The Tall Men (The Classic Film Collection) Page 4

  Ben returned his look, saying nothing. Nathan Stark shrugged easily.

  “All right, Ben and Clint, now we know each other. It’s the best way, you’ll see.” He slowed, putting it with patent sincerity. “Any name you give is safe with me, remember that.”

  Ben nodded. But Clint didn’t quite buy it.

  “We’ll remember it, Mister Stark,” he said deliberately. “See that you do.”

  Stark watched him a moment longer.

  Under the circumstances only one construction could be put on the younger brother’s reply. In the West when a man had been offered your first name, then “mistered” you on purpose, friendship was already out the window. He had been unsure of Clint from the beginning. That unsureness had just been removed. Young Allison’s cards were on the table, face up. It was only a question of time before they would have to be called.

  With the decision, he turned to Ben, waiting for him to speak. Thoughtfully, the big Texan obliged him.

  “I reckon we’ve a’ready tooken your word, or we wouldn’t none of us be here,” was all he said. “Let’s mosey along. Wind’s risin’ agin and we got some miles to make ’fore sundown.”

  Stark nodded, came to his feet, started for the horses. So far, so good. The older brother had used neither the requested “Nathan” nor the rejected “Mister.” He was still playing a dumb, open hand. One that could be bet into and built up gradually until all the chips were in the middle of the blanket.

  Clint was slower to leave the fire, hanging back to catch Ben.

  “You out’n your mind, you crazy bastard? We’ve knowed this son of a bitch twenty-four hours! And by God for a friendly pat on your dumb butt you’ve give him information a sheriff couldn’t beat out’n you with a gunbarrel in six weeks. What the goddam hell you thinkin’ of, Ben?”

  “Texas,” said Ben. “And three thousand head of San Saba steers. What’s yours?”

  “A rope,” growled Clint. “And a nice handy span of yeller pine rafters.”

  Ben said nothing, only began to kick the fire into the snow. Clint, starting for his mare, held up. “Now what the hell?” he snapped irritably. “You Injunjumpy a’ready? For Christ’s sake we ain’t twenty miles shut of the settlements yet!”

  “Never knew the Injun,” said Ben softly, “that could count past ten."

  For ten straight days they rode south, following the base of the Rockies down past the Three Tetons, crossing below them and over Wind River Pass to come out at Fort Bonneville on the headwaters of the East Fork of the Green River. Tracing the East Fork they hit the main Green, followed it south and east until they struck the old Fort Bridger cutoff on the eighteenth day. Here, Ben wanted to angle east, heading over through the North Park country of Colorado to feel out a trail route for their cattle along the east slope of the main divide. It was the way he and Clint had come north and he wanted Stark to see the good water and grass it made for the whole of the way to the Arkansas, and beyond.

  Nathan Stark had other ideas.

  No one had ever run a trail down the dry west slope. If they could route one over there, it figured to be freer of Indians and Army alike than any passage east of the mountains.

  For eight days they were lost in the arid wilderness of eastern Utah. On the ninth day they cut the valley of a major stream running nearly due east. Ben had had enough of Nathan Stark’s leadership. He studied the river and the hazy mountains beyond its eastern vanishing point for a full five minutes, saying nothing. Finally, he looked at Stark.

  “This’ll be fur enough south. You want to search out your dry-hole route past this water, you’ll do it with two other Texans. Me and Clint are swingin’ east.”

  At the headwaters of the stream, three days later, they rode into the fur camp of a Taos fox hunter. The stream, he informed them, was the Eagle Tail River. They were a bare hundred and fifty miles north of the New Mexico line, a shade over the same distance west of Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas. It was as much as Ben cared to know, or needed to. He spoke short and he spoke quick, not wanting Stark’s opinion and not waiting for it.

  “We’ll head for Bent’s and the short grass,” was all he said.

  There was no argument from Nathan Stark. By now the Virginia City man was no longer thinking in terms of who was in real charge. He swung up and followed Ben and Clint without a word.

  Late in the afternoon of the twenty-ninth day from Alder Gulch, they came into the broad valley of the main Arkansas seventy-five miles above Bent’s Fort. There was little enough cause for celebration. They had been on the trail a month, had covered little more than two thirds the distance to Fort Worth. And worse, they were out of meat, had no flour and no coffee, had seen no game for three days. Their mounts were nearly used up, were grassbellied and sorefooted, would need at least a week on soft ground and good grain to be fit to travel.

  It was agreed a layover had to be figured at Bent’s Fort.

  The following morning, an unusually clear and warm one for the date, they set off down the Arkansas. The day wore on soft and balmy as only such days can in the perverse spring of southern Colorado. By ten o’clock Ben’s and Clint’s spirits were considerably uplifted by the continuing brightness of the March sunshine on the homeground of their beloved short-grass country

  The uplift lasted until an hour after noonhalt, when the sky to the north and east began to lead-up ominously and the wind to whine softly and nervously up the sweeping valley of the Arkansas from the south and east.

  Within twenty minutes the grass was lying flat and due southwest and the wind, having switched compass completely was hammering at them with the unimpeded force of its eight-hundred-mile march across the Kansas and Colorado plains. Seconds later the snow began and the darkness shut down around them blacker than a Montana mine pit.

  In the ten-foot lee of a riverbed shelfbank, Ben pulled the black gelding in.

  It was two o’clock in the afternoon. A man on horseback could not be seen thirty feet away. It was time for a talk—and in the unprotected sweep of the open prairie a man couldn’t hear you if you were yelling in his near ear with a deaf-horn, four inches away and downwind.

  “We cain’t stop here.” He leaned in the saddle, cupping his hands toward Stark. “Got to drift with the river till we hit timber. That’s Timpas Crick at Ludlow’s Bend this side the fort. ’Nother fifteen, twenty miles mebbe.”

  The wind caught his words, whipping them across Clint’s hunching shoulders, drumming them ominously past the white-faced Stark.

  “How far is the fort itself?” he called.

  A vicious drive of sleeted snow trapped his question, flung it away from Ben, out across the turgid Arkansas. Clint heard it. “Too far, little man!” he consoled, then handcupped its relay to Ben. “The gentleman from Virginia City rises to request the official distance to Mr. Charley Bent’s second-hand store.”

  “Forty miles, mebbe forty-five,” shouted Ben.

  Stark waved stiffly, signifying he had heard. “I say we stay right here! We’ve no chance in this weather!” Nathan Stark had drifted out his share of north plains blizzards, had no stomach for adding this southern specimen to his successful record.

  “You say like hell!” bellowed Clint. “This here’s a blue Texas norther, mister. Not no Montana chinook. Ain’t nobody sets out her dance agin no cutbank. Not and stays spry for the promenade home.”

  “Clint’s right.” Ben was shaking out his rope with the shout, flipping its noosed end to Clint. “We got to go on, right now. There’s like to be five foot of snow on the level come daylight.”

  Clint caught the rope, looped it over his mare’s head, passing the reins free of it. In the same motion he uncoiled his own rope, shot it, hondo first, toward Stark. The latter caught it, made it fast around his bay’s neck. “I hope to God you boys know what you are doing,” he shouted to Clint.

  Clint laughed, turned his Comanche-dark face to the belly of the blizzard above them.

  “Ka-dih!” he yelled, calli
ng harshly upon the Southern Comanche’s Great Spirit. “You hear the man? Listen to your white brother from Montana, you no-good Injun bastard! Leave off that infernal howlin’, you hear?”

  “You leave off of it,” warned Ben. “It ain’t funny to even play crazy in a tight like this.”

  “Brother mine,” boomed Clint, his grin flashing white in the darkness, “you been misinformed. I ain’t playin’!”

  “Hang on,” ordered Ben. “We’re goin’ out.”

  With the wave, he kicked the black gelding out past the cutbank. Behind him the thirty-foot lengths of the Texas lariats sang tight. The three-horse chain cleared the bank, the weary mounts staggering as the full blast of the hurricane wind struck them. They were lost to view in as many seconds as they had men in their saddles, and in as many more the ironshod marks of their passing were flattened and filled with the white smother of the driving snow.

  In the center of a south plains blizzard all senses are at once destroyed. A man is a blind, deaf mute, his mount an unreasoning, terror stricken wild animal, fighting both him and the storm with equal dumbbrute fury. All points of the prairie compass are blotted out. In any direction and in all directions the fearful needle may swing, only blackness beckons, only death by cold awaits. There is no time, nor any sense of it. A minute may be an hour, an hour but twenty seconds—or five—or no seconds at all.

  Fighting for his breath against the strangling clot of the snow, Ben kept the black moving. Behind him Clint’s and Stark’s horses fought the growing drifts. He could see neither of them, hear nothing but the insane yammer of the wind. He knew they were there only by the tension on his rope.

  How long they had been riding before he realized they had lost the river, he did not know. He only knew that one minute the yellow surge of the Arkansas was still roiling ten feet to his left, and then there was nothing over there where it should be but the piling, dirty white of the unbroken snows.

  He did not stop the black and did not dare to.

  There was no chance for them, now, which they would not make worse by a rope-tangling halt. He kept the black digging, reining him back to the left, cursing him on.

  The big horse fought him at once. He threw his head, flinging and jawing at the bar of the bit, bowing his neck, humping his spine, grunting and whickering fiercely. Ben put the spurs into him to their shanks, nearly jerked his head off sawing back on the left rein. The horse took it and held now to the left, but a man could feel by the way he went, sidestepping and hipswinging constantly to the right, that he was being driven against his crazed will.

  Ben began to count now, shouting the numbers aloud. That river had to be close, he could not have lost it more than a few seconds. But time was a crazy thing when a man could not see or hear. If he lost track of it now—

  The count reached one hundred. Then two. The leaden pile of the snow rolled on, unbroken. At two hundred and fifty, Ben knew five minutes had gone. And that the Arkansas had gone with them.

  All that was left now was something he had been told all the days of his ranch boyhood was no good—a horse’s sense of direction in a blue norther. But in the big Texan’s mind was another memory from that same boyhood, and not from the ranch. A memory from that other part of that boyhood. One from the Comanche camps along the North Concho. The red brother did not agree with the white. There was a proverb among those Kwahadis. An old, old proverb. From a people who had been horse Indians a hundred years before the Sioux left Minnesota on foot, or the broadfaced Cheyenne trudged down onto the plains from their Uinta Mountain fastnesses. A proverb that went, “Tsei hou-dei kyh-gou-p gaux-kin—a blind horse has more brains than a bright man in a blizzard!”

  Ben eased up on the black, shook out the reins, let them fall slack. The horse stopped dead. He gathered his haunches, stood waiting uncertainly. Ben shook the reins again, ticked him with the spurs, leaned up in the saddle.

  “Go along, you black bastard!” he yelled. “I ain’t bright and you ain’t blind, but we’re sure as hell in a blizzard!”

  The big gelding flung his head around, walled his eyes at his crouching rider. He blew the snow from the moist red bell of his nostrils, began shortly to move ahead. Within twenty steps Ben felt him veer back to the right. Before a minute had passed, he had completely reversed their left-hand course, was blundering and bucking the hock-deep snows in a direction Ben’s instincts told him was directly away from the river.

  “Ka-dih!” Ben yelled into the storm, suddenly thinking of Clint and his crazy laugh. “Don’t you make no liar out’n me and my poor old grandmother!”

  Hearing the shout, the black seemed to redouble both the speed and sureness of his stride. Ben let him go. He was feeling the cold now. Feeling its tingling, swift deadliness closing in on him. Numbing its spreading way up his arms and legs. Creeping relentlessly past wrist and ankle. Pushing its leaden weight toward knee and elbow.

  As it did, he knew without benefit of white boyhood ranch lore or red-memoried Kwahadi proverb exactly where the black gelding was taking him and Clint and Nathan Stark. Once you knew that, the next grim question for Ka-dih was easy.

  How long did it take three white men to freeze to death in the belly of a blue Texas norther?

  Chapter Six

  There was no way for a man to know how long he had been unconscious in the saddle. He only knew something struck him heavily along the right thigh, then twice along the left, nearly scraping him from his horse. He remembered pawing for the saddlehorn, getting his eyes open. Then he saw them, thick and blackstemmed, all around him.

  Trees. Cottonwoods, alders, willows. They were in the timber. Dense, grove-thick timber. Timber that shut out the hammer of the wind as suddenly as though there had never been a blizzard.

  They were saved. Saved by the grace of Ka-dih and the memory of a Comanche proverb—by the will of a heathen Kwahadi god and the brains of a “blind,” black horse.

  The big gelding had brought them into Timpas Creek Grove.

  It was only seconds after Ben’s clearing vision recorded the trees that he was aware of the fire which gleamed beyond them. Moments later, the black broke free of the intervening scrub and into the tiny cleared space which sheltered the blaze.

  The snow blindness was still harsh and glaring in front of his peering eyes. Ben could make out only blurred forms coming toward him. His ears, still full of the shriek and howl of the outer wind, could not clearly distinguish the voices which came with the forms.

  He tried to dismount, to get down off the black gelding and move to meet them. He could not. His frozen limbs would not relinquish their hold of the horse’s barrel.

  He remembered the voices growing suddenly clear and close, saw for a moment the swim of upturned, white faces which came with them. He felt, numbly and far off, the reach and grasp of the friendly hands. Then the momentary clearness withdrew. The faces faded out, the voices fell away. There was an instant’s prolonged sensation, half floating, half falling, of leaving the saddle and coming away from the black gelding. After that, there was nothing but the darkness and the silence.

  His next memory was so disturbingly beautiful he wondered for an idle, suspended moment if despite a hard and heretic life he had not somehow managed to get past the pearly gate check point. To slip by old St. Pete, unculled, and make it on into the celestial range with the main herd of highgrade beef.

  But at that precise moment the surpassingly lovely vision chose to smile down upon him. With that smile all thoughts of the great beyond faded from Ben Allison’s mind. There would be no place in heaven for a smile like that, nor for the face that smile was coming out of. Only the devil could fashion a set of lips like those. And hell alone could hold the haunting beauty of the face behind their moist, warm curve.

  “Easy now, partner. Feeling better—?”

  He could only nod, dumb and stiff, and go on looking up at that face.

  It was an oval, angular face, carved that way by nature to begin with and now hollowed and w
asted to a shadowed gauntness that told at a glance of the hunger and privation which inhabited the little camp they had stumbled upon. The drawn skin was startlingly white save for where the wide, red fullness of the warm mouth broke its pallor. The eyes, set deep and wide above the sculptured cheekbones, were of a dark cobalt, almost an indigo blue. And at their outer corners they had that sweeping upslant which put their long lashes to curving black and wicked above their depthless color.

  “Don’t strain yourself, stranger.” The voice was as deep and disturbing as the eyes. “You’re not strong enough to be thinking about that yet.”

  If Ben was a simple man, he was not that simple. Her boldness hit him hard and bad, and he did not like it. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he muttered. “Guess I’m purty done in. Didn’t mean to stare, I reckon.”

  “Reckon none of you ever gets too done in to take a good look,” said the girl evenly. Then, the full lips breaking away to show the snowflash of the teeth again, “Coffee’s on and long boiled. I’ll get you a tin.”

  The way she put it let a man know she was from his own country, at least from somewhere west of the Big Muddy and not any eastern or northern girl. And the tone and look she put behind it let him know he wasn’t the first hombre that had sidled up to her and been eared down for his trouble.

  In the moment before she returned he found himself already wondering about her, who she was and where she had come from. The same moment was long enough to tell him that while she may have come with these people, she was not one of them. The rest of the folks in the little camp were emigrants, pure and simple. Sod hut farmers, for sure. Looking to be from the Missouri or more likely the Kaw bottomlands from say around Olathe or Fort Leavenworth. And heading west chasing the same old settler shadow—more and better land and fewer folks to share it with.