Single Tree

By Gary D. Svee

Searching for a home on the range, a rancher finds death under the cottonwoods

Samuel Wilders tried to love farming. But after years of roping cattle, this cowboy found it impossible to settle down on the Nebraska plains. With his young wife and children in tow, Wilders sets out for Montana—where the sky stretches farther than the eye can believe, and a man needs only a little water to ranch. One day, he leaves his family behind under the shelter of a cottonwood and rides toward town, hoping to do some trading. Before Wilders can get there, a gang of bandits mistakes him for a horse rustler and strings him up from the nearest tree.

Abandoned on the range, the Wilders family waits for a husband and father who will never return. A wandering Indian must protect them from Samuel Wilders’s killers—men who are still hungry for blood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Apr 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480487079

Gary D. Svee

Gary D. Svee grew up along the banks of the Yellowstone, Stillwater, and Rosebud Rivers in Montana. His novels include Spirit Wolf, Showdown at Buffalo Jump, The Peacemaker’s Vengeance, and the Spur Award winner Sanctuary. Svee lives in Billings, Montana.

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Author’s Note

We must either gather up what stock we have left and leave the country or gather up these desperadoes and put them where they will kill and steal no more; there is no alternative, and we choose the latter. It is now simply a state of war.

—James Fergus, nineteenth-century cattleman

The vigilante movement of 1884 was aimed at cleaning out a nest of rustlers preying on herds of cattle and horses in Montana and Dakota. The story is obscure. The cattlemen were sworn to secrecy—to speak was to put a noose around their own necks, and good hemp rope choked off any comments from the an sixty men that summer.

This novel is completely fictional, based loosely on later accounts of that story. The characters say the words that might have been spoken if the nooses had not silenced them.

PROLOGUE

A SEED-BEARING BALL of fluff danced on the eddies and ripples of the northerly wind, bound for the eternal waters of the Missouri. Bright green leaves rustled in a century-old stand of cottonwoods, whispering the litany of the annual spring ritual.

Accept this seed, oh ageless river, giver of life.

Feed it with the silt of your spring waters, with the blood of the buffalo drowned in their crossing.

Grow then another stand of cottonwood trees to taste the breezes, to feel the nibble of the deer and the rub of the buffalo.

Do this and massive trees will shade your banks and keep you strong as you travel to the sea.

Below, the river bosttom was white with millions of seeds, but only one caught a thermal rising off the black shale banks lining the river. Only one rode the northerly breeze beyond the river, over the prairie where no cottonwoods grew.

It floated above a patch of ground recently moistened by a thunderstorm. The seed settled here, tentative as a butterfly approaching a rose, and took root.

The sapling grew through the wet spring, its roots tracing moisture to an underground spring. Blessed by the gods, or chance, the cottonwood grew over the years, a patch of green on a prairie of yellow bunchgrass and silver sage and dark juniper. Unhampered by the shadows of taller trees, it spread wide its branches to embrace the sun.

The tree became a haven to the creatures of the high plains. In summer, weary animals gratefully shared the tree’s shade. In spring, buffalo, elk, and grizzly rubbed their hides against the cottonwood’s rough gray bark, leaving sprigs of winter hair—as the plains tribes left willow wands and eagle feathers to commemorate their holy places.

The native people of the plains also came to stand in the tree’s dark shadows to spy on rivers of passing buffalo, to seek their own kind—sailors traversing the sea of grass. Sometimes they left signs of their passing, a rock cairn or a hand painted red on a nearby boulder.

The cottonwood drew life to it with its promise of summer shade and water. And that is how it came to catch Sarah Wilders’s eye one day in 1884.

CHAPTER 1

SAMUEL WILDERS’S TEETH grated together with each bump and jolt of the wagon. The road was little more than a trail, and previous wagons had worn all the soft out of it. Only the stones remained.

He could feel each of them through the steel-rimmed wagon wheels, through the long, unforgiving oaken spokes of the wheel, through the rock-hard seat that was wearing a hole in his soul.

He looked across the seat at his wife, Sarah. She swayed with each lurch of the wagon, her lap cushioning little Rosie from the wagon’s abuse.

Seeing Sarah filled him with wonder. Even on the seat of this damnable wagon, even holding a squirming little girl, that woman seemed to be presiding over some wondrous cotillion. Whatever possessed her to marry a man like him, a man who would subject her to the indignities of the long trail from Nebraska to Montana?

Wilders pulled his eyes from his wife, and his mind from the guilt that had nagged at him for weeks. He turned his attention to the prairie. It was all here, just as Zeb Saunders had promised.

Saunders was a middle-aged cowboy—edging toward thirty—wandering south to pick up another herd when he rode into Friend, Nebraska. The vagaries of spring and chance drew the cowboy to the chair that sat empty most days in front of the Friendly Mercantile.

Chance and the need for seed brought Samuel Wilders to the store the same day. Wilders was a cowboy—a farmer’s bib overalls and lace-up shoes couldn’t hide that—and each man sensed a kindred spirit in the other.

The talk ranged up the long trail from Texas to Montana, Saunders talking about the rivers he crossed and the bad water and good whisky. But when he talked of Montana, he whispered almost reverently.

Montana was a place where the prairie bumped into the top of the world, Saunders said. Grass tall enough to scratch the belly of a horse, and the sky stretched from forever to forever. Didn’t need land to raise cattle, just water. Find some unclaimed water and you had a ranch.

Saunders’s words took root in Wilders’s mind. Grass high as the belly of a horse, sky wide as forever … and Wilders would be doing what he did best, caring for cattle.

Wilders had spent most of his life on horseback. He would have been there still, if he hadn’t found himself in Friend, Nebraska, years ago, fighting the granddaddy of all hangovers.

He awoke in the dark coolness of an alley with a splitting headache and empty pockets. He was ready to roar his anger, his frustration at humanity, when he saw the sun flash against golden hair: A princess was surveying her kingdom from the seat of a grain wagon. The sight of her pierced his heart as the morning sun had pierced his brain.

That was the day Samuel Wilders became a farmer. He stayed around Friendly and began to carve his living from the prairie with a single-bottom plow, his horizons shrinking to a plot of upside-down earth, to green plants peeking into the sun. And each day he appeared on the Johnson porch, tanned almost as dark as his boots, slim as the posts that held up the porch roof. He came carrying sprays of prairie flowers on his arm, carrying his heart on his sleeve.

And then she said yes, and her father smiled. The following year Jimmy Wilders squawked into the world. Samuel Wilders fell in love for the second time … and the third when little Rosie was born.

Wilders and his family attended a tiny steepled church each Sunday. During planting season, he prayed for a good crop, along with the rest of the congregation.

Nurture this seed, O Lord.

Quench its thirst with warm, gentle spring rains.

Bless it with the warmth of the sun so that it may grow green and strong and be a blessing to your creation.

Spare these fields, O Lord. Afflict them not with pestilence. Protect them from the hooves of passing cattle. Shelter them from searing winds and the hot hunger of prairie fire.

Do this, O Lord, and you will bless us with your giving and we will give in return to the needy who knock at our doors, in the tithing for the church.

Do this, O Lord, and we will sing your praise.

Wilders did his best to be a farmer. If that was what it took to win and keep Sarah Johnson Wilders, then that, by God, was what he would do.

Wilders worked at it, from before light to after dark. He worked himself thin as a rail and twice as hard, but Samuel Wilders was a cowboy. He would never be anything else.

His eyes were alight when he came home that day from the Mercantile and Zeb Saunders’s stories. He told Sarah about Montana, tried to paint in her eyes the pictures he had seen in Saunders’s words. She watched him then and watched him later, as he paced the kitchen that winter, as he stared from the kitchen window of the family’s clapboard-sided farmhouse.

And then Sarah said yes, and Samuel glowed as he had when she had said yes to his proposal of marriage.

The excitement of their adventure grew until the two felt almost giddy with their good fortune. When spring arrived, the Wilderses traded their farm for some breeding stock, a solid wagon, and hope…. They clicked the team north and west.

Sarah perched on the wagon seat and Samuel ranged free and easy on his saddle horse. They moved slowly, setting their pace to fit the herd’s comfort. The weeks on the trail whittled them down, time and quicksand crossings and the constant breakdowns of the wagon. Their money disappeared first, and then their cattle, and then the saddle horses.

They were racing for their lives in a slow-moving wagon. They had to find an unclaimed creek and build a home. They would start slow, work brandings and roundups for a calf or two. They would make it: They had to.

They had just crossed the Missouri River in Montana and climbed the shale banks to the high plains. They were two days along that jolting, rocky road, just beginning to allow optimism to swell in their breasts when Jolly, one of the two horses pulling the Wilderses’ wagon, dropped to his knee in a badger hole. The snap of the horse’s leg cracked like the family’s hopes, cracked like the rifle shot that stopped the animal’s thrashing. Jack, the remaining draft horse, was too weak to pull the wagon very far alone.

It was then that Sarah Wilder saw the tree, a point of green against the blue horizon. Trees meant water. Water meant a place to bathe, coffee to drink, clean clothing. Trees meant shade from this god-awful heat, something to look at besides sagebrush, something to give definition to their lives.

It seemed to Sarah Wilders, even then, that they had been swallowed in the immensity of the prairie, an insignificant speck in a vastness that transcended imagination. Only the tree seemed real to her.

Wilders rigged the wagon for one horse and they walked behind it, following its creaking, final trek to the tree.

They found a dugout nearby where some trapper had wintered long ago. All the family needed was water enough to last while Wilders backtracked to the nearest ranch to find a second horse.

Samuel Wilders untied the shovel from the side of the wagon.

Has to be a spring here, he said, more to himself than to his son, grunting as the first spadeful of earth tore loose from the rich prairie grass.

A vast swale tipped toward the cottonwood like a giant washbasin. Had to be water in that basin, Wilders thought. The cottonwood was proof. Cottonwoods are shallow-rooted, better suited to river bottom than prairie. The tree must be rooted in cool water from an underground spring.

Wilders grunted as another clump of grass and earth popped free.

Has to be a spring here, he repeated to himself, wondering if that thought was dictated by the lay of the land or by his family’s desperate need for water.

The fate of the Wilderses turned now with the clumps of dirt and prairie grasses. Another clump of grass tore loose. Blue grama, needle-and-thread, buffalo grass, and western wheat grass.

Samuel Wilders stopped, wiping the sweat from his brow with his shirtsleeve. The last clump of grass tore free in a circle five feet in diameter. Wilders wiped his forehead again with his sleeve and paused, stretching his neck. The digging would be easier now that he had broken through the grass cover.

Little puffs of dust arose as his heel slammed into the dry soil. As he dug deeper, it seemed that the prairie was consuming him just a little at a time, as the journey from Nebraska had consumed the family’s possessions.

But he found damp soil and then a trickle of water and then a pool. He felt better, joking with Jimmy that if he had dug much deeper he might have fallen into an underground river and been swept around the world to emerge in China.

Wouldn’t those Chinese be surprised, Wilders said, to see a blue-eyed devil pop from the earth?

The next morning, he shuffled around the camp, spending as much time trying to read the light in his wife’s eyes as he did packing for his journey. And when he could no longer postpone his leaving, he held Sarah Johnson Wilders at arm’s length, trying to find the words that would extract forgiveness for placing her in this jeopardy.

She smiled, and he pulled her to him, their two bodies melding into one. Rosie came first to the hugging and then Jimmy, each seeking a part of the love they sensed.

Samuel Wilders mounted the draft horse and left the camp with a grin on his face, carrying his shotgun and pistol. He hoped to trade the weapons for a horse past its prime but willing still to help Jack pull the Wilderses toward their new home.

And that is how Sarah and Jimmy and Rosie came to settle by this lone tree on the prairie. They were carried there by chance, as the tree had been—and shallow rooted as the cottonwood, they remained.

The rider sat motionless, ringed by men from the Trident ranch. They had been waiting for him in a coulee, revealing themselves only when they were too close to be avoided, too near to run.

Samuel Wilders almost smiled. The draft animal was a poor choice for a race. Jack was capable of little more than a trot, and that for only short distances. The big-footed, roman-nosed horse was tired from the long trek, tired from pulling a rough-riding wagon.

Wilders’s eyes flicked around the half circle of men—cowboys all, from their broad-brimmed hats to their down at the heel boots. Their clothing was rough and mended. Their meager pay was spent on wild hoorahs and not high fashion.

A grim-faced man with an air of command nudged his skittish roan forward. Silas Tolkien, he growled. Trident ranch.

Sam Wilders. Saw your brand on some stock a ways back.

Then what the hell are you doing here?

Just passing through.

Where you headed?

Snowy Mountains. Friend said I might find a place to stake out for a little ranch up there.

You going to start your ranch with that horse?

Wilders tensed. He had seen enough cowboy courts to realize that he stood accused in one. What the hell do you mean by that?

Mr…?

Wilders.

Mr. Wilders, we’ve been watching you for half an hour.

Wilders bristled. Spit it out.

That’s a Trident horse you’re riding. We don’t much care for rustlers, Mr. Wilders.

The hair went up on the back of Wilders’s neck. He took off his hat and rubbed his sleeve across his forehead. I’m no damn rustler. This is my gelding.

You might explain the Trident brand on the right shoulder.

It’s not a trident, it’s a pitchfork, registered in Nebraska to me.

The day was edging toward noon and hot, one of those days when the sun rubs out the horizon with its glare. Samuel Wilders’s horizon was shrinking, too, from the vastness of the Montana prairie to the eyes of a half circle of grim men. Their faces were painted dark by the shadows of wide-brimmed hats. One of his accusers, a dark-haired, dark-skinned cowboy, looked away. That frightened Wilders more than all the glares. He sensed that the young man knew exactly what these men intended to do, and the kid couldn’t look their victim in the eye.

Wilders had never thought of himself as a victim. He’d spent a wild youth on the plains of Texas. Even now his arms bore the puckered scars of flesh torn in thorn thickets. He was as much a cowboy as any of the men facing him, and he knew the seriousness of Tolkien’s charge.

Boys, he’s telling us that he rode that plow horse all the way from Nebraska, Tolkien said.

Nervous laughter pattered through the men.

Rides a plow horse, and he’s armed to the teeth. Just what is it that you plan to do, boy, that you need a shotgun and a pistol to get it done?

I want to trade the pistol and the shotgun for another horse.

Little George, he wants to trade those guns. Suppose you take them and we’ll see what they’re worth.

Wilders blanched and said, Like hell.

Son, you want to try to use those?

No.

Then give them to Little George.

A florid-faced rider reined his horse next to Wilders, reaching over to take the weapons. Little George examined the weapons for a moment. "Not