Baptized in Mud

THE WATER WAS SHALLOW, but it felt like he’d landed on bedrock. Mud sucked at his shirt. His hat was gone, and somewhere upstream, a longhorn was bellowing like damnation itself. The herd kept churning through the narrow ford, hooves pounding the riverbed, flinging water and muck and everything else the beeves left behind. He’d landed hard on his right side, felt something crunch, and now sat half-submerged in the churned-up mess, one hand clutched at his ribs, and the other was too slick with filth to push himself upright.

The sun, high and pitiless, caught every glint of sweat and stink rising off the cattle like steam from a kettle. But overhead, the sky to the north had turned a flat pewter gray. A cooler breeze blew through the river bottom, and one puncher tipped up his hat and glanced at the clouds before riding on.

Another cowboy, a lean Tejano named Lujan with a silver tooth and a voice like gravel rolled in whiskey, rode by and laughed, not cruelly, just with the detached amusement of a man used to the stupidity of others.

“Look lively now, Preacher,” he called. “Baptism is over. Get to herdin’.”

He gritted his teeth, eyes burning—not from the river water, but from the weight of it all. Of course, they’d taken to calling him Preacher. Not because he was one, but because he’d once tried to be, and because cowboys had a nose for blood in the water.

He’d come west from Boston that spring, eager to find adventure and make up for a timid childhood, and because there was nothing left to hold him. The battle of Antietam killed his brother. A few years later, his sister took ill in the winter and never got well again. His father followed not long after, succumbing to fever. And his mother, well, heartbreak finished what sickness hadn’t. Seemed the thought of still having one son just wasn’t enough to keep her going. He’d been too young for the adventure of war and now too aimless for the pulpit, sought only out of obedience. So, he traded sermons for the frontier, figuring the West was as good a place as any for a man to make up for lost time.

He took the train west to Chicago, then down to St. Louis before drifting into Kansas. He met a crew of cowboys in Dodge after a two-day card game, during which he lost most of the money he had and the rest of his good sense. They were heading back south after delivering a herd, rawhide men with sun-cut eyes and stories bigger than the plains. Listening to them in the wild cow town had thrilled him like a boy reading a dime novel for the first time.

When the outfit mentioned needing a rider for their next turn up the trail, he’d lied with both feet and stepped right in it. Tall, strong-backed, and speaking with borrowed grit, he looked the part well enough, and any good preacher knew how to sell a story when it counted. He claimed he’d done some ranch work as he’d drifted and had ridden since he was a boy back home, which was accurate enough. He’d just left out the part where back home was outside Boston, the riding going to and from their small town for Sunday sermons and hauling firewood for his father’s little flock in the hill country, and the cattle work a pair of docile milk cows. The lies had come easily; the saddle sores didn’t.

And now here he was. Two weeks out on the Western Trail, sunburnt, saddle-sore, and covered in cow pies. His borrowed saddle squeaked. His back ached. His pride, which had once stood tall enough to bluff the trail boss, was now wallowing in mud.

It had all been harder than he’d imagined. The cow towns and card games had filled his head with stories of wild adventure, but most days were just dust and silence, sunburn, and sore knees. He’d eaten more salt pork than any man should, slept on rock and mesquite, been shot at by rustlers they never caught, and once woke up with a scorpion in his boot.

And riding drag. Always riding drag.

He spat river water, wiped his face with a sleeve that only made it worse, and looked up to see the tail end of the herd clearing the far bank.

“You know what?” he muttered, rising to one knee. Then, louder: “You know what? I quit.”

There was a beat of silence, broken only by the groan of a few men, snorts of horses, the creaking chuck wagon and lowing cattle in front of him, and the slosh of river water behind him.

Then came the voice—a thick drawl, low and disbelieving.

“You quit?”

Preacher turned to see Walt McKinnon, trail boss of the outfit, sitting his horse like a man carved for the saddle. Walt was old enough to have gray in his thick mustache, but broad as an oak and twice as unyielding. He spoke like a man who never wasted words and never needed to. He wore a flat-crowned hat, sweat-stained and brim-curled, and he had a Henry repeater in a scabbard and a Walker Colt on his hip.

“Son,” Walt said, spitting a stream of tobacco near the water’s edge, then brushing his mustache, “lemme tell you what quittin’ looks like from here.”

He nodded east. “That way’s nothing but open prairie. Ain’t a drop of water nor a shade tree for thirty miles. You’ll burn up by day after tomorrow, and that’s if the bandits don’t get ya first.”

He pointed south. “That’s Comancheria. Maybe you make it. Maybe you don’t. My money’s on don’t.”

A jab west. “Dust and horizon. Hotter, emptier, save for the Apache. Maybe you’ll find a well. More likely you’ll find a bone pile that figured their chances wrong.”

Finally, north. “That’s the herd. That’s us. Ogallala, at the end. Wages, if you earn ’em. Beans, if Cookie don’t burn ’em. A hot bath, a shave, a new set of clothes, and a steak dinner. Whiskey and girls, if that’s your thing, a clean bed, and a ticket back east through Chicago if it ain’t. Far as I can reckon, it’s the only direction that don’t end with buzzards on you. ‘Specially since that ain’t your horse, or saddle, and my remuda don’t outfit quitters.”

He paused, squinting against the glare. “So. You still quit? You only get to say that out loud once ‘fore I don’t give you the chance to take it back.”

Preacher didn’t answer. Couldn’t. His jaw clenched as his heart pounded with something worse than fear—shame. A month ago, he’d dreamed of becoming one of these men. Now here he was, muddy, bruised, and dressed down in front of them like a child who’d dropped the offering plate.

The moment hung there. No one else said a word.

Then a distant sound pricked the air, and the wind picked up from a new direction, cool and sharp. The men looked north to see quick moving dark clouds. There was a flash of light, then a distant rumble of thunder.

Walt turned in the saddle, suddenly rigid. “Mount up.”

Another rider galloped down from the ridge above the ford, his horse lathered and wide-eyed.

“Thundered ‘em, boss,” the rider shouted, panic rising in his throat. “Lightning to the north touched ground, then the thunder shook it. They’re runnin’.”

Walt didn’t hesitate. “Stampede. Get movin’!”

Preacher staggered to his feet, breath catching. Riders were mounting, bolting into motion. A second later, someone threw him his hat, mud-caked but whole, and his horse’s reins slapped into his hand.

No one asked if he still quit.

He hauled himself into the saddle. Pain lanced his side, but he gritted his teeth and kicked the gelding forward.

The ground was moving, not shaking like an earthquake, but rolling beneath him, a low, living thunder in the earth that ran up through the hooves of his horse and rattled in his chest like a sermon pounding out of an old church floor.

The herd was breaking, wild-eyed and terrified, a dark mass of muscle and horns surging northward like floodwater. The dust they kicked up hung low and thick, mixing with the first drops of rain and flashes of lightning.

He didn’t think. He just rode.

The gelding was game, already half-spooked but still listening to the reins, and Preacher gave him his head and leaned into the chase. Around him, the riders were shouting names, orders, curses, half-lost beneath the rising roar of the stampede. He glimpsed Lujan on a sorrel, yelling at a group to split and ride wide. Walt was ahead already, cutting across the flank, trying to wheel the leaders before the herd made the wrong kind of turn and killed itself in a draw or dry wash.

Preacher kicked his horse harder.

He wasn’t sure what he was doing. But his hands remembered things his pride had forgotten. How to ride, how to move with the animal beneath him, how to keep his eyes forward and his weight low. He rode like he had back on the hills above Concord, chasing lost mules or racing the dusk home to supper.

And the fear, oddly, fell away.

He rode hard and fast along the herd’s outer edge, angling toward the front. He realized Walt wanted to get the beeves turning, and rode as close as he dared to the edge of the stampede, doing his best to force them clockwise. Then he saw it. One of the younger hands, Tad, had been thrown, his horse galloping loose a hundred yards away while the young man tried to scramble clear of the oncoming mass.

Preacher didn’t hesitate.

He wheeled the gelding hard and veered toward the downed rider. The horse stumbled, nearly pitched, but caught its footing. Preacher pressed low, his hand practically skimming the grass and mud as he came alongside Tad, who was crawling on hands and knees, wild-eyed, mouth moving but soundless under the roar.

“Grab on!” Preacher shouted.

Tad lunged. Preacher caught a fistful of shirt and yanked, summoning all his old wood-hauling strength. The momentum nearly tore him from the saddle, but the gelding held, and somehow they stayed upright. Tad clung to his leg, then hauled himself up behind the saddle, arms cinched tight.

And then they were off again, the herd surging past where Tad had been, trampling the grass to powder.

Preacher cut a wide arc and rejoined the others, circling to help Walt and the point riders turn the leaders as Tad told him what to do. The punchers pushed hard, whooping and waving slickers, flanking the lead cows and pressing them in, in, in.

Gradually, agonizingly, the chaos bent. What had been a wall of death became a wheel, the cattle beginning to circle and slow.

It took ten minutes. It felt like a year.

And then it was done. Preacher looked to the sky, and it opened up, a soaking rain pelting his hat, cleansing him.

The herd milled in a broad, panting circle, chests heaving, steam rising from hides slick with sweat and rain. The dust settled into mud, and the storm passed east as quickly as it had come.

Preacher sat still for a moment, feeling the thrum of his horse’s heart, the ache in his side, the warmth of blood where Tad’s boot had raked his shin. His hands were trembling. His mouth tasted of copper.

Tad slid down behind him, staggering a little as he touched the ground.

The young man went to touch the brim of his hat, then looked around and chuckled, realizing it had flown off in the melee. “Thanks,” he said, voice hoarse.

Preacher nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

Walt walked his horse over, chewing on a fresh pull of tobacco. He looked at Preacher, then at Tad.

“Good thing he didn’t quit,” he said.

Then he flicked the reins and rode off.

***

THE HERD SETTLED and was grazing, a wide circle of weary longhorns kept calm by the first shift of night riders. Their silhouettes passed like shadows beyond the firelight, low in the saddle, rifles across their laps and slickers pulled tight against the creeping chill.

Preacher limped toward the chuck wagon after staking his horse with the remuda and setting his saddle, tack, and bag with his bedroll.

His whole body ached. His right leg dragged a little, and the ribs on that side throbbed with every step. His shirt stuck to him like bark to a tree, dried sweat and mud in patches, blood on his leg.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this empty and this full all at once.

Cookie barely looked up from the Dutch oven as Preacher appeared at the back of the wagon with his mess kit. Bald, bearded, and missing two fingers on his left hand, he was the sort of man who only respected hard work and coffee black enough to float a horseshoe.

Preacher loaded his tin plate with beans, hardtack, and a greasy flap of salt pork. He reached for the pot of coffee, and Cookie surprised him by picking it up first and filling his cup, nodding once.

“’Bout time you earned your supper.” He reached for a proper biscuit and tossed it on Preacher’s plate, taking back the hardtack. “Save a man’s life, you get somethin’ good.”

Preacher nodded back. “Yessir. Thank you.”

He made his way to the fire, dropping slow against a warm, sunbaked rock. The fire cracked and popped beside him, smoke curling toward the stars in the vast Texas sky. A few of the other hands settled nearby, quiet now, bone-tired, too worn out to brag or complain.

He ate slowly. Each bite seemed to wake him up just a little more, and with it came a kind of peace. Not comfort. But something close.

After a while, Lujan came over and crouched beside the fire, squinting across it at Preacher. “Damndest quittin’ I have ever seen.”

A few of the others chuckled. Tad called from the dark, “Hell, if that’s quittin’, we oughta all give it a try. Though I prefer not gettin’ near tromped down again.”

Preacher just grinned and shook his head. The shame from earlier was gone now, burned out by dust and thunder, baptized into the cowboy ways.

Lujan pulled a twig from the fire and used it to light his smoke. “We must give you a new trail name. Somethin’ proper, like ‘Mudslide.’ Or ‘Lucky.’”

There were murmurs of approval.

“Nah,” said Walt, stepping into the ring of firelight. “He’s Preacher.”

Preacher looked up. Walt didn’t smile, didn’t nod, just met his eye for a moment. “We don’t wanna talk ourselves out of any divine intervention.” He then moved on, cup in hand, vanishing into the dark like a man who didn’t believe in dwelling on anything too long, good or bad.

Preacher leaned back against the rock.

He let the heat soak into his bones. Watched the sparks rise. Listened to the nearby songs of the night riders, and the steady breathing of the men around the fire who no longer questioned whether he belonged.

Preacher.

He’d hated the name at first. Thought it was meant to mock what he’d left behind. And maybe it had been.

But now, he wasn’t sure.

He didn’t pull out his Bible as much these days, and he hadn’t preached a word in months. But today, he’d ridden straight into Hell and hauled someone out. Not for glory. Not for salvation. Just because it needed doing.

He hadn’t found what he’d been looking for out here.

He’d found something better.