by Rob Hill
‘You got anything to say about Dunmore getting shot?’ The sheriff let his question hang in the air.
Mary May appeared at McGreggor’s side like a shadow. Overhearing the mention of her father’s name had brought her out on to the porch again.
‘Do you know who did it, Sheriff?’ Mary May’s eyes were red. Her arms hung helplessly at her sides and one hand held her handkerchief twisted as tight as rope.
‘Miss Dunmore, pleased you could come out.’ The sheriff touched his hat again. ‘I just wanted to clear up one thing. That scattergun you had with you when you left the Hartford farm yesterday, what happened to that? And the answer to your question is no, I’m sorry, not yet we don’t.’
‘Scattergun?’ Not expecting the question, Mary May was lost.
The sheriff shrugged as if it was nothing.
‘I don’t own a scattergun, Sheriff.’ She looked at McGreggor for reassurance.
‘Where’s Boone?’ Hartford said.
Mary May started to cry. She lowered her head and low sobs shook her. McGreggor put a great arm round her narrow shoulders and turned her towards the house.
‘Go back inside, my dear. These men are just leaving.’
McGreggor stepped down off the porch and stood face to face with the sheriff.
‘Get out now.’ His voice rasped in his throat.
‘Boone is this man’s brother.’ The sheriff took a step towards McGreggor. ‘He deserves to know where he is.’
‘You’re the Pinkerton?’ McGreggor rested his hand on the door jamb and stared at Hartford. ‘You really think that wastrel brother of yours stands a chance with Miss Dunmore?’ McGreggor lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘She’s under my protection now.’
As he headed inside, the steel rims on the heels of his boots sparked against the flagstone floor.
The sheriff struggled to pull himself up on to his horse. As he took his weight on his foot in the stirrup, pain tightened his face.
‘You’re leaving, just because McGreggor says so?’ Hartford was amazed; where there was danger he was used to heading straight into it.
‘Man like McGreggor likes to make his own decisions.’ The sheriff turned his horse. The lawn was so green against the dusty path, it seemed to shine. ‘We’ve poked him with a stick. Give him a few hours and he’ll figure it’s his own idea to tell us what he knows.’
Hartford said nothing. He didn’t share the older man’s faith in the plan and he didn’t give a damn about letting McGreggor save face. The sheriff had goaded McGreggor about pushing his boundary into Dunmore’s land, but what use was that? What was Mary May doing there? What about Boone? He had it on the tip of his tongue to ask the sheriff if he at least intended to take Jake Nudd back to jail.
As they passed under the adobe arch, Hartford looked back. The whitewashed walls of the house reflected the sunlight, the lawn was vivid green, the place was tranquil. The porch was in shadow and he couldn’t see if McGreggor had stepped outside again to watch them leave.
‘Tell them at the gate that I went inside with McGreggor,’ Hartford said quickly.
Before the sheriff could reply, he had turned his horse and headed away from the gate and towards the cattle pens. He had to see for himself if Dunmore’s steers were down there. After all, these were his orders from Allan Pinkerton. He clicked his tongue to hurry his appaloosa and ignored whatever protest the sheriff called out after him.
It was a quarter mile of dirt track between the house and the pens. As Hartford drew close, he could make out thin lines of black smoke rising from a fire where the men were branding steers. Hartford glanced over his shoulder and was relieved to see the sheriff wasn’t following. Once he had checked what he needed to, he might be able to catch up with him before he reached the main gate.
At the cattle pens, it was just as Hartford suspected. A longhorn was being held down by three guys while a fourth altered the brand. Hartford knew straight off that was what they were doing. Instead of handling a McGreggor brand, the man held a home-made running iron, a length of blackened wood shoved through a saddle cinch ring. He held it over a small fire until the ring glowed and the handle began to smoke, then he traced an addition to the brand that was already there. An LD design became a McG. Concentrating on their work, the men failed to register Hartford’s approach until he was right by them.
‘Ain’t they sent you down with some coffee?’ The man doing the branding looked irritated. ‘We’ve been out here all morning.’ Clearly in charge, his work clothes were covered in dust and smoke from the fire blackened his face. He looked tired and from what Hartford could see, they weren’t even half way through. The stink of burning hide hung in the air.
The other three released the steer which they had had pinned to the ground and jumped back to let him go free. With a strangled grunt and a shake of its head, the terrified animal bucked itself to its feet, flicked its tail and trotted away.
‘Why don’t you Lazy D guys come down here and help us?’ One of the others spoke, a tough cowboy with resentment in his eyes. ‘It don’t take all of you to sit on the main gate. Up until yesterday, there was only ever one guy on the gate.’
‘Yesterday?’ Hartford said.
‘Yesterday,’ the man echoed scornfully. ‘When you guys arrived.’
‘You going to just sit there on your horse or are you going to get down and give us a hand?’ the man doing the branding said.
‘Ask me, McGreggor’s jumpy all of a sudden,’ the second man said. ‘Never had more than one guy on the gate before.’
‘With this many beeves, who wouldn’t be?’ A third man spoke. ‘Damn hard work branding full-grown steers. Pete got kicked this morning.’ He indicated one of the other men.
Pete was younger than the others. Standing back from the group, waiting to be brought into the conversation before he said anything, he smiled when his name was mentioned.
‘Might have broke a rib,’ Pete said. ‘Hurts like hell.’
‘Pity you didn’t get kicked in the head,’ the fourth man said.
‘Wouldn’t have noticed then, would you?’
The other men laughed. Pete’s face reddened, but he stared at a patch of ground down by his feet and smiled again. Teasing like this meant that the older men had accepted him.
‘All these come from the Lazy D?’ Hartford tried to sound casual. He cast his eye over the pens. There must have been more than seventy beeves between the three pens.
‘You brung ’em.’ Pete felt confident enough to attempt banter of his own. ‘You should know.’
The men all stared at Hartford. They realized something, but hadn’t figured out what it was.
‘Didn’t you?’ Pete tried to get someone to laugh at his joke.
Again, none of them laughed.
‘How come you don’t know that?’ The foreman held the running iron at his side. Then he added, ‘You come down here to help us or what?’
‘Just been with McGreggor,’ Hartford said. ‘Came down to see how you fellas were getting on.’
‘Told you McGreggor was jumpy,’ the second man chipped in.
‘Shut up, Zac.’ Something was making the foreman uneasy.
‘We need some of those new guys on the gate to come down here and give us a hand and we need someone to bring us down some coffee.’ Zac wouldn’t be quiet.
‘Maybe Mr McGreggor put the new guys on the gate because they ain’t as good as us at doing the real work.’ Pete made another play for the approval of the group but everyone ignored him.
There was a shout from further up the track that led towards the main house. A rider careered towards them, his horse kicking up a fierce cloud of dust. As he drew closer, Hartford recognized Logan. When he reached the pens, he jerked his reins and pulled the animal to a standstill.
‘You shouldn’t be down here,’ Logan yelled at Hartford. He looked down distastefully at the dust on his clothes. ‘Mr McGreggor told you to leave.’ Then he rounded on the foreman. ‘What are you do
ing talking to him anyway?’
‘He’s one of your guys from the D, ain’t he?’ The foreman looked baffled.
‘Why don’t a couple of you fellas come down here and give us a hand?’ Zac chimed in. ‘It don’t take all of you to sit on that gate.’
Hartford turned his horse and started back up the track. Logan shadowed him all the way to the gate. Sheriff Milton was waiting there with Jake Nudd and Clyde Shorter.
‘They don’t like you guys,’ Hartford said. ‘They figure you’re letting them do all the work.’
Nudd and Shorter looked anxiously at Logan to see if this was true.
‘Saw about seventy head with the Lazy D brand,’ Hartford went on. ‘You boys cut Dunmore’s herd?’
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Logan said innocently. ‘Mr McGreggor took us on to guard his gate. We don’t have nothing to do with the herd.’
CHAPTER NINE
After leaving the McGreggor spread, Sheriff Milton insisted on heading out to Snake’s Creek.
‘Ought to see where it was done,’ he said.
On the ride, the sheriff became lost in his own thoughts. When Hartford tried to tell him how he had witnessed McGreggor’s men doctoring the brands on Lazy D steers, the sheriff merely nodded as if he already knew.
Hartford hadn’t visited Snake’s Creek since he was a boy. His mind played over old memories of his pa taking him out there. What a hero his pa had seemed then. Tall and strong, there seemed nothing he couldn’t fix, no question he couldn’t answer and nothing he didn’t know. He taught him patience and carefulness, the right way to cast a line, how to use the home-made net to land his catch without harming it. Pa always brought Boone along too and set him up with a pole just like Hartford’s.
But it was never long before Boone became bored. His mood darkened, he complained about the heat and threw stones in the creek. The older he got, the more readily he found excuses to head into town instead, usually on the pretext of running some errand or other. Then he would stay there all day, hang around the livery stable or the saloon and arrive back home after dark, sometimes after his pa had gone looking for him, full of stories of stand-offs and fist fights between the cattlemen. To shock his ma, he made a point of using language he picked up during the course of the day, which had never been heard at home.
Joe Hartford taught his sons all he knew about the farm, how to dig wells and turn parched land into productive fields, how to shear sheep, raise hogs and milk the cow; each spring they witnessed the birth of lambs. While the boys were young, their parents were happy, the farm prospered and everything was fine.
From the get-go everyone acknowledged that Boone was a difficult kid. Tantrums and disobedience, which could be excused while he was a child, became serious when he didn’t grow out of them as a teenager. When he told his parents he hated the farm, everything they had worked for, it broke their hearts. The constant strain of being peacemaker and worrying about what Boone was up to, on top of the toll of gruelling farm work, wore his mother out.
Joe Hartford barely noticed. He buried himself in his work. Somehow, far away from the house, there were always fences that needed mending and livestock that had strayed, which meant he arrived home after dark, too late to do anything but eat and go straight to bed. He didn’t want to have to deal with Boone or listen to his wife’s complaints about how rude or lazy he had been that day or how she had failed to get him to do his chores. Joe Hartford’s dream of handing on a thriving farm to his two sons was broken. He began to realize that the assumptions he had made about how the future would turn out were simply wrong.
To help him get through all this, Joe Hartford regularly took refuge in a bottle of red eye in the evenings. Not being an argumentative man, his drinking never led to fights and he was never so much as discourteous to his wife. It was simply a way to prevent himself thinking about problems he knew he could never solve, his wife’s failing health, Boone’s apparent loathing of everything he stood for and the fact that Hartford’s ambition to become a Pinkerton Agent meant that he too would turn his back on the farm.
When they reached Snake’s Creek, Hartford and the sheriff edged their horses along the narrow track which zig-zagged down to the river. The high sides of the creek provided welcome shade. As Hartford and the sheriff rounded a bend, they saw a figure hunched over a fishing pole. Pops Wardell.
‘Figured no one would mind, now that . . . I mean . . . Dunmore being . . .’ The old man didn’t notice them approach until they were right on top of him. He jumped up and knocked his pole off the rock where it was balanced.
‘That’s fine Pops,’ the sheriff assured him. ‘Come to look at where it happened.’
‘I can help you there, Sheriff.’ Pops Wardell scrambled up from the river’s edge on to the path.
The next bend upstream was a place where animals came to drink. The flow of the river slowed here and the water’s edge was shallow.
‘Right here.’ Pops stood still and pointed.
Hartford noticed animal tracks, hoof prints and some human boot prints. He climbed down off his horse and inspected the dirt. Amidst the confusion of tracks, he could just make out parallel lines made by wheels.
‘Bill Greely bring a wagon out here when he came to pick up the body?’
‘No sir,’ Pops said. ‘Said he wouldn’t be able to get it close enough to the river. Led a mule out from the stable, carried him back to town on that.’
Pops gave them a thorough tour of the site, pointing out tracks and places where he had seen tracks which were now covered over. Hartford examined the ground, but the dirt was so dry, the slightest breeze could make hoof prints disappear almost as soon as they had been made. He kept his eyes peeled for anything else, clothing snagged on a thorn, a shell casing perhaps, but found nothing. The hoof prints Pops swore he had seen heading south had disappeared too.
‘What d’you reckon about the tracks?’ Pops was excited. He wanted to be a part of the investigation. ‘See, I reckon Dunmore came out here looking for me. He knew I wasn’t going to quit fishing just on his say so.’ Pops drew himself up to his full height. ‘We were playing a game of cat and mouse.’
On the way back to town, Hartford insisted on describing the brands he had seen being altered on the McGreggor ranch.
‘Same thing on every ranch in Texas.’ The sheriff was unimpressed. ‘If you ask me, that’s why the bosses keep the cowpokes’ wages so low. The only guys who miss out are the ones who do the rustling. They all think they’re going to make enough money to put down a payment on a spread of their own. Never happens.’ The sheriff suddenly became serious. ‘Bet you any money you like Logan and the others will have sold the beeves to McGreggor at a rock bottom price. All they’ll have made will be enough for a couple of nights drinking at Pearl’s place. When they sobered up and went asking McGreggor for work, he’ll have said he’d take them on as a favour because Dunmore fired them. Then he’ll pay them even less than Dunmore did.’
Riding side by side, the men pulled their hats down low. The hard midday light stabbed their eyes and the heat lashed their shoulders. Sweat ran down their temples and cut tracks in the dust that clung to their faces. Neither of them spoke for a while. Their bodies relaxed into the regular, monotonous pace of their horses.
Sheriff Milton slipped into a reverie, a place where intuition, instinct and experience met and combined into thought. When he was walking, he grimaced with pain at every step, but here in the saddle, his face was relaxed, content. It was at least two miles before he broke his silence.
‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten about the jail break.’ The sheriff raised his chin as he turned to Hartford so that the shadow cast by his hat did not hide the look of determination on his face.
‘Has it always been like this between McGreggor and Dunmore?’ Hartford wanted the sheriff to focus on Dunmore again. Some cowhand busting out of jail didn’t seem important.
‘Forever,’ the sheriff said. ‘McGreggor arriv
ed down here when land was free for the taking. Following year, Dunmore turned up and lay claim to his spread. Any parcels of land they couldn’t sign for legally they grabbed anyway. Always argued over that boundary of theirs, I doubt if either of them knows where the true line runs.’
A couple of miles up ahead, the wooden buildings which made up the town shimmered in the heat. From here, they seemed part of the landscape. The bleached cottonwood was the same smoky grey as the caliche dust around it, cast the same pools of black shadow as the cactus plants which grew outside it, and sat as still as the rocks strewn along the desert trail.
Hartford remembered the excitement he felt as a boy whenever he witnessed the men working on a new building, the sound of their hammers pealing like bells out across the empty plain and the sight of the newly cut wood, as pale as early sunshine. Now, the town was not so much growing out of the landscape as sinking back into it. His memory was of a place of hope nourished by dreams of the future; now it was a place of despair where old enmities were laid bare.
‘Dunmore called in the Pinkerton Agency because McGreggor was getting the upper hand,’ Hartford said. In his head, pieces fell into place. ‘Allan Pinkerton thought he was answering the cry for help from a cattleman terrorised by a gang of rustlers. He had no idea he was joining one side in a range war.’
As they entered the town, the doors to the livery were open. Inside, Bill Greely was measuring coffin length planks of pine. The dirt floor around him was littered with yellow shavings and the smell of planed wood sweetened the air. Greely looked up and smiled his black smile as Hartford and the sheriff rode past.
At the saloon, Pearl was adding rosettes to the loops of bunting which ran the length of the porch. There were more rosettes and twists of crepe paper along the lintel. On the doors, the names Boone and Mary May were picked out in paper flowers.
‘What do you think?’ Pearl was pleased with her handiwork. ‘I’m guessing the wedding’s still at one o’clock tomorrow. Nobody’s told me it ain’t.’
