The Trail West (4 page)

Monahan and Sweeney rode out at first light with Blue trailing behind, while Carmichael’s men were still yawning in their blankets. They left without incident, except when they topped the hill over which Monahan had ridden the day before. The dog turned one last time and paused, lifting his head in a single long mournful howl.

It set the hair on the back of Monahan’s neck to prickling.

“C’mon, Blue,” Monahan said kindly. “Come along, fella.”

After a moment the dog turned away from the ruined place it had lived and known good, hard work and love, and followed them.

 

 

All that day they traveled south, with an occasional bob or weave to the west or east to avoid climbing a hill too high or skidding down a gorge too steep. It seemed to Monahan the farther south they went, the faster the calendar was pushed along. Spring roundup had just finished in the mountains, and he could still feel the recent memory of snowy climes and icy creeks chilling his old joints.

But the Christmas smell of the high country had gone out of his nose entirely. The fellows around Phoenix would have finished their spring roundup a good month past. They’d get enough heat to bake a buffalo come summer, but they rarely saw more than a brief dusting of snow, and it never smelled like Christmas.

He was beginning to think he’d best cowboy on the flats for a while, maybe forever. For old men with cranky old wounds, life was a good bit easier close to sea level than it was at seven or eight thousand feet. A good bit warmer, too.

He’d managed to push thoughts of Dev Baylor pinning him to a pine with a rusty baling hook—and Alf twisting it—from his mind. Sweeney had had a point. If the Baylor boys were tracking him, and if they knew anything about him—which they probably did—they’d know he always traveled alone when he was between jobs. They wouldn’t follow the prints of two men and a dog.

The young man was turning out to be a halfway decent traveling companion. At least, he was quiet enough after Monahan ignored four or five attempts to get a conversation going. Sweeney gave up and seemed content to ride in silence, and that was all right with Monahan, who figured he’d used up about all his talking back at the Morgan ranch.

But he wasn’t deaf or stupid as Carmichael and the other others thought. He’d heard every word, when they were talking around their campfire the night before. He wasn’t as lackadaisical as Carmichael about those Apaches, either. He’d kept his ears cocked and his eyes open all day long.

But the Apaches didn’t show.

Monahan and Sweeney made camp for the night in a little hollow lush with paloverde just thinking about bringing up some yellow buds. Sweeney shot a big buck jackrabbit for their supper and was skewing it on a makeshift spit when his talking muscles all of a sudden kicked into high gear again. “Back up at the Circle D, those hands yammered about you all winter.”

Monahan put the bean pot on the fire and sat back, shaking his head at the dog tossing the rabbit hide up into the air and catching it over and over. “Reckon we’d best find that dog somethin’ to herd. Trampin’ the trail all day, and he’s still got enough energy for twins.”

Sweeney wasn’t easily dissuaded. “They said as how you knew the James boys. That true, Monahan? They said as how you rode with Jesse.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “They said you rode with Quantrill.”

Monahan snorted. “Hog squirt.” He poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Which?” Sweeney insisted. “That you rode with Quantrill or that you rode with Jesse?”

“You just don’t give up, do you, son?”

Sweeney smiled. “No sir, I don’t.”

Behind him, the dog threw the rabbit pelt high in the air with a snap of his neck, then leaped up to catch it in midair. He gave it a good shaking, and then another toss.

Sweeney didn’t see any of it, but Monahan did, and it put him in a pretty fair mood to see the critter finally enjoying itself. After a moment, he said, “I’m from the great state of Iowa, boy, and I fought for the Union . . . I think.” He took a sip of his coffee. “If I’da ever run into Quantrill, I wouldn’ta stopped to say howdy, that’s for dang sure. I probably woulda put a lead ball between the crazy man’s eyes. And I wouldn’t know Jesse Woodson James if he was to walk in here and ask for a plate of rabbit and beans.”

A puzzled look crossed Sweeney’s face, and Monahan added cryptically, “Now, his brother Frank? That’s another matter.”

Sweeney leaned forward, his face eager as a pup’s. “How’d you come to know him then, if you fought for the North? Did you ride together? I mean, after the war?”

“Nope.” Monahan took another sip of coffee. “The backstabbin’, bank-robbin’, rebel coward married up with my second cousin.”

That seemed to stun Sweeney into silence, and Monahan took advantage of the lull to give the beans a stir and add four pinches of salt and three of pepper. He couldn’t stand flat beans. While he was at it, he adjusted the rabbit’s spit, giving it a half turn. It was starting to get a little too done on one side to suit him.

Monahan gave the beans another stir and said, “It was a long time back. Reckon I’ve got over the worst of the mad.”

“F-Frank James is your second cousin?” Sweeney finally stuttered.

Monahan shook the bean spoon at him, and a couple of beans hissed when they hit the fire. “Only by marriage. Don’t you get to blamin’ that pestilential James clan on me!”

“Well, did you go to the wedding?”

Monahan snorted. He had gotten over the worst of his mad at Frank James, all right. That was, he was past the point of uprooting trees over it. But he was still plenty doggone ticked.

“I should say I didn’t! I was up to Minnesota when my old neighbor wrote me about it, and I was so disgusted I up and burned that letter right then and there. And I’m through talking about that rebel trash, iffen you don’t mind. And even if you do.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sweeney. “Sorry.”

“Well.” Monahan supposed he’d snapped at the boy. Young Sweeney couldn’t help it if a bunch of bored bunkhouse cowhands had talked his ear off. “Just don’t believe everything you hear.”

“No sir, I won’t.”

“And quit that ‘sir’ business.”

“Yes sir. I mean, okay.”

Monahan tried to mash a bean against the side of the pot, but it was still a little stony. He topped off his coffee and leaned back against his saddle. “When you was a kid, did you ever play a game called Town Gossip?”

Sweeney shook his head.

“Well, Missus Frye—she was the parson’s wife, up at our church back home—had us play it when we was kids, to teach us against the sin of repeatin’ tales. It was a right good lesson, and I ain’t never forgot it. She’d start out with a long line of young’uns, and the first one gets somethin’ whispered in his ear. Say, for instance, ‘Sally went to town and bought a green dress.’ Somethin’ simple like that. And then that kid whispers it to the next kid and so on, right on down the row. By the time it’s gone through that long line, it’d end up ‘Sally caught herself a greased pig and barbecued it with Mayor Woolard’ or some such.”

Monahan hadn’t thought about that old game in years, and danged if it didn’t make him feel kind of sentimental. He didn’t know whether he liked the feeling or not, but he put it down on the side of not, just in case.

Sweeney said, “I reckon it’s a good thing you told me the truth of it, then. Just to clear things up.”

“Maybe.”

“What about Bill Hickok, then?” Sweeney asked. “Or Clooney Portnoy or Arapaho Jones or Cole Younger, or these Baylor boys that are followin’ us? What about the Kalikaks or Charlie Goodnight or Joaquin Murietta or—”

Monahan barked out a laugh, couldn’t hold it in. “Joaquin Murietta? By gum, those boys surely did talk, didn’t they? Joaquin Murietta was beheaded in the Golden State almost twenty years ago, boy, back when California was a place where donkey-headed fools went to scratch in the dirt for gold. Well,” he added thoughtfully with a scratch of his chin, “suppose they wasn’t all donkey-headed. Some of ’em actually found somethin’.”

“But—”

“That’s enough,” Monahan said crisply, signaling a halt to the proceedings, and Sweeney stilled his tongue. Monahan dug a hand into his possibles bag and pulled out his own dinged tin plate and a fork, as well as Blue’s chipped bowl. “Iffen them beans ain’t ready, I’m gonna eat ’em anyway,” he muttered, scooping a soupy ladleful into the dog’s bowl to cool.

Blue had given up tossing his rabbit skin around—which was just as well so far as Monahan could tell, for the hide had become a tattered, unrecognizable, muddy lump—and came to sit beside the fire. He eyed his bowl and hungrily licked his chops.

Monahan shook the spoon at him. “You just hold off until I say,” he warned. “That there’s too hot for dogs. ’Sides, I’m gonna put some rabbit in it for you.” He turned toward Sweeney. “You got a plate?”

“Guess I know where I rank around here,” Sweeney said sheepishly. With a smile, he held out his dish.

Long after Monahan was asleep with the dog stretched out beside him and snoring softy, Sweeney stared up at the stars. Damned if it wasn’t something, his meeting up with Dooley Monahan and actually riding along with him! He was Frank James’s cousin! All right, it was a second cousin and by marriage to boot, but Sweeney didn’t much worry about the details.

He’d tried to pump Monahan for more information about the Baylor brothers, and why they were dogging him. After all, if those mean no-accounts were on Monahan’s trail, he wanted to know the reason why. Not that he actually wanted to tangle with them, no sir. But it would be an interesting story to add to Monahan’s legend. Sweeney was all for interesting stories.

However, every single time he broached the subject, Monahan either changed it or ignored him. It seemed the old cowboy was embarrassed by talking about the Baylors. Any man who had done the things he had done and known the people he had known ought to be more convivial. Why, he ought to be downright eager to share stories! At least, that’s the way Sweeney looked at it.

He hoped Monahan would open up after they got to know each other a little better. Riding with a famous man who knew celebrated people—and was sort of related to at least one of them—was a long stretch from growing up an orphaned kid, kept practically a slave by fat old Fess Wattlesborg at his lonely place up in the mountains.

Sweeney could picture the sign out front of the shack. H
OOCH AND
E
ATS AND
T
RADE
—W
ATTLESBORG’S
R
OAD
.

The “road” was a narrow trail not wide enough for two horses abreast, and it was snowed in three-quarters of the year. Oh, he could just hear Wattlesborg. “Clean them stalls again, you lazy little peckerwood, and do it right or you’ll get a right proper lickin’! Here I took you in outta the kindness o’ my heart, and you ain’t once showed me the proper gratitude!”

It had seemed to Sweeney, still heartsick over the loss of his folks, that he could never clean the stalls right. Nor did he rub down Wattlesborg’s roan mare good enough to suit him, or cut enough firewood, or treat the customers right—when they had customers for the rank mash Wattlesborg brewed and the venison steaks he sold to trappers and the occasional passerby at two bits a plate, or in trade for pelts. Wattlesborg was a hard man indeed, fat and tall and strong and nearly always sozzled and looking for trouble.

Sweeney had spent four long years, from the age of twelve until just after his sixteenth birthday, either bloody and bruised and curled on his pallet from one of Wattlesborg’s punishments. Either that, or facing up to a new beating.

But come his sixteenth year, Sweeney had been blessed with a growing spurt, going from five-foot-six to six feet tall in less than eight months, and one day he’d finally owned the courage to hit Wattlesborg back.

He guessed he’d been madder—and Wattlesborg drunker—than he thought, because the man didn’t hit him back. When Sweeney up and slugged him, he went down in the straw in a surprised three hundred and fifty pound heap.