Destiny, Texas

by Brett Cogburn

  “He built here to cause trouble. He’s testing me, or his father is,” Papa said. “We let him squat inside our range and more and more of his kind will flood in until we don’t have enough good land to graze a herd of goats.”

  “You’re right, but digging them out of there isn’t going to be easy,” Gunn said.

  “Moon Lowe is a cattle-thieving son of a bitch to boot,” Papa added.

  “Nobody has ever proved that,” I said, garnering a scolding look from both Papa and Gunn.

  “I know a rat when I see one, without having somebody show me his tail,” Papa said.

  “It’s time we ran him out of the country,” Gunn said. “Let me handle it.”

  “Moon Lowe, do you hear me?” Papa shouted.

  “I hear you,” Moon’s voice sounded from within the cabin.

  “I want to talk with you.”

  “You brought an awful lot of guns just to talk.”

  Papa shoved his Sharps down in his saddle scabbard and scowled down the hill. Most of the men had long since swapped out such guns for lever-action cartridge repeaters like Winchesters and Whitneys. Papa also had a .44 Smith & Wesson on his hip and his old Griswold cap-and-ball tucked in behind his belt buckle. He’d come loaded for bear, but I was glad to see that it looked like he was going to try and talk to Moon first.

  Papa nudged his horse forward. There were those that didn’t like his hard ways, but anybody who saw him that day couldn’t deny that he was a brave man. His hair may have been going gray and his belly a little heavier than it once had been, but he rode down that hill without flinching, even though that no-good Moon Lowe and his partner were as nervous as cats on a hot tin roof and apt to shoot instead of talk.

  Gunn didn’t let Papa’s horse take three steps before he spurred up even with him. The last thing I wanted to do was to ride down there, but I couldn’t let Papa and Gunn go without me. It seemed like I had been traipsing after those two for as long as I could remember. Some things don’t give you a choice. If there was one thing the Dollarhydes had in spades, it was pride and expectations. Living up to them was the hard part.

  Gunn was cocksure enough to smile at me when I caught up. “Good to see that you could join us.”

  Papa glanced at me and I could tell he noticed that I wasn’t packing a gun. “Joseph, you’d best hang back with our men.”

  “No offense, but I’ll ride it out with you, Mr. Dollarhyde,” I said.

  “I’m not questioning your courage,” he said. “I want you back there in case that Moon opens up on me. If he does, I want you to promise me that you’ll make sure our boys hang his sorry ass and burn that two-by-twice outfit of his to the ground.”

  “Don’t you come any farther!” Moon shouted at us.

  “I want to talk things over with you,” Papa said.

  “To hell you do!”

  “You remember what I said,” Papa hissed quietly at me.

  “The men will do what you want whether I’m back there with them or not.” I kept my horse walking beside his. Gunn rode on the other side of him. We went three abreast down that hill.

  “That’s far enough,” Moon said.

  We pulled up about a hundred yards in front of the cabin. I could barely make out Moon lying on his belly under that wagon with his Sharps buffalo gun resting across a sack of Arbuckle coffee. He had what looked like a jug of whiskey beside him.

  “You’ve built your cabin on Dollarhyde ground,” Papa said.

  “I filed with the state for this claim,” Moon replied. “You don’t own a bit of it.”

  “You knew my lines. We’ve run cattle and claimed this country since long before you showed up.”

  “Get gone. I’m warning you.”

  “Moon, I’m trying to give you a chance. There won’t be any squatting on my range.”

  “You’ve got about ten seconds, Dollarhyde, to get your old ass back up that hill or I’m going to start shooting.”

  “I’ll plug him for you, just say the word,” Zeke’s voice carried to us. A rifle barrel was sticking out between a pair of the window shutters where the voice came from.

  “I’ll burn you out,” Papa said. “Don’t push me.”

  A gun bellowed. I don’t know if it was Moon or Zeke that shot, but the bullet spanged off the hardpan to one side of Papa’s horse and it reared and made a wild jump. All three of us put the spurs to our horses and fled the way we had come. Gunn had dropped the reins over his saddle horn and was thumbing his Colt at the cabin behind us. I heard Zeke laughing when we finally topped over the hill out of sight of them.

  “Next time I won’t aim low,” Moon’s shout barely carried to us.

  Our hands gathered their horses around Papa, some of them leaning over their saddle swells, afraid that they might be skylined over the top of the hill.

  “How are we going to smoke those two out?” Gunn asked. “Wait till dark?”

  “Riders coming,” one of the men said.

  Papa’s horse was still nervous from the gunshots and the race back to cover, but he managed to quiet it and pulled his binoculars from their case and aimed them to the east.

  “Who is it?” the same man asked.

  “Look’s like Clayton Lowe and a handful of his freighters and maybe a few of those hiders that hang around his store,” Papa said.

  “That’s Prince riding beside his daddy, if I’m not mistaken,” Gunn said. His eyesight was a wonder, for the riders coming still had to be a mile away. “He must have been here when Joseph and I rode by the first time and rode to get help after we were gone.”

  “If we let them get to that cabin it’s going to be a hell of a fight,” somebody said.

  “It’s going to be a hell of a fight no matter what,” Gunn said.

  “This is getting out of hand,” I said. “We can’t open up on Clayton for no reason.”

  “No reason?” Papa threw me a dirty look, but I could tell he was thinking the same thing. “I should have shot him years ago when I had a better excuse.”

  “Maybe we ought to let things settle down and come back later,” I said. “Maybe they will listen to reason then.”

  Papa’s perturbed look changed to something sly. “We’re not licked yet.”

  An hour later, Papa had half our men sitting in scattered gun pits dug along the top of the ridge. All the cowboys looked grim, but I don’t know if that was because they had to dig holes with nothing but their sheath knives, or because they knew what was coming. Papa had those of us riding back to the ranch leave our rifles and ammunition with those we were leaving behind in the gun pits.

  “Don’t shoot unless they try to come up the hill,” Papa said. “We’ll be back come morning.”

  “What’s Papa planning?” I asked Gunn.

  Gunn shrugged. “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t bet against him.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  There were two big double-freight wagons sitting in the ranch yard when we rode in at dusk. They had been there when we brought Papa’s Hereford bulls home, but I paid them little mind and didn’t have a clue what was in them.

  After a short night’s sleep, Papa gathered us all in front of the bunkhouse. Oxen were already yoked to those wagons, and the freighters that brought them looked ready to travel.

  “What are they doing?” Gunn asked.

  “They’re coming with us,” Papa said. “If I can’t root Moon Lowe out, I’ll make sure he doesn’t move another inch into our ground.”

  “What’s in those wagons?” I asked. I couldn’t see anything for the tarps tied down over the wagon beds.

  Papa smiled a wolf smile. “Something I ordered a few months ago. Couldn’t have got here at a better time.”

  It was only five miles to Moon’s homestead, and we were there before the sun was good and up. Our men were still manning their gun pits, but were glad to see us.

  “Who all is down there now?” Papa questioned one of our cowboys.

  “Clayton, Prince, and seven more
men armed to the teeth.”

  “Did they give you any trouble?”

  “No, I think their plan is to fort up and wait for us to come.”

  “Let ’em wait.”

  The hill we were on was shaped more like a long, low ridge running north to south on the west side of the dip the cabin lay in. Papa sent one of the freight rigs to the north with instructions and had the other one roll along the backside of the hill headed south. The freighters and our cowboys began pitching out rolls of wire and fence posts at increments.

  “What kind of wire did you say that was?” I asked, examining a roll of it. It was twisted, galvanized wire with a two-prong barb every so often along its length.

  “Barbed wire,” Papa said. “They’ve been using it some down in South Texas. I ordered it intending on fencing in a big pasture for those new bulls and some of my best cows, but now I’ve found a better use for it.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to fence from the Little Wichita as far south as that wire will go. There won’t be one more squatter come along that won’t see where our boundaries are.”

  “You’re going to build a fence right in front of that bunch over the hill.”

  “I intend to send a message.”

  Our men didn’t like work that couldn’t be done from the back of a horse, but they kept to it because Papa said that was the way it was going to be. It wasn’t much of a fence—three strands of wire stretched tight with a team and singletree, with cedar, mesquite, and oak fence posts set thirty feet apart. All that first day, from dawn until dusk, we dug postholes and stretched wire and took turns manning our gun pits and keeping an eye on Moon’s cabin. More of Papa’s men had ridden in from the line camps, and we put a guard on the fencing crew. From time to time, Moon or some of his bunch yelled out at us. They could hear the commotion and ongoing work, but couldn’t see what we were doing over the hill. We didn’t bother to answer them.

  Clayton Lowe rode alone up the hill the next morning. I’ll give him that much. He wasn’t the coward Papa and Gunn thought him to be.

  He stopped that fancy gaited horse of his and waited for Papa to have the first word. He studied the fence while he tried to wait Papa out. Finally, he decided he was going to have to start the talking.

  “Moon filed on that state land fair and square. As legal as legal can be,” Clayton said. “That’s the law.”

  “Best thing you can do is have him pack up and go back where he came from,” Papa said. “He does that, and I’ll pretend he didn’t shoot at me.”

  “If he had shot at you, you wouldn’t be here. He was only warning you.”

  “You see that fence there? There’s a warning for you. Any more of you decide to claim what’s mine, my men are going to have orders to shoot you the instant you cross that fence.”

  “You can’t fence in what isn’t rightly yours. You’re a squatter as much as anybody ever was. Claiming everything in sight whether it’s yours or not.”

  “You try to take it from me. I fought for this place when nobody wanted it, and I’ll fight for it now.”

  Clayton swallowed his anger and took a deep breath. “It’s going to take a lot of wire to fence everything you claim.”

  “I’ll buy more. Before I’m through, I’ll have six bull-tight strands stretched around it all.”

  “We keep what we claim, Lowe,” Gunn said. “Just like I told you before.”

  “Your fence cuts across the west end of Moon’s claim,” Clayton said.

  “Tell him to restake his claim,” Papa said, pointing to the east. “He’s got all of that to choose from.”

  Clayton sighed like a tired horse come to rest. “I’ve tried, Dollarhyde. Tried to get along with you. Tried to reason with you, but it never works.”

  “Best thing you can do is to stick to your own. Tend that town of yours and your freighting business. I don’t begrudge you that.”

  “You aren’t the only ones around here. This country’s filling up. They’re saying that maybe the railroad will reach here from Fort Worth in a few years. Clay County is reorganized and we’re the county seat. We’ve got a telegraph and a county sheriff now.”

  “Then you ought to be happy. Leave the grass to me.”

  “The new people are going to see you for what you really are—a high-handed bully and grabber. We’re getting civilized and the law won’t put up with the way you operate.”

  “I’m the law on my land, and I’ll take care of my own.”

  “You’re starting a fight you can’t win. No good can come of it.”

  “I don’t lose, Lowe. Don’t know how.”

  “We’ll see what the state has to say about your fence when I talk to the judge. Maybe he won’t have the same opinion about you laying siege to my son’s homestead and fencing off state land.”

  “You tell that boy of yours that the next time I suspect he’s been stealing my cows I’m going to hunt him down and hang his fat ass from the first tree I come across.”

  “I’ll kill you first.”

  I noticed the nickel-plated belly gun tucked into Clayton’s waist and the way his hand was trembling. I thought for a second that he was about to draw on Papa.

  Papa pushed his horse forward until he was beside Clayton, their legs almost touching. “I’m here, right now. Why don’t you start killing?”

  Clayton tried to hold Papa’s hard stare, but he couldn’t. He looked next to the Dollarhyde hands gathered around him, and every man of them gave him a look almost as cold as Papa’s.

  “Don’t push me too far.” Clayton turned his horse and rode back to Moon’s cabin.

  “If I had one bit of backshooter bred in me I’d plink him off his horse right now. Save somebody else the trouble,” Gunn said. “I still think we ought to ride down there tonight and finish this thing. Those Lowes are going to be a thorn in our sides as long as we let them hang around.”

  “I’ll handle Clayton Lowe,” Papa said.

  “He’ll do like he said,” I threw in. “He’s going to complain to that judge as soon as he can. You can bet on that.”

  Papa gave me that sly smile again. “Two can play at that. If he wants to hire lawyers, then we’ll hire our own. If he thinks his politician cronies are going to help him, well then, we’ll buy us one or two.”

  “It would be easier and cheaper to shoot him,” Gunn said. “And I thought you hated lawyers and politicians.”

  “Fight fire with fire, I say.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Papa put some of the men to cutting more fence posts and left for Austin the next day. We didn’t see him for a month, but when he finally returned he brought more wagonloads of barbed wire and a land agent with him.

  I don’t understand all the legal shenanigans that went on to make the state land situation like it was, but in a nutshell, Texas made up her own homestead rules. Somehow, Texas had managed to keep its land when it was annexed into the Union. As such, the various Federal homestead acts didn’t apply in the Lone Star State. Mixed among a 160-acre state homestead act for the general citizens of the state were old Spanish land grants and colony grants from the days when Mexico ruled, headrights for the veterans of the Texas Revolution, homestead laws for Confederate veterans, and the list went on. Couple that with the fact that the government coffers were generally busted from as far back as the Republic days, and that Texas had always sold or traded land to pay its bills or to get improvements it couldn’t afford. Railroads were granted large rights-of-way, far in excess of what they needed to lay tracks. Other companies built projects for the state government in exchange for land certificates. Those land certificates were bought and sold and traded hands until sometimes it was hard to say who owned what.

  The land agent Papa brought with him worked for some firm out of Sherman, Texas. His company had certificates for three hundred thousand acres of land, and he and Papa sat up half the night dickering. They were at it again late the next morning on the front porch of the big ho
use when Gunn and I joined them.

  “A dollar and a half an acre? Are you kidding me?” Gunn asked.

  “Hush,” Papa said.

  The land agent, instead of a lawyer or bookkeeper type like I suspected, was a burly brute with a beard halfway to his belly and the look of a man who knew hard work. Come to find out, he had made a fortune in the freighting and construction business, and had bought land certificates to trade on when he could get them on the cheap. Not only was he a partner in the firm, he was also one of its salesmen and surveyors.

  “Times are changing. When the railroad gets here it will bring people wanting land. We’ve already sold to the cattlemen surrounding you. The only reason they aren’t buying some of your ground is out of respect and courtesy, and because you’re the biggest operator in these parts,” the land agent said.

  “If they won’t try and take it from us, what makes you think some farmer will?” Gunn asked.

  “Those corncob pipe–smoking, piney woods senators back in East Texas think all you big ranchers are robber barons. The newspapers, too. They say you’re making a fortune off of grazing your cattle on land the public rightly owns and that the little men of the state could use.”

  “Where the hell were they when we were fighting Indians out here?” Gunn asked. “None of them would set a foot out here then.”

  “You don’t have any idea the way things get when you get the government and a pack of lawyers involved. No, if we want to last we need to get in the first punch, before folks like Lowe even know they’re in a fight.”

  “How much deeded land do you have?” the land man asked over his coffee.

  “Two years ago, I bought forty-five thousand acres off of a veteran of the Battle of San Jacinto. It was one of those headrights the Republic gave to those who fought in the revolution, you know,” Papa said. “That ground covers about seven miles on both banks of the Little Wichita.”

  “What?” Gunn and I both asked at the same time.

  Papa got a twinkle in his eye. “Do you think I haven’t seen this coming? Moon Lowe simply reminded me that I need to work faster.”