Rancher's Law

by Dusty Richards

  Still angry with him, Luther scowled at the dog. “And a damn foolish one, too. Why, that old bear would have eaten him in two bites.”

  “Probably give her some real indigestion.” Hirk chuckled.

  “Probably would. Ben, you either forget bear hunting or get ready for dog heaven. On second thought, you’re going to the hot place. Lot hotter than up here.” He left the panting Ben at his mud hole and went off to help Hirk cook the evening meal.

  They found Stearn’s half-walled tent in mid morning. At first, they reined up at the iron pump over the dug well and took turns filling the dry tank and watering their horses. Luther had seen several B Bar branded cattle in the area, so the roundup would be perhaps two weeks or longer. Of course, the ones they didn’t get up could be cut out in the range wide fall gathering.

  The tent stood on a knoll with a hitch rack and an iron cot inside, made up neatly. The inventory included a camelbacked trunk, a dry sink, a couple of captain’s chairs, and a small table. The iron stove served for his heat and cooking, a rusty stove pipe went out through a metal patch in the yellowing canvas, which let in a mellow light on the contents. Well-worn carpet covered the floor, though Luther decided there was dirt beneath it.

  “Find anything?” Hirk asked, sticking his head in the flap.

  “No, I figured them deputies must have checked it already.”

  “They never found Dikes’s diary.” He waded over and threw open the chest. “Well, I’ll be a horned toad.” The cowboy reared back with a picture frame in his hands. “Here’s Eve!” he said, and turned the painting toward Luther.

  The canvas bore a well-endowed nude woman lying on a fainting couch. The picture was expertly done in oils, and the artist spared no details. She even wore a small smile on her face.

  “Wonder what bar he stole that out of?” Hirk handed it to him and recovered another unframed one from the trunk. It obviously was an uncompleted artwork of cattle and mountains. “You reckon that Stearn did these?”

  Beside him, Luther saw some more frames in the trunk and could smell the paint thinner and turpentine strong enough coming from the chest: He drew out another. It was of a naked woman wading in a stream. Her skin shone a stark white, but freckles were sprayed over her shoulders.

  “Oh, damn!” Hirk slapped his hand over his mouth and his eyes widened in shock. “You reckon she posed for him?”

  “You know her?”

  “Hell, yes. That’s Matt McKean’s wife, Taneal, wading in Christopher Creek. Why, I’d know her anywhere with or without her clothes on. Oh, damn, you reckon McKean knows about this picture?” He tapped his finger on the hard-stretched cloth to make his point.

  “No. He’d surely burn them,” Luther said, taking off his hat and scratching his head. No man would have left his wife’s nude picture for all the world to see, no matter how demure it looked. Steam was an accomplished artist. Burtle understood Shakespeare and Dikes wrote of him. Three one-eyed jacks in these pastoral Alps with the singing pines, and all of them dead by rope.

  Had McKean’s wife posed for Steam? Hard to ride up and ask a proper married woman that question. Steam probably snuck up and spied on her. He wondered about Tillie. Sure would be hot in Fort Smith by this time of year. He kind of liked the cooling gusts of midday wind sweeping his face. The puffy clouds on the move northward promised an afternoon shower somewhere along the front of the rim country.

  “What’re we going to do about these?” Hirk asked.

  “Leave them, they ain’t ours.”

  They looked at them again, returned the paintings to the trunk and closed the lid. Both men nodded and went outside. Luther looked back. A strange enough deal, but none of his business.

  He searched around for Ben. About that moment with an I don’t-care-look on his face, the bulldog came around the corner. Good enough. He was fine. In the morning, they’d head back to Fortune and hire a crew. By his rough tally, there were over three hundred head bearing the B Bar brand. Two of the big ranchers remained that he hadn’t met Reed Porter and Crain. Luther wondered what they were like.

  In the evening shadows, campfire smoke swirling around his pans, Luther stirred the beans and looked at Stearn’s half tent. A man could surely be surprised. He never expected to find impressive artwork inside it. Why, the ranny must have taken lessons. Luther had seen his share of barroom nudes painted to pay a bar bill or collected by the saloon owner for the mutual admiration of his customers. The largest one he could think of hung in Dodge City behind a famous polished bar whose name escaped his mind at the moment. He would never forget her open, suggestive wantonness nor her ample, nearly life-sized proportions. They called her Lizzie Dodge. He closed his eyes, recalling Tillie, then watched a line of cows and calves cross the valley headed east.

  “Water up there?”

  “Yeah. Over that ridge. They know where it is,” Hirk said, lounging on his side and smoking a roll-your-own.

  Plenty of water, too, near where Tillie resided, though by early July in most years the riverboats had to wait for a rise to get that far upstream. Shame he couldn’t forget her. She wasn’t the first in his life, nor he hoped the last. She simply made a bigger mark. He tossed a pinch of grass in the wind and heard thunder roll in the distance. They might need Stearn’s tent before the afternoon was over.

  “You decided if we should do something about that trunk?” Hirk asked.

  Luther shook his head. “We better leave it all here.”

  Hirk nodded as if that satisfied him.

  14

  The stage left Papago Wells with a great jerk and shoots. A whip cracked and they were off in what the major considered his ride to hell. He shared the coach with the stiff-backed woman in her thirties, who last smiled when she whipped some boys in her classroom for putting a toad under some papers on her desk. No, he made up that part about Miss Hmm. In fact, at the moment, he knew less about her than anyone he’d ever shared a stage with.

  He could recall between Tucson and Pacacho Peak how he unlaced a girdle for a lady rancher from Chino Valley, who was about to die in the confines of the newly purchased garment. A pleasant shady lady rode with him on the stage to Ash Fork, and then took the same train to St. Louis when he went on to Fort Smith to hire Luther Haskell. He wondered how Luther was doing in the mountains on his cattle buying business and investigation of the lynching.

  “Going to get hot,” he said to her, wiping his forehead with the kerchief that Mary had ironed. The drum of the horse hooves, wheels whirling, and the shouts of the driver all formed a rush that swept them across the flat desert that was studded with giant saguaros, great patches of prickly pear and the leafless weeping Palo Verde, the greenest of them all.

  “I am told the army took temperatures of one twenty in this region at a place called Gee-lah-Bend that we will pass through,” she said with a primness that he expected.

  “Gila Bend is about halfway.”

  “You say Hee-lah.”

  “Yes. A Spanish word. G is an H sound.”

  “Oh, you must be proficient at their language to know that.”

  “No, ma’am. I’m still learning it. In the Army, I had a scout named Jesus who did all my translating.”

  “J’s are H sounds, too?”

  “Yes. You’re going to Yuma?”

  “I would know of no other sensible reason to ride this bucking bucket than to go there. It is an absurd abomination for anyone to have to ride in such conveyances. They tell me they are building rails to there, but they are not completed.”

  “Southern Pacific. They’re coming along with it.”

  “Coming along! They should be shot en masse for not having those tracks finished.” At that moment the coach jolted. It tossed them from side to side, then a dip caused her to suck in her breath. “Total abomination,” she gasped.

  “I take it you aren’t a resident of Yuma?”

  “Resident? No, no. I am going to see about my uncle’s estate that he willed to me.” She made a
shocked face at the rotating cloud of dust that boiled in the coach from a dust devil. Then she pawed at the swirling dust with her gloved hands, all an exercise in futility.

  “Sorry, I tried to miss that one,” the driver shouted, and went back to urging on his teams.

  “He can’t miss the bumps in the road. How did he expect to miss that dust devil?”

  The major found the question humorous and laughed. Then with a look of shock, her features melted and she managed a few chuckles.

  “Are you not put out with this primitive mode of transportation?”

  “Beats walking,” he said, considering the oven-like conditions beginning to heat up with the sun’s journey upward.

  She rolled her brown eyes toward the ceiling as if looking for some celestial help from this dilemma. “But only barely.”

  “Barely.” He smiled at her and wondered about the chasers and those being pursued, who were somewhere ahead of them. Sure hoped they didn’t end up in the midst of their confrontation. Oh, well. He needed to learn about the honesty of the prison contractors and solve that matter, then get back to Mary.

  “You live in Yuma?” she asked

  “Preskitt,” he said.

  “Is that the capital? I thought it was called Prescott?”

  “It’s spelled like that, but up there folks say Preskitt.”

  “I see.”

  “When in Rome …” He looked across at her.

  “Yes, you do as the Romans.” Then she folded her arms over her rather flat bosom. Squirming to find a comfortable place on the leather seats stuffed with horse hair, she looked at him about ready to give up even trying her facade of “putting up with it all.”

  They made the Soda Springs stage stop and he helped her down to allow her to use the facilities out back. He went the other way and behind the adobe-walled horse corral, and drained his bladder in the coarse, thirsty ground.

  What was contained in those purple saw-toothed mountains that edged his world at Soda Springs? Be interesting to ride over and examine them. Pan for gold in the dry washes. Read the strange crude signs on the canyon walls that some ancient Indians had left a record of their time spent in this waterless land.

  Many times on an Army campaign, Too Gut, the Apache scout with his company, led him up a deep canyon and showed him the pictures of men, women, animals, and weapons left by the “old ones” pictured on a rock face. Some of the artists were good as modern-day ones. Others drew crude children’s art, but real.

  “Who were the ones that did this?” he asked the smug Apache who crouched down, always watching with his repeating rifle across his knees.

  “Old ones. Part ghosts.” The only answer he had for the drawings.

  He ambled back to the stage in the hot wind. Miss Hmm was outside on the porch, fanning her face with a funeral house fan. The first thing popped in his mind: Had she inherited a Yuma funeral parlor? She would be good at that.

  The horse handlers and the driver fooled with a piece of harness on the outside horse of the second team. Obviously, immediate repairs were necessary. The driver sent one of the Mexican boys after something. He soon returned and the leather tug was replaced. Their actions drew another look at the sky from the jittery woman.

  “Better get in. We’re fixed,” the driver assured them.

  “I hope so,” she muttered under her breath.

  In late afternoon through the dust, Gila Bend’s huddle of low-built structures looked blood-red against low sun. But the closer the stage grew to the main stop, it took on the weathered adobe hue of dirt. Rushing up the narrow streets, the major wondered why with all the worthless land about the place, they hadn’t taken more room to build wider ones. Must be a Spanish custom, for Tucson, too, had the same cramped streets winding around it. Perhaps safety from the bloodthirsty bands of Apaches who raged over this land for two centuries led them to build such narrow ones. The Apaches had deprived the Mexicans, and the king of Spain before them, from ever making more than stabs at civilizing and drawing any commerce from the region.

  The stage stopped in a clatter of brake blocks on the iron rims, which drew a moan from Miss Hmm.

  “You can get a meal here,” the driver announced. “Thirty minutes.”

  “In thirty minutes?” she asked in disbelief. Then she stuck her head out to examine the palm frond–covered, dust-floored porch. She accepted his aid to dismount, and skirt in hand, took the driver’s directions.

  The major wondered if the two sets of riders had reached that place. Nothing was mentioned at any of the previous change stations about them. He hadn’t pressed for information, but even the chance of being in the middle of their final resolution with her along concerned him.

  She joined him at one of the long tables. He felt she did so more because of her fears than wishes. Several sleepy-eyed Latinos loafed about Some might have been Indians, but they all looked rather introspectively at the straight-backed lady in black. The kind of looks men gave a woman when they wondered what she would look like in the buff. He was quite certain they would find hers to be a rather angular form, shaped by bones close to the skin. They would be disappointed at their discovery, he decided as he drank the alkali-tasting coffee to pass the time.

  The woman in charge served them each a tin plate of frijoles in a brown gravy and a stack of black-spotted corn tortillas. With some coarse salt on the table, he managed to season his enough to make them palatable.

  “Those hot chilies in them?” She pointed at his food with a long finger.

  “No, they aren’t bad.” He passed her the bowl of salt which had a grayish cast and was in chunks. “Crush some salt and try it.”

  “How?” she asked, looking in dread at the salt cellar.

  “I used my spoon.”

  “Did they wash it?”

  “Ma’am, you know as much as I do.”

  With a shake of her head, she used her dress to polish the dull spoon. Between bites, he watched her mash the granules and spread them over the beans on her plate. She made a great effort to stir them all around in delaying tactics he felt postponed the time she must orally accept them.

  “You think they’re all right to eat?”

  “They aren’t sour,” he said, and toasted her with his next spoonful.

  She took her first bite and issued the most disgusting sound he ever heard. He wondered if she’d swallow them. But with perseverance, she finally managed to choke the small spoonful down.

  With a face that two lemons could not have made any more sour, she went, “Ah, bad.”

  To keep from chuckling, he wiped his face with his kerchief. Then when he thought he might have to go outside to control his amusement, she smiled at him and that gave him permission to laugh aloud. The rest of the onlookers seated around the wall laughed, too, harder than he did. They raised enough dust slapping their legs that it caused her to sneeze. It must have been the first sneeze a gringo lady ever made in that stage station, for it only added to their mirth.

  Her hand shot out and stayed his hand. “I am certain this must be a mistake.”

  “The food?” he asked with a frown, after deciding their English was the foreign language in this remote place.

  “No, we’re in a lunatic bin.” Frowning seriously, she darted her gaze around to indicate their company. Then she laughed freely and shook her head in defeat.

  He nodded in agreement, then watched in approval as she fed herself several more spoons of the beans. No matter the quality of the food, he knew from his Army days one needed some form of sustenance to survive such trips.

  Their stage finally went off into the crimson sunset in a clatter of hee-yaws and pounding hooves on the baked caliche. The desert swallowed the day into twilight. The sun’s blast released its hold on the super heat and he wondered if he would be able to sleep the rest of the way.

  But suddenly, there were shots. They sounded like Chinese firecrackers at first, and the Major scrambled for his Colt. Orange flairs lit the night. Angry words
of Spanish filled the darkness. Orders to give up. More blasts. The driver gave a shout about being hit. Then the coach swung to the right, and the major knew they would turn off. He dropped his revolver and tackled her. Despite the screams in his face, he wrapped his arms around her, in a cocoon hoping to break part of their crash as the coach struck ground and skidded on its side.

  Dust boiled in. The cracking of splintering wood sounded like shots. Some of the horses were either down or injured; he could hear their shrill, pain-filled protests. His head hurt where he had hit the divider by the door. In choking dust and darkness they slowly released their embrace and he looked closely at her ashen facial features.

  “Anything broken?” he asked in a whisper. His ear turned to listen for the words and location of the highwaymen.

  She barely shook her head, frozen in his arms. “How about you?” she asked in a hushed voice.

  “I think I am fine. Need to find my gun.” He raised with the side of the coach under him and the benches piled on top of them. They untangled slowly and he winched at his hip that he had hurt in the wreck. She wrestled with the seat and he used his hands to feel for the Colt. It had to be there. His fingers found nothing.

  Outside in the night, there were horses coming hard, and voices. Words spoken in a tough dialect he didn’t underhand, but they told him enough. They were the outlaws.

  “Where is it?” she hissed. Feeling anxious over his loss, he shook his head. Crouching, they moved the seat cushions and remained low enough not to show themselves above the sides.

  “Must have fallen out,” he said under his breath, still on hands and knees hoping against hope it was there somewhere in the inky darkness. He closed his eyes and his heart sank when he heard one say. “Hands up! Get out here!”

  15

  “Oh, damn,” Tillie swore under her breath, already hearing the conductor announcing the next station.

  “Winslow’s next stop, folks,” the conductor repeated as he hurried through the car.

  She wet her lips. Her nerves were so frayed, she felt she might scream at the slightest provocation. It was so far out here. Why did that foolish boy want to come out to this God-forsaken land, anyway?