Roughstock (A Gail McCarthy Mystery)

by Laura Crum

  "Does he always travel that wide behind?" I asked Kris. While she jogged him again, I pointed out to her that the gelding seemed to be swinging his hind feet out as he traveled. "Is that just him, or is it different?"

  She shook her head. "I don't know. I've never noticed it before. He seems sound, though."

  "Yeah, he's sound." I watched Rebby trot again and said, "He's even on both sides." Giving him a B for soundness, I told Kris, "Keep an eye on him, though. I don't remember him being like that before."

  I handed Kris her card and turned to greet the next competitor. People were lining up in front of me, and I worked steadily for a couple of hours checking horses in and out. I had time only to note Kris's departure out of the corner of my eye; Rebby seemed to trot out of the checkpoint freely, and immediately picked up the lope, hard on Jazz's heels.

  Three hours later, more or less, I was checking the last couple of stragglers who were accompanying the drag rider-an officially designated person who rides last, making sure no one is abandoned on the course who needs help. The "drag" in this case was a fiftyish woman who'd competed in many a race; today she was just helping out. With her were a young girl on an old horse and a man on a recalcitrant mule.

  Both the old horse and the mule were doing okay, medically speaking, but their riders elected to take advantage of the gooseneck trailer parked at the checkpoint by the race staff, and accepted a free ride back to the starting point. The girl was worried about her twenty-three-year-old mount, and the man explained that the mule had already bolted off the trail several times without warning, once rubbing him off on a convenient tree. A long, bleeding cut on his forehead attested to this, and I examined it briefly, gave him some gauze to keep it clean, and suggested he might want to see a doctor.

  As he was pooh-poohing this suggestion, with the drag rider remonstrating firmly, the steady clip-clop of hoofs coming up the hill alerted us to the fact that the leaders had now made one lap and were coming in again, having already gone approximately forty miles.

  Craning my neck anxiously to see who was coming up the hill, I could hear the mutters from the race crew. "Jared, he'll be in front. "

  "I don't know, Rebby and Kris beat him last time." We all stared at the spot where the trail rose into view. Who was ahead?

  Jazz and Jared, it turned out, with Kris and Rebby right on their heels. The woman on the bay horse who had been with them earlier was nowhere in sight. Jazz and Rebby were both obviously tired now, shiny wet with sweat and puffing hard; both would take a significantly longer time to come down than the first time I'd seen them.

  Kris and Jared Neal were absorbed in cooling their horses. I stretched and ambled over to the edge of the bluff; my feet ached from standing in one place for hours.

  Sun warmed my shoulders and glinted off the blue of the distant ocean in dancing pricks of light, mocking the icy cold of early morning. It had turned out to be one of those changeable winter days that we got here in coastal California; one moment the sky was bright and sunny, the next it was darkly gray and threatening rain. A couple of times it actually spit a few scattered drops at us before, once again, the clouds would disappear. I'd spent most of the day taking my jacket off and putting it back on.

  For the moment it was shirtsleeve weather. I stared down the slope, thick with clumps of greasewood and occasional stands of live oak, to the Hollister Ranch. The barns and houses sat quietly in the weak winter sunshine, no humans visible. I could see three horses grazing peacefully in the pasture behind the largest barn. What would happen to the ranch, I wondered suddenly, now that Jack was gone?

  Someone tapped me on the back and I jumped a foot.

  "I'm sorry." It was Kris. "Could you check Rebby now?"

  "Sure. So how's it going?" I asked her, as I went over Rebby's vital signs.

  "Okay," she said, but she looked doubtful. "Ever since you pointed out to me that he's traveling weird behind I keep thinking he feels funny. But he's not limping."

  "No, he's not," I agreed as we jogged the horse. But I could feel the same frown that was creasing Kris's brow on my own face. Rebby was swinging his hind legs outward. It was subtle, but it was there.

  "So what do you think?" Kris asked anxiously.

  "I don't know what to tell you," I said slowly as I felt up and down both legs and flexed all the joints. "There's nothing obvious here and he's moving out freely. If this was his normal way of going I wouldn't think anything of it. But you don't seem to think it is."

  "I sure don't remember him being like this. But he wants to go."

  We both stared at the dark brown gelding. Despite being sweaty and obviously somewhat tired, his eye was bright and his expression alert. He didn't look the slightest bit uncomfortable or ready to give up.

  I marked him with a C for soundness and told Kris, "It's your call."

  She looked down and I could see the struggle on her normally quiet face. Kris was strongly competitive; she wanted to win this race. On the other hand, there was no doubt in my mind that she loved Rebby and wanted to do what was right for him. Emotions tangled; her jaw muscles tightened.

  "We'll go on," she said at last. "As long as he feels like he wants to. I won't push him.”

  I nodded. When she left the checkpoint a few minutes later, following Jazz, Rebby trotted out freely and seemed eager to pick up the lope. Whatever was bothering the brown gelding, if anything, couldn't be bothering him very much, I told myself. Horses that hurt don't move out like that.

  On the other hand, Rebby was a horse with tons of heart. "Quit" was not in his vocabulary. No matter how he felt, he'd probably be willing to try and go some more. I shook my head in confusion; the mannerism, lameness, whatever, that Rebby was displaying wasn't something I'd ever seen before. I simply didn't know what it meant, if anything.

  Two hours later, I finished up with the last of the stragglers, talked a few brief seconds to the drag rider, then hurried back to the finish line. Most of the competitors were already in camp, unsaddling and feeding their horses, by the time I made it.

  I zipped my jacket up to my chin as I got out of the truck and wished yet again for my wool beanie. The clouds had darkened once more and the sharp little wind was chilly with the advance of the winter evening. I hustled over to the area where Craig was jogging horses, wanting to get this over with.

  "Who won?" I asked him, as I accepted a race card from a woman with a sorrel saddle-bred gelding.

  "Jazz," he said briefly. "Rebby was second."

  I nodded and went back to work. By the time Craig and I finished all the post-race checks and gave the best-conditioned award to the bay Arab mare who had finished fifth, Kris had already loaded Rebby up and left. She hadn't even entered him in the best-conditioned class, knowing that his low marks on soundness would eliminate him and anxious, I was sure, to get him home.

  Hoping Reb would be all right and thinking I'd call Kris later to find out, I got wearily in my truck and bumped out of the parking lot, looking longingly forward to a glass of chardonnay.

  There was still an hour or so of daylight left, though, and the Hollister Ranch was only fifteen minutes away. I'd been out there before on a couple of calls, and I knew my way around the place. It wouldn't take long just to see if Bronc or Trav was home. That's what I told myself, anyway.

  NINE

  Ten minutes later I was down Empire Grade, past the university, and driving through the many new housing developments on the northern edge of Santa Cruz. Populated largely by university students, professors, alumni, and employees, I assumed. No doubt the developments were a boon to construction contractors, real estate agents, and local merchants, but they were not an asset to the scenery. Slowly but surely the ugly new tract houses and condos were creeping over the ground, encroaching on the open land to the north of Santa Cruz, pushing the city's boundaries ever outward.

  It wasn't two minutes after I passed the last stoplight on Mission Street that I turned into the entrance to the Hollister Ranch. The r
anch looked peacefully secluded, there in its hollow by the sea, but the nearest tract was less than a mile away. I wondered how long it would be before the old place was finally gobbled up.

  I parked my truck in the barnyard and got out. The big buckskin horse Bronc usually rode was tied to the hitching rail, and Bronc himself emerged from the largest barn and came walking in my direction, his arms held wide. I smiled at the sight of him.

  A short, feisty character in his sixties, Bronc was crudely flirtatious, hot-tempered, and tougher than nails. He and Jack had always appeared an odd duo, like a terrier and a wolfhound, and I'd often wondered how they ended up together.

  "Well, hi there, sweetheart; you finally come to move in with me?" Bronc closed in for a hug, which I gave him, then kissed me on the cheek. "Would you like to step into that house over there?" he whispered in my ear.

  I laughed and disentangled myself from his embrace. "Not today, Bronc. I came to say I'm sorry about Jack."

  The words made my voice solemn and Bronc's face grew correspondingly stern. "I'm pretty sorry about it myself."

  For a moment we were silent. "I know you and Jack have been ... were," I corrected myself lamely, "friends for years. It must be hard."

  Bronc jerked his chin up. "Forty years," he said shortly.

  "Didn't you guys used to ride saddle broncs together?" I asked, trying to get him talking.

  Bronc snorted. "Jack and I were roughstock riders-bulls, saddle broncs, bareback broncs-we weren't particular. Not like those prima donnas you see out there today."

  For a minute he was quiet, staring off across the barnyard, his expression unreadable. "I met Jack when I first went to work for his old man, right here on this place. I was twenty-five and flat broke from riding in the rodeos. Jack was a great big strapping kid of seventeen, just dying to learn how to ride a bucking horse."

  "And you taught him."

  "I damn sure did. His old man, Len Hollister was his name, hired me to break a string of horses for him. There were twelve of them, all big, strong geldings, anywhere from three to six years old. Never been touched." Bronc spat and cleared his throat. "See, how he came to have them was Len had a studhorse, a soggy-looking yellow horse, the kind of horse you don't see much anymore. He was big and quick, a cold-blooded son-of-a-bitch who would buck your ass off if he could. But he was a ranch horse-a horse you could part cattle on, or rope a steer, or ride forty miles in a day if you had somewhere to go. And his colts were just like him. Big and quick and double tough.

  "The reason the old man had a dozen of 'em standing around, all unbroke, is he didn't have anybody who could ride 'em. He was too old, and his hired hand was as old as he was, and the kid didn't know one damn thing about starting colts. So Len hired me for the summer to break them all."

  "And you stayed?"

  "That's right. I broke everyone of those bastards and worked my tail off with the cattle besides. The old man liked me. He asked me to stay on."

  "Did you teach Jack to ride broncs that summer?"

  "I didn't really have a lot of choice." Bronc laughed, his sharp old eyes lit with a memory I couldn't see. "The kid was dying to learn, wouldn't stay away from the bullpen where I worked those colts. I told him he was too big-he should have been a dogger, big men are good for that-but he wanted to ride roughstock. You never could tell Jack anything."

  Bronc seemed to run down at that, the light of his old memories dimmed by the darkness of recent events. I touched his arm gently. "I'm sorry about Jack. You must miss him."

  Bronc turned away abruptly and slapped the buckskin horse on the shoulder. "Willy, here, is the last of the old man's line. His mama was an own daughter of the yellow horse-Hondo, we called him."

  We both regarded the gelding with appreciation. Of course, I'd seen him before; he was the only horse I'd ever seen Bronc ride. Big for a Quarter Horse, all of sixteen hands, he was dark gold with a black mane and tail and black socks, and had the pronounced black dorsal stripe and zebra stripes on his legs and withers that were typical of buckskins. Despite Bronc's comments about the yellow stud and his ornery disposition, I thought Willy looked kind, and I knew he was a hell of a rope horse.

  "Willy's got a nice eye," I said.

  "Willy's a good one, all right. This sucker doesn't have a mean bone in his body. I had him standing out in the field here until he was four years old, just never had time to ride him. Then one day I got in a little early and saw him standing there and I said to myself, Well, I guess I'll ride the son-of-a-bitch.

  "So I took him down to the bullpen and I saddled him and damned if he didn't act like he'd been saddled every day of his life. So I just hung that snaffle bit in his mouth and climbed on. And off he walked, easy as pie."

  I smiled and agreed. "Some of them are like that."

  I doubt Bronc even heard me; he was rolling now, absorbed in his story, a trait I knew others found tiresome. I enjoyed listening to him, though-his stories seemed to bring another, earlier world to life.

  "So after I rode him around the pen a couple of times I just reached over and opened the gate and out we went. I rode him around that little twenty-acre hay field right over there" -Bronc waved a hand at a level area off to his left-"and then I just kicked him up into a lope. He never even humped his back. Two days later I took him on a gather."

  He looked back at the buckskin gelding as he spoke and slapped the horse's neck in a gesture of rough affection. He wasn't exactly petting him, not by my standards, anyway, but Willy seemed to take it as meant and neither threw his head nor sidled away, just stood there unmoving, as if to say, "I'm used to the old fart."

  Bronc stepped up to the horse and, resting one arm on his back, stood there looking over the buckskin rump across the darkening barnyard. The barns and employee houses surrounded us, hulking silvery-gray shapes in the winter dusk. Even though the natural hollow of the land and the buildings diminished the wind, it was still a long way from warm. In fact, I was shivering inside my jacket, but I wanted to keep Bronc talking.

  "Where's Travis?" I asked tentatively.

  Travis Gunhart lived in one of the two employee houses-Bronc lived in the other.

  "He went to town." Bronc was staring off toward the adobe ranch house, suddenly looking very much an old man. The cold, rapidly dimming light, I wondered, or the fact that his usually animated face was still for once? Bronc had to be, what? Sixty-five? Around that, I thought, though he usually impressed me as looking more like fifty.

  "I can hardly believe Jack's gone," he said at last, as if talking to himself. His eyes drifted to the south, where the sea, hidden now in the gathering darkness, murmured endlessly. "There's always been a Hollister on this ranch, ever since I've been here. And that's forty years."

  Poor old man, I thought sadly. He's outlived his life. Everyone who mattered to him is dead. Feeling ghoulish, but still wanting to know, I asked, "What will happen to it? The place. Will it be sold?"

  Bronc snorted, his old inimitable self in the turn of a second. "Goddamn developers. No, the sons-of-bitches won't get it. It goes to the state."

  "To the state," I parroted stupidly. "Why's that?"

  "Jack's will," Bronc said briefly. "He left the ranch to the state, to be part of Bonny Doon State Park. Wanted them to preserve it the way it is now. Like the Wilder Ranch and the Coe Ranch."

  "Oh," I said blankly, wondering what this meant. "Jack left everything to the state?"

  "No, not every thing, just this one little old five-hundred-acre ranch. The home ranch, we called it. Jack owned land all over California. All over Nevada and Oregon and Washington, too. But that's all part of the rest of his estate. It's just the Hollister Ranch that goes to the state."

  "So who gets the rest of his estate, do you know?"

  "Oh, I know all right." It was too dark to see well, but from the sound of his voice Bronc's old eyes were bright. "Jack showed me his will when he made it, right after he got a divorce from that last bitch. A couple of years ago it was." He w
as abruptly silent.

  He was baiting me, I thought. He knew I was curious and so was deliberately withholding the information, just to make me ask.

  All right, I'd ask. "So who gets it?"

  Bronc held his silence a moment, playing it out, but I wasn't really worried. He liked talking more than he liked not talking. After another second he grinned, his teeth a brief flash of white in the dusk. "His ex-wives."

  "His ex-wives. My God. Why?" As the words left my mouth I realized my comment was hardly tactful, but the shock behind it was certainly genuine. How many people left millions and millions of dollars to be divided among their ex-spouses?

  "Didn't have anyone else to leave it to, I guess." Bronc's voice was noncommittal. Why not you, I thought instantly, or Trav, but this time I kept it to myself. For a second we were quiet. Then I asked, "What will you do?"

  "Why, move in with you, of course. If you'll have me." Again the flash of teeth. Bronc laughed. "Naw, honey, I can stay here. Jack wrote it that the state had to let me live here till I died, and anything on the place that's portable-livestock, vehicles, whatever-is mine."

  "What about Trav?" Bronc's face seemed to shut down at that. "He can stay here, too," he said briefly and, I noted, uninformatively.

  But my mind was already shifting back to what I saw, suddenly, as the all-important question. "Jack's wives-ex-wives I guess-do they know what they'll inherit?"

  "Uh-huh. The damn fool went and told them."

  "Why?" I asked, completely nonplused.

  “It was Jack's way. He wanted them to know he did right by them. I think he felt guilty. Damn fool."

  "Guilty?"

  For a second I thought Bronc wasn't going to answer, but then he said, "Jack couldn't have kids, you know. He was sterile."

  I shook my head. I certainly hadn't known. Was this, I wondered, what Lonny had meant by "talk"? I'd always thought the gossip was about Travis being Jack's illegitimate kid. But somehow I didn't like to come right out and say this to Bronc.