Excerpt from DRYGULCH TO DESTINY

A QUIET MOMENT

Now Morgan was alone—until Hanna Jameson finished the supper dishes and came out. A patch of yellow light flooded the porch, growing wider, then dimmed by a shadow. Morgan forced himself to calm. His first instinct, born from years of being shot at through doorways, was to reach for a gun, but he knew Hanna was the only one inside the house. He managed to keep his hands still, his left one on the arm of his chair, holding his pipe, his right one dangling a tad too close to his Smith and Wesson. His fingers tickled the smooth pearl of its butt.

“What a nice evening,” remarked Hanna, and she remained standing on the porch, hushing the door shut behind her. The dog, Curly, lay next to Morgan’s chair and thumped his tail a couple of times against the porch.

“Sure is.” Morgan said no more.

“Am I free to speak?” Hanna asked.

He turned his head. “Ma’am? Well, it is your porch.”

He could see her nod, although in the dim light it was very faint. “I have heard of you, Mr. Morgan. And Andy told me more. Is it true? These stories?”

Stifling a cough, he shifted around in his chair. “Don’t rightly know—since I don’t know what you’ve heard. Or what he said.”

“Some call you a town tamer. Others a killer.”

A long moment of silence. Then: “And you? What do you think?”

“We’ve only just met. It’s not fair to turn this back on me. What would I base a judgment on?”

“But yet you are bold enough to bring it up. So I’m asking again: What do you think? I have my offhand judgments about you. You must have yours about me too.”

Hanna folded her arms, drawing in a deep breath. She started to say something, then instead she laughed, embarrassed. “You’re right, Mr. Morgan. I do have my judgments about you. You flew into my house uninvited, because you felt there was trouble here. You saw the trouble, saw a man with a gun in his hand. The man Andy says you are, the man in some of the newspapers, I feel like that man would have shot him. You had call enough to—if you really were that man. You could have asked your questions later. And then again, when they both showed what kind of men they were—when I told you what they were up to—you could have decided to shoot them then. But you didn’t. That tells me you are not the heartless man of instant violence Andy claims you are.”

Morgan tried to smile, an expression that was all too rare for him. “I appreciate that, ma’am. I will tell you this, and I stand behind it: I have killed men. I’m not proud of it. But I go from town to town when I’m hired to bring peace, and some men only know the peace of being dead. They have been robbing and bullying and beating and killing for so long that they know no other way. No one can help those men—not in life. I come to help towns in need of peace and safety. When I find men standing in my way, I move them. And if moving them makes them dead, I don’t look back. I’ve never mourned the loss of a single one of them. I’ve never regretted that my gun was the thing that made them dead, because I knew they meant to kill me first. Does that fit what Hicks told you?”

Hanna stared as he talked, then stood there quiet. After a moment, she asked, “Do you mind if I sit?”

“Not at all. They’re your chairs, too.”

She laughed. “Yes, but you were sitting here first, and you deserve your solitude.”

“I’ve had a belly full of solitude, ma’am. Especially here of late.”

She pulled her chair a little ways from his and eased into it. He could see her looking at him, trying to read his face in the shadows. “It’s lonely here at night. I have Curly, and the sound of the horses. The stars. And the wind. Often the coyotes sing for me, and sometimes the wolves. Sometimes I can hear the cattle, out on the range. And the crickets are always here. That is my company, Mr. Morgan. Most nights.”

“Nate’s a good man. I’m sure he’d stay up longer and keep you company if you asked.”

She laughed again, and the musical notes were soothing as a birdsong. “Nate is like a father to me. And Andy is a boy who often doesn’t know his place. Sometimes a woman longs for more.”

Morgan cleared his throat. “All that is none of my business. If you’re trying to excuse being here with me, you don’t have to. You’re welcome, for my part.”

“Thank you. I hope it makes some kind of sense when I say it feels safer with you here.”

“Safer? Sometimes a man like me draws trouble where there otherwise wouldn’t have been any.”

“In a wild town, maybe. But not here. I was already in trouble. You came, and you made the trouble go away. Perhaps just the sound of your name made it go away.”

She paused for a long minute, and they both listened to the crickets in the yard. One lonely coyote began to yelp, far out in the brush. “There he is,” she said, her soft voice music in his ears. “I knew he would come.”

Morgan nodded. “Yep, there he is.” His voice was deep, throaty, a voice to match the depth of this night.

“I call that one Singer.”

Morgan raised a brow. “You name your coyotes? Ma’am, you are lonely.”

She laughed again. She seemed to like laughing, and he liked to hear it. It made him long for the kind of home he hadn’t known since he was a boy back in Virginia.

Hanna cleared her throat almost inaudibly. “Another question? A very personal one. And you don’t have to answer.”

“But you want me to.”

“Of course, or I wouldn’t ask. But it’s your choice.”

“At your service.”

“What happened in Frisco? It is said they intended to hang you. The mob came, and your deputies didn’t even stand behind you—but other friends did. I will never tell a soul, Mr. Morgan. You have my word on that. Men can change, and I know that. Today, I had my own chance to see the kind of man I believe you to be. Today, you saved me from something I don’t want to think about. If you had wanted to, you could have turned on me then and done anything you wanted. But I could see in your face that you wouldn’t. So I won’t turn on you, either. But I would like to know. What happened there? Why did they believe you did the robbery? And killed that man? Did you?”

The last question was point-blank, unabashed. Maybe the dark had made it easier for her.

“That’s more than one question,” he remarked, and she instantly laughed, realizing her folly.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” He sat there for a few moments more, fiddling with the tobacco sack in his vest pocket, thinking about packing his pipe again. “Do you mind my smoke?” he finally asked.

“My father smoked for my whole childhood.”

He started to draw out the sack, then thought better of it and let it slide back in. What her father might have done gave him no right to force his habit on this woman. Her eyes followed his movements, and a smile formed on her lips as she appraised him anew.

“Ma’am, I don’t know who I’ve told about that night—about those days that followed. Not many. One, I guess. Maybe two.” He chuckled. “Never had anybody ask me direct like this. Reckon they’re all scared of me?”

“Maybe they are. They would have reason, I suppose.”

“I suppose.” He reached over with his right hand and popped the middle joint of his left trigger finger, then did the same with the right—a nervous habit he hated. “Well, ma’am, I’ll tell you what I know. What I remember. You can take it for what it’s worth. The jury thought it was enough for acquittal.”

“You don’t remember it all? I would think that isn’t something you could easily forget.”

“I didn’t either. Until the night of the robbery.”

KNIGHT OF THE RIBBONS, Cont.... CH. 4 and 5

† Four †

For a second, all Clay could see was the dust, boiling around them like the smoke of a greasy fire. Then he saw many yards below him a body of water, and that was all he had time to discern. They struck with a great splash and submerged. Coming up, both the horse and Clay were in shock. Clay had come free of the horse, and he had to orient himself to find the animal. As the horse started swimming, he reached out and grabbed its tail, letting himself be hauled along toward the far shore.

He heard a cry behind him, then another. They sounded like they came from opposite banks of the gully down which he had been riding. An arrow plunked into the water beside him. Another followed, and another. Soon there were at least four voices whooping on the bank behind him. A few more arrows plummeted down like the devil’s hail, and then he felt a blow to the middle of his back.

He had been hit!

Panicky, he reached behind him to feel for the shaft, but there was none. The range must be too far, and it had bounced off, just from the thickness of his cotton undershirt, wool shirt and canvas vest. Clay heard himself laughing before his mouth dipped under the water, and he came up sputtering. He turned and looked back toward the bank, and there sat the four warriors, yelling and throwing their hands in the air. All around them rose the huge bank of dirty brown cloud, and off to their right Clay could see the surge of buffalo through the gloom. They were walking now, doggedly determined to be moving. It had been a short-lived stampede.

The water carried them slowly, and Clay looked around him. They were in a large, muddy river whose far bank was lined with cottonwoods. Even as he realized this they came up into shallower water, and soon his feet touched bottom. Weary, he let them drag for a moment before catching his step and hurrying around to reach out and grasp the sorrel’s rein. He eased the frightened animal to a halt, and they both stood blowing on the muddy bank, looking back toward the Indian braves. The four of them had now ridden farther downstream so as to stay directly across from him as the water carried him and the sorrel.

It wasn’t until then that Clay had time to think of Rodney Anderson. He had no doubt the man was dead. If the arrow hadn’t killed him he knew the braves had finished him off in short order. They had Anderson’s life, and they had a donkey, two mules, two good Cleveland bays, and enough supplies to have seen Clay and Anderson through at least to Fort Laramie, where they could have re-supplied. They also had two rifles, if they were able to find Clay’s wherever he had dropped it in the stampede.

Clay was angry, and he felt himself growing furious. He hadn’t done anything to these Indians to be attacked for. Why did they have this lust to kill? He started hoping fervently that they would try to swim over to this shore in pursuit of him. He would shoot every one of them dead as they got within range of his pistols.

But they didn’t come. They threw a few last insults at him, then turned their horses back in the direction they had come. They were going after their morning’s booty.

Clay looked around him at the vast loneliness of the prairie. Here and there he could see bunches of bison that had stopped to graze, and along the shore of the river he spied a herd of ten or fifteen animals that looked like large deer and must be elk. They were tan in color with dirty cream rump patches and darker brown necks, all scruffy with their winter hair coming off in ugly clumps.

Holding on to the one rein, Clay walked up the bank of the river to the cottonwood trees. Between two of them was a lush patch of new grass, and here he slumped down and lay on his back, staring up at the soft blue sky and wisps of cloud.

After a moment, he realized there was a burning pain in his forearm, and he remembered being wounded. He raised it up above him and saw that it was no longer bleeding. Peeling back his cuff, past the point of a tear in his sleeve, he saw that it was only a surface cut where an Indian’s arrow had sliced across his flesh after glancing off his saddle horn. With a little fresh air and some time, it would heal. He lowered the arm and looked back at the sky. There were far bigger things to think about than a flesh wound on his arm.

Rodney Anderson, dead . . . How fast a friend could come and then be gone. It was starting to look as if anyone fool enough to mix up with Clay Logan didn’t last long. And if Clay had just let him come down that hill with him, maybe both of them would be alive now. That thought struck him hard. First his parents, then his wife and baby, and now Anderson. And there had been others before them—childhood friends, associates, many of them already killed in the War-Between-the-States. Most of them weren’t his fault, but all were just as dead. It was beginning to be difficult to believe that anyone in his company stood a chance at a very long life.

Clay slammed his fist hard into the ground and sat up abruptly. The sorrel was looking over at him in consternation, deciding if his master was mad enough that he should move away.

"I’m not even going to name you," Clay heard himself say out loud. "I get to like you and you’re dead."

The horse nickered back at him, then after seconds went back to cropping grass. Clay decided to throw caution to the wind and let go of the rein. The horse wouldn’t go far. And if any other Indians lurked hereabouts and wanted to kill him, then let them come on. He would take some of them with him.

No sooner had he thought this than he heard a rustling in last year’s grass, and he looked over toward the river bank to see a big bird that looked much like a chicken standing in the grass and staring at him. Carefully, he eased the Colt Dragoon from its holster, cocked it and took aim.


Click.
Clay swore and tried again. Nothing. Suddenly, he felt his skin pale. His powder was wet! Or more likely, his caps, for the powder charges were sealed tight behind a soft lead bullet that would have made a water-tight seal in each chamber of his pistols. None of the pistols was going to work! He thought back to his wish that the Indians would cross the river after him, and the recollection made him want to void his stomach.

Lunging up from the ground, his eyes swept the country around him in a panic. He was in grave danger here, far worse than he had believed. If he wasn’t killed by wild Indians or animals, he was going to starve to death. He had to get re-supplied with the little money he had left. But where would he buy supplies?

He laughed madly. He was hundreds of miles from anywhere—from nowhere—out on the Nebraska prairie where the lonely wolves howl and the buffalo graze. Without a pistol, or some other kind of weapon, he was nothing. Clay Logan was a man without a hope.

Only God could save him now . . .

He sank back down to his rump and settled his face into his hands. He had gotten himself into it good now. All he had wanted was to make it to California, to work in the gold fields, to try to make something of his life, a new life, alone. Now here he was defenseless, prayer-less, a man just waiting to die. From here on he would have no friends. Everyone was a potential enemy, since he no longer had any protection.

Could gunpowder dry out? That he didn’t know, as he had never had to experiment. Maybe he could be saved yet. But how long would that process take if it worked at all? It was only a prayer, but at least it was a prayer. With that thought in mind, he carefully removed all the percussion caps from the nipples of his pistols and set them in the sun to dry.

Now to plan for the worst. If the caps didn’t dry and reach a useful state, his only chance was to catch some passing wagon train and travel with them, or at least see if they would sell him some gunpowder. Even though travel on the trail had slowed down now that many were traveling the water route, still, the heaviest season for wagon trains to leave Missouri was upon him, and he was certain that eventually he would come upon one, if he could get his bearings and get back on the main path. In the meantime, he might be a target for any ravenous beast, or any passing Indian, who didn’t have to worry about their arrows getting wet and not working.

He was thinking about these horrors when his mind turned darkly to the Indians who had chased him, who had killed his partner and friend. What of them? Tonight they would feast on fat young buffalo cow around a cheery fire. They would pass around Rodney Anderson’s pistols and rifle, and the bottles of whisky that both of them had kept in their packs. They would drink and laugh and make jokes about the man they had killed and the man who had run from them like a scared jackrabbit, diving into the river to save his skin. It didn’t matter that Clay had only fallen in the water on accident, had not in fact even known it was there. To them it would look like he had dived in. But the truth was, if he had known it was there he still would have dived in.

But the main question was, why should he let those four murderous savages laugh and carry on at his expense? Why should he let them enjoy the use of those firearms and feast on his flour, his coffee, his sugar? Why, most of all, when he was a man whom death did not frighten, who even welcomed its coming?

He stood up slowly this time, full of resolve. He scanned the landscape across the river, wondering where the braves had gone, and how to get back there. He was going. He was going now. To kill four young Indian braves who believed they could murder and steal with immunity. Tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, those redmen would die. It was only a matter of time. And for the first time in his life Clay Logan would have lifeblood on his hands.

† † † † †

Living in a populated area, driving coaches for a living, Clay had never found cause to read sign. But following the trail left by the four Indians through the tall prairie grass was straightforward. Caution—or fear—gave him the sense to stop now and then, for long periods of time, to survey the prairie before and around him. He did not believe the Indians would expect pursuit. They had seen his cowardly act of retreat, and such they would expect of him. Yet because Clay had seen so many of his own premonitions come true, he trusted the power that lies deep in the unknown facets of a man’s brain. And if he could sense these things, why couldn’t others as well? Surely one or more of those savages were eventually going to feel something, and once they got nervous they would be scanning their backtrail, and the horizon to all sides. So Clay could not afford to relax, not for one moment.

Several times he stopped and pulled his pistols, blowing into the cylinders in case there was moisture in them. He carried the caps in his vest pocket, and when they seemed to be dry, he replaced them on the nipples. He ached to try a shot, simply to see if the caps could indeed dry and be useful again—as well as the powder, if it too had gotten wet. But he didn’t dare. Those Indians could be anywhere, five miles away or just over the next ridge. And even if one round of his pistols worked that did not mean any others would.

Even while knowing it was futile, he stopped to go through his saddlebags for the third time since leaving the river. He already knew he had left his tins of black powder and his powder flasks and tin of caps in his packs. But he couldn’t stop himself from looking again, on sheer hope. There was nothing but a cotton sack full of flour that was starting to harden up and another sack full of jerky, along with two extra pairs of socks, a coil of rope, another of wire, and an extra skinning knife. The pistols would be useless until he could regain his supplies. Perhaps not useless, but he could not take the chance of relying on them until he knew for a fact he was in a safe place for experimentation.

The sky overhead was a brilliant blue, and the clouds but bits of fluff and long, windblown tendrils that resembled the patterns on a beach. Here and there he spied the stragglers of the huge bison herd, and once, off to the far west, he saw a mass of them that was easily two or three hundred bodies. Elk appeared here and there, and one time a herd of pronghorn antelope.

Clay was lucky enough to have a quart canteen of water that had been tied to the saddlestrings on the front of his saddle, and now and then he sipped at it, but it wasn’t enough. He had to ration it until he could get out of his dilemma, and then he could get back to the river. He would try to follow it as far as he could, as long as it didn’t take him too far out of his way.

He saw the smoke toward mid-afternoon. The wind was blowing briskly into his face, yet the smoke was far enough way that he couldn’t yet smell it. At first, he assumed it to be a large campfire. But the cloud kept growing and widening, and soon a large plume was bulking into the sky, blackish gray and ugly. The line of smoke was widening, and with the breezes coming straight at him like they were it was traveling at a good clip. He began to look nervously about. Everywhere around him, for miles and miles, it was nothing but a sea of tall big bluestem grass. It was spring, but it had been a dry one here, and this prairie would light up like a candle. Where did a man run? The only thing he could think of was the river. Did he ride for it now? Did he wait? Maybe the wind would change. Maybe the fire would blow back into itself.

One thing he knew for sure: As fast as that cloud was growing, if the wind kept blowing his way he was going to have to decide, and soon. Did he gamble and keep on, hoping that in this direction there might be a body of water large enough to shelter him? Or did he turn and run for the river?

Even if he had a thinly veiled death wish, Clay didn’t cherish the thought of meeting it by smoke or fire. But he was not happy to think of letting the Indians go after what they had done, either. With a nervous blink, he scanned the country around him one last time, then nudged the horse, and together they moved forward.

What had started the fire? he wondered as he rode. There had been no lightning. It had to be man-caused. So who? The Indians? Why would they burn their own buffalo hunting range? Was it an accident? Did they sense his approach and mean to drive him back? It all baffled him, but contemplating it brought no answers. There was only to ride, to pray, and to hope.

Soon, the smoke smell arrived, and it wasn’t long before it bit into his nostrils acridly. He started to see little bits of ash, tiny black bits of grass that had burned and broken free of the wall of flame, carried on the air currents created by the now tremendous fire. They seemed like a black rain, filtering down all around, dropping on his clothes, his skin, sometimes disintegrating, other times remaining intact. None, of course, was hot by this point. They only served as signs of what was coming.

Ahead, the smoke billowed in gigantic, smutty clouds. The front had to be a mile wide, or at least it seemed to be. The prairie could fool a man, and Clay had been fooled before. Distance here was unfathomable. He licked his lips and turned his head to look back toward the river. It was too far now. He was closer to the fire than he was to the water. And the wind was getting stronger in his face.

At one point along the fire front a fat little tornado made of smoke appeared, twirling high into the sky. It grew and grew, twisting around like a top, bending this way and that. Then it was just as quickly gone.

Clay took off his hat and ran the back of his forearm across his forehead, drying it. This pushed some of the sweat before it, making it run into his eyes. He blinked against the sting of the salt and stared toward the smoke. If forced to make a guess he would say the fire was only a mile or two away at the most. He was beginning to feel that the Indians had built this fire just for him. It was a drastic defensive measure. Who would have believed he was such a threat to them? And how had they known he was following them?

He licked his lips, and his tongue almost stuck to them. He swallowed one mouthful of water and held onto it for several minutes, letting it trickle very slowly down his throat. He could drink a gallon right now. He cursed the savages for what they had done to him and his friend, for putting him in the position he was in when he had done nothing to wrong them. But here he was, and he had no choice about that. The only choice was to let them go or not. And that was no longer a choice.

Taking his bandanna from around his neck, he tied it snugly over his nose, and with the smoke burning his eyes, he rode forward.

Within minutes, even through the heavy smoke, he began to see the flickering orange fingers of the flame. The wind was moving fifteen or twenty miles an hour, and it caused the flames to lay low. But even so some of them appeared to be ten feet high or more. He gulped and wiped the sweat out of his eyes. Could a man survive a wall of fire like that? Did he dare even try?

He looked left and right, gauging his chances of outrunning the fire now. There were no chances. He had waited too long.

Now that he had seen the flames, they seemed to come at him with incredible swiftness. They were raging, licking at the grass, seeming to jump ahead of themselves, five, ten, twenty feet at a time. He fancied he could almost hear them. Clay figured he had one chance, and that was to run into the fire. After all, this was almost one hundred percent grass, so it could only burn so long. If he could brave the wall of flame, and tough out the choking smoke, all he had to survive was ten or twenty seconds, maybe less. Then he would surely come out into a place where the grass had already burned, where the insistent wind had pushed all the smoke on before it, clearing the air for man or beast to breathe again. That was his chance. That or . . . he thought of a way to end his own life, if it seemed too bad. He could try one of the revolvers, to see if perhaps the powder had dried. If it hadn’t, what about his knife? A jugular vein, perhaps? A wrist? It wasn’t a pleasant thought, but it wasn’t as unpleasant as the idea of death by fire.

The fire was only a quarter mile away. It was raging toward him, and he had been moving toward it, closing ground fast. He felt bad for the sorrel. He had no filter over his nose as Clay did. He was the weak link in the chain. Even if Clay could survive this gauntlet, could his horse? The animal, for the past ten or fifteen minutes, had been flashing his eyes and balking, making as if to turn and run. But Clay held him steadily in check, urging him on. Now the animal was in a near panic, and that scared Clay. He was choking on the smoke himself, his eyes burning so badly that he could hardly see. How was the horse still going without the benefit of a bandanna? He took a deep breath to calm his nerves, but it only brought him into a fit of coughing.

And then there was that one miraculous moment when the wind died. He saw the flames rear straight up, and the smoke followed it. Like a man about to jump ship in the middle of a stormy ocean, he filled his lungs and hit the sorrel with his spurs.

　

　

　

† Five †

Clay was not a man to use spurs in such a way. The sharp points on the rowels had a place, and it was to roll across the horse’s ribs, not jab into them. But Clay did not mean for this signal to be gentle. He wanted this Morgan on the run for all he was worth. There was no other way they were going to survive.

The sorrel leaped forward. Even though he knew better, he followed his master’s guidance, and Clay leaned low over the saddle. The lull in the wind was holding. Three hundred yards . . . two hundred . . . one . . .

Without warning, the wind came up again, and now it was stronger than ever. Clay could hardly see what was ahead anymore. The smoke was too thick. The horse faltered, almost falling. Clay fought the tears in his eyes, trying to see. He could hear the roar of the flames now, somewhat like a freight train. He could see the wicked orange wall that danced and snarled and leaped at the grasses ahead of it.

"Come on, boy!" he yelled at the horse. "You get me through this and you’ll have a well deserved name." He ended the sentence with a cough, and he had to cram his eyes shut to clear them of the tears. They weren’t going to make it. They were almost upon the flames now, and the heat was tremendous. It was going to light them on fire. God, help me, he thought. Please don’t let us die this way. This horse didn’t ask to be here.

He sank the spurs again, not wanting to, but needing that extra impetus. And then the flames were all about them, a wild, grasping, super-heated, howling wall of banshees bent on his destruction, intent on dragging him down into their fiery hell.

It seemed like forever, but it was only seconds. The horse was galloping at high speed, no less than thirty miles an hour, and two or three seconds after they hit the flames they were through. Panicked, Clay whirled the horse around, searching himself and the animal for flames. He could smell singed hair, and he knew much of it was his own. But more of it was coming from behind him. He tumbled over the side of the horse, searching him, and was in time to grab the tail with his gloved hands and snuff a place that was glowing.

All around them was a black sea of smoking soot and ashes. Clay grabbed the horse’s reins and ran with him, not stopping until they were another fifty yards from the wall of fire. Then, gasping and choking, and with the sudden dark realization of how close he had come to death, he fell on his knees and felt a huge sob wrack his body.

As the crackling, sucking sounds of the fire began to fade, he forced himself to shove to his feet, and he turned and stared after the retreating orange beast. He had not beaten that enemy, but he had met it head on, and it had not beaten him, either. They had emerged almost as equals, and Clay had only the singed ends of his hair and his eyebrows to show for the adventure. A few loose threads on his jacket had been burned off, but the jacket itself, as well as his other clothing, had suffered no more than a few scuffs of soot.

Clay Logan had triumphed against the odds. And now he was going to kill the savages who had tried to murder him. Nothing could stop him, and if they took his life in the bargain, then so be it. He would not be afraid. He would never be afraid again.

Clay led the horse. He slogged on through the mass of burned prairie, black like corn smut. Where before it had been emerald in waving grasses, come to herald the approach of summer, now, as far as the eye could see, was a tar-colored wasteland, tendrils of white smoke still waving here and there in the roots of shrubs or in the hundreds of old buffalo droppings. It gave the prairie a smell every bit as acrid and overpowering as the musky stench of the buffalo herd.

Clay trod on, and after twenty minutes or more the sorrel began to settle down. His eyes stopped rolling, and his ears quit twitching rearward. Both of them stank of singed hair, of sweat, and of fear. But it was a vanquished fear.

As they traveled, Clay continued to scan the skyline. He had no intentions of stopping anywhere until he found where the Indians had camped, and thus, while they trod the mighty grassland until long after they had left the borders of blackened ground, a magnificent, fiery red, orange and lemon sunset plunged like gold and vermilion and marigolds over the entire western sky. It was like a promise for a better day tomorrow, a sign that in spite of the raging fire that still put up its clouds of smoke in the distance the world moved on, and life could be good again.

The problem was, Clay wasn’t sure he could believe that promise.

He was nearly on top of them before he saw the tiny flicker of flame. It was pitch black now, and under the shelter of night he was once again atop the sorrel. He had not dared ride much for the last two hours before sundown as his guts had warned him that he was getting close, and it is much too hard for a mounted man to hide out on the open prairie.

Now, at what seemed a great distance, he saw that flicker of flame, and then a shadow passed before it. It appeared once again, now steady. Only if he peered closely could he detect that it was not as steady as one of the planets. It was like a tiny orange star, lost in that otherwise black void of night.

The point where Clay now rode was a gentle knoll, it seemed, for even in the darkness he had felt the prairie rise below him. He turned the horse back, and once the firelight had disappeared he picketed the animal, hoping this would keep him from whinnying. The sorrel, ready for a rest and for the chance to graze, dropped his head and began feeding. Clay moved on. He had the Dragoon in its crossdraw holster, and in his left hand he carried his gun belt, with the twin Colts in their pommel holsters. But he had no way of knowing if they would serve him. The knife at his belt would perhaps be of more service, but the main thing was to try to find Anderson’s pistols. They were the surest thing between him and quick death.

It turned out to be God’s mercy that made Clay see the fire when he did, for he had only gone perhaps four hundred yards when he saw a shadow loom in front of the fire and realized he was now less than a hundred yards away. The fire was so small that it had only looked farther away than it was. Sitting down in the high grass, Clay pulled off his boots. He carried them under his left arm as he crept on.

He drew on all his senses. His eyes only served so well on this deep night, but he could smell the fire and the horses, and now and then the strong, rancid scent of grease. And he could hear the savages laughing and talking loudly, talking as if proudly recounting the heroic acts they had done today.

Clay’s blood began to heat, and he had to calm himself by breathing deeply. He could not let his emotions get the better of him now, as he too often had in the past. He had to move carefully, no matter how badly hate was burning in his heart, coursing through his veins. To be careless now was only to go the way of his friend Rodney Anderson, and then what purpose would be served? The Indians would win again, the very ones who had started this fight.

Carrying both boots and pommel holsters, he crouched and moved in, seeking for the horse herd. In short time he could see all four of the dim-lit braves, for although their fire was very small they were no more than thirty yards away. He sank to his knees. Their camp was situated on a high place, and even over the tall grass he could see all their movements. Their gesticulations matched the triumphant sounds of their voices, and they pranced around proudly, one of them waving what Clay assumed with a growing sickness in his chest must be Anderson’s scalp, what little there had been of it.

Clay kept himself breathing deep of the cool night air. He had to have fresh air in his body, had to have the best of his wits about him. What was he going to do now? Where did he go from here? He had pistols that he must assume, for his own safety, still did not work, and he had his knife. He couldn’t take a chance on the pistols, for even if he tested a pistol and it worked, hitting one of the braves, surely the others would scatter into the night. And this was their turf. Once they knew he was here, and all of them were on equal ground, in the darkness, Clay was doomed. Besides, the other chambers might not fire anyway.

So what of the knife? He could use it, but it would have to be after they had bedded down. And did he have the fortitude to creep in and stab a man that close to him? It would be one thing, he imagined, to shoot a man from ten or fifteen yards distant. But how did you put your hand over a man’s mouth and sink a knife into his breastbone? Even in his deep anger and his hatred he didn’t believe he was able to accomplish more than one such killing.

Where did that leave him? As he knelt there and let his mind pick through options, his eyes kept seeking out the horses, and finally he found them. They were scattered out on the prairie to the left, grazing peacefully. None of them had detected him yet, as far as he could tell. The thought of moving in on them, cutting their lines and taking them away with him struck him. This would leave the Indians on foot. But he had read too many accounts of Indians’ infamous ability to track, and their desire for revenge, which was surely every bit as strong as his. He didn’t need to be dogged for the next hundred miles by Indians. And besides, if they had a village nearby they would soon be remounted and be just as alive as ever, and his self-appointed task would be left undone forever. What was more, they would probably ride him down and kill him, and their own purposes would be all that was served.

No, the only thing to do was to kill them here, tonight. But how? Surely the alcohol they were consuming, which he knew came from his and Anderson’s packs, would be on his side. Everyone knew how well Indians handled liquor, since they were unaccustomed to it, and they were surely going to down at least two quarts between them. This ought to make them sleep soundly, and then all Clay had to rely on was his own grit to do the rest.

He sank back, sitting on his lower legs. He breathed deep and fondled the butts of his guns. He would wait. All he had was time, and one thing he had learned was patience. The liquor was making the Indians foolish, for they had set no guard. All four of them were drinking and laughing at the fire. He would wait until they all passed out. Then he would move in . . .

It felt like an hour, perhaps two, but as Clay had predicted the Indians began eventually to slow down. They were stumbling more and slurring their speech, and after a while one, then two of them sat down. One of those fell over and was snoring in minutes. Before another twenty minutes passed, the third man was seated, and the other soon followed. One of them kept pointing at one of the others and laughing hysterically. The object of his laughter just spat some slurred words back and pounded against his chest with one arm, raising his whisky bottle trophy high.

A half hour later, the fire was dying low, and all four of the Indians were lying in various positions about the glowing coals. All Clay could hear was the horses cropping grass. He got to his hands and knees and crawled, then went to his belly. He stopped at fifteen feet. He could hear some of them breathing now, and smell the rank grease that he assumed was on the warriors’ bodies. The white canvas of his and Anderson’s packs appeared, almost glowing orange in the firelight. They were not far from the braves, mostly lying open with items strewn around.

Watching the sleeping Indians, Clay crawled around to the packs and quietly began sifting through the wreckage. His heart seemed to be strangling him. He could hardly breathe. He could find no trace of the weapons, and he began to fear that the Indians had them on their persons. But finally he located a big tin can that he kept the powder in for his weapons. His heart leaped. Here was the answer! He stared over at the bodies for a moment, and all was as he had last seen it. With his heart thudding dully, he calmed himself and tried to figure out how he was going to accomplish the thing he had planned. First off, he slipped a jackknife from his pocket and very carefully punched a number of small holes into the sides of the powder can and one in the bottom. He tried to keep them small enough so the powder wouldn’t drain, although a few grains inevitably escaped here and there.

He had started creeping toward the fire on his belly with the powder can when a thought struck him, and he stopped. Crawling backwards, he got back to the opened packs and searched a little farther until he found a leather draw bag containing lead bullets for his .44’s. With a grim smile he opened the bag and poured out the majority of the bullets, leaving only fifteen in the bag, which he stuffed down inside his shirt.

Taking a deep, calming breath, he started again toward the fire, intently watching the sleeping braves the entire time.

Clay had to crawl between two men to reach the fire, and it took all his courage. As he was passing one, he spotted one of Anderson’s pistols in his waistband. With his senses racing, he reached out and carefully withdrew the piece, and the man didn’t even stir. That might be a problem in the fruition of his plan, but it was something he would deal with in time. He made it to the fire and threw several handfuls of dried grass bundles from beside the fire into it, then placed the tin into the hot coals. Now to get away fast.

He couldn’t wait to move, so he got to his feet and at a crouch started out of camp. There was a whisky bottle hidden in the grass. His foot struck it, and it in turn hit one of the Indians in the foot, making him sit up.

The Indian let out a yell of alarm.

The yell was loud enough, and the Indians’ hard-earned alertness so ingrained, that all four of them started coming out of sleep at the same time and getting to their feet. Clay went to his belly in the darkness at the edge of their camp, not knowing how long to expect before the explosion. It wasn’t five seconds.

The excitedly talking braves, who hadn’t come to their senses in time to even know Clay had been there, were all moving about in the light of the flickering grass flames when the powder can blew. It went off with a sickeningly loud explosion that destroyed any peace of the night, and Clay heard one or two of them scream in pain. He rolled over and saw two of them down, and one was clutching his ribs, where blood ran between his fingers.

The other man was staring at his fallen comrades, unsure how to react, when Clay raised Anderson’s pistol and fired into his chest. But he didn’t have time to see him go down.

As if from nowhere, something heavy struck Clay in the side of the neck. It was with such force that he thought he was done for, and he went to his face in the tall grass. Even in his agony, his powerful instincts made him roll over, and he was just in time to miss being skewered by a lance aimed at his back.

Clay had to fight. Somehow there was a fifth man he hadn’t seen, and he had to struggle against him, struggle until he regained his temporarily vanished faculties and strength. The blow to the side of his neck had stunned him, and when he rolled and grabbed the lance shaft in both hands it was all he could do to hang on when the warrior started trying to pull it away.

Gasping, Clay rolled enough to fling the backs of his heels against the Indian’s right thigh, and he heaved with all of his strength and threw him sideways. The spear stayed stuck in the black prairie earth as Clay rolled and sat up, trying to find the dropped pistol in the darkness.

He felt a mighty kick to his stomach that rolled him over, and a knife blade flashed in the night. Clay reached instinctively and got hold of the man’s forearm, bearing down. He had been at the art of stagecoach driving since the age of four, first with a practice station his father had built for him, and then on farm wagons before going to the real thing. To this long practice he owed his grip that was like a vise, and he felt like his own teeth were going to break with gritting them when the Indian cried out and dropped his knife.

They began fighting, one kicking the other, the other returning the coup, and moved closer and closer to the fire and the wounded warriors. When Clay saw his chance, he lunged and grabbed his opponent by the throat with his right hand, and he squeezed with all his strength. He felt the Indian’s throat being crushed in his fingers, and there was no escape now for the man. He grasped the man’s right hand in his left to hold it at bay, and the man’s left hand clutched futilely at his death grip. Even in all Clay’s fury he still saw the arrow wing past and land with a swoosh in the tall grass. But somehow it didn’t deter him except to make him whirl and fling his foe around in the other direction.

There near the fire one of the wounded braves was struggling valiantly with a bow. Clay squeezed harder and at the same time pushed forward and down on the brave’s throat, driving the dying man to the ground. As they came down he drove his knee into the man’s groin several times.

Clay was terrific in the force of his violence, but he knew if he stayed here the wounded warrior would find the strength to put an arrow through him. It didn’t matter, for the damage had been done to the man whose throat he held, and he was suffocating on his own blood.

Before he could let go, however, the wounded brave at the fire managed to nock his arrow to his bow as he fell to his knees. He aimed straight at Clay’s chest.

Sample Chapters of the 2013 book, KNIGHT OF THE RIBBONS

 

 

Knight

of the

Ribbons

  

　

　

　

　

Dedicated with love to my second son, the "knight of the ribbons"

of this book

Clay Logan Jonas

　

　

　

"Walk the straight path. Keep your head clear.

There are very few situations in life that a man

can’t handle by using his head ."

　

 

　

　

† One †

 

The great big gray thoroughbred was already dead.

But even as a corpse he was the fastest horse Clay Logan had ever ridden.

Clay had heard that a man can run a horse to death. He runs because he has a great big heart, because he loves to feel the wind in his face, and because he knows his master desires it of him. He runs to feel the freedom, like an eagle over a mountain canyon. But a horse with real heart can outrun that heart if he is pushed to run and then never urged to temper his speed. He foams and gasps, and his big, loyal lungs surge for air, but the time comes when there is not enough. That big heart seizes up, along with all his power, and he falls, a fall that, if his owner loves him as Clay loved the gray, will shake the very earth.

Clay Logan had listened to such stories since he was able to hear, to understand and to reason. But that type of thing did not happen to Clay Logan. He was horseman through and through. Another man, perhaps. But not Clay Logan. Everything there was to know about man’s partner, the horse, was entrenched in the deepest recesses of his mind. His daddy had patiently taught him all he needed to know about his equine companions over the course of his twenty-six years. He could feel a horse’s pain, sense when it was struggling, or short of breath, or continuing to run only to please its rider. Clay Logan did not kill horses. Beneath his loving hand, a horse grew eagle’s wings and it flew.

So Clay and the thoroughbred flew on that deepest, darkest of nights. They coursed like the zephyrs, along the damp, rutted Ohio lanes of Defiance County, past the dark farm houses and the lonely country inns, never pausing at the crossroads. The doctor’s house couldn’t be more than five more miles. They would reach it, and then the horse could rest. He would trade animals and reward Domino, his beautiful gray, with a much-deserved night in the doctor’s barn, where the hay would be lush and the corn rich and sweet and deep yellow.

For now they had to drive like an Ohio hailstorm. They had to pound down these moonlit highways like a pack of hounds was baying behind them, bent on tearing them to bits. He just couldn’t leave Samantha in so much pain behind him, great with child, crying out for him in their bed . . .

The horse was breathing in great gushes of air. Froth was flying back at Clay. Now and then it spattered his face. The great ribcage heaved between his knees. The horse had begun to saw back and forth with his neck, surging harder and harder, moving to the yells of his rider, his master, his friend.

There was no warning. Domino was strong and beautiful, alive and running. Then he was gone.

A stumble. A grunt and a vast, ragged, tired sigh. They were going down, earthbound like a spine-shot stag. Instinct made Clay throw his arm up in front of his face. It was all he had time to do.

He hit the packed dirt hard, and the horse flipped sideways and spun him over its side, tearing his feet from the stirrups. Clay landed and rolled, he didn’t know how many times. He smelled the dust and the sweat, tasted the blood in his nostrils and mouth, saw the sky spinning. The bright moon whirled above him, zipping past, and then it was gone. He tasted dirt in his mouth and felt cold ground against his cheek and hands.

Trying to sit up, he fell back down and retched, vomiting and lying almost in it. He was able to roll onto his back, but he couldn’t rise. His eyes spun this way and that, seeing stars. In moments he realized some of them were real, not simply darting about in his dizzy brain.

He again tried to sit up, using his left hand, but it buckled and threw him on his face once more. He lay there and tried to catch his breath, aching all over. Finally, he made another attempt to rise, this time using his other hand. He struggled to a sitting position, drawing his knees up. Looking around, he was in time to see the last great breath of silvery, star-lit steam seep from the nostrils of the gray thoroughbred.

Now he noticed the ringing in his ears. He felt suddenly very sleepy, and he tried to remember what he was doing here. Why was one of his boots off? Where was he, for that matter? He looked around, seeing dim orange lights in distant houses, black trees swaying against the midnight blue skyline. He started to push up again, and this time he saw his left forearm buckle midway, and once again he fell. The fall was accompanied by searing pain like he’d never felt before.

Feverishly, he rolled onto his back and raised his arm over his head, staring at it until his eyes focused. His forearm was bent at a strange angle. He almost fainted.

And then he remembered Samantha . . . Samantha!

He had to get to the doctor. His wife and child were in trouble! Struggling to his knees, he crawled to Domino, cradling his broken arm. He lowered his good hand to touch the horse’s chest as his eyes fell on the animal’s face. Its great brown eye was open to the night, and a big tear had rolled over the bridge of its nose.

With an involuntary sob, Clay lunged to his feet. He almost fell again and had to stand there, keeping his eyes shut for a few moments. Finally, he opened them again and saw in the distance a smattering of dim reddish yellow lights. How far were they? Two, three miles? It didn’t matter how far. He had to go.

Looking around, he found his other boot near the dead horse and sat down on the horse’s side, somehow managing to get his boot on one-handed. Then he looked toward those distant lights again. He started that way, in stumbling steps at first. Then his strides became more sure, and after trying to go at a run for a minute or so he settled back into a fast, long-legged pace that let him hold onto his broken arm, easing the pain. Samantha!

A heart-wrenching feeling seized Clay, and he stopped for a moment and saw a vision of his little wife, dead. He squeezed his eyes shut and forced it away. He wouldn’t entertain those horrible visions. He would force them out of his mind, will them gone. He wouldn’t let Samantha die, a death foreseen, like the deaths of his parents.

He sped on, walking as fast as he could, easily five miles an hour. He could feel his feet getting sore in his riding boots, but it didn’t matter. They could get skinned for all he cared. At all costs he would reach the doctor.

It was half an hour later that the lights began to define houses, little red brick homes and some of clapboard, many with trim little picket fences surrounding their yards. The village enveloped him, many of its buildings altogether dark and still. Dogs began barking, and back in the shadows someone yelled and a goose honked tentatively. Clay sped on. A couple of tom turkeys began to gobble, and they didn’t stop until he was beyond hearing range. What in the world was wrong with those turkeys, awake at this time of night? Everyone knew birds roosted and slept at night.

At last he reached the hanging shingle that said DOCTOR, and he pounded on the door. A lantern began to glow after a minute or so, and a forty-some year-old man in a nightshirt at last pushed open the door.

"You’ve got to come with me, Doctor," Clay managed to say. In his head he sounded completely calm.

"Settle down," the doctor ordered. "Take some deep breaths. I can hardly understand you."

"My wife—" Clay turned and pointed back the way he had come. "She’s in trouble, having our baby."

"Jane, run and get Nathaniel to hitch the dray," said the dark-haired doctor over his shoulder, grasping the gravity of the situation. "Tell him to put Linus and Bear in the harness. They’ll be the best night horses."

Still in a bit of a daze, and breathing way too fast, Clay waited at the door until a black rig came rattling around the corner of the house, a colored man a little older than the doctor driving it. By now the doctor had returned from another part of the house, and he was hastily dressed.

The colored man jumped down. "Here you go, Jim. Drive safe and good luck." He shot a worried glance at Clay.

"Thanks, Nathaniel," the doctor said and sprang onto the seat of the dray. He looked down at Clay, who was struggling with his good hand to get up on the seat.

The doctor swore as he glimpsed Clay’s broken arm, and his mouth dropped open. "You can’t come with me like that!"

"Well I am," said Clay. "My wife is in trouble." With that, he heaved with all his strength and fell across the seat, then pulled himself erect. "Go!"

He pointed the way, and the doctor guided his horses around and flipped the lines at them. They stepped smartly down the street, but he kept them at first to a long walk.

Clay sat there for a few moments with his anger building, then finally turned. "Make them run! She can’t hold out by herself."

The doctor’s hand came down and touched Clay’s good forearm, gentling it to sit on his thigh. "You have to know horses, son. You can’t just run them into the ground and expect to get what you need out of them."

This comment shut Clay Logan up, as a vision of Domino flooded over his mind. He sank back against the seat and clenched his teeth, trying to think the best of what was happening at home. His arm throbbed with excruciating pain, but not as horrible as the pain in his heart.

Although in some corners of the world Clay Logan might have been considered young, he was a well known and respected man in Defiance County and beyond, known as the most natural stagecoach driver in hundreds of miles. They called him, embarrassingly, the Prince of the Road. His grip was like a vise, his forearms like corded steel. He could guide a coach at speed around the worst of curves on the muddiest or snowiest or iciest of roads. He had been readying himself to handle the lines since he was four years old. People would come out to wave at him when his coach passed by, to stare in awe at the Prince of the Road and his four beautifully matched chestnut geldings. He was gallant, brave, a hero of the people. Such was generally believed of any coach driver, but there were those who said, because Clay had the gift, that he was the greatest, the most revered of them all. To Clay, more than any other driver on these Ohio byways, was applied the heroic name, knight of the ribbons.

And Clay knew horses. He was legendary for that knowledge as well as his deft handling of the lines, also known in stage driving circles as ribbons. That was what made this ride back home so long and painful, the horrible knowledge running through his mind that he had killed a magnificent thoroughbred that he could have saved had he but applied everything he knew to that ride. Domino . . .

He couldn’t stand to look down fifteen minutes later when they rolled past the gray. The doctor hardened his jaw but didn’t look over at Clay and said nothing.

The pain overtook Clay’s entire body, and cold sweat stood on his face and trickled down his cheeks, his neck, his chest and back. His body went from cold to hot and back again as they drove, and several times he thought he would have to vomit over the side of the dray. But they kept rolling through the night, and the rhythmic clopping of the big horses’ hooves, the sliding, metallic rattle of the steel wagon tires mesmerized him and seemed to make the pain recede into the darkness of his mind.

The world was black and dreamlike, but he remembered stopping the doctor at his little house, and he recalled jumping, almost falling, from the wagon seat. He ran to the house, where inside several lamps glowed dim. Samantha lay on a four poster bed in a room with pale yellow walls. The sheets were thrown down low, and she was soaked with sweat. And between her legs on the bed it was pooled, while handprints made of it stained the sheets and blankets . . . blood. The blood of his wife.

Clay didn’t want to touch Samantha. He didn’t want to find out yet if she was going to move. But he had to. He reached out slowly, and his fingers felt her sleeve, which was warm. She turned her head slowly, and a smile broke over his face. In her arms she cradled a tiny bundle. Her lips moved when Clay spoke her name. She smiled, and pent-up tears rolled down both sides of her face.

"Oh, my Clay. He would have looked like you. Just like you."

He stared, and soon realized the little bundle was as still as a deserted house. There was no crying, and no rise of breath. And when he looked back at Samantha her eyes were fading, and the doctor, with his stethoscope over her heart, closed his own eyes before turning his head to look up at Clay. He looked down at all the darkness on the sheets and blankets, and in his head he must have been estimating the amount of blood that had left the woman’s body. Her face was ashen, hardly a hint of pink in the dim lamplight.

Her eyes seemed to stare through Clay and up to the ceiling. Her lips moved breathlessly. She gasped a huge breath, and it seeped out. Five seconds later she took another, and it made almost a moaning sound as it left her. It was ten seconds before she drew another, and he never heard that breath leave his beloved wife, for it dissipated in cold silence.

The doctor was standing now, his stethoscope dangling from his grip, both hands hanging at his sides. Vast sadness swam in his eyes as he watched Clay. Clay looked away, and then, exhausted, he slumped on the edge of the bed. He remained dead quiet while the doctor set his broken forearm. All pain had vanished, and only complete loss and nausea remained. He stared at the floor and felt the tears burning behind his eyeballs, but none came.

And then he heard those words that would haunt him for the rest of his life: "If only I had been here an hour sooner, son. I might have saved them both."

Lying in bed some hours later, Clay stared at the ceiling. He was bone tired, but sleep seemed to detest him: It wouldn’t come. Vague, waking dreams caromed around in his head. Visions of Samantha making breakfast, which he knew she would serve him when he awoke from the daze he was in. He remembered that a man had been here, and the man had been telling him why there were splints on his arm and how long they should remain before the swelling went down and they could put on a cast. He looked down, studying the cotton-wrapped splint and once again wondering what it was doing there. Then an angel came down and darkened the room, and Clay Logan was asleep. An hour later, the yellow Ohio sun broke over the bare gray bones of the March treetops.

　

　

　

 

 

 

 

† Two †

Young bones heal fast. And young, numb minds believe them healed before they truly are. Four weeks to the day, on the fifteenth of April, 1863, while the American Civil War was starting its third year, Clay Logan, Prince of the Road, headed west for the California gold fields.

He was through driving stagecoaches forever.

The beseeching of the superintendent did no good, nor did the pleading of his friends and of the reinsmen with whom he shared a kinship. His wife and his child and his dreams were gone. The only aim that remained was to get as far away as he could from the memories in Ohio. His mother and father were dead like Samantha. Ironically, his father had been considered the greatest stagecoach driver around, yet they had both been killed in a stagecoach accident one bleak January day in 1860 when his father overturned the coach his mother was riding inside of into the Maumee River at full flood. Clay’s brothers and sisters were scattered, some vanished. Nothing was left in Ohio to hold him.

He soaked the cast off his arm, then packed some food, his rifle, a handful of books, and all the clothing he owned, put it all along with cooking utensils and anything else he might need on the trail on his three remaining horses, two Cleveland bays and a sorrel colored Morgan with a golden mane and tail, and rode away from Defiance County.

The roads were long and lonely, weaving through rolling farm fields bordered by dense, dark forests of hardwoods, just beginning to turn green with spring. Searching fingers of farmland groped everywhere, fertile, dark soil with new green life emerging from it to mock the deaths Clay had suffered. For America, spring was a time to be on the move, mostly west, and from time to time he passed wagonloads of people, or horseback travelers, or men on foot with knapsacks on their backs. Some of them were without arms, or even without legs, some missing eyes, or bearing some other scar from the horrible war that was raging. They were escaping the war-torn East and the so-called bread famines, headed for the farming country of Oregon or the gold country of Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho Territory and the hope of a better life. Most of them traveled in groups, or in pairs. And most greeted him with friendly waves and greetings. But seldom did he give much more than a nod back, and when the travelers were husband and wife, with children or without, he often could not even bring himself to meet their eyes.

Clay Logan was a lonesome man, his skin turning deep brown in the April sun, with his bristly ash blond hair protruding from under a gray, round-crowned hat. His great coat was gray, too, and his boots and trousers black but spattered with the mud of the open road. Even his neckerchief was gray. The only splashes of color in that palette of drabness were the red of the horses and the steely blue of the rider’s deep-set eyes.

Through Indiana and Illinois he rode, then finally into Missouri, where big mules and heavily muscled farm horses were hard at work breaking still-virgin land, and the dirt mounded away from the plow blades in fertile black ridges, as far as the eye could see to the rolling horizon, or at least until the vast tracts of hardwood timber absorbed the furrows.

Sometimes faster travelers would catch Clay on the road, and sometimes they paused to keep him company. But Clay couldn’t greet them with his old smile, the one his mother had called impish. There was no gladness left in his heart. Only memories of Samantha and the tiny baby boy he had named Thomas Jefferson the morning that they laid him beside her in the ground. Eventually, because conversation was sparse or nonexistent, these travelers always moved on. Then once more Clay was left alone to the cacophony of the wind and the trills of a thousand songbirds that literally filled the trees and dotted the tops of the stronger grasses like blue and red and yellow blossoms.

Then there came the one traveler who seemed not only to sense Clay’s loneliness, but with his sad eyes and drawn face managed somehow to share it. He was in his forties, his cheeks hollow and lined, his lean body stooped a little at the shoulder. He rode a breedless bay horse and led a pack donkey behind him.

The man introduced himself as Rodney Anderson, lately out of Vermont, and at the last roadside inn for many miles he and Clay fell in together. They rode, seldom speaking, studying the skyline and the trees and the wood glade animals that sometimes stood in the borders of the forest in the tall green grass and stared at them as they went by.

After two nights together, they camped in an area of downed cottonwoods along a quietly trickling, shallow stream, the kind that has seen its wilder times and is on the last leg of its journey before emptying its dogged remains into the closest river.

Night blanketed down, and in the twilight the fireflies began to glow and flicker in the grass, and like miniature candles swinging from the boughs of the new-green trees. In silence, Clay built the fire out of dead limbs that lay here in profusion from the last tree brought down by the prairie wind. They leaned their backs gratefully against the huge dead log and felt the heat of the fire in front of them and reflecting off the white, smooth wood behind.

"It’s powerful what a man becomes when he loses folks."

Although spoken in a quiet tone, Anderson’s voice seemed almost cacophonous in the grassy glade. A little wind soughed by, and Clay looked over at his companion, gauging him. Did this man know, or only sense what had happened to him? Was there someone else who felt things and saw things like Clay did, without knowing, without being told?

A minute passed while the branches of the trees chittered together and the fireflies danced and a screech owl cried from a far-off perch. Anderson said no more, so finally Clay leaned far forward and picked up a stick, pulling it from the fire and studying its glowing end. He made it dance in the shadows like a firefly as Anderson drew a pipe from his coat pocket and tamped it full of tobacco.

"You lost somebody, did you?"

Anderson nodded to the sound of a distant whip-poor-will. His eyes narrowed with hard memories. He sucked his pipe and let the smoke seep out his nostrils. "Lots of somebodies," he said.

It sounded gut-wrenching, not just the words but in the hollow way the man spoke them. But Clay was drawn to know the rest, and it was plain that Anderson needed to tell someone, although the pain of it pressed powerful on his shoulders. Clay asked no questions, but he studied Anderson’s face, lowered and stained orange by the teetering flames.

The man felt him looking, and because he understood Clay he knew that was his way of asking him to go on. "My wife left me. Guess I was too old for her anyway, and her old sweetheart’s wife died on him, back in New York. She decided she wanted him back. She took our four young’uns. Headed off west to Buffalo."

The story was tragic, but not what Clay had expected. Someone leaving you could hardly be classed in the same category as having them die. It was another minute before the man spoke again. He had been biting hard on the stem of his pipe, and the mounds of his jaw muscles seemed too large against the narrowness of his weathered face.

"They found them a house to stay in on the way. Abandoned house, I guess. I know, because I followed them. The boy . . ." He paused and cleared his throat, looking off into the night. "The boy, he tried to add wood to the fireplace when the rest was in bed. Must have put too much on, I reckon. Did something wrong, anyway. Set the house on fire."

Clay’s heart had started again to thud with the pain of the story that was unfolding. Now he almost wished it weren’t being told.

Anderson ran a raw, leathery hand down his face, his whiskers making scratching noises that rivaled the screech owl for harshness. "It was the boy that found the fire. But he was too late. Tried to get ’em out. Couldn’t. Burned his legs and his back. The others . . . Well, they didn’t make it."

He shucked his pipe from his teeth and looked at the chewed stem, then thrust it back into his mouth and bit on it furiously, turning his eyes away to some dark corner of the world while Clay waited.

"I made it to his bed," Anderson finally went on, still gazing into the dark. "Folks was at the burned house when I showed up and found the wagon and Meg’s horses. They took me where they’d laid the boy. So I made it to his bed and heard him say he was sorry for leavin’ me. Watched him stop makin’ sense, and it took all them burns three or four more hours to kill ’im. Four young’uns and the woman I used to love, Logan. All gone at the same time. So . . . I headed out. Nothin’ left in Vermont but some crosses on a hill and an old hound dog that couldn’t keep up. Long ways back," he said with a sigh.

Clay could find no words of comfort. He didn’t dare speak at all. He simply sat and contemplated Anderson’s horrible tale. He hung his head and quietly placed the stick back into the fire, pushing it into the coals a little farther.

"You lost someone too, young man. Ain’t none of my business, and I don’t ask no questions. But it burns in your eyes and I know you’re runnin’ fast to get away from the pain. Just wanted you to know you’re travelin’ with a man who knows. I understand a powerful lot about losin’ someone."

The wind crackled the branches around them, and the owl screeched because he was angry that the whip-poor-will had stopped his plaintive cry. The last of the fireflies fluttered and bounced and flickered away. The fire was dying low, and the wind skirled through and stirred the sparks as if with an unseen limb. Heavenward, the stars sparkled like jewels, while Clay Logan’s heart was as dull and black as the inside of a boot.

　

 

 

Three

 

April faded into May. It was a lonesome country now, and Clay and Rod Anderson lived off the land and off the supplies they had loaded on their pack animals in Independence, Missouri. There Anderson had bought himself two mules, and the mules and the donkey packed his life behind him. As for Clay, his horses took turns carrying him and carrying his supplies. The tallgrass prairie waved belly-high around them, and there were times it was all they could see but for a myriad of wildflowers dotting the prairie in nearly every shade of color. Big, odd-looking deer with rope-like tails and huge ears sometimes bounded out away from them, then stopped to watch them pass. He had to go on his slim knowledge of the West, all gleaned through reading, to guess that these were the half-tame mule deer he had heard so much about. But they didn’t seem all that tame, just almighty curious. Flocks of ducks and geese sometimes blackened the sky with their numbers, heading for some lake or pond, and always and everywhere the songbirds trilled in the tall grass.

The pair had to be more careful now, for they rode in Indian country. Both of them had purchased revolvers in Independence, two pairs of Colt .44 Armies that rode in pommel scabbards hung from their saddles. Clay had also found himself a Colt Dragoon that now sat in a crossdraw holster on his left hip, its nearly five pounds, when fully loaded, comforting even though he had never had much cause to use pistols.

Neither Clay nor Anderson was a man of the wide open spaces. Although neither had lived in villages, cities or towns, they both came from the civilized areas east of the Mississippi, where companionship or at least other human souls could almost always be found within five miles of any point on any road they chose to travel. So here in these vast, empty spaces there was an eerie sense of aloneness, of desolation, that ate at them both, that made them shrink even in the face of its austere beauty. This loneliness made them grow closer, and although neither man talked much Clay began to think of Anderson as his best friend—perhaps his only friend.

They were lying in bed early one morning, the sun only a rosy light slashing the rim of the eastern horizon, when they heard the rumble of thunder. Since neither man had brought any kind of cover other than the tarpaulins in which they packed their supplies, they both moaned and pulled themselves deeper into their blankets.

The rumble continued on, deep-voiced and hollow but distant. After a moment, Anderson rolled over and sat up, his hair sticking in every direction. Clay, who had felt him move, pushed his blankets down and squinted up at him. "What?"

For a long moment Anderson just sat there, unmoving. Finally, he said, "Well? Listen to that thunder. It ain’t stopped—has it? And it’s gettin’ louder."

Clay took his attention from Anderson and listened, and then he lunged straight up. "What in the name of—"

The older man was scrambling up out of his blankets, and Clay did the same. Bewildered, they looked around and tried to place the sound. There were no thunderheads in the sky, no sign of lightning on the skyline all around their vast, unpeopled world.

"Better get the horses gathered," Anderson warned. "Whatever this is it ain’t good."

Clay was already moving. He chose the Morgan to throw his saddle on, and within half a minute the job was done. But now what? They couldn’t possibly make up their packs in seconds. If they had to run, they would have to leave all their belongings behind.

Suddenly, Anderson swore. "Which way’s the wind blowin’, Clay? Bring me some matches."

Clay didn’t have time to answer the question. He just swept his hand down to his shirt pocket and came up with a packet of matches he kept there, running over to Anderson with them. "What are you doing?"

"Lightin’ the prairie on fire, boy. Them’s buffalo you hear!"

Buffalo! Of course. Even back in Ohio Clay had heard the stories. And in Harper’s Weekly he had read one tale of the wildlife a returning traveler had seen "out there." Buffalo, technically the American bison, used to wander even through his home state, long before his time. The man who wrote the Harper’s article claimed he and his company had made camp and watched one herd that took four days to cross before them—thousands of hairy, stinking beasts—tens of thousands.

Clay suddenly jerked the matches back out of Anderson’s reach. "How do you know where they’re comin’ from?"

"I don’t," admitted the older man. "But we gotta do somethin’."

Cocking his ear for a moment more, Clay looked at his partner. "I don’t think they’re running."

"Of course they’re runnin’! Listen to that."

"I don’t think it’s running," Clay repeated. "It’s just a whole lot of animals. Makes ’em sound like they’re going fast."

Achingly slow, the sun was sizzling away the darkness in the east, and now a pale blue-gray was flung far up into the night, hazed by violet and pink, chasing stars before it. Both men stood there for a long time, listening, watching their horses, smelling the breeze. It was ten or more minutes before Anderson finally turned to Clay.

"Reckon you’re right. They ain’t runnin’ at all."

Almost at the same moment there was a nearly imperceptible shift of the wind, and a powerful stench of warm, musky bodies, ground up manure and dust reached them, coming out of the west.

Without the man’s words registering on him, Clay began to pull his horse and walk toward the distant rumble and the smell. Leading his own mount, Anderson followed.

They came up onto a long ridge waving with tall prairie grama and there they started to sit down. But the grass came up over their heads. So they climbed onto their mounts, both of which were rolling their eyes back and forth and pivoting their ears. Long before Clay or Anderson could make out any shapes or movement on the prairie, both horses had fixed their ears straight forward and with their eyes opened huge they stared down below. It was another fifteen minutes before the gray light became strong enough for the men. Then Clay just about fell out of his saddle.

He had been straining his eyes, gazing over the miles of prairie below them, trying to spot movement. There were great dark masses of trees down there. But all of a sudden he began to sense the trees were moving. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth without looking at his partner.

"Those can’t be trees, can they? We haven’t seen a tree in fifty miles."

Anderson squinted harder. "Damn, boy, I’m forty-five years old. I can’t see anything I could even mistake for a tree."

Clay had to laugh, and it lightened his heart a little. He didn’t remember laughing in many days.

Then he began to see what appeared to be a great, dark river that coursed away slowly from the rest of the bulkiness below. But then he began to make out fuzzy shapes within that river, and all of a sudden he knew: The river he could see was a tremendous stream of bison! And they were meandering away from not trees, but more bison. Just like in all the fanciful-sounding stories he had heard—bison, as far as the eye could see.

The light in the sky had grown brilliant yellow, with pink clouds strewn across it, when Clay heard Anderson swear in awe over the rumble of the herd. "I’ve never seen anything like that, boy. Never imagined anything like it."

Now that they had both seen them, the animals below became more and more clear. They were even closer than Clay had imagined, some of them wandering to no more than two hundred yards away. There were gigantic bulls with heads covered as if in great black blankets, their horns visible even from this distance. There were red calves that ran to and fro, making wide circles and curling their tails up and away from their rumps as they ran and leaped, kicking their heels in the air.

Clay and Anderson ended up putting their horses back on the picket lines, and they came back and made their way down the grassy slope with handfuls of jerky and canteens to an eroded place where the gray earth was exposed from the grass. Here, the two men cleared grass away in a circle at the base of the eroded patch, then built a fire and hunkered down with their backs to the wall of dirt.

Below them the herd surged and wove, wandering as it grazed. The closest animals were now within a hundred yards, but the wind continued to blow from them to the men, and they were not alarmed. They seemed to take no heed of the tiny fire on the hillside. Stronger than ever, now that the partners were up against the slope with no way for the wind to rush past them, the breezes carried a musky odor of urine and hot bodies and excrement, of crushed grass and dust. That heavy, permeating dust filtered onto Clay’s and Anderson’s clothes and turned them the same gray as the dirt upon which they sat.

The rumble was unending. It still had the tonal quality of thunder, but somehow it was different, and it amazed Clay now that he had been so fooled. The herd had either been moving past for some time, or else they had simply been bedded down there all night, not much farther away than they were now. They stretched from far off to the right, disappearing over that horizon, to as far as he could see to the left. There was no end to them.

It was two hours before either man thought to move, and then it was Anderson. He turned and went back up the hill behind him, moving slowly. When he came back he was carrying his .54 caliber Hawken rifle, and he crouched and laid it across his legs, gazing at the herd.

They could now see light shapes on the edge of the herd, small animals with white rumps and black, curving horns. These tiny, goat-like animals bounded alongside the herd, sometimes grazing, always stopping to survey their surroundings with huge black eyes. Both men guessed they were some of the antelope they had heard of that followed the buffalo herds, assumably for the protection offered by their numbers. After a while, one of them tucked its ears back, and they took off running with a speed almost unfathomable.

Soon, Clay and Anderson saw why. From off to the left they came, walking in the graceful way of cats, stopping, sniffing the air, surveying the herd. Their lengthy, grizzled bodies swept along the grass like earthbound clouds, but even though their legs seemed too long for them, if not for the elevation the two men might not have seen them misting through the tallgrass.

Wolves. The infamous buffalo wolves. There must have been twenty of them, strung out through the grass, some sitting, some walking, some standing and facing the herd. Their bright eyes darted this way and that, their ears and noses working incessantly as they stared, often with mouths open in an expression man would call grinning. They studied the herd for the old, the young, the weak, the unwary.

From his perch on the hill, Anderson sank to his rump and laid the long rifle across the top of his knee. He held high on the back of one of the young cows, and when she stopped and looked over at the wolves he squeezed off the shot. For a moment, time seemed to pause, and then dust kicked up off the animal’s side in a cloud, and she wheeled and ran a few steps back into the herd. Without warning, her front feet went out from under her, and she slumped to her side.

The closest herd members, made skittish, ran around a little or sidled out of the way. But when nothing more happened they went back to their grazing or lazy plodding. One older looking cow ambled over and nosed the dead one, then looked up and around her, appearing very sage for what Clay assumed was not an extremely bright animal. At last, she went on her way, and the dead cow lay there under the glare of the dusty sun.

It was half an hour before Clay turned to Anderson. "We’d better go get that before it spoils. It’s gettin’ warm out here."

Anderson nodded. "Boy, I been studyin’ on that. Since I’m the one with the rifle, maybe you ought to go down there."

Clay looked at his partner slant-ways. After a while he said, "I reckon we’ll both go. Don’t expect to have the fun and make me do all the work."

The other man grinned. "I guess not." He looked down at the fading specks that were the buffalo wolves. They had moved away when he fired. The wolves had not seemed to be much of a menace to him and Clay. But that wasn’t how they wrote them up in the story books. "What about them wolves?"

Clay took a look in the direction they had gone. "They didn’t look much interested in us. They want buffalo meat—not man meat."

"Exactly. And now we have some."

Clay inclined his chin toward the now-distant wolves. "Like I said, they don’t look too interested. I’m more worried what the herd will do when we get close. You stopped to figure how big those animals are? They could stomp us into the dirt if they had a mind to."

"With your reputation?" mocked Anderson. "You must be jokin’, boy. They wouldn’t tackle a man like you. I thought you told me they called you the Prince of the Road!"

"All right—old man. When did you decide to start calling me boy?"

Anderson’s eye corners crinkled up when he smiled. "Bad habits die hard."

Clay laughed and climbed the hill to his horse. He pulled the picket pin and coiled the rope, tying it to his saddle. Then he walked over and started to gather Anderson’s horse, but he stopped. He was thinking hard on what he had said about the bison. Just what would they do when he and Anderson went down that hill? Were they safe? Would the animals run, would they continue on grazing as if they didn’t have a care in the world, or would they turn on the men as enemies? He suddenly decided Anderson’s first idea was the best one, and with it in mind he rode his horse back down the slope, leaving Anderson’s animal picketed and grazing.

"All right—grandpa." He grinned. "I changed my mind. If you promise to sit nice and ready with that rifle and watch my back I’ll go get us some meat. Just don’t let those animals anywhere near me. Is that a deal?"

"Naw," said Anderson. "I decided I want to go down there too."

Shaking his head, Clay said, "At least let me be the first to skin one out. You got to shoot it."

"Well, if skinnin’ a stinkin’ cow is your idea of fun, then far be it from me to argue," Anderson replied with a laugh. He reached behind his waist band and threw Clay his sheathed skinning knife, its handle worn and scarred. "At least use a real knife."

Clay took it slow going down the hill, watching the herd closely, his rifle across his saddle. The sorrel was spooky, flashing his eyes and dodging his head around, his tail tucked. A couple of times Clay had to gouge him with his spurs to move him along. They finally reached the flat, and here he allowed the nervous horse to stop.

He cast a cautious glance over his shoulder at Anderson, who was watching the herd closely. The main mass of animals had started moving away now, but slowly. Perhaps if the wind shifted or curled toward them from him and the horse they would panic, but for now they were still just as curious as the two-leggeds.

Far along the edge of the herd, the wolves, too, were curious. All of them had moved closer in to the herd, where the grass had been trodden down, and they sat on their haunches staring toward the horsemen, obviously wondering what they were and what they were up to. Or perhaps the canines were habituated to eating well on the remains of the dead that men left behind.

It was just sinking into Clay what a monumental sea of bodies surged before him. These beasts must weigh twelve hundred, fifteen hundred, some of them maybe two thousand pounds. The nearest ones, not counting the dead cow, were fifty feet away, and in their nearness they were gargantuan and thick and black. Their heads, beneath the masses of black fur, looked almost comically large for their bodies, and their hips seemed surprisingly compact when compared to their deep, heavy chests, and the mound of meat that rode over their shoulders like narrow barrels.

Up close, it was even more obvious which animals were the bulls and which were the cows. The cows, much smaller and with horns more twisted, were moving back into the herd, shoving their calves along with them. The bulls, in particular the largest ones, had formed sort of a defensive front and were eyeballing the riders with small, reddish eyes. Some of them curled their tails up over their backs.

"You really want that cow?" Clay looked back to ask Anderson.

Anderson gritted his teeth and called, "Never was one to waste meat."

Clay simply nodded. He had just lost his wife and his baby. He had lost his world. What was the worst thing that could happen to him if this went bad? Death? That was something he had begged for during some of the long, lonely nights he had spent over the last month.

Nudging the sorrel, he started forward.

But the partners never got to taste that buffalo meat.

Clay heard a whir behind him and a thunking sound, followed by the boom of Anderson’s Hawken.

The man cried out.

Nothing registered on Clay’s brain until he heard the cry. He was too intent on the expected danger before him.

Clay had always read that the sound of a shot did not generally cause buffalo to run. But this herd was already nervous because of his and the horse’s approach, so at the sound of the shot and the cry, they broke, and the thunder of their hooves was something Clay could never forget. A cloud of dust he couldn’t poke a knife through began to roil into the sky, and first dozens, then hundreds, of beasts were running in blind panic. The vast thunder and the shaking earth beneath him were the fodder of nightmares.

Clay whirled to see Rodney Anderson pitch out and away from the eroded outcrop, his eyes and mouth open wide in fear and shock. Clay started to rein back around, and it was then, as Anderson rolled over in the grass, that he saw the small protrusion from his friend’s back. At the same time something struck Clay’s saddle horn, then bounced off and hit his forearm, causing a searing pain. He was already bleeding when he looked down, and he spun to look back up the hill the way he and his partner had come. There were four horsemen there, their heads shorn except for a streak of upright black sprouting up the middle. They were all dressed in leather and eagle feathers, with red and black paint on their faces. Even their horses bore paint. Clay had never seen a wild Indian, but he didn’t need any introductions.

Even as he looked, a cry rose up from the warriors, and they kicked their horses down the hill toward him. Clay wheeled the sorrel, sinking in his spurs. The Morgan was game, and he leaped into the curtain of dust left by the disappearing herd. They became a part of the earth-shattering thunder. Dust was everywhere around them, shrouding them like the pea soup fog banks of the Atlantic seaboard. Clay could hear the war cries behind him, but the Indians were already dropping back. The sorrel was fleet of foot, and even better at long distance than short. Clay lay low over the saddle horn, waiting for arrows to pierce his back.

The dust was choking him. He tried to breathe through his nose because his hands were too occupied to attempt drawing his scarf up over his face. He could still hear the braves, and they were trying to flank him. Their voices came from left and right, but still far to the rear. A dark shape appeared out of the dusty gloom, almost at the horse’s very feet. The fast-thinking sorrel made a leap into the air, sailing over a wounded bison that must have been knocked down and trampled in the stampede.

They were passing through what appeared to be a huge city of animal holes now, and Clay clung to the horse and prayed. These holes would undoubtedly be the work of the infamous "prairie dogs" and might have contributed to the bison’s fall. But he couldn’t let himself slow down, so he kept slapping the horse with his reins, and they pounded on, their lives in the hands of God—or of fate.

Soon, a wide gully yawned before them, with a way going down into it on his side but a very steep bank on the other. They had no choice but to take to it, and Clay jumped the sorrel down into it. Even after a violent and near tragic stumble he managed to keep him at a run. The gully continued to grow deeper. Clay started wondering if he would be able to get out. Would he have to turn back? Was this his death trap?

He gasped for air, getting nearly as much choking dust in his mouth as coveted oxygen. The billows of dust were brutal. It was so much like the heavy fog he recalled from childhood that he almost slammed into three bison rising out of the gray-brown mists. Somehow the sorrel veered around them.

A couple of whoops sounded from the bank above him, and he knew at least one of the braves had stuck to him, somehow, and was closing in. An arrow flew just in front of his horse’s nose.

Then, before another could come seeking, Clay felt the sorrel take off from the earth and fly. It was like the eagles he had always dreamed of soaring alongside. The sorrel pawed on nothing but air.

 

 

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