“You work for me. You help us drive our cattle to Dodge City.”
The bandit’s head nodded, and Mathew pulled his barlow knife from his pants pocket, unfolded the blade, and cut the lashings loose. The bandit turned, sucked the blood from a cut just below his left wrist, and straightened.
“Gather your horse, No Sabe,” Mathew said. “You’ll help my boys bring back the cattle you stole.”
No Sabe massaged his wrists. He wet his lips. He asked, “Dígame. How much dinero is it that you will pay me as one of your vaqueros?”
Mathew snorted. “Pay you?” His head shook. “Money?” A smile stretched across his tired face. “No, No Sabe. You don’t get any dinero. But you get to live, No Sabe. That’s your payment.”
As No Sabe and the others found their horses, Mathew slowly returned to the whip and, as he began recoiling it, he said to himself, “Soft, Cherry? I don’t think so.”
* * *
When the rustled livestock had been gathered, they dropped the dead bandits into one hastily dug grave. Dunson would have read over the bodies, but Mathew wanted to get across the river before he had to explain their presence to Rurales. They found the closest ford and crossed back into Texas. It was easiest to find the wagon road and herd the cattle—and the horses the dead no longer needed—toward Dunson City.
When they reached town in the gloaming, Mathew turned his horse back and trotted to Lightning and Tom, riding drag. He hooked a thumb in the general direction of the Rio Saloon and said, “You two thirsty?”
Lightning jerked the dust-coated bandanna from his face. “You serious?”
“No. I’m thirsty.” Turning in the saddle, he called out Laredo’s name. Riding point, the old cowhand looked back as Mathew waved his hat toward the cattle pens by the railroad tracks—the pens rarely used—then gestured toward the cowboy saloon. Laredo immediately understood and began turning the herd back. Joe Nambel also needed no further instructions. He loped to the pens to open the gate to the nearest shipping pen.
* * *
It had been a quiet night at the Rio, the bartender said as he drew foamy, lukewarm beers for the cowhands, sliding them expertly down the bar to the paying customers.
“He gets one, too, Jim,” Mathew said, nodding at No Sabe.
“Course he does,” the beer-jerker said. “He rides for you.”
“You lettin’ greasers ride for you, Garth?” a voice called from the batwing doors.
Turning, Mathew lowered the mug he was holding back atop the wet bar and wiped the suds off his face with the dirty sleeve of his shirt. His right hand hung just above the butt of the revolver still tucked inside his waistband. Now it gripped the walnut handle as the man with the drooping mustache and beard stubble, all the color of gunmetal, pushed through the doors. He held a Winchester rifle in his gloved hands.
Mathew thought back to the winter, when he had spoken finally to his sons about the stranger who had intervened in the fracas at the Knuckle Coupler. Months ago, the man on the dodge had worn rags for clothes. His luck, and his wardrobe, had changed down in Mexico.
“You’re looking fit, Jess,” Mathew told Teveler, but he did not release his grip on the Colt.
The hat, straight out of the Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog, was black. The band, fancy, hand beaded, and colorful, probably bought—or stolen—from some artisan in Mexico. He wore new boots, silver spurs, gray-striped britches, and a blue silk shirt. A calico bandanna fell loosely across the shirt. His gun rig held what looked like a Colt Lightning—but maybe a Thunderer—butt-forward on his left hip. He was smoking an expensive cigar.
Teveler grinned. “Tequila. Mexican women. Enchiladas. Does a man well in the winter. I hear you might be hirin’.”
Mathew pointed toward No Sabe, who stood, slowly drinking his beer, a boot hooked on the brass rail.
“I hire,” Mathew said. “Men I trust.”
“That don’t include me, Garth?” Teveler tossed the cigar into a spittoon.
Mathew’s head shook.
“Pa!” Lightning said. “This fella’s—”
“I know who he is, Lightning,” Mathew said.
“Because I rode with Dunson,” Teveler said. “You begrudge me what happened in Abilene after twenty years?”
Mathew smiled. With his left hand, he scratched his nose. “Not for that. Dunson paid you for a job. You didn’t quit him.” Mathew wasn’t about to tell him that he had hired Bradley Rush.
The man’s eyes beamed. His head nodded just a little, and he let out a chuckle. “I see. It’s them, ahem, other things. Since then. That it?”
“That’s it.” There might have been a little more, Mathew thought, which Tess would probably remind him of back at the ranch. But the more he thought of it, the more he realized that he wasn’t lying to the gunman.
“It’s seven hundred, eight hundred miles to get that herd to Dodge, Teveler,” Mathew said. “Across Texas, the Nations, and Kansas. I can’t risk having Rangers, marshals, or county sheriffs stopping me. And, for you, they would. They most certainly would.”
“Maybe you ought to drive your herd to Mexico City,” Teveler said.
“Maybe I will,” Mathew said. “Next time. If I do, I’ll send word to you that I’m hiring.”
“Well.” Teveler brought up the Winchester, but not in any threatening move. He rested the barrel on his left shoulder and kept his finger out of the trigger guard. “I reckon I don’t blame you, Garth. And I don’t particularly like the smell of greasers anyhow. That’s why I had to come up from Mexico. I’d wish you luck, but that would be insincere. See you around, Garth.” He spotted Tom and Lightning. “Take care, you two. Don’t ride no white horses in thunderstorms.”
With that, Jess Teveler was gone, into the darkness, and as Tom and Lightning stared at Mathew, he looked at the gun—the one taken off No Sabe—that his right hand still gripped.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Go ahead and say it, Laredo,” Mathew said as he sipped his second tumbler of rye whiskey. “Groot would.”
Fifteen minutes had passed since Jess Teveler had ridden away, and the saloon remained quiet. Cowboys usually did not stay quiet in saloons, especially after their third round of drinks. Mathew had felt Laredo’s stares since right after the ambush. Now he turned and gave his foreman a hard look.
Laredo Downs looked at Mathew for a moment, then quickly gulped down what remained of his whiskey and set the shot glass down. When the barkeep moved to refill the glass, Laredo put his gloved hand over the top. “Treat the other guys, Billy,” Laredo said, and waited until the bartender reached the end of the bar and began to serve Tom, Lightning, Joe Nambel, and No Sabe.
Tilting his head toward those men, Laredo said, “You really ain’t gonna pay that Mexican?”
“Pay him with what?” Mathew said. “I’m broke. Cash money is hard to come by. And if we don’t get that herd to Dodge, nobody’s going to get paid.”
“This ain’t like you.”
“I think it is.”
Laredo’s head shook. “Even Dunson didn’t cotton to slavery, Mathew. That’s what this is. Dunson wouldn’t use that Mex the way you plan to.”
Mathew grinned. “Because Dunson would have killed him in that arroyo.”
He finished his drink, set the glass down, and turned. “Finish those drinks, boys,” he said. “Moon’s rising, so we can get those cattle to the ranch and grab some supper.”
As he crossed the sawdust-coated floor, a figure appeared in front of the batwing doors. Mathew stopped and waited as the man tentatively pushed his way into the Rio. The doors slapped his buttocks, but the man didn’t appear to notice. Even though Mathew stood five yards away from the newcomer, he could smell the whiskey on his breath.
“I hear,” the man said, “you’re hirin’.”
He was younger than Mathew Garth by a few years, but nobody would have guessed it. More gray than brown flecked the week’s growth of stubble on his face, his eyes appeared rheumy, most of
his teeth—what few he had left—were black with rot, and red marks lined his eyes. He seemed to have trouble breathing. He could barely stand.
“John,” Mathew said, nodding.
“I wants . . . to . . .” The man paused, took another tentative step, and wiped his mouth with the back of a trembling hand. His clothes were trail worn, dirty, the boots scuffed, no spurs, no gun. Remembering his hat, he quickly swept it off his head, although few men would remove a hat in a saloon. Few men, Mathew thought, would even be caught dead with a hat like that. If you could call it a hat. Maybe it had been, ten years ago.
Life had not been kind to John Meeker Jr.
“I gots,” Meeker said, “to go on that drive. You gots to hire me, Garth.”
This wasn’t what Mathew had expected. He inhaled sharply, held the breath, and turned, nodding an unspoken order to Laredo Downs as he released the air from his lungs.
“Come on, boys,” Laredo said. “You, too, No Sabe. Let’s get ’em steers out of the pen and on the trail home.”
He waited until the batwing doors stopped banging and looked back at the bar, where the bartender was taking the glasses from the bar to the washbasin. Looking back at Meeker, Mathew hooked his thumb toward the bar.
“You want a drink, John?”
Meeker’s tongue wet his cracked lips. He kept breathing hard, and all he was doing was just standing there. “I . . .”
Mathew waited.
“I’d . . . be lyin’ if I said I didn’t. But . . .”
“It’s all right, John. We’ll make it a beer. One beer. Just one.” Mathew led the way, not sure if John Meeker Jr. could even make it to the bar. As he walked, he held up two fingers and nodded at the tapped keg. Reaching the bar, he hooked his right boot on the rail, took off his hat, and tried to think about how he should handle this.
A long minute passed before Meeker found a spot at the end of the bar, a few feet from Mathew. The beers arrived, and Mathew dropped two nickels on the bar. He drank, wiped his mouth, and waited.
Meeker just stared at the beer. He stood, still shaking, now wringing his hands.
“’Bout that job, Garth,” he said.
“John.” The beer was warm, too bitter. He set the mug over the two nickels. “This drive might bust me before I even get out of this county. Cash is tight.” The laugh that escaped surprised him. That it held no joy, on the other hand, did not. “Been accused of turning to slave labor, and”—he picked up the mug and drank half of the beer—“there’s truth to that.”
Meeker had found the beer in front of him. He tentatively took a sip, more suds than beer, and almost dropped the mug back onto the bar.
“This drive—if we can gather enough cattle to make a drive—is going to be like Dunson’s first drive after the war. Pay comes at trail’s end. We don’t make it, nobody gets paid. All the cash I have is likely to go to supplies. We lose those supplies in a river crossing, a stampede . . .”
“I know . . . how it . . . is.”
Mathew finished his beer. He glanced at the bartender, who, being a smart bartender, stayed at the far end of the bar, burying his nose in one of Beadle and Adams’s dime novels, a cigarette smoking between his fingers.
“When’s the last time you’ve been on a horse?” he asked, looking back at the drunk.
“Had to ride here and—”
“I don’t mean riding from the quarter section you still have. I mean ride. Twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours in the saddle. In the rain. In the blistering sun. Swimming a horse across a flooding river with cattle milling all around you. For eight hundred miles. When, John? How long ago?”
“I . . . well . . . I . . . never.” His willpower dissolved, and he grabbed the mug and killed all of the beer, slamming the glass down so hard Mathew—and the bartender—thought it might break.
“You gots . . .” Meeker found another idea. “You gots a wagon, right?”
“Chuck wagon? Sure. That’s Groot’s job. You remember Groot.”
The haggard face tightened. The head nodded. “Groot. Sure. Good man.”
Mathew finished his beer and started to turn.
“But you gots a hoodlum wagon, ain’t you?”
The hoodlum wagon. Mathew leaned back against the bar. Hoodlum wagons had come about for longer drives, later during the trail-driving era. They were for bigger herds, to store bedrolls, firewood, and extra supplies. Larger, profitable ranches might run a hoodlum wagon. Mathew had to wonder how many ranches would be able to afford a hoodlum wagon this time.
Mathew hadn’t even considered a hoodlum wagon . . . until John Meeker Jr. had brought it up. Pushing a herd of fifteen hundred or even two thousand head of cattle was one thing. You could get by, usually, with just the chuck wagon. But Mathew was hoping for three thousand head. And seven to eight hundred miles . . . He would need a hoodlum wagon.
“You need me, Garth. I can drive that wagon for you.”
Meeker was right. Hell’s fire, Mathew couldn’t afford a hoodlum wagon. But he would need one.
He pointed at the empty mug in front of Meeker.
“You want another beer, John?”
“No, sir. What I wants . . . is that job.”
Mathew let out a little laugh. Shaking his head, he said to himself, “Fast—and just a little soft. Still the same, right, Cherry?”
“What’s that, Garth?” Meeker said.
Shaking his head, Mathew stepped away from the bar. “The job’s yours, John. Fetch your possibles. Be at the ranch first thing tomorrow morn.”
* * *
He had the men. Enough, barely, to get three thousand cantankerous longhorns to Dodge City.
Laredo Downs would be trail boss, even if Mathew would be riding with him. Joe Nambel and Teeler Lacey on the point, but Mathew or Laredo could fill in for Lacey when they wanted him to scout ahead. Teeler Lacey knew that country better than the settlers and Indians that lived there. No Sabe and Bradley Rush on the swing, where the herd would begin to swell. The two vaqueros who had been working with him for the past six years, Alvaro Cuevas and Yago Noguerra, would ride the flank. At drag, swallowing all that dust, Mathew had decided to put Lightning, Tom, and John Meeker Jr. Lightning and Tom would argue, but only briefly, because nobody wanted to ride drag. He had considered putting Meeker on the hoodlum wagon, as the drunkard had suggested, but promoted old Negro-Seminole scout, Milt Blasingame, there. Blasingame could also do some scouting in a pinch, and he knew sign language better than even Teeler Lacey, so if they had to barter with Indians in the Nations, that would be a plus. Drag riders were less likely to get killed in a stampede—another reason Mathew’s sons were there—and he decided Blasingame could handle a team of mules better than Meeker. Another black man, barely out of his teens, would serve as wrangler, because Joey Corinth knew horses better than most men in this part of the country. Corinth had ridden up to the ranch house two days ago, and Tess had hired him on the spot.
He saw Blasingame and Groot riding into the yard in their wagons, so he set the coffee cup on the barrel by the bunkhouse door and walked out to greet them. Groot wasn’t smiling. Nor was the old scout.
Mathew stopped walking, pursed his lips, and waited for the bad news.
“That old skinflint at the mercantile wouldn’t give you no credit,” Groot said after he had set the chuck wagon’s brake. A glance at the back of the hoodlum wagon confirmed that.
“Says he’s had to put so many folks on tick, it just ain’t worth the risk to him. We got what we could with what money you give us, and Milt and me even put up what little we had. Sorry, Matt. I’m just plumb sorry.”
“Not your fault.”
He owned, or claimed, more land than most. He had a fine house, good horses, and hardly any hard cash money. And Chico Miller had already turned down his request for a loan. Hiring hands, he had known, would prove difficult—and it had. Back when Dunson had been trying to make that first drive, the war was just over, everyone was broke and willing to gamble. Ten dollars a
month, tripled if the herd brought better than fifteen (which it had).
“If we lose the herd,” Dunson had said, “you lose your wages.” And men wanted to go.
Now, in 1886, people wanted money. Not risks.
“Progress,” Chico Miller called it.
“We’ll empty out the root cellars,” Mathew said. “The pie safe. We’ll leave just enough grub for Janeen to get by—if I don’t have to hire her to ride drag.” He smiled to let the two men know he was joking.
Or am I? he thought.
“And Tess,” he said.
Groot reached into his back pocket. “But I got us somethin’,” he said, smiling. “Drummer sold it to me. I figured it might just help us out on the way north. Here.”
The old cook’s eyes beamed, and, from the smell on Groot’s breath, Mathew knew that this pamphlet wasn’t the only thing the drummer had sold to Groot.
* * *
Tess brought him coffee that morning as he sat at his desk, poring over the books. He didn’t even realize she was in the library until she cleared her throat.
“That’s not Shakespeare,” she said as he looked up. He smiled, but it seemed weary, as he held up the pamphlet:
THE GREAT TEXAS CATTLE TRAIL
With MAPS and LOCATIONS
of River Crossings
and Water Holes
and How to Avoid SAVAGE INDIANS
Written by MAJOR C.J.X. CARTER
Who rode with Jesse Chisum
and made his fortune “on the hoof,”
at Abilene, Ellsworth, Newton,
Caldwell, Denver, and Dodge City.
Maps and pamphlets were common. Mathew had seen one about the Oregon Trail, and if he looked in his library, he could probably dig up the Guide Map of the Great Texas Cattle Trail, from Red River Crossing to the Old Reliable Kansas Pacific Railway, which he had bought back in 1875. The railroad had published that one, to drum up business, and it was pretty reliable as those things went. But the one Groot had brought from Dunson City . . .
“Shakespeare knew more about the trails than this clown.” He tossed the pamphlet into the wastebasket.
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