The Busted Thumb Horse Ranch Read online

  The Busted Thumb Horse Ranch

  Paul Bagdon

  LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY

  Dead of Night

  I’d been sleeping with my Colt under my saddle blanket, which I used as a pillow. I eased it out and thumbed back the hammer. In reality, the sound was a minuscule, oiled click—but in the dark of night it sounded like a couple of cooking pots being slammed together.

  Armando drew his boot knife. I could hear the ten inch blade slide out of its leather sheath sewn into his left boot, which left his right hand free to draw his pistol.

  I didn’t know any of the Indians in the area, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Then I saw the image of six dead men on the street in Burnt Rock. Each of those cowpokes had friends, relatives, maybe partners, and they’d want revenge.

  Arm drew an arc on my shoulder, pointing me off to the left. I got my feet under me and duckwalked very slowly and as quietly as I could about twenty feet. I assumed Armando was doing the same think to the right, but I couldn’t hear a sound from him.

  All of a sudden, the place we’d been sleeping erupted dirt and stone and sand into the sky. The hollow, deep boom of at least one shotgun mixed with the sharper, quicker pistol reports. One shot— and then another—was deeper and louder than the others. One of those boys was firing a Sharps.

  Arm and I opened up on the muzzle flashes…

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dead of Night

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Other Books By

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  The document—that’s what the circuit rider judge called it: the document—was ten or a dozen pages long, tucked neatly into a black leather folder. There were a herd of whereases, heretofores, perpetuities, and parties of the first and second parts on each page.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  Armando SantaMaria, my partner, poured himself another shot of whiskey, and downed it. “White-man bullsheet,” he mumbled.

  “It’s quite simple,” the judge said to me, ignoring Arm. “You’ve inherited a thousand acres, a house, a barn, and six thousand dollars from Hiram Ven Gelpwell, deceased.”

  “But I don’t even know…”

  “Whether or not you know or don’t know matters not a twittle. Suffice it to say that he was an…uhh…paramour of your mother’s. He felt responsible, for some reason, for you.”

  “Where is theese land?” Armando asked. “And where is the six thousand dollars?”

  The judge looked at Armando the way a new bride would look at a squished cockroach on her piece of wedding cake. “The land is in West Texas,” the judge said. “I have here a certified bank check made payable to Jake Walters in the amount mentioned.”

  “Bueno,” Arm chuckled. “We can drink up the dollars an’ raise prairie dogs on the rocks an’ sand. Or maybe the rattlers an’ scorpions, no?”

  The judge ignored Arm. “The land is good for the area,” he said, “and there’s a year-around stream. It’s a tad slight in the summer, but it never goes dry. The pasture is sparse but it’ll support some beef.” He took a loose map from the folder and handed it to me. The land I apparently owned was outlined in heavy ink. It looked big. The nearest town was Hulberton.

  “What’s the town like?” I asked.

  “I was through there once a few years ago,” the judge said. “It’s much like any West Texas cattle and Farmington town—a decent mercantile, two saloons, a blacksmith and livery shop, a bank, a small hotel with a restaurant, a house of soiled doves— that’s about it. There’s a railroad spur not too far away and that’s what brings in the business— cowpokes with cash at the end of a drive.”

  “What do I have to do?” I asked.

  “Sign here—and here—and here—and here. Then I hand the bank draft to you and our business is concluded.” The judge handed me a pen and a small ink pot. I signed in the places indicated and the judge handed over the draft and a copy of the whole mess.

  Arm and me now had a prairie dog, rattlesnake, and scorpion ranch—and $6,000.

  “Ain’t that somethin’,” I said. “This here piece of paper is worth six thousand dollars.”

  “Maybe might could be,” Armando said. “Me, I think it’s white man’s scribbling an’ will find trouble for us.”

  I looked across the table at my partner. He was all Mexican, that was obvious, from the wet sand color of his skin to the deep, unfathomable chestnut of his eyes. He wasn’t what one would refer to as handsome; he had deep acne craters from the pox on his face as a youth, there was an elevated four-inch scar running from his forehead, through his left eyebrow and onto his cheek, and his nose had been broken and not set several more times than once. His mustache ran shaggily over his upper lip, down each side of his mouth, and then beyond his jaw a couple of inches to dangle freely.

  “What you gawkin’ at?” he asked. His voice was a whiskey, tobacco, and cinders sound that grated on the listener’s ears.

  “Your beauty, Arm. At times it purely stuns me.”

  He grinned, showing a wonderful set of white, straight teeth so many Mexicans are blessed with. “Is true,” he said. “Let’s drink much cerveza,” he said. “We celebrate theese ranch, no?”

  “It’s beer, you damned fool,” I said. “You’re not a campesino in some adobe hut—you’re in America. We drink beer, not cerveza.”

  Armando stood, still grinning, and clutched his genitals with his right hand. “Here is your America, gringo. You fight a good an’ just war an’ get your asses shot off. The bes’ part of your country couldn’t fight worth a damn, an’ now your South, it is nothing, the remains of a campfire.”

  Armando and I had been partners for better than twenty years. We’d both run off from our homes—my father was a drunken oaf of a sodbuster, and Arm’s mother was a whore and he had no idea who his father may have been. We met near a long curve of railroad tracks close to the Tex-Mex border, waiting to hop a train. We joined up and haven’t been apart since.

  Sometimes it happens that way, between boys or between full-grown men. There’s something there that holds them together—makes them partners. I don’t know what that force is, but I’m right glad it exists.

  “Let’s drink lots of cerveza,” I said. “And talk about our ranch.”

  We commenced to do just that.

  We were roughly 400 miles from Hulberton and our ranch and had no real idea what lay between us and our destination beyond sand, mesquite, scraggly desert pines, little water, and wandering gangs of screw ups from both sides of the war who were as crazy as shithouse rats and bloodthirsty, to boot.

  The distance didn’t much bother us; we’d covered more ground than that either running from the law or headed in one direction or another simply to see what was there. Rabbit isn’t a bad feed, although a man grows tired of it when eating it twice a day for long periods of time.

  We figured we’d best cash the bank draft, provision up at the mercantile, and set out. The bank in this little town, Burnt Rock, was small, as was the town itself. We had to talk to the chief officer, a turtlelike old fellow whose face showed he didn’t like most people and, in particular, didn’t like drifters who smelled like beer barrels and looked like they didn’t have a penny between them. The fact that Arm was a Mex didn’t cheer him up any, either.

  “What is it I can do for you?” he asked. A little plaque on his desk said his name was alvin l. terhune.

/>   “Well, I’ll tell ya, Al,” I said. “We want to cash this here draft.” I handed it to him.

  “You’ll refer to me as Mr. Terhune,” he said, his voice as frigid as a West Texas winter.

  “I’ll refer to you as the tooth fairy if I care to,” I said. “Just cash the damn draft.”

  He began to reply when Armando released a truly thunderous belch that was loud enough to rattle the windowpanes.

  “You swine!” Terhune snapped. “You can’t…”

  Arm grinned. “Ain’t much I’d rather do with a ol’ woodchuck like you than swing you by your tail an’ whack your ugly head ’gainst a rock. Now, you do like Jake says an’ we’ll saddle up an’ haul ass.”

  Terhune’s hand trembled as he inspected the draft. Evidently, it was the sort of thing he’d have to cash if Satan himself came walking in with it. He pushed his chair from his desk and stood. I noticed that Arm took a step to the side and let the fingertips of his right hand just barely touch the bone grips of the holstered Colt .45 he had tied with latigo lower on his leg than a cowhand would. He actually thought the old codger was going to draw on us. I laughed.

  “Get the money ’fore you get my partner all sweaty an’ bothered, Al,” I said. “All fifties’ll be just fine.”

  Terhune glared at us for a moment longer and then stomped off toward the line of three tellers behind little windows across the room.

  “You ever notice how silly a little man with a fat ass looks?” I asked Arm.

  “Sí.”

  The safe must have been in a room behind the tellers. Terhune used a key to open the door of the room, went inside, and locked the door behind himself. For a few moments there was no sound. Then we heard the door unlock. Terhune emerged with a cloth sack in one hand and relocked the door. He walked to his desk and dropped the bag on it. “Count it,” he said.

  “No need,” Arm said jovially. “You ain’t got the eggs to try to cheat us.” I picked up the sack and liked the heft of it. We left the bank.

  I’ve always liked a good mercantile, and the one in Burnt Rock was the best I’d been in for a long time. Everything was neatly arranged, the glass of the cases glistened, and the scent inside the place was a delightful mixture of leather, wood, penny candy, fabric, apples, and the steel of plows and other farm implements. We walked up and down the aisles, checking out the saddles, bits, and bridles, passed by the patent medicines, dresses, and ladies’ hats, looked over the rifles and pistols in a glass-fronted case, and went back to the main counter. An ol’ gent dressed in a suit with shoes shiny enough to hurt if you looked at them in the sun gave us a large sack.

  We picked up maybe six pounds of beef jerky, 1,000 rounds of Remington .45 ammunition, four quarts of whiskey, a couple pounds of tobacco and several books of rolling papers, four canteens apiece, and a Buck knife that caught Arm’s fancy. That filled the sack; I went back and got another one. We bought a half dozen cans of peaches in heavy syrup, a dozen or so apples, and a box of cigars. I tried on a tooled leather vest that was the nicest piece of goods I’d ever seen and left my ol’ vest in a trash barrel.

  We didn’t need anything in terms of saddlery —we both rode Texas-made double-rig working saddles and used low-port bits, and everything was in good shape. We picked up a can of neat’s-foot oil and a couple cans of Hoppe’s gun oil, and that was it.

  When we put everything on the counter we saw it’d be impossible to stuff everything into our saddlebags.

  “We need a pack animal,” I said.

  Arm nodded. “I’ll go to the livery an’ buy one—you get us a pack rig.”

  I reached into the money bag and gave a few bills to my partner. He stuffed them in his pocket without looking at them. We both knew that it was our money, not mine. That’s the way we did things.

  I picked out a pack rig. If a fella knew what he was doing, a mule or horse could be loaded securely with a single, long length of good rope. Neither Arm nor I had that skill, and the leather rig was a whole lot easier on the animal.

  The mercantile owner was running a tally on a sheet of paper, and the more he added, the broader his smile became. He offered me a free cigar, which I accepted, and was just putting a match to, when raucous laughter penetrated the mercantile from the street. “Hey, Pancho,” a drunken voice bellowed, “why not trade your ma an’ your sister for a saddle for that nag?” The laughter rose again, swelled, took on the sharp edge of mockery.

  “Damn,” I said, and set my cigar on the counter and headed for the door.

  There were six men—cowhands, from the looks of them—mostly drunk, in a scraggly line facing Armando and a ribby bay mare he had on a lead line.

  I left the mercantile and walked to a spot about ten feet to Arm’s left. “Partner,” I said quietly. Sneaking up on a man in the position Arm was in could easily buy a fella a hole on boot hill.

  Arm dropped the lead rope and let his hands hang to his sides. I carried a Colt .45, too, and wore it as Arm wore his—low, tied to my leg, ready for action.

  Three of the cowpokes had stepped forward, a yard in front of their friends. One carried a lever action 30.30 and the other two wore holstered handguns.

  “Maybe you boys better back off an’ grab another drink,” I said. “If you don’t, most—maybe all—of you are going down hard and going down dead.”

  Jagged laughter ran through the men. The one with the rifle cranked the action, chambering a round.

  “You and the beaner gonna shoot us up?” the rifleman asked. “You gonna kill us dead?” The laughter covered my few quiet words to Armando. “I got the rifle an’ the two to the left.”

  Armando nodded.

  The rifleman seemed to be the leader. I thought that if I took him down fast, the others may turn tail. It was far from a sure thing, but I guessed it was worth a try.

  The barrel of the 30.30 rose toward me. I drew and blew a hole in the man’s throat. He took a step back and then collapsed like a sack of grain tossed from a wagon. The two men to his side were scrambling to draw their pistols. I fired twice: one slug entered through one cowpoke’s right eye, the other in the middle of his friend’s chest. I heard Arm’s .45 bark two or three—or maybe four times, he fired so rapidly, it was hard to tell—and his three targets were splayed on the street, their blood soaking into the dirt and grit.

  Arm and I both reloaded our pistols before we reholstered them. We always do. It’s a good habit to get into. There aren’t many worse sounds than squeezing a trigger in a bad situation and hearing a click instead of a bang.

  “ ’Bout time to leave Burnt Rock,” I said.

  “Sí,” Armando answered. The packhorse had run into an alley between buildings and Arm went after him.

  I went back into the mercantile to settle up our bill and to retrieve the cigar I’d left on the counter. “How’s the law around here?” I asked.

  The store owner was white faced and a little shaky. He’d obviously watched the action from the window. He stuttered slightly as he spoke. “There isn’t any law just now,” he said. “Our sheriff got gunned down two or three weeks ago an’ we can’t find nobody who cares to fill the job. Deputy was killed, too. Goddamn army is out chasin’ Injuns.”

  I nodded. “Now, how about finishing adding up our charges?”

  He went back to his piece of paper and his nub of a pencil, his lips moving as he ran the sums. “It’s…uhh…a bit high,” he said, as if he were apologizing.

  “That’s not a big surprise,” I said. “C’mon— what do you need to square us up?”

  “Well,” he said, “it’s $48.52, all told.”

  I handed him a fifty. His face lit up like I’d handed him the key to paradise. “Keep the change,” I said. A thought struck me. “Damn,” I said. “We forgot coffee. Add in twenty pounds.” I had a scrunched-up ten-dollar bill in my pocket and dropped it on the counter. “That’ll cover it, no?”

  “Oh, yessir—I can sell you twenty pounds for that and give you change.”

&nbs
p; “Give us the coffee and keep the change.”

  Armando had tied the packhorse to the rail outside. We fitted the rig to the horse and loaded up. There was some weight to our purchases, but not so much that it’d wear down the horse. He’d carried before; we could see the places where the straps had rested on his hide.

  We led the horse down to the livery to pick up our own mounts. Arm’s horse was a tall, broad-chested, big-assed short-horse type, completely black except for two white socks in front and a snip of white on his snout. Mine was an Appaloosa that stood a bit more than fifteen hands and was faster than a bolt of lightning and about as dumb as a shovel. He’d go all day and all night, though, without a complaint, and gunfire from his back barely caused him to prick his ears. Arm hadn’t had his black too long and the horse could get jittery at times, but Arm could always ride him down without a problem. We figured I should hook up with the packhorse. I took a wrap around my saddle horn with the lead rope and we rode on out of Burnt Rock, headed east and slightly north. We gave the bodies in the street a wide berth. The best of horses got antsy when they got the scent of human blood.

  We filled our canteens at the livery pump, let the horses have a last suck at the trough there, and set out.

  There were men peering through windows and gathered in alleys as we left town. Before long, the dead men’s boots, guns, cash, hats, and anything else of value would be gone and the boot-hill man would have six half-dressed corpses to plant in unmarked graves.

  We rode until just about dark, each smoking cigars and having the occasional suck on a whiskey bottle. Early on there was some nipping and screwing around among the horses, but that calmed right down. The pack animal figured out that the other two horses ran the show and decided it was easier to live with that than to have chunks of hide and hair chewed out of him.

  I guess maybe I didn’t mention that it was early July when all this took place. The sun hung in the sky ten or eleven hours a day, like a probing, blinding, maniacal eye. It was the sort of wringing-wet, oppressive heat that caused problems that otherwise wouldn’t have taken place. Good dogs— cattle dogs—tore into their owners—or their owner’s kids, for no reason at all. Men who’d been friends for years traded punches and rolled over one another biting, gouging, and kicking in the spilled beer and damp sawdust and blood of saloon floors. Kids were listless and surly, ignored their chores, sassed their folks.