The Baron Range

by Jory Sherman

  Anson laughed. “I know something about that.”

  “Indeed you do,” said Juanito.

  “Well, I’ve got just the job for young Roy Killian,” Anson had said. “And we’ll see just what kind of man he has become.”

  Juanito still did not know what job Anson had in mind for Roy, but when he made the introductions, Anson had made no reference to Jack Killian, nor had he singled the boy out for some of the more distasteful jobs. He figured he would find out soon enough what Anson would ask Roy to do. Juanito and Roy had worked together and stayed up late over many a campfire, talking. Juanito thought Roy was intelligent and of good character. In short, Juanito liked being with young Killian and found him good soil for the seeds of his own philosophy, just as it had been with Anson.

  “I count twenty-five hundred head,” Anson called out.

  “I make it twenty-five hundred and two,” yelled Ken as the last of the herd passed by.

  “Close enough,” said Anson. “But you’re dead wrong.”

  “I’m an optimist,” Ken shouted, and Anson laughed as they fell in behind the herd to ride drag for a time. The chuck wagon pulled in behind them, and they listened to the rattle of iron pots and pans and tin cups and the creak of yokes and leather. “Besides, you forgot to count the two head pulling the cook wagon,” he added.

  Anson looked around at the two steers under yoke and shook his head. “You’re a damned good man, Ken Richman. At least you can count better’n I can.”

  “I’ll bet I get more saddle sores than you do before this drive is over, too.”

  “I couldn’t cover it,” said Anson, already feeling the butterflies swarm in his stomach and ropes knot up in his abdomen as they left La Golondrina behind and headed into an unknown world, toward places he had never been. “And I wouldn’t bet against you if I could.”

  Ken grinned and pulled his hat brim down to shade his eyes from the blazing sun climbing above the eastern horizon. He pulled his bandanna up over his mouth as he had seen Anson do, to try and keep some of the trail dust from blowing into his lungs.

  The solid, muscular feel of the horse under him and the sight of the long line of cattle made Ken’s pulse beat faster. Mist arose from the grass as the sun drew the moisture from the land. This had been a dream of his ever since he was a boy, and when his father had given him his first horse, he knew that he was born to the saddle.

  “Ken, you ride drag. It’ll give you a good feel for the drive.”

  “You mean I’ll eat dust all day.”

  Anson laughed dryly. “Good for the digestion.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll ride up and give Roy his instructions. We’ll do good to make ten miles today. And a lot of it will depend on Roy Killian.”

  “Okay, boss,” Ken said. Anson touched a finger to the brim of his hat and rode slowly up the line of cattle at a canter. Ken saw him disappear into the scrim of dust that now hovered over the trail.

  Anson drew Juanito aside before he rode on ahead of the column of cattle.

  “I’m going to ride up and see how Roy’s doing, Juanito,” Anson said.

  “Good idea.”

  “Ken and I counted twenty-five hundred head, neara-bouts.”

  “I notice the cattle all carry the Box B brand,” said Juanito.

  “That’s right,” replied Anson.

  “Didn’t Benito want to join you?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Benito is apparently dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “My mother has adopted the blind boy, Lazaro, Pilar’s son. He told her that his father and mother were murdered.”

  “By whom?”

  “Matteo Miguelito.”

  “The son who went away,” Juanito said.

  “And came back and murdered Benito and Pilar.”

  “For sure?”

  “No proof, but my mother believes the blind boy. I didn’t ask Matteo to come along.”

  “Because of that?”

  “No, because I want to buy more land from him. He doesn’t have enough help to make a drive—too busy fighting off Apaches.”

  “Maybe he will not like you for not inviting him.”

  “He’s cash poor. It won’t make any difference. When we get back, I’m buying more of his land for the Box B.”

  “I think you are going to be a very good man with business, Anson. You have the killer instinct.”

  Anson laughed. “I wouldn’t know about that. I do know that the Box B is going to grow. And to grow, we need more land.”

  “Your father would be proud,” Juanito said.

  “My father has nothing to do with it. I’ve already filed on all the land he bought. Put it all in my name.”

  “You had a bill of sale from him?”

  “I have my mother,” said Anson. “She gave me a bill of sale.”

  59

  ANSON FOUND ROY Killian about two miles ahead of the herd, heading north. Anson hailed him and Roy reined in his horse. The air was clear and sweet and the empty land stretched for miles, with no visible landmarks in between.

  “Do you know what you’re looking for?” asked Anson.

  “No, sir, I reckon I don’t.”

  “Are you just out for a ride, then?”

  “Well, sir, I thought I was heading generally in the direction of the Nueces River, north of us. And I was generally keeping my eyes out for Indian savages, sir.”

  “That’s good, Roy. But what I want you to do is ride about ten, twelve miles ahead as hard as you can without foundering your horse and find a water hole big enough to wet this herd. And then I want you to ride back and tell us where it is exactly. Can you do that?”

  “Well, yes, sir, I reckon I can.”

  “And after you’ve found that watering hole and come back and told us where it is, I want you to ride back beyond that hole and find us another, fifteen, twenty miles ahead. And then come back and tell us where that’n is. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Baron, I can surely do all that.”

  “You might have to sleep some nights all by your lonesome.”

  “I reckon I can do that, too.”

  “Do you know the way to Fort Sumner, Roy?”

  “Yes, sir, I’ve got the way pretty much fixed in my mind.”

  “That’s good. ’Cause you’re going to be doing this all the way there unless I find someone to spell you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And, while you’re looking for these watering holes, you’ll also be on the scout for hostile Indians, right?”

  “Right, sir.”

  “It’s a big job. Think you can handle it?”

  “I know I can, sir.”

  “Good. Now, light out and find us that water.”

  Roy turned his horse and rode away at a brisk trot. Anson watched him until he became a tiny dot and then was swallowed up by the distance. He waited at that spot until Juanito rode up a few minutes later, the herd about a half mile behind him.

  “Where is Roy ?” Juanito asked.

  “I told you I had a job for him. Well, he’s working at it right now.”

  “You sent him ahead to look for water.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Because that is what I would have done. I did not know you would rely on Roy.”

  “He seems capable of the job.”

  “I am sure that he is,” Juanito said.

  “We’ll damned sure find out, won’t we?”

  “Did you have any special reason for sending Roy up ahead by himself?”

  “What do you mean?” Anson asked.

  “I thought perhaps you might have a dislike for him.”

  “Because of his father?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. I didn’t really know Jack, except as a boy looking at a grown-up. And I don’t know Roy at all yet.”

  “That is a good job you gave to him,” Juanito said.

  “Yes, I thought so. It will give him the chance to show me what he can do, and it wil
l give him a chance to think about whether he wants to be in the cattle business.”

  “That is good, Anson. A man needs time to think about such a thing.”

  “Do you believe Roy can do his job, Juanito?”

  “Find water? Yes.”

  “And Indians, if there be any?”

  “Yes, his father was killed by one.”

  “Let’s hope he doesn’t inherit that from his father,” Anson said, with the thinnest smile a man could make.

  60

  ROY FOUND A watering place for the herd that first day, and then found another for the next day. When they crossed the Nueces, they lost six head of cattle, but the herd was soon making fifteen miles a day and sometimes more. They grazed at night, listening to the vaqueros playing their guitars and singing sad songs of lost love and wrongful imprisonment.

  Anson came to love the weeping minor chords his vaqueros played on their instruments, with leathered fingers as delicate as a woman’s flying over the frets.

  Counting Anson, Roy, Ken, and Juanito, there were only nine of them to look after the herd, so they were all very tired at the end of each day.

  Some days they bucked the stiff headwinds that blew across the Texas plains and the cattle and horses seemed to stand still more often than they moved. The men’s hats blew away and were never found. A man yelling would often eat his own words, literally, as the wind blew his voice back down his throat.

  After they crossed the Nueces, water became more difficult to find and the men’s tempers sharpened as their nerves stretched to the snapping point. The cooks served stew peppered with sand and at suppertime the sound of teeth grinding grit in the tortillas was the only noise.

  Roy found the water holes that he had seen when he and his father rode with Goodnight. There too grew provender for the drovers, thanks to the cook who rode with those two men.

  “Charlie Goodnight’s cook planted garlic, onions and other herbs and tubers under the chaparral,” Roy explained to Anson. “You tell Lonnie he can find stuff to make his meals taste less like dried horseshit.”

  Alonzo soon began to look for the garlic, onions, potatoes and cilantro underneath the spiny chaparral, and he mixed them with the dough for hardtack, in the corn and wheat flour, and in the pinto and black beans, and he used them with the dried chilies he carried in the cook wagon. He even spiced up the coffee with thyme and cilantro.

  “A man can smell Lonnie’s cooking five miles away,” remarked Ken.

  “And taste if for five days after he’s eaten,” Anson said.

  The days grew long, and too often Roy rode back to camp, saying that he was unable to find water. But before they reached the Concho, a thunderstorm descended upon them and watered the land. During the lightning and thunder, the cattle fought to turn their backs to the wind and the vaqueros had to bunch them and turn them into the wind to keep from losing ground.

  Between the Concho and the Pecos, they lost three hundred head of cattle to Comanche raiders that they hardly ever saw. It took the drovers three days and three nights without sleep or rest to cross that desert. They had to keep the cattle moving so that they could get them to the Pecos before they died of thirst.

  Anson rode the same horse for those three days and nights, and the only sleep he got was in the saddle. As the cattle got nearer to the water, they became senseless beasts. When they struck the Pecos, the cattle stampeded, swam straight across and then doubled back before they stopped to drink from the river.

  “Crazy,” Ken said, his body dripping with sweat. “I’ve never seen such a sight.”

  “We probably lost a half hundred head when they spooked,” Anson said. “We’ll be lucky to make the government post with any herd at all.”

  “We will get there,” Juanito said.

  And so they did. Fort Sumner served as a supply depot for the Apaches at Bosque Redondo. There Anson received from the quartermaster eight cents a pound for the 2,176 head of beef.

  “That’s nearly ten thousand dollars,” he told Juanito. “All in silver and gold.”

  “That was the easy part,” Juanito said. “Now you have to get the money back to the Box B.”

  “What do you mean?” Anson asked.

  “Every Mexican bandit, gringo renegade, Apache, Comanche, Kiowa and coyote between here and the Rio Grande knows that you have all that shining metal,” Juanito said. “And they will be sniffing your trail and following you and waiting for you at every step of the way.”

  “What do you think I should do with the money? Bury it?”

  Juanito laughed. “No. They would dig it up very soon, I think.”

  “Then what?”

  “Try and fool the bandits.”

  “And just how do I do that?” Anson asked.

  61

  THE NIGHT AFTER the sale of the cattle to the government was completed, Anson paid off all of the vaqueros in silver. He paid off Alonzo Guzman and Joselito, too. He gave Ken Richman some of the money to put in the bank at Galveston.

  “Juanito is going to lead you back to the ranch,” Anson told them. “You have plenty of guns to fight off any bandits.”

  “Aren’t you coming with us?” Ken asked.

  “I’ll be along in a few days,” Anson replied. “Roy and I will stay behind. Roy, put your horse in the remuda along with mine. We’ll buy fresh mounts.”

  Puzzled, Ken shook his head. Juanito had thought it better that the fewer who knew about the plan, the better.

  The next morning, Juanito led the men out of Fort Sumner, riding back the way they had come. Anson and Roy waved good-bye to the men. When they were gone, Roy turned to Anson. “You didn’t pay me, Mr. Baron. And now I don’t even have a horse to ride.”

  “I can pay you now and you can catch up with them, but I hope you will decide to ride with me.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m betting that any bandits will think the money is with the guns. You and I are going to take another route and act like the poorest sonsofbitches in the country.”

  “I—I guess I don’t understand, Mr. Baron.”

  “Roy, you can call me Anson. That’s my name. Come on, we’re going to buy us a couple of nags and some pack mules.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Roy said.

  “Me, too,” Anson said.

  62

  ANSON AND ROY slipped away from Fort Sumner in the deep hours of the night when almost all the lamps were turned off and it was pitch-black outside the confines of the outpost. They used the stars to guide them well away from the trail the others had taken. Pulling the pack mules behind them, the panniers loaded with water, food, lean-to canvas tarps, guns and ammunition, they rode through the eerie, moon-dusted landscape like wanderers from some other time and place, nomads who had no roots, no homes and no destination.

  In the frail pewter glow of moon and starlight, Anson glimpsed the mysterious shapes of living things gone dead with the dusk, and some were terrifying monsters, demons with rigid outstretched arms like the shadows lurking in a nightmare, like the horrors populating the landscape of a man going mad.

  Roy too was uncomfortable in the dimly seen cosmos of phantasms, his horse jumpy beneath him, shying at every unknown shape that loomed on the darkened skyline. The men rode through the desolate nocturnal world of shades and visions, heading southeast on trackless waste, each with his own soft prayers voiceless in the silver-spattered shroud of night, sojourners in a strange land, the boy in each of them aghast with wonder and fright.

  Coyotes spooled their chromatic ribbons of laughter across the forsaken spirit trails. An occasional distant howl of a wolf pierced the stillness. Bullbats streaked overhead like wraiths with silver dollars on their wings.

  Before the sun rose, Roy took their bearings and double-checked them with Anson.

  “We’ll sleep by day and ride at night,” Anson said. “Find us a shady spot if you can.”

  “I fear there ain’t much shade in this desert,” Roy said. “But maybe we
can bunch the horses and mules so that they’ll shadow us some.”

  They stopped that morning in a shallow draw and hobbled their mounts and tied the mules to each horse. They put the feed bags on the animals and hoped that eating would keep the stock occupied.

  “Shouldn’t we set a lookout?” Anson asked. “One sleep, one stay awake?”

  “The horses will sound a warning,” Roy said, and Anson felt stupid. There was so much he didn’t know, and so much he had to learn.

  The two men slept fitfully in the harsh light of day, their flesh dried and parched by the wind, the fluid in their bodies sucked out of their pores by the blistering heat of the sun. They awoke in the early afternoon, their bellies empty, the mules braying for water and the horses fidgety and fighting the hobbles.

  The men swallowed hardtack and dried beef, washing the arid food down with water. Anson gave the mules water from one of the large canvas bags hanging from the pannier while Roy watered the horses with cupped hands for water bowls.

  “Guess we’d better move on,” Anson said. “If there’s anybody out there, we’ll see them coming.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Roy said. “Comanches is kin to lizards, I swear.”

  “I ain’t seen no lizards even,” Anson said.

  “That’s what I mean,” said Roy.

  63

  THEY STOPPED AND gathered nopal and scraped the spines from their leaves and fed them to the animals like green cakes and pierced their fingers and hands in the process, while the heat bore down on them and sweated them dry.

  And they saw no one in the shimmering oceans of heat that made the land dance and lakes appear before them like magic mirrors flashing in the dazzling sunlight. The sun fell away in the long blue sky and the breeze lifted up out of some far-off place and dried their sweat as if they had ridden into a blast furnace somewhere on the edges of hell.

  “We should have gone on back with Juanito and them,” Roy said as the sun sank toward the western sea.

  “Do you remember those Apaches we saw when we crossed out of Texas into New Mexico?”

  “Yeah, they were miles away.”