Pinto Lowery (6 page)

“I admit it's temptin', ma'am, but I lef' enough places to know de trade. Don't get easier put off. Now's as good a time as another to ride.”

“Won't you reconsider, Pinto?” Toney asked.

“You got yer ranch, Bob,” Pinto said, mustering a grin. “Me, I only know de Llano. And I worry after my ponies.”

With that said, he waved farewell and started for the corral. The big black sensed his approach and stirred anxiously. In short order Pinto had the restless stallion saddled. Only then did the horse stamp and storm.

“Miss dem mares, do you?” Pinto whispered. “Well, dey los' to you now, old fellow. Might's well know it.”

The horse settled down, and Pinto climbed atop the saddle. Then the two of them, horse and rider, set off onto the Llano Estacado. Soon they were splashing across the Brazos and swinging west toward the walled-up canyon and the pony herd.

That night Pinto made his camp beside the river in a hollow formed by a curling creek. It was a good spot. for scrub cedars and swaying willows clung to the river's banks, hiding the encampment from the eyes of any wandering Comanche or renegade cow thief. Even so, Pinto built no fire. There was a chill to the spring air, and he would have welcomed the warmth of burning embers. Even a hint of flame showed out against the black emptiness of the plain, however, and Pinto desired no unwelcome visitors—not with money enough in his boot to tempt half the state!

With the wind howling eerily through the treetops, and the black stallion pawing the ground restlessly, Pinto found himself remembering the laughter of the Toney youngsters. Laughter was a balm for a lonely man. A tonic for his troubles. But when it came time to leave, the haunting memory of high spirits could plague a man to his grave.

“You feel it too, don't you, boy?” Pinto called to the horse. “Miss bein' 'round yer own kind. Well, cain't much blame you. I miss bein' 'round mine sometimes.”

All in all, though, Pinto supposed horses to be a higher caliber of creature than people. Perhaps the stallion had better cause to complain.

He passed a fitful night in the hollow. Three times the stirring of the stallion woke him. And twice the spectral face of Jamie Haskell brought Pinto shivering and shuddering to life.

“Can't you leave me be, Jamie?” Pinto howled. “I was always a true friend to you. Can't you stay dead even one night?”

Dawn found him sitting in a cold sweat and staring at the rising sun. His eyes were wild with torment, and he welcomed the resumption of his journey. Riding along the Brazos, heading back to the waiting horses gave Pinto Lowery purpose. And the work would free his mind from the iron grip of old ghosts.

Perhaps that was why he saddled the white-faced mustang and climbed atop without bothering to even chew a scrap of jerked beef. The big stallion was equally anxious to return to the penned-up ponies, and the horse sped across the broken country as if he'd become winged Pegasus.

More than once Pinto swept past startled farmboys, busy breaking ground or thinning plants. Those straw-hatted youngsters gazed up in wonder or howled encouragement at the scraggly looking stranger riding that devil of a black horse.

“What's the hurry, mister?” one called.

“You seen Indians?” another cried.

They were too young to understand it was ghosts that drove a man to such exertions. Or maybe they were smart enough to know a spectre wasn't about to be put off by such tactics.

Pinto returned to the fenced-off canyon an hour short of dusk. There'd been a rain, and the ravine was awash with runoff.

“Jus' as well,” Pinto remarked as he rolled off the side of his horse and left the stallion to satisfy his thirst. “Means de ponies got plenty to drink.”

He knelt beside the bubbling stream and splashed water onto his sweat-streaked face. The lines under his eyes and those etched in his forehead warned exhaustion approached. Pinto shrugged, then stripped the saddle, knapsack, and blanket from the weary stallion. It took but a moment to lead the horse to the gate and send him rushing eagerly back to his harem.

A less practical man, watching the mustangs cavorting in the natural corral, would certainly have set the whole batch loose on the Llano. The scene touched Pinto's heart. But he'd grown used to the big stallion, and the time for running free across the unbounded plain was nearly gone. Those buffalo bones proved that. No, the longhorn had come to displace both the buffalo and the range pony.

“And farmers've come to take ole Pinto's place,” he lamented.

Pinto shook off the notion and set off for the river. He shed his dusty clothes and splashed into the shallows. For close to a whole hour he alternately splashed around midstream and soaked in the shallows. Finally he gave his clothes a similar scrub before snaring a pair of fat catfish for supper. As he built up a brisk fire and huddled beside it, naked save for a rough wool blanket draped around his shoulders, he couldn't help recalling similar spring eves passed with Jamie Haskell on old Abner Polland's place outside of Marshall.

“Now that's a chicken-brained notion if ever I heard one!” Jamie had howled the time Pinto suggested hiring themselves out to a pair of Choctaw traders. “Them Indians'll get a year's work out of you and pay you with some ole nag no right-minded Texan would climb onto.”

“Be my own horse, though,” Pinto had argued. “And I never knew any Choctaw to back out of a bargain.”

“Still, it's addled thinkin', Pinto.”

“Be an advendure.”

“Naw, only hard work,” Jamie grumbled. “I know horses some myself, don't I? My uncle raises good ones. These fool paints, Georgie, just ain't worth a lick o' salt. You got to get yer thinkin' straight.”

So it was Pinto turned down the Choctaws. Isaac Flowers took the job and came home with the finest bay mare anyone north of Waco had seen. Isaac ran five hundred horses nowadays, or so Pinto had heard. Of course no Flowers, man or boy, signed the muster book and shouldered a rifle for the cause.

“Things'd been different if de war hadn't happened, Jamie,” Pinto said, glancing at the phantom face smiling at him from the fire. “Who knows? You might've talked Sarah Ames into sittin' with you at Sunday meetin'. Or maybe . . . ”

The dancing demon frowned, and Pinto reached over and grabbed a knife. As he started skinning the catfish, Jamie's face seemed to fade.

“Sure, things might've been different,” Pinto said again. “But a man plays de hand he gets. You did, didn't you, Jamie? So now you're only a ghos' goin' 'round hauntin' yer ole friends. And me? I guess I'm still that chicken-brained fool!”

Perhaps it was lying beside the glowing embers of the fire that night that brought Pinto Lowery contentment. Or maybe the refreshing dip in the Brazos and the tasty fried catfish restored his old energies. Then, too, it might have been ghosts who took a rest from their eternal wanderings. Whatever the reason, Pinto awoke that next day with new vigor.

Almost at once he set about readying himself for a summer on the cattle trails. The paint he'd ridden for two years became a second packhorse. Pinto led the two pack animals, together with the big black and the dancing chestnut mare, beyond the fence so they could graze on the tender meadow grass downstream. He then began organizing the remaining sixteen animals for the journey back to Wise County. If they brought as fair a price as the first batch, Pinto Lowery would find himself downright close to prosperous, chicken-brain or not!

Pinto thought it likely. After all, three of the mares were long and sleek, the kind favored by Texans for breeding. The others would make good saddle ponies, and the two young stallions were sure to draw some cowboy's eye.

“Be a fair start toward a future,” Pinto told himself. After all, a thousand dollars would buy a fair stretch of country. It had long been a distant dream. But just then Pinto could only think of the trail to Wichita. He remembered the singing . . . missed the pranks and the company. And the idea of another week alone with only ghosts for company vexed him considerably.

“So, it's back down de Brazos, eh?” Pinto asked.

He passed two more days readying himself and the stock for the journey, though. Those last horses were far more restless than the first batch, and Pinto draped a rope around each animal's neck and tied the whole batch to a long line he trailed behind the black. Of course, a sudden stampede would likely pull Pinto, saddle and all, across half of Texas, but so long as the horses stayed calm, they would trail well enough.

When Pinto finally did set off, he wasted little time whittling down his inventory. There were twenty or thirty ranches between that ravine-scarred valley and the little town of Defiance, and Pinto had marked each one in his mind on the homebound leg of his earlier ride. Now he visited those ranches, each in turn.

“That mare with the splash o' brown on her rump's a likely enough breeder,” the first rancher observed. “But forty dollars? I ain't seen that much foldin' money in a month o' Sundays!”

At the next place a bowlegged rancher named Jonas Brayville picked out five of the more ordinary ponies.

“I know you'll get yer price on dem others,” Brayville told Pinto. “But these here's sound enough, and you might take thirty-five for 'em if I was to buy the five.”

“The price's forty,” Pinto said, frowning. “You wouldn't talk down a hones' man from a fair price, would you?”

“I'd talk my own grandma out o' her hat if I needed it to keep my ranch goin',” Brayville insisted. “Been some lean times, you know. Comanches come through here and run off my saddle horses. Kilt my second boy. Only fourteen, he was. No bigger'n a peapod.”

“Well, I know 'bout hard luck,” Pinto said, relenting. “You take de five at thirty-five.”

“Bless you fer a good man,” Brayville responded. He went inside his house for a bit. He returned with a stack of well-worn green-backs and three gold pieces. His wife brought a flour sack full of food and a fresh-baked pie. A shaggy-haired boy of sixteen helped his father lead the mustangs to a waiting corral while two barefooted girls herded four younger Brayvilles out of harm's way.

“We'd have you take this food for yer kindness,” Brayville said when he accepted Pinto's bill of sale. “Maybe we'll pass you on the way north. You did say you thought to join a drive.”

“Hopin' to,” Pinto said, tying the flour sack behind his saddle. “They say they's hirin' at de Double R, up Wise County way. 'Course I still got horses to sell firs'.”

“I wouldn't expect that to trouble you long,” Brayville declared. “Man's hard put to find a mustang as lively as these here.”

Pinto nodded his thanks for the food and the praise. Then he set off eastward again.

Gradually the string of horses melted away. A livery in Fincherville took two. One of the better mares was snatched up by a farmer north of Weatherford, and his brother-in-law rode down to Pinto's camp on the Brazos to buy another.

“Those two are of a kind,” the fellow pointed out. “Can't have Henry gettin' the upper hand on me.”

So it was that by the time Pinto rode into Defiance, he had only seven range ponies left. He still had his packhorses, the white-faced black, and the little chestnut, but then he had no yen to sell those. Once he had a good look at Defiance, he decided the prospects for selling anything were none too good.

Defiance, Texas, wasn't much more of a town than Hill's Junction. In fact there was only a motley collection of picket houses clustered around a brick-fronted bank, a plank-walled rooming house, and two saloons. Pinto saw one solitary figure trudging along the single dusty street, and that was a sawed-off boy whose tattered trousers hung down on his slim hips so low they threatened any second to commit an indecency. Anyone who cared to might count the child's ribs, for the leathery skin of his chest was stretched so tight that each bone seemed to protrude like a regular ridge.

“Come fer the auction, mister?” the boy called out.

“Came to sell some horses,” Pinto answered.

“Buyers done gone,” the boy explained. “I could have me a look 'round the drinkin' spots and see if any's stuck, though. If a man paid me two bits fer it.”

“Have a look,” Pinto said, tossing the youngster a quarter. The urchin snatched the coin out of the air with an unexpected dexterity and then rushed toward the nearest saloon. Amid a howl of laughter, the youngster tumbled back out the door.

“I tole you, Johnny Cole, I don't abide scarecrows in my parlor!” a tall red-haired woman announced.

“Was lookin' fer him,” young Johnny said, pointing to Pinto, who nodded.

“Well, I'll excuse him for bein' a stranger,” the woman said, smiling at Pinto. “You know better.”

Thereupon the boy turned and made a dash toward the second saloon. He made no immediate exit from that one, and Pinto led his horses over to where he could tie them off to a hitching rail. He just finished securing the last of the animals when Johnny Cole emerged from the dingy door of the saloon, tugging the arm of a respectable-looking rancher.

“Boy, I've seen all the horses I ever care to gaze upon!” the man complained. “Now leave me to enjoy an honest game of cards in peace.”

“Ain't honest if you play with Kansas Jack,” the boy argued. “And there's a fellow here with horses he wants to sell.”

“Were a dozen of 'em this morn,” the man barked. “I've seen 'em. Now git!”

Only then did the man happen to glance around and spy Pinto. For a moment the rancher paused.

“You weren't at the auction, were you?” he called to Pinto.

“Didn't know 'bout it,” Pinto explained. “Jus' come off de Llano.”

“Well, you couldn't've planned it better so far's I'm concerned,” the rancher declared as he trotted closer and began looking over the horses. “That chestnut mare's a dandy.”