Hard Country

by Michael McGarrity

  “Nope,” Cal said. “I’ve got something for you.” He took an envelope from his shirt pocket and handed it to Kerney. “A mule skinner down in El Paso was asking around about you. When I allowed I might know you, he gave me this to pass along.”

  Kerney’s name on the grease-stained envelope was misspelled and barely legible. “What else did he say?”

  “Said this fellow in a mining camp up north was asking anyone heading south if they knew you.”

  Soon after arriving on the Tularosa, Kerney had sent a letter to Ida’s shopkeeper brother in Dodge City with money to settle the account for the care of his son. He’d also enclosed a letter to Ida asking that it be forwarded if her whereabouts were known.

  Quickly he tore open the envelope and read the note:

  Ida dead eight weks ago come Sunday. I cain’t care your boy no more myself. Come get him or I give him away to someone who can.

  Virgil Peters

  Kerney’s expression hardened. “Did he say where he met this man?”

  “Arroyo Hondo, north of Taos,” Cal replied. “You look like something bit down on you terrible.”

  “I need to get up there pronto.” Kerney stepped off hurriedly toward the corral.

  Cal kept pace. “Mind telling me why?”

  Kerney handed Doran the letter as he got his saddle and entered the corral.

  Cal read it quickly and gave it back. “How old is the boy?”

  “Coming on four years.” Kerney heaved the saddle over his horse’s back and tightened the girth strap. “His name is Patrick.”

  “What in blazes are you gonna do with a four-year-old boy?”

  “Be his pa, which I haven’t been for one damn day of his wretched life so far.”

  “That’s a heavy load for a hired hand on horseback,” Cal said. “You’re going to need some considerable help to raise up that pup.”

  “If I don’t go get him, then I’m the sorriest man who ever forked a horse.” Kerney led his mount out of the corral, looped the reins loosely over a railing, and turned for the barn. “I’ll get my gear and bedroll.”

  “Better hold up there, horse,” Cal said with a nod at the ranch house. A woman came toward them at a hurried pace. “Seems your leaving has raised some curiosity. Is that rancher Good’s wife?”

  “It is.” Kerney touched the brim of his hat when she drew near. “Ma’am.”

  “Where are you going?” she demanded indignantly, dismissing Cal Doran with a stern look.

  “Mrs. Good,” Kerney said. “I don’t like leaving you short, but I need to draw my pay and be on my way.”

  “Draw your pay?” Jewel Good snapped. “You know my husband’s rule. No wages paid until the end of the month.”

  “I can’t stay. I’m in a tight spot. I need to fetch my son from a man who has been caring for him and now threatens to give him away. Surely you understand.”

  “Humph,” she said in a huff, giving Cal a hostile glance. “Going drinking with your friend is more likely the truth, I’d say.”

  “Just hold up one minute, ma’am,” Kerney said. “I don’t appreciate your words, and I’m owed my wages.”

  “I have no money to give you.”

  Kerney knew better. He bit his lip to keep from calling the woman a liar and mounted up. “I’ll get my bedroll and be gone.”

  “I’ll ride with you a ways,” Cal said. He gave Mrs. Good a winning smile, removed his hat, and said, “Ma’am, if I may say a word or two?”

  “What is it?” she replied tartly.

  “The way I see it, the only good thing about you is your name, which you plainly don’t deserve.”

  Mrs. Good turned livid. “Get off this ranch.”

  “Gladly,” Cal said with a broad, courtly sweep of his hat.

  * * *

  During their time in New Mexico, neither Kerney nor Cal Doran had strayed far from the basin, but they knew that the mail coach came to Tularosa from the village of Las Vegas, on the high plains, a far ways north of Fort Stanton. Because the road was a well-traveled route, Kerney figured he’d be able to make good time. Once in Las Vegas he would find out the quickest and best way to reach the mining camp at Arroyo Hondo before striking out for the high country.

  After riding through most of the night and stopping for a few hours’ sleep before traveling on, they arrived at Fort Stanton late in the day, where Kerney expected he and Cal would part company. Instead, after the colors had been retired for the evening and the troop formation dismissed from the quadrangle, Cal grinned at him, clicked his heels together, saluted, and said he’d decided to sign on for the duration.

  “Are you sure?” Kerney asked. A small group of Mescalero Apaches wrapped in blankets came out of the squat administration building and sat on the ground in front of the building. The Indian agent stepped out and tried to wave them away. The Mescaleros didn’t budge.

  “You’re good to ride along with,” Cal replied, “and I’ve got a hankering to see Santa Fe. I understand the town is dirt ugly, but some of the women are fetching and a good game of chance is easy to come by. After we find your boy, I’ll say adios and leave you to get in trouble on your own.”

  “I appreciate the company,” Kerney answered, pleased to have Cal’s companionship and his gun hand.

  They left the quadrangle and found a stage driver who told them the wagon road to Las Vegas was passable and mostly tolerable except in wet weather, when the mud made for a blasted muddle. He mentioned that a good day’s ride would get them to the stage stop and tavern in Red Cloud Canyon.

  While Cal watered and fed the horses, Kerney went to the trader’s store and stocked up on provisions. As he settled up with the clerk, Ignacio Cháves walked in and hurried over. He had Twice-Told Tales clutched tightly in his hand.

  “I saw your horse outside with Señor Doran’s,” Ignacio said, smiling broadly. “This book is maravilloso, when I can make out words.”

  Kerney took a guess at the word. “Does that mean marvelous?”

  “Sí. But I tell you now a man named Charlie has asked about you. Not be importante maybe, but I think he is not your friend.”

  “No, he’s not,” Kerney replied. “Stay clear of him, if you can.”

  Ignacio stuck his chin out defiantly. “Perhaps no.”

  “Have you had a run-in with Charlie?”

  “It is for my concern only.”

  Kerney nodded gravely. Private matters were not to be questioned, and although Charlie wasn’t a hard-nosed outlaw yet, Ignacio would be no match for him. “Use caution, my young amigo.”

  “First, I prepare myself.” Ignacio tapped his forehead with a finger. “I will be, how you say, smart.”

  “Good.”

  “Will you come back to Tularosa?”

  “I plan to.”

  Ignacio smiled as he slid his book inside his shirt. “I see you again.”

  Kerney nodded in agreement. “Your English is getting better.”

  Ignacio beamed. “I’ve been practicing. Talking only americano at the fort. It making my father loco.”

  “Perhaps not,” Kerney replied, knowing full well how proud Cesario Chávez was of his son.

  Outside the store, Cal waited with the horses. They said good-bye to Ignacio and rode out in the twilight. Soon they would be under a full moon in a clear sky and if they kept a steady pace would reach Red Cloud Canyon by dawn.

  They crossed the river and at moonrise were past the flats north of the mesa. They topped a ridge above a narrow gorge and caught their first glimpse of a vast rangeland, the wagon road cutting through it, darkened by the shadow of close-at-hand mountains that ran east-west and dwarfed the lowlands.

  “Now, that’s a sight,” Kerney said as his horse picked a careful way through the rocky wagon ruts.

  “A nice piece of country,” Cal said, following behind.

  “More pleasing come sunup, I imagine.”

  They rode silently for a time, their eyes focused on the rough road as they made
the steep descent to the great valley floor.

  “I’ve been thinking on your predicament after we find young Patrick,” Cal said as they resumed riding side by side.

  “Have you, now?”

  “Yep, and I’ve come up with a solution. You’re gonna have to round yourself up a wife.”

  Kerney brought his horse to a stop. “Not this old boy.”

  Cal likewise drew rein. “You’ve got no choice, as I see it. Well, I guess maybe you could take Patrick along while you’re out on the basin gathering shaggy cows with a mind of their own. Although I doubt any rancher would hire you riding double with a young squirt. Without a wife, you might have to turn to crime and thievery to care for that boy, and I know you’re not inclined in that direction.”

  “You’re thinking way too far ahead for me,” Kerney growled, uneasy with the truth of the matter. He flicked the reins and his horse moved on.

  Steady riding throughout the remainder of the night brought them to the stage stop in Red Cloud Canyon just as the full moon set to the west and the fiery sun spread yellow light through a stand of tall trees.

  Built with rough logs, the place was nothing more than a one-room tavern with a small kitchen attached to the back. A cowboy was passed out on the sawdust floor, his head pressed against a piece of firewood, and an old man slept on a cot in the kitchen next to the still-warm stove. Cal woke up the old man, who soon scratched together a breakfast of cold biscuits, beans, and bacon served on battered tin plates, and hot coffee as thick as molasses. As they ate, the man invited them to sleep on the floor for two bits each until the stage rolled in at noon.

  Cal quickly turned down the offer before Kerney could open his mouth to say no.

  Outside, away from the smells of sour-mash whiskey and rancid bacon grease, they unsaddled their tired horses, watered them, and turned the animals out into a fenced pasture. In the deep shade of the tall pines, they stretched out their bedrolls and let the sounds of the squirrels and birds foraging for food lull them to sleep.

  As he drifted off, Kerney pondered how he’d be able to take care of Patrick once he found him. He didn’t have a notion in mind, not even one glimmer.

  * * *

  There were wonders to behold on the road to Las Vegas: distant mountains to the north and to the west; grassy, windswept rangeland as far as the eye could see; and stair-step mesas that dotted the horizon. The nights camped beside the road for a few hours’ sleep were quiet and peaceful, and during the day few riders passed them by.

  The wagon road gradually climbed, then dipped again until it bordered a canyon riverbed thick with nesting birds, where the water ran fast and cool. They passed through small farming settlements where the villagers spoke a different kind of Spanish than that of the Mexicans on the Tularosa.

  The thickly forested mountains that rose from the plains behind Las Vegas folded back into even higher peaks, still white tipped by the last of the winter snow. Deep gorges scored the mountains, which filled the skyline. From a distance, the range seemed impenetrable, and Kerney wondered if it augured a hard, toilsome ride through the high country to reach the mining camp at Arroyo Hondo.

  Las Vegas wasn’t much of a town. A scattering of adobe houses, some with tin roofs and a few with tiny windows, sat near an oval patch of dust six inches thick that served as the town plaza. A two-story mercantile store next to a low adobe bank building bordered one side of the plaza, where some small willow trees had been transplanted in front of the store, each protected by a slat-board fence. Beyond the plaza were low-lying hills stripped bare of all the trees by village woodcutters, and here and there adobe buildings sagged amid crumbling mud walls with signs announcing rooms, whiskey, tobacco, baths, and food.

  They stayed overnight, and in the morning they reprovisioned at the mercantile with the last of Kerney’s cash and some money Cal threw in. With advice from the store owner on the best route through the mountains to the mining camps, they left Las Vegas with a stiff prairie wind whistling at their backs and dust clouds swirling on the barren foothills.

  For three days they worked their way through the rough high country on a road that faded to a trail and sometimes petered out completely. They passed through stands of pine, fir, and spruce trees, groves of tall, stately aspens, and crossed clear, cold, rocky streams. As they topped an open ridge with a slender river valley in sight, a thunderstorm pelted them with hail that stripped the leaves off nearby aspen trees. That night the temperature dropped so perilously low that not even the campfire kept them warm.

  They rode into the valley soon after first light. Several prospectors, all working different parts of the stream, were strung out down the canyon, panning for gold and breaking rock along the riverbed. Kerney stopped and asked each man for Virgil Peters, but none of them knew him.

  “How far to Arroyo Hondo?” he asked the last man at the bottom of the canyon.

  The man raised his pick and pointed westward. “One day.”

  “Hallelujah,” Cal said with a smile.

  “And a night,” the man added, returning his attention to the boulder he was trying to dig out of the riverbank.

  Cal’s smile dimmed considerably.

  “Are you wearing down?” Kerney asked as they rode away with the sound of metal on stone echoing through the valley.

  Cal shook his head and patted his horse’s neck. “No more than you. Patches and me have miles left in us, although I’ll admit all this good land and wondrous country we’ve ridden through has made me a shade lonely for a touch of civilization.”

  John Kerney nodded in agreement and broke his horse into a trot.

  * * *

  In Arroyo Hondo, a booming area with a stamp mill for crushing ore running at the lower end of the canyon, all Kerney found was disappointment. Virgil Peters had moved on, to where nobody knew, and while some said Patrick was with him, others weren’t sure. For the better part of a week, Cal stuck with Kerney, bankrolling the search for Patrick once he learned his friend was busted. They went to every mining camp in the district—Willow Creek, San Cristobal, Arroyo Seco, Moreno Valley, some of the smaller camps that had no names, and finally Red River.

  In Red River, Kerney decided to ride east across the mountains to Elizabethtown to look for Patrick. Although the town was just twelve miles from the headwaters of the river, it would be a forty-mile crossing on a bad road and a perilous rocky trail.

  “I’m gonna part ways with you and head down to Santa Fe,” Cal said as the two friends sat at a table in a saloon that was nothing more than a tent and knocked back a whiskey just shy of not being fit to drink.

  “But let me grubstake you,” he added, sliding a small coin pouch to Kerney. “I want no back talk or twaddle from you, now. I won a pretty big pot down in El Paso before I rode up to La Luz to deliver that letter to you, and I’m still flush.”

  “On my word, I’ll pay you back,” John Kerney said.

  Cal grinned. “Make me a silent partner in that ranch you’re looking to start once you’ve rounded up Patrick and get back to the Tularosa. I figure the day will come when I’ll probably need a safe place to hide out.”

  “Partners fifty-fifty,” Kerney said, extending his hand.

  They shook hands and had another drink to seal the partnership.

  “Don’t go bust down in Santa Fe with all the women and gambling,” Kerney cautioned as Cal mounted Patches.

  Cal laughed. “I’ll hide some traveling money in my boot. I still think you’re gonna need a good woman to help raise up that son of yours.”

  John Kerney’s expression clouded. “First I have to find him.”

  8

  After the money Cal lent him ran out, John Kerney took jobs as he found them, working just long enough to get a stake and start looking for Patrick again. He had no luck hiring on as a ranch hand, so he labored on a crew building a road to a new ore site, drove a wagon over the mountains hauling parts of a stamp mill shipped from Chicago, worked as a chore boy at a high-country
summer sheep ranch, and signed on with a construction gang to build a water flume a hundred feet above the ground that spanned half a mile.

  During the working stints, he often slept in filthy, cramped tents or on the hard ground with drifters of every sort, who’d come west to get rich in the New Mexico gold and silver fields. Outwardly, he looked like any other muckman: bearded, shabby, and dirty. But instead of a motherlode strike, he sought a son he couldn’t describe who was with a man he didn’t know and might never find. He stopped at every settlement, mine, camp, and town, no matter how big, small, or remote. He talked with town marshals, merchants, preachers, mine officials, assay masters, womenfolk, and the mountain men he happened on in the wilderness. He trekked the length and breadth of the northern New Mexico and southern Colorado high country, digging for any information about his boy and Virgil Peters, putting up posters as he traveled, asking the same questions over and over again.

  For his efforts he got lots of secondhand stories, not one of them the same, most of them unreliable. From a drunk in a whiskey tent, he heard Peters was living in Taos with a Mexican woman. A hard-rock miner in the Moreno Valley told him that Virgil and Patrick were somewhere up in the Leadville mining district. A grocer recalled that Virgil Peters had disappeared into the backcountry to prospect, leaving Patrick in the care of a traveling preacher and his wife, who’d moved on to Willow Springs along the Santa Fe Trail. Another tale had Peters shot dead in a bar fight in Elizabethtown, the boy with him taken in by a Mexican sheepherder who lived somewhere out on the vast prairie of the Maxwell Land Grant. The most troubling story he heard had Peters selling Patrick to a Ute Indian before leaving the territory for California.

  John Kerney followed every yarn as far as he could, but as the months passed and each trail turned cold, he became more and more disheartened. No longer did the peaceful mountain meadows and the shimmering, sky blue high-country lakes lift his spirits. Deep in the gloomy woods or traveling through the narrow, dark canyons, he felt hemmed in and jumpy. In towns he found no friendship with other men. He yearned for the open desert grasslands and big sky of the Tularosa, but now his dream of proving up a spread on the eastern slopes of the San Andres seemed no more than a trifling whimsy beyond his reach. About the only good thing was he hadn’t had to sell his saddle yet.