The Tall Men (11 page)

Not counting Stark, there were twenty-odd men in his drive crew; eighteen fulltime cowboys, two horse wranglers, a cook and two halfbreed assistants, a jack-of-all-trades farrier and graduate of doubtful
cum laude
“cow doctor,” and Ben and Clint Allison. Not barring Nella and excepting only Stark himself, every member of the Montanan’s trail outfit was as deep-Texas as range beef and retried red beans.

And, again excepting Stark and the girl, the sum total knowledge of that Texas delegation could be spelled out in three capital letters; thusly, C-O-W, with the “c” silent, and pronounced “beef.”

Herd bulls, heifers, sack-wet calves, weaners, long yearlings, four-year-old market steers, six-year stags and ageless mossyhorns alike, they were all “cows” to the Texas hands. If they knew another word they never used it and when they said cows they meant “beef.”

Beef, and the cows that made it, composed their entire lives and learnings.

It followed that when Ben called them up around the late coffee fire on his and Stark’s return to announce that the herd faced disaster, they were set back on their dung-caked heels. Hard looks went asking at ten cents a dozen and the sudden shiftings of sagging cartridge belts and old vintage Navy Colts could have been offered at a nickel a gross with the
market flooded in the first twenty seconds of their trailboss’s report.

To a bowlegged man they were ready to fight. Ben Allison, previous higher education on getting himself and his, out of corners limited to the six-shot course taught in the old University of West Texas, was more than ready. Should the distinguished class of ’66 feel impelled to go ahead with its present evident intent to buck Rule Three and bet into the Jayhawkers’ pat hand, he would gladly open the pot by riding point for the gamblers from Fort Worth.

But once more, quick and brainy as ever, Nathan Stark graded-up to the class Ben had always figured him to have.

The big Montanan stood up, waiting for the men to quiet down following Ben’s fight talk. When they had, he looked at the latter and said very quietly, “Ben, you or Clint, or the first, next man to follow you, will have to walk over me.”

On the trail, Stark dressed in workboots and plain buckskins, wore two .38-caliber Navy Colts, crossbelted. Ben had no more idea than the last man across the fire whether or not the blondbearded young giant could use those Colts—had, at the same time, certain satisfaction that he
would
use them.

“Well, we’re waitin’, Mr. Stark,” he suggested softly.

It was the first time Ben had “mistered” him in weeks. Stark took note of it, kept his words to the point and his back to the chuckwagon.

“You’re not making sense now, Ben,” he began patiently. “You know I won’t listen to you when you don’t. Boys—” He turned soberly to the silent crew. “I’ve got ten thousand dollars of my own money tied up in this herd.” It had been part of the original agreement that Stark would be announced owner of
the herd, and Ben said nothing. “Now Ben, here, sounds like he meant to shove it all in on a gamble to beat the Jayhawkers, and I figure Clint will back him.”

“You’re a whiz at figgers,” grunted Clint, lounging carelessly away from the wood wagon.

Ben at once slid forward.

He had seen his brother’s mouth loosen and that far-away, quiet look of half humor and no-humor-at-all start to get into his eyes. The time to watch Clint was when he started to look like he wouldn’t pull fuzz off a peach. That time was right now.

“Clint,” he warned. “Hold up and listen to Mr. Stark. Comes to cows, it’s you and me. Comes to money, it’s him. You hear me, now?”

Clint eyed first him, then Stark. “Ears widespread as handles on a slopjar.” He nodded laconically to the latter. “Pick me up and pee me full.”

“All right—” Stark passed it off like there wasn’t any dry grass around and he hadn’t seen the sparks about to fly. “I simply propose we ante-up to those outlaws. It will let us get the herd through and sold. That way we can guarantee wages, and with me the men come first. You do it your way you’ll take such losses you won’t be able to halfway pay out.”

Clint lost his grin. Stark wasn’t talking to Ben, no matter he was looking at him while the words came out of his mouth. He was talking to the men.

The Virginia Citian now paused dramatically to prove it. He wheeled from Ben, faced the waiting cowboys. “Boys,” he said humbly, “I don’t care about my share except to see that you get yours. I know Ben means you the same and doesn’t aim to sound like he’s trying to do you out of anything.

Clint shot a side glance at Ben. “Brother!” he hissed
under his breath, “I’m about to kill myse’f one mealymouthed Montana bastard.”

“Hold tight, you hear me, boy” rasped Ben. “He’s only makin’ sense the way he sees it. Same as he alius does. You jest don’t listen.”

“You mean you jest don’t
hear!”
snapped Clint. “You big dumb slob, Ben. Cain’t you see he’s makin’ a goddam hoss’s butt out’n you.”

“He’s makin’ sense. The only way he sees it,” repeated Ben stubbornly. “Leave him be.”

Clint subsided mutteringly, moved back against the wood wagon.

When he did, Stark concluded modestly. “We’ll take a vote,” was all he said.

The men talked earnestly among themselves for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile a rider loped out to the cattle to collect the opinions of the boys on nightherd. On his return, Chickashaw Billings, quondam elder statesman and self-appointed Mother Superior of the drive crew, stepped uncomfortably forward.

“She’s thirteen-to-five,” he drawled sourly. “Me, Waco, Slim, Hogjaw and Charley Stringer sees it like Ben. The
others,”
there was no escaping the persimmon sneer with which Mr. Billings rendered the social distinction, “sides with Stark. I allow there ain’t no end,” he glared at the unhappy traitors, “to what some sons uh bitches will do fer money.”

Sensing the makings of a first-class fight without going one step out of his own camp to find it, Nathan Stark poured on his best pint of peace oil.

He turned to Ben, gesturing in frank appeal.

“Ben, what do you say? Are you willing to go along with the other boys and me? I want you to, you must know that. You’ve brought the herd this far when none of the rest of us could have done it. I’d like to see
you take it on through. But you call it the way you see it. And either way Ben,” he finished quietly, “I reckon I don’t have to tell you how you stand with us.”

Ben tried to think. On Stark’s side lay cold logic and common sense, on his own, only angry instinct. Stark was likely right and him, dead wrong. On the other hand, what about the Gallatin Valley and that million dollars in three years? And all that big talk the night they’d thrown in with the Montanan’s big dream. Something was wrong about Stark’s talk just now. Something a slow man couldn’t get his hand on, but could
feel
all the same. Something in what he said, or in the way he said it—

Frowning, Ben looked up to find Nella Torneau staring at him across the fire. The girl had come up unnoticed by the main group, to stand with Clint in the shadows of the wood wagon. Confused as well as angry, Ben’s first bitter thought was that she’d drifted up to wait out the argument so as to be sure to pick the winner. She’d been a lot with Stark lately, had not had much time for him. It was like her hard kind to just stand there and watch them both without a blink. And wait to see which one she would wind up smiling at.

But the eyes of the Trinity River girl never wavered, and suddenly Ben knew she was not looking at Stark, or Clint, or anybody else. She was looking at him, Ben Allison.

Timpas Creek came back. The cave on the Arkansas returned. The long, happy ride to Fort Worth. The talk on the ride to Bent’s Fort. The hundred hard, bright smiles. The precious scant few of long, soft ones. The low-voiced words and the soft, wide lips that had uttered them there in that Arkansas darkness. All these things came back now, swift and
sudden and bell clear. And with them returned the slow, certain order of Ben Allison’s mind.

He and Stark had both been wrong.

A man read that now in the flash and challenge of Nella Torneau’s violet eyes. And read it just in time. Go on! those eyes were saying. Don’t quit on me now, Ben. You said you would never leave me. Follow me now, Ben. Follow me always.
North, Ben, north!
Remember—?

“I reckon,” he said at last to Stark, “you and me has both been thinkin’ a little short. I was jest reminded of suthin’.”

“Go on, man,” said Stark uneasily.

“Montana,”
said Ben. And he said it and meant it for Nella Torneau.

Stark knew it. He had not missed the exchange of heated looks between the girl and his towering trailboss. Typically, his face remained expressionless, his blue eyes, steady.

“We’re a long way from Montana, Ben. You should have thought of that at Red River crossing.”

“I did,” said Ben. “And was voted down.”

The blue eyes darkened. “You were,” said Stark. “And were again, not five minutes ago.”

“Comes a time,” Ben’s drawl turned warningly soft, “when votin’ won’t do it.”

Stark stepped past the warning in flat-voiced stride. “I take you to mean that time has come—”

He broke off the statement to step slowly back and away from the fire.

In the ordinary course of such impasses in the Southwest, the next words would have been spoken by Colonel Colt. The present course was lifted out of the mundane realm of six-gun averages before either
Ben or Stark could make his opening hammer-thumbed remarks.

Standing as he was, outside the firelight and facing north, Ben saw them first. And seeing them, he eased the forward hunch of his right shoulder, let his tensing right hand fall slack. He only grinned suddenly at Nathan Stark. His two-word answer came with the wave of his left hand toward the darkness north of the fire.

“It has,”
he said simply.

They all saw them now, and heard, suddenly, through the following big stillness, the creak and jingle of their saddles as their crowding mounts halted five yards beyond the fire.

As Ben had said, there came a time when voting wouldn’t do it. That time had not come the way he was thinking of at all. But it had come. And in a way that left none of the late cowboy constituency in doubt of the parliamentary outcome of any debate likely to be held in the next sixty seconds.

Thirteen-to-five, or any other way you wanted to recount it, as of right now Stark & Company were outvoted. And the next election bid well to be balloted Ben Allison’s way—with bullets.

There were no less than three dozen heavily armed guerrilla horsemen standing their sweated ponies short-north of the chuckwagon fire.

Not too long ago there were grizzled oldsters still mending saddles or swamping out bunkhouses in northern Montana who could tell you, from having been there, of the following three minutes around that Kansas campfire. The main idea you would get from their rheumy-eyed remembering would be
that Tom Horn and Bat Masterson and Butch Cassidy “wasn’t in it” with a certain tall, quiet boy from San Saba Texas.

Stark opened the pot by stiffly demanding names and a stating of business from the guerrilla visitors.

He got both, back-to-back.

Three of the bearded ruffians shoved their horses farther into the firelight. Their leader, a stocky, pastyfaced youth of twenty, hooked his jackbooted leg around his saddlehorn, shifted his quid of longleaf Burley, spat into the fire, delivered himself to the required information.

“You’re lookin’ at Carter Jennison, yours truly,” he bowed mockingly. “And Simm Webb and Burris Walker.”

“Any relation to ’Redleg’ Jennison?” inquired Ben civilly. He was referring to the hated war leader of the Kansas Union guerrillas.

“We’re kin,” scowled the youth, not liking the plain inference in the big Texan’s wry-mouthed query. “Where’s that leave us?”

“Waitin’ to hear what’s brung you down on us poor defenseless southern boys,” interrupted Clint smilingly. He moved up with the answer, siding Ben but standing well away from him.

“You won’t need to wait all night,” sneered the youthful Jayhawker. “We’re from Alvah Jenkins, you may have heard the name Jenkins sends you his love and suggests one of you ride back with us, with somethin’ in yer saddlebags besides hardtack and jerky. The goin’ price is two dollars a head, suckin’ calves admitted at half price. We’re told you’re drivin’ close to three thousand head but Alvah’s an easy man and likes round numbers.”

“All right, Jennison.”

Stark stepped toward him.

“How round?”

“Five thousand dollars, gold or greenbacks.”

“We haven’t got it. You’ll have to take a draft.”

“So? That’s interestin’. What bank?”

“The Mastin Bank, Kansas City.”

“Could be. Sounds all right. It’s fer Alvah to say… You comin’ now?”

Stark opened his mouth, but it was Ben Allison the words came from.

He said it soft and he said it slow. And after that the softness and slowness had had their play for the evening.

“No, you Yankee bastards,
you’re goin’.”

The sneer was still on young Jennison’s mouth when the .44 slug made it immortal. Simm Webb was fast. He got his righthand gun almost clear of its leather. And only almost. Clint’s three shots bucked into him, all in the belly close under the heart, nearly tearing him in two. The third guerrilla, with the advantage of the split second Ben took on Jennison, got one shot off. It was wide of Ben by a foot, and for a very solid reason. In the instant of its discharge, Ben’s second and third shots were shattering his cheek and collarbones, respectively.

The blast of the Texas brothers’ 44’s was still slamming back and forth between the close-parked canvas walls of the chuck and wood wagons when its uproar was cut through by the backing volley of five interested fellow Texans.

Old Chickasaw Billings was first into action by a shade, but Waco and Slim would never admit it. For their tardy parts, Charley Stringer and Hogjaw Bivins later apologized to Ben, with the latter insisting his first two snaps hung fire and the former declaring
that Chickasaw bumped him in the stampede for shooting room.