Novel 1968 - Brionne (v5.0) (3 page)

“I don’t know.” He glanced down at Mat. “I’ll have a look.”

The cowboy got up. “I’ll go along.”

Brionne hesitated, looking down at his son. The dark-eyed girl smiled. “Go along,” she said. “I will watch over your son. If he wakes up I’ll tell him where you’ve gone.”

Brionne walked to the end of the car and stepped out on the platform.

Vast plains, rolling up into low hills, swept away on either hand. The single line of rails disappeared in the distance behind them. Holding to the handrail on the end of the car, he leaned out to look toward the engine. He could see the dark figures of two men who were talking, and the bobbing lantern of the conductor as he came back along the train, checking the cars.

Brionne swung down, the cowboy beside him. “What is it?” Brionne called softly.

“Fire,” the conductor answered. “I smell fire. I figure one of the cars must’ve developed a hotbox or something. Maybe a cinder set the roof on fire.”

The cowboy had been standing apart. “It ain’t none of my affair, Mr. Conductor,” he said mildly, “but if I was you I’d board up an’ take this train a-sky-hootin’ yonder. That there smell is grass a-burnin’. That’s a prairie fire an’ she’s a-comin’ thisaway!”

The conductor turned and stared at him in the darkness. “Sure enough,” he said, “that
is
burnin’ grass.”

He turned and started a stumbling run back toward the engine, but even as he started the flames showed, a dull red glow against the sky.

“We can’t make it,” Brionne said. “We’d better backfire.”

“Not here.” The cowboy drew his gun. “There’s a slough back up the line a ways. We’ll need water.” He fired into the air, and the conductor skidded to a stop.

“Back!” the cowboy yelled. “Back to the slough!”

There was an answering yell from the engineer, and the conductor leaped aboard the nearest car. Brionne swung up, catching the cowboy’s hand as he jumped for the platform.

The engine wheels spun as they ground into reverse, and the train began to move. Already the horizon was dancing with a leaping line of flame. How far away was it? A mile—half a mile? In the darkness it was impossible to judge.

Grinding and roaring, the train backed up the line. Brionne went inside the swaying car. Mat was sitting up, his eyes wide and frightened. The girl was beside him.

“It’s a grass fire, Mat,” his father said. “You take care of this lady. She doesn’t know about such things and she may be frightened. But stay inside the car.”

He glanced around. “We’ll need any help we can get.” One of the passengers, a soldier in uniform, sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Brionne spoke to him. “Private, go forward along the cars and roust out all the men. Get buckets, anything that will hold water. These cars are made out of dried lumber and varnish. Soak them down!”

He threw off his coat and ran to the back of the car and jumped off as the train slowed. The slough was on the wrong side of the car to stop the fire, but there was a good water supply, and if need be it offered a shelter from the flames.

Brionne began running on the other side of the train, toward the fire. “Start one close in to the track,” he said to the cowboy; “one that will get the nearest grass and that we can put out. I’ll go farther out.”

He could see the fire clearly now, great towering flames roaring over the prairie. When scarcely fifty yards out he stopped, knelt in the grass and tugged up a double handful. Lighting it, he waited until it was ablaze, then touched it to the grass. A flame leaped up, and he ran on, touching the grass until he could no longer hold his torch, then taking a second handful of grass. When he had a fire started the length of the train, he turned and started back, setting new fires inside the outer ones. The idea was to keep any fire from getting too large, but burning the grass toward the train to stop the big one that was coming.

Others were helping. A score of dark figures were alongside the track, throwing water over the cars. Others were burning grass, and putting out some when the flames got too high or too close.

It was desperate work. There is no work that will demand more of a man than fighting fire, for there is a desperation in it that is born of man’s ancient fear and his present realization of the danger. Brionne had no sooner set the backfire than he was fighting to keep it under control.

The cowboy, who knew what to do and worked swiftly, had set a fire only six feet from the tracks, burning off a border that was easily controlled and soon burned out except for that edge that ate slowly back against the wind to meet the area burned off by Brionne’s large fire.

But the great wall of flame came on; it was now only a few hundred yards off. The train stood between the burned-off portion and the slough. With the outer edge of the backfire burning slowly to meet the wall of flame, and with a margin of burned-off ground to protect them, all hands turned to drenching the wooden cars with water.

Several men got on top of the cars, and others passed buckets up to them. Still others were throwing water on the varnished walls of the cars. All were coughing from the smoke; leaves and grass blew over them, and blazing tumbleweed rolled close to them. The heat was intense.

Now the flames rolled up to the backfire and blazed furiously there, but they could go no farther. Around the ends of the backfire some flames tried to make their way around the island of slough and burned-off grass that surrounded the train, but these they could take care of more easily.

Within a few minutes it was obvious that the train was safe. Silently, the small group of tired men stood there for a moment.

Brionne found himself beside the cowboy. “Quite a fire,” he commented dryly.

“Yeah. I’ve seen a few. This was a bad one.”

The conductor came up to them. “I want to thank you men,” he said. “Without you we’d have lost the train.”

The cowboy chuckled. “I’ve come too far to lose my hair in a prairie fire,” he said. “Pa allus said I was born to be hung.”

He grinned at Brionne. “You move fast,” he said. “My name’s Mowry. Dutton Mowry.”

Brionne shook his hand. “James Brionne,” he said. “My son and I are heading west. Utah,” he added, “or maybe over the line into Nevada.”

“Headed that way m’self,” Mowry said. “Where you leavin’ the train?”

“Promontory,” Brionne said. “We plan to locate somewhere south of there for a while and scout the country.”

Mowry gave him a wry glance. “You don’t look like no tenderfoot,” he said, “but that there’s a country to ride careful in.”

They walked back to the train and slowly climbed aboard. The sudden emergency had changed the men from a trainload of strangers to a group of men who had joined hands in a common cause. Brionne glanced around at them, at their blackened, sweat-streaked faces. “It looks as if we should have saved some of that water for ourselves,” he said, and a big Swede farmer grinned at him. The train started to move.

There was something about such emergencies that lasted, Brionne thought. No matter what happened to them afterwards, the men on this train would never be strangers to each other again. They had something in common and there was now a warmth between them, a knowledge of readiness to rise to an emergency, and each one of them felt better within himself for this victory they had won together.

Mat looked up at his father; his eyes were big. “I wanted to help,” he said. “Miranda wouldn’t let me.”

“Thank you,” Brionne said simply to the young woman. “I am James Brionne.”

“I am Miranda Loften. You have a fine son, Mr. Brionne. I am afraid he comforted me more than I did him.”

“You are going far?”

Her eyes became cool. “Not far, Mr. Brionne. Not far at all.” Turning, she walked back to her seat.

“She’s nice,” Mat commented.

Brionne glanced out of the window. It was growing light. The last flecks of fire had died out, and now it was daylight.

The sun went behind heavy clouds, and there was a spattering of rain on the windows. The train’s speed had slowed, for they were climbing a long grade. Brionne, suddenly restless, got up and strolled down the aisle, leaving Mat to watch the rain.

The big Swede grinned at him and two others spoke to him, commenting on the fire or on the weather. One man, a short, stocky man with a broad red face, looked up as he approached. “Heard you are getting off at Promontory. I keep a store there. If there’s anything I can help you with, you just drop around.”

“Thanks.”

“Fellow back east was asking me about that golden spike they drove there at Promontory. Wanted to know if it was still there. I told him it would have been stolen long ago if they’d left it there. Why, there’s men out there would steal the fillings out of your teeth if you left them around. And there’s some would shoot you to get at them,” he added.

Now the train slowed still more. Bending over, Brionne peered out of the rain-streaked windows. The train was surrounded by a black sea of bobbing woolly black shapes.

“Buffalo!” he exclaimed.

The train stopped. The storekeeper leaned over to look out. “Hope it isn’t like last time. We waited most a whole day while the buffalo passed…millions, it seemed like.”

Suddenly Brionne turned around. Two men stood at the end of the car, looking at him. One of them was a tall, round-shouldered man with wide hips made wider by the two guns he wore. His hat was battered, his shirt collar greasy with dirt, his drooping mustache tobacco-stained.

But it was the man beside him who drew Brionne’s eyes, for he had a memory for faces. It was the man he had seen in the Southern Hotel in St. Louis.

Even as Brionne’s eyes met theirs, the men turned and went through the door behind them.

The storekeeper followed his eyes. “They’ve got some horses back there…ridin’ in the baggage car. I don’t know what else.”

“I wonder where they were during the fire,” Brionne commented. “I didn’t see them.”

“Come to think of it, neither did I.”

The conductor paused beside them. “We’ll be in Cheyenne tonight,” he said. “There’s a live town for you.”

“I hear there’s some horses in the baggage car,” Brionne said.

The conductor nodded. “Four men got on last night,” he said. “They bought out the whole car. They’ve got six horses and a lot of gear. Wild horse hunters, they say.”

Four men…

Brionne went back to his seat. Mat had fallen asleep, and no one else was near. Opening his carpetbag, he took out his gunbelt and gun. He checked the load, and belted it on.

Then he sat back in the seat, facing toward the front of the train, and leaned back for a rest. He could watch the front of the train from where he sat.

Now the train had begun to move a little faster, for the buffalo were thinning out. Several times the whistle sounded, and each time the buffalo would trot a few steps, then subside to walking.

Mowry paused in the aisle. If he noted the addition of the gunbelt he offered no comment.

“Not many pilgrims aboard,” he said. “If there was, they’d be shootin’ the buffalo. I’ve seen twenty-five, maybe thirty men, shootin’ all at once. Just killin’—not even able to get the tongues or liver. I never seen the like.”

“They can run when they want to,” Brionne said. “I’ve seen Indians hunt them on the run.”

“Buckshot,” Mowry said. “I favor buckshot. You can pick up a good shotgun…a Wells-Fargo type express gun in Promontory. There’s something mighty impressive about a shotgun.”

Mowry drifted away, and Brionne sat back in his seat, the brim of his hat low over his eyes.…Now what was that all about? Had they simply been talking about buffalo? Or was there something more?

Chapter 4

A
S THE TRAIN rumbled into the yards at Cheyenne, the conductor stopped by Brionne again. “We’ll be in town an hour and a half,” he said. “You and the boy best catch yourselves a bite. You’ll find nothing else along the line that’s worth the stoppin’. Not for a gent like you.

“The Cheyenne House ain’t much,” he went on. “Canvas partitions, and they sleep two in a bed. The food’s worse than you’d expect. Hook’s Pilgrim House is the best place to stay, but for grub the place to go is Kate Connor’s. She’s got an eating place close to the tracks, and you’ll get the best. She cottons to youngsters.”

The food at Kate Connor’s was good, and the bustling, motherly Irish woman took Mat in hand as if she’d raised him from a baby. From time to time she studied Brionne. Finally, standing by the table, hands on her hips, she said, “Most folks I can spot right off, but you don’t fit, mister. You don’t look to be runnin’ from nothing. You could be a gambler, but that ain’t likely or you’d be stoppin’ at one of the places down the street.”

Brionne glanced at his watch. They had eaten well, and now it was nearing train time. He pushed back his chair and got up, and at that moment a bullet spattered glass and rang a deep gong from a Dutch oven hung on the wall near the door to the kitchen.

One quick hand pushed Mat to the floor, the other held a gun. Brionne, well inside the room, was crouching to look over the edge of a table and out of the window. He could see nothing in the darkness, but he waited for the flash of a gun…it did not come.

Kate stared hard at him. “That was no drunken puncher, mister. That man figured on makin’ you dead.”

Brionne holstered his gun and stood up slowly. He smiled at her. “I don’t believe so, Mrs. Connor. It was just a wild shot.”

“You think what you like,” she retorted, “but if I was in your boots I’d leave by the back door.”

“Thanks,” he said; “I believe we will.”

Holding Mat’s hand in his own left, Brionne eased out the back door and stood for a moment absolutely still, listening to the sounds of the Cheyenne night.

At least two music boxes were offering their jangling tunes to the night. Somewhere a door slammed and a squeaky pump started. A loud voice, with only the shadow of a tune, was singing a drunken song. Spurs jingled along the boardwalk in front of the restaurant.

Brionne squatted on his heels. “Mat, I don’t believe that bullet was intended for us, but there are some rough men in this town. We will have to be very quiet…like playing Indian. Do you understand?”