Deuces Wild

by Dusty Richards

  “No, sit here.” Burt indicated for him to take a place at the table. “We need to talk about plans. Things we need to do here on the farm. Sit,” he told the hesitant boy. “You’re ready for the irrigation?”

  “Sí, it comes mañana.”

  “Good.We will need to cut the alfalfa soon.”

  “Sí.”

  “Can you sharpen the sickle bar?” Burt decided from the concerned look on the youth’s face that he was uncertain about the process but afraid his patrón would be mad if he said so.To save the poor boy any more fears, he spoke up quickly. “I’ll do that when I return.”

  Juan nodded gratefully.

  “Relax, you are my segundo here,” he said to brace the youth up.

  About to laugh at Juan’s obvious discomfort with being at the patrón’s table, Burt concentrated on his coffee. Angela brought them plates of eggs, frijoles, and flour tortillas. She set them before both men and nodded.

  “That was fixed in record time,” she said.

  Burt agreed, putting red sauce on his scrambled eggs.

  “Something wrong?” she asked the hesitant Juan.

  “Oh, no, no,” he said, and began to fix his food.

  She shared a private wink with Burt, then swept up the younger of the babies and headed for the kitchen with a promise to come back for his brother.

  “You better eat something, too,” Burt said after her.

  “I will,” she said from the doorway, coming after the other little one, who had crawled under the table.

  He knew good and well his new bride would rather mess with little children and baby livestock than eat any time. Still, he was anxious to get the prisoner to town. He wondered what the Tucson high sheriff would say about the matter—what was he doing about the raids by Mexican bandits on ranches along the Santa Cruz River? There might even be more than one band of outlaws.

  Pima County’s head lawman would probably say he couldn’t spare a deputy. Truth of the matter, all his men were out counting cattle to put them on the property tax rolls. Arizona sheriffs collected ten percent of all the county’s property taxes. The tax business paid them much better then chasing scruffy border bandits.

  After their meal, he and Juan wrapped the dead outlaw in the old blanket. Then they placed him with the wounded one, Miguel, who sat tied up in the back of the buckboard. Burt took the Winchester along in case of trouble. Once Angela, wearing a new blue dress, was on the spring seat, he handed the long gun to her to hold before he climbed up beside her.

  Juan promised to drag off the dead carcass. He also had caught a loose saddle horse that came back to the ranch ones. From the Mexican saddle on the mustang, Burt decided it must have belonged to one of the outlaws. Juan unsaddled and put him in the corral. Burt doubted any nearby rancher would claim it. Still, he planned to hold the horse as some sort of payment for the inconvenience they’d suffered in the raid.

  The day’s heat rose from the damp dirt as they hurried southward. The towering Catalina Mountains beside them and the pristine desert sparkled from the cleansing rain as the thin iron rims cut a song on the gritty surface. In the usual dry washes, small streams of water meandered across the roadway for them to splash through.

  Mid-morning, he reined up before the adobe building that housed the county sheriff ’s office and jail. He tied off the reins and climbed down.

  “I’ll wait here,” Angela said from under her blue parasol.

  He entered the building and let his eyes adjust to the darkness.

  “Señor?” The young man wearing a star on his shirt sat up at a desk.

  “Sheriff Adams here?” Burt searched around and saw no one else as his eyes adjusted to the low light.

  “No. May I help you?”

  “Burt Green. Bandits raided my ranch up on the Santa Cruz last night. I have one dead outlaw and a wounded one out in my buckboard. Would you remove them?”

  “Oh, yes!” The deputy bolted to his feet and shouted for a swamper to come help him.

  Burt followed them to the open doorway and shared a nod with Angela on the spring seat. After taking off his hat for her, the deputy helped gather the injured one. He and his helper carried Miguel through the doorway.

  “He’s wounded, all right,” the deputy said as they took him past Burt and into the jail portion. “I better get a doc to come take a look at him.” The deputy sent his helper for the physician. He turned back to Burt. “How did all this happen?”

  “A gang of outlaws tried to raid Angela’s—our—ranch last night. I stopped them.”

  “How many and what gang?”

  “Must have been seven or eight. The wounded man said the leader was named Torres. He got away.”

  “Lots of them bandits.” Warily, the deputy shook his head. “I never heard of no Torres before.”

  “Obviously, this wounded one is one of Torres’s men.

  How many raids have been made on ranches around here lately?”

  “Not as many as last year.” The young man shrugged. “Last week, they raided a few places up at Oracle, but there aren’t as many attacks happening this year.”

  “What’s the sheriff doing about them?”

  With obvious affront, the deputy suspiciously cocked an eye at Burt. Then, very deliberately, he said, “All he can do with such limited funds and a short staff.”

  “Raids like this have to be stopped.”

  “Yeah, well, mister, you figure them out, and we’ll stop ’em. These damn Messikins can ride back to Mexico quicker than a lamb can wag his tail.”

  “If the law won’t do anything, then perhaps civilians will have to.”

  The young man gave a shrug as if that was all he could do.

  “Tell Sheriff Adams,” Burt said, “that deputy U.S. Marshal Green will check back with him on the case’s progress.”

  The deputy only gave him a scathing look. “I’ll tell him.”

  “You look upset.What did they say in there?” Angela asked when he climbed on the rig, undid the reins, and clucked to the team.

  “They said as much as there was nothing they could do about the bandits. They had no deputies and no funds, and the bandits swooped in and ran back to Mexico before they could do a thing.” He looked over his shoulder and, seeing the way was clear, put the buckskins in a trot.

  “What do you plan to do?”

  “Go and see my boss, Marshal Downy. Maybe he knows someone in Preskitt who can wake this sheriff up.”

  She looked up at the parasol. “I forget they called Prescott that.What will the governor do?”

  He stared straight ahead, fighting for some control over the fiery rage inside himself. “Someone like Governor Baylor needs to make Adams do his job and put an end to such lawlessness.”

  “Sounds like you have work to do,” she said with a broad smile.

  Looking over at her, he nodded, pleased to see the attack had not depressed her this time, that this latest episode had not set her back the way the murder of her husband did. He could also see that her efforts were intended to bring him out of his own anger. Grateful for her concerns about him, he gave her a reassuring smile and clucked to the team.

  His pair of horses paused for a two-wheel cart blocking the narrow street. He decided he should see Downy first, then go find some capable men to guard his new bride and ranch. The lightninglike raids coming from below the border had to be stopped. If the local law couldn’t do anything, he’d have to figure out a way to end their habitual reign of terror.

  Chapter 2

  THE CELL WAS COOL IN THE PREDAWN DARKNESS. Seated on the iron bunk, Deuces knew from what the guards had told him that a marshal would soon come for him and take him to the place they called Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. They said this place was many days by train from Fort Bowie. He wondered if he would ever again smell the mixed aroma of creosote and juniper that filled his nose. In deep concentration, he tried to separate the outdoor fragrant air from the sweaty and fecal odors of the military jail.

&n
bsp; The snoring of the other prisoners asleep in the adobe quarters sounded like the steam-driven sawmills that sliced up the pines in the Chiricahuas. Deserters and killers, the other prisoners were army whites and two buffalo soldiers. The blacks fascinated him the most, their kinky hair like tight wire coils and big lips, their skin not brown like Apaches but black as the polished stones called Apache tears. He could hardly understand them when they spoke, though he knew enough English to speak it and Spanish even better, as well as his own Apache. The blacks spoke in a very different tongue, but in many ways they were like Apaches. They sang their songs and danced. He did not know their meaning, but he felt more akin to them than to the cursing, grumbling white prisoners.

  Looking out the small, barred window at the twinkling stars, he wished that he could once again be in Mexico as a scout with Tom Horn. That was where he belonged, not in this jail, not sentenced to years of hardship. They told him at Leavenworth he would make big rocks into small ones as punishment. He shook his head. What did rocks have to do with him killing Sombrero? Then he closed his eyes and recalled how the wet-eyed Tish told him she was sad with her husband, that Sombrero got drunk and beat her all the time.

  In his heart, he knew what he did to that worthless one was what he should have done. But there was no way to explain that to white men—to officers. They had never been Apaches and lived in a wickiup. Never listened to elders tell them evil must be stopped—that you do that for your tribe. Do not shirk such duty, he’d been taught, the Apache’s god, Ussen, will guide you. Pray to him, and he will give you answers.

  His heart felt heavy. Never again in his life would he hear the top knotted quail whose whistles kept a man company in the desert. Would the sun dog howl there? Would the eagle soar over such a place? No antelopes to

  eat. No desert sheep’s haunch to roast on a fire. His mouth grew thick with saliva at the thought of such a treasured meal. No hearts of the century plant to bake.

  No more stomp dances, where the tiswain flowed freely and one could pound his heels in moccasins until dawn with a dark-eyed maiden.

  Instead, he would eat bitter beans, wormy salt pork, bad bread, and coffee that tasted like piss, until his spirit expired. His real heart would never die, only suffer. If only he could make his spirit fly away like a freed bird and let it live with the green-headed parrots that came in such huge flocks to the Chiricahuas each year.

  “I will you to stay in these great mountains until I come back,” he said in Apache. But his spirit did not fly out the bars, and he decided it, too, would go with him to this place of big rocks to little rocks.

  Midday, a soldier took him from the cell. The deputy marshal stood tall and lean in his brown suit beside the jailer’s desk. He wore a bushy mustache with gray hairs, his blue eyes deep set and dark when he looked Deuces over.

  “Well, we’ve got a fur piece to go,” he said as he signed the papers on the desk.

  He placed handcuffs on Deuces’s wrists, then with a hard squeeze made certain they were tight enough so he could not slip them off. Egan’s breath smelled bad in Deuces’s nostrils: tobacco, strong food, rotten teeth.

  “You behave, I won’t put legs irons on you?” The man looked him hard in the eye.

  “I behave,” Deuces said quickly. At first, he had worn leg irons in the fort’s jail; only his good behavior and friendship with the soldier guards had gotten them removed.To not have to wear them on this trip would be good fortune for him; he could never escape this man with them strapped on his ankles.

  “Deuces is a model prisoner,” Desk Sergeant Cafferty said, handing the papers to Deputy U.S. Marshal Philip Egan.

  “Yeah, that’s good,” the man said, stuffing them in his coat pocket. “But he tries anything, he’s one dead sumbitch.”

  “I don’t expect he will. His record as a scout was unblemished.”

  “Except for the murder?” Egan turned his lip up in disgust and gave an I-know-it-all glance to the sergeant.

  “That’s right. Tom Horn’d had his way, they’d never tried him for it.”

  “Well,Tom Horn ain’t the gawdamn law. Just another civilian.”

  Cafferty shook his head. “Not just any civilian. He’s a great scout.”

  “Way I heard it, he tells them renegade ’Paches everything the army does.”

  “You need anything else, Egan?” Cafferty’s face grew beet red.

  Deuces wanted to laugh. The marshal had better clear out of there. Things he said about Horn had made the noncom angry, and Egan did not want to see that man’s wrath. Deuces knew Cafferty’s reputation well.

  “You damn blue bellies may like him, but I say Horn’s a gawdamn spy for them Apaches.” With that said, Egan roughly shoved Deuces for the doorway.

  “Wait one moment!” Cafferty ordered.

  Egan stopped, turned back. Deuces could see the rage pulsing in the blue veins on the side of the sergeant’s red face.

  “You forgot his suitcase.” And he shoved the cheap valise into the lawman’s gut.

  The ride in the ambulance, driven by two soldiers to the Bowie station, proved to be dusty and long. Close to sundown, they reached the small community on the Southern Pacific tracks. Egan removed Deuces and both of their suitcases from the conveyance. He never said a word to the two soldiers, who drove off and left them standing in the dirt street.

  “I need a damn drink,” Egan said, looking around. He motioned for Deuces to head toward the saloon across the dusty street.

  “Wait here,” he said, and put his own bag on the ground beside Deuces’s. Then he took out a small chain. At the hitch rail, he looped it over the bar and through the cuffs, then padlocked it, securing Deuces to the rack.

  “Stay here. They won’t let your red ass in there, anyway. I won’t be long.”

  Deuces watched his escort disappear through the batwing doors. When Deuces decided to sit upon the edge of the boardwalk, he learned the chain was not long enough. He had to hold on to it with both hands. No matter, he squatted at the edge anyway and wondered how drunk the marshal would get before he came outside for him.

  To try to escape so close to Bowie would be foolish.

  They had a dozen Apache scouts at the fort who could trail him down in no time. But farther on, he would find a way to slip away. Perhaps if this man Egan drank lots of whiskey, it would not be so hard to get away from him—somewhere.

  Then someone spoke in Apache to him. He looked up at an old, wrinkle-faced tribesman.

  “They going to hang you?” the ancient one asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Good. They hang you—keep you from next world.”

  Deuces acknowledged him before the old man shuffled on. He knew the poor devil was looking for a drink. Begging in his worn-out voice, he held out his pitiful hand to two soldiers. They ignored him and went inside the bar. Perhaps when he was released from prison, he would be as this old man was—without any pride—pleading for whiskey to forget the good times.

  Egan came out, picking his teeth, then looked up and down the street. He used the side of his hand to smooth out his mustache. When he drew closer, Deuces could smell the sharpness of the liquor on his breath.

  “Get up, Buck. We got to find some food. Damn train’ll be here in an hour or so, if it’s on time.”

  Deuces decided that his new name with this man would be Buck. They went behind the adobe building and drained their bladders in the dust. Then Egan took him to a café run by a Mexican. A swarthy man with a filthy white towel tied around his waist came over and took Egan’s order.

  Soon he delivered them plates of frijoles, some kind of stringy meat, and corn tortillas. Egan never bothered to release the cuffs, so Deuces ate with them on, forced to move them together to feed his face. The food was not fresh. He could taste the staleness, the flavor of tobacco smoke, and other bad odors in it. Still, he did not know when this man would feed him again. Life as an Apache had taught him to eat whenever he had a chance—his next meal might
be days away.

  “If it didn’t have hot peppers in it,” Egan said under his breath, being certain the cook couldn’t hear him, “this food would be pure garbage.”

  Deuces nodded.

  “Damn, hope we don’t get the shits on that train from eating this slop,” the lawman said, looking at the juice-dripping tortilla in his hand. “Be bad. I had them once. Had to get off the train, put the prisoner in a city jail until I got better. Whew.” He took another big mouthful, then struck the prongs of his fork on the plate to get Deuces’s attention. “Sure hope we don’t get them eating this crap.”

  Deuces nodded.

  After the meal, he took Deuces to the small depot.

  The sun was setting in the west. Red flared the sky into bloody tones that bathed the Dos Cabezas Mountains and the Chiricahuas. Deuces wanted to remember the picture of those peaks on fire, to hold the sight forever in his mind so he would recall what his land looked like during his long absence.

  “The train’s supposed to be on time,” Egan said, returning to where he told him to sit on the bench while he went to see about the schedule. “Can’t never tell about trains. They got their own schedule. Sons a bitches got all the money. Railroad moguls will own this whole country one day.”

  Egan’s rambling words made little sense to Deuces.

  He spoke about dogs, trains, and mongrels and them owning the world. Maybe he meant dogs would replace white men. Like the whites had replaced the red man.

  How would a dog shoot a gun? No, this man was crazy.

  Deuces knew all about dogs—they were dumber than Pima Indians.

  The distant whistle of the locomotive sank his heart. Deuces had hoped the train had been swallowed up and would never ever come for him.

  “Get your bag, Buck.”

  Deuces obeyed and stood beside the man at the edge of the platform. He had seen the mother-of-pearl grips in his shoulder holster. Egan would not hesitate to use it, either; this he knew well.

  The locomotive came to a screaming halt. A hiss of steam obscured things, then drifted away. The platform still vibrated under Deuces’s soles, so close to the fire-breathing steel devil that pulled the train—he hoped its spirit had not noticed him in passing.