Return to Red River

by Johnny D. Boggs

  He remembered Meeker challenging Dunson, saying the Englishman could do anything he wanted with his longhorns, but not Meeker’s. He was going to look over the herd, and Dunson had objected.

  Cherry Valance, with the dark eyes of a killer and the well-oiled revolver of a professional gunman, had asked Dunson if he planned on trying to stop them.

  Mathew had answered with words—“I would”—and with his revolver, which he had drawn cleanly from its holster and pointed it at the gunman from Valverde who was now riding for John Meeker.

  In the end, Dunson had explained his reasoning, his impatience, and his determination to get that herd to Missouri. He didn’t care how many good cattlemen and cowboys had been cut down by the road agents. He said he would pay Meeker two dollars a head when he got back from Sedalia. Meeker had agreed, and Cherry Valance had stayed—over Mathew’s objections. Dunson had hired the gunman, and even then Mathew had figured that eventually he would have to face down Cherry Valance. That didn’t happen. Dunson had faced Valance, and killed him—with some assistance from Tess Millay—but the bullet Valance had put in Dunson eventually sent Dunson under.

  * * *

  Thomas Dunson—and, yes, Mathew Garth—had resurrected Meeker’s cattle kingdom with that legendary drive to Abilene all those years ago. In fact, Mathew and Big John had combined trail herds to Kansas for two or three years after that first one. Later, in 1871, they had each sent two herds to Abilene.

  But Meeker was an old man. He looked ancient even before Mathew had donned the gray and joined up with Nathan Bedford Forrest to fight Yankees in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Kentucky. In 1874, Meeker turned the ranch over to his son, John Meeker Jr. A year later, and Mathew was serving as one of the pallbearers at Big John’s funeral. Within five years, the Meeker Ranch had collapsed. John junior had seen to that. Wild, restless, with no sense for money or ranching.

  “The punk needed a mother,” Miller said. Now he drank the bourbon.

  “I never had a mother, either,” Mathew pointed out. “At least, not after I was twelve.”

  “I did.” Miller dropped the glass in the drawer and corked the bottle and made it disappear, too. “Hated the old crone.”

  Mathew let the comment pass with a poker face. He thought about John Meeker Jr. Of the twenty-three sections he had inherited, he now had 160 acres—a quarter section—and that was only because Big John had been granted that for his service with Sam Houston during Texas’s fight for independence. And nobody in Dunson City—even the railroaders—would let John junior use the deed to cover a bet at a poker table or faro layout. Instead of Dunson City, Mathew sometimes thought, the town should have been named Meeker.

  “What are your boys doing?” Miller asked.

  “Skinning dead beeves,” Mathew said.

  “How much will that bring you?”

  Miller knew the answer already, but Mathew answered, “A dollar a hide.”

  “And the meat?”

  “Spoiled. We’ve been burying or burning what we can. Leave the rest for the coyot’s, wolves, ravens . . .”

  “And how many can a man skin in a day?”

  Mathew shrugged. “Depends on the man.”

  Miller stared. His dark eyes did not blink. The banker would have made a pretty good poker player, Mathew figured. He cleared his throat and told the banker what Miller wanted to know.

  “The hands working for me now can skin enough so that I can pay them their dollar a day and found, ship the hides to the tannery in Goliad, and have enough left over to buy grub for next month and keep everyone at the ranch fed and . . .” He almost said “happy.” Which would have been a bald-faced lie.

  “And how much longer will that last?”

  Mathew gave the banker a humorless grin. “Well, if you could loan me enough money for a few more whetstones, so my boys can sharpen their knives, we probably can go on for another year or two.”

  The banker frowned. “I see no profit in that loan for me, Mathew.”

  “I don’t, either. And I’m not doing it. Groot, Laredo, those boys . . . they won’t do it much longer, either. Besides, floaters are already drifting into the country. Cowboy crews from as far north as Nebraska. We’ll leave the skinning to them, and we’ll go back to cowboying. Putting a herd together.”

  “A herd?” Miller could not hide the skepticism in his voice.

  “That’s what we do in this country, Chico,” Mathew said.

  “Not anymore, Garth.” Chico Miller opened another drawer and pulled out a pad that was full of numbers and chicken scratches. He found his spectacles, put them on the bridge of his nose, and said, “The Diamond C is practically wiped out. I don’t think Henry Cressell’s spread will survive this year. The LX boys are doing what your men are doing, skinning carcasses, and they will be doing that till November. The XIT is looking at a loss of fifteen percent. Up in Donley County, one ranch lost fifty percent. The Texan who owed that spread decided he would eat a bullet for his breakfast.”

  The eyeglasses came off, and Miller stared hard across the desk.

  Mathew’s voice stayed calm. “Those ranches are all far north of here. Winter was harder there.”

  “It was damned hard here.” He dropped the pad into the desk drawer and returned with a copy of the Drovers Journal, jabbed a finger at a paragraph, and said, “More than two hundred thousand. That’s what this reporter says. More than two hundred thousand dead cattle. This winter has wiped out the market, maybe the entire industry, and not just in Texas. Across the whole West.”

  Mathew nodded. “Since when did you believe in newspapers, Chico?”

  The banker cursed, pushed the Journal aside, and frowned. He opened a box on the desk and pulled out a cigar, bit off the end, stuck the cigar in his mouth, and, as an afterthought, turned the box toward Mathew.

  Mathew shook his head.

  Miller grinned. “Love these things. Don’t know how they do it, but I’m addicted to these things. Imported from Havana. Cost me seven bucks to get a box here. In New York, they went for four bucks.” He did not light the cigar. Mathew had never seen Chico Miller smoke. He just chewed the cigars until they were soggy shreds. The banker’s expression quickly hardened. “Only a damned fool would attempt a drive after a winter like this one.”

  “They said the same thing about Thomas Dunson twenty years back,” Mathew said.

  “And they would have been right, too. Dunson should have wound up dead and forgotten like that man . . .” He snapped his fingers trying to recall the name. “Cummerbund.”

  “Cummerlan,” Mathew corrected.

  “Like I said,” Miller said, “forgotten.”

  Mathew cleared his throat. Leaning forward, he said, “Our losses will probably reach seven percent. No more—”

  The banker shot out a thick finger. “You don’t run as many cattle as the XIT.”

  “So I don’t have as many dead beef to skin. I’m not talking about the XIT, and you don’t care about the XIT. The XIT doesn’t give you any business, Chico, because it’s way up in the Panhandle. I’m here. I’ve made you a lot of money.”

  “And I don’t plan on losing a penny of it.”

  Mathew nodded. He let the silence fill the room and wondered if the clerk and those other banker types were eavesdropping, waiting, wondering what the New Yorker would say.

  “Laredo your trail boss?” Chico Miller asked at last.

  Mathew nodded. “He has been doing it since ’82.”

  “And you figure a loan would get you a crew hired, say a thousand—”

  Mathew shot out. “Say . . . twenty-five hundred or three thousand.”

  “That’s a lot of beef.”

  “Not every steer, bull, or heifer died this winter, Chico.”

  Chico Miller dribbled his fingers on the desk. He glanced at the first drawer he had closed, as if considering another drink, but the Seth Thomas clock began to chime, reminding the banker of just how early it was for a banker to be getting rooste
red.

  “Fifteen hundred longhorns in two herds?” Miller asked.

  “One herd,” Mathew corrected.

  “Denison?”

  Mathew’s head shook. “It’s too expensive to ship cattle from Texas. Right now.” He tilted his head toward the door. “That’s why all that railroad spur brings us is railroaders and trouble . . . for now.”

  “Then . . . Caldwell.”

  Again, Mathew shook his head. “Dodge City.”

  “Caldwell’s closer,” Miller said.

  Mathew nodded. “Caldwell pretty much closed the cattle market after last season.” Caldwell lay in Kansas just across the border from the Indian Territory. Mathew had trailed herds there back in 1879 and 1880, but that wild burg made Abilene or Ellsworth look like a Quaker prayer meeting camp. Not too long back, the city marshal of Caldwell had been killed—lynched, in fact, after getting caught trying to rob a bank in Medicine Lodge.

  “Well, I could . . .” Miller stopped, shook his head, and waved at Mathew. “Go on. I’m listening.”

  “Dodge City,” Mathew said, “gets more quality buyers from Chicago and Kansas City. Men with thicker checkbooks.”

  “From what I’ve heard, Dodge City is not exactly tame,” Miller said.

  “No cow town is.”

  Miller had picked up a pencil, began writing some numbers on a past-due notice, spent a minute doing multiplication and long division, then turned the sheet over and did some more ciphering. He studied what he had written, flipped the paper over, checked his work, then wadded the paper into a ball and tossed it toward the wastebasket, but missed. It landed on a mountain of other wadded-up papers.

  One of the dogs rose to his feet, stretched, and ambled to a bowl, where it began slopping up water.

  “Too much of a risk, Mathew,” the banker said at last. “Not enough profit for my bank. Not enough money for me. If I were you, I’d sell the ranch while you can. Go back to Memphis. Isn’t that where you first met your charming wife? Good city, Memphis. You can eat a lot of catfish.”

  “I don’t like catfish.” Mathew stood. Again, Chico Miller did not offer a hand to shake, but went back to his work while Mathew Garth walked out of the bank.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Janeen Yankowski tapped on the door as Tess Millay was climbing out of the bathtub and toweling herself dry.

  “Yes,” Tess said.

  The stout Polish woman stepped into the room and tilted her head back toward the new part of the house. “Man to see you, ma’am,” she said.

  Tess rubbed the towel over her hair, lowered it, and said, “A man.”

  Yankowski shrugged. “Tramp.”

  “And he wants to see me?” She tossed the towel aside and reached for her undergarments.

  “By name.”

  Men had asked for her by name back in Memphis, sometimes to their eternal regret.

  “Where is he?” Tess asked.

  “In Mr. Garth’s library.”

  Mathew, Tom, and Lightning—and the entire crew—would be out on the ranges now, skinning dead cattle to salvage their hides along that drift fence, or maybe beginning the gather. Tess was alone with only Janeen Yankowski, but she had been alone many times. In fact, twelve years earlier, she and two servants had fought off a gang of bandits who had ridden across the river in some idiotic attempt to relive those raids old Cheno Cortina, the Red Robber of the Rio Grande, had tried back in the late 1840s and during the War Between the States. She wasn’t afraid. She had never been afraid.

  “All right, Janeen,” Tess said. “Tell him I’ll be in directly. Ask him if he wants a drink of whiskey.”

  “No need.” The servant had already turned and was closing the door behind her. “Already he helped himself.”

  * * *

  He turned away from the window when Tess pushed through the door into Mathew’s library, and lifted the glass of whiskey to his leathery face covered with gray stubble. To call him lean would have been an understatement. The hat he held in the hand that did not hold the tumbler of good Scotch was ripped where the front brim met the already well-ventilated crown. Patches covered his duck trousers, the suspenders were caked with filth, and a piece of rawhide was wrapped around the foot of his left boot. He wore no vest, just a cotton shirt so thin you could practically see through it, and a frayed bandanna of what once might have passed for yellow silk.

  Both the Remington revolver and russet shell belt strapped around his waist, however, remained clean.

  Tess could smell him from here.

  Yet she smiled, and pulled the door closed behind her.

  “Teeler Lacey,” she said warmly.

  He seemed shocked, but he returned her smile, revealing only a few black teeth remaining in his gums. Quickly, he finished the whiskey and said, “You remember me.” He couldn’t quite believe it.

  “How long has it been, Teeler?” She showed him the Remington over-and-under derringer she had been hiding in the folds of her dress and dropped it on Mathew’s desk as she went to the bottle of Scotch.

  “Fifteen, by my recollections,” Lacey said. Tess held out the bottle for him, but he shook his head, wiped his mouth, and set the empty glass on the windowsill.

  She had seen Teeler Lacey before she had seen Mathew Garth or Cherry Valance or Thomas Dunson. He had come across Clark Donegal’s wagon train in the Indian Territory while scouting the best route for Mathew’s herd of longhorns—it was Mathew’s herd by then, with Dunson coming up from the south with his hired gunmen. Tess and the girls had fed the old trail hand sowbelly, biscuits, beans, and vinegar pie—and he had worked his horse into a lather on the way back to Mathew and the boys to tell them what he had discovered. Mathew and Cherry had called him crazy.

  “Mathew and I were on our way to Dallas,” she said. She lifted the Scotch, tasted it, and leaned against the desk. To keep that derringer close, just in case. Tess had always been careful, especially when it came to men. “We stopped in Waco, rented a rig, rode out to your place along the Brazos.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You were married. How is she?”

  He frowned hard. “Left me,” he said. “Nine years back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He limped over to the desk, only to remember that he had left the glass on the sill. He looked back for it—it must have seemed like it lay ten miles away—and when he turned back to Tess, she handed him her glass. He took it and gulped it down.

  “Lost the place two years later,” he said. “Been driftin’ ever since.”

  “I’m sorry, Teeler,” she said. “We had not heard.”

  “Yes’m. Don’t matter none.” He studied the empty glass, glanced at the bottle near Tess and her derringer. She made no offer. He did not beg. He put the glass on the edge of the desk and cleared his throat.

  “How’d y’all fare this winter?”

  Tess shrugged. “That remains to be seen.”

  He nodded and absently slapped his worn-out hat against his worn-out trousers. “Lots of folks in that same per . . . pre . . . per . . .”

  “Predicament,” Tess said.

  “Yes’m.”

  “Mathew’s not here, Teeler,” she said to fill the uneasy silence.

  “Yes’m. Figured that much. Rode up to the bunkhouse first. Groot wasn’t there.”

  “They’re all on the range. West section, I think.” She didn’t think. She knew exactly where the crews were working that day, at least, where they were supposed to be.

  She could see the sudden thought in the man’s pale eyes. He straightened, looked at the closed door, then out the window, then back at Tess Millay.

  “How’s ’em boys?” he asked suddenly, with excitement.

  “Tom?” she asked, but she knew whom Lacey meant.

  “Naw. I don’t reckon I ever met him. You talked ’bout him, though, when you come to visit me and . . . Helen . . . that time near China Springs. The other one. The one I held for a jiffy.”

  “He’s fin
e.” Tess did not use Lightning’s name. “Full grown,” she said. “He and Tom both.”

  “Stampede.” Teeler Lacey nodded. “That’s what we named him. Stampede. On account it was—”

  “Lightning,” Tess said stiffly. Yet suddenly she smiled. “I don’t know why we didn’t change that silly name.”

  He snorted. “Ain’t no sillier than Teeler, ma’am.”

  She smiled warmly at that and thought about asking Lacey if he would want another drink. But she did not.

  “I hear that Mathew might be hirin’,” Teeler Lacey said at last.

  “Where were you when you heard that?” Tess asked. She wondered how far the news might have spread across the state that Mathew Garth was considering a trail drive to Kansas.

  “Sanderson.” He waved his old hat in the general direction.

  That wasn’t too far.

  “Sheriff tol’ me as he was openin’ the door to my cell.” He nodded an apology. “Been some lean times of late, ma’am.”

  “For us all,” she said.

  “Yes’m. You reckon Mr. Garth . . . that he . . . might be . . . I’m still a good cowhand, ma’am.” He patted his leg. “Yank saber give me a limp when I walk, but no one can ride . . .” He stopped, lowered his head. “Well, ma’am, I’m sorry. Don’t mean to brag or nothin’.”

  “Wait in the bunkhouse, Teeler,” she said. “You’ll have to ask Mathew or Laredo—Laredo Downs is the foreman here. You remember Laredo, I’m sure.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Mathew leaves the hiring and firing to Laredo these days. Wait in the bunkhouse. It’s getting late, and they should be along directly. But I’ll have Janeen—that’s my house servant—I’ll have her fix you up something to eat. Does that suit you, Teeler?”

  “To the ground, ma’am.” His head bobbed, and he slapped on his hat, which sent dust drifting across Mathew’s desk. “Yes’m. But I don’t want to put y’all out none. I’ll just heat up some coffee whilst I waits . . . iffen that’s all right with you.”

  She said, “Nonsense. Janeen will bring over a plate of food. We don’t hire everyone who comes here, Teeler, but no one ever leaves our ranch hungry. You go on now. It’s good to see you, Teeler. It’s real good to see you.”