Cherokee (11 page)

Just before we nooned Hays said, “Boss, that pack is working around.”

I looked over at the packhorse. We were in a rack, a gait somewhere between a trot and a canter, and I could see that the weight of the kegs was causing part of the pack, the middle part, to slip and slide over the horse's back. It wasn't much, but it didn't take too much of that kind of action to get a horse sore-backed. And a sore-backed packhorse is as useless as a sore-footed running horse. I said, “Damn! I was afraid of something like this.” And I had been afraid of using the nail kegs because of their unwieldy weight, but it had seemed like such a good place to hide the gold and hide the weight of the gold. But the nails I'd left in the kegs had just made the whole proposition too heavy. It wasn't too heavy for the horse; it was just too heavy to keep from swinging around and pulling the pack all over the horse's back.

Up ahead I could see a little grove of trees, oaks, off to the left side of the road about two hundred yards. I swung us into the grass and pointed. “Let's make a nooning in those trees and see what we can figure out.”

We pulled into the trees, and Hays and I got down and loosened the girths on our riding horses so they could have a good blow, and took the bits out of their mouths so they could crop a little grass. Then together, we unfastened the girths on the packhorse and lifted the pack off. I ran my hand along his back, running it against the grain of his hair. “Yeah,” I said. “Seems to be chafing him, all right.” I could see little spots where the hair had worn down to the skin. That stiff canvas the pack was made of wasn't an ideal material to put up next to a horse's skin.

Hays said, “Appears as if the pack is workin' front to rear. You can see from the sweat marks on the girths, see how they movin' backwards. Maybe a martingale might help.”

“Might,” I said. I dropped the packhorse's lead rope so he could graze along with the other two horses and said, “Let's eat a bite and think about it.” Of course I was thinking about dumping the rest of the nails out of the kegs and just leaving the gold in the kegs. That would lighten each keg at least twenty pounds. The problem with that was we didn't have a mallet to loosen the tops of the kegs, and they were hell to get off even when you did have a mallet.

While Hays sliced off some smoked brisket and cheese I stood there staring at the horse's back and looking at the pack and trying to think of a way to fix the problem. The biggest part of it was that folks just didn't take kegs of nails and hang them on a horse and not expect trouble. Finally I turned and sat down on the ground where Hays had lunch all laid out on the ground sheet. We ate biscuits and cheese and the smoked beef and washed it down with water. Hays said, “I figured you was in too big a rush to build a fire so I didn't figure on coffee.”

“Who said we was in a rush.”

He gave me a look. “Well, it's either that or they is a hell of a wind at our backs judging from the pace you be a-setting.”

“Maybe if we tie that pack off across the horse's chest it will keep it from working backwards.”

Hays was chewing. He said something I couldn't understand.

“What?”

He swallowed and said, “Couldn't hurt to try.”

We finished the meal, and then got the saddle horses ready and turned to the packhorse. I said, “We ought to put some kind of saddle blanket on him, protect his back from that stiff canvas.”

Ray looked around like somebody was fixing to hand him a saddle blanket.

I said, “You didn't think of a saddle blanket for this packhorse?”

“Well, no, not actually.”

“So we just got the two saddle blankets for the horses, the saddle horses?”

“Well, yeah, I reckon you could say that.”

“Let me ask you. If you'd been putting a packsaddle on this horse wouldn't you have used a saddle blanket?”

He swallowed. “Well, yeah, of course. But it didn't seem necessary on account of all the pack we was using was cloth, not leather like a packsaddle.”

“Canvas, not cloth. Stiff, hard cloth. That's canvas. Would you wear a shirt made out of canvas?”

“If I had to.”

“Would you put an undershirt in under it?”

“If I had one.”

“Uh, huh. You are the assistant boss of the horse herd, right? That is who I'm speaking to. I mean, you draw wages for knowing more about horses than anyone except Ben, ain't that about the size of it?”

He swallowed again and just blinked at me, not speaking.

I said, “And we just have the two blankets?”

“Just the two horse blankets. Saddle blankets.”

“None others?”

He looked uncomfortable. He looked around the grove of trees as if the answer to my question might be written on one of the trunks. He finally said, “Well, they is the blankets in our bedrolls . . .”

“Reckon one of them would help this horse's back if it was between the horse and the hard canvas?”

“Well, yeah . . .”

“Then why don't you get one?”

We were facing each other across the back of the packhorse. I could see him shift from one foot to the other. He said, “Gonna kind of mess up the blanket. That horse is gonna get pretty sweaty. Wouldn't be much use to a man at night.”

“That's all right, just get one.”

“Whose?”

I just looked at him.

He said, “I know, I know. Let ol' Ray Hays get his sleepin' blanket and put it on a smelly horse. Let that poor sonofabitch get his blanket ruined.”

He was kneeling by the pack, hauling out his bedroll and stripping one of the blankets out of it. It looked like an old olive-drab army blanket. I said, “Well, who was it forgot the saddle blanket?”

He came back, waving off the words with his hand. “I know,” he said. “I know, I know. Don't matter if old Ray Hays has a choice of sleepin' cold or usin' a blanket some horse has smelt up with horse sweat. Don't matter, it's jest ol' Ray Hays.”

“Hays, if you get any dumber we are going to have to cut you into cordwood.”

He adjusted his blanket to the right size and then smoothed it over the packhorse's back. Then we took the pack and hung it on the horse. While Hays was pulling the girths tight I went up by the horse's neck and took out my pocketknife. First I cut a couple of three-foot lengths off his soft lead rope. Then I punched a hole in each side of the pack just below the horse's neck. I ran one end of one of the lengths through one of the holes, tied a knot, and then did likewise with the other end, pulling it tight but not so tight that it would bother the horse, just tight enough to hopefully keep the pack from sliding backwards. I did the same thing a little lower down, making another hold-back right across the middle of the horse's breastplate.

When I was done and Ray was done, I stepped back and looked at our work. We had that pack cinched in about as many ways as we could, but I still had the feeling it was going to work around and gall that horse's back. See, you set a saddle on a horse and the leather skirts go down on each side and hold the saddle in place. The canvas was stiff but not like saddle leather skirts. And the weight hung too far down on each side. The pockets should have been snugged right up nearly to the horse's back. As it was they drooped down nearly below his belly.

I said to Hays, “I don't like it, but it'll have to do.”

Hays said sourly, “Hope the damn horse appreciates my blanket.”

“Oh, I'm sure he's going to be mighty grateful.”

We got mounted, and Hays took the packhorse on lead and we started for La Grange. But even as we rode I could see we still had trouble. If we tried for any speed at all the packs on each side of the horse would get to swinging back and forth, sometimes out of time with each other, and the poor old horse would get so confused he wouldn't know which foot to put down first. By mid-afternoon it was becoming clear we weren't going to make La Grange by dusk or by any time within reason. The poor old horse that had been pressed into service as a packhorse was well on his way to getting so confused on account of his burden that he was going to be ruined forever. The whole situation just made me angry all over again. Here I hadn't figured to spend a single night out on the prairie, and now it was beginning to look like that was the only place I was going to be sleeping. Well, it just wouldn't do. Besides, even if we did get to a hotel in time, how were we going to get the pack up to our room? One man couldn't carry it; it wasn't too heavy, but it was too unwieldy. And we couldn't just take the kegs out and carry them through the lobby. Might as well carry a sign that said we were hiding something because I didn't believe any two men had ever taken rooms in a hotel carrying a keg of nails each. And of course, we couldn't leave the pack with the kegs in them in the livery; it was too risky. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred nobody will mess with your gear in a stable. But when you're carrying $25,000 around with you, you just can't take the chance and leave it unguarded. Of course I could always sleep in the stable, or make Hays do it, but that would just be like raising another flag. Here is the hotel and here are a couple of prosperous-looking men and one of them is sleeping in the stable with his gear.

Hell, it was a quandary and no mistake.

We rode on until it began to get dark. I knew there was no chance we could make La Grange at any decent hour. Consequently we veered off the road, and hunted around until we found a grove of mesquite trees and made camp.

It was like a thousand other camps I'd made before. The ground was just as hard, the Gulf Coast mosquitoes were just as big. You couldn't get cleaned up; you couldn't clean your teeth without going to a hell of a lot more trouble than it was worth. The food had to be the same because you had to pack food that wouldn't spoil and there wasn't just a hell of a big selection of that. When I'd been fifteen it had been fun. By the time I was twenty I was beginning to think it wasn't all that big of an adventure like I'd thought it was at an earlier age. By the time I was approaching thirty and was making a lot of money, I figured I'd done my share of that kind of living and it was somebody else's turn. Then, after I got married, I was completely convinced that I deserved a good bed in a pleasant house with a pretty woman beside me. And then had come Howard with his simple little request.

While we circled the horses around and around in a tight little area to tramp down the grass I mentally gave Howard a damn good cussing. But it wasn't doing any good; I was still out in the open with a chill wind starting to kick up and Howard was home in bed.

We ate beef and bread and canned tomatoes, and finished off with some canned peaches, mainly just punching a hole in the can and drinking off the juice and then sucking the peaches dry. After that we sat around with coffee and whiskey. Off to the north of us I could see a dim glow. I figured it was either a prairie fire or La Grange. Hays thought that more than likely it was La Grange.

I said, “Yeah. I reckon.”

I figured we were about ten miles short of it. But on beyond it, on the road to Austin, which was the general direction we were taking, was the town of Bastrop. I figured it to be about thirty miles from La Grange, maybe thirty-five. But cutting cross-country we could make it closer, maybe just thirty or thirty-five miles from where we were camped. There was no railroad line that ran through La Grange, but I knew there was a northbound line out of Bastrop, a line that ran to Austin and then on the Fort Worth, and from there, I figured a man just about had to be able to get a train from someplace in Oklahoma.

I knew Howard didn't want me to do it that way, for reasons known only to himself. But Howard wasn't stuck with a bewildered packhorse and a rig that didn't allow us to make much more than thirty miles a day. Besides, we were probably going to spend so much time looking for this Charlie Stevens that we'd spend the extra time it would have taken us to go all the way horseback.

Still, I knew I was thinking angry and that a man ought not to make decisions in that frame of mind. I'd told Howard I'd horseback his gold to Charlie, just as it had been horsebacked away from him, and I was going to do my dead-level best to stick to that line of agreement.

Hays said, “Boss ...” He kind of hesitated. Then he said, “This gonna be a real long trail?”

“Your bones getting old, Ray?”

“Well, no, you just ain't give me no indication of when it's gonna end.”

I tilted my watch toward the glow of the fire. It was a little after nine. I said, “We better get to bed. Maybe if we start early enough we can get out of our own shadow.”

Hays lifted his head to the wind. He said, “Damned if that wind ain't gettin' colder. You don't reckon we could be gettin' a norther this early, do you?”

“I hope not.” But we were in Texas, and a blue norther could come swooping over those flat plains and drop the temperature forty degrees before you could get into your coat.

Hays got up. He said, “I reckon I maybe better borrow my blanket back from that damn horse. Ain't gonna make me smell no better, but that's better than freezing.”

“You ain't going to be anywhere where it's going to much matter how you smell.”

“I wish you wouldn't say that. Just takes the heart plumb outten me.”

We got settled down for the night. I could see clouds scudding across the night sky, blotting out the stars. It was getting colder. Even through my blankets and my clothes I could feel it. I was starting to wish I'd put on my sheepskin-lined jacket, but I was just too sleepy to get up and get it. Hays was laying right beside me, and he was right about the blanket he'd loaned the horse. It smelled like hell.