Hard Country (46 page)

As he slowly recovered, the doctors told him he had miraculously survived the most dangerous, potentially life-threatening form of malaria. He believed them. Back in the hospital wards at Camp Wikoff he had seen men as sick or sicker, dying like flies. Thousands had died of the disease, far more than those shot down by Spanish guns. It was a grim business.

Wearing a brand-spanking-new Rough Riders uniform with almost a year’s pay in his pocket, Patrick left the massive, six-sided stone fortress, which had been built decades before the Civil War. Situated on a point of land at the tip of the ocean, completely surrounded by a moat, Fort Monroe had brought back memories of Yuma Prison. He was glad to be rid of it.

He bought a train ticket all the way to Engle and sent a telegraph to Ignacio in Tularosa, asking him to let Emma and Cal know he would be arriving in four days. He’d written home a week before saying he would soon be released and asking that they bring his pony to the station so he could ride home. Now with his energy low again, he wasn’t sure that had been such a good idea.

In Baltimore, there was a two-hour wait for his train. He passed the time rereading the letters from home he’d received over the months. Cal and Emma had written faithfully, mostly with news of the ranch and doings on the basin.

George had recovered from gout only to crack his head on a fall from his horse in rough country. He’d healed up nicely under Emma’s care and was back in the saddle. Last summer’s rains had brought more grass back in the high pastures, and a couple of winter storms had put a good mantle of snow on the peaks.

Patrick had missed both the fall and spring works, but Cal wrote about them in detail, praising Emma’s growing skills as a hand. With her help, the outfit had made enough profit from stock sales in the fall to put a little money in the bank and build a line cabin in the high country. Cal reckoned he’d reached a point where he didn’t need to sleep on the cold, hard ground anymore when he was out tending cattle. The cabin had been supplied with a stove, two cots, firewood, and provisions. Cal figured it would add some years to his life if he could avoid gunfights and accidents.

With George’s help, Emma had built a chicken coop near the barn and had stocked it with six hens and a rooster. So far, the hens were producing a steady quantity of eggs, much to Cal and George’s delight at breakfast. Within a month of getting the chickens, Emma had shot a coyote and a bobcat trying to raid the henhouse. She wrote that some Troop G boys back in Las Cruces had told her about how Patrick had gotten wounded carrying a message for Colonel Roosevelt, and she was eager to hear all about it when he got home.

He wondered how long he’d be worthless once he returned to the ranch. He’d lost thirty pounds, was as pale as a banker, and ran out of steam real fast. The doctors had told him getting back to his old self could take a while and he could expect to have relapses that might be mild or severe. But he’d fixed on the notion that no matter how long it took him to get well, he damn sure wasn’t gonna let Emma, Cal, or George coddle him like some invalid. He’d had enough of that in the hospital.

He mostly worried how he and Emma would get on. Her letters hadn’t been filled with tender feelings, but then neither were his. He remembered the times when she’d stormed out of the house in a fury and wondered if he could put up with the dark moods that came over her. Maybe she was done with all of that and they could start fresh, start a family.

He paged through newspaper clippings Emma had sent along in some of her letters. The war with Spain hadn’t kept the skirmish over the Fountain murders from heating up on the basin. There had been a gunfight at Wildy Well between Pat Garrett and his deputies against Oliver Lee and his partners. A deputy sheriff had been killed and Lee and Jim Gilliland had gone on the dodge. Cal had seen them riding with Gene Rhodes in the San Andres backcountry. This time the three men sported long beards that made them almost unrecognizable.

In Cal’s last letter, he wrote that Lee and Gilliland had given themselves up and were about to go on trial for the Fountain murders in Hillsboro, the Sierra County seat north of Las Cruces. Newspapers from around the country had sent reporters to cover the event, and Patrick had been following the goings-on and the hullabaloo as best he could. He had no druthers as to how it might turn out but wouldn’t mind being in the courtroom to hear all the lies that were sure to be told by both sides.

Other than the pending trial, the big excitement on the basin was the coming of the railroad. While Patrick was in Cuba, the tracks had reached the new town site of Alamogordo on the eastern side of the Tularosa and building lots were being laid out and sold. The territorial legislature had carved a new county out of parts of Doña Ana and Lincoln counties and named it for the sitting governor, Miguel Otero. The seat of county government was to be the new town, which just about guaranteed its future prosperity. Patrick wondered if newcomers had already started pouring in. He didn’t doubt it. Would he even recognize the place once he got home?

He boarded the train and settled down in an empty seat, hoping folks would let him be, but his uniform attracted too much attention. Men came up to him and shook his hand, women were thrilled to meet a Rough Rider, and a young, wide-eyed button traveling with his mother asked if he’d been shot in Cuba. Patrick allowed that it was so, sent him back to his seat pronto, pulled his campaign hat down low, and pretended to sleep. It wasn’t long before he drifted off.

* * *

D
uring the next few days, Patrick stayed to himself as much as possible, watching the countryside pass by through the railcar windows. The doctors had told him to avoid hard spirits, and he stuck to their advice when offered a drink now and then by fellow passengers who wanted to hear all about the Rough Riders.

The Midwest was a big, fertile country and he was glad to see it, but he missed the mountains that screened the endless sun-blasted Tularosa, the huge skies that capped the heaving sand dunes and jumbled lava flows, and the purple sunsets that danced over the San Andres.

There were moments when his mind returned to the war. He flinched at the thought of Jake Jacobi dying in his arms, blood pulsing from his throat. Or he remembered the Spanish artillery shell that took off the trooper’s leg at the battle for Kettle Hill, the limb tumbling end over end in the air. He had almost no memory of getting shot but recalled clearly the days he spent lying on the spongy, moist ground burning up with fever, his wound infected, his mind a confused jumble, watching the sand crabs crawling toward the bodies of the men who had died.

He put thoughts of war aside when the Rocky Mountains rose in the distance, and during the remainder of the trip his spirits revived. From Socorro south into the Jornada del Muerto he drank in the sight of the raw desert and rugged mountains he knew and loved so well.

As the train chugged into Engle, he spotted Emma, Cal, and George standing on the platform, waving gaily. George looked older; Emma, browned by the sun and still about as pretty as a girl could be, looked as though she’d grown an inch or two; and Cal sported a bushy white mustache that gave him a distinguished air.

Seeing them brought feelings of delight and apprehension Patrick hadn’t expected. As the train ground to a stop, he grabbed his bag and headed for the exit. They had all changed some, he reckoned, and with the new century just months away he wondered what the future would bring and just how he might fit into it on the Double K.

48

P
atrick stayed close to the ranch after his return home, happy to be back on the Tularosa. He grew stronger every day, and when the fevers and chills came, he recovered faster each time, thanks to Emma’s care. She had welcomed him back to her bed without hesitation, and although the sex was satisfying, Patrick seemed indifferent toward her, something she’d never experienced with him before. Many nights he fell asleep in a porch rocking chair and came to bed in the wee hours.

When Patrick left to go to war, Emma had felt a twinge of jealousy. Had she been a man, she would have done the same. Not for the fighting, but to see faraway places, walk big-city streets, and watch ocean waves lap sandy shores. It had always been her dream to see the world.

Their first night in bed together after he got home, she touched the bullet-hole scar in his side. “Does it hurt?”

“Leave that be,” he said, pushing her hand away.

“Tell me what happened.”

“I didn’t get into this bed buck naked to tell you a story,” he said as his hand slid to her thigh.

“Will you tell me sometime?”

“Maybe so, but I doubt it.”

At breakfast the next morning she asked him about the ocean. “I’ve always wanted to see it.”

“Didn’t like it,” Patrick said. “It ain’t a friendly place. Empty and dangerous.”

He went outside and she followed. “I don’t mean to rile you, but you’ve seen places I can only dream about.”

“I didn’t go on a pleasure trip.”

“I know that,” Emma said, touching his arm.

Patrick pulled away. “Let it be.”

That night he came into the bedroom just as she was putting away the letters he’d written to her.

“You should burn those,” he said.

“They’re mine to keep,” she said. “I’ve been reading them again. What happened to that Arizona friend of yours?”

“Jake got shot in the neck and died,” he answered grimly, staring at her.

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing about the war that you need to know, so stop pestering me about it.”

He turned, stomped away, and was gone all night.

In the morning, she sought Cal out and told him what had happened.

Cal nodded sympathetically. He had served in the Eighth Texas Cavalry, known as Terry’s Texas Raiders, during the War of Secession, and fought at Shiloh, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. Near the end of the fighting, he’d slipped through Union lines with a hundred and fifty fellow Confederate cavalrymen to avoid capture. Thirty-four years later, he had no desire to talk about the horrors he’d experienced, although they still haunted him at times.

Emma looked at Cal. “Was I pestering?”

“Nope,” he replied, “but war ain’t an easy subject to talk about. It’s the worst kind of killing. There ain’t nothing to compare. It changes a body forever.”

“Have you been in a war?” Emma asked.

Cal nodded. “And it still troubles my mind to think about it.” He patted Emma’s arm. “Just like it must vex you to recollect what happened at Pine Tree Canyon.”

Emma shivered and her expression clouded. “Yes, of course.”

“Don’t fret,” Cal said. “You ain’t been contrary about it.”

“I’ll leave him be, promise,” Emma said.

Cal smiled. “Don’t you do that. You’re his best medicine. Maybe he’ll tell you on his own someday.”

“I hope so.”

During his next trip to town, Cal found issues of
Scribner’s Magazine
that contained Colonel Roosevelt’s serialized accounts of his war exploits in Cuba and brought them home to Emma, who studied them eagerly. Patrick also read them and allowed that the colonel had told the story true enough.

“Except he makes it sound like it was heroic, which it weren’t,” he added.

“Then what was it like?” Emma asked.

“A bunch of blundering fools creeping up hills to their deaths,” he replied. “Cal was right; there ain’t no glory in war.”

Emma bit her lip. “No one was brave?”

“Lots of boys were,” Patrick replied. “But it was still nothing but a god-awful mess.”

Live cattle prices had jumped during the war, and the trend had held into 1899. Before Patrick’s return, Cal had struck a deal with a cattle buyer that guaranteed another prosperous year for the outfit. With enough grass in the high pastures to winter over more than just the steers, cows, and calves, Cal had held back some of the yearlings to sell as two-year-olds. It meant greater profit, and if prices held steady he planned to do it again.

There was always the risk another drought could upend his plans. But with the ranch almost in the black and the bank loan about to be paid off, Cal figured it to be a good time to take the gamble. After he explained his thinking on the matter, Patrick readily went along.

The two men had worked as stray riders on the John Cross, 7TX, and Bar Cross roundups, so when the time came to get the Double K fall works under way, cowboys from all three spreads showed up, along with Gene Rhodes.

“I thought you went off to get married,” Cal said as Gene slid off his saddle.

Colonel Fountain’s and his son’s bodies had never been found, and after the acquittal of his friends Oliver Lee and Jim Gilliland in the murder trial, Gene Rhodes had gone back east to marry a lady he’d been romancing by mail.

“I did and I am,” Gene replied as he nodded at Patrick. “Went all the way to New York State. Sure is different than this hot, dusty basin, but I can’t say I like it any better. Family will join me shortly, but until then I need work and a place to lie low.”

“What did you go and do?” Patrick asked.