Hard Country (5 page)

“I’ll allow that a light tongue has kept me out of a few arguments and fights, but it hasn’t helped me get work these last few weeks.”

Wilcox shook his head sympathetically. “I guess most people in these parts are still smarting over the war. But I’ll criticize no man who fights for what he believes in. It seems downright unchristian to do so. Now, if you’ve an interest, I’ll soon be trailing cattle west, if you don’t mind moseying in that direction.”

Kerney smiled at Wilcox’s friendly rag over his reluctance to travel any deeper into Johnny Reb country. “Are you offering me a job?” he asked.

“I allow I could use another hand or two. I pay a dollar a day, plus grub and browse for your horse, if you’ve a mind to sign on. You can pick out a string of broomtails to use once we get to the ranch. We’ve got a real fine remuda.”

Kerney nodded his agreement. “I’m obliged to you. How far west do you propose to go?”

“New Mexico Territory,” Wilcox replied. “My boss wants free grass, open range, and ready buyers. Plans to sell to the army and Indian agents. Haven’t been there myself, but those who have say the grass is belly high to a horse and the land has never been grazed.”

Wilcox laughed and pushed his glass aside. “Course, I don’t believe a word of it. Those stories about a cattleman’s paradise come from old-timers who pushed cows to California ten years before the war, fighting Comanches and Apaches along the way.”

“It sounds a mite embellished,” Kerney allowed.

“Embellished,” Wilcox echoed. “Now, that’s a word you don’t hear too often around a trail-drive campfire. But I’m told you’re a man good with words, although you don’t appear to waste them just to fill up empty air.”

“Less said, the better,” Kerney replied.

“Now, that’s an idea I can take a hankering to,” Wilcox said. “I’d like to ask you a personal question, if you’re agreeable.”

“I’ve got nothing to hide,” Kerney answered, wondering if the same held for Wilcox.

“No offense, but is it true that you lost your wife and had to leave your baby boy with a half-crazed woman up in Dodge City?”

“I wouldn’t call her half-crazed, but the rest is true. The woman was my sister-in-law.”

Wilcox nodded. “I’ve got a hand who works for me, name of Cal Doran. He trailed up to Dodge City a while back. Talked about meeting up with the brother of the woman caring for a little one, not even a scamp. Seems the man asked about you, wanted to get in touch. You might want to jawbone with Cal about it.”

“I surely will, and I appreciate the information.”

“Glad to pass it on,” Wilcox said as he adjusted his hat and glanced out the open door. “Best we get started. We’ve got a considerable ways to ride.”

Kerney drained his drink and followed Wilcox out into the humid, hot Texas sun of a late April morning. His last meal had been in a cold camp the night before last, but he pushed down the cramps that gnawed at his empty stomach. He’d been hungry before, and with a new job and a new boss, food could wait. He watched Wilcox climb onto the back of the bay that had been Tom’s favorite pony and mounted up beside him.

Wilcox seemed an open-minded, tolerant man, but during the course of their conversation Kerney had learned nothing at all about him. Was all his charitable talk about Kerney’s blue-coat past nothing more than blowing smoke? And why had Wilcox been so quick to ask him about Ida and his son in Dodge City?

In the brush country of southwest Texas, a man’s past was considered his own personal business, unless he was otherwise inclined to talk about it. Wilcox had prodded where most men would have sidestepped. Was that just his nature, or did he have another motive?

Kerney didn’t try to swallow his doubts about Wilcox. His goodwill toward men had turned brittle and withered the day he’d buried his wife, brother, and young nephew. He’d need a hell of a lot more convincing before he would believe that the man sitting astride Tom’s bay was an honorable, trustworthy man.

For now, he’d ride along with eyes wide open, hoping to learn something about his son from this waddie that Wilcox had mentioned. The letters he’d written to Ida had all gone unanswered, leastways as far as he knew. Maybe she’d written back and the letters had gone astray, been scattered to the four winds after a Comanche raid on a mail wagon, or just never caught up with him. Or maybe she’d fallen ill, or something bad had happened to the boy and she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. Knowing nothing, he hungered for any news, no matter how old, unreliable, or distressing.

Wilcox didn’t talk much on the ride to the ranch, which suited Kerney just fine. He held his own tongue about Wilcox’s bay and tried to avoid dwelling on it. But the horse was a powerful reminder of that dreadful day. The memory had continually flooded through his mind, along with painful stabs of guilt he carried for not saving Mary Alice or being there to stand and fight side by side with Tom. There were times the memories were so godawful that he wished he could have died with them.

Kerney hoped the pony Wilcox was riding would lead him to the murderers. He surely would like the chance to gun them down.

4

T
hey arrived at the ranch at early dusk, just in time for a supper of beef, beans, biscuits, and hot coffee. Wilcox introduced Kerney to the rest of the hands as they drifted in and lined up by the cook pot next to the chuck wagon. While he waited for his first meal in two days, he learned that Cal Doran, the cowboy Wilcox had mentioned, and three other hands were camped ten miles distant, bedding down several hundred cattle that had been chased out of the brush over the past week. It deflated him a bit to know that he’d have to wait to hear what Doran knew about Ida and his son, if anything, but the smell of hot grub restored his spirits.

He ate his meal perched on a log with two fellows he’d worked with up north a ways on other spreads, and learned that the ranch had been sold and the drive west to New Mexico would start in a matter of days. Except for a shed and a low-slung cabin, about the only other improvement on the land was a large corral that held the remuda.

After his meal, he washed his plate and went to the corral to look over the horses. It was a mix of the usual nondescript, hardworking stock found on any ranch; some of the animals appeared to be half-broke, others looked sturdy and relatively gentled, and none seemed paunchy or unsound. On the far side of the corral, he spied a broomtail roan not much bigger than a pony that drew his attention. He ducked into the corral and made his way to the animal. It had horny growths on the inside of its front legs, and a sharp, arched back. In spite of the shoulder brand being altered just like on Wilcox’s bay, it was young Timmy’s pony sure enough.

In the morning Kerney would watch with interest to see who cut out the roan. Wilcox was small enough to ride the pony, but so were several other hands he’d met. But no matter who saddled the broomtail, two horses stolen from his brother, both with the same altered brand, were on this ranch. That made for some sober speculation that he might be working side by side with one or more of the killers.

He left the remuda in time to see Wilcox walking in the light of a full moon toward the cabin, where a man stood framed in the open doorway, backlit by the flames of the fireplace. Kerney figured it was the rancher Robertson, who’d sold out to move west.

Kerney didn’t discount Robertson as a suspect just because he bossed the outfit. Many a man in West Texas had grown respectable after whipping a tired horse out of a town in some other state where the law had a jail cell or a hangman’s knot waiting for him.

Had he chanced upon one or more of the murderers? If not, maybe he could at least learn the name of the men who’d sold his brother’s stolen horses.

Kerney had grit but was no shootist when it came to gunplay. He wore his hogleg high and strapped tight, not low and loose like the
pistoleros
. He spread out his bedroll thinking he could easily end up dead if he didn’t bide his time, get the facts straight, and keep his temper. He’d never bushwhacked anyone but wasn’t opposed to doing it if that was the only way he could put the killers in their graves.

Wilcox walked up as he was about to bed down.

“I’m sending you and three other men east at first light,” he said. “Work the timber and brush rough country around the water holes and gather as many cows as you can. Most are mavericks with longhorn blood that have been running wild for so many years that moss is growing on their horns. You’ve got two days. Bring in what you gather and watch out for the bulls.”

Wilcox pointed to a snoring man stretched out near the embers of the campfire. “That’s Buck Moore. You’ll ride with him. Do what he tells you.”

“As you say,” Kerney replied.

Wilcox nodded and left.

Disappointed that he’d be delayed meeting Cal Doran yet again, Kerney pulled off his boots and settled down with a full belly to get some sleep.

* * *

L
et down to see Tim’s pony remain unsaddled in the corral the next morning, Kerney picked out a fresh mount from the remuda and trailed his own horse behind as he lit out with Buck Moore, the ramrod, and two other waddies named Ed Pearl and Charlie Gambel. For two long days, they worked the brush in dense chaparral, with thickets of prickly pear impassible in places.

Passage at times had to be on foot to reach the cows deep in the brush. They fought their way through undergrowth that poked, stabbed, jabbed, and cut, skirted angry six-foot-long rattlesnakes, and faced mean, wild, long-back bulls that charged straight at them before veering away to vanish into the brush. They worked a parcel of bottomland where the mesquites grew large and the hackberries provided some shade, but not even the shade could cool ground so hot that it almost scorched the hand to touch.

Some of the cattle they worked were descended from stock brought to the New World by the Spaniards. Born wild during the war years, when ranchers and cowboys left the land to fight as Johnny Rebs, the animals had never known a rope around their necks or the searing heat of a branding iron. In among the bovines were a few mean mother cows that could kill a man or a wolf with their horns or hooves, survive a summer drought or a winter freeze, drop a healthy calf like clockwork every year, and never suffer a day’s sickness. They were rough, rangy, and lanky, and many could outrun a man on horseback.

Some of the cattle were unbranded mavericks of mixed blood, not quite as wild and a bit easier to gather. But no matter the breed, busting them out of the brush was so perilous and painful that at the end of each day the men removed thorns and spines from their horses’ legs before tending to their own cuts and bruises.

At one point they almost lost every animal they had gathered when a herd of fifty or more deer scampered through the cows and sent them stampeding for the breaks.

During all of it, Buck Moore, who had a cleft palate that badly affected his speech, gave his orders with hand signals, which let him avoid talking.

When they had seventy cows and calves corralled in a makeshift pen, Buck left to bring a few more men back from the ranch headquarters to help trail the animals to the main herd. Without the extra hands, they would lose most of the stock back into the brush, making it impossible to round them up in time to start the drive west.

At camp that night, with Buck gone, Charlie and Ed were more talkative.

“We don’t chew the fat much when we’re around Buck,” Ed Pearl explained in his gravelly voice. “It frets him that he can’t wag his tongue like an ordinary person.”

“Gets angry ’cause he thinks he sounds stupid,” Charlie Gambel added. He held a stained, tightly folded piece of paper in his hand. “One of the boys you worked with on the Lazy Z says you can read.”

“I can,” Kerney said.

A boy of no more than sixteen years, Charlie had a button nose and cheeks that had yet to feel the sharp edge of a straight razor. He thrust the paper at Kerney. “I’d appreciate it if you’d read this to me. I’ve heard it read twice before but would sure like to hear it again.”

Kerney unfolded the paper and in the light of the campfire scanned the one-page letter before reading it to Charlie. It was from a sister in Tennessee writing about the birth of her first child and the improving health of their mother, who had caught a bad chill that had laid her up over the winter. She closed by asking for news about Charlie and his older brother, Frank. The letter was nearly a year old.

Kerney read it slowly as Charlie sat beside him, smiling and nodding his head.

“Seems you and your brother are uncles,” Kerney said as he folded the letter and handed it back to Charlie. “Is Frank with the outfit?”

Charlie’s smile vanished. “He’s dead. Cal Doran shot him down. I’d kill Doran myself, except he’s too good with a gun. Maybe I’ll bushwhack him.”

Surprised to hear Charlie say exactly what he’d been thinking to avenge his own brother’s murder, Kerney gave him a long look.

“It wouldn’t be such a bad thing,” Charlie said, flinching under Kerney’s stare, “him being a shootist and all.”

“I can see how a fella might want to do that,” Kerney said.

“I’ve told him not to talk that way,” Ed Pearl said with a disapproving shake of his head. “Either fight Cal square or let it be, is what I tell him.”

“Who is this Cal Doran?” Kerney asked.

Ed grunted. “A gunfighter by trade but a decent hand when he puts his mind to it; I’ll give him that.”

It wasn’t unusual to have a hired gun on a trail drive. Oftentimes rustlers, criminals on the run from the law, ne’er-do-wells, and petty thieves worked as waddies and brushpoppers right along with the honest cowboys. And if the hard cases and ruffians weren’t working for an outfit, they were close by, ready to steal what they could from it any chance they got.

That Cal Doran was a
pistolero
made the man all the more interesting to Kerney. “What happened between Doran and your brother?” he asked Charlie.

Charlie shook his head sadly. “Cal called Frank out for stealing money from his bedroll.”