Hard Country Page 23

  Patrick fretted that he had been hornswoggled. The Double K wasn’t a big outfit like the Bar Cross and the Diamond A, but it wasn’t a small spread either. Even with the drought and the cattle market gone belly-up, the land with all the improvements had to be worth a pretty penny. He’d poured years of sweat into the Double K and damn sure wasn’t gonna lose it by being stupid.

  Maybe it had been thickheaded to give up on the Double K to begin with. After all, John Kerney had started it for him. Maybe Cal had always wanted it for himself.

  Patrick took to working odd jobs trying to win back a stake so he could return to the Tularosa and set things right. He figured to pay Cal his four hundred dollars and get back to doing what he knew best. Instead, he kept putting his dinero into circulation at the gambling tables and wound up losing his saddle in a faro game. It was a double-rigged, hand-tooled stock saddle with wool-lined fenders and a nickel-plated horn Cal had given him for his fifteenth birthday.

  He couldn’t abide losing it, so he stole it back. When he tried to skedaddle from town on his pony, the town marshal caught him and locked him up. After the trial, the marshal sold Patrick’s pony to pay for his keep in jail and he went to Yuma Prison with absolutely nothing to his name but the clothes on his back.

  Within a month of his arrival at Yuma, a new cell mate named John Flynn arrived and had to sleep on the floor because of overcrowding. A hard case in for manslaughter, Flynn wanted Patrick’s bunk. One evening after mealtime, he picked a fight with Patrick in the exercise yard. The guards broke it up quickly, but it cost Patrick his job in the kitchen. For the next two months, along with Flynn and other hard cases, he broke rock and made adobes on the Troublemaker Crew.

  By the end of every day, six days a week, he was ready to drop. His body ached from his toes to his head. Hours after work ended he could still hear the sound of sledgehammers ringing in his ears.

  He slept with seven other inmates in a stinky, dirty, eight-by-ten-foot cell, one of a double row of cells facing each other along a long corridor. The walls were granite, three feet thick, and an iron grate locked them in at night. Six narrow steel beds, eighteen inches wide, stacked three to a side were anchored to the walls. A bucket served as the crapper. Besides his cell mates, he lived with roaches, bedbugs, lice, fleas, and spiders. He had an upper berth, which made it easy for him to avoid conversation once the guards locked them in. Two men slept on the floor on straw-tick mattresses. Flynn wasn’t one of them; he’d been knifed by another prisoner and was in the hospital dying.

  Most nights during the summer, it didn’t cool down enough to sleep until late, and he would lie awake thinking how much he hated being locked up.

  During the day, he broke rock near the guards who watched over the crew to avoid any further trouble with the hard cases. The strategy worked. In the yard after dinner, he stayed to himself, avoiding the heat-stroked locos who lived in the mental wing, the lily-livered trustees who cowered together like a herd of sheep, and the toughs who roamed trying to get money from the men who sold their handcrafts to town folks on Sundays. The consumptives stayed pretty much isolated in their special ward. He never saw the three women prisoners, who were kept in the inner yard.

  He spent his Sundays in the prison library, reading Mark Twain, Herman Melville, William Dean Howells, and James Fenimore Cooper. He liked tall tales and rousing adventures that made him yearn for his freedom. No matter what happened in the future, he vowed never to get locked up again.

  On Sundays, the only day of rest, the library was the quietest place in the prison. The main yard filled up after church with town folks who came to gawk and buy the prisoners’ handcrafts. Inmates could have family members visit on the Sabbath, and there were always a few men due to be released who got fresh duds to wear when they walked out the gate. Seeing folks walking around free to come and go as they pleased dejected Patrick no end, so he hid out in the library.

  Every Sunday on his rounds, Superintendent Thomas Gates stuck his head in the library, glanced around, and disappeared across the yard. Gates had a shoot-to-kill order on prisoners trying to escape and had enforced it more than once, but he was harsh only with men who deserved it. For those on good behavior, there was an occasional concert to attend put on by townspeople and the freedom to use the library in the evenings after mealtime. As a troublemaker, Patrick could use the library only on Sunday.

  One day Gates spied Patrick teaching Francisco Lopez and another Mexican prisoner some American words and called him outside.

  “You speak Spanish?” Superintendent Gates asked.

  He was a tall man with thin lips and a hawk-like nose. Patrick figured him to be old, maybe fifty.

  “Yes, sir,” Patrick replied.

  “Do you read and write English?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you believe in the good book?” Gates asked.

  Patrick paused only slightly. If being religious would bring him good luck, he’d be a Holy Roller. “I surely do.”

  “What’s your work detail?”

  “I’ve been busting rock, but Officer Hartlee says I’m to go back to the kitchen soon.”

  Gates nodded and walked off without another word. On Monday, he had Patrick brought to his office and made him stand silently at attention while he thumbed through some papers on his desk.

  Madora Ingalls, known to all as Dora, was the wife of Thomas Gates’s friend Frank Ingalls, who had twice been superintendent at Yuma. Dora had started the prison library some years ago, and it had remained her favorite charitable undertaking. The most recent library trustee had died a while back, and Dora had been nagging Gates to appoint another. But this time, she wanted someone who could teach Mexican prisoners English. Dora believed that if the Mexicans learned English they would be less inclined to remain lawbreakers.

  Thomas Gates wasn’t convinced of her logic, but he wasn’t about to argue with a woman as formidable as Dora Ingalls. He scanned Pat Floyd’s record: one reported conviction for theft, one fight started by another prisoner, no other infractions.

  He looked up at Pat Floyd. He seemed a bright enough lad, neither surly nor too submissive, with no record of incorrigibility or violence.

  “You are fluent in both English and Spanish?” Gates asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Patrick replied.

  “And can write in both languages.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I haven’t seen you at Sunday services.”

  Patrick lowered his head. “No, sir.”

  Gates sighed. Sometimes prison moved men away from the Lord. “That must change.”

  “I’ll be there next Sunday for sure,” Patrick said.

  “Good,” Gates said as he wrote a note on the paper in front of him and slid it into a desk drawer. “Starting now, you’re the library trustee. In addition to your normal duties, you will teach English to some Mexicans who will be selected by Mrs. Madora Ingalls.”

  “That would be my job?” Patrick asked.

  Gates nodded. “Keeping the library in order and teaching Mexicans to read. Mrs. Ingalls will inform you of your duties and supervise your work with the Mexican prisoners.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, holding back a smile. Short of getting cut loose, he couldn’t think of anything better than getting off the rock pile and into the library.

  “I’ll tolerate no informality on your part with Mrs. Ingalls. Also, do not fail to meet her expectations. One mistake and you’ll be back on the rock pile, understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s all.”

  The guard who escorted Patrick away from Gates’s office told him Mrs. Ingalls usually arrived after the start of morning work details to select and distribute books to the hospital patients. He unlocked the library and left him alone to wait for Mrs. Ingalls, who soon arrived with a stack of books in her arms, which she placed on the desk.

  “Are you my new trustee?” Dora Ingalls asked. She was a comely woman with a tiny waist and a lively, int
elligent face. A woman of breeding, Patrick figured, never having met one before in person, only in books.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Pat Floyd.”

  “Well, Mr. Floyd, these book have just been donated to the library by some good citizens of Yuma, and we need to catalog them. Let me show you how to do it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Patrick replied.

  “Are you familiar with our library?”

  Patrick nodded.

  She took a ledger out of the desk drawer, explained the cataloging process, and had Patrick enter the title of the book, the subject matter, and the author’s name.

  When he finished, Mrs. Ingalls smiled. “Excellent. You can read and your penmanship is very good.” She handed him a Spanish Bible. “Pick any page and translate a section into English.”

  He thumbed through the Bible and translated three sentences from the Book of Matthew about Jesus sending his disciples out among the people.

  “That will suffice,” Dora Ingalls said cheerfully with an approving nod, taking the book from his hands. “We have much to do. I know there are several of the Mexican prisoners who read and use the library. They will be our first experiments. I’ll guide you as to how to teach them.”

  She gestured at an empty chair as she sat at the table. “Sit. Let’s not waste a moment.”

  * * *

  During his first month as the library trustee, Dora Ingalls kept a close eye on Pat Floyd. She had been initially concerned about his youth. All of the previous trustees Thomas Gates had assigned to the library had been older men convicted of crimes such as embezzlement, forgery, or defrauding creditors. They were of a meek temperament and fell easily into the library routine.

  Her worries were unfounded. Pat Floyd was bright—of that there was no doubt—and he did all that she asked of him without complaint. He was attentive to her but appropriately polite, and according to Reverend Parker he’d attended every Sunday service since his appointment as a trustee.

  Often she would arrive at the library to find him with his head in a book, but she knew nothing about him. Not once had he said anything about his life before coming to the prison. All she knew was that he’d been caught stealing a saddle in Tombstone.

  Only a few Mexican prisoners were interested in learning English, and it was here where Pat struggled, sometimes losing his temper with them as they stumbled over comprehension and pronunciation. He was not, Dora decided, cut out to be a teacher, and while the experiment wasn’t working as well as she had hoped, it was a beginning. Thomas Gates, however, was pleased with the effort and had taken to bringing visiting dignitaries by to show it off.

  After Patrick had served six months as the library trustee, Superintendent Gates met with Dora and asked if he was fit to be released.

  “I am overrun with prisoners,” he explained, “and the governor will grant pardons to those I recommend.”

  “Although I shall be sorry to lose him,” Dora answered, “he shouldn’t be kept here a moment longer.”

  Gates nodded. “I’ll see to it by week’s end.”

  “But you must replace him by then,” Dora noted.

  “Of course,” Gates replied, wondering if any of the newly arrived prisoners would be suitable. After supper, he would carefully review the files.

  29

  Patrick left Yuma Prison through the whitewashed adobe sally port with a five-dollar gold piece Dora Ingalls had pressed into his hand and a pardon made out to Pat Floyd in his pocket. At her insistence, he had promised to get some schooling to advance himself, but he knew he was meant to ranch, not be a scholar. He was still a partner in the Double K, and he’d have it back if it took a year or more to get the money to do it.

  He’d never known a woman like Madora Ingalls. For six months he’d fantasized about her. She was too good for him and that made him angry at times, but he always managed to hide it. He wondered what her husband was like and pictured him as a fat, old man who ate like a pig and always had bits of food in his beard. He imagined her undressing in front of him, seeing her breasts for the first time. He dreamt about her and woke up with the image of her in his mind, her blue eyes sparkling, her face lit up when she smiled.

  He knew he’d never meet anyone like her in a gambling parlor, dance hall, or saloon. Maybe that was the way it was supposed to be. Women like Dora Ingalls were too damn pretty, too smart, and too highfalutin to be interested in the likes of him.

  He walked to town and bought a ticket at the train station for Tucson. Although it was still late spring, it was likely the big outfits outside Tucson would be hiring soon for fall works. If he could get a start, he planned to work his way home to New Mexico. Once there, he’d figure out what to do next.

  Starting right now he was Patrick Kerney, not Pat Floyd, and this time he’d live up to his name. He’d find a way to pay Cal back every cent of that four hundred dollars he’d squandered, even if it took years and he had to live poor to do it.

  He sat on a bench at the station, waiting for the train, staring back hard at the people who passed him by with their noses in the air. They gave him a wide berth and cautious glances as they waited for the train at either end of the platform, far away from him. He felt like he was a different breed than all of them, and it didn’t bother him a bit.

  * * *

  In Tucson, Patrick got a job mucking out stalls at a livery stable for fifty cents a day and a place to sleep. He knew that a cowboy without a saddle was as useless as a milch cow without teats. No self-respecting rancher would hire such a sorry sight. He ate one meal a day and finished up at the end of the month with enough money to buy a beat-up eight-dollar saddle. He patched the torn fenders with some rawhide as best he could, bought some cheap leather-covered steel stirrups, and got a train ticket to Benson. He’d heard that the Wilcox ranch, a huge spread along the San Pedro River, was hiring for fall works. At Benson, he hitched a ride with a supply wagon heading to the ranch. Fats, the old stove-up waddie driving it, told him the boss was fixing to gather from the Dragoon Mountains north to Cochise, a fuel stop on the Southern Pacific, and after that work northwest to the Galiuro Mountains. Fats reckoned the job would last at least a couple of months, maybe longer.

  The Wilcox estancia sat in a valley hard against some pretty, grassy hills. A long house with a pitched roof, a wide veranda, and a chimney smack dab in the center of the building was enclosed by a low, white picket fence. There were haystacks and a grove of fruit trees behind the house, and down by the barn were two adobe bunkhouses and the ranch manager’s cabin. A nearby big corral held a good eighty or so horses, the remuda for the roundup. Fats told him there were at least thirty cowboys already on the payroll. Patrick spotted a bunch of them working with some raw-looking broomtail broncs at another corral out by a pasture.

  He grabbed his saddle and jumped off the wagon at the gate to the picket fence as Fats rattled away in the direction of the cookhouse. A man stepped out to meet him before he reached the veranda. He was rail thin, with a broad nose, deep wrinkles around his eyes, and the leathery skin of lifelong rancher. He was old, far older than Cal.

  Patrick touched the brim of his hat. “Mr. Wilcox?”

  Sam Wilcox nodded as he looked the young cowboy over. His clothes were past due for the rag bin and his saddle was about the sorriest he’d ever seen.

  “I hear you’re hiring,” Patrick said.

  “Could be,” Wilcox said. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Patrick Kerney.”

  Wilcox eyed Patrick with greater interest. “Any kin to John Kerney?”

  “He was my pa.”

  “He’s passed on?”

  “Yes, sir, sometime back, when I was just a button.”

  “Sorry to hear that; he was a good man.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He came west with me out of Texas. He was always looking to find you. I guess he did.”

  “Yes, sir, he did.”

  “You’ve forked cows some?”

  “Y
es, sir, most of my life, and I’m a fair hand with ponies.”

  Wilcox rubbed his nose. There was no reason not to believe the lad, but he wasn’t about to give a job to someone who couldn’t make a hand, no matter who his daddy was. A waddie looking for work on foot wasn’t typical, and the saddle sure didn’t show much pride.

  “Go see my manager, Dan Burgess,” he said. “He’s working those mustangs at the corral in the pasture. If he thinks you’re worth your salt, he’ll take you on.”

  Patrick touched his hat. “I’m obliged.”

  Wilcox waved off the lad’s gratitude. “You go see Dan.”

  * * *

  Dan Burgess watched the young cowboy terrapin his way to the horse corral with a saddle slung over a shoulder. He draped it over a low railing and found space between two of the boys at the fence who were watching Jack Thorpe working a bronc.

  The lad looked like he’d fallen on hard times and Dan wasn’t one to throw bones to stray dogs. He wanted hard-riding hands who could work the brush, the flats, and the high country without being mollycoddled. He gave the cowboy a brief nod and returned his attention to the corral.

  The corral had two gates, one opened to a fenced pasture for horses, the other to the outside range. Young ponies and wild mustangs were brought to the horse corral, where they were snubbed to the snubbing post, blindfolded, hackamored, saddled, and ridden for the first time. It was a long, drawn-out process. A year could pass before a cow pony was ready to work cattle.

  Today, Dan had his best riders working with some top broncos brought in from the south range that Mr. Wilcox wanted saddle broke as cow ponies. Burgess had handpicked the broncos himself. Sound in body, quick of foot, spirited, and intelligent, they would be more valuable once trained than any other animals on the ranch. They had to be good at cutting cows in and out of bunches, running fast in spurts, stopping and turning quickly, and not shy of the rider’s lariat.