Buffalo Trail (8 page)

B
illy Dixon and his scout crew got back to Dodge City a week before Christmas. As with everything else in his life, Billy kept the return low-key. He showed up that night in Jim Hanrahan's saloon and sat quietly in a corner, sipping whiskey for two bits a shot and watching the billiard matches in progress. As always, his red setter bitch Fannie lay by his feet. She was a nervous dog, unlike the rest of the aggressive Dodge pack that roamed the town's dirt streets growling and fighting among themselves. Fannie stuck close to Billy, who often crooned to her in a soft voice that would have invited ridicule for any of the other hide men demonstrating such tenderness. But nobody ever ragged on Billy about it, because for all his quiet ways he was the toughest among them. None of them could have explained precisely why that was common knowledge, but everyone understood it all the same.

Dodge City being a gossipy place, it was soon known that Billy was back and drinking in Hanrahan's. The minute Bat Masterson heard he hustled right over, pausing only to fetch Cash McLendon from their room at the Olds boardinghouse. McLendon didn't want to come. He told Bat that Billy probably just wanted to have a few drinks in peace;
when he was ready, he'd get everyone together and talk about his trip south. But Masterson wouldn't wait.

“The sooner we know Billy's plans, the sooner we can get ourselves right in the middle of them. Haul your ass off that cot, C.M. For all we know, there are fifty others ahead of us, bearding Billy in that saloon and convincing him to take them along when he goes south for his big hunt. We don't hurry, we could lose any chance of places.”

“I've told you, I doubt I'll go along with Billy even if I'm invited,” McLendon said wearily. “Bat, don't you ever listen to what I'm saying to you?”

“I listen, but I don't credit a lot of what I hear. No man in his right mind would refuse the honor of hunting with Billy Dixon. Now, pull on your boots and we'll be going.”

McLendon reached down for the boots. He knew there was no discouraging Bat; his friend would just keep haranguing him until he gave in.

When they got to Hanrahan's, a few others had already joined Billy at his table. They were all hide men, with hair down to their shoulders as a symbol of their profession. Bat's hair was just as long; McLendon's was somewhat shorter because he found long hair too difficult to keep clean.

“Well, looky here,” Masterson cried. “We got Heath Lee, Crash Reed, Bermuda Carlyle, Fred Leonard, and Christopher Johnson all in one distinguished group, and who's that stranger among them? Why, can it be the long-absent Mr. Billy Dixon?”

“Sit down, Masterson,” Billy said. “And hello, C.M. I hope you're well.”

“I am, thank you, and hope you're the same.”

“Enough of the social chitchat,” Bat said. “What did you find down south, Billy?”

Dixon heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Typical of young Bat Masterson,
interrupting when the grown-ups are talking. I pray that he soon grows out of such rude habits.” At twenty-four, Billy was only four years older than Bat, but in terms of maturity there was little comparison. Bat huffed to indicate that he was offended, then shut up. The others were content to let Billy choose the time when he'd get to the important subject, and for a time the talk at the table concerned mundane local matters. Another restaurant was about to open, this one featuring French cuisine. The Chinese laundry had started charging a dime a shirt, up from seven cents. The first shipment of the new Colt .45s, popularly known as “Peacemakers,” had just reached F. C. Zimmermann's hardware store, and everybody would have to have one. Some of the saloon's women, Tucson Ingrid and Wendy Erica and Hope R. (no further last name known) and Anne Louise, came over to the table to see if any of the gentlemen wanted to dance or maybe something else. Everyone politely declined; they were waiting for Billy to open up about his scout. Bat told the ladies to stay patient: in a while he'd be glad to come and excite them with his company. Heath Lee reached over and lightly smacked the back of Bat's head.

“I'm a gentleman from Virginia and expect white females of every sort to be treated with respect, Masterson,” he said. “Mind your tongue around them.”

“It's a hard thing to have to watch every word,” Bat whined, rubbing the spot where he'd been struck.

“Then try saying fewer of them,” Billy suggested. “Well, I suppose Masterson's been patient long enough. I don't want to have too much conversation concerning this yet. The thing of it is, the buffalo really have shifted south in great numbers. We found considerable sign near the Canadian River. I don't doubt hunting down there this summer would far exceed what's left up here. But you all know the problems with that, starting with the Indians.”

Everyone nodded. The Cheyenne, the Kiowa, and the Arapaho were ready to annihilate any white hunters who trespassed on what they considered their land—and even so, they were collectively of less concern than the Comanche, who even the most religious among the hide men feared more than Satan himself.

“The son-of-a-bitching treaty favors Indians over white men,” Fred Leonard complained. “The Army says we can't go down past the Arkansas, and the Indians come above it all the time. Like a few months back when they got that teenage boy Jacob Dilsey right near here, scalped him and cut off his arms and legs besides. Where was the goddamn Army then?”

“I don't think there's much Army presence along the treaty line anymore,” Billy said. “There was no sign of them. I understand most have been pulled out, sent down to South Texas to fight the Indians raiding there. If we mount a large-scale hunt, I don't think the Army will be a problem.”

“And it won't,” declared a man who walked up to the table.

“Mr. Mooar,” said Bermuda Carlyle, putting sarcastic emphasis on “Mr.” “Of course you would be coming around, thinking your opinion would be needed or even wanted.”

Josiah Wright Mooar was a rangy native of Vermont who found himself in Kansas just as buffalo hides became invaluable as sources of machine belts in the East and in Europe. Outfitting himself with the best guns, horses, and camp crews, he was among the first hide men to decimate the Dodge area herd. In the process he made a lot of money, and the other hide men had to acknowledge both his shooting prowess and business acumen—Mooar was always able to negotiate the best prices for his skins. But he was also given to bragging, and always assumed he was smarter, and better, than the rest. Mooar was the only hide man to consider himself as good a shot as or even a superior marksman to Billy
Dixon. In town he wore gabardine trousers while the other hunters stuck to denim jeans and overalls, and on summer nights in the Dodge City saloons he claimed daily buffalo kill figures that the rest of the hide men felt sure were impossibly high.

Mooar ignored Carlisle and addressed the group as a whole. “I'm certain Billy Dixon here is regaling you with stories of his little trip south,” he said, his clipped Yankee accent just as annoying to the men at the table as his condescending tone. “As all of you may know, it lagged behind my own excursion down in that direction. But I'm glad Billy finally found the sand to make the trip and see for himself.”

“Billy's got plenty of sand,” Bat said angrily, but Dixon held up a hand to silence him.

“J.W., perhaps you can share what you found down there,” Billy suggested. “It's certainly possible that you observed things I missed. No man's eyes are infallible.”

Mooar signaled the bartender for a drink and pulled up a chair. “Well, there's plenty of buffalo sign. Come late spring, they'll be back along the Canadian, I suspect passing right by that spot where Kit Carson had the big Indian fight ten years back. I forget the name.”

“Adobe Walls,” Carlyle said. “Called that on account of some of the structures built there by traders. Carson's party barely escaped with their hair.”

“Yes, Adobe Walls. The buffs will come through that area. Anyone waiting who has a good eye with a gun and sufficient crews to skin all day will make a fortune.”

“That's if the Indians don't get him or the Army don't run him off,” observed Heath Lee.

Mooar smiled indulgently. He took a clay pipe from his pocket, tamped in tobacco, and lit his smoke with a match that he struck smartly against the heel of his boot. “Yes, of course, always the Indians. But a
smart man can avoid them, and a well-armed man with steady aim can fight them off if needed. They're scattered down there and hungry, no real danger if you stay prepared and alert. And as for the Army, well, I have it on good account that the Army is no longer interested in discouraging white hunters from roaming south of the Arkansas.”

“I'd be interested in knowing what you mean by ‘good account,'” Billy said. Coming from Mooar, the statement would have sounded like, and been intended as, an insult, but Billy managed to keep his voice neutral. He just seemed curious.

Mooar tossed back his whiskey and gestured for a refill. The bartender rushed over to serve him and was rewarded with a few extra coins.

“Well, young Billy, when I got back, instead of coming straight to a saloon, I paid a visit to Fort Dodge, called on the commanding officer there. I was straight with him, as I always am to everyone. Told him that I knew white hunting was forbidden below the Arkansas, but it was time to be practical, the buffs being virtually vanished from around Dodge. ‘Sir,' I said, ‘I've just been down all the way to the Canadian River and there's plentiful buffalo sign. Now, we all know that treaty was wrong from the start, all favoring the Indians and so forth. I'm a hide man who wants to make a good living. In my place, what would you do?'” Mooar paused and sipped his drink. He knew someone would soon break the silence.

It was Bat Masterson. “And what was the response?”

“Ah,” Mooar said dramatically. “The commanding officer, he said to me, ‘Mr. Mooar, if I was hunting buffalo, I would go to where the buffalo are.' Can't get clearer permission than that.”

“What he said to you fits with what I've heard,” Billy said. “Army's got limited numbers, and they've moved most of them down to the Mexican border. Mackenzie's supposedly leading them.”

“I'm gratified that you're trying to keep current. So what about it,
Dixon? In the spring I intend to put together a small, top-notch crew and find my way down by the Canadian, there to shoot record numbers of buffs and enrich myself considerably. Care to hire on? There's always plenty of room for another skinner, though since you're almost as handy with a Sharps as your friends claim, I might bring you along as my back-up shooter.”

Everyone else at the table stiffened except Billy, who smiled.

“I appreciate the offer, J.W. I've got a lot to ponder before spring, and as I put together my plans, I may well consult you.”

“You do that.” Mooar nodded to the group, wandered over and whispered to the bartender, then sauntered out of the saloon.

As soon as Mooar disappeared through the swinging doors, Crash Reed blurted, “I can't stand that Yankee bastard. Billy, you ought to have coldcocked him for speaking to you so.”

“It's true Mooar's a bastard and a Yankee to boot, but it's also fact that he's a damn fine shot and the best hide-price bargainer among us,” Billy said. “Whatever I decide to do, I may need him to be part of, though I doubt the possibilities include one of us being employed by the other. Say, what's this?”

The bartender placed a full bottle of Old Crow bourbon on the table. “Compliments of Mr. J. W. Mooar.”

“Now, isn't that a fine thing?” Billy asked. “Let's break the seal.” He took the bottle and poured generous drinks for everyone. “It's impossible to detest a man while you're drinking gift whiskey from him.”

“Then I'll toss this down fast so I can get back to hating him,” Masterson said, and everyone had a good laugh.

They sipped the bourbon appreciatively; it was much smoother than the bar label whiskey they'd previously been drinking. Then Carlyle asked, “Billy, ain't you worried that Mooar will get down there and shoot up all the buffs before any of the rest of us get a crack at them?”

“I'm not, because the sign I saw indicated a herd just as sizable as the ones we used to have up here. Mooar or any other single shooter would need twenty years to make even a tiny dent in it. No, I'm trying to figure how to slim the risk to being down there this coming spring and summer. J.W.'s right with what the fort commander told him. The Army's no longer a consideration. But the Indians could be, especially the Comanche. We go down in the usual way, small groups of six or ten, and half of us won't ever get back. Those Indians will be aware of who's in their land, how many, and where. They'll set ambushes and make sneak attacks and pick us off a few at a time. It wouldn't take that many of them to do it.”

“Then you might not go?” Bat protested.

“I want to go, and mean to. But maybe not in the usual way. A lot of hide men are gone from Dodge for the winter. I want to wait on all this until most everybody's back and I can get a sort of general temperature.”

“To what end?” McLendon asked. Around the hide men he usually said as little as possible, because he felt he had so little in common with them. But Billy clearly had at least the beginning of a plan in mind, and McLendon's respect for Dixon was such that he was genuinely curious.

Billy furrowed his brow and rubbed his mustache with his thumb. “What I'm thinking is, maybe we need to do this different. Us hide men, we're friendly to each other at night in town, but in the summer daylight we're out there trying to outwit each other, get the best shooting angles, and try to kill all the buffs for ourselves. We do that kind of competing in Comanche country and we're dead men. Six of us in a party, hell, any three or four Comanche braves could take us by surprise and carve us up proper. No, don't argue. In any kind of even numbers, they're the better fighters. But if maybe fifty or a hundred of us went in on the journey down and then out on the hunt together, that might do it. You know how the Comanche and the other Indians never have big war
parties—maybe twenty, twenty-five at the most. We put together a big enough group, build us a substantial camp down the Canadian way that we could defend if need be, no twenty Kiowa or Cheyenne or even Comanche could get at us there. They'll be watching us every step of the way and they'll know it would be useless to try. Don't forget, those Indians ain't just good fighters, they're smart.”