The Busted Thumb Horse Ranch

by Paul Bagdon

  “For.”

  “You took a chance, Armando.”

  “Ever’thing we do is a chance, no? Hell, tha’s the way we live. But it don’ mean you gotta get killed by a crazy horse.”

  “I’ll take it slow an’ easy,” I said. “You worry too much.”

  “Boolshit.” We each had a taste of the tequila. “What say we ride into town, see Tiny, hire on Teresa an’ Blanca?”

  “An’ a cold beer?”

  “You bet.”

  I coiled the rope and we walked to the barn to saddle our horses. I hung the rope from a hook near the big front doors. A man can’t tell when he’s going to need a throwing rope in a big hurry— particularly cattlemen, but the same thing applies to horse traders and breeders.

  We took it easy on the way to Hulberton. The temperature was more fall-like than we’d been experiencing, and it felt good—the air was cool and fresh.

  We heard the ringing of Tiny’s hammer against his anvil from way far out. It sounded a bit like a bell.

  “That sound,” Arm said, “mus’ carry on forever, no? To the moon an’ past it.”

  “Maybe so. You know how a gunshot sounds a little fuzzy from far off? An anvil doesn’t do that—the sound stays clear.”

  “Es verdad.”

  Tiny was just finishing shoeing a nice-looking carriage mare. He nodded but didn’t speak because he had a half dozen horseshoe nails in his mouth, head pointing out. The horse stood well as Tiny tapped the nails home. The six points protruded a half inch above the top of the hoof and Tiny snipped those off with a sharpened plierlike tool. His final step was to flatten the metal studs left behind on the hoof surface to snug the shoe. He eased the mare’s foot to the floor and straightened.

  “I hear-tell you boys got yourself a stud horse,” Tiny said.

  “How the hell did you know that? We haven’t told…”

  “Ain’t no secrets ’round here, boys. Fella by the name of Les Auborn—a patent medicine drummer—seen you with the horse between you on ropes. Les, he said the horse was a good looker.”

  “He’s that, okay,” I said. “What else he is we don’t know yet.”

  “A man might get thirsty shoein’ a horse, no?” Arm said.

  Tiny took off his muleskin apron and set it aside. He led the mare to a stall and closed her in. He rubbed her snout before walking to us. “What’s keepin’ us?” he said, grinning.

  On the way to the saloon I explained our plan to hire Teresa and Blanca.

  “You want them to live in or come back an’ forth each day?”

  “I never thought about it. We’ve got enough bedrooms, so they might just as well live at the ranch, if they want to do that. We’ll pay ’em good, an’ the work ain’t half bad—cleanin’, cooking, an’ such like.”

  “They live above the dry goods store,” Tiny said. “You more’n likely can catch them there now.”

  “I’ll go,” Arm said. “I have Spanish. You boys go ahead, but make sure you save some beer for me.” He turned to me. “What will we pay?”

  I looked at Tiny. “Twenty a week, each?”

  “Damn,” he said, “that’s more than a good cowhand draws. Them ladies’ll jump on it.”

  We separated, Arm walking toward the dry goods store and Tiny and I to the saloon. There were a bunch of horses tied outside, and lots of noise from inside, considering it was barely noon.

  “The KG boys just dropped a thousand head at the railroad yards,” Tiny said. “They’ve got money in their pockets an’ they’re thirsty an’ horny.”

  As we approached the bat wings a lanky fellow with a nose gushing blood came out as if he were flying—a good couple of feet above the ground. He hit about eight feet out, moaned, turned over, and went to sleep.

  As we walked in, a ’hand drew his Colt and put a couple of slugs into the ceiling. That kind of gave his pals an idea and within seconds the place sounded like a shooting gallery at a county fair. There were thirty or so men crowding the bar. Some showed signs of a very recent bath, a haircut and new clothes; the rest looked about like you’d expect a man to look after over a month on the range, driving a thousand head of beef.

  There were three bartenders and all of them were running their asses off, trying to keep up with shouted orders from the cowboys. They were also pocketing money the cowhands didn’t owe—snagging a five-dollar note for a single beer, clearing off the change in front of other men who were too drunk to see what was happening.

  Tiny and I stood just inside the bat wings. My hand dropped to the grips of my Colt on its own—I didn’t tell it to do so.

  Tiny leaned in close to me and shouted into my ear, “They’re harmless, Jake. Drunk an’ stupid, but they wouldn’t draw on a man. Shit, if I followed cows’ asses for a month or better, I’d be raisin’ hell, too.”

  We shoved our way to the bar. One tender recognized Tiny and came right over.

  “Six beers,” Tiny shouted. “We got a friend coming.”

  “Lookit, Tiny,” the bartender said, “the owner has jacked the prices of beer an’ booze and…”

  I placed a twenty-dollar gold piece on the bar. “Keep ’em coming,” I said.

  The whores were doing lots of business; no sooner would a soiled dove come down the stairs than she’d be escorted back up by another cowboy. A couple of minor fistfights broke out about who was next, but nothing serious.

  The beer tasted real good.

  Armando came in, a big smile on his face, and pushed his way to me an’ Tiny.

  “The ladies, they’ll be out tomorrow,” he said. “They’ll be ready to move in—a friend will bring them and their things on a farm wagon.”

  I shouted into Arm’s ear, “There’s no supplies for them—nothing for them to cook. How can…”

  “I give them one hundred dollar, mi hermano. They’ll buy what they want at the mercantile. That’s why they needed the wagon—to haul all that stuff to the ranch.”

  “I hope you told them to stock up on beefsteaks,” I said.

  “For sure, no? I tol’ them we like to eat steak for every meal, an’ we like them rare an’—”

  “Now, lookit this,” a cowboy yelled. “We’re drinkin’ with a goddamn beaner.”

  “Ahh, shit,” Tiny said.

  Armando wasn’t a man to do much talking before a fight. He buried his fist in the cowhand’s gut, and caught the guy’s face with his knee as he crumpled forward. Those who were standing close enough heard the snap of cartilage. Of course, a dozen ’hands moved in to get their hands on Arm. Tiny stepped forward and so did I. Tiny grabbed the cowboy closest to him, slammed the man’s face into the bar, lifted him and threw him back into the crowd.

  Two cowboys came after me. I kicked one in the balls and got a good haymaker into the second fellow’s jaw, and he went down.

  Tiny was throwing cowhands around and enjoying every second of it. Someone would take a swing at him and his grin would broaden and he’d pick up his opponent by the neck and belt and hurl him back into the crowd.

  Arm was doing a hell of a job, too. His face was cut up a bit and his nose was bleeding, but he was taking on all comers and dropping them like stones down a well.

  When the first shot was fired, the fistfighting stopped. Men with fists drawn back and ready to deliver halted in midmotion. The crowd spread out, leaving an open tunnel between Armando and the boy who fancied himself a gunfighter.

  “You don’ need to do this,” Arm said in the eerie silence that had come about.

  “I don’,” the kid mocked. “Maybe I want to. See, I don’t like you goddamn beaners.”

  Arm let his hand drop to his side, inches from his holster.

  I tried to step between them, trying to reason with the kid, but Tiny pulled me back. “Ain’t no stoppin’ it now,” he said. “Is Arm handy with his Colt?”

  “He’ll do,” I said.

  The kid may have been twenty years old—or maybe not. He’d been on the drive, but he didn’t seem to be drunk
. He wore his holster at his waist, like a farmer or a cowhand, and he was facing Armando full-on. He was no gunfighter—he was a kid, is all.

  Arm turned to his side and crouched down a bit.

  “You goddamn beaners are scum,” the kid said, “and so are your whore mothers.”

  “Ahhh, shit,” Tiny said again.

  “Theese is wrong,” Arm said. “You can no talk about my mother. It is not allowed. You see?”

  “Theese? Can no?”

  “You mus’ not do this. You’ll die, boy. I know how to fight with guns—an’ you don’t. Turn away, kid. Please.”

  The kid stood stock-still for a long moment and then his right hand reached down and grabbed the grips of his pistol. He drew and had his weapon out and was raising it toward Arm.

  My partner drew and fired twice, one shot hitting the kid in the throat, the second next to his nose. He went down immediately and he was no doubt dead before he hit the floor.

  Arm stood there with his pistol hanging at his side. He was pale and I saw the hand holding his Colt was trembling a bit.

  “I din’ want to keel him,” he said quietly, maybe so quietly that only Tiny and I could hear.

  I took his gun from his hand and dropped it into his holster.

  “Come on, Arm, we gotta go back to the ranch.”

  “I tried to let him stop the fight,” Arm said. “I tried, you know?”

  “Yeah. I know. Come on, pardner.”

  We picked up our horses at Tiny’s place and rode home. Neither of us spoke. There was really nothing to say.

  Chapter Four

  As we were unsaddling in the barn, Armando turned to me. “Ees the same thing,” he said, as if he were continuing a conversation.

  “What’s the same thing?”

  “That kid you killed an’ this boy I killed today. They poosh an’ poosh an’ end up dead. We are not big guns, mi hermano. Why come we to these gunfight?”

  “I suppose anybody who can draw and not shoot themselves in the foot is a big gun in Hulberton, Arm. But today—that was a thing about your race, your family. And you’re right—the kid pushed and pushed. You did nothing wrong.”

  “Doesn’t make the boy less dead.”

  “No, it don’t. But I’ve been thinkin’ on something. Maybe when we get the Busted Thumb up an’ running, we can put our guns away for good.” Arm thought for a long time before turning away from me. “It won’ ever happen,” he said quietly. “We will live an’ die with our guns on.”

  Tiny showed up the next day driving a farm wagon loaded with Teresa and Blanca and their belongings and things for the home. It looked like they’d spent the whole hundred Arm gave them. There were fifty-pound sacks of coffee, salt, sugar, flour, a couple of canned hams, lots of canned peaches and pears, as well as some restaurant-type dishes and knives, forks, and spoons. Other boxes and bags held stuff we didn’t bother to look into. The women scurried about, from the wagon up the stairs to their room and then from the wagon to the big walk-in pantry in the kitchen.

  Tiny, Arm, and I sat on the porch and rolled smokes. When all our cigarettes were lit and drawing nicely, Tiny said, “You boys are gonna need grain. I got a pal at the mill who can get what you want within a few days.”

  “Might just as well stock up with winter comin’,” I said. “How about a thousand pounds of crimped oats with a molasses cut, a thousand of corn, and a thousand of crimped oats without the molasses. The days we gotta keep them in, they’ll go nuts not bein’ able to run off the energy that molasses generates.” I handed four twenties to Tiny.

  “You ain’t sayin’ much, Arm,” Tiny said.

  “No. I ain’t.”

  “He’s still chewin’ on that kid he dropped yesterday,” I said.

  “Well, hell,” Tiny said. “He didn’t have no choice. The kid was bound an’ determined to shoot himself a Mex—don’ matter if it was Armando or Santana. An’ that stuff about Arm’s people—I woulda did the same thing. Somebody woulda put a few rounds into the little bastard sooner or later.”

  Armando nodded but didn’t speak.

  An uncomfortable silence followed. Then Tiny said, “I got a fella bringin’ in a half dozen mares in the next couple of days. I ain’t sure what they are, but this fella, he’s never done me wrong. It’d be worth a ride for you boys to town to check them out. Like I said, I don’t know what they are, but my pal don’t try to unload coyote feed on me.”

  “We’ll do that, Tiny.”

  “When you gonna start workin’ that stud horse?”

  “I kinda thought I’d play a bit with him today, get his rope around the snubbin’ post, see if I can’t handle him a little bit.”

  Before long, Tiny went on his way and the women banged and clattered about in the house. I went in for some coffee and saw they had a metal bathing tub—it looked like a stock trough, only smaller. There was a cauldron of water boiling on the stove and a long-handled brush and a lump of soap on the floor next to the tub.

  “What’s…” I began.

  “You an’ Armando, you steenk,” Blanca said, using more English than I thought she had. I guess lots of Mexicans ran that ploy to avoid arguments or controversy with Anglos. “You will have bath.”

  “The hell I will,” I said. “I been rained on plenty in the last few weeks. An’ this bath stuff is unhealthy—it makes a man’s skin soft and sets him up for cholera.”

  “You first,” Blanca said, “then Armando.”

  Teresa poured the last cauldron of water into the already half-filled tub while Blanca fetched a coarse towel for me.

  “I ain’t…”

  “You don’t take no bath, you don’ eat,” Blanca said, stone-faced. The two women left the room. “Shit,” I said. Then I shucked down. Actually, the hot water felt pretty good, and the grayish brown soil and dried sweat that rose from my body indicated that perhaps the ladies were right. I set to with that brush an’ soap until my skin tingled, an’ I washed an’ rinsed my hair, too. The damned towel felt like a feed sack, but at least it dried me off. I dressed an’ called the women. “All done.”

  They came into the kitchen, looked me over, an’ nodded. “Es bueno,” Teresa said. “We will buy new clothes next time in town. Yours are but rags.”

  I couldn’t argue with her on that point.

  “You send Armando in now,” Blanca instructed. “He, too, is a peeg.”

  I went out to the barn to pick up my throwing rope. Arm was rubbing saddle soap into the fenders of his saddle.

  “The women need you inside right now,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “Ask them. I got a horse to play with.”

  “I’ll see what it is they want an’ then come to the corral to watch, maybe help, no?”

  “Fine with me.”

  I put my arm through my coiled rope and rather than using the gate, climbed over the fence into the corral. The bay stud was chewing away at a flake of hay I’d tossed over to him early that morning. His head snapped up and he glared at me, huffing through his nose—challenging me. He’d worked off the rope that’d been around his neck, which I hadn’t expected. He must have rubbed his head an’ neck against the side of his water trough or somehow hung up the rope on a rough board of the fence. I let my rope slide down into my hands, coils in the left, loop in the right.

  The horse watched my every move, his eyes embers, his muscles tight, ready to fight. Rather than approach him, I walked the circuit of the corral—slowly, taking short steps and making no fast motions. His hay and where he stood was maybe fifteen feet from the fence. He moved his body to watch me walking, but didn’t offer to charge me, although I could tell he was considering doing so. I knew he’d do it eventually. There was no doubt about that.

  I kept on walking ’round and ’round that corral for a good long time at the same slow pace. The bay’s eyes and mine remained locked, even as he lowered his head to grab hay. He seemed to quiet a bit—his muscles didn’t seem quite as rigid, but he never s
topped looking at me.

  I’d been very slowly—a quarter inch at a time— letting my loop grow until I had it about as wide around as a half keg, which should be all I needed if I made a good throw.

  The stallion’s eyes flicked to Arm as he climbed up an’ sat on the top rail, watching. Obviously, he knew enough not to say anything or make any quick moves—he was damned near as good a horseman as I was.

  I stepped out a yard or so from the fence and kept walking at the same pace. The bay’s ears lay back immediately. He’d noticed the change. When I saw his chest swell, I braced myself and lifted my loop. The stallion charged, nostrils flared, teeth bared, a long string of saliva hanging from his mouth. I raised my loop and whirled it once—but the horse didn’t give me a chance to use it. He veered very sharply to his right and hit the fence where Arm’s legs had been, bashing the boards the way a runaway locomotive would hit a solid wall. I heard Arm from the other side grumble, “Crazy goddamn horse.”

  I scrambled for the fence and was up and over it before I looked back. The stallion was staring hotly, piercingly, at the spot where Arm had been. If I hadn’t run, I could have put a rope on him and snugged it to the post right then. Shit!

  Armando’s hair was still wet from his bath, I noticed, and I grinned. “I wasn’t sure I recognized you with all the dirt gone,” I said.

  “Me? You look like a banker, Jake.”

  We walked to the barn. “He’s one sneaky sumbitch,” Arm said. “His eyes were on you ’til the very last second.”

  “I coulda gotten a rope on him if I hadn’t skedaddled.”

  “Sí. An’ the perro—the dog—he woulda caught the rabbit if he no stop to take a sheet, no?”

  I laughed. “I guess. But I’ll get him to the post.

  I’m goin’ to go out an’ just walk again later, carryin’ my rope.”

  “You sure this boy is the stud we’re after?” Arm asked.

  “Well, name a confirmation fault other than that twisted-up foot.”

  There was a long silence. “Ain’t none.”

  “There ya go, Arm.”

  Arm changed the subject. “You was lookin’ him straight in the eye, no? You know this is the challenge, ’specially to the wild one—an’ this mustang, he’s as wild as a box of rattlesnakes.”