The Sonora Noose

by Jackson Lowry

  “Sean,” Barker said in a low tone. “We got to talk. Let’s step outside.”

  “No!” the man said, his knuckle turning white on the trigger. “I want my money back, and I ain’t budgin’ till I get it. I was robbed, I tell you. Where’s that worthless hunk of coyote meat?”

  “Don’t go doing anything you’ll regret,” Barker said, seeing that Leary wasn’t going to stir from the chair at the card table until he either got his money back or started flinging lead.

  “My money, Marshal. I got to have it!”

  “This is a bit delicate, Sean,” Barker said in a confidential tone. “You see, I have the money.”

  “Gimme it!”

  “I can’t, Sean, as much as I’d like to. It’s a matter of pride. That gambler can’t let it be known he’s giving you the money back. It’d ruin his reputation.”

  “But—”

  “He gave it to me because I’m a federal deputy marshal, but I can’t let it look as if he did. So I’ll sit down in his chair, and we’ll play one more hand. I’m no good at cards, so I’ll lose. You take the pot, you get your money back, and you get on back to the missus.”

  “All right,” Leary said, frowning as his alcohol-fogged mind worked on what the lawman said. He didn’t relax the grip on his six-gun. Barker watched to be sure the farmer wasn’t going to open fire and worried that the old pistol might go off accidentally. The potential was still there for someone to get hurt mighty bad.

  Barker settled down, now on the receiving end of the pistol. He took the cards and shuffled quickly. The other players tried to edge back and leave, but Leary’s threatening six-shooter kept them glued where they were.

  “All right, ante up,” Barker said, scooting a white chip to the center of the table. The other men also anted up. Barker’s eyebrows rose when Leary didn’t make a move to put his chip in. “Go on, Sean. Ante up.”

  “You know I can’t, Marshal. He done robbed me of all my money.”

  “This is a problem,” Barker said softly. “You know I can’t give you back the money. We got to make it look respectable.” He paused a moment, then smiled. “I’ve got it. Just you and me. We cut the deck. High card wins.”

  “All right,” Leary said.

  “But you have to bet something. What do you have that’s worth anything?” Barker pushed his chips into the center of the table.

  “I ... I don’t have nuthin’.”

  “The gun. Put it into the pot. It ought to be worth about that much.” Barker held out the deck for Leary to cut. The drunken farmer was torn between getting his money back and putting down the pistol.

  “I’m gonna win, ain’t I?”

  “Sure as rain,” Barker said, hoping Leary wouldn’t consider how dry it was in the desert this year. Not even the droughty Rio Grande a couple miles to the southeast was flowing as poorly as Leary was thinking.

  Leary put his pistol onto the table and cut out a ten of diamonds.

  “I win,” he said, but Barker was quicker. The deputy cut out a queen of spades.

  “Nope, I win.”

  Confusion befuddled the sodbuster for a moment, giving the lawman time to scoop up Leary’s six-shooter.

  “I was supposed to win!” Leary cried. He looked around wildly, but without a six-gun to use as a threat, he was powerless. Barker wasted no time shoving the farmer’s six-shooter into his belt, going around the table, grabbing him by the collar, and half-dragging him from the Plugged Nickel.

  Barker raged. “Don’t ever, I mean ever, gamble money you can’t afford to lose. If I see you within ten feet of a bottle of whiskey, I’ll clap you in jail so fast your head won’t stop spinning for a month of Sundays!”

  “But you said—”

  “Get your buckboard. I’m taking you home.”

  “No, you said I’d get my money back.”

  “It’s lost, Sean. You lost it in a fair game.”

  “My gun!”

  “You lost it, too. It’s mine and I’m keeping it. Get in that buckboard of yours. Oh, the hell with it.” Barker grabbed Leary by the seat of the pants and his collar and heaved, staggering him down the street to the buckboard. With a heave, he dumped the man into the back. “You stay put. I’ll be back with my horse in a minute.”

  Barker saw he wouldn’t have to chase Sean Leary down. The man was curled up in the buckboard sobbing like a baby.

  In disgust, the deputy got his trusty mare and fastened the reins to the rear of the buckboard, then got the rig moving to the Leary farm outside Mesilla. As he rode, Barker saw the fields of beans and fragrant green alfalfa stretching out of sight. This wasn’t the best land in the world, but with irrigation from a well-planned acequia, a hardworking man could make a decent living.

  An hour after leaving Mesilla, the sobbing man had finally fallen into a drunken sleep, and Barker pulled up in front of an adobe house needing a fair amount of repair work on it. He figured Leary was more inclined to go into town to drink and gamble than he was to do a proper day’s work here, but that was his wife’s problem.

  “Afternoon, Mrs. Leary,” the deputy called. He drew rein and fastened the leather straps around the brake before jumping to the ground. He touched the brim of his floppy black hat in polite greeting, but the tiny woman knew this was no social call.

  “What’s wrong, Marshal?” she demanded. She wiped flour off her hands as she stepped away from the rounded, head-high, adobe horno she had just shoved a couple loaves into to bake. The Indian oven a couple yards from the main house seemed out of place being used by a woman with such a heavy brogue, but in this desert everything but sidewinders and prickly pear cactus was an interloper.

  He cast a quick look into the rear of the buckboard.

  “He lost our mortgage money, didn’t he?” she said, her lips thinning to a razor slash.

  “Reckon so, ma’am,” Barker said. He hesitated. These weren’t rich folks, but neither was he. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from saying a bit more. “I’ve got his six-shooter, but I can’t in good faith give it back after Sean waved it around like he did.”

  “I understand,” Mrs. Leary said.

  “That’s why I got to pay you for it.” Barker fished in his shirt pocket and found some of the scrip Judge Donawell had paid him. He unfolded a ten-dollar note issued by an El Paso bank. In Mesilla it didn’t mean as much, but the Learys weren’t going to starve. He handed it to the woman.

  “You’re paying ten dollars for that rusty old thumb-breaker?” she asked.

  “You see that he stays out of the saloons in town, ma’am,” Barker said. “I told him, ’fore he passed out, that I’d have to lock him up if I ever saw him in any of them again.”

  “Considering how many drinking establishments there are, that’s nigh on half the town being off-limits,” Mrs. Leary said in despair. “That’s good of you, Marshal Barker. Thank you.” Her eyes shone with unshed tears and not a little anger, but it was directed at her husband. Her words of gratitude were sincere.

  “You look after him and keep him working,” Barker said.

  “I will.” The cold steel in the small woman’s words chilled Barker. He was glad she wasn’t his wife. He tipped his hat, mounted his mare, and rode off without so much as a look backward when he heard Sean Leary’s anguished screech as his wife dragged him from the buckboard. Before this day was over, the man would end up wishing he had been thrown into the calaboose.

  Mason Barker rode toward home and his family, feeling good that he had avoided bloodshed. Even better, his back hardly twinged at all.

  2

  MASON BARKER RODE TO THE SMALL BARN AND shook his head when he saw how badly it needed another coat of paint that would be put off, at least for a few days until he could get rested up. He dismounted and settled his mare in a stall with a nose bag filled with oats as reward for such diligent service over the last couple weeks, did a bit of currying, and only then went to the door of his small adobe house. He hesitated for a moment before opening the heavy
wood door, then pushed inside to the cool, dim interior.

  “Ruth, I’m back!” he called. The house was modest and his booming voice filled the four rooms.

  “Mase?” came the tentative query.

  “It’s me,” he said, going into the main room crowded with a settee, a china cabinet that had belonged to Ruth’s aunt, two long tables he had made from a lightning-struck oak tree, and a rocking chair with a smaller table beside it holding their solitary coal oil lamp. The kitchen straight ahead was empty. That meant his wife was in their bedroom, since he doubted she would be in their son’s room attached to the other side of the house. “Who’d you think it was?”

  Ruth came from their bedroom, a hint of a smile on her lips. She brushed back vagrant strands of mousy brown hair from her eyes. The woman stood five-foot-two but seemed smaller, as if she had collapsed into herself. When her brown eyes refused to meet his pale blue ones, Barker knew something was amiss.

  “Oh,” she said a little guiltily, “I hoped it was Nate.”

  “He hasn’t come home for a spell, has he?” Suddenly every bone in his body ached. Barker took off his gun belt and hung it on a peg threatening to pull loose from the flaking adobe wall. The weight of the leather belt, holster, and six-shooter was almost too much for the wood post. He knew how the peg felt. Too much weight over time could wear down anyone with despair.

  He sank into the sturdy oak rocking chair that had come all the way from Indiana and felt his back try to relax. It was almost painful. Almost as painful as hearing what trouble their son had gotten into while he was gone.

  “You know how it is with young men,” Ruth said, rubbing her hands nervously on her calico skirt. “You sowed your wild oats before you settled down, Mase.” She finally met his gaze. Barker had become real good at reading what people meant rather than only listening to what they said.

  “How long since he decided to leave?”

  “He left just after you did. I reckon he’ll be back anytime now that you’re home. How did it go?”

  Barker sighed and dug around in his shirt pocket to find what money he had left. He quickly counted it and came to eleven dollars and eighty cents as he put it on a side table. It wasn’t much, but it would let Ruth get food for another couple weeks. He had earned enough from serving process to pay expenses for a full month, but he had given Mrs. Leary ten dollars for a hunk of rusted iron that wouldn’t fetch fifty cents honest money. He shrugged it off. That was only scrip. What he had kept was all specie. Except the silver dollar he had paid to Gus Phillips. That was the way money always went, a little here and a lot more there.

  “That’ll go a ways toward paying off our bill at Dooley’s,” Ruth said. Their bill at the general store was always a matter of concern since Hugh Dooley was about the hardest-nosed merchant this side of the Pecos. He didn’t let anyone run up an account more than twenty dollars. Sometimes Barker bumped up against that barrier, but seldom did he ever pay off the entire amount due the tradesman. There was always some other reckoning from some other store. At least he had paid off Gus at the Plugged Nickel.

  “Nate’s not contributing anything to running the household,” Barker said. “It’s high time he found a job and settled down.”

  “If he’s not here, he’s not eating our food,” Ruth said. “That’s no drain.”

  “He ought to be fixing up the barn, taking care of the house, feeding the stock.” Even as the words left his mouth, Barker knew the same could be said of him. Although his job took him away from home and bed often enough, he was seldom able to do much when he was there, because of his back.

  Barker rocked a little and eased the tension mounting across his shoulders. He did what he could to keep his discomfort from his wife. Ruth had enough to worry about, what with their ne’er-do-well son causing such concern. It had been so hard when their younger boy, Patrick, died from infection four years ago. Somehow, they had both pinned their hopes on Nate, and the boy wasn’t up to meeting such lofty expectations. Mason’s own job as deputy marshal gave Ruth a twinge or two, also, in spite of his assurance that he was more likely to get snake-bit than shot by any of the owlhoots roaming through New Mexico Territory. What little law enforcing he did was in Mesilla, and it was hardly more than a town marshal would do.

  He had to smile thinking how he had run the tinhorn gambler from town and taken care of Sean Leary. It’d be a cold day in hell before that sodbuster’s wife let him out of her sight again, and when she did, he wouldn’t dare even go sniffing after a shot of whiskey. The image of Sean Leary crouched at the front door of the Plugged Nickel, snuffling like a whipped cur at the scent within, made Barker smile even more.

  Thinking about the potent liquor made Barker hanker for a shot of his own, but he had left his small half-pint flask out in his saddlebags.

  “He’s only a boy,” Ruth said.

  Barker groused, “He’s a man and ought to accept responsibility. Where does he go when he’s not here, anyway?” He turned as the door opened and his son came in, having to duck to avoid hitting his head on the low lintel.

  Nate Barker mumbled under his breath as he headed for his small room.

  “Come on back here,” Barker said sharply. His keen nose picked up not only tobacco smoke but also beer from the eighteen-year-old’s clothes.

  “Mase, please. Let the boy—”

  “He’s not a boy,” Barker said to his wife more harshly than he’d intended. The sight of Nate looking as if he had been on a weeklong bender did something to him. It wouldn’t take much for Nate to end up like Sean Leary, gambling and losing money he didn’t have after drinking himself into a stupor. Mason hadn’t worked as hard as he had, spending long hours in the saddle under a burning desert sun catching crooks and serving process, so his son could become a complete wastrel.

  “What do you want?” Nate said sullenly. He was an inch taller and thirty pounds heavier than his father, all of that weight muscle. His pale blue eyes were bloodshot, and his dark hair was a greasy tangle no self-respecting rat would have deigned to crawl around in. It looked as if he had lived in his clothes for the entire time he had been absent. Barker couldn’t say much about that since he hadn’t changed his clothes in two weeks, either, and sorely needed a bath himself.

  “For you to pull your weight around here,” Barker said.

  “You’re a fine one to talk. You’re never here.”

  “I have a job that pays for the food on the table and the roof over your head,” Barker said, holding down his anger.

  “That what you call real money?” Nate said sarcastically, pointing to the money on the side table. “That’s chicken feed.”

  “I earned it,” Barker said. “Where’s the money you earned? Nate, it’s high time for you to get a job since you’re not helping with the chores for your mother.”

  “What are you going to do? Hire me as a lawman? A deputy’s deputy?” Nate’s tone irritated Barker with its sarcasm.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being a deputy marshal,” Barker said, a tad closer to losing his temper.

  “Nate, dear, your father’s likely to be made chief deputy before long.”

  Nate scoffed. “Oh, good, chief deputy marshal. Heap big chief.”

  “I’ll get you a job tomorrow in town.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Anything I can find, since you’re not inclined to put yourself out.”

  “As long as I don’t have to drag off dead animals in the street, like you do.” Nate retraced his steps and left, slamming the door behind him. Barker started to get out of the rocker and order Nate back, but his back tightened in a new spasm that kept him seated. The sound of horse’s hooves pounding told Barker his son had left again.

  “You don’t have to do that, do you, Mase?” asked Ruth.

  “That’s what town marshals are for,” he said.

  “There isn’t one in Mesilla, not right now, but I heard Mayor Pendleton say the other day at church how he was thinking of hiring one
since you’re always out serving process. He thinks trouble in town can be held down if there’s a permanent marshal.”

  Barker and the mayor didn’t see eye to eye often, but this time he had to agree. A town marshal would take a considerable weight off his shoulders. Barker considered Mesilla his home and felt an obligation to maintain the peace. He might get that promotion to chief federal deputy Ruth had mentioned if he could spend more time riding through the vast arid stretch from Arizona Territory over to the Texas border and ranging all the way north to Socorro. That would mean more time away from home. It would also mean more money, maybe as much as fifteen dollars a month more.

  “Are you hungry?” Ruth asked, looking distracted.

  “Hungry for you, my lovely young bride,” Barker said. He used the forward motion of the rocking chair to get to his feet as he reached for her, but she stepped back just enough to avoid his grasping hands.

  “I meant food, Mase. Please, I’m not up to doing anything ... more.”

  She hardly ever felt up to performing her wifely duties, not after Patrick had died. Barker accepted a plate of savory beans with green chili mixed in for spice and a fresh-baked flour tortilla with churned butter, instead of lying with his wife in a bed they seldom shared anymore.

  Early the next morning he was in the saddle, heading into Mesilla to find his son a job. It might not lighten the guilt he felt for never being home to raise Nate properly, but at least a job would furnish more money for Ruth to run their household.

  3

  BARKER MIGHT WEAR A DEPUTY MARSHAL’S BADGE on his vest, but he felt like a naughty schoolboy whenever he spoke with Hugh Dooley. The man peered at him through spotlessly clean spectacles, head tipped slightly forward so that he always seemed disapproving. And maybe he was. Barker knew he and Ruth seldom paid off their bill at the general store, but most other citizens of Mesilla were in the same position, especially after the Panic of ’73. Still, Dooley made Barker feel as if he were the only scofflaw in the whole danged territory who was a day late and a dollar short.