The Busted Thumb Horse Ranch (12 page)

Going into Hulberton became a big treat to
Arm and me. We’d drag Tiny away from his
work—which didn’t take a ton of effort—and
suck beer in the saloon for a few hours. Then
we’d ride back to the ranch feeling good an’ at
peace with the world.

There were still a crew of Dansworth men
hanging around, but they wouldn’t look us in
the eye and they didn’t seem to be causing any
particular
trouble—at least until the buffalo
hunter with the Sharps came to town and began
hanging with Dansworth’s men.

We first noticed him when the three of us were
drinking beer and talking about horses. He was a
big man, like most shaggy hunters, tall and heavy
with muscle rather than fat. He was long-bearded
and his hair hadn’t seen scissors in a long time.
He wore leggings and a greatcoat, both made
from buffalo hides. He sat with his back to the
wall, a bottle and a glass in front of him, and a
Sharps rifle across his lap.

Christian Sharps was a bookish kind of guy
who held the patent on the most deadly sniper
weapon used in the War of Northern Aggression.
He operated out of Hartford, Connecticut, and
didn’t turn out a lot of his rifles, but the ones he
made and sold were perfect. They fired a .52 slug
that could pass through a horse, a man, and still
have the power to kill another man. It literally
tore arms and legs off if the shot struck a limb
rather than the body mass. Anyone who took a
.52 slug from a Sharps in the body was dead.

“There’s trouble, no?” Arm said, eyeing the
man.

“Yeah,” I said. “For sure.”

Tiny glanced over. “He looks hard,” he said,
“but that buffalo gun don’t mean nothin’ less he
knows how to use it. It’s as easy to miss with a
Sharps as it is with any rifle. Hell, I got a Sharps
breechloader my uncle left to me when he
croaked. I tried her out a few times, but couldn’t
hit nothin’ with her. I think the rear sight was
bent a tad, an’ maybe the front, too. An’ I never
did
figure out that elevation sight. I didn’t care
’nough about it to put no work into it fixin’ the
sights an’ then firing her in until she shot true.”

Arm and I stared at each other as if we’d been
told that pigs sang songs an’ nested in trees.

“You got a Sharps?” I asked.

“I jus’ said I did, didn’t I?”

“You weel sell us the rifle?” Arm asked.

“Hell, no. It ain’t fit nor fair to sell somethin’ a
dead man left to you. I’ll lend her to you, though.
I got no use for it. I ain’t big on guns, tell the
truth. I don’t carry one like you boys, an’ I don’t
care to.”

Tiny wanted to keep on drinking, but we
goaded hell outta him to go to his place and get
the rifle. Finally, after we bought a pair of buckets
of beer to take out, he gave in.

The Sharps was in a hard case and was
wrapped in deerskin. There was some light rust
on the barrel, and there was a gouge in the stock
where a bullet had hit it, but other than that it
looked just fine. I put the butt to my shoulder and
I could immediately see that both the front and
rear sights had taken a beating, maybe when the
rifle was dropped onto a hard surface. It didn’t
look like it’d take much to fix things and then run
some bullets through the rifle to sight it in.

The clerk at the mercantile had to scrounge
around in his storeroom to find any .52 ammunition,
but he finally came up with three boxes of
fifty each. He wanted six dollars for all of them. I
gladly paid the exorbitant price.

We rode back to the ranch a little faster than we
usually did—I was that keen on seeing what I
could
do with that fine Sharps rifle. All I really
needed was a pair of pliers to straighten the two
sights. I ran a piece of cloth saturated with Hoppe’s
gun oil through the barrel and carefully lubricated
the hammers and the two triggers this model had.
Arm stood next to me watching, shifting from foot
to foot, asking a question every so often. I wasn’t a
rifle expert, but I’d picked up some knowledge
here and there. It was coming dark when I thought
the rifle was ready to be tested.

“Maybe we should wait until tomorrow,” I said.

“Boolsheet.”

We walked out through the snow a couple hundred
yards from the house to a point where a
small stand of trees were a hundred or so yards
ahead of us. I slipped a slug into the breech and
brought the butt to my shoulder. It fit perfectly, as
if the weapon had been made ’specially for me. I
put the sights on a small tree and eased back the
first trigger and then moved my finger to the firing
trigger. I took a breath and squeezed. The recoil
knocked me on my ass, and the blaze of light
from the muzzle was as bright as lightning on a
dark night. I missed the tree—and as far as I
know, that slug is still traveling. Armando
laughed at me as I sat there in the snow, but then
there was a look of awe on his face as well.
“Jesús,”
he whispered.

The thundering, percussive roar of the shot
rolled out and echoed back like that of a cannon.

The next morning we decided to go out on our
horses to test-fire the Sharps again. After all, it
was likely that the rifle would be used from
horseback or dismounted near the horses.

We rode beyond the stand of trees I’d shot at
yesterday. There were no gauges or torn-away
branches that’d show I’d hit anything. Armando
made a couple of smart-ass remarks about my
marksmanship, including, “Maybe you try to
shoot the barn nex’? Is bigger than trees.”

We’d fired pistols and rifles from the backs of
our horses in the past, but there’s no comparison
to the sound those guns produced with the
blast—the roar—of a Sharps. We each fired our
pistols a couple of times and each squeezed off a
few rounds of 30.30s from our rifles while
mounted. Our horses were used to the sound by
now and weren’t bothered. We tied them well to a
thick limb of an oak and walked a few yards
away. There was a rock fifty yards away and even
the weak and sullen sun made the bits of mica in
the rock glint. It was a fine target.

I hunkered down to shoot from the standard
sniper sitting position. The gun oil smelled fresh
and good, and the furniture polish I’d used on
the stock the night before gave off a sweet, woody
scent. I leveled the Sharps over one knee, loaded a
round into the breech, and took aim. I was steady
and confident this time around. I squeezed the
firing trigger, and this time my shoulder absorbed
the recoil. A volcano of snow erupted a
few feet to the left of the target. All that was fine.
What wasn’t fine was that both our horses were
rearing, crazy-eyed, pulling against their reins,
squealing in fright. We ran to them and, after a
bit, were able to calm them without getting our
heads smashed in.

It was Armando’s turn to fire. He took the
same
position I had, loaded up, and aimed for a
long time. Finally, he fired. His round spurted
snow into the sky almost on top of where my
shot struck. That was good—I could adjust the
sights again to come back to true from the left.
What wasn’t good was that our horses went berserk
again, and it took us longer to calm them
down.

“Ain’ no other way to do eet,” Arm said. “The
silly sonsabitches gotta learn the Sharps, it won’t
hurt them no more than our pistols or 30.30s.”
Unfortunately, he was right, but I wasn’t sure
how much the animals could take. Both their
mouths were bloody from yanking against the
bit, both were trembling, and both had eyes as big
as wagon wheels.

Arm stroked and calmed them as I took the pliers
from my pocket and moved both the front
and rear sights a frog’s hair to the right. I looked
back at Arm and the horses. He nodded that he
was ready. I steadied myself, took the customary
deep breath, and fired the Sharps. The rock didn’t
so much split or break as it did disintegrate, sending
chips, pieces, and shards of sparkling mica-studded
stone into the air as if it’d been shot into
the sky by an artillery piece. It was an awesome
and somewhat frightening sight. I couldn’t help
but visualize what would happen if a man were
hit midbody.

Arm was standing between the two horses—
which wasn’t a good place to be—but he had
control of their heads, his hands locked around
the chinstraps that set the bit in their mouths.
Their reaction to this round was less violent, but
their
trembling increased. “Shoo’ again,” Arm
called.

I picked out another rock about 150 yards out.
It was more of a boulder than a rock; with the
Sharps now apparently sighted in, it’d be hard to
miss. I jacked up the elevation bar a notch, took
my stance, and fired. The thumb-size slug split
the boulder like it was a loaf of bread cut with a
sharp knife.

Arm nodded and yelled, “Go!”

I shot at the smaller piece of the boulder, spewing
brownish dust and pieces of rock in all directions.
“Ees ’nuff for today, Jake,” Arm shouted.
“Tomorrow we do another lesson, no?”

I checked over the horses’ mouths. They were
abraded by the bit rather than cut, and the blood
and saliva mix had already ended. Both were
skittish and on the edge of panic, but a good deal
of stroking and talking to them eventually
calmed them down.

On the way back we scared a jackrabbit out
of a mess of dead brush—a common enough
occurrence—but the horses reacted like barely
sacked-out two-year-olds. We reined them in easily
enough.

“Takes some time,” Arm said.

I agreed. “They didn’t do all that bad. We knew
they’d come apart a bit when they heard the
Sharps. I figure a couple more days and they’ll
settle on down.”

“They will no like that rifle, but they’ll live
with it.”

Back in the barn I spread udder balm on the bars
of our horses’ mouths—the part of the jawbone
upon
which the bit rests—and we rubbed them
down, checked their feet, and fed them—adding
an extra treat of molasses/oats mixture.

Arm had been unusually silent during all that
process.

“What?” I said.

“We now have the beeg gun an’ you can shoot
the hairs offa fly’s balls with it—but that fella in
the saloon, he has the beeg gun, too. An’ he shoots
an’ keels buffalo from far distance, no?”

“Yeah. But the thing is, he’s shooting at an animal
twice as large as a big bull, an’ his target is
standing still. When the shaggy hunters set up on
a herd, they pick off those farthest from the
center—and they’re standing still, grazing. Shaggies
are stupid, Arm. Hell, a shooter can drop one
ten feet from another an’ the other one will keep
on grazing. That’s the way those guys work a
herd—start on the outside and shoot their way in.
Hell, dropping twenty or thirty a day isn’t rare.”

“Es verdad?”

I nodded. “An’ there’s somethin’ else, too.
There’s nobody shooting back at a buffalo
hunter. That ain’t the case with us.”

We had a fairly moderate storm that started
that afternoon. We left the horses in their stalls
and Arm took the Sharps and went out into the
wind and swirling snow a couple hundred yards
and ran a half dozen slugs through the rifle.

Of course, the horses didn’t like it, but they
didn’t come apart, either. They flinched each time
Arm fired, and their eyes got a tad wide, but that
was about the extent of their reactions.

Strangely enough, our packer raised his head
at
the first shot and then went back to his hay,
paying absolutely no attention to the other
rounds. I left the barn and watched our stud in
the corral. He snorted, ran a bit, and then pretty
much clamed down. I suppose in his mind, the
racket was a natural thing: thunder, maybe.

After all the barn and corral chores were done,
Arm and I were damned near frozen. We went
inside and shucked out of our heavy gear and sat
at the kitchen table having a couple of slugs of
whiskey and talking things over.

“Ees good—the Busted Thumb Horse Ranch,”
Arm said.

It’s strange how rapidly things can change.

A feeble storm swept in but it didn’t have any
balls to it—it was over in a couple of days. Nevertheless,
both of us were stir-crazy and we decided
that we should ride on in to Hulberton and visit
Tiny. There was some wind when we started out,
but it wasn’t doing anything but shifting existing
drifts around.

In town we sat in the saloon with ol’ Tiny for a
couple of hours or so. I noticed that a while after
we came in, the buffalo hunter stood up, belched
loudly, picked up his Sharps and left through the
back door. Arm said he needed something from
the mercantile, so he met Tiny and me back at
Tiny’s shop. Dusk was coming on and we didn’t
want to ride in the dark, so we made tracks out of
Hulberton.

The wind was about the same as we left as it’d
been when we came in—kind of annoying, but
not threatening to dump another storm on us.

We left Hulberton at a jog and held that gait.
The horses had been on vacation; they needed a
little workout, lest they turn into butterballs as
our packer had.

Arm had bought a pipe in town and a couple of
sacks
of Green Mountain smoking tobacco. He
was having a hell of a time keeping his new pipe
lit, scratching stick match after stick match trying
to suck the flame into his bowl. I rolled a smoke
and lit it with a single match cupped in my hands.
That kind of pissed ol’ Arm off.

“Why such a goddamn hurry?” he snarled at
me. “A man can no get a pipe…” He never finished
the sentence. Instead his body was thrown
violently to his right. He was hitting the ground
as that unmistakable bellow of a Sharps reached
us. I jumped down, told the horses to stay, and
crouched over Armando.

His face was completely covered with red from
his forehead to jaw, where blood was dripping
steadily onto his coat. The blood sheeted downward
and to the sides from a long gouge—like a
shallow furrow—probably a good five inches
long. I thumbed his neck pulse. It was thrumming
nicely, steadily. I was surprised; I thought
my partner of all those years was dead. I’ll admit
to the quick tears that ran from my eyes, and the
huge lump that suddenly appeared in my throat,
almost cutting off my breathing. I’ll also admit to
a fire of anger that flared in my belly as I snatched
my Sharps from my saddle scabbard. It was already
loaded—I carried it that way since it took
two separate triggers to fire it.

Arm was mumbling curses as I brought the
butt and made a sweep of the direction from
which the shot must have come. The thought that
if Arm had been a couple inches ahead of where
he was, he’d be as dead as a lump of coal, and,
more’n
likely, his head woulda been torn off his
shoulders. That flash of thought made the fire
within me burn hotter and stronger.

I saw nothing on my first sweep. Then, on the
second, I saw a drift that was covering a small
cluster of rocks and boulders. I kept my sights
there and ticked up the elevator ladder sight very
slightly—the target was about 300 yards away. As
I squinted into the thickening dusk, a gray horse’s
ass came into view. I’m not big on killing horses,
but tht fire was almost out of control inside me. I
put a round through the animal’s spine and he
dropped like a bucket down a well. I didn’t like
doing it, but I did it. That buffalo hunter tried to
kill my partner and there was nothing I wouldn’t
do to take the sonofabitch permanently down
and leave his corpse for the vultures.

I reloaded, keeping my eyes on the cover area.
The day was ending and I wasn’t about to let him
run on back to Hulberton in the dark. He’d misgauged
his shot or the wind or both. He wasn’t as
good as I was and I think we both knew that. I
would have made the shot at Arm just as easily as
I picked off the buffalo man’s horse.

’Course my horse had scurried back a bit when
I fired but I caught him up easily. I swung into
my saddle and banged my heels against my
horse’s sides. He was ready to run. I jerked him
from side to side in hard turns to make the moving
target more difficult, should the buffalo man
get lucky and draw a line on me. I felt hooves losing
purchase on snow-covered ice a few times,
but kept on asking for more speed.

The buffalo man tried a shot from behind his
cover.
I heard that big slug whistle by a few feet to
my right. As I raced up to the rocks I was pretty
sure he’d try again. He did, and missed me by a
lot. Then he began to run—clumsily, panicked,
slipping and skidding in the snow. I grasped my
reins in my teeth to free up my hands and
shouted, “Hey!”

The damned fool turned toward me and I blew
a hole the size of a cannonball in his chest. The
impact threw him back like a rag doll hurled by a
tantruming kid. I didn’t ride up to see if he was
dead. There was no doubt at all about that.

I rode back and fetched Arm’s horse. Arm was
still sitting on the ground. He’d wiped a good bit
of the blood from his face and had his scarf tied
around his head, pressing on his forehead. Without
his hat he looked a Spanish pirate I remembered
from a picture book I’d seen as a kid.

“You keel heem?” Arm asked as I reined in
near where he sat.

“You betcha.”

“
Bueno.
Back-shootin’ sumbitch, he no deserve
to leeve.”

I didn’t bother to point out that the buffalo man
hadn’t shot from anywhere near Arms’s back. I
figured a man who’s just missed death by the
slightest part of an inch deserves to say whatever
he cares to.

I stepped down from my horse to help Arm
onto his. He tried to push me away, cursing in
Spanish, but I saw he was wobbly on his feet and
that the places on his face where he’d cleaned
away the blood were a sickly, pale white. He
slumped a bit in his saddle, once he was mounted.

“Teresa and Blanca will doctor up that ditch in
your forehead,” I said.

“Boolsheet. I don’ need no doctorin’. Ain’t
nothin’ but a scratch, no?”

“No. It needs to be fixed a bit.”

The Spanish cursing continued.

We rode back to the ranch at a walk and I noticed
that Arm had both hands grasped on his
saddle horn with his reins tied together just
above his hands. It was full dark when we got
back. I helped him off his horse and walked him
into the house. I called the women down from
their room and set them to work in fixing my
partner.

Our horses—as well as the mare, the colt, and
the stud—needed looking after an’ I took care of
all of them. The stallion actually hustled over to
me when I climbed down into the corral with a
bucket of grain and a flake of hay jammed under
my arm.

The women had Arm stretched out on his bed
on his back with a yellowish salve packed into his
wound. Teresa was just wrapping a piece of cloth
cut from a sheet around his head while Blanca
held him steady as I walked into his room.

“Jake,” Arm said, “these women, they will give
me no tequila. You will fetch a bottle?”

I looked at Blanca. She shook her head negatively.

“Later on,” I said.

“First, you will take a bowl of broth, then
maybe a seep of tequila,” Teresa said.

“Seep, my ass. I wan’ the whole damn bottle.”

“There is no need to talk like the campesino,”
Blanca said sternly. “We are not
putas.
You weel
show a little respect, Armando.”

“Damn leetle,” Armando grumbled, not quite
loud enough for the women to hear.

Teresa mixed a couple of pinches of a grayish
powder into the bowl of beef soup for Arm and
he slept quietly the entire night, without the tequila.
In the morning he was as pleasant as a
rattler in a bucket of boiling water. He tried to
stand but fell back onto his bed. After another
bowl of soup he slept the day away.

I talked with the women in the kitchen. “The
powder, it makes for sleep an’ healing. ’Fection is
the only problem an’ we don’ see none of that.
Lots of blood he lost, though. He needs the rest.”

“Suppose he has a concussion or some such
thing?” I asked.

“No ’cussion. None. His
ojos
are same,” Teresa
said.

“Equal, is what she means,” Blanca said.

I went out to take care of the chores. After
mucking out the stalls and cleaning the corral a
bit, I fed the whole crew. I noticed that the colt
had his nose in the air a good part of the time,
and that the mare held her tail slightly raised
from her rear end. I took a closer look and almost
whooped with joy—I was pretty sure she was
ready to be bred.

The problem was the stud—he was the big
question. I didn’t doubt that the mare would accept
him, but I was concerned how he might
damage her—some stallions get pretty rank, jamming
their tool into the wrong orifice, or biting at
a mare as he mounted her. If Arm was in better
shape
we could put ropes on the bay and wrestle
him away from the mare if we needed to. But,
he wasn’t. The women, I’m afraid, would be
useless—and there’s the danger of catching a
hoof in the head.

That left me two choices, and I needed to decide
quickly since a mare stays in heat only a
short time, particularly during winter. I could try
it alone, or I could scramble into Hulberton and
ask Tiny to come out and help me.

It didn’t take long to make the decision or to
saddle my horse and haul for town. On the way,
I had some thoughts about the man I’d killed
the day before. I felt no guilt or sorrow whatsoever
—to me the shot I fired into him was of no
more consequence than plugging a rabid coyote.
I compared that with how I felt after Arm’s gunfight
with the kid and then decided there were
simply no comparisons to be made, and put the
whole matter outta my mind.

Tiny was enthusiastic about the breeding, and
he had no work that day, anyway. He saddled up
and we hustled back to the Busted Thumb. Tiny
looked over the mare, noticed she was pissing
frequently, saw the colt sniffing the air to catch
her scent and revel in it, because that was all he
was going to get to do, and then looked in on the
stud. He, too, was spending a good deal of his
time with his muzzle pointing upward, drawing
in the scent of the mare.

We had Blanca tear off another piece of sheet.
She grumbled, “All our sheets, they go to wounded
men and
puta
horses.”

Tiny wrapped the mare’s tail near her genitals
to
keep it out of the way. We decided to bring the
mare to the stallion rather than attempting to
bring the stud into the barn. We tied the mare
outside the corral. She immediately began squealing
and backing up to the fence. Tiny grinned.
“This little lady is real ready,” he said.

We opened the gate to the corral, dropped
loops over the bay’s neck and tied him to the
snubbing post. It was more than clear that he was
as ready as the mare; it looked like he’d grown a
slightly shorter third hind leg.

As it turned out, I could have probably taken
care of the breeding by myself. We led the mare
into the corral, backed her to the stallion, and he
climbed on as easily and smoothly as a dowager
settling in a church pew. The deed itself took only
a few minutes. Tiny was ready to guide the bay’s
tool if it slipped out, but it didn’t. When it was
obvious the deed was done we led the mare back
to her stall in the barn.

We visited with Arm, who was still a tad woozy
but becoming more alert, drank some whiskey,
and then rode out to see if the buzzards had gotten
to the buffalo man yet. They had. Six or eight
were circling above and there was an equal number
chowing down.

“I never had no use for them sonsabitches,”
Tiny said. “Hell, I’ll take a deer when I need meat,
but dropping shaggies from a half mile away and
then tearing their hides off and leaving fifteen
hundred or so pounds of good meat to rot jus’
ain’t right. I seen the results of a big stand once,
an’ it ’most made me puke. There must have been
twenty buffalo on the ground and a crew was
staking
them out and making the cuts so that
their mule team could drag off the hides. All that
meat gone to waste…” He let the sentence die.
We watched as one of the larger vultures dragged
a length of pinkish white intestine from the
corpse in its beak and flailed its six-foot wings at
the others to keep them away while he ate.

We went back to the ranch and had lunch, a
couple of tastes of whiskey, and then took the
mare back to the stud. Both of them were still interested
and went through the process again.

Tiny wanted to beat the dark to Hulberton and
he rode off with my thanks. Maybe five minutes
later he came back as I was unwrapping the
mare’s tail.

“You’d best keep a close eye on this gal,” he
said. “We had a audience when we was breedin’.
I seen their tracks—it was three, maybe four
men.”

We’d been too busy to pay much attention to
anything but the mare and the stud during the
mating. I vowed I’d keep a close watch on our
buckskin mare. I supposed I could have bundled
up and slept out in the barn by the mare’s stall,
but it was cold enough to wreck a brass monkey,
and I’d gotten right used to sleepin’ in a real bed
the past few months. I thought—very briefly—of
bringing the mare into the mudroom at night.
Then, I realized what Teresa an’ Blanca would
have to say about that. Hell, if I’d done it, we’d
probably have mare stew for supper the next
dinner.

Instead, I leaned some planks on the inside of
the stall door and strung some tin cans—hoof
ointment,
udder balm, canned peaches, and so
forth across the inside, just above the planks. It
wasn’t a perfect alarm system, but it was better
than nothing, and I figured the noise would wake
me up.

Arm came down for breakfast the next morning
lookin’ pretty good, except for the cloth
wrapped around head. He ate with his usual voracious
appetite. As he crammed his face I filled
him in on the breeding and the tracks Tiny had
seen.