The Sons of Grady Rourke (6 page)

“You must have met Mr. Bonney already.”

“Yes.”

The young men nodded at each other.

David Shield walked out of his cranny office.

“Mr. Rourke? Nice to see you again. Have you decided to have me admit your father's will to probate?”

“Don't think so, sir. My brother and I want to wait for Liam corning down from Canada.”

“That will be fine, Mr. Rourke. There's no rush really.”

“Thank you.” Patrick turned to Billy Bonney. “I need some stores for the ranch: flour, sugar, maybe some sourdough starter if you have any this time of year, and a bottle of whiskey, please. Oh, and do you sell glass?”

“Glass?”

“The front window is broke.”

“Have to order it. Do you have the dimensions?”

Patrick pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to the boy behind the counter. Billy squinted his pale, narrow eyes and nodded.

“Take about three weeks, unless the pass on the stage road thaws early. And we have starter, but this time of year it's potato. That all right?”

“That'll be fine.”

“Good.” Billy began to search the spacious store for the supplies.

“Mr. Bonney? Small doses of everything, please. I only brought my riding horse.”

“All right. And call me Billy. Everyone else does.”

John Henry Tunstall ushered Patrick toward a table at the saloon end of the store. There were four tables; two were empty. The proprietor and the customer sat down.

“A drink, Patrick?”

“Just coffee, thanks.”

“Two coffees, Billy.”

“Thanks, Mr. Tunstall.”

“Call me, John. I heard your brother took a room across the way.”

“Yes. He's a little upset about Pa's will—giving everything to Liam and me. Can't hardly blame him.”

“Perhaps not. But the Wortley is part of the House, you know.” Tunstall saw Patrick nod. “They're a rough lot, Dolan and his kind. Is Chisum still running part of his herd on your ranch?”

“Yes.”

Billy Bonney set two china cups of black coffee on the table. Tunstall thanked him like a proper English gentleman.

“Then you had better keep an eye on the cattle. The House makes part of its living rustling.”

“Cattle thieves?”

“Yes. For years. And not just any cattle—Chisum cattle is their speciality.”

“But the House is a bunch of clerks and one deaf and dumb girl.”

Tunstall spoke over his steaming coffee cup close to his face.

“You met Miss Bryant?”

“Yes. I visited Sean before I came over here.”

Tunstall nodded and sipped.

“She isn't deaf, just mute. Tragic story. Such a pretty girl, too. And her daughter is just precious. But the House isn't clerks. Jimmy Dolan runs with the Boys. You heard of them?”

“No. Only been back four or five days.”

“The Boys are what these colonists call the Jesse Evans Gang: ruthless thieves and bushwhackers. The Boys do Dolan's dirty work: rustling and ambushing decent people.”

“How do you know? About the rustling, I mean?”

“You saw Chisum's jingle-bob ear brand on the steers?”

Patrick nodded.

“Not long ago, my people raided one of the gang's cronies at a ranch south of town. Found a hole in the ground full of cow ears. Cutting the ears off is the only way to get rid of that brand. They're rustlers, all right.”

“Anyone arrested?”

Tunstall laughed out loud. “Who do you think hand-picked Sheriff Brady for this town?”

The Englishman couldn't stop chuckling. The picture of Lincoln looked grimmer to Patrick than he had imagined.

“But how come my Pa's ranch ain't been rustled dry? Pa's been gone for months.”

“I'm afraid your father ran with the Boys and Dolan. Not much and not often. But Grady was one of them all the same. They don't bushwhack their own, I suppose.”

Patrick sat back against his chair. He looked stunned.

“I'm sorry, Patrick. I didn't mean to imply that your father was a cattle thief. Only that he bought at the House and welcomed the Boys to his home. Everyone in Lincoln has taken sides. Your father simply chose Dolan. He got everything and everyone that goes with it.”

Tunstall stopped abruptly in mid-thought. He lowered his cup, put his hands palms-down atop the table, and closed his eyes. Patrick waited for a moment.

“Are you all right, John?”

The Englishman opened his eyes slowly, as if after a half-minute nap.

“Excuse me? Yes, yes, quite all right. I just get tired. I spent four or five weeks down with small pox last summer. Came down with it at Las Vegas. I should have spent more time recovering. But I had business back here in Lincoln. In the middle of October, I rode back on horseback—forty miles a day for three days. That was three months ago and my bones still ache from that ride. But I'm doing much better now.”

“Good. You were speaking about Jesse Evans and rustling.”

“Yes, the captain—that's what the locals call Jesse. The Boys even stole some livestock of mine.”

Patrick watched his host intently.

“Back in September. Middle of the month. Stole my horses from my ranch down on the Rio Felix. Everyone knew the gang did it. So even Sheriff Brady had to go after them. Sent Dick Brewer, his deputy. Arrested the captain and three of the Boys down at Seven Rivers and threw them in jail up here in Lincoln. The sheriff of Doña Ana County refused to issue the arrest warrants so Justice Wilson—Justice of the Peace John Wilson—in Lincoln issued the warrants.”

Billy Bonney stepped out of the shadows with a large pot of hot coffee. Without asking, he refilled the two china cups and stepped back.

“Tell Patrick how you got the captain out of jail.”

Bonney looked almost giddy over the story's climax.

“Nonsense, Billy. Go help those ladies with that flour barrel.”

“Yes, Mr. Tunstall.”

“As I was saying, the captain and his gunmen were locked up. Toward the end of last November, the whole damned gang—twenty-five riders—broke them out of jail. I got a little of the credit just because I sent Evans a few bottles of whiskey while he was in jail. Folks thought I hid a saw in a fruit cake! But his men broke him out, not me.”

Patrick concealed a faint smile behind his beard.

“Did you ever get your horses back?”

“Yes. Jesse promised me that he would return them when he was released. He was and he did. But I didn't have anything to do with his breakout.”

“Of course not.”

“Well, as I was saying: If your brother stays at the Wortley, he will either run with the Boys or get himself run over by them. He can't stay long over there without choosing sides. Everyone in Lincoln has chosen sides.”

“Yes. You said that.”

“It's true. And that's the end of it.”

Billy came back without the coffee pot.

“Your supplies are ready. Packed small for behind your saddle. Four dollars, please.”

“How much for the coffee?”

“On the house,” Tunstall answered for Billy. “It was nice talking with you, Patrick. I hope things work out with your brother.” The Englishman excused himself, stood up, and walked into Shield's back office.

Patrick reached into his pocket and laid four silver dollars on the table. Billy picked them up and went to the counter. Patrick followed him and picked up a canvas sack heavy with his purchases. The sack was only two-thirds full so it would dangle from the saddle's cantle.

Outside, the sun was well up and seemed to stop dead in the purple sky to the south. It was noon and Patrick regretted having already burned up half of the day. He walked to the paddock on the side of the store and waited for his horse to come over. Tunstall's blind horse followed the swishing tail. Saddling quickly, Patrick heaved the sack across the back of his saddle. The saddle was a cattleman's saddle designed for roping and cutting John Chisum's cattle: long toward the rear and secured by two belly cinches.

Patrick rode at an easy walk toward the west. The sun was shoulder high to his left. He pulled his fur collar up high on his neck to keep the cold breeze out of his thick flannel shirt.

He glanced right as he walked his mount past the Wortley. Patrick did not see Sean. But Melissa Bryant stood ankle-keep in old and dirty snow just outside the door. Still in her short sleeves, she wrapped her arms across her full chest to keep warm. The brilliant sun was in her eyes, squinted nearly closed. Her long black hair shined against the drab adobe wall behind her.

Patrick looked down and kept going. When his eyes half hidden by his wide hat met the woman's blue eyes, he nodded and touched his floppy brim with his gloved hand.

The woman blinked and turned quickly, closing the door behind her.

B
Y
M
ONDAY
, J
ANUARY
28
TH
, 1878, P
ATRICK
R
OURKE HAD
stayed away from Lincoln for six days. During that time, he continued to work at making the ranch house livable. It seemed to him that he cleaned out enough cobwebs to knit a sweater. Mucking out the barn felt like working in a mine. The frozen piles of manure were like shoveling rocks. With the fences down, the cattle with mutilated ears strolled the brown and yellow snow up to the front door as if they were the real tenants of Grady Rourke's home. When mornings came cold and bright under a purple sky, dozens of them huddled to stay warm on the front porch. Patrick wondered if the weight of their thin bodies had shattered the front window—through which the night wind still blew hard against the faded curtain nailed across the sill and sash.

By Monday, six days had passed since the woman who had no voice had walked behind Patrick's chair in the cantina. He had felt or had imagined that he felt the coarse linen of her skirt just touch the back of his neck. She did not walk through his dreams until the third night.

Because of the woman, Patrick thought over hot coffee in a tin cup, because of the woman the cattle dozed this morning on his front porch. Since his third morning in his father's bed, each day he awoke from dreaming of Melissa Bryant. Instead of stepping out of his warm bedroll onto the ice-cold hardwood floor the instant his eyes opened, he lay there with his hands folded under his head and thought of Melissa. Each morning, he wasted an hour trying to conjure every detail of his dream in his mind. Inhaling sleepily, he would imagine that he had her scent on his beard, instead of the stench of the night's cow droppings steaming on the front porch and seeping through the billowing curtain.

The morning hours spent remembering her were hours that would have been better spent on mending fences and patching the roof. But instead of stoking the fire in the hearth and baking a sourdough biscuit to go with his morning coffee, Patrick sat thinking about shining black hair, white shoulders, and sparkling blue eyes. In the moment when he had ridden past her and she had looked up and turned away, Patrick had seen eyes full of sunlight and a distant blind terror that haunted her memory. Each morning, as he lay there remembering the fleeting glance of pain in the comers of those violet eyes, he tried not to imagine that skin and that face screaming under a dozen brown bodies taking her, one at a time. For eight years, she had not used that voice again.

The only way to shake the last vision was to climb out of his blankets and let the deathlike cold of the floor snap his mind back to the business at hand. So Patrick had rubbed his eyes and grimaced when his stocking feet touched the floor. He built a fire and now sipped hot coffee at the small table in his dead mother's kitchen.

Rummaging through the old house, Patrick had found a loose board in the floor of his parents' bedroom. Investigating further, he saw that the timber was not nailed to the framing underneath. When he lifted the plank to inspect for rot or termites, he discovered a rusted, metal box no larger than a loaf of bread. Inside were gold and silver coins, just under one hundred fifty dollars. Within the treasure was a yellowed citation naming Master Sergeant Grady Sean Rourke a brave soldier at the battle of Chapultepec, Mexico, September 12, 1847. The citation was signed by Brevet Lt. Colonel Robert E. Lee and countersigned by Winfield Scott, General of the Army. The long-hand signature at the very bottom belonged to James K. Polk, President of the United States.

Patrick had counted the coins into neat piles on the kitchen table, kept twenty-five dollars, and put everything else back into its place under the bedroom floor. The little box and a few hundred dollars under Grady's name at Tunstall's bank were all of Grady's life savings. The money, the rundown ranch, and a Presidential citation were all Grady Rourke had in the world-that, and three sons should Liam still be alive.

By the sixth day, Patrick knew that he could not repair and manage the ranch alone and that Grady's hidden money would not last long. To keep the ranch, he would need either a brother or a hired hand. That would require renting the pasture to Chisum's herd—up to the front porch, if necessary. And since Grady's estate could not be released until Liam returned or was declared dead by the Army, Patrick knew that he needed a job.

So on this cold and bright Monday, Patrick saddled his horse and rode again into Lincoln.

“Run out of sourdough already?” Billy Bonney asked cheerfully from behind the counter.

“No. I would like to see Mr. Shield, please.”

“He”s gone for at least a week."

“Gone?”

“Yep. Went down to Mesilla to see about getting Mr. McSween loose.”

“What about Mr. Tunstall?”

“He's in the back. You can go on in, I suppose.”

“Thanks.”

John Tunstall stood up when Patrick knocked on the door frame of the open door.

“Good morning, Patrick. Have a seat.”