The Busted Thumb Horse Ranch (14 page)

I knew Arm’s skills. He was pretty fast and his
accuracy wasn’t bad with his Colt. With his 30.30
he could shoot the tongue out of a sidewinder’s
mouth at a hundred yards on a moonless night.
But against a killer like this one, he didn’t have
the chance of a snowball in hell. “Not this time,
Arm,” I said. “I seen this piece of crap cut a man’s
throat an’ gun a sheriff an’ deputy in Laredo
and I’ve wanted him for a long time. He’s mine,
partner.”

Arm didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said,
“Don’ make no difference whose bullets kill theese
scum, jus’ as long as he’s dead. Is right, no?”

“Yeah,” I said. I met the ’slinger’s eyes. “You got
a pair of ways to keep on breathing. You mount
up
an’ send our women home, or you tell us
where they are an’ we go get them. There’s nothin’
in between.”

“Ain’t you a cocky pup.” The gunfighter grinned.
“I guess I gotta tell Mr. Dansworth you fellas
wasn’t interested in no trade, then. I’ll take you
both down an’ go off with the buckskin. What
happens to them Mex women ain’t no nevermin’
to me.”

There’s always some sort of a physical rush in
a gunfight. The thought of winning and living
or losing and dying generates a tingling—a
tautness—through a man’s body. I saw the gunfighter’s
fingers grasp the grips of his pistol—
but it was like watching one of those stereopticon
things, where movement is fast and jerky.

Maybe at one time he’d been very fast. He
wasn’t any longer—either that, or he was off
guard, figuring I was jus’ some shit-kicker he’d
put a couple slugs into and have plenty of time to
drop Arm, as well.

I felt as if a bolt of lightning struck me; everything
leaped into a flat-out gallop in my mind and
in my body. I could hear my pulse in my ears, feel
my heart beat. I saw the gunfighter’s Colt begin to
leave his holster, until only the barrel was left in
the leather. That’s as far as it got. I fired three
times, putting three bullets into his chest. The impacts
threw him back but he didn’t go down right
away. His fingers released his Colt and it dropped
back into his holster. He took half a stumble step
back, and then dropped. Three blossoms of red
appeared on his shirt and vest. His feet and legs
trembled a bit and then were still.

I walked over to his horse, ignoring the corpse,
and unbuckled and removed the spade bit from
the black mare’s mouth. “Let’s tie him to his
saddle,” I said. “His horse’ll get him home. He’s
been around long enough for the mare to know
where her stall is. If he comes untied and drops
off, the coyotes’ll eat good tonight.”

“Or
el
buzzards tomorrow. They eat
mierda
such as theese,” Arm said.

We didn’t want to waste good rope on the
killer. We took his gun belt an’ Colt but didn’t
bother going through his pockets or saddlebags.
We draped him over his saddle and used baling
twine to run a double line under the mare, holding
the gunslinger’s hands and feet as tight to the
horse as possible. The mare was a little jittery; the
scent of blood was scaring her. I slapped her on
the rump and she skittered away and then began
to cut a path toward Hulberton.

“We’d bes’ get our horses,” Arm said. “We can
follow the surrey’s tracks good enough—’least to
we get to town. Then we see what’s what.”

I saddled my horse and tugged the Sharps
from its scabbard, checking that it was loaded.
It was. I replaced the spent cartridges in my Colt
and stuck the killer’s Colt between my gun
belt and my gut. I got a 30.30 from the house an’
carried that across my lap once I was mounted.

Arm, too, checked the loads on his Colt and his
rifle. We jogged away from the barn. There was
really no need to follow the wide-wheeled tracks
of the surrey early on; there was only one logical
way to make it to the church in town. What we
did
look for were those tire tracks veering off in
any directions, and hoofprints around and near
the surrey.

“Tiny, he would like to be here,” Arm said.

“He would. But this ain’t his fight. The two of
us have been able to handle anything thrown
at us before. We’ll do the same thing this time.”

“Es verdad.”

It was damned cold and the wind was picking
up. There’d been some teasing signs of spring in
the last few days, but the temperature and the
wind showed us that’s all those signs were: teasing.
We’d wrapped scarves around our heads to
cover our ears and then jammed down our hats
to keep the whole mess together. We both wore
fingered gloves, but even through them our hands
were numbing up some. I was working my fingers
almost constantly, clenching and opening
my fists to keep the blood running, an’ I saw Arm
was doing the same thing.

We came upon what we were searching for
about forty-five minutes later. At least four men
on horseback had come upon the surrey. The
tracks there scuffled a good bit; it looked like Teresa
and Blanca had tried to make a run for it.
They didn’t get far. The tracks then showed a
man on horseback was leading the surrey horse
and that the others were spaced around it.

We rode to the top of a gradual rise and stopped
a few hundred yards below what must have been
an abandoned farm with a barn that’d caved in
on itself. The house was still standing and smoke
was leaving the chimney and being immediately
whisked
away by the biting wind. Four saddle
horses and the surrey horse were tied to a long
rail in front of the house.

We figured they’d have a couple lookouts and
there were. They were on foot, and their faces
were cherry red from the cold. Neither made an
effort to hide himself. Both cradled rifles.

There was a dim lamp in the farmhouse but
the windows were so dirty we couldn’t see any
movement through them. I drew my Sharps and
tied a fresh white pillowcase to it that I’d taken
from the house. “I’ll go on down,” I said to Arm.
“You watch the lookouts. You see or hear any
shooting, you take them down. Okay?”

“Sí.”

I rode to the farmhouse with the barrel of my
Sharps raised, the pillowcase whipping in the
wind.

As I approached, a single man stepped out of
the house, a rifle cradled in his arms, the butt
ready to find his shoulder. I reined to a stop in
front of him.

“Where are the women?” The wind carried
most of my voice away but the fella heard me. I
recognized him from the saloon. He was one of
the cluster that constantly hung about Dansworth.

“They’re inside,” he said. “Though I gotta say
we ain’t any too happy bein’ closed in with a
couple of stinkin’ Mexicans.”

“I want to see them.”

“Sure.”

He said something over his shoulder and
Blanca and then Teresa were brought past the
now-open
door. There was dried blood under Teresa’s
nose.

“Here’s the deal,” the kidnapper said. “We go
from here to your place with two of my men riding
in the surrey with the women. If there’s any
screwin’ around, both
putas
die. Get it? Anything
out of the ordinary happens an’ they’re dead.
Then we’ll deal with you an’ your pard.”

He spat a stream of tobacco juice to the ground.
“We all go to your place an’ git the mare. That’s
where we let your women go. You try to follow us
an’ the men already waiting by your place will
shoot your asses off.”

“How do I know your word is good?”

“You don’t—but you got no choice. We’re goin’
to get that buckskin one way or another. This is
the best deal you’re gonna git. Take it or leave it.”

Before I could answer, he added, “One other
thing. I want that Sharps.”

“Seems like you got all the cards an’ the hand
ain’t been dealt yet,” I said.

“Sure do look like it, don’t it.” He grinned.

A sudden gust of wind slammed the door inward,
giving me a quick view inside. Teresa and
Blanca, standing near the fireplace with their
arms around each other, were white-faced, either
with cold or fear. A fella sat at a rickety table with
a bottle in front of him.

I began to speak to the man in front of me—
some nonsense about the trade not being fair—
and lowered the barrel of my Sharps. I blew a
hole through his midsection large enough to ride
a draft horse through, let my Sharps fall, and
drew my Colt. The man at the table had the bottle
to
his mouth, upended, sucking whiskey. I was
firing rapidly so it was hard to tell which round
smashed the bottle, but from the pulp, hair, and
crud behind him on the wall, all four of my slugs
had taken him in the head.

Teresa and Blanca commenced to scream. Behind
me I heard gunfire—two rapid shots, one
more—and then silence. Armando’s whoop told
me he’d taken care of his part of the mission.

The women took some calming down. They’d
never seen a gunfight before, much less seen a
man catch four rounds from a .45 at close range in
his head. Armando rode down and spoke to them
in Spanish, touching their shoulders, holding
their hands. He was pretty good at it. After maybe
fifteen minutes they seemed to have shed all the
tears they were going to and some color was
returning to their faces. Both refused to cast their
eyes anywhere near the wall with the gore still
dripping down its rough boards to the floor.

During that fifteen minutes, the wind had begun
to pound on the old house, shaking it, bringing
forth screams and groans of wood long since
overly dry and without real weight-bearing
power.

“We gotta git outta here ’fore the whole damn
place, she comes down on our heads,” Arm
warned.

“Yeah. I’ll get the surrey an’ load up the ladies.
You untack the horses this scum rode in on, an’
send ’em on their way. Ain’t no use in lettin’ them
freeze to death. ’Least they have a chance to join
up with some mustangs.”

Neither of us gave a thought to the bodies of
the
two lookouts or the pair in the farmhouse—no
more than we’d mourn over killing a rat in our
barn. In fact, I figured, that’s pretty much what
we’d done: rid the world of some vermin.

The snow had begun and it was coming on
hard, almost parallel to the ground as it was
driven by the snarling of the wind. Arm was
driving the surrey, jammed between Teresa and
Blanca, his horse tied to the back, following the
cart. I stayed in my saddle but didn’t wander far
from the surrey. If we got stuck out here it was
the only shelter we had—and piss-poor shelter,
at that.

Arm wasn’t much good at directions, and neither
was I. The best use for a map, we believed,
was to tack it up inside an outhouse. We’d operated
by instinct and by guessing, but we’d never
been in quite a situation as this one. The storm
my partner had predicted had fallen on us like a
slavering, starving timber wolf.

I could barely see Arm and the women although
I was riding a yard away from them. “You
know where you’re going?” I hollered to Arm.

“Sheet,” he yelled back. “I don’ know where
nada is, Jake.”

A brief lapse in the wind allowed me to see
Blanca tuck her face very close to Arm’s. I could
see her mouth moving, but the wind caught up
with itself again and I lost any words exchanged.

“Stee close,” Armando yelled. “We turn to the
left a bit now.”

I had no better suggestions so I followed the
surrey as it swung in a long arc to the left. It
seemed to me that all that accomplished was to
give
the wind and snow a better bite at my face,
but like I said, I had no better suggestions.

I lost all sense or orientation or direction; I
might just as well have been ridin’ on the surface
of the damned moon. I’d gone a couple feet beyond
the surrey horse, because I had no idea what
sort of obstacle he could get tangled in—rock out-croppings,
snowdrifts, whatever-the-hell, and I
was in a much better position to handle my animal
than Arm was with the surrey horse and the
long reins.

I began to think of making a shelter from the
surrey; tip it on its side, break off a few boards,
and tie the horses in snug enough so that they’d
make a sort of a wall. I couldn’t see a damned
thing, and I was just about to turn to yell to Arm
about building, pulling in, and waiting out the
worst of the storm, when my horse walked into
the side of our barn.

I figured it had to be our barn; there were no
other barns around our land that were still standing,
and even if it wasn’t ours, it’d provide better
shelter from the lashing wind and whiteout snow.

The thing is, although I knew it was a barn, I
had no idea where we positioned on it. A couple
feet from the main door? The very back of the
structure? One of the sides?

There was only one way to find out: dismount,
tie my horse to the surrey, and start walking,
keeping at least one hand on the wood siding.
That wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounded—the
wind was doing its level best to tear my legs out
from under me. I imagined myself being whisked
away like a tumbleweed, to die in a snowbank.

I climbed down from my horse and followed
the traces of the surrey to Arm and handed my
reins to him. I leaned in close. “I’m gonna follow
the siding until I come to a door an’ then I’ll be
back to get you. Ain’t no other way to do it.” Arm
shouted something but the storm carried his
words away before they reached me.

I took short steps, facing the barn, both hands
in contact with it. It was hard and clumsy walking.
I fell a couple of times, tripping over things
I
couldn’t see. There was a flash of panic each
time: suppose I rolled or was blown away from
the structure. I had no choice. I went on.

Actually, we were fairly fortunate. We’d struck
the barn on the north side, not many feet from
where the rectangle made its turn to the front.
The feel of that big sliding door was wonderful. I
backtracked just as slowly as I’d come to the door
and walked into the side of my horse. I grabbed
the surrey horse’s bit with one hand and set out
again, retracing my path to the door, one hand
always in contact with the wood.

The door was a bitch to open with the wind
blowing against it, but I got it open wide enough
for the surrey to pass through. The wood inside
screamed under the stress of the storm, and it
was as cold as a tomb, but we were out of the
wind. I muscled the door closed while Arm fumbled
around near the tack room, scouting for one
of the lamps we kept hanging here and there. He
found one, lit it, and the light shoved the darkness
aside.

Blanca and Teresa were making the sign of the
cross and praying, seemingly frozen to their seat.

“I gotta bring the mustang in,” I told Arm.
“There’s no way we can build anything to keep
him outta the wind.”

My partner’s lips were blue and numb. He
mumbled rather than spoke. “Always with hand
on wood,” he managed to get out. I nodded. “You
need rope for open space.”

He was right. The corral wasn’t tight to the
barn—there was fifty feet or so between them. I
took a double wrap of rope around my waist and
tied
it off and then tied the other end around a
stout upright beam. I went out again. The damned
storm hadn’t abated a hair. I stumbled and cursed
my way in what I thought was a fairly straight
line until I hit the corral. I was fairly close to the
singing gate.

I didn’t have to find the stallion—he found me,
shoving his muzzle against my chest. I guess it
was as if we’d declared a temporary truce; we
weren’t going to argue when our lives were at
stake. I grabbed his halter with one hand and
drew on the rope, reeling us in like a pair of big
fish being hauled out of a river. I led him through
the barn door and pulled him into a box stall. He
stood there shaking, eyes huge, looking around,
a long icicle suspended from his lower lip, his
muzzle frosted, eyelashes thick with snow. I secured
the gate and tossed him some hay.

Arm had put both our horses and the surrey
horse into stalls and had hayed them. Our work
wasn’t yet over and we both knew that. We had to
run a line between the barn and the house. That
didn’t take too long; we were oriented and it
would have been hard to miss the house. We
knotted the rope around the hitching post by the
porch and followed it back to the barn. Teresa
and Blanca were still praying, huddled together,
the chatter of their teeth making their Spanish
sound like some strange language from Europe
or somewheres.

We led the ladies to the house. The first thing
they did—even before taking off their heavy
coats—was to add wood to the stove fire with
trembling hands. The first thing Arm did—before
taking
off his coat—was to fumble a bottle of
whiskey out of the cabinet with his trembling
hands, yanked the cork with his teeth, and took a
very long drink. Then, he handed the bottle to
me. I did the same.

Outside, the storm continued with demonic
malevolence. We heard sounds of pain and protest
from our farmhouse we’d never heard before,
and the power of the wind was such that the entire
house shivered, trembled, like the ground
does when a highballin’ train roars by a few feet
away from a man. Still, it was cozy enough inside.
We built a huge fire in the fireplace while the
women—still uttering prayers—heated up some
stew and put biscuits up to rise. Arm and I had
another belt or maybe two and then went to our
rooms and changed out of our frozen clothing.

When we came down, something was tickling
Armando’s mind. “Tell me theese,” he said to
Blanca. “How you know to make that beeg swing
that got us home. Nobody could see nada, yet
you…”

“You are too far away from your people,”
Blanca said, “to remember what a
niño’s
job was,
no? My family, we made pulque—thee good pulque,
not thee rotgut. The only agave we used was
thee leetle short ones that grew in the shadow
of the arms of the beeg cactus—the primo agave.
The
niños,
we would be sent out in the morning
with a burlap sack as big as we were an’ we no
come back ’til the sack, it is full. We took a mule,
no? An’ we went miles an’ miles searching out
the right plants. If we no make sure where we
were alla time—well, it wasn’t good. Some died.
It became natural we do this—an’ many of us, we
still can do it.”

“Some of the times we’d cut the head from a
rattlesnake and toss heem inna sack,” Teresa
added. “It makes good flavor in the pulque.”

That pulque is a kinda frothy stuff that tastes
like scorpion piss, an’ it’ll knock a big man down
faster than a .45 will. I never had much use for it;
I drank it once an’ woke up a day later with my
boots, money, pistol, an’ horse gone.

“One must know how to drink cactus juice,
Jake,” Arm said.

“Yer ass. Ain’t nobody who can drink that stuff
an’ remain standing.”

“Beely, he drink it.”

“Sure. Billy the Kid drank it an’ he shot three
men in a saloon for no goddamn reason. Don’t
tell me about no pulque, Arm. It’s poison.”

There’s only so much that can be done around a
farm—particularly one with only a few animals—
during the cruelest and coldest part of a West
Texas winter. I was handling, fondling, and
grooming our stallion daily. The stud was coming
along nicely. He’d get a little nervous and
antsy when I kept him in a stall for too long a
time, I guess because in the course of his life he’d
never been boxed in, and although he enjoyed the
grub and the attention, he preferred to be outside
in his shelter in the corral. The mare was an easy
keeper; she required little attention but obviously
appreciated the daily grooming. The foal was curious
and affable and I’d often let him out in the
aisle in the middle of the barn to wander and
sniff
and see what the world was ’bout. He followed
me like a puppy tagging along after his
master.

Arm bought a load of lumber and replaced any
cracked or warped boards. Beyond that he pestered
Blanca and Teresa, following them as they
went about their chores. When he attempted to
advise them on their cooking, they’d had more
than enough of him and laid into him in shrill
and vindictive Spanish. I couldn’t understand
any of it, but poor Armando slunk out of the
kitchen with his tail ’tween his legs.

If those two ladies were men, I don’t doubt that
Arm would have hurt them badly—or worse.

We rode into town one fine day, when the sky
was as blue as it ever got and there wasn’t a cloud
in sight. Even the wind had died and the sun was
shining with July intensity, although with none
of its heat. Our horses were frisky, nodding their
heads to get under their bits and run off some
steam. We wanted to let them run—we knew
how they felt—but it was too dangerous. The
snow that appeared as flat and level as an ironing
board could hide rocks, holes, and ruts that could
bust a leg.

Tiny, as usual, was happy to see us. We visited
his shop, put up our horses there, and watched as
he finished nailing new shoes on a typey-looking
carriage gelding. Then, ’course, we meandered
over to the saloon.

We hadn’t seen Dansworth since we freed
Blanca and Teresa. I’d kind of expected immediate
retaliation, but nothing happened for a few
weeks and Arm and I had pretty much put the
whole
episode out of mind, just as if we’d done
nothing more than plugged a few rats around our
grain barrels.

The tender brought us our usual tray: a bottle
of decent whiskey and six foaming schooners of
cold beer. We settled in at a rickety table. Tiny
told us a long tale of how he’d once ridden a Tennessee
walking horse, and how that animal’s gait
was as smooth as rolling slowly in a sweet, sweet,
lady’s arms.

As usual, Dansworth and a cluster of his boys
were at the rear of the saloon. They seemed
drunker than they generally were, but we paid
little attention to them. Arm was in the middle of
a story of how his pa’s mule once sat down midday
and refused to work. Mules or horses don’t
sit like dogs or cats do, ’course, an’ what Arm’s pa
done was to take a wooden match, slide it into
that ornery mule’s bung, an’ touched it off with
another. That mule never gave his pa another
minute of trouble, but from then on, he carried
his tail like one of them Arabian horses—up an’
arced. We were having a laugh when Dansworth
strode over to our table and stood there, glaring
down at me.

I’d drawn my .45 under the table when I saw
him begin our way and I was pretty certain Arm
had, too.

Dansworth’s stance was good and steady, but
his eyes showed he was drunk. I looked him up
an’ down. He had a day or so of stubble on his
face, his shirt and coat were wrinkled, and his
drawers had some stains. What I focused on,
though, was his .45 and his gun belt. I know
prime
leatherwork when I see it, an’ Dansworth’s
was the best. The stitches were so tight together
on his holster it was hard to see they were anything
other’n a single line. I know the difference
between bone an’ ivory, and his weapon’s grips
were ivory. His hand was loose next to the pistol,
fingers curved in a tad.

The entire saloon went as quiet as the inside of
a long-in-the-ground coffin.

“You cost me some more good men,” he said.
His words weren’t slurred at all, but damn, his
eyes were drunk.

“Good men?” I said mildly. “I cost you nothing.
See, I don’t consider anyone who grabs up women
an’ holds ’em up for ransom to be men. All I did
was drop some trash onto the ground.”

The silence in the joint continued. Dansworth
continued his stare at me.

“I’m faster an’ better than you’ve ever been,” he
said. “I had me a—”

“You had a fine pistol built from the ground
up,” I said. “And the cut of your holster makes it
easy to get to that fine .45. I hear a gunman taught
you to handle a gun. That’s fine. But, you piece of
horseshit, on the best day you ever had, in a gunfight
’tween you an’ me, you’d go down an’ die.
That’s the way things are, Dansworth.”

The drunkenness from his eyes finally reached
his mouth. “Y…You think you can…”

I let the hammer forward on my Colt. There
wasn’t going to be a gunfight here. I didn’t holster
my pistol, but it’d take more than a puffball to hit
the trigger to fire it.

“You come back sober an’ maybe we’ll talk
about this—maybe do something about it.”

“You think I…I can’t…”

“I know you can’t. Right now you couldn’t
shoot Jumbo the goddamn elephant if he pinched
your nose.”

Dansworth turned and walked back to his
crew. They huddled together for a few minutes
and then one, a hatchet-faced fella with a patch
over one eye, came to our table. “Mr. Dansworth,
he says you’re chickenshit, Walters. He says he’ll
bet you a thousand dollars cash he can outshoot
you right here an’ right now.”

I was getting tired of this folderol. “I don’t care
to draw on drunks. Tell Walters that if—”

“No, that ain’t the bet,” the one-eyed man said.
“We’ll set up six shot glasses on that beam back
by our table. You an’ Mr. Dansworth stand back
about thirty feet an’ do your shootin’. Whoever
busts the most shot glasses wins.”

I was about to tell him to go to hell when I
glanced over at Arm. He was grinnin’ like a Halloween
punkin. So was Tiny.

“Our table here,” I said, “is maybe fifty feet
from that beam. Dansworth shoots from thirty
feet an’ I’ll shoot from here. This is for a thousand,
cash, right? Fair ’nuff?”

One-eye near busted a gut scurryin’ back to the
rear of the saloon with my offer.

Dansworth’s “Goddamn fool,” and his laugh
were louder than the rabble around him. He dispatched
a man to the bar to fetch a dozen shot
glasses an’ to set six up a few inches apart on the
beam.
Then Dansworth, grinning, took thirty
paces toward us.

“Them las’ steps, they was kinda short,” Arm
pointed out.

“Let it go,” I said.

Dansworth turned his back on us. Again, the
gin mill was totally silent. He shrugged his shoulders,
clenched and unclenched his right fist, spat
off to one side, an’ drew his .45. The explosions of
his rounds were like dynamite in the closed
building. Dansworth fired quickly—maybe a bit
too quickly. Five of the shot glasses shattered but
one remained standing, as if mocking him. Still
he seemed satisfied with his performance and his
boys whistled, whooped, and cheered.