Sharpshooter

by Dusty Richards

  “Sounds just like him already, don’t he?” Cole teased.

  Chet shared a private nod with his son. “You’ll show her and the horse.”

  “Naw, he’s just got things to learn. Besides, she might get more horses and give them to me. I’m not saying anything about her.”

  They all laughed and headed for the back porch stairs in the bleeding sunset.

  Chet shook Jesus’s hand and thanked him for the job he did. A boy brought up a saddled horse for him to ride home. Things were settling down in the evening when Chet climbed the steps and looked across the yard as the ranch people headed home.

  Oh, they’d find those cap busters. Might take some time but they’d wish they never tried that robbery or whatever it was those devils wanted.

  CHAPTER 10

  The women were busy in the kitchen, examining the material Lisa bought for Oleta’s wedding dress. While in the living room Chet, Cole, Salty, Vic, and Vance were laying down plans to try to find the masked thugs.

  “Daylight, two of us will do some tracking back there,” Salty said. “Vic and I bet we can find their tracks.”

  “Lots of luck. Be careful. I lost Lisa’s husband, Miguel, in a deal like this. They aren’t worth anyone getting killed over.”

  “We will, boss man. I can’t figure why they’d make a breakout like that at you.”

  “When the masked outfit started shooting, I handed her the reins and jerked out the Winchester. I was rocking around on that seat and finally figured I’d shoot some and maybe scare them off. We topped the ridge and she had that team running dead out. They weren’t quitting until we came in sight of the Black Canyon Stage office and by then they probably had emptied their six-guns. It wasn’t the bullets from my rifle slowed them up, but the Black Canyon Stage boys were shooting at them, too.”

  “You notice the color of their horses?” Salty asked.

  “Two were bays but one of them had a gray or light roan horse. May have been dirty white.”

  “That’s good. He would be easy to find even at a distance. We might catch a sight of him we’d miss ordinarily.” Salty was nodding his head, going over the discovery.

  The girls served them some supper. The visitors left for the evening and Oleta said, “I am glad you moved him up here. The dress material your wife bought today is very nice. Maybe more than all I deserve, but no one ever before did so many things simply for me.”

  “When I saw him wearing those black rocks, I figured he was still serious about you.”

  She bobbed her head and laughed. “I told him I said if he was wearing it for you to tell him. He kind of got all over me. Like, why wouldn’t he wear it?”

  “He’s serious or he’d never have worn it.”

  “Oh yes. Gracias, my—amigo, huh?”

  “Yes, no patrón. You two are both hard workers and you will do well together.”

  She lowered her voice. “I can’t believe he is that rich?”

  “He is.”

  She left the kitchen, cranking her head around like she’d gone off the deep end.

  Later in their bedroom he told Lisa about Oleta’s conversation with him.

  Amused about it, she agreed, and told him they’d make a good couple, and then she asked where she and Chet would go next.

  “I guess we better go see the kids up on Crook’s Road. Toby and Talley work so damn hard I don’t want them to think we don’t appreciate or see it.”

  “He’s grown up a lot, too.”

  Chet agreed. She rolled over and kissed him. “We get into another fix like that, don’t worry about me. I can drive horses, can’t I?”

  He shifted a little to kiss her back. “You damn sure can.”

  She gave a great sigh. “Aside from those three trying to bust it up, I want you to know I feel as fortunate having you as Oleta does having Salty.”

  “Good. I don’t ever want that to end.”

  “Good. I have a black rock necklace—”

  He tickled her until she said, “You don’t have to wear it.”

  Chet and Lisa’s plan was set for the next morning when Salty and Vic would ride out to investigate the road bandits’ deal. Cole and Jesus would ride with Chet and Lisa the next day to the Rustler’s Ranch. Jesus was to set up the pack train so they could go on from there to see about the new easternmost Wagon Wheel Ranch, run by Spencer Horne and his wife, Lucinda, along with Fred and his wife, Josey.

  * * *

  It was a nice day when they crossed the Verde River and struck easy on the road that General Crook built to make a way for troops to get from Preskitt over to Fort Apache, far around in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona. The mountain road clung to the Mogollon Rim’s towering heights, which made this route a picturesque one, but it was not a graded, smooth highway, having some real steep stretches. Easier used by horseback rather than in a wagon but still, not a simple path.

  They reached the Rustler’s Ranch, where horse thieves had fought Chet and his posse to their own deaths rather than serve long terms in prison. Bo had secured the deed and Chet had bought the ranch at the same time he was busy building a stage line and then a telegraph line that stretched across four hundred miles from east to west on the Marcy Road.

  The ranch had vast meadows. The meadows were all brush, and any ranch this far north needed a hay supply. This brush couldn’t be simply mowed. It had to be chopped away, and no cowboy likes to get off his horse to swing an ax or machete at brush.

  So, securing a foreman to run it, Chet had less options than he’d had for any other place he’d ever purchased. Toby had helped him, and Chet knew he had a hard work personality. He was still a young man with no past experience as a supervisor of men. But his tenacity to get a job done made Chet try him.

  His wife, Talley, was one of those young women who had run off with a band of outlaws who raided the stage stopovers. She’d quickly discovered a woman like her was only being used by those men and that none of them would ever marry her. Chet had found her the laziest one of the women there. She had a snobby way about her, and she wasn’t half as pretty as she thought she was. Then she woke one morning and must have discovered she had no boyfriend and she’d faced being a common housemaid for the rest of her life. Chet saw she’d set to convincing Toby he needed her, since he looked like he had the best chance at becoming a ranch foreman.

  Chet knew how everyone at the Preskitt Valley headquarters, including himself, thought that Talley would never stay out there on the Rustler’s Ranch past six weeks with a husband she’d earlier snubbed. But like the woman who’d jumped into the sailor’s arms when the captain rushed by her to save a prettier woman, Talley jumped into Toby’s hug. Chet and Lisa laughed over that story.

  With a brush-cutting team of eight teenage Mexican boys and her husband to feed, she proved them all wrong about how the isolation of this far-back place would bring her in a hurry to separate from her husband. Instead she became his closest sidekick and even became his pusher at times to get things going despite Apache war party’s raids and the rigors and the size of the job.

  Soon Toby talked Chet into doubling the number of brush cutters to do the job, and for her to feed. They cleared all the once-open meadows on that place and fenced the ranch in record time. After Talley, Chet surmised, discovered how he owned all those homesteads Bo had bought, she came down to the ranch and asked for barbwire and permission to fence those plots and use them for hay making.

  Chet couldn’t tell them no. Not that determined married couple who swam the flooding Verde River to come to a main ranch party to tell everyone they had most of them fenced and would hay them that year, too.

  The plan to stock that ranch with beef cows was moved up to three hundred head, and in the next two years with the hay supply to feed them, he’d be at six hundred mother cows or more. Even while she was pregnant Talley worked hard every day.

  Lisa had commented that some women had children and gave up all the side work. Not Talley—she grew more involved.


  Talley was excited to see them and sent word to Toby, who was working on a windmill setup to come in. The boss was there.

  Talley gave the baby to Lisa to hold and told one of the younger hands to show the boss all the new corrals they’d built since the last time he was there while she’d make supper. Jesus and Cole took off to look at the meadows and water development.

  Chet had to admit the corral additions were really inventive. They also were as strong as an army fort stockade.

  “I guess you helped build them?” he asked his teenage guide.

  “No, señor. I help the señora do the cooking. I work in her garden. I rock the baby when she is busy. She promised me when Ruben goes to work on the hay crew I can milk the cow.”

  “Well, that will be lots of work.”

  “Not so much. Someday I will be a cowboy, huh?”

  “I hope you make it.”

  “Oh, I will.”

  Toby arrived on a sweaty horse and slid to a stop. “Oh, Chet, I didn’t know you were coming. I was working on a windmill when I got word.”

  “You get it fixed?”

  “Oh yeah. Jud will finish it and there is still water in the tanks for the cows that come by.”

  “How many mills have you got?”

  “Twelve, counting the new one I got last week, but I need that many more. I am putting them in every well I have on the homesteads, then I pipe it outside to a tank to water the cows outside of the boundary fence, so I have my hay and those cows outside have water.”

  “Robert told me last trip your boys were getting him enough hay up there.”

  “That is a long haul for me. Is there any way Victor could supply part of that?”

  “How far is it?”

  “It takes my men six days to go up there, unload, and come back.”

  Chet considered the distance. Victor’s men could make a round trip in three days yet they were letting Toby handle it. “I will see what I can do. You providing Spencer?”

  “Oh yes. He had no hay land fenced yet. In some cases, those far east homesteads are only a three days’ round trip hay haul over to Spencer. I have some homesteads right beside Sarge and use them. He said he wouldn’t miss that hay equipment he gave me. But I sure needed it.”

  “I bet you did.”

  “Met Spencer over at his fenced place south of the road two weeks ago. That was the only fenced ground he has. We can put hay up there next year if he can get the brush and cactus cut off that land. Says there are some Navajo boys would do it.”

  “This is where that past owner tried to grow corn that time?”

  “Yes. The perimeter fence is pretty good.”

  “I appreciate all you do but can your men really get over there, mow it, and all?”

  “Yes, we can handle it. I don’t believe his Navajos will get much hay land cleaned. You’d just have to buy the hay equipment for him and hire him more help. My boys can do it easier.”

  They rode up to where the water came out of a pipe from a windmill on a rise a good distance away from the tanks. Well designed, it flowed by gravity into a series of homemade rock-and-mortar tanks to hold it. Chet nodded in approval.

  “Where was the closest water before you built this?”

  “Over a mile and a half south of here. The cows never came up here to graze before we fixed this. I was riding with the ranch foreman in west Texas on the HFT Ranch. I didn’t know much back then so I said, ‘Lots of good grass here.’ He said, ‘Yeah, there ain’t no water in three miles is why.’”

  Chet laughed. “That’s how you learned about water and cows?”

  Toby rubbed his three-day-old whiskered cheek with his palm. “Embarrassed me. But I damn sure never forgot it.”

  “I noticed those New Mexico cows we brought in last year are doing good on your water.”

  “I heard that lie, too, about damned old Arizona grass ain’t worth nothing to a cow out here.”

  “Unless she’s got water, I agree.”

  “We haven’t upset you in any way, have we?” Toby asked. “I know the place could look sharper.”

  “How? You and Talley are working your backsides off.”

  “Yeah, you aren’t mad at us about anything we didn’t get done?”

  “Let me put it straight—hell, no.”

  Toby smiled. “Good. Not seeing anyone, you wonder if you pissed in their soup bowl is why they ain’t coming by.”

  Chet laughed. “Guess all those folks who said Talley won’t stay out here and you won’t make it have learned better.”

  “I can see why. She come from some folks I’d say had more than most. And she resented that folks were getting along better than she was—but, Chet, I told her nice-like as I could, she and me had to really prove who we were and what we could really get done.

  “We were about to be married. I could tell she didn’t hold no big ambition for me. I said we’d have to prove to folks who think we won’t make it they’re wrong. They were all wrong, and they didn’t know what we could do as a team. Now, she had more education than me. I told her if I wasn’t running a great ranch in five years I’d divorce her and let her find a better provider. But she had to lend me her education.”

  “That’s what changed her?”

  “Part. We had a real big honeymoon over at Oak Creek. I think it changed things, too, because she began to want to sit close to me, be a part of me, and she began to say, ‘How did you see that?’ And we began challenging each other after that.”

  Chet, riding beside him, was nodding his head. “I knew something had swept you two away.”

  “Whew.” Riding along, he stripped off his dusty, stained hat and waved it. “It’s worked, then, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes, you have shown them. Don’t stop.”

  “I won’t. I promise. Nor will she.”

  That evening, sleeping in their tent, he and Lisa talked.

  “Their honeymoon in Oak Creek was heavenly,” Lisa said. “And I bet she realized that a good man would treat you good as compared to probably what she’d had before. But she read his cards and must have decided to help him reach their goals.”

  “It has worked.”

  “Oh yes. You know, she worked for me at the house. She is not now the same one who did that. Somehow I’d like to dress her up and make her be prouder of herself.”

  “Maybe we can dress both of them up?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  They shook hands and sealed it with a kiss.

  CHAPTER 11

  Each day, Chet and Toby rode out and looked at lots of his different homestead farms and windmill setups. Two rock-and-mortar dams on small creeks, both with a spillway, showed his men’s masonry talents. Chet marveled at his accomplishments and at the neat haystacks on those separate places. There was plenty of feed stacked high on those places, which were well fenced so even if range animals penetrated the very well-constructed boundary fences they could not get to the hay.

  “No rustlers up here?” Chet asked.

  “We have not seen any cases of it. Spring roundup we worked two hundred thirty-eight calves. I guess I lost seven calves at birth or that many had aborted for some reason.”

  “That’s a good calving percentage.”

  “We’ve had a good year and I expect close to that many to be weaned. I am going to wean them on a few of the places close to the house.”

  “Your bulls I’ve been seeing look good. Next fall we can sell a hundred head of big steers and make eight thousand dollars.”

  Toby made a sour face. “Wow, we will be a long time at that rate to being profitable.”

  “We get to five hundred mother cows and the calves get to be two years old, we can sell four hundred head of heifers and steers, retain a hundred head of heifers for replacement, cull fifty-sixty cows each year. That would make us at eighty bucks a head or gross of sixty-some thousand.”

  “I’ll go easier on you about expenses until then.”

  “No. Your hay sales thi
s winter will pay your labor bill. I am replacing some worn-out mowers this coming year but all in all we are going to be in good shape.”

  “I need this experience of running a ranch, but Jesus told me those guys went to the North Rim with you made seventy thousand on that Spanish gold?”

  “It was a once-in-a-lifetime find. Nice if you drew some of it.”

  Toby shook his head. “I just couldn’t imagine that much money.”

  “I hope they know that and manage it well.”

  “Then, in four years you will begin to realize a profit on this place?”

  “Oh, we will have the startup covered and be ready to make some money.”

  “That’s great. I’d like to have some of those artesian wells drilled that push water out enough to irrigate with.”

  “If we can find some land that’s worth the money to buy and level in an area where there are other wells, we can try to drill some.”

  “I will be looking for it.”

  “Good. We’re going on to Spencer’s next. Send my accountant a list on this hay you haul to everyone. I will be sure you get credit for it. I’ll tell Spencer you will cut his hay next year if he can get it cleared, and that way he doesn’t need a hay crew.”

  “Thanks. Talley can send you all those hay receipts we delivered and then do it monthly. We have hauled a lot to Robert, Sarge, and Spencer, and I have lots spoken for from other ranchers.”

  “Good. I want you to take a week or so off this winter. Take her to Tucson, see some shows, wine and dine her. You can hire a babysitter to take along and take a stage down there.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Lisa and I are sponsoring it. Call it a bonus for doing such a swell job.”

  “Well. Thanks. Best part of this job is knowing you’ve done something.”

  “You two most certainly have.”

  At supper that evening, Toby told his wife about their vacation coming, and she held her hands over her mouth and cried.

  Lisa went on, “And you will need a wardrobe, so plan on coming to my house a month before and find the clothes you two will need to wear.”

  * * *

  Chet and his bunch packed up and headed for the Wagon Wheel Ranch the next morning. Leaving, riding north for the Marcy Road, they came out on top in the wide-open grass country and hit the main road eastward. The second day they crossed the staked-out survey for the railroad tracks north of the main road and then rode on onto the neat ranch setup.