Pinto Lowery (3 page)

“Well, you don't expect me to have money for wages after yesterday!” Tubbs yelled. “And for a coward!”

“Mister Tubbs, I'd watch my words,” Pinto said, slapping the horse into its stall and turning red-faced toward the freighter. “I'm owed money, but I can take thad in trade. Thad little chessnut mare'll square us. You write out a bill 'o sale. As to what you jus' said, you repeat it and I'll give you a nose to match Joe Hannigan's. Yer enditled to your opinions, but no man thad stayed at his fire when I was freezin' my toes off at Petersburg's fit to judge honor nor duty. Not by my way o' thinkin'. You want yerself a fight, I'll oblige!”

Pinto strode up to Elmer Tubbs so that their chins near touched. Fury darkened the mustanger's brow, and Tubbs gave way.

“Thought not,” Pinto muttered as he walked past Tubbs and hurried along to the house. It took but half an hour to bid Alice and the boys farewell. He swapped a few words with Faye as well, but he wouldn't answer her questions.

“With Elmer off chasing those Hannigans, I'd feel safer if you stayed,” she told him. “What's got you in such a hurry to ride?”

“I won't speak ill of a man in his own house,” Pinto finally told her. “You'll have to trus' me do have my reasons.”

Pinto then stepped onto the porch and located Elmer Tubbs.

“Here's your bill of sale, Lowery,” the freighter announced. “Now you know the road west, I believe.”

“Sure do,” Pinto said, accepting the paper. He then walked to the corral and threw a rope over the chestnut's neck. Pinto wasted not a moment in leading the animal to the barn. There he climbed onto a spotted mustang, tied off the pack horse and the chestnut to his saddlehorn, and started west.

By daybreak Pinto had passed through Cleburne and was winding his way north into the wild Brazos country. The Brazos had a way of running swift and wide in late winter and early spring, and he had the devil's own luck finding a reliable ford. Only when he and his horses were across on the north bank did he feel he'd finally escaped the confinement of the Tubbs place. And even then he hadn't eluded the haunting emptiness that had filled Muley's stone-cold eyes.

“Boy never had a chance,” Pinto muttered as he halted along the river. “But den we don't any o' us have much o' one.”

Tired and wracked with hunger, Pinto hobbled his horses and left them to graze atop a nearby hill. He dangled a baited hook in the shallows and snared a fat river-catfish. In no time he'd built up a fire, skinned and gutted the fish, and was enjoying a breakfast of sorts beneath the early morning sun.

There was something cheering about daylight. It chased off the gray February mists and brought a warming glow to the land. That particular morning it put Pinto in mind of morning chores, though, of Muley grumbling about hog slop and horse dung.

Pinto finished off the catfish and sighed. He then walked to the packhorse, untied a blanket, and rolled it out onto a clover-covered slope. After kicking off his boots and loosening his belt, he sprawled on the blanket and let sleep whirl him away from his grief.

It didn't entirely work. For a time Pinto did drift through a world of fluffy clouds and sweet silence. Then he found himself crawling through the rock-strewn Pennsylvania hell to the south of Gettysburg. The whole of the Marshall Guards, or at least what was left of the company after Sharpsburg and Chancellorsville, was creeping through the Devil's Den, exchanging long-range rifle shots with Yankee sharpshooters.

Minie balls stung the rocks, sending deadly splinters of lead and stone into many a man. George Lowery had hesitated before continuing.

“What you feared of, Georgie?” Jamie Haskell had called as he rushed forward. “Cain't them Yanks kill you but once.”

“Jamie!” Pinto had cried, leaping toward his foolhardy friend. The two of them got to within a hundred yards of Little Round Top when a pair of cannons fired from the hilltop. A giant boulder up ahead simply disintegrated. Smoke and powder blinded the charging Confederates. Pinto never saw the steel fragment that took Jamie's legs. He himself was thrown back against a fallen tree with such force that a bone in his leg snapped.

“Move along, Lowery!” the captain urged as he waved his sword overhead. “We close to got 'em.”

“No, they got us,” Jamie called, grinning as he sat in a sea of his own blood.

“Fool boy,” Pinto had scolded as he dragged himself to his friend's aid. “Done it dis time!”

“Yup,” Jamie said, staring down at the stubs attached to his lacerated waist. “You'll write my mama.”

“Lord, Jamie, you know I will,” Pinto had gasped as he fought to collect his wits. “I'll tie off de stubs and ...“

“Fool's errand,” young Haskell had announced. “I'm plum blown in half, George Lowery. Teach me to run ahead like a peach-fuzzed kid!”

Pinto recalled laughing. They didn't sport a dozen chin whiskers between them that summer of 1863. Barely nineteen. It had seemed old enough. Now it was painfully young. But for Jamie Haskell, it was as old as he'd ever get.

George Lowery had stayed with his friend in spite of a fierce artillery exchange around noon. By then Jamie had bled out his life, but Pinto had been reluctant to leave.

“It's time, Lowery,” the captain had finally commanded. “Come on. I'll help you along. You need some tendin' your own self.”

“Wait fer me to bury Jamie,” Pinto had objected.

“Yanks'll do it,” the captain argued. “We don't get movin' they might just have to bury us, too.”

Pinto was determined to stay, but Merritt Hardy and Ben Turley arrived. They were tall, lean, and farmboy strong.

“Ain't leavin' but one friend behind here,” Hardy declared as he handed over his rifle and picked up Pinto bodily. “Cap'n, you write ole Jamie's name on him, hear? Only right those Yanks know what kind o' man they gone and kilt.”

The captain had scrawled Jamie's name in his order book, then had torn out the page and tucked it into the boyish-looking corpse's pocket.

“Now get along with you!” the captain ordered as a fresh round of artillery fire began. Hardy struggled through the rocky ravine, carrying a pain-tortured George Lowery along as Turley and the captain followed.

Pinto soon found himself sailing across the battlefield, soaring over the bloodstained wheatfields and orchards of Gettysburg. Later he found himself in a barn with his leg braced by a pair of oak splints. Only a threat from Ben Turley had prevented a harried doctor from cutting that leg off.

“Best to lose a limb than your life,” the doc had argued.

“One-legged man's little use to Bob Lee and even less on the Texas plain,” Turley'd replied. “Now tend the break well as you can. Then I'll take over. I got five brothers and two sisters back home in Jefferson, and there's not a one of 'em's not broke somethin' or another.”

Many a man died from amputation. Ben Turley surely saved Pinto's life. But that only came after a world of pain and fever passed.

There were men who might have returned to Texas with a lamed leg, but George Lowery fought on. He survived the confusion of the Wilderness when the First Texas threatened to mutiny if General Lee didn't leave the front line. Then, at Spotsylvania Court House, he helped bury Ben Turley. Merritt Hardy froze in the Petersburg trenches in November of 1864. In fact, only nine of the original Marshall Guards lived to lay down a rifle at Appomattox.

As the nightmare continued, faces of slain friends and murdered enemies appeared like phantoms in Pinto's mind. He shook violently and flayed his hands at his sides. Scenes too horrible to describe tormented him.

“War's not the frolic we thought, eh?” legless Jamie whispered.

“Should've ducked that last volley,” Ben Turley spoke. His mutilated face sent daggers of pain twisting and turning through Pinto's insides.

Finally Muley flashed his easy grin and spoke of the high times they would share chasing down range ponies.

“No!” Pinto screamed as he bolted awake. He shuddered as he felt the damp sweat which soaked every inch of him.

“We'll have a time or two, won't we?” Muley's ghostlike voice seemed to whisper.

“No, dis year it'll jus' be me,” Pinto replied. “Jus' me and a thousand ghosts of men better'n I'll ever be.”

He blinked the exhaustion from his eyes and stared at the yellow sun high overhead. It was near noon, maybe a hair past. He'd slept hours, or had his eyes closed, anyway. He hadn't had much rest, what with the nightmare and all.

Almiys thought it was not buryin' Jamie brought on his ghos'
, Pinto mused.
Now it seems buryin' a man's bones ain't all you do to hush his ghos'
.

No, some things just weren't to be set aside. Many would be with a man for all his days. Ever since Gettysburg George Lowery had blamed himself for not seeing Jamie to cover. After all, they were as close as brothers, the two of them. And now there'd been Muley. That sliver of a boy didn't have the smarts to hide from a fight. No, it was Pinto who should've seen Muley to safety before setting off to the freight office.

“Man's got just a few chances in his life to stand tall,” old Grandpa Lowery had once said. The old man had done his standing at San Jacinto and again fighting the Mexicans with Winfield Scott.

“I had my chances, too,” Pinto remarked as he rolled up his blanket and tied it atop the packhorse. “But I never been as strong as what was needed. And men've died on account o' thad!”

Pinto Lowery was thinking that over as he removed the hobbles from his horses and climbed atop the mustang.
Maybe nex' time'll be different
. Deep down Pinto hoped there wouldn't be a next time. And all along he knew there would be.

It was strange how memories that should have died at Appomattox eight long years before should have haunted Pinto Lowery so. For three days the nightmare faces of fallen comrades visited his dreams. As he wandered across the wind-swept range, passing scattered clusters of grazing longhorns and the crude picket ranch houses of their owners, he couldn't help recalling old dreams born on the trail to Kansas.

“I'll have myself a herd one day,” Ken Preston had boasted. “How 'bout yourself, Pinto?”

“Oh, wouldn't be so mad,” a younger Lowery had confessed. “But mos'ly I'd like to run myself some horses.”

Dreams had their way of coming back at a man, didn't they? Here Ken got himself pistol shot in Wichita by some Kansas farmer over a bit of foolishness with his daughter, and Pinto had passed too many winters mending harnesses and loading freight. Finally he was back on the Llano, sniffing out ponies.

It was late on the glorious first afternoon of March 1873, when Pinto Lowery at last came upon the unshod tracks of a mustang herd. He smelled traces of the animals before that, and for twenty miles he'd spotted their dung amidst the sea of yellow buffalo grass. As he stalked the horses, he put aside those lingering memories of an unfulfilled past.

“I was born to hunt horses,” he announced to the world. “Ain't a man in Texas does it half so good, and none at all more inclined to de trade.”

Pinto urged his horse onward. He rode only three or four miles before locating the distinctive mottled colorings of a range pony. Beyond the first animal another two dozen grazed. At Pinto's approach, the horses lifted their nostrils to the wind. But days on the trail had blended Pinto's natural odors with those of horse sweat and damp ground. The animals noted nothing peculiar and relaxed their guard.

Pinto, meanwhile, led his packhorse and the chestnut mare through a narrow ravine and along to a low hill overlooking the Brazos. A spattering of willows lined the river there, affording good firewood. It made for an ideal camping spot, and Pinto wasted no time in hobbling his horses and unpacking his belongings. It was only later, when the midday sun sent the horses to the river for a drink, that Pinto counted them and made plans for their capture. Of the thirty-six animals he counted, he hoped to snare half to two-thirds.

“How exactly do you plan to capture two dozen horses singlehanded?” Bob Toney, another veteran of the First Texas and a prominent Parker County rancher, had asked two summers before when Pinto had announced a like intent.

“Oh, catchin' 'em's no trouble,” Pinto had answered then. “It's keepin' 'em's de trick.”

So it was now.

To begin with, Pinto had learned long ago even a dozen men had little hope of roping more than five or six horses once the herd took to flight. If a man was just after a saddle mount, a rope would get him there. But if he was after a profit, he needed to have the horses do most of the work.

Pinto knew once the animals stampeded, a leader would emerge. It wasn't hard to spot which one. The strongest of the stallions gathered around himself a harem of sorts. Oh, he'd sometimes tolerate another stallion or even three or four if the herd was large enough. Mostly the leader drove his rivals off, even those he himself had sired. There were always colts about, though.

The leader of the current herd was a tall, prancing black with a splash of white across his face. It seemed likely he was the off-spring of some rancher's mare mated with a mustang. Or maybe the horse had been stolen by Comanches as a colt. The black was half a hand taller than his companions, and he tirelessly worked his way among the harem as if to tell the three other younger and smaller stallions that they had best keep their place.

“Horse like that 'un's sure to leap a four foot fence,” Pinto told himself. “Well, I'll build mine six.”

As for where, Pinto followed the ravine into a walled canyon. Where once a creekbed had promised freedom on the opposite side, a massive rock slide now barred the way. It was a perfect box.

Pinto set to felling live oaks. In two days' time he'd cut posts and planted them in the rocky ground. Rails six feet high followed. He left a narrow entrance eight feet wide so the animals could get inside the canyon. It wouldn't take much to slide rails into place afterward, trapping the whole herd.