EIGHT

Let the man see where he’s goin’.

In the cool of the early morning, John and Duffy pointed their mounts northwest, leading a packhorse laden with provisions. They rode along the dried-up floodplain of the North Platte River, between the waterway itself and its grassy breaks, which consisted of patternless folded hills and bluffs rising perhaps fifty or sixty feet, cut through here and there with narrow valleys. Rope-like stream beds that saw water only during the spring runoff streaked some of the hillsides, and the dark green, stunted junipers growing on the slopes looked as if somebody had planted them helter-skelter to make the area look less desolate. Some of the draws were thick with them. The land had turned brown in the searing, arid heat, and the shrunken, turbid river, barely distinguishable from the colour of the terrain, looked more like a narrow lake as it flowed sluggishly toward its confluence with the South Platte. Though their surroundings looked unsuitable for supporting life, the pair spotted several mules and white-tailed deer, and felt confident they would not be short of meat during their journey.

The two men made the unlikeliest of companions, as physically different from one another as two humans could be: John tall, wide, and black; Duffy several inches shorter, narrow, and white. Beneath his Stetson, John’s hair was short and grew in tight curls against his skull, while Duffy’s tumbled onto his shoulders, a red waterfall streaked with white. One face was handsome, with a wiry black beard, the other weather-pounded and trenched, with a thick red one. And while John was in his early thirties, Duffy was old enough to be his father. But they were of like mind and that is the proving ground of kindred spirits.

John had been prepared to make the journey north alone, but he was happy that Duffy wanted to join him. His newfound friend had more than a few stories to tell about the war and Emmett, and it pleased John to hear them. Duffy had been born in Ireland and brought to America as an infant by parents who sought a better life. The only place he knew as a child growing up was the East Texas town of Nacogdoches, about a hundred and seventy miles southeast of Fort Worth. His father had operated an inn and freight service, and Duffy’s first job entailed tending to the chamber pots in the rooms and ensuring there was plenty of firewood on hand. He graduated from that to swamping on the freight wagons. While making a delivery to one of the several cotton plantations in the vicinity, Duffy saw first-hand how some of the slaves were mistreated. He had heard horrific screaming coming from the slaves’ quarters, and when he looked over, he saw a slave frantically running around with his head on fire. “He had tried to escape and the owner had poured tar on the poor bastard’s head and set it on fire. I ain’t never heard such a sound come from a man’s mouth. The owner didn’t want him to die though, so he let the slave use the primer bucket at the well to put it out. That son of a bitch wanted him to live and suffer.” Duffy paused in reflection, before adding, “When the war come along, I knew which side I was on. You can’t fight to give men the right to do somethin’ like that.”

After the conflict ended, he drifted north with Emmett, thinking that he might find work in Fort Worth or Dallas, but ended up staying in Waco, where the town was about to build a huge suspension bridge over the Brazos River. The project took four years to complete, and he connected with Emmett whenever his friend came to town for a “Cattlemen’s Association” meeting. Those rendezvous were always good times, as John well knew. When work on the bridge ended, Emmett got Duffy a job on a nearby ranch, and later Duffy joined him on the drive to the railhead in Abilene, Kansas. Afterwards, he returned to Waco and continued cowpunching for the same rancher. Emmett had shown up one day and, as usual, they had gone to Two Street for recreation. Later, while they soaked in hot baths, Emmett had said, “I’m thinkin’ of puttin’ together a herd to trail up Nebraska way. You interested in taggin’ along?”

Duffy didn’t have to think about it. “I won’t say no if you’re askin’.”

“I’m askin’.”

“And I ain’t sayin’ no.”

•

They had put twenty miles behind them before they stopped for lunch at the edge of the North Platte. Since the river had shrunk considerably, John leaped down a three-foot embankment and crossed the reedy, dried mudflat to scoop out a pot of water. Duffy gathered juniper twigs from the hillside and got a fire going while John strained the water through a cloth brought for the purpose. Finished, he led the horses to the river for a drink while Duffy put coffee on to boil.

The satisfaction of that strong brew in that unfamiliar place, with the responsibility of the drive behind them and a positive future ahead, was immeasurable. Both men were buoyant, a feeling buttressed by money belts stuffed with more cash than they had ever possessed in their lives. The possibility of making themselves even richer as miners was their main topic of conversation, and they decided that Virginia City, Montana, some eight hundred miles distant, would be their destination. They would follow the North Platte to its beginnings in Wyoming and get further directions there. They reckoned it would be comparatively easy on good horses, with no cattle to fret about.

Their coffee and biscuits finished, the men rolled cigarettes and smoked in silence. Finished, John moved to get up when his hat flew from his head—accompanied by the loud crack of a rifle shot from the hillside and the whine of a bullet. There was confusion for a second or two, the friends unsure of what was happening. But they shifted their positions enough that another shot missed them, burying itself in the ground beside John. Under attack, both men responded instinctively. About a dozen feet away was the low bank of the river and they tumbled over it onto hard-baked mud as more shots rang out and small explosions of dirt geysered up behind them.

Out of the line of fire, Duffy exclaimed, “Jesus Christ! What the hell is this all about?”

Pressed tight against the bank on his belly, John shook his head in disbelief. “It’s about someone wantin’ to kill us. Indians maybe.”

“That don’t seem very Indian-like to me. Indians woulda rode down on us, shootin’ and yippin’. We’d a been dead as the grass by now.”

“Could be it’s a hostile, on his own and hungry. Or maybe we’ve been mistaken for somebody else.”

Duffy snorted. “You think there’s another pair looks like us anywhere on this good earth?”

John voiced another thought. “Maybe it’s someone who knows we had a big payday in Ogallala and wants it without workin’ as hard as we did for it.”

“Maybe. Meanwhile, we’re in a fix and we need to find a way out.”

John removed his hat and rose cautiously. Peering through the tufts of dried grass on the bank’s edge, he caught a glimpse of a solitary figure on the bluff where the shots came from, moving to another hiding place. John ducked back down.

“It’s an Indian,” he said.

Duffy took off his hat to have a look, but the soil about two feet from the edge of the bank exploded as the sound of another shot rolled down the hill. They dropped to their bellies again.

“Don’t look as if he has plans of leavin’,” John said.

“Well, he ain’t gonna come down here unless he’s got a death wish. Maybe he’ll try to wait us out, fool us into thinkin’ he’s gone. But I think we can get the bastard. We got a good bank for protection, so if I go upriver and you go down, we can maybe get up in those hills and squeeze him from two sides. Make sure you know what you’re shootin’ at. I don’t need two people gunnin’ for me.”

John didn’t need any further prompting. The sooner they got moving, the better chance they would have of getting their assailant. The river curved both ways to their advantage, and John began crawling downriver on his belly over the dry, cracked mud, hugging the bank. He wished that he had his rifle, but it was still in its scabbard on Cat, who, with the other two horses, had galloped off. He had only his sidearm, which would have to do. It meant getting closer to the shooter, but it also meant that he would know what he was shooting at. He kept as close to the bank as his big frame allowed, hoping that the Indian, not seeing any movement, would bide his time and wait for the right opportunity to bag his quarry. Then again, he might also have sneaked around to a gully and be making his way down to the river to get them from the side. John kept that thought handy and glanced behind him every few seconds.

He reached a spot where a dry, narrow stream bed joined the river and calculated that he had gone far enough to be out of the shooter’s sight. He peered over the riverbank. He could not see where he figured the shooter was; the slope of a small hill was now between them, but the stream bed ran down a crease between two hills and would provide a route to the top. He watched for two or three minutes, his eyes sweeping as much of the breaks as he could see. When he detected no movement, he drew his pistol, took a deep breath, and rolled onto the bank. Scrambling to his feet, he ran for the crease. It was no more than sixty yards away, yet it seemed twice that distance. Though John had always considered himself fleet of foot for his size, his feet had never seemed as heavy as anvils before. He felt vulnerable every step of the way, but he reached the crease without incident and began picking his way up the rocky incline, one eye on the terrain below his feet and the other on the land above. The heat in the sun-soaked ground radiated up around him and beads of sweat rolled from his temples.

He heard the snake before he saw it, and stopped as if he had run into an invisible wall. Merely looking at the loathsome creature made his knees tremble and he wanted to shoot it. Afraid to risk the noise, he picked up a rock and heaved it at the reptile. Struck a glancing blow on the head, the rattler slithered behind a boulder. John winced at the sound of the rock clattering over the ground. He listened for a while but could hear no other sound. He continued to the top of the crease, giving the wounded reptile a wide berth, not knowing what he feared more, a bullet or an encounter with a snake. The crease ended in a small basin with a scum-coated pool at its centre. He skirted the water and crept on his belly the short distance to the basin’s rim.

From his vantage point, he could see the river and the undulating landscape of the breaks. He saw no movement and reckoned that he was about two or three hundred yards from the Indian’s position and behind him, if the Indian had stayed put. Below and to his left, a shallow cut studded with junipers ran in the general direction that he needed to go, so John hurried down the slope and slid the last few feet. He moved slowly, careful of where he placed his feet, on the lookout for the gunman and snakes. The excitement he felt tempered his nervousness. He was as much the hunter now as he was the hunted, and that made all the difference.

The crack of a gunshot nearby startled him and he instinctively ducked behind a juniper. Who had fired it? Duffy, he hoped, because it sounded more like a pistol than a rifle. There was no answering fire, but seconds later, he heard a horse whinny off in the distance, followed by the sound of hooves on hardpan. He scrambled to a spot where the cut petered out, about forty feet above a wide draw running at angles to it. Looking down, he saw an Indian fleeing on horseback. He decided not to shoot, because it would have taken a lucky shot to bring him down. More than likely, he would have hit the horse and he did not want to kill or maim an innocent creature. Duffy appeared across the draw, waved, and began descending into it. John scrambled down the grass-covered slope in front of him and met his friend at the bottom.

Duffy’s eyes were wild with excitement. “I dunno,” he panted, “but I think I mighta hit him. Came out above him as he was about to mount up and got a shot away. You were right, a goddamned renegade Indian!”

Examining the tracks, they saw that the horse was unshod. John also spotted several drops of blood. There was more blood a few yards farther on.

“I think you got him good, Duffy. Wait here and I’ll get the horses. We’re goin’ after him.”

John found Cat and Duffy’s mount grazing, oblivious now to the affairs of men. He climbed on Cat, grabbed the reins of Duffy’s horse, and returned swiftly to his friend.

“I’m seein’ lots of blood,” Duffy said when John rejoined him. “I don’t think we’ll have to ride far till we find the son of a bitch.”

Duffy holstered his gun, mounted up, and pulled his rifle from its scabbard. John took his rifle out too and they followed the tracks at a trot. The valley widened slightly and, a quarter mile ahead, bent to the right. The men slowed their horses to a walk, scanning the slopes and hilltops. A red-tailed hawk drifted low into the valley ahead of them, swooping down and disappearing around the bend. The hawk was clearly hunting, and they took it as a sign that there was nothing threatening in the immediate vicinity. They cautiously rounded the bend and reined up abruptly when they spotted a riderless horse. The animal had seen them and was warily regarding their approach. Not far away, a motionless figure lay face down on the ground.

They held still for several moments, watching. The only movement was the hawk soaring overhead. The valley was hot and still. They rode toward the downed man, keeping their rifles trained on him, suspecting a trap. They stopped several feet away and John dismounted. He instructed Duffy, “You see even a small tic that I don’t, put another slug in him.”

He walked over to the prone Indian and prodded him with the muzzle of his rifle. It evoked a small moan. He put his foot against the man’s side and pushed him over onto his back. Behind the garish paint on his face and the plaited black hair, John could see that it was no Indian. It was Rufus Pauley.

He was barely alive and his eyes were losing focus. Even so, he recognized the man towering over him. He gasped, “Killed . . . by a fuckin’ . . . nigger.”

John did not bother correcting him. He reckoned it was a pretty good thought for Rufus to take with him into eternity. The dying man’s eyes closed; he took a few shallow breaths and was gone.

“Goddamn!” Duffy exclaimed when he saw who it was, adding a little self-righteously, “I reckon I had him pegged proper. Men like Pauley don’t change unless it’s to get sneakier than they was as a child.”

John was baffled. He had believed that, through the sheer force of his deeds and personality, he had changed Rufus’s mind about black people.

Duffy rode back to the packhorse to get a spade and they took turns scooping out a shallow trench. When they were finished, John grabbed Rufus’s wrists and dragged him alongside the hole. He placed his boot against his waist and rolled him in, the corpse ending up face down. John considered turning it over but Duffy said, “Leave him be. Let the man see where he’s goin’.”

They shovelled the dirt back into the grave but did not bother protecting it with rocks. Neither cared much if animals dug Rufus out, nor had they any words to say over the grave. John felt betrayed and had no tears for the man’s passing. Indeed, he figured that if the world had any tears at all for Rufus, they would have been better shed at his birth.

They retrieved Rufus’s mount, led it back to the river, and linked it to their packhorse. They doused the dregs of their fire, rinsed their cups and coffee pot, returned them to their saddlebags, and continued their journey northwest, still stunned by their discovery. They speculated that Rufus’s indirect apology at the Cattleman’s Rest was strictly for show, so that it would appear as if he’d had a change of heart concerning blacks in general and John in particular. That way, he would not have been a suspect if his plan had been successful and his victims’ bodies were discovered.

He had dressed and painted his face like an Indian, plaited his long hair, and shaved off his moustache in the event someone happened along during the attack, or if John or Duffy got away. He had even removed the shoes from his horse, and had probably hidden his saddle somewhere in the breaks. They believed that as much as Rufus wanted the money, the bonus was murdering John, since the bullets appeared to have first been directed at him. John was lucky to have moved at just the right moment. Otherwise, he and Duffy, along with their horses, might now be in some hidden gully providing a feast for the coyotes and other carrion eaters. Rufus would have ridden off with a small fortune, leaving behind not a single shred of evidence of his misdeeds.

They rode on as the sun sailed the sky in its daily journey between the horizons and the stars eddied against the black void of the night. Long days in the saddle turned into weeks. They holed up in foul weather and pressed on in fair, and one day they reached the crest of a hill and saw that the rim of their world now included the rugged profile of the mountains they had heard so much about.