by Mike Blakely
We studied all this from a distance of a hundred yards, as the last gray light of day slid beyond the mountains in the west. The scene invited us, for we were hungry for fresh meat and thirsty for spring water, and the activity of the fandango excited our senses so long deprived of human society. Rayado Creek gushed nearby, and a cool breeze crept down from the mountains in the west, making us yearn to warm ourselves at a fire. Lucien Maxwell’s adobe ranch house, with its seven chimneys belching smoke into the darkening sky, seemed to me and Toribio as a city, so long had we been in the wilderness among nomads.
I could not help thinking how vulnerable the ranch would be to Indian attack right now, and that surprised me. Kit and Lucien were usually more careful than that. I did not see Kit anywhere in the lantern light, but I did see gangly Lucien Maxwell dancing with his wife, though he was not much of a dancer.
“Toribio,” I said, “do you want to have some fun?”
He looked uncertainly at the fandango, then back at me. “Of course,” he said. I’m sure he was thinking of the feast.
“We should ride into the middle of that fandango, screaming like two Comanche warriors.”
“They will shoot us,” he said.
“Perhaps.”
The boy considered it a moment or two, then I saw him shortening his reins. “I know the Comanche scream,” he said. I saw him smile for the first time since I had ransomed him from that Penateka squaw.
We dug in our heels and leaned forward as the well-trained Comanche ponies bolted. In seconds we were at a full gallop. Thirty yards from the lights of the fandango, I began war whooping, and Toribio joined in. We must have sounded like a hundred Comanches to the celebrants there because they scattered like quail flushed from cover. Then I saw Kit Carson stepping from Lucien’s house, the muzzle of a rifle swinging around toward me, and I whipped off my hat as I entered the light.
“It’s Plenty Man!” I yelled. “It’s Kid Greenwood!”
Kit’s shot went right through the hat I held in my hand, and I knew Kit did not often miss his target. When I reined in my pony and turned, I saw Kit Carson smiling at me.
Lucien Maxwell did not seem nearly as amused. He stalked around a corner holding an axe he had grabbed to defend his ranch. This he sank into a pine post that supported the arbor. “Antonio!” he yelled. “Where the hell are you?”
Lucien began looking about the grounds of the ranch, as one of his employees sheepishly stepped out into the light. Lucien stalked up to him and, towering over him, gave him a lecture in mixed English and Spanish:
“When I tell a man to stand guard, he had better not leave his post. No dinero por usted esta semana, señor. No, sir, not a peso. Now, you git your cómo-se-llama out there on guard like I told you, and don’t you come back till you see the light of mañana!” The rancher grabbed the laborer by the collar and kicked him in the rear. This, I knew, was lenient treatment from Lucien Maxwell, who had been known to flog men for petty theft and other minor infractions.
Antonio sheepishly grabbed an old musket and trotted out into the darkness. Lucien Maxwell watched him go, then began laughing. Kit turned and waved the residents back into the light. “Baile, baile!” he ordered. I looked at Toribio and found him grinning. I, too, began to laugh as big Lucien Maxwell pulled me from my horse and pretended to squeeze me to death in his big arms. I could smell liquor on his breath. Two workers led our horses away as the makeshift band started playing a waltz called “El Chiquiado.” It was a favorite, because to convince a señorita to dance, a young man had to compose an original verse to sing to her as everyone listened.
“You done good, Kid,” said Kit Carson as he shook my hand. “Woke us up.” There was no smell of drink on Kit’s breath. “Sorry about the hole in your hat.”
“Better there than my head.”
Now Kit allowed himself to chuckle, and gave me a big Mexican abrazo, wrapping both arms around my shoulders and slapping my back. Kit was about my height—only five feet five or so—but he was built much stockier than me. Lucien Maxwell, on the other hand, stood over six feet tall in his boots, and towered over me and Kit.
“We figured you for dead, Greenwood.” Lucien indeed looked surprised to see me. “Who’s this whelp?”
“His name’s Toribio Treviño. I bought him from a squaw. He comes from way down near Monterrey.”
“Be darned,” Kit said. “He looks hungry. Comida?” he asked, looking at Toribio.
“Por favor.”
Kit pointed, and the boy bolted toward a big table made of hand-split pine planks. It was covered with all kinds of roasted, baked, and fried victuals.
“What are you gonna do with him?” Kit said.
“I guess I’ll write and try to find his people. His mother died giving him birth, and his father was killed in the raid that got him captured, but he said he’s got some great-uncles he never met.”
“Well, leave him stay here till you find his folks. If that’s what you want. I’ll look after him. Won’t be the first orphan I’ve taken in.”
By now, the women and children were venturing out from their hiding places, and Kit’s wife, Josepha, saw me. She came running toward me with a year-old child in her arms. Josepha, whom I had once saved from the same angry mob that murdered Charles Bent, the governor of New Mexico, loved me as if I were her blood brother. “Oh, hermano,” she said as she hugged me, tears streaming down her face. Lucien’s wife, Luz, also came to embrace me, though I did not know her as well as Josepha.
“What’s the cause for this fandango?” I finally asked.
“Come on, we’ll show you,” Lucien said.
He dragged me into his house with Kit, Josepha, and Luz close behind. Entering the first room of the adobe home, Lucien tossed his hat onto a set of deer antlers, revealing a head that had lost much hair since last I had seen him, three years before. He was only thirty-one years old, but going rather bald. He took two big steps to a handmade pine cabinet and pulled open the bottom drawer. From this, he extracted a pair of saddlebags that sagged with weight. I heard coins rattle as he dropped the saddlebags on the dirt floor packed and smoothed with ox blood. He opened the saddlebags to reveal scores of gold coins of a making I had never before seen. Lucien dipped his hand among them and let them pour between his fingers like mineral water.
“Come see, Kid.”
I knelt beside Lucien and scooped up several coins. Most of them seemed handmade, for they were stamped only with crude 5s, 10s, and 20s, but I also spotted a Peruvian doubloon, an English crown, a Dutch florin, and two Spanish pesetas. I looked up at Kit and found him shaking his head with amusement, for money had never influenced him as much as it did Lucien. Josepha simply smiled and rocked the baby in her arms, and Luz tossed a stick of wood onto the fire as she hummed along with the band outside.
“Where did you get all this?” I asked. “California?”
“Exactly!” Lucien said.
“You’ve been prospecting?”
“Like hell I have!” He exploded in laughter as he crammed the saddlebags back into the drawer and kicked it shut. “Can you see Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell stooped over a gold pan?”
“I guess not.”
“Tell him, Kit.”
“Well,” Kit began, “last year, me and Lucien decided we wanted to go a-trappin’. Like we did in the old days. We got together a party of eighteen men. All the old-timers. John Hatcher, Tom Fitzpatrick, Charley Autobee—you know … All the old survivors from the thirties, when beaver plews was worth something. Oh, we had us a time!”
“We did, Greenwood,” Lucien said. “Damned if we didn’t. You should have been along, and you’d have seen the last great beaver hunt. We went up the Arkansas, trapped Bayou Salado, down the South Platte, and up the North Platte. We trapped New Park and Middle Park, and just skinned us a mess of beaver.”
“And sold them in California?”
Lucien laughed. “Hell, no. Tell him, Kit.”
“Well,” Kit said, his voice a m
ere whisper compared to Lucien’s bellow, “the only rascal we couldn’t get to go a-trappin’ with us was old Dick Wootton. He said he had better things to do than trap a bunch of worthless pelts, and was going to California to make some money. You know Uncle Dick—he will find a way to turn a dollar. So, he bought nine hundred sheep here in New Mexico, and trailed them all the way to California. Went past Salt Lake.”
“While we were livin’ off the fat of the land and cooking beaver tail every night under the stars of the Great Shining Mountains,” Lucien interjected, “old Uncle Dick was trailing a bunch of stinking wool maggots across the desert to the Pacific Ocean. We thought he was crazy. Tell the rest, Kit.”
“Well, he paid four bits a head for them sheep here, and sold them at five dollars a head there.”
“Sometimes five and a half!” Maxwell blurted.
I whistled as I ciphered the gross and net take instantly in my head. “So you decided to take a herd of sheep to California?”
“Now you’ve got us figured,” Maxwell said. “Oh, God, it was miserable, proddin’ them sheep along day after day, but we took five thousand head, and just made a haul. John Hatcher and Blue Wiggins went with us. We’re all rich!”
“There ain’t nothin’ to buy between here and St. Louis, and we don’t need nothin’ we ain’t already got,” Kit said, “but we’re rich, all right.”
Josepha laughed.
“I’ve got plenty to buy,” Lucien said, grabbing and hugging his wife, Luz, as she came near to him. “If I can find Guadalupe Miranda down in Mexico, I believe I can buy his half-interest in the Beaubien-Miranda Grant. I’ll own it all before it’s over …”
The Beaubien-Miranda Grant was Lucien’s obsession. This former trapper, former Indian trader, former superintendent of William Bent’s great fort, former hunter for the explorer John Charles Frémont—Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell was bound to be the single biggest landowner inside the territories of the United States. Eleven years before, Lucien had married Maria de la Luz Beaubien. Lucien’s father-in-law, Judge Carlos Beaubien, was a Canadian who had immigrated to Taos soon after Mexican independence, and was one of the leading citizens of northern New Mexico.
Judge Beaubien and an influential native, Guadalupe Miranda, had convinced the Mexican government to grant them a huge tract of land between Taos and Bent’s Fort. The Spanish government had long granted land to citizens, and the Mexican government followed the pattern, establishing a chain of land grants to the northeast of Santa Fe and Taos, designed as a buffer against American encroachment. Nobody knew yet if the U.S. government was going to honor the old Mexican and Spanish grants, but Lucien was gambling that it would, and had spent much time, money, and effort in settling his father-in-law’s grant. Guadalupe Miranda had fled New Mexico during the Mexican War, and had not been heard from since. Lucien was sure that if he could locate Miranda, he could purchase his half of the grant, and become a partner with his father-in-law in a land holding that was so large that nobody really knew the extent of it, except to say that a few days would be required in riding across it.
“But I don’t reckon I’ll find Guadalupe Miranda riding in here tonight like you, Kid, so we might as well go on and celebrate.”
“Is Blue here?” I asked. “And John Hatcher?”
“No, they stayed in Santa Fe to spend their share of the money,” Kit said. “Now, come on. You’re bound to be hungry as a coyote from the looks of you.”
“I could eat,” I said, as they dragged me back outside to join the feast and the fandango. Before the night was over, Lucien had fetched my left-handed Stradivarius, which I had left with him for safekeeping, and I was made to play along with the Mexicans under the lantern light. We played and sang until the broad eastern horizon began to turn gray.
Three
About the time I turned twenty-two, I began drinking coffee and playing cards. This may not sound so bad, considering I was already a murderer, a thief, a liar, and a whiskey peddler, but the truth is that I used the coffee and the cards to cheat at poker. For years, I had practiced the art of prestidigitation, including many card tricks. My fingers, trained to classical music on the violin, could handle a deck of cards with equal facility. I could double-cut with one hand, deal from the bottom of the deck as smoothly as I could from the top, and palm a card while I dealt to the entire table.
The coffee? Well, I didn’t drink much of it. Never liked the stuff. But a cup of black coffee can function as a mirror. I could situate that cup between me and the man I wished to cheat, and see a reflected image of every card I dealt to him in the dark, still surface of the coffee. This was a technique used by bogus fortune tellers reading tarot cards more so than by card players, so no one at the gaming tables ever realized what I was up to.
All I can say in my defense is that I only cheated one man at cards my whole life. And he deserved it. His name was Luther Sheffield, and he had, in turn, cheated my friend Blue Wiggins out of all his thousands of dollars of gold field money earned by herding sheep to California. It was my aim solely to get Blue’s money back for him. That’s why I started drinking coffee and playing cards.
After leaving Maxwell’s ranch I had made an easy two-day ride to Santa Fe over ground I often covered in half the time when I served as a courier for the U.S. Army during the Mexican War. I rode Major and led two mules I had acquired from Lucien B. Maxwell in trade for the mount Toribio had ridden out of Comancheria. Toribio had stayed with Kit and Josepha, who frequently took in homeless waifs.
Arriving in Santa Fe, I stabled Major in a livery and went about my business of buying whiskey to trade to the Indians. Buying whiskey was perfectly legal, but selling it to the Indians was illegal, of course, so I had learned how to make my purchases quietly. I hid two kegs of cheap St. Louis rotgut in the ponderosa pine forests above the city, covering my trail to the hiding spot with the sweep of a pine branch, Indian style. I would leave them there until I was ready to pack them to Taos, where I would buy some even cheaper homemade corn liquor called “Taos Lightning.”
In the meantime, I enjoyed Santa Fe’s social life. I stayed at an old inn at the corner of the plaza, called simply La Fonda. I was told that it had been operating for over a hundred and fifty years. I took a room on the second floor of the adobe inn. Sleeping that far above the ground provided something of a novelty for a man who had lived for months in a Comanche buffalo-hide tipi, for a Comanche lodge embraces the very bosom of Mother Earth. The angles of the square room also troubled me at first. The Plains Indians know that a round shelter synchronizes with the roundness of all that is natural, from the circling of the seasons to the shape of the sun. The room full of square angles seemed to pull my whole body and mind out of shape at first. But the walls were adobe, and adobe is of the earth, and overhead pine vigas supported the ceiling, somewhat like the lodge poles in a tipi, so on my third night there, I finally got several hours of sleep.
The next day, while enjoying my lunch at La Fonda, I happened to see my friend Blue Wiggins enter and speak to the proprietor of the eatery there. I could not hear him speak, but I could tell by reading his lips and his gestures that he was offering to trade a good hunting knife for a meal. This puzzled me, for Kit and Lucien had told me that Blue had made quite a profit with them herding sheep to California. Anyway, the proprietor would have none of such a trade, so I jumped up and greeted Blue, shouting across the room.
“Hey, you old trail bum!”
“Who’s that?” Blue said, for the room was dark and his eyes had not yet adjusted from the glaring sheen of the New Mexican sun.
“Your pal Orn’ry Greenwood, that’s who.”
A smile flashed across Blue’s face, and he exploded in laughter. “Son of a bitch, if you ain’t still kickin’ ! I heard you was scalped.”
I made knowing gestures to the proprietor, and dragged Blue over to my table near the little fireplace in the wall.
“I’ve just come from Maxwell’s ranch on the Rayado,” I said. “He and
Kit told me of your good fortune in California.”
Blue rolled his eyes and grinned. “Maxwell offered me a job on the ranch. I wish to hell I’d have taken it now. I might still have all that money I made.”
“You haven’t spent it all, have you?”
“Spent it? Not much of it. Lost it’s what I done.”
The proprietor brought a mug of coffee and a few piloncillos of sugar.
“Where? How?” I said, before stuffing my mouth full of a delicious tortilla dipped in mole poblano sauce and frijoles fritos.
“At the gambling hall.”
“Are you that bad a gambler?” I asked.
“No, but there’s a feller over there that sure can cheat a fool like me out of a bosal full of gold in a hurry. His name’s Luther Sheffield. Come to find out he cut his teeth gamblin’ on the riverboats of the Mississippi. I don’t even know how he cheated me, but he got my gold from me a lot quicker than I got it from them prospectors in California.”
The proprietor brought more tortillas, scrambled eggs, onions, and beans. My temper flared like the peppers burning in my mouth to think of my friend Blue Wiggins getting fleeced by a card cheat. Blue Wiggins had once stood back to back with me, each of us with a single-shot pistol in his hand, for four hours and thirty-nine minutes, as we held off a band of hostile Comanches and Kiowas that wanted our horses and our scalps.
“Where is this gambling hall?”
“Down on Burro Alley,” Blue said, scorching his fingers on the iron skillet the proprietor had left on our table. “You know it. It’s the same place Doña Tules used to own.”
“Used to?”
“You haven’t heard she died? A year ago. This Luther Sheffield has taken her place over.”
“Tell me about this gambler, Sheffield.”
Blue shook his head with an embarrassed smile. “He’s pretty damned slick, Orn’ry. Seems like a good sort of feller at first. Dresses like a dandy, tells a good yarn.” Blue’s smile slid away. “But he deals with his back to the corner, if you know what I mean. And he hired a couple of rough ol’ bullwhackers to knock heads when somebody acts up in there. It ain’t like it was when Doña Tules ran the place. Sheffield shot and killed some poor kid from Missouri this summer. The kid accused him of cheatin’ and pulled a knife on him. That Sheffield whipped out a pocket pistol and got him right in the head.”