Short Stories & Tall Tales
Mission in the Desert
By Tom Sheehan
Out to avenge his brother Max’s death and two days deep into the desert on the trail of a bushwhacking rat, the last thing Justin Tolliver could remember, as he fell over the edge of the cliff, was wondering why a stranger had taken a shot at him, a man he did not know, had never seen before.
And never out in the torrid Mojave, as though neither one of them belonged here. There was a twist of irony floating in his thoughts; it seemed to be pointing at him, making observations that should not be disregarded. He also realized there were days he’d rather shoot than think. This was one of them, but he had been too slow on the draw.
The Mojave in its placid markings was a sin against man as well as animal, though Tolliver had seen a few critters in his time that seemed to revel in hot, dry days and cool nights. Life on the trail always carried dictates and trade-offs; the ups and downs, wins and losses, shot taken and shot missed. There was no way around such facts. Sometimes during one of his rare bounty hunter chases the nights became so damned cold his toes felt the blasphemy of the terrain and what it held out for him. Then the sun would make a return visit. Destiny always reared its ugly head in harsh solitude, silence between dunes or cliff faces, in dry wadies that led nowhere. Geological rock faces told him he was 10,000 years too late for a water run, odd strata telling him stories his grandfather had told. At odd moments he swore that the desert was Hell in itself, or about halfway there, for he remembered his father saying a waddy was also a cowboy. Was he slipping in his thinking again? Something overtaking him, long past its due? How far afield had he gone?
On those nights that he was leery of the unknown, what lay ahead, he knew what he was and what he was at, though there were times he could not look back down the trail at what he had become. He was a relentless rider when provoked or on a mission. He bore animal instincts. Survival was a saddle partner; it had to be that way. From the outset, from his first days, he rode a horse that was special to him, but not a tool to use recklessly, to push beyond the pale. He had animal dictates that ruled his life: horse dictates, though others burned their onerous way into his psyche; be damned good to the horse under your rump; payback will take a long time if you don’t.
And the still, black memories of his brother kept coming at him, sketchy as they were, shadowy, loose as dreams. At one point he believed all he could remember of his brother’s gruff voice was him saying, “There are some things in this world that don’t belong here, and I hope you never bump into any of them.”
It was an omen from the blood.
Max never once carried that statement any further, as if to settle it in place for once and for all. “Mark it,” he seemed to be saying. And he could almost see the full image of Max, like looking in a mirror; they could have been twins except for the lines that Max crossed in his times on the trail. But both of them were blond, blue-eyed, square chinned, tall, agile, who rode tough and long, who mostly found any kind of labor agreeable; fencing, riding herd for endless hours, branding, getting wet in the last saloon on earth. But, as fate works its way, one found the cards and the other didn’t. The card man won the big ranch with a full house, treys and deuces. He wanted to call it Threes ‘n’ Twos and settled on Double-TT. It was bigger than the town they were born in back in Illinois.
Justin went back to those deep desert thoughts that forever stayed awake in his consciousness. A few of the desert critters, making announcements each day on their entry into his sight, reveled in his discomfort, the way they could look at him from a safe distance, or come too close for him to breathe. Long ago he had learned to leave well enough alone, especially when it came to denizens of territories where he was not very comfortable, the desert being the most respected place for his separateness. In his travels he had seen all its critters; the lizards and chuckwallas, spiders and centipedes, tree-climbing fox and howling and yelping coyotes, cottontails and jackrabbits, the road runners and Gila woodpeckers. The gamut of them ran through his everyday mind as his eyes moved, sifted and catalogued the moving ones. In addition, he was aware of many of their traits, knowing that such knowledge was a lot better than staying ignorant. In every end, he believed, it would pay off. He had to count on that. Survival wore many guises.
Many times he went back over the incident at the saloon where Max had been killed, as it had come to him: the card game rigged from the beginning, the scene rehearsed, the bystanders brought into the mix by Carter Enright, big man in Fort Darby, who wanted the one thing that was foremost on his mind at the time… Max Tolliver’s ranch, the big Double-TT spread that ran as far as a horse could go in half a day. The deal, as later nervously discussed behind backs and whispered into trusted ears, went as practiced. The false charge was accepted, the retort coming from Max as the table was heaved asunder and he reached for his Colt. Cards and cash went flying, and two triggers were pulled. Only one shot was fired.
It was all as planned and rigged. Now Justin Tolliver looked for the WHO. Later he’d look for the HOW.
His brother never went into town with his gun chambers empty and astride his hips. Along the line somewhere, at least one chamber had been emptied. It was the mark of Carter Enright, as dirty as a buried toad off the desert, and the shooter was an Enright ranch hand, Carl Furmer, a plant if there ever was a plant; one hired gun, cowboy style.
Before morning on the day following the shooting, before the sun leaped down into the desert with its full grip, Enright was gone from Fort Darby. And so was Furmer. Men on the run. Everybody knew that Justin Tolliver would take up the chase. Once in town, hearing the whispers, it was known that he would head out on the trail, often a home away from home for him; herder, rambler, now and then a relentless bounty hunter.
He re-affirmed that some of the desert animals told him water was near, or where brush growth might provide slender cover from the sun or provide firewood, or which snared animal might dress up his spit or fire pan. It was knowledge he was constantly adding to as he scanned all things about him, what was still and what moved, however slowly or slyly. He could follow trail while doing so, but also realized there were trade offs to such intensity. He stayed away from bands of peccaries or javelinas, all snakes regardless of color coding, unless they were easy kills, the scorpions and centipedes that were new or strange, and strange shapes or movements of bodies he had no knowledge of. Slithery shadows, critters with sly movement, bothered him no end.
It was at one of those moments then, studying the trail mysteriously and coyly laid out for him as if a trap was being set, when he saw the first human being he’d seen in close to a week. The man, on a pinto, came up out of a dune dip way off to his left. The stranger had immediately leveled a rifle shot at him like he was one of the despised desert critters. The slug hit Tolliver in the left shoulder, spun him around and knocked him off his horse, and continued to toss him way off balance. As he fell down the slope of a sandstone cliff, the stranger came and stood at the rim looking down at him. On the bottom he played dead, door-sill dead. He wondered where his Colt had flown off to during the fall, and the stranger, tall as a tree on the rim’s edge, smiled contemptuously and turned away, sure that the deed was done.
The sun, a hot pot in the sky, even early in the day, seemed to boil over, touching Tolliver with frenzies of heat. A critter slithered from the shade of a nearby stone and whispered away, perhaps a dread creature taking stock of him. On a flat rock a mere dozen feet away a lizard tossed its tail slowly, the eyes steady on his eyes, hypnotic and ghostly at the same time. High above him, still wheeling with an awful grace and apparent ease, the vultures let themselves out to the wind. The dozen of them sifted easily like windblown leaves, lazy, patient, hungry.
The whole scene was too much to put off as chance. His horse had run off. With his rifle. His gear. His supplies. Almost all his hope. Even the vultures had begun to circle lower, riding nearer thermals, counting time. Once again he was being carefully eyed. Like staring was an undelivered knife awaiting aim and delivery.
The strange shooter, the bushwhacker, might well have been a hired detour or stop-gap in the road, a kind of ploy that Carter Enright used in his way of business. Tolliver thought about his horse and his grub sack and his water bags, how they had been mysteriously damaged a few nights earlier, as if timed to break down too far out on the trail to get back for refills. Lucky he had met Martha Ann Cosgrove one more time, the decent widow of the sheriff who’d been a dear friend, and her invitation to stay a night had saved him from a breakdown out on the dry trail and Carter Enright and his murdering hand, out there ahead of him, sitting, waiting, aiming.
Just Tolliver was not on the run, though he had felt like it as he set out on the front leg of his journey, a journey he figured would eventually take him right to Carter Enright, high in some lonesome place where he was sure Just Tolliver could not find him… not ever again.
Now, prone on the hot sand, the pain starting to ride in him, apparently dead to any on-looker, he wondered how long he could play the ruse. The sun was merciless, the vultures closer, but his horse was faithful, for not more than a half hour later, with no sign of the bushwhacker, the big black returned, snickering, neighing, kicking at the sand, possibly leery of other animal movement, seeking the safety of his rider.
Tolliver, in a few moments, lay in the shadow of the horse. He scanned the near ground and saw his Colt in the sand but 15 feet away. There was no other movement. The other rider did not re-appear to check out his victim.
In another hour, his wound dressed, the horse watered from his Stetson, Tolliver picked up the trail. The bushwhacker, he was convinced, was not too serious at his work, and had hurried off to brag about his supposedly completed deed and to get his money. It was the bushwhacker’s second mistake.
Just before midnight, the stars unlimited in the sky and as high and as far as Tolliver ever had seen them, the smell of stale smoke came on the wind along with the yelp of a fox and the distant howl of a coyote riding the wind too. Night was in its deep set, colorless but carrying its own music. He reined his horse in, climbed down, tied that good old boy off on a small bush, and circled to his right, as if he was circling the heart of the smoky odor. In less than an hour he had his rifle sighted on the man settling down for the night. Embers in the fire were pale and dim. A bedroll was laid out. The fox yelped again. Way off the coyote howled anew. In the brush some other creature slithered across the sand. Each came as a separate note of the night’s rhythm.
In a slight ensuing silence, Tolliver, a creature to be feared, stood in command, darkness wrapped around his tall frame. “Stand to,” he said, “I can fire a shot over your head so close you’ll think you’ve been shaved some. The other man came close to crumpling at the smoldering edge of the fire. “And stand up, you desert rat. Raise your arms slow like. Real slow. One sneaky move and you’re one dead bushwhacker.”
He walked in on the other man, his rifle leveled at his midsection. “I know you’re Enright’s man. Where’s he waiting for you? What’s your name?”
“Ben Loughman,” the man rasped, “and he’s in Hodd’s Canyon. He said you damned well wouldn’t rest until you got all of us. Told me I’d earn myself a month’s pay if I brought you down. He knew you were coming after him. He wanted you out here, said you’d be easier out here than your brother was in town. Sounds like he was counting on it and it ain’t gone his way.”
Tolliver, still thinking about the lay of the land and the kind of man Enright was, said, “I’m taking your horse, your guns, and you’re walking back the way you come. Take your water. But if I ever see you again, here or there, I’ll kill you on sight. Were you part of the gang that tricked my brother into the gunfight?’
“No,” Loughman answered, “I was not part of it. I was with Enright’s herd, at Kalappo, bringing them in. We were a day out. We heard about it from a rider who came from town.”
Three hours later, dawn a mysterious false light in the eastern sky, the chill still in place,
silence yet a part of night breaking apart, Tolliver looked down the length of Hodd’s
Canyon and the small shack built against a line of sparse brush and the remnants of awater hole. Three horses were tethered at a make-shift rail. Smoke circled from a smallchimney made of stone. A roadrunner moved quickly in the soft light. A fox yelped andTolliver wondered if it was the same one he heard before. The piecemeal sounds,coming from darkness, had not disturbed the setting.
Drawing on all he had learned on the trail over the years, what he knew of men like Enright, the scene in front of him was too idyllic, too composed, too made up for a grownman to believe. If there was one man like Loughman on the payroll, there would beothers. Though there were three horses tied at the railing, he believed only Enright was inthe shack. The other horsemen would be out on the fringes, waiting for him if Loughmanwas not able to get his job done. It would be one more move that Enright was holding, like the final ace tucked up his sleeve.
Tolliver retraced his steps, slipping back into the soft purple of morning’s false dawn.Two more men were discovered and discharged from their duties, each without a shotfired, as Tolliver drew on every facet of his experience. Any Indian, Plains or otherwise, would own him as a brother at stealth.
As he moved down toward the shack, he could hear his brother saying again, “There are some things in this world that don’t belong here, and I hope you never bump into any of them.”
In a matter of minutes, that all went by the boards.
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