Chaparral Range War (9781101619049) Read online

The fire in the stove soon caught ablaze and Noble was back. Water was on the stovetop to boil for coffee. The skillet was hot enough to make the ham sizzle while Guthrey’s pan of biscuits was in the oven and starting to really bake. He found a quart jar of canned green beans that he opened and poured into a saucepan on the edge of the main fire spot in the range top.

  By sundown they were enjoying their supper. Noble was rambling about being with the Texas Army and Sam Houston at San Jacinto when they captured Santa Anna.

  “Damn, I was tired of retreating. We kept asking Sam Houston when we were going to fight that bastard. He’d just shake his head and say, ‘When we can win.’ Damn, I thought that day would never come. But they got as tired as we did and finally decided we wouldn’t ever fight them. And then we struck them hard and we also captured Santa Anna. I wanted to kill him for the Alamo. Sam would not hear of it. Said we wasn’t that low. I guess we weren’t.”

  Guthrey nodded. “We better turn in and go find that calf with the wrong brand in the morning. Or would you like to stay here at the ranch and watch things?”

  “When my ass starts dragging, I’ll tell you.”

  “Fair enough. You tell me when.”

  “I might as well get it off my chest. These kids wouldn’t have had a chance to survive here on their own with their pa gone. Why did you stop here?”

  “I saw that and guess it made me think I weren’t doing nothing else right now.”

  “What I figured. Couple of men I know saw you in town buck them three over that boy that afternoon.”

  Guthrey nodded. “I might have ridden on that day. But it was too obvious Dan was about to be legally murdered.”

  “For a fact, he would have been. All right. Good night, then. Ring the triangle. I ain’t a real early riser these days.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Outside Guthrey undid his bedroll from the saddle and went to find a place to roll it out. The coyotes were yapping and their owl accompaniment carried on the night wind, which was making the windmill creak so loud that Guthrey decided it needed grease. At last under the covers, he mentioned Dan in his silent prayers. Then he rolled over on his left side and went to sleep.

  * * *

  THE COW’S HOARSE bawling woke him early the next morning. He checked the big dipper. It was close to dawn.

  He’d learned how to tell time by that constellation on his cattle drives to Kansas. It was how all cowboys knew when their shift on guard duty was over. He had gone on his first drive as the guy who helped the cook, learned the business and the ropes, then soon drove his own herds up the line. Flooding rivers to cross, tornados, storms, stampedes, the sorry element of bandits, and the logistics, a word he learned in the army. He worked really hard for the three to four months of herding cattle north, had deaths in his crew, pneumonia, snakebites, and horse wrecks. On his last trip two boys were shot in town. Maybe the sight of Dan braced by Whitmore’s men reminded him of the Dugan brothers, Tad and Arnold, lying dead in the street that afternoon in Wichita while some drunk braggarts bought rounds of liquor in a saloon and told the world what big men they were. Must not have been too big though. Each one of those three fit in some hastily nailed together coffins made from cottonwood lumber.

  He milked the cow first that morning, then went up and lit two lamps in the house and started a fire in the stove. He brought in an armload of small split wood for future fires, then put the coffee water on the stove before he started the bread dough. Noble joined him and laughed.

  “By God, I can see you’re a man without a woman. Any man this handy has been doing his own cooking for a spell.”

  “You ever have a wife, Noble?”

  He held up three fingers while Guthrey ground up some roasted coffee beans.

  “Can you recall their names?”

  The old man sat down on a chair at the table. His gnarled hands folded on the tabletop, he nodded. “First one was Claudia. She was my camp follower in the war for Texas, a small Mexican girl who treated me like a king. We were both just kids. When she heard I’d been wounded in battle she tried to get to me. She got ran over by a runaway team and heavy wagon. She’s buried in a Catholic churchyard in San Antonio.”

  His biscuits in the oven, Guthrey straightened and looked at the old man for more of his story. “Number two?”

  “I was riding from Austin to someplace up the Colorado River bottoms. I came across a six-foot-tall woman whose wagon was stuck in the mud. She had a big team of horses and they were no help. One would pull, the other one fall back, and after that the other one would do the same thing. No way could she get them both to pull at the same time.

  “‘Well, don’t sit on that horse and gawk at a woman in trouble,’ she said, sounding disgusted with me. ‘Either get down and help or ride on.’

  “‘Hold on to your britches, lady. I’m coming,’ I said. In those days I could take a leather line, whip it out, and cut a small patch of hair off a mule’s belly to show him who was boss. My pa told me when I did that I was to whisper, ‘Whoa, Jack’ and check them with the lines. He also said to do that in a small voice. Second time he’ll hear you if he misses it the first time.

  “The team consisted of a mare and a gelding that were the worst I ever saw at that trick. So I got on the right side of them, took the lines from her, and shook my head at her offer of the buggy whip she’d been using on them. Next I whipped a line over my back and leaned into the strike, holding them back and said, ‘Whoa, Jack.’

  “And I took a small patch of hair off the gelding’s belly.

  “I mean his ears went forward and he stood on his toes. Their owner didn’t like it, but I saw that she kept her mouth shut. When I clucked to them, the mare went forward like I thought, and the horse, he fell back in the harness. I did the line trick again at that moment and he joined her and they rolled that wagon out of the mire.

  “She looked flabbergasted. I took off my hat and shook her hand. ‘How in the blue blazes did you do that?’ she asked.

  “‘Experience,’ I told her.

  “Well, her man had been kilt in a war, so we set up housekeeping. Wasn’t no sin, we were surviving, and six months later we got married. Eulia and I had us a place west of Austin, and we freighted. Made a good living. Never had no kids, though we sure tried. She took a fever, and after six long days she died. We had five good years. I went back to cowboying. Freighting is boring without company, and I was pretty melancholy about life without her. She was a foot taller than me, and we’d wrestle like two bear cubs. One time she’d win, the next I would.”

  Guthrey took the biscuits out of the oven and set them on the table, put the skillet of ham-flour gravy on a hot-plate board, and poured them coffee. They ate in quiet, and when they finished, full as pups at a butchering, Noble cradled a tin cup coffee in his hands and continued his story. “Then I met Celia Watson.” He chuckled until he had to set down the coffee cup, then shook his white-bearded face. “Now, that was a funny deal. Sweetest but most scatterbrained female in my life. I found her carrying a suitcase on the road to Mogollon, in the middle of Apache country, and back then they were really bad down in that part of New Mexico.

  “I rode up and asked her what she was doing there. She said, ‘I’m damn tired of working in a whorehouse and so I set out to find me a new job. But I guess I plum I forgot how far the rest of the world was away from the Snyder Gold Camp.’

  “‘My lands, girl, where are you going?’ I said. ‘Ain’t no town either direction from here less’n twenty miles. And this is Apache country.’

  “She set down on her suitcase and dropped her chin in defeat. ‘How can I do it, then?’

  “‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.

  “‘A job. It don’t have to pay much, just so I get out of wrestling with unbathed old men every night.’ She shook her head at me, filled with dread.
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  “‘I’ve got me a small place up at Alma,’ I told her. I did some day work. It suited her and we had a good life together for a long spell.”

  “You ain’t got a wife now?” Guthrey asked him.

  “Lord, no. She died two years ago. She asked me that morning on the road how I was going to get her suitcase and her up there on the horse with me.

  “‘Ride double, I guess, and tie the suitcase on.’

  “‘That will beat the hell out of walking.’ She handed me that carpetbag and it was heavy as hell. I wondered what was in it that heavy. But I tied it on my horn.”

  Guthrey laughed at Noble’s yarn and shook his head. “How come it was so heavy?”

  “I asked her. How she ever came that far a-packing it I’ll never know.

  “‘Never mind. I’ll show you later,’ she said. She put one foot in the stirrup, and I pulled her up behind me and looked all around for some copper-faced Apache to be peeking at us.

  “We finally made it to my place up by Alma. She was a doozy. But sweeter to me than any woman I ever had. I married her a month or so later. She was twenty years younger than me, but that never bothered her.”

  “What was in the suitcase?” Guthrey asked.

  “You won’t believe me, but she had gold nuggets that those miners paid her inside it. That’s how we moved down here and bought that place I live on now.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She took sick one day and I got the doc to come there and check her. After he examined her, he came out and shook his head at me. It was her heart. There wasn’t anything he could do. It just up and quit on her.”

  “Did she linger long?”

  “Maybe a week of me praying and hoping to God she’d come out of it. But she passed away one night in her sleep. She was so simple and so scatterbrained, I loved her every day we had together. She’d get up and say, ‘We going to church this morning or not?’ Hell, it would be Tuesday. She baked a pie once and forgot the sugar. Sourest dang apples I ever ate, but I ate it all and never let her know it wasn’t good.”

  Guthrey could see the tears in the corners of his eyes. Noble blew his nose and turned away. “Celia was the neatest thing I ever had, despite her scatterbrained ways. I’d come home tired and she’d crawl on my lap. Tell me how she missed me all day since I left that morning. No one could have been sweeter. And she meant it.”

  “Well, you’ve had a great life.”

  Noble shook his head. “I guess I ain’t talked that much about myself in years.”

  “Thanks, it was a good story to hear. Now let’s go find that calf.” Guthrey lifted a lid on the stove to check the fire. It would safely burn out. Then, with the door closed behind him, he went into the early-morning light to pick a horse to ride.

  Noble was already in the corral, shaking out a loop. “What horse you want?”

  “The white one. He looks stout.”

  Noble tossed the loop over the horse’s head and the animal stopped. He was a veteran cow horse, Guthrey decided as Noble dragged his saddle blankets and rig over to saddle him.

  They both had their mounts ready in a few minutes and turned the rest out to graze. In the saddle, they rode west to cross over the hills and headed north to where Guthrey had found Dan. They checked several groups of scattered cows and calves plus some resting roan, shorthorn bulls that rose and stretched their backs at the men’s approach. There was no sign of the Whitmore brand on any of the calves they looked at.

  Noble proved to be a real hand at circling cattle to bring them out of the brush so they could be examined without a lot of unnecessary riding for them. At midday, Guthrey and Noble watered at a tank fed by an iron pipe from a spring. The cool outflow of the spout wet down their mouths and throats as the day’s temperature warmed. Their canteens full again, they gnawed on some jerky that Guthrey had brought along.

  “This country has some good water,” Noble said. “Bridges developed lots of it. Whitmore hasn’t done a damn thing but load more cattle on these ranges.” Disgusted, he shook his head over the deal.

  “Why do the work yourself when you can crowd folks out of where they’ve done theirs?”

  “You’ve got it.” Noble remounted with a little more effort, but he still looked as solid as anyone once his boot soles hit the stirrups.

  There was no sign of the wrong-branded calf, though they were searching in the same country where Guthrey had found Dan. “We better go home. There’s still tomorrow to go look for him again.”

  Noble agreed and sat his hipshot horse. “Oh, he’ll show up.”

  Guthrey agreed. They rode back to the ranch talking about the range. A good drenching rain would help the forage, but in the southwest the rain gods were always stingy. Not much difference between west Texas and this part of the desert country in that respect. But this region had a small edge on moisture that came out of the gulf in the monsoon season, according to folks Guthrey had talked to about it. More brush growth and forage than the same latitude in Texas, which he knew would mean there might be better soil out here as well.

  In another month, those rains were expected, but the good Lord knew when they’d come. After dark, back at the house, he made coffee and they ate leftover cold biscuits and a jar of canned pork sausage balls heated up.

  Noble stood in the doorway as the twilight settled on the land. “When do you reckon Whitmore will try another strike on you?”

  “Let him come. I’m ready.”

  “I don’t doubt he will, but next time I figure he’ll send six dummies instead of three. By grabs, there’s comfort in numbers among a damn lot of cowards.”

  “There sure is. We can eat now, it’s ready. If they come, they better be in their Sunday clothes.”

  Noble nodded and took his place. “They won’t be as easy the next time.”

  “No, but he ain’t hired any Mexicans so far, has he?” Guthrey asked, pouring them some fresh coffee.

  “No, why?”

  “He hires some of them tough ones, we may need to barricade up somewhere.”

  “Guess you ran into them as a Ranger.”

  “They call them Tigres down there. They aren’t the easygoing peons that come from south of the border to find work up here.” He took his chair. “I think they can bite barbed wire in two.”

  “Where do they live in Mexico?”

  “Sierra Madres.” Guthrey filled his plate, recalling the raid that he and his fellow Rangers had made far below the border to bring back a vicious killer. “Our unofficial invasion of Mexican territory to arrest the bandit chief Gilbert Antago was an international upset deal that Mexico told Washington, D.C., was clearly warlike. But in reality, the federales helped us locate him and we caught him hiding in a privy before dawn. We handcuffed and leg ironed him, then put him belly down over a stout mule and headed for Texas. No one was able to hinder us getting him out of that country. In the El Paso jail, we put a ball and chain on him so they couldn’t break him out.

  “On the way back from Mexico, we finally stuffed some dirty socks in his mouth, we got so tired of his filthy language, threatening us and bitching.”

  “Did they hang him?” Noble asked.

  “Yes, they did, for killing an entire ranch family in one of his many raids above the Rio Grande.”

  * * *

  WHEN THEY RODE out the second morning, they both had loaded Winchesters in their scabbards and cartridges in their saddlebags. By then Guthrey really had begun to miss Cally and her cooking. She’d spoiled Dan and him both with her great meals. Their private conversations had somehow been more of a hit with him than he had thought. Things would be better when she returned. Wednesday, he planned to go in and check on her and Dan. He certainly would be grateful to have her cheerful voice back again. And her cooking.

  Over the next few d
ays, there was still no sign of the calf they were searching for high and low. They range roped a steer and a yearling heifer to treat them for signs of screwworms. The old man was great on the heel catches. He could effortlessly rope one horse out of a bunch in a pen or wind his reata around a stock cow’s hocks and then stretch the animal out.

  On Tuesday, they went back in the foothills where they had looked the first day. Noontime found them at the same spring-fed water hole. Eating some apple turnovers Guthrey had made in the skillet that morning, Noble was bragging on him.

  “You’re a pretty good hand at this cooking business.” Busy eating the treat, Noble looked to be enjoying them.

  “They taste good enough, I guess. You know we ain’t seen a soul all week. Whitmore don’t have any range hands?” Guthrey asked.

  Wiping his mouth with the back of his liver-spotted hand, Noble shook his head. “They travel in groups of three or four when they do come through. That’s part of his bluffing folks with his forces. Most of them act like they own all this ground, and the small guys don’t belong here.”

  Guthrey turned his ear to the wind. “I heard someone talking on the wind. We may meet some of his men this afternoon.”

  “Yeah, I just now saw a black hat over the chaparral coming down that draw out of the west.”

  When Guthrey stood up, he brushed the dirt off the seat of his pants, reset his holster, and saw a different colored hat bobbing above the spiny vegetation.

  “Two of them now,” he said to Noble.

  The old man rose and stretched. “May be more that that.”

  Another rider coming off a hillside whistled to his partners when he spotted Guthrey and Noble. It was a loud, shrill whistle and the two in the draw soon appeared on top of the bank still a good distance away.

  Guthrey moved to his bay ranch horse and jerked out his rifle. In moments Noble did the same.

  “I can handle them,” Guthrey said.

  Noble nodded. “When I work for a man, I ride for his brand.”

  “Thanks.” He had his eye on the first two.