by Lou Cameron
Meanwhile they were out of sight now, and he didn’t see how a few head run off so recent could have anything to do with the secret someone else didn’t want printed in the newspapers. So he got to work on the old Tewksbury home spread.
By mid-afternoon he’d worked his way out of ideas as well as shade, having started from the middle by prying up the old hearthstone and finding nothing but mormon-cricket grubs under it.
Buried treasure made no sense. The secretive mastermind who kept sending hired guns after curious strangers had had over ten years to dig up anything of value the long-gone half-breed clan could have ever left in these parts. But Stringer made sure anyway. He even dug into a suspicious low spot out back, still soft from the recent rain, until his nose warned him he was probing into the sanitary habits of a large and mighty stinky family, considering how long it had been since anyone could have stepped out back to the shithouse.
Other low spots figured to be garbage pits or previous positions of the portable squat-and-drop. He found one deeper and more open crater among the weeds, where some earlier explorer had made sure of his or her suspicions by excavating a mess of busted crockery, glass, and animal bones. Mostly sheep and at least one pig. Stringer wondered why they’d dug just there and not anywhere else. He decided that someone who’d once visited the spread when it had still been inhabited would know where the shithouse and more recent garbage pits had been. The place they had dug showed they’d given up just a few feet down. It hardly seemed likely the Tewksbury family plate had been buried shallow, mixed with after-dinner scraps. So the earlier treasure hunters hadn’t been too serious. Perhaps, like himself, they’d simply wondered what all the fuss had been about down this way.
As the sun got lower and the sunny slopes all about began to at least look cooler, Stringer saddled the paint to ride on. He didn’t want to camp too close to the burnt-out Tewksbury place.
Haunted or not, the scene was sort of depressing. The old Army mount must have thought so too, for even though there was now grass and water all about, the fool critter puppy-dogged after Stringer and his hired ponies. He warned it, “With virgin grass as lush as this free for the asking, you can just forget about oats in the near future, Army.”
But the old chestnut followed them anyway. Stringer stayed near the stream running the length of the wide flat-bottomed valley. Unlike the Hash Knife riders who’d preceded him this way, he wasn’t looking for stolen stock. He wanted to get the feel of this once hotly disputed range.
It was fine range now. Thanks to that recent rain the tall tawny grass was already starting to green at the roots again, and the sedge along the creek stayed green all the time in any case. There was more nutrition in the grass, even dry. But sedge made a nice sort of salad for stock, and save for a nibble here and again, he could see neither grass nor sedge had been grazed in recent memory. So much for the legend of abandoned herds. At the most a burro here and a desert bighorn there might account for the very few signs of any grazing at all. Wild critters tended to graze on the run like that. It hardly seemed possible anyone was holding enough stolen beef down this way to matter. So that couldn’t be the secret.
As he rode at an easy walk toward the old Graham spread his map said he’d find farther down, he tried to picture this range as it might have looked back in the days blood was spilled over it. The grass would have been a lot shorter, of course, and the gentle slopes all around would have been dotted with cows and sheep, albeit hardly at the same time and place.
Stringer had been raised cow, so he’d naturally grown up on the horror stories cattlemen told about sheep. Having seen more of the world since, he’d learned that while sheep and cattle had their differences, human greed caused more trouble than either sheep or cow men liked to admit.
It was true that sheep could manage on range too overgrazed for cow, and that once they had to forage seriously, sheep could ruin what was left of a range by digging for roots with their buck teeth and sharper little hooves. But back east and all over Australia, cows and sheep were grazed together in mixed herds by cooler heads who knew when it was time to move on and give any range a rest.
On well-managed range, sheep and cattle grazed more efficiently together than either species could graze alone. Unless driven by hunger and dearth, cows preferred grass, and having no front teeth, didn’t mow it down to the roots. Sheep could, and would, if they had to. But left to their druthers, sheep preferred broad-leafed forbes the cows tended to ignore if there was grass enough to matter. In a mixed herd the cows kept the grass from choking out the weeds while the sheep kept the weeds from choking out the grass. On overgrazed range, of course, all bets were off. You could tell overgrazed cattle range by its scattered welcome mats of close-cropped grass surrounded by tough chaparral and haunted by tumble weed. You could tell overgrazed sheep range by bare ground and gullies. Neither seemed a problem in these parts this afternoon. The healing grass had filled in a gully here and there. But apparently the Graham faction had shot off the Tewksbury clan before their sheep had done much damage.
Stringer reconsidered one of the carbons Peggy Stern had let him have to ponder. Both sides had charged the other with every vice known to man, and some other locals had charged both with worse. It was a mite late to worry about now, but at one time it had been hinted by some that the war hadn’t really been over sheep versus cattle. It was said that at one time the Graham and Tewksbury boys had ridden together, against Mexicans, of course. Along with some other Anglo hands they’d shot up the Hispanic fiesta of Saint John the Baptist in Saint John’s, the original county seat east of Holbrook, named by the original Mexican settlers in these parts.
Sheriff Owens’s part in the amusing event had been his preventing the outraged Mexicans from lynching an Anglo called Greer. The records were incomplete. So it was hard to say how Greer fit in with the later Graham-Tewksbury feud. Owens had run Dick Greer out of the county after a later discussion about sheep versus cattle with a Mexican sheep man who’d been slower on the draw. It had been charged by other Mexican sheep men that old Indian John Tewksbury had entered the sheep business at their expense, to the considerable annoyance of the Graham brothers, no matter how they might have felt about Mexicans.
But another version had it that their pal, Dick Greer, had been a sheep man himself, and that the fuss with the Mexicans had been over range, not species. That made sense in a land where grass and water came scarce, no matter what you wanted to use it for.
Stringer dug the carbons from his hip pocket to refresh him memory, and yeah, there was the unsubstantiated rumor that the Graham and Tewksbury boys had together robbed the bank in Saint John’s and later argued over the spoils, together with gossip to the effect a Graham had been caught in a hay loft with one of the Tewksbury women. No names were offered. But all of Indian John’s grown sons had women, even if they had been sheep herders, and old Indian John had himself married up with an English immigrant gal named Lydia after his old squaw died. An old man with a new young wife likely would have felt mighty surly if he’d caught even a good pal messing with her.
Stringer decided that on the other hand the simple answer was most often the best one. Old Indian John and his brood had been here first. He might have welcomed new neighbors at first, if only as allies again the surrounding Mexican and the even older Indian element. But then the Grahams had brought in other Texas tribes called Simpson, Blevins, and such as their own allies, and there was a record showing old John Simpson had tried to buy the Tewksbury range, with the Grahams backing him when he accused Indian John of being no more than a squatter and a known cow thief.
Stringer put all the flimsy carbons in his saddle bag for now. They were only starting to confuse him more. Whatever the feud had started over, it had been a long nasty fight that both sides had lost in the end.
He spotted a lonesome chimney ahead, upslope a ways from the creek. That made sense. This far down Cherry Creek would flood its banks pretty good after a heavy rain. As he rode up
hill to investigate the ruins, he spotted buzzards circling above the skyline far beyond the chimney. He wondered why. He set the thought aside while he poked about the abandoned site. It looked more salvaged than burned. The only hardware left was a horseshoe nail rusting on the long-cold hearthstone. Hardly any housewife let a horse doze by her cooking fire. Some later visitor had no doubt lost the nail, poking about in here aboard his pony long after the roof timbers had been carted away. There was nothing to say whether the folk who’d lived here had been named Graham or anything else, and the site wasn’t on the map Patty had given him. Unless one of the Tewksbury boys had lived here with his own wife, it conflicted with old Indian John’s claim, penciled and noted as such on the printed map.
As Stringer remounted he saw a column of flies hovering over one spot, just upslope, and rode over for a closer look. A cow pie, fairly dry now but still fresh enough to draw flies, winked up at him from the grass. He got out his makings and rolled a smoke as he stared up at the skyline and muttered, “Howdy, buzzards. You sure seem interested in something over yonder. There ain’t supposed to be any stock on this range right now, but somehow I doubt that’s a bird turd under all these flies down here.”
He rode on up, spare and pet mount trailing, as he hauled out the Krag and worked the bolt before resting it across his thighs behind the saddle swells, polite but ready.
This time the thin dry air sort of fooled him. For when he got to the top of the rise he saw the buzzards were hovering over yet another, rockier ridge to the east. He kept going, and sure enough, there was yet another rise ahead. It was getting tedious when he finally rode between two big boulders to see what the buzzards, now directly about him, were staring down at.
A half-dozen, no, exactly eight cows lay scattered not too far apart down the far slope. They hadn’t been dead long enough to bloat. But buzzards didn’t wait that long. There was a brush lean-to someone had thrown up between him and the dead stock. There was a dead fire near it as well. Stringer was still working it out when a bullet spanged off the boulder to his right, followed by a pistol report and a high-pitched voice cussing him just awful in Spanish.
Stringer yanked the reins and crawfished his mount back as he dismounted, rifle in hand, to belly flop in the tall grass between the boulders, yelling back, “Qué pasa? Usted es todos parecen irritados pornada!”
The girl in the lean-to detected his accent and shouted back in passable English, “Go away! I have a gun!”
Stringer called back, “I noticed. I’ve got one too. It’s a rifle. If I meant you any serious harm, I’d be peppering that clump of weeds you’re hiding in pretty good by now. So come on out and let’s talk it over more civilized.”
She pegged another pistol shot his way. He could see from her smoke she was hunkered low and aiming through the brush at him. He sighted carefully and sent a .30-30 round through the same, high enough to keep from really parting her hair.
It worked. A nickel-plated Smith & Wesson sailed into view to land in the grass at a safe distance. Then the lady who’d been firing it at him, really a girl, stepped into view with her hands in the air and a defeated look on her pretty brown face. She was dressed part Indian, too, in a maroon pueblo shirt with a silver concho waistband, and a more Hispanic-looking calf-length campesina skirt which might have been red before it was washed once too often. He couldn’t see her feet in the tall grass, but her parted and braided black hair seldom went with high-button shoes.
He got to his own feet and moved down to join her, his Krag lowered politely at his side. She was even younger and prettier as he got closer. She licked her lips and asked simply, “Are you going to kill me or just rape me, señor?’’
He smiled down at her and said, “I haven’t made my mind up yet. How come you seem so intent on guarding them dead cows from the birdies up above? Can’t you see they’re rapidly becoming unfit for human consumption?”
She said, “They refuse to come down while anything here still lives. I am here because I have no place better to go, thanks to your cruel friends, señor.”
He said, “I’ve been riding alone some time now. When’s the last time you’ve had water, señorita?’’
She lowered her hands experimentally, saw he didn’t seem to mind, and pointed at her shelter, saying, “I have all our canteens and perhaps enough food for two more days. But our mules all ran away when the shooting started last night. I ran away too. That is for why I am still alive. Papacito and Ramon were not fast enough. I buried them both where I found them, over there.”
Stringer stared soberly at the two flimsy crosses fashioned from weed stems, and asked, “How did you manage? Do you have a shovel in that hut?”
She said, “With difficulty. The few camping tools we had departed with our mules. But the earth was not too hard, thanks to that rain the other day.”
He nodded and said, “Well, I could try to put it all together by myself. I can see the running iron someone left in that long-dead camp fire. But why don’t you just tell me what in the hell took place up here?”
She suggested they get into the shade of her lean-to. They did. They sat on the one Navajo blanket she had, and he rolled a smoke for her as she told him her simple story.
Her name was Concepción. Her father and older brother had let her come along to cook for them as they’d ridden up this way from the Salt River Valley to check out the tales they’d heard of abandoned beef roaming free for the asking up this way.
He cut in to warn her, “We’re not likely to get along as well if you fib too much, Concepción. I have it on good authority that the Hash Knife, to the west, is missing exactly eight head of stock, and no offense, I can read their brand on the rump of that nearest dead cow.”
She shrugged and said, “We did not steal them. We found them grazing alone over by Cherry Creek. The Hash Knife ranges its beef along the Tonto, no?”
He sealed her smoke and lit it for her as he said, “I reckon that ferocious thunderstorm the other day could have spooked a stray or more from one watershed to another. But for folk who knew where the Hash Knife usually runs its stock, you must not read brands so good.”
She took a deep sensuous drag on the smoke he’d given her before she replied, simply, “We are poor. All this land was ours before your people stole it from us, señor.”
He shook his head and said, “We never stole it. We licked Mexico fair and square for it. Just like your folk licked the Indians for it to begin with. But save your excuses. I’m neither the law nor the proper owner of the stock you meant to reclaim as your birthright. Your menfolk herded them up here to run the brands whilst you tended to camp chores for ’em. What happened then?”
She said, “It was after dark. We had just eaten. Ramon was, it is true, poking his iron in the fire, as teenaged boys will. Our Papacito had said it would be best to wait for daylight so they could, ah, work more artistically on the brands of the orphaned stock we had rescued. I had to attend to a call of nature. So I moved up the slope, away from the firelight, for to do so. I had no sooner finished when the shooting started. I did not see who was shooting. We had no pistols with us. We were not that kind of people. I saw Ramon leap to his feet, then fall right down again. I heard someone shouting cruel things about Mexicans. As I was Mexican, I ran. I ran far, fearing each step would be my last. But I do not think they knew about me. Nobody chased me. I fell down in some thick grass and wept a long time. Then it was dawn, and oh so quiet. After a long time I crept back to our campsite to find it as you see it now, except for the bodies of my father and brother, buried up the slope. They must have been Hash Knife riders, no?”
He shook his had and said, “No. Two reasons. I just met some Hash Knife riders, well after sunrise. They were still searching for the stock. The second reason is that they weren’t searching for their own stock to butcher it and leave it for the buzzards. Hash Knife riders might have treated your menfolk just as surly, but they’d have rounded up them eight cows and taken ’em home with ’e
m. So who’s left, and how come I had to duck those pistol rounds if you innocent folk came all this way without pistols?”
She said, “I found the gun, loaded, in deep grass near poor Papacito. One of them must have dropped it in the dark, no?”
He said, “I’ll know better in a minute,” then crawled back out into the sun to look for the gun she’d tossed out there someplace. It only took him a few moments to recover it. It was a .38. He rejoined her and told her, “A man was murdered in Holbrook the other night. Someone might have thought he was stretching his luck by packing it after he’d shot your menfolk with it as well. Or, hell, it could be just one of those things. Either way, I can see I was wrong assuming there was only one hired gun prowling about down this way. It looks like they sent one after me and some others over this way to make sure I didn’t find something out if I managed to get through.”
She stared soberly at him to ask, “Then the same monsters who killed my father and brother are after you, as well, Americano?”
He said, “I am called Stuarto, by your kind, Concepción. I can’t say why we seem to have enemies in common. But it’s sure starting to look that way. Have your people had trouble up this way before with sneaky night riders?”
She let out some smoke and said, “Yes and no, Stuarto. Fights between my people and your own do not take place as often or as seriously as they might have when this range was inhabited by most-rough Anglo tribes. But my people tell tales of their ghosts still riding their old range.”
“Do you believe in ghosts, Concepción?” he asked.
