by Paul Bagdon
He was right. The corral wasn’t tight to the barn—there was fifty feet or so between them. I took a double wrap of rope around my waist and tied it off and then tied the other end around a stout upright beam. I went out again. The damned storm hadn’t abated a hair. I stumbled and cursed my way in what I thought was a fairly straight line until I hit the corral. I was fairly close to the singing gate.
I didn’t have to find the stallion—he found me, shoving his muzzle against my chest. I guess it was as if we’d declared a temporary truce; we weren’t going to argue when our lives were at stake. I grabbed his halter with one hand and drew on the rope, reeling us in like a pair of big fish being hauled out of a river. I led him through the barn door and pulled him into a box stall. He stood there shaking, eyes huge, looking around, a long icicle suspended from his lower lip, his muzzle frosted, eyelashes thick with snow. I secured the gate and tossed him some hay.
Arm had put both our horses and the surrey horse into stalls and had hayed them. Our work wasn’t yet over and we both knew that. We had to run a line between the barn and the house. That didn’t take too long; we were oriented and it would have been hard to miss the house. We knotted the rope around the hitching post by the porch and followed it back to the barn. Teresa and Blanca were still praying, huddled together, the chatter of their teeth making their Spanish sound like some strange language from Europe or somewheres.
We led the ladies to the house. The first thing they did—even before taking off their heavy coats—was to add wood to the stove fire with trembling hands. The first thing Arm did—before taking off his coat—was to fumble a bottle of whiskey out of the cabinet with his trembling hands, yanked the cork with his teeth, and took a very long drink. Then, he handed the bottle to me. I did the same.
Outside, the storm continued with demonic malevolence. We heard sounds of pain and protest from our farmhouse we’d never heard before, and the power of the wind was such that the entire house shivered, trembled, like the ground does when a highballin’ train roars by a few feet away from a man. Still, it was cozy enough inside. We built a huge fire in the fireplace while the women—still uttering prayers—heated up some stew and put biscuits up to rise. Arm and I had another belt or maybe two and then went to our rooms and changed out of our frozen clothing.
When we came down, something was tickling Armando’s mind. “Tell me theese,” he said to Blanca. “How you know to make that beeg swing that got us home. Nobody could see nada, yet you…”
“You are too far away from your people,” Blanca said, “to remember what a niño’s job was, no? My family, we made pulque—thee good pulque, not thee rotgut. The only agave we used was thee leetle short ones that grew in the shadow of the arms of the beeg cactus—the primo agave. The niños, we would be sent out in the morning with a burlap sack as big as we were an’ we no come back ’til the sack, it is full. We took a mule, no? An’ we went miles an’ miles searching out the right plants. If we no make sure where we were alla time—well, it wasn’t good. Some died. It became natural we do this—an’ many of us, we still can do it.”
“Some of the times we’d cut the head from a rattlesnake and toss heem inna sack,” Teresa added. “It makes good flavor in the pulque.”
That pulque is a kinda frothy stuff that tastes like scorpion piss, an’ it’ll knock a big man down faster than a .45 will. I never had much use for it; I drank it once an’ woke up a day later with my boots, money, pistol, an’ horse gone.
“One must know how to drink cactus juice, Jake,” Arm said.
“Yer ass. Ain’t nobody who can drink that stuff an’ remain standing.”
“Beely, he drink it.”
“Sure. Billy the Kid drank it an’ he shot three men in a saloon for no goddamn reason. Don’t tell me about no pulque, Arm. It’s poison.”
There’s only so much that can be done around a farm—particularly one with only a few animals— during the cruelest and coldest part of a West Texas winter. I was handling, fondling, and grooming our stallion daily. The stud was coming along nicely. He’d get a little nervous and antsy when I kept him in a stall for too long a time, I guess because in the course of his life he’d never been boxed in, and although he enjoyed the grub and the attention, he preferred to be outside in his shelter in the corral. The mare was an easy keeper; she required little attention but obviously appreciated the daily grooming. The foal was curious and affable and I’d often let him out in the aisle in the middle of the barn to wander and sniff and see what the world was ’bout. He followed me like a puppy tagging along after his master.
Arm bought a load of lumber and replaced any cracked or warped boards. Beyond that he pestered Blanca and Teresa, following them as they went about their chores. When he attempted to advise them on their cooking, they’d had more than enough of him and laid into him in shrill and vindictive Spanish. I couldn’t understand any of it, but poor Armando slunk out of the kitchen with his tail ’tween his legs.
If those two ladies were men, I don’t doubt that Arm would have hurt them badly—or worse.
We rode into town one fine day, when the sky was as blue as it ever got and there wasn’t a cloud in sight. Even the wind had died and the sun was shining with July intensity, although with none of its heat. Our horses were frisky, nodding their heads to get under their bits and run off some steam. We wanted to let them run—we knew how they felt—but it was too dangerous. The snow that appeared as flat and level as an ironing board could hide rocks, holes, and ruts that could bust a leg.
Tiny, as usual, was happy to see us. We visited his shop, put up our horses there, and watched as he finished nailing new shoes on a typey-looking carriage gelding. Then, ’course, we meandered over to the saloon.
We hadn’t seen Dansworth since we freed Blanca and Teresa. I’d kind of expected immediate retaliation, but nothing happened for a few weeks and Arm and I had pretty much put the whole episode out of mind, just as if we’d done nothing more than plugged a few rats around our grain barrels.
The tender brought us our usual tray: a bottle of decent whiskey and six foaming schooners of cold beer. We settled in at a rickety table. Tiny told us a long tale of how he’d once ridden a Tennessee walking horse, and how that animal’s gait was as smooth as rolling slowly in a sweet, sweet, lady’s arms.
As usual, Dansworth and a cluster of his boys were at the rear of the saloon. They seemed drunker than they generally were, but we paid little attention to them. Arm was in the middle of a story of how his pa’s mule once sat down midday and refused to work. Mules or horses don’t sit like dogs or cats do, ’course, an’ what Arm’s pa done was to take a wooden match, slide it into that ornery mule’s bung, an’ touched it off with another. That mule never gave his pa another minute of trouble, but from then on, he carried his tail like one of them Arabian horses—up an’ arced. We were having a laugh when Dansworth strode over to our table and stood there, glaring down at me.
I’d drawn my .45 under the table when I saw him begin our way and I was pretty certain Arm had, too.
Dansworth’s stance was good and steady, but his eyes showed he was drunk. I looked him up an’ down. He had a day or so of stubble on his face, his shirt and coat were wrinkled, and his drawers had some stains. What I focused on, though, was his .45 and his gun belt. I know prime leatherwork when I see it, an’ Dansworth’s was the best. The stitches were so tight together on his holster it was hard to see they were anything other’n a single line. I know the difference between bone an’ ivory, and his weapon’s grips were ivory. His hand was loose next to the pistol, fingers curved in a tad.
The entire saloon went as quiet as the inside of a long-in-the-ground coffin.
“You cost me some more good men,” he said. His words weren’t slurred at all, but damn, his eyes were drunk.
“Good men?” I said mildly. “I cost you nothing. See, I don’t consider anyone who grabs up women an’ holds ’em up for ransom to be men. All I did was drop some trash onto the g
round.”
The silence in the joint continued. Dansworth continued his stare at me.
“I’m faster an’ better than you’ve ever been,” he said. “I had me a—”
“You had a fine pistol built from the ground up,” I said. “And the cut of your holster makes it easy to get to that fine .45. I hear a gunman taught you to handle a gun. That’s fine. But, you piece of horseshit, on the best day you ever had, in a gunfight ’tween you an’ me, you’d go down an’ die. That’s the way things are, Dansworth.”
The drunkenness from his eyes finally reached his mouth. “Y…You think you can…”
I let the hammer forward on my Colt. There wasn’t going to be a gunfight here. I didn’t holster my pistol, but it’d take more than a puffball to hit the trigger to fire it.
“You come back sober an’ maybe we’ll talk about this—maybe do something about it.”
“You think I…I can’t…”
“I know you can’t. Right now you couldn’t shoot Jumbo the goddamn elephant if he pinched your nose.”
Dansworth turned and walked back to his crew. They huddled together for a few minutes and then one, a hatchet-faced fella with a patch over one eye, came to our table. “Mr. Dansworth, he says you’re chickenshit, Walters. He says he’ll bet you a thousand dollars cash he can outshoot you right here an’ right now.”
I was getting tired of this folderol. “I don’t care to draw on drunks. Tell Walters that if—”
“No, that ain’t the bet,” the one-eyed man said. “We’ll set up six shot glasses on that beam back by our table. You an’ Mr. Dansworth stand back about thirty feet an’ do your shootin’. Whoever busts the most shot glasses wins.”
I was about to tell him to go to hell when I glanced over at Arm. He was grinnin’ like a Halloween punkin. So was Tiny.
“Our table here,” I said, “is maybe fifty feet from that beam. Dansworth shoots from thirty feet an’ I’ll shoot from here. This is for a thousand, cash, right? Fair ’nuff?”
One-eye near busted a gut scurryin’ back to the rear of the saloon with my offer.
Dansworth’s “Goddamn fool,” and his laugh were louder than the rabble around him. He dispatched a man to the bar to fetch a dozen shot glasses an’ to set six up a few inches apart on the beam. Then Dansworth, grinning, took thirty paces toward us.
“Them las’ steps, they was kinda short,” Arm pointed out.
“Let it go,” I said.
Dansworth turned his back on us. Again, the gin mill was totally silent. He shrugged his shoulders, clenched and unclenched his right fist, spat off to one side, an’ drew his .45. The explosions of his rounds were like dynamite in the closed building. Dansworth fired quickly—maybe a bit too quickly. Five of the shot glasses shattered but one remained standing, as if mocking him. Still he seemed satisfied with his performance and his boys whistled, whooped, and cheered.
I hadn’t taken into consideration the murkiness of the air in the saloon, which had been increased by the smoke from Dansworth’s pistol. I could barely see the new shot glasses that’d been set up. The outlaws backed away—far away—from the beam and my diminutive targets. I pretended to check the load in my .45 as I scrambled for a plan. The only one I could up with was not only risky but foolish, but it’s all I had. After all, if I couldn’t see my targets, I couldn’t very well hit them. I stood and pushed my chair back, .45 hanging easily, comfortably in my hand. I looked things over once again and fired my first round. The kerosene lamp hanging a few feet from where Dansworth stood detonated nicely, casting more than enough orangish white light for my purposes. I picked off the next four glasses with no trouble at all. Then came the challenge. I fired my sixth shot so that it hit and smashed the very edge of the sixth glass, but blew enough glass at the fifth to bust it up. I let out a breath I’d been holding.
“Holy sheet!” Armando exclaimed.
“Some shootin’, Jake,” Tiny added. “I never seen nothin’ like it.”
If the truth be known, I probably couldn’t pull off that little trick again in a thousand tries, but that didn’t matter none. It worked this time.
I remained standing and Arm stood, too, and moved several feet to my left. The buzz and snarls from the other end of the saloon were as ominous as the warning of a rattlesnake. I knew this thing wasn’t over, an’ so did Arm.
After a few moments the one-eyed, hatchet-faced fella walked toward us, headed to Arm rather than to me. I looked him over. His .45 was tied low on his leg and his holster was well-worn. He had a sheath of banknotes in his left hand. He stopped about eight feet from Arm. “This here’s your pard’s money, Pancho,” he said. He opened his hand and the bills fluttered to the floor. “All you gotta do is pick ’em up with your teeth and you’ll walk out of here. You don’t, you’ll be carried out—dead.” He paused for a moment and smiled. “Pretend they’re tamales, Pancho—that’ll make it somethin’ you’re used to doin’.”
Armando grinned. “S’pose I put a slug right on through that patch over your eye,” he said, his voice conversational, calm. “An’ then I pick up the money?”
“Well, lemme tell you somethin’, Pancho. See, what I’m offerin’…”
It was a gunfighter’s trick that was already old when Methuselah was a infant. Get the opponent to shift his mind for the tiniest part of a second and draw then. His hand flashed to the grips of his Colt.
There was one round fired. Arm’s slug passed on through the black cloth patch. A spurt of blood and grayish glop spat out of hatchet-face’s eye socket and a sizable piece of the back of his head sailed the length of the room, struck the wall, and stuck there to the rough wood. I drew and kept my pistol leveled on Dansworth’s group. Arm picked up the cash. I nodded to Tiny and the three of us backed on out.
For once, Dansworth had no parting words.
Tiny was pale-faced as we stood out in the street, the wind snapping grit and discarded newspaper pages past us. “Maybe I oughta start carryin’ iron,” he said.
Arm’s voice was low and serious. “Don’t even theenk of it, amigo. Jake an’ me, we been doin’ this all our lives, no? You know the Bible? It says, ‘He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.’ Ees good advice.”
“You start carryin’,” I said, “an’ you’d kill two men.”
“Two? I…”
“Sí. Es verdad. You an’ the man who killed you. Me an’ Jake, we take him down.”
Tiny looked up at the sky. “You boys got some daylight left. Let’s put a dent in my tequila supply an’ talk this over.”
The low fire in the forge provided all the heat we needed. Arm an’ me sat on bales of hay, but Tiny was antsy, pacing. We passed his bottle of tequila around a couple of times.
“I take me a deer whenever I need meat,” Tiny said. “A bear killed two of my best dogs an’ I put a dozen shots into the sumbitch, but I killed him. I ain’t new to guns, boys.”
“You’re new to handguns, Tiny,” I said. “And you’re brand-new to takin’ the life of another man if it ever come to that. ’Course you kill a deer for meat, an’ that bear, an’ a barrel fulla rattlesnakes an’ rats to boot.”
“Sí,” Arm said. “Keeling a man is different. I dream sometimes about gunfights an’ I sweat an’ sometimes I cry.”
“Yeah, Tiny,” I said. “It ain’t just a matter of bein’ a little faster an’ pullin’ a trigger. The boys who died had mas and pas an’ maybe wives an’ children. Sometimes…sometimes…I wish I’d lost.”
Tiny sucked the bottle for a long moment. “Jake—if you’d lost, then Arm woulda settled the score. Isn’t that right?”
“Score? Bullshit. There ain’t no score in gunfighting. We do what we gotta do.”
“So—if a ’slinger dropped you, he’d jus’ ride away?”
“No,” Arm said. Tiny and I waited a moment but Arm didn’t say anything else and it was clear he wasn’t going to.
“We gotta saddle up,” I said eventually. “And for a while, we gotta
cut out our trips to town— the two of us together, I mean. Dansworth knows we’d track him down if he grabbed our mare, but we can’t leave the place unprotected.” I turned to Tiny. “You’re our very good friend,” I said. “You’ll have to come to us ’stead of us comin’ to you— but you do that whenever you take a mind to. Hear? Anytime at all. We have whiskey an’ food an’ we want you to be free to come by anytime.”
The air took on a fresh sweetness not long thereafter, and the melting snow runoff sounded like a distant river. Gutsy grass sprigs began to poke their heads through the remaining snow and here and there were good-size patches of rich-looking mud and soil. Riding in the mud loosened shoes quickly, kinda of sucked them away from the hoof with each stride. Both of us could renail a shoe, so it was no trouble. The smith skills—shaping a show from bar stock, leveling it, screwing on nubs for traction, all that, was beyond us. A lame horse is as useless as teats on a boot heel; we took our horses to Tiny for that kind of work.
Our stallion was gettin’ as nervous as a whore in church, sniffing the spring air, hustling about in his corral as if he expected a magic door to suddenly appear, giving him freedom.
I worked him daily on a long rope, running around me at the end of the rope at a pretty good clip, even with that stumble-footed gait of his. He hadn’t offered to attack me in quite some time, but I was still leery. He’d been born in the wild and had gone where he wanted to when he wanted to his entire life. I doubt that he’d ever get used to captivity. He was looking good. He’d filled out some and his coat had taken on an almost brassy shine to it. The work on the rope kept him muscled up and tight.
The mare was looking good, too. She was showing that she was pregnant and that the youngster had moved back inside her toward her birth canal. She ate almost nonstop, but we figured she was eating for two, and let her have at good hay and grain. It put some fat on her but we’d work that off after she’d given birth.
Neither Arm nor me had much experience with birthing. We’d see it happen now and again on our travels, but knew little about the process.