Shortgrass Song (57 page)

“Well, honey, why do you think me and Javier built the dang cabin in the first place? If you want to blow that wad of cash on a fiesta, we'd better go kill some meat.”

“You have only been here an hour and already you are talking about going away to the mountains with Javier!”

Caleb got up and tried to embrace her, but she avoided him. “I must have told you a hundred times,” he said, “that if you want to be with me so bad, you can come with us.”

She put her hands on her hips. “I don't want to go with a bunch of stinking
borrachos
and sit around a dirty cabin and sing songs and tell nasty stories!”

“Oh, it ain't that bad. Besides, you know it'll take Javier two weeks to get the hunt organized. That's two weeks for just you and me.” He trapped her in a corner. He was the only man he knew of who could still chase his woman around after six years. It made sense to stay gone three out of four seasons, he thought. It made them yearn for each other when they came together.

Marisol was wishing Caleb would settle down and live like Javier, who came home to his wife every night. If they lived together all the time, maybe he would learn to behave himself in his own house.

“Why don't you take the children over to your grandma's house,” Caleb suggested. “I'll drop in on Javier and let him know I'm back.” He raked her neck with his mustache.

She moaned, half in protest, half in surrender. “I'll take the children,” she said. “Just let me out of this corner.”

She carried Elena and herded Marta and Angelo down the lane to her grandmother's house. The old lady was not overjoyed to see her great-grandchildren arrive at such an hour, but she dutifully took them in.

Marisol stopped at her house to brush her hair a hundred strokes. There was no hurry. Caleb would stay awhile with Javier. She only hoped they didn't pick up their infernal guitars. She freshened up, put on a clean dress, and stepped out into the cool November night. Crossing the footbridge, she saw lights on in the
casa consistorial.

When she cracked the doors, a group of young men burst into laughter. Javier had a guitar on his thigh and was smiling at Caleb, with one hand stroking the hand-some crease in his chin. Caleb had a fiddle, but they were between songs.

“… And after that,” Caleb said, “I headed west of San Antonio and fell in with a fellow named Halsey who was a tax assessor. He went around tellin' people how much their land and stuff was worth so he could tax 'em for it. Well, we came on an old Mexican on the Devil's River, and he had him a house made out of crossties. Halsey looked it over and says, ‘Francisco, I'm gonna assess this place of yours at three thousand dollars.' Well, Francisco like to have throwed a fit and says, ‘This house is not worth that much!' But Halsey says, ‘Damned if it ain't, Francisco. You've got about a thousand crossties in this place, and they sell for three dollars apiece, conservative!' And Francisco says, ‘God damnit, Halsey, you know I didn't pay no three dollars apiece for them crossties. You know I stole every damn one of them from the Texas Pacific Railroad!'”

The listeners roared with laughter. Sylvia shrieked and wrapped her arms around Javier's neck.

As she watched through the crack between the double doors, Marisol had to smile. Caleb told a fine story and loved a crowd around him. Sadly, she closed the laughter inside, turned away, and went home to wait.

SIXTY-SEVEN

Buster rose in the dark of early morning. He needed no more than five hours of sleep a night and always got up well before sunrise. Gently, he lifted Gloria's arm and slipped out from under it. He slithered out of the bed as if he might wake her, but he knew better. In their one month of marriage, he had learned that nothing short of artillery fire could rouse her before eight o'clock in the morning.

He shivered as he stood in his long underwear at the window of the Cincinnati house. For a ready-made structure that had been won in a poker game, the little frame home was built amazingly well, but was hard to keep warm. It had no fireplace, just a single woodstove in the lean-to kitchen that jutted out from the back. A bedroom and a parlor completed the floor plan. It was a nice little honeymoon shack, but Buster knew he would have to add on soon. He intended to raise a family.

Through the bedroom window, he looked out on his grove of young pines, bathed in the light of a full moon hanging over the Rampart Range. He turned to look at Gloria's face, benign and restful on her pillow. It amused him to think of how different she had looked the first day he saw her.

Amelia had brought Gloria to the ranch after her honeymoon with Pete in Denver. There was no way Amelia, by herself, could have kept a house as big as the one Pete had built for her, so she had employed Gloria as a cook and housekeeper. The day Pete and Amelia returned from their honeymoon, Buster drove to the station to pick them up in Amelia's surrey, a wedding gift from Captain Dubois.

When Gloria appeared and started putting luggage in the surrey, Buster stared as if he had never seen a black woman in his entire life. In fact, he had seen pitifully few women of his own race since coming to Colorado, and of the few he had seen, Gloria fetched his attention quicker than any. She was ten years younger than he was, comely, and buxom. He simply sat in the driver's seat and ogled her as she loaded the baggage.

“What're you lookin' at?” Gloria said, scowling under the brim of a floppy straw hat.

“Didn't mean to stare,” Buster said, tipping his hat.

“Get down off that seat and help me get Miss Amelia's bags in there.”

Buster almost followed her orders but caught himself. “That's your job. I don't work for Miss Amelia. I'm just being neighborly.” He met her glare with a smile.

After Gloria got over her first meeting with Buster, and found out that he was as well-off as any homesteader in the county, she stopped ignoring his attempts to call on her. Then, in a matter of weeks, she agreed to marry him.

For the first time since coming west, Buster felt civilized. He had a farm, a house, a wife, good neighbors, and respect—even among white people. The country had never looked better to him than it did in the morning moonlight. He could gaze from the window of his Cincinnati house, look through the pine trees he and Pete and Caleb had planted seven years before, and see his old cabin near the irrigation ditches. It was still one of his favorite places, and he used it as a private retreat, storing his wildflower seeds and other specimens there and designing new implements he could build to use on his farm.

Turning his eyes from his old burlap-carpeted cabin, he looked upstream, across the barn and bunkhouse, past the old Holcomb cabin, toward Pete's two-story stone mansion above the irrigation reservoir. Amelia fed pet ducks and swans there and planned to landscape the creek bank all the way from the pond to the mansion. Upper branches of cottonwoods that Pete had planted around the site years before the home was built were approaching the second-story windows in height.

The house had cylindrical towers at all four corners. Many Colorado Springs residents had criticized Pete for attempting to upstage General Palmer's mansion, Glen Eyrie, built along the order of a castle near the Garden of the Gods. Pete and Amelia mused secretly. Only they knew that the ancient cliff dwellings above Manitou held the true inspiration for their home.

Just when he got ready to turn from the window and start a fire in the stove, Buster saw a light come up in the kitchen of Pete's house. Rarely did any of his neighbors rise as early as he did. He was intrigued but determined not to let his curiosity turn into nosiness. He pulled the curtains together and went to start the fire, taking his clothes and boots with him so he could dress by the warmth of the stove.

With his overalls and flannel shirt buttoned, and the stove lids warming, he could not resist taking another look at Pete's mansion through the kitchen window. Just as he peeked through the curtains, Pete's door cracked open and Pete came out, carrying a lantern, and walking quickly toward the barn. Buster was overcome with curiosity. He grabbed his scarf, a felt hat, and a sheepskin coat and went to see what Pete could possibly be up to so early on such a winter morning.

The clean freshness of the cold air filled him with vigor, and he covered the frosty ground in long strides, the dead and frozen stalks of grass crunching under his heels. A half-Durham, half-longhorn heifer saw him from the middle of the barbwire pasture and let out a plaintive moan, begging for hay. He glanced back and saw her breath rising against the dark sky, a gray cloud in the moonlight.

Leaving the pines behind him, he marched toward the barn, where he could see Pete's lantern shining between the planks. Ab's house was silent and dark in the distance, the nearby bunkhouse merely dark: He could hear the snores of the cowboys rasping through the board-and-batten walls.

He looked in through the large doorway of the barn where, years before, Allegheny had hung in a sling, convalescing. He saw Pete throwing his saddle over a high-strung three-year-old stallion called Whiplash, a classic Nez Perce pony, black with a white “blanket” on his rump and black spots on the blanket.

“Where are you goin'?” Buster asked.

Pete almost jumped over the horse, and the horse almost pulled the barn down by the bridle reins, which were looped around a post. “Dang, Buster! You know better than to sneak up on a man in the dark like that!” Pete said, calming the stallion.

Buster laughed. “You're the one sneakin' around. What're you doin' up so early?”

“I'm tryin' to get up in the mountains before the boys get out of bed and see where I'm goin'.” He pulled the fork of the saddle back onto Whiplash's withers.

“You must be goin' after that buck,” Buster said.

Pete's buck had been the source of rampant speculation among the cowhands since spring. In May he had found a shed antler somewhere up in the Rampart Range—the right-hand antler from a huge black-tailed buck. It was no typical antler. It didn't follow the orderly lines of most deer horns. Instead of branching cleanly into a few slender, graceful tines, it bristled with at least a dozen points—heavy, gnarled appendages protruding at random angles.

Sam Dugan had accidentally given name to the originator of the antler. He had burned cedar brakes in Texas and, later, pulled the charred stumps out by the roots. He said the antler Pete had found reminded him of a twisted mass of cedar root. Thus, the buck who had shed the antler became known as Ol' Cedar Root.

There was much argument as to whether the single antler sported twelve, thirteen, or fourteen points. Piggin' String McCoy insisted that a point was anything a watch could be hung on by its chain, and he found ways to hang his watch from fourteen points. Dan Brooks insisted that a point had to measure one inch from its base to its apex. He could only find twelve tines that met up to his measurements. Every man agreed, however, that Ol' Cedar Root would be the kill of a lifetime for any hunter.

Pete refused to say where he had found the antler. He didn't want any of the boys beating him to the trophy or spooking the buck out of its home range. One night in September, however, he let it slip that he had actually seen Cedar Root on the hoof, from only a couple of hundred yards away, sporting his new set of hardened antlers.

“What's the left-hand horn look like?” Sam Dugan asked anxiously.

“I just got a glimpse of him,” Pete replied. “I couldn't tell exactly what he looked like. But I'd say String could hang as many watches on that left horn as he could on the right one.”

All through the summer and fall the cowhands had pestered Pete for some clue as to where the big buck hid out, but he wouldn't give up so much as a hint. Now that the high-country snows had claimed much of the old monarch's range, and restricted him to his lower haunts, Pete knew it was time to hunt him down.

“Yep, I've got his range figured,” he said to Buster as he tied a thick roll of blankets and canvas behind the cantle. “He doesn't move far south in the winter—he just comes down low. I think I know just where I'll find him.” He chuckled as he stuffed his saddlebags with biscuits and bacon.

“What's so funny?” Buster asked.

“Oh, I was just thinkin' about Sam. You remember in August, when me and him went up into the mountains to hunt that Hereford bull that got through the fence? Well, we found the bull in a canyon and was drivin' him back home when that big buck ran across the bottom of the canyon not two hundred yards in front of us, and Sam never saw him. He was rollin' a smoke. My eyes dang near bugged out of my head, but I didn't say anything to Sam.”

“Is that where you're headin' to find him today?”

“Yes, but don't let on to the boys, or they'll come along and spoil my hunt.”

“I won't tell 'em,” Buster said. “How long you gonna stay out after him?”

Pete slipped his Winchester model 1876 into his saddle scabbard. It chambered a .45-caliber cartridge with a 350-grain bullet. It was a lot of gun for a deer, but Ol' Cedar Root was a lot of deer, and Pete anticipated having to shoot at some distance. Buster had helped him attach an extra rear sight on the wooden stock behind the hammer—an adjustable sliding leaf sight for long-range shooting. He had been practicing for months and could hit a pie plate eight out of ten times at four hundred yards with a firm rest.

“I've got bacon to last four days,” he said. “I'll be back Saturday night unless I get him before then. I have to give my scripture lesson to the boys on Sunday morning. That reminds me,” he said, pulling on his gloves, “can you play ‘Rounded Up in Glory' on the fiddle or the guitar or somethin'?”

“Sure,” Buster said. “What's the scripture lesson gonna be about?”

“Thou shalt not covet anything that is your neighbor's,” Pete said. “I figure the boys will need remindin' of that when I bring in Ol' Cedar Root.” He grinned and led his stallion to the doorway of the barn. “Amelia's a little rankled at me for goin' huntin' when her mare's about to foal. I told her you and the boys would be around if the old girl needed any help.”