Wheeler's Choice

by Jerry Buck

  We got off easy. The only hostiles we met were some enterprising Cherokees who demanded fifteen cents toll for crossing their land.

  It took us just over three weeks to cross the rolling prairie land of the Indian Territory. We rarely made more than ten miles a day, and the numerous rivers and creeks that crisscrossed the territory slowed us considerably. Fording them was hard on Abby and the wagon. Thankfully, none was at flood stage at that time of year. Once we got past the two Canadians and the Washita, the going was easier.

  There was no possibility of losing your way. The hooves of a million cows had dug a sunken road along the Chisholm Trail that even a blind man could follow. Or that blind man could follow his nose. There were enough cow flops to fertilize every farm in the state of Ohio.

  Twenty-four days out of Colchester, we ferried across the Red River and entered Texas. Abby hadn’t wanted to travel on the Sabbath, but I reminded her that we were in a race against the winter. We were on the go every day of the week.

  Five days into Texas we felt the bite of the first norther at our backs. It blew day and night for the next week, chilling our bones and taxing our sanity with its relentless and ghostly moan over the sea of grass.

  One morning, in the distance, by some grazing steers, I spied a windmill. It was spinning so furiously I remarked to Abby that it had dragged the well five miles across the prairie.

  Abby smiled for the first time in weeks. “If only you could rig the quilts like sails,” she said. “We could load the bullocks in back and sail all the way to San Miguel.”

  “Like a prairie schooner,” I added.

  We laughed at the welcome break in the tension caused by the wind. We camped early that day by a small stream, splashed happily in the frigid water, and made love for the first time since leaving Colchester.

  As we drove west, the tall, nourishing buffalo grass of the north gradually gave way to the gama grass growing less densely in the sandy soil. The bullocks took to it like it was hay, and the roan and the buckskin I trailed behind the wagon kept their stomachs full. Texas herds grew fat on it.

  Gradually, too, we began to enter tableland. In the distance we saw purple mesas, and behind them low mountains darkened by a thick growth of piñons.

  We passed longhorns grazing on the grasslands. Several times we met ranch hands riding line. They were suspicious of strangers crossing their range and feared we might be tempted to butcher a cow to supplement our fare. I knew better than to poach on another man’s land, but on numerous occasions we dined on rabbit and prairie chicken, and once on deer.

  Abby’s cheerful friendliness quickly allayed their suspicions, and there wasn’t a cowboy among them who wasn’t eager to accept her invitation to a home-cooked supper.

  When at last I spotted Angus’s Lazy A brand, I knew we had reached San Miguel.

  I was wrong. Angus grazed his herds over such a vast area that it took another week to reach town.

  It was then I realized I had underestimated Angus. He had spoken lightly of his “little spread,” and judging from his unprepossessing appearance, I had taken him at his word. I had always figured part of the herd he drove north belonged to his neighbors. I saw now that Angus was only being modest. He was truly what the Texans called a cattle baron.

  Chapter Five

  Angus became not only my first client in San Miguel, but my patron as well. Ranchers and their families rode in from fifty miles to attend the barbecue he threw to introduce us to the community. It was one of those mild days on the high plains before the northers sweep snow down from Canada.

  More than two hundred ranchers and townspeople gathered at the Lazy A Ranch, and Angus declared a holiday for his ranch hands.

  Everyone was in a festive mood as they gathered behind the main house in an area Angus called a patio. It was paved with flat stones, decorated with flowering shrubs, some growing in big, gaily painted Mexican clay pots, and shaded by trees and an open lattice roof overgrown with wisteria.

  Angus lived in a sprawling Spanish house made of adobe the color of earth. The summer heat never penetrated its three-foot-thick walls of dried adobe brick, and in the winter it was warm as toast. The roof had only the merest slant from the ridge to the eaves. Rather than the usual tile, it was three feet of dirt grown thick with grass, and was supported underneath by heavy timbers.

  Angus, widowed and childless, was the grandee of this Spanish castle, but Juanita ran the household with a will of iron that even Angus adhered to. She was a short, dark Mexican woman who had the stamina of a longhorn steer and brooked about as much nonsense.

  The women were to one side with Abby, to appraise her and see what new fashions she had brought down from Kansas. She wore a light blue chintz dress she had gotten by mail order from St. Louis. To ward off the cool air, she had draped over her shoulders a dark blue shawl she had knitted during those long nights she had waited for me to make my rounds and put the cowhands to bed. On her light brown hair she wore her best Sunday-go-to-meeting bonnet.

  The ladies hadn’t expected anything fancy, and they weren’t disappointed. Abby, they saw as they sipped spiced tea, was plain folk just like them, and her lack of airs, her modesty, her cheeriness, plus her good sense, quickly won them over. Angus, who doted on her like a proud papa, frequently said, “That woman’s got a head on her shoulders.”

  Now, when I said plain folk, I wasn’t talking about Abby’s looks. There was nothing plain there. She was a beauty, that’s for sure. Angus called her his “bonny lass.”

  The men drifted over toward the cook house, where Ginger applied liberal dabs of a fiery sauce to a whole beef roasting over a fire of mesquite wood. A young Mexican turned the spit with a huge crank.

  Lounging nearby on the cool grass was Ginger’s dog, Caesar, a large, shaggy mongrel hound of unknown ancestry and an indeterminate shade of dirty yellow. Caesar had a disposition as surly as his master, and every man gave them both a wide berth. Ginger had a temper as volatile as his sauce, and with a brown derby perched on his head and red suspenders holding up his baggy pants, he stood by the spit like king of the hill.

  Ginger had hair that matched his nickname, and his face seemed to be permanently flushed from too many choleric outbursts. Hard, sidelong glances warned the guests not to encroach upon his fiefdom. No man, not even Angus, presumed to impose upon Ginger until he was ready to dispense his culinary delights. On a roundup or on a trail drive a good cook was as essential to the morale of the cowhands as a pair of comfortable boots and an amenable cutting horse. And much more difficult to come by, so Angus gave Ginger his rein.

  Near the house a group of cowboys sawed on fiddles and plucked at guitars and a banjo. They were loud and lively, if not always in tune. At first I did not recognize “The Lakes of Killarney.” Later I picked up strains of “Little Joe the Wrangler,” “The Girl I Left Behind,” and the inevitable “Old Chisholm Trail.”

  The men sized me up, as the women took their measure of Abby. It didn’t take them more than an instant to see that I was no pilgrim. I’m a tall man, standing more than six feet, and my long legs were in a pair of wool pants and my feet were shod with my best pair of boots. Every ounce of fat had been sweated and pounded off my body, and I had that tiny, hard butt that a man develops when he spends his life in the saddle. I’ve got broad shoulders, long muscular arms, and eyes the color of an emerald.

  Abby swore it was those cold green eyes and the way I looked at a man that kept me out of many a gunfight. I wasn’t sure, being convinced that it was easier to stare a man down with piercing blue eyes. Most of the gunfighters I knew—that is, the ones who were good enough to still be alive—had blue eyes. Still, I always looked a man square in the eye when he was about to draw on me. You can back a man down that way, just the way a dog does. But if a man’s bound and determined for a showdown, his eyes will also tell you when he’s going to go for his gun.

  A barrel-chested rancher, smelling of leather and horse sweat and clutching a tumbler of
whiskey in one hand, broke the ice. He said, “Angus was right. You ain’t no jackleg lawyer from one of them fancy eastern schools.”

  Everyone laughed at his left-handed compliment and took swigs of whiskey to moisten throats parched by the long ride to the party.

  I agreed that I had gotten my education on the back of a mustang running through chaparral and curled mesquite for the Monarch brand down near Corpus Christi. “That’s where I learned cow,” I said. “After that, the law was easy.”

  They laughed again, and another stockman said, “Angus tells us you’re a handy man with a Colt. We might have need of your services. We haven’t had a marshal in San Miguel since a drunken drifter gunned down the last one two years ago. And the sheriff never seems to find his way to this neck of the woods. We could use a man who knows the business end of a Peacemaker. Not everyone in these parts knows how to respect another man’s brand.”

  A short, wiry man with sparse hair and skin like old leather pushed his way through the ranchers and said, “What he means, Mr. Wheeler, is that some of the big ranchers got a handy way with a runnin’ iron when it comes to the little fella’s stock.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the challenged man rest his right hand on his gun. Almost by instinct, I started to quell the trouble before it started, but I checked myself.

  I was wearing neither a badge nor a gun now, and this was not my fight. For a stranger to step into a long-simmering feud would set both sides against me. Not even Angus would be able to keep my law practice from being aborted at birth.

  I hadn’t been in San Miguel two days before I learned that the most explosive issue on the range was the big ranchers vs. the little ranchers. Neither was too careful about whose steer they burned a brand on, and in recent years there had been much gunplay and more than a few men had stretched a rope hastily thrown over a tree branch.

  I was surprised, however, to see a small rancher baiting a big rancher at a barbecue thrown by Angus Finlay, the biggest rancher of them all.

  The banty rooster wasn’t backing down. He, too, had his hand on his gun, and everyone else stepped back to clear a lane for the gunfire.

  I hadn’t known where Angus was when the trouble began, but he suddenly stepped beside the weather-beaten rancher and clasped a muscular arm around his shoulders.

  “The trouble with you, Daniel, is that you think because your name’s Daniel you gotta spend your whole life in the lion’s den.” Angus’s voice was calm and friendly, and I’d swear the way the words r-r-r-rolled off his tongue like heather swaying in a breeze off the North Sea had something to do with taking the sting out of it.

  “Why don’t you step over here with me, Daniel, and I’ll show you some whisky that was distilled on the banks of the Spey about the time that strapping son of yours was a wee bairn.”

  He walked the man over to a big oaken barrel and drew a glass for him. Angus soothed the man’s anger as diplomatically and effortlessly as he handled his own rowdy cowhands. It was easy to see why Angus, despite his sometimes flinty nature, was the most respected and best-liked man in the territory.

  Later, after I had put away my own share of Angus’s smooth, smoky Scots whisky, he said to me in an aside, “You’ll do all right, laddie. The ranchers, big and small, like you. And it was a smart thing you did to stay out of another man’s fight. Aye, I saw your hands twitch and your jaw muscles screw up tight. You showed good judgment.”

  All the while his powerful hand was on my shoulder, though the top of his head reached no higher than my chin, and just as he had managed the wiry little cattleman, he steered me toward a man whose pink face and fancy duds told me he was no rancher. “Ben, I want you to meet somebody,” he said. “This here’s Otis Rankin, president of the Stockman’s Bank.”

  I shook hands with Rankin, and I could tell by his iron grip and the straightforward way he looked me in the eye that he was a tougher man than he appeared. This was tough country, and only the toughest survived. Rankin, I could see, was thriving.

  Before we sat down to enjoy slabs of spicy beef, red beans, and the hottest chili I had ever sampled, topped off by Ginger’s wild berry cobbler, it was agreed that I would become the bank’s counsel. Rankin offered me the use of an office on the second floor of the bank, which he proudly proclaimed to be the only brick building in San Miguel.

  “Not adobe brick, mind you, but gen-u-wine red clay brick,” he said. Rankin had a fat cigar clinched in the middle of his mouth, and he never moved it, not even to speak.

  Angus winked at me. “He wants you close so he can keep an eye on you. And he’ll charge you a stiff rent for that office, mark my word. Sometimes I think the man’s a Scot.”

  Rankin curled his lips into a passable grin. The cigar sat in the middle of his face like an exclamation point.

  Angus sniffed the air. It was thick with the mouth-watering aroma of the roasting beef. “I’d say the grub’s about ready.” He looked toward Ginger, who nodded his derby-topped head in agreement.

  Angus picked up an iron rod and rang the triangle. It stopped nearly everyone in midconversation and brought them into a circle about the smoky, flavorful spit. Angus removed his hat and bowed his head. Beyond the circle came the squeals of children still at play. Angus didn’t say a word, but after a moment several mothers shushed the kids and brought them to stand by their skirts.

  Then Angus, who had never raised his head, began a long prayer that was almost fulsome in its supplications for the young couple come to their midst. More than once I remarked to Abby afterward that Angus’s prayer was enough to see us through seven lean years.

  Chapter Six

  As Otis Rankin occasionally reminded me, I was not doing a land-office business in San Miguel. He also seldom failed to point out that I’d never become rich as a lawyer. But I handled enough liens, mortgages, contracts, bills of sale, and wills to pay our debts that first winter.

  Otis, being a banker, put a great store by money. To me money was simply a tool. You used it if you had it, and if you didn’t you found other means to get by.

  I frequently stopped by Otis’s desk in the bank to look over a deed or a contract. Often, he came up to my second-floor office by the steps inside the bank. His visits were never a surprise. You could hear him trudging up the steps, and when he got to the door he threw it open with a bang and came wheezing into my office.

  The only excitement my first winter in San Miguel came when I defended two brothers accused of cattle rustling. They had been lucky enough to be tossed into the county jail to await the circuit judge without being the guests of honor at a necktie social. Nevertheless it was a foregone conclusion they would meet swift justice. It was my first case, and I lost.

  No one held it against me that I had defended them. After the judge had sentenced the two boys to hang, an important rancher stopped me outside the Bluebonnet Saloon, which had been our temporary courtroom. He said, “It’s a lawyer’s duty to speak up for scoundrels.”

  I didn’t say so publicly, but I knew the brothers’ real crime was not rustling but being small ranchers who could not bend the law to their own devices the way the big ranchers did.

  I expressed my feelings one night to Angus.

  “Aye, lad, that’s a fact,” he replied. “How do you think the big ranchers here got so big? Nobody gave it to ’em, said, ‘Here, this is yours.’ By God, they took it! Every inch of land, every cow, every horse—everything that wasn’t nailed down. And if it was nailed down, sometime they took that, too.

  “When I came here in ’fifty-three, San Miguel was just a one-shack Indian trading post. Hardly had a name then. They just called it ‘Doyle’s Place,’ after the sutler. I drove out five hundred head of cattle. Half of ’em I picked up on the way here. I didn’t stop to ask whose cows they might be. I had three cowhands. I stopped here because there wasn’t another soul in sight. I laid claim to everything I could see—and then some. And ever since then I’ve had to fight to keep it!”

  Angu
s poured us each a couple fingers of his smoky whisky.

  “Now, these two boys you defended,” he said. “They’re not a bad sort. I knew their daddy. They were just unlucky. They came along too late—and they got caught.”

  Abby and I wintered that first year in an adobe shack on the small spread I had staked claim to. Nothing was said, but I suspected that nobody challenged my claim because Angus wanted it that way.

  Abby kept busy with her sewing and mending. She taught Sunday school at the tiny Presbyterian church where Angus was an elder. She fussed over the old widower as if she were his daughter, and he treated us both like the children he never had.

  As soon as the ground had thawed enough to take a hoe, I turned over the soil and Abby planted a garden. She bought her seed at Asa Stanley’s store, and I helped carry water from the creek. To my surprise, she had planted several rows of flowers. I never objected to this extravagance. Abby needed some beauty in her life. There was little enough in this hard land.

  At night after supper, her sewing basket in her lap, she talked hopefully of starting a family. We had been on the move since that day I walked out of the Yankee prison and asked her to marry me. We stayed for a while in Ohio, then moved on to Indiana, where I learned I wasn’t cut out for farming. I was a deputy for a few years in towns across Missouri. Then I was appointed marshal in Colchester.

  After the northers slacked and died, I joined Angus on the spring roundup. His claim extended from the river to the eroded foothills and mesas seen distantly on the horizon. It was mostly flatlands, although in places it undulated like a washboard. Either way, it was laced with enough canyons and arroyos to keep his crew busy for weeks flushing out cows and their newborn calves.

  My agreement with Angus was that I could keep one out of every four calves I brought in. By the time we finished burning the last brand on the last stray, I had a start. Certainly not a herd, or anything resembling a herd, but a good start. I devised my own brand, a kind of a running W, and I had Bob Dudley, the blacksmith, make the iron for me.