Feud On The Mesa

by Lauran Paine

  Jack closed the door with a sigh as Sally raised her tearstained face and looked at the Indian shirt. “No, Caleb. You’ve worn the last one of those things you’re ever going to wear. From now on you dress like Jack an’ the rest of the respectable cattlemen. The frontier is changing. You have to change with it.” She tossed the fringed shirt into a corner and looked appealingly at Britt.

  He cleared his throat again. “Uh, Caleb, uh…well, Sally an’ I’ve bought you a little herd o’ cows. Uh…like I told ya once before. Scoutin’s all over, pardner. It’s goin’ to be cows from now on, not buffalo. Uh…you can buy a chunk of land an’ be a cowman. Uh…how about it?”

  Caleb looked sadly at the hunting shirt, over at Sally’s wide, pleading and tearstained eyes. He nodded to Britt. “I reckon you’re right, Jack. From now on I’m a cowman.”

  Feud on the Mesa

  I

  There was a place called Purgatoire by the early trappers who came exploring across the Rockies, and the trappers, who the Indians did not kill or who were not assimilated into the plains culture, returned back where they had originated. When the next westering wave arrived, they were Yankees, called mountain men, instead of voyageurs as those earlier explorers had been called, and the Yankees turned Purgatoire into Picketwire.

  Roughly the same thing happened upon the high, vast plateau above the New Mexico northwest cattle country, except that there the matter of corruption had a better, at least a more comprehensible genesis and evolution. For example, the first Spaniards to climb to the great plateau arrived there at a time of year when some contiguous areas beyond the immense sweep of pale grass were turning a tawny shade of reddish tan after the first light frost, and they consequently called the mesa Canela, which referred to the color of those sumac bushes as being cinnamon.

  Then those lean horsemen passed along, wearing their fine casques and their leather armor, and several generations later the unarmored and much less hawk-like descendants of Spanish miscegenation rode up onto Canela Mesa, and in their imperfect, Indian-Spanish, called the mesa Canana, corrupting the Spanish name into something more relevant to them; they were also soldiers and explorers, and each of them carried a canana that contained their bullets. It was a little leather box that the French called a cartouche and that the next wave of newcomers—Yankees again—called a cartridge box, unless of course they were officers, then they used the French word, cartouche, because it sounded finer.

  Finally a barrel-chested, black-bearded, fierceeyed dauntless man named Amos Cane arrived on the mesa with his Shoshone wife and their string of pups ranging from panther-like youths in their teens to a baby on a travois behind a gentle, spotted-rump horse, and spent a golden summer creating a fortress-like big house of logs, an even larger log barn, outbuildings for smoking meat and storing things like salt and flour and dried wild fruit, a blacksmith shop and a bunkhouse for the half-wild youths, and the name Canana underwent another change. The high plateau became Cane’s Mesa, and it remained known as Cane’s Mesa after Amos, old and bowed with wars and labors, yielded up the doughty ghost, his tribe scattered to the four winds, and finally his klootch was also tamped down into the rich earth at his side, and the last of their off-spring, a quiet, sober-eyed, golden-skinned woman of twenty-five named Elisabeth for some foreign queen her father had admired, but called Corn-flower by her mother because of her intensely blue eyes, was all that remained of the clan on Cane’s Mesa. She was the one who had come up the tortu-ous trail out of the inferno of a New Mexico desert lashed to a travois.

  There still was no other permanent resident on Cane’s Mesa, although farranging cattlemen had been encroaching a little at a time, like wolves, as old Amos had become less able to mount his war horse, gather his sons with guns in hand to chase them away, and two summers after Elisabeth had buried her mother out back beneath the magnificent old cottonwood trees, within the little iron paling fence where old Amos also lay beneath his granite stone, a cowman named Arlen Chase had ridden into the yard, had sat his horse looking around at the massive old log buildings that were beginning to show signs of neglect and decay When Elisabeth had come forth from the barn, he had told her bluntly that he was there to stay, and had stepped off his horse—right into the barrel of a horse pistol that had belonged to old Amos and had nine notches upon its stag-handled grips.

  Arlen Chase hadn’t stayed after all, but he had not left Cane Mesa, either. He had established his cow camp three miles northwest, close to where the ancient trail led off the mesa down to the lowland country, where it endlessly meandered until it came to the village—now the town—of Clearwater.

  Chase’s obvious intent was to block access to the mesa. He was a lifelong free-graze cowman and knew a valuable asset when he saw one. Cane’s Mesa ran for roughly fifteen miles east to west, and from the northward high mountains to the sand-stone, rusty red bluffs southward, it ran another six miles. A man would never have to overgraze Cane’s Mesa to grow rich up there. All he would have to do would be to claim it and hold it. With that thought in mind, Arlen Chase hired riders who were more than range riders. Anyone could become a range rider, which required little enough talent, the Lord knew, but the other attributes Chase’s men possessed only came from being courageous and willing, and fiercely loyal. Most range men regarded loyalty as a primary virtue; they existed in a world of feudal concepts and convictions, but the surest way to strain a man’s sense of loyalty to the brand he rode for was to engage in activities that went against a man’s moral grain.

  The men Arlen Chase hired were never moralists. If Chase chose to blockade the pass and inaugurate a quietly passive siege of that black-haired, blue-eyed woman in the clutch of old log buildings who never went anywhere without a gun that she could use as well as any man, that was entirely agreeable to his riders. They made jokes about it, and once in a while, with or without a little firewater inside them, they would swoop in close to the old buildings and let fly a few rounds into the mighty log walls, not with an intention of shooting the woman, but simply in order to see her race for her house and grab up an old rifle to fire back. It was something that endlessly amused them even though they had learned early that it would remain a source of laughter only as long as they remained well out of gun range. She was an astonishingly unerring marksman, and, while they respected her for that, it made the little impromptu attacks all the more zestful. They were a wild breed of men. Arlen Chase never made a point of enquiring into the past of his riders; he only insisted that they work hard and obey orders, which they usually did because that was how they had matured, but from time to time it was said, down in Clearwater, that, if there’d been any law in the New Mexico-Colorado border country beyond an occasional town marshal, Arlen Chase’s cow camps would have provided a jail-house full of fugitives.

  For Elisabeth, imprisoned upon her mesa, existence was little different from what it had always been. She worked hard at keeping her band of horses where the grass was best, and, although her cattle had been steadily diminishing in number for several years, since even before Arlen Chase had squatted on the mesa chasing away all other encroaching cow-men, she tried to keep track of them, too.

  Once, she had hired two riders down at Clear-water. They had lasted three weeks; subsequently one of them turned up in Chase’s camp, and the other one left the country never to return. After that, although she had tried to hire other men, none had ever arrived at her ranch. Not even the ones who had promised to ride up.

  If they hadn’t been discouraged down in Clearwater, then they had been halted where the trail came up atop the mesa. Chase’s camp over there was a series of log corrals, some rough log structures thrown up in haste and with no genuine interest by his cow-boys, who did not like that kind of work, and an area of trampled earth and dead grass that covered about thirty acres of land. There was a fringe of trees along the mesa’s three borders, but down along the rusty old cliffs to the southward there was not a tree, just some scraggly underbrush that kept the sandstone
from eroding too badly. Old Amos had often said they should plant trees there, for otherwise the cliffs were going slowly to wash away, but nothing had ever been done about that. There were always too many other things requiring more immediate attention. Planting trees, like planting anything else in the soil, was something old-timers either left to their young ones and womenfolk, or did themselves only when there was nothing else to claim their attention. And there was always something else; pioneering a land was nothing that could ever be accomplished in one man’s lifetime. The best old Amos had been able to achieve had been his buildings, his family and its roots into the good soil of Cane’s Mesa, and his armed defense of his private fief. Those things he had done well, but no man’s accomplishments out-last him by very much, any more than his dreams outlast him.

  For Elisabeth Cane, it was a concern of silent irony that only she—a woman—had fully inherited her father’s strong, almost mystic love of the mesa. Five brothers had gone away, but because of a different course, they had learned to love, and, although Elisabeth had never learned that, she was a woman and she, therefore, understood it.

  One of her sisters lived in Texas, married to a slow-drawling, gentle-acting, tough cowman who had come through on a trail drive. Maybe once a year Elisabeth would receive a letter from Texas. Her other sister had simply gone away. One night she had kissed Elisabeth, the youngest, and in the morning she and a fine chestnut horse were gone. Elisabeth had been unable to understand such a thing. When she had asked her mother, she’d been told simply that people were like the leaves of autumn, something within them blew them this way and that way; sometimes they came to earth in a stony, sere place, and sometimes they fared better, but whatever their destiny, its source lay within them, a personal thing.

  Her mother had grieved. So had Amos who had been rapidly wearing out when that disappearance had occurred, but of her two parents Elisabeth had always felt that her mother’s feelings were the deeper, even though her mother was nowhere nearly as articulate as her father. He could thunder and roar and hurl challenges, and he could, as when her sister took the chestnut horse and rode out to find her own individual world, suddenly become softly still and thoughtful and surprisingly gentle to-ward his woman. He did not lack feelings; he simply had a very difficult time expressing them, explaining them, and, when he tried, as when he wanted to say something soft to Elisabeth, or any of his children, it came out gruffly.

  All the memories were there, on Cane’s Mesa, in and around the massive old log structures. For Elisabeth, who had inherited from her father the soul sensation for her birthright, her heritage and the land where both still existed, and who had inherited from her mother a deep sense of almost fatalistic serenity, there was no other place.

  If Arlen Chase triumphed finally, he would have to bury her out beneath those cottonwood trees in-side the iron fence, and until he triumphed—when she thought about it at all, she was willing to con-cede that he probably would beat her and take over Cane’s Mesa—until that happened, she would con-cede him nothing whether he slowly stole all her cattle and horses, slowly cut her off and starved her out, or whether through a miracle she survived Arlen Chase.

  It was springtime when she rode and discovered Chase’s horses, wearing their AC shoulder brand, running with her own horses. One week later she found her sole remaining bull dead in a shallow arroyo, shot cleanly between the eyes.

  II

  Springtime on top of Cane’s Mesa was an amalgam of Colorado’s last frosts and cold nights, and New Mexico’s Santa Anna winds that came dryly hot in a swooping updraft along the scored faces of the red-rusty sandstone bluffs, pushing back the cold a little, yet not strong enough them-selves to impart their curling heat.

  The grass fairly jumped out of the ground. The trees around the grasslands brightened, and, if they were hardwoods, they came into full greenery complete with the downy cotton from cottonwoods, and the pollinated buddings from all the other varieties. It was the beginning of the best time of year, because neither the northward ice fields nor the southward infernos ever more than weakly met upon Cane’s Mesa, which was what made summertime there, and late autumn, and even most winters as perfect for people as well as for livestock.

  When a pair of horsemen cursed and grunted and scrabbled their way up atop the mesa from the west, and passed through a mile of solid pine and fir forest, clambering around ancient deadfalls nearly as tall as a mounted man and longer than most village roadways, then came to the thinning last fringe of dark trees to catch their first view of the mesa’s huge rolling to flat grasslands, it was probably like get-ting from this life to the next one, at least for men born and bred to the saddle and to stockmen’s ways.

  They just simply reined down and sat there, like struck dumb, bronzed and weathered, faded and hard-eyed carvings, until the one called Jud said: “Now this is what a man spends his life dreaming about, and knows damned well don’t exist.”

  The other man smiled, looped his reins so the horse could rest after his recent three-hour odyssey of travail, with scratched shins and seared lungs from the climb, and pointed.

  “Smoke, Jud. Early for supper and late for dinner, I’d say.”

  Jud studied the distant, very faint tendril rising al-most arrow-straight against the pale, flawless sky and made his guess. “Branding. It’s that time of year again.” Then Jud swung from the waist to look be-hind, but if there had been a troop of cavalry back through the dark forest, or a whole band of feathered war whoops, he couldn’t have seen them because sunlight never reached fully to the forest’s floor, and the trees stood thickly as hair on a dog’s back.

  When Jud straightened back around and caught his partner’s sardonic smile, he shrugged. “I don’t want it put on my headboard that they caught Jud Hudson from behind.”

  The smiling man turned back to gazing out where that faraway smoke arose. “No one’s any closer be-hind us than the Gila Valley, and that’s a month’s damned hard riding back yonder.” The speaker lifted his reins. “Want to bust right out, like we got a right?”

  Jud considered. He was heavy boned but not heavy in build. He probably would have been heavy, if he’d had that chance, and, in fact, throughout all his thirty-five years he’d never had a chance to vegetate.

  His partner was finer boned, leaned-down, sinewy as old rawhide and perhaps ten or fifteen pounds lighter, but he looked as weathered, as faded, as though he were about Jud’s age. His name was Rufus Miller, and he was wanted back across a moonscape of desolation, of deadly desert and ghostly nights, for the same crime Jud Hudson was wanted for— stage robbery.

  Jud hung fire over the decision on whether to ride forth boldly in plain sight or not. A month of trailing by moonlight and becoming shadows by sunlight had fixed in Jud Hudson a habit of reticence. He gestured. “We could stay among the trees and get most of the way down there.”

  Rufe turned to follow after, but, as he rode and studied this huge plateau, it became clear to him that, when they ran out of forest to protect them, they were going to be miles southward of that standing smoke. It also struck him that down south where those trees played out, there had to be a series of damned near perpendicular bluffs, because he could see 100 miles straight outward and downward without a single blessed knoll or ridge to interrupt the view.

  Rufus Miller was a calm, pensive man, gray-eyed, capable, range-born and rough-raised. Earlier, like Jud, he had let his spurs down a notch in the towns so that they would make music on the plank walks, and he’d worn his gun in a special holster, twisted slightly away from his hip. But a man gets over those things—if he manages to survive his youth in a country where every other gun-carrying rooster is just as quick Tomake, or accept, challenges.

  Rufe had survived and so had Jud, but they’d done some things others who had also survived had not done, like raiding the coach in the Gila Valley But again, if a man can survive his errors and doesn’t repeat them, there’s hope for him.

  There was not a worthwhile man
alive who hadn’t done his share of wild, senseless things. Unless he had done them, he never quite acquired the cross-hatch of invisible scars upon his inner self that, when he finally matured, made him wiser than many, more careful than most, and more understanding than the mill run of folks.

  And that lousy stagecoach had turned out not to have one damned mail pouch on it. Nothing, not even a good watch, because the only passengers had been an old man and his little bird-like, frightened wife, and, hell, a man wouldn’t take an old man’s watch right there in front of his wife. Like-wise the driver. He’d had three $10 gold pieces he’d been hoarding to buy his boy a speckled pony for Christmas.

  They had ridden away fast, and empty-handed, and from the first high hill they had seen the cowman posse boiling up dust in flinging pursuit. So— becoming outlaws hadn’t proven any more profitable than mustanging had been, or than range riding had been, or than horse-breaking had been, except that outlawing created reverberations, and they hadn’t dared go back west of the Gila country where they’d been range riding, so they kept heading northeast, skirting around the worst of the desert country profanely assuring one another that the whole damned planet couldn’t be that bad. And now, by God, it turned out that the whole damned planet wasn’t that bad.

  Jud drew rein, stepped to earth, peered steadily out across the golden sun smash, then turned and beckoned for Rufe to join him. “There’s a big old log ranch out there, all by itself. That’s where the smoke’s rising up…out back behind the barn where the corrals are. You see?”

  Rufe saw. The air was as clear as crystal glass, so the Cane place looked two miles closer than it was. Even so, those mighty log structures would have been visible from an even greater distance.