Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Caleb climbed the steps to Doc Burnett’s porch and rapped on the door.
This was not good. He’d sent nearly every last dollar he and Henry had for the herd of longhorns Duke Ortiz was supposed to drive up from Texas.
Now, from the looks of things, he had a couple of wounded cow punchers and no cattle.
He hoped the rest of Duke’s men were off watching the herd somewhere close.
Winter was about to roll in and bury them all.
Hearing no one coming to the door, he knocked again and then went and peered in the front parlor window.
Through the glass, he saw Mrs. Lewis hurrying toward him from the back of the house.
The woman always reminded Caleb of a prairie dog—small and wiry and quick, with a pinched face and a nervous way about her.
She was the wife of the hardware store owner and had been helping keep house for Doc since before Sheila arrived.
Mrs. Lewis pulled open the door and ushered him in. “Come on through, Mr. Marlowe. It’s fortunate that you’ve come. I heard the cowboys talking about you.”
“They hurt, ma’am?”
“Two of them are. Doc is working on the one who’s hurt the worst. Miss Sheila is helping him.
The other two are sitting outside the surgery door in the back hallway.
” She shook her head. “They refused to wait in the back parlor or the kitchen, even. Said they wouldn’t muddy up the place with blood and trail dust.”
Caleb went past her along the wide central hallway.
The smell of antiseptic, coffee, and fresh bread hung in the house. It struck him how familiar it all felt now. Five months ago, Doc Burnett's house had been another stop in another town. These days, stepping through the door felt a little too much like coming home.
An open stairway to the second floor was ahead of him and to the right.
The steps turned at a landing and formed an arch over the downstairs hallway.
Beyond the arch, at the end of the narrower passageway, he could see the trail boss and his companion sitting on kitchen chairs outside the closed door to the surgery.
Beyond that door, Sheila was helping her father. Caleb found himself listening for her voice without meaning to.
The two men stood up as soon as they spotted Caleb and waited until Mrs. Lewis disappeared into the kitchen.
“Marlowe,” Ortiz said grimly.
“Duke.”
Ortiz hadn’t changed much since Caleb last saw him.
That was at Duke’s Texas ranch, five years ago.
A couple of inches under six feet, he was—as Malachi described him—lean and tough.
His complexion was not as dark as his companion—a blend of a Mexican father and a black-skinned mother—but his face had developed the deep lines of a man who’d spent a great deal of time in the sun, and as much time worrying.
Caleb saw how bone-weary both men looked. They’d shed filthy trail coats that hung on the backs of their chairs. Their wide-brimmed, sweat-stained hats lay on the floor, and the man with Ortiz was wearing a bloody sling on his left arm.
Both men wore the clothing of their trade.
Bandanas, heavy woolen shirts under leather vests, scarred cowhide chaps over the pants, and sturdy boots that showed the dirt and the wear of the trail.
Duke had given up wearing the sash of the vaquero, but his bandana was still the traditional bright red silk of his Mexican forebears.
“What happened to you? What are you doing here? Where’s the herd?”
“We lost it,” Ortiz said straight out.
“What do you mean you lost it? Lost it how? I trusted you, Duke.”
“We was bushwhacked. They took the herd. Killed nine good men. These two are all I got left.”
Caleb tried to take this in. A thousand head of cattle lost. Nine dead.
How was that possible? A hundred questions exploded in his head.
“This is bullshit, Duke.” Caleb’s temper boiled over. Everything he had, everything he’d put into their future was gone. “You’ve done this a hundred times. You never lost a damn herd in your life.”
“Damn right.” Duke was fired up, as well. “Don’t think I just handed them critters over.”
“You sure as hell don’t have them now.” Caleb slammed his hat on the floor. “Damn me, Ortiz, but I thought you were good.”
“I am good, cabron. Give me a damn minute to explain. I’m here, ain’t I? I didn’t hightail it back to Texas, did I?”
“Texas ain’t big enough for you to hide from me.”
“You know me, Marlowe. Say what you will, but I know you trust me. Just listen to me.”
If he didn’t know Duke Ortiz, if he didn’t trust him, Caleb might have forgotten they were standing in Doc Burnett’s house. Beyond the door, Sheila and Doc Burnett were trying to save a man’s life.
That thought cooled his temper faster than anything Duke could have said.
“How?” he managed to get out through clenched teeth.
“We was ambushed. By rustlers.”
“Rustlers?” Caleb glared at him. “You ain’t no greenhorn.”
The trail boss’s eyes darted fire. “No, I ain’t no greenhorn, and neither were my men.”
Mrs. Lewis poked her head out of the kitchen for the tenth time since the argument started. She was trying to catch Caleb’s eye.
“I’m putting on coffee,” she chirped as brightly as she could manage. “Would you fellows care for a cup?”
The cowboy standing behind Ortiz answered, “No, ma’am. But thankee.”
Ortiz shook his head and Caleb declined, as well.
Caleb waited until the woman went back into the kitchen before speaking again. “That thousand head cost me everything I got. This’ll ruin me.”
Duke shook his head. “You know better. Marlowe. I’ll make good on this.”
“How?”
“I’m going after the rustlers.”
“And what if you can’t find ’em? What if you can’t get the cattle back.”
“I’ll go down home to Texas and gather another herd. I’ll drive them up here next spring. I’ll start early and deliver by late summer. I’ll eat half the cost. And you don’t pay till I deliver.”
Caleb considered the offer. The money had already changed hands. Any other rancher would just call it tough luck and move on. But Ortiz was trying to do the right thing.
“You are being decent.”
Ortiz slapped Caleb on the shoulder. “Them dirty pendejos won’t think so when I find them.”
“We’ll make ’em pay, boss.”
Caleb looked at the wounded man standing behind Ortiz. He had a blood-soaked cloth wrapped around his upper arm.
“This here is Bass Dart, Marlowe.” Duke gestured to the surgery door. “Tex Washington is in with the doc right now.”
Caleb nodded to the cowboy. “Doc’ll fix you up.”
“First time being shot by rustlers, but I’ll live.”
Rustlers were a problem everywhere, but cattlemen had been driving longhorns up from Texas for over a decade.
The three main cattle routes—the Shawnee Trail, the Chisholm Trail, and the Goodnight-Loving Trail—were well known to men like Duke Ortiz.
When Caleb had been up in Greeley, he heard a fella say that he figured over a million head had already traveled those trails.
The westernmost route, the Goodnight-Loving Trail, was the only one that passed through Colorado.
Starting near Fort Concho in Texas, it ran west until it picked up the Pecos River, then ran north through Arizona Territory all the way to Denver and eventually to Cheyenne up in Wyoming.
All told, it covered two thousand miles.
Duke wasn’t going all the way to Wyoming, but that route was the way he’d planned on coming.
A cattle drive was hard going, and it always had its dangers, but Ortiz knew what he was doing. Or should have.
“No one ever got the drop on you before, Duke. What happened?”
“Do you want the short version or long?”
“Start from the beginning.”
“We left my ranch figuring, with a little luck, we’d make it up here before the snow shut us down.
It was a good herd, Marlowe. ’Course, we hit a few snags along the way.
We were still in Texas when a prairie fire burned out everything west of Horsehead Crossing for fifty miles.
We had to go south to get around the charred grass.
Then we lost two weeks rounding up the herd after a pinche perra of a hailstorm hit us south of Fort Sumner.
Even so, I thought we’d beat the winter snows. ”
“Did you cross the Arkansas River west of Pueblo?” Caleb asked.
“We did. We left Goodnight there. Followed the river where we could. We’d driven the herd north around a place called Charlotte Falls. We had the mountains ahead of us, and we knew we were at the beginning of the difficult part of the drive.”
Caleb knew that area very well. They would have been climbing pretty steadily, and the going would have been slower, but eventually the Arkansas would turn north. His ranch and Elkhorn were a straight shot from there.
“That’s where the dirty culeros were waiting.
We’d been funneled into a narrow pass. For a half mile, we had rocky bluffs above us on both sides.
” Duke’s anger showed in his eyes. “A dozen or so rode right at us from the west, boxing us in. We had nowhere to go. They had the sun behind them, and they were firing their guns and shouting. The cattle panicked and turned on itself.”
Bass Dart glanced at his boss. “Tell him about the gunmen.”
“They had riflemen above us. I don’t know how many.
There we was, hemmed in good and tight, the cattle in a damn frenzy, and the bastards shot down five of my men before we even knew where it was coming from.
By then, the herd was stampeding. Even if I had a hundred men, there was no chance of stopping them.
Three of my drag riders got stomped in the run. ”
Caleb had seen stampeding buffalo and cattle. He knew how deadly the hooves and long horns of these steers could be once the terror got hold of them.