Chapter 3 Escape
Bret was given better quarters in the bunkhouse with the other men on the ranch, and now he was expected to pull his weight with ranch chores.
From sunup to sundown, a cowboy's life was hard work. Hazing the cattle out of creek draws of scrub oak and box elder, roping astride a cutting horse, bulldogging, or throwing the beef to the ground for branding. Riding a bucking horse and being thrown off into the sand. Saddle sores, and not all of them on the horse, either.
He began to notice that running, or single irons, were changing brands, hot in the middle of an Arizona June. The talk ran that the cattle came from as far away as Sycamore Canyon, almost one hundred and fifty miles, its creek a tributary of the long, winding Verde River.
Did he think of running away? At night in the bunkhouse, busted from the hard day, he'd hear a lonesome coyote howl out on the desert, or an even more lonesome cowpoke sing and strum his guitar, and he'd think he'd found a slice of heaven. No better life than herding cattle. Feeding the multitudes. He was a kind of hero to the world. Then he'd remember who he worked for. Rustlers.
Besides, with his natural reticence to dying, he was loath to run away again at this time, a plan that just might get him killed. Everyone was on high alert with the preparations for a drive of the stolen herd to Agua Prieta, on the Mexico side of the border.
So he bided his time to gather his gear and ride off. Travers hadn't treated him any differently than the others working for him, but time would tell how that played out.
Once they had a talk just outside the heat of a firepit in the blacksmith's tent. While Travers watched the work on the anvil, and as the forge fire crackled, Maverick stood looking off to a distant mesa, chewing on a piece of long grass.
"It's peaceful here," was all he said.
Travers looked at him, then pulled out the 'makings' for a smoke, lighting up and offering the pouch and papers to his reluctant companion. Maverick hesitated as he didn't often smoke, but then took both and rolled his own cigarette, lighting it from a match Travers provided.
Travers inhaled deeply, then exhaled. "I'm not sending you to Agua Prieta, with the rustled stuff, Bret."
Bret turned. "Hmm?"
"I know how your feelings run. You'll go north with me when my own cattle's ready to move."
Maverick had no wish to go south, that was for sure. Dry dust, rocks, desert hostiles, and a too broiling sun made him glad he hadn't been chosen to help drive the stolen beef into Mexico. Travers had decided to let him go on the drive to Ellsworth—north—instead.
"And after that?"
Travers exhaled again. Smoke billowed out of his mouth. "I can't tell. It all depends. You know a lot about our work here."
"Though you and Bessie treat me fine, wouldn't it be a good time to let me go, before this goes any further?"
"Not this close to the drive south. You might tell the bluebellies at the fort."
"Fort McDowell?"
Travers nodded, turned away and inhaled again.
Maverick knew what he meant. Each day brought the drive into Mexico that much closer. It'd be a bad time for the army to find out about it. Travers had chosen his drive boss and his ramrod. The men were gearing up, checking saddle cinches and other straps on their saddles, rolling up their bedrolls, exercising their trail horses inside the corrals, and trying out new lariats.
Willing to throw Maverick a bone of some sort, Travers added, "After Ellsworth, we'll see."
With that definite 'maybe,' Travers eased a cramp out of his back and found his horse, forked it and rode off down the river. Maverick had no choice but to get on his remuda horse and follow. They were heading back out to look for more strays in the oak brush.
Taking a long swig from his canteen, he caught up with Travers, who was flailing his lariat at some startled group, propelling the beef towards the holding camp. Trying to wash the sandstone dust out of his throat on a blistering hot day like this one, when the water dried on his tongue before it had a chance of going down, was like trying to thread a needle with his two big toes.
He gazed up at the hot, hot sun. A kind of fiery bronze, reddish-brown blaze. Part of him liked that color, but the part that made sense hated it. It was but the middle of a long, hot day, and Maverick longed for sundown, when the sky turned orange and the sun dipped lower and lower, bringing a kind of shady cool with its passing.
He hung his canteen back over his pommel and began hazing some of the bawling critters himself, leaning out of the saddle and brandishing the braided rope, yipping to them to move out of the draws, making scary noises like a flustered chickadee.
The Mexican drive got underway. In the following week, while roundup continued on Travers' own cattle, Bret ate only once in a while with the bunkhouse crew—the few who were not on the drive—and slept there, but more often he took his meals with Travers and Bessie in their parlor-cum-dining room.
Carla, who now helped out more in the kitchen as Bessie's time drew near, talked rapidly with him in broken English and fluttered around the dining table filling empty bowls and platters with highly-seasoned food. She poured wine, wiped up crumbs, and enjoyed herself immensely. Maverick smiled up at her and knew he had won a friend. At least one who'd never see him go without.
After two more days of roping, hard riding, and the smell of cattle-trampled dust in his nostrils—he decided it was time to vamoose, especially now that Travers was down to half-force with the Mexican exodus. His remaining men were tied up too in branding his own 'stuff' with a trail brand for the drive to Ellsworth, on which he'd throw his herds in with other owners' herds.
So on the third day, on the quiet, Maverick put an extra canteen of water in his saddlebag, along with his only other shirt, and begged Carla for a couple of extra sandwiches. Carla, delighted, happily supplied them. She wondered though, since he was no growing boy, why he needed the extra food.
He was keeping a secret. Without much effort, she realized what it was. For him to be truly happy again he had to be free. She had come to love his company, and his rare smiles, and would do anything to make him happy, so she chose not to mention anything to Travers.
He accepted the cloth-wrapped bundle gratefully, then rode out to a section only lightly scoured for strays. It looked like a good place to be if his mind was really on his work.
Travers was so short-handed, and so much at ease with his prisoner, that he actually took his eyes off him more and more often, even sending his guard of Texas Pete and the boys away. Additionally, he gave them a few chores to do to keep their eyes off him. He had a complaisance about Maverick's staying on that his prisoner didn't feel.
When all the saddle cinches had been loosened for the midday feed, and the men were chewing, jawing and smoking their short, rolled weeds, Maverick crept off to his own sorrel, glad that he had wrangled Ollie to be included in Travers' remuda, or remounts, today.
Speaking softly in the gelding's ear, he soothed his muzzle with a rope-callused hand, dragging his long fingers slowly over the wide nose. Earlier, he had made a show of loosening his own cinch, but had actually kept it tight around the horse's belly in order to be ready to fly the coop.
Leaning over, he untied Ollie from the picket line, then carefully guided him back out of the grove of willows where the shade was soft on this hot day. Here by the creek and under the cottonwoods, the cowboys had chosen to take their short break. Still talking to him, he pulled Ollie through the grove, away from the fire, and there, with no noise, mounted him. Turning the horse downriver, he gave a short kick with both feet to the gelding's sides and took off as soundlessly as a wad of thistle-down floating in the air.
Travers had been expecting something like this all that morning. He'd seen Maverick taking Clara aside, and noted one less canteen hanging from the pegs in the tack room just before they rode out. Once he startled them into action, the cowboys tightened cinches, untied their brutes, and made off down the river after the escaping man.
It became a chase as Maverick soon knew he was being followed. He yelled and spurred Ollie across the river and up the bank through thickets of scrub oak that tore at his pants legs and Ollie's bare flanks.
He pushed Ollie up a rocky escarpment and then sailed out onto the dry flats. Ollie responded well, almost as if he was tired of his previous inactivity. For a town horse, used to soft straw in a livery stable and good hay and nightly rubdowns, he had some spunk.
Hooves pounding the hard sand, he galloped wildly and showed no hold-back, not seeming to mind the hide scratches from the brush. Maybe too he was glad to be free of Travers, if horses could think that way. His rider surely was.
In a quarter of an hour, heading north, Maverick gained a short mesa, struggled up it, and saw below a land of washes and dry sage, leading to the canyon walls of Fossil Creek, the place where his adventure had all begun.
Angling into a canyon down an old Apache trail, through some pine, he came to the steep bottom where willows and cottonwoods grew. He waded the creek with Ollie in an attempt to lose his pursuers by hiding his tracks in the rushing water. Ollie hadn't yet tired. He splashed through travertine pools, another and another, like strings of wet pearls in the shady wilderness, with fiery determination. It was almost as if he knew what this—escape—meant to his rider.
Climbing the tree-lined bank, with no knife for bushwhacking, Maverick used his hands to scatter the brush aside, making passage for himself and his sorrel. He got cut a lot that way, but escapin' was escapin'. No doubt it wasn't going to be easy.
If he could emerge unseen, he might have a chance to hide out for a while, until things 'cooled' down. Long Valley, a narrow glen above the Mogollon Rim, might offer some refuge, he thought.
But he never got out of Fossil Creek Canyon. By another route, Travers and his men cut him off. Shooting ahead of his position, they brought him to a stop, but he wasn't giving up yet.
"Hard to keep those boys down," he muttered to himself as he alighted from Ollie and dove into the scrub at the sound of the pistol shots. He tied Ollie's reins to a tree limb and prepared to sell his life dearly. If need be.
Travers had dismounted too, and knowing he was unarmed, stomped down on his position, splashing through the shadowy creek water. A half-dozen men, some with pistols drawn, one or two carrying rifles, clumped through the brush after their boss. Bret could have fought them, but instead gave up peaceably, untying Ollie and leading him out of the scrub again. Once back at the creek, he submitted to being tied with whang-strings.
Shaking his head as he bound Maverick's wrists in front of him, the slightly older Travers gave the itinerant gambler a little talking to.
"First off," he said, sweat pouring off his tanned face and coloring his pale blue shirt, "if you run off again like that, it'll be the last time. Understand me?"
Maverick, both winded and bathed and in his own sweat, nodded, then he got on his horse with some difficulty due to his bound hands. Work, at least for him, was over for the day.
But he did resume work with Traver's cattle. The stockman couldn't spare any man. He had the drive up north to think of. The next day, he gave a stern-eyed look at Maverick and slapped his own Colt .44 in its holster as a sign he wasn't fooling this time. Maverick got the hint and found himself some cattle to 'drift' of the nearly one thousand head belonging to the businessman side of Dale Travers, and not to the rustler side.
He spent that day in the saddle, and after another two, he had the rotten luck to find a steer stuck in a wet wash. He and Hank Rollins were trying to fetch him out, the steer bawling for all he was worth (quite a lot). He dallied the rope, already tied to the steer's horns, around his saddle horn, while Hank jumped into the muck and tried to haze the poor beast out by waving his hat and making a god-awful catcall. Maverick walked his horse backward to try to pull the steer out.
"That's just about got it!" yelled the curly-headed cowboy. A man of about twenty-two, which was the average age for Travers' men, he stood up to his knees in mud. His hat slipped out of his hand into the slough as he pushed on the southern end of the northbound steer.
Maverick laughed until his sides would bust and in so doing happened to glance up towards the west, seeing some riders come out of the trees towards where they were. These riders wore blue coats and rode strong army mounts. He could almost see the chevrons on the sergeant and the crossed swords of their trooper caps from where he was.
"Pull back, Bret!" yelled the struggling cowboy. "I think that'll do it. Pull!"
Hank had taken hold of the steer's tail for leverage in getting out and fell forward into the mud at Maverick's yank. Cursing a blue streak, he struggled out at last, shaking himself off like a wet dog while he untied the steer and handed Maverick back his rope, muddy now from Hank's tumble. Slapping his hands together to knock off the mud, he too looked towards the riders.