The Baron Brand

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The Baron Brand Page 27

by Jory Sherman


  He spurred his horse into an off-gait and the jolting helped keep him from falling into a slumberous state that would have been dangerous. And, he knew he had to catch up with Martin and the two nighthawks, get ahead of the wagon.

  Finally, he put David and his mother out of his mind as the horse jarred his body with its jolting gallop.

  He almost ran Martin down. One moment the way was clear and the next, he was in the deeper darkness of trees and the three men loomed up right in front of him like sudden apparitions.

  “Ho up, Roy,” Martin said.

  “Hey.”

  “Any change back there?”

  “They’re coming at a steady pace,” Roy said. “Two flankers, a point man and one riding drag.”

  “Good. We’re not far from the place I picked for the ambush.”

  “How do you figure to get the slaves to the Box B if you capture them?” Cullie asked. “Walk ’em?”

  “We’ll borrow Aguilar’s wagon,” Martin said. “I had that figured before we even left. He won’t miss it.”

  “Let’s see this place you got picked,” Tom said.

  “Follow me,” Martin said, and rode toward the road. The three men fell into line, their mounts following his lead with weary, leaden docility as if they were old warhorses trekking to some nocturnal abattoir where Black Sabbath witches were in waiting in long midnight robes, fire-blackened cauldrons bubbling steamy clouds behind them.

  Roy felt the eeriness and the muscles of his abdomen tautened as he realized the enormity of what was about to happen. The horses dropped into a dark, featureless coulee, black as the pit of hell, a place choked with brush and he could almost hear the rattlesnakes slither away as the horses clacked their iron hooves on loose stones and sent them clicking like dice against the larger rocks so that they sounded like skeletal bones clacking in some wizard’s castle keep.

  The four horsemen climbed slowly out of the coulee onto a somnolent plain bristling with mesquite bushes and treacherous with nopal cactus, a long dry wash that led into a series of interstitial gullies worn to desecration over countless centuries, hollowed out by rains and winds and floods until they lay like scars of old wounds upon the land. A few yards farther on, they encountered a deep arroyo, seemingly bottomless in the nightpitch, and Martin turned his horse left, away from it and came upon a gradual rise that led to the road, to a patch of it, bordered by mesquite trees so thick they seemed to be threaded together into a maze’s wall that led to God knew where and Roy realized what a perfect place it was for an ambush.

  Martin reined up and halted his horse and turned to face his three followers. The others stopped and tried to discern the features on his face, but it was a mask, hidden from them in the darkness of trees and sky and they waited for him to speak and reveal that he was alive and the same man they had followed, not some wraith born out of the night’s black illusions.

  “This is where we’ll jump them,” Martin said. “Roy, you’ll ride past the arroyo and stay just off the road. We’ll let the point rider reach you. Then, I’ll take out the driver of the wagon and turn it into the arroyo.

  “Tom, you and Cullie take out the near flank rider and the drag man. I’ll stop the wagon and ride back to take the opposite flanker.”

  “Jesus,” Tom said, “you pile up a plate.”

  “You have to picture it in your mind long before that wagon gets here. Roy, if you can down the point rider quick enough, you can take out the other flanker. He might come riding up on you, anyway.”

  “See what I mean?” Tom said. “You got a heap more probables than possibles in this little scheme.”

  “Hell, it’s darker’n the inside of a well here,” Cullie said.

  “Your eyes will get used to it,” Martin said.

  “Do we shoot or rope?” Tom asked, “or just yell and scare the hell out of ’em?”

  “You can do whichever’s easiest for you,” Martin said. “I’m going to run up on my man after he’s shot his rifle and knock him off his horse, then hog-tie him if I have time.”

  “If not?” Tom asked.

  “I’ll coldcock him with the butt of my rifle.”

  “Only thing left to do is have a pie social,” Tom said.

  “They’ll be confused,” Martin said. “We’ll chase ’em back into those gullies or carry ’em back there and tie ’em up if they’re still breathing.”

  “Cullie,” Tom said, “was I you, I’d shoot your man dead and get your pistol ready. And I’m going to duck like hell because I think there’ll be lead flying like ducks in October.”

  “I was thinking that the best thing to do is shoot their horses. Put them on the ground. They’ll probably shoot wild and you can ride up on your man and knock him senseless.”

  “You got an idea there,” Tom said, coming around.

  “We have the advantage,” Martin said. “They’re not expecting us. And, with the wagon out of the way, they’ll try and run after it. That’s the natural thing to do. Go after what you’re guarding.”

  “Only it won’t be there,” Roy said.

  “That’s the idea,” Martin said.

  “I think we can do it, Tom,” Cullie said.

  “Pick your spots. We haven’t got much time,” Martin said. “Roy, go on.”

  Roy rode off. Martin put Tom just above the dip in the road and led Cullie beyond to a place in the trees where he could watch the whole caravan pass by and catch the drag rider from the rear. Then, he rode back and found a place on the opposite side of the road. He had an idea that he might take out the flanker on his side and still go after the wagon driver. If he was quick, it would work.

  Soon, they all heard the distant clatter of the wagon. None could see the other, but each man sensed what the others were doing. They unlimbered their rifles, checked their locks, poured fresh powder into the pans and blew gently on the grains, leaving only a film of fine black dust that would explode into fire when the flint struck the iron face of the frizzen.

  Some moments later, the point rider rode past. Then, the wagon rumbled up to the precipice of the dip in the road. Two riders flanked the wagon as it bent downward to the lowering road. Close behind, the drag rider rode, oblivious to what lay ahead.

  Roy waited until the lead rider was just a few feet past his position and then took a bead on the neck of his horse. He cocked his rifle and led the target slightly. He held his breath, then squeezed the trigger.

  There was a hiss and a poof as the spark from the flint struck the pan and the fire shot through the hole. The main powder charge ignited and the rifle cracked like a whip, spouting orange flame. White smoke obliterated horse and rider but Roy heard the ball thunk into flesh.

  The horse screamed and then the night exploded with more shots and flames lit the darkness and men yelled as if they had been thrown into the fires of hell.

  Roy raced through the smoke straight at where he had heard the horse fall, his veins tingling, his heart throbbing, his senses running hot with electricity and he wondered if he would ride into a lead ball and never see the stars or his mother again.

  39

  ANSON AND PEEBO did not speak to each other for fifteen long miles as they rode toward the burned-out jacal that lay within a stoΩe’s throw of the Nueces River. Anson’s head cleared and he felt no aftereffects of the concussion. The fresh air, the clear blue sky dotted with little cauliflower clouds, the land stretching out forever, all served to change his mood and his outlook. He thought, too, that getting away from the ranch was a big part of the mood that was on him now.

  Being around his mother always twanged his nerves, made him edgy, disgruntled. He had not stopped to figure out why to any great degree, but now he thought it might be because he knew she was ill, possibly going crazy, and there was the smell of death about her that brought back memories of Juanito, Bone and what had happened between Mickey and his mother. And, having Lazaro around didn’t help any—the boy was a constant reminder of his mother’s sin and the terrible c
onsequences they all were forced to bear.

  They followed a pair of wagon tracks that had been rutted over the years since Martin Baron had purchased the land from old Aguilar after giving up the sea to raise cattle. Such scars as these lasted a long time, especially with fairly frequent use. The Barons had hauled in supplies from Galveston and Corpus Christi over that route at least twice a year and Anson had used it to find his way to the farthest eastern edge of the Box B for the past couple of years. Each time he rode it, he felt more at home and the tracks were comforting, more or less stable markings on an unmarked land.

  They came to a small creek and a watering hole that was still seeing a lot of use. There were cattle and deer tracks in the soft mud around the hole, laced by the tracks of birds, armadillos, coyotes, rabbits, rats, and the boots of men.

  Anson reined up and ground-tied his horse in the shade of a husky oak whose branches spread wide as if to provide shelter for wayfarers. Peebo jumped from his horse as if he had just arrived at a picnic spot. Anson spread his body on the ground and drank from the running stream above the water hole.

  Then, he took off his hat and dipped it in the water, carried it to his horse. Peebo, watching him, did the same.

  “Good thing you got here first,” Peebo said.

  “Why?”

  “I would have watered my horse first, out of habit.”

  “Our horses would have sucked that hole dry and we wouldn’t have gotten a lick out of ’em the rest of the day.”

  “It’s a long country,” Peebo said.

  “Long and wide.”

  “And then some.”

  “If we hadn’t run into trouble after you got here with those horses, this is the way we would have taken getting back to the ranch headquarters.”

  “I figured as much,” Peebo said, carrying a hatful of water to his horse. “Shade feels mighty nice.”

  “Juanito said God made places such as this.”

  “I believe him.”

  “I’ve been thinking about him all mornin’,” Anson said.

  “Thinkin’? You must have got your brain back. I thought you must have plumb lost it somewheres yesterday .”

  “You still got your smart mouth, I see.”

  “Sometimes it ain’t as smart as I’d like it to be.”

  The two carried another pair of hatfuls of water to their horses. They could feel the light breeze under the tree, cooling them down.

  “I probably wouldn’t shoot that horse that throwed me if I was to see it right here,” Anson said.

  “No, I figured you was mad at somethin’ else and wanted to take it out on the horse.”

  “Is that what you figured?”

  “I didn’t think you’d shoot a helpless horse that hadn’t done you no harm.”

  Anson laughed. The tension had been broken between the two as if it were a cord that had stretched so tight it had snapped under the strain.

  He kicked a clod of dirt that had once been mud, rolled up above the creek from some hooved creature by accident. “I probably never would have pulled the trigger.”

  “Especially if you looked into its big brown eyes,” Peebo said.

  Anson laughed again. “It would have helped if you had named the damned horse.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Hard to kill something you’ve been calling Joe or Billy.”

  “True. A ’course I could have called it Shithead.”

  “It wouldn’t have been too hard to shoot old Shithead,” Anson said, laughing underneath his words.

  “Or Percy, maybe.”

  “I don’t know if I could kill a Percy.”

  “Maybe Percival.”

  “Yeah, I could murder a Percival, no question.”

  “Well, I’ll just have to be a mite careful on what I name my stock with you around, Anson.”

  “Name them something pretty, maybe. Like Fluffy or Taffy.”

  “I could do that. When you rode into town you could holler out, ‘Whoa up, Fluffy.’”

  Anson laughed gruffly, letting out a lot of the tension that still lingered like a stubborn flame that won’t go out no matter how many times you blow on it.

  “Let’s have a smoke,” Anson said. “Then, we’ll ride another five miles and make camp.”

  “Or we could ride into the evening,” Peebo said. “Make some miles in the cool.”

  “All right. Let’s see how we feel by then.” He stepped out from under the oak and looked at the western quadrant of the sky, saw that the sun stood on the low side. “There’s another little crick about eight or ten miles farther on. If it isn’t dried up.”

  “My canteen’s full.”

  “So’s mine.”

  They rolled smokes and squatted in the shade. Anson picked up a stick and started drawing in the soft dirt. Peebo watched him, fascinated at his friend’s intense concentration. Anson drew several shapes, squares, circles, diamonds, hexagons, triangles, trapezoids, and other curious shapes. He drew curving lines and straight ones all in a row. To one side of this growing pictograph, he drew a large box with sides of straight lines so that it made a square. Inside the square, he drew a large B. He inhaled from his cigarette and blew smoke out of the side of his mouth.

  When he was finished, Anson rocked back on his legs, cocked his head and viewed his large sketch with a critical eye. “Know what all this is, Peebo?” he asked.

  Peebo blew a stream of smoke out of his mouth and hunched forward to get a closer look at Anson’s strange design. He tipped his hat back from his forehead and scratched a spot on his scalp as if to align his thoughts. “Hen scratches?”

  Anson chuckled. “You can do better’n that.”

  “Looks like some kind of map, maybe. Crude as any kid’s scratchin’ in the dirt. I give up.”

  Anson took the stick and waved it like a pointer, or a wand over the entire landscape of his sketch. He finally plunked the point of the stick square on the large B he had drawn.

  “This here’s the town Ken Richman built. We call it Baronsville. You ain’t been there yet.”

  “No, I haven’t. That’s for sure.”

  Anson brought the pointer over to another series of small squares. “This is where we were this morning. Headquarters of the Box B. These little dots over here are where most of our hands live. About a mile, mile and a half from the big house.”

  “Didn’t I see you walking over there last night?”

  “Yeah, you might have. I went to see Jorge’s family.”

  “To tell them how he died?”

  “Yes. To tell them I was sorry.”

  “That all?”

  “I gave them some money, told them where they could find his body. Look, let’s get back to the map. All these other shapes around it are Baron property.”

  “None of ’em look connected, lessen those lines mean roads.”

  “They do. Our ranch looks kind of like a patchwork quilt. A piece here and a piece there. With connecting roads. See?”

  “Kinda.”

  “Okay. This little chunk here is where Roy Killian has his itty-bitty spread my pa gave him. Likely, he’ll grow it some bigger someday. Buy more land.”

  Anson made some scrawls to the west of the Killian icon. “He’d have to go this away.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Over here,” Anson said, raking the stick through the air and pointing at other squares, “is Matteo Aguilar’s Rocking A. Box B and Killian come to a point here.”

  “What’s all that jumble to the south?”

  “That’s the brasada. The brush country. No one claims it. It’s wild and thick and full of snakes and wild cattle and God knows what.”

  “And all this over here? I gather we’re just about in the middle of that.”

  “Yep. More Box B land. Here’s the road we’re on, see? And up yonder’s the Nueces. Down there is the Rio Grande, what used to be called the Rio Bravo by the Mexicans because they thought it was a short river.”

  “How come yo
u drew all this?”

  “See these lands around the headquarters?”

  “I reckon.”

  “Well, they’re fenced and we have cattle on ’em. This is where we do the crossbreeding and experimenting with different grasses.”

  “And all this other?”

  “What me and the hands have been doing is branding everything on this whole range. I mean to put a Box and a B on every head of cattle I run across and then fence all this in, probably with mesquite at first, and cull ’em down and mix ’em up and see what breeds do best. After we finish branding every damned critter that moves, then we’ll gather ’em all up and I’ll have me the biggest herd in all of Texas.”

  Peebo tipped his hat back and ground out his cigarette.

  Anson get up, took one last puff and tossed the stick away, crushed the butt of the cigarette into the dirt.

  “Seems like you bit off an awful lot, Anson.”

  “We’re just about finished with the branding, near as I can figure. We won’t stop, of course, but next thing we’ll do is put up the fences, cross fences and then we’ll make the gather. We’ll have to sell off some stock so I can hire extra hands, but we’ll get it all done.”

  “I think you might,” Peebo said.

  “First I got to catch that white bull and put my brand on his sorry hide.”

  “Then, after he kills you, what?”

  Anson laughed.

  “If he kills me, I’ll kill him. But, no, I’m going to make that mean sonofabitch fall in love with me. He’s going to love getting his hide burned and he’s going to follow me home like a puppy.”

  “That what you think? Boy, I think that old bull’s goin’ to stomp your ass right into the ground and piss on what’s left of your hide.”

  “Let’s mount up,” Anson said, heading for his horse.

  Peebo nodded and went to his horse. The two men set out once again, headed east. In the waning hours of the day, the sun played with the shadows and the land took on a richness of texture that made Anson’s chest swell with pride.

  Peebo, too, was not unaffected by the pastel colors that seemed to shift and blend with the changing light as the sun sank lower in the sky and softened the harsh features of that rugged country. He came up alongside Anson, flashed his disarming grin and began to talk when Anson smiled back.

 

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