Feud On The Mesa (5 page)

Red Sleeves swore volubly in both Spanish and
English, the Apache tongue having no profanity in its vocabulary He ordered out the warriors, recently returned from the springs, to hold off the settlers while the rest of the encampment tried to get away In his perplexity, however, he ordered one half of the fighting men to go with the tribe. He felt certain that the soldiers were hidden in ambush.

The men under Doom and Leclerc were brought to a sliding halt when they charged around a bend in the trail and came face to face with a furiously charging body of hostile horsemen. Shouts, curses, and gun-fire welled up among the tall, stately trees as men, red and white, flung themselves off their horses and sought shelter. Jock Leclerc’s roaring voice rumbled over the fight. He spurred his horse into the thickest of the fight and shot into the mass until his gun was empty, then he used a rifle for a club. The warriors were fighting defensively now, and the whiskey was turning to acid in their entrails.

Doom, caught up in the zest of the moment, found a spring of inner energy somewhere and rode in be-hind Leclerc. A brave, resigned and doomed as the settlers swept in and past his tree stump defenses, jumped at Doom, grabbed his wounded leg, and tried to pull him from the horse. A wild, sickening jolt of agony ran through the frontiersman and his pain-filled eyes were sharpened with a murderous lust as he reached down, his big pistol almost against the hostile’s head, and pulled the trigger. Doom straightened up as the settlers surged over the hostiles
en masse
and swept on up the trail into the Indian camp area.

The Apaches, who hadn’t gotten away with their fellows, fought and died where they stood. The
settlers, flushed and maddened with their sufferings and brief triumph, matched the hostiles in savagery and abandon. Wounded warriors, spitting defiance from the ground, were dispatched with knives and rifle butts; the hectic skirmish was over almost as quickly as it had begun. Doom told Leclerc to keep the settlers from following the main camp of Indians through the treacherous forest, and, with a few exceptions, the attackers stayed back and hunted fugitives among the débris that littered the former
ranchería.

Doom was getting painfully down from the Indian horse, before the abandoned brush hut of Red Sleeves, when a single rifle shot echoed through the noisy camp. Instantly everyone was hunting cover. Caleb dropped flat as the bullet threw a violent gust of gravel and dirt up beside him. He rolled toward the abandoned shelter, drawing his pistol as he went. Again the hidden gunman fired. This time the bullet struck sideways on Caleb’s pistol and ricocheted off into the air with a whine. Doom dropped the smashed gun and flexed his fingers, half numb from the shock. He made it safely to the edge of a small, fallen tree, floundered over it, and lay flat be-hind the punky, rotten trunk as the third shot flung a gorge of splinters out of the wood.

The
ranchería
was deathly still as probing, narrowed eyes and cocked guns sought the hidden gunman among the brush and trees. Caleb had surmised where his enemy was and began an oblique crawl, knife in hand, through the foliage toward a flanking spot. The silence was oppressive, and Doom listened with acutely sharpened instincts for a telltale sound that would guide him. None came.

Somewhere, a long way off, a bugle call came
distantly to the hidden settlers. Caleb heard with a tight smile and continued his crawl. He stopped his advance in a clump of chokecherry and sage. A movement off to his left and a little ahead had caught his eye. Cautiously he parted the brush and looked inquiringly among the shadows of the trees and his face froze into a thwarted grimace. Not 200 feet from where he was lying, Sam Ginn was turning a high-headed bay horse around, preparatory to mounting. Without a gun and with a leg that he knew would no longer support him, Caleb was forced to lie still and watch the renegade getting ready to escape.

Suddenly he cried out, involuntarily. Another figure, ghost-like and massive, shot up out of the brush almost at Ginn’s feet and struck the startled half-breed with stunning force. Ginn, still wearing his Apache clothing, went down as the dark, powerful body of Jock Leclerc smothered him in a cursing, raging mesh of huge, flailing, slashing fists. Ginn half rose to one knee as Leclerc’s knife went in under his upthrust arms and sank to the hilt in his chest. Ginn jumped up and ran like a rabbit for about twenty feet, then collapsed in a sodden heap. Leclerc walked over to him, pulled out his knife, looked apprehensively around, knelt self-consciously.

Caleb coughed and Leclerc jumped up and whirled, his face red and angry. “Ought to be ashamed o’ yourself, scalpin’ a poor dead renegade.”

Leclerc’s dark face lightened up, but the embarrassment remained. He poked the inert body with a blunt-toed boot. “I allow I oughta be, all right, but, dammit, I just couldn’t resist it. Sort o’ forgot I’m a civilized man fer a second there.”

He forced a guilty smile, then frowned as he helped Caleb to his one good leg. “Wait a minute,
hombre.
Wa’n’t that a hostile hair lock I seen, nice an’ fresh, on your horse’s bridle when we rode up here?”

Doom’s eyes were twinkling in spite of the bone weariness that was sapping his strength. “Well, that’s different. I’m an outcast, an’ folks sort o’ expect that from me. But you…. ”

Leclerc’s powerful shoulders and arms half carried, half led Caleb back to the desolation of the Apache
ranchería
, where a group of perspiring soldiers were displaying trophies taken from those they had chased southward. “Ain’t a man livin’ that’ll ever say any-thin’ about Caleb Doom bein’ a outcast in my pres-ence.” The soldiers looked up quickly from where they stood beside their horses, amid the settlers. Several officers looked a little embarrassed at Leclerc’s words, and avoided Doom’s eyes.

Leclerc bristled as he helped Caleb astride his horse and clambered up on his own mount. His words were repeated in a truculent, loud voice. “Ain’t a man livin’ that’ll speak evil o’ Caleb Doom in my presence!” Leclerc’s black eyes were wide and challenging and his massive shoulders were hunched as he stared at the silent officers.

An enlisted trooper, sweat-streaked and grinning slightly lopsidedly, nodded slowly. “No, I don’t reckon they will. In your presence or out of it.”

Jock tossed a sardonic look at the officers. “Now that you
hombres
finally got outen your little block-house, chase them hostiles y’selves. We’re a-goin’ back to Dentón.” He shook out his reins and moved off beside Caleb, whose thoughtful, brooding face wore a white, drawn, half smile.

As the settlers moved down the trail, one of the officers, a tall graying man standing stiffly among his subordinates, snapped a quick salute at the retreating
back of the buckskin-clad ex-soldier riding beside Jock Leclerc, turned quickly, antagonistically, and frowned at the younger men. “There goes one of the men who’ll make this land a safe place to live in.”

The younger officers nodded slowly and wiped the beaded sweat from their faces.

T
here was sultriness to the hot desert air that made even the lizards slow and lethargic, and Caleb Doom looked up at the sullen sky. His gaze wandered over the trackless heaven and the brassy, blast-furnace lining was covered over with a dull gray opaqueness. He looked down over the tremendous sweep of the ageless land and let his eyes stop on a distant dust cloud that wound its way down out of the far mountains. A Texas herd. His gray, deep-set eyes were thoughtful and pensive. Since the end of the war, great Texas herds had been coming up into the northern territories. Texas was making a gallant effort to recover her shattered economy under the Confederacy and the Texas cattle were the medium. The big black gelding saw the dust and pointed his small, delicate ears. Caleb reached for-ward and patted his damp neck. The heat was intense as he reined around off the slight eminence, and started to ride down the narrow deer trail that led to-ward the little frontier town of Lodgepole.

Caleb Doom was an average-size man dressed in the garb of a scout. His buckskin clothing was fringed, and the fringes swayed sinuously with the movement of his body as he rode into Lodgepole. The hostler at the livery barn nodded respectfully
Caleb Doom was a well-known man on the changing frontier. His exploits among the Indians were al-most legends. To the red men, he was known as the Silent Outcast, a former cavalryman who spoke only when there was something worth saying.

After leaving his horse at the public barn, he strolled along Lodgepole’s single, dust-coated road, past the raw, new buildings with their brave false fronts, and entered the only two-storied establishment in town, the Lincoln House Hotel. In the roughly furnished parlor, he saw the man he was looking for, Jack Britt, grizzled cowman whose ranches on the Verde made him one of the big men of the Lodgepole country.

“Texas herd comin’, Jack. Crossin’ the Big Sink right now, comin’ from the direction of Taos.”

Britt’s close-cropped, gray head nodded thoughtfully. “I figgered there’d be one along afore too long.” He looked up at Caleb. “Well, it’ll mean trouble. The Crows won’t let’em go on upcountry with their herd, an’ the local ranchers will fight’em if they try to hold their herd on Lodgepole range. Barely enough grass fer local cows, let alone havin’ enough to spare for an outside herd.” Caleb was turning away. “Where ya goin’?”

“Over to see Bull Bear. See if I can’t talk him into lettin’ the Texans go on through.”

“He won’t let’em.”

“Maybe not, but if he would, it’d save some trouble. Anyway, maybe the Texans’ll cut out a few stragglers an’ give’em to the Indians for a tribute. That used to work pretty well.”

Britt shook his head dourly. “Won’t work no more, Caleb. Them Crows rustle whatever they need nowa-days.” He shrugged resignedly. “Well, go to it. If
anyone can talk sense into that redskin, you can. I’ll hang around town until you get back. Maybe the Texans’ll bivouac out in the sink before you get back, an’ there won’t be no trouble for anyone.”

Caleb picked up his black horse at the livery barn and headed out onto the great prairie that began abruptly at the north end of Lodgepole. He rode with the grace of a born horseman. There had been no rain for two months and the feed was fast turning brown.

It took three hours of slow going to get to Bull Bear’s camp. Wraith-like riders fell in behind him. He affected not to notice them following him in the shimmering distance. Crow scouts, he knew, had been posted strategically across the prairie to keep a close watch on Lodgepole. Caleb understood the Indian viewpoint easily enough. With no rain and the feed drying up, there was barely enough feed to keep the natural game from moving farther north. When the game left, the Indians would have to go, too. This, naturally, they didn’t want to do; consequently they had drawn an imaginary deadline beyond which none of the white man’s cattle could go.

Caleb rode past two sullen sentries, signaled that he came in peace, and was allowed to pass. The camp of Bull Bear was in a magnificent meadow fringed with a sprinkling of majestic pines that lent a delicate aroma to the grasslands where the conical, gaudily decorated teepees were scattered. Bull Bear’s camp was in the hereditary upland of his people. From its slight eminence, the Indians could see the prairie around them for hundreds of miles. They could see the great dust clouds caused by the hump-backs, hours, sometimes days, before the buffalo would be close enough to kill. It was a favorite
camping grounds of the Crows and in the rank, coarse grass at their feet and the top two layers of mulch could be found the discarded artifacts of their ancestors, indicating how ancient was the camp site.

Bull Bear’s teepee was somewhat larger than the others, being, in fact, a combination home and council lodge. Impressive symbols of the Crow tribe and Bull Bear’s fighting and hunting prowess were daubed with Neolithic candor over the high structure. Four horses were tied to a crude hitch rail in front of the teepee and a heraldic coup stick was planted firmly in the ground in front, and a little to one side, of the teepee opening. Caleb dismounted under the curious glances of the Indians, who knew him by sight, and entered the Great Plains home of the Crow chieftain.

Inside, a caressing coolness swept over Caleb. He stood respectfully just inside the flap, accustoming his eyes to the shadowy gloom. A resonant voice boomed out at him in English. “Silent Outcast, I have been expecting you. Sit.”

Caleb, who had a genuine affection for the scarred, dusky man before him whose piercingly fierce eyes were also genial and friendly, sat. Another man was sitting beside Bull Bear. He was younger, with twin streaks of red paint daubed horizontally across each cheek, stretching from his nose to the area just below each ear. He nodded with slight reserve and Caleb nodded back. “Bull Bear, I am always glad to find my welcome in the teepee of my brother. Why were you expecting me?”

Bull Bear snorted. “Because my scouts told me early this morning that a Texas herd was riding into the Big Sink.”

Caleb was mildly surprised. If the Crows knew
the herd was coming, they must have scouts completely around Lodgepole and far out on the plains south of town. “Why would I come to you because of a Texas herd?”

Bull Bear’s face was touched by a faint smile. “Be-cause you would want to get my permission to let the Texans cross Crow land. It is simple, Silent Out-cast. Unless the Texans cross Crow land, there will be a fight with the Lodgepole cowmen. You would try to avert this.”

Caleb looked for a long silent moment at the Indian. He had encountered perspicacity before, but never, that he could recall, had he run into an Indian who thought through to the end of a situation. Curious to see how far Bull Bear’s reasoning had gone, he spoke again. “You are a wise man. What, then, is in the end?”

Bull Bear leaned forward a little. “There will be a fight among the white cowmen. Some will be killed. Some will give up and go back beyond the mountains. Others will hunt new ranges and new ways of driving their cows into the north country.” He straightened up and smiled slightly. “The white men, who will stay in the land, are my brothers.”