Fighting Caravans Page 3

  “Did our men—kill many?” asked Clint, biting his lip.

  “Nineteen. Reckon we’d not done so well but fer a dog ——”

  “Dog!” interrupted Clint. “That was my Jack.”

  “Wal, he’s a smart dog, an’ you can lay to thet. We was all lined up with guns cocked when the varmints charged. We poured it into them hot an’ heavy. You ought to have seen them wilt. This mawnin’ we found nineteen bodies. I found six myself. One reddy was alive, an’ I busted him over the haid with my gun. Wal, we hauled them down to the crick an’ dug a big hole. Cap Couch an’ two of his scouts scalped every last Injun. Funny aboot thet. These old plainsmen shore hate redskins, an’ raise the ha’r of every darn one they can. After thet we throwed the Injuns in the hole an’ covered them up. Cap Couch strung all the scalps on a buckskin thong an’ hung the bloodin’ things up on his wagon.”

  “Did we lose any—men?” asked Clint, curiously thrilled despite his stunned condition.

  “Nope. But two got hurt. Jim Thorn has a bullet in his laig, an’ Tom Allen has a bad cut on his arm. But thet’s all.”

  Clint climbed to his seat and waited for the wagon ahead of him to pull out. The horses were skittish. Clint had all he could do to control them. Soon the caravan was in motion. Clint felt a rending in his breast. He was leaving his dear mother here on this lonely prairie. He sobbed aloud. As he drove past her grave, marked by a rude cross of wood, his eyes were dim. He fought the weakness that threatened to prostrate him. He had been trusted with all his father’s belongings and his best horses. The winding road shone in the sunrise like a yellow thread across the prairie.

  It was well Clint had a hard team to drive that day. The effort sustained him. He had to attend to a job which was not a slight one even for a man. The road had bad places. The pace-makers had been ordered to move as fast as possible. Clint’s father was behind, and sometimes on down grades the big freight wagon rolled alarmingly close. When the caravan halted Clint was amazed to find they had reached Council Grove, the first stage-coach post on the line. The wounded men were left there to be taken back to Independence.

  Next morning Clint was astonished to learn that the Bells were going to remain at Council Grove for the present. He was too full of grief to feel the loss of little May, yet the way she cried at parting touched him.

  “Don’t—forget—my—promise,” she whispered, and Clint assured her he would not, and indeed he believed he would always remember her tear-wet eyes.

  The Couch caravan went on, strengthened by more wagons joining at Council Grove. That day passed. Again Clint slept the deep slumber of weariness. Then days and nights swept by as swiftly as the rolling of the wheels. He had his work and it was all but too much for him. Yet he held on, and while he grew stronger, more accustomed to his arduous task, the dread misery in his breast gradually softened to sorrow.

  On the twenty-ninth of June the caravan reached Fort Larned, where a stop of a week was to be made. Clint and his father camped with most of the freighters outside the fort. It was a wonderful place, quite different from Independence. Despite his sadness, Clint could not help the curiosity and interest of youth.

  Fort Larned bustled with activity. There was one large store, where eight clerks had all they could do to wait on the many customers. Clint’s father told him there were nearly a hundred white hunters and trappers there to sell their winter catch of furs, and fully a thousand Indians of different tribes. Clint could see the different costumes of the Indians, but did not soon learn to distinguish one tribe from another. As for the hunters and trappers, they resembled one another closely. They wore buckskin, and Clint liked the look of them, strong, soft-stepping, lithe men, a few young, but mostly matured and grizzled, and never without their weapons.

  The saloons did a thriving business, and every saloon was, as well, a gambling den. Clint’s father took him into them. From that time dated Clint’s aversion to gamblers. He preferred to walk the street, or go to the fort, where there were stationed four troops of dragoons and two companies of infantry, with Colonel Clark in command. Clint liked to mingle with them, and especially with the hunters and trappers. All the time he touched elbows with Indians. He avoided them as much as possible, hated them, yet always had an eye for their picturesque appearance in their tight-fitting deerskins and beaded moccasins. Some wore hats, some had eagle feathers in their black hair, some went bareheaded, and they all had buffalo robes.

  Several days after Clint’s arrival at the fort he was accosted in front of the store by two scouts. These men he had noted before.

  “Howdy, boy! What’s your name?” asked the more striking one of the two. He had wonderful piercing eyes that looked right through Clint, and he had long curling hair which fell on his broad buckskin-shirted shoulders.

  “Clint Belmet,” replied Clint.

  “You’re the lad we heard drove a freighter from Independence?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Shake. . . . My name’s Carson,” said the scout, and he squeezed Clint’s hand, which was sore from driving, so hard he had to suppress a yell.

  “Put her thar. I’m Dick Curtis,” said the other scout, and he repeated the hand-shaking performance.

  “Lost your mother on the way?” asked Carson, his hand going to Clint’s shoulder.

  “Yes—sir,” replied Clint, his lip trembling.

  “Clint, I know how you feel,” went on the scout, and there was something very winning about him. “It’s hard. . . . The West needs such lads as you. Go on as you’ve begun. You’ve an eye in your head. Don’t ever take to drink an’ cards. An’ learn that the only good Injun is a dead one.”

  The other scout, Curtis, patted Clint on the head, and then they passed on.

  Belmet, standing at the entrance of the store with others, had been an interested spectator of this little incident. He put both hands on Clint’s shoulders and looked down at him.

  “Son, what did those scouts say to you?”

  Clint told him, whereupon he swayed back impressively.

  “Have you any idea who they are?”

  “They told me. The short man was Curtis—Dick Curtis, he said. The tall one with the sharp eyes—he called himself Carson.”

  “Wal, I reckon. Carson. . . . Kit Carson! He is the greatest Indian fighter an’ plainsman in the West.”

  “Kit Carson!” ejaculated Clint, incredulously. “I’ve read about him. . . . An’ to think he shook hands with me! Gee! he nearly broke my fingers! . . . Paw, I’m right proud of what he said.”

  “So you should be. You see what this frontier life is like. Wal, a young man who takes to drink an’ cards doesn’t last long. So I hope you’ll pay some heed to Kit Carson’s advice. Reckon it was a great compliment to you.”

  “I’ll take his advice, paw. I’ll never drink an’ gamble,” rejoined Clint.

  “Son, shake hands on that,” said Belmet, with emotion.

  They did not leave the fort until July 8th, when the freighters who had unloaded, of whom Belmet was one, joined a caravan returning across the plains to Missouri. It was a larger caravan, escorted by troops. Clint drove every day, and they arrived at Westport, later called Kansas City, on the 10th of August.

  The largest commissary stores were located at Westport, and all incoming supplies had to be unloaded there. Belmet obtained a government contract, over which he was much elated. On August 20th he and Clint drove out with over seventy other freighters on the long eighteen-hundred-mile journey to Santa Fé. They were given an escort of ninety soldiers under Captain Payne. This government caravan had to haul supplies to every fort along the trail.

  Belmet had disposed of the prairie schooner. He kept the horses, and purchased another freight wagon, a new one, painted green and red, which Clint drove. After a few days out, every man in the caravan had a cheery word for the boy and his dog, perched high on the seat, and even Captain Payne noticed him.

  “Lad, I see you have a buffalo gun on the seat there,” he said
, quizzically.

  “Yes, sir, but it’s not there for buffalo,” replied Clint, significantly.

  On the afternoon of the sixth day the freighters camped at Cow Creek. It was a pretty spot, in the big bend of the Arkansas River. The green grove of cottonwoods and the shining water appealed strongly to Clint, but he had no time to indulge in his favorite sport. The wagons, as usual, were driven in a circle, the pole of one under the rear end of another, with three wagons left out to form a gateway for the stock to get in and out of the corral.

  Horses and oxen were outside, feeding on the thick grass, under a heavy guard. Presently they were observed to be moving fast. The guards were hurrying the stock back to camp, and one rider came ahead shouting, “Indians! Indians!”

  Captain Payne ordered his soldiers to mount, and the freighters to stand ready to repel attack. Then he climbed on top of a wagon with his field-glass. He took a long look.

  “Nothin’ to worry us,” he announced, presently. “Pawnees an’ Comanches fightin’ each other.”

  “Wal, we shore hope they assassinate each other,” remarked an old soldier.

  “Johnny, come up an’ have a look,” called the captain to Clint. “It’s a sight worth seein’. An’ it doesn’t happen often.”

  Clint climbed up with alacrity and eagerly accepted the field-glass. With naked eye he could see the running horses, the flying manes, the flash of color, of smoke and fire. But the distance was too great to hear guns. When he got the glass focused upon the battling tribes he stood transfixed, with nerves and veins tingling.

  On a hillside over a mile away several hundred Indians were engaged in a terrific running fight. It was plain that a larger party was pursuing a smaller, in the direction away from the camp. Naked red bodies, plumes and spears, flames of red and puffs of white, the level racing of wild mustangs, the plunging of horses together, the rearing of two with their riders fiercely fighting, the falling of Indians to the grass and the galloping away of riderless ponies—all these the glass brought vividly to Clint’s rapt eyes, and held him trembling and unnerved until the warriors passed over the hill out of sight.

  Clint handed the glass back to the smiling captain.

  “So they fight—each other,” he said, rather low. He felt a little sick.

  “Lucky for us. That saved us a fight.”

  “I hope the Pawnees kill all those red-devil Comanches,” returned Clint, grimly, suddenly answering to what the West had roused in him.

  On the following morning, bright and early, the cavalcade was on the way again, with orders to keep close together and watch sharply for Indians. Sometimes clever Indians ambushed a wagon-train and attacked in the center, causing loss of life and freight before the mounted riders and scouts, who usually rode in front and in the rear, could reach the scene of conflict. Comanches, particularly, were wonderful horsemen, attacked as swiftly as the rush of a cyclone, and then were gone. No sign of Indians, however, marred the drive.

  To Clint’s disappointment, the caravan passed right through Council Grove, only a few of the freighters, and these the last in order on the line, halting for a few moments. The train drove on to Fort Zarah on the Walnut River, where two days were necessary to unload supplies for that place.

  “Paw, did you see the Bells when we drove through Council Grove?” queried Clint, eagerly, on the first opportunity that offered.

  “No, son, I didn’t,” replied his father, turning away.

  Clint was busy at the moment, but later he got to thinking this over, and it struck him that his father appeared unusually abrupt and noncommittal. So when time offered, Clint approached him.

  “Did you speak to anyone at Council Grove?”

  “Yes. I stopped for a few moments long enough to hear some sickenin’ bad news. . . . Clint, I wanted to tell you before, but I couldn’t. Hard as it is, though, you ought to be told.”

  “Somethin’ happened to our friends, the Bells?”

  “It sure did,” replied Belmet, gloomily, and he left the task upon which he had been occupied.

  “Paw—was it bad?” asked Clint, his voice thickening.

  “Couldn’t be no worse. . . . A week or so after we left Council Grove it ’pears Sam Bell got sick of the frontier an’ wanted to go back home. There was a rumor that a gambler fleeced him out of all his cash. No one could talk him out of the idea. An’ he got on the first stage for Independence. Accordin’ to some the stage broke down an’ the dozen or more travelers had to make camp while the driver rode back for help. There was several mounted riders with the stage, good Injun-fighters, but durin’ the night the party was raided by a bunch of redskins. The grown-ups were killed, scalped, an’ left naked on the plain. The stage was burned an’ all valuables stolen. There was no sign of the little girl, May Bell. It ’pears sure she was carried off into captivity. . . . The stage-driver never got back at all. It was buffalo-hunters comin’ the other way who fetched the news to Council Grove.”

  Clint stood up unflinching to this shock, and without a word he stalked away into the shade and covert of a grove of cottonwoods. He had not shown it, but his heart was bursting. Hiding in a secluded spot, he let himself go. His mother—and now little May! It was too much to be borne. He broke down and wept as never before in his life. That storm racked something out of him. When it was over, boyhood had left him and there was born in him the stern, grim hatred of the red men of the plains. Clint had somehow always felt that the white men were in the wrong. They had no right to usurp the hunting-grounds of the Indian tribes, to take their domain from them. For that was what this invasion amounted to. Up to the hour of his mother’s murder Clint had secretly felt sympathy for the savage tribes of the West, who must, no matter what was said to the contrary, some day be driven back into the waste lands to starve. But the loss of his mother, and now added to it that of little May Bell, stultified all fairness in Clint’s breast.

  “I’ll be an Injun-killer like Kit Carson,” he vowed.

  Chapter Four

  TWO days later Clint’s wagon-train rolled into Fort Lamed, and Clint found himself meeting scouts and hunters who remembered him, one of whom was the buckskin-clad Dick Curtis.

  “Wal, lad, you shore ’pear to be growin’ husky—onless my eyes are pore,” said Curtis, approvingly.

  “Paw says I’m runnin’ up like a weed.”

  “How old air you?”

  “Nigh on to thirteen.”

  “Say, is thet Injun talk?”

  “Honest, Mr. Curtis. You ask paw.”

  “All right, I’ll take your word fer it. But you shore look older. . . . An’ don’t call me Mister.”

  Curtis seemed disposed to be friendly and he took Clint around with him while he made purchases. He informed Clint that he would accompany the wagon-train as far as Fort Union, where he turned off the trail to go up into the mountains of New Mexico.

  “Is Mr. Carson goin’ with you?” asked Clint.

  “No. Kit left some time ago. He lives at Taos, New Mexico. He’s married to a Spanish woman an’ he has a fine place. You be shore to go an’ see Kit. He’s the greatest man in these plains an’ he took a shine to you.”

  Curtis introduced Clint to Jim Baker and John Smith, two famous frontier characters. They had been on the frontier for twenty-five years, which meant that these adventurers were among the first to cross the plains. Clint had never before seen such rough, dirty, greasy, disreputable-looking men. But for their beards and jolly talk, most of which was profane, he could not have distinguished them from Indians. Baker was married to a Cheyenne woman, Indian fashion, so Curtis said, and Smith had for wife a Comanche girl, who was handsome and could talk some English. The revulsion Clint had felt for everything pertaining to the Comanche tribe apparently did not extend to her. Clint thought her pleasant and more interesting than her renowned trapper husband. Smith had made a good deal of money buying furs from the Indians and selling them to the whites.

  “Clint, there’re some short drives when th
e Old Trail starts uphill out yonder,” said Curtis, “which means we make camp early. Do you like to hunt?”

  “Yes, but fishin’ comes first.”

  “Me, too. But a feller has to get fresh meat. Have you got a rifle?”

  “Yes. It’s an old buffalo gun.”

  “Wal, thet’ll do fer buffs, but you need a lighter gun fer deer an’ turkey. An’ say, there shore are plenty of them when we begin climbin’ the divide. Fer thet matter you’ll see deer all the way now, an’ a mess of buffalo. How about buyin’ a rifle? An’ you’ll shore want a knife. What’d you scalp your first redskin with?”

  “I—I won’t scalp him.”

  “Haw! Haw! Wal, then, what’ll you skin your first buffalo with—or deer?”

  “I’ve got a penknife.”

  “Clint, you’re on the frontier now. You want a blade thet’ll go clean through a redskin’s gizzard an’ stick out far enough to hang your hat on. Come, we’ll go in Tillt’s store an’ I’ll pick out a gun, a knife, an’ I reckon a buckskin shirt.”

  “But, Mr. Curtis, I—I haven’t any money,” replied Clint. “Paw’s got my wages.”

  “Wal, you can get what I spend an’ give it to me. An’ I’ll shore tell yore paw somethin’.”

  When Clint emerged from that crowded store he felt that it would take only a puff of wind to blow him sky high. He simply could not walk naturally. And when he and Curtis reached Clint’s camp it was no wonder that Jim Belmet stared a moment and then burst out, “For the land’s sake!”

  “Paw, this is my—my friend Dick Curtis,” said Clint, loftily.

  “Howdy, Belmet!” greeted the trapper, extending a brawny hand. “Reckon you be’n neglectin’ this youngster. He’s shore the Kit Carson stripe an’ there ain’t no sense in holdin’ him down.”

  The caravan, still under escort of Captain Payne, took what was called the Dry Trail. It cut off about two hundred and fifty miles, but was not safe for an unescorted train, and without scouts who knew where to go for water.

  Several days out from Fort Larned the perceptible heave of the prairie land began in earnest. How vast the slow, endless rise of grass! It was no longer green, but gray and, in more barren spots, a bleached white. No better feed, however, could have been found. Clint did not grow accustomed to the boundless expanse. More and more it fascinated him. As he drove on he watched the plain, and his keen eye seldom went long without espying bird or beast of some kind. Travel was slow, because of the grade, and uphill driving was easier, at least for the drivers. The road appeared to wind more than formerly, owing to frequent washes and gullies that had to be headed. Clint believed he drove and watched for days without seeing a bush or a tree. When camp was reached nothing but buffalo chips could be found to burn. These made a first-rate fire. Clint was always ready to gather this fuel, for anything that led him away from camp had an attraction. Buffalo were sighted often, though so far off that Clint could scarcely believe his eyes.