“Whenever I get my degree.”
“And then what?”
I shrugged. “I’ll play it by ear.”
Gunn nodded at my valise. “I guess it’s right that you have your share.”
“I don’t know that it’s right, but it’s what I’m doing.”
“All right, but if you take that you don’t have any stake in the ranch. You’re selling out your interest.”
“Meaning it’s yours when Papa is gone?”
“That’s what I mean. I’m the one staying.” Gunn cleared his throat. “It’s been a long summer.”
“That it has.”
We had spent the whole summer hiding out in the Indian Nations, not knowing if the army or some posse was going to show up at any time or be waiting ahead of us when we finally drove north. Papa wasn’t in Abilene that fall when we finally straggled in with the herd, but he had a rider waiting for us there to tell us he was okay and not locked up in the Jacksboro jail. He had taken a stage down to the capital at Austin and hired him a big shot lawyer that also happened to be a prominent state senator. After that, the State Police were told to lay off us until the case was worked out in the courts.
Papa had the money to hire a good lawyer. I know, because the cattle market was booming. Gunn and I brought that herd in so fat and prime that cattle buyers fairly fought one another over them, and I sent eighteen thousand dollars to Papa’s Kansas City bank account. He would have had more, but I kept twenty thousand for myself—the same twenty thousand that had Gunn eyeing my valise.
“Gunn?”
“What?”
“Being mad at the world won’t do anything but cause you more problems.”
“Got an answer for everything, don’t you?”
“No. Wish I did.”
“I ain’t you, and it might be that you aren’t as smart as you think you are. Might be you with most of the problems. You’re the one running.”
The engineer was already stoking the firebox full of coal, and smoke was pouring from the locomotive’s stack. I brushed my hand down the lapel of my frock coat, feeling a little awkward in my new suit, but proud, too.
“I don’t know how you stand wearing that getup,” Gunn said.
“How do I look?” I adjusted the bowler hat on my head and stared down at the black-polished shoes on my feet.
“Like you’re ready for your burial or a church service, take your pick.”
I unbuckled my gun belt and pulled my holstered Remington Army from under my coat. I wrapped the belt around the pistol, making a bundle, and handed it to Gunn. “You can have it. Sell it if you want to.”
“That’s a lot of cash you’re carrying to go without a gun,” he said.
“I’ll make do.”
“You’re going to feel naked without this on your hip.” He held my pistol before him and hefted it up and down, as if weighing it.
“I don’t intend on wearing one of those again.”
“All aboard!” the conductor shouted.
“I guess this is it,” Gunn said.
“So long, brother. You take care of Joseph.” I held out my hand to shake with him, but he was already walking away.
I don’t know if he heard me. I took a seat next to the window and watched Abilene disappear through the glass, the coal smoke floating past the train as wispy as my dreams.
PART II
JOSEPH
Chapter Twenty-six
1874
Some folks think I’m a Dollarhyde because I took their last name. That isn’t true, at least by blood, but they did adopt me and I haven’t thought of myself as anything but one of them in years. You would think that people would notice that I’m six inches shorter than those long, tall devils that I grew up with. Too much short Dutchman bred in me, if you ask my brothers. Gunn was the worst to ride me, but he didn’t mean anything by it. It was just his way.
Papa—I thought of him that way, even though he wasn’t my real father, although I never called him anything but Mr. Dollarhyde. I don’t know that he would have minded if I called him Papa, but I never tried. Mr. Dollarhyde was what everyone called him, for he was a man who required your respect. A hard man, yes, but a man that bore listening to. I didn’t always understand him, but he taught me most of what I know and never treated me anything but square. Not many would have taken me in, and I don’t know why he did.
Anyway, it was Papa who sent me with Gunn. Having me with Gunn eased Papa’s mind, I think. Not that Gunn was a wanted man anymore. None of us were.
The former adjutant general of the State Police thought it a good idea to run off with thirty-seven thousand dollars of the state’s funds, and after that, the legislature decided it was a good idea to do away with the State Police. That meant that the little black book of wanted men they put us in for running off with that herd didn’t matter anymore.
That wasn’t what worried Papa. It was because Gunn had a way of finding trouble. And there was the fact that Hamish left us. He rarely showed it, but Papa thought the world of his two boys—his real sons. He kept it hid as best he could, but Hamish leaving hit him hard. He told us that Hamish was a thief who took money the ranch badly needed, but it was his heart that was hurt more than his purse. Oh, he loved a profit, but his greatest pride was in his sons and the name he gave them. Not many know that, for he was a man hard to get to know.
They were all like that—all three of them tearing each other or tearing at themselves. I remember when we lost Mrs. Dollarhyde. Not the new Mrs. Dollarhyde, but the older one the Kiowa killed. Hamish and Gunn, they never got over that. Papa, neither, although he was the kind built to carry whatever burdens life loaded him with. I wonder sometimes if they hadn’t been hoping the Kiowa would kill them all when they took me with them on their vengeance trail. Such men never know a day’s peace until you lay them below the ground. If it hadn’t have been the loss of Mrs. Dollarhyde, it would have been something else. They always had to have a fight, whether it was something that got in their way or something they imagined got in their way. Everything on the turning of the earth is made a certain way, dobbed together like a ball of mud between your hands. That’s the way they were made.
They often tease me for being so quiet, but I can’t help it. It was hard to get a word in edgewise, even when I wanted to, for none of them were ever ones to hold back their opinions. There were times I wanted to tell them that they should be glad they still had each other, but I didn’t. Maybe I should have spoken up a time or two, for I could have told them what it’s like to lose everyone you love.
No matter, I’m a Dollarhyde now. They gave me their name, and we don’t talk about what’s eating us. Admitting a weakness is the same as being weak.
When I caught up to Gunn he had stopped his horse on the edge of town next to the sign. It was the same sign that had been there when the Kiowa took my first family. The same old red letters painted on the same old piece of scrap lumber: DESTINY, TEXAS. Only the town had changed. In place of the burned-out ruins of the old settlement there was now a scattering of log cabins, sod-bricked shacks, and a few frame houses lining a narrow, short stretch of street, with a general store and trading post at the far end. Stacks of buffalo hides taller than a man on horseback made a wall of their own on our end of the street.
“Sons a bitches,” Gunn said to nobody in particular.
I didn’t even know if he had heard me ride up. “Who?”
“Those damned hiders.”
I had to agree with him, even if I refrained from profanity. Men had come down from the north that spring—men with wagons and a crew to skin and one to shoot. Buffalo runners, some of them called themselves. We called them hiders.
Buffalo hides were bringing three dollars apiece, and the slaughter was on. You would come across a place where some shooter had made his stand with a big bore single-shot rifle propped on a set of shooting sticks and a sack of hand-loaded cartridges laid beside him. Everywhere you went, dead buffalo. Little bunches, big bu
nches, carcasses everywhere, the bubbly white fat of them where their hides were peeled away standing out on the prairie like bloody mounds of snow in the brown grass. I’ve never seen anything as indignant or as sad as what they did to those animals left to rot under the sun. The blowflies were so bad along the river that year that you had to strain your coffee before you could drink it, and you could smell the kill sites from a quarter a mile away, or farther when the wind was right. The lobo wolves and coyotes were thicker than I ever saw them, feasting and gorging themselves on scavenged meals.
“Damn shame the Indians don’t wipe them out,” Gunn said.
I knew he didn’t mean the buffalo. “They’ve tried, but it’s a losing battle.”
That very summer, a mixed band of Comanche and Kiowa had cornered twenty-eight buffalo hunters up in the Panhandle. Adobe Walls they called it, but it was nothing more than a couple of hide town trading posts, with a sod saloon and a few outbuildings. More in the name than there was in the place. They say there was anywhere from three hundred to a thousand of those mad Indians, but they weren’t any match for marksmen holed up with good guns—repeating Henrys, Spencers, and Winchesters for close work, and Sharps and Remington big bores that could knock over a bull buffalo at better than a quarter a mile away.
Some Comanche medicine man convinced those Indians that he could make them bulletproof, but a man by the name of Billy Dixon took aim with his bull-barreled Sharps at one of them over a mile away and tipped him over with his first shot. It was undoubtedly a lucky piece of shooting, but it was big medicine and enough to make those Indians decide to fight another day.
Other than killing a hunter or two here and there or raiding some supply train or lonely outpost, the southern plains tribes couldn’t do much to slow the slaughter of their livelihood. The Kiowa were mostly held in a reservation in the Indian Nations, ever since General Sherman arrested some of their big chiefs and sent them off to prison. Only a few scattered, mixed bands of Comanche, Kiowa, and Southern Cheyenne made up the hostiles that wouldn’t submit to the army and the reservation system.
You still had to keep your eye out for raiding parties, but it wasn’t anything like when we first came west. Other than a few cattle run off from the ranch and one of our hands running his horse to death fleeing from a hunting party he ran across, we hadn’t had much trouble out of the Indians in the last year. With the army hot after them, most of the tribes were hanging close to the edge of the river breaks and canyon country up in the Panhandle or farther west in the dry country.
I still couldn’t sleep well at night, especially when the moon was full and the Indians were bound to be raiding. He might have joshed me some, but Gunn never told anyone how I used to crawl under my bed in our jacal and pull the covers over my head. Maybe it was because we all had nightmares those first few years on the ranch and were prone to call out in our sleep.
“Shit,” Gunn said. “I wish there was someplace else to have a drink.”
“We could ride to Buffalo Springs or down to Jacksboro.”
“I’d die of thirst before then.”
Gunn kicked his horse up and I followed him. There were several freight wagons along the street and men loading out hides or unloading powder, lead, and other supplies freighted in from the East. Many of them stopped their work to stare at us, recognizing the brands on our horses. None of the looks they gave us were anything close to friendly.
Months before, Papa had found one of our steers shot dead and he blamed it on some vagrant buffalo hunter, whether that was true or not. And then a prairie fire burned over a third of our range. Papa blamed that, too, on some hunter careless with his campfire. After that, he gave all his riders instructions to run off any hide men they saw on the range we claimed. The word had gotten around, and we weren’t the most loved people among the hiders.
Gunn ignored them and rode on. The hitching rails in front of the lone saloon were filled up with tied horses.
“Let’s go on to the store,” Gunn said. “Maybe there won’t be so many of these stinking sons a bitches in there.”
“I think you wanted to ride in here just to thumb your nose at them,” I said.
Gunn didn’t answer me.
Clayton Lowe was standing on the porch when we loosened our cinches in front of the store. The sign above him proclaimed him as the proprietor, and mayor of Destiny.
“Good afternoon,” he said.
“Fuck off, Lowe.” Gunn shouldered past him.
I nodded at Clayton, hoping to take some of the sting out of Gunn’s words as I followed him inside.
Clayton had a little watering hole in the back of his trading post. There were a couple of hide hunters outfitting themselves, but nobody was sampling the whiskey. Clayton filled his customers’ orders and then went behind the sanded plank that served as his bar and rested both of his hands on it and looked from one of us to the other. “What will it be?”
“Like you’ve got more than one choice,” Gunn said. “You could poison wolves with the stuff you sell.”
“Take it easy,” I said under my breath to Gunn.
Clayton seemed like he didn’t hear Gunn, or was willing to ignore it. I don’t know why he didn’t leave Gunn alone. It was obvious that Gunn was in one of his quarrelsome moods, and bad blood between the Lowes and the Dollarhydes wasn’t ever going to go away.
But Clayton was a man who liked to pick at a thing, and he poured us both a drink and then one for himself. “I hear the cattle market is awful this year.”
“It’s been better,” Gunn said.
“Last year’s financial panic hasn’t righted itself yet,” Clayton said. “I hear your daddy sold at a loss last summer—two herds that he practically had to give away up in Kansas.”
“I bet that broke your heart,” Gunn said after he downed his drink.
“You’ve been listening to your daddy too much. I don’t hold any grudges against you Dollarhydes.”
“To hell you don’t.” Gunn slapped down his money and reached for the bottle himself and poured another drink.
“Keep your money. It’s on the house.”
Gunn left his money on the bar and looked at me and then at the full glass of whiskey in front of me that I hadn’t touched. “You going to drink that?”
He knew the answer to that without me telling him, but I answered anyway. “I’ll pass.”
“Still the good Quaker boy, huh?” Gunn tossed down my whiskey. “Sin or not, a little whiskey is about the only thing that makes some days tolerable.”
Clayton made a show of wiping the bar with a rag, and butted in when he saw that I wasn’t going to argue with Gunn. “I don’t bear you any ill will, Gunn, or the rest of your family.”
“Can’t say the same,” Gunn said.
Another group of hide hunters came through the front door. By the loud way they talked, it was plain that they had been in the saloon next door. One of them walked over and slapped Gunn on the back.
“Is there room here for one more? I’ve got money in my pocket and a man-sized thirst.” The hunter wore a filthy army coat stained with blood and grease, and his fingernails were black. He reeked like he was rotten. “I’ve been skinning for Frank Mayer. Best rifle shot in the world. Took better ’n sixty buffalo in one stand last week. Like to wore us out trying to keep up with him.”
“Get your hand off of me,” Gunn said, still staring at the wall behind the bar. “You smell like old guts.”
“Excuse me?” the man said. If he hadn’t been drunk he would have noticed that Gunn was looking for a fight.
Gunn reached for his pistol at his waist. He did it slowly, and the hider didn’t notice until he heard the sound of the hammer cocking below the bar and out of sight.
The buffalo hunter backed up two steps while he looked to see if his friends knew what was going on. “That’s a hell of a thing for you to be looking for trouble, especially a one-armed cripple.”
The hider’s hand inched up for the skinning knif
e on his belt, and the others were easing through the shelves of goods, trying to come at us from more than one angle.
“There will be no trouble in here,” Clayton said. “Not in my store.”
“Well then, let’s all be friends.” Gunn drew his pistol, uncocked it, and slammed it down on the bar top. He downed another whiskey and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “As soon as the sons a bitches take a bath I’ll buy all three of them a drink.”
I don’t know why Gunn got like that. He was polite to everyone most of the time, but if you crossed him, or he was drinking, it was best to walk easy around him. The problem was, his drinking had gotten worse since Hamish left.
I looked at the pistol Gunn had left lying on the bar. It was a brand-new .45 cartridge Colt that he had picked up in Newton to replace his old Dance the year before. The chunk of blued and case-hardened steel lay there on the bar like an unspoken oath, the tiny ruby eyes in the serpent engraved into the ivory grips glowing like coals—a Peacemaker, folks out West had taken to calling such Colts. They said God didn’t make all men equal, but Colonel Colt did. I never saw anything peaceful about such a weapon, no matter what anyone might call it. A man with one of those can send his enemies straight to Hell, but he had better be careful or he can send himself right along to the same place if he isn’t careful. The Devil’s right hand is what people of the Good Book used to call them.
Clayton pulled a shotgun from under the bar and backed himself against his stock of whiskey. He didn’t point the gun at anyone in particular, leaving it pointed at the ceiling. “I said there will be no fighting in here.”
The hiders started out the door, but the one who had tried to drink with us hung back. “This ain’t over, cripple.”
Gunn smirked over his whiskey glass.
“You Dollarhydes,” Clayton said when the hiders were gone. He set his shotgun in the corner and took a seat on a stool. “Think you’re really something, don’t you? Better than everyone else. I would throw the both of you out of here, but those hide hunters you insulted are likely to be waiting outside. Maybe they’ll cool off and go to the saloon. A few more drinks and they might forget about you.”
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