by Lou Bradshaw
“Wouldn’t make a livin’ at it, but I ain’t poisoned anybody yet, and there ain’t no trick to cookin’ those things.”
“You already know my name…. what am I supposed to call you?”
“Name’s Tate. James L. Tate, but most folks either call me Jim or Tater. Don’t matter whichever one works best for you.”
I looked him over from head to toe, and I saw a man in the making but not quite finished. He was about five foot nine and probably didn’t weigh over a hundred and thirty pounds. His hat was a beat up, and his boots were rundown. Everything in between could either use mending, dusting, washing or all three. Tater seemed to be a little too much like something you ate, he certainly wasn’t any kind of a James L. anything, and he hadn’t grown up to a Jim yet. So I said, “Alright, Tate, finish your beer and we’ll head on up to Cimarron.”
Two days later, we rode into Cimarron. Tate had turned out to be a capable cook and a pleasant traveling companion. To my surprise he never looked at me like I was a hundred dollars on the hoof, so I reckoned he wasn’t really a bounty hunter after all. I told him that I was planning to sit around Cimarron for a while and see if I could catch on with a trail herd heading for Pueblo. That’s where the rail head was. It seems to have stalled there since last year.
I heard my traveling companion’s life story on the trail to Cimarron, and it wasn’t an uncommon tale. He’d been raised on a Missouri farm near St. Joe. When his pa died, Tate had been fifteen. His older brother took charge of the distribution of assets. The brother gave him two hundred dollars and an offer of a job, while the twenty five year old brother took everything else. Everything else consisted of four hundred and fifty acres of bottom land with a house and stock.
“I took the two hundred dollars and told him where he could shove the job, and then I took the best horse pa had and lit out for California and the gold fields. Never made it to the gold fields. Just been bangin’ around cattle and cattlemen ever since… I’m probably wanted in Missouri for horse stealin’.” He said.
After looking the town over, we went into a likely looking saloon for a dust cutter and some grub. I asked him if he had any eatin’ money, and he said that he had a few meals left in his pocket, but not a lot. I gave him a ten dollar gold piece, and told him that it was a loan. He could pay me back when he hit the gold fields. He didn’t want to take it, but he finally saw the wisdom of pride being a pretty poor substitute for beans and beef.
I told him that if either of us latched on to a trail heard to look the other one up. He said, “Bell, I’m sure glad I didn’t shoot you for that hunnerd dollars,” I laughed and told him that I was too.
Cimarron was a rowdy little town. It was sort of a collection of ranch supplier, freight haulers, and movers. There were more than a few men walking around with guns tied down. Whether or not they could use them, was a question that I didn’t care to find an answer to. As far as anyone was concerned, I was just another drifting cowhand looking to land a week or a month’s wages before moving on.
I sat in on a few penny anti games, just to establish myself and to pass the time. There was close to twelve hundred dollars in my money belt, so I wasn’t about to starve. I’d run into Tate from time to time. He was still lookin’, but he still had a smile on his face.
During the week I’d spent in town, some of the games had been bigger than the penny anti stuff. So I sat in on a few. One in particular had a ten dollar large bet limit, so I sat in to test the waters. Stud poker has a large bet and a small bet. The large bet is the most you can raise on a single round, and the small bet is the least you can raise. Anything in between was fine.
I’d been playing for a couple of hours and was doing alright, but there was something peculiar about a couple of players. When one dealt, the other one won, so I settled in to keep a closer eye on things. They didn’t look like they belonged together because one was city dressed and the other was in range clothes, but I knew that didn’t mean a thing.
There were a number of people standing off a bit watching the game. One fella caught my eye. He was paying close attention to what was going on, and he was uncommon big. He stood at least two or three inches over my six foot height. I could tell that there was strength in his size but without a lot of bulk. There are some men who just look like they’re made of something hard. He did.
He had long arms and broad shoulders. I just got the sense that he’d be a handful in any kind of tussle. He was moving around the table and watching the play. I wondered if he was giving signals to someone in the game, so that gave me one more thing to watch for.
As the deal came back around to the city fella, I concentrated on his hands. On the second round of the hole card deal, I saw it coming out of the deck from the wrong place. “Are you absolutely sure you want to deal that card, Mister?” I said.
Everything got suddenly quiet. You could’ve heard a mouse fart. “What are you implying, cowboy? You calling me a cheat?” The card was still in his hand, suspended above the table.
“I’m not calling you anything. For all I know, you may not know the rules of the game. You may not know, that the cards are supposed to be dealt from the top of the deck and not the bottom.”
He flinched and I had my hand on the butt of my sixgun, when the big man I’d been watching laid his left hand on the shoulder of the city fella and said, “Friend, I don’t know a spade from a shovel, but I saw where that card came from… and it wasn’t from where it was supposed to come from.”
I had my weapon out and pointed in the general direction of his accomplice. Someone made a comment about getting the tar hot, and someone else said he’d get his rope. When it was all said and done, we split their winnings and threw them out in the street with some degree of malice.
My new found friend and I went to the bar for a drink. “Thanks, friend, you saved a life back there and maybe two… one of them could have been mine. I’ll buy the drinks.”
“It was my good fortune that you showed up and took an interest in the game.” I told him.
“Actually,” he said “I was kinda lookin for you.”
I became wary and said, “You’re not planning to collect that hundred dollars that John Slack’s offering are you?”
He laughed good and hard and said, “Nah, nothin’ like that… I ran into an old friend back in Las Vegas, who told me to kinda keep an eye out for you, a little dark eyed filly named Dory… or Isadora as I knew way back then.”
I felt a bit easier and relaxed then asked, “Where do you know Izzy from?”
“It was back in River Town, Texas. She came in to the smithy I was working for needin’ a shoe replaced for one of the horses hitched to her buckboard. She weren’t but about fourteen or fifteen but she was already a looker. It was all I could do to concentrate on what I was doin’. She sure had fun at my discomfort.”
“That sounds like Izzy.”
“Yeah when I walked into the Plugged Nickel Saloon, she knew me right off and said, ‘Ben Blue, as I live and breathe… is that really you?”
“Then she told me about the card game and that the marshal kinda wanted you out of town…and said if I should run into you to give you a big old kiss, which I’m not inclined to do.”
“Well I for one was happy enough to kiss you when you broke that little fracas over at the table.”
“Are you just on your way through, Blue?”
“No I’m with a herd about ten mile back, I just rode ahead to see if I could pick up a couple more hands… Then I spotted you… she described you as a good looking rogue with a cut up hat… She got the hat part right.”
“You the trail boss of that herd?’ I asked.
“No, but they’re my steers, and I’m payin the bills. So I’ll hire what the trail boss couldn’t or wouldn’t get. There’s thirty five hundred in that bunch, and we’ve only got eight men and a cook. Only two of the men are mine, the rest came with the trail boss.”
“You don’t sound too overly happy with this
trail boss. He give you any reason not to trust him? Or have you just got a hunch?” I asked.
“There’s nothing I could put my finger on, and he had some recommendations, mostly from people I don’t know. He was known around Taos, but no one had any firsthand experience with him. Let’s just say something don’t smell right.”
“I’ve worked cattle off and on since I was thirteen or fourteen. And I’ve driven a couple herds up into the mining camps a time or two with some pretty solid crews. I’ve never worked this big a herd. If you’ll take a chance on me, I’d sign on, and I’ve got a friend lookin for work as well.” I told him.
“Well, you sure enough look the part. I’ll take that chance. Where might we find this friend?”
As we were walking out the door, I was saying, “Oh, he won’t be far away. In a town this size he’ll be easy enough to find.” As the bat wings closed behind us I looked out and saw Tate sitting on that pile of bones he’d called his pa’s best horse and holding the reins to mine.
My gear was all there and he said, “I figured you boys would be sorta anxious to get out of town at least long enough to let them card sharps cool off a bit.”
“I turned to Ben Blue and said, “And he can cook too.”
The big man, looked at Tate and said, I like a man who thinks ahead and can cook… He’ll do.”
“It was already well into the evening, so we pitched camp about five miles out of town, not wanting to ride into the herd in the middle of the night.
After Tate went to sleep, Ben and I sat up talking for a spell. There was something about this big easy going, soft spoken man that I liked and felt easy about. He may have been an ax murderer in another life, but I trusted him. Besides that, anybody who could go about shoeing a horse with Izzy sitting there on the seat, and not get it all messed up had to have some kind of concentration.
He practically told me his whole life’s story while we drank coffee and listened to the night birds. Before I knew it I was telling him things that few people knew. I told him how my ma and pa were both riverboat gamblers, and how I was born in a stateroom heading for New Orleans. I told him that I didn’t remember my mother because she died while I was very young, and how I was sent to live with her mother in Natchez. Pa sent her money and would visit when he could. I remembered how Granny and I stood on the quay when I was five waiting for his boat to dock.
She told him, “La Mont, you’ve got to take the boy with you. The doc says I won’t live till fall, and I can’t take care of my poor girl’s baby no more. There’s nobody here to do it.” She kissed me good bye, and I went with my father. I remembered feeling hurt because she called me a baby.
I went on to tell him about living on a riverboat and when the war came we went to New Orleans for a while. “I remember pa telling me that he didn’t get along with his father, but he took me to see their mansion. Pa said they had a falling out over slavery, and they had booted him out.” That must have been some falling out. “Pa said he couldn’t fight against the ones who were trying to end slavery, but he couldn’t fight against his own people either. So he took me on an ocean ship around the horn and up to California, where I grew up.”
I told him how we went from San Francisco to Los Angeles on a coastal schooner and stayed. “My pa was French and came from a proud old family. When we left New Orleans he changed our names. He changed his from Le Mont Bellefontaine to Monty Bell, and changed mine from Maxmillion Bellefontaine to simply Max Bell.” It was a lot easier to handle and a lot easier to spell… I liked it.
We joined the herd the next morning and met the trail boss, who assigned us to drag. Everybody’s least favorite spot. He was the boss and he could put us wherever he wanted. The first few days we got the worst of the duty. I guess the trail boss, Ralls, was trying to see if we could take it… we could.
Ralls was a smallish man in his mid thirties. He was square built and losing his hair. I don’t guess he was a very happy man because he never smiled. He gave orders and that was about the only thing he said to anybody.
When we got back to Cimarron, we stopped the herd for a day on some good grass and water. We weren’t pushing them very hard giving them plenty of rest and feed to keep the fat on them. Ralls was sending some of the men in for a drink and a little entertainment, at least those who had any money went. Ben and I went. He went because he wanted to pick up any mail, and I went because he asked me.
We rode in with a few of the other boys, and of course we went straight to the first saloon we saw. Ben was going to walk down and pick up the mail, so I asked him to check on any I might have. As we were parting, the town marshal stopped us, “Hold on there boys.” He looked at me and said, “You I know, but I don’t know Red here. You boys riding with the herd? Is that Ralls’s outfit? I recognized the fellas you were with.”
“That’s right, marshal, Ralls is the trail boss, and I’m Ben Blue from over near Taos, It’s my herd… Is there a problem?”
“Well, maybe there is and maybe there ain’t. But I’d like for you to come on down to my office and we can talk a little.”
Ben turned to me and said, “Max, would you pick up the mail and come on down to the marshal’s office?”
The marshal pointed down the street to the general store, and I headed that direction. The two of them crossed the street to the jail. Having spent nearly a week in Cimarron, I knew where the post office and jail were, but it made the lawman feel good pointing it out for me. I found three letters for us, two were for Blue and one was for me. One of Ben’s smelled good, but mine smelled delicious. I stuffed mine in my pocket and took the other two back to the marshal’s office.
When I went through the door, Ben motioned me over and said, “Listen to what the Marshal has to say.”
“There ain’t nothin I can prove in court… but Ralls has had some hard luck with his drives. It seems that trail herds are hell on owners and their home crews. Between stampedes and Injun raids and rustlers and rattlers, there have been at least three owners who have died on the drive. And it seems like the herds are a lot smaller when they get to the rail head than they were when they came through Cimarron… by half. The owner’s crews ain’t fared too well neither. Some of them are never heard of again and some just move on. But it seems like none of them ever come back through.”
“I’d say you need to trust your hunches, Ben.” I told him. “You had a feelin’ that something wasn’t right.”
We thanked the marshal for the information, and told him that we’d be on full alert, which we fully intended to be. “If I’m still alive, I’ll let you know how we fared on my way back to Taos.” Ben told him. “I think Mr. Bell has other plans.”
We didn’t much feel like going to the saloon after that, so we turned our horses around and headed back to the herd. I’d have to say, that Ben was about as calm and collected as anybody I’d ever seen considering what he’d just been told.
“What do you think, Ben? Coincidence or out and out murder and thieving?”
“Oh, I believe in coincidence, but I also believe in a feelin’ deep in my guts, that tells me to watch out. “You pass this on to Tater, and if you two want to pull out, I’ll understand. I’ll talk to the two vaqueros, and if they want to pull out, they may also. Although, I seriously doubt that either of them would.”
“I’m stickin’,” I told him, “I can’t speak for Tate, but I think he’ll stand.”
Tate was sitting his horse at the top of a knoll overlooking the herd, when I found him. I relayed the marshal’s suspicions, he thought about it for a few seconds and said, “Why that low down egg suckin’ weasel. Let’s go git the bastard!”
“Hold on a minute.” I told him. “We can’t go off half cocked. Apparently, nothing happens till the herds get on the other side of the Raton pass. That’s a week or more away. All I want to know is will you stand or do you want to draw your time? The boss says he’ll understand.”
“Well hells fire yes, I’m stickin’.”
; “Alright then. You keep your eyes and ears open. Know who’s next to you and who’s behind you. If you don’t feel comfortable about anyone, trust your gut.”
Jesus, one of the two vaqueros rode up while we were talking, and to Tate’s complete surprise spoke to us in perfect English… a sight better than he did.
“Benito tell me that there may be a try to steal the herd. I jus’ want you to know that Delgado and me will stay.”
“I figured as much, Jesus, maybe the five of us can keep the herd. If they try anything it’ll most likely be on the other side of the pass, but keep your eyes open.”
“I didn’t know you savvy American, Jesus.” Tate said.
“Si, it is convenient sometimes not to let out too much knowledge. If we don’t answer your questions or don’t speak, think nothing of it… Senor Blu is a good friend to the New Mexican’s. He saved our priest and a nun from rape and death. Don Carlos and the Madre Dios watch over him.”
I had no idea that Blue was so well connected. There seems to be a lot more to this rancher than just the easy going cattleman that one sees on the surface.
We split up, and I rode back to camp. I found Ben sitting in the shade reading his mail, which reminded me that I had a letter in my pocket that needed reading.“We’re all on board, so let ‘em do their worst. We’ll be ready.” He thanked me and I went on, “I noticed that one of them letters smelled mighty friendly… sweetheart or wife.”
“Sweetheart for now, but we’re makin plans. The house is finished, the ranch is starting to prosper, and if this drive is successful I’ll start pressing her to set a date.”
“Well, congratulations… I think.”
He laughed and flushed a little, then he changed the subject. He looked over at my horse standing in the shade nibbling at some grass. “Max, that’s a mighty fine looking animal. He looks like a real outlaw horse.” Then he went on to explain, “My brother, Andy, and I got our first riding horses from a couple of dead outlaws that raided our place back in Missouri. They were real horses. In fact they still are, I don’t ride ‘em much anymore, but they’ve earned all the grass and grain they want.”