by Paul Bagdon
I don’t know that it’s really possible to get used to the sort of heat we were experiencing, but Arm and I had done a good deal of traveling in it, and we did generally all right. For instance, a few years ago, I’d somehow developed the habit of humming as we plodded along. It was a tuneless sound and why I did it or where it came from, I have no idea. Arm listened for a few days and then said, “If you don’t queet that buzzing, I’ll tear your stupid head off an’ stick it up your ass.”
I quit humming.
We made camp just before dark. We hobbled the horses, gave them each a Stetson full of water, which wasn’t enough but was a lot better than no water at all. Armando and I each had a can of peaches in syrup, a few solid hits of whiskey, and, when our coffee was boiling, slurped down a couple cupfuls each.
“This ain’t Arbuckles’,” Arm commented. “Don’t have much flavor to it.”
“Don’t drink it then,” I said. “Next time, you pick out the brand. Far as I’m concerned it’s all the same coffee in different sacks.” Arm grumbled something I couldn’t hear, which was fine with me.
Before our small mesquite fire had burned out completely, we were both asleep.
Morning slides in real early in a West Texas summer. I started the fire and put the coffee on in near dark while Arm checked over the horses. We loaded up our packhorse, saddled our own animals, drank a pot of coffee, and were traveling before the huge brass disc of the sun had cleared the horizon.
“Be good to cross water today,” Arm said. “Four canteens don’t go far between three horses and two men.” Neither of us drank—the only water we used was that for the coffee. The rest went into our hats for the horses.
Long before noon the sun was enough to bring the rattlesnakes out, seeking not prey but warm rocks to rest upon, soaking up the heat. Every so often one of us would draw and nail a rattler, especially the big ones—and they got big out there. Six-footers were fairly common and eight-footers not completely rare. Sonsabitches were as big around as a strong man’s forearm. I heard-tell that a man can tell the age of a rattler by the number of buttons on its tail, but Arm said that ain’t the case. He said there’s a new button every time the snake sheds, and that could be four or five times a year. I’m not so sure about that, but it wasn’t worth arguing about.
After four or so hours of riding our shirts were soaked through with sweat and stuck to our backs and chests. We reined in and pulled the cinches to let the horses breathe a bit, but we had no water to offer them. After maybe twenty or thirty minutes we cinched up and went on. The afternoon lasted forever. Our horses plodded along, heads much lower than usual, often scraping their toes in the sand and dirt, indicating how fatigued they were.
Arm’s eyes were better than mine. “Up there—I see some scrub an’ maybe a few desert pine. Mus’ be water there, even should we have to dig for it.” Moments later all three of the horses’ heads perked up and their nostrils widened as they caught the scent of the mud or water or whatever was there.
There were a few scraggly-assed desert pines in a clumsy half circle and some buffalo grass that showed a tiny bit of green. The horses wanted to run and we let them.
The water pocket was about the size and shape of a good-size trough, maybe a foot deep. It was sulphur water but there rodent tracks all around it, so it wasn’t poisonous. Arm vaulted off his horse into the muck and water and so did I. The horses waded in and began to suck hard. After a few minutes we had to drag them out still thirsty, wait ten minutes or so, and let them have at it again. Arm and I drank as much as we wanted and then filled the canteens.
I’ll tell you what: there ain’t many things that put out the stench warm sulphur water does, and both Armando and I puked up some of it later, but it tasted as good as fresh cream when we gulped it down. The animals didn’t have any problems with it, though.
We decided to make camp there for the night. The hobbled horses could graze through the buffalo grass and stumble over to the water when they cared to. Arm went out and returned in fifteen minutes with a couple of nice jackrabbits. I skinned them and cleaned them out and we chowed down. Then we settled back with cigars and a bottle of booze.
“Ya know,” I said, “this ranch is a perfect chance for us to see if what we’ve been yapping about for years can really work.”
“Is true. I have the same thought. Maybe we run a few head of beef, but make our business the breeding of the fine horses, no?”
“Finest ranch an’ working horses,” I said. “I know we can do it, Arm, if we can gather up the right stock.”
“Lotsa mustangs aroun’ there.”
“Yeah—mostly jugheads an’ tanglefoots, though. But still, you’re right, there must be some good ones.”
“Plus, we have plenty dollars if we need to buy one we can’t steal—from another ranch, I mean.”
“We’ll need good fences an’ corrals.”
“Sí. Ain’ no problem, though.”
I took a good, long pull at the bottle and settled back, enjoying the heat in my gut and the way the booze kind of whisked away how much work we’d have to do for a very unsure outcome.
“Look,” I said, as if I were explaining our idea for the first time, “a cowpoke on a drive needs a string of five or so horses. Most are no damned good—half broke, stupid, lazy, an’ clumsy with the conformation of a damn goat. With the right breeding we can bring along strong, smart, hardy horses that a cowhand won’t need more than a pair of, no matter how long the drive. We can get big bucks for such horses.”
“We already got the big bucks an’ a ranch to boot,” Arm said. He chuckled a bit. “You an’ me, we want to make this horse even should we starve to death, no? Is our dream, no?”
“Yeah. Es verdad.”
“Right.” Arm traded my Spanish for English. “Is true.”
We kept tapping away at the whiskey, not drinking hard, but regularly—a belt every few minutes. Before long I heard Armando’s breathing become quiet and slightly sibilant. He was sound asleep.
The moonlight out on a desert area such as where we were is awfully pretty. It’s like a soft gossamer fog has descended to soften everything—so that there were few, if any, sharp angles or jagged terrain. I finished off the bottle, set it aside, and closed my eyes.
I saw the ranch clearly; the fences were arrow-straight and tight. The snubbing post in the center of the corral was stout and stood at attention. A coil of rope hung over the gate post. The house was freshly painted—white, of course—and its lines were true and sturdy-looking. There was a porch around the front of the place with a couple rocker-type chairs waiting to be used of an evening.
The barn was a two-story, ten-stall structure. The roof looked good and the red paint dusty but not worn away by the elements.
A bay horse stood in the corral, tearing mouthfuls from a flake of hay. He was tall—every bit of sixteen hands—with a chest like the front of a locomotive. He stood squarely and the muscles of his forelegs bulged slightly against his flesh. His tail—black, of course— swished lackadaisically at flies. His flanks were tight and perfectly formed, and not a rib showed. Very suddenly, I was standing in front of him, looking into his eyes. It was like looking into the eyes of an eagle, but without the taint of aggression an eagle would show.
The horse snorted…
I came awake immediately. During my sleep a thick cloud front had moved in; there was no more light than there’d be in a tomb. The snort was real, not part of my dream—and it was the snort of a horse coming upon others he didn’t know: half challenge and half greeting.
I felt Arm’s finger tap my shoulder three times. He must have been crouched next to me but I couldn’t see him. So—there were at least three men out there, perhaps one or two more. Arm had hearing like no other man I’ve known and he must have heard boots scuffling in the sand.
I’d been sleeping with my Colt under my saddle blanket, which I used as a pillow. I eased it out and thumbed back the hammer. In reality, the sound was
a minuscule, oiled click—but in the dark that night it sounded like a couple of cooking pots being slammed together.
Armando drew his boot knife. I could hear the ten-inch blade slide out of its leather sheath sewn into his left boot, which left his right hand free to draw his pistol.
I didn’t know of any hostile Indians in the area, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Then I saw the image of the six dead men on the street in Burnt Rock. Each of those cowpokes had friends, relatives, maybe partners, and they’d want revenge.
Arm drew an arc on my shoulder, pointing me off to the left. I got my feet under me and duck-walked very slowly and as quietly as I could about twenty feet. I assumed Armando was doing the same to the right, but I couldn’t hear a sound from him. A bat swooped past my face, its high-pitched squeak announcing it. I damned near fired on it before I got my wits back about me.
All of a sudden, the place where we’d been sleeping erupted dirt and stone and sand into the sky. The hollow, deep boom of at least one shotgun mixed with the sharper, quicker pistol reports. One shot—and then another—was deeper and louder than the others. One of those boys was firing a Sharps.
Arm and I opened up on the muzzle flashes. It was almost too easy. I still had a round left in my pistol when the attackers were totally silent. I felt like a goddamn executioner, but I didn’t see that we had a choice in the matter—those men were out for our blood and if they were stupid enough to offer us targets the way they did, it wasn’t our fault.
There was no wind—not even the lightest breeze—and a thick cloud of acrid gunsmoke hung about chest level all around us. As we drew closer to the attackers the unmistakable coppery smell of fresh spilled blood melded with the gunpowder stink.
I struck a match. There were four of them, three obviously dead and the fourth, gut-shot, clutching at his stomach and moaning quietly. Bleeding out from a gut shot is no way to die. Before my match burned down, Armando put a bullet between the fellow’s eyes.
“Ten lives we took this day,” Armando said quietly. “Surely we’ll fry in hell.”
“We would have with or without the ten today,” I said, but I knew what Arm was feeling because I was feeling the same thing—a weight in my chest and a profound awareness of what we’d done. There was no joy in killing for us. We protected ourselves, and we realized that. Still, the weight and the realization remained.
We walked out of the haze of the battle and settled down to await the coming of the next day. I didn’t sleep and I don’t think Arm did, either. It seemed like a long time, but it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours.
We stood and stretched at the very first light. The corpses were covered with flies—where the sonsabitches came from, beats me, but there they were. A half dozen vultures were circling high above us—as it got lighter they’d come lower.
The attackers’ horses stood in a cluster, trying to gouge some grazing out of the dull brown buffalo grass. Armando looked them over and then unsaddled and unbridled each, dropped the gear and the ground, and slapped him on the rump.
“Nothin’ there worth havin’,” he said.
I picked up the Sharps from next to one of the bodies. “This is sure worth havin’, though,” I said. “Ever fired one?”
“No—an’ I ain’t gonna fire that one. That’s a dead man’s rifle, Jake. Is evil to take it, to use it.”
“Yer ass. The Sharps is the best rifle in the world, regardless of who owned it or used it.” I held the rifle to my shoulder and swept the landscape with it. It was fairly heavy but easy to handle, and it’d had good care. I could smell gun oil on it. I plucked a round from the bandolier around the dead man’s chest, chambered it, and took a vulture out of the sky as easy as spitting in the dirt.
“Shoots good—but ees still a dead man’s rifle.”
“That vulture didn’t seem to notice the difference,” I said.
Armando grunted. After a moment he said, “You wan’ to stand ’round here burnin’ daylight or get ridin’?” In twenty or so minutes we’d filled the canteens, let the horses drink, and were on our way. The vultures were lower. Arm tried a shot with his 30.30 but missed. I blew apart the bird he’d aimed at with the Sharps, which pissed him off. He didn’t say anything for quite some time, which wasn’t unusual behavior for him.
Later in the day, he said, “’Course a rifle don’t know if it was owned by a dead man. It’s only a damned gun an’ they don’t know nothing, right?” He held his hand out to me. I handed the Sharps to him. He looked it over carefully and then raised the stock to his shoulder and fired. A rabbit so far away I couldn’t see anything but a tiny brown blur exploded when the thumb-size bullet hit it, like a fountain of pink and red and gray bits and pieces.
“Damn,” Arm said. “Ees good gun.” He handed the rifle back to me.
We got lucky later that day. A slow, warm rain began and continued through the night and into the next day. We covered good distance. On the second day of the rain the temperature had moderated delightfully. The horses became frisky, dancing, trying to get under the bit to run. We held them in, but rode at a slow lope throughout the balance of the day.
The next day we were back to inferno temperatures and scalding sun.
“How far you think we come?” Arm asked.
“I dunno, but we did good the last couple days. I figure we’re a bit better’n halfway to Hulberton.”
“Shit,” Arm grunted. “I thought more. Theese long ridin’ is a pain in the ass, no?”
I grinned at him. “Sometimes a cigar an’ a nip of red-eye helps out, mi amigo.”
It did help out. It was hotter’n a wolf bitch in heat, but we made good distance and even crossed a large spring-fed puddle that was icy cold and as sweet as water could ever be. We drank and led the horses in and out until they’d had enough. We filled all the canteens and mounted up. It was coming dusk by then.
“We have more whiskey an’ cigars, no?” Arm said.
“Sure.”
He looked up at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud in sight. “We have good moonlight tonight. What say we keep on ridin’?”
“Fine idea,” I said. We each lit another cigar, passed the bottle back and forth, and kept on moving. We did so well that night we rode through the next day, using the same booze an’ tobacco system of travel. About midafternoon we came across a sort of small oasis, with water, a few desert pine, and some blessed shade the small trees yielded. We stripped down the horses, gave them each a hatful of water, hobbled them, and slept until the sun was rising the next morning.
We started seeing free-range cattle. These beef were never handled by man, and, in fact, most of them had probably never even seen a human. They were strong, fast, and wild as hawks. “Is our first good meal at our ranch when we get there,” Arm announced, watching a longhorn standing a couple hundred yards off. He was right. I doubted that any of the free-rangers had ever seen a branding iron; they were the offspring of other free-range beef, putting them another step away from an owner. So, we had as much right to shoot and butcher one as we did a rabbit.
I don’t know how many days we rode, and I didn’t much care about that. The thing is, we were making good progress. Some days were harder an’ hotter than others, but we kept on rolling. When we came upon the wide wooden board nailed to a fence post with hulberton hand-lettered on it, we felt like we’d arrived at the promised land.
The sign, like all such signs, was riddled with pistol bullet holes and shot scars.
“We might just as well do it right,” I said, and pulled the Sharps out of the sheath that’d once held my 30.30. That rifle was snugged down over my bedroll. I put a round into the sign from about fifty yards out, blowing half of it spinning away, leaving the sign reading hulb.
We rode into town as the sun was beginning its downward journey. The tinkling of the honky-tonk of the piano in a gin mill was the first thing we heard. Hulberton was much the same as all the West Texas towns: four saloons, counting the bar in th
e restaurant, a church, a rather small mercantile, a cabinet maker and funeral man, a doctor’s office, a bank, a whorehouse, and at the end of the main—and only—street, a stable and blacksmith operation. There were a few private homes strewn around the outskirts of the town— shoddy-looking affairs with chickens, pigs, or both wandering around them. The usual town dogs came snarling and snapping at us. Arm gave his horse all his rein so he could drop his head—a horse can’t kick out unless he drops his head far down—and the horse nailed what looked to be a critter with more than a little timber wolf blood running through its veins. The dog sailed maybe ten feet in the air before hitting hard and rolling along another few feet. He slunk off into an alley, lips curled back over his fangs, but it was obvious he was finished for the day. The others followed into the alley.
The stable looked like a tight operation. The sale horses were decent, and the corral had two large troughs, both of which were almost full of water. The smith was working at his forge and anvil, turning shoes from bar stock. Blacksmithing isn’t a job for a weak man, and this fellow had forearms as big as hams and arm muscles larger yet.
Arm and I swung down and stood back until the smith finished the shoe he was working on and tossed it into a large bucket of water, where it hissed and sizzled for a moment.
I held out my hand. “I’m Jake,” I said. “This here’s my pard, Armando—Arm, usually.” The smith shook with each of us. Grasping his hand was like squeezing a brick. He was tall—taller than me and I’m pushing six feet, and much of his face was hidden by a thick black beard.
“I’m called Tiny,” he said, grinning. “As a kid I beat the shit out of anyone who called me Tiny, but they all kept it up—adults, too—an’ I got used to it. Anyway, my real handle is Forsythe Dragonovich, so I figure Tiny beats that all to hell.” He paused. “What can I do for you boys?”