The Busted Thumb Horse Ranch

by Paul Bagdon

  I spent lots of time with the bay stallion. I’d let him off the rope holding him to the snubbing post and he danced and bucked and carried on like a colt at his freedom. He still often skittered away when I approached him. On good days, though, he’d follow me a step behind as I carried out his grain and hay. Nevertheless, any loud, unexpected noise scared hell out of him. A heap of snow sliding down from the barn’s roof with a long whoooosh frightened him, so he took off in his awkward run and damned near slammed into the corral fence. Then he turned, nostrils flared, pawing the ground in front of him, challenging the sound. It took him a full day to come down from that little episode.

  The thing is, there’s always noise around a working ranch. Arm and I talked it over and decided that on an irregular schedule, we’d clatter pots an’ pans or fire our rifles or pistols, or yell as loud as we could at least once a day. That was tough on the stud. His nature told him to either fight or haul ass when something threatened him. For a few days he ate his grain and drank water but left his hay to blow around in the corral. It took about ten days to bring him to a point where he’d tighten at a strange sound, but wouldn’t bolt or rear.

  The mare was getting prettier by the day. I swear if she were a woman, I’d have married her. The Appy was growing out of coltishness and beginning to grow into a horse. He put some muscle on his legs, his chest broadened and filled out, and his ass went from lean slabs of muscle to the semirounded rump we were looking for. He had a hell of a personality, too. Armando was his obvious favorite since Arm fed and brushed him daily, but he tolerated me, usually poking his snout at me for a treat. The packer was getting fat and we probably should have sold him off since we didn’t see any future use for him, but we both liked him, and we could easily afford to feed him, so we kept him and let him grow fatter. He seemed to appreciate our generosity.

  Going into Hulberton became a big treat to Arm and me. We’d drag Tiny away from his work—which didn’t take a ton of effort—and suck beer in the saloon for a few hours. Then we’d ride back to the ranch feeling good an’ at peace with the world.

  There were still a crew of Dansworth men hanging around, but they wouldn’t look us in the eye and they didn’t seem to be causing any particular trouble—at least until the buffalo hunter with the Sharps came to town and began hanging with Dansworth’s men.

  We first noticed him when the three of us were drinking beer and talking about horses. He was a big man, like most shaggy hunters, tall and heavy with muscle rather than fat. He was long-bearded and his hair hadn’t seen scissors in a long time. He wore leggings and a greatcoat, both made from buffalo hides. He sat with his back to the wall, a bottle and a glass in front of him, and a Sharps rifle across his lap.

  Christian Sharps was a bookish kind of guy who held the patent on the most deadly sniper weapon used in the War of Northern Aggression. He operated out of Hartford, Connecticut, and didn’t turn out a lot of his rifles, but the ones he made and sold were perfect. They fired a .52 slug that could pass through a horse, a man, and still have the power to kill another man. It literally tore arms and legs off if the shot struck a limb rather than the body mass. Anyone who took a .52 slug from a Sharps in the body was dead.

  “There’s trouble, no?” Arm said, eyeing the man.

  “Yeah,” I said. “For sure.”

  Tiny glanced over. “He looks hard,” he said, “but that buffalo gun don’t mean nothin’ less he knows how to use it. It’s as easy to miss with a Sharps as it is with any rifle. Hell, I got a Sharps breechloader my uncle left to me when he croaked. I tried her out a few times, but couldn’t hit nothin’ with her. I think the rear sight was bent a tad, an’ maybe the front, too. An’ I never did figure out that elevation sight. I didn’t care ’nough about it to put no work into it fixin’ the sights an’ then firing her in until she shot true.”

  Arm and I stared at each other as if we’d been told that pigs sang songs an’ nested in trees.

  “You got a Sharps?” I asked.

  “I jus’ said I did, didn’t I?”

  “You weel sell us the rifle?” Arm asked.

  “Hell, no. It ain’t fit nor fair to sell somethin’ a dead man left to you. I’ll lend her to you, though. I got no use for it. I ain’t big on guns, tell the truth. I don’t carry one like you boys, an’ I don’t care to.”

  Tiny wanted to keep on drinking, but we goaded hell outta him to go to his place and get the rifle. Finally, after we bought a pair of buckets of beer to take out, he gave in.

  The Sharps was in a hard case and was wrapped in deerskin. There was some light rust on the barrel, and there was a gouge in the stock where a bullet had hit it, but other than that it looked just fine. I put the butt to my shoulder and I could immediately see that both the front and rear sights had taken a beating, maybe when the rifle was dropped onto a hard surface. It didn’t look like it’d take much to fix things and then run some bullets through the rifle to sight it in.

  The clerk at the mercantile had to scrounge around in his storeroom to find any .52 ammunition, but he finally came up with three boxes of fifty each. He wanted six dollars for all of them. I gladly paid the exorbitant price.

  We rode back to the ranch a little faster than we usually did—I was that keen on seeing what I could do with that fine Sharps rifle. All I really needed was a pair of pliers to straighten the two sights. I ran a piece of cloth saturated with Hoppe’s gun oil through the barrel and carefully lubricated the hammers and the two triggers this model had. Arm stood next to me watching, shifting from foot to foot, asking a question every so often. I wasn’t a rifle expert, but I’d picked up some knowledge here and there. It was coming dark when I thought the rifle was ready to be tested.

  “Maybe we should wait until tomorrow,” I said.

  “Boolsheet.”

  We walked out through the snow a couple hundred yards from the house to a point where a small stand of trees were a hundred or so yards ahead of us. I slipped a slug into the breech and brought the butt to my shoulder. It fit perfectly, as if the weapon had been made ’specially for me. I put the sights on a small tree and eased back the first trigger and then moved my finger to the firing trigger. I took a breath and squeezed. The recoil knocked me on my ass, and the blaze of light from the muzzle was as bright as lightning on a dark night. I missed the tree—and as far as I know, that slug is still traveling. Armando laughed at me as I sat there in the snow, but then there was a look of awe on his face as well. “Jesús,” he whispered.

  The thundering, percussive roar of the shot rolled out and echoed back like that of a cannon.

  The next morning we decided to go out on our horses to test-fire the Sharps again. After all, it was likely that the rifle would be used from horseback or dismounted near the horses.

  We rode beyond the stand of trees I’d shot at yesterday. There were no gauges or torn-away branches that’d show I’d hit anything. Armando made a couple of smart-ass remarks about my marksmanship, including, “Maybe you try to shoot the barn nex’? Is bigger than trees.”

  We’d fired pistols and rifles from the backs of our horses in the past, but there’s no comparison to the sound those guns produced with the blast—the roar—of a Sharps. We each fired our pistols a couple of times and each squeezed off a few rounds of 30.30s from our rifles while mounted. Our horses were used to the sound by now and weren’t bothered. We tied them well to a thick limb of an oak and walked a few yards away. There was a rock fifty yards away and even the weak and sullen sun made the bits of mica in the rock glint. It was a fine target.

  I hunkered down to shoot from the standard sniper sitting position. The gun oil smelled fresh and good, and the furniture polish I’d used on the stock the night before gave off a sweet, woody scent. I leveled the Sharps over one knee, loaded a round into the breech, and took aim. I was steady and confident this time around. I squeezed the firing trigger, and this time my shoulder absorbed the recoil. A volcano of snow erupted a few feet to the left of the target. All
that was fine. What wasn’t fine was that both our horses were rearing, crazy-eyed, pulling against their reins, squealing in fright. We ran to them and, after a bit, were able to calm them without getting our heads smashed in.

  It was Armando’s turn to fire. He took the same position I had, loaded up, and aimed for a long time. Finally, he fired. His round spurted snow into the sky almost on top of where my shot struck. That was good—I could adjust the sights again to come back to true from the left. What wasn’t good was that our horses went berserk again, and it took us longer to calm them down.

  “Ain’ no other way to do eet,” Arm said. “The silly sonsabitches gotta learn the Sharps, it won’t hurt them no more than our pistols or 30.30s.” Unfortunately, he was right, but I wasn’t sure how much the animals could take. Both their mouths were bloody from yanking against the bit, both were trembling, and both had eyes as big as wagon wheels.

  Arm stroked and calmed them as I took the pliers from my pocket and moved both the front and rear sights a frog’s hair to the right. I looked back at Arm and the horses. He nodded that he was ready. I steadied myself, took the customary deep breath, and fired the Sharps. The rock didn’t so much split or break as it did disintegrate, sending chips, pieces, and shards of sparkling mica-studded stone into the air as if it’d been shot into the sky by an artillery piece. It was an awesome and somewhat frightening sight. I couldn’t help but visualize what would happen if a man were hit midbody.

  Arm was standing between the two horses— which wasn’t a good place to be—but he had control of their heads, his hands locked around the chinstraps that set the bit in their mouths. Their reaction to this round was less violent, but their trembling increased. “Shoo’ again,” Arm called.

  I picked out another rock about 150 yards out. It was more of a boulder than a rock; with the Sharps now apparently sighted in, it’d be hard to miss. I jacked up the elevation bar a notch, took my stance, and fired. The thumb-size slug split the boulder like it was a loaf of bread cut with a sharp knife.

  Arm nodded and yelled, “Go!”

  I shot at the smaller piece of the boulder, spewing brownish dust and pieces of rock in all directions. “Ees ’nuff for today, Jake,” Arm shouted. “Tomorrow we do another lesson, no?”

  I checked over the horses’ mouths. They were abraded by the bit rather than cut, and the blood and saliva mix had already ended. Both were skittish and on the edge of panic, but a good deal of stroking and talking to them eventually calmed them down.

  On the way back we scared a jackrabbit out of a mess of dead brush—a common enough occurrence—but the horses reacted like barely sacked-out two-year-olds. We reined them in easily enough.

  “Takes some time,” Arm said.

  I agreed. “They didn’t do all that bad. We knew they’d come apart a bit when they heard the Sharps. I figure a couple more days and they’ll settle on down.”

  “They will no like that rifle, but they’ll live with it.”

  Back in the barn I spread udder balm on the bars of our horses’ mouths—the part of the jawbone upon which the bit rests—and we rubbed them down, checked their feet, and fed them—adding an extra treat of molasses/oats mixture.

  Arm had been unusually silent during all that process.

  “What?” I said.

  “We now have the beeg gun an’ you can shoot the hairs offa fly’s balls with it—but that fella in the saloon, he has the beeg gun, too. An’ he shoots an’ keels buffalo from far distance, no?”

  “Yeah. But the thing is, he’s shooting at an animal twice as large as a big bull, an’ his target is standing still. When the shaggy hunters set up on a herd, they pick off those farthest from the center—and they’re standing still, grazing. Shaggies are stupid, Arm. Hell, a shooter can drop one ten feet from another an’ the other one will keep on grazing. That’s the way those guys work a herd—start on the outside and shoot their way in. Hell, dropping twenty or thirty a day isn’t rare.”

  “Es verdad?”

  I nodded. “An’ there’s somethin’ else, too. There’s nobody shooting back at a buffalo hunter. That ain’t the case with us.”

  We had a fairly moderate storm that started that afternoon. We left the horses in their stalls and Arm took the Sharps and went out into the wind and swirling snow a couple hundred yards and ran a half dozen slugs through the rifle.

  Of course, the horses didn’t like it, but they didn’t come apart, either. They flinched each time Arm fired, and their eyes got a tad wide, but that was about the extent of their reactions.

  Strangely enough, our packer raised his head at the first shot and then went back to his hay, paying absolutely no attention to the other rounds. I left the barn and watched our stud in the corral. He snorted, ran a bit, and then pretty much clamed down. I suppose in his mind, the racket was a natural thing: thunder, maybe.

  After all the barn and corral chores were done, Arm and I were damned near frozen. We went inside and shucked out of our heavy gear and sat at the kitchen table having a couple of slugs of whiskey and talking things over.

  “Ees good—the Busted Thumb Horse Ranch,” Arm said.

  It’s strange how rapidly things can change.

  Chapter Six

  A feeble storm swept in but it didn’t have any balls to it—it was over in a couple of days. Nevertheless, both of us were stir-crazy and we decided that we should ride on in to Hulberton and visit Tiny. There was some wind when we started out, but it wasn’t doing anything but shifting existing drifts around.

  In town we sat in the saloon with ol’ Tiny for a couple of hours or so. I noticed that a while after we came in, the buffalo hunter stood up, belched loudly, picked up his Sharps and left through the back door. Arm said he needed something from the mercantile, so he met Tiny and me back at Tiny’s shop. Dusk was coming on and we didn’t want to ride in the dark, so we made tracks out of Hulberton.

  The wind was about the same as we left as it’d been when we came in—kind of annoying, but not threatening to dump another storm on us.

  We left Hulberton at a jog and held that gait. The horses had been on vacation; they needed a little workout, lest they turn into butterballs as our packer had.

  Arm had bought a pipe in town and a couple of sacks of Green Mountain smoking tobacco. He was having a hell of a time keeping his new pipe lit, scratching stick match after stick match trying to suck the flame into his bowl. I rolled a smoke and lit it with a single match cupped in my hands. That kind of pissed ol’ Arm off.

  “Why such a goddamn hurry?” he snarled at me. “A man can no get a pipe…” He never finished the sentence. Instead his body was thrown violently to his right. He was hitting the ground as that unmistakable bellow of a Sharps reached us. I jumped down, told the horses to stay, and crouched over Armando.

  His face was completely covered with red from his forehead to jaw, where blood was dripping steadily onto his coat. The blood sheeted downward and to the sides from a long gouge—like a shallow furrow—probably a good five inches long. I thumbed his neck pulse. It was thrumming nicely, steadily. I was surprised; I thought my partner of all those years was dead. I’ll admit to the quick tears that ran from my eyes, and the huge lump that suddenly appeared in my throat, almost cutting off my breathing. I’ll also admit to a fire of anger that flared in my belly as I snatched my Sharps from my saddle scabbard. It was already loaded—I carried it that way since it took two separate triggers to fire it.

  Arm was mumbling curses as I brought the butt and made a sweep of the direction from which the shot must have come. The thought that if Arm had been a couple inches ahead of where he was, he’d be as dead as a lump of coal, and, more’n likely, his head woulda been torn off his shoulders. That flash of thought made the fire within me burn hotter and stronger.

  I saw nothing on my first sweep. Then, on the second, I saw a drift that was covering a small cluster of rocks and boulders. I kept my sights there and ticked up the elevator ladder sight very slightly—the
target was about 300 yards away. As I squinted into the thickening dusk, a gray horse’s ass came into view. I’m not big on killing horses, but tht fire was almost out of control inside me. I put a round through the animal’s spine and he dropped like a bucket down a well. I didn’t like doing it, but I did it. That buffalo hunter tried to kill my partner and there was nothing I wouldn’t do to take the sonofabitch permanently down and leave his corpse for the vultures.

  I reloaded, keeping my eyes on the cover area. The day was ending and I wasn’t about to let him run on back to Hulberton in the dark. He’d misgauged his shot or the wind or both. He wasn’t as good as I was and I think we both knew that. I would have made the shot at Arm just as easily as I picked off the buffalo man’s horse.

  ’Course my horse had scurried back a bit when I fired but I caught him up easily. I swung into my saddle and banged my heels against my horse’s sides. He was ready to run. I jerked him from side to side in hard turns to make the moving target more difficult, should the buffalo man get lucky and draw a line on me. I felt hooves losing purchase on snow-covered ice a few times, but kept on asking for more speed.

  The buffalo man tried a shot from behind his cover. I heard that big slug whistle by a few feet to my right. As I raced up to the rocks I was pretty sure he’d try again. He did, and missed me by a lot. Then he began to run—clumsily, panicked, slipping and skidding in the snow. I grasped my reins in my teeth to free up my hands and shouted, “Hey!”

  The damned fool turned toward me and I blew a hole the size of a cannonball in his chest. The impact threw him back like a rag doll hurled by a tantruming kid. I didn’t ride up to see if he was dead. There was no doubt at all about that.

  I rode back and fetched Arm’s horse. Arm was still sitting on the ground. He’d wiped a good bit of the blood from his face and had his scarf tied around his head, pressing on his forehead. Without his hat he looked a Spanish pirate I remembered from a picture book I’d seen as a kid.