The Last Ranch (4 page)

Tyler laughed. “I sure wouldn't want to mess that up, Sarge.”

Childs grunted and handed Tyler the form. “What are ya standing there for? Your leave doesn't start for two weeks. Go to work.”

Tyler grinned and turned on his heel. Two weeks couldn't pass fast enough.

***

T
he day before Matt and Anna Lynn were to leave for Fort Bliss, a corporal in an army jeep from the Alamogordo Army Air Field ground to a stop at the ranch house, knocked on the open door, asked to speak to Matthew Kerney, and handed him a sealed envelope.

“Is this the check I'm owed for the two dead ponies the flyboys
killed?” Matt asked, waving the envelope at the young soldier standing on the veranda, looking miserable, uncomfortable, in perfect health, and no more than nineteen. Matt had no sympathy for any able-bodied GI sitting out the war stateside.

“I don't know, sir,” Cpl. James Barko replied with a nod to a woman who had joined Mr. Kerney on the veranda. He'd driven from the airfield to the ranch in a hot car with the windows down, and his face was crusted with dust and his uniform shirt damp with sweat. “I was just told by my lieutenant to bring this to you right away.”

The enclosed telex message from Dr. Beckmann read:

Due to an unexpected problem, your appointment tomorrow is rescheduled for 8 AM, June 6. The laboratory shipped a green eye instead of blue. My apologies for the mix-up.

Capt. S. Beckmann, MD, USA Medical Corps
William Beaumont Hospital
Fort Bliss, TX

Matt laughed and handed the message to Anna Lynn. “Seems our trip to Fort Bliss is delayed until June sixth.”

Anna Lynn scanned the telex and said, “You're taking it lightly.”

Matt shrugged. “There's nothing I can do about it.”

“One green and one blue would be an interesting combination,” she suggested.

“Certainly eye-catching, wouldn't you say?” Matt said.

Anna Lynn suppressed a giggle and smiled at the young soldier, wondering why Matt hadn't shown the boy, who looked
decidedly nonplussed by the exchange, any hospitality. “Can I get you a cool drink?” she asked him.

“No thank you, ma'am,” Corporal Barko replied, desperate to depart. Born and raised along the Delaware Bay, he hated the desert, the heat, the dryness, the absence of water, and the boredom of New Mexico. He also hated the army that sent him to such an awful place. “Do you want to reply to the message, sir?” he asked Matt.

“Nope, just tell your general or whoever is in charge of the flyboys to pay me for my two dead ponies.”

“I'll pass that along, sir.” Barko nodded again to the woman, retreated to the vehicle, and quickly drove away. In the pasture, the tires of his car threw a billowing cloud of dust that veiled a horseback rider approaching at a fast trot.

“Now what?” Kerney asked, trying to identify the rider.

Anna Lynn searched Matt's face. “Why were you rude to that boy?”

“I wasn't rude, just unsympathetic.” Through the diminishing dust cloud, Matt made out Al Jennings Jr. approaching on his gelding. “Al Jr. has come calling and I don't think he's got good news.”

***

A
l's news wasn't good. Someone in a vehicle had busted through the gate to the 7-Bar-K high pasture where Matt was grazing his mares and foals and scattered them onto the desert scrub of the Jornada west of the San Andres. Al rounded up two that had strayed onto his land, but the rest were nowhere to be seen. From the tracks he'd found, it had probably happened about a week earlier.

“I figure it was some army boys from the airfield, out joyriding in jeeps,” Al added. “The sheriff says he's had half a dozen reports from ranchers that have spotted them trespassing and spooking their livestock.”

“Well, I'd better go fetch them critters back,” Patrick said from the living-room couch.

“I'll lend a hand,” Al offered, which was about all he had, having lost a thumb and forefinger in a roping accident. It hadn't slowed him one mite.

“That's mighty neighborly,” Matt said, perched on the edge of the desk. “But you two aren't going anywhere without me.”

“You shouldn't,” Anna Lynn cautioned. “Besides, it could be dangerous.”

Matt fell silent for a moment and then burst out laughing.

“What's funny?” Patrick asked.

“Think about it,” Matt said. “You with a stove-up leg from when you crashed the truck, Al missing some fingers, and me with one good eye. Now who, pray tell, would be foolish enough to rile us?”

“I didn't crash the truck,” Patrick grumbled. “A buck deer ran into it.”

“I like our odds,” Al said, grinning.

“So do I.” Matt rose to his feet. “Let's get packing.”

Ginny, who'd been quiet during the grown-up conversation, tugged Matt's sleeve. “I can go too,” she announced, smiling hopefully.

“Not this time,” Anna Lynn replied. “Us girls get to stay behind. And don't you dare pout.”

Ginny pouted anyway and stomped out of the room.

Within an hour the three men were on their way, Patrick and Matt trailing pack animals. With Ginny at her side still pouting,
Anna Lynn stood wet-eyed on the veranda and waved goodbye as the riders moved up the ranch road that led to the high country cabin. She'd wanted to argue strenuously with Matt not to go, but outmatched by three true-blue cowboys who weren't about to be dissuaded from doing what was best, she held her tongue. And besides, all the lust for life that the war had drained out of Matt was back in full force, and was such a tearful joy to see.

The day before Matt Kerney's scheduled appointment with Dr. Susan Beckmann at William Beaumont Hospital, Pvt. Fred Tyler started a five-day leave from Fort Bliss. Dressed in civvies and carrying a small satchel containing a change of clothes and an army-issued model M1911 .45-caliber semiautomatic he'd stolen from an MP soldier's footlocker, he caught a midmorning bus to Alamogordo.

Once there, he had a sandwich, apple pie, and coffee at a luncheonette before hitchhiking his way to Mountain Park through the Mexican village of La Luz along a winding gravel state road that hugged canyon walls. At the village post office, he told the portly postmaster he was Anna Lynn Crawford's cousin just back from the war on convalescent leave and looking to find her. The story and his limp from his badly damaged foot got Tyler sympathy and directions to Crawford's farmhouse, although the postmaster added he didn't think she was home, as she hadn't picked up her mail for some time.

Tyler thanked the man with a wave and a smile, stepped
outside, and started down the steep road that cut through the village. He could see for miles across the empty desert to a hazy mountain range, and wondered exactly where Kerney had his ranch. The distance across the valley looked daunting but the thin ribbon of the state highway reassured him. He was sure to catch a ride.

There wasn't much to Mountain Park. It was just a sleepy spot on the map, with a general store, a church, a small schoolhouse, and some homes scattered on a hillside and in a narrow valley sprinkled with apple orchards. There were shuttered roadside fruit and vegetable stands along the way, stands of tall evergreens in the high, forested country above the settlement, and a long wooden railroad trestle that loomed over the far side of the pinched valley. Tyler reckoned the citizens were mostly poor and struggling. Other than knocking over the general store or the post office, he figured doing robbery in Mountain Park wouldn't be worth the effort.

Anna Lynn Crawford's tidy farmhouse sat in the mouth of a shallow side canyon on a nice piece of grassy land. An empty corral sat fifty yards or so from the front porch and there was a row of handmade wooden white-painted beehives out back. Tyler called out from the front porch to make sure no one was home before trying the door, which was, as he had hoped, unlocked. He slipped inside and took a quick look around the orderly front room, the kitchen, and two adjacent bedrooms—one for a child, the other containing a large, comfortable bed with fluffy pillows. A framed pencil drawing under glass of a younger-looking Matthew Kerney hung on the wall above the headboard. In a tall, ornate wardrobe he found a couple of pairs of pressed men's jeans and long-sleeved work shirts on hangers. Inside the drawer of a bedside table was a stack of letters tied with a ribbon that Kerney
had written to Anna Lynn while in the army. He paged through them. Some were downright lovey-dovey.

Tyler smiled. The question of whether Anna Lynn Crawford was more than just a skirt to Kerney had definitely been answered. He considered busting the pencil drawing and scattering the glass on the bed but thought better of it. Best to leave things as they were. He started an exhaustive search looking for valuables, carefully putting everything back in its place.

The house was filled with homey things women accumulate: kitchen pots and pans, enough dinnerware and utensils for a squad of soldiers, letters from relatives, family photographs—some showing Kerney with little Ginny as a toddler or with an old man who looked like his father—and an amazing number of books. There were also sewing baskets, a hamper filled with unfinished needlework, several kitchen shelves of home-canned fruits and jars of raw honey, shoeboxes crammed with old receipts and sales slips, a small wooden box filled with inexpensive jewelry, and a nice sterling-silver tea service, each piece wrapped in protective cloth, tucked away at the back of the top pantry shelf.

It took the better part of an hour to finish his search. He came away with thirty dollars in greenbacks from the pocket of a ladies' winter coat in the bedroom wardrobe and two dollars and seventeen cents in a piggybank in the kid's room. He pocketed the money, pleased that he now had enough cash to cover the entire loan minus the interest he owed Master Sergeant Michelet. He made a mental note to return for the tea service after he'd disposed of the bitch and her brat.

With the day fading and the sun hanging low in the western sky, Tyler hitchhiked down the road, getting a ride within ten minutes from a grizzled Forest Service worker on his way home to Alamogordo. The man had once been a supervisor at a CCC
camp in the nearby national forest, and on the trip down the mountain he jawboned about the hardships of the Great Depression before the war. Tyler let him ramble on without interruption. He got dropped off at the junction to the US highway and was told Tularosa was seven miles north, where a rundown village hotel rented cheap but clean rooms.

In the cool of the evening, he hoofed it for a mile before a Mexican farmer named Miguel Chávez, who spoke good English, gave him a ride in his wagon the rest of the way. As Chávez slowed in front of a dilapidated hotel, he told Tyler it had once been owned by an Irishman named Coghlan, who'd been known throughout the basin as the king of Tularosa—a man now long dead and almost forgotten.

“My father told me that in its day the hotel had the best saloon, the best restaurant, and the best whores on the whole Tularosa,” Chávez added, gazing at the listing veranda that fronted the hotel. “He said it was the most elegant place in town. Soon they will tear it down, I think.”

Tyler, who was not well disposed toward Mexicans, Negroes, foreigners of any stripe, or snobs who thought themselves his betters, grunted his thanks as he climbed off the wagon seat. He was tired, wanted a drink, food, and a bed, and didn't give a hoot about some long-dead Irishman and his once-ritzy hotel.

“Know a good place to eat?” he asked Chávez.

Chávez pointed down the quiet street to a blinking electric sign a quarter mile away. “Where the road forks there is a bar and diner. The food is okay and they stay open late.”

Inside the hotel, the threadbare carpet in front of the reception desk, several burned out electric lightbulbs in the table lamps, and the scruffy lobby furniture didn't faze Tyler at all. From his time in the prison woodshop, he could tell the dingy
wainscoting on the walls was first-class carpentry and the dinged-up furniture had been handmade. The Mexican had been right about the hotel once being grand.

Tyler paid for one night, climbed the squeaky stairs to his room, dumped his satchel on the bed, and hoofed it up the street to the bar and diner. Over a whiskey and a hot meal, he'd study the New Mexico road map he'd picked up at an Alamogordo service station, estimate the miles he had to travel to reach Kerney's ranch, and decide if he should keep hitchhiking in the morning or steal a car.

***

A
t sundown, Matt, Patrick, and Al Jennings made camp at an old Bar Cross horse camp on the Jornada not far from the Camino Real that once stretched from Mexico City to Santa Fe. They'd cut trail on the mares and foals twice, only to lose it on a volcanic rock field and again at a perilous lava break that flowed around a stand of petrified tree stumps. To the west, the Fra Cristobal Mountains rose up, masking the Rio Grande. To the east, basalt-capped black mesas hovered in the foreground with the Oscura Mountains beyond.

Earlier in the day at the high pasture, Al's conclusion that joyriding army boys in jeeps had busted the gate and spooked and scattered the herd proved true. They followed the trail to a yucca grove on the edge of the Jornada where the jeeps had turned back, and tracked fresh hoofprints north over some faint tire tracks that ran through desert scrub and stopped in the middle of nowhere at the base of a low mesa. There the footprints of four men led from two parked vehicles to the top of the mesa. The party had tromped around for a time, pausing to look in all
directions before descending to their vehicles, where they turned around and went back the way they came.

The pony tracks veered east toward the bald face of the Oscuras, but low hummocks hid from view the sight of any animals that might be loitering, and there was no telltale dust floating skyward to signal movement of the herd. The riders pushed on, hoping to find the ponies at the abandoned Bar Cross horse camp where a steady trickle of water from a creaky old windmill filled a rusty tank, but all they found were signs the herd had recently moved eastward.

Patrick speculated the ponies were looking for browse, drifting toward the old McDonald Ranch that ran hard up against the Oscuras. “We'll catch up to them in the morning,” he predicted as he put the coffeepot on the campfire to boil. “But answer me this: Why were four men driving around in the middle of this forlorn country for no good reason? It makes no sense.”

“The tire tracks came from army jeeps,” Al said as he joined Matt and Patrick at the campfire. “Maybe some soldier boys were treasure hunting or sightseeing.”

“Except for the old, played-out Spanish mine in the Fra Cristobals there's no treasure here to be found,” Patrick remarked as he gingerly sat on the chair he'd rescued from the dilapidated, varmint-infested cabin. At sixty-nine, his gimpy leg and the long day in the saddle had left his body sore and aching. “And while it can be a pretty slice of country at times, there ain't that much to see.”

“They were looking at something,” Matt said.

“Like what?” Al asked.

Matt shrugged. “I don't know, but they drove straight to that mesa, took a long gander, and went back the same way they came.”

Patrick filled his cup with boiling coffee and passed the pot
around. “If they weren't treasure hunting, rubbernecking, or joyriding, then why bother? It's plumb mystifying.”

“Stupid or smart, the army always has its reasons,” Matt said.

Having served as a Rough Rider under Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War, Patrick nodded in agreement. “I wonder what dumb thing it could be,” he added.

“It's too far from anywhere civilized to make any sense,” Al noted.

“But if you want to do something on the sly, this big empty is just about the perfect place for it,” Matt conjectured.

“That's savvy thinking.” Patrick opened the hamper of food Anna Lynn had packed and pawed through the contents. “There's a canned ham in here and some of Anna Lynn's homemade muffins that look inviting, and I'm a mite hungry. Let's chew on it over supper.”

During supper, and to no one's satisfaction, the men tossed around notions of what the army was doing on the Jornada. Then they turned in under the blanket of a million stars in a clear night sky with the first hint of a full moon touching the tips of the Oscuras. Before sunup they struck camp and were trailing the ponies at a good clip when they came upon Billy McDonald, who was driving Matt's mares and foals toward the Bar Cross horse camp they'd just vacated.

“Howdy and I'm glad to see y'all,” Billy called out with a pleased smile. No more than sixteen, young McDonald had left school after the fifth grade to help on the family ranch. “It saves me the trouble of herding these renegade mares and their babies back home to you.”

“
Buenos dias
,” Matt replied as he drew rein and gave his ponies a quick once-over. They all looked healthy, including the little ones. “We're glad to see you as well. Where did you find them?”

“In the pasture near my grandpa's old place, none the worse for wear,” Billy answered as he drew alongside the three riders. His cowboy hat hid his red hair but not the freckles on his face. “I watered them good and let them graze overnight. I'll ride with you a spell to the horse camp.”

“I'm in your debt, and your company is most welcome,” Matt said.

Patrick tipped his hat. “You done good and we're obliged.”

“That's the truth of it, Billy,” Al echoed with a grin.

“No need for all of that,” Billy said, unable to hide his pleasure at the compliments.

The riders fell into place side by side and as they pushed the little herd along, Matt asked Billy if he'd seen anything unusual lately on the Jornada.

Billy nodded and explained that for several months soldiers had been driving a bunch of civilians around in jeeps taking pictures with big cameras, floating large balloons in the sky, and doing all kinds of strange stuff with instruments the likes of which he'd never seen before. Once, when he tried to approach them neighborly, MPs had shooed him away with stern looks.

“Has anybody talked to them?” Al asked.

Billy shook his head. “Appears not. My pa says the Socorro County sheriff was told the government is looking for a safe place to store a lot of military ammunition.”

“Now, that makes good horse sense,” Patrick said. “Put it out here where no one gets hurt if it blows up.”

“Mystery solved,” Al said as he guided a skittish foal back to its mama.

At the horse camp, the riders watered the ponies, parted company with Billy McDonald, and started the trek back to the 7-Bar-K. Matt figured they could get home before the next sunup
if they made an early stop for a cold supper and kept the ponies moving once the full moon broke over the mountains.

Al allowed that even though the ponies had been found safe and sound, he'd ride along for a spell before heading home. Matt thanked him again for his neighborly help. Patrick winced at the thought of his aching bones come the end of another day and a full night in the saddle and glanced west. Thick clouds had gathered above the Black Range, swirling into towering columns that pierced the turquoise sky.

“Best we get moving,” he said, stifling a groan. “Storm's a-coming.”

***

A
fter an early breakfast in Tularosa, Fred Tyler decided it would only draw unneeded and unwelcome attention if he stole a car in the village. He slung the strap of the satchel over his shoulder and started out under the cool shade of big cottonwoods that bordered large adobe haciendas and adjacent irrigated farmland fed by dirt ditches that drew water from a slow-running stream. Outside the confines of the village, both the stream and the shade disappeared and the morning sun burned the back of his neck. He walked along the graveled state road, switching his gaze from the distant mountains to the broken, green-gray valley floor of greasewood, mesquite, prickly pear cactus, and occasional yucca groves with stalks ten feet high topped by dry, dead blossoms.