Hard Country Page 31

  It was here John Kerney had bought the milled lumber to build the barn he planned to raise, only to die carting it home.

  Cal reined in at Blazer’s adobe house next to a saddled pony hitched to the post. The house had a cupola on top of the second story that looked over the sawmill and gristmill two hundred feet downstream. Blazer stepped out to greet him before he could dismount. An old-timer who’d come to the territory soon after the War Between the States, Blazer was in his late sixties. He had a full white beard, white hair, and a long face with narrow eyes.

  Doc Blazer had been a witness to one of the most famous gunfights of the Lincoln County War: a shootout in which Billy the Kid and the Regulators traded lead with Buckshot Roberts at the gristmill. The fight had left a Regulator dead and Roberts mortally wounded.

  “Cal Doran,” Doc Blazer said genially. “Light and set a spell. There’s fresh coffee on the stove.”

  “Now, that’s a remedy I could use on this bone-chilling day,” Cal said as he eased out of the saddle.

  Doc Blazer ushered him into the kitchen, where James Kaytennae sat at the table with his hat pushed back, feet crossed, and a biscuit in his hand, completely at ease. A tribal police officer badge was pinned to his shirt. He nodded a wordless greeting.

  “I thought you’d given up on the police,” Cal said as he shucked his coat.

  “I tried,” James answered, eyeing the tin star on Cal’s shirt, “but Lieutenant Stottler says I track too good and speak too good white-eyes lingo to go back to being a camp Indian. Seems you the same.”

  Cal nodded. “Yep, I got drafted into keeping the peace again. I’ve been hankering to hear about the Apache who gave Henry Fountain that pony. What can you tell me?”

  “He went to live at White Tail. Somebody said the colonel had long time done a favor for the old man; that’s why he gave the pony.”

  Cal waited for Kaytennae to say more, but he ate another biscuit instead.

  “I wonder if the old man saw any strangers following Fountain,” Cal said.

  Doc Blazer brought the coffeepot to the table, poured a cup for Cal, one for himself, and sat. “If he didn’t, I did,” he said. “Albert and Henry spent the night here on their way home. Much later after they left, I saw two riders pass by. Although I could not see their faces clearly, as they were some distance away, I was worried for the colonel because he told me he recognized some suspicious characters on the road from Lincoln.”

  “Was it two riders, or one rider and a pack animal?” Cal asked.

  “Just two riders,” Doc Blazer replied. “I didn’t see a pack animal.”

  “Were they bearded or clean shaven?”

  “Bearded, as best I could tell.”

  “Did Fountain mention any names?” Cal asked.

  “No, but he feared for his safety. Someone had handed him a piece of paper at the Lincoln courthouse before he met with the grand jury on the cattle cases. It said, ‘If you drop this we will be your friends. If you go on with it you will never reach home alive.’ He showed it to me.”

  “Who gave him the note?” Cal asked.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “I found his lost horses two days past,” James Kaytennae said quietly. “One buckboard pony and the pinto, long ride apart. Big stain on the wagon horse. Maybe blood. No more tracks. I sent ponies to the sheriff with the stage driver.”

  “Where did you find them?” Cal asked.

  “West and south. Sheriff will send men to look. I think the bodies are gone forever.”

  “Probably so,” Cal said.

  Doc Blazer sighed. “The colonel said he could take care of any trouble if it arose. He seemed to think no man would dare to harm him with young Henry at his side.”

  “White eyes would,” James Kaytennae said flatly.

  Neither Cal nor Doc Blazer protested the comment. The three men finished their coffee in silence.

  * * *

  After bidding Doc Blazer good-bye, Cal and James Kaytennae rode together to Mescalero. On the way, Cal told Kaytennae that Patrick was living with Emma and her daughter, Molly, at the Double K.

  Kaytennae grunted his approval. “It is good that she has taken Walks Alone to her bed.”

  “It surely does seem to be a tonic for the lad,” Cal replied.

  The wind picked up and lashed the snow that had fallen earlier in the week into their faces. They turned up their collars, lowered their hats and high-loped the horses to the agency headquarters.

  “It’s too late for you to ride on,” James announced as they arrived at his one-room cabin. “Birds say much colder tonight. You stay here. Bring saddle inside. Otherwise my uncle will take it. He likes stealing things from white eyes.”

  “What about my pony?” Cal asked.

  Kaytennae shook his head. “Too big for his treasure bag.”

  They fed and watered their horses, put them out to pasture, and carried their gear inside. James lit a fire and put the coffeepot on the stove.

  “Is Lieutenant Stottler still locking up parents who won’t send their children to school?” Cal asked as he sat on a sheepskin rug.

  Kaytennae nodded sadly and grinned at the same time. “More bad than that now. Lieutenant locks up the grandmothers and stops rations to the parents. It big mistake to make war on Apache grandmothers. Somebody put witchcraft on him. He won’t live to be old man, for sure.”

  “How long does he have?” Cal asked.

  “Not soon enough, grandmothers say,” James replied. “They upset he make all the men wear white eyes clothes and fence a piece of land for farming. Many warriors just get drunk instead. You hear Tom Dunphy’s wife dead?”

  “No, what happened?”

  “Hung herself in the barn. Dunphy dead too.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Somebody shot him. Stottler sent me to bring Dunphy to Mescalero for meeting and I found him on the front porch with hole in his head. Some cattle missing too, maybe fifty. I left Dunphy there and followed the cattle to the Upper Penasco, but trail died. White eyes steal them.”

  “I didn’t hear about any cattle thieves up this way,” Cal said.

  Kaytennae shrugged. “Maybe rustlers come from Seven Rivers.”

  “That would have been a long trek off the plains to steal fifty cows,” Cal said. “Besides, why didn’t they take all those critters? We trailed a hundred and fifty up here.”

  Kaytennae shrugged again.

  “Doesn’t make sense. So who killed Dunphy?”

  Kaytennae shook his head. “Only tracks I found around the house were my own. I told Lieutenant Stottler and he sent out some white eyes to bury him Christian next to his woman.”

  Over a meal of mutton, Cal and James Kaytennae talked about the Fountain murders. Kaytennae questioned how white-eyes law could trust men to tell the truth when the white-eyes fathers lied and stole from the Apache all the time. Cal told him most of the time the law wasn’t about truth but who was the better liar. During the evening, he tried to get James to talk more about the murder of Tom Dunphy but got nowhere with it.

  In the morning, Cal said thanks and adios. James asked him to give his greetings to Walks Alone.

  “I’ll do it,” Cal replied, “although he doesn’t much appreciate the moniker.”

  “Moniker?” Kaytennae inquired with a puzzled look.

  “The name you gave him.”

  Kaytennae nodded. “Tell him it’s good to have an Apache name. All the tribe knows who he is.”

  “And that’s good?”

  Kaytennae shrugged. “Maybe my uncle won’t steal from him.”

  Cal laughed. “I’ll tell him that.”

  He rode off pretty much convinced that James Kaytennae had shot Tom Dunphy and that a number of Apache families were supplementing their meager government rations with cuts of prime Hereford beef. The idea of it made him smile, but his smile faded when he thought about telling Emma what had happened to Dunphy and her sister.

  He wondered if it w
ould throw her off her feed to be told. Probably not. He hadn’t heard her mention either one of them by name since the day she left Pine Tree Canyon. He figured the presence of little Molly had to be a constant reminder of her ordeal at the hands of Dunphy and her sister, but not once had Emma shown that baby girl anything but love. He marveled at her grit.

  41

  Lincoln, once known as La Placita del Rio Bonito, sat in a narrow, lush valley along the Rio Bonito. Rich farm- and pastureland bordered the watercourse, and steep hills rose up on both sides of the town. Houses, hotels, saloons, and businesses lined the wagon road through the busy county seat. The only prominent structure remaining from the original Spanish settlement was a large circular tower called a torreón, where early villagers had gathered for safety during the many Apache raids.

  Across from the two-story adobe courthouse stood the Wortley Hotel, a low-slung building with a sloping roof and veranda sheltered by a line of trees. Cal put Bandit in the livery, took a room for the night, and went looking for Curly Long, an old-timer who never missed a jury trial or a hanging if he could help it and never turned down a free drink.

  Curly was a harmless, stove-up old wrangler without a lick of hair on his head, and Cal found him in the saloon next door to the hotel watching a game of billiards. He asked Curly what he knew about Fountain’s time in town with the grand jury.

  “Things were already popping with excitement by the time the colonel got here,” Curly said. “Folks came from miles around to see if Lee and his partner Bill McNew would be indicted for cattle thieving, and when Colonel Fountain had that calf skin spread out on the courtroom floor showing the altered brand, everyone figured their gooses were cooked.”

  “Did you see anyone pass Fountain a note on the last day?” Cal asked.

  Curly scratched his beard and peered at Cal with his bleary red eyes. “All this talking makes a man parched.”

  “Get us a bottle,” Cal said, handing Curly some coins, “and we’ll sit a spell.”

  Curly showed his crooked, stained teeth, hurried to the bar at the back of the room, and returned with a bottle and two glasses.

  “About that note given to Fountain,” Cal prodded.

  “Didn’t know nothing about it until after the colonel and his boy disappeared. Then there was talk.” Curly paused to knock back a glass. “I hear tell the note was pressed on him by someone in the crowd waiting to get into the courtroom. Some folks are saying the note came from one of Oliver Lee’s cowboys, but I was there and those boys were giving the colonel a wide berth. Not one was within ten feet of him. In fact, several had skinned out of town the night before.”

  “What about Bill Carr?” Cal asked.

  “One-Eye Bill Carr? He weren’t around at all.”

  “You certain?” Cal asked.

  “I rode with Bill, so I should knowed him.”

  “How about somebody who looked like old Bill?” Cal asked.

  Curly stroked his beard. “There was a fella. Him and a pard had a room at the Wortley. But he had two good eyes.”

  After a glass with Curly, Cal returned to the Wortley and asked the innkeeper about the men.

  “Yes,” the innkeeper replied after checking his register, “a Mr. Wilson and a Mr. Jones. They took a room a day before the grand jury convened and stayed through the whole proceedings. They left soon after the indictments were announced.”

  “How soon?” Cal inquired.

  “Before Colonel Fountain, who was sent off amidst much congratulations.”

  Cal questioned the innkeeper further and learned the men had kept to themselves and caused no trouble during their stay. He came away with descriptions of the two along with the innkeeper’s strong opinion that neither Wilson nor Jones looked a lick like One-Eye Bill Carr.

  Cal spent the rest of the day visiting with folks who’d been at the courthouse during the grand jury proceedings. No one recalled seeing a note passed to Fountain, or seeing Bill Carr in town at the time.

  The next day he talked to the Lincoln County sheriff and his deputies, all the merchants and innkeepers, town folks who knew just about every living soul in the county, and several area ranchers who sided against Oliver Lee and his boys. Some allowed they’d seen two strangers in town that might have been Wilson and Jones, but those who knew him swore Bill Carr hadn’t been around at all.

  Two days of asking questions seemed only to cloud Cal’s investigation. Rumors about the Fountain murders abounded: One mysterious man allegedly shadowed the colonel after he left Lincoln; four unknown men had followed him to Blazer’s Mill; three of Lee’s riders had been seen on the Tularosa Road to Las Cruces. Some said for certain that two years past, Lee and his partner Bill McNew had offered five hundred dollars to have Fountain killed. Others speculated that Judge Fall had masterminded the whole affair.

  There was talk that outside killers had been imported to do the job, while others argued there would have been no need to murder little Henry if that had been the case. The Lee partisans Cal spoke to put the whole affair at the feet of some former members of a band of rustlers known as the Socorro Gang, which Fountain had recently busted up and sent to prison.

  After a night of poor sleep pondering on what to do next, Cal saddled up in the morning with the idea of making a wide circle around the basin, stopping at every settlement, town, and ranch. He needed to find the mysterious Mr. Wilson and Mr. Jones, try to get a lead on any of the ghostly riders who’d supposedly been seen trailing Fountain, and discover if there was any truth to the notion that members of the Socorro Gang had done the killing.

  On the outskirts of town, he met up with George Curry, a politician, former sheriff, and local businessman, returning from White Oaks.

  Cal reined in next to Curry’s buckboard. He had added some heft to his bones and his face had filled out since Cal had last seen him. “George, you may be the only Lincoln citizen I haven’t talked to about the Fountain murders.”

  “Let us correct that grievous error,” Curry replied amicably.

  “Folks tell me you dined with the colonel the night before he left.”

  “Very cordially,” Curry replied, “and with no mention of court business, I might add. If he had a premonition of danger, nothing in his manner showed it.”

  “Were you introduced to two men named Wilson and Jones during their stay at the Wortley Hotel?”

  “I was,” Curry answered. “They’d come over from Socorro, as I recall.”

  Cal had heard the same from several other town folk. “Did they state their business in Lincoln?”

  “Not to me,” Curry said, “but I figured them to be courthouse spectators, not dangerous at all. I’ll wager you’ll find them poor suspects for murder. If I were you, I’d go looking for José Chávez y Chávez.”

  Chávez y Chávez, part Indian and Mexican, had ridden with Billy the Kid during the Lincoln County War and at various times had been both an outlaw and a lawman. He had a mean streak a mile long and was reported to have killed some people in Las Vegas.

  “Why so?” Cal asked, pleased to hear of possible new information.

  “I saw him a day or two before Colonel Fountain left Lincoln. He bought me a drink at the saloon across from the courthouse and said he would keep his promise to me not to cause trouble in town, but that he would get Fountain if he had to hang for it. Those were his exact words.”

  “What was his grievance?” Cal asked.

  “Fountain had gone after José at the grand jury for cattle stealing, but they refused to issue an indictment.”

  “Do you know where he lit out to?” Cal inquired.

  “I can’t help you there,” Curry said. “José is a drifter. He could be just about anywhere. I heard tell that he was seen at Luna’s Well near the White Sands the night before Fountain and his boy were gunned down.”

  “Who saw him?” Cal asked.

  “Can’t say that I know,” Curry said.

  Cal thanked Curry for his time and started down the road to
Fort Stanton. From there, he’d swing a wide loop to Seaborn Gray’s ranch on Salado Flats, the town of White Oaks at the foot of the Jicarilla Mountains, and Socorro along the Rio Grande, trail down the Jornada del Muerto to Engle and Las Cruces, and finally cut back across the Tularosa to Oliver Lee’s Dog Canyon ranch. Hopefully, the journey would shake something out of the brush useful to the investigation.

  At Fort Stanton, Cal found the army post mostly shuttered, the silent quadrangle under a blanket of melting snow, and the buildings empty except for two small units of soldiers. He met with Lieutenant Wright, the commanding officer, who told him José Chávez y Chávez rode through on his way to Tularosa before Colonel Fountain had passed by, and that the fort would officially close in August. A caretaker detachment of soldiers would remain behind to protect the property from vandalism. Neither Lieutenant Wright nor his quartermaster recalled seeing Mr. Wilson and Mr. Jones traveling through on their way to Socorro.

  Since Cal figured to be in the saddle a good two weeks or more, he decided to buy a pack animal at Seaborn Gray’s ranch and get provisions for the trip at the store. The letter of credit Sheriff Ascarate had given him would cover the expense.

  He made it to the ranch in good time and bargained with Seaborn for a surefooted gelding, which he got at a fair price. At the store, he bought a fourteen-dollar packsaddle along with all the victuals and supplies he needed, charged again to the sheriff, and set out on the road to White Oaks, a good thirty miles distant. The road crossed the Nogal Divide to the flats and wound around the Carrizo Mountain before turning north to White Oaks. Except for a few large spreads along the route, it was that big, wondrous country of high mountains and vast rangeland he’d first seen with John Kerney during his quest to find Patrick so many years ago.

  After several days of constant jawboning with the good citizens of Lincoln, Cal looked forward to having as much time to himself as the remainder of the trip allowed. He would camp under the fast-approaching starry night sky and happily not mutter another word, except to his pony, until he reached White Oaks.