Ralph Compton The Badlands Trail

Chapter One

Breakfast came early, as the foreman had promised: bacon, beans, and bread. It wasn't gourmet fare, but Toby Bishop had survived on worse.

From time to time, he had survived on nothing much at all.

The other hands seated along the outdoor trestle table, ten in all besides Bishop, spared time to introduce themselves, most of them shaking hands. Toby was good with names and filed them in his memory, matched up with faces, guessing that he'd find out more about them on the trail.

The only one who stuck out, for a start, was Graham Lott, a sometime preacher, likely self-ordained. A rangy man with thinning ginger hair, left eyebrow interrupted by a scar, he advised that those who felt inclined could call him "Pastor." He said grace over their tin plates piled with food and claimed that he'd be offering a Sunday service in the evenings, for anyone who felt the need after ten hours herding beef.

For Toby's part, he couldn't picture spending any downtime on his knees.

It wasn't that he spurned religion altogether. He'd been "raised right," as the folks in Cairo used to say-meaning brought up to be a rock-ribbed Baptist, though in Toby's case it felt more like a superficial coat of paint that weathered down with time.

When Illinoisans spoke of Cairo as the lowest city in the Prairie State, they mostly meant geography. It was the farthest south, as far as Toby knew, located at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers, also with the lowest elevation in the state and prone to flooding, ringed around with levees in a bid to hold back nature's inundations. But there was a certain meanness to the place as well, and throughout Alexander County as a whole, particularly when it came to white folks versus blacks. People of color in the neighborhood kept to themselves whenever possible, free state before the Civil War or no, and on occasions when a young man might forget "his place," he sometimes wound up stretching rope.

That was one reason Bishop hadn't gone back home since lighting out at seventeen, the better part of sixteen years ago. But if he'd been expecting other states or towns to demonstrate more tolerance, they'd come up short so far.

While Toby cleaned his plate, he glanced around the table, firming up the link between faces and names. Foreman Bill Pickering was absent, busy elsewhere, but that still left ten hired hands besides himself and Pastor Lott.

On Toby's left sat Boone Hightower, forty-something, with a weathered air of weariness about him, focused on his food without contributing to conversation. Close on Bishop's right, Deke Sullivan was roughly half Hightower's age, maybe three-quarters of his weight, and wore his pistol holstered for a cross-hand draw that struck Toby as awkward.

Moving on from Sullivan, he came to Leland Gorch, the oldest drover in the bunch, somewhere on the high side of fifty, with a permanent black smudge at his jawline, which looked to Bishop like a gunpowder tattoo. It wasn't close enough for an attempted suicide, more like a remnant of some long-ago near-death experience.

To Gorch's right, down at the table's end, sat Curly Odom, obviously named in jest. He wore a slouch hat now, but if glimpsed without it, he was bald on top, with long hair down below the arid pate that draped his collar all around. He smiled a lot, maybe too much, and had no qualms about intruding on a conversation if he spied an opening.

Facing him sat Paco Esperanza, sole Latino riding for the Circle K on this trip, traces of his breakfast clinging to a handlebar mustache he'd cultivated to enhance his narrow face. To his right was Isaac Thorne, their only black companion on the trail, full-faced and sporting a goatee shot through with flecks of gray. Scarred knuckles marked him as a brawler at some bygone time, and maybe not that long ago.

To Thorne's right, facing Bishop, Estes Courtwright kept his head down, shaded by his hat's brim, fully focused on his food. He hadn't spoken yet in Bishop's presence and appeared to be a slacker when it came to making small talk. That was fine with Toby, since he hadn't joined the drive to pad his scanty list of friends.

That still left two. Beside Courtwright sat Abel Floyd, the Circle K's horse wrangler, who would keep and care for their remuda on the trail. That meant the blond late-twenties cowboy would be watching over thirty-odd replacement horses day and night, instead of babysitting some two thousand steers.

Across from Floyd, to Boone Hightower's left, sat Whitney Melville, tallest of the lot at six foot five or six, tipping the scale at around two hundred pounds. To that weight, add a fancy gun belt holding up a Colt Dragoon that had to measure nearly fifteen inches overall, more than four pounds of steel, together with a Bowie knife protruding from his boot.

Bishop felt sorry for his horse.

Bishop had finished his breakfast when a clanging racket echoed from the main ranch house. All eyes turned toward that direction to behold the foreman beating on a metal triangle suspended from a porch rafter, demanding their attention.

"Rally round!" he called. "We're burning daylight!"

Some of the hands were grumbling as they got up from their benches, but they clearly didn't mean much by it. Young or old, raring to go or halfway broken down, even if you'd done it all a dozen times before, there was a certain energy about the start-up of a trail drive that no free spirit could ignore.

At forty-seven, coming up on forty-eight that autumn, Gavin Dixon knew that he could stand to lose some weight. His wife had mentioned it in passing and he couldnÕt argue with her, tried to make his peace with smaller portions at some meals and cut back on his alcohol intake, but so far he had nothing much to show for it.

That was the thing about prosperity. When he and Maryanne had started building up the Circle K-named for their daughter, Katherine, who'd died before she reached her second birthday-it had been hard work from dawn to dusk, with little in the cooking pot but prairie stew. Once they had made a decent go of it, the spread still made demands, but they had help around the place, the number of their hands increasing as the herd grew and their bank account kept pace. Dixon wasn't retired, by any means, but there was marginally less to do that forced him to complete each job himself.

Now he was older than his father ever lived to be, and it occurred to him that most folks-in Atoka, anyway-regarded him as wealthy. Sometimes, facing his reflection in the mirror, Dixon reckoned it was mostly true.

Which didn't mean that he could stay home, rocking on the porch, and let Bill Pickering command the trail drive to St. Louis. Dixon wasn't that old yet, and when the time came, if he lived that long, he just might sell the spread and find a city place, maybe in Dallas or its new neighbor Fort Worth.

But not just yet.

He scanned the upturned faces of the drovers ranged before him, wishing he could pick out anyone among them who was likely to go sour on the trail. He'd trusted Pickering to hire them, but that didn't mean that all of them would go the distance without problems. Every drive he'd been on, there were quarrels that had to be resolved and some that couldn't be, so that he had to part with badly needed hands. He hoped there would be less of that, this time around, but Dixon never liked to bet on human nature to come shining through.

You could have heard a pin drop when he started speaking to his men.

"We've got a long trip waiting for us," he reminded them. "Five hundred miles and then some till our payday in St. Louis, and I hope to get there with the herd intact. Remember that your pay depends on it. Each steer we lose along the way, and any weight loss by the ones that make it through, comes out of my pocket, and that means less for each of you. I can't predict what we'll run into down the road, won't even try. It calls for every one of us to stay and do our very best, no matter what the job demands. Focus on that, we ought to be all right. Questions?"

No one spoke up or raised a hand, which suited Dixon fine.

"Okay, then," he concluded. "Stash your bedrolls on the chuck wagon, mount up, and get these critters on the trail. Time's money, gentlemen."

Longhorns were different from other cattle Bishop had worked on other spreads in Texas, and particularly farther north. First, their horns could reach a two-yard span or half again that much on ancient bulls, and served as deadly weapons if the steers were riled. A drover caught in a longhorn stampede might wish that he was facing hostile Indians instead.

Another thing: they were descended from the New World's oldest cattle, spawned in far-off Arab lands and shipped across by Christopher Columbus, their numbers mounting with the Spanish colonists who'd followed him long before the Pilgrims got around to fetching up on Plymouth Rock. Predominantly white and dark red, they were a hardy breed, resistant to the Southwest's frequent droughts and scarcity of feed, in the sixty-pound range at birth, up to five feet at the shoulder in maturity, weighing from fourteen hundred to twenty-five hundred pounds.

The trick was keeping most of that weight on their bones while traveling five hundred miles or more across rough country, over hills and valleys, fording rivers as required, and always stopping where the herd was free to graze all night. As Gavin Dixon had reminded them, each steer they lost along the way-from snakebite, broken legs, or rustling-meant their payoff at trail's end would be reduced.

Their boss couldn't hand over money that he hadn't made.

The drovers weren't guaranteed to reach St. Louis either. The Circle K provided no insurance if one of them died along the way or got stove up somehow and couldn't pull his weight. Dixon was required to pay a cowboy for the time he worked, not for being dragged along on a travois through trail dust. Dead men were worth less on a trail drive than a wagon with a busted wheel, since that could be repaired.

If one of them died en route, their payout was a prairie grave, trampled into invisibility by longhorns' hooves.

The steers were penned in large corrals and well fed in close captivity so they'd start the drive with weight to spare, then closely examined to make sure that none of them were lame or otherwise injured. Once they were on the move, nature would take its course over the next two months or so.

It was like gambling, in a way, except the stakes were life and death for all concerned.

Riding his snowflake Appaloosa stallion, christened Compa–ero-"Partner"-by the Mexican horse trader in Nogales he'd bought it from sometime back, Bishop kept pace with Mr. Dixon's other drovers as they nudged, cajoled, and cursed the longhorns from their pens and into a formation that he knew would bear consistent watching once they left the Circle K.

Drovers would have to watch for any strays while traveling by daylight, and the men assigned to riding herd at night were duty bound to keep the steers from spreading out too far, while also remaining alert for any predators, whether the ravenous four-legged kind or bandits bent on rustling cattle any way they could.

In that case, Toby knew there would be gunplay, and while that was nothing new to him, he didn't relish it.

The whole point of his ride across the line from Texas was to leave all that behind him if he could.

WhereÕd you say you come from?Ó Pastor Lott inquired.

"I never said," Bishop replied.

They were together on the herd's southwestern flank, Lott riding on a chestnut gelding brought from home-described to anyone who'd listen as a little Texas town called Bitter Root. They both had sandwiches prepared by Mel Varney, the drive's trail cook: cold roasted beef on buttered bread and not half-bad.

"That's right, I recollect now," Lott said, talking with his mouth full. "Must have mixed you up with someone else. But now you mention it-"

"I didn't," Toby said.

"All right, then. I apologize for being nosy, son. Don't mean to pry."

"It's not that," Bishop answered back, although it was precisely that. Then said, "Most recently, I'm out of Mason County."

"Texas?"

"That's the one."

"That rings a bell," Lott granted. "Something I should know about." He chewed and swallowed, then came out with it. "I've got it now. The so-called Hoodoo War."

So-called was right. There wasn't a thing about Mason County's troubles that had to do with voodoo.

"I never understood that name," Lott said, as if reading his trail companion's thoughts.

"From what I hear," Toby replied, "it had to do with vigilantes wearing masks when they went out to hunt for rustlers."

Steers were at the bottom of it, countless head stolen by rustlers and sold across the Rio Grande in Mexico. No herd was safe from depredation, though at first it seemed the county's German immigrant homesteaders suffered greater losses than their Anglo neighbors.

The conflict between the rustlers and vigilantes hunting them had turned into a chauvinistic thing, Germans against "Americans." Toby had departed from the war zone after a few months of gunwork.

In any case, a recent arson fire had razed the Mason County courthouse, taking with it all official records of the Hoodoo War, sparing participants who'd managed to survive from the embarrassment of being charged and facing trial.

"I hope you didn't get mixed up in that," said Pastor Lott.

"I try to mind my own business," Bishop replied, thinking it wasn't quite a bald-faced lie.

Watch out for them steers straying over there!Ó Bill Pickering commanded, pointing toward a trio of longhorns who seemed about to lose their way and wander off westward.

"We're on it," Whitney Melville told him, riding off with Boone Hightower to retrieve the truant steers.

So far, so good, thought Pickering, but it was still day one, another four, five hours until dusk, and anything could pop up to surprise them in the heart of Indian country.

From what Pickering knew, the problems with that unofficial territory spanned three-quarters of a century, without considering the wars and massacres that started almost from the day England's first colonists set foot on the East Coast. The native tribes, present for umpteen thousand years before white Europeans first "discovered" the Americas, resisted being driven from their homes and hunting grounds as anybody would, but always wound up on the losing end. By 1803, tribes were ceding their ancestral lands and trekking at gunpoint to dwell on "reserves" set aside to protect them-white leaders claimed-from mistreatment by westbound settlers.