I knew it was coming. ‘Fancy rig,’ he said. ‘You a lawman?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Just as well; we already got a county sheriff. It’s a small county and he don’t need a deputy here. He’s got one up at Riverton, the county seat, but he prefers to be down here. Fishing’s better. Most of the time, like me, he has trouble finding something to do other than arrest a few busted drunks when we need Main Street cleaned of horse shit for free.’
‘That would be?’
‘Billy Bob Hunt. Been elected three times in a row.’
‘And across the river?’
‘They got their own law over there. Mexicans have little respect for federal law but they keep it south of the river, mostly. And when they don’t, old Billy Bob goes fishing for crappies up at Springwater Creek. Clear water there before it reaches the big river.’
‘You know a good place to eat?’
‘Mostly Mex food and mostly hot. Not your thing? Then try the Blue Parrot. It’s a restaurant out back of the Wayfarer’s Hotel. Food’s mostly good and the hotel is clean if you are staying a while.’
‘And a quiet waterhole?’
‘Well, there is a bar in the Wayfarer’s and the only other one this side of the river is the Red Diamond down the end of the street, just short of the jail. If you were a respectable cattleman you could use the drovers club, but I do not think you are.’
I gave him my practised deadeye look and he flushed.
‘A drover, I mean.’
I smiled, thanked him, resettled my hat and walked back out into the sunshine, across Main Street to the livery, and set about hiring a horse for a few days. I had no idea as to how many those days might be, but I didn’t want to rent an animal chosen in haste, one I couldn’t handle. Stock would need careful scrutiny before I put it between my legs. Big horses worry me, and I did not believe San Pedro would have a Morgan to rent . . . but I was wrong there.
CHAPTER FIVE
Billy Bob Hunt
I registered for a room at the Wayfarer’s Hotel and signed the book as Louis Bassett of Wichita, noting as I did so that Henrietta Larsson of San Antonio was there six days ahead of me. I had a wash, changed my clothes and made arrangements with the desk clerk to have my dirty gear picked up and laundered. It was quite a sophisticated burg for such a no-account small town, and I wondered where the influence for the comforts of the Wayfarer originated.
Like a lot of hot places, south Texas could burn you to death during the day and freeze the cojones off you when the sun went down. In the hotel diner, I sat as near as possible to the large potbellied stove as I could. Supper was good; Ben the barber had been right. I had steak, well cooked, with beans and baked potatoes and sat back warming my hands around a steaming mug of hot coffee.
Then he came, as I knew he would: sometimes the law can be as predictable as sunrise.
Sheriff Billy Bob Hunt was an elderly, short and rotund man in a frayed and well-worn tan three-piece wool suit, the buttoned vest adorned by a silver watch chain and a polished nickel star. His bright eyes belied his age, set deep in a tanned face lined like old leather, grey hair poking out beneath a tan derby hat. His smile was wide and his handshake firm. ‘Mind if I join you for coffee, Mr Bassett?’
‘No, sir,’ I said and waved him to a seat opposite me.
‘Welcome to our peaceful little community, and whatever your business here is, I hope you enjoy your stay, be it brief or long. If you are passing through, then I would suggest north rather than south. Mexico is having one of its fretful little turns at present and the border is not as it should be.’
He smiled a genuine, white-mouthed smile, and as much as it reminded me of a ’gator eying up its next meal, I had the feeling he really was just trying to be friendly. He offered me a stogie and I accepted it, looking directly into his eyes as I took a light from his match.
‘Just one small thing, Mr Bassett.’ He reached into his inside pocket and took out a folded sheet of paper, unfolded it and spread it out on the table, smoothing the creases as he did so.
It was a good likeness. It was a federal Wanted dodger. The Peaceful River Kid wanted in Patterson County for questioning regarding the aggravated felonious assault on a federal officer of the law. So, this what was what Beaufort was smiling about when he said he had ‘seeded the mine’.
‘Not a bad likeness,’ I said, ‘but I wouldn’t be seen dead in a hat like that, and I was never six feet tall.’
That alligator smile again. ‘What the hell is aggravated felonious assault doing way out here? Assault is assault; how can it be anything but aggravated?’
I shrugged, pulled on my smoke and waited.
‘Patterson County is out of my jurisdiction but they’ve got a good man down there in Tad Jones. He wants you; no doubt he will hear you are here and come get you if the ride is worthwhile, and I doubt that it is. We still don’t hold federal law in any great stead down here.’
‘I am sure he would, Sheriff Hunt. I am pretty sure he would.’
He studied on my answer for a long moment and said, ‘Several strangers in town at present. Unusual this time of year. . . . Not part of some religious gathering, are you?’
‘You serious?’
‘No,’ he laughed, ‘not really, just so long as you’re not about to start a war, you are welcome to San Pedro.’
‘No war, no revolution and no bibles, I promise you. Just passing through is all, and needed a rest.’
He got to his feet, smiled again and turned to leave, turning back just as reached the door. ‘You like fishing, Mr Bassett? If so, you come by and see me and I’ll show you a little touch of paradise in this sun-baked Godforsaken county.’
CHAPTER SIX
The loop
I read in a book somewhere that there is a plant that stinks so bad that only big blue-tailed flies can smell it. It attracts the biggest and the best, and once they have wandered inside of the thing they are never see again. I sometimes think I am the human equivalent to that plant in the way I attract attention from some of my fellow human beings. Life is a loop – mine seems to be, anyway – and I knew it would not be long before that blue-tail fly sought me out.
The following day, after a long and uneventful rest, I finished my evening meal of a well-cooked steak and baked potatoes awash in a sea of onion gravy. I tipped the attractive waitress far too generously, thanked her for lighting my stogie and made my way out of the Blue Parrot, through the hotel lobby and onto Main Street. It was a little after nine and the smoky coal oil lamps were spluttering in the cool evening breeze that drifted up from the distant Rio Grande. It was too early for bed and there had been no contact with Henrietta Larsson. Maybe she was not aware of my arrival, so I used that thinking as my excuse for drifting down the street and into the Red Diamond saloon.
There were maybe a dozen customers seated or standing in the smoky gloom, one being Billy Bob Hunt playing dominoes with another elderly gent. He looked up and nodded, but that was all.
I bellied up to the bar and ordered a beer without a head. The barkeep glared but said nothing. I picked up a week-old copy of the San Antonio Times, which I guessed had been left by a fellow traveller, took out my spectacles and settled myself down for a quiet read of it.
And so the loop began.
Careful not to catch his eye, I studied the man in the long bar mirror. He was a big man, bulging belly but slim of hip and small of feet. He looked a bit like a kid’s whipping top. He wore a dark brown suit over a white collarless shirt. His derby hat was propped on the back of his head and the deep-set eyes were filled with fire. He was arguing horse prices with a wizened little man in similar attire but, unlike the big man, he did not wear a sidearm as far as I could see. The big man was packing a Colt .45 SA Army in a tied-down tan leather holster. I studied on the paper but could not help but be aware of the harshly raised voice of the big man. Unhappy with the lack of response from his small companion, he cast his eyes around the smoky room and settle
d them upon me, just as I was looking in the mirror and wondering why old Billy Bob paid no heed to the growing ruckus that any lawman worth his salt would have been on to in a heartbeat.
The loop, the stinking plant and the blue-tail fly.
‘You,’ the big man said, ‘stranger, can I buy you a drink?’ He moved away from his companion, his fire-lit eyes focusing on me.
‘No, thank you, sir,’ I said, ‘I only ever have the one.’
‘Where you from, friend?’
I took off my reading spectacles and placed them in their soft leather case, carefully folded the newspaper and finished my drink.
‘You hear me, old man, or are you deaf as well as blind?’
There is no escaping the loop.
‘I am neither, sir, but if you are really interested in my origins, I am from just about anywhere.’
He thought about that for a moment, shuffling a step or two down the bar. I was aware that the dominoes were no longer clicking and the barkeep had disappeared.
‘You’re the stranger in town. Rumour is you are on the dodge, is that right?’
‘Don’t believe all you hear. A rumour is just that: a rumour.’
‘Do you know who I am?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘and I am not that much interested, either.’
‘Jimmy the Deuce.’
‘Colourful,’ I said. ‘And now that we are acquainted, I think it to be my bedtime.’ I stepped away from the bar, as did he.
‘You any good with that fancy rig you’re wearing?’
‘Better than most,’ I said, ‘and far too good for you, Jimmy the Deuce.’ It was a baiting remark but I was tired and, whatever I said, nothing was going to leave the loop open.
He stepped away from the bar and let his coat fall open. I heard a scraping of chairs behind me as customers got out of the line of any possible fire. I wondered if one of them was Sheriff Billy Bob Hunt . . . or had he already gone fishing? What to do? Perhaps it was time I got noticed; nothing travels faster than the news of a gunfight.
Jimmy was thinking, I supposed, of a smart reply and not coming up with one pulled. He was fast, but not fast enough by a long shot. The muzzle of his Colt was barely clear of the leather before he was looking down the barrel of mine. He froze.
‘I told you so, Jimmy the Deuce, but you don’t listen so good, do you?’ It wasn’t much of a question and I did not expect an answer, so I dropped the hammer and capped a round, blowing off most of his right ear. He screamed, dropped his gun and held his hand to his ruined ear, the blood dripping through his fingers. His little companion stared at me, not quite sure he believed what had just happened.
‘You got a sawbones in town?’ I addressed the question directly to him, raising my voice a little above the moaning of the crumpled Jimmy the Deuce. He nodded. ‘Then get him there, pronto, before he bleeds to death.’
The barkeep reappeared and helped the little man and his weeping companion out through the swing doors.
I flipped open the loading gate of my Colt, put it to half cock and, turning the cylinder to the spent brass, rodded it clear and replaced it with a live round. I placed the spent casing on the bar. ‘Souvenir,’ I said quietly to the white-faced barkeep. ‘Remember you had the Peaceful River Kid in here this evening.’ I smiled the words but he remained white-faced.
And the loop was closed one more time.
The air stank of black powder smoke and my ears were ringing. Billy Bob Hunt walked over to me. ‘Buy you a drink?’
‘Why not?’ I said.
‘Two beers, Larry, and no heads.’
‘Shouldn’t you have stepped in there somewhere, Sheriff?’ I said.
‘Maybe so, but I was curious to see how you made out. You would not have been the first pistolero Jimmy Olds put in the ground. You did OK, but Jimmy was one right-hand man to Frank Vagg, who’s a big shot around these parts, so watch your back.’
‘Thanks for the warning.’
‘Not so much a warning; more by the way of advice. As for not stepping in? That’s easy: I believe you are going to be trouble to me. Jimmy is always trouble to me, so either way it went would have been a win-win situation for me.’ He gave me the alligator smile and walked away carrying his beer, and pretty soon the dominoes were clicking again.
Some town, San Pedro.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Frank Vagg
The Rio Grande was running low, an ideal time to cross the border and see to it that his interests in the Mexican side of the river were under control. A horseman could cross without getting his boots wet, but when it was running high in the rainy season, it was a swim. Not that Frank Vagg ever rode a horse across the river: he had a boat and an oarsman to carry his lightweight frame across. Frank Vagg did not like horses and he did not readily take to the border country, but it so suited his purpose in life, which was to make money. It was a boundary he could cross whenever he chose. It was a border that would, he suspected, forever be a gateway of hope to the Mexicans and a thorn in the side of the United States of America.
Vagg felt his position to be safe, and he was comfortable with men he trusted to ensure his well-being. With troubled New Mexico to the north, Chihuahua to the south and the border town of El Paso to his west, he felt certain that if the railway came, it would come San Pedro’s way. He heard a whisper that the government were staking money on it, so it stood to reason, he thought, that his money should follow theirs.
Although border conflict was rare, minor irritations were always apparent. But both sides offered lucrative rewards and San Pedro was highly suited for just about any game in town. The possibility of the Denver and Rio Grande railroad cutting west from Abilene and reaching this far down was a gift from heaven – if he believed in such a place, which he did not. He believed in very little beyond his own controlling influence backed by US coin. He was a grey cadaver of a man, a pale skull of a face with a short white goatee. He had a malnourished look about him that belied the energy he could muster in a crisis, and there had been many such moments in his life. His crumpled white suit hung loosely upon his bones, and the wide brim of his Panama straw protected his balding, liver-spotted scalp from the sun in the daytime and the coolness of the night, and rested on his large ears.
Frank Vagg sat his rocking chair and watched the misty evening draw in around him, the air filled with the night sounds of the wetlands and the river. He could smell it: that muddy smell filled with promise. He could hear it: the crickets, the night birds and the bullfrogs. Once he thought he heard the distant scream of a cougar but was not sure; from south of the river many sounds drifted up to the front porch of his large adobe ranch house, and not all of it from the wildlife. The men he commanded in south San Pedro, mostly brutal renegade Yaqui who bore no allegiance to Mexico or the US, were far removed from those he employed on the Texas side of the river. He drew on his cigar and contemplated the day. It had not been a day that had filled him with pleasure. Jimmy Olds, one of his most trusted men, had gotten the best part of his right ear shot off by some drifter and he thought he had heard one of the many songs of the raven that morning.
Frank Vagg hated ravens with a passion. He considered them birds of ill omen and always had, from way back when he was a youngster in the Big Thicket country on the Arkansas border. He had seen two large, black birds pecking at the eyes of the dead cattle strewn across the dry grassland of his father’s two-by-four ranch. Ravens were a rare sight in that part of the country: a migrating pair, he assumed. He did not blame the drought for the death of the cattle, nor for the death of his father, who had shot himself in the head following the death of that last steer. He did not blame the god his father had worshipped and trusted. He blamed the raven; it was the only tangible thing to hate. The raven feasted on the hate within him. His mother had died giving birth to his sister Margaret so, alone, the pair of orphans had been shipped off to an aunt and uncle in Virginia to be abused, beaten and raised as a duty without love or compassion. As a teenager, the
young Frank Morris, a surname he later changed to Vagg, had killed them both with a stolen English sawed-off shotgun and fled with his young sister in tow. They disappeared – ‘gone to Texas’, as the saying went. It was a saying he was very fond of.
Ravens were filthy birds and were everywhere throughout this rocky landscape he called home. But no ravens flew above the Circle V. He had placed a handsome bounty on their black hides. At first it had been an easy bounty to earn, but not so now; the raven was, as much as he hated the thought, a smart bird and quickly learned where the boundaries of the ranch were and tended not to stray across the land where so many of their kin had disappeared. They were in for a bit of a shock. He smiled at the thought: the Circle V was set to expand.
The Yaqui he employed had done and continued to do an excellent job, crossing the border, firing homesteads, destroying crops and rustling cattle – beef he later sold, running them with his own brand. Finding a rough-and-ready Mexican crew was not difficult. The border country was, as was most of Mexico, wallowing in poverty and rife with unrest, as the undemocratic and corrupt rule of President Portifio Diaz offered little reward to the people for their labour or their loyalty. They, like the Yaqui, accepted Vagg’s almighty US dollar happily. The border was but a river and their guns served him well, as many of the frustrated and frightened homesteaders loaded their waggons and whatever belongings were transportable and headed back to the north, as far from the border as possible. Of course, supplying guns to the renegade and restless Mescalero Apaches helped fan the flames.
Vagg paid what he considered to be a fair price for any land purchased, although that was a basic price without any consideration of the hard, backbreaking work the small ranchers or homesteaders had put into their small and often insignificant holdings. But a lot of little, unimportant things joined together made one big thing, and most of the land now in his possession was in line with the route proposed by the government, should the railway move that way; he was given to understand it would. There were still a few stubborn men who refused to sell, but in due course he would slowly persuade them to see the error of their ways.
Where No Ravens Fly Page 3