The Badlands Trail Read online

  LYING IN WAIT

  If there was one thing Toby Bishop didn’t crave, it was responsibility for other lives.

  He’d traveled that route more than once, though never as a landowner, and the results were mostly negative.

  Tonight, he had first watch, along with Curly Odom and Deke Sullivan. He’d caught a break when Graham Lott drew an assignment to the second shift, sparing Bishop from uninvited monologues.

  Three drovers at a time kept eyes on Mr. Dixon’s stock for a three-hour turn, then packed it in when their replacements came on duty. During those three hours, men on watch spread out and circulated, singing to the animals if they felt like it, otherwise just watching out for danger in the dark.

  A threat requiring action might be animal or human. Coyotes and the like would be repelled by any means required or shot if they refused to take a hint. A human prowler, on the other hand, shouldn’t expect a chance to cut and run.

  There was no good reason for anyone to sneak around a herd once it was bedded down. Therefore guards on night watch assumed that any trespassers were armed and nursing bad intentions. Rustling ranked first among the possibilities for devilment, but Bishop had heard tales of drifters looting chuck wagons—and once about a drover who was stalked and murdered on a cattle drive by the brothers of a girl he’d left with child.

  Orders were simple when it came to lurking strangers. Order them to stand fast for a meeting with the trail boss, tossing any weapons that they might be carrying. A prowler who attacked or tried to flee was forfeiting his life. Cowboys who couldn’t bring themselves to pull a trigger normally weren’t hired.

  Bishop had no qualms about shooting if it came to that, no fear that it would spoil his sleep, but as he mounted Compañero, he was hoping that his shift would pass without that need.

  An hour into it, he thought his luck had soured.

  Deke Sullivan was crooning to the herd, an off-key but passable “Oh! Susanna,” circling around to Bishop’s south, some eighty yards distant. Curly Odom was riding to the east of Dixon’s lowing herd, marked by the glowing ember of a hand-rolled smoke.

  So, who or what was moving in the brush ahead of Bishop and a little to his left?

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  Copyright © 2020 by The Estate of Ralph Compton

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780593100783

  First Edition: July 2020

  Cover art by Steve Atkinson

  Cover design by Steve Meditz

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Lying in Wait

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Immortal Cowboy

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  About the Authors

  For Harley

  THE IMMORTAL COWBOY

  This is respectfully dedicated to the “American Cowboy.” His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.

  True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravages of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.

  In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?

  It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.

  It has become a symbol of freedom, when there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives, or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.

  —Ralph Compton

  PROLOGUE

  FULL NAME?”

  “Terrell Tobias Bishop. Most folks call me Toby.”

  The foreman had a sheet of paper on the card table in front of him, a pencil in his left hand, and wrote with a funny kind of slant. It made a scratching noise like spiders walking.

  “Where you from?”

  “All over,” Toby Bishop said. “If you mean born, that would be Cairo.”

  “Cairo, Illinois?”

  He thought of Egypt and restrained an urge to laugh. “That’s it.”

  “More recently?”

  “I drift around. Last place where I spent any length of time was Mason County. That’s in Texas.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Odd jobs. Whatever paid.”

  He didn’t feel like mentioning the Hoodoo War, saw nothing to be gained from it.

  “Not wanted anywhere, meaning the law?”

  “No.”

  Bishop had cleared out before it came to that, losing his last week’s pay. If the court had papers on him now, he didn’t know it, so he wasn’t lying.

  “Ever been locked up?”

  “No.”

  “We can check on that, you understand.”

  “Answer’s still no.”

  “What brings you to the Circle K?”

  He had an impulse to say his horse but played it straight, with money riding on the line. “The same as everybody else. I heard in town that you were hiring for a drive.”

  “‘Town’ meaning Atoka?”

  “Right.”

  The foreman wrote it down, then raised curious eyes to study Bishop’s face. He said, “The boss likes hearing ‘sir’ from drovers.”

  “Does that mean I’m hired, sir?”

  “Not yet. And I ain’t the boss.”

  “Okay.”

  That would be Gavin Dixon. Bishop hadn’t
seen him, but he knew the name from talk around Atoka’s main saloon, the Dry Gulch, which was anything but dry.

  “You ever worked a cattle ranch before?” the foreman asked, his pencil poised.

  “I have. Last time in Mason County, on the Sutter spread. Before that, Winston’s, up in Barber County. That’s in Kansas.”

  “Ever on a drive?”

  “Not yet,” Bishop replied.

  “It ain’t the same.”

  “I figured that.”

  “We’ve got about two thousand longhorns heading for St. Louis. That’s five hundred miles and change northeast of here. With any luck, we ought to make it inside seven or eight weeks, but luck ain’t something you can count on, driving steers.”

  “You’re saying anything could happen.”

  “That’s the ticket, and it likely will. Weather aside, times past, we’ve had to deal with rustlers, hostiles, damn near anything.”

  “Sounds fair to me.”

  “And you can spare that kind of time?”

  “No problem.”

  “Only, we’ve had so-called drovers quit a drive before and leave us wanting. Understand, the boss don’t pay until the herd’s delivered and he sells ’em off. You drop out anywhere along the way, you ride off empty-handed. You can’t come back later, asking for partial compensation. It’s an all-or-nothing deal.”

  “I get it.”

  “Same thing if you make trouble anywhere on the drive and Mr. Dixon has to let you go. Get fired and it’s on you.”

  “Seems plain enough.”

  “You’ve got a horse.”

  That didn’t come out sounding like a question, but he answered anyway. “The snowflake Appaloosa tied outside.”

  “There’ll be replacements out of the remuda. Give your animal a rest on night patrols and such.”

  “As long as no one else tries riding mine.”

  “Not much for sharing, then?”

  “I was thinking of my horse. He doesn’t take to strangers.”

  The foreman considered that, then said, “I see you wear a Colt.”

  Bishop didn’t respond to that. The Peacemaker was holstered on his right hip, in plain sight.

  “Well, are you any good with it?”

  “I’ve held my own so far.” He let it go at that and hoped the foreman would as well.

  “You have a rifle?”

  “Winchester. The Yellow Boy.”

  “Might come in handy sometime on the trail.”

  Bishop expected to be asked if he had ever shot a man, was calculating how to answer, but the question didn’t come.

  “The job pays forty bucks a month and found. We’ll feed you meat, bread, taters, beans, and bacon. Nothing fancy, but our cook’s all right.”

  “I’ll take it, if you’re offering.”

  “I am, under the terms I just explained.” He pulled another sheet of paper out from underneath the one on top, spun it around, and pushed it toward Bishop, pencil extended. “Sign or make your mark on the fifth line.”

  Bishop wrote out his signature, refrained from adding any kind of flourish at the end. When that was done, the foreman shook his hand. Said, “I’m Bill Pickering, but you can call me ‘Mister.’”

  “Duly noted.”

  “Nothing much for you to do, rest of today. We start first light tomorrow, and I mean first light.”

  “Got it.”

  “Breakfast is half past four. Get used to it.”

  And that was it. After the bloodiness in Mason County, riding for the past month up from Texas, killing time and spending most of his remaining money in Atoka, Bishop had another job.

  He hoped that it would turn out better than his last.

  CHAPTER ONE

  BREAKFAST CAME EARLY, as the foreman had promised: bacon, beans, and bread. It wasn’t gourmet fare, but Toby Bishop had survived on worse.

  From time to time, he had survived on nothing much at all.

  The other hands seated along the outdoor trestle table, ten in all besides Bishop, spared time to introduce themselves, most of them shaking hands. Toby was good with names and filed them in his memory, matched up with faces, guessing that he’d find out more about them on the trail.

  The only one who stuck out, for a start, was Graham Lott, a sometime preacher, likely self-ordained. A rangy man with thinning ginger hair, left eyebrow interrupted by a scar, he advised that those who felt inclined could call him “Pastor.” He said grace over their tin plates piled with food and claimed that he’d be offering a Sunday service in the evenings, for anyone who felt the need after ten hours herding beef.

  For Toby’s part, he couldn’t picture spending any downtime on his knees.

  It wasn’t that he spurned religion altogether. He’d been “raised right,” as the folks in Cairo used to say—meaning brought up to be a rock-ribbed Baptist, though in Toby’s case it felt more like a superficial coat of paint that weathered down with time.

  When Illinoisans spoke of Cairo as the lowest city in the Prairie State, they mostly meant geography. It was the farthest south, as far as Toby knew, located at the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers, also with the lowest elevation in the state and prone to flooding, ringed around with levees in a bid to hold back nature’s inundations. But there was a certain meanness to the place as well, and throughout Alexander County as a whole, particularly when it came to white folks versus blacks. People of color in the neighborhood kept to themselves whenever possible, free state before the Civil War or no, and on occasions when a young man might forget “his place,” he sometimes wound up stretching rope.

  That was one reason Bishop hadn’t gone back home since lighting out at seventeen, the better part of sixteen years ago. But if he’d been expecting other states or towns to demonstrate more tolerance, they’d come up short so far.

  While Toby cleaned his plate, he glanced around the table, firming up the link between faces and names. Foreman Bill Pickering was absent, busy elsewhere, but that still left ten hired hands besides himself and Pastor Lott.

  On Toby’s left sat Boone Hightower, forty-something, with a weathered air of weariness about him, focused on his food without contributing to conversation. Close on Bishop’s right, Deke Sullivan was roughly half Hightower’s age, maybe three-quarters of his weight, and wore his pistol holstered for a cross-hand draw that struck Toby as awkward.

  Moving on from Sullivan, he came to Leland Gorch, the oldest drover in the bunch, somewhere on the high side of fifty, with a permanent black smudge at his jawline, which looked to Bishop like a gunpowder tattoo. It wasn’t close enough for an attempted suicide, more like a remnant of some long-ago near-death experience.

  To Gorch’s right, down at the table’s end, sat Curly Odom, obviously named in jest. He wore a slouch hat now, but if glimpsed without it, he was bald on top, with long hair down below the arid pate that draped his collar all around. He smiled a lot, maybe too much, and had no qualms about intruding on a conversation if he spied an opening.

  Facing him sat Paco Esperanza, sole Latino riding for the Circle K on this trip, traces of his breakfast clinging to a handlebar mustache he’d cultivated to enhance his narrow face. To his right was Isaac Thorne, their only black companion on the trail, full-faced and sporting a goatee shot through with flecks of gray. Scarred knuckles marked him as a brawler at some bygone time, and maybe not that long ago.

  To Thorne’s right, facing Bishop, Estes Courtwright kept his head down, shaded by his hat’s brim, fully focused on his food. He hadn’t spoken yet in Bishop’s presence and appeared to be a slacker when it came to making small talk. That was fine with Toby, since he hadn’t joined the drive to pad his scanty list of friends.

  That still left two. Beside Courtwright sat Abel Floyd, the Circle K’s horse wrangler, who would keep and care for their remuda on the trail.
That meant the blond late-twenties cowboy would be watching over thirty-odd replacement horses day and night, instead of babysitting some two thousand steers.

  Across from Floyd, to Boone Hightower’s left, sat Whitney Melville, tallest of the lot at six foot five or six, tipping the scale at around two hundred pounds. To that weight, add a fancy gun belt holding up a Colt Dragoon that had to measure nearly fifteen inches overall, more than four pounds of steel, together with a Bowie knife protruding from his boot.

  Bishop felt sorry for his horse.

  Bishop had finished his breakfast when a clanging racket echoed from the main ranch house. All eyes turned toward that direction to behold the foreman beating on a metal triangle suspended from a porch rafter, demanding their attention.

  “Rally round!” he called. “We’re burning daylight!”

  Some of the hands were grumbling as they got up from their benches, but they clearly didn’t mean much by it. Young or old, raring to go or halfway broken down, even if you’d done it all a dozen times before, there was a certain energy about the start-up of a trail drive that no free spirit could ignore.

  * * *

  * * *

  AT FORTY-SEVEN, COMING up on forty-eight that autumn, Gavin Dixon knew that he could stand to lose some weight. His wife had mentioned it in passing and he couldn’t argue with her, tried to make his peace with smaller portions at some meals and cut back on his alcohol intake, but so far he had nothing much to show for it.

  That was the thing about prosperity. When he and Maryanne had started building up the Circle K—named for their daughter, Katherine, who’d died before she reached her second birthday—it had been hard work from dawn to dusk, with little in the cooking pot but prairie stew. Once they had made a decent go of it, the spread still made demands, but they had help around the place, the number of their hands increasing as the herd grew and their bank account kept pace. Dixon wasn’t retired, by any means, but there was marginally less to do that forced him to complete each job himself.