The man nodded. “These are different than those shorthorns. You wait and see.”
“What I’ll wait for is Papa going broke buying two-hundred-dollar bulls,” Gunn said. “It will be worth the trouble to say I told him so.”
“Tell your father that I’ll be out to the ranch in a day or so,” the man said, giving us a look like we were foolish children. “The doc here wants to keep an eye on my leg for a while longer. Says I’m too old and don’t mend like I used to.” He snorted through his nose.
“We’ll tell him.” I started my horse forward to open the corral and let the bulls out. We had two more hands with us, and driving ten yearling bulls a few miles to the ranch was going to make for a boring, easy evening.
“Hold on there, Joseph,” Gunn said. “What’s your hurry? Those bulls aren’t going anywhere.”
Somebody had forked the bulls a mound of hay and their water trough was full. They stared back at me with contented, gentle eyes. Fat and sassy.
Gunn pointed down the street. “Wouldn’t hurt to check the mail and get a bite to eat. Maybe have a toddy or two and see the sights.”
I knew it was useless to argue with him.
Regardless of what he said, there weren’t many sights in Destiny, but the little town was still growing. The hiders had wiped out the buffalo to the point that there wasn’t any profit in it. It was a rare occasion to see a straggling bunch anymore and the stacks of hides that had once lined the street were gone. A few of the buffalo hunters remained, but they had all gone on to other habits. There were some of them that had taken to farming at the edge of town and some that had put in small businesses. A larger part of them hung around to get drunk and lament the days when the buffalo were as thick as flies.
That’s not to say that Destiny was nothing but a bunch of cast-off hiders. The country was filling up in the past few years. There were now lots of other ranchers with cattle on the range, and there were several patches of oats and corn showing north of town, tended by newcomers who had homesteaded a chunk of state ground. The town sported three saloons, a hotel and restaurant, stockyards, wagon shop, and a genuine cigar and tobacco store. And Clayton Lowe’s general store still sat at the head of the street, right across from his yellow house.
“I could use a haircut if they’ve found a barber,” I said. I was twenty years old and had never had my hair cut by other than one of the vaquero’s wives.
We left the bulls and Gunn made a beeline for the nearest saloon. The bright green and yellow sign over it proclaimed it the LAST CHANCE FOR GOOD WHISKEY IN TEXAS.
Gunn dismounted and threw a loose wrap of one rein around the hitching post. He stopped on the boardwalk and turned to me when I didn’t follow. “Still determined to have a haircut instead of a toddy?”
I nodded.
“Suit yourself. You know where to find me.”
I hadn’t ridden much farther down the street when I saw her sweeping off her front porch. She was even prettier than the last time I had seen her. I pulled up, making a show of studying the sky and wondering what to say.
“I thought you had forgotten me,” she said. “What has it been? A month?”
“Three weeks. I’ve been awful busy.”
“Excuses, excuses.” Cindy Lowe wasn’t but a snip of a girl. Not more than a hundred pounds soaking wet, with freckles across her nose and curly hair that wouldn’t stay where she pinned it. But she had a wit as quick as the snap of a steel trap and seemed to love nothing more than deviling me. It’s hard to think ahead and have the right answers ready when it comes to women. No matter, I’d been coming to town to see her off and on for a good while.
“It’s the truth,” I said.
Her eyes were mischievous, but no matter how she teased me, I saw her throw a cautious glance across the street. “My brothers are gone, but Mama and Daddy are over there tending the store. Don’t you hang around here too long.”
“Excuses, excuses,” I said.
“Joseph Dollarhyde, you know my daddy would strap me and you both if he knew you were sparking me.”
I shifted uneasily in the saddle and cast my own glance at the store. Then I looked at the saloon that Gunn had disappeared into. Clayton Lowe seeing me might not be as bad as Gunn doing the same.
“Meet me at the river where we met last time,” she said and disappeared inside the house.
I wished I had time for a bath and that haircut. Cindy always smelled so sweet. But I wasn’t going to keep her waiting. She had opinions on lots of things and was temperamental at times and apt to give me an earful if I kept her waiting.
There was a pretty little spot in a grove of trees on the riverbank not a half mile from town. I barely had time to tie my horse and stomp the kinks out of my legs before Cindy came through the trees with a skip in her step and a smile on her face.
“Let’s go wading in the river.” The frank way she had of looking me in the eye always made me nervous, and her suggestion caused me to stammer instead of answering her.
“What? You ask me to sneak off with you, but then you’re all of sudden too shy to talk?”
“It’s just that . . .”
“Gosh, you’re acting like I said we ought to strip naked and go skinny-dipping or something.” A pout formed on her mouth.
“Somebody might see us.”
“Wading in the creek?”
“Yeah.”
“I promise not to hike my dress up too high. Surely, if someone sees my calves they won’t die of shock.”
“I guess so.” It was always later when I noticed that Cindy made up all the rules and I pretty much did what she wanted.
“My, but you’re an exciting one.” She gave me a teasing frown and then sat down and plucked off her shoes.
By the time I got out of my boots and rolled up my pants legs she was already wading in the shallows with her dress hiked up to her knees. I took a look around to make sure nobody was around and then joined her.
“Ooo, the water feels good,” she said.
“It’s been a hot one today.”
“Is that all you’ve got to say to a girl? Talk about the weather?”
“You stymie me some. Every time I get set with what I want to say to you, you throw me off-kilter.”
Instead of answering me, she shrieked and nearly knocked me over, splashing her way to the bank. She turned around once she was back on dry land and pointed behind me. “Snake!”
It was definitely a snake slithering along on top of the water, and a big old cottonmouth at that—nasty, ill-tempered serpents and poisonous to boot. For all of that, it didn’t seem intent on biting us, and swam slowly by me.
“Why don’t you shoot him?” she asked. “Moon shoots their heads off without me having to ask.”
I waded toward her and made an exaggerated showing of looking at my waistline and shrugging.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” she said.
“How’s that?” I sat down on the riverbank beside her.
“I think you’re the only cowboy in Texas that doesn’t wear a gun.”
“I never had a cow shoot at me.”
“You’re sweet, but there isn’t any way that this is going to work.”
“Us? Why, I like you something fierce.”
“I know you do, but how’s a man who doesn’t carry a gun, doesn’t cuss, and blushes at the sight of my calves ever going to deal with my family? Sweetness and kind gestures don’t work too well on them.”
“I guess we’ll have to ease them into the notion of me.”
“Daddy would have a conniption fit if he knew I was seeing a Dollarhyde. And Argyle Dollarhyde would rather spit on a Lowe than talk to one of us,” she said. “I don’t think you have the fight in you it would take, and me, well, I don’t know if I’ve got the nerve to keep seeing you on the sly.”
“I’d fight for you, if it came to that.”
“Oh yeah? Is that why you’re so willing to sneak off every time I suggest it?
I haven’t seen you anxious to tell my daddy or yours that you’re sweet on me.”
She was right, but that didn’t make it any easier to take. If only things weren’t so bad between our families. Papa had never forgiven Clayton Lowe for his actions with the State Police and trying to impound our cattle, and Lowe let it be known to anyone that would listen how Papa got his start in the cattle business by swinging a big loop and not being too particular whose cattle he roped.
“Don’t look so sad.” She laid a hand on my forearm. “You can’t help it, no more than either of us can help it that we have two stubborn fools for fathers.”
I jumped to my feet. “All right, let’s go tell your father now. And then we’ll go tell Mr. Dollarhyde. They’ll have to like it or lump it.”
She stood slowly, ending up with her little pug nose not an inch from mine. “That easy, huh?”
“I’m no coward.”
“No? You know what my daddy is liable to do, and worse if Moon’s around.”
“I won’t fight Moon if I don’t have to.”
“He won’t give you a choice.”
“I’d hate it if it came to that.”
She giggled, and a rush of anger built in me and I could feel the red crawling up my neck and flushing my face. “Go ahead and laugh at me. You do think I’m a coward, don’t you?”
She giggled again and somehow she was even closer to me. She must have been chewing on a candy stick not too long before, for her breath smelled like peppermint.
“So brave, yet you haven’t kissed me yet. Not in all the times I’ve gone out to meet you.”
“I . . .”
She raised up on her tiptoes and put both hands on my chest to balance herself. “Kiss me.” Her eyes were already squinted shut.
I gave her a quick, unsure peck, never feeling so awkward in my entire life. I intended to have another go at it to make up for the way I bungled it, but she was already running down the creek bank toward town, leaving me standing there at a loss. She never looked back at me, not once. That girl could really run.
Chapter Thirty
“If I didn’t know you better, Quaker boy, I’d say you’ve found a sweetheart. You’ve got that dreamy, fevered look about you,” Gunn said.
“Hmmph,” I grunted. The yearling Hereford bulls were lazy and not apt to scatter, but I spurred my horse forward anyway, pretending like I needed to knock one of those bulls back into the line of our drive.
“I wouldn’t have thought it.” Gunn gave a long whistle. “There I was, drinking rotgut and wasting a perfectly good evening, and the little saint managed to find some feminine company where I thought there wasn’t any. What did you do, find some farmer’s daughter?”
Sometimes I could ignore him and he would give it up, but not that time.
“Who was it? Was it that blacksmith’s wife? She’s fat and ugly, but she’d do in a pinch. Especially for a first time,” Gunn said. “I hear she used to sell herself to an occasional hider when her husband’s business was slow.”
I should have let Gunn believe that. It would have been better. Gunn might have been crude and rowdy, but he wasn’t dumb.
“Don’t tell me you did what I’m thinking. Tell me you aren’t sparking that Lowe girl.”
My lack of denial was as good as telling him he was right. I was prepared to fight him if it came to that, and I was sure it would. Gunn hated Clayton Lowe worse than Papa did.
“You better not let Papa find out,” he said. “He’ll disown you.”
It shocked me how easy he took it. “She’s a good girl.”
“I bet.”
“What are you meaning?” I rode my horse back to him. “I didn’t like the sound of that.”
“Don’t crawl up my back. You’ve got yourself enough trouble as it is.”
“Let me handle my own business.”
“Fine. Can’t say as I blame you. She’s a cute little button and about the only thing around here. Even if she is a Lowe.”
“I’ll figure it out. Papa’s going to hit the sky when I tell him, but maybe it will blow over.”
“Don’t count on it. But I’ll at least be glad that someone else is on his bad side.”
“I’m grown. He can’t tell me everything to do.”
“Don’t you know he slapped his brand on you the instant we picked you up from that Quaker wagon train?”
“I don’t think he thinks that.”
“Papa don’t turn loose of what he thinks is his, and the only way he thinks is right is his way.”
“I’ll get him to listen. I just need time to think of the right words. Maybe if he met Cindy.”
“She’d still be a Lowe, and Papa has as much use for a Lowe as he has for a rattlesnake.” Gunn pulled his horse up and he was staring at something in the distance. “No use for a Lowe at all. It’s one of his better qualities.”
“I said I would figure it out.”
“Well, you watch out for Moon Lowe.”
We’d come south of the trail we normally took back to the ranch, and I hadn’t ridden through there since the spring before during roundup. I saw the trickle of chimney smoke that Gunn was seeing, and we hadn’t gone half a mile more when we could make out the little log cabin tucked into a swale between two low hills. I knew it hadn’t been there the year before, and the logs it was made from were still white and fresh where they had been peeled. A set of hog pens and a brush horse corral lay alongside the cabin.
We passed close enough that I could make out the man standing in the doorway of that cabin watching us. It was Moon Lowe, and that Zeke came around the corner and stood by him, shading his eyes from the sun and staring at us until we passed.
“That cabin’s two miles inside our line,” Gunn said.
With more ranchers moving into the country, Papa had long before decided to build a series of line camps around the boundaries of the range we claimed. A rider was assigned to each camp to ride our boundaries and keep our stock on their home range and turn back anyone else’s cattle.
“Papa ain’t going to tolerate that,” Gunn said. “He’ll have a fit when he finds out.”
“Moon Lowe isn’t going to like it, either.”
Chapter Thirty-one
There had been a time when most of the Dollarhyde ranch hands were Mexican vaqueros and most of them married. But as the country settled up that wasn’t the case. The feel of the ranch changed along with the times.
The cluster of jacales still stood, where most of the vaqueros lived, but most of the hands hired in the last few years were young, Anglo bachelors. Because of that, Papa had built a long bunkhouse. You might say two populations existed on the ranch, one centered around the jacales, which was a village of its own, full of women and children, and one centered around the bunkhouse. The jacal village lay about a half mile from the headquarters, and the ranch hands had taken to calling it “Rancho Poquito,” the little ranch. The bunkhouse was a stone’s throw from the barn. Except when it came to work, the hands from those two locations rarely spent time together.
There were places in Texas where Mexicans and gringos mixed like oil and water, especially close to the border, but it was more subtle on the $D. Oh, there were some of the boys in the bunkhouse who didn’t hide it that they thought they were better than a bunch of greasers, and there were some of the vaqueros who had the story handed down to them of how the mean old gringos stole Texas from their ancestors. What held it all together was the fact that Argyle Dollarhyde didn’t care who you were.
He treated everyone equally good or equally bad. He expected every man on the ranch to work whatever hours he put them to for thirty-five dollars a month. It was menial pay for menial work, but everyone suffered the same. Furthermore, he would personally chew out any man on the payroll or send him packing when he was displeased with their work, no matter what color your skin was.
On the opposite end, there had been more than once when he gave a man an advance in pay, whether it was to bail some dumb An
glo cowboys out of jail after a drinking spree or paying a doctor to deliver one of the vaquero’s babies. It wasn’t perfect, but nobody complained, at least where the old man could hear them.
No matter, we had more hands than ever—enough to run the ranch and enough to finish about any kind of a fight. Right then it was fighting men Papa needed. Funny how men who work like slaves for thirty-five a month were ready to go to war the second Papa told them to grab their guns and saddle their horses. Some used to call that riding for the brand, and Hamish used to call that feudalism, whatever that is. All I know is that Papa’s men would do about anything he put them to. Even the bickerers and the complainers wouldn’t hear anything bad spoken by an outsider about the $D. There was pride that went with being a Dollarhyde hand, and it was kind of like a family. You might gripe about your family, but you would beat the snot out of anyone outside the family that said one foul word about it.
Papa didn’t brag about it, but I knew he was proud of how the men followed his lead. That’s the trouble with being strong like that; it’s a lot easier to fight without thinking when you’re sure you’ll win.
Papa took the news about Moon Lowe’s homestead about like we thought he would, and when we rode out of headquarters we were twenty-five men strong, armed to the teeth, and Papa leading us hell-bent for leather. Papa didn’t like the Lowes, and as a result, every man riding for him didn’t like them and was willing to burn them out as a matter of principle.
Moon must have known we were coming for by the time we got there, he and Zeke were forted up inside that little cabin. They had shutters latched over the few windows and had parked a wagon in front of the door for a barricade.
“Papa, I would be careful if I rode any closer,” Gunn said.
We sat our horses in a long line on top of the hill overlooking the homestead. Those that knew Moon, or of him, looked to Papa uneasily. They would charge hell with a bucket of water if Papa asked them to, but the thought of riding several hundred yards across open prairie with Moon and Zeke looking down the barrels of their buffalo guns was enough to give you a sour stomach.
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