“You lie.”
Several of the Rangers stood to their feet.
“You ought to go easy with that war talk,” one of them said.
Papa didn’t seem to notice him, or any of the rest of them, for that matter. His attention was on Captain Pike. “I trailed them.”
“Are you a tracking man?” the captain asked. “You’re obviously a fighter and maybe a military man in your past, but you don’t seem like an old hand in this country. If you were, you wouldn’t have drug these little boys along on an Indian hunt. Could be you lost the first trail and picked up Big Belly’s tracks after that.”
“They were the ones.”
“Whether you’re right or wrong, Mr. Dollarhyde, that doesn’t explain why you killed the women and the little ones.”
Papa was trembling.
“Don’t you take a mind to try me, Mr. Dollarhyde. Don’t be stupid. You keep that pistol in its holster, and me and my men will be on our way.” The captain eased to his feet.
“I don’t have to explain myself to you,” Papa said.
The captain picked up his saddle but didn’t immediately go to his horse. “If you’re worried about us taking you in, rest easy. While it doesn’t make me think much of you for doing what you did, I won’t say I don’t understand your situation.”
Papa watched silently as the Rangers saddled their horses and mounted. They were almost ready to ride away before he spoke again. “You think you’re better than me, don’t you?”
The captain turned his horse back. “No, Mr. Dollarhyde, but what you did was wrong. There’s some that say the only good Indian is a dead one, but old Big Belly was a decent sort, even if there isn’t a court in Texas that would try you for killing him. I might shoot you on the spot here and now, or hang you if I could find a decent tree, but then I’d leave these boys without a father. And there’s been enough bad in this country without adding to it.”
“You don’t know me.”
The captain started away with his men but he threw back over his shoulder. “No, but I know what you did, and you do, too. I might not like it but I can live with it. The trouble is, can you?”
Chapter Thirteen
For the best part of the summer we slept on buffalo robes under a wagon tarp stretched over a rope strung between two trees. None of us would sleep in the dugout. Abandoned, it loomed over us as if it were one hundred feet tall. It was always there and catching your eye when you turned around, a burden that weighed more than earth and log, giving you pause, looming, accusing, reminding. The black eye of it, that dark doorway in the hillside, stared at us from dawn to dusk and never let us forget, no matter how hard we tried. I don’t know why we didn’t tear it down, but it became a scar that we all shared, as much as the stump of Gunn’s lost arm.
I thought Gunn would die, at least at first. He looked so pitiful and frail on his buffalo robe, with his flesh drawn so tight over his ribs that you could count every one of them, and his skin so pale that it was almost translucent.
And weeks after the fever left him and his body began to mend and his strength return, he would still rarely leave the shade of our makeshift tent. He ate little, brooding and either staring at nothing or at the scarlet red and tender flesh of his healing wound with its knotted, puckered stitches crisscrossed in random patterns where the Ranger captain had sewn him together, making it up as he went, like a patchwork quilter with no plan in mind and nothing but odd-shaped scraps at hand.
But I don’t think the pain and the loss of his arm were the only things that made Gunn so quiet. I feared that something besides his limb was cut away that day out on the prairie. A bit of him was gone and floated away on the wind.
Once, when Gunn did leave the tent, I found him down on the creek bank, clutching his stump and staring across the water at nothing but whatever lay out there to the west. I stood behind him for a long time, unsure if he even knew I was there, and was cautious about what I should, or could, say to him.
“Whatcha doing?”
It took Gunn a long time to answer. “Was thinking of drowning myself, but this sorry excuse for a river isn’t deep enough.”
That was the first thing he had said to me that was at all like the old Gunn I knew. I figured more small talk was in order.
“What kind of turtle do you think that is over there on that log?”
“Where did you leave me?” He kept his back to me, speaking as if he hadn’t heard me.
“Leave you?”
“Where’d you bury it?”
I stammered and saw it as if it were happening all over again. It had been so light as I carried it, as if it weighed nothing. A poor little pale chicken wing that once was a boy’s arm, and then it wasn’t. There were times when I could still feel the coldness of it against my palms.
“Where’d you bury my arm?” Gunn had turned around and his eyes burned right through me.
I’ve never seen another person with eyes like Gunn’s. You look at some of those pictures of Geronimo, Sitting Bull, or any of those old Indian chiefs, and maybe you’ll know what I’m talking about.
“I don’t know. If I could get back to that spring we camped at again I might find where I buried it, but I’m not sure.” For some reason I was about to cry. “I stuck a buffalo rib bone into the ground to mark it.”
“I can still feel it,” Gunn said. “I never would have thought that. It’s gone but it isn’t gone. Papa says that’s normal, but maybe if I could see it I wouldn’t feel it anymore.”
“Papa could take us back there.”
“He don’t want to go back there.” He turned back to the river, lost again in whatever he had been looking at before I arrived.
I started back to camp and little things that Mama used to say kept coming back to me. Worries and troubles can be like a man astride a bad horse. I guess Gunn had his own devil horses to handle, and there was nothing to be done but to wait and see how he stood the ride.
“Bubba?” Gunn hadn’t called me that in years, and his voice was only a whisper.
“What?”
“You shouldn’t have left me out there.”
Chapter Fourteen
It was near summer’s end before José and Juanita returned. And they didn’t come alone. There were four other Mexican families with them, women, kids, and all, traveling in a long train of big-wheeled carretas. The peeled cottonwood frames of their carts looked like strange skeletons rolling across the distance, the skinny oxen pulling them straining in their yokes, and the softwood axles screeching like demons.
Out to one side of the procession rode two handfuls of Mexican vaqueros driving a herd of horses before them. They were laughing, bold, wiry men under huge hats and wrapped in bright-colored wool serapes. The spoked rowels of their big spurs rattled in wooden stirrups hanging beneath the bellies of the long-maned, dish-faced little horses they rode.
It was soon revealed that José had traveled all the way south to the Rio Grande and the little village where he was born. There, he bought those ponies with Mama’s treasure and convinced the entire village, by the presentation of such wealth, to come north with him to work for Señor Dollarhyde. José spoke of my Papa as mi jefe, el patrón, and all the other names poor Mexicans had of calling a man a big shot and to convince themselves that they should swear fealty to him.
At the time, I had no idea why Papa had purchased so many horses, but I assumed that José had brought his kin with him in order that we might have a settlement of sufficient size to fend off any Indian raids while we put in crops and tackled the building of homes. I should have known Papa had other plans, and that there wasn’t going to be anything easy about them. Papa never was one to do anything by half measures.
First, he gave the men two weeks to throw together homes for their families, more shacks than anything—slim cedar and oak poles set into the ground on end to form walls, and mud dabbed between to fill in the cracks. “Jacales,” the Mexicans called them—grass-thatched roofs and dirt floo
rs coated in ox blood and tamped to the hardness of concrete. Joseph and I helped with the building of them, for Papa said any man who worked for him had to carry his weight. The thing about boys in Texas is that all of them want nothing more than to be considered men and will do anything to prove that they are.
As soon as the jacales were built, including one for us that became the new Dollarhyde headquarters, Papa gave us an afternoon off. And then we set in to gentling horses that didn’t want to be gentled, and getting our gear ready to work.
In short, Papa had taken the notion that we were going into the cattle business. Two dollars a head was the going rate for a beef steer in Texas, but you would be lucky to find anyone with a dollar in their pocket, much less two, and much less anyone willing to spend it on a longhorn steer. The war hadn’t left anyone in shape to buy much of anything, and most folks made do with what they could make themselves. Usually, they did without.
But Papa heard that there wasn’t enough beef to feed the people back East. A fat steer would bring thirty to forty dollars there, and a railroad was building its way west across Kansas. It didn’t matter if that railroad was about four hundred miles and a lot of rivers away from us. All that was needed were men with a little gumption and a herd to drive north.
Problem solved. There were more cattle running loose around us than you could shake a stick at, just ripe for the taking. And the men . . . well, Papa had gumption enough for ten men and was going to make me and my brothers into vaqueros—cowboys, folks later called us.
Chapter Fifteen
“There.” José set the saddle down in the dust in front of our jacal. “I made it for you.”
Gunn stood in the shadowed doorway, saying nothing and making no offer to come outside. He wouldn’t even look at the saddle.
Joseph and I were already mounted with the rest of the crew. We soon forgot about work and watched intently.
And we weren’t the only ones. One of the women tossing a pail of dishwater to the side of her door looked up and saw Gunn and José. Quick as that, she ran to the jacal next to hers, starting a chain reaction. In a matter of seconds everyone knew what was happening, and a half dozen feminine faces were peering out of their doorways or huddling together and whispering their predictions to one another. The kids followed the example of their mothers and quit their playing and peered from behind whatever cover they felt best suited their spying. You could have heard a pin drop.
“This should be interesting,” Papa said beside me.
For an entire winter, Gunn had said little to anyone, would rarely look you in the eye, and steadily refused to join in the work, no matter how many subtle suggestions Papa or the rest of us made in that regard.
“It’s a good saddle,” José said.
Gunn finally gave in and glanced at the saddle. “Give it to somebody else that needs it.”
“Your papa is right. Your arm is healed enough, and it’s time you quit pouting and joined us.”
“Are you like the rest of them and going to act like I ain’t a cripple?” A little bit of the old Gunn and that anger he always packed inside him surfaced in his face. “Admit it. I have. It’ll be easier on all of you.”
José hefted the saddle again and held it in front of Gunn. “Your papa asked me to make this for you. Rafael and Hector helped me. Will you insult them by refusing their gift?”
“I appreciate it, but you wasted your time.”
José looked to Papa and got a nod from him. One of the vaqueros rode forward, leading the Kiowa roan that Joseph had been riding for the past months. Several of the vaqueros had lent a hand gentling and training it. José took the horse by the bridle rein and pitched a blanket on its back and then settled the saddle there.
“Maybe you think that you can’t ride,” José said with his back to Gunn while he tightened the cinch. “But you have an arm left to handle a bridle and two good legs. There are men with less to work with.”
“I’m not going to get on that horse.”
José patted the seat of saddle and rested against the horse with that hand. He and Gunn stared at each other silently.
It was a good saddle that he leaned on, even if it didn’t look like much. I know, for he or the other vaqueros had made me one like it. It was the kind of bare-bones rig that you could cobble together with what was on hand, with most of the white rawhide–covered saddletree showing except where a hair-on deer hide was laid over the seat for a pad, and the cinch rings for the single rigging made on Papa’s blacksmith forge. Fancy, no, but stout and serviceable and made for men who handled cattle from the back of a horse. Those Mexican vaqueros had been building basically the same rig for two centuries.
The saddles we were used to riding back East either lacked a horn or had one so small and rigged so weakly that it was of little use when you had a rawhide riata tied to it on one end and a thousand-pound steer on the other. But the saddles that the vaqueros made had high forks and a great big saddle horn with a three-inch cap. It was like having a fence post in your lap.
It didn’t matter what kind of saddle it was, because I knew how stubborn my brother could be. But then again, Papa was just as stubborn, and he rode Shiloh over there and dismounted.
“Gunn, you’re going to get on that horse,” Papa said.
“You can’t make me.”
Papa grabbed Gunn by his arm. “Son, I can. I’ve been too patient with you and it’s time you quit moping around. Crying about it won’t make it any better.”
“I don’t want to ride.”
“You don’t have any say in it. A Dollarhyde doesn’t quit.”
“What about what I think?”
Papa lifted Gunn and set him on the horse, ignoring Gunn’s squirming and kicking.
“I don’t care what you think,” Papa said. “You grow up enough to get some sense and then maybe I’ll listen to you.”
“You won’t always be the boss of me.”
Papa looked up at him. “Time comes that you think you can do something about that, you come look me up. I’ll run this family until then.”
Papa and José went to either side of Gunn and unlaced the stirrup leathers and fitted them to his leg length. When they were done, they jammed his feet in the stirrups and Papa slapped the roan on the top of the hip.
The horse took off in a scramble of sand and gravel, and Gunn nearly toppled from its back, falling over the saddle horn and clutching for the reins Papa had knotted together for him. The horse disappeared down the trail along the river and into the timber.
“Do you think he will be all right?” José asked Papa.
Papa climbed up on Shiloh and tugged his hat brim down. “He doesn’t have a choice. This country won’t give him one, and I won’t, either.”
Chapter Sixteen
It was the heat of the day when I noticed Gunn’s horse standing riderless with its reins dragging the ground. The rest of the crew was scattered out at wide intervals, working through the mesquite brush to drive out whatever cattle were hiding there.
I feared the worst and put my horse to a trot and held up one arm across my face to shield it from the thorny tree limbs I was busting through. Gunn was wearing a white shirt, and that was the first thing I saw when I got closer. He was sprawled out on the ground next to a big clump of prickly pear.
I baled off my horse and knelt beside him. He pushed himself up on his elbow and squinted at me.
“Are you all right?”
“Hell, no. Do you think I would be laying here if I was?” He sounded bad, no matter how he tried to let on.
“Sleeping on the job, huh?” I noticed how pale he looked, and when I put my hand on his forehead his skin was clammy cold, no matter how warm the day was.
“I could use a drink.”
I brought him my canteen and helped him hold it while he took a drink.
“Help me to the shade.”
He was shaky, but got to his feet with my help. We made it to the nearest mesquite with high-enough limbs to
get under, and he took a seat with his back to its trunk.
“Want another drink?”
He shook his head and pointed behind me. “Fetch my horse while I sit here a bit.”
“I’m going to go get Papa.”
He grabbed my elbow and tugged me back to him. “I said I would be all right once I sit a spell.”
I noticed the dried blood soaked through his sleeve over the stump of his bad arm. I also noticed how his hand shook as it tried to hold me there.
“You aren’t up to this yet,” I said. “You need a little more time to heal up, that’s all.”
“Just got too hot. This brush holds the heat like an oven.”
“Could happen to anybody.” I knew that it wasn’t only the heat. It was the second time in the last week I had found him where he had fallen off his horse.
Papa had been driving us hard. Fifteen hours a day in the saddle was tough on anyone, but especially for Gunn. He was still a shell of his former self, thin as a rail and hollow-cheeked—no way to be for the kind of work we were doing and the hot sun beating down on him.
“I can’t believe I fell off,” he said. “I started getting woozy and then the first thing you know, I hit the ground.”
“You look as weak as a cat.”
“I’m already feeling better.”
“Liar.”
“Get my horse.”
I did as he asked, not because I thought it was a good thing, but to appease him and to keep him from trying to get up and get it himself. He held out his hand for the reins when I brought the horse, but I kept back from him.
“Why don’t you sit there awhile longer?”
He took another sip from the canteen and then poured a little on top of his head. “That feels good. I think I cooked my brain.”
“You never use it anyway.”
He cocked his head, listening for the sound of the men working through the brush. “Somebody’s going to see me like this.”
“We all know that you’re still mending.”
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