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No man's land. As I looked across it I could nearly
smell the black powder smoke and the moans of the injured. This was more likely
to happen than it had looked at first, for not only would Drisco be pushed - the
Navajo nation would be infringed upon and they might go on the warpath, who
could blame them? I scratched my head. How could have a poor hill boy like me
got into such a tangled scheme? I remembered Pa telling me when in doubt forge
forward so that was what I was going to do.
One sad fact of living on the range is that baths can
be few and far between. My clothes felt like they had been slept in for a month
and my skin was even beginning to feel scaly. With the river in front of me and
time on my hands, I decided to make the most of it. A hundred yards further on I
found a nice hole that was about five feet deep.
Looking sheepishly around, I shucked out of my clothes
and started scrubbing them first. Everything but my boot, hat and gunbelt were
tossed in and scrubbed with a bar of lye soap that I carried in my saddlebags. I
preferred the tar soap but hadn't been to a store to buy any in a spell.
When I pulled out the clothes and hung them on a bush
to dry I half expected to see them full of gaping holes, but luckily such was
not the case and they were still in one piece. Not only that, but they were sure
as shooting clean. That lye soap is fast, I had to give it that.
Now for the body. I jumped in and with some
trepidation applied the soap to my chest. I pretty near jumped back out. I was
willing to bet that stuff would peel a man's hide if he gave it a chance. The
rest of the bath went some old quick, and I was very careful about the nether
regions, if you get my drift.
I moved upstream a bit and lay in the shallows,
enjoying the cool water on my skin. Occasionally a very slight 'plop' sounded
but at first I paid it no mind. Then I just happened to be looking when a dark
bubble rose out of the bed and broke free on the surface. Finding this quite
unusual I looked closed and found the bubbles to be tiny globules of oil being
released from the earth. Now I noticed what I had somehow missed before - the
black deposits along the shore and on the stems of the water plants.
I had heard of oil, of course, back in Pennsylvania.
To the north of us a man named Drake had been drilling for it for years. The
only uses that I knew of were for lighting and tar soap. No, seems like I
remembered it being rendered into grease, as well. There was quite a bit of
speculation attached to the mineral. Probably someday people would come up with
used for it that I had never dreamed of.
Perhaps someone knew something that I didn't. I
grinned. Come to think of it, most people did. This could be the reason for an
attempted land grab. In fact, I was sure of it. The man behind all this had
probably been in Pennsylvania and seen the oil wells there first hand. I had the
time, so today I would ride up to Kirbyville and ask the settlers who had sent
them.
First I took a ride along the river to see how much
ground was affected. The distance between the two beds was considerable in
places. There could well be thousands of acres affected. Regardless of the
reason, there could be a small fortune at stake here.
I rode well north of the trail that led to Kirbyville
so as to bypass the guard on the road. A lot of the men at the ranch looked at
me strangely all ready. There was no reason to add to their speculations.
When I found the little settlement it was about what I
expected. A small pool of water was the focal point. Manzanita bushes lined one
side, the settler's wagons the other. Every wagon had a clothesline out, for who
knew when the chance would come again? A couple of large fires apparently served
as communal cooking areas, and the women chatted merrily as if they had always
been friends. A mule deer hung from the rear of one of the wagons, and a group
of boys cleaned fish. They must have found a hot spot judging by the size of
their catch.
I recognized some of the people I had turned back on
the trail. They were all friendly and apparently held no hard feelings. The man
with the boy that I had met yesterday surprised me by coming over and holding
out his hand. "Sometime it's hard for a man to admit when he's wrong. I was
wrong yesterday. I apologize."
"No need, I understand. It is a new and difficult
land. You learn fast. You and your son will make out just fine." He was not
an impressive figure, dressed in very worn homespun and wearing the old
fashioned clodhoppers that had neither a left nor a right to them. Most people,
especially the cowboys out here, had switched to the fitted left and right
footwear after the War Between the States, but poor is poor, and a lot of
farmers could not afford to do so.
He was not impressive until you looked him full in the
face, and then you saw the intelligence and vision that would carry him far.
"By the way, my name is Jackson, but most people
call me Snake because I'm kind of skinny." I figured to let it go at that
and not mention my speed at handling a gun.
"I'm Noah Cross, and this is my son Adam. I
mentioned that his Ma died back yonder, and then the locusts ate my crops, so we
decided to pick and move out here. I don't know what lies ahead but it has got
to be better than what we left behind. I hope."
"It will be. You learn to live with the land out
here, and once you do that there is nothing that can stop you." I gazed
around to include the others. "You all have a good chance as long as you
take the time to learn. Now you just need a good place to light. I just came
from the Flat, and believe me, that is no place you would ever call home.
"Who gave you the idea to come out here, anyway?
There was obviously some kind of a mix up."
"I've got it written down here," said a
balding man who was surrounded by a small herd of dirty faced children.
"The Great Territorial Land Holding Company. A fellow named James Hazeltine
spoke to us. A very pleasant chap."
"He would be," I said. "It helps when
you're selling snake oil."
"What?"
"Never mind. Let's just say that your Mr.
Hazeltine is quite a salesman. Did he tell you that Branscom Flat was a good
place to settle?
"He sure did. Said the land was fertile and we
would never run out of water."
"He got that part right. No danger of running out
today, anyway. Where did this fellow have his office?"
Now the men looked a bit sheepish. "Well, it
wasn't exactly a ...er..."
Another one spoke up. "He runs his business out
of a wagon. Has big signs he puts on the side of it when he rolls into a
town."
Under my breath I muttered, "Bet they say snake
oil on the other side." Aloud I said, "Well, the best thing to do is
forget about him. A shyster like him won't last long in the West. He'll end up
decorating a cottonwood tree, sooner or later.
"But in the meantime we've got to find a better
place for you to go. I've heard Green Valley has rich soil but I don't know if
it's open to settling. There's always Oregon. I haven't been there yet, but they
tell me it is truly God's Country. I plan on seeing it one of these years."
"Cold up there, ain't it?"
"The eastern area is, but the country along the
coast is quite warm for being so far north. It rains a lot, but if you don't
mind that it sounds like a good place to farm. The winters are easy, but like I
said, there is a lot of rain."
"I seen times I dreamed about such a place. Times
when the crops just withered and blew away. I'd like to know more about this
here Oregon."
"I'll find somebody that's been there and bring
him over. Who knows, I might even ride up there with you."
Any such plans were quickly shelved as a ruckus arose
at the end of the camp. The crowd opened up to admit a gangling man carrying a
wounded woman in his arms.
"Somebody shot up this whole family. This woman
is the only one that's left."
"Set her down in the shade of those wagons
and..."
One of the women interrupted him. "You men leave
us to it. I bet all us women has dug out a least one slug from a man."
"My God," exclaimed Noah Cross, "That's
the Fuller woman. We ate with them a week ago back along the trail."
"Pa, what happened to MaryAnn?" asked his
son.
His father shrugged at the gangling man in question.
"All dead, I'm afraid. All dead but this
one."
The younger Cross bolted away for the solitude across
the pool. His father spoke up.
"She was a pretty little thing. My boy took to
her."
A bad feeling was coming over me. ""Where
did it happen?"
"I don't know. I met the wagon running wild down
on the main trail. She was the only one still alive, so I brought her right
over."
"Was that wagon heading east or west?" I
asked him.
"Why, come to think of it, it was coming east,
coming back the way it came would be my guess."
Noah Cross looked me square in the eye. "Yeah,
mine too. Any conjecture, Snake?"
"No. It looks like it's connected to Drisco's
guards, but we don't have any proof. Not yet, anyway. Were you thinking
something else, Noah?"
He shook his head. "No, I just wanted to see what
you had to say about it."
I could see he had changed his mind. At first he had
wondered if I could have done it. I could have piped up then and told him of my
time to go scouting and coming directly from Navajo Wash, but I wanted him to
make up his own mind about me instead. I wanted him to judge my character
instead of my word. I could see that he had.
"We'd better dig some graves. How about on that
high spot over there?"
"Better dig another one," came a woman's
voice from the wagon. "She's gone too."
We all stood silent for a second, then without
speaking turned and went to the trail to take care of the other bodies. The men
were scanning the trail, the hillsides; anything but each other. Adam sullenly
looked at the ground beneath his feet, kicking at odd rocks that happened to be
in his path. His pa looked at him but left him alone.
Buzzards were all ready circling in the sky when we
approached the wagon. One horse was down. Apparently it had caught a bullet as
the wagon departed the scene of the shooting and its adrenalin had kept it
running until it stopped. There was nothing for us to do except cut the dead
horse from its harness and lead the other back, pulling the wagon that had
become a hearse.
"You know, we all ready have a graveyard, before
we have a town." Unwittingly Noah Cross had spelled out the future. For
from that sad comment the little settlement of Kirbyville turned into a town.
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