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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Romance on the Trail
Tom Sheehan
“Ladies,” wagon master Joe Ditson yelled out to a small group of women working on a small collection of weapons, “make sure each rifle is loaded and ready. No telling what’s coming at us from that noise out there. Joe knows how to shake things awake, bring stuff down that’s hanging in the trees for the plucking. Never was one to miss a fight, I can say that for him.”
“You can say that for me, too, Joe Ditson,” said a woman in a long pale blue dress with a wide dark blue collar, a red kerchief on her neck, and a pair of rifles in her hands being handled as if they were mixing spoons. She was a tall, beautiful redhead who had not collared a man as yet and who shared a wagon with her widowed father. The two Joes of the wagon train, Ditson and Dixon, realized they sat well in her eyes, but neither one had advanced the situation, content to look on as partners in sharing an observation of beauty. The lady’s name was Millicent Coombs, lately of Illinois and bound for Texas, cattle, and marriage, one way or another.
“I’m ready for anything the right man throws my way,” she had announced on occasion.
Ditson, from the first day, believed every word she said.
The Great War was over and hundreds of battle-tested men, trying to forget the troubles they had seen, upon separation from their service headed west, for a new start, a new life, and a new adventure. Few men realized how difficult their dreams would be to attain, but hard labor was better than horror, harsh blisters preferred before minie balls’ fearful interruptions.
In squads, companies and even up to battalion level, close comrades were dissipated by many causes … death, infirmities, separation, and the far horizons where hope languished like sleeping gods of promise. Some men elsewhere went to sea for a change in life’s fortunes. Some men headed for the Great Lakes and the great rivers, for the new steamers and paddle boats and a thousand ports of call that awaited them. And many robust men, uncounted numbers of them in a matter of a few years, headed west, into parts of the country unknown to them, though stories and legends circulated in every gab session about the western adventure.
Two comrades, alive because of the other’s intervention in combat’s turns, headed west together; Joe Dixon and Joe Ditson, once of Haverhill, Massachusetts, once of the 124th Massachusetts Infantry, but friends forever, started their journey on a miserable day of rain in April of 1866, when they departed from Missouri on this leg of their westward search.
In truth, they had once before gone this route, on another wagon train, but this time Joe Ditson was the wagon master and Joe Dixon was the lead scout. They were a pair of gallant men who knew each other as well as men can, inside or outside of the battlefield, which remains forever the final advocacy among men.
At the final gathering of wagon families, Ditson put it on the line for all of them. “Me and Joe are going all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Maybe one of you will get that far with us, maybe not. I know somewhere along the line a few of you will be caught up by a stretch of grass lying against a sweet mountain or a sweet river, or some valley will capture your heart, or a piece of a whole mountain will throttle your imagination like it’s never been stoked and you’ll drop your reins and know that’s the place for you and your family. It’s going to happen like that for some of you.”
“Joe,” said Millicent Coombs, “you paint a picture good enough for a bridal couple.” She tossed her red hair in the air as she continued to brace a pair of loaded rifles. Of all the women in the train, that parcel of red hair stood out for the two Joes, and that abundant and lovely figure she carried to dreamy perfection.
Ditson replied, “Like I said before, it’s not for everybody, not everybody’s so lucky. Best be ready for the signal when it comes. It may not come twice in one journey.” He had trouble keeping his eyes off her when she was not looking at him.
With that he yelled loudly to the head of the train, “Head ‘em out, Joe. Head ‘em out.”
With the usual problems having reared their heads on like entourages, such as a cranky wife or mother-in-law, a runaway daughter trying to hold onto something newly found, a sassy youth needing a lesson from outside the family, the wagon train was a month’s travel beyond Missouri. In places the stretch of grass was infinite, the mountains lifted the sky like a tent top, and wild game fed the lot of them for days on end.
Part of the route was idyllic, bringing to all the members of the wagon train a sense of security and a feeling of undisturbed motion toward western targets. Meals, on the move or at hasty campfires, went well, now and then a pie or cake was baked in a novel reflector oven set beside a campfire, or a side of venison brought in on horseback set off minor celebrations. Children, once hard to teach, learned their do’s and don’t’s quicker than ever. Each day gave them added hope, for each mile could be marked as a step in the right direction. Whistlers and singers let their tunes carry their own light-hearted spirits, chants and ditties and songs of different styles made for good company.
Out front of the wagon train, Joe Dixon kept his silhouette off skylines, out of the bare breath of lightness that opened from canyons and gullies and sudden drastic changes in the landscape where Mother Nature had dropped crude things from her hands, and away from prying eyes always on the watch. Dixon’s eyes never left their search, seeking any movement not natural in origin, or suspicious from any consideration. And he as well as Joe Ditson bore a certain nerve cell that was an exceptionally good alarm, once trust had been established.
It was being tested, he knew, in one intake of breath before sounds disturbed the peaceful terrain.
On this wet morning in early June, the sound of gunfire came from a distant cluster of trees at the edge of minor foothills rising to the true tree line. He saw no smoke nor saw any motion, but the firing rate was sporadic and he marked it as rifle fire.
Ditson, sitting his horse at a small rise in the landscape at the head of the train, figured just where Dixon was, in the midst of the running sounds. He whistled for three trusty men to come to his side. “Go check on Joe, who’s probably in the middle of that noise, or near it. But come in from back there beyond those trees, from the other side. Don’t pass any dips in the land without checking them out, like some folks might try to catch you unaware. I saw some cowboys way off yesterday, so we’re in cattle country. Gotta mind our manners hereabouts. They got sticky rules about their property and we have to mind our manners. And keep your eyes peeled for any renegades. I heard some stories back there in Missouri, so be alert.”
Ditson knew his place was with the wagon train regardless of any intrusion. With Dixon out there in the mix of something, it wouldn’t be right to leave the wagon train with no leader. He began to scream out orders, making sure that everybody on the train was ready for action. That included the women, and the tall redhead he could admire forever. Millicent Coombs was off to his left standing extra loaded rifles at the ready for any action, and looking like a statue to beauty had come alive.
That momentary draw on his attention went afield as he turned to the gunfire going off out of sight somewhere. The firing rate had slackened and a new thought hit him that all the noise had been a diversion. The thought came out of the sixth sense, the special nerve cell he and Dixon had experienced and talked about so many times during the war. Now it came rolling out of a hidden place in his mind to become as much fact as it could be made into.
He muttered to himself, “Joe, I hope you’re listening to the same thing I am. It’s coming clear as written on paper.” They both had heard stories of renegades raiding wagon trains, not for goods or riches or weapons, but for women. Again he looked at the gorgeous redhead and his whole body froze with trepidation thinking of her being abducted.
He screamed, “Circle the wagons. Watch out there at the rear. Watch for raiders.” Then he yelled again, “Ladies, get in your wagons. Take a rifle with you. Watch out for the rear.”
He watched as the protective circle started to form, as women ran to rejoin their family wagons, as Millicent Coombs tossed a rifle up to her father and jumped up on the seat and took the reins. She snapped them and yelled as if she had been driving a team her whole life. The team of horses snapped into action too.
Joe Ditson knew he was in love.
Pard Joe Dixon was, at that same moment, riding hard back to the train along with the three men Ditson had sent out. He had seen two unknown men down in a wadi, renegades most likely and not local cowboys, firing randomly at nothing, and knew it was a diversion, a sporadic matter of gunfire to draw attention, and men, from the wagon train. He turned and fled back toward the train.
It was the redhead who yelled at Ditson, “Joe, they’re coming up from behind.”
Ditson saw the band of men coming hard at the rear where the circle was being tightened up. He rode hard toward the raiders and saw Dixon and three others coming in from the side. A fusillade of firing started, from both the raiders and from members of the train as all parties were fully alert.
Two of the raiders, both ornery looking white men, tried to drag a woman from the seat of a wagon. A young boy in the wagon shot one of the men right off his horse. The woman hit the second man with a whip in the face, and then saw him get knocked off his horse by a shot from another wagon. As he tried to get up from the ground the hoof of another rider’s horse kicked him in the head. The man would be hard pressed to come back from that jolt.
Two more renegades came up on the other side of the wagon and were met by Dixon, the returning men and a hail of fire. These renegades apparently had been after the same woman, a young 30-ish woman of good proportions and decent looks, and it looked to Ditson as if the train’s women had been spied upon or studied by the renegades somewhere along the line, if not at the start of this leg of the journey. He looked at Millicent Coombs knowing she too must have been ear-marked. She had a rifle across her lap as she continued to drive her team up close to the next wagon. Her father shot another raider who came close and then he in turn was hit and slumped into the bucket of the seat. His daughter shot a man directly in the head. He fell off his saddle, one leg caught up in his spur, and the horse dragged him across the grass.
A woman screamed from another wagon and Joe Ditson drove his horse right at a raider attempting to grab her from the back of the wagon. His arm naked out and dragged the man away from the woman and jerked his head almost off his shoulders. The man went limp and dropped to the ground. Ditson shot him on the way down.
The continuous fire from the wagon train finally drove off the raiders, who left four men dead, one possibly dead out on the prairie, and no women taken as prisoners, including the tall redhead and the woman first targeted who had wielded a nasty whip. Mr. Coombs, after being checked, had been wounded in his shoulder, but not seriously, and was put into the back of his wagon to recuperate. One of Dixon’s companions had been slightly wounded also.
Millicent Coombs, when the excitement was over and the dead were buried, said, “I hope all our days on the trail are quieter than this one. How did they ever expect to get away with kidnapping women? It seems so futile, so uneven.” She looked at the burial mounds and how their statements stood out on the green grass of the prairie.
Ditson said, “If one of them got a woman on their horse they know damned right well we wouldn’t shoot, afraid we’d hit the victim. They take great chances because you ladies are special prizes out here, even though they know we’d chase them down to get back what’s ours.”
Smiling broadly, beauty and announcement glowing in her face, the redhead said, “Joe, you have what they wanted, but they weren’t man enough to take it from you. I’d sooner be dead than be with any of them. I trust my options are better than that.”
When she looked at Ditson, her eyes were telegraphic, and he felt a possessive tremor in his body.
From his point of view, Joe Dixon nodded acknowledgment for his true pard.
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