Lucky Billy (9 page)

"He's right about that. But he got in over his head, I believe. He's a little lost when it comes to cattle. I can see his busy mind adding up the tons of meat. It ain't so much the ranch, it's the store that riled the Dolanites. He's the first real competition they've had."

"He gets you on his side," said Billy, "by way of talking nonstop about all his plans. Pretty soon you feel a stir of something, too. I like it when he shouts,
By the Powers!
and rolls his eyes and makes a little fist and waves it at the ceiling. I can't help from laughing. He came in one night with a cut on his head two inches long when that crazy mule threw him. The confounded treacherous beast of a mule, he screams. Then he gets mad about the harnesses he ordered that never arrived and chews out Dad Gauss as if
he
was the mule. Then he turns around and stands us all a glass of whiskey and says things are going 'swimmingly' and pretty soon we all agree—we're all rolling on the floor. 'To burros,' he says, lifting his glass—'God's noblest work.'"

"That's pretty good," said Fred. Both men looked around. The flanks of Tunstall's horses wouldn't stop twitching though this was flyless February. Each but one was tied to a snubbing post, and suddenly that one swallowed his neck, rolled on his back, and flexed in the dirt and dust of the street.

"He's square," said Billy.

"But the world is not square."

"I trust him. Don't you?"

"I'd like to know him better."

"A man like that makes you feel like going straight."

"Straight to where?"

"Come on, Fred. Straight to hell." Billy laughed. But he did trust Tunstall. That such a man would just drop from the clouds and think highly of him was surprising enough, but that he'd come to him in jail, to the thief who stole his horses, and offer to spring him, no questions asked—it makes you want to stick around.

"What do you suppose they're doing in there?" Fred nodded at the house.

"Deciding what comes next."

It was natural that you either hated Mr. Tunstall, as James Dolan did, or learned to admire him. Billy took it on principle that people were either friends or enemies; men of their word or low sneaking animals. No one was both, there was no middle ground. Four-square men like the Englishman the Kid took to right away, all the rest could go to hell. Tunstall didn't necessarily look the part—he could have been a banker. And he was swelled up a little over his nationality. Tight, wavy hair, aquiline nose, receding chin-line. It was the way he laughed, the way he spoke his mind. Mr. Tunstall pooh-poohed things like lords and dukes when he talked about England—they had no drive, he claimed—but there was something in his manner of carrying himself, unless he'd slept badly and woke with a crick, something in his lofty soft-heartedness that seemed positively nobby. You could tell from his looks and the way he spoke that he'd wind up rich. He never threw money around but he had it. He didn't soft-soap you. Then why, Billy wondered, can't I look him in the eye?

Because he is a gentleman. He never acts second-rate. He never seems concerned about shielding his cards, he is an open book. He likes horseplay, too, and this they had in common, he and the Kid, who often felt the urge to kick up his heels, to whip around on a crowded dance floor crushed hard against some sweetie pie's hips, he got stiff just thinking it.

"Who's this intoxicant?" Fred was peering up the road.

"My God. It's him." Billy draped his hand around the butt in his holster and Fred raised his carbine, both staring at the man pimp-strutting up the road, Mr. Tunstall's nemesis, James Dolan himself. "C'mon, you son of a bitch," the Kid whispered. "We'll give you a game." And the Irishman did come, he didn't waver, he spotted the two men guarding Tunstall's horses and aimed directly toward them. You could almost hear the drums. In fact, he'd been a drummer boy in the Union army when he met Lawrence Murphy, whose interest in little Jimmy Dolan, the Tunstall side claimed, was more than just fatherly.

On the other hand, the Dolanites insisted that they'd seen the Englishman and Widenmann chasing each other and snapping their towels while bathing buck-naked in a hole on the Bonito.

James Dolan was short, shorter than Billy, and swung his arms like a very tough citizen, balefully smiling as he drew closer. Fred levered his Winchester. Billy watched the man approach. The doughnut-shaped pout around his tight mouth, the John B. hat, the army-tent overcoat, high-heeled boots, and steel-bore expression—and the scornful smile—all buttressed a façade carefully devised to intimidate pantywaists. His powder-blue eyes looked hard and cold enough to shatter whatever light they admitted. Through his smile could be glimpsed the cratered lava-bed that once had been his teeth. The funny thing was that as he drew closer his stature didn't wax, it contracted. He was a death-fist, a bantam, a cocky little midget who'd rip out someone's eyes just for looking at him wrong. "Hello, boys."

Billy watched him.

"Don't I know you? You look familiar."

"I work for John Tunstall," said the Kid.

"And these horses—?"

"They belong to Mr. Tunstall."

Dolan looked at the animals. "Weren't they attached?" "Brady said Mr. Tunstall could keep those horses. They're his personal property."

"He said that, did he?" Dolan smiled at the Kid. Then he eyed Fred and reached in his pocket and handed him a card and walked on toward Tunstall's store with a wafture of his hand.

"I've seen this before," said Fred. "He drops it in the laps of cuties he spots—unfulfilled ladies—on ferries and trains and at the gaming tables."

Later, McSween called them inside while Hank Brown and John Middleton took their places on the street guarding the horses. They ate in the winter kitchen with Yginio Salazar, and listened to the sheriff's deputies slowly moving room to room in the other wing, meticulously listing all the lawyer's possessions. The fourteen-year-old Yginio didn't exactly work for John Tunstall; he hung around and ran errands and delivered messages for spare change. Mr. Tunstall and Macky Sween, he told Fred and Billy, were following the deputies to make sure they didn't pilfer. "He wants you to take those horses to the ranch."

"What for?"

"I think he don't know. He's trying to decide. He and Macky, you know—they got aggravations."

Billy said, "Yes."

Macky's house was a large U-shaped adobe with a flat, earthen roof with the usual vigas. Three wings of rooms around a central garden on three long sides. The McSweens had furnished it expensively, tastefully—where
had
they found the money? Billy wondered—with a parlor organ, six stuffed chairs, a sofa, corner racks, lavish mirrors, heavy drapes. In the sitting room, where the deputies now operated, Mac had a hundred law books in sectional glass-fronted shelves to the ceiling. There were five hundred more in his office next door at Mr. Tunstall's store. All this he could lose. Sue McSweens sewing machine, their stoves, lamps and clocks, the library tables and carpeted bedrooms with the tall-boy bureaus and washstands and beds sporting altar-sized headboards—all of it was subject to the writ of attachment.

In the kitchen, Fred and Billy lapsed into silence and overwhelmed the food. Slumgullion stew. It would have to hold them for the rest of the day and the forty-mile ride to Tunstall's ranch on the Feliz.

T
UNSTALL'S RANCH HOUSE
wasn't much: a one-room log structure with a single door and window all of fourteen by fourteen, and a corral. Driven there by Fred and Billy, the seven repossessed horses and two mules now occupied the corral. In a borrow pit outside the corral the Kid shoveled dirt into empty grain sacks to help fortify the place. Somewhere to the east were Tunstall's cattle, he knew, four hundred head on four thousand acres, land that spanned a long stretch of the Feliz River. Fred had told Billy that years before Tunstall arrived in Lincoln this acreage had belonged to the Casey family. But Robert Casey having been killed by William Wilson—who had to be hanged twice—his widow and children were powerless to stop Tunstall and McSween from arrogating their grass and water, since the law is on the side of those who file, not those who squat. Not that Tunstall could file. His friends had to do it, including Fred, because foreigners couldn't legally own land under the Desert Land Act. But Tunstall had put up the twenty-five cents an acre, and made the improvements, and at the end of three years for the further payment of a dollar an acre to the U.S. government, his friends would have title and would transfer it to him.

He'd loaned the widow Casey money to tide her and her children over once they lost the land they thought was theirs forever. Most of Tunstall's cattle had also belonged to Ellen Casey, whose debts to the Englishman became discounted in the form of livestock, which thus became a bargain. All this sounded square to the Kid, since as Mr. Tunstall explained, he'd never expected the sold-up widow to pay back the loans; and this was the way it was done in New Mexico.

Still, he'd come out ahead on that deal. He'd acquired a considerable amount of dirt and meat that belonged to someone else.

The ranch sat in a high desert bowl in the foothills east of the Sacramento Mountains, a place thick with grama grass circled by rolling hills and crushed by blue sky. Sky was most of it, Billy had observed, sky and hills, and hills inside hills, and hills concealing hills, and hills pinching into arroyos and ravines then swelling out into more hills, all bare of trees. The only trees lined the river: clusters of cottonwoods leaning over its bed. A spring at the head of a canyon to the west watered this basin even when the Feliz seemed all but dry, as now in winter. Dick Brewer, Tunstall's foreman, held his boss's ranch to be the most brutal yet singular spot in all of God's forgotten backyard, a place where awe and solitude met, and he'd defend it with his life, he'd declared to Billy, and without consideration of the fact that
his
ranch on the Ruidoso would be claimed next by Tunstall if he were to die.

The Kid filled the grain sacks, Brewer and Fred Waite hauled them to the house and piled them in barricades four feet high, enclosing a space as large again as the house before its front door. "This wants dirt," Brewer said, hefting a sack. "You never will follow the spade for a living."

Billy flushed. "My arms are tired."

Under Rob Widenmann's officious direction, Henry Brown, John Middleton, and Bill McCloskey cut portholes in the ranch house and piled Billy's sacks on the roof to serve as parapets. Tunstall had stayed in Lincoln to strategize with Alexander McSween but they expected him soon. They also expected Sheriff Brady and the Boys. If the Dolanites could attach their boss's cattle and ranch in addition to his store, what would be left to him? Seven horses, two mules, and a shovel, thought the Kid. When the barricades were complete, he and the others sat inside them on the ground and spooned into their mouths and immediately swallowed, without pausing to taste, the son-of-a-bitch stew cooked by Godfrey Gauss, Mr. Tunstall's gray-bearded, hollow-eyed coosie. Each of them said, "Hey, this is
good,
Dad," but Gauss didn't smile. Leaning back against the wall, Billy sat with his legs straight out and his plate in his lap and his hat on his boots, and Fred asked him why. "It's a quick way to get up if I have to."

"Don't look quick to me. And where'd you get that shirt?"

The blue shirt in question, threadbare and faded but nonetheless distinct through Billy's unbuttoned jacket, sported an anchor whose rope was loosely coiled around its canted shaft. He looked down at it. "Had this since a boy."

"I've had this one a while, too," said Fred. "Sateen." He opened his coat. "Here we are like two five-year-olds comparing our weenies. Don't get me wrong, anyone that wears a sailor shirt is after my own heart. An anchor in the desert makes as much sense as a cuspidor on the ocean. You never thought you'd be socially crucified for it?"

He looked away. "Why should I give a damn?"

The earth thundered to the north. Over a raise came a squall of horses and even from this distance, craning his neck to peer across the wall, the Kid recognized members of the Boys: Jesse Evans, Frank Baker, Billy Morton, Tom Hill, and other former associates. At their head was not Sheriff William Brady but his deputized factotum, Billy Matthews, whose glower was unmistakable even through a wall of dust a half-mile away.

Pear-shaped Rob Widenmann suddenly jumped up and climbed over the wall. "Rob!" hissed Dick Brewer.

"I am not afraid. I intend to arrest them."

"You can't arrest those men, you cabbagehead. There's more of them than us. They'll serve you up for supper."

"I have warrants," said Widenmann, walking toward the posse and holding up his hand when they were fifty feet away, and ordering them to stop right there. The man who liked to call John Tunstall "Harry" ordered Matthews to ride forward and state his business. As he'd crowed to Tunstall's men, Widenmann had convinced the U.S. marshal for New Mexico to appoint him as a deputy, and now he would arrest Evans, Baker, and Hill, for those were the very brigands, he'd repeatedly declared, who had stolen some cattle only last year on the Apache reservation. Billy and his compadres watched from the barricades, hands on their weapons. Facing Widenmann, Matthews announced they were an authorized posse and expected his assistance. He produced a document and with downcast eyes pretended to read it, even though it was generally known he couldn't read; instead, Billy guessed, he'd committed it to memory, no doubt under James Dolan's tutelage. While "reading" the court's writ of attachment Matthews sounded like a schoolboy, loud and discomfited, but when he was through he reverted to a beast with red eyes and mossy face, and glared at Widenmann then announced he'd come for the Englishman's stock. "I see the horses," he said, nodding at the corral. "Where's the cattle?"

"Sheriff Brady said we could keep those horses."