Texas Fever Read online

  Chuck started to speak quickly, and stopped. The silence endured lengthily, broken at last by the sound of Pat Wills, the night guard, coming in from the herd and dismounting at the picket line. His partner, still out there, could be heard singing to the cattle in a low voice. The words were Spanish. Guiltily, Chuck glanced up at the stars and started to rise.

  His father said, “I’ve spoken to Miguel. He’ll stay on guard a little longer tonight. You can relieve him early tomorrow.”

  Chuck nodded mechanically. “Murder?” he whispered. “It’s a serious charge,” the Old Man said. “That’s why I want any information you can give me. I want to make no mistake.”

  “Aren’t you going to give them a chance to speak in their own defense?”

  “They’ll have that opportunity, of course.” The Old Man looked at him hard. “However, it’s my feeling that the speech for the defense has already been made. That’s a clever young woman. She wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to tell her story to receptive ears. What did she say, Chuck?”

  Chuck hesitated, feeling trapped and helpless and furiously angry at the way he seemed to have been used by everyone tonight. Joe Paris leaned forward.

  “Come on, boy. If it’s the young lady you’re worrying about, you know the Major won’t hurt her; we don’t fight women. Anyway, it’s the man we want.”

  “Her father?”

  Joe laughed. “Maybe he is that, but I wouldn’t bank on it.”

  Chuck looked at him in horror and disbelief. Jesse McAuliffe said quickly: “The relationship between them isn’t a matter of importance. The man may well be her father, which would excuse her actions to a great extent—but not his.”

  He stopped there, and the two older men sat in silence, watching Chuck and waiting for him to speak. He could feel the pressure of their regard, and he knew that it was important for him to think clearly, but his mind was a confused jumble of thoughts and images.

  “She said—” He had to clear his throat and start over. “She said you’d never get this herd past Baxter Springs.” “Indeed?” The Old Man’s voice was gentle. “Why not?”

  “Because of the quarantine—”

  Joe Paris said impatiently, “We know all about their quarantine. They’ve had it for years, but they’ve never done much about it.”

  The Old Man waved him into silence. “It’s possible that the girl, having recently come from the north, has better information than we have. What else did she say, Chuck?”

  “The quarantine is being enforced this year, to the hilt, she said. If we try to drive to Sedalia, we’ll be mobbed. There’s only one place where we maybe can slip through, a town to the west called Jepson—”

  “Ah, never mind all that!” Joe said. “Did she have a story to explain what she and this man were doing here in the Nations?”

  “She said—” Chuck licked his lips. “She said there’s going to be a railroad built to Fort Gibson, and some speculators had hired her father to make a survey—”

  “A railroad!” Joe snorted. “You’re sure he wasn’t digging a canal across the prairie, instead?”

  The Old Man said reprovingly, “It’s not unlikely that a railroad will be built here some day, Joe, maybe even clear to Texas. However, I doubt that the man in that wagon knows a transit from a chain. The young woman went a little far out of her way to explain how he came to lose his instruments, and she her clothes; I doubt they ever had any along. Chuck, that story isn’t good enough without proof. Is that all she told you?”

  “Yes, sir, but—”

  Jesse McAuliffe said, “I’m not being as arbitrary and unreasonable as you seem to think. I’ve had my suspicions from the beginning; it was just a little too pat, meeting them where we did. But there was no hurry, and I wanted to be sure. Tonight, finally, I got the man to tell me exactly how he’s supposed to’ve been shot. He says that, when these alleged ruffians began to abuse his daughter, he picked up a heavy stick and started to her aid. A man from the group rose to meet him, drew a pistol, shot him in the leg, and clubbed him to the ground when he did not fall immediately—”

  “But that’s exactly what Amanda . . . what Miss Netherton told us!”

  The Old Man shook his head. “You don’t understand. I had to have the details, to be sure they were lying. Chuck, I extracted the bullet, remember? When one standing man shoots another in the leg, it’s hardly possible for the bullet to strike above the knee and range upwards into the thigh.”

  “On the other hand,” Joe Paris interjected, “it’s just the kind of wound a man on horseback might get, being shot by another rider at point-blank range—particularly if the shooting happened so fast the second rider never had time to raise his pistol, but fired from the hip.”

  “There were grains of powder in the wound,” the Old Man said. “Your brother’s gun was fully discharged when he was found, but he wasn’t one to go riding around with an empty pistol in his fist. He’d been trained, in a fight, to hold back one load for a real emergency. Well, it came, I believe: a horseman charging out of the dust and darkness right on top of him. I see both men firing simultaneously, both riding on a little ways to fall from the saddle gravely wounded, in one case mortally wounded. . . .” The Old Man’s voice stopped.

  “Dave?” Chuck whispered. “You think Mr. Netherton killed Dave?”

  CHAPTER 8

  Sitting there, with his own words still sounding in his ears, Chuck could hear the deep, hoarse voice of Sam Biederman, who’d joined Miguel on guard, singing to the cattle in incomprehensible, guttural German that sounded like a savage chant. Chuck thought of a wooden cross in the rain, and of a woman’s warm lips and strong, small hands. . . . He’d told her about Dave, he recalled. She’d seemed only mildly interested, with no more than the sympathetic concern anybody would display, hearing of someone else’s bereavement. She’d asked him to kiss her, and permitted him—led him—to go much further. Well, he reflected wryly, if you were going to be a damn fool, you might as well be a big damn fool, it cost no more.

  Joe Paris was speaking. “Dave brought a nice pair of Remingtons back from the war,” the foreman said. “He didn’t figure to need two guns in peacetime, and he didn’t have a present for his kid brother, anyway, so he split the pair. He gave one to you, and loose powder and round balls to fit it; but he saved his small supply of paper cartridges for himself, with the long, heavy conical bullets.” Joe reached into his shirt pocket. “Here’s the bullet the Major dug out of Netherton, if that’s his name. It’s battered some, but if you cut the lead from one of those cartridges of Dave’s I gave you the other day, and compare the two, I think you’ll find they’re the same caliber and even the same shape. It would be a real coincidence, out here on the border, finding two .44 caliber long bullets from different sources cast from molds so similar.”

  The Old Man’s voice said quietly, “I think the evidence is fairly conclusive, Chuck.”

  “But—” Chuck had difficulty speaking the name. “But Miss Netherton. How do you account for her presence. Surely you don’t think she was riding with the gang—” The Old Man said, “We spent almost a week, what with hunting strays, coming less than thirty miles from the river—plenty of time for a man on a good horse to reach the settlements, pick up the lady and a team and wagon, and drive back to where the wounded man was waiting.”

  “But if he was one of the outfit that jumped us, wouldn’t his friends stay—”

  “Varmints like that have no friends,” Joe Paris said harshly. “I’m surprised they even went as far as they did in looking after him. It would seem to indicate that he’s somebody important among them, maybe even their leader. Otherwise, I’d have expected them just to leave him behind to die.”

  The Old Man said, “They left him in the care of the girl. Whether she then, driving towards the settlements, ran into us by accident, or whether, when her man’s condition grew worse, she took the desperate gamble of approaching us for help deliberately, only she can tell us.” He grimac
ed. “I would say the latter. She was a little too obviously a maiden in distress, a little too artfully muddied and disheveled, and her accent was a little too obviously designed to appeal to Texas ears. . . . A resourceful young woman. I think it’s time we paid her another visit.” Jesse McAuliffe regarded his son for a moment. “You can wait here if you like. Joe and I will do what is necessary.”

  Chuck licked his dry lips. “What are you planning, sir?”

  “Miss Netherton will be free to go,” the Old Man said. “She is, at most, an accomplice after the fact, and as Joe says, we don’t fight women. Unless the man can explain away the evidence against him, we’ll hang him.”

  Chuck said, “The law—”

  “This is Indian Territory, boy. The only law here, as far as I know, is the Union Army, and if our experience with occupation troops is any guide, they won’t consider shooting an ex-rebel a serious offense. As for taking him on to Kansas and turning him over to the authorities there, I don’t intend to leave his punishment to the whims of a Yankee judge and jury.” He paused, and went on: “It’s not entirely a personal matter. There’ll be other herds following us. We may be coming this way ourselves next year. We’ve got to teach this border scum that it doesn’t pay to molest a Texas outfit.”

  The Old Man raised the glass of the lantern and blew out the flame. Then he rose, tall in the darkness, took his gunbelt from where it hung over a spoke of the wagon wheel, and buckled it on. There was a purposeful grimness about him. He was a just and law-abiding man in his way, but he came from a race that had never taken much stock in the biblical injunction about turning the other cheek.

  Joe Paris got to his feet, lifted his revolver from the holster, spun the cylinder experimentally, and replaced the weapon. Chuck got up, as the two older men started to leave.

  “Sir?”

  “Yes, Chuck.”

  “If you’re right, it’s more or less a family affair, and I’d better have a hand in it, hadn’t I?”

  “I hoped you would see it that way,” the Old Man said, and nothing more.

  Mounted, they started away from camp, but reined in as Miguel Apodaca rode up. The little Mexican vaquero looked at the three of them before speaking.

  “Will you need help, señor?" he asked Jesse McAuliffe. “Should I wake the others?”

  “Not for a girl and a man with a bad leg.”

  “I have been watching, as you asked. A little while ago the Señorita built up the fire again, it was almost out. Now it bums brightly, as you can see, but they are both in the wagon; I have not seen them again.”

  “Thanks, Miguel.”

  “Be careful, señor. A man with a bad leg is nothing, but a woman with a double-barreled shotgun, that can be formidable.”

  Miguel spun his horse about and cantered back towards the herd. The Old Man made a gesture, and they rode towards the yellow, flickering fire, not too far away. Beyond it, the wagon sheet shone dimly white. Chuck found himself wondering unhappily what it would be like to hang a man—with the girl, daughter or mistress or whatever she might be, looking on. It wasn’t anything like galloping towards the muzzles of hostile rifles and returning their fire____

  “Major!” It was Joe’s voice, sharp and perturbed.

  Jesse McAuliffe said, “Yes, I see it. . . . As I said, a resourceful young woman.”

  Chuck said, “What—”

  Then he saw it, too: the fire burning brightly before a canvas carefully draped over bushes and supported by sticks to simulate the cover of a wagon. At a distance, in the dark, the illusion had been perfect.

  Joe swore bitterly. “They can’t have gone far!”

  “Even so, it’ll be hard to trail them at night without a moon. She undoubtedly counted on that,” Jesse McAuliffe said. “We’ll wait until daylight. . . . Chuck?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What was that town she mentioned?”

  “Jepson,” Chuck said.

  “Jepson, eh. I wonder,” the Old Man said thoughtfully, “why she went out of her way to call attention to the name. I have a feeling that young lady does very little without good reason.” He sighed. “It is too bad—”

  “What, sir?”

  “She obviously came from people of quality. It is too bad she should find it necessary to consort with outlaws and murderers. Well, war is never kind to the defeated.”

  CHAPTER 9

  In the morning, the Nethertons’ camp-fire had burned itself out, but the ashes still sent a thin wisp of smoke skywards when Chuck and his father rode by. They paused briefly to look back at the herd, already in motion. Joe Paris, at the point, flung up an arm to wish them well. The Old Man acknowledged the signal.

  “Shouldn’t be much trouble tracking them,” Chuck said, pointing to the plain marks left by wagon wheels in the soft ground.

  “No,” said the Old Man, “which makes me wonder just what they had in mind. They must have known they couldn’t outrun us, even with several hours’ start. And it seems Hardly likely that the leader of a band of bushwhackers would dare take shelter in the settlements, unless . . .”

  “Unless what, sir?”

  The Old Man shook his head. “We’ll see,” he said, setting off along the trial at a fast lope.

  The fugitives had made no effort to cover their tracks, and Chuck and his father made good progress. The hunt had a kind of irresistible excitement about it, even though what lay at the end of it wouldn’t be pleasant, and Chuck found himself absorbed in the sign on the ground to the extent that, when his father, in the lead, threw up his arm to signal a halt, it came as a shock to look up and find the trail ahead blocked by a crowd of armed men, afoot and on horseback. There were even several wagons, although not the one they sought.

  It was a motley group, Chuck saw as he rode forward slowly beside Jesse McAuliffe: farmers in overalls, bearded ruffians wearing remnants of blue uniforms, even a few townsmen in sober, dark suits—they must be closer to Baxter than he’d thought, Chuck reflected. They bore weapons ranging from shotguns to long muskets of wartime origin, not to mention a sprinkling of the short, ugly Sharps carbines that, supplied to these areas before the war by the abolitionists under the urging of that eminent divine, Henry Ward Beecher, had come to be known as Beecher’s Bibles. Trust a Yankee man of God, Chuck reflected bitterly, to go passing out rifles for the purpose of breaking the laws of both man and God.

  A stout man rode forward to meet them, on a horse that would have looked better between the shafts of a plow.

  “That’s far enough,” he said. He pulled back his coat so they could see the badge on his shirt. “This trail is closed.”

  “We’re hunting a murderer,” the Old Man said. He pointed to the tire tracks on the ground. “He came this way.”

  “A murderer, eh?” the sheriff said. “You wouldn’t be referring to a young lady and her pa who came through town early this morning.”

  “There was a woman with him,” the Old Man acknowledged.

  “You’re damn right there was a woman with him!” the stout man said. “As pleasant a young lady as ever I laid eyes on, and if she’d been willing to prefer charges, I’d be putting you under arrest this minute. We don’t stand for abusing women around here, Mister!”

  Chuck started to speak angrily, but his father silenced him with a gesture. “Arrest?” the Old Man said quietly. “What for?”

  “You think it’s lawful to detain people against their will, Mister? She told us all about it, how you fine chivalrous Texans kept her and her sick pa virtual prisoners for days. She put up with it, she said, for her pa’s sake— he wasn’t fit to travel fast—until she couldn’t bear the indecent advances to which she was subjected and lit out in the middle of the night for help.”

  The Old Man said, “Well, I was brought up never to contradict a lady, Sheriff, but just why were we supposed to have detained her?”

  “Why?” the fat man said. “So she couldn’t drive ahead and warn us how you were planning to slip your herd of d
iseased longhorns past the quarantine, of course!” He turned his head to spit on the ground. “Now, I’ve got no real jurisdiction here, Mister, but I’m speaking for these citizens of Kansas when I tell you we don’t want any of your wild Spanish stock even coming close to our state line, which is back only a couple of miles. This is plenty close enough. So ride back to your herd, Mister, and turn it around. Any animal that comes within range, we’ll shoot it down.”

  There was a murmur of assent from the men behind him. The Old Man regarded them for a moment, and turned his attention back to the sheriff.

  “Just as a matter of record, Sheriff,” he said mildly, “I am telling you that the man who calls himself Netherton is a murderer and a member—perhaps even the leader—of a gang which attacked us a couple of weeks back, probably the same gang that wiped out the Laughlin outfit of twelve men last year, shooting them down in cold blood.”

  “A murderer, eh?” The stout man regarded him coldly. “My son died at Pittsburgh Landing, Reb. Maybe you were there, with that gray coat. Don’t you go telling me about murderers! Now get along back and turn those cattle.”

  Chuck opened his mouth again, indignantly, but his father’s hand was on his arm, restraining him. The Old Man picked up the reins and swung his pony around. Chuck followed. They rode away. It gave Chuck an uneasy feeling to turn his back on all those weapons, but the Old Man never looked around, so he didn’t either.

  Presently. Chuck heard his father make a small sound, and glanced that way warily. Probably the Old Man was bursting with fury, mild though his manner had been. You couldn’t always tell. The Old Man wasn’t one to rant and swear. He’d act smooth and polite until people got to thinking nothing would rile him; and then he’d go killing mad all in an instant.

  The little sound came again. Chuck frowned, and looked more closely, shocked. His father was laughing heartily, almost silently.

  “Indecent advances, eh?” the Old Man murmured.

  Chuck felt his face go hot and his ears turn red. He tried to say something, but couldn’t. Then the Old Man reached out and clapped him on the knee without speaking, and they rode on in silence, father and son.