Even Jimmy seemed to revere the silence that sprang up between the two men, and Dag could hear him draw in a breath through his nostrils as if to inhale all the aromas of morning. Somewhere, far off, a cockerel crowed and the moment passed. The carnivorous maw of the sky bled out, turning to a paler crimson, and where the stars had been moments before, a yellow sky built momentum like some encroaching desert reflection in a celestial mirage.
“You still set on doin’ this, Dag?”
“I am.”
“It’s not goin’ to work. None of it.”
“Look, Jimmy, we been all over this coon. I rode it last year. I got a buyer. I know the way I’m goin’, and I got others throwin’ in with me.”
“You didn’t ride it with four thousand beeves, Dag—all of ’em hungry and thirsty and a whole hell of a lot more.”
Dag wasn’t tired of dreaming of the trail drive. He was tired of talking about it, though. He had made up his mind. He knew it would work.
“What more, Jimmy?”
“You goin’ up the Palo Duro still?”
“All the way to Amarilly, Jimmy. Purt nigh.”
“Comanches still own the Palo Duro. A lot of it. The Rangers ain’t drive ’em out and no one else neither.”
“We’ll handle that if it comes up.”
“You’re leavin’ way too early,” Jimmy said.
“We may be gone a year or two. I don’t know.”
“That’s just it. You don’t know. This time of year, them rivers are goin’ to be swolled up like a plantation mammy’s black belly. You’re goin’ to drown beeves and drovers and wind up with nothin’ but an empty skull with long horns.”
Dag sucked in a breath. Jimmy always sang the same old tune. He was a horse wrangler and didn’t know much about cattle. And he hadn’t ridden up to Cheyenne with Dag last year.
“Abilene would be better. Closer. Or even Sedalia up in Missoura. You’d get top dollar either place.”
“The buyer in Cheyenne’s offerin’ me more.”
“He won’t buy cattle what ain’t there, Dag.”
Dag sipped more of his coffee. He was beginning to itch inside. Impatience. That was something he always had to fight against. He had been over the whole drive in his mind so many times, it often seemed as if he had already driven a large herd up to Cheyenne and come back flush with cash.
“Let’s finish the coffee up and get after it, Jimmy. We should finish the count by noon and then I can call in the other hands for the gather.”
“That’s another thing, Dag. You can’t count on nobody. Nobody round here, leastways.”
“I got commitments from a bunch of good hands.”
“I’m not talkin’ bout them so much as Deuce. That hombre’s got greed writ all over him. And he don’t trust nobody ’cept hisself.”
“Deuce will fill out the herd with his own cattle. We’ll meet the requirements of the Cheyenne buyer.”
“He wants thirty-eight hunnert head, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, right now, you’ll scrape the brush from here to the Rio Grande to come up with thirteen hunnert head.”
“Deuce says he wants to run up twenty-five hundred. I plan on rounding up another four or five hundred head. We’ll drive over four thousand head up, and wind up, maybe, with the number the buyer wants.”
“Ha!” Jimmy snorted. “You could lose that extry five hunnert in one little old stampede. Not to mention them what drowns or gets snakebit, breaks their legs in prairie dog holes and such.”
“I’m mighty grateful for your optimism, Jimmy. It really warms the cockles of my heart.”
“Your heart ain’t got no cockles, Dag. And your head ain’t got no sense, neither. You watch. Deuce is a-goin’ to put the boots to you, one way or another.”
Dag had thought about that too. Adolph Deutsch was a hardheaded German who had built up a pretty fair herd of nearly ten thousand head of cattle. But he was a suspicious man and difficult to deal with. The cowhands had trouble with his last name and called him “Deuce,” but there was another reason of the appellation—one that said something about Deutsch’s character, perhaps. Adolph ran a mercantile store, a kind of trading post. He carried supplies for a lot of the outlying ranchers, but his prices were on the high side. People who bought from him said if something was marked a dollar, he would say the price had gone up and double it. “He deuces everything,” the ranchers and cowhands said, and they weren’t far off, Dag admitted.
The sun was edging up over the eastern horizon when Dag finished his coffee. He set his cup down. Jimmy took a final swallow and tossed the rest of his on the ground, next to the fire ring.
“We’ll come back and maybe cook some breakfast,” Dag said, starting toward his saddled horse.
Then the silence was shattered by a high-pitched scream that curdled the air and lifted the hackles on the backs of both men’s necks.
That was when both Jimmy and Dag stopped dead in their tracks.
“Egod, Dag, that sounded like Little Jake.”
“Shit,” Dag said, and then he was running toward his horse.
Chapter 2
The scream came from somewhere to the west of their camp. Dag was in the saddle first, and he dug smooth-roweled spurs into the flanks of his sorrel gelding, heading for one of the gullies that marked the land and left humps of earth in low mounds as if some giant burrowing animal had dug below them. The scream lingered in his brain like a tattered ribbon of sound, chilling, gut-wrenching.
Dag knew Jimmy was right behind him. He could hear the pounding hooves of the other man’s little buckskin pony, the crack of dry branches breaking, the thud of iron shoes on hard pan. The sun had cleared the horizon; horse and rider cast a long, eerie shadow in front of Dag, a dark horseman riding through a dream, through golden sand, racing, racing, but never catching up.
He saw something waving, something bright and white, white as bone, caught in the glare of the sun just above the ground. But as he rode up, Dag saw that someone was in one of the gullies waving a shirt to attract attention. He drew his six-gun, a converted Remington New Army .44 that took cartridges instead of percussion caps, and rode into the gully.
Little Jake was standing near something dark and ugly on the ground. His face was drained of blood and Dag could see that the kid was scared. His shirt—the one he had waved above his head like a flag of surrender—was off.
“Dag, it’s Little Jake,” Jimmy hollered behind him.
Dag reined his gelding to a halt and slid from the saddle as the horse braked. “Little Jake, what have you got yourself into?” he asked as he ran up and grabbed one of the youth’s arms, the one waving the shirt.
“God amighty, Dag, just look at him. I tried to bandage him up, but the blood just kept . . . kept . . .”
The young man broke down in tears, crumpling to Dag’s feet.
Dag looked at the shirt, saw that it was spattered with blood. The blood was still wet.
“You just take it easy, Little Jake.”
Jimmy ran up then and hunkered down to see what was wrong with Little Jake.
Dag stepped over to the dark shape and saw that it was a man’s body slumped over a rock, an arrow sticking from his back and another through his neck like a skewer.