Or, A Storm Blows In, and a Life Snuffs Out
For the next few weeks, every owl hooting and bunk board creaking was Hungry Bob on the hunt for a juicy cut of man steak. Tall John almost got himself shot on three different occasions creeping out to drown spiders in the middle of the night. We went to bed jumpy and woke up exhausted, and none of us had much energy for chores.
But then Uly gave us something new to think about—the very orders we’d been hoping for. We were to start breaking horses for the roundup.
We spent the next week getting thrown ass-over-hat busting broncs—and loving every minute of it. At night we dropped into our bunks scraped and sore, and the snores of soundly sleeping men once again rattled the walls.
When we finally rode out looking for cattle, we saw that McPherson’s men had been up to something useful after all. They’d stocked a feeding camp with hay and cottonseed and moved a thousand head in from the furthest pastures. We weren’t to see those far grasslands ourselves—Uly ordered us to stay within five miles of the castle. Just in case we might drift over the limit, either Spider or Boudreaux was on our heels at all times.
But Old Red managed to unstick our escorts one day. Uly needed a windmill water pump fixed, and my brother stepped up to say he and I knew windmills like the back of our hands—which would have been true had our hands been something we saw only on occasion, and then from a distance.
We wrestled with that wooden monstrosity for hours, slicking ourselves black with grease in the process. Fortunately, there was no audience on hand but thirsty cows, as Spider and the albino were off keeping watch on the other Hornet’s Nesters. Somehow we got that windmill pumping water, and after washing ourselves off and taking a good, long drink, we let the cows have a taste.
I was feeling pretty pleased with our ingenuity as we headed back to HQ, but Old Red seemed absolutely downcast. He rode slow, leaning out away from his saddle, his head hanging low.
“You feelin’ faint?”
“No, I ain’t feelin’ faint,” Gustav growled. “I’m lookin’ for some-thin’.”
“What kinda somethin’?”
My brother stopped his horse and slid from the saddle.
“That kind,” he said, pointing at nothing in particular, far as I could see. He went down on his knees and started crawling through the grass.
“Third time in as many days,” he muttered.
“Third time in as many days what?”
He shot me an annoyed glance. “Third time in as many days I’ve had to figure I’m the only man here with eyes in his head.”
My brother’s always had a talent for tracking, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let him get uppity about it.
“Alright, Chief Eagle Eye,” I said. “Just tell this deaf, dumb, blind white man what it is you think you see.”
Old Red pointed again. “You’re blind alright if you can’t tell me what that is there.”
Grass was all I saw. I had a feeling that wasn’t the answer Gustav was looking for.
“Well, now that you point it out, it’s plain as day,” I bluffed.
“That it is. Same as this.” He pointed at a muddy patch nearby.
“Why, sure. I can’t believe I didn’t see it right off.”
Old Red nodded. “And I know you can tell me what this is.” He nudged a moist cow patty with his boot.
“Well, of course.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s. . .well. . .”
“It’s bullshit, brother—like half of what comes outta your mouth. Now just grab the reins of my pony and follow behind. I want to see where this trail goes.”
I cussed, but did as I was told. For years I’d been letting my brother say things to me no other man could—probably because he was the only other Amlingmeyer left to say anything.
He moved off through the grass slowly, stooped over like a chicken hunting for something to peck. I ambled after him with the horses. After we’d poked along like that maybe five minutes, it became clear where we were headed. There was a rocky, shrub-covered bluff half a mile to the east. Whatever my brother was following, that’s where it had gone.
We never made it there ourselves. Gustav straightened up and turned to the northwest, and there was Spider bearing down on us hard. It looked like he planned to send his horse right up my brother’s chest and down the other side, but Old Red just stood there and watched him come. When Spider finally reined up, his horse was practically stepping on Gustav’s toes, yet he didn’t get a flinch out of my brother. Me, I jumped enough for the both of us.
“What the hell are you doin’?” Somehow Spider knew to yell this at Old Red. I was just my brother’s movable hitching post. “You’re supposed to be workin’ on a windmill. We’ve told you dumb bastards not to—”
“I’m trackin’ a man,” Gustav said calmly.
“What?”
“You asked what I’m doin’. I’m tellin’ you.”
Spider pushed the brim of his sweat-soaked Boss of the Plains up high on his head.
“Say again?”
Old Red pointed at the spot where he’d hopped off his horse a few minutes before. “Someone’s been messin’ with grouse nests back there. Huntin’ for eggs or a nice, tender prairie chicken, I reckon. Funny thing, though—whoever it is, he don’t seem to have a mount.”
“He’s on foot?”
“That’s right.”
“Hey,” I said, putting my two bits in for the first time, “you think maybe—?”
Spider threw those bits right back in my face. “Keep your trap shut.” He turned toward Gustav again. “This trail you’re on—any idea where it leads?”
Old Red shrugged, which was probably a lie in itself. “Have to keep followin’ it to know that.”
“Alright.” Spider took a good look around—and it wasn’t to admire a pretty sunset. He was marking the spot. “Get back to your bunkhouse and don’t breathe a word of this to anybody. You do, I’ll pluck out your eyes and eat ‘em like a couple of boiled eggs. You understand me?”
My brother scratched at his ear in a casual, absentminded way, like he was trying to remember where he’d left his pipe.
“You’re understood,” he said.
Spider stayed close behind as we rode toward HQ. It gave me a creepy feeling, him having such a clear view of our backs. But we made it to the corral without any slugs in our spines. Spider didn’t turn his horse out for the night, as we did. He went looking for his brother and Boudreaux, and when he found them they tore out toward the range together.
“You think that’s Hungry Bob out there?” I said as they kicked up dust.
Old Red didn’t answer.
“There’s gotta be a bounty on his head. A big one. Five hundred dollars. . . maybe a thousand.”
That didn’t get a response, either.
“I reckon that’s what the McPhersons are up to,” I went on. “They’re lookin’ to snatch that reward right outta our hands, when it was us who—”
“Us?” my brother finally said.
“Alright, you. But the point is—”
“There ain’t no point. Not when we don’t got facts. Now hush. I’m thinkin’.”
I hushed—and Gustav did the same. The only sound he made the rest of the night was when he struck a lucifer to light his pipe. Of course, silence came easy to him. For me, it was torture. A dozen times I almost blabbed to the boys about what we’d found. But I was anxious to keep my eyeballs from between Spider’s teeth, and I managed to limit my conversation to cards and cattle.
The next day Uly gave me something else to talk about. We had new orders. Old Red and I wouldn’t be fixing any more windmills. We’d be branding calves with the other Hornet’s Nesters.
“Guess they don’t want you out where you might see another trail,” I said as the two of us stoked up a fire for the irons.
“Or they don’t want me to notice there ain’t no more trails to see,” Gustav said.
“What? You think they caught somebody out there?”
“Well, if they did, it sure as hell wasn’t Hungry Bob,” I said.
Old Red looked up from the fire just long enough to cock an eyebrow at me.
“If the McPhersons bagged Bob, they’d have run him straight in to Miles City,” I explained. “In fact, they’d be there still, blowin’ the reward on wine, women, and song—or whiskey, whores, and more whiskey, more like.”
Gustav frowned, making the sort of face a man puts on when he takes a bite of overbaked vinegar pie—a face that says, I ain’t so sure I can swallow that.
“Could be,” he said, and that was all I could get out of him on the subject for quite a spell.
Over the next week, we did so much branding that the whole world began to look like a cow’s backside. When we finally got a break from the irons, though, I wasn’t happy about it. It started late in the afternoon with a wall of black cloud that blocked up the sun like brick. The sound of distant thunder came with it, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up—and that isn’t just an expression. The lightning strikes were still a ways off, but the electricity was already thick in the air around us. A shimmer of green fire danced on every edge, and pony ears and bull horns lit up bright as lanterns.
It was shaping up to be a nasty one indeed, and all the hands—even Uly, Spider, Boudreaux, and the rest of their bunch—headed out to get the cattle to high ground. When the rain came it was going to come hard, with gully washers that flashed up fast. What looked like a dried-out creekbed one minute could be a roaring river the next, and cow, horse, or man caught in the wrong place when the downpour started could easily end up drowned.
And that’s not the only way to get yourself killed in a storm. Sometimes that green spark starts jumping from cow to cow, and fear jumps with it. Before long your mount’s getting spooky, too, and one good crack of thunder could set everything with four legs to running. If you found yourself unhorsed in the midst of that, there wouldn’t be enough of you left to say a prayer over.
These encouraging thoughts had a half-hitch on my brain as me and the boys pushed about three hundred cows up out of a flat. The air was so charged by then I could feel an electric prickle on my eyelashes, and my tongue tasted like a mouthful of pennies. All at once such a wind whipped up I had to dig my boots into my stirrups to keep from taking off like a kite. The rain started soon after that, coming down hard enough to wash the tan off a man’s skin.
Through the sheets of rain, an apparition appeared before me—a vision so unexpected I had to wipe away the water blowing into my eyes and stare a moment before I could accept it as something other than a trick of shadow and light. It was a man on horseback wearing not a wide-brimmed Stetson but a derby, and not a yellow slicker but a black frock coat.
“Keep the cattle moving!” he was yelling.
I recognized the voice before I saw the face, and my shock doubled. It was Perkins.
I’d rarely laid eyes on the VR’s manager out of doors, and never on horseback. Yet there he was atop Puddin’-Foot, the tamest pony on the ranch. Puddin’-Foot was slow, but he was smart: Leave him blindfolded in any corner of the spread and you’d still find him at headquarters at the end of the day begging for sugar. He was the perfect mount for anyone without much horse sense—and Perkins certainly wasn’t displaying sense of any kind by venturing out of the castle on such a night.
“Get them to high ground! High ground!”
“Yessir!” I called back. “High ground!”
Perkins nodded, gave me a sort of “Go about your business” salute, and rode off.
That the man had risked life and limb to tell me to do exactly what I was already doing might have struck me as thickheaded indeed—if I’d had time to ponder it. But I was occupied with more pressing business. The ground was turning to thick black muck, and the pinto beneath me almost went down more than once as we struggled through it. Riding in a storm was a fine way to break a horse’s leg or a man’s back, and I was mighty curious to see which was going to happen first.
After what could have been hours or days far as I knew, another lone rider appeared. It was Spider this time, and though what usually poured from his mouth was pure bile, this time it was sweetest honey.
“Head in! We’ve done what we can! Go!”
He got no arguments. Us Hornet’s Nesters dragged ourselves back to the bunkhouse and fell asleep still slimy as catfish. The next morning we stumbled outside into a world of sunshine and mud. Look up and everything was clear blue, look down and everything was nasty brown. The Swede whipped us up biscuits and ham, and we got to swapping tales of the storm we’d been too tired to tell the night before. I was waiting for the right moment to mention my encounter with our manager when Uly appeared and sped things up.
“Any of you seen Perkins?” McPherson asked.
“Not this mornin’,” I said, and the other boys shrugged and shook their heads.
“What do you mean, ‘Not this mornin’ ‘?”
“I ran across him yesterday in the storm.”
“You what?”
“I saw him, too,” Tall John threw in.
“And me,” said Pinky Harris.
“We was about four miles southwest of here workin’ cattle up out of the flats,” I explained.
“What the hell was Perkins doin’ there?”
I shrugged. “I guess he was tryin’ to help.”
Uly gave me a long squint that let all of us know exactly what he was going to say next.
“Well, I never saw him. And he ain’t in the house now.”
We put down our plates and got our saddles without a word. We all knew what had to be done. Tall John, Pinky, and I led the rest of the boys out to the spot where we’d seen Perkins, then we fanned out.
It didn’t take long. Someone squeezed off a shot, we all circled in on the sound, and there stood Tall John next to a streak of black, red, white, and yellow in the mud. The black was a frock coat.
The rest of it—well, you already know about that.
Just a few hours before, it had been a man.