"Bring Me His Ears"

by Clarence Edward Mulford

Pedro begged and pleaded, but to no avail. He still was arguing when his two companions rolled up in their blankets and settled down to go to sleep. Sadly he walked away, hiding his anger until well out of their sight, and then hastened to his own fire and sent three of his compatriots to watch the sleeping pair. They had their watch for nothing, and while they doggedly kept their eyes on the two plainsmen, Uncle Joe and his two wagoners were busy on the other side of the camp, stowing merchandise in the wagons and making false packs. This they found easy to do without calling upon many buffalo rugs, for the goods had been packed in light boxes, over which had been thrown skins and canvas. By taking out the contents of the boxes and putting the containers back into their original wrappings the shapes of the packs did not change. The pigs of lead, a keg of powder and bundles of stones were wrapped in pieces of old skins to give weight to the packs to keep them from flopping at every step of the mules. They did not start to work until Zeb Houghton and Jim Ogden returned from their tour of guard duty and took up another kind of guard duty near the wagons; and long before daylight awakened the encampment the work was done and no one the wiser. Alonzo Webb and Enoch Birdsall had taken care of the packs belonging to Ogden and Houghton and everything was in shape for quick action.

On the march again after an early breakfast the caravan plodded along the trail to reach Willow Bar in good time for the next night camp. As the wagons rolled along the road following the course of the Cimarron, Uncle Joe and Patience dropped back to the rear guard, where Hank Marshall scowled at Jim Ogden, but refrained from open hostilities. Hank was glad to see them and entertained them mile after mile with accounts of his life and experiences in the great West. At times his imagination set a hard pace for his vocabulary, but the latter managed to keep up. The men exchanged tobacco off and on and no one gave a second thought to what they were doing. When Uncle Joe and Patience rode forward again as the train drew near to the noon camping place, Uncle Joe was poorer and lighter by the loss of a goodly sum in minted gold, while Hank was richer and heavier. The balance was obtainable in Santa Fe in the warehouse of a mutual friend.

The wagons hardly had left the noon camp when a heavy rain storm burst upon them, with a blast of cold air that quickly turned the rain into driving sheets of hail. These storms were common along the Cimarron and at times raged for two or three days. The animals became frantic with fear and pain, and the train was a scene of great confusion from one end to the other. Alternate downpours of rain, sleet, and heavy hailstones continued all the rest of the day and the encampment at Willow Bar was one of sullenness and discontent. The wind rose during the early part of the night and sent the rain driving into the wagons through every crack and crevice, and the flapping and slapping and booming of wagon covers, added to the fury of the wind and the swish of the downpour, filled the night with a tumult of noise. The guards around the camp either crawled under skins or crept back to their wagons, not able to see three feet in the blackness.

Tom and Hank had taken refuge under a great Pittsburg wagon owned by Haviland and had fastened buffalo rugs to its sides to shed some of the rain. As soon as darkness set in and Pedro's spies found that they could not see an arm's length from them and were drenched and half frozen by the steady downpour, they fled from their posts and sought refuge from the storm. It took very little to convince them that the men they were to watch would stay where they were until dawn or later, and they did not let Pedro know of their deflection.

"Nine, ten, eleven," muttered the first of two men leading packmules as they felt their way from wagon to wagon. "This oughter be Haviland's, Zeb. Yep, I kin feel thar skin walls." He bent down and raised the lower edge of a skin. "Hank! Tom!"

"All right, Jim," came the low answer, and the two partners, bundled in skins until they looked like nothing human, crawled from their snug shelter and stood up, their one and constant thought being for the covers of the hammers of their heavy rifles. Hank pushed ahead and the night swallowed up the little party.

Uncle Joe raised himself on one elbow and peered through a small opening in the canvas at the rear end of his first huge wagon, and got a faceful of cold rain before he could close the opening again. He had done this a dozen times since dark. Muttering sleepily he rolled up in his blankets and rugs and dozed again, squirming down into the warm bed as vague thoughts sped through his mind of what his friends were going to face.

Suddenly the soft whinny of a horse sounded squarely under him, and he bounced from the blankets and crept to a crack where the canvas was nailed to the tailboard of the wagon. "Hello!" he called. "Hello!"

A low voice answered him and he shivered as a trickle of cold rain rolled down his face. "Thought you had given it up till tomorrow night. This is a hell of a night, boys, to go wandering off from the camp. Sure you won't get lost among th' hills?" He chuckled at the reply and shivered again. "Sure I'll tell her Bent's. Yes. No, she won't. What? Look here, young man; she's plumb cured of tenderfeet. Yes, I remember everything. All right; good luck, boys. God knows you'll need it!" He listened for a moment, heard no sounds of movement, and called again. "What's th' matter?" There came no answer and he crept back to his blankets, his teeth chattering, and lay awake the rest of the night, worrying.

Between the wagons and the road the little pack train waited, kept together by soft bird calls instead of by sight. A plaintive, disheartened snipe whistled close by and was answered in kind. Hank almost bumped into Ogden before he saw him. They both looked like drowned rats, the water slipping from the buffalo hair and pouring from them in little rills.