by Frank Bonham
“Oh, no, you mustn’t! Please!” She hurried across the floor to remove an antimacassar-like cloth of petit point from the back of Hank’s chair. “It is very precious to me, you understand. My mother made it. And you Americans … the grease you put in your hair.”
Deliberately she laid it on the arm of a chair and sat in the center of the sofa, adjusting her skirt about her. Then she raised that lovely young face imperiously and allowed her eyes to say that she was ready for them to talk to her.
Hank ran his hand over his hair. There was dust in it, perhaps, that a creek bath hadn’t removed completely, but there was no grease. He told her as much with his glance, but said nothing. This tramps-begging-at-the-back-door role that she had assigned to them got under his hide. He decided that she would speak first.
Finally she said, “I notice that you were in the army,” glancing at his faded shirt.
“For a while.”
“During the war?” And when he nodded: “Then you must have killed a great number of Mexicans?”
“Only the ones that were trying to kill me …”
“And won much medals. And honor.” Her voice was scornful.
He said: “Can’t we agree the war is finished? I don’t know who started it, but I’m ready to forget it. Our business here is with horses.”
“Querida,” Red chimed in boldly, “how’d you like a yella horse to set off that black hair of yours?”
“I fear the price would be too high.”
Red laughed. “Wouldn’t be a question of money at all, querida.”
The girl flushed, from shame or anger, Hank could not tell.
“You Yankees! You think that is all there is to it … you come in here and think that you can treat us all like swine! And if we object, there are always your guns.” She looked directly at Hank. “Or your knives.”
“Now hold on,” he said. “We got some horses to sell. We came a thousand miles to sell them, and the first night we get here a sprout tells us to break camp and move along, and pulls a gun on us.”
“After he had been insulted.”
“That kid gave me a pretty good roasting first, querida.” Red grinned at her.
“In California,” said Julia de la Torre, “gentlemen call a lady by her proper name at the first meeting. Words like sweetheart are not permitted.”
Red bit off the end of a cigar. “Us gringos work kinda fast. You’d be surprised to know how we treat ladies we take a shine to, on the second meeting.”
Her lips went thin as she fought to contain her anger. “You have come to ask me for pasturage. What is it worth if I say yes? Will you and Pike leave me alone? Will you—?”
“Pike, Pike. That’s all I hear,” Hank said. “Who is Pike? Your pal Ramon Calder pulled the same thing on us. This Pike must be quite an hombre.”
She sighed. “All right. I’ll pretend that you are as innocent as you want me to think. Pike is an empresario who is camped with his squatters on my land. According to law, I can make him get off. According to practice, he can stay until the courts decide he ought to have the land, if he wants it so badly. Then he pays me a little money, and I have been satisfied.”
“That really how it works?”
“When one’s name is de la Torre. If it were Smith, for instance, or Jones … it would go differently. My title would have been acknowledged four years ago, and I could run off Pike before he ruins me.”
Hank said easily: “Then why not throw him off … tie a can to his tail?”
He had forgotten the mayordomo, Soto, who spoke now from the doorway.
“Vincente Arvizu was fined five hundred dollars for throwing some squatters off his place. And then they brought their relatives. He lost everything.”
In the silent parlor, guilt buzzed around the Americans. Even Red shifted on his chair.
Abruptly Hank rose. Carefully he replaced the antimacassar. “I hope we didn’t bring in any vermin, señorita. You go right on fighting the good fight. Enough females like you could send any army in the world home dragging its muskets.”
Their eyes clashed.
“We … we have not arranged about your horses,” the girl said quickly. “I shall buy all of them. I’ll send the horse foreman back with you.”
He smiled. “You really don’t trust us, do you? You still figure maybe we got a connection with Pike. But give us a good hatful of money for our horses and we might listen to reason and ride off. Ain’t that it?”
“Do not all Americans have a price?” she asked contemptuously.
III
That morning they drove the horses five miles north into some brown hills. Here, on scorched grass ,in a dusty live oak grove, they settled the herd once more. Then they ate hardtack and venison and sat among the low-branching trees, sipping their coffee. Hank could discern the pattern of the vineyards and horse pastures, fruit orchards and truck gardens of Julia de la Torre’s Rancho Temescal.
Evidently Red had been studying it, too. “That there’s a tolerable big outfit. Must’ve been fifty flunkies around the hacienda this morning.”
“No wonder pigs like this Pike try to grab off the old ranchos, eh?” Hank knocked out his pipe and covered the sparks with loose dirt. “Well, we better curry the horses. I figure tomorrow we ought to move them into the plaza and advertise ’em. They must have a paper, town of this size.”
Stretching, Red smiled like a lazy tomcat. “That ain’t all they got, I reckon. You take care of the advertising. I’ll track us down some sweet-smellin’—hey!”
He grinned, ducking the rock Hank had chucked in his direction. They got up and went to work.
With currycombs and dandy brushes, they burnished the golden horses. Hank wished the Torre girl could see them. She would gasp, and he would say: “Take your pick. Nothing stingy about a Yankee, querida.”
Of course, if she had formed her impression of them from an occupation army and one-mule sharecroppers like Pike, you couldn’t blame her. Yet every time he remembered the way she had treated him about dirtying the chair, he got warm in the neck. He found himself thinking, too, about this fellow Pike, and the kind of reputation a man like that brought to other Americans.
When they had finished with the horses, it was almost dark.
“I got Pike and his bunch spotted over in that wash where all the smoke is,” Hank said. “Probably cooking a beef they stole.”
“You figuring on riding over that way?” Red asked.
Hank nodded. “This may be just a cockeyed idea of mine. You don’t have to get mixed up in it.”
“We’re partners, ain’t we?” Red said.
They pulled out two mounts, tightened their saddle girths, and rode out.
They encountered the fragrance of Pike’s camp before they found the camp itself. Rotting carcasses of sheep, rudely butchered for a few tender cuts, lay in the brush beside the trail. Soon they came in view of a campfire and saw deer-hide tents among scattered oak trees. Riding in, they saw that a beef was being barbecued in a pit; a man was slopping sauce onto it with a mop-like affair. The scent of it was overpowering. They sat inhaling it and inspecting the sprawl of a half dozen tents among gear of all sorts—plows, saddles, bucksaws, boxes.
A man spoke from the shade of a tree. “Howdy, boys. You the mustangers?”
Hank noticed the rifle in the crook of his arm. “Yep. Smelled your food.”
“Plenty for everybody,” said the man. He came forward to look at them. He was tall and well made, youngish, not bad looking—a supple man wearing a saucer-brimmed straw sombrero.
“Owen Pike,” he said.
“Hank Ashwood,” Hank said. “This is Red Wolfe, my pardner. Might take some of that boot leather you’re cookin’.”
At the barbecue pit, they shook hands with the bald-headed little man with the mop. His name was Brown. There was another
man named Flint who had unhappy gray eyes that watched with suspicion from beneath thick brows. Flint was very tall, with wide sagging shoulders. He had badly made false teeth that he rattled like a horse chewing a bit.
“Rest of the boys are in town,” Owen Pike said, “gittin’ fixed up.” He chuckled.
All of these men, Hank perceived, had one thing in common. They were unconscionably lazy. They would do three days’ work to get out of one.
“Aim to settle,” Pike queried, “or move along?”
“¿Quién sabe?” Red shrugged. His teeth tore at a dripping slab of meat.
“Fix you up with a nice piece of land,” said Pike.
“Horse traders”—Hank sighed—“can’t afford land like this.”
“Bring me a couple of them titles,” Pike told Flint.
Flint brought some impressive-looking documents. Pike frowned over one. “This is five hundred acres. Fifty acres of muscat grapes grow on it and a hundred orange trees. The rest will cultivate or raise stock.”
“Nearby?” asked Hank, with interest.
“You’re settin’ next door to ’em. Both on Rancho Temescal.”
“You own the land?”
“Fixin’ to.” Pike winked. “I’ll sell either or both at a dollar an acre. Or trade for horses.”
“What if this de la Torre woman makes trouble?”
“You got it wrong, friend. They don’t make us trouble. We make them trouble. You could move in tomorrow.”
“But how do I know these titles will stand up?”
Pike drew the cork from a jug of whiskey, laid the jug across his elbow while he drank, then stoppered it again. “I get it that every Mexican title in Los Angeles county is going to be throwed out. That makes the next titles in line good. And you know what they say about possession.”
Hank drank deeply of the whiskey. After belching, he said mildly to Red: “Cover Brown and Flint.”
Red pulled his gun and the squatters blinked at it. Pike stared, then roused up from his heels to reach for his rifle, cocked against an ox cart. “Well, by God,” he snarled. His face writhed, coming out evil as that of a cur.
But he froze when he saw the knife shining in Hank’s hand. Hank reached forward to catch Pike’s gun belt and cut it loose. The revolver fell to the ground.
“Get up,” Hank told him.
Pike came up tall, like an Indian. He threw aside his hat and waited. His face was murderous; his eyes bored at Hank’s.
“Up to you,” he said. “But remember … in this town you can have a man killed for two bits, and git change.”
Hank sheathed the knife and handed his Colt to Red. “You ain’t worth two bits.” His left hand flicked into Pike’s face. His right crashed in when the squatter ducked. Pike covered his face and stumbled away. He went to one knee but lunged up again. As Hank came slashing in, he wiped the blood from his face and slanted into him, both arms swinging.
Hank ducked under the squatter’s swings and butted him in the belly. He got his arms around him and ran backward. The squatter, Flint, bawled: “The pit, Owen!”
Hank unlocked his arms and stopped short. Owen Pike stared at him, afraid to look back. At once he leaned, flailing, into Hank, swearing, calling up all the vicious profanity of two languages. Hank dodged and ducked, and then feinted at Pike’s crotch with his knee, and, when Pike grunted and covered up, he slammed him in the face with an overhand right. Pike’s head jerked. He twisted backward and sprawled across the greasy, sweating carcass of the spitted veal. Screaming, he went ankle deep in the coals before he could haul himself out. Red was roaring with laughter. Hank just stood there with a grin, waiting to see whether the squatter had all the fight squeezed out of him.
Groaning, Pike held his feet for one moment, as he huddled on the ground. But an instant later he clawed his hands full of dirt and hurled it into Hank’s face. Hank’s eyes were full of the grit. He heard Red’s angry bawl: “Duck, Hank, I’ll give it to him!”
But the squatter was upon him, hammering one into his jaw, and, as Hank went back, he felt Pike’s hand clutching at his hip. Hank felt the knife slip out of the sheath. What had been only a rough fight was now deadly serious.
Pike was moving in like a cat. Hank considered ducking away to give Red a shot at him. Yet he wanted to handle this himself, and he did not want anyone killed. He wanted Julia to know that he had been enough, bare-handed, for a whole camp full of squatters.
The knife cut the air before his belly, withdrew, slipped in toward his breast, retreated again. Hank backed slowly. Then Pike dived in with a straightforward lunge for the buckle of his belt. Hank jumped sideways and brought a smashing fist down upon Owen Pike’s forearm. The knife fell. Hank scooped it up, and, as the squatter went for his throat—he brought it across the side of his head.
The tip of the squatter’s ear fell to the dirt. Blood fountained over the side of his head and down his neck and shoulders. When Pike saw the bit of flesh in the dirt, he covered his ear with his hand and staggered away. He sat on a log with his palm against his ear, twisting his head back and forth in agony.
Hank saw to the disarming of the other squatters. He carried all their pistols in his hat. Mounted, he stopped beside Pike.
“You got all day tomorrow to pack and get. Be gone the next morning. Or all the two-bits in Los Angeles won’t keep you from losing the rest of that ear.”
IV
The pueblo called the Queen of the Angels was different from anything Hank had ever seen. It was a long haul from an Eastern town, or even Santa Fe. Nothing seemed to matter to the natives. Even the air was soft and slow.
They had moved into town the day after the fight, and pitched camp in a vacant lot off the plaza, under a huge peppertree dripping red. They corralled the horses in a rope enclosure and Hank put an ad in the Star, and the horses began to sell. They did not make $100 a head, but they did well.
Red and Hank took their meals in a Mexican café on the plaza. In the evenings they would sit in the deep bay of the windows, smoking and watching the traffic come and go, and, after a while, when it was dark, Red would say: “Got to find a gal, Hank. I’m great for dancing.” With a laugh he would go out into the night. After a couple of these nights he asked Hank: “What’s eating you, compadre? All the señoritas you were going to swing, and you ain’t done anything but eat and work since we hit town.”
“Anything wrong with eating and working?”
“Nothing wrong with the fillies here, either. Tell you one thing … they ain’t the angels they named the town after.”
And Hank sighed and wished he could get the picture of a black-haired girl out of his mind.
At 8:00 p.m. one night, as he was finishing his cigar before the café, Hank saw a turnout flash up to their camp and stop. He sauntered over, hopeful of a customer. A young fellow was walking nervously about the camp, looking at the horses, and, as Hank came up, he ducked to glance into the low deer-hide tent.
“¡Aquí estoy!” Hank called.
The man turned quickly. It was Ramon Calder. He came toward Hank with the stiff-legged strut of a small dog guarding a large yard. Hank smiled to himself, but his hand was on the butt of his gun.
A girl spoke, close to Calder: “Ramon, you promised!”
A tingle chased itself along Hank’s spine. Her voice—it was like a bell heard softly on a warm evening. He had heard it for days, saying things that tantalized and infuriated him. Now he did not turn to look at her, sitting in the rig, but watched the Californio come on. Ramon stopped three feet away with his hands on his hips. Just a kid, Hank thought. A spoiled and hot-blooded kid, but a scrapper. He found himself liking him.
Before Ramon could say anything, Hank remarked: “Sorry about the arm, Ramoncito. That pardner of mine … I blame him as much as you.”
“What’s the plan now? To lay claim to the plaza?”
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“Sell and git.” Hank smiled. “Tell you what I’ll do. Give you your pick of the horses for half price.”
“Would that apply to me, too?” asked Julia de la Torre.
Hank took his eyes off Ramon and let himself relax. The night and her voice combined to disarm him. He heard his voice say quite distinctly: “No, ma’am. I’ll just give you one. To set off that black hair of yours.”
“Señor Ashwood,” Julia said quietly, “I am sorry about the other day. But when you are about to lose everything … I am going to accept the horse, with thanks. Ramon, will you pick out one for me?”
“Be assured the horse won’t be free,” Ramon said darkly. But the girl smiled and made a face at his concern, allying herself by the small action with Hank. She got down from the turnout, holding out her arm for him to take.
They stood close together. In the dying light he could see that her lips were smooth as lacquer, that there was the slightest blemish near the corner of her mouth. And that her eyes were very dark brown, with incredibly long lashes. Her nose was delicate, perfectly fashioned. He was glad for that tiny mole; without that to break the perfection, he had a feeling that he would have choked on this lump in his throat. She was sure something for a man to run smack into after five months among the squirrels.
“I want to thank you for trying to frighten off my squatters,” she said. “It was very brave of you.”
He felt the movement of her hand in his and remembered only then to release her. “It was very practical business, too,” he told her. “Best way to show people here that I’m not like Pike, and that I want no part of Pike or his kind. My horse sales have been going well.”
“Of course, señor. Good business, as you say. Pike and his men are still here, though. You must watch out for them.”
“I’ll take care of myself. Is that what you wanted to talk about, señorita?”
“To thank you, yes. And …” Her luminous eyes met his briefly, and he saw a doubt, a question in their depths. “Yes, there is something else. But I do not know if I can make you see.” She took a deep breath, swelling the merino gown. “This … this place is not what I remember from my childhood. What we had here before the war … it used to be so wonderful! The ranchos, the people … all of us living as we were meant to live. My grandfather would have fiestas you wouldn’t believe! Those were the happy times, señor!” She seemed to dream over it. “And now we have the great ranchos being broken up, the land stolen from its owners. Did you know this town before, Señor Ashwood? The fine residential district of the north side … it is now the infamous Calle Desesperar!”
