Panhandle Read online

  “Serves you right for roping a pinto.”

  “That sore-footed nag you’ve got won’t go five miles tomorrow. Besides, I like a horse with some flash.” Billy wasn’t lying. He loved nothing more than parading around on a good-looking horse.

  “Well, I won’t have any problem riding this one, will I? You can do all the trick riding you want, and if those reservation savages catch up to us, they might spot you first and leave me alone,” I answered as smugly as a cold, saturated man who’d had no sleep in two days could.

  Billy stepped down under the trees, and began unsaddling his horse. He was silent for once. I was sure I had bested him, and that was enough to make things a little bit bearable.

  Billy somehow managed to saddle the paint without a wreck, and turned the other horse loose. He had the little fart tied to a tree and hobbled by the time I finished my own. If he hoped to soak some of the devil out of that paint, he was sadly mistaken.

  I pitched my roll on the highest, driest spot I could find—one with only three inches of standing water—and flopped down. I could hear Billy splashing around somewhere behind me. I rolled up in my blanket, hoping to sleep, or float through the territory, one or the other.

  “Riding with you is like riding with my mother. Hell!” Billy grumbled.

  “Go to sleep. The rain’s slacking off.”

  “Yeah, it’s falling straight down now, and not sideways like before.”

  April in the Panhandle isn’t exactly tropical, and that rain was cold enough to chill beer. It’s amazing the conditions a man can sleep under when he’s been in the saddle for two days straight. Just before I dozed off in one of the most miserable bed grounds of my life, I asked, “Reckon Andy’s all right?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Andy showed up the next morning and I guess you could say he was all right. He was caked with mud from head to toe, his hat missing, gamely half carrying, half dragging his saddle along in his wake.

  “I was hoping you boys had some coffee on,” Andy said in his squeaky voice.

  “We were just fixing to chop up the ark and burn it when you walked up.” Billy was trying to wring the water from his blankets.

  “Fine horse you got there.” I pointed at Andy’s feet.

  “He quit me.”

  “They seem to do that to you.”

  “The son of a bitch stopped in his tracks and sulled up. I couldn’t move him for anything. He finally fell over on his side, and I tried almost everything to get him going again.” Andy flopped down on his saddle and scratched his scrawny whiskers thoughtfully.

  “I like to have never dug my saddle out from under him,” he added.

  “He might get back up and come trailing in later,” Billy said.

  “No, he won’t,” Andy said forcefully.

  “I admit you know something about wind-broke, rode-down, sulled-up horses, but you could be wrong,” Billy threw back at him.

  “No, I ain’t.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I shot him, that’s why!”

  “You sure ain’t a lover of animals, Andy,” I said.

  Andy Custer might have been sixteen, although he claimed to be older. He was just short of six feet tall, and rail thin. He was blond and fair as white linen. He wore a thin mustache and goatee that he claimed to have patterned after a picture of General Custer he saw once. He had a voice that tended to get higher and squeakier the more excited he became.

  Andy fancied himself a sure-enough desperado. You didn’t have to ask him, because he’d tell you without your asking that he was a bad man—hell on the men who crossed him, and worse on the women who dared to love him. He had a habit of always pulling out his pistol and playing with it when he was sitting around. Billy and I wondered which he played with more, his gun or his pecker.

  Andy’s image of himself might have been shattered if he could have seen himself then, sitting there muddy and shivering, with his hair sticking out every which way. He idly played with the flopping sole of his right boot, and his big toe poked out of a hole in the other.

  None of us had much in the way of clothes, and we were a ragged lot. Our hats were the best, our neckerchiefs were of silk, and our fancy-topped boots were too fine to walk in. But, in between, we were mostly just faded rags. My own shirt had so many holes it looked like somebody set me afire and put me out just before it all went.

  Now Billy was as opposite from Andy as could be. He had a way of looking good no matter what. Even in his rain-soaked rags, he somehow stood out over us. He always seemed to find a way to spruce himself up a mite. I don’t know when or where he did it, but he did. That morning he had shaped up the brim of his hat a little, and he had dug a fresh, red silk wild rag from somewhere in his bag. It beat me, but it was dry, and so was the white shirt he’d donned. He always had to have a white shirt. It may have been stained and patched, but he looked like a thousand dollars compared to Andy and I.

  Some men just have a way about them. Billy Champion had that way. He did everything bigger, faster, and wilder than anyone I ever ran across. I guess that is why I followed him down from the D-Cross in the spring of ’81. I’ve heard men say that he was a man’s man, whatever that is. I know horses and women liked him to uncommon extremes, and he liked them with equal enthusiasm.

  There are a lot of stories about Billy, and you can believe what you want. Billy was like that; he made people talk. Billy Champion’s downfall was that there wasn’t any backup in him. He was double-bred stubborn. I loved him to death, but men like him can be hard to ride with, because you will get your nerve tried from time to time.

  Billy was coal-black-headed, and a little on the dark side. I always figured he had some Indian in him, but he’d have shot me had I said so. On the worst morning, I never saw him go unshaved, and that morning was no exception. Billy was always an early riser, and while I sat rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and studying Andy, Billy was already done with his morning pruning.

  Striding over to me, Billy sat down on a deadfall log, pulled out his ivory-handled Colt, and began wiping it down with a rag and a little can of oil. He always kept his shooter clean. Me, I never took much care of mine, like a lot of other boys I knew. Hell, my old Colt would have probably jumped up and ran off in shock if I ever showed it a single drop of oil.

  A friend of mine, on a drive to Kansas, once stopped to shoot a cottonmouth on the banks of Red River. He found his pistol was so rusty he couldn’t even cock it. It was locked plumb up. He chucked it in the water, waved good-bye to the snake, and rode off.

  A lot of the boys were like that. Most of them just carried them for show, or because they thought a man was supposed to. The trouble was, when the majority of the boys on the range carried guns, and were apt to settle their differences in the most violent and informal ways, there was bound to be a number of gents who didn’t carry a gun for show. Nobody ever said that Billy carried his for show.

  Billy wasn’t a big man. He might have been five nine, or so, and didn’t weigh more than one-fifty crossing a river with his boots on. But when Billy was on the prod, or happy for that matter, he seemed as big as life. He was always smiling and flashing those pearly-white teeth. One look at him and you knew it was all fun, and damned the consequences.

  Andy had pretty white teeth, except for the two front ones that were missing. He said a calf had kicked them out. I rose and started to hang my blankets to dry on the log.

  “No time for that,” Billy said. “That’s Commission Creek, and she heads up not too far from here. We should be able to cross, as she’s falling fast, and pretty narrow and shallow on up there.”

  “My horse might not carry this wet bedroll.” Sleeping in a hurricane never made me what you could call chipper in the morning.

  “That sore-footed driblet might not carry you out of camp.” Billy pointed to my new horse.

  “What the hell is a driblet?”

  “You know, a driblet.” There was t
he faint trace of a smirk at the corner of Billy’s mouth. He was enjoying my ignorance of his newfound vocabulary.

  “No, I don’t know what a driblet is. I think you’re making it up.” I wasn’t about to be buffaloed.

  Billy walked a wide semicircle around my horse, making a big show of judging its quality. “Yep, that’s what I thought. He fits the bill.”

  I waited for him to continue, and wasn’t about to bite the bait he was laying out for me. Billy hacked up a little wad in his throat, and let the ball hang for a minute from his lip until it fell slowly to the ground.

  “That’s a driblet. It ain’t quite spit, and it ain’t quite drool. It’s a driblet.” Billy jabbed a thumb at my little horse, who stood three-legged under the cottonwoods, with his nose practically on the ground, and his bottom lip sagging. He might have weighed seven hundred pounds saddled. “That’s a driblet.”

  Andy snorted, and whistled through the hole in his teeth. “You beat all, Billy.”

  “Maybe the sun will pop out later and we can stop and dry our gear.” I was annoyed at Andy for no reason. But then again, I was annoyed at Andy most of the time.

  “I’ll go bring up the horses if I can, and catch ‘Horsekiller’ here a mount.” I was perfectly willing to leave, so as not to give Billy the chance to gloat.

  I was just about out of earshot when I heard Andy whine, “Catch me a good’un, Nate!”

  Like there was a good one in the bunch. It was a pretty sorry-looking herd of horses, and only three outlaw cowboys would be stupid enough to risk life and limb stealing them. Much as those Cheyenne liked to race, you would have thought they would ride better horses. Maybe that’s why they hadn’t caught us, because it just wasn’t worth the effort. They probably gave up chasing us as soon as they had put on a little show of trying to shoot and scream us into the Hereafter.

  That might have been the case, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I would keep a watch over my shoulder all the way to Kansas. When they were burning rifle friction over our heads I took them plumb serious. We were lucky to have outrun them, but Billy had figured it that way. It was early spring, the grass just starting to green up, and he claimed that if we rode horses that had wintered with a little corn, we could outrun any pursuit by Cheyenne on winter-starved ponies.

  To my own way of figuring, I thought that the Cheyenne didn’t have a good horse left among them, what with every cowboy wintering in the Cherokee Strip to the north driving them off, and with the soldiers around the reservation keeping the bucks from stealing any new replacements.

  The horses weren’t scattered too far at all, because they were mostly gutted and wore out. I roped a little bay that looked in better flesh than most of the others. Billy joined me on the paint. As he swung around to the other side of them, I laughed as the paint repeatedly boogered, jumping sideways every so often as he kept looking back at Billy on his back. That served Billy right for being foolish enough to ride him. Nobody in those days wanted to ride a paint horse.

  We started the ponies up the creek. They were moving slowly without any travel to them. I left them to Billy, and led the bay to Andy. It was a five-minute ordeal saddling him, but Andy finally got a leg tied up and got it done.

  “Wish I had my hat. My head don’t feel right,” he complained.

  “I wish you had a lick of sense. Slip his foot loose and let’s go.”

  Andy pulled loose the slipknot holding up the near hind foot and hung his rope from his saddle horn. Gathering up his reins, he carefully stepped aboard. The bay tensed and humped up like a cat with a watermelon on his back. “He don’t act sociable, do he?”

  The bay stood stock-still and trembling until Andy let out his version of a Comanche warwhoop and tapped both rowels into that pony’s blown-up belly. Bay shot straight up and landed, all fours bunched up and too cinchy to move. Andy motivated him again, and they lit out up the creek. The bay bawled and stiff-legged all the way. Say what you wanted to about Andy, but the kid could sit a bucking horse.

  The sorrel I rode had been ridden a little before, but he was a far cry from broke. His feet were too sore to give me much trouble, and I contented myself to amble along back to Billy. Andy came by me, his horse still crow-hopping a little ways and then stopping. Andy would spank him out of it, and they would go a little ways and repeat the process.

  “I don’t think this boy’s been rode before. How am I supposed to herd horses?” Andy said as he plunged past me.

  “Keep his nose pointed the way you want to go. Kick when you need to move, and pull when you want to stop,” I advised.

  “I hear you.”

  I’d never done anything but cowboy since I was big enough to count for anything. It seemed like that was a hand’s job in those days. You were expected to herd wild cattle on the back of a horse just as wild. I have seen and rode some good animals, broke to death, gentle, the kind you could do something on. There were good cutting horses worth a fortune beyond me, and good roping horses that you weren’t afraid to tie to and rope just about anything. Every hand had one to tell about, but most of the time it was riding some sorry bronc that would as soon stomp you as look at you.

  We caught up to Billy. He put a lead on the herd, and Andy and I brought them along, pushing up on the drag until we broke them into a good long trot. We were quite the sight, all of us on green or unbroken horses. Andy’s horse continued to pitch, and Billy’s paint shied at everything from Billy to a clump of grass that didn’t look right. Hell, I even saw it fart and spook itself. There was something about the splashy-colored devil that had outlaw written all over him. I thought Billy was making a fool of himself over that nag. A knot-headed horse has been the misery of many a man, but if I’d known half the trouble that little paint horse was going to get us into I’d have shot him on the spot.

  We made our way upstream, waded across the creek, and rounded a little rock pile, a government survey marker that was the Texas line. Both Andy and Billy let out a whoop, and kicked their horses up. Andy went so far as to turn a little circle at a lope, whooping and slapping his chaps’ leg in time as the bay broke into pitching again.

  Crossing that little line must have meant a lot to those boys. The country in front of us looked just the same to me as what we had left behind, but then again, I wasn’t from Texas. You would have thought those two were born in heaven, and had just come home after fifty years in hell.

  I knew better than to say anything, or I would have to hear Billy expound upon the virtues of Texas for an hour. To my mind, that country might not even have been Texas, except by the say-so of Texans. There was nothing civilized that far north that I knew of, and damned sure no towns north of Mobeetie and east of Tascosa. But then again, those Texans would have claimed California, and part of Canada as Texas ground if the world would let them.

  Maybe we all carry a touch of the old home with us, packed away in its own little cubbyhole. They say home is where the heart is, but I was a restless, traveling sort of man. Those gusting winds drifted my wandering horse back and forth across the plains of endless grass until I was an orphan by my own choosing. I’ll always remember home, not as a quaint picture of the place where I was born, but as a feeling. It was a rhythm of one hoof after another cutting prairie ground.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Swinging west of a little stage station, our stomachs be damned, we lined out north across a rolling, short-grass country, scattered with gyp-rock canyons here and there. About noon we topped a hill and could see a long, flat descent down to a little creek cutting across our way. A small trickle of smoke drifted up from a camp below. I could make out what looked to be a cart with a couple of horses tied alongside.

  Billy came loping back down the line and pulled up beside me. “What do you think?”

  “My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut.”

  Without another word, he lit out back to the front of the herd. We headed on down to the creek, the camp still some mile or so off. A hundred yards out, the horse
s in the camp nickered, and a few of ours answered. A sawed-off, bearded man with a Muley Sharps rifle in his hand came up to lean against the wheel of his cart.

  Leaving the herd to scatter on grass, the three of us rode up and stopped about ten yards out from the fire. Billy spoke for us. “Howdy.”

  “Hi,” the man beside the cart replied.

  “We’re driving north to Kansas and are all but out of grub. Was wondering if you might have a bit to spare.”

  “I might.” The whiskered gent looked us over for a bit, and then strode to the fire. “Light and set.”

  All three of us ground-tied our mounts, and then stepped up to the fire, where the fellow had a pot of beans simmering. And I’ll be danged if he didn’t have a little batch of sourdough biscuits warming there. He dug out some plates from a kit in back of the cart, and we went at that food like a starving bitch wolf with pups. There wasn’t enough silverware to go around. I came up short, but just raked mine off the plate with my knife straight into my mouth.

  I slowed down long enough between bites on my second plate to study the wizened fellow across the fire from us. He sat Indian-fashion on the ground with that Sharps nestled across his thighs. He still eyed us suspiciously, or maybe there was a crafty look about him. He was extremely short, with an old, slouchy hat that hung down almost to the bridge of his nose. His gray beard draped over his potbelly. He might have been sixty, but his round little eyes were bright and sharp.

  I noticed Billy was watching him just as closely as I was. I noticed too, that he was especially eyeing that Sharps Borchardt rifle on the old man’s lap. It looked to be brand spanking new. Depending on who you asked, cowboys had taken to calling that model a Muley Sharps either because it kicked like a mule, or because it was a hammerless design and muley cattle were those without horns.

  Now I carried only a pistol, but Billy carried a Winchester too. He was always armed like a bandit. He claimed he carried a long gun for shooting meat, and to keep some disagreements at a distance. He had a love for firearms, and that Muley Sharps had caught his eye.