Hard Country (32 page)

Alone in the bunkhouse, Patrick washed his only good pair of pants and a shirt, dried them near the woodstove, stitched up a rip on a sleeve, and pressed everything with an iron he’d borrowed from María, Wilcox’s Mexican housekeeper. He knew the boys thought he was too stingy to spend his money, and some had even said outright that his duds were a disgrace to the outfit. He couldn’t fault them for that, but he never said a word about why he was tightfisted with his money.

He’d spent most of his wages from the fall works on outfitting himself with a saddle, tarpaulin bedroll, yellow slicker, new chaps, rawhide gloves, a Colt .45 and a holster, boots, a hat, and the two sets of duds he’d bought. He was still toting the Winchester Mr. Wilcox had originally loaned him, buying it outright with money from his first pay as a top hand. Come next payday, Dan Burgess would give him a bill of sale for Cuidado, so he’d own his pony free and clear and have a hundred dollars set aside toward the money he owed Cal. Still, it would take a lot more time to save the rest.

He aimed to not be embarrassed at Christmas supper sitting with the gussied-up girls and fancy-dressed cowboys, but when the time came he was uncomfortable and self-conscious. The only time he’d felt worse was as a ragamuffin begging for food in the mining camps when Ida got too drunk and forgot to feed him.

They all sat at a long table loaded with platters of roasted beef, fried chicken, potatoes, and homemade pies. Sam Wilcox sat at the far end, his daughter and her girls surrounding him. Lucinda, her mother, and her sisters were in their holiday best, with ruffles at their collars and bows in their hair. The cowboys wore spanking-new shirts and flashy bandannas around their necks. Even Fats had spruced up in a white shirt and pair of red suspenders.

Lucinda’s mother had placed Patrick as far away from the family as she could, at the other end of the table with Fats and a young, freckle-nose waddie who was riding the chuck line and had showed up for supper. After the food was passed around, Patrick concentrated on his supper and said little. Fats wasn’t much of a talker to begin with, and the freckle-nose drifter was too busy packing away the victuals to have much to say. Patrick chewed his beef and felt like there wasn’t one waddie in the room he’d call a true friend, not even Jake.

During the meal, Sam Wilcox kept eyeing him. He finally leaned over and said something to Dan Burgess. When the plates had been cleared, the last toast had been made, and the men were making their good nights and filing out, Dan told Patrick to wait for Mr. Wilcox in his office. A good ten minutes passed before Wilcox arrived, looking less than friendly.

“I asked Dan Burgess why one of my top hands would come to my table on Christmas looking like he doesn’t have three cents to his name. He said you’ve been drawing your wages right along. I want to know what you’ve been doing with it. And I warn you, I was a good, plausible liar in my youth, so you better tell me the truth.”

“I’ve been saving it, Mr. Wilcox.”

“All of it?”

“Yes, sir, except for the money I still owe you for the pony you sold me.”

“Saving it for what?”

“I’ve got my reasons, sir, and I don’t mean to reflect badly on you or the brand.”

“You need to do better than that, son.” Wilcox lit a cigar.

“I need a stake to buy back a spread I let go on the Tularosa. It was plain dumb of me, and I mean to get it back.”

“I hear the drought hit hard there.”

Patrick nodded. “It did, and a lot of nesters have moved on. But the grass is coming back in the high country.”

Wilcox nodded approvingly. “If you can get back your land, more power to you. Someday a lot of these boys at the Flying W will be busted-up old waddies with nothing to show for a life’s work except stories nobody wants to hear.”

“There’s truth to that, sir,” Patrick said.

“I wish you the best, but while you’re working for me I expect you to dress like you’re proud of the brand. Fats is going to town for supplies in the morning and you’re going with him. Buy some new duds with a few of those greenbacks I’ve been paying you. It won’t set you back that much.”

Patrick stood, hat in hand. “Yes, sir. I’d be obliged if you’d keep my plans to yourself. I don’t need a bunch of old boys joshing me about turning into a stockman.”

Wilcox nodded. “I won’t say a word.”

“Thank you.”

After Patrick left, Sam Wilcox sat and thought over what he’d been told. The cowboy seemed sincere enough and he’d spun a believable story, but Wilcox flat-out figured there was more to it than that. He shucked off thinking about the young cowboy and finished his cigar.

31

P
atrick and Jake Jacobi stayed on at the Flying W for a short time after spring works to finish the cow ponies and put them through their paces for a rancher out of California who had a spread along the central coast. The rancher picked out thirty of the best ponies and even tried to buy Cuidado out from under Patrick at a hefty price. Patrick turned him down, so instead the rancher proposed to hire both cowboys to take the horses to his ranch by rail, promising steady work once there. Patrick turned him down again, but Jake jumped at the chance. Working on a ranch in sight of the ocean sounded like pure heaven to him.

At the rail siding in town, Jake and Patrick loaded the ponies on stock cars and said adios.

“Sure you don’t want to come with me and see the ocean?” Jake asked with a grin.

“Wrong direction, amigo,” Patrick replied as he picked up the rope to his packhorse, a sturdy gray, and climbed on Cuidado.

He waved good-bye and headed north out of town. Over the past few weeks, he’d studied hard about what to do when the job at the Flying W ran out. He had three hundred dollars tucked away, another thirty dollars in his pocket, and enough grub and supplies to get him back to New Mexico, but he was still shy of what he owed Cal. He decided to ride the chuck line north awhile before swinging east, in the hopes he might land a job along the way.

The first night he camped at an empty cabin in the hills protected by an old hound dog that flopped down in front of him and rolled on his back when he arrived. In the morning, he fed the hound a piece of bacon from his breakfast, and the old dog kept him company for a few miles along the trail before turning for home.

Over the next week, he had a few meals and a warm place to lay his head at several high-country ranches that bordered Apache lands, but nobody was hiring. He kept north, climbing steep, pine-covered plateaus, crossing mountain meadows thick with herds of elk, fording fast, clear-running streams shaded by willows, plunging down deep canyons only to raise distant mountains at the crest of an enormous rim. He rode under tall pines that dotted grassy pastures and stopped at small lakes tucked into tiny saucer valleys at the base of soaring peaks still dusted with snow above the timberline.

The untamed land was about the best piece of outdoors Patrick had ever seen, and the solitude that came with it was a balm to his mind. He spotted a grizzly bear ambling through the forest, and a wolf serenaded him at night. At dusk as he snaked wood for a campfire, he saw the flash of a cougar in a mountain meadow, and next morning before first light an owl woke him with its gentle call. Eagles and hawks hunted above on wind currents, woodpeckers beat tattoos that echoed through the woods, and wild turkeys gobbled out of sight in the underbrush. It was one of the best trail rides he’d ever made.

He crossed into New Mexico and passed through the mesa lands on the Zuni Pueblo without stopping. He pushed on to Ramah, a Mormon farm and ranching settlement in a pleasant, tree-shaded valley with thick bottom grass along a wide stream. He stabled his ponies at the livery and in a rickety bathhouse behind the general store he soaked in the tub until the water cooled. After a campfire dinner, he spread out his bedroll on soft hay in the livery and fell asleep before dusk turned to night.

The next day, in a hurry to reach the Tularosa, he moved on without trying to find work, riding through red rimrock country, where tall, thin, wind-carved spires and odd-shaped pinnacles hovered over juniper woodlands. At Inscription Rock he watered his horses at the pool at the base of the mesa and studied the names carved into the stone. For hundreds of years, Spanish explorers, scouts, Civil War soldiers, Catholic priests, army officers, cowboys, and travelers had stopped to chisel their names into the soft stone near the water hole. He added his initials before continuing east.

He followed a wagon road that skirted some northerly mountains and, with the sun low in the west, camped for the night at the edge of lava badlands that reminded him of the Tularosa malpais. To the southwest, a line of mountaintops peeked above the horizon as the setting sun lit them on fire. He went to sleep with the pull of home tugging at his memories.

The next day at Grant, a fueling stop on the railroad, he bought fresh grub for himself and feed for his ponies and camped for the night. Eager to keep moving, he slept poorly and rose early, and by noon he was back in the badlands trailing southeast toward the Rio Grande. Four long days of travel across a rough country of sharp ridges, narrow divides, and staircase mesas brought him at last to a scarp overlooking the twisting green bosque of the Rio Grande. To the east the Fray Cristobal Mountains, dwarfed by sky and tier upon tier of desert tableland, tumbled across the horizon. On the other side of the cameo-clear mountains, a hundred miles or more from where Patrick sat on his weary pony, was the Tularosa and home. But he wouldn’t go there yet.

Three days later he arrived in White Oaks, a mining town on the north end of the Tularosa. He made camp at an abandoned cabin on the outskirts of town, deposited three hundred dollars in the bank under the name of Pat Floyd, went looking for work at the Old Abe Mine, and got hired on as a laborer at two dollars and fifty cents a day.

He worked six ten-hour shifts a week and lived like a hermit at the cabin on fifty cents a day. To the townsfolk he was just another one of the faceless men who disappeared down a thirteen-hundred-foot shaft every morning and every night. He never hated a job more.

On Sundays, he took Cuidado out for a ride, good weather or bad. Leading the gray, he galloped them across the grasslands outside of town, scattering the few remaining antelope herds that hadn’t been wiped out for fun by the town folk. There were bones and carcasses all over the flats.

When he got to feeling lonely, he walked to town and looked at the people. Although it was a fair size, with more than two thousand people, White Oaks wasn’t much of a hell-raising place. It had only a couple of saloons, the most popular the Little Casino, but no hurdy-gurdy girls worked there. The Ozanne Hotel had a fine dining room, but Patrick had never eaten there because of the cost. He did his shopping on Fridays after work at the Ziegler Store, which stayed open to serve the miners, who’d been paid and needed to buy grub and sundries.

There was a fairly new stone schoolhouse and some fancy two-story homes with gables and latticework porches some mine owners and managers had built. Sometimes, the families were out on the porches when he passed by, but not once did anyone venture a howdy in his direction.

He quit the day he had enough to pay Cal what he owed. He got a shave, a haircut, and a bath, changed into fresh duds, and took his money from the bank. At the cabin he packed his gear on the gray pony and rode out of town feeling like a new man.

His pulse quickened as the Oscura Mountains came into view. There were mountains roundabout as the basin stretched out before him, flinty, dusty, encrusted with the black lava tubes that snaked over the gravelly, rolling land. There was nothing green or grassy about it, nothing comforting, yet it pleased Patrick to see it once again. Old, twisted alligator junipers poked out of deep lava holes, stands of mesquite meandered in shallow draws, sagebrush savannas waved on sacaton flats, and the rolling sugar white sand hills that brushed the shallow lake along the road to Las Cruces sparkled in the morning sun.

There were cattle on the range, but far fewer than before the drought. The land had come back some, but where once tall grasses had flourished, sandy cactus benches now prevailed.

He wanted to keep on riding through the night but pulled up at Malpais Spring instead. He fed the horses, made a cold camp, and slept fitfully, waking from a bad dream that had him seeing the Double K in ruins. Troubled in mind, he saddled up and rode under starlight, raising the Double K at midday. A windmill had been thrown up next to the saddle shed, but aside from that everything looked the same. There were cows and some horses in the pasture, and a saddled pony stood hitched to a corral post near the open barn door.

He reined Cuidado to a stop just as Cal stepped outside. He tipped his hat back, glanced at Patrick, and studied Cuidado.

“That’s a thrifty-looking pony,” he said, as if nothing bad had ever passed between them.

“He’ll do,” Patrick replied. There was gray at Cal’s temples and a few more wrinkles around his eyes.

“What happened to your saddle?” Cal asked.

“It got stolen,” Patrick said, twisting the truth.

“Too bad.”

“Yep.”

“You here for your money?” Cal asked.

Patrick shook his head. “Nope. I want back in as partner.”

Cal smiled. “This hardscrabble place ain’t worth the money I gave you.”

“Maybe, but its half mine, and I’m here to claim it.”

Cal studied Patrick. This wasn’t the same man he’d last seen in Juárez. He looked harder and he talked tougher. “You got four hundred dollars?”

Patrick nodded. “I do.” He pulled the greenbacks out of his pocket and handed the money to Cal.

Cal counted it. “Four hundred exactly. Light. George is up at the house rustling supper. He’s been asking me regular when you’d be coming home. I guess now he’ll have to come up with something else to worry me about.”

Patrick slid out of his saddle. “I want that paper you made me sign.”

“I didn’t make you sign anything. But come up to the house and I’ll get it for you.”