Bitter Trail - Softcover

Elmer Kelton (1926-2009) was the award-winning author of more than forty novels, including The Time It Never Rained, Other Men's Horses, Texas Standoff and Hard Trail to Follow. He grew up on a ranch near Crane, Texas, and earned a journalism degree from the University of Texas. His first novel, Hot Iron, was published in 1956. Among his awards have been seven Spurs from Western Writers of America and four Western Heritage awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. His novel The Good Old Boys was made into a television film starring Tommy Lee Jones. In addition to his novels, Kelton worked as an agricultural journalist for 42 years, and served in the infantry in World War II. He died in 2009.

1
The horse tracks appeared suddenly out of the chaparral, milled in brief disorder, then struck northward up the crooked wagon trail that snaked its dusty way through the mesquite and catclaw and prickly pear.
Coming upon the tracks, Frio Wheeler reined his horse to a quick stop. His hand dropped instinctively toward the stock of the saddlegun beneath his leg. He peered through narrowed eyes at the trail, which disappeared into the rippling late-summer heatwaves and hostile brush. He took off his flat-brimmed black hat to wipe dust-thickened perspiration onto his sleeve and turned to the Mexican who ode beside him.
“What do you make of it, Blas?”
Sombreroed Blas Talamantes turned in his bighorned Mexico saddle to look at the tracks as they led out of the mesquite. Sweat-soaked, his homemade cotton shirt clung to his back.
“Twelve, maybeso fifteen horses.”
Frio Wheeler stepped from the saddle and squatted on the ground for a close look. He fingered the tracks. Not very old--an hour or two, maybe. Made since daylight, at least. “A few years ago, I’d’ve said Indians.”
Blas Talamantes shook his head and pointed. “A piece of cigar, Frio, over there. Vaqueros, maybe?”
“Maybe cowboys. More likely renegades from across the Rio.” Wheeler swung back onto his horse, took a grim look across the drought-stricken country, and brought the saddlegun up into his lap. “Best listen hard, Blas, and keep our eyes peeled. There’s a war on.”
This was the Rio Grande country of Texas in 1863, a small extension of the bloody conflict ablaze upon the battlefields of Virginia and Tennessee, upon the green rolling hills of Gettysburg. Here on the underbelly of the Confederacy lay the South’s only open border, its only port free of the Union blockade. Along this thorn-studded trail to the Rio Grande, dust boiled high over trains of mule-drawn wagons and ox-drawn carts, carrying their heavy burden of Confederate cotton southward to be sold across the river in Mexico. Moving north, the same trains would carry war supplies for the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederacy--rifles, powder and bar lead, sulphur, mercury, and cloth.
At the end of this trail across the barren sands and the forbidding chaparral waited the twin cities of the Rio--Brownsville on the Texas bank, Matamoros on the Mexican. Once sleepy border towns, separated by the sluggish waters of the muddy Bravo, they had awakened to the rattle of sabers and the boom of cannon. They were swollen now and bustling with the international commerce of war. Gold coin clinked to the groan of wagon wheels, and tequila spilled in the streets.
Though this was a long way from Virginia, men rode with eyes open and their guns ready to use, for the hatreds of war had come to the Rio. By the hundreds, Texans with Union sympathies had fled southward across the river. Some had gone north by boat from Bagdad and other Mexican ports to join Lincoln’s forces and wear the blue. Others remained in Mexico. Many of these waited impatiently in Matamoros, listening eagerly for war news, looking across the river with longing eyes at a homeland that now had become an enemy. Sometimes, in league with border bandits of either Anglo or Mexican blood, these men swam the river at night to raid and burn in the name of the Union, then ride back to sanctuary across that narrow, muddy boundary. Renegados, the Confederate Texans called them, using the Mexican name. It was a time of indistinct loyalties and confused hatreds, when friends had become enemies and old enemies had somehow become friends--a mixed-up time when all the rules had been lost....
* * *
Frio Wheeler touched big-roweled Mexican spurs to his sorrel’s ribs and moved him into an easy trot. Wheeler sat upright in the saddle, shoulders squared with a pride born of his place and time. He was in his early thirties, though it would have been hard to guess his age from looking at him. He was a man seldom under roof. His skin was burned Mexican-brown from the scorching sun of Texas’s ancient Camino Real, the Royal Road, and from wagon trails through the Wild Horse Desert and the chaparral. His brown hair, which needed a cutting, was beginning to show a glint of gray. Turkey tracks had bitten deep at the corners of his blue eyes, for the habitually squinted against the glare of the sun-drenched land.
Riding beside him, Blas Talamantes was the more spectacular. His high-peaked Mexican sombrero was twice as wide as Wheeler’s plain old black hat. His brown leather breeches were decorated with lacing laboriously sewn by a loving woman’s nimble fingers. Wheeler had allowed his big spurs to darken with grime and tarnish, but Talamantes had kept his own polished to a bright silver. Both men rode with collars and sleeves buttoned against the sun.
There was much about them that was similar--size, build, and age. By a like token there was much that was different--their upbringing, their heritage of two cultures a world apart. To Wheeler, the first consideration always was to tend to the business at hand. To Blas, business was not unimportant, but a man should also seek out whatever beauty, love, and adventure the day might yield, for there might not be a tomorrow; and if there were no tomorrow, the business would have been of little import.
The two men had ridden together a long time now, and the things about them that were different had been put aside. Wheeler was patrón, and Talamantes was the man hired. But over and beyond that, they were compadres, so that it was not always apparent who was patrónand who was empleado.
Blas Talamantes had the better ears. “Frio, I hear shooting.”
Frio stopped and slowly turned his head, seeking the sound. It came to him on the hot breeze from uptrail.
“Renegados,“ he guessed, his mouth drawn tight. “They’ve hit some small outfit that’s short of men.”
“Maybe yours,“ said Blas.
They rode on with their rifles ready. The firing was nearer now, dropping down to a few sporadic shots and eventually stopping altogether. Presently they saw white smoke begin to spiral upward over the brush.
“Cotton smoke,“ Frio said. “I expect that’s some CSA bales that’ll never make it to Matamoros.”
They heard hoofbeats drumming towards them. Frio jerked his head to one side, signaling Blas to pull out of the trail. “Two of us couldn’t dent them much,“ he said, “but they could plow us under.”
This was a hostile country where almost everything went armed for its own protection, whether it be plant life or animal. The thick mesquites and catclaws at trailside were white-flecked with cotton scraps that their tough thorns had ripped from bale-laden wagons. Frio and Blas sought a way through this brush and the thick growth of man-tall prickly pear. They dismounted, rifles in hand, and stood with fingers over their horses’ nostrils. The sound of the hooves came louder, and Frio could glimpse a flash of movement.
Watching over a tall clump of pear, he saw the men pass by in a jog trot. He saw the black-clad Mexican in front, wearing a sombrero so wide that in the afternoon sun it cast a shadow to his waist. He saw the two Anglos who moved side by side, by side, half a length behind the Mexican. Trailing these, a dozen more riders straggled along, all of them apparently Mexican. They led four strings of mules, these still wearing the harness with which they had drawn the cotton wagons. Trace chains rattled from the steady swing of their pace.
The men passed, but the gray dust still hovered a while behind them, drifting at last out into the heavy brush.
Frio Wheeler’s eyes glowed with helpless anger. “My mules.” He swung back into the saddle, Blas following suit. “Blas, did you see who was ridin’ out in front?”
Blas nodded, his mouth grim. “Florencio Chapa! Bandido muy malo, with a heart like a grinder’s stone.” He paused, looking at the ground. “The gringos, you see who they are?”
Gringocould be a fighting word on the border if used in the wrong tone. But there was no offense in the matter-of-fact way Blas said it.
Frio’s jaw ridged with regret for what he had seen. He knew from Blas’s eyes that the Mexican had known the men. “You mean Tom McCasland? Yes, I recognized him.”
“He is your best friend, Frio. Or he was.” The last came more like a question.
“War changes things, Blas.”
“That other gringo, he is Bige Campsey. In the old days Tom McCasland would never ride with a man like Campsey.”
Frio shook his head. “Like I said, war makes a man do lots of things. Come on, we best go see how bad the damage is.”
They found five wagons strung out in the trail. The one in the lead, loaded with burning cotton bales, collapsed in a shower of sparks as Frio and Blas rode up. The other four wagons were being saved, though the Mexican teamsters were letting themselves be scorched to push burning bales out of the wagon beds and onto the ground. Without asking questions, Frio and Blas pitched in to help. They tossed their rawhide ropes over the tops of smoldering bales and spurred their horses out, dallying the ropes around their saddlehorns and pulling the bales down from the wagons.
The raiders had missed dumping some of the water barrels. A sandy-haired young Texan was running back and forth, dipping water and pitching it onto a wagon, dousing flames. With the bales out of the way, some of the Mexican freighting crew shoveled dirt over the fires, slowly snuffing them out.
Cotton smoke is a hard kind to take, and the choking smell of it clung awhile from the still-smouldering bales that lay about in scattered confusio...