped her heart.

She almost fell back into the wagon. A huge brown buffalo bull tore ahead of her, passing to the left. Milly recovered. Then again she heard crashing ahead of her, to one side, and more at a distance. There were buffalo in the brakes.

Above the swish of brush and rattle of wagon and pound of hoofs she began to hear a low, rumbling thunder, apparently to the fore and her right.

"They said stampede!" she cried fearfully.

Her horses heard it and were excited, or else the scent and proximity of stray buffalo had been the cause of their faster, less regular gait. Milly essayed again to swerve them to the left, but in vain. And indeed that left side grew more and more impractical, owing to obstructions which shunted the horses in an opposite direction. Quite unexpectedly then they burst out of the brakes into open prairie.

Milly was as amazed as frightened. The plain was so dusty she could not see a mile, and strings of buffalo were disappearing into a yellow broken pall. They appeared to be loping in their easy, lumbering way. The thunder was louder now, though still a strange low roar, and it came out of the dust curtain which obscured the prairie. The horses, snorting, not liking dust or buffalo, loped for a mile, then slowed to a walk and halted. Milly tried to get her bearings. The whole horizon to fore and right was streaky with dust and moving buffalo. From behind her the line of river timber extended on her right to fade in the obscurity of dust. This established her position. She had crossed the brakes of the tributary and was now headed east. The buffalo were then coming out of the south and they were crossing the Pease. Milly realized that she was far out of her proper course and must make a wide turn to the left, cross the dry stream-bed, and then go up the river to the camps of the hide-hunters.

Suddenly she missed something. The two saddle horses! They had broken off in the rough ride. Milly looked back at the dark, ragged line of the timber from where she had come. The air was clearer that way. Movement and flash attracted her gaze. She saw animals run out into the open. Wild, lean, colored ponies with riders! They stretched out in swift motion, graceful, wild, incomparably a contrast to the horses of white hunters.

Milly realized she was being pursued by Indians.

Chapter
XV

Milly screamed at the horses and swung the lash, beating them into a gallop. The lightly loaded wagon lurched and bounced over the hummocky prairie, throwing her off the seat and from side to side.

A heavy strain on the reins threatened to tear her arms from their sockets.

It was this physical action that averted a panic-stricken flight.

The horses broke from gallop into run, and they caught up with scattered groups and lines of buffalo. Milly was in the throes of the keenest terror that had yet beset her, but she did not quite lose her reason. There were a few moments fraught with heart- numbing, blood-curdling sensations; which on the other hand were counteracted by the violence of the race over the prairie, straight for the straggling strings of the buffalo herd. The horses plunged, hurtling the wagon along; the wind, now tainted with dust and scent of buffalo, rushed into Milly's face and waved her hair; the tremendous drag on the reins, at first scarcely perceptible, in her great excitement, began to hurt hands, wrists, arms, shoulders in a degree that compelled attention. But the race itself, the flight, the breakneck pace across the prairie, with stampeding buffalo before and Comanche Indians behind--it was too great, too magnificent, too terrible to prostrate this girl. Opposed to all the fears possible to a girl was the thing roused in her by love, by example of a thief who had died to save her, by the marvel of the moment.

Milly gazed back over her shoulder. The Comanches had gained.

They were not half a mile away, riding now in wide formation, naked, gaudy, lean, feathered, swift and wild as a gale of wind in the tall prairie grass.

"Better death among the buffalo!" cried Milly, and she turned to wrap both reins round her left wrist, to lash out with the whip, and to scream: "RUN! RUN! RUN!"

Buffalo loped ahead of her, to each side and behind, in straggling groups and lines, all headed in the same direction as the vague denser bunches to the right. Here the dust pall moved like broken clouds, showing light and dark.

She became aware of increasing fullness in her ears. The low rumble had changed to a clattering trample, yet there seemed more.

The sound grew; it came closer; it swelled to a roar; and presently she located it in the rear.

She turned. With startled gaze she saw a long, bobbing, black, ragged mass pouring like a woolly flood out over the prairie. A sea of buffalo! They were moving at a lope, ponderously, regularly, and the scalloped head of that immense herd crossed the line between Milly and the Comanches. It swept on. It dammed and blocked the way. Milly saw the vermillion paint on the naked bodies and faces of these savages as they wheeled their lean horses to race along with the buffalo.

Then thin whorls of rising dust obscured them from Milly's sight.

A half mile of black bobbing humps moved between her and the Comanches. She uttered a wild cry that was joy, wonder, reverence, and acceptance of the thing she had trusted. Thicker grew the dust mantle; wider the herd; greater the volume of sound! The Comanches might now have been a thousand miles away, for all the harm they could do her. As they vanished in the obscurity of dust so also did they fade from Milly's mind!

Milly drove a plunging maddened team of horses in the midst of buffalo as far as the eye could see. Her intelligence told her that she was now in greater peril of death than at any time heretofore, yet, though her hair rose stiff and her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth, she could not feel the same as when Pruitt had parceled her, share and share with Follonsbee, or when those lean wild-riding Comanches had been swooping down on her.