Trouble Trail

THE air was warm and the sun’s rays splashed through the trees on to the surface of the Witch Fork of the North Platte River. At one point a good-sized tree had fallen into the water, creating a large, deep hole beyond its effective brake on the current. In the big hole a large brook trout finned lazily, not actively hunting food, but ready to take any morsel canted to it in the swirling eddy beyond the dead-fall. The trout had grown large because it learned wisdom early. Once it had shared the hole with many of its smaller brothers and sisters, but cannibal tendencies exploited while young gave it growth and bulk until it reigned supreme on that stretch of river. Dwelling in the most choice spot, it lived on such smaller squaretails as ventured into its domain, while frogs, snakes, small birds and animals all fell grist to the big fish’s mill.

However, like all tyrants, the big fish had enemies. The ubiquitous black bear and the rarer but even more deadly Great Plains grizzly had long been catchers and eaters of fish and were large enough to take even a big brook trout. Once a cougar tried to hook out the fish while lying on the dead-fall and slashing with its claws. Recently another menace had been added to the list of enemies. Soldiers from Fort Connel discovered the big trout early in their stay and many an attempt was made, the enlisted men dunking worms and other live bait, the officers trying their fancy artificial flies, to bring the fish to the bank. All failed, for the trout knew caution and had a secret advantage. At that point the bank was a mite overhung and some property in the bank’s soil transmitted vibrations from any feet approaching the hole. Once such a warning had been received, the big squaretail faded into the depths of the hole and remained there unfeeding until the danger passed.

Just as the trout had engulfed an incautious little squaretail which ventured into the hole, it felt warning vibrations strike its lateral line. They were danger vibrations—the big trout ignored such harmless four-legged creatures as wapiti or whitetail deer—heralding the arrival of a two-legged, human animal, With a lazy flick of its powerful tail, the brook trout sank down into the depths and withdrew to its submerged cave under the dead-fall.

The figure which strolled along the Witch Fork’s bank did not have fishing in mind—and if she had would not have wasted time trying to take a nine pounder that was likely to he as tough as old saddle leather when in the frying pan. Miss Martha Jane Canary hoped to take a bath. For ten days she had been on the trail, handling the reins of a six-horse Conestoga wagon, eating dust and growing more dirty by the hour, for there had been too much urgency to reach Fort Connel to allow time out for ablutions Her one desire in life at that moment was to strip off her clothing and soak away the dirt and dried sweat in the cool, inviting waters of a mountain stream.

The river lay ready, cool and waiting before her. She had not broken either of her arms and so stood full capable of stripping off her clothes. One way and another Martha Jane Canary reckoned she ought to be able to satisfy her whims.

The still waters behind the dead-fall reflected the picture of a girl in her late teens and who, wearing her Pawnee moccasins, stood maybe five foot seven in height. A battered U.S. cavalry kepi perched on top of her shortish, curly mop of red hair; and the face framed by the hair was good looking without being ravingly beautiful, Tanned and sprinkled with attractive freckles, the face had happy blue eyes, a slightly snub nose and a mouth which looked made for laughter and kissing, but which could cut loose with a hide-blistering flow of coarse invective when a situation called for it.

Laying down the small bundle of clean clothing she had brought to wear after her bath, the girl unfastened and removed her tight-rolled dust-smothered old bandana. The man’s shirt and jeans she wore looked like they had been bought a size too small and further shrunk during washing. Clinging firmly to her torso, the round full swell of her breasts straining against its material, the shirt’s upper three buttons lay open and revealed there was little other than girl under the cloth. Her waist slimmed down without the aid of a corset, then swelled out into shapely rounded hips which held tight the washed-out blue jeans. Nor could the jeans hide the firmly-muscled curves of her shapely and powerful legs.

A gun belt hung around the girl’s waist, its holster tip lashed to her thigh by a pigging thong and supporting an ivory-handled Navy Colt butt forward at her right side. On some women such an outfit might have been regarded as a stupid piece of ostentation. Martha Jane Canary could handle her gun well enough to prevent folks laughing twice at the sight of her wearing it. Thrust into her belt at the left side was a coiled, long-lashed blacksnake whip; and, like the gun, she did not carry it just for decoration.

Taking off her kepi, the girl folded her bandana and placed it into the hat’s crown, putting them down by her clean clothing. Next she unfastened the holster’s pigging thong and un-buckled the belt, laying the gun and whip where she could reach one or the other’s working end even while standing in the water. Again this was no affection; Martha Jane had been long enough in the West to know the folly of being out of reach of one’s weapons.

With a wriggle, she extracted herself from the shirt’s tight embrace and underneath it wore a man’s sleeveless undershirt which revealed more than it concealed. Just as she reached to unfasten her waist belt ready to take off her jeans, she heard the dry pop a stepped-on twig made as it broke.

Bending down, the girl’s right hand closed on the butt of her Colt, sliding the gun from its holster and thumb-cocking it even as she turned. Then she gave an annoyed grunt, lowered the Colt’s hammer on to its safety notch and replaced the gun in its holster once more. Scowling her disgust, she studied the man who walked from the trees towards her.

‘I might’ve known nobody but a shiny-butted, desk-scraping, blue-belly three bar’d make that much noise sneaking up on a gal,’ she said contemptuously.

Coming towards the girl, Quartermaster-Sergeant Milo Hack worked his loose lips into what he fondly imagined to be a masterful grin; but which came out as a slobbering sneer. He was a man just over middle height, fatter than any hard-riding combat soldier ever became, and with a face that only a mother could love—most folks thought Hack’s face would show at its best advantage upon a tray and with an apple thrust between its teeth. If his uniform looked better and smarter than most soldiers on the frontier sported, it was only because his position in life gave him opportunities of augmenting his salary and enabled him to patronise a higher class of tailor than who served the needs of his fellow, enlisted men.

‘Figured you might like a guard,’ he told the girl, ‘seeing’s how we’re in Injun country.’

Actually Hack’s intention had hardly been so noble and chivalrous, for he did not intentionally come into view at that moment—nor had he come to defend her from marauding Indians, but rather to watch her disrobing and had no desire to be noticed at such an early stage in the interesting process.

Hack figured himself to be gifted with intelligence beyond that of his enlisted comrades and reckoned he could think right smartly. So when he saw the girl talking with the boss of the freight outfit, he listened to the conversation. On hearing the girl say she aimed to find someplace to take a bath, he decided the sight would be worth seeing and possessed possibilities of amorous adventures. So he followed her at a distance until she reached the dead-fall and halted to commence her bath.

At first he decided to stay put and watch her preparations, but decided the view might be better closer up. Not being a man who went for such outdoor pleasures as stalking alert prey, he trod on a twig while moving up for a better view and the sound warned the girl that she did not have the woods to herself. Hack would never know how close he came to getting a .36 calibre bullet in his favourite belly. In fact, only one thing saved him from a not undeserved fate.

‘Mister,’ the girl said, explaining the reason she did not shoot, ‘the only Injuns in these parts are the Army’s Crow, Ankara and Osage scouts—and they know better’n to bother me. Happen I’d not seen your uniform, you’d knowed it, too.’

‘Yeah!’ grinned Hack, coming closer and his eyes staying like they were magnetised to the front of her undershirt. ‘Well, how’s about me’n’ you getting to know each other better?’

‘I know me, all I want to,’ the girl answered. ‘And I sure as hell don’t want to know you.’

‘Now that’s not friendly, gal. I saw you come in with Dobe Killem’s freight outfit. If Cap’n Bigelow sees you, you’ll be headed back for wherever you come from and fast.’

‘Will, huh?’

‘Sure will, gal. He’s a real stickler for the rules, is Cap’n Bigelow. He lives by the good book, which to him’s
Field Service Regulations
. And they says no unattached females is allowed on military trains.’

‘Is that the living truth?’ asked the girl.

‘It sure is. Now me, I’m not as hide-bound and bow-necked as the cap’n when it comes to some things.’

‘You wouldn’t be.’

‘Shucks, be nice, gal,’ Hack warned, moving closer all the time. ‘I’m nice to be nice to, but I’m hell to rile.’

Even as he spoke, Hack reached out his right hand, aiming to lay it where he had been looking all the time—and that was not at the girl’s face. If he had studied the grim set of her features, Hack might have saved himself a fair piece of the trouble that was fast coming his way.

Up came the girl’s hands, clamping hold of Hack’s advancing wrist. Holding the trapped wrist, the girl carried her arms upwards, pivoting under them and bringing them down again. Hack found himself with the choice between going over or receiving a dislocated shoulder. He chose the former, his feet leaving the ground as he sailed into the air and then lit down heavily on his back. Snarling with rage, he forced himself up although the girl still held his wrist. Bracing herself, she suddenly heaved, catching Hack off balance. The man let out a howl as he shot forward and went head-first into the water.

Bending down, the girl scooped up her whip, its lash coiling out behind her as she watched Hack surface. He stood belly deep in the water and a fair way out.

‘You cheap whore!’ were the first understandable words to follow water out of his mouth. ‘I’ll—’

Out flickered the whip’s lash, wrapping itself around Hack’s fat throat and choked off what he aimed to say next. Bracing herself, the girl gripped her whip’s handle in both hands and heaved back on it. Hack pitched forward and under the water’s surface again. Coming up, he began to snarl out more curses until the girl jerked on the whip and returned him to beneath the water.

While underneath for the third time Hack gripped the lash of the whip in both his hands and on surfacing gave it a savage jerk which shot the girl towards him. As he saw her coming, Hack’s mind worked with its usual speed. Once he laid hands on her, he would half-drown her, maybe give her a damned good licking to boot as an added lesson not to resist the honourable intentions of Milo Hack in future. Then when she felt good and sorry for herself, he would stretch her out on her back upon the bank-strip—

At that point his day-dreams ended; although probably not in a fashion, he would have selected had he been given his choice. Given his way, he would have preferred to carry on savouring the forthcoming rape of the girl rather than have his thoughts ruined by being kicked under the jaw with the full power of a young woman’s shapely right leg.

Using a trick taught her by whip-fighting freighters, the girl permitted Hack to believe he was dragging her helplessly forward into his clutches, then when she came into range brought up a kick which learned him the error of his ways.

Returning beneath the water’s surface with a churning splash, Hack found himself free of the whip’s lash. His right hand went down and brought the Army Colt from its closed-topped issue holster. A wise fighting man would have known better and called the game quits at that moment. While Hack had the advantage of a reasonably good education and a certain shrewd, unscrupulous cunning, he was not and never had been a fighting man and so did not know the vitally important lesson of having the prime good sense to yell ‘calfrope.’ Lurching himself upright from the water, he began to raise the revolver.

If he expected the sight of a drawn gun to quell the girl into submission, or drive her into swooning helplessness, he would be sadly mistaken. Even as he rose from the water and began to lift his long-barrelled revolver, the girl dropped her whip and bent to scoop the Navy Colt from its holster.

‘Drop it!’ Hack snarled—or as near a snarl as his chattering teeth would allow him, the water being very cold for so lengthy an immersion. ‘Drop it, you cat-house whore, or I’ll—’

‘Sergeant Hack!’ roared a voice that was masculine, familiar to Hack’s ears and which did not originate from the girl.

Both the girl and Hack turned to look in the direction of the speaker. He had come hurrying along the river’s bank unnoticed by either of them; a tall young man with a sun-reddened face sporting the latest eastern fashion in side-whiskers, and wearing a well-groomed Quartermaster Corps’ captain’s uniform. Letting the fishing rod he carried slide from his fingers and rest against the trunk of a tree, the captain stamped along the river bank and jumped over the dead-fall to halt before the girl and his soaking, still water-bound sergeant. Being Army, the captain directed most of his annoyance against the civilian element. Yet he had his duty to do and aimed to do it come what may.

‘Get out of there and return to the fort, Sergeant!’ he ordered. ‘I’ll attend to you later.’

‘Yes—sir,’ Hack replied sullenly, holstering his revolver.

‘That’s the first sensible thing you’ve done so far, Fatso,’ the girl stated as she replaced her Navy Colt. ‘An 1860 Army Colt’s as good a gun as can be had, but even it won’t shoot after that long in the water—and my old Navy’s bone dry.’

‘So?’ snarled Hack, dragging his sopping wet form from the water.

‘So happen you’d pulled that trigger, misfire or not, I’d’ve blowed a hole in your fat-gutted belly sure as they call me Calamity Jane.’

If the way Hack’s eyes bulged out like twin organ stops went to prove anything, he knew the name the girl dropped out. So did the captain, for he glanced at the girl with cold, unfriendly eyes.

Calamity Jane. A name spoken of around the campfires throughout the West. In a man’s world, Calamity Jane stood almost unique. Her father died on a wagon train and her mother, a bright and lively girl in her own right, left the Canary children in a St. Louis convent then disappeared into the West. Charlotte Canary figured she acted for the best, knowing a girl with her talents could not keep a family and that the kids would have a better life than she could offer them. However, Martha Jane had too much of Charlotte in her to take to the strict life of a convent. On her sixteenth birthday she pulled up stakes. Hiding out on a freighter’s train, she had been twelve miles from St. Louis before making her appearance. Even then she might have been returned in ignominy if the cook had not been too drunk to make the men a meal. One of the things the nuns taught Jane was how to cook and she laid to and whomped up a mess of mouthwatering victuals for the freighter’s men. From then there had been no thought of sending her back. Jane went the full trip with Dobe Killem’s outfit, cooking, lending a hand with the stock and making herself useful. At the end of the trip Killem offered to take her on the next run and she agreed. How she picked up the name Calamity was not known. She learned to do a man’s work in handling a six-horse wagon team. The freighters taught her to wield a whip with the best of them and through necessity she learned to handle firearms. After taking a licking from a saloon girl who rolled one of the boys for his poke, Jane added fist-fighting to her growing repertoire. She returned the saloon-girl’s licking with interest and developed a taste for fighting which often led her into throwing out a challenge to take on the toughest gal in the house when visiting a saloon. Nor did she lack takers, for saloon-girls prided themselves on their toughness and tried to put down that kid in the man’s clothes. None of them succeeded in doing so and Killem’s outfit made many a handful of money betting on Calamity.*

Many stories were told of Calamity’s achievements in various fields, some of them exaggerated. One thing Hack did know for certain sure. If that red-headed girl was Calamity Jane—and he had every reason to believe she was—he had never been more fortunate than when Captain Bigelow arrived and prevented his trying to line his gun.

‘You heard my orders, Sergeant?’ Bigelow barked, scowling at Hack.

‘Y-yes, sir, Cap’n Bigelow!’ Hack answered, tearing his fascinated eyes from the girl and throwing up a salute which came straight off the pages of the drill training manual and disregarded the fact that his hat floated away on the river’s current.

After Hack took his hurried departure. Bigelow turned and faced Calamity. A flush came to his cheeks as his study of the girl reached the undershirt and what lay beneath it. With an effort that showed the high standard of will-power West Point instilled in its cadets, Bigelow jerked his eyes up to the girl’s face. Like Hack, Bigelow had heard stories of Calamity Jane, but he discounted most of them as being mere fallacies built up around a rather unsavoury frontier woman. If anyone had asked Bigelow to describe what he imagined Calamity Jane looked like, he certainly would not have been within a good country mile of getting her right.

‘And what, may I ask, are you doing out here?’ he asked, fighting to keep his eyes on her face. ‘I gave orders that nobody was to leave the post.’

‘Figured to take me a bath,’ Calamity replied. ‘Only lard-guts back there thought I needed somebody to wash my back, which same I don’t.’

‘And what are you doing at Fort Connel?’

‘Driving for Dobe Killem.’

‘You! A woman!’

‘Me,’ Calamity grinned. ‘And I reckon that by now you’re sure I’m a woman.’

The flush deepened on Bigelow’s face as he jerked his eyes guiltily upwards once more. Being a red-blooded young man, under the
Manual of Field Service Regulations
, he found it hard to resist the temptation to glance downwards.

‘I’ll not have it!’ he barked.

‘Mister,’ Calamity replied, ‘you’re some too late to stop me being born a woman.’

‘I mean I’m not having Killem taking along his camp foll—’

‘How’d you like to go into the river?’ Calamity interrupted, anger glowing in her expressive eyes.

‘I’m senior off—’ Bibelow began. having been fed respect for his rank back east and reckoning it to be his God-given right.

Once again Calamity chopped off his pompous words. ‘Dobe pays me as a wagon driver and that’s what I’m here to do. No less—and no more, as that barrel-gutted shiny-butt just found out!’

Being a ‘shiny-butt,’ as the combat soldiers impolitely termed all office staff of the Quartermaster Corps, like Hack, Bigelow did not care for the name. A scowl creased his brow and he pointed in the direction of the fort.

‘Get back to your wagons!’ he barked.

While Calamity was an obliging girl most times, she had a well-developed streak of mule in her when riled. She sure did not care for the way that bow-necked shiny-butt officer talked to her and objected to his giving orders to a civilian.

‘I’ve not took my bath yet,’ she stated.

‘Damn it, woman!’ Bigelow bellowed. ‘Get g—’

Slowly, never taking her eyes from his face, Calamity drew the undershirt from her pants and began to raise it. For a moment Bigelow thought her to be bluffing and aimed to call her bet, However, the undershirt lifted to expose her navel and an even-widening strip of bare flesh. Give him his due, he stood his ground like an officer and a gentleman until the bottom of the undershirt almost reached the lower slopes of Calamity’s breasts. Then he turned and headed into the trees as fast as his legs would take him, leaving his fishing tacle behind him.

Calamity watched him go, then grinned and continued her undressing. Somehow she did not figure there would be any further interruptions to her bath.