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Authors: Mike Blakely

BOOK: Come Sundown
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“Well, he paid four bits a head for them sheep here, and sold them at five dollars a head there.”
“Sometimes five and a half!” Maxwell blurted.
I whistled as I ciphered the gross and net take instantly in my head. “So you decided to take a herd of sheep to California?”
“Now you've got us figured,” Maxwell said. “Oh, God, it was miserable, proddin' them sheep along day after day, but we took five thousand head, and just made a haul. John Hatcher and Blue Wiggins went with us. We're all rich!”
“There ain't nothin' to buy between here and St. Louis, and we don't need nothin' we ain't already got,” Kit said, “but we're rich, all right.”
Josepha laughed.
“I've got plenty to buy,” Lucien said, grabbing and hugging his wife, Luz, as she came near to him. “If I can find Guadalupe Miranda down in Mexico, I believe I can buy his half-interest in the Beaubien-Miranda Grant. I'll own it all before it's over …”
The Beaubien-Miranda Grant was Lucien's obsession. This former trapper, former Indian trader, former superintendent of William Bent's great fort, former hunter for the explorer John Charles Frémont—Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell was bound to be the single biggest landowner inside the territories of the United States. Eleven years before, Lucien had married Maria de la Luz Beaubien. Lucien's father-in-law, Judge Carlos Beaubien, was a Canadian who had immigrated to Taos soon after Mexican independence, and was one of the leading citizens of northern New Mexico.
Judge Beaubien and an influential native, Guadalupe Miranda, had convinced the Mexican government to grant them a huge tract of land between Taos and Bent's Fort. The Spanish government had long granted land to citizens, and the Mexican government followed the pattern, establishing a chain of land
grants to the northeast of Santa Fe and Taos, designed as a buffer against American encroachment. Nobody knew yet if the U.S. government was going to honor the old Mexican and Spanish grants, but Lucien was gambling that it would, and had spent much time, money, and effort in settling his father-in-law's grant. Guadalupe Miranda had fled New Mexico during the Mexican War, and had not been heard from since. Lucien was sure that if he could locate Miranda, he could purchase his half of the grant, and become a partner with his father-in-law in a land holding that was so large that nobody really knew the extent of it, except to say that a few days would be required in riding across it.
“But I don't reckon I'll find Guadalupe Miranda riding in here tonight like you, Kid, so we might as well go on and celebrate.”
“Is Blue here?” I asked. “And John Hatcher?”
“No, they stayed in Santa Fe to spend their share of the money,” Kit said. “Now, come on. You're bound to be hungry as a coyote from the looks of you.”
“I could eat,” I said, as they dragged me back outside to join the feast and the fandango. Before the night was over, Lucien had fetched my left-handed Stradivarius, which I had left with him for safekeeping, and I was made to play along with the Mexicans under the lantern light. We played and sang until the broad eastern horizon began to turn gray.
A
bout the time I turned twenty-two, I began drinking coffee and playing cards. This may not sound so bad, considering I was already a murderer, a thief, a liar, and a whiskey peddler, but the truth is that I used the coffee and the cards to cheat at poker. For years, I had practiced the art of prestidigitation, including many card tricks. My fingers, trained to classical music on the violin, could handle a deck of cards with equal facility. I could double-cut with one hand, deal from the bottom
of the deck as smoothly as I could from the top, and palm a card while I dealt to the entire table.
The coffee? Well, I didn't drink much of it. Never liked the stuff. But a cup of black coffee can function as a mirror. I could situate that cup between me and the man I wished to cheat, and see a reflected image of every card I dealt to him in the dark, still surface of the coffee. This was a technique used by bogus fortune tellers reading tarot cards more so than by card players, so no one at the gaming tables ever realized what I was up to.
All I can say in my defense is that I only cheated one man at cards my whole life. And he deserved it. His name was Luther Sheffield, and he had, in turn, cheated my friend Blue Wiggins out of all his thousands of dollars of gold field money earned by herding sheep to California. It was my aim solely to get Blue's money back for him. That's why I started drinking coffee and playing cards.
After leaving Maxwell's ranch I had made an easy two-day ride to Santa Fe over ground I often covered in half the time when I served as a courier for the U.S. Army during the Mexican War. I rode Major and led two mules I had acquired from Lucien B. Maxwell in trade for the mount Toribio had ridden out of Comancheria. Toribio had stayed with Kit and Josepha, who frequently took in homeless waifs.
Arriving in Santa Fe, I stabled Major in a livery and went about my business of buying whiskey to trade to the Indians. Buying whiskey was perfectly legal, but selling it to the Indians was illegal, of course, so I had learned how to make my purchases quietly. I hid two kegs of cheap St. Louis rotgut in the ponderosa pine forests above the city, covering my trail to the hiding spot with the sweep of a pine branch, Indian style. I would leave them there until I was ready to pack them to Taos, where I would buy some even cheaper homemade corn liquor called “Taos Lightning.”
In the meantime, I enjoyed Santa Fe's social life. I stayed at an old inn at the corner of the plaza, called simply La Fonda. I was told that it had been operating for over a hundred and fifty years. I took a room on the second floor of the adobe inn.
Sleeping that far above the ground provided something of a novelty for a man who had lived for months in a Comanche buffalo-hide tipi, for a Comanche lodge embraces the very bosom of Mother Earth. The angles of the square room also troubled me at first. The Plains Indians know that a round shelter synchronizes with the roundness of all that is natural, from the circling of the seasons to the shape of the sun. The room full of square angles seemed to pull my whole body and mind out of shape at first. But the walls were adobe, and adobe is of the earth, and overhead pine
vigas
supported the ceiling, somewhat like the lodge poles in a tipi, so on my third night there, I finally got several hours of sleep.
The next day, while enjoying my lunch at La Fonda, I happened to see my friend Blue Wiggins enter and speak to the proprietor of the eatery there. I could not hear him speak, but I could tell by reading his lips and his gestures that he was offering to trade a good hunting knife for a meal. This puzzled me, for Kit and Lucien had told me that Blue had made quite a profit with them herding sheep to California. Anyway, the proprietor would have none of such a trade, so I jumped up and greeted Blue, shouting across the room.
“Hey, you old trail bum!”
“Who's that?” Blue said, for the room was dark and his eyes had not yet adjusted from the glaring sheen of the New Mexican sun.
“Your pal Orn'ry Greenwood, that's who.”
A smile flashed across Blue's face, and he exploded in laughter. “Son of a bitch, if you ain't still kickin' ! I heard you was scalped.”
I made knowing gestures to the proprietor, and dragged Blue over to my table near the little fireplace in the wall.
“I've just come from Maxwell's ranch on the Rayado,” I said. “He and Kit told me of your good fortune in California.”
Blue rolled his eyes and grinned. “Maxwell offered me a job on the ranch. I wish to hell I'd have taken it now. I might still have all that money I made.”
“You haven't spent it all, have you?”
“Spent it? Not much of it.
Lost
it's what I done.”
The proprietor brought a mug of coffee and a few
piloncillos
of sugar.
“Where? How?” I said, before stuffing my mouth full of a delicious tortilla dipped in mole poblano sauce and
frijoles fritos.
“At the gambling hall.”
“Are you that bad a gambler?” I asked.
“No, but there's a feller over there that sure can cheat a fool like me out of a
bosal
full of gold in a hurry. His name's Luther Sheffield. Come to find out he cut his teeth gamblin' on the riverboats of the Mississippi. I don't even know how he cheated me, but he got my gold from me a lot quicker than I got it from them prospectors in California.”
The proprietor brought more tortillas, scrambled eggs, onions, and beans. My temper flared like the peppers burning in my mouth to think of my friend Blue Wiggins getting fleeced by a card cheat. Blue Wiggins had once stood back to back with me, each of us with a single-shot pistol in his hand, for four hours and thirty-nine minutes, as we held off a band of hostile Comanches and Kiowas that wanted our horses and our scalps.
“Where is this gambling hall?”
“Down on Burro Alley,” Blue said, scorching his fingers on the iron skillet the proprietor had left on our table. “You know it. It's the same place Doña Tules used to own.”
“Used to?”
“You haven't heard she died? A year ago. This Luther Sheffield has taken her place over.”
“Tell me about this gambler, Sheffield.”
Blue shook his head with an embarrassed smile. “He's pretty damned slick, Orn'ry. Seems like a good sort of feller at first. Dresses like a dandy, tells a good yarn.” Blue's smile slid away. “But he deals with his back to the corner, if you know what I mean. And he hired a couple of rough ol' bullwhackers to knock heads when somebody acts up in there. It ain't like it was when Doña Tules ran the place. Sheffield shot and killed some poor kid from Missouri this summer. The kid accused him of cheatin' and pulled a knife on him. That Sheffield whipped out a pocket pistol and got him right in the head.”
“You know, I'm pretty good with a deck of cards,” I said.
Blue laughed. “I've never even seen you deal a hand.” “I've got a fair amount of coin on me. How much did this Sheffield cheat you out of?”
“Now, Orn'ry, don't go to thinkin'. It's gone, that's all.”
“How much?”
Blue's face darkened with anger and embarrassment. “Don't tell Kit.”
“I wouldn't tell anybody. Just between you and me.”
“Almost three thousand dollars.” Blue looked down at the pine planks of the table. When his face rose again to look me in the eye, he was faking a smile. “Nothin' another drive to California won't fix.”
But I knew he didn't even have enough left over to buy a cheap herd here in New Mexico. Had I not just witnessed Blue trying to trade his hunting knife for a meal? “I think I'll wander on over to that gambling hall this evening,” I said.
“Now, Orn'ry, don't get riled on my account, and let that slick bastard cheat you, too.”
“I don't have much to lose, anyway. Just a couple of hundred Kit loaned me until I can finish my trading at Adobe Walls.” The excitement of the endeavor must have shown in my grin. “I don't mind taking a calculated risk with it. What do you say, Blue? Let's see if we can figure this gambler's game.”
“How you plan on doin' that?” he said, his skepticism plain in his tone of voice.
“I don't know. We'll observe. You know what Plato said: You should learn to know evil—not from your own soul—but from long observation of the nature of evil in others.”
Blue nodded as he chewed a fiery mouthful of his meal. “Who the hell is Plato?”
“The same fellow who wrote, ‘Everything that deceives may also be said to enchant.'”
“You got that from one of your confounded books. Orn'ry, you're a caution.”
 
 
I ASKED FOR a pot of coffee and a pair of cups from the proprietor of La Fonda, and we went up to my room to plot our revenge on the gambler.
“We've got to act like we're strangers to each other when we go into the gambling hall,” I said. “I'll go in first and ask for a cup of coffee.”
“Coffee?”
“Well, I don't drink whiskey.”
“I didn't know you drank coffee.”
“I don't.” About that time, I poured a cup of coffee from the pot I had carried up to my room. “But, watch this …” I got out my playing cards that I used to perform card tricks, for my entertainment, and that of others. There wasn't a table in the tiny adobe room, so we sat cross-legged on a rug on the floor. I put the cup of coffee on the rug, and showed Blue how I could see the face of each card dealt in the mirrored surface of the coffee.
Blue shook his head. “It happens too fast in a real game.”
“I'll practice. I can do it.”
“Even if you could see the cards that way, how could you remember them all?”
“Oh, my memory is pretty good, Blue. There are card cheats out there doing it every day. You'd be amazed at what a person can get away with.”
To convince Blue, I dealt each of us a quick five-card hand, facedown, catching glimpses of his cards in the surface of the coffee as they flipped through the air toward him. Then I told him every card in his hand before he even picked them up.
When Blue looked at the cards, he nodded and grinned, seeing that I was right. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked next.
“You'll come in an hour or so after me and get into the game. Pretend you never met me before. Don't worry about winning or losing. Just keep your bets low, so you don't lose too much. Your job is to stack the deadwood.”
“What's that mean?”
“When each hand is over, and you toss in your cards, facedown, stack them with the highest-ranking cards on the bottom.”
“How come?”
“That way, I can gather your cards last, and your best cards will be on the bottom of the deck.”
“You're gonna deal off the bottom of the deck?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“Can you do that without gettin' caught?”
“That last hand I just dealt to you and me …”
“Yeah?”
“All off the bottom.”
“Not much, hombre,” he said with deep skepticism.
“I swear.”
“Well, somebody's got to cut the deck. Then how do you control what's on bottom?”
“I crimp the bottom card before the cut. That way I can put the deck right back where it was before the cut, and you'd never see me do it.”
“No …”
“I've been living in an Indian camp for the past three years,” I explained. “I have an Indian wife to cook all my meals and make all my clothes. I have a lot of time to mess with. You know I don't sleep much. I practice magic tricks. The card tricks are the easiest ones.”
“Son of a gun,” Blue said. “This might just work.”
“We're not going to get filthy rich. We're just going to win your money back.”
“Agreed.”
We shook hands and went on with our scheming.
 
 
THAT NIGHT, I polished my boots and put on my spurs. I wasn't riding anywhere, for the gambling hall was within walking distance from La Fonda, but I wanted the spurs for show. For the same reason, I donned the felt hat I had purchased the day before, and my nickel-plated Colt revolver given to me a few years earlier by General Kearny for serving as his courier through the dangers of the Mexican War.
I stepped out into the frigid evening air of a high-country winter and walked briskly to Burro Alley where several establishments of questionable repute operated around the clock. I went staightaway to the place that once belonged to Doña
Tules. The moment I opened the old pine door, it was obvious that the business no longer belonged to that infamous old cigar-smoking madam. During her reign there, the place had possessed a simple honesty even if the dealers were trained to cheat for the house. A venerable warmth had resided here when Doña Tules ran the place, for everything was handmade of earth or stone or wood.

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