Texas Blood Feud (2 page)

The two-story limestone house that Rock Byrnes first erected had grown into a fortress over the years. The huge wooden front gates had not been closed in a decade. A twelve-foot-high wall encircled the headquarters and inside the compound, the once-small two-story structure had festered into several connected residences, a bunkhouse, multiple corrals, pens, barns, a blacksmith shop, and a grain storage building. Two windmills filled the tank towers that provided water pressure to the faucets in the kitchen, the bathhouse, and the livestock tanks.

When Chet came in sight of the main house, Dale Allen’s wife, May, stepped out on the porch wringing her hands in a tea towel. The short woman had lost most of her shine since the pudgy girl had married his brother a few years earlier as his second wife. Childbirth and having to oversee things with Susie had been a big chore for a town girl and banker’s daughter who’d lived a sheltered life up until her marriage.

“What’re you going to do?” May asked.

Everyone asked him that all the time. “Take two of the boys and go get them back.”

“Boys?”

“Reg and J.D. We’ll need to be ready to leave in twenty minutes. When they ride in, you wave them in to eat lunch.” He gave a head toss. They were a quarter mile behind him. “I’ll get a packhorse and then be back.”

“Why not get the sheriff?”

“They’ll be in Kansas, May, before I could even tell him.”

“Guess you’re right. I’ll get the boys fed and the food ready for the trip. Good thing we’ve got plenty of jerky.”

“Thanks.” He turned Blue toward the corrals and at the horse pen, dismounted to hitch him. He took a lariat off a post and shook it loose while walking to the gate. In the lot, the dozen horses threw up their heads from eating hay off the ground, and he picked out a stout black he knew would lead good. The bunch broke hard around the pen, and he raced on foot to head them off. Overhanded, he tossed the rope, and it settled over the black’s head. Chet sunk his boot heels in the dirt and put on the brakes when the noose jerked tight.

Snorting and acting the part of a walleyed fool, Black shied from Chet like he was ready to plunge off as Chet came up the rope hand over hand. “Whoa, stupid.”

He fashioned a halter and led the horse out. Dale Allen’s six- and eight-year-old sons by his first wife Nancy, who had died in birthing the youngest, a girl, Rachel, sat on the top rail, watching it all. They rushed over to walk beside him to the barn.

“He’s pretty spooky, ain’t he, Uncle Chet?” Ray asked, acting grown-up and making his younger brother Ty stay up with him so the horse didn’t step on him.

“He’s full of boogers,” Chet said.

“I got boogers, too,” Ty said.

Chet frowned at him, and the younger one put his finger up his nose and then showed him the results.

“You sure do.” Chet jerked hard on the lead to settle Black down, then tied him high in a ring on the wall and went into the tack room for the packsaddle and pads.

“What’s that smell in here?” Ty asked, sniffing the rich odors.

“Saddle soap and neat’s-foot oil.” Chet stepped around them with his arms full of a cross-buck saddle and pads. He put blankets on and talked the whole time to settle Black down. Then he looked around for the boys. “Stay there, fellas, he’s still kinda wild.”

“May says we’re wild.”

“Hush up, Ty. Uncle Chet don’t need to know all that.”

Chet paused and frowned at them. “Maybe I do. What’s she been telling you boys?”

“Nothing.”

Ty gave his older brother a two-handed shove. “She did, too.”

“Aw, she was just in one of them crying moods. She never meant it, she told us later.”

“Did so. Said she wished the Co-manches would get us—we was so wild.”

Ray shook his head in disgust over his younger brother’s disclosure. “May’s got them two babies and that’s lots. Paw said we got to be nicer to her.”

“I’m glad you’re trying to be nice to her,” Chet said, untying the lead rope.

“Yeah, we don’t want her to get like Grandma,” Ray said.

“Yes,” Chet said, a little heartsick at the words coming from an eight-year-old. “Let’s go to the house.”

“Can we ride him?”

“Boys, I’d love that but he’s still pretty high. Might throw you.”

“We understand. Maybe you can find us a pony we can ride.”

“You wasn’t supposed to ask him for that.” Ty put his hands to his mouth over his older brother’s transgression.

“We won’t tell on him and I’ll look for a good one.” Chet hitched the black at the rack with the other horses in front of the yard gate. “We better get washed up. Looks like they’re eating without us.”

“Okay. Uncle Chet,” Ty said, and they hurried for the washbasins on the porch.

He waited for them to wash up. Susie appeared in the doorway and set an armload of bedrolls on the stone floor. She clapped her hands together. “May’s about got the foodstuff in the panniers.”

“Thanks, hate to leave the place in so few hands—”

“We’ll make it. I hope you can get the horses back.”

He nodded. They had to.

After the meal, Chet first made a quick check of all they were taking along. Coffee, jerky, beans, salt pork, lard, flour, saleratus, sugar, raisins, and dried apples. A small Dutch oven, coffeepot, and skillet, plus big spoons, spatula, tin cups, plates, silverware, and a few towels. Matches, some candles—three extra shirts. And plenty of hemp rope. He and Reg carried the panniers out and hung them on the packsaddle. Dale Allen threw on the bedrolls, and then he put the canvas tarp over it all.

Susie brought out the three .44/40 Winchesters and two boxes of shells. J.D. put the rifles in the saddle scabbards on each horse and the cartridges in Chet’s saddlebags.

“Tell Louise when she gets back from Mason, the boys’ve gone with me and we’ll be back in a couple of days,” Chet said to Susie. “Keep watch. No telling what’ll happen next.”

“Don’t let them filthy savages get you boys,” Theresa screeched from the doorway, and clawed the air like a cat with her arthritis-deformed hands. “They all should have been drowned as pups. My Gawd, I’d’ve held each one of them under the water myself.”

“Now Mother, get hold of yourself.” Susie guided her back inside. “They ain’t going after Comanches, just rustlers.”

“They took Cagle—they took my twins—”

Rock sat in the cane rocker and nodded his head. “If I was ten years younger—”

In the saddle, Chet looked down at Dale Allen. “Hold her together. We’ll be back shortly.”

“Watch out for them boys.”

“I will—you go fishing with yours.”

“Why?” Dale Allen blinked at him in astonishment.

“They need some fathering—since Nancy died you ain’t been much of one, I’m afraid.”

Dale Allen nodded in surrender. “They remind me too much of her, I guess. But I will.”

“See you all,” Chet said, and the three of them, leading the packhorse, rode out of the compound for the north pasture in a long trot.

“You ever go after rustlers before?” Reg asked Chet when they were beyond anyone hearing him.

“Several times.”

“You always get them?”

“Most.”

“Guess you hung them?”

Chet looked hard at the far ridge. “Yes, we hung ’em.”

“If it’s the Reynolds bunch, what’ll you do?” J.D. asked, pushing his horse in closer.

“A horse thief is a horse thief.”

“Even, like, if you know them?”

“Even then.”

“Gosh, I hope Susie was wrong…”

“Maybe she was, J.D., maybe she was.”

Over a fourth of the cavy was shod, so it wasn’t hard to pick out their tracks from where rustlers drove them out the wire-and-stake woven gate and headed ’em northwest. Chet pointed at the hoof marks, and they short-loped for a ways down the dim road.

Late afternoon, Chet spotted some smoke, and led the way off the trail to a place up in a canyon. A white man in his underwear top and pants came out of the jacal. He looked them over, then combed his too long hair back with his fingers and gave it a toss back.

“Gents, can I help you?”

“J.D., you look over them horses in the pen,” Chet said, and reined up the roan. “Evening, mister, we’re tracking some rustlers.”

“I sure ain’t one.” He made a frown like it was all a mistake.

Chet nodded, and looked for J.D. as the youth studied the stock. When the boy shook his head and started to ride back, Chet nodded again to the man. “Much obliged. Sorry to bother you.”

“How many did they get?”

“Over sixty head. Any of them with the bar-C brand on them will bring a reward my brother will pay if I ain’t back. I figure they’ll lose a few in their haste.”

“Thanks, I’ll be watching for ’em.”

“Sure,” Chet said, and turned Roan to leave. The boys leading Black joined him, and when they reached the road, Reg looked back. At last, he turned forward and frowned at Chet. “What’s he do for a living?”

“Eats our beef and lays up with that Mexican woman.”

Reg turned up his lip in disbelief. “You figure so?”

“Yes, and some day I’ll catch him red-handed at it.”

“Be kinda easy to live like that. I sorta wish I could live like he does.” Reg snickered. “I’d sure like to try that for a spell.”

“What’s that? Steal beef or rut with some old Mexican gal?” Chet grinned.

Red-faced, Reg pounded his saddle horn with his fist. “The latter, I guess.”

J.D. shook his head as if disgusted. “I ain’t having no part of either.”

“We better lope a ways,” Chet said, suppressing his smile and setting his spurs to Roan.

At sundown, they found a tank and set up camp. Horses hobbled, they made coffee and gnawed on May’s jerky. Too late to cook much, and they were tired. Chet fell asleep to a coyote’s yapping while wondering how far ahead the rustlers were that night.

Before dawn, he shook the boys awake in the morning’s cool air. Leftover coffee was reheated and some more peppery jerky was gnawed on. They saddled, packed, and rode off when the gray light touched the eastern horizon.

“Sure is cold,” J.D. complained, rubbing his arms. “I must have missed fall this year.”

“I guess,” Chet said, wishing for some rain on his winter oats. They were up, but wouldn’t grow much without more moisture. He’d planted close to eighty acres in the creek bottoms. Large acreage and an expensive outlay. But he’d needed the feed for horses and the milk stock. They’d farmed that much corn the past summer and made a good crop. Some of the crop made forty bushels of ear corn to the acre. His heart wasn’t into dirt farming, but he needed the output for the rest of his operation. Still, he recalled plowing with a fifteen-inch Oliver hand plow and hitting root snags that jerked the wooden handles out of a thirteen-year-old’s hands.

These days, they used hired help, five mules, and a riding sulky plow that could really lay the ground over. Did more work than four hands with walking plows could in a day and lots easier. Still, farming was not his favorite game. But he and Pa planted many crops, broke many teams, and until his Comanche episode, no one could stack hay faster than the old man. Real sad how both of his parents had become so done in by the twins’ abduction. But even death was better than that—with death you knew they were planted and nothing else you could do. But them red devils stealing those babies and never to know what became of them was a thing that had ruined his parents’ minds and lives.

“Them horse apples we’re seeing look fresher today.” Reg broke into Chet’s thoughts as the boy rode along and leaned over in the saddle to study the manure.

“I don’t think they stopped last night—kept going.” Chet stood in the stirrups, looking for signs of their dust on the northern horizon.

“You thinking that they ain’t got a batching outfit?” J.D. asked.

Chet nodded. “It may have been a lark they went on.”

“A lark?” Reg screwed up his face.

“I’ve done some dumb things being a little liquored up.”

“You never stole no horses.”

“No. but dumbest thing I ever did, I sang a song to a girl one time.”

“You did what?” J.D. was about to bust into laughing.

“Aw, I had a crush on Kathren Combs before she married Luther Hines.” Chet shook his head while looking hard at the long mesa ahead of them in the north—no sign of dust. “Well, one night, I got liquored up and took this Mexican fiddler along with me to play. Boy, was he drunk, and in the dark we went down to her folks’ place, and I sang some ballad in Spanish outside the house.”

“Were you any good?” Reg asked.

“Her father thought we were alley cats and shot at us with a shotgun. My, my, that damn Mexican sure outrun me.”

“He hit you with the shot?”

“No, he was laughing too hard.”

“I sure hope I have some adventures when I grow up,” J.D. said.

“How old are you, fifteen?”

“Be that this next spring.”

“You will. Just don’t get pie-eyed and go sing to some gal. Her pa won’t like it.”

“How serious were you about her?” Reg asked.

“I asked her to marry me a couple of years later.”

“She turned you down?”

“Sure did.” Chet rubbed his calloused fingers over his whisker-bristled mouth. “I guess I was drinking a lot in them days and she was kinda upset about that, I reckon.”

“Then you decided to serenade her and win her back?” J.D. snickered out his nose.

“No that was a few years before that. Damn sure didn’t work anyway and that Messican he said, ‘Oh,
mi amigo,
it works every time.’”

“What did he say after you two got shot at?” Reg asked.

“
Madre de Dios!
That never happened before to me, hombre!”

At noontime, they reached a crossroads store, dropped out of the saddle, and tied the horses at the rack. Chet hitched up his canvas pants and led the way inside.

“Howdy, gents,” a man in his forties with a bushy mustache said from behind the counter. “What’s on your minds?”

“Food sure smells good in here,” Chet said, sniffing the rich aroma.

“My wife Alisha has some great stewed chicken and dumplings. Lunch is ten cents today.”

“We’ll take thirty cents worth.”

“I’ll tell her that she has customers.” He picked up the coins that Chet laid down and said, “My dear, three chicken dinners.”