Elmore Leonard's Western Roundup #1

by Elmore Leonard

  “You're on a side whether you like it or not,” Moon said. “You're on the side of commerce and, I imagine, you believe in progress and good government.”

  “What's wrong with that?”

  “Copper is progress and the land has been leased to the mine company by the government.”

  Maurice Dumas didn't like the insinuation. “That doesn't mean I'm on the side of the company. But if we're talking about legal rights, I'd have to say they, the legal right, are. The company owns mineral rights to the land for a hundred years.”

  “You feel that's long enough?”

  “I don't know how long it takes.”

  Moon took a sip of whiskey and drew on his cigar. “You happen to know what the mine company's doing up there?”

  “Right now they're surveying,” Maurice Dumas said, “trying to locate veins and ore loads that look promising.”

  “And how are they doing that?”

  “As I understand, they set off dynamite, then pick around, see what they've got.”

  Moon waited.

  “So far, I guess they haven't found anything worth sinking a shaft in.”

  “But they spook the herds, scatter 'em all over, kill what they want for meat,” Moon said. “They've blown up stock tanks, ruined the natural watershed, wiped out crops and some homes in rock slides. They tear up a man's land, clean him out, and leave it.”

  “It's theirs to tear up,” the news reporter said.

  “No, it isn't,” Moon said, in a quiet but ominous tone.

  The whiskey made Maurice Dumas feel confident and knowledgeable. He said, “I'd like to say you're right. Good for you. But the fact remains your Indians are off the White Tanks reservation by several miles. And the other people up there, whoever they are, are living on land without deed or title. So LaSalle Mining, legally, has every right to make them leave.”

  “You asked my opinion,” Moon said. “Are you gonna print it in the paper?”

  “I hope to, yes.”

  “You're not writing anything down.”

  “I have a good memory,” Maurice Dumas said.

  “Well, remember this,” Moon said. “The Mimbre Apaches were hunting up there before Christopher Columbus came over in his boat, and till now nobody's said a word about it, not even the Indian Bureau. There's a settlement of colored people, colored soldiers who've taken Indian wives, all of them at one time in the United States Tenth Cavalry. You would think the government owed them at least a friendly nod, wouldn't you? The Mexicans living up there have claims that go back a hundred years or more to Spanish land grants. The Mexicans went to Federal Claims Court to try to protect their property. They got thrown out. I wrote to the Indian Bureau about the Apaches up there—it's their land, let 'em live on it. No, they said, get your people back to White Tanks or you're fired. You see the influence the company has? Generations they've hunted, roamed through those mountains. Government doesn't say a word till the big company kneels on 'em for a favor. Yes sir, we'll see to it right away, Mr. LaSalle—”

  “Is there a Mr. LaSalle?” Maurice didn't think so.

  “I went to Federal District Court to get an injunction. I wanted to restrict the mine company to certain areas—they find ore, O.K., they pay a royalty on it to any people that have to move. They don't find any ore, they clean up their mess and get out. The judge held up my injunction—cost me fifty dollars to have written—like it was paper you keep in the privy and threw it out of court.”

  “Legal affairs get complicated,” the news reporter offered.

  “Do you want to tell me how it is,” Moon said, “or you want to listen.”

  “I'm sorry. Go on.”

  “All these people I've mentioned number only about two hundred and sixty, counting old ones, women and young children. Fewer than fifty ablebodied men. And they're spread all over. By that, I mean they don't present any kind of unified force. The mine company can send a pack of armed men up there with guns and dynamite to take the land, and you know what will happen?”

  “Well, eventually—” the reporter began.

  “Before eventually,” Moon said. “You know what will happen? Do you want to go ask the people what they'll do if armed men come?”

  “Will they tell me?”

  “They'll tell you it's their land. If the company wants it, the company will have to take it.”

  “Well,” the news reporter said, a little surprised, “that's exactly what the company will do, take it.”

  “When you write your article for the paper,” Moon said, “don't write the end till it happens.”

  6

  1

  White Tanks: May, 1889

  Moon and four Mimbre Apaches were whitewashing the agency office when the McKean girl rode up on her palomino. They appeared to have the job almost done—the adobe walls clean and shining white—and were now slapping the wash on a front porch made of new lumber that looked to be a recent addition.

  The McKean girl wore a blue bandana over her hair and a blue skirt that was bunched in front of her on the saddle and hung down on the sides just past the top of her boots.

  Sitting her horse, watching, she thought of India: pictures she had seen of whitewashed mud buildings on barren land and little brown men in white breechclouts and turbans—though the headpieces the Apaches wore were rusty red or brown, dark colors, and their black hair hung in strands past their shoulders. It was strange she thought of India Indians and not American Indians. Or not so strange, because this place did not seem to belong in the mountains of Arizona. Other times looking at Apaches, when she saw them close, she thought of gypsies: dark men wearing regular clothes, but in strange, colorful combinations of shirts made from dresses beneath checkered vests, striped pants tucked into high moccasins and wearing jewelry, men wearing beads and metal trinkets. The Mexicans called them barbarians. People the McKean girl knew called them red niggers and heathens.

  Moon—he was saying something in a strange tongue and the Apaches, with whitewash smeared over their bare skin, were laughing. She had never heard an Apache laugh, nor had even thought of them laughing before this. Coming here was like visiting a strange land.

  One of the Apaches saw her and said something to Moon. He turned from his painting and came down from the porch as the Apaches watched. He looked strange himself: suspenders over his bare, hairy chest, his body pure white but his forearms weathered brown, like he was wearing long gloves. He was looking at her leg, her thigh beneath the skirt, as he approached.

  She expected him to pat the mare and pretend to be interested in her, saying how's Goldie. But he didn't. He looked from her leg up to her face, squinting in the sun, and said, “You getting anxious?”

  “It's been seven months,” Katy McKean said. “If you've changed your mind I want to know.”

  “I've been building our house,” Moon said.

  The McKean girl looked at the whitewashed adobe, and the stock pens, the outpost on the barren flats, dressed with a flagpole flying the stars and stripes. Like a model post office.

  “That?” she said.

  “Christ, no,” Moon said. “That's not a house, that's a symbol. Our house is seven miles up the draw, made of 'dobe plaster and stone. Front porch is finished and a mud fence is being put up now.”

  “You like front porches,” the McKean girl said. “Well, they must've given you what you wanted. What do you do in return?”

  “Keep the peace. Count heads. I'm a high-paid tally hand is what I am.”

  “Tell them jokes, like you were doing?”

  “See eye to eye,” Moon said. “A man catches his wife in the bushes with some other fella—you know what he does? He cuts the end of her nose off. The wife's mother gets upset and tells the police to arrest the husband and punish him and the police dump it in my lap.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “Tell the woman she looks better with a short nose—I don't know what I do,” Moon said. “I live near them—not with them—and try not to c
hange their customs too much.”

  “Like moving to a strange heathen land,” the McKean girl said, unconsciously touching her nose.

  “Well, Christian people, they caught a woman in adultery they used to stone her to death. Customs change in time.”

  “But they never do anything to the man,” the McKean girl said.

  “Ask your dad, the old philosopher, about that one,” Moon said. “Ask him if it's all right for you to come live among the heathens.”

  “When?”

  “Next fall sometime,” Moon said. “October.”

  “Next month,” the McKean girl said, “the third Saturday in June at St.John the Apostle's, ten A.M. Who's gonna be your best man, one of these little dark fellas?”

  The wedding took place the fourth Saturday in June and the best man was Brendan Early: Bren looking at the bride in church, looking at her in the dining room of the Charles Crooker Hotel where the reception was held, still not believing she had chosen quiet Dana Moon. It wasn't that Bren had sought her hand and been rejected. He had not gotten around to asking her; though it had always been in the back of his mind he might easily marry her someday. Right now, as Dana's wife, she was the best-looking girl he had ever seen, and the cleanest-looking, dressed in white with her blonde hair showing. And now it was too late. Amazing. Like he'd blinked his eyes and two years had passed. They asked him what he was doing these days and he said, well (not about to tell these industrious people he was making a living as a minecamp cardplayer), he was looking into a mining deal at the present time—saying it because he had in his pocket the title to a staked-out claim he'd won in a $2,000-call poker game. Yes, he was in mining now.

  And told others on the Helvetia stage—pushed by a nagging conscience or some curious urge, having seen his old chum settling down with a wife he thought he would someday have. Time was passing him by and it wasn't the ticket for a gentleman graduate of the U.S. Military Academy to be making a living dealing faro or peaking at hole cards. Why not look into this claim he now owned? He had title and a signed assay report that indicated a pocket of high-yield gold ore if not a lode.

  Starting out on that return trip to nowhere he was in mining. Before the stage had reached its destination Bren Early was in an altogether different situation.

  2

  The Benson-Helvetia Stage: June, 1889

  Three very plain-looking ladies who had got off the train from an Eastern trip had so much baggage, inside and out, there was only room for Bren Early and one other passenger: a fifty-year-old dandy who wore a cavalry mustache, his hat brim curved up on one side, and carried a cane with a silver knob.

  Bren Early and the Dandy sat next to each other facing the plain-looking, chattering ladies who seemed excitable and nervous and were probably sweating to death in their buttoned-up velvet travel outfits. Facing them wasn't so bad; Bren could look out the window at the countryside moving past in the rickety, rattling pounding of the stagecoach; but the Dandy, with his leather hatbox and travel bag, lounged in a way that took up more than half the seat, sticking his leg out at an angle and forcing Bren Early to sit against the sideboards. Bren nudged the Dandy's leg to acquire more room and the Dandy said, “If you don't mind, sir,” sticking his leg out again.

  “I do,” Bren Early said, “since I paid for half this bench.”

  “And I paid in receiving a wound to this leg in the war,” the Dandy said. “So, if you don't mind.”

  The ladies gave him sympathetic looks and one of them arranged her travel case so the Dandy could prop his leg on it. The Dandy had a cane, yes, but Bren Early had seen the man walk out of the Benson station to the coach without a limp or faltering gait. Then one of the ladies asked him whom he had served with.

  The Dandy said, “I had the honor of serving with the Texas Brigade, Madam, attached to General Longstreet's command, and received my wound at the Battle of the Wilderness, May 6, 1864. Exactly twenty-five years ago last month.”

  Bren Early listened, thinking, Ask him a question, he gives you plenty of answer. One of the ladies said it must have been horrible being wounded in battle and said she was so thankful she was a woman.

  “It was ill fate,” the Dandy said, “to be wounded in victory while giving the enemy cold steel, routing them, putting to flight some of the most highly regarded regiments in Yankeedom. But I have no regrets. The fortunes of war sent a minié ball through my leg and an Army wagon delivered me to the hospital at Belle Plain.”

  “Whose wagon?” Bren Early said.

  The Dandy gave him a superior look and said, “Sir?”

  “You are only half right in what you tell these ladies,” Bren Early said. “You did meet six of the most respected regiments in the Union Army: the Second, Sixth and Seventh Wisconsin, the Nineteenth Indiana and the Twenty-fourth Michigan. You met the men of the Iron Brigade and if you ever meet one again, take off your hat and buy him a drink, for you're lucky to be alive.”

  “You couldn't have been there,” the Dandy said, still with the superior look.

  “No,” Bren Early said, “but I've studied the action up and down the Orange Plank Road and through the woods set afire by artillery. The Iron Brigade, outnumbered, fought Longstreet to a standstill and you, if you were taken to Belle Plain then you went as a prisoner because the Confederate line never reached that far east.”

  The Dandy looked at the ladies and shrugged with a weary sigh. See what a wounded veteran has to put up with?

  Bren Early had to hold on from grabbing the mincing son of a bitch and throwing him out the window. With the ladies giving him cold-fish looks he pulled his new Stetson down over his eyes and made up his mind to sleep.

  Lulled by the rumbling racket of the coach he saw himself high on a shelf of rock against a glorious blue sky, a gentle breeze blowing. There he was on the narrow ledge, ignoring the thousand-foot drop directly behind him, swinging his pick effortlessly, dislodging a tremendous boulder and seeing in the exposed seam the glitter of gold particles imbedded in rock, chunks of gold he flicked out with his penknife, nuggets he scooped up from the ground and dropped into canvas sacks. He saw a pile of sacks in a cavern and saw himself hefting them, estimating the weight of his fortune at $35 an ounce…$560 a pound…$56,000 a hundred pounds…He slept and awoke to feel the coach swaying, slowing down, coming to a stop, the three ladies and the Dandy leaning over to look out the windows. The driver, or somebody up above them, was saying, “Everybody do what they say. Don't anybody try to be brave.”

  The ladies were now even more excitable and nervous and began to make sounds like they were going to cry. The Dandy gathered his hatbox and travel bag against him and slipped his right hand inside his waistcoat.

  The voice up top said, “We're not carrying no mail or anything but baggage.”

  And another voice said, “Let's see if you can step off the boot with your hands in the air.”

  Shit, Bren Early thought.

  His revolvers were in his war-bag beneath his feet, stowed away so as not to upset the homely, twittery ladies, and, for the sake of comfort. What would anybody hope to get robbing this chicken coop? The only important stop between Benson and points west was Sweetmary, a mining town; and he doubted a tacky outfit like this stage line would be entrusted to deliver a payroll. No—he was sure of it, because there was just the driver on top, no armed guard with him, not even a helper. Cheap goddamn outfit.

  A rider on a sorrel came up to the side of the coach, Bren seeing his pistol extended, a young cowboy face beneath an old curled-brim hat.

  “You, mister,” the young rider said to the Dandy, “let me see your paws. All of you keep your paws out in plain sight.”

  Another one, Bren Early was thinking. Practiced it and it sounded good. Times must be bad.

  Looking past the sorrel Bren could see two more riders beyond the road in the scrub, and the driver standing by the front wheel now, a shotgun on the ground. The rider on the sorrel was squinting up at the baggage, nudging his horse cl
oser. He dismounted then and opened the coach door to look in at the petrified ladies in velvet and the two gentlemen across from them. Someone behind the young rider yelled, “Pull that gear offa there!”

  Making him do all the work while they sit back, Bren thought. Dumb kid. In bad company.

  The young rider stepped up on the rung and into the door opening, reaching up to the baggage rack with both hands. His leather chaps, his gunbelt, his skinny trunk in a dirty cotton skirt were right there, filling the doorway. Bren thinking, He's too dumb to live long at his trade. Hoping the kid wasn't excitable. Let him get out of here with some of the ladies' trinkets and the Dandy's silver cane and think he's made a haul. Bren had three twenty-dollar gold pieces and some change he'd contribute to the cause. Get it done so they could get on with the ride.

  Sitting back resigned, letting it happen, Bren wasn't prepared—he couldn't believe it—when the fifty-year-old Dandy made his move, hunching forward as he drew a nickle-plated pistol from inside his coat and shoved the gun at the exposed shirt-front in the doorway, pointing the barrel right where the young rider's shirttail was coming out of his pants as he reached above him.

  Bren said, “No!” grabbing at the Dandy's left arm, the man wrenching away and coming back to swat him across the face with his silver-tipped cane—the son of a bitch, if that was the way he wanted it…Bren cocked his forearm and back-handed his fist and arm across the man's upper body. But too late. The nickle-plate jabbed into the shirtfront and went off with a report that rang loud in the wooden coach. The young rider cried out, hands in the air, and was gone. The women were screaming now and the Dandy was firing again—the little dude son of a bitch, maybe he had raised hell at the Wilderness with his Texas Brigade. He was raising hell now, snapping shots at the two riders until Bren Early backhanded him again, hard, giving himself room to get out of the coach.

  He saw the young rider lying on the ground, the sorrel skitting away. He saw the driver kneeling, raising the shotgun and the two mounted men whipping their horses out of there with the twin sounds of the double-barrel reports, the riders streaking dust across the scrub waste, gone, leaving the young rider behind.