7

The rain held for three days. By the time it let up, every blanket in camp was crawling with blowfly maggots. The men hadn’t had hot food or coffee for forty-eight hours, and the trail was a mire of mud stifle-deep to a tall mule. The fourth morning showed up as clear as only a prairie morning following a three-day rain can.

Tuss declared they would take the morning to dry out the wagon goods, hit the trail after noon dinner, drive all night to make the seventeen miles to the Little Arkansas in one hitch. A night drive was risky but the trail ahead was level and open and all hands knew there was time to make up. The enforced layover brought two surprises to Kirby, the first pleasant, the second harsh as the hair on an angry dog’s back.

First, Don Pedro called him up to his tent, made a gracious Spanish acknowledgement of the train’s debt to the scout’s work at Cottonwood Crossing and presented him with the roan mare as a gift in token.

“Her name? Dispensante, señor. Mil pardones. Jacinta-salvaje, Bluebell. She will go all day and all night, takes only a breaking hackamore, sits soft as a cloud, travels easy as the wind. Her bad habits, señor? Absolutely none. She reins true or will go by the knees alone. She is afraid of nothing and always watches where she puts her feet. Her temper? Good! Excellente!”

Leading Bluebell back to the wagon, Kirby figured he had had quite a morning. A man didn’t just pick up a top mare every day in the week. Made a body wonder if his luck wasn’t stretching its seams a mite. Something was bound to happen.

And along about noon it did, a solitary figure showing up afoot on the backtrail.

To an eye as sharp as Kirby’s, distress was spoken in every lurching motion of the staggering stranger. He wouldn’t last to the creek, Kirby figured, and he didn’t. Twelve yards short of the stream and even as Kirby was swinging up on Bluebell, he went sprawling, face-forward, into the trail muck.

Kirby was first man to the creek, putting the roan mare into the racing tide, hanging hard to her tail as she surged across. The flood carried them three hundred yards downstream before a landing was made. Spitting sand and water, Kirby got a leg up on Bluebell, kicking her into a full gallop. He recognized Sam’s still figure as he hit the ground and ran to the old mountain man’s side. “Sam! Sam! Ye old son of a gun. Whut the hell hit ye?”

He got his answer only after he had gotten the old man back across the creek and forced the best part of a tin cup of trade whiskey through his cracked lips.

“Howdy, young un.” Sam’s greeting tottered weakly. “We’re out’n business. Damn buzzards hit us five days ago at Mud Crick. Must of bin a hunderd of them, mostly Panani.” He used the Sioux name for the Pawnees, and Kirby nodded.

“They was Pony Stealers, all right, old-timer.”

Sam nodded in turn, continuing his story. “I was trailin’ with a leetle outfit of Texas folks. Bein’ in a fever to ketch up with ye, I had throwed in with them at Council Grove. The Panani got us proper. Burned every wagon. Run off every mule. Thet war five days ago, and h’yar I am.” The old man drew a labored breath, concluding, “I allow it ain’t much use goin’ back to try and help them Texas folks, now.”

“We wouldn’t go back nohow,” Tuss’ deep voice broke in flatly. “We’re loadin’ right now, rollin’ in a hour.” Turning to Kirby, he continued, hard-eyed. “Blanket the old goat down in the cook wagon whar we had Clint. Give him a feed. And by the way, Randolph,” Tuss’ pig-eyes clamped down on Kirby, “who is the old beaver, anyhow? Seems mighty familiar to me, somehow. Cain’t place him, though.”

Kirby winked at Sam, reached his long arm down, placed his great hand affectionately on the narrow shoulder. “Boys,” he announced dramatically, “I want ye to meet my mother—Mr. Samuel Q. Beekman!”

“Beekman?”

“Sam Beekman?”

“‘Old Sam’ hisse’f?”

“The riverman?”

The questions came from a succession of the older teamsters, men who had been on the frontier long enough to have heard “Beekman” mentioned in the same breath with names like “Bridger,” “Colton,” and “Beckwourth.”

“The very same!” smiled Kirby, beaming proudly down on the old man who, by this time, was scowling furiously. “The old top-dog river hoss, hisse’f.”

“Whut’s the ‘Q’ stand fer?” Tuss’ demand for information came slow and heavy, the glint in his tiny eyes belying the innocence of the query.

“It stands fer ‘Questions,’” old Sam answered up for himself. “I don’t ask them and I don’t answer them.” His own squinted gaze matched Tuss’.

The wagon boss glanced sideways, first at Kirby then back to the old man. His statement, when it came, stepped a little faster than usual. “I allow we’ll get some askin’ and answerin’ done around h’yar before very long, you two. Ye kin mark thet.”

* * * *

The trail was fetlock-deep in slop for the best part of the afternoon, but a steady south wind and rising country, between them, combined to make a reasonably good road by nightfall. They halted at dusk, built fires and cooked supper, rested for two hours to give the early moon and the first, fat stars time to build up a little light. By nine o’clock they were rolling again.

Tuss had every available hand working as outriders, even Aurélie and Ptewaquin saddled up and rode with Don Pedro. The whole night through, the mounted band flanked, headed and tailed the train. Sam, refusing to accept his consignment to the jolting hell of the cook wagon, caught up a mule and jogged along with Kirby, half a mile out front of the wagons. Tuss himself rode the trail a dozen yards ahead of the lead wagon driven by Uncle Thorpe. There was no trouble and no sign of trouble.

They halted at 6:00 a.m., spanned out, made coffee, rested two hours. Noon found them pulling down on the Little Arkansas.

All morning, as they rode, Kirby and Sam had noted the increasing buffalo sign, though so far not a single animal had been spotted. But the piles of chips and the white blemishes made by the bleaching skulls and jagged racks of ribs dotting the prairie were becoming heavy enough to let any old hand know that Uncle Pete was bound to show up soon—and in force.

“I allow this h’yar Leetle Arkansaw marks the beginnin’ of the buffler country down in these parts,” grunted Sam, scanning the growing sign uneasily.

“Yeah, Uncle Thorpe says they got into one hell of a herd down h’yar last spring. Took them a day and a half to drive through.”

“I’d jest as lief not get into no sizable herd with a heavy bunch of loose mules like we got. Ye kin get yerse’f into six kinds of hell before breakfast thetaway.”

“I suppose,” nodded Kirby. “But it don’t seem hardly likely.”

“Oh, don’t it now? Thet’s because ye’ve done all yer associatin’ with the ornery cusses from the back of a top buffler pony. These h’yar Trail freighters hates them. And ye kin bet yer ruby-red neck they got theirse’fs mighty good reasons fer so doin’. Specially a mule outfit like ourn.”

“Why fer ye say thet?”

“Wal, ye take a ox train now, it ain’t so bad. A ox has got a mort in common with the shaggy sons of guns. A ox ain’t much but a yoke-broke buffler, nohow. But mules now, boy! Thar ye got somethin’ else again. When ye get a trail herd of loose longears into real buffler country, happen ye’ve got yerse’f a right smart handful. And I ain’t jest a’honkin’, mister.”

Kirby grinned. “Sam, I swear ye’re gettin’ jumpy as a bit-up old bull in flytime. Happen ye see a few piles of chips and two, three skulls, ye’re figgerin’ we already done lost the mules and are hoofin’ it the rest of the way to Santy Fee.”

“It ain’t so much the buffler I’m thinkin’ of,” Sam frowned. “It’s the cussed gnats.”

“Gnats?” Kirby’s question indicated he figured the oldster was slipping his head hobbies. “Ye mean plain, ordinary buffler gnats?”

“I don’t mean no other variety. Ye see, it’s like I done told ye so many times, young un. Comes to sawyin’ all thar is to know about buffler, ye’re a good plew hunter. Happen ye know whut I mean.”

“Stream ahead—!” Kirby stood in his stirrups to make the interruption. “Thet’ll be the Leetle Arkansaw, likely.”

“Likely,” nodded Sam, not bothering to dignify the laconic agreement with a corroborating look. “And as muddy a leetle slough as ever the Cottonwood.”

The Little Arkansas proved just that, for all it was a scant six yards wide. Camp was finally made at 4:00 p.m., all hands pitching in to repair the wagons damaged in the crossing. With dark coming on, the heat, oppressive all day, seemed to grow. Clouds, thick as top cream and black as a bat’s mouth, began to pile up southward on the prairie rim. Sitting to their fire with Sam and Uncle Thorpe, Kirby’s eye roved the surrounding territory apprehensively.

As far as he could see, the lingering twilight lit up a scene of eerie loneliness. Disused buffalo wallows by the score, glinting full of rain water, ringed by golden coreopsis and brilliant scarlet mallow, puffballs, big and white as human skulls, dotting the shadowy clusters of purslane and lamb’s quarter, and everywhere the curly, blue-gray nap of the buffalo grass, combined to make a depressing ghost vista stained sick-yellow by the weird cloud light.

Turning to the others, he hunched a shoulder at the building clouds, muttered quietly, “Them’s fair dirty clouds down thar, ain’t they?”

“Tolerable.” Sam cocked a professional eye horizonward. “But them clouds’ll never hurt ye. Happen we might get some shortly thet will, though.”

“I allow I foller ye.” Uncle Thorpe entered the conversation. “I bin thinkin’ we seen mighty heavy buffler sign today.”

“I suppose ye two old mossybacks are still frettin’ about yer infernal gnats.”

The old men sucked their pipes, each apparently deferring to the other in the privilege of handing the cub his cuffing. Finally Uncle Thorpe looked around for a stone, found one, knocked out the dottle of his pipe, blew through the stem to get the spittle clear and addressed his remarks to the open darkness beyond the fire.

“The buffler gnat,” he began, speaking with the pained weariness of a schoolmaster fronted by a chronic dullard in the class, “is a leetle old midge of a thing, no bigger then a speck of dust in the tail of a man’s eye. He’ll bite ye, right out, on the hands and face to make ye feel like somebody was pitchin’ porkyhog needles into ye by the pawfuls. Or, more likely, he’ll crawl under yer duds and fasten hisse’f onto ye like a Texas tick. When he gits in thar he’ll put his leetle drill in ye and hang on till he’s blowed hisse’f plumb up suckin’ at ye. And when he’s got his gut full and goes to droppin’ off, he’ll leave ye a welt big as yer thumb and sore as a moccasin blister. Now thet’s yer buffler gnat fer ye. And whut he kin do to a human critter, he does ten times over to any kind of stock he kin get his stinger into.”

The old man paused long enough to spit into the fire, then concluded. “Tooken by hisse’f he don’t mean a tarnal thing. But tooken in clouds and swarms and waves thick enough to choke a ox, he’s apt to mean aplenty.”

“Sech as whut, mebbe?” Kirby’s question came more as an acknowledgment of the lecture than as an expression of interest in it.

“In this h’yar case,” the old teamster stretched the statement significantly, “sech as mebbe a mule stampede.”

* * * *

The first cloud of gnats drifted in about ten o’clock. From then until midnight the men in their blankets, the saddle-stock on their pickets, the mules in their loose herd, tail-slapped, bit, brayed, scratched, groaned or cursed, each in his own way fighting off the myriads of invisible insects.

At one, a second, vastly thicker horde of the pests lowered down out of the night skies to join their fellows. The sufferings of man and brute became swiftly more intense.

When, at one-thirty, Tuss ordered the skinners out of their blankets to join the arrieros in holding the frantic mule herd, Kirby’s face was already a beefsteak of welts, his hands swollen and puffed until they could scarcely open and close. Yet when he rolled out to mount up and rode with the others, he found he had just begun to suffer.

Listening as he rode, to the fearful whining hum of the multi-billions of the invaders’ tiny wings and the hoarse braying of the biting, wildly kicking mules, Kirby wondered how the four-legged brutes could stand up to the torment. It was all he could do to keep from screaming himself, and he was a human being with a brain in his head. And hands to scratch with, too. Those poor damn mules had nothing. They could kick and bray and bite, that was all. Otherwise they just milled and jumped around snapping and tail-slapping at themselves, and taking it.

One thing a man knew. If the swarm didn’t let up soon, there would be no holding them.

God! If it would just come on to rain good and hard. That would fix the little devils. And quieten and soothe the mules, too. Cripes, what the hell was that? A man could get off-centered getting bit and stung so heavy, and with his head spinning from the vibration of those damn wings. But, listen. No, by damn, he wasn’t crazy! The hum was building!

The third swarm hit about two o’clock, the mule herd breaking before it to go plunging and braying off into the blackness, the hammering drumfire of their panicky hoofs rising briefly above the ear-ringing hum of the insect horde and the screaming, helpless curses of their human pursuers.

Then there was nothing but the continued whine of the whirling black host muffling the bitter, weeping profanity of the weary, nerve-worn men.

The mules were gone.