Hard Country Read online

  Land around the train depot and the switching yards had been divided into lots, and homes were being built with inexpensive milled lumber delivered by rail. Just beyond the depot stood a new general store that took up a block. With a brick facade, a long freight platform wagon high for easy loading, fancy iron hitching rings for horses, and a covered porch with chairs suitable for lounging, it was a modern marvel.

  To the east of the town, the Organ Mountains rose like an array of tall, rugged spires that cast long early morning shadows down the uneven, shrub-covered foothills to the valley. To the west, the land climbed more gradually, with solitary peaks off in the distance and a sheer, barren uplift range close by that kept the Rio Grande from wandering into the desert.

  Cal rode through Las Cruces without stopping, crossed the Rio Grande, and arrived in Mesilla just in time to join the Mexicans filling the streets after their siestas. It was Sunday, and government buildings, including the territorial court, the land office, and the county offices, were closed for the day. But the saloons were doing good business. Cal rewarded himself with a whiskey in one of the dozen or more saloons that served the two thousand residents of the village and the folks who streamed into town for business or pleasure. It was twelve and a half cents a shot, half of what Coghlan charged at his saloon, so he decided to have another before seeking lodging for the night.

  Mesilla was mostly Mexican. In fact, it felt and looked Mexican, the way Tularosa had a few years back. The village had been started after the Mexican-American War by families who wanted no part of the United States. They wound up citizens anyway, after the federal government bought almost thirty thousand square miles of land from Mexico for ten million dollars.

  The tiny plaza had a church, several large haciendas, a general store, and a couple of saloons. The rest of the drinking establishments were on side streets. Brown and whitewashed adobe houses spread out from the plaza, and rich bottomland farms lined the river. Many of the folks out on the street were Mexican women hurrying on their way to church for vespers.

  Cal put Patches in a livery for the night and found a room in a casa on a narrow lane just off the plaza that offered a meal and a bath with clean water for two dollars more.

  Two months after John Kerney’s death, Cal had sent a letter to Albert Fountain, a lawyer in Mesilla, with a list of instructions and a bank draft to cover legal fees and expenses. In the morning, he would meet with Fountain, who had papers drawn up to make him Patrick’s legal guardian and Patrick his sole heir, a title deed application at the land office to buy an additional six thousand acres adjacent to the ranch, and a document conveying the original title to the ranch from Calvin Doran and John Kerney, deceased, to Calvin Doran and Patrick Kerney, a minor.

  Kerney had registered his brand as the Double K in memory of the family he’d buried on the West Texas plains, and Cal saw no reason to change it.

  As he soaked in the tub he thought about Patrick. In spite of his stubbornness and suspicious nature, the boy had come a ways since John Kerney’s death. Once he realized he wasn’t going to be sent away, he started acting like he had a home, or at least a place where he could stay. He now spoke Spanish like a native and had taken to reading books borrowed from Ignacio. With no public schools in the territory, much less on the basin, Patrick’s only chance for learning was at home. So before heading back to the ranch, Cal would load up on some books for the boy that could teach him numbers, penmanship, and maybe some history.

  Patrick had the makings of a hand. He’d sprouted two inches in the last six months, sat a horse as well as any cowboy, had learned to rope, and seemed to thrive on hard work like his daddy before him. If he stuck with ranching, he’d be a cowman from his boot heels up.

  As for Ignacio, that one-armed Mexican had become about as good a ranch foreman as Cal had ever known. Maybe he could talk Ignacio into hiring on every now and then when he needed an extra hand.

  Cal soaked the washcloth in the water and draped it over his head. John Kerney’s death had turned him into a responsible, upstanding citizen, something he’d never imagined for himself some years back. The notion of it tickled him. It would have likely tickled John Kerney too.

  The hot water eased the pain in his bones from the long journey. But heading home when his business was done would be as easy as roping a newborn calf. He’d load Patches on a livestock car, take the train from Las Cruces to Engle, and ride over the pass through Bear Den Canyon to the ranch. It would take two days off the trip.

  The six thousand acres he was fixing to buy had cured grass on it that hadn’t been grazed. When he got home, he’d turn the stock out to fatten them up a bit and cut the remaining grass for hay to use in the winter.

  The time was coming when he’d have to think about doing some fencing. The days of open range were passing, but not quite yet.

  He climbed out of the tub, rubbed himself dry, and got dressed. He had a hankering for some female company, and not all the pretty señoritas he’d seen on the street earlier were going to evening vespers.

  20

  Drought hit the Tularosa in 1889 and settled relentlessly over the basin. The following spring brought blistering winds that were oven hot and spawned dust devils coiled a mile high, six or more swirling across the parched valley almost every day. When the winds settled, the sky was turquoise blue but the mountains were invisible behind the thick haze of dust and debris that had blasted through the mesquite and cactus. Weeks passed without a cloud in the sky.

  Where a hundred thousand cows had roamed on great pastures of black grama and buffalo grass, only leafless plants survived. Even the tough sacaton grasses that fringed the alkali flats withered away. Mesquite, barrel cactus, century plants, and slender ocotillos dotted the grim landscape, while the carcasses of dead animals fouled what few shallow water holes remained out on the flats. At Three Rivers, maggots floated downstream from the springs above into the Tularosa River.

  Over the winter most of the Double K stock had survived on cured grass in two pastures Cal had purposely left ungrazed in hopes the drought would break come spring. But it had only worsened, and with the grass eaten down to the roots, the cattle had scattered in search of any browse.

  At the ranch house, the stream through the valley was bone-dry and the cistern and dirt tanks were empty. The pond and the well still produced water, although the flow had slowed.

  Throughout the winter they’d kept the horses corralled by the ranch house, getting them saddle ready for the army. The Double K still had a quartermaster contract for twenty horses, but with money short, George, the hired hand, had been let go. The task of gentling and training the ponies fell mostly to Patrick, who quickly proved himself to be about the best bronc rider Cal had seen in a long spell. With Patrick busy with the ponies, Cal spent his time day-herding cattle over twenty square miles of pastures, valleys, and high country, trying to keep them alive.

  With the coming of spring, Cal and Patrick were out every day looking for strays. Most of the profits they had been banking on from the army contract had already been eaten up by wagonloads of horse feed purchased on credit in Tularosa and brought to the ranch by Ignacio and Cesario. Once they settled their accounts for the feed and other bills, Cal figured they’d be lucky if they came away with a twenty-dollar gold piece. And he wasn’t counting on any more quartermaster contracts. Talk in Tularosa was that the army planned to shut down Fort Stanton now that Geronimo and his bucks had been shipped off to Florida and the Apache menace had ended.

  At the southernmost pasture, the cow tracks wandered off in the direction of Hinman Rhodes’s homestead. A Civil War veteran, Rhodes had been a colonel in a volunteer infantry regiment out of Illinois. His oldest son, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a young cowboy six years older than Patrick, had worked for a time at the Bar Cross, the biggest outfit on the Jornada, before leaving for California to go to college.

  “That’s where they’re headed,” Patrick said, his head bent low, reading the trail.

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p; “Reckon so,” Cal said.

  Patrick jigged his horse and loped ahead under a brilliant, cloudless sky. During the winter, he’d sprouted to five-ten, gained muscle, and filled out in the chest. His square shoulders, blue eyes, thick eyebrows, and long legs reminded Cal of John Kerney. From a distance, he looked like a fully grown man. Only up close did his boyish features give him away as a fifteen-year-old.

  Like his pa, Patrick was quiet by nature, but he lacked John Kerney’s sense of humor. Most found him standoffish; others thought him downright disagreeable. Either way, it didn’t seem to matter much to the lad.

  Cal smiled at Patrick’s eagerness to raise the Rhodes homestead. The lad loved to read, and Colonel Rhodes had shelves of books that he let Patrick borrow two at a time. Reading by lamplight at night, Patrick raced through tomes by Dickens, Scott, Cooper, Longfellow, Byron, and the like. When he was done with the books, Cal would read them. Sometimes, they read aloud to each other.

  They entered the mouth of the canyon, rounded a curve, and slowed to a stop when they spotted smoke rising from the cabin chimney. Colonel Rhodes, his wife, Julia, and their two younger children, Helen and Clarence, had spent the winter in Mesilla and weren’t due back at the homestead until summer.

  “Trouble?” Patrick asked. During the Rhodes’s absence, the remote two-room cabin had become a convenient way station for rustlers and outlaws looking to slip the law. They had come upon some tough hombres in the past.

  “Maybe,” Cal said as he scanned the horse shelter, the cowshed, and the plot of fenced pasture close to the spring in the narrow canyon. The small herd of cows they’d tracked milled around the spring, and a saddled horse lazed in the pasture, ready to make tracks for his rider at a moment’s notice. A fresh, uncured cowhide draped over a cedar rail. Not signs of someone with a law-abiding nature.

  But it wasn’t always easy to tell fine, upstanding citizens from hardened pistoleros. It was common practice on the open range to butcher an unbranded stray or a maverick for beef. A broke, hungry cowboy without a job didn’t think twice about it. Mavericking went on all the time during brandings and roundups, and most ranchers bragged about never eating their own beef at the table. But with the drought taking its toll and leaving so many dead cattle on the range, every cow mattered.

  “Let’s act neighborly so as not to rile anyone inside,” Cal cautioned as they approached.

  They stopped well short of the cabin, and Cal called out to announce their presence. Quickly the cabin door opened and a bowlegged, bearded, one-eyed cowboy with a gap between his two front teeth and a six-gun low on his hip stepped out.

  Cal recognized him instantly. “Howdy, Bud.”

  “Is that you, Cal?” Bud McPherson asked, squinting with his one good eye.

  “I reckon,” Cal replied. “It’s been a long time. I heard you were up Montana way.”

  “Drifted back sometime ago,” McPherson replied, giving Patrick a quick, wary glance. “Who’s your pard?”

  “This here lad is Pat,” Cal said.

  Being called a lad didn’t sit well with Patrick, and he shot Cal a prickly look before touching the brim of his hat in a greeting.

  “Those are our cows yonder at the spring,” Cal added, ignoring Patrick’s sulkiness. “We rode sign to find them. We’ll collect them and be on our way.”

  McPherson relaxed a bit. “You turned to ranching?”

  Cal shrugged. “Keeps the law from worrying over me.”

  McPherson chuckled. “Climb down and have some coffee. I’m just camped here for a few days. Found the place empty.”

  “I could use a cup,” Cal said, turning to Patrick. “Start those cows up range. I’ll be along shortly.”

  Patrick balked. “I need books.”

  “Not this time,” Cal replied sternly as he swung out of the saddle. “Get those cows moving so we can raise the ranch pasture by sundown.”

  Patrick stared hard at Cal before turning his pony and trotting away.

  “Lad’s a book reader, is he?” McPherson said as he stepped inside the cabin.

  “That he is,” Cal said.

  “Well, I ain’t ever seen so many books in a homesteader’s cabin before,” McPherson said as he walked to the big stone fireplace and reached for the coffeepot. “Those folks must plumb not have enough to do.”

  “The owner is an educated man,” Cal said, looking around. Everything seemed to be in its place: the tall bookshelf, the piano, the pots by the hearth, the furniture the colonel had made himself. There were some dirty dishes on the table and some clothes soaking in a pot of water, but Bud hadn’t caused any damage to the place as far as Cal could see.

  McPherson handed Cal a tin cup, filled it with coffee, and poured one for himself. “Sit a spell,” he said as he kicked a chair back from the table.

  Cal pulled up a chair across from McPherson.

  “Is that your boy riding with you?” Bud asked.

  Cal took a sip and shook his head. “His pa is dead. I look after him. He fights the bit once in a while, but mostly he’s a good lad if you can put up with his sullen moods. You may have met some of his other kinfolks sometime back.”

  “Not around here, I reckon.”

  “Nope, up on the panhandle when you and your boys were none too careful about what you threw a rope at.”

  Bud laughed. “Hell, that was a long time ago, and I admit we didn’t stop to tip our hats and say howdy. Doubtful I’d remember his kin.”

  “Dick Turknet brags he paid half what your horses were worth before you lit out for Montana.”

  “Them ponies were some fine horseflesh. Old Dick caught me with empty pockets and a sheriff on my trail looking to hang me.”

  Cal pushed the tin cup to one side. “For horse thieving or murder?”

  “From his point of view, a little bit of both, I reckon.” Bud squinted at him with his one good eye. “Why the all-fired interest in what happened in Texas?”

  “Because you killed that lad’s kin in Texas,” Cal replied. “And from what I gather, you haven’t stopped your murdering ways.”

  McPherson dug for his six-shooter, and Cal shot him between the eyes before he could clear leather. His head snapped back and he slumped forward in the chair.

  Cal didn’t feel the least bit bad about shooting McPherson. The man’s habit of killing people had made a mess of Patrick’s young life. And if Colonel Rhodes and his family had been at the cabin when McPherson showed up, they’d likely all be dead.

  At the Doña Ana County courthouse there was a wanted poster out of Arizona for McPherson with a reward of five hundred dollars, dead or alive. He’d gunned down a deputy sheriff in Tucson.

  In better times, Cal would have planted McPherson in a shallow grave, turned his horse loose in Cottonwood Canyon to find its way, and forgotten about it. But five hundred dollars would keep the Double K afloat for another year without going hat in hand to the bank.

  He got McPherson’s horse from the corral, tied his body across the saddle, packed up his bedroll, cleaned up the blood inside the cabin as best he could, and put out the fire. Before starting out, he looked for books Patrick hadn’t read and settled on one about the Revolutionary War hero John Paul Jones and a worn copy of Robinson Crusoe.

  He stuffed them in his saddlebags and set out at a lope. He should have no trouble catching up to Patrick trailing those slow-moving cows. The lad would have to get them to the ranch by himself, but he was enough of a hand to do it.

  Patrick would surely be curious why Bud McPherson was suddenly deceased. Cal pondered the best way to explain it. He settled on the notion that John Kerney’s son deserved to know that some justice had finally been served.

  He caught up to Patrick trailing behind the tiny herd in a long valley that snaked between two bleak ridgetops and gave him the lowdown on Bud McPherson.

  Patrick gazed at the body draped across the saddle. “How do you know he was one of the killers?” he asked.

  “Your pappy learned of i
t years ago. He just didn’t see a reason to go chasing after McPherson up Montana way. Not with a boy to find and raise.”

  “Well, then I guess it’s a good thing you shot him for what he did,” Patrick said. “But there was no need to send me away before the gunplay.”

  “There’s no sport in seeing a man shot down,” Cal replied.

  “I don’t need to be mollycoddled.”

  “I’ll decide what you need until you’re full grown. I’ll be gone for a day or two getting this straightened out with the sheriff. You head home and stay close by.”

  Patrick nodded abruptly and spurred his horse in the direction of the cattle. He didn’t turn to look back until Cal was well out of earshot. For years, he’d heard about the murder of John Kerney’s kin on the Texas panhandle, but he had no strong feelings one way or the other about McPherson or his gang. Those folks who’d been killed long ago had never been real to him. He felt no binding ties to them. McPherson’s death meant nothing to him one way or the other. The five-hundred-dollar reward Cal had mentioned sure was good news in hard times, though.

  Still miffed at missing the gunplay at the cabin, Patrick watched Cal disappear up a rocky draw. He sure would like to have seen that, and who was to say what he needed?

  He moved the small herd along at a good pace, chasing a few strays now and then, and raised the ranch at dusk. He put the cattle in the pasture next to the horse corral, fed the ponies some hay, and fixed a dinner of beefsteak, boiled potatoes, and canned peaches. He sat at the kitchen table with his food and looked over the two books Cal had brought him from the colonel’s library. The Robinson Crusoe one looked interesting, and he was soon engrossed in the story, until he got too drowsy to continue.

  A clear sky had let the night cool down nicely, and he was tired from a long day. Tomorrow, he’d ride to the far north canyon where two years ago Cal had hired a crew to dig a well and put up a windmill. The windmill fed a big dirt-and-rock stock tank that held three hundred gallons of water, and to keep every critter on the basin from drinking it dry, they’d fenced off the narrow entrance to the high-walled canyon.