Duster (9781310020889) (10 page)

"Ha ho, Duster, you will make a fine cowman
one day," Ramon said. "But these sheeps, they is not the same. You
turn a cow loose in the thorn an' it comes out fat an' fighting to
stay there. You turn a sheep loose in the brush and it don't come
out at all 'cause it ver' soon make a meal for a coyote.

"What you got to do wid the sheeps is to
keep them in a big bunch, all together, so you can keep the other
animals away. An' then when you want you jus' bring them home to
sell for meat or to cut the good wool off them, eh? An' wool—tha's
where you get the good money for raising the sheeps, so you don't
burn it with a iron, an' if you cut the wool an' brand the sheeps
then pretty soon you can't even find the sign for all the wool
growed over it."

"I still don't understand it, but I guess
them sheep really are some different than our McMullen County
cows," I said. "I'd sure admire to see a herd of sheep being worked
some time."

"Sure, amigo. One o' these
days you an' Jesus come down
here an' ride
with me a few weeks. I show you all there is to see of this sheep
business, you bet. An' maybe by then I show you a fat baby boy to
tend my sheeps one of these days, eh?"

I couldn't think of much I'd enjoy more the
first chance I had to slip off on a lark, and I said so. Jesus, he
took on more to teasing Ramon about him maybe being a poppa.

I couldn't figure out some of the jokes even
when they was trying to tell them in English, and I guess they was
having trouble understanding it themselves. Pretty soon they gave
up being polite on my account and switched into Spanish.

IT WASN'T TOO hard the next morning to
follow upriver about ten miles until we came to a big, rambling
adobe that wandered every which way. It was a big old place that
had been added on to here and there with every new room going off
in a different direction and showing a different amount of
softening at the corners.

The house was built on a little rise. Below,
there was a stand of pecans, the kind that gave the Nueces its
name. Down the slope from the river there was a big space that went
a mile or more deep and probably a couple miles on up the river. On
that whole plain there wasn't but a few clumps of brush. The rest
of it was covered mostly with patches of sacaguista, a coarse, salt
grass that grows in much littler pockets up our way but makes fine
graze.

It might of surprised me more the day
before, but I was already beginning to learn that the Brasada was
really pretty much the same as our kind of brush country, even if
folks did talk about it as being different. The big difference was
in the people who lived there, not in the thorns.

Off on this open pasture—I
never did decide if it had growed that way or if someone took the
time and muscle to
clear it—we could see
little bands of horses scattered here and there.

There was something odd about those bunches
of horses, even at a distance, and at first I couldn't figure out
why they didn't look natural. Then I realized what it was.

"Jesus, look there at all them bands of
horses. Each bunch is just one color. See…there's a bunch of paints
up ahead by the river and on over yonder there's nothing but
blacks. Why, I never seen the like."

"Aie-yi-ee, Duster, you sure ain't traveled
much. Just about every Mexican horse herder keeps his horses apart
like that to keep the blood pure."

Jesus pointed toward the bunch of paints
that was the closest to us. "See the stallion up high on the bank
where he can keep watch? All the rest of them horses are mares an'
young'uns, and they belong to the stallion. When the males are big
enough they'll be branded an' cut an' put into a separate work herd
for breaking. Then, the rancher will sell from that herd. The best
males and their manadas are kept for breeding."

"Well, I'll be. From here it sure looks like
it works, too. That's mighty handsome stock."

"It oughta work. We been doin' it for a
couple hundred years," Jesus said. "Come on. Let's get up there an'
see if we can deal."

We took off walking again like we'd been
doing all the way from Ramon's jacal, carrying just our bridles to
save weight.

Jesus looked over at me and pretended he was
about to fall down. Then he grinned. "I am not sure but I think
maybe it was bad luck when I started ridin' with you, Duster. Ever
since then I have had to do most of my riding on my own feet."

"I'd be lyin' to you if I said I wouldn't
rather be riding even that old Gert mule. Come to think of it I'd
like to be on Gert right now so's I could leave the driving up to
you an' take a nap."

"There's a lazy gringo streak in you,
Duster."

"I can't say no to that, my friend, and I
ain't even ashamed of it."

We hoofed it on up toward the big adobe. The
closer we got, the neater and nicer kept we could see the place
was. When we got up to the house, I snuck a look around, and from
the yard in front of the place I could see a long ways, it being up
on top of the hill like it was. There must of been ten or a dozen
manadas of horses in sight, each one held apart from the rest by a
boss stallion. Away off up the river we could see some dust and
could make out that a crew of vaqueros was working some of the
horses up that way.

Down below us was a big old pen that had
been hid behind the hill when we first got a look at the hacienda.
The pen was made of logs stuck endwise into the ground real close
together, harder to build but a whole lot stouter than the
post-and-rail fences most cowmen make. The pen covered maybe three
or four acres though I'm no hand at figuring the size of a piece of
land. The riverbank was low there and someone had dug a ditch
through to make a little watering tank at one end of the pen. Right
at the moment, the pen was empty.

The house seemed to be just as empty,
judging by appearances. We couldn't see or hear a soul around the
place.

There was a big covered veranda, or
porch-like walk, built out at the front of the place. We went under
there and found it real cool. There was all kinds of doors and
windows opening out on that porch, but we didn't know which one we
should go to to try and find someone.

It being so quiet and still, I didn't want
to holler out a hello, and I guess Jesus felt the same, for he was
as careful as me to keep from making noise when we walked. Finally
I looked over at him and whispered, "I don't think there's anybody
to home, or if there is they're taking a little nap before
siesta."

"That don't make sense," he said.

"I know."

"What do we do now?"

"I don't know, but I sure don't aim to just
walk in an' set."

"Me too, amigo. Ramon said this was a nice
place, but I never saw anything quite so grand."

Jesus was right about that. Even Mister Sam
Silas's big ranch house couldn't take a candle to this place. The
shutters was all open on the windows to let air in, and we couldn't
help but see into some of the rooms.

One that seemed to be the main room had a
fireplace at the other end that would have been big enough for a
half-growed boy to stand up in without stooping.

We couldn't see the whole room from where we
stood, but I'd have been willing to bet I could set our whole house
down in it and still have space left over.

The furniture was big and heavy, and we
could see where someone had taken and carved designs all over the
wood. Even on the backs of the chairs and stuff where it wouldn't
show except from the window where we stood.

The floor was made out of some kind of
odd-shaped bricks or something, not just packed dirt or smoothed
off logs, and it was shiny like someone had rubbed grease all over
it. Here and there on the floor there was rugs scattered too. Not
rag rugs, either. They was real, woven rugs, deep red and covered
with pretty figures in different colors, and they had fringes
around the edges.

Hanging up above it all, there was a great
big candle holder sort of thing that was slung down from a chain
and must of had thirty candles in it and had little things hanging
all over it like glass raindrops.

Jesus spotted the candle holder thing too
and gave me a nudge with his elbow. We both leaned down closer to
the window so we could get a better look at it. We was bent over
like that, gawking at all those pretty baubles hung on the candle
holder, when we heard a real polite cough behind us.

The both of us jerked up
straight and turned around
quick. We
hadn't really been doing anything wrong, but for just a second,
there, we sure felt like we had. It was like we'd been caught
looking in at folks in their house instead of just looking in at
their home by itself. I hoped they wouldn't be mad at
us.

When we got turned around and got our eyes
up off the floor we could see it was an old Mexican that had found
us peeping in the window. One look and it was easy to see that this
old man was the rancher we had come out to see.

He was a little fellow, short and as thin as
a whip, and in spite of being right on up there in age he looked to
be about as tough as a whip too. Not mean tough, though. He just
looked like whatever came his way he could take it, get up off the
ground if he had to, and pick right up where he left off before.
And he looked like an awful lot had come his way from time to
time.

His face was burnt dark and there was deep
cracks and wrinkles showing from behind a fluffy white mustache
that was as big as he was little. What with all the years and
wrinkles and snowy hair, though, he stood just as straight as if he
was tied tight against a post stuck in the ground.

There wasn't a way that anyone could tell if
he was mad at us, not from his expression. As close as I could tell
he didn't have any expression.

"I may help you, please?" he asked. There
was a flicker of something in his eyes, but I couldn't tell what it
was. His eyes were black, I noticed then.

Jesus didn't say anything at first. I
swallowed hard and then gave up and nodded my head. I mean, you
could tell that this old man was muy hombre, as the Mexicans
say—much man.

"I may help you?" he asked again.

Jesus got his tongue back then. He seemed as
embarrassed as me. "My cousin, Ramon Nunez, he told us to come here
an' talk to Senor Alfredo Valdez. We need some horses. Fifty, sixty
head. Ramon said Senor Valdez has the best horses anywhere around
here."

The old man thought about
that some, then he nodded one time, slow like he had thought over
every horse and horse
ranch around and
decided that Valdez did have the best to be found. "That is so," he
said. "And this is the place you want."

The old fellow took his time then looking us
over from top to bottom. In truth I'd have to say that he wasn't
seeing much to inspire confidence, for if there was one thing we
did not look like, Jesus and me, it was a pair of stock buyers with
the savvy and the cash to strike a bargain. Not even for the worst,
scrubbiest animals around, much less for the best there was.

"It ain't for us," I told him. "We come down
here for Mister Sam Silas up to Dog Town." I hoped that would make
him feel better about us. Especially since from the way he looked,
I had got the idea he had to be someone with some say-so around the
place. Either Valdez himself or maybe Valdez's papa. And, for a
change, I turned out to be right.

"I am Alfredo Valdez," he said, "and I have
heard about Senor Silas. These are good things I have heard about
him. You come in and we will talk some more."

Senor Valdez led us inside the ranch house
and straight on into that big, beautiful room we'd been looking at
before. From the other side of the window it was even grander than
we had seen before.

There was candles nearly everywhere we
looked, some even stuck into wood doodads on the walls, and there
was a couple of real lamps that had gold-looking designs worked all
around them and glass pieces wrapped around the wicks. You could
tell that even at night he could have it just as bright as he
wanted.

I would of loved to of walked on the rugs
we'd spotted before, just to see what it felt like, but my shoes
was awful dirty so I stayed clear of the rugs. I was ahead of
Jesus, and when I walked around the rugs he did too, figuring he'd
better not mess them up either. Valdez just walked right across
them like they wasn't there.

Valdez might not of paid
it any mind, but I couldn't help lookin' around at all the things
in that room. I had always figured Mister Sam Silas's house was
pretty elegant with its wood floors and rag rugs and wax candles,
but this old Mexican's
place was more than
I had ever heard of even. And I saw Jesus peering about the same as
me in spite of the way he took on sometimes about having been
places and seen things that I hadn't.

Valdez didn't say anything to us at first,
and nothing showed on his face exactly, but I did catch that same
little flicker down inside his eyes again like as if he was
laughing to himself without letting us see. Still, it wasn't like
he was laughing at us to make fun of us, more like he was getting a
kick out of showing off for us, so I took no offense. I had to
figure he had aplenty to be proud of in that hacienda of his.

He let us look at it a while more, then he
motioned for us to set down in a couple of carved wood chairs. He
settled in a big one with thick, leather pillows on it and said,
"Now, boys, you have come to talk with me about the horses. All
right... I will talk of business with your fine Senor Silas."

Valdez glanced over at me with a concerned
look. "I beg for you to forgive me, please. My English is not so
good, and for the business it is better I should use my own words,
yes?"