Blood and Gold

It was no secret in Dodge that I’d ridden out of town with thirty thousand dollars. That was money enough to tempt a man, especially the shifty border trash, gamblers, dance hall loungers, goldbrick artists and the like, who migrated north with the herds every spring to Dodge and Caldwell and Wichita, eager to separate a drover from his hard-earned wages.

And there were others, much more dangerous, dry, hard-eyed men who wore their guns like they were born to them, lean riders who haunted moon-shadowed trails and never looked at a thing directly, but saw everything. When such men went to the gun, they were almighty sudden and certain and I wanted no part of them.

Was it men like those who rode behind me?

When you’re eighteen, you figure you can’t be killed. I’d seen plenty of dying on the Western Trail: punchers trampled in stampedes, drowned in river crossings, snakebit, dragged by runaway ponies. But death always chose some other poor feller and seemed content to tiptoe around me.

But now I couldn’t shake the feeling that danger was dogging my trail and maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t as immortal as I thought. Being eighteen doesn’t make a man bulletproof, and, looking back, I realize them’s words of wisdom.

The rain had started that morning just after sunup, driven by a gusting south wind that hammered cold drops against my slicker and drummed on my hat.

I was riding through the Gypsum Hills country west of the Red Bed Plains, a series of rolling hills, buttes and red mesas some 150 to two hundred feet high, all cut through by narrow gullies. The hills are capped by fifteen- to twenty-foot layers of gypsum that sparkle in the sun—the reason the Indians called them the Glass Hills.

Here and there grew stands of red cedar, blackjack and post oak, some of them lightning-blasted and dead, and under my horse’s feet primroses, black-eyed Susans and tiny violets peeped out from among the grama grass.

I kept turning my head, checking behind me, and saw nothing but the rain-lashed landscape, iron gray clouds so low I reckoned I could reach up and grab a handful and I figured it would be like clutching at wood smoke.

I rode on, heading due south. A hundred or so miles to my west lay the majestic Black Mesa and directly in front of me, but still a long ways off, rose the weathered crags of the Wichita and Arbuckle mountains.

There was no letup in the rain, a steady, hissing downpour that ran off my hat brim like a waterfall and beat steadily on the shoulders of my slicker.

It was getting close to noon and I was becoming needful of coffee and a smoke. I’d tried to roll a cigarette earlier, but the rain had battered tobacco and paper from my fingers, scattering brown shreds over the front of my slicker. I’d given vent to a few choice cuss words, I can tell you, even though I knew if Sally heard me she’d be real annoyed. That little gal was dead set against cussing and she’d made that plain to me a time or two.

Reining in the paint, I glanced around, looking for a likely spot to hole up for an hour. If the riders behind me were honest men, they’d likely be sheltering from the downpour, and outlaws don’t much care for getting wet either, come to that.

It seemed to me, I could stop and brew up some coffee and then be on my way again, and nobody the wiser.

Like I said, that was how it seemed to me. But as things turned out, I was about to lead my ducks to the wrong pond.

About a hundred yards ahead of where I sat my horse, the gypsum crowning one of the hills slanted sharply downward to about thirty feet above the level. A narrow creek ran along the bottom of the hill under the gypsum shelf and the slope had been undercut, eroded away by wind and floodwaters, forming a natural, shallow cave about ten feet deep, twice that much high and maybe forty or fifty feet long.

A few stunted juniper grew higher up the hillside, where there might be fallen branches, at least enough to boil up some coffee.

I kneed the paint forward and rode up to the cave. Now I was closer, it was pretty much as I’ve described and I saw traces of previous fires, built small, the way Indians do. A goodly supply of dry wood, mostly pine and hickory branches, was scattered around and I was glad I didn’t have to depend on the wet, slow-burning juniper.

I swung out of the saddle, eased the girth on the paint and led him to a patch of good grass close enough to the overhang that he’d be out of the worst of the rain.

The saddlebags I took with me back to the cave. When a man you regard as a friend as well as a boss gives that much money into your trust, you take care of it real well. That was what I thought anyway, and I believe I had the right of it.

I started a fire, and when it was burning good, I went to the creek and filled the coffeepot. Then I fetched Sally’s bonnet and my sack of supplies back to the cave and laid them in a dry spot. That done, I threw a handful of coffee into the pot and set the pot on the coals to boil.