The Baron Range

by Jory Sherman

  “Jean? Well, yea.”

  “Jean Gates, isn’t it?”

  “That’s her name. Lives with her widowed mother. Come out from Missouri a month ago. Wagon full of clothes and no man to look after them.”

  “So are you looking after them?”

  Ken grinned. “I sure am.”

  “Well, you’d have to leave them both behind to fend for themselves.”

  “They can do that. After working on a hardscrabble farm in the Ozarks, they can pretty much take care of themselves, I reckon.”

  “Be gone a long time. Over a hard road.”

  “I know,” Ken said. “Rattlesnakes, Comanches, drought, wind, rain, scorpions, sand fleas, cactus, you name it.”

  “Goodnight made it. I’ m going to do the same.”

  “How many cattle are you driving up?”

  “Pert near four thousand head,” answered Anson.

  Ken blew a long low whistle. “God, I can’t wait, Anson. Ever since Charlie told me how it was when he drove cattle north, I got the hankering.”

  “You don’t sit a saddle much, do you, Ken?”

  “Not lately. But I rode out here from New Orleans and I still have a couple of horses I keep.”

  Anson smiled. “If you can get Juanito for me, we’ll have it a lot easier.”

  “You feel bad about what your daddy did to him, don’t you?”

  “My daddy was wrong. But that’s not the reason. Goodnight told me that he might have lost more cattle if Juanito hadn’t helped him cross the Concho. And Charlie rode away with plenty of cash. That’s what I need. Cash.”

  “You’ve been holding your own.”

  “I want to make the Box B the biggest ranch in Texas. I need more land and I aim to buy it.”

  Ken walked around to the front of the desk and slapped Anson lightly on the shoulders. “And by God you will, Anson Baron. You’re a chip off the old block.”

  “With one exception,” Anson said. “Unlike my daddy, I ain’t no quitter.”

  Ken sucked in a breath, cocked his head. “No, Anson, you’re not a quitter.”

  56

  JUANITO SALAZAR LOOKED at the burnt-down remains of his casita, grown over now with grass and tumbleweeds blown against the collapsing fence. He smiled wryly and turned his horse. He rode to the hitchrail in front of the Baron house and lit down. He wrapped his reins over the rail and walked up the steps, knocked on the door.

  “Come in.” He remembered the sound of Caroline’s voice and smiled. He opened the door and walked inside. The house was cool, breezy from windows being open, and yet there was a melancholy hush to it that bordered on being eerie. “I’m in the kitchen,” Caroline called.

  When Juanito saw her, he almost didn’t recognize Caroline Baron. She stood at the long counter, her faded dress just touching the tops of her button-down shoes, her hair caught up in a bun, with strands of it falling over her face. There was some gray in it, silver where the sun streaming through the window burnished it. Not much color in her face, but that same proud look and those pretty blue eyes that had made Martin’s heart turn somersaults.

  “Caroline,” Juanito said. “How are you?” He took off his battered and dusty hat. His’ clothes were rumpled and dirty from days in the saddle and he knew he reeked of sweat. But politeness did not care what a man wore, but what he was.

  “Is that you, Juanito?”

  “Truly.”

  “Why, land’s sakes. You don’t look a day older than—”

  “Than the night I left. Well, I have a couple of years inside of me.”

  “Pshaw,” Caroline said. “Why, sit down there and I’ll fetch you some sweet milk from the well house.”

  “I came to see Anson. Ken Richman told me he wanted me on the drive to Fort Sumner.”

  Caroline glided gracefully over to where Juanito stood and looked at him for a long moment. Something flickered in her eyes, a fragment of regret, a flash of something that had flown by her once in her life a long time ago, a spark that flared and died. Her look stabbed at Juanito’s heart, for he recognized that she was still a young woman, still in love with Martin, and the sadness in her could not silence her cry of remorse for the things that might have been.

  “You haven’t seen Martin, have you, Juanito? I feel bad that I was the cause of the misunderstanding between you and him.”

  “No, I have not seen him. I do not think he can face me or you just yet. Martin sails the sea like a man just burning up his days.”

  “Will he ever come back home? Will he ever forgive?” She could not finish the sentence.

  “I do not know, Caroline. I hear about him from time to time. He goes to Biloxi, to New Orleans, to Cuba.”

  “But he does not sail to Matagorda.” It was a flat statement, devoid of bitterness, but rich with the resignation that only a woman of wisdom could summon from the depths of her despair.

  “No.”

  For a moment Juanito thought she was going to embrace him and cry on his shoulder, but she clamped her lips together when the lower one started quivering and sighed. He wished he could give her some comfort, but Martin was driving himself beyond endurance, a loner with few friends, an anger in him that he could not quench with strong drink so that it only turned against him, leaving him bitter and disconsolate. He had heard many stories about Martin Baron, but none that he wished to repeat to Caroline. He saw Martin as Ulysses, following his own adventure, homeless, but perhaps not homesick, and Caroline as Penelope, weaving her tapestry at night and tearing it apart each dawn.

  Abruptly Caroline turned away from Juanito and returned to the counter and her vegetables. “I don’t know where Anson is,” she said. “He might be at La Golondrina. He does not stay home much.”

  “I will find him. I just thought he might be here.”

  “He doesn’t talk to me very much anymore and he’s almost never home. I don’t know who does his washing.”

  Juanito sensed the desperation in Caroline’s voice. Now she felt abandoned not only by her husband but also by her son.

  “He has the ranch to run. It cannot be easy for him.”

  “I think he wants to stay away from me. I think he has condemned me as his father has. To Anson, I’m a disgrace.”

  “What about yourself? Do you think you are a disgrace?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then, that is what you have created for yourself. This is how you will live, Caroline.”

  “What are you saying, Juanito?”

  “We make our own lives, weave our own webs. You have paid for your indiscretion many times over, and it is time to put the past behind you. It is not something you can change. And you cannot see into the future or live in it.”

  “I know that,” Caroline said without rancor.

  “There is only this moment, Caroline. This single, solitary moment, and it is eternal.”

  “What?”

  “I mean that we live only in the present, in the now, and the way we see ourselves is the way we are. Live now and the past and future will not harm you.”

  “You’ve always talked strangely, Juanito. Martin told me he often could not understand what you were saying.”

  “It does not matter,” Juanito said. “Your heart knows what I am saying. Do not punish yourself. Do not look back down the long tunnel to the past. Look at what you have and perhaps it will seem that you are rich. If you do not have Martin here with you, he had you with him wherever he goes, for he has wronged you as much as you have wronged him.”

  “He’s wronged you, too, Juanito.”

  “Has he? Who is to say that I did not sin with you in my mind?”

  “Juanito! Don’t you dare say such a thing.”

  Juanito smiled. “It is possible, Caroline.”

  She blushed and Juanito thought she looked quite fetching at that moment. But he had never thought of her as a woman he might take as a lover, for she was married to a man who had once been his best friend.

  “You’re tea
sing me, I think.”

  “No, I do not tease you, Caroline. It is just that you must not blame yourself for what has happened. What you did was one thing. What Martin did was quite another. Revenge is not sweet. It is a mean and bitter root that one must chew on all his life until its poison kills him.”

  “I wish Martin thought that way.”

  “Perhaps he will come to think that way.”

  Juanito looked at Caroline more closely now that the blush was fading from her cheeks. Beneath her eyes there were creases under puffed and swollen skin. It appeared to him that she slept little.

  “You’re very kind, Juanito. Quite the kindest man I’ve ever met, I think.”

  “You look tired, Caroline. You do not sleep well?”

  “I—I sleep when I can. I’m not tired. Really.”

  “Well, it is nothing,” Juanito said, but he knew there was something Caroline was not telling him. She had a secret, he guessed, but he did not know what it was. A lover, perhaps, but possibly something more complicated than that. “I must go now, but it has been very good to have seen you again.”

  “Please tell Anson to come home when he can.”

  “I shall. And, I am sure he will.”

  “Good-bye, Juanito. Thank you for stopping by.”

  “It was a pleasure to see you again, Caroline.”

  Juanito put on his hat and turned to leave, when Caroline’s voice stopped him.

  “If you see Marty …”

  He turned to look at her. “Yes?”

  “Tell him … tell him I want him to come back home.”

  “I will do that, Caroline,” Juanito said softly. “That is very brave of you.”

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it? I never knew how to be brave before. But I miss him and I love him and I want to ask his forgiveness.”

  “Surely, you are entitled to it,” Juanito said.

  “Thank you. I hope to see you again soon. I want you to come back home, too.”

  “I am sure we will meet again bye and bye.” Juanito left the house, leaving its empty echoes behind him, and the sadness he felt at seeing Caroline again, a widow with a living husband, a woman who had been punished so much for such a momentary indiscretion.

  He was disappointed in Martin. Not just for what he had done to his wife and son, but for what he had done to himself. He had thought Martin’s ambition was a pure thing, a good thing, but it had faded at the first sign of trouble. He had never thought Martin would let anything get in the way of his dream to build a cattle empire in Southwest Texas, but the man had turned on himself over a woman’s mistake and was now committing slow suicide. It was a tragedy, Juanito thought.

  And now he worried that the sins of the father would be inherited by the son, for he had not seen Anson Baron in two years and did not know if he was soft inside like his father or made of the iron that he thought Martin had once possessed for a backbone.

  57

  CAROLINE WENT TO the front room and peered out the window. She watched Juanito unwrap his horse’s reins from the hitchrail and mount up. He rode away toward La Golondrina and she felt suddenly sad and lonely. When he had disappeared, she went out the back door and walked straight over to Esperanza’s adobe, her heart racing, her head held high. Somehow Juanito had given her the courage to see Lázaro in the daylight. She did not want to hide him anymore.

  “I am here,” Caroline said as she tapped lightly on the door.

  “Entra, señora.”

  Lázaro rose from his cot and ran to Caroline, his arms open wide.

  “Mama, mama.”

  Caroline took the boy in her arms. He was growing tall and strong. She played with him at night, sometimes let him go out in the daytime.

  “What do you want to do today, Lázaro?”

  “I want to play on the cannon again.”

  “It is not a toy,” Caroline said.

  “I know. It is a gun. A big gun. I want to ride it and shoot it. I like to feel it.”

  Caroline smiled. She had let him play with the cannon and had taught him how to shoot it. He was surprisingly adept at learning the shapes of things through touch. His favorite game was pretending to shoot the cannon. And he loved to climb on it and run his hands over the smooth brass barrel.

  Caroline stood up, tousled the boy’s head with her hand.

  “Esperanza, I want you and Lázaro to move into the main house today.”

  “But are you not afraid someone will see Lázaro?”

  “I am no longer afraid and you should not be either. I want him to be a normal boy, to sleep at night and play in the daytime.”

  “Oh, senora, you make me so happy. Lázaro, do you want to live in a big house?”

  “Oh, yes, Esperanza. That would be fun.”

  “Let us go to the barn and play with the cannon,” Caroline said. “Esperanza can begin moving your things into the house. Put Lázaro’s cot in my bedroom, Esperanza. You can pick out a bedroom for yourself.”

  “Good-bye, Esperanza,” Lázaro said and put his hand in his mother’s. Together they went out to the barn, with Lázaro skipping along, chattering to his adopted mother about everything he heard and smelled along the way.

  “It is cool inside the barn,” Lázaro said when they had entered. “Where is the cannon?”

  “In the center, where it always is,” Caroline replied.

  Lázaro ran straight to the cannon, as surefooted as any sighted boy. He found the cloths in the box and began to rub the brass. He checked the breech and the muzzle. “Is it loaded?” he asked.

  “It is always loaded,” Caroline said.

  “Can I shoot it?”

  “Not today, Lázaro. Maybe someday.”

  “I want to kill the men who killed my real mother and father,” he said.

  Caroline felt a chill strike her. She was surprised that the boy knew so much about the world around him. He had told her that some man shot his mother and father. He knew the name of the man who now lived in his father’s house. Esperanza had told him everything that had happened to Benito and Pilar Aguilar, something Caroline would not have done.

  The boy didn’t hate Matteo Aguilar, but in his simple dark world, he thought it was proper to kill him. Esperanza had told him about “an eye for an eye,” and so revenge lived in the boy’s heart. The cannon represented a chance to kill his parents’ assassins.

  “It is wrong to kill,” Caroline said tonelessly, as she had so many times before.

  “But Matteo killed my real mother and father. I could shoot him with this cannon. Look, I know how to do everything.”

  As Caroline watched, Lázaro went through all the motions of firing the cannon, reloading it with powder and ball, inserting a fuse in the hole, lighting a fire and touching a flaming faggot to the fuse.

  “Boom,” Lázaro said, grinning and holding both hands to his ears.

  Caroline shuddered. She was sorry now that she had told the boy so much about the cannon. For as blind as he was, he could sight the weapon by sound and he knew how to arm it and fire it.

  “Don’t you ever come out here and play with the cannon if I’m not with you, Lázaro. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Mama. I will not. I promise.”

  But Caroline knew, even as he spoke the words, that he was just saying them for her satisfaction. Someday, she knew, he would shoot the cannon. She just hoped that no human would be in its line of fire.

  Lázaro pushed down on the barrel of the cannon, then pushed up. He made the barrel swing from left to right. And each time the barrel stopped moving, he said “Boom.”

  “I am going to make you some toys to play with,” she told Lázaro.

  But she knew he never heard her. He was too busy making believe that he was shooting at Matteo Aguilar.

  58

  THE HERD OF longhorn and mixed-breed cattle moved slowly out of the pastures of La Golondrina, strung out for a count before reaching the trail Juanito had marked out. In the lead was a rangy longhorn steer with wide, fo
rmidable horns that measured better than six feet. The vaqueros called this one Jefe, which meant “Chief” in Spanish. His calico hide was plain to see at the head of the column of darker cows and steers, and his horns served as a kind of front gate to the herd, for he was as good a cutter as some of the Mexican horses. If any cow tried to get in front of him, Jefe would swing his wide horns and the gate would close.

  Anson counted from one side, Ken Richman from the other, each marking down the tally by fives, four straight vertical lines, the fifth line slanted across the “fence.”

  Juanito rode up and down the procession of cattle, turning back the potential strays, talking to the riders in low tones. The cook wagon stood off to one side, waiting to fall in behind the herd after it passed. He waved to Alonzo Guzman, the cook whom Anson had nicknamed “Lonnie,” and his helper, a young Mexican named Joselito Delgado. The pair on the wagon waved back, grinning through the light dust that began to rise in the hot still air of morning.

  Riding point for the start of the drive was Roy Killian. Juanito had brought him down from the Palo Duro after he got Ken Richman’s message. When Anson asked him to join the drive, he said that he would on one condition. That Anson hire Roy as well.

  “I don’t know him,” Anson said. “But his name’s familiar.”

  “His father once lived on the Box B.”

  “Jack Killian?”

  “Roy’s father.”

  “But my daddy run Jack off.”

  “He did. But this one is of good character. Jack died on the drive to Fort Sumner with Goodnight. I took Roy under my wing.

  “On your say-so, I’ll take him along. Does he know cattle?”

  “He is wise beyond his years.”

  “About cattle?”

  “About cattle. And men.”

  “How do you know all this, Juanito?”

  “Roy watched his father die. That makes a boy grow into a man very quickly. Just as your father grew into a man when he watched his father and his best friend, Cackle Jack, die. I have worked alongside Roy Killian and he does not complain. When he is given a job, he does it. And as a boy, he drew all the short sticks.”