A Vast and Desolate Land Read online

  Stealing horses was the best way he knew to increase idle hours and still have the money to enjoy them.

  But he had a dream.

  Some years ago, when he was riding with an outfit of rustlers, they had a camp in a canyon in the Texas hills. It was a pretty place with a stream and a pool of water, and there were half a dozen cabins there. One of those cabins doubled as a sort of saloon for the outlaws.

  Over the years, thinking about that spot and all the camaraderie he'd enjoyed there, Bernard Swain formed a dream of one day establishing an outlaw town — a place where men like him could go and put up their feet and enjoy idle hours with fellow travelers. He knew what he would name it, too. Profanity, because a man would be free to swear all he wanted in Bernard Swain's outlaw town.

  -8-

  Losing a horse and gun to that buffalo hunter aggravated Rab Sinclair to no end, particularly because he'd had misgivings about helping the man in the first place.

  "I'll tell you, old hawss, you cannot trust a stranger," Rab said.

  Like most any man who ever sat a saddle for any length of time, Rab Sinclair's best conversations tended to be with his horses.

  "And you damn sure don't trust a stranger who's begging for help. A man who can't do for hisself is bound to steal from you the first chance he gets."

  The place in the far distance where the sky touched the ground seemed like an eternity away. It was hard to imagine that somewhere out there was Texas, where they'd been among people when they bought the cattle. The Staked Plains seemed so big and empty, and yet Rab knew there were Comanche out here, somewhere. Likely as not there were others, too. Maybe others moving cattle. Maybe even settlers moving across to New Mexico, although if there were settlers they'd be more apt to be on marked trails.

  The land seemed to stretch out as flat as it could be, but along the horizon there were small rolling hills, ridges that hid canyons, even tall hills. The wide plains were deceptive in that way. A hill that seemed to be just a few miles off might be an ancient mesa thirty or forty miles off.

  A man could not trust what he saw out here.

  And everything appeared so dry — just sand and dead grass. But even water could be found, if a man knew where to look.

  "The Comanche know where to find it," Rab told the Appaloosa. "They fled into the Llano Estacado to escape the Spanish a hundred years ago, and they've known ever since then where to seek out the water. If I'd turn you loose, you'd probably find it. I reckon you can smell it, can't you?"

  Rab rode back to the east, but not exactly in the path cut by the cattle. He was looking for any signs of the Comanche to try to judge their numbers. He wanted to find out, too, if they seemed to be following. That might indicate if they intended a threat to Sinclair's outfit.

  But he found no signs of the Comanche, neither tracks where they'd ridden through nor evidence of campsites. They were like haints that drifted across the plains, never actually pressing a foot into the sand, never bedding down or lighting a fire.

  Some time ago he'd lost sight of the herd.

  It was hard in this place not to feel overwhelmed with a hopelessness, a loneliness that came from nothing but the sheer desolation.

  And still, Rab marveled at the fact that people moved through this empty land. Here he was, driving three hundred head of cattle across the plain just to get them from one place to another.

  A couple of days before, not long before they found the massacred buffalo hunters, he'd seen a herd of pronghorn. It was a small herd, only ten or eleven. But they were there, surviving in this wasteland. They found water, and food enough.

  Low as they were, the ridges and hills hid a seemingly endless expanse beyond them.

  Rab urged the Appaloosa forward, riding another half mile up to the top of a ridge, and there beyond, maybe two or three miles off, he spotted something jutting up out of the flat plain.

  It looked out of place, a bright green spot in a sea of sandy brown.

  "Now what do you reckon that is?" Rab said. "Come on now, let's go and have a look."

  He did not hurry to it, but as the Appaloosa took its easy strides, the distant shape began to take form, and Rab realized that there in the middle of the sweeping waste, a squat cottonwood had taken root. And as he neared it, he could see that the cottonwood was not alone. Beside it someone in some time had built a small rock hut with a timber roof. The timbers had fallen in, and some of the rocks from the walls had collapsed and were spread out beside the hut. But all the same, there it was — a rock hut where it should not be.

  The trunk of the cottonwood was twisted and bent. The wind had stripped the cottonwood of all but its most devout leaves so that bare branches reached out helplessly away from the trunk. The tree was squat, not much taller than the hut, and it seemed to escape the wind by hiding behind the hut.

  When he got to the hut, Rab dismounted. Curiosity, more than anything, made him want to find some clue as to what man set these rocks one atop the next.

  Back in Las Vegas an Italian religious man had lived for three years in a cave on the mountain peak above the town, and Rab now thought of him. Did the ruins of this hut remember some similar man who sought solitude in the name of his God?

  "What do you reckon, old hawss?" Rab said. "What damn fool tried to make a home here?"

  Any mortar that was used in the walls was now gone. The rocks seemed to sit in place for lack of anything better to do.

  As he dismounted and walked up to the hut, Rab saw that it was an entire wall that was knocked over and spilled out all over the ground to the side of the cabin. The roof was caved in and made it impossible to get into the hut itself.

  There was no furniture inside. Not table or chair. No papers or books, not even any cookware.

  Either the person who lived here took everything with them when they left, or others had come along and looted everything out of it. Another possibility was that whoever built the hut brought nothing with them.

  Rab walked around the place to the door to the hut. When he peeked inside, he had a different view from what he'd seen through the collapsed wall. And there he saw the bleached white skull on the ground and bones scattered below it.

  "Whoever he was, he never left here," Rab said to the horse. "Let's do one better than him and get on back to the herd."

  Maybe it was the sadness of the bones in the broken down hut, or his eagerness to check in on the people he felt a responsibility for, but Rab urged the Appaloosa into a gallop.

  It would be an easy thing for a man in this place with no natural landmarks to get turned around and lose his way. The cattle herd probably was less than ten miles from him now, but even from the hilltops, Rab did not immediately find evidence of it.

  Riding back to the west, he eventually came to a place where he could see the tramped and chewed clumps of grass and buckwheat that showed the way to the herd, and over the next ridge he could see the movement of the steers like a brown wave on the empty plain.

  He gave the Appaloosa a pat on the neck.

  "We'll get up in front of them so neither you nor me have to eat dust all afternoon," Rab said.

  -9-

  Caleb Morgan spat at the ground and issued a curse.

  The big bay gelding that Fitz had been riding as a spare mount ever since they started across the Llano Estacado wandered off to the north in search of good grass, and half the remuda followed the bay. It amazed Caleb, working with so many horses and learning their individual personalities, how horses could be so smart and so dumb all at the same time. He was also learning that every horse was stubborn as a mule, but some were subtly stubborn while others were stand-in-your-face stubborn.

  Fitz's bay was stand-in-your-face stubborn. Forever that bay wanted to wander off in different directions, and half the remuda always seemed to follow.

  Caleb let them go. It mattered little if the horses strayed too far in one direction. But then they moved on a bit farther, and Caleb knew he needed to chase them back with the r
est of the horses.

  When he rode off to gather them up, that red-headed sorrel made its way down to the south near a high ridge.

  As Caleb pushed the buckskin and the other horses back toward Cromwell and the rest of the remuda, he noticed the sorrel drop down below the ridge and out of sight. As strong-headed a mare as he'd ever seen.

  So Caleb chased the buckskin back down toward Cromwell.

  "Come on, you old biter," he said, using the pet name Rab sometimes employed with Cromwell. "I can't do all this work myself. You've got to take up some of the slack."

  With the other horses now back with the remuda, Caleb rode down to O'Toole who was bringing up the rear guard.

  "That danged sorrel done wandered off," he said. "She dropped down over that ridge yonder. You keep an eye on the horses while I round her up?"

  O'Toole looked over at the ridge. If the sorrel had gone down the back side of it, she was a mile and a half off.

  "Listen, son, you be careful down there. You see anything, you fire off a round and then get back up to us lickety split."

  "I'll do it," Caleb said. "Don't worry, though. Once I get down there she'll come on back. She just wants to be ornery for a bit."

  "Okay," O'Toole said, but he wondered if maybe he should ride down there and keep an eye on the boy.

  Caleb Morgan was a special project for Rab Sinclair, and all the men in the outfit knew it. None of them were aware of the particulars, except Vazquez. The story, as O'Toole knew it, was that Caleb's grandfather had been killed because he'd helped Rab Sinclair in some way. So Rab took the boy in and took care of him. The men in the outfit knew that Rab expected them to watch out for Caleb. But they also knew that part of watching out for him was allowing him to learn by doing. So O'Toole shrugged and watched the boy ride off to fetch the sorrel.

  Caleb reached the top of the ridge and was perturbed to find that the sorrel was standing down in a sandy wash. The bank wasn't steep, but there was no sense in the horse wandering down into a dry wash where there was no grass for grazing.

  "You dumb old cow," Caleb said, sliding down out of his saddle. "There ain't even grass down in there. What are you doing there?"

  Caleb dropped down out of the saddle and left his horse there on the top of the ridge.

  It was a long, easy slope down to the dry wash. At the bank, Caleb hopped down into the wash, his feet hitting the crusty sand. That's when he realized the horse's lead had come undone and fallen down to the horse's feet. Effectively, the sorrel had ground-tied itself.

  Not every horse would stand for a ground tie, but most of the horses in Rab Sinclair's remuda were pretty well trained. If any of them would wander from a ground tie, Caleb expected it would be this sorrel.

  The three Comanche were hiding under a rock outcrop that hung out over the bank of the wash. When Caleb jumped down into the wash, they were already behind him.

  Caleb never saw the Comanche, nor did he see the club that swung down hard and smashed against the back of his head. One moment he was cussing the sorrel for being a dumb beast, and the next moment everything went black.

  The three Comanche moved quickly, throwing his limp body over the back of the sorrel and tying him to the horse. Then they led the horse down the wash to a place where another dry wash joined the first. They followed that second arroyo up to where their horses were tied out of sight. The three Comanche mounted, and leading the sorrel with Caleb tied to its back, they disappeared quickly into the vast emptiness of the Llano Estacado.

  ***

  The cattle moved in their slow, lumbering way.

  The horses followed out of habit.

  O'Toole rode up close behind, pressing the horses when they needed to be urged forward. He kept a watch over his shoulder.

  Out across the plain he could see the three vaqueros working the herd. He had sight of Vazquez and Kuwatee, and he knew Rab was somewhere up ahead. When he looked over his shoulder, Fitz was there.

  Sancho had pressed ahead of the horses, and the wagon was between them and the grazing steers.

  As rearguard, O'Toole's job went beyond just watching the backtrail. He also had to make sure he could lay eyes on the entire outfit.

  He could not see Caleb, but he did not worry about Caleb because he knew where the boy had gone. But after some time, O'Toole checked back over his shoulder and saw Caleb's mount still standing at the top of the ridge. What surprised him was the distance — the mount was quite a ways back behind the herd now.

  O'Toole wheeled his horse and rode back to Fitz.

  "You seen Caleb?" he asked.

  Fitz turned in his saddle and saw Caleb's horse standing at the top of the ridge. Fitz had seen the sorrel wander off, had seen Caleb talk to O'Toole, and knew where he was going when he rode off toward the ridge.

  "I saw him go after that sorrel, but I can't believe he ain't back yet," Fitz said. "We'd better go check on him."

  O'Toole cast a concerned look over at Caleb's mount.

  "I'll go check," O'Toole said. "You ride on ahead and tell Vazquez."

  Fitz nodded.

  Even as he galloped forward, he suspected they were being overly cautious. But it was odd that Caleb would leave his horse at the top of the ridge and not already be coming back with the sorrel.

  He looked back over his shoulder and saw O'Toole galloping toward the ridge.

  O'Toole was a practiced Indian fighter. He already had his six-shooter in his hand, ready to fire a warning shot or defend himself. Seeing the Colt in O'Toole's hand gave Fitz a new sense of urgency. He pressed the horse forward faster.

  Fitz reached Vazquez about the same time that O'Toole reached the top of the ridge.

  Fitz looked back and watched as O'Toole walked his horse along the ridge.

  "We may have a problem," Fitz said to Vazquez. "Caleb went over that ridge to fetch the sorrel, and he's not come back yet. He went afoot, left his horse standing there."

  Vazquez turned his horse to face back east.

  No O'Toole was waving his hands in the air. No one wanted to fire a shot if it wasn't necessary. A single shot probably wouldn't stampede the cattle, but they all knew that it might.

  "That looks like trouble," Vazquez said. "I'll ride forward for Rab. You go to O'Toole."

  Both men knew that this was a dangerous moment.

  The outfit was fine as long as every man held his position. Plenty of eyes scouted for trouble. Every man knew he could count on the man behind him or beside him.

  But when the outfit started getting strung out and the eyes searching for trouble were all in one place or the man who was supposed to be behind was off somewhere else — it meant the outfit as a unit was weak.

  Fitz knew it from his time in the war. He understood intuitively how to position troops and hold defensive positions. Even as a cavalryman whose job was to attack, Fitz knew how a smaller unit could hold ground and defend.

  Vazquez knew it from riding with posses going after outlaws who were bunkered down in the hills above Las Vegas.

  O'Toole knew it from his Indian fighting days.

  By abandoning their positions, they were leaving the main body exposed to attack from the side or behind. But there was no choice. They had to find Caleb.

  Fitz reached O'Toole before Vazquez could get forward to Sinclair.

  "Hell. He ain't here," O'Toole said. He pointed to the dry wash down below the ridge. "I reckon he walked down into there, but I don't see him at all."

  Fitz rode his horse along the ridge, looking out past the wash in search of some sign of where Caleb might have gotten to.

  "Why'd he leave his horse? That's what I don't understand."

  "Maybe he saw the sorrel and thought he could get to it," O'Toole said. "Maybe it ran off and he ran off after it."

  "On foot?" Fitz said. "It don't make sense. I sent Vazquez to go and fetch Rab. We need him or the half-breed to come and look at the tracks."

  O'Toole checked forward but did not yet see Rab riding back to t
hem.

  "We're losing time," O'Toole said. "If something's happened to him, the sooner we get to him the better."

  "Can you track him?" Fitz asked.

  "Maybe a little," O'Toole said. "But not so much as Rab or the half-breed could do."

  "Then wait," Fitz said.

  In another moment they could see Rab, thundering toward them on the black-spotted Appaloosa. Vazquez was not with him. He'd only rejoined the outfit an hour or so ago.

  As he crested the low ridge he reined in the Appaloosa.

  "How long has it been since you saw Caleb?" Rab asked.

  "Maybe a quarter of an hour, Rab. Between a quarter of an hour and half an hour, I reckon," O'Toole said. "I mean, you see how far we've come."

  Carlos and the other vaqueros had the cattle moving along at a good pace just now, and they had been all through the afternoon. The cattle seemed as eager as the riders to get ground between them and the Comanche.

  "Hold my hawss," Rab said, tossing the reins of the Appaloosa to O'Toole. He slid down out of the saddle and began looking at the ground around Caleb's horse. "Fitz, you'd best get back in position and keep the outfit moving along. Keep a watch on them horses and don't let them stray."

  "All right, Rabbie," Fitz said, wheeling his horse and moving back toward the remuda.

  "Tell me what happened," Rab said to O'Toole.

  "About half the hawsses wandered off to the north a ways, and Caleb rode to get them. But that sorrel hawss, you know the one, she came off this way on her own. She dropped down below this ridge here, and we couldn't still see her. Caleb got the others back in line, and then he rode down here to go after the sorrel. He dismounted here on the ridge, and the last time I saw him, he was afoot down the slope toward the wash there."

  Rab was already walking down toward the wash. His eyes were on the ground.

  Now he stood at the bank of the wash.

  "Comanche got him," Rab said.

  "You sure?" O'Toole asked. "I didn't see nothing."

  "I don't know if they lured the sorrel, or if she just willingly helped them. But they had her standing right there in the wash, probably ground tied. I've got Caleb's footprints here, he jumped off the bank into the wash to fetch her. Good clear prints. Then I've got prints from at least two men right here. Soft prints, but I can see 'em. Maybe it was three men. They grabbed him and took him to the sorrel. Tied him to the hawss, I would guess."