by Rusty Davis
“Your problem, son. The War Between the States ended in 1865, and that is six long years in the past. You took your time coming back here. That’s your business. Not my problem if the ranch fell apart and your family sold to those women.”
“Never got sold. Nothing was ever filed with the territory. Name of Carrick will still be on the deed, wherever it is. That means it’s mine because I’m the only one in the world that’s got a legal claim to that land.”
“Paper don’t tell a man where to run his herd,” Jones said angrily, spitting on the floor to punctuate his disgust. “Ink and paper don’t mean a thing. Out here, a man has what a man takes in his own God-given hands and holds onto so tightly no one can pry it away. Not one inch more. You ought to know that.”
“Wasn’t always that way. Used to be there was land enough for everybody.”
“That is not the way this range works now, Carrick. When I was in the ditches at Petersburg with flies and shells all around me, I told myself no man was going to make me live like that again. I had lived back in old New York State, where they figured people like me were made to work the mills or fix the wagons so somebody born in some family that had what they call breeding got to be fed from a silver spoon. I was not going back to that life. I made some fast money in Virginia selling things the rebels left behind in Richmond. Then I came out here.” He fidgeted in his chair and started to get up. Carrick moved the gun.
“Shot in the leg. Bothers me to sit too long. Put it away. I won’t call anyone and you ain’t gonna kill an unarmed man or you would have done it by now.” Jones stood with some difficulty, braced himself on the desk, and walked around the room. Carrick holstered the gun.
Jones stopped by the huge set of windows. The light shone full on his face as he looked out at the land. “Out here, Carrick, a man can reach out and grab onto a dream like an Easterner reaches out and picks an apple off a tree. It’s that easy. All you got to do is reach hard and hang on. I came out here; this place was a ruin. Look at it now! I built that house next to this one; it’s got more furniture and trimmings than the rest of the range combined. Once the army pushed out those Indians, this land was there for the taking. Them women want to build a ranch, more power to them. They won’t ever do it because they don’t know how. They’re women. It takes a man.
“You know how many nights I spent in a saddle; how many days on a horse? I built this by the right of my own work, and I will grow it as big as I want. I’m not going to be cut up and hemmed in by whiny women or an old weasel like Francis Oliver or pestered by the thieves in the badlands. Not many times in history, Carrick, can a man walk out in God’s good sunshine and build an empire out of his own hard work and nothing else. This is one of those times. One of these days real soon I’m going to have me a son. He will own land beyond anyone’s wildest dreams because I won’t let anyone or anything stop me.” As Jones talked, his hands waved and his voice rose with the fervor of a tent revival preacher.
Jones stopped and put down his hands. “The Crowleys mean nothing to me, Carrick. They’ve already been replaced. Heard what happened. Their bad luck. A man makes his own luck. The old Bar C and the old range you knew before the war got as much to do with the future as the Indians. It’s a new world, Carrick. This Wyoming we’re living in is for the strong, not the weak. I’m not gonna tell a man where to ride, but them women had their time, and it’s over. Sell or not, they’re done. Ride their range and tell me what you see. The place is sagging and ready to go under. What’s meant to go under should go under, so the rest of us can thrive. That’s the law of the land, Carrick. That’s the law of the range, the law of nature. Wolves don’t feed the weak; they kill the weak. I want to build this valley, Carrick. I want it strong. You can’t build strong and tolerate weakness. I will not allow it in my own ranch, and I refuse to countenance others taking up land to no purpose.”
Jones limped back toward Carrick. “You want a job, you come to me. I respect a man with the iron to come straight up and face me. A man who lives that way should be working with me, not against me. You want to fight for some silly dream about the world you left behind you, it’s gonna buy you nothin’ but trouble. In the end, Carrick, you’re going to lose. Even Bobby Lee found that out when he faced Grant: It’s not how good you fight; it’s how big you are. Double J is bigger than anything you’ve ever seen. Ride around and see. I built it, Carrick; I built it to last. Nothing is going to stop me.”
His oration finished, Jones landed behind the desk with an audible grunt.
Carrick put his palms on the edge of the desk and leaned in close to Jones. “Don’t think I can let you swallow Bar C.”
The bushy brows twitched but Jones’s glare never wavered. “Don’t think you can stop me.”
Carrick looked across the gulf that separated him from Jones. He felt a tinge of regret. In another place, he’d have gladly worked for a man like Jones. Not here. “Guess we won’t be talkin’ much more, then.”
“Not much to say. Change your mind, you’re welcome here, Carrick. One more thing to tell you: I got rules. I don’t back-shoot or lie or steal. That Oliver is a whiny man who moves like a worm in the light when he gets cornered. That’s not me, Carrick. I live this life straight with the Lord, and straight with every man. I don’t shoot women. If I did, I’d have their range by now. But let me tell you it’s not being mealy-mouthed that builds dreams, Carrick.” They looked at each other across Jones’s desk—poker players dealing with lives and land instead of cards and chips.
Jones slapped his hand on the desk again with the sound like a .45 going off. “Tell them stubborn fools to sell, Carrick. Tell them I’ll double the last offer. I’ll triple it. There! You got that? Triple it. But if they don’t take what they can get, they got a fair chance to end up with nothin’. Understood?” Lions did not roar louder.
Carrick understood. The war had sent thousands of men West with dreams and ambitions. He’d seen a hundred men like Jones who were ruthless in building their dreams, regardless of what they did to anyone else’s. Men with a code they lived by. Greed was too simple a word for it. They were driven by pride, by glory, by something Carrick knew could make a man say all kinds of noble things and hire folks to do the things that got the job done any way that made the boss happy.
“We’ll be seeing each other,” Carrick said, impulsively holding out his hand.
Jones took it. The door burst open. A man Carrick’s age came in, stunned to see Jones talking to anyone in the stronghold that was his private sanctum. Carrick thought he focused on the handshake and got very pale very fast. The man, tall and thin with what looked like a boiled collar on his shirt, started to call for help.
“Get back in here, Henry!” Jones roared. “This is Carrick. Family used to run that old Bar C range before the war; the range the Lewis women are running into the ground. Carrick and I have been talking. Carrick, this here’s Henry Petersen, my ranch manager. Never thought I’d see the day I got too big to remember all the numbers but it came and Henry keeps track of it all for me.”
Jones may not have known the history of the name, but the ranch manager reacted when he was introduced. He tried hard to hide it. Petersen was nervous. Carrick wondered how much Jones knew about the details of running his empire. A big man with a bad leg might not ride as much as he might, Carrick thought.
“If you want that job, and I’m not here, see Henry,” Jones added, telling his manager Carrick had free run of the range. Then he turned the full power of his gaze on Carrick. “I think we understand each other.” Carrick knew he was being dismissed. He’d come to learn. He had. Jackson Jones was going to die grasping for one more acre, and nothing short of death would stop him.
Carrick was restless, or maybe he was putting off the bad news he would bring to the women. He rode up to Black Wind Pass. The name itself was from an old Cheyenne legend that when the hot, wild winds blew through the pass and into Buffalo Horn Valley, they brought a black wind of doom. Because the worst s
torms had an east wind that would come from that direction there was the usual level of practical information in the legend.
Crazy Uncle Charlie’s cabin—he recalled being told from the time he could remember—would never last another winter and the old fool would freeze to death when the snow buried it. He’d lived there a lot in his teens when the Carrick ranch house was nothing but fights; Charlie didn’t care about much, told good stories, and enjoyed going any way the rest of the world wasn’t headed. There it stood. The place was an odd mix of decay and decorum. Somebody had planted a few flowers; a wood pile not far away had rotted over the years. The roof had a patch on it that looked new. He guessed the shack was some place people went when they had no place else. At least that much had not changed.
The pass was the one place where the valley was visible. Shaped like a buffalo horn, it curved around from the narrow east end to the wider west end. Carrick thought about making camp near the shack. He’d been lucky last night. No sleep meant no screaming wide awake in the middle of the night when it all came back. They all screamed at the hospital, all the ones that survived Andersonville. No one cared there. No one cared when he was in jail. Some nights on the plains he’d awakened to find Beast looking down at him. It was getting better, but he wasn’t taking chances. He was not having the women look at him the way folks did with pity when men got crazy. He’d tell them it wasn’t right for a man to camp with two women like that. It wasn’t his home. He wasn’t their rider. Folks would say things if he stayed any time at all. Not right for Miss Reb. They’d see that. The house brought back memories. Too many. Nope. Staying there would give the nightmares the chance to ambush him and humiliate him. The cabin was safer.
The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea of staying at the shack. The wind felt clean. Putting distance from the old place reflected his state of mind. He did not know what he would do next. Ride on if the women sold? Stay if they didn’t and stand up to Jones the way he wanted to? Maybe he’d hole up here and see what happened. After all, he wouldn’t be the first man who made a fool decision because there was a woman involved whose face kept wandering into thoughts when it probably shouldn’t.
He took his time riding back to the old Bar C. He’d eaten enough the night before to go without for a day at least, so there was no rush on that score. Beast picked his way over rocks and along trails that had held untold wonders when he had been a boy. He remembered Georgia boys trying to tell the Union army that they didn’t care about slavery; they were fighting for the land. He could understand that better now that he had come back. He had no reason to stay; but even after a day, he was starting to feel that no one was going to make him leave. Not again. Not ever again. Man needed air and food and a horse and gun, but above all, a man needed a place to belong. This was his.
Predictably, Jessie Lewis took the news of Jones’s offer calmly and without comment while her niece peppered her speech with anger.
“I hope you told him I’ll shoot his head off before I move out for the likes of him,” Reb scolded. “I hope you stood up to him like a man. That wife of his who thinks she’s so important. She cheated in that contest where she got the sharpshooting ribbon. You remember, Aunt Jess? The judges were against me. Both of them, those high and mighty Double J people. Why, I’d like to . . .”
“Rebecca Lewis! Less violence in your language, please. There must be a way to resolve this that will not result in violence.”
Reb looked at Carrick. “Not my range; not my fight,” Carrick observed. “Don’t like seein’ Bar C carved up and gone, don’t like it at all, but unless you got a hole card I don’t see, Jessie, he’s got all the aces. He can wait you out until you go under. Unless . . .”
“Gutless like all of them,” Reb shot back. “If you wanted your old range back, you could have it by standing up to him. What’s the matter with you? Another man who is all talk but no action?”
Reb eventually calmed down. She even, with only moderate prompting, apologized if Carrick took anything she said the wrong way. Since Carrick figured there was only one way to take it, it wasn’t very contrite, but her obvious clumsiness in having to apologize at all was worth a smile Carrick made sure was hidden.
“What I was sayin’, Jessie, was that the only thing you can do, if you don’t want to cave and you don’t want to sell, is find a way to make the ranch pay. Jones thinks you are going to fail and wants to be the first to scoop up the land. If you can make the ranch pay, Jones might decide to back off. He doesn’t respect anything but strength. Don’t like to be the bearer of bad news, but the man knows the ranch isn’t runnin’ like it needs to if you want to survive. If you can’t find a way to make this land pay for you, Jess, I don’t see how there’s a good ending in all of this for you and Reb. Might not be today or even this year, but if nothing happens, you end up losing.”
“Not without a fight,” Reb spat out. “Nobody gets this while I’m breathing.”
“I think what Rebecca might be trying to say, Mr. Carrick, is that we will do anything we must to keep the ranch,” Jess Lewis interjected. “You lived here when it did pay. If you can think of something we have not tried, we would be most grateful.”
Carrick could not imagine what they had not done in the past 10 years, but made noises that he would try to think of something. Not likely. He’s probably forgotten all he ever knew these past years. Everything except guns. Those he knew too well.
Neither woman liked his idea to stay at the pass for the time being while he was trying to figure out his own plans. It didn’t help that he was trying not to explain that the house wasn’t really his home—it was the place where the ghosts of the past lived. He wasn’t going to explain the nightmares. Never. If they sold, which he figured they would because it was the only sensible thing to do, they might be gone before that ever came up.
Reb was, as always, the more vocal; wondered what deal Carrick had cut that he didn’t want to be seen at the ranch. Carrick lost his temper.
“Well, what do men say about a girl when a man who likes a girl stays with that girl in the same house when they’re not married, Reb?” he asked, stung into bluntly bringing up one of the main reasons he didn’t want to be there right now while avoiding what he did not want to say. She looked like she had been slapped as her face went red. Jessie seemed to be stifling a laugh, but Carrick could not imagine what was funny. There were no further objections.
“I’m not runnin’ off. I don’t rightly know what to make of everything, and I need to figure this out in my own time in my own way. I slept in that shack plenty with my Uncle Charlie before the war and I want to sleep there again.” It was true. It didn’t say why he had to be there, but that was fine.
Reb brightened a bit when he asked her to show him the range in the morning so that he could learn where the stock was. “If I’m supposed to help out until you get a real crew or until you figure out what you want to do, it might be useful for me to know where you got your critters hid,” he said.
“ ’Bout time you said something that made sense,” Reb grumbled.
Carrick rode off to the shack with conflicting emotions. The fight wasn’t his. The land wasn’t his—not anymore. But the truth was, Carrick wanted to fight. It was all he knew how to do. Although it stuck in his craw to give in to anyone, the safest thing for Reb and Jessie was to sell and move along. Women weren’t made to be dragged into a range war. Even when they wanted one.
CHAPTER FIVE
Reb was waiting for him, mounted, when he and Beast rode up early. She was sitting atop a black stallion; not a ladylike horse, but one born for saddle work. Her black hair spilled out from under a tan, broad-brimmed hat. She was wearing an old brown leather jacket that was work-stained. Her pants were tucked into a pair of high-top boots. Her posture radiated contentment. She informed him the horse’s name was Arthur, after some legend about a king who could never be conquered.
“Thought you were sleeping the day away,” she chided as he app
roached. “Arthur is the fastest horse around Buffalo Horn Valley except for that wild stallion Jackson Jones thinks is his but can’t ever catch. See if you can keep up.” She and the stallion were gone in a wink. Carrick found himself with that dumb-fool smile on his face only the girl seemed to cause. There was only one thing to do. Follow!
He caught up with Reb under the shade of an oak that had been cut in half by lightning when Carrick was a boy. It had regrown itself in a crooked fashion, looking like a tree that should blow over in a breeze.
“They never teach you how to ride?” she challenged.
“Bein’ polite to a helpless little woman,” he jibed back.
Reb’s lips compressed. Her good intentions were warring with her instincts to fight back until she realized the man was trying to incite an explosion. “For the sake of behaving the way Aunt Jess says a lady is supposed to behave when dealing with a range bum, I will declare a truce for the moment, Carrick,” she said. “Now, do you want to see the range?”
They rode side by side as the morning drifted past. Each took turns pointing out features of the range. Cougar Rock had so eroded Reb didn’t recognize it; other changes that were new to him were favorite haunts of hers. The creek road had spots near the water that were overgrown—places where she hid from the world.
She had made some biscuits that served as their lunch. They ate in the shade of a giant pine. He asked a question about the land and her attachment to it. “Most folks, dirt is dirt. Maybe they fight back to save a house. You don’t give an inch, Reb. Curious.”
