Dave Carson had been running a herd of longhorns since he was a young man in the early forties; at about the same time that others, like Ezekiel Carmichael, were also grubbing a living out of raising cattle purely for the consumption of those living in Texas. It had been a struggle in those days to make a decent living out of that kind of farming and so Carson had let that side of his business fall off and had concentrated on growing crops instead. That too had failed, the barren soil of southern Texas not being suited to the growing of wheat and barley. By the time that Carson had realized his mistake, the cattle market had picked up and he had been left behind by those who had stuck at it and helped set up the trails to Kansas taking advantage of the new railroads.
In short, by making a miscalculation in his younger days, Dave Carson had missed out on the chance to become a cattle baron; one of those who became rich through supplying the eastern states with prime quality meat for the workers in the rapidly growing cities. Each year, the smaller men like Carson found themselves getting squeezed just a little more by the big operations such as the Carmichael Cattle Company and the South Texas Livestock Company.
As the years passed, all this rankled with Carson and he began to persuade himself that he had, in some obscure way, been cheated. As his own fortunes waned and those of men like Carmichael waxed ever stronger, Dave Carson’s mind turned to thoughts of revenge. Why should those men have all the luck and all the riches associated with the livestock business, while he contented himself with the crumbs from their tables?
The War Between the States was a turning point, because of course the southern army was desperate for meat to feed its men on. The “Three Cs” and the South Texas Cattle Company won contracts to supply the army, while Carson was ignored and saw his own herds slaughtered and sold at a pittance for the local market. By the end of the war in 1865, his ranch was like a ghost town. It was then, at the lowest point of his fortunes, that Dave Carson had hit upon the scheme which would both revive his own prosperity and provide him with a convenient way of revenging himself upon those who he blamed for his poverty.
When you are driving between three and ten thousand head of cattle for a thousand miles, it stands to reason that you are going to lose some of them on the way. They will fall sick, tumble into rivers and drown, crush each other to death, wander off, topple over cliffs or fall victim to a hundred and one other vagaries of chance. You can’t count every one of those steers every day on the trail and often it was only when they were being loaded onto the trucks at the railhead in Elsworth that it would be possible to work out just how many had been lost en route from Texas. No matter how much care was taken during the cattle drive, regardless of how many men were engaged in watching for stragglers there would always be a few hundred fewer steers at the railhead than there were when the journey began back in Texas. Much the same applied to the situation in winter, when the herds were just grazing out on the range. There were always losses between the fall and the springtime. It was this which had given Carson the germ of an idea, five years before Dan Lewis set out on the trail from Indian Falls.
He had begun in a small way in the spring of 1866, by hiring a half dozen former soldiers who were down on their luck and would do more or less anything for a good meal and a place to stay. In the first instance, Carson had got these fellows to bring him as many mavericks as they could lay hands on before the spring roundup. By tradition, mavericks, which is to say unbranded calves, belonged to nobody and were there for the taking of whoever first chanced upon them. That spring, the men working for Carson managed to bring him nearly two hundred calves which had not yet been branded and so claimed by the owners of their sires. This was when Dan Carson showed that he had a real and hitherto unsuspected flair for crime.
The “Three Cs” brand was just that; three Cs in row, one after the other. Thinking ahead, to the time that he might want more than a few mavericks and stragglers, Carson officially registered his own brand; the “Barred Os”. This consisted of three Os, with a long line passing straight through the middle of them all. There was nothing out of the ordinary about this. As the years passed, most of the brands using simple combinations of letters had already been registered and so letters and symbols struck through with a line or bar were becoming increasingly common.
After the “Barred Os” was registered to him, Dan Carson had sent out two of his boys to bring in one of Carmichael’s branded steers. He had carefully measured the “Triple C” brand and then set a fellow in his forge to tailor a branding iron to precisely those dimensions. The result had exceeded his wildest hopes. When the “Barred O” brand was applied over the existing mark, it obliterated the three Cs and replaced them with his own three Os with the bar through them. It was absolutely impossible to detect the least hint of a previous brand. Ezekiel Carmichael’s steer now bore Carson’s own brand and he defied anybody in the world to prove that this was not his own property.
Of course, it would not be prudent to prey solely upon the “Triple Cs’” stock. The brand of the South Texas Livestock Company was just ST. Carson had another brand registered in his own name, which was a figure eight followed by a square with a vertical line running down the middle and dividing it into to oblongs. This too, could be overlaid on the ST brand; replacing it and making it all but impossible to tell that there had previously been a mark there at all.
Over the course of four years, Carson had built up what was, in effect, a rustling operation on an industrial scale. He stole steers from both the main cattle companies in that part of Texas and simply converted them into his own stock. He was careful not to appear to be doing too well financially, but by the spring of 1870, his was the third largest cattle company in the southern half of the state, after the “Three Cs” and the South Texas Cattle Company.
The problem is of course that when you are getting something for nothing in this way and simply taking other folks’ property willy-nilly as the mood strikes you, you are apt to get a little greedy and careless after a time. This is what had happened in the spring of 1870 and the two men who had been caught and hanged by the trail boss of the “Triple C” had actually already made one raid on that particular cattle drive, only two nights after they had left the ranch. Carson paid them handsome bonuses for every steer successfully abstracted from his competitors and then the two men who had been summarily executed.
Dan Lewis, of course, knew nothing of all this. His only interest in the business was that he had come damned close to losing his own life the previous night and was now regarded as a rustler himself. His sole aim now was to clear his name and show that he was not the sort of sneaking wretch who would sign up with an outfit and then betray them for money.
Once the man to whom Dan was talking felt sure that the other two men that he had evidently been working with were definitely dead, he said nothing more, but took from his saddlebag a piece of silvered glass which looked to have a small peep-hole scraped in the backing. This he raised to his eye and peered out across the valley with it. Seeing Dan’s interest, he told him, ‘It’s the latest thing in communicating in the field. The British call it a heliograph. I can use it to send messages to my partner, over on the hill yonder.’
‘What’re you telling him?’ asked Dan.
‘To come right here so as we can work out what’s best to do. You better not be lying about our friends boy, I’ll tell you that for nothing.’
‘I ain’t lying,’ said Dan indignantly. He was struck by a thought. ‘Say, if you like, I can lead you back there and show you where they’re hanging from a tree still.’
The man pulled a face, like he’d bitten into something sour. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I reckon I’ll pass on that. I’ll take what you say as a true bill. Lord, I don’t want to see any hanged man.’
‘You the superstitious kind?’ asked Dan with interest.
The suggestion appeared to irk the fellow, for he said irritably, ‘It ain’t a matter of being superstitious. All of us who live so can end up in that way if we don’t take care. I just don’t like to be reminded of it overmuch.’
‘It’s nothing to me.’ said Dan, indifferently.
When the man’s partner arrived, he listened to what Dan had to say and then swore like a mule skinner. Dan thought that he had heard some cussing and bad language in his time; but this fellow beat all that he had ever encountered before. He swore for several minutes without stopping. When finally he ran out of steam, the other man said, ‘Well then, what’s to do?’
‘What’s to do? Why, we cut for home, of course. It’d be madness to try anything more as things stand now.’
‘What of the boy here?’
‘He can ride along of us, if he cares to. I dare say as we can find a use for a likely fellow like that, ‘specially since he’s been riding with Carmichael’s outfit.’
So it was that Dan Lewis found himself falling in with a set of the most dangerous and determined rustlers to be found anywhere in Texas at that time.
Careful as Dave Carson had been not to draw undue attention to his newly found success in the cattle business, word had inevitably got around that the man most had written off as a no-count dirt farmer was now flourishing. Carson’s spread was tucked out of the way and he did not encourage casual visitors. Even so, there was some suspicion about the means by which he had recovered from almost-ruin and was now being talked of as a big player in the field of livestock. There was a stock growers’ association in Texas, to which everybody of consequence in the business of cattle farming belonged. Everybody that is, except Dave Carson. A month or two earlier, there had been a meeting of this organization, at which it had been agreed that a sum would be set aside to engage the Pinkerton agency to send an investigator down to look into what might be going on at the Carson ranch.
‘What age do you have, boy?’ asked the first of the men he had picked up with that day. They were riding at an undemanding trot, away from the “Three Cs” cattle drive and heading, as far as Dan could gauge, south east.
‘I’m seventeen sir, just gone.’
‘Never mind with the ”sir”, you can call me Lance. This your first ride out like this?’
‘Yes. Yes it is.’
‘I tell you now, you fall asleep on the job with us and it’ll be a sight worse than just curse-words you’ll earn. You like as not figured the play by now. You seem a smart lad. What do you think we’re about?’
Dan shrugged with a nonchalance he was far from feeling within. ‘Rustling, I guess.’
‘You know it’s a hanging matter?’
‘Everybody knows that. ‘Sides which, if I hadn’t o’ known it before, I would o’ done after seeing those friends of yours hanged last night.’
There was silence for a space, as the two other men mulled over the idea of two of their companions being lynched in that way. Then the second of the men, who had introduced himself as ‘Fats,’ said, ‘So you know why it’s life and death when we’re out on the scout. You fall asleep when you’re on the lookout for us and it could mean the death of us. We all of us hold the lives of our friends in our hands when we’re working. You do well to recollect that.’
All this was alarming enough to the boy, who began to wonder if he hadn’t taken a wrong turn by throwing his lot in with such men. Then he thought about the prospect of returning to Indian Falls so soon after leaving and the questions that such a course of action would invite. No, he thought to himself, I better stick at this for the time being. If I can find out a little more about these characters, then it will go some little way towards proving I wasn’t guilty myself of rustling.
It looked as though they wouldn’t reach their destination that day and Dan was feeling almost faint with hunger – not having eaten since the night before. He didn’t like to broach the subject of food though, lest he appear to be a weakling. As it was, there was no need to do so, because a few hours before twilight, they arrived at a little blind canyon where five other men were waiting for them. When they saw that there were no cattle being driven, there were shouts of irritation and dismay. They all of them pretty much depended on the extra money that was paid for successful raids on the cattle drives.
The man who called himself ‘Fats’ explained what had happened and thoughts of money were soon overshadowed by the spectre of death. All these men knew the risks that they ran and the prospect of being hanged out of hand was a very real one to them all.
One of the men who had been lying low in the canyon said to Dan, ‘How’d they die? Was they brave about it?’
‘I never saw anybody seem less troubled at the idea o’ being hanged,’ replied Dan, truthfully enough, ‘They didn’t say a word, nor plead for their lives nor anything at all. Just got on with it and accepted it like they might anything else. They were game ones, all right.’
‘Ah, I wouldn’t’ve thought anything less of ‘em. Pete Barker was born game and so was Jed,’ said another man, ‘I’d o’ guessed that’s how they’d die.’
As much as the seven men present seemed to have a deal of respect for the two who had died, their eulogies didn’t last long and they soon fell to discussing the more practical matter of how they might best acquire cattle from another source. To Dan’s relief, eating was the main concern though at that moment and a fire was kindled, so that coffee might be brewed up and some meat broiled. Nobody showed any particular interest in Dan and he formed the impression that stray men were often being picked up by this crew.
After they had eaten, those who had pipes lit them and there was a feeling of relaxation. They might have been disappointed to find that there were no steers to take back to the Carson spread tomorrow, but these were not men who tended to dwell unduly upon past misfortune. They were far more concerned about the present and, seeing that their bellies were now full and there was no shortage of tobacco, they were pretty well content to let the morrow take care of itself.
Next day, all but two of the men set out for Carson’s ranch, which seemingly lay a half day’s ride away. Nobody took the least notice of Dan Lewis for which he was profoundly grateful. It gave him the opportunity to ravel threads of his own and dream up a suitable story for when they arrived at their destination.
The six of them reached Dave Carson’s place at about four that afternoon. Not one of them saw the man lying on his belly up in the hills surrounding the Carson spread. He surveyed the area constantly with a pair of military field glasses; sweeping them back and forth, looking for the Lord knew what.
Abraham Goldman of the Pinkerton’s agency was not a happy man. He was essentially a city dweller. Set him down in the meanest Chicago street and you could be sure that if there was any species of villainy about, Goldman would be the one to sniff it out and expose it. The open range was something else again though and as he lay there, scanning the buildings and fields of Dave Carson’s ranch, Goldman wondered what on earth he was supposed to be looking for. It was easy enough to spot a crooked Faro table or some shylocking operation; knowing the signs that would distinguish a dishonest cattle dealer from one who was a straight dealer, though, was something else again. As the riders passed below him, Goldman marked that some were men he had seen before, but that the party also included a young man he didn’t know.
‘We’ll take you to see Mr Carson,’ said the man whom Dan had first met, ‘He’ll say if you can work here or not.’
‘What’s he like?’ asked Dan curiously.
‘You’ve no need to be afeared of him, if that’s what you’re askin’. He’s a decent man.’
This struck Dan Lewis as an odd way of describing a man who was in charge of a large rustling operation, but he said nothing. In truth, he was thinking only of how swiftly he might be able to gather enough information about these rascals and then inform on them to the nearest sheriff’s office. So far, he had only heard a lot of gossip. He’d a notion that if the law got involved, then they would want hard evidence before they would take action.
Carson liked the look of the young fellow that Fats and his friend had picked up on their travels. He said, ‘So you’re wanting to team up with us, is that the way of it?’
‘If you’ll have me, I would.’
‘Tell me about yourself, son.’
Dan was able to tell almost the entire truth in answer to this enquiry. He just added a few fanciful touches about being indolent and lazy, representing that as the cause of his being thrown out of the drive. When he’d finished spinning his tale, Dave Carson said nothing for a minute or so and then asked what scruples the youth had, if any, about undertaking work which was illegal. ‘Got nothing at all in that way,’ replied Dan, ‘I’ll do whatever’s needful, you don’t have to worry about that.’
‘You’ll stick at nothing, hey?’ said Carson. He slapped the young man on the back and said, ‘With an outlook of that sort, I have no doubt that we’ll get along famously, my boy. You cut along now to one of the bunkhouses and see where’s there room for you.’
To his surprise, Dan found that he was all over sweat, after his brief interview with the boss of the ‘Barred Os’. True, the man had been affability itself when talking to him, but when all was said and done, he and all the others there were engaged in an enterprise which could land them all within the shadow of the rope. How much Dan Lewis’s life might be worth if once it was discovered that he was there as a spy and an informer, he really wouldn’t have cared to guess.
The men in the bunkhouse where Dan fetched up were a motley bunch. Almost all of them were former soldiers who had, without exception, fought for the Confederacy. None of them were from Texas originally; they had drifted south in hope of escaping the horrors of the Reconstruction. These were men who had been cheated by those they trusted and then treated badly by the set of new masters who popped up after the war. There was a grim camaraderie among them, in which Dan felt unable to share.
Nobody appeared to mind if he just loafed around for the time being; there had been no suggestion that he had been assigned any kind of work yet and so Dan, feeling a little excluded from the group in his bunkhouse, decided to go for a stroll outside.
The Carson spread was an extensive one, covering many hundreds of acres. It might be an idea, thought Dan, to familiarize himself with the layout of the place. He didn’t expect to uncover any solid clues about wrongdoing straight away, but it would do no harm at all to know how the place was laid out. He wandered aimlessly over to the forge, noting the branding irons stacked against the wall. There was nobody around, so he entered the smithy and picked up one of the irons and hefted it in his hand. The end was formed of three neat Os and a long line, which ran through them. Dan picked up another branding iron and examined it with interest. This one was of a different design: a figure of eight, next to a square divided in half.
A hand fell on Dan’s shoulder and he whirled round to find that the man he knew as Fats was eyeing him with disfavour.
This is a nicely developing plot.
Simon ,are you on X ?