A Vast and Desolate Land Read online

  A VAST AND

  DESOLATE LAND

  ◊

  ROBERT PEECHER

  For information the author may be contacted at

  PO Box 967; Watkinsville GA; 30677

  or at mooncalfpress.com

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to actual events in whole or in part are purely accidental. None of the characters or events depicted in this novel are intended to represent actual people.

  Copyright © 2018 ROBERT PEECHER

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 9781723844218

  For Harrison,

  A fine traveling partner

  Through a Vast and Desolate Land

  CONTENTS

  -1-

  -2-

  -3-

  -4-

  -5-

  -6-

  -7-

  -8-

  -9-

  -10-

  -11-

  -12-

  -13-

  -14-

  -15-

  -16-

  -17-

  -18-

  -19-

  -20-

  -21-

  -22-

  -23-

  -24-

  -25-

  -26-

  -27-

  -1-

  Distance, like time, played havoc in this place.

  In the distance, a small herd of pronghorn grazed on what grass they could find.

  The distance deceived the eye on the flat, open plain of the Llano Estacado. The pronghorn might be a mile or maybe half a mile, but probably not more than two miles. The Llano Estacado existed as a vast emptiness where distance deceived and time passed according to no schedule.

  Skinner Jake gave a disgusted glance at his Sharps rifle and spat brown juice onto the crusty sand at his feet. With respect to the pronghorns, the empty cartridge box rendered that Sharps rifle as useless as a stick. So Skinner Jake just watched the pronghorn meander, and he spat brown juice.

  Distance deceived.

  To the south thirty miles, or maybe sixty, dark clouds melted to the earth in the first sign of water Skinner Jake had seen in days. So he picked up his Sharps and the possibles bag that was running out of defenses against possibilities. The one he cradled in the crook of his elbow, and the other he slung over a shoulder.

  South to water.

  Those who knew him still called him Skinner Jake, though he'd not cut the hide off a buffalo in more than two years. Buffalo skinning proved to be a filthy way to make a living, but he done it long enough to earn the nickname. Cut and peel, slice with the sharp knife, careful not to damage the pelt, peel back the hide. Long, hot days on the open plains tracking sign with one of the best buffalo runners who ever shot a bull. He could put down ten or fifteen from a herd in short order. Lank Hawkins they called that man. Ol' Lank, tall and skinny with just a few good teeth and a patch of bald on the front of his head where an Injun had tried to take his top knot. He didn't much take off his hat, even in a church, but mostly Ol' Lank just stayed away from places where he might be conspicuous for his head gear.

  Lank Hawkins taught Skinner Jake all he ever knew about buffalo hunting, and Skinner Jake got to be pretty good with a rifle. Though on this current trip, he'd hired on to skin, not shoot.

  Skinner Jake considered that he'd be pleased right now for Lank Hawkins' company.

  Them pronghorns had water. They would not be here if there warn't water to be had nearby. But finding it could be just as impossible as using that empty Sharps to bring down one of them pronghorns.

  Skinner Jake found himself in a sorry spot, and just now it seemed a small likelihood that he'd make it out.

  A month ago, he'd come out on the Staked Plains with a dozen other men. Four wagons, two horses a piece for all the men. They intended to cross the Llano Estacado in search of buffalo. They brought with them ample supplies for the trip. They wandered the Staked Plains without seeing more than a small herd of buffalo. When they saw it, they brought them down and skinned them up, but it was too small a load in the wagon to turn back. So they kept wandering and seeking.

  Then the Comanche attacked.

  The band of buffalo runners scattered from their camp, and Skinner Jake couldn't say what happened to some of the others. Except for a boy called Dave. Dave took a bullet in the thigh. Jake helped Dave, and together they fled the marauders, finding refuge in a deep wash.

  Most, maybe all the rest, lost their scalps and their lives.

  Skinner Jake knew for sure that the Irishman Murphy was killed. He saw that happen. And Murphy's son, too. Father and son died together as they fled on foot across the open plain. A half dozen mounted Comanche rode down on them, speared them, dismounted, and committed slaughter.

  Skinner was lugging Dave, running, falling, pulling Dave back to his feet. When he saw the Comanche ride down on Murphy and his son, he pulled Dave off in a different direction. That's when they fell into the wash. In his panic, Skinner never even saw it. He just fell and pulled Dave with him.

  With just their hands and Skinner's knife, they dug into the bank of the wash and pulled themselves in as far as they could.

  It was enough.

  The sounds of the slaughter reached them. Skinner Jake believed now that the screams of his companions would be with him as long as he lived, even if he survived this.

  When it was over and the Comanche were gone, Dave was dead. He bled to death hiding their in the dugout embankment of the wash.

  But Skinner Jake survived the initial attack. He picked through the wreckage left behind and found his own Sharps rifle. The Sharps was in tall grass, but not difficult to find. It perplexed him why the Comanche did not take it. But it hardly mattered because they took the powder and balls.

  For more than a week Skinner Jake wandered, trying to find his way back to anything like civilization. But there were no trails here, no roads, no signs that pointed to anything. And the vast, high plain whipped its wind and battered him. The nights were so cold he could only sleep from complete exhaustion, and the daytime sun seemed to bake his face.

  Still, the thing he feared most was coming upon the Comanche.

  The Llano Estacado appeared flat and stretched off to unimaginable distances, but Skinner Jake knew that across the level plain there were depressions and washes and hollows where the ground sank away. But even in these places he could find no water. No puddles left from a recent rain. No river flowing. The wind whipped into even the low places and worked together with the sun to steal every bit of water that might sustain life.

  Common sense and the weakness in his bones told him that the rain to the south was too far. He could not survive that trek.

  When Skinner Jake gave up, he found a pencil and some paper in his bag. This was not the way he wanted his life to end. It was a thing he feared, dying alone of exposure and thirst and hunger, and yet here he was in the face of that thing.

  He did not have much in the way of letters, but he knew which letters made which sounds and could scratch them out on paper well enough to make himself understood.

  With hands blistered and skin cracked from the constant wind, Skinner Jake made his final letters.

  "I am noin by Skinr Jak. Skinr of buff. I cum to this plays with a band o men, but they all kilt by comanchee. I run and git cleer o them, but am now lost and out o wata and fuud. Wil di heer. If u find my bodee, take nif and sharps ryfel and buree me. All hop gon. Shud not hav cum heer. Ant no buff inee how."

  He stuffed the note inside his shirt pocket and then crawled down into a shallow wash with a sandy bottom. There he stretched out on the ground, sheltered a bit from the wind, and Skinner Jake used his possibles bag as a pillow.

  Ther
e, Skinner Jake waited to die.

  -2-

  Two men picked through the wreckage left by the Comanche.

  Bodies were strung out for a mile around the busted up wagons. Dead horses and dead men, both.

  Clothes blew out across the Staked Plains — a red bandanna turning somersaults across the grass first caught their attention, and they followed its path to a high spot where they could see more colorful clothes and the wagons.

  Caleb Morgan turned his head and wretched when he discovered the man tied spread-eagle, his wrists at the top of a wagon wheel and his ankles staked into the ground. They'd built a fire at the V where the man's legs were spread, cooking his genitals while he was still alive.

  "It's hideous," Caleb said, his stomach still turning and the bile of fear in his throat. The horror of it repulsed him, but deep down Caleb's fear that the same might happen to him is what turned his stomach so violently.

  Most of the others among the dead went faster. A bullet or lance in the back, their hair cut away.

  "Comanche don't want the white man coming into this place," Rab Sinclair said. "These bodies are a warning to stay away."

  "Maybe we should not be here," Caleb said.

  "Maybe not."

  They looked around at the remains of the wagons and the men.

  "Buffalo runners," Sinclair proclaimed. "Come up here hunting buffalo."

  "How can you tell?" Caleb asked. In the time that he'd lived on Rab Sinclair's ranch in New Mexico Territory, Caleb Morgan had come to realize he had an opportunity to learn some rare lessons. Sinclair's unusual upbringing and his travels gave Caleb access to expertise that some men spent all their lives trying to obtain without every getting close.

  "Look at what's scattered around. Sugar and flour, jerky, gunpowder and lead balls. The Comanche would not have wasted so much of the sort of thing they want if there'd not been plenty more to loot. Every sack of sugar or salt you see is another two bags the Comanche took with them. These men came here with food enough to feed themselves for weeks. No women or children, so they ain't homesteaders. Most of them ain't wearing holsters, so they carried rifles and not six-shooters. This is a hunting party."

  Rab pointed to the baggage scattered around.

  "If you pile all their belongings up and even if you double it figuring the Comanche took that much more, you've still only got enough provisions and supplies to fill one of these wagons. That means they was planning to bring something back off the Plains with them. Hides. There ain't nothing else up here on the Staked Plains to hunt and skin other than buffalo, and precious few of them."

  The older of the two, Sinclair, followed tracks in the crusty sand. Two men fled this way. The tracks led some distance away from the wagons, and ahead of him Rab saw that the tracks disappeared down into a dry wash, so narrow that it was barely visible even from just a few yards away. Rab dropped down into the wash and found the body of a man who'd bled out. The body was hid well enough in a hastily dug out hole in the side of the embankment. This body, unlike the others, still had its hair.

  Rab stood up and called to Caleb Morgan, "One of them got away."

  Caleb hurried over to where Rab was standing down in the wash.

  "How do you know?" Caleb called.

  Rab pointed to the tracks. "Two men ran this way. One helping the other. If you look, you see tracks from just three feet, occasionally a fourth foot where the man dropped a wounded leg. In the confusion of the attack, these two got away. They ran here, to this wash, and dug themselves into the bank. The one with the wounded leg died here."

  Rab nodded down toward his own feet. "He's still here. Still has his hair. The Commanche'd have scalped him, even if he was dead when they found him. But they didn't find him. I reckon the other that was with him must have waited until dark, or until the Comanche were gone, and then cut a trail out of here."

  Caleb now stood over Rab, looking into the wash where he could just see the body.

  Rab reached up and Caleb gave him a hand out of the wash.

  "Should we look for him?" Caleb asked. "The one who survived?"

  Rab looked at the sky above them, searching for some answer. The crows had gotten to the bodies here. Some were circling, angry that Rab and Caleb came along to disrupt their free meal. Others were hopping along on a ridge not far away. A murder gathered around a dead horse farther away from most of the bodies and was having a feast.

  But Rab saw no other birds in the sky that might indicate the location of another body.

  Far to the south rain dissolved down out of the sky. South was not their direction.

  Rab Sinclair tightened his lips, his face grim and severe.

  "He might head for water, but that's probably fifty miles from us. We've got work to do. If a man comes to a place like this, he needs to be prepared to get hisself out of it. We ain't nobody's rescue party."

  Caleb nodded.

  "What about these? Should we bury them?"

  Rab shook his head. "The Comanche left these as a warning. We bury their warning, I promise you they'll use us to make the next one. Best get back to the others and keep moving."

  They crossed again over the killing field. Caleb did not like to look at the bodies and see the grotesque places where their hair was cut away.

  "Another one survived," Rab said, after looking at some tracks on the ground. "Look here."

  They were near one of the wagons now, and Rab showed Caleb footprints that crisscrossed the field where the buffalo hunters had been slaughtered.

  "He hid up under that tarp," Rab said. "You can tell, by the pattern of the tracks, he walked through here after it was all over."

  "Maybe it was one of the Comanche," Caleb said.

  "Look here," Rab said, drawing a circle in the sand around one of the tracks with his finger. "That's a boot heel, son. This was a white man. He came out from under that canvas tarp and he walked around, probably picking up supplies for hisself. And then he walked off to the south. Didn't run, neither. He stayed up under that tarp while all his outfit was killed around him, waited for the Comanche to leave, and then he walked away, easy as you please."

  "What do you make of that, Rab?" Caleb asked. "A man hiding like that instead of standing to fight?"

  Rab Sinclair stretched his neck.

  "You can't fault a man too much for doing what he has to do to survive, Caleb," Rab said. "I reckon it's unfair to judge someone when you ain't been in their place. But I'll say this about it. I wouldn't want to call a man like that my friend. If I'm riding with a man, I'll fight for him and expect him to do the same for me."

  "Even if it means getting killed?" Caleb asked.

  "You pick the right friends to ride with and you won't get killed."

  The two men walked back to where they'd ground tied their horses. Sinclair was riding a black-spotted Appaloosa and Caleb Morgan was mounted on a buckskin horse that was almost as good as Rab's roan.

  They'd backtracked that bandanna for more than two miles, and when they topped a low ridge and could see the dust from the three-hundred head of cattle, Rab Sinclair felt some relief.

  "Them Comanche that attacked the buffalo runners are going to gnaw on me," Rab said. "They'll care less about our steers than they did the salt and flour them buffalo runners had, but that was a war party what butchered those men. They're hunting scalps. We'll double up the watch and maybe enliven our pace."

  Caleb nodded. His stomach was still turning for fear, and if Rab Sinclair had Comanches gnawing on him, that was a bad sign.

  ***

  The outfit Rab Sinclair chose to drive the cattle out of Texas was a motley bunch, but Caleb Morgan had enjoyed their company. They were probably too many men for driving three hundred head of cattle, but even before they left New Mexico to go into Texas, Rab had warned Caleb there could be Injun trouble. Having a couple of extra men made sense.

  Caleb, being the youngest in the outfit, took on the job of wrangling the horses. Nine men with two spare horses for
each man meant that Caleb had spent the last three months taking care of eighteen horses at any given time. There were also the spare mules for the chuck wagon, but Sancho Biscuit managed his own mules.

  Sancho Biscuit drove the chuck wagon and cooked the meals. They called him "Sancho Biscuit" because he could not, or would not, get any rise out of the biscuits he made. For years Sancho had cooked for one outfit or another, and always there were Southern men in the outfit who wanted biscuits the size of a cat's head. But flat bread was the best Sancho would do.

  "He's a generally poor cook," Rab Sinclair told Caleb on one of their first nights out of New Mexico, "but he speaks a little Comanche, and that may mean more to us than the taste of his vittles."

  Rab hired on three Mexican vaqueros — Miguel, Jorge, and Carlos. They did the bulk of the work with the critters, with Carlos riding almost like the trail boss.

  A fellow called Fitzpatrick, who'd fought in the War, and another man named O'Toole who was a former army cavalryman and Indian fighter, rode at the back of the pack, even behind Caleb and the remuda. They were gunmen who Rab hired on to deal with trouble, whether it was bandits or rustlers or Comanche. Fitzpatrick and O'Toole were the rearguard.

  Up in front were the other two men, Vazquez and a half-breed Apache named Kuwatee.

  With Sancho Biscuit and Rab, it made for an outfit of ten men. It was too many for a herd of just three hundred, but Rab Sinclair was feeling careful.

  The herd consisted of cows and a few bulls, but mostly steers that Rab bought cheap to graze on his ranch. When they were good and fat, Rab was going to sell them to the army at Fort Craig. Rab's intention with the cows and bulls was to grow his own stock with some hardy Texas longhorns.

  "Ride down and let O'Toole and Fitzpatrick know about what we saw up there," Rab said. "They don't need the particulars, but let them know a band of buffalo hunters were attacked and killed. Also, let them know that one man survived it. Tell them to keep a lookout. If we see him, we'll take him with us."

  Caleb returned to his horses, strung out and grazing at the back of the herd. O'Toole and Fitzpatrick had helped him manage the horses anytime they got too strung out, and being in the back with the remuda, they'd gotten to be friendly with Caleb.