the Man from the Broken Hills (1975) (2 page)

He must have agreed with what he saw, for he turned on his heel, seeming to speak toward the house. Then he walked back to the bunkhouse which lay across the hard-packed yard facing the shed.

A thin blonde girl stood on the steps, hair blowing in the wind, shading her eyes to see us. Joe Hinge said, "Ma'am, I brought you a hand."

"He's welcome, and when you've washed, come up for supper." She looked after me as we rode to the corral and stripped the gear from our horses.

"Who was that with the rifle?" I asked.

"You'll see," Danny cautioned, "but step light and talk easy. He's a neighbor."

"How many hands do you have?"

"We're them," he explained. "Harley comes over to help, sometimes. He's got him a rawhide outfit over east against the break of the hills."

The bunkhouse, also of logs, was long and narrow with bunks along the sides and a sheet-iron stove at the end. There was a pile of dusty wood near the stove with somebody's socks drying on it, and a fire-blackened coffeepot atop the stove.

Four of the bunks had rumpled bedding and four had no bedding at all, only cowhide for springs, lashed to each side of the bed frame with rawhide strings. Coats and slickers hung on pegs along the wall, and there were a couple of benches and a table with one slightly short leg. A kerosene lamp stood on the table, and there was another in a bracket on the wall near the stove. There were two beat-up lanterns sitting along the wall.

The floor was scuffed and dusty, not looking like it had been swept in a while, but I'd grown up with Ma watching and knew that wouldn't last. Outside the door there was a washstand with a broken piece of mirror fastened to the log wall with nails, and a roller-towel that had been used forty or fifty hands too long.

Rinsing the basin I washed my hands and combed my hair, looking in the mirror at the man I was: a man with a lean, dark face and sideburns and a mustache. It was the first time I'd seen myself in anything but water for three or four months, but I didn't seem to have changed much. The scar where a bullet cut my hide near a cheekbone was almost gone.

Danny came out and slicked back his hair with water. A cowlick stuck up near the crown of his head. "The grub's good," he said. "She's a mighty fine cook."

"She does the cooking?"

"Who else?"

I whipped the dust from my clothes with my hat, drew the crease a mite deeper and started toward the house, my eyes sweeping the hills around, picking out the possible places for anyone watching the place. They were few, as the hills were bare and lonely.

There was a picket fence around a small bare yard in front of the house and a few pitiful, straggly flowers. A stone-flagged walk led to the door, and the table inside was spread with a red and white checked cloth. And the dishes were kind of blue enamel and a chipped enamel coffeepot.

There was a fine looking beef stew steaming on the table, and an apple pie on the sideboard ... dried apples, of course, but it looked good. There was also a pot of beans, some crabapple jelly and slices of thick white bread looking fresh from the oven.

She was even thinner than I'd thought, and her eyes were bluer. "I am Barby Ann." She gestured to the head of the table. "And this is my father, Henry Rossiter."

He had the frame of a once-big man, and the hands and wrists of one who must have been powerful. Now he was grizzled and old, with a walrus mustache and white hair that was too long. There was no sight to his eyes now, but I'd have known him anywhere.

"Howdy," I said at the introduction, and his head came up. He looked down the table at me, his eyes a blank stare, yet with an intentness that made me uneasy.

"Who said that?" His voice was harsh. "Who spoke?"

"It's a new hand, Father. He just rode in with the boys."

"We had us some words with Balch and Saddler," Hinge explained. "He stood with us."

Oh, he knew, all right! He knew, but he was shrewd enough to ask no more questions ... not of me, at least.

"We can use a hand. You ready for war, son?"

"I was born ready," I said, "but I ride peaceful unless crossed."

"You can ride out if you're of a mind to," Rossiter said, "and if you ride west or north you'll ride safe. You ride south or east in this country and your chances of getting through are mighty poor ... mighty poor."

Hinge explained what had happened with Balch and Saddler in a slow, casual tone that made enough of it but no more, leaving nobody in doubt.

Barby Ann ate in silence. Twice she looked at me, worried-like, but that was all. Nobody talked much, as it was not the way of ranch folk to talk much at supper. Eating was a serious business and we held to it. Yet at my home there'd been talk. Pa had been a man given to speaking, an educated man with much to say, and all of us had the gift of gab. We talked, but amongst ourselves.

When we were down to coffee and had the pie behind our belts, Rossiter turned his dead eyes toward Hinge. "There will be trouble?"

"Reckon so. I just figure he aims to keep us this side of the cap-rock, no matter whose cattle run up yonder. Unless we're ready to fight, we just ain't a-goin' to get 'em."

Rossiter turned his eyes in my direction, and he wasn't off-center one whit. "Did you see any Stirrup-Iron cattle?"

"I wasn't keeping count. I'd guess fifteen, maybe twenty head along where I rode. Probably twice that many Spur."

"There will be trouble then. How many hands does he have?"

Hinge was careful. He thought a minute, then shrugged. "No tellin'. He had eight, but I hear he's been hirin', and there was a man with him I'd never seen before."

The boys finished off and headed for the bunkhouse but Danny lingered, sort of waiting for me. I held on, then gave it up and stood.

"You," Rossiter said. "You set back down. You're a new hand and we'd better talk." He turned his head. "Good night, Danny."

"Good night," Danny said grudgingly, and went out.

Barby Ann went to the kitchen, and he said, "What did you say your name was?"

"You know what it is," I said.

"Are you hunting me?"

"No, I was just drifting."

"Seven years ... seven years of blindness," Rossiter said. "Barby Ann sees for me. Her an' Hinge. He's a good man, Hinge is."

"I think so."

"I've got nothing. When we've made our gather and drive, there won't be much. Just what I owe the hands, and supplies for a new year ... if we can round up what we have and get to the railhead with the herd."

He put his hand to the table, fumbling for his pipe and tobacco. Just when I was about to push it to him, his hand found it. He began loading his pipe.

"I never had anything. It all turned sour on me. This here is my last stand ... something for Barby Ann, if I can keep it."

"She'd be better off in some good-sized town. There's nothing here for a girl."

"You think there is in them towns? You know an' I know what's in them towns, and her with nothin' put by. This here is all I got, an' it's little enough. You could take it all away from me right now, but you'd still have a fight on your hands."

"You borrowed trouble, Rossiter. I don't want your outfit. You cheated your friends and you've only got what you asked for."

"Ssh! Not so loud! Barby Ann don't know nothing about them days."

"I'll not tell her."

"Your ma? Is Em still alive?"

"Alive? Em will die when the mountains do. She runs the outfit since Pa died, and she runs it with a tight hand."

"She scared me. I'll admit to that. I was always afraid of your ma, and I wasn't alone. She put fear into many a man. There was steel in that woman ... steel."

"There still is." I looked across the table at him. He was still a big old man, but only the shell remained. I remembered him as he was when I was a boy and this man had come to work on the Empty.

He had been big, brawny and too handsome, a good hand with a rope. And he knew stock. We had been shorthanded and he did the work of two men. But the trouble was, he was doing the work of three, for at night he'd been slipping away from the ranch and moving cattle to a far corner of the range.

Pa had been laid up with a badly injured leg, and Ma was caring for him, and this big young man had been always willing to help, but all the while he was stealing us blind. Yet he had helped us through a bad time.

He left suddenly, without a word to anyone, and it had been two days before we knew he was gone and almost a week before we knew anything else was wrong. It was Ma who got suspicious. She took to scouting, and I was with her when we found the corral where he'd been holding the stock. By that time he had been gone nearly two weeks.

It was a box canyon with a stream running through it, and Henry, as we knew him then, had laid a fence of cottonwood rails across the opening. There were indications there had been four men with Henry when he drove the cattle away. We knew the hoof tracks of Henry's horse, and they were all over the place. Ma sent me back to the house after Barnabas and one of our hands, as well as a pack horse.

"Tell your pa we're going after the cattle. It may take us a while."

When we got back, Ma was long gone down the trail, so we taken off after her. Them days, she mostly rode a mule, so her tracks were mighty easy to follow.

We found where the four extra men had camped, while wating for Henry to tell them to come in and drive the herd. Judging by the tracks, they had five or six hundred head. It was a big steal, but on a place the size of ours--and us shorthanded--it hadn't been so difficult. All he'd done was to move a few head over that way each time he rode out, and then gradually bunched them in the canyon.

On the third day we caught up with Ma, and on the fifth day we caught up with them. We'd no cattle to drive, so we'd come along fast. Ma was from Tennessee mountain stock, nigh to six feet tall and rawboned. She was all woman, and where she came from women were women. She could ride as well as any man and use a rifle better than most, and she'd no liking for a thief. Especially one who betrayed a trust like Henry had done.

She wasted no time. We came up on them and Ma never said aye, yes, or no, she just cut loose. She had left her Sharps .50 at home but she had a Spencer .56, a seven-shot repeater, and she let drive. Her first shot emptied a saddle. Coming down off the hill, we stampeded the herd right into them.

Henry, he lit a shuck out of there. He knew Ma would noose a rope for him and he lit out of there like somebody had lit a brushfire under his tail.

The other two taken off up a canyon and, leaving a hand to gather the stock, we taken out after them. We run them up a box canyon and Ma, she throwed down on them with that Spencer and she told it to them.

"You can throw down those guns an' come out with your hands up, or you can die right there. An' I don't care a mite which it is. Also, you might's well know. I ain't missed a shot since I was close on five year old and I ain't about to start now."

Well, they'd seen that first shot. She was nigh three hundred yards off and in the saddle when she pulled down on that moving rider, and she'd cut his spine in two. They only had their six-shooters and there was Ma with her Spencer, and Barnabas an' me with our Winchesters.

Where they stood, there wasn't shelter for a newborn calf, whilst we were partly covered by the roll of the hill and some brush. They decided to take a chance on the law, so they dropped their guns.

We brought them out and hustled them to the nearest jail and then went to the judge. We were a hundred miles from home then, and nobody knew any of us.

"Cow thieves, eh?" The judge looked from Ma to me. "What you think we should do with 'em?"

"Hang 'em," Ma said.

He stared at her, shocked. "Ma'am, there's been no trial."

"That's your business," Ma said quietly. "You try them. They were caught in the act with five hundred of my cattle."

"The law must take its course, ma'am," the judge said. "We will hold them for the next session of court. You will have to appear as a witness."

Ma stood up, and she towered above the judge, although he stood as tall as he was able. "I won't have time to ride back here to testify against a couple of cow thieves," she told him. "And the worst one is still runnin'."

She walked right down to the jail and to the marshal. "I want my prisoners."

"Your prisoners? Well, now, ma'am, you--"

"I brought them in, I'll take them back." She took up the keys from his desk and opened the cell doors while the marshal, having no experience to guide him, stood there jawing at her.

She rousted them out of their bunks and, when one started to pull on his boots, she said, "You won't need those," and she shoved him through the door.

"Now, ma'am! You can't do this!" The marshal was protesting. "The judge won't--"

"I'll handle this my own way. I'm the one who made the complaint. I am withdrawing it. I'm going to turn these men loose."

"Turn them loose? But you said yourself they were cow thieves!"

"They are just that, but I haven't the time to go traipsing across the country as a witness, riding a hundred miles back home, then a hundred miles up here and maybe three or four such trips while you bother about points of law. These are my prisoners and I can turn 'em loose if I want."