High Plains Justice, Page 2

TWO

  Toward evening Johnnie’s father met him about a mile out from the ranch house. His approach had been seen, and Ding Dong... James Lockwood Bell, had been the first to horse. Two other riders followed a minute or two behind.

  ‘Indians?’ the old man demanded, a worried look on his grizzled, weatherbeaten face.

  ‘Not by what I could see,’ Johnnie told him. ‘There were a whole lot of different shoe patterns. More likely reivers. An Indian band would have had all their animals shod by the same man.’

  ‘What in hell would reivers want with our cattle?’ Ding Dong asked. ‘What could they do with ’em?’ His question had been bothering Johnnie since the first intimation of trouble that morning. Situated as they were, the cattle spread farthest up the Brazos River at that time, they were right on the outer edge of settlement. Only Commanche Indians held the land further out, and there was peace with them, settled by treaty. In addition, Ding Dong had sweetened the bargain with presents of cattle, and trade goods, to make sure that his relationships with the tribe were of the friendliest. They were. Several individual tribes-folk had become personal friends, and treated the ranch almost as a second home.

  Further away there were the Kiowa peoples, but they were allied with the Commanche, and would not poach on their territory. In the other direction were the Osage, and they had enough trouble with still other Indians to their north, without buying further grief with the ‘white eyes’.

  Reivers, as the Bells called rustlers, would have a problem disposing of their booty. Few, but the Bells and their like, would have a better understanding of the economics of cattle thieving. Generations back, their ancestors had themselves been Scottish reivers, ravaging over the border into England, until King James the Sixth, the king of the Scots, had been offered the English crown as well. When he had become king of both kingdoms at the same time, James had decided to clean up the borders between them. A mess of Bells, and Johnstones, Grahams, Armstrongs, and other thieving border rabble had been hung, conscrip­ted, pressed, or otherwise driven from their lands.

  This line of Bells had escaped first to Northern Ireland, and then to Nova Scotia, trying to do what they knew best, run cattle and breed horses. Always they sought land, grazing for their animals, inheritances for their sons, property to replace that which King James had taken from them. This later and more humble James... James Lockwood Bell, a younger son, when his turn came, had taken his share of his father’s cattle, to drive south from the Kansas settlements to where new lands were going cheap.

  Here, to the upper Brazos, he came with his wife, Betsy... Elizabeth Irvine Bell, his children, and few drifting range riders who needed the money he paid.

  The hands who had come with him had soon drifted on. Some were wastrels, and useless. Those ones had not cared for the remoteness, the lack of towns, and saloons, and bar girls. The good ones only stayed until they could set up with stock of their own. There was a desperate need for workers willing to stay. He had all too few of them. Some jobs could be left until there were hands enough to do them, but for much of the work he had to have constantly available labour.

  As soon as possible, Ding Dong had taken what little ready money he could find, and had ridden off to Baton Rouge, the one sure place he could get himself some permanent workers.

  He left Betsy in charge of the ranch, guarded by a few trusted hands, two of them Commanche braves come to learn blacksmithing, and trading their labour in return. Nobody was mentioning the fact, but the pair, Bobcat Pouncing and Little Hawk were lying low after a horse-stealing raid they had been on in the previous year, 1858. Following their chief Buffalo Hump, they had raided a settlement of Chickasaw Indians, not knowing that the Chickasaws were under the protection of the United States Cavalry at Fort Arbuckle. Not many of Buffalo Hump’s six hundred people had survived to tell the tale. These two found the Bells’ Dryfe Sands Ranch a good place to be while the dust settled. They owed Jamie Bell, Ding Dong, their lives when the rancher spoke up for them in the aftermath of the raid.

  At Baton Rouge was the slave market, not that Jamie Bell wanted any truck with slavery, but there was labour to be had there, when he could not find it anywhere else.

  When he returned, he had brought with him Eb de Lange, Rastus, and Eb’s wife Jasmine. The de Langes had been handed their manumission papers on the day he bought them. Ding Dong never mentioned where Rastus had come from, and nobody dared ask him.

  Jasmine was a natural-born housekeeper, and Betsy was only too pleased to have her. Betsy had enough to do, what with children to raise and school, her own and others, besides riding range with the menfolk when they were shorthanded.

  Consequently, when the horse sledge bearing the still unconscious Eb drew up in front of the ranch house, two women were waiting there to meet it. Betsy was ‘tut-tutting’ like a disturbed chicken, while Jasmine was wringing her hands in her starched white apron, and making a hell of a mess of it.

  ‘Bring him right in here,’ Betsy ordered. ‘He’ll have to go in the guest room, where we can all keep an eye on him, watch him round the clock.’

  In next to no time, they had Eb stripped, cleaned up, and rebandaged. Despite the whiskey, the edges of the wound were looking an angry red. Jasmine hung a fresh steak out on the porch to get flyblown. When they could see eggs on it, they would bring it in, and bind it directly over the wound. Maggots were the best thing going for cleaning up a putrefying wound, gorging them­selves on pus and dead meat, while leaving the living flesh to heal.

  One of the ranch hands, who helped to carry Eb inside, was Danny Long Knife, a stocky, broad­faced Indian-looking man, although in truth his father had been an Irishman. The other part Commanche, Danny had been educated at a Spanish mission school, where the curriculum had covered reading, writing, figuring and black-smithing. The priests were realists. Danny earned his living working for a few weeks at a time for each of a string of remote Texas ranches. At the moment it was the Bells’ turn to have him. In any case, he spent more time with the Bells than he did anywhere else, as he had a deal with Ding Dong to run horses on the Bell range.

  The Commanche up river also had an interest in those horses. That was one of the reasons for Ding Dong not expecting Indians to steal his cattle.

  ‘My horses are gone too?’ Danny echoed when they told him. ‘I don’t understand it. Who’d want to buy trouble with the Commanche? What’d they do with the horses? They’ve all got winged spur brands.’

  The brand was the Bells’, but Danny used it on his stock too, and therefore many Commanche horses also bore it. What law there was in Texas, the rangers, the army, and certainly all the horse copers and livery stables would recognize it. Nobody would be able to sell the horses without having a good explanation of how they had come by them.

  ‘Settlers going further west?’ Cab Phillips, a recently employed rider suggested. ‘There’s wagons by the hundred going through to Santa Fe, and more still on the Oregon Trail.’

  ‘We’ve looked at that before,’ Johnnie replied. ‘It’s not likely. Those folk have got their stock before they start. They’ve got no money to buy more along the way. They’d not be expecting to find any to buy, anyway.’

  ‘Yeah, but what ifn they’re stealing ’em to keep for themselves; breeding stock to start their own ranches?’

  ‘So the army finds them on the trail with stolen stock. How do they get away with it? They can’t make more than a dozen or fifteen miles in a day, so we can ride ’em down as soon’s we’re ready. I can’t see what they’re expecting to get, ’cept’n a sure enough humdinger fight with us.’

  ‘How many of them are there?’

  ‘I found tracks for a couple of dozen. They’ve got near on a thousand head of our cattle beasts.’

  ‘Hey. Hey, there ain’t enough of us here to handle that number! We’ll have to fetch the rangers,’ Cab Phillips suggested.

  ‘They won’t want to come away up here,’Johnnie argued. ‘They’ve got troubles enough along the Mexica
n border.’

  ‘So we ride over to Fort Washita, and get the army after them,’ Ding Dong said. ‘Some of us keep a tail on ’em, whilst some of us go for the army.’

  ‘And some of you, Jamie Bell, stay here, and keep this place running,’ Betsy insisted. ‘All those late calves still aren’t branded. You can’t all go galli­vanting about, and getting yourselves shot at.’

  ‘Sooner we get after them, the less trouble it will be,’ Ding Dong claimed.

  ‘In the morning will do,’ his wife argued. ‘Even if those rustlers went twenty miles overnight, and more today, some time about now they’ve got to be bedding down some place. I reckon even I could follow their trail. They’re still going to be less than fifty miles away by tomorrow night. You can be up with them before then.’

  ‘That’ll do,’ Ding Dong agreed. ‘Johnnie, a couple of the boys, can sit on tne rustlers’ tails. No rough stuff, mind you. Just watch ’em. I’ll go fetch the army, and we’ll find ourselves a good place to deal with the buggers.’

  ‘Jamie!’

  ‘Devils ...’

  Cab Phillips looked doubtfully at Johnnie, Dryfe Sands Johnnie. Perhaps the youngster would have enough sense to stay out of range of the rustlers’ guns, perhaps not. Cab, an older man and cautious, decided to hold his tongue. After all, it was not his place to play the nursemaid.

  ‘I want to go with Johnnie,’ Danny Long Knife said. ‘They’ve got my horses.’

  ‘Me too,’ Bobcat Pouncing claimed. For the Indian, backing the Bells’ oldest son was a way of repaying the family for the safe haven they had given him during the repercussions from the Chickasaw raid. Besides, a good showing against the rustlers would restore some of his lost honour ... an important consideration if he was ever to attract a squaw.

  For the same reason, the other brave, Little Hawk, might have gone too if Ding Dong had allowed it. As it was, the rancher had other need of him.

  Accordingly then, just the three of them set off back up the Brazos at daylight the next morning. Each of them took two horses, and they shared a packhorse between them, not that there was much for the packhorse to carry. Bedrolls and slickers fitted behind the cantle on the ridden horses. Reserve ammunition was slotted into cartridge belts in the main, although there were a couple of extra packets with the eating irons and dixies. Food was mostly flour, coffee, salt, and a bag of dried beans. The rest they would pick up along the way. Apart from that, there was only the medical kit, and a square of canvas to form a shelter roof for use on wet nights. They were not travelling light. They had all completed long journeys with much less.

  At the line camp they stopped and checked the gear still hanging safely in the trees. While they spelled the horses, Johnnie brewed coffee, and Danny and Bobcat took the opportunity to go up on the mesa above, to examine the tracks left by the rustlers. The tracks up there would be less disturbed by milling cattle, or scavengers in the night. When they came down they reported that they had between them memorized the characteris­tics of a half dozen individual horses’ hoofprints.

  ‘Show you something, Johnnie,’ Danny Long Knife invited. He led Johnnie out to the edge of the cottonwoods. ‘These tracks coming past the trees. That’s the fellow as killed Rastus. That’s the boss man.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He’s been riding back and forth over the top of other men’s trails. He’d be doing that to supervise them, to give orders, eh?’

  ‘Yes, I see that,’Johnnie nodded.

  ‘Right, so now you see this nail head here,’ Johnnie went on, pointing to an indentation in the left hind print.

  ‘It’s bent sideways.’

  ‘Yeah, so now we know one of the horses that that man rides. Bobcat and me, we can sort out some of the other men too. How about you getting to know a few of the tracks that came across the river?’

  When they rode on, Johnnie had memorized three sets of prints to watch for. Less than two hours later, however, he was finding those prints overlaid by others he could not identify.

  By that time the marks of the cattle, and the men with them, had led them up the grassy flats beside the Brazos, until they saw where the panicked cattle had slowed to a manageable walk. Soon after they had turned up a side canyon, which must have been hard to negotiate, for it would have been late twilight by the time the rustlers reached it. Not far up, a draw had let them up on to the mesa, and from there they faced a long stretch of the open grass­lands of the high plains. That they must have crossed with nothing but the stars to light their way.

  ‘Hey,’Johnnie called a halt. ‘Aren’t we looking at more tracks than there ought to be?’

  ‘That’s so,’ Danny agreed. ‘I was just waiting for you to see it for yourself.’

  ‘So what’s happened.’

  ‘There’s another big party ahead of us, also following the rustlers?’

  ‘Commanche?’

  ‘No,’ Bobcat told him. ‘I would know the tracks, the men who made them.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘Indians, but not Commanche, not Kiowa.*

  ‘But there shouldn’t be any other tribes on this ground.’

  ‘No,’ Bobcat replied flatly, and left the young range boss to think about that.