I was wickedly pleased to come home one day to find Long’s father-in-law camped out on an extended visit. He and his harem of womenfolk, Fawn’s mother included, had pitched a lodge on the creek below the house. Fawn had erected her father a brush arbor in the yard, and that was where the old savage was sitting when I rode up.
I hugged my wife, admired a papoose she and the womenfolk were fawning over, and took a seat with Blue Knife. While I looked him over, I was thinking what a scare he might put in some of those boys showing up all the time. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed a good idea to get him to move in his whole clan. Perhaps he could recommend a few warriors that liked to chase and scalp nosy cowboys.
“How are you, Blue Knife?”
“I’m good, Tennessee.” He patted his belly with a gesture at the empty plate beside him.
On second thought, should one of those cowboys come upon a bunch of Cheyenne surrounding my house it might lead to the whole country believing that the Indians were off the reservation and on the warpath. It wouldn’t do to have half the country riding to the aid of my household. Since the Cheyenne scare in ’78, people were still a little jumpy.
“You’ve got a good woman, Tennessee.”
I hadn’t had time to measure just how well Barby was taking the presence of her latest company, especially the fearsome Blue Knife. I watched the women while I talked with him. Apparently Fawn was now speaking enough English for her to translate to her family for Barby.
“I’m proud of her.” I regretted immediately that I sounded like I was talking of my horse or something.
“She didn’t run the first time she saw me.” His black eyes twinkled with devilment as he spoke.
“Maybe you didn’t yell and shoot as much as usual,” I shot back at him good-naturedly.
“Smoke with me, Tennessee.”
That meant that I was supposed to pull out my tobacco, and I gladly did so. No doubt, he had a sack of his own, but I gave the devil his due. Besides, I was coming to like him.
We sat silent for a while, enjoying our cigarettes and watching our women play with the papoose. I felt unusually content right then. My cattle were fattening on good grass, I had a home and a soon-to-be baby, and no cowboys were going to run off with my woman. I felt like taking a peaceful afternoon nap with a clear conscience and an easy mind.
“I saw your old friend this morning.” Blue Knife interrupted my daydreams.
“Long?” I hadn’t seen him in two weeks.
“Billy,” he said, like he’d known him for a long time.
It was no wonder Blue Knife and Long got along so well. You couldn’t guess what either one knew, or didn’t know.
“I saw him down by the creek this morning. We smoked and talked some,” he added.
“How was he?”
“He was good. I guess he came to see you, but you were gone.”
I hadn’t seen him since he shot Rory Donnovan the day before my wedding. I’d heard he was in Dodge, but hadn’t run into him on any of my trips there. I still thought of him as my best friend, but there was Barby between us. I didn’t know how to solve that. I figured things have a way of working out if given a chance, and in the meantime I wished I had been home when he called.
“I wish I’d been here. There’s no telling when I’ll see him again.”
“He will come again soon.” Blue Knife sounded confident in his assertion.
“What makes you think so?”
Blue Knife’s black eyes twinkled again, and seemed to look right down to the inside of me. I had a sick feeling I already knew the gist of what was to come.
“I saw his tracks down by the creek and up the hill. He’s been here many times.”
“Is that so?” I knew damned well that it could be.
I’d almost paid off my debt to Long for the money he’d loaned me to buy my freight outfit with, and that Caldwell banker’s payment on the cattle loan wasn’t due until the fall. I figured I was due at least a little time at home with my wife. Maybe I’d been gone way too much the last few months.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Billy never showed up to visit again that spring, and I heard he was down south picking up a trail herd. I stayed around the house for most of the month of May, loving my wife, and trying to make her home a little better. I built us a horse shed, and helped her transplant some flowers from the creek where she found them to the little window boxes I made for her. I enjoyed going to sleep every night with my hand on her baby belly, and the sweet smell of her in my nose as I lay my face against her neck.
My stay at home lasted through the roundup of my home range during the first week of June. That done, I knew that the lard can we kept our savings in was nearing empty, and I had to get back to freighting. I drug my feet at leaving, but Barby knew the situation just as well as I did. She regretfully sent me on my way.
I met Long in Dodge, and we picked up a load of military freight we had on subcontract for delivery at Ft. Elliott. It was while at the fort that I heard Billy was just south of the Salt Fork with his herd of cattle and headed north for delivery somewhere in Colorado. I also heard that the Panhandle Stock Association had formed up an army to see that he turned east or west of their ranges. The Association had a quarantine on all cattle coming in from the south, because of the Texas fever scare. They sent thirty-five tough cowboys to make sure that he went around. That’s a lot of men to suggest to a trail boss that he follow a certain route, but they knew Billy like I did. He might not be of a mind to go around anything.
Mobeetie was buzzing with guesswork as to what would happen when the Association tried to detour Billy from his chosen trail. There was no state law backing the quarantine. The only authority it had was the Association’s guns, and that was what had folks excited.
The Association members were steadily fencing off large holdings of private and state leased grassland, and it wasn’t going to be long until the little man wasn’t going to have a place to graze his herds for free. The big ranchers complained that they invested lots of man power to operate the roundup on open range, paying a disproportional and unfair amount to tend small operators’ cattle in the process. They also said that without legally claimed grazing territory and fenced holdings, the cheap old longhorn cattle that many of the little men or old-time cowmen owned would cross-breed with the fancy European Hereford and Roan Durham cattle that they paid high dollar for to improve their herds. Also, open range would let us poor folks enjoy the benefits of their high-dollar bulls servicing our cows without having to pay for them. In short, rawhiders like myself who couldn’t afford to operate on a big scale were seen to be freeloading off their attempts to be cattle barons.
I had to admit that the beef industry was changing, and that the time was probably coming when a man had to run better cattle and fewer of them. That meant fencing off land to protect your breeding program. Land was expensive when you had to buy it, and a man with limited space needed to run meatier cattle like the Herefords and Shorthorns that would bring a premium at market. Nobody wanted to eat tough longhorn meat unless they had to. The farmers were bound to come once the railroad came through the Panhandle, and they’d suck up the available government land. Maybe Colonel Goodnight was right to preach that the future of the country was livestock farming, or a blend of cattle and crops. I wasn’t ready to trade my rope for a plow, but what he said made some sense. Of course he and the English dude who was his investor could afford enough ground to still cowboy and not have to farm.
The town was heavy on the side of the “free-grass” faction, as it was labeled by some. Despite the Association’s claims to equal representation for both large and small stockowners, many folks refused to believe that it was anything but a way to keep a few power-hungry men in control of the country. Our ranks were reinforced by a few stubborn ranchers and fence haters with large outfits who didn’t see eye to eye with the Association. Open range was a time-honored tradition in Texas, and a lot of us wanted it to
stay that way.
I myself wasn’t too blind to see some of the good the Association was doing, but I was too late and too poor to have any say in things. So, in the American tradition of self servitude and unmitigated revolutionary spirit, I was ready to fight them tooth and nail. Leave it to Billy to pick the fight.
I hired a man to drive my wagon until I returned, and saddled Dunny for war. Within five minutes of hearing the news I was ready to ride to the aid of my friend, but I wasn’t quick enough to get out of town before Long cornered me.
“Are you coming?” I asked impatiently.
“Too many outlaws and whiskey peddlers already give you free-grassers a bad look, without adding a proud black man to the mix.” Long’s tone left no doubt as to the fact that he intended to ignore the situation and keep right on about his business.
“That’s Billy I’m going to help.” I thought that was good reason enough.
“Billy’s likeable enough at times, but he doesn’t feed me.”
“What if it was me down there?”
“It ain’t.”
“It could be.”
“You’ve got a family to take care of, and a business to tend to. You can’t hire some drunk out of a saloon to entrust your livelihood to while you go off looking for fights that you own no part of.” Long’s calm tone fell far short of soothing me.
“I help my friends when they’re in trouble.”
“Do you think Billy and I are friends?”
“You sure ain’t acting like it.”
“Being friendly and being friends are two entirely different things. I might have broken bread with him, but that doesn’t make me his good friend.”
“At least you’ve made it plain.”
Long shook his head slowly in frustration while he continued, “When I was a boy white folks used to put me up on a keg and get me to dance. I never once mistook all their clapping and backslapping praise for any more than what it was.”
“Billy didn’t put that chip on your shoulder,” I said, only half-hearing him.
“No, he ain’t put me to picking cotton, but when he laughs and slaps me on the back I might as well be up on that keg again. I’m just a funny nigger with a big dick doing tricks,” Long said quietly, but I could see the color of passion rising in his face.
“I don’t know anything about all of that.”
Long probably could tell that everything he was trying to say was just bouncing off my hard head. He was silent for a long moment, looking like he was trying to figure out what one says in an insane asylum to calm the patients down. I was getting madder by the minute at him; the more he talked, the madder it made me.
“You run with an outlaw, and you’ll end up like one.” He pointed a finger at me for emphasis.
“He’s in the right, and don’t point your damned finger at me.”
“Listen”—Long held up his hands to me in appeasement—“you do what you’re going to do, but remember this. There are two kinds of outlaws. There are those that are outlaws because they’re too mean, too greedy, or just too evil, if you will, to abide by most any kind of law. The other kind of outlaw is of another sort.”
“What’s the other sort?”
“The other sort just doesn’t give a damn about consequences.”
“I suppose you think Billy’s that kind?”
“And he won’t live long because of it.” Long paused to spit in the dirt for emphasis. “The world won’t tolerate him.”
Talking to Long was like talking to a fence post, and I had no more time or patience for it. I promised to catch up with him as soon as I could, and asked him to tell Barby where I’d gone if he saw her first. However, before I could show my heels to that town, One Jump Kate came running up and latched on to my arm. Great big tear tracks streaked her makeup, and the little wampus cat looked like she was more mad upset than sad upset.
“They’ve arrested Billy for cattle rustling, and they’re bringing him here for trial,” she blurted out.
The Association kept Billy’s herd from crossing their holdings, but they didn’t give him a chance to decide whether or not to push through the wall of Winchesters they had waiting for him on the far side of the river. Instead, they snuck up on his camp in the dark of the night, and caught him in his bedroll. He woke to a bunch of rifle barrels staring him in the eye, and found out that he was under arrest. I heard that Billy told them all to go to hell and he counted out loud the number of rifles pointing at him.
Back in the days when cattle were cheaper than cheap in Texas, and as many wore brands as did not, a lot of cowmen thought nothing of killing cattle that didn’t belong to them on the range. You damned sure didn’t do it under the owner’s nose, but nobody would label you a cow thief for doing it unless you didn’t own stock yourself. What kept the practice going was everybody’s suspicion that it was impossible to stop, and the unwillingness of most to make an issue of it.
Our faith in the common man’s good sense told us that most folks weren’t going to kill a beef that they paid for or worked to gather and deliver when they could shoot one belonging to somebody else. Nobody liked supplying free beef to their fellow man, but a lot of folks figured to make sure they ate as much of others’ beef as they were bound to lose in kind. It sounds an awful lot like stealing, but at least if everybody did it, then maybe the scales would balance out in the end. The custom persisted in a backdoor way until the likes of the Association decided to make an issue of it, and they had the man power and money to do it.
The word had been out for a good while in the Panhandle, but due to adherence to his training, or because he thought he could get away with it, Billy had his boys kill a range steer and butcher it just as they were about to camp one night. The Association got wind of it and found a means to dodge a showdown with Billy’s herd, as well as show the country they intended to enforce all of their laws.
They arrested Billy as the boss who ordered the steer to be slaughtered, and they arrested Andy because in the heat of the arrest he got mad enough to tell them he shot the steer. Two criminals were apparently enough to serve their wants, because the rest of the crew were left with the herd under the watch of the Association cowboys. The upshot was that Billy and Andy were taken to Mobeetie to face charges, and stand trial like common rustlers.
I waited with the rest of Mobeetie for the arrival of Billy and his captors. A large group of us greeted them when they rode into town and gave the Association posse a fair share of catcalls and insults. There like to have been a shooting, but nothing was thrown around but hot tempers.
The prisoners were turned over to Cap Arrington to jail, and charges were filed with the district attorney. There was some talk of storming the jail that first evening and busting Billy and Andy out, but before the crowd could get drunk enough, Cap came walking down the street with a twelve-gauge coach gun across his elbow. He never said anything to the crowd; in fact he acted like we weren’t even there. He went inside the new courthouse, which contained the jail, and came out with a chair. He took himself a seat beside the front door and proceeded to clean his shotgun. From time to time, he quit swabbing the bores of that gun, and gave us a friendly smile.
A lot of the crowd decided it would be best to take their complaints back to the saloons and leave Arrington to his gun cleaning. If that lawman had a problem with our stand against injustice he knew damned well where to find us.
The Association gang that had arrested Billy stayed in town for a show of force, but they kept to their own. The sporting crowd at Mobeetie was dead set against the law-and-order business that the Association was pushing on all fronts. That’s not to say, by any means, that everyone in town was against the Association. There were a lot of good people who liked many of the things it was doing. I myself counted some of its members as friends, despite my feelings about open range.
Things had calmed enough for the law to let me visit Billy by the next morning. After they checked me for hidden weapons, I was led down the na
rrow hallway fronting the cells and allowed to take a chair in front of the one containing Billy and Andy. A deputy manned another chair at the far end of the hall. He was leaned back against the bars of the last cell, reading a newspaper and trying to appear as if he wasn’t listening.
One night of hard time in the calaboose didn’t seem to bother Andy, and he was grinning when he reached through the bars to shake my hand.
“Don’t make any suspicious moves.” Andy nodded his head toward the guard. “They know there ain’t any jail that can hold me.”
“You’re a certified desperado now,” I kidded him.
Billy didn’t look as tickled with his surroundings as Andy did. He gave me a quick handshake, and began to pace the floor of the cell. I had the impression he had been pacing before I arrived, and maybe the entire night before. In fact, Billy looked more than half pissed-off about the whole situation.
“Where’s the cake?” Billy asked me, disappointment in his voice.
“What cake?”
“The one with the hacksaw and a forty-five in it.”
I was glad to see he still had a little of his sense of humor about him. He brought his pacing to an abrupt end, and dragged his cot over to the front of the cell for a seat. He leaned back in the corner of the bars and rolled himself a cigarette while we talked.
“They act like they aim to see this through,” I said to the both of them.
“There’s still some that won’t stand for this,” Billy said.
“Have you got a lawyer yet?”
Billy was licking his new cigarette closed, and could only nod, but Andy was quick to blurt out, “We’ve got Temple Houston on his way here.”
I made no attempt to hide the fact that I was greatly impressed. Temple Houston was one of the best known lawyers in the western half of Texas. Besides being the son of the late hero of the Republic, Sam Houston, he was a real fire-eater with enough flamboyance to keep him in the newspapers, and he was quickly rising among the state political ranks. He packed a pistol that he was more than willing to use, and it was he who killed Al Jennings’s brother in a saloon gunfight over to Woodward, Oklahoma in later years. Little Al was never more than a wannabe outlaw and train robber, and I reckon his brothers weren’t much shakes either. But it’s safe to say Temple Houston had a little bark on him. Besides shooting straight, he could get every man in a courtroom standing up and cheering him on when he was laying his defense talk on thick. Maybe it was just lawyer parlor tricks, but many of the common folk thought he was one of their own.
Panhandle Page 24
