Each one set to work. Mr. Blatherbell moved the ladder into position and climbed to the top shelf, pulling out books and examining them. Mr. Poopendal cut the string of one box, drew out a handful of papers, and sat on the floor to study them.
“The drawers are locked,” said Mr. Snoddergas.
Paul picked up a paper-knife and snapped the lock, then went back to the litter on top of the table.
The candles had burned nearly halfway down when Paul rose, arched his weary back, and went to the door. He whistled, and instantly the female butler appeared. “Bring some wine,” he told her, pinching her cheek.
She purred like a kitten. “At once, Your Grace,” she said, tripping over her feet as she hurried away.
Paul went back into the room. Mr. Blatherbell and Mr. Poopendal were gathered around Mr. Snoddergas, excitedly reading a document he was holding.
“Look, Your Grace!” shouted Mr. Snoddergas. “Your uncle does own some other property.”
“What is it?” asked Paul.
“The deed to a … a ranch, in a place called the Territory of New Mexico.”
“The Territory of New Mexico? Where the devil is that?”
“It is in the United States,” said Mr. Blatherbell. “I believe it is in the west, or the southwest, of that country.”
“But there are only Indians in the west of the United States,” said Mr. Poopendal. “Whatever would prompt His Grace to buy Indian land?”
“This says it is a ranch,” said Mr. Snoddergas. “That is where they raise cattle over there?”
“How large is it?” asked Paul.
Mr. Snoddergas calculated rapidly. “It seems to be about one thousand square miles in area.”
Paul snorted. “A thousand acres? That’s not worth going all the way there to sell.”
“Not acres, Your Grace, miles.”
Paul’s eyes popped open. “Miles?” He snatched the document from Mr. Snoddergas’ hand. “Show me.” Mr. Snoddergas pointed it out. “It can’t be,” said Paul, incredulous. He looked up at the three intense men. “Maybe their miles are smaller than ours, like acres.”
“No, Your Grace,” said Mr. Blatherbell. “They have the same number of furlongs to the mile as we have - eight.”
Paul looked closely at the deed again and a smile wreathed his lips. “Who’s for a trip to this Territory of New Mexico?”
“I am, Your Grace,” spoke up Mr. Snoddergas quickly.
“And I, Your Grace,” said Mr. Blatherbell.
Mr. Poopendal sighed. “And I too, Your Grace.”
CHAPTER V
Paul leaned back in his train seat and gazed out of the window with amazement at the mile after mile of open country. He actually didn’t know how to identify and catalogue all the incidents that had taken place since the day he and the three solicitors had stepped aboard the ship at Liverpool. Although the voyage was a slight indication of things to come, inasmuch as he had never seen so much water in his life, it was not really the ultimate but merely a prelude to something he still couldn’t quite place his finger on.
New York had seemed like a scene from one of those crazy novels written by that Frenchman, Jules Verne. Jammed with horse trolleys packed with people, with drays loaded with kegs of beer, and wagons filled with bricks, and carts piled high with vegetables, and carriages carrying swarms of people, it was a hustle and bustle that assailed the ears. Buildings going up at every turn, higher and higher, so high that the neck ached to look up. Everyone was shouting in Irish and German and Italian and a strange kind of English, glib types were grabbing you by the arm to sell you a bridge or a piece of land or a pheasant’s egg just off the Yankee Clipper from China.
They had escaped to a medium-priced hotel, but there the activity of buying land, stock and oil rights, cotton and parts of a shipping venture was no less intense than on the streets, only less noisy. Service at the hotel was riotous, with waiters rushing about slamming down plates in front of the customers and whisking them away before they had time to say howdy-do, and everyone eating faster to keep up with the tempo. And the food - it was a nightmare! Steaks two fingers thick that only a man with razor-sharp teeth and an iron jaw could grind small enough to swallow, incompletely boiled potatoes that were served in plates as large as baskets, and enough sharp-tasting cabbage to feed a family, but even more raw than the potatoes.
The one thing which met with Paul’s complete approval was a short stroll in the Bowery, short because within a whisper of time he had become as drunk as a lord and had been led up to a room where two ladies of the evening taught him a few tricks he had never encountered before, including the imbibing of a liquid which had clubbed him into a slumber so deep that he did not waken until noon the following day. His empty pockets did not disturb him too much, since he had left most of his money with Mr. Blatherbell the night before.
It was with relief that they boarded a train the next morning, and this too was an uncommon experience, seeing the breadth and brawn and bread-box of a land so varied and rich that it staggered the imagination. Russia was a land of great distances and open spaces, but it was nothing compared to what he saw as the train passed through the sharp hills and by the coal mines of Pennsylvania, and between the corn fields of Ohio and Illinois and Indiana, fields so vast that they dwarfed the pigsties and beef cattle and dairy herds, and were broken by patches of cotton and tobacco, potatoes and apple orchards. Then entering the booming, crashing, smashing St. Louis, with its madness, its preoccupation with cattle, railroads and immigration to the west, while struggling to cope with the horde of river boats piling supplies haphazardly along its shores. A city bursting at its seams, everybody walking, running, riding, galloping, racing as if there was no time to stop or even pause for breath.
They had lain over at St. Louis for two days to recover from their five-day trip from New York, then were off again. And suddenly, as if Jules Verne had placed another book in his hands, Paul saw a new, strange world, a no-nonsense world of the rolling Missouri and the flat prairie-like Indian Territory of Oklahoma. A raw land where the soil, the sky and the people lived together only by dint of never-ending labor, of relying not upon each other but stepping warily round one another. The soil capable of bearing fruitfully and accepting calmly the floods and torrents, the unseasonal snows and the seasonal winds howling over the face of it, skimming the crust from the surface and flinging it helter-skelter to the four corners of the earth. Everything there seemed to be spaced farther apart, desolate, in conflict with the stubborn nature of the land.
Here also, for the first time, he saw Indians, and they were a far cry from the fierce warriors he had been led to expect. They swarmed about the railroad stops, begging, holding up scraggy furs for sale or barter. A pack of short, unwashed, evil-smelling thieves, dressed in worn cotton trousers and shirts, who would reach through the windows and run off with whatever they could grab if not closely watched. Paul eyed the women, and quickly lost interest.
The train kept moving along, and then Paul was in paradise. It was not a blending of one color with another, or even a change of shading, nor was it a gradual shift from a familiar world to a composite world and then to a new world. It was an explosion! It was abruptly the harshest, most deadly, God-forsaken land Paul had ever seen, and he fell in love with it instantly.
Where are we?” he asked a lean man seated behind him.
“Mistah, yo'all in Texas. Up ahead there a bit, that’s New Mexico Territory.”
“How far ahead is New Mexico Territory?”
“Jus’ a short piece. ‘Bout a hunnert or a hunnert an’ fifty miles.”
“Is it like this?”
“Wal, reckon it’s a mite wilder. Ain’t settled like heah.”
Paul laughed aloud, for he hadn’t seen a habitation of any sort for the past twenty miles, then he turned back to the window and gazed rapturously at the primitive land of sand and rock, dotted with cactus, junipers and tumbleweeds, and patched with grazing cattle as the only vivi
d spots of color. Then in the distance he saw a stream feeding life into a stand of piñon trees, and the sheen of a small lake, seeming almost alien in this nearly deserted wasteland.
It took six days to travel from St. Louis to their final destination, Rijos, and here they alighted, surprised to find a bustling, thriving town of almost five hundred people. As Paul stepped down to the railroad platform, he took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air and gazed with fascinated curiosity at the huge mountains rising loftily in the western sky.
He looked about for the man to whom he had sent a telegram - a Mr. Ned Fenton. The solicitors had found his name mentioned in correspondence between his uncle and an attorney residing in Santa Fe, seventy-five or eighty miles further along the line. The attorney had handled the sale of the ranch to his uncle two years ago and had written that Ned Fenton was a most reliable foreman. There was also a short note from Ned Fenton in the files - a scrawled request for permission to sell some cattle a year ago to defray a large item of expenditure which his uncle seemed to know about. There was also the name of the ranch - The Three Barbs.
He didn’t notice the man until he heard a voice at his side. “Mr. Sanderson?”
He had to conceal his reaction to his first sight of the man. He had probably been six feet tall at one time, but he was bent over from a deformity or accident to almost six inches less. His face was marred by deep scars, and his hands were turned inward, as if the wrists had been broken and not set properly. His age would be in the late forties, decided Paul, although his hair was already completely grey.
“Yes,” he replied. “Are you Mr. Fenton?”
Fenton put out his hand and Paul took it cautiously, surprised at the firm grip he received “I’m Fenton,” said the foreman. “Call me Ned, Mr. Sanderson. They all do.” He motioned with a thumb to the side of the tiny railroad station. “I’ve got a wagon over there. It’ll be pretty tight for you and the gentlemen with you, but we’ll manage.”
Paul introduced him to the solicitors, then Ned picked up one of the luggage boxes and walked towards the wagon. He limped from what was evidently a badly-injured leg that had also not set properly.
Once their effects were loaded into the wagon, they climbed aboard, Paul sitting up front with Ned and the three solicitors on their boxes in the rear. Ned clucked to the two smooth-limbed bays and they set off along the packed-dirt main street of the town. Paul looked at it curiously. Weather-beaten wooden fronts of a score of shops and twice that number of houses lined the street, along which ran planked sidewalks raised a foot or so above the road. He saw a school, a general store, a harness shop, a butcher’s, a grocery store, a freight office, blacksmith’s forge, two restaurants, three houses with signs over the doors reading ROOMS, one small hotel, a livery stable, three saloons, a grain and feed store, a barber shop advertising medical services, and a well-kept church.
“Does it seem different from back home?” asked Ned, his eyes smiling under the brim of his high-crown hat.
“A little,” said Paul. “But I’ve been looking at a number of similar towns on my way here. How far is it to the ranch?”
“Bout ten miles.” He studied Paul obliquely. “What am I supposed to call you? You’re a Duke, aren’t you?”
“How about Paul? I’m a long way from home, anyway.”
“Good, Paul it is.” They passed through the town and along a flat road towards rolling ground directly ahead. Here and there were small shanties set back off the road, children playing in the yards among chickens pecking at the ground and dogs napping in the shade. There were pig pens beside almost every shack. “I was surprised to hear about your uncle’s death. He seemed like a right fine man.”
“He was a tight-fisted, penny-pinching bastard,” said Paul with a chuckle, “and the only reason I inherited his estate was because of a bit of good luck.”
Ned laughed, showing large white teeth in his seamed, suntanned face. “You sure don’t talk like those Englishers are supposed to talk.” He flicked at the rumps of the horses with a long buggy whip. “Reckon you know about the trouble we’ve been having here?”
“Trouble?” asked Paul, sitting up straighter. “What kind of trouble?”
“Didn’t your uncle tell you?”
“The last time I saw him was nine or ten years ago. What’s this trouble you’re having?”
“Good Lord,” whispered Ned. He pulled the wagon to the side of the road and stopped. “I’m right sorry, Paul, I thought you and your gentlemen friends knew.” He pointed with his whip to the west. “See those mountains?” Paul nodded, for it was impossible not to see them looming up in the distance. “They’re the Holmans, of the Sangre de Cristo range. That means the Blood of Christ. The Holmans go up to ten thousand feet. Behind them are peaks twelve-thirteen thousand feet high.”
“How far away are they?” asked Paul.
“Twenty-five, thirty miles.” He turned towards the flat land to the east. “Over yonder is the Canadian River, about thirty miles away, not much to look at but it provides some mighty important water for these parts. It runs two hundred miles north, parallel to the Sangre de Cristo. Up ahead, just where your ranch starts, the mountains and the river are only forty-five miles or so apart, and your land goes straight from those mountains to that water and over twenty miles north. The railroad wants to build a line from Santa Fe up to Denver and you’re plumb smack in the way.”
“Why,” exclaimed Paul, ‘that’s the best news I’ve heard for a long time. How much will they give for the right of way?”
“The man running the show, Stewart Upjohn, he doesn’t want just the right of way - he wants the whole” ranch.”
“That’s even better news,” said Paul. “I might as well tell you, Ned, we came here to dispose of the cattle and the land.”
Ned shook his head sorrowfully. “I can see you don’t know anything about what’s going on here. First of all, there aren’t any cows - except maybe a hundred head lost out there on the range and in the mountains.”
”No cattle!” exclaimed Paul. He turned in disbelief to Mr. Blatherbell. “How many cattle are shown on the bill of sale?”
“Over four thousand,” said Mr. Blatherbell from memory. “That was two years ago. Where have they all gone?”
“They’ve been rustled, run off.”
“By this ... Upjohn?” asked Paul,
“Yes.”
“And you’ve permitted him to do this?” snapped Paul. He was sorry the instant he said it, but it was a most pertinent question.
Ned flushed and his hands gripped the reins tighter. “I told your uncle that would happen and advised him to either sell the herd or take on enough hands to make a fight of it. He kept writing back that they wouldn’t dare touch his cattle. So when they did come in, we just couldn’t handle them. I asked for permission to sell some of the cows to hire fighting men, then went ahead and sold what I could anyhow - three hundred head - but that was all I could salvage.”
“And the law?” asked Mr. Blatherbell indignantly. “Have you no law out here to stop such behavior?”
Ned motioned with the tip of his boot at a rifle lying on the floor boards. “That’s the law out here, the only law. There’s a marshal’s office at Albuquerque, almost a hundred and fifty miles away. The marshal rode up when one of my hands was killed and left a deputy at Rijos, but it didn’t do a bit of good. One man out here, covering ten thousand square miles, why, he just can’t do anything. The best he could do was hold down trouble in town.”
“They didn’t arrest this Upjohn?.” asked Paul.
“What for? I know it’s Upjohn at the bottom of all this and so does the deputy marshal and every man-jack in the Territory, but who’s going to prove it? He has the Birmans doing all his dirty work.”
“Who are the Birmans?” asked Paul.
A look of almost insane fury crossed Ned’s battered face and his hands gripped the reins and whip so tightly that the bones stood out white and stark. “They’re a family li
ving at the south end of the Holmans, about thirty miles away from here. There’s old man Birman, seven of his sons, and that Injun daughter of his, 1 can’t think of a more murderous, back-shooting, torture-loving gang of black-hearted half-breeds in my life.”
“Indians?” said Mr. Poopendal, looking about fearfully. “Are there any Indians near here?”
“The Birmans, they’re half-breeds. They look like white men but think and act like Injuns. Oh, there’s Injuns about down south and to the west of here, but they don’t bother anybody unless he’s alone or if a pack of young bucks get their dander up. The Birmans do the killing and burning for Upjohn.”
“Eight men and a girl,” said Paul, eyeing Ned reflectively. “That’s not enough to destroy a ranch the size you controlled. How many people did you have working for you?”
The flush on Ned’s face deepened. “Mr. Sanderson,” he said bitingly. “You’ve hinted at a couple of things I don’t rightly take to - as if I didn’t fight back.” Paul continued to eye him, waiting for a better explanation, not unmindful of the anger building up inside the crippled man. “First of all,” said Ned hotly, ‘the Birmans have over twenty men riding for them. They aren’t cowhands, but fighting men. The only time a cowhand pulls a gun is when he sees a rattler or a coyote, and he generally misses it the first shot or two.
“I had sixteen men working for me when the Birmans broke loose on us. They killed one right off, wounded three, and chased the rest out of here so fast that they’re still running. I asked your uncle for the right to sell some cows so I could hire men who knew which end of a gun a bullet comes from, but it was too late.”
“Why?” asked Paul, less sternly.
“A year ago they ambushed me. Got me in the hip. My horse dragged me for two, three miles over the brush and rocks.” His jaw tightened and his eyes flamed. “I used to stand six feet tall, Mr. Sanderson, and I was as handy with a sixgun as any of the Birmans, but I’m not much good any longer. A neighbor of yours, north of your spread, his name is Wes Laughton, he took me in and kept the Birmans from finishing the job.”
The Cossack Cowboy Page 7