Fighting Caravans Page 11

  Couch and his riders ran into the range of Clint’s glass. They soon came within rifle-shot of the wheeling, flashing circle of Comanches, and spreading out they halted to open fire. Clint’s cold, clammy horror broke to thrill on thrill as he saw the quick puffs of white smoke.

  It appeared that the Comanches had the guards surrounded, but not the stock. Oxen were lumbering in every direction. Unsaddled horses were running wild.

  Then Clint was rudely shaken from his fascinated gaze. A freighter had jerked Tom off the seat and was reaching for Clint.

  “Get down. Go back to your own wagon. Load your guns. Be ready to fight,” he ordered, harshly.

  Clint piled off the seat, glass in hand, and ran to his wagon. In a few swift moves he had both his rifles and his pistol and a bag of ammunition ready at hand. But where should he make his stand. The wagon wheels afforded but little protection, though better than none. If there had been time he might have built a platform of boxes high enough so that he would be protected by the wagon bed. He decided he would be better off inside the wagon. There was room enough under the seat for him to hide. Forthwith he deposited his arms in the wagon and climbed in. He still had Captain Couch’s field-glass.

  Panting and sweating, Clint peeped over the side of the wagon. The wide, black, moving circle out there appeared to have condensed or gotten farther away. His hand shook and he had to rest the glass on the wagon to steady it. Then he found a dimness in his eyes, that hindered vision. There seemed both a knocking and a something locked tight within his breast.

  Presently the powerful field-glass brought the battle right before Clint. And it was stunning. The swift circle of Comanche horses seemed riderless, but the occasional puffs of smoke, and a closer view proved those incomparable horsemen were hanging over the backs of their mustangs, shooting from under their necks. A streaming, smoking continuous whirl! All inside that circle was a blur. Yet plain it was the circle closed inward.

  Somewhat to the right Couch’s men bobbed on their horses, shooting fast, moving back, it seemed. Where were the fifteen freighters who had dashed out to the rescue of the guards? Clint counted only nine.

  Faster and smaller rode the wheel of Comanches. Smoke and dust and action! The gold of sunset flashed on bright moving objects. Mustangs leaped high to plunge down. The rattle of rifle-shots lessened. Suddenly all those wheeling horses appeared to have riders with upflung arms, plumes and feathers flying; the circling ceased. The movement was inward only. It was like the wave of prairie grass. Then from across the space pealed a low, wild, and hideous sound—the war whoop of the Comanches. It signaled victory. And the intricate mass seemed a lashing thicket of horses’ heads, manes, riders, arms, bonnets, guns, and bows, all upflung in terrible significance.

  “ALL READY! They’re comin’!” sang out the stentorian voice of one of the freighters in the line.

  Clint saw Couch and his men—only seven now—riding madly toward the caravan. Another glance showed the mass of Comanches spreading out into a line in swift pursuit.

  Dropping behind the wagon-side, Clint shuddered there. The glass fell from his nerveless hand. His father was murdered. He sank under the blow. He had an impulse to hide his head, so as not to see the end. Convulsion of horror and agony clamped him inert, cold as ice, like wet dead flesh.

  Yet his instinct was to listen. Silence! The freighters were under their wagons, grim and silent. A faint low trampling clatter of hoofs pierced Clint’s strained ears. It increased, breaking to the crack of rifles. Another sound struck fire into Clint. The swelling yell of the Comanches! Clint had heard old frontiersmen tell about the most terrifying of all human sounds—the war cry of the Comanche Indians. It swelled louder. The trampling clatter of hoofs likewise increased.

  Clint’s hair rose stiff on his head. At the same instant a hot explosion of blood within him galvanized all his being. Grasping a rifle with hard hands, he thrust it over the wagon-side and looked over the barrel.

  Couch and his riders were close, madly riding, their horses separated, stretching low on a dead run for the caravan. Behind raced the Comanches, scarcely a hundred yards distant, riding as one horseman. They were shooting. Clint saw puffs of smoke but heard no shots. If the freighters were shooting, the reports were lost in the din. Clint dared not take aim, because Couch and riders were still between him and the Indians. But they were sweeping to the right toward the gate.

  The last rider suddenly threw up his arms. His horse gave a wild plunge. Clint’s keen sight registered the man’s awful blank face and as he pitched off the saddle, a feathered arrow showed quivering between his shoulders. His riderless horse swept on.

  Roar of heavy Colt’s rifles then mixed with the yell of the Comanches. Two hundred or more, they split into two lines and sheered to right and left, closing in to encircle the wagon-train. Clint had a grim realization of this familiar manoeuvre of all plains savages. He was in that circle now. And surely the fate of many wagon-trains was at hand for Couch’s freighters.

  He tried to get a bead on an Indian, but he could not see any. They were riding on the far side of their horses. Then he caught glimpses of lean dark-red faces, of guns and bows, protruding from under the stretching necks of the mustangs. Also he saw puffs of smoke and flash of arrows.

  Clint fired at a white mustang. Missed! How swiftly these horses flashed by! He aimed at another, tried to get a little ahead of it, and missed again. They were still quite far out, perhaps between eighty and a hundred yards. But Clint saw mustangs rear and fall. Others staggered away. The freighters were taking toll, though Clint did not see any Indians drop. They just disappeared in the grass.

  He fired the Colt seven times, then dodged down to reload. He had his buffalo gun there, too, and his pistol. The din was growing deafening as the savages closed in.

  Clint thrust his rifle over the wagon-side and peeped after it. They were close now, a string of racing ponies, with a red leg over each back. The white horse swept into Clint’s range. He led it—fired. And with a convulsive lunge the beautiful wild creature went down to roll with kicking hoofs in the air. Clint saw its rider fall like a sack.

  “Got—the—hang of it—now,” muttered Clint to himself, hot and wet, his grimy hands reloading. Holding the rifle tight, he waited until a lean mustang head was aligned with his sight, then pulled trigger. Down went that beast. One after another, then, Clint shot five more horses, satisfied that he had disabled some of their riders. He had half reloaded when he felt the wagon shake under him.

  The next instant a hideously painted face, with eyes of black fire, protruded over the side of the wagon. A naked body rose, barred with black and white paint. Swift as light a lean arm swung a tomahawk high. Clint had no time to raise the Colt. A terrible panic seized him.

  At its highest point the tomahawk paused. It quivered as behind Clint boomed a heavy buffalo gun. Then it slipped from the lean dark hand that had swung it aloft. Clint gasped back to life. He shifted his gaze down. The Comanche’s visage had incalculably changed. Vacant, wild eyes set! His hand clutched at his breast. Then as he sank Clint saw a huge round bullet hole with blue edges in the center of his body.

  One of the freighters, standing behind Clint’s wagon, had saved his life. Clint peeped out on that side. Tom Sidel stood there, half crouching, rifle thrust forward, his hair standing up like a mane, his face black with powder. His wild roving eyes caught sight of Clint. “I got him, Buff,” he yelled above the uproar.

  If anything could have inspired Clint out of his panic at that awful moment, it was the sight of Tom and the fact that he had shot the Comanche with the tomahawk. Clint bent to the other side of the wagon, and completing the reloading of his rifle he peered out behind it again.

  Smoke and dust overhung the prairie. Clint could not see the whole space in front. The steady reports of guns along the wagon-train grew distinct, which proved that the yelling of the savages had ceased. Mustangs were not flashing by as formerly. As the smoke lifted Clint discern
ed Comanches from each side riding together, farther out, to where others on foot were trying to get wounded and dead on their mustangs. They had been repulsed, apparently with great loss. And they were finding rescue of injured a losing game, for where one Indian was lifted on a horse two went down under the deadly fire of the freighters. They gave up the attempt, moved out of range, held a consultation which seemed plain as print to the freighters, and then rode off out of sight over the ridge.

  Clint leaned his guns against the wagon seat and stood up. Outside the caravan, dead and crippled Indians and horses showed everywhere. Inside, groups of men around objects on the ground awoke Clint to another aspect of the situation. One of these groups—three men, all kneeling beside a prostrate form—was right next to Clint’s wagon. Then he saw Tom Sidel’s pale face.

  With a sharp cry Clint leaped out, and plunged to his knees beside Tom. His eyes were closed; his slowly heaving breast was all dark and wet; a thin stream of blood ran from his mouth.

  “Tom! Tom!” cried Clint, frantically. Then he gazed at the grim men. “Say he isn’t bad hurt. . . . He saved my life. . . . One of the Comanches got on my wagon. . . . He was about to tomahawk me. . . . I couldn’t move. . . . Tom shot him.”

  “Buff, it’s tough lines. Tom is dyin’,” huskily replied one of the men.

  “Oh, my God! How awful! . . . Tom!”

  The poignant cry reached Tom’s fading consciousness. He opened his eyes, strange, deep, unfathomable. He smiled.

  “Good-by—Buff,” he whispered.

  Then light and life fled. The men laid him back, covered his face, and rose and went away, leaving Clint kneeling there with Tom’s limp hand in his. Under this last blow Clint seemed to lose thought for a while. He heard dully, and could see the men moving around in a hurry. It was Maxwell who aroused him.

  “Lad, brace up. It’s been hell, but it can be worse,” he said, a kind hand lifting Clint. “We must hurry on to Fort Union before the Comanches come back. They’ll come, an’ they’d get us all next time.”

  Clint allowed himself to be led and presently could obey orders. During the next hour he learned the extent of the catastrophe.

  The twenty-five guards, among whom were Belmet and John Sidel, had been massacred to a man, stripped, scalped and mutilated. Of the freighters left, less than fifty lived, and many of these were wounded.

  Sixty-nine Comanches were found on the prairie outside the caravan, twenty-three of whom were still alive. But they did not live long after they were discovered. Dead horses lay everywhere.

  The freighters, under command of Couch and Maxwell, loaded seven wagons with the most valuable supplies and personal belongings, and abandoned the rest. Fort Union was not quite two days’ travel. They had little hope of arriving there and sending the soldiers back in time to save the one hundred and twenty-four wagons of supplies.

  Couch’s last act was to spike his brass cannon, which the freighters had not had time to get into action. And he did it viciously, as if he were driving the spike into the heads of the Comanches.

  It happened that Clint’s wagon, which was a large and new one, was chosen one of the seven. The driver assigned to it, a man named Saunders, knew Clint and liked him; and when he cracked his whip, ready to start, he called, “Rustle an’ jump in, Buff.”

  “An’ leave Tom—here—to be—scalped—an’ eaten by coyotes? . . . No, I’ll stay an’ be—be scalped with him,” replied Clint, with a sob.

  Saunders leaped off, and grasping a blanket off a pack he wrapped it round Tom and lifted him into the wagon.

  “Thar, lad. We’ll take him along an’ give him decent burial,” said Saunders. “Jump up, now. They’re leavin’.”

  One of the seven wagons held two hundred and fifty of the Colt rifles, with ten thousand rounds of ammunition. These the freighters had brought to sell to hunters and trappers. It would never have done to let this load fall into the hands of savages.

  That shortened caravan halted only twice in thirty hours, and then to let the oxen and horses drink. At Mora Creek the condition of the wounded demanded attention, so a camp was risked there.

  Clint helped bury his friend Tom high above the creek, back in the grove, under a giant cottonwood. Clint hid the grave with rocks and brush. He would know where to find it if he ever passed that way again.

  Clint neither ate nor slept and the night was a horror. Next day, by noon, the depleted caravan had straggled into Fort Union, and all were objects of great interest and sympathy. Dragoons were dispatched to the scene of the carnage.

  “Wal, Buff, how about you?” queried Captain Couch, kindly, the first chance he had to accost Clint.

  “I don’t care about nothin’,” replied Clint, despondently.

  “Reckon you don’t now. But hard as it seems, it’ll pass. This frontier is a hell of a place, Buff. You know thet. An’ we got to be men. Wal, here’s your father’s bag. We’d better open it.”

  Belmet’s papers, two thousand dollars, a few keepsakes, and a letter written some years before composed the contents. Couch read the letter.

  “Your dad leaves you in my charge till you’re twenty-one,” explained Couch, seriously. “Wal, I’ll do my best by you, Buff. You’re a born freighter an’ you can throw in with me. I’ll keep these papers an’ the money for you.”

  Maxwell, too, sought Clint out, and was so kind that Clint felt a mitigation of his utter loneliness and hopelessness.

  “Buff, you’ve got the same stuff in you that made Kit Carson an’ me an’ Frémont himself what we are,” said Maxwell. “We are all losers at this frontier game. Some more an’ some less. It’s hell for a boy to lose mother an’ father an’ then his pal.”

  “I—I lost my—my sweetheart, too,” replied Clint, breaking down under this kindness.

  “Well! Well!” . . . Maxwell was plainly baffled by the boy’s misfortunes, and at a loss for words. “I just don’t know what to say, Buff. . . . But I’ve been thirty years on this frontier, an’ it has taught me much. I’ve been friends with Indians from all tribes. Some of them are good Indians, though many of my friends cuss me for sayin’ that. So I can’t advise you to be an Indian-hater an’ killer. . . . Just stick it out for the sake of the West an’ for those who are to follow us.”

  “All right, Mr. Maxwell,” replied Clint. “I—I’ll stick it out.”

  “That’s the spirit, boy. I was not mistaken in you,” said Maxwell, warmly. “Now when we get to Santa Fé, I’d like you to go to my ranch for the winter. Will you come?”

  “Yes, sir, thank you,” rejoined Clint, gratefully.

  Upon the return of the dragoons from Point of Rocks, the sergeant in charge reported that all of Couch’s wagons had been burned, and piles of supplies were still burning; over a hundred dead horses lay on the plain, but not an ox, nor a dead Indian, was to be seen for miles around.

  Chapter Ten

  CLINT BELMET went on with Maxwell to his ranch and spent the winter there. It was well that this good influence came to Clint at this critical period of his life. When spring returned Clint did not go out with Couch and the freighters. Maxwell advised against it. So it came about that Clint had the run of the ranch during the following spring, summer, and through winter again.

  Maxwell’s Ranch in 1861 reached the zenith of its fame and prosperity. There was not then, and had never been, any place like it in all the West, and nothing ever approached it in later times.

  Maxwell left Illinois for the West in 1822, and became almost as great a frontiersman as Kit Carson. He went through the war with the Navajo Indians and came out a captain. He fought through the Mexican War in 1842 and the Texas Invasion in 1846. Then he was a captain of Texas Rangers for four years. After these years of active service he retired to the great ranch he had acquired.

  At that time he was the biggest landowner in America. His ranch was bounded on the north by Raton Pass for a distance of sixty-five miles; on the west by twenty-five miles of the Red River; on the east by th
e Cimmaron River, about fifteen miles, and south was the open prairie. Fort Union, twenty-two miles off, was the nearest settlement.

  Usually Maxwell employed between four and five hundred Mexicans. He raised corn, oats, wheat, and all kinds of vegetables in immense quantities. He operated a flour and grist mill, using horse power, and furnished white flour and meal to the forts and settlements.

  In 1861 he had no accurate idea how much stock he owned, but the estimate was four hundred thousand sheep, fifty thousand cattle, and ten thousand horses. Mules and burros he never attempted to count.

  One of his contracts with the government required that he furnish beef to the Indian reservations in New Mexico; and another, to render the same service to the forts. He owned the largest trading and supply store in the West. He was friend alike to whites, Indians, and Mexicans, and was not known to have a single enemy among them. The Indians called him Father Maxwell. At all seasons hundreds of red men were camping on his ranch, and in the spring, when the trading of pelts was on, there were thousands. And white trappers, hunters, freighters, plainsmen were as numerous as soldiers at the fort.

  Colonel Maxwell was a very handsome man, standing six feet one inch in his moccasins. He never shaved his face. He had a habit of looking anyone straight in the eyes, and his own were singularly piercing. His rare smile relieved the sternness of his face.

  Never had a white man been employed at Maxwell’s ranch. When a caravan camped there, which happened often, he was especially courteous to any women who happened to be with it. A vague rumor of an unhappy love affair never had any substantiation, but the sadness of his face in repose and the shadow in his eagle eyes seemed to justify such a surmise.

  The main ranch house appeared more like a white-walled fort than the home of one man. It was of Spanish design, long and low and picturesque, with a wide porch all along the front, from which one of the most magnificent views in the West always fascinated visitors. As to that, Maxwell and his guests, who were always numerous, lounged on the shady porch and gazed out across and down that gray, endless, purple-horizoned prairie, as if they could never tire of it.