Hard Country (23 page)

“I’ll send him home in two weeks,” Cal said.

“
Gracias,
” Cesario said.

After a second helping and another cup of coffee, Cal and George said adios and rode to Coghlan’s store, where Cal picked up a letter from a lawyer in Mesilla. At the saloon, Cal spun some silver on the bar and ordered a shot of rye, while George slipped away with a hurdy-gurdy girl and a bottle of whiskey under his arm in the direction of the rooms behind the wagon yard.

He read the lawyer’s letter and was about to invite a pretty little redhead to join him for a drink at the bar when Dick Turknet sidled up and gave him a hard look.

“Got something stuck in your craw, Turknet?” Cal asked.

“Coghlan doesn’t want your business anymore,” Turknet said tersely, “here or at his store.”

Cal downed his whiskey and called for another one. “Haul in your horns, hombre.” He ignored the gunslinger while the bartender filled his glass. “I’m guessing your boss heard I got another contract for army ponies.”

“That’s the gist of it.”

Cal sipped his whiskey slowly, put the glass gently on the bar, and turned to face Turknet. “Are you willing to get yourself killed trying to run me out of here?”

Turknet responded with a toothy smile. “I ain’t that short of brains. I’m just the messenger boy.”

Cal smiled back. “Fair enough.”

Turknet nodded and left with two young
pistoleros
trailing behind him. Cal figured waiting on Coghlan’s next move would just be too aggravating. Why not counter his warning with a play of his own?

He finished his drink and asked the bartender to have George wait on him once he was done with his poke. There was no sign of Dick Turknet and his sidekicks on the street. He rode Patches to Coghlan’s big house and knocked on the door. Alice, Coghlan’s wife, answered.

Cal flashed a courtly smile. “Good day, Mrs. Coghlan. It’s a pleasure to see you again, ma’am, and I surely do hate to impose on you at home, but if Mr. Coghlan is available, I do need a minute of his time.”

She was a tall woman who masked her plainness with fancy clothes and expensive jewelry. The Mexicans called her
La Madama
because she liked to lord it over them, acting like royalty and not some blackguard’s wife.

She swung the door wide open. “Come in, Cal. He’s in the study.”

Cal followed her through the front parlor, which was filled with furniture, paintings, and statuary Coghlan had bought on trips back east and voyages to the old country. The door to the study was open, and behind a huge desk, studying some papers, sat Patrick Coghlan, big in the chest, red faced, with thick eyebrows that ran together and hands twice the size of an average man’s. Across from him sat Morris Wohlgemuth, his manager.

“Cal needs a word with you,” Alice said from the open door.

Coghlan looked up, leaned back in his chair, and smiled broadly. “Certainly, my dear.”

Cal stepped in and Alice closed the door behind him. Coghlan’s smiled faded. “Why are you here?”

“Dick Turknet said you wanted to palaver.”

“Is that what he said?” Coghlan replied.

“That’s what I took him to mean. I don’t appreciate getting messages from your hired help. Thought I’d hear what you had to say direct.”

“Maybe Turknet didn’t make my message clear,” Coghlan said, “so I’ll explain it. Stay out of my store and saloon. Come around again and I’ll take it you’re looking for trouble.”

Wohlgemuth sat as still as a mouse, staring at the papers in his lap.

“That’s clear enough,” Cal said, “although it strikes me peculiar that a big man like you can be so piddling about losing another army contract to a small outfit like mine. So I’ve got a caution for you. If anything unnaturally worrisome happens out at my ranch or trouble befalls any of my friends, you’ll see me again and I won’t be cordial.”

“’Tis a brave one you are,” Coghlan replied, his color deepening, his brogue thickening.

“Keep your riders reined in, Coghlan.”

Coghlan rolled his tongue over his lips. “I’ll give your proposition some thought.”

Cal touched the brim of his hat. “
Buenas noches.
”

Back at the saloon, George’s horse, a dapple gray named Alibi, was still hitched outside. Cal led the pony into the wagon yard, called out to George, and told him it was time to jingle his spurs. Soon a door flew open and George came out, hat jammed down over his ears, a half-empty bottle of whiskey showing in a coat pocket.

“You sober enough to ride?” Cal asked.

“Many a times old Alibi has carried me home after I’ve had a bottle or two,” George said as he threw a leg over his horse.

“And a few times he got you lost,” Cal replied. “Are you too liquored up to listen to what I want to tell you?”

“My ears ain’t drunk.”

“I want you to get back to the ranch and keep an eye on things,” Cal said. “Look after Ignacio and Patrick. Don’t leave them alone.”

“What’s got you spooked?”

He gave George the lowdown on his visits with Dick Turknet and Pat Coghlan and told him he was heading to Mesilla on some legal business.

“You ain’t been charged with a crime, have you?” George asked.

“Not yet,” Cal answered as he turned Patches down the wagon road that led across White Sands to Las Cruces. “
Hasta la vista.
”

* * *

T
he railroad had bypassed Mesilla, the largest town in the valley and the Doña Ana County seat, in favor of Las Cruces, turning it into a boomtown. What had been a sleepy village of small homes, several hotels and saloons, a trading post, and a general store now sported streetlamps in front of the Montezuma Hotel, a drugstore, a photography studio, a row of trees planted on the town plaza, and a population that had almost doubled in a year. Merchants newly arrived in town were busy putting up brick-and-mortar buildings on Main and Church streets. One such structure had high windows covered with ornate iron grills. The sign in front proclaimed it to be a bank.

Land around the train depot and the switching yards had been divided into lots, and homes were being built with inexpensive milled lumber delivered by rail. Just beyond the depot stood a new general store that took up a block. With a brick facade, a long freight platform wagon high for easy loading, fancy iron hitching rings for horses, and a covered porch with chairs suitable for lounging, it was a modern marvel.

To the east of the town, the Organ Mountains rose like an array of tall, rugged spires that cast long early morning shadows down the uneven, shrub-covered foothills to the valley. To the west, the land climbed more gradually, with solitary peaks off in the distance and a sheer, barren uplift range close by that kept the Rio Grande from wandering into the desert.

Cal rode through Las Cruces without stopping, crossed the Rio Grande, and arrived in Mesilla just in time to join the Mexicans filling the streets after their siestas. It was Sunday, and government buildings, including the territorial court, the land office, and the county offices, were closed for the day. But the saloons were doing good business. Cal rewarded himself with a whiskey in one of the dozen or more saloons that served the two thousand residents of the village and the folks who streamed into town for business or pleasure. It was twelve and a half cents a shot, half of what Coghlan charged at his saloon, so he decided to have another before seeking lodging for the night.

Mesilla was mostly Mexican. In fact, it felt and looked Mexican, the way Tularosa had a few years back. The village had been started after the Mexican-American War by families who wanted no part of the United States. They wound up citizens anyway, after the federal government bought almost thirty thousand square miles of land from Mexico for ten million dollars.

The tiny plaza had a church, several large haciendas, a general store, and a couple of saloons. The rest of the drinking establishments were on side streets. Brown and whitewashed adobe houses spread out from the plaza, and rich bottomland farms lined the river. Many of the folks out on the street were Mexican women hurrying on their way to church for vespers.

Cal put Patches in a livery for the night and found a room in a casa on a narrow lane just off the plaza that offered a meal and a bath with clean water for two dollars more.

Two months after John Kerney’s death, Cal had sent a letter to Albert Fountain, a lawyer in Mesilla, with a list of instructions and a bank draft to cover legal fees and expenses. In the morning, he would meet with Fountain, who had papers drawn up to make him Patrick’s legal guardian and Patrick his sole heir, a title deed application at the land office to buy an additional six thousand acres adjacent to the ranch, and a document conveying the original title to the ranch from Calvin Doran and John Kerney, deceased, to Calvin Doran and Patrick Kerney, a minor.

Kerney had registered his brand as the Double K in memory of the family he’d buried on the West Texas plains, and Cal saw no reason to change it.

As he soaked in the tub he thought about Patrick. In spite of his stubbornness and suspicious nature, the boy had come a ways since John Kerney’s death. Once he realized he wasn’t going to be sent away, he started acting like he had a home, or at least a place where he could stay. He now spoke Spanish like a native and had taken to reading books borrowed from Ignacio. With no public schools in the territory, much less on the basin, Patrick’s only chance for learning was at home. So before heading back to the ranch, Cal would load up on some books for the boy that could teach him numbers, penmanship, and maybe some history.

Patrick had the makings of a hand. He’d sprouted two inches in the last six months, sat a horse as well as any cowboy, had learned to rope, and seemed to thrive on hard work like his daddy before him. If he stuck with ranching, he’d be a cowman from his boot heels up.

As for Ignacio, that one-armed Mexican had become about as good a ranch foreman as Cal had ever known. Maybe he could talk Ignacio into hiring on every now and then when he needed an extra hand.

Cal soaked the washcloth in the water and draped it over his head. John Kerney’s death had turned him into a responsible, upstanding citizen, something he’d never imagined for himself some years back. The notion of it tickled him. It would have likely tickled John Kerney too.

The hot water eased the pain in his bones from the long journey. But heading home when his business was done would be as easy as roping a newborn calf. He’d load Patches on a livestock car, take the train from Las Cruces to Engle, and ride over the pass through Bear Den Canyon to the ranch. It would take two days off the trip.

The six thousand acres he was fixing to buy had cured grass on it that hadn’t been grazed. When he got home, he’d turn the stock out to fatten them up a bit and cut the remaining grass for hay to use in the winter.

The time was coming when he’d have to think about doing some fencing. The days of open range were passing, but not quite yet.

He climbed out of the tub, rubbed himself dry, and got dressed. He had a hankering for some female company, and not all the pretty señoritas he’d seen on the street earlier were going to evening vespers.

20

D
rought hit the Tularosa in 1889 and settled relentlessly over the basin. The following spring brought blistering winds that were oven hot and spawned dust devils coiled a mile high, six or more swirling across the parched valley almost every day. When the winds settled, the sky was turquoise blue but the mountains were invisible behind the thick haze of dust and debris that had blasted through the mesquite and cactus. Weeks passed without a cloud in the sky.

Where a hundred thousand cows had roamed on great pastures of black grama and buffalo grass, only leafless plants survived. Even the tough sacaton grasses that fringed the alkali flats withered away. Mesquite, barrel cactus, century plants, and slender ocotillos dotted the grim landscape, while the carcasses of dead animals fouled what few shallow water holes remained out on the flats. At Three Rivers, maggots floated downstream from the springs above into the Tularosa River.

Over the winter most of the Double K stock had survived on cured grass in two pastures Cal had purposely left ungrazed in hopes the drought would break come spring. But it had only worsened, and with the grass eaten down to the roots, the cattle had scattered in search of any browse.

At the ranch house, the stream through the valley was bone-dry and the cistern and dirt tanks were empty. The pond and the well still produced water, although the flow had slowed.

Throughout the winter they’d kept the horses corralled by the ranch house, getting them saddle ready for the army. The Double K still had a quartermaster contract for twenty horses, but with money short, George, the hired hand, had been let go. The task of gentling and training the ponies fell mostly to Patrick, who quickly proved himself to be about the best bronc rider Cal had seen in a long spell. With Patrick busy with the ponies, Cal spent his time day-herding cattle over twenty square miles of pastures, valleys, and high country, trying to keep them alive.

With the coming of spring, Cal and Patrick were out every day looking for strays. Most of the profits they had been banking on from the army contract had already been eaten up by wagonloads of horse feed purchased on credit in Tularosa and brought to the ranch by Ignacio and Cesario. Once they settled their accounts for the feed and other bills, Cal figured they’d be lucky if they came away with a twenty-dollar gold piece. And he wasn’t counting on any more quartermaster contracts. Talk in Tularosa was that the army planned to shut down Fort Stanton now that Geronimo and his bucks had been shipped off to Florida and the Apache menace had ended.

At the southernmost pasture, the cow tracks wandered off in the direction of Hinman Rhodes’s homestead. A Civil War veteran, Rhodes had been a colonel in a volunteer infantry regiment out of Illinois. His oldest son, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a young cowboy six years older than Patrick, had worked for a time at the Bar Cross, the biggest outfit on the Jornada, before leaving for California to go to college.