Hard Country (10 page)

Las Vegas wasn’t much of a town. A scattering of adobe houses, some with tin roofs and a few with tiny windows, sat near an oval patch of dust six inches thick that served as the town plaza. A two-story mercantile store next to a low adobe bank building bordered one side of the plaza, where some small willow trees had been transplanted in front of the store, each protected by a slat-board fence. Beyond the plaza were low-lying hills stripped bare of all the trees by village woodcutters, and here and there adobe buildings sagged amid crumbling mud walls with signs announcing rooms, whiskey, tobacco, baths, and food.

They stayed overnight, and in the morning they reprovisioned at the mercantile with the last of Kerney’s cash and some money Cal threw in. With advice from the store owner on the best route through the mountains to the mining camps, they left Las Vegas with a stiff prairie wind whistling at their backs and dust clouds swirling on the barren foothills.

For three days they worked their way through the rough high country on a road that faded to a trail and sometimes petered out completely. They passed through stands of pine, fir, and spruce trees, groves of tall, stately aspens, and crossed clear, cold, rocky streams. As they topped an open ridge with a slender river valley in sight, a thunderstorm pelted them with hail that stripped the leaves off nearby aspen trees. That night the temperature dropped so perilously low that not even the campfire kept them warm.

They rode into the valley soon after first light. Several prospectors, all working different parts of the stream, were strung out down the canyon, panning for gold and breaking rock along the riverbed. Kerney stopped and asked each man for Virgil Peters, but none of them knew him.

“How far to Arroyo Hondo?” he asked the last man at the bottom of the canyon.

The man raised his pick and pointed westward. “One day.”

“Hallelujah,” Cal said with a smile.

“And a night,” the man added, returning his attention to the boulder he was trying to dig out of the riverbank.

Cal’s smile dimmed considerably.

“Are you wearing down?” Kerney asked as they rode away with the sound of metal on stone echoing through the valley.

Cal shook his head and patted his horse’s neck. “No more than you. Patches and me have miles left in us, although I’ll admit all this good land and wondrous country we’ve ridden through has made me a shade lonely for a touch of civilization.”

John Kerney nodded in agreement and broke his horse into a trot.

* * *

I
n Arroyo Hondo, a booming area with a stamp mill for crushing ore running at the lower end of the canyon, all Kerney found was disappointment. Virgil Peters had moved on, to where nobody knew, and while some said Patrick was with him, others weren’t sure. For the better part of a week, Cal stuck with Kerney, bankrolling the search for Patrick once he learned his friend was busted. They went to every mining camp in the district—Willow Creek, San Cristobal, Arroyo Seco, Moreno Valley, some of the smaller camps that had no names, and finally Red River.

In Red River, Kerney decided to ride east across the mountains to Elizabethtown to look for Patrick. Although the town was just twelve miles from the headwaters of the river, it would be a forty-mile crossing on a bad road and a perilous rocky trail.

“I’m gonna part ways with you and head down to Santa Fe,” Cal said as the two friends sat at a table in a saloon that was nothing more than a tent and knocked back a whiskey just shy of not being fit to drink.

“But let me grubstake you,” he added, sliding a small coin pouch to Kerney. “I want no back talk or twaddle from you, now. I won a pretty big pot down in El Paso before I rode up to La Luz to deliver that letter to you, and I’m still flush.”

“On my word, I’ll pay you back,” John Kerney said.

Cal grinned. “Make me a silent partner in that ranch you’re looking to start once you’ve rounded up Patrick and get back to the Tularosa. I figure the day will come when I’ll probably need a safe place to hide out.”

“Partners fifty-fifty,” Kerney said, extending his hand.

They shook hands and had another drink to seal the partnership.

“Don’t go bust down in Santa Fe with all the women and gambling,” Kerney cautioned as Cal mounted Patches.

Cal laughed. “I’ll hide some traveling money in my boot. I still think you’re gonna need a good woman to help raise up that son of yours.”

John Kerney’s expression clouded. “First I have to find him.”

8

A
fter the money Cal lent him ran out, John Kerney took jobs as he found them, working just long enough to get a stake and start looking for Patrick again. He had no luck hiring on as a ranch hand, so he labored on a crew building a road to a new ore site, drove a wagon over the mountains hauling parts of a stamp mill shipped from Chicago, worked as a chore boy at a high-country summer sheep ranch, and signed on with a construction gang to build a water flume a hundred feet above the ground that spanned half a mile.

During the working stints, he often slept in filthy, cramped tents or on the hard ground with drifters of every sort, who’d come west to get rich in the New Mexico gold and silver fields. Outwardly, he looked like any other muckman: bearded, shabby, and dirty. But instead of a motherlode strike, he sought a son he couldn’t describe who was with a man he didn’t know and might never find. He stopped at every settlement, mine, camp, and town, no matter how big, small, or remote. He talked with town marshals, merchants, preachers, mine officials, assay masters, womenfolk, and the mountain men he happened on in the wilderness. He trekked the length and breadth of the northern New Mexico and southern Colorado high country, digging for any information about his boy and Virgil Peters, putting up posters as he traveled, asking the same questions over and over again.

For his efforts he got lots of secondhand stories, not one of them the same, most of them unreliable. From a drunk in a whiskey tent, he heard Peters was living in Taos with a Mexican woman. A hard-rock miner in the Moreno Valley told him that Virgil and Patrick were somewhere up in the Leadville mining district. A grocer recalled that Virgil Peters had disappeared into the backcountry to prospect, leaving Patrick in the care of a traveling preacher and his wife, who’d moved on to Willow Springs along the Santa Fe Trail. Another tale had Peters shot dead in a bar fight in Elizabethtown, the boy with him taken in by a Mexican sheepherder who lived somewhere out on the vast prairie of the Maxwell Land Grant. The most troubling story he heard had Peters selling Patrick to a Ute Indian before leaving the territory for California.

John Kerney followed every yarn as far as he could, but as the months passed and each trail turned cold, he became more and more disheartened. No longer did the peaceful mountain meadows and the shimmering, sky blue high-country lakes lift his spirits. Deep in the gloomy woods or traveling through the narrow, dark canyons, he felt hemmed in and jumpy. In towns he found no friendship with other men. He yearned for the open desert grasslands and big sky of the Tularosa, but now his dream of proving up a spread on the eastern slopes of the San Andres seemed no more than a trifling whimsy beyond his reach. About the only good thing was he hadn’t had to sell his saddle yet.

When a fierce storm brought winter to the mountains, Kerney dropped down into the deep shade of a canyon of spruce and aspen that led to the town of Cimarron. A watering hole and stomping grounds for cowboys, rustlers, gunslingers, outlaws, and mountain men, the town sat along the Santa Fe Trail on the edge of a boundless short-grass prairie that rolled eastward through hills and river valleys.

During his search for Patrick, he had been in Cimarron once before, and the town was passing familiar to him. A two-story adobe with a wide veranda filled one side of a plaza ringed by cottonwoods. Not far from Lambert’s Saloon on the road through town, a three-story stone gristmill powered by water from a deep ditch stood near the Cimarron River’s edge. Outside the plaza, adobe dwellings were scattered about in slapdash fashion. Away from the dirt houses, a small church with a cross nailed to a wooden belfry marked the town’s cemetery grounds.

Kerney had a month’s wages in his pocket and a thirst, so he hitched his horse to a post and went into Lambert’s Saloon. He made his way to the bar through a crowd of cowboys, traders, road agents, travelers, and miners playing cards and jawboning, found elbow room next to a whiskered old-timer, and looked around the room for familiar faces. In a corner at a monte table he spotted Dick Turknet and the two cousins, Billy and Walt Clossen. Charlie Gambel was nowhere in sight. Turknet glanced his way but showed no sign of recognition.

Kerney had wanted to see Turknet again, but not now while he searched for Patrick. He couldn’t risk riling the gunfighter and jeopardizing his own safety. Uneasy that Charlie might show up and make a play, Kerney downed a quick drink, left the saloon, stabled his horse, and rented a room at the big adobe hacienda on the plaza. He paid extra for a bath and scrubbed and soaked in the water until it cooled down and he started to shiver. He dried off, dressed, and took scissors to his beard, cutting it to a nub. Peering closely in the mirror, he shaved the rest of his beard off and then hacked at his hair with the scissors until he could see the tips of his ears. Figuring he looked almost civilized again, he went to bed feeling better about himself than he had in months.

Come morning, after a sound night’s sleep and a dime breakfast, he made the rounds, asking merchants and any strangers he happened to pass about his son and Virgil Peters. As usual, he made a point to question the womenfolk of the town, who might be more inclined than their husbands to notice a young boy and a man traveling alone.

At midday, with nothing to show for his effort, he went to the saloon with the waning hope he might learn something from customers still sober enough to wag their chins. It was half-crowded, mostly with gamblers and hard-bitten miners at the tables, and they surely wouldn’t cotton to any uncalled-for interruptions on his part. At the bar, Dick Turknet was talking to the saloon owner, Henry Lambert, a Frenchman who’d once been Abraham Lincoln’s chef and had official letters framed over the bar to prove it.

Kerney looked cautiously around for the cousins and Charlie Gambel, but he didn’t see them. He turned back to Turknet, who eyed him with interest, said something to Lambert, and walked to where Kerney stood.

“You’re John Kerney,” Turknet said, showing yellow teeth stained brown by tobacco juice.

Kerney nodded and looked around again. “I am. Where’s the rest of your outfit?”

“If you mean young Charlie Gambel, he’s still down on the Tularosa, lovesick over some little Mexican gal. He sure doesn’t think kindly of you.”

“I know it.”

“And he’s turned himself into a fair hand with a .45 in the hopes y’all will meet up again,” Turknet added. “Course, the question is, does he have the grit for killing? I think he does. What did you do to rile that boy?”

“Saved him from a hiding or worse,” Kerney answered.

Turknet shook his head. “Some folks just don’t take to being treated fair and square. It gets them out of sorts.”

“Charlie’s a bit chuckleheaded.”

Turknet smiled. “Yep, he’s short on brainpower, but that doesn’t make him less bothersome to a peaceable man like yourself.”

“I expect you’re right.”

“Cal Doran said you had an interest in how I came by some Texas horses I sold to Sam Wilcox.”

“I am, if you’re inclined to tell me,” Kerney said guardedly. Turknet hitched his thumb in the belt above his low-slung holster, which made Kerney a mite more nervous.

Turknet shrugged. “Not much to tell. Those horses along with some others were part of Bud McPherson’s remuda at his hideout in the brush country. Don’t know how Bud came by them exactly, but I’ve never known him to put good money in an honest man’s pocket for an animal he admired. His boys got captured by Texas Rangers and wound up hanged and in shallow graves, but Bud got away and was looking to shuck Texas and ride north to Montana. I gave him half what those animals were worth and he gladly took it, eager as he was to make tracks.”

“Bud McPherson,” Kerney said.

“That’s the man to talk to,” Turknet said. “But be careful if you cross his trail. He’s got snake blood and will strike fast if you accuse him of having a long loop.”

“Did he spend any time up by the panhandle?”

Turknet shrugged. “Can’t say I know for sure, but him and his boys covered a lot of country.”

Kerney thanked him for the information, and Turknet took his leave, joining the cousins, who had just entered the saloon and had sidled up to the bar. He made quick work of asking questions about Patrick to patrons willing to hear him out and left Lambert’s empty-handed, wondering if Dick Turknet had spun him a yarn or told the truth about Bud McPherson. He guessed the truth but wasn’t completely sure and didn’t see much sense in drifting north to Montana to find out.

But for the first time, thanks to Cal, John Kerney felt like he had some reliable information about Tom and Timmy’s killers. He wondered what made Turknet come to figure he was such a peaceable man. Likely by way of Cal Doran, Kerney supposed, smiling at the thought. Or was Turknet just pointing out that he held the upper hand when it came to any thoughts of gunplay?

The sunny, cool day had turned dismal and cold, with a stiff wind running down the canyon and heavy gray clouds ringing the mountains. Earlier, Kerney had found the small adobe church locked, but now smoke rose from the chimney. He rode over and found an Indian woman inside cleaning a wooden altar under the watchful eye of a young friar.

“Do you speak English, Padre?” Kerney asked as he removed his hat.

“Of a sort,” the priest replied softly with a Spanish accent. He had a long, thin nose, red hair, and a heavily freckled face. “How may I help?”

“I am looking for my son, a boy of four. He was in the care of a man named Virgil Peters, who wrote me he would give him to strangers if I didn’t come fetch him. I’ve been searching for them ever since.”