The Baron Range Read online

  The mother gasped at this sacrilege. She touched a hand to Teresa’s forehead. “She is still hot with the fever,” she said.

  “That is because you still believe she has the sickness. You must believe she is well and that her flesh is cool.”

  “Who are you to say these things to me?” the woman asked. “You are not a curandero.”

  “No, I am not a healer in your eyes,” Juanito said. “I look to the Father of All to heal, and so should you. He is here, in this room, and your daughter is becoming well. Truly, I see only wellness here in this house.”

  “Get out, get out,” the woman said. “You are the devil.”

  Juanito stood there. He smiled at Teresa. She smiled back at him.

  “No, he is not the devil,” Teresa said. “I believe him. I can feel the fever going away. I feel cool inside.”

  “There are no devils,” Juanito said quietly, “unless you create them. Teresa is perfect as you are perfect, and she is well as you are well. There is no sickness here except your belief that there is, little mother.”

  The woman clasped hands to her ears and shook her head.

  Juanito smiled at Teresa again and nodded. “Teresa believes. She knows what is true.”

  “Get out of my house,” the woman said. “Now.”

  “I will go,” Juanito said. “I will pray for you both.”

  “And to whom will you pray?” asked the woman.

  “I will pray to the Father, to God, to His spirit which is in every living thing. So I will pray to you and Teresa.”

  The woman spat and motioned for Juanito to leave. Her daughter reached out and grabbed one of her mother’s arms, drew it back so that her mother’s hand rested on her forehead. Juanito smiled at both of them again and turned to go. He heard the woman gasp and then she was sobbing. He looked back and Teresa had drawn her mother down into her arms and was giving her comfort. He walked outside into the sunlight.

  Domingo was waiting for him. He had an anxious look on his face. “How is my sister?” he asked.

  “She is well,” Juanito said. “Have your brother bring my horse. I will ride on.”

  “I will get your horse myself,” Domingo said.

  “What do you call this place?” Juanito asked.

  “It does not have a name, but we call it Victoria. I do not know why.”

  “Maybe it will become a town then. If you have given it a name, it exists.”

  The boy looked bewildered. Juanito smiled broadly at him.

  “I will get your horse,” the boy said.

  Domingo appeared a few moment later, leading Juanito’s horse. Juanito gave him some coins and Domingo grinned. “Thank you,” he said.

  Juanito mounted his horse and rode from the tiny settlement. As he headed southwest for the Box B and Baronsville, he saw an old man riding a donkey. They passed on the wagon-rutted road that wound through the sage and cactus.

  “Have you come from Victoria?” the old man asked. He wore a small straw hat tied under his chin with string. His face was leathery, furrowed with the channels of age. He looked at Juanito with watery brown eyes, the whites streaked with brownish veins.

  “I have. It is not far.”

  “There is a sick girl there. I am a curandero.”

  “You are mistaken, viejo,” Juanito said. “There is no sick girl there.”

  “And how do you know this?”

  “I have seen her. She is well.”

  “I will see for myself,” said the curandero.

  “Yes. It will be good for you to see her. It is easy to believe what you can see with your own eyes. Just be sure that you cause no harm.”

  The curandero snorted and clapped heels to the burro, and switching him with a length of leather. The burro tottered off toward the village.

  Juanito waved good-bye to the old man, but the curandero did not respond. Instead, he stuck his nose up in the air and switched the burro even harder than before. The burro galloped away while the curandero posted up and down on its back like a mechanical toy.

  But the old man turned and shouted “Vaya con Dios” at Juanito before he rode out of sight.

  “Siempre,” Juanito shouted back. Always.

  26

  ANSON MOVED THROUGH cobwebs of dream in a forest of shadow trees and columns of nightmare, a maze that he struggled through with a broken pistol that he could not put together. Ropes scaly as snakes dangled from the trees, each looped and tied with a hangman’s knot, each writhing and coiling, casting out for him as he passed.

  He spoke to people during his journey and he saw the faces of men dead and living and he fired at some of them with his broken pistol and nothing emerged from the barrel but a soupy substance that had no existence in the waking world. The yodels of a pack of coyotes threaded through the fabric of the dream, and it seemed to him that he could see their cries in color as they floated like bright ribbons through the artificial forest. He cried out as the men chased him and he fled upward through the watery depths of nightmare and floundered in the cobwebs of sleep, fighting for every breath, gasping and choking on the smoky webs until his arms were tangled and he felt as if he were drowning and falling at the same time.

  “Ho, Anson, wake up,” Martin said in a gravelly voice. “You’re all tangled up in your bedroll.”

  Anson awoke with a start, still gasping for air, the dream fast slipping away from his consciousness, but some of the nightmare still holding him fast. He rubbed his eyes and blinked. He kicked at his blanket and grabbed a corner that had wrapped around his shoulder.

  “Bad dreams?” Martin asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, it’s time to go.”

  “It’s still dark,” Anson said.

  “It’ll be light enough to see once we get going.”

  Anson’s bladder was full. He was fully dressed, even to his boots. He fought out of the tangled bedding and rose to his feet. He staggered into a grove of mesquite and relieved himself. He heard the horses nicker as his father put on the morrals. He walked back to their camp, shaking the stiffness out of his joints. He was still sleepy. He felt as if he had struggled all night in some fading dream. He could remember only the ropes that were like snakes and the face of the Swede, Lars Swenson. He remembered him, all right, but he now wondered if he had even dreamed that.

  “We got hardtack and jerky for breakfast,” Martin said. “We can eat as we ride.”

  Anson laughed. “I wish we had some of Mother’s flapjacks and eggs, maybe some fatback.”

  “You’ll tangle your stomach worse’n that bedroll of yours you keep talking about food like that.”

  “I know.”

  “Catch up your horse. They can eat out of the bags for a ways while we pick out the tracks. At least it didn’t rain.”

  “Did you think it would, Daddy?”

  “I can feel it in the air. Can’t you?”

  Anson sniffed the air. It was cool and dark and the night birds had gone silent. It was very quiet except for the munching of the horses on oats and corn, the clacking of their teeth. But it did feel like rain for some reason. He looked up and saw no stars, but it was hard to see the clouds, too.

  “It feels some like rain. It’s pretty early.”

  “The sun comes up sudden out here,” Martin said, and mounted his horse. Anson caught up his mount, removed the hobbles and stuffed them in his saddlebags. He checked his rifle and pistol. He put fresh powder in the pan after wiping it clean, rammed the wiping stick down the barrel to make sure the ball was still seated tightly.

  Martin rode his horse around in the clearing as if on parade to see how his legs were holding up. Anson mounted his horse. From his seat in the saddle he saw that the trees were gradually coming into focus. The dawn was already breaking on the eastern horizon.

  “Can you see well enough to track, Daddy?”

  “I think so. I think we might be gaining on Cullers.”

  “You mean on that little feller, don’t you?”


  Martin laughed dryly. “Whichever comes first,” he said.

  They rode out of the clearing as the sunrise lightened the land. Anson smelled the fresh scents of trees and flowers, the earth itself. He was no longer sleepy because he could see the horse tracks himself. He wondered how long it would take them to catch up to the little feller. Anson was very curious about him. He still wondered how such a small man could beat up a bigger man like Swenson and put a rope around his neck and pull him high up on a tree limb.

  The tracks got fresher as they rode and Martin found a place where the small man had bedded down.

  “He didn’t stay long. Less than an hour from the looks of it. How in hell can he track at night?”

  “He must have good eyes,” Anson said.

  “He’s not tracking with his eyes at night. His are the only tracks.”

  “Which means he hasn’t caught up with Cullers yet.”

  “No, but I think the little feller sure as hell knows where Cullers is going.”

  “How can he? We don’t even know that ourselves.”

  “He knows,” Martin said grimly, and he put his horse to a gallop as the sun rose over the trees and burned through the clouds spreading across the sky before it was swallowed up again and the land turned gray and somber and it did feel like rain.

  27

  THERE WAS STILL only that lone track. One horse, one man, and the horse had walked and galloped and the man had stopped and rolled a smoke and ground the butt into the ground before mounting up and riding away at a good clip.

  “Where in hell is he going?” Martin asked for the tenth time that morning.

  “West,” Anson said before he realized his father did not want to hear a logical answer.

  “He knows where he’s going. But how?”

  This time Anson said nothing. But he could see that his father was puzzled and frustrated, if not downright angry.

  “The tracks are plain. He’s going somewhere and he’s not far off now.”

  “We’ll catch up to him, Daddy.”

  “I wonder if he knows we’re trailing him.”

  An hour later, Martin knew. The tracks turned off and looped back and crossed theirs, and the rider had then gone on to make a complete circle and they were following him again.

  “He knows now, doesn’t he, Daddy?”

  “Yep. He knows now.”

  And on they rode, father and son, into the afternoon and they did not stop to rest, but ate jerky and hardtack out of their saddlebags and drank water from their canteens. Anson could feel his saddle turn to iron and his legs to wood. He lost all feeling in his toes and his butt felt dead no matter which way he shifted his weight and he grew drowsy and his eyes closed and snapped open again and again, each time that he felt himself falling out of the saddle. He slapped his face and peeled his eyelids back one at a time and drank water and pissed standing up in the saddle as he had seen his father do and he wanted to do more, but he knew his father would be mad if he stopped and probably wouldn’t wait for him, but would press on through the deep heat of the day under clouds that had turned black and ponderous and looked as if they would rain at any minute.

  And finally it did rain and they were blinded by it and the wind tore at them and they had no slickers to put on, so they grew wet and heavy and rode on blindly with the rain stinging their eyes and faces and the wind tearing at their soggy clothes and confusing the horses, who plodded on like animals gone blind from living in caves for thousands of years.

  “Daddy, we got to stop,” Anson shouted above the roar of the cloudburst. He heard his words get snatched away by the wind and disappear in curtains of steel rain.

  “He ain’t stopped, so we don’t stop,” Martin yelled back and to Anson his father sounded far away when in reality he could reach out and touch him, so close was he, a dark and faceless man.

  And they rode on like riders plowing through quicksand, bent over their saddle horns like men beaten and taken prisoner. The decision to ride on in the driving rain was soon taken away from them as they came up on a high knoll and heard the roar of rushing waters only yards ahead of them and Anson looked up and saw the tall horse with another one next to it, and the small man hunkered on the ground underneath both horses, holding on to the reins with one hand and his big, wide-brimmed hat with the other.

  Anson thought he was seeing some apparition created by the rain, so he stopped his horse. Then he realized his father had already reined his mount in and was dismounting in the brunt of the wind and walking toward the man, using his horse for shelter.

  “Bunch your horses next to mine,” the little man said in a deep, booming voice, “and get under them.”

  “That a flash flood I hear?” Martin asked.

  “The worst, I swear,” said the man under the horse.

  “Jesus,” Martin said as he pulled his horse next to the tall one and Anson slid out of his rain-slick saddle and pulled his horse around behind the other three, using him like a cross-brace. He ducked down and squatted with his father and the little man, surprised at the shelter the horses gave them.

  “You Baron?” the little man asked.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I heard them bastards stole your boat.”

  “They murdered a friend of mine, the man I sold the boat to,” Martin explained.

  “Damned shame.”

  “This is my son, Anson. Who are you?”

  “I’m Peebo Elves. Cullers and Hoxie stole my horses.”

  “You know where they are?” Martin asked.

  “They’re just on the other side of that creek yonder, the one you hear roaring like a pack of lions.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw ’em cross just before the flood up and come. They barely escaped with their thieving asses.”

  “How did you know they’d be here?” Martin was almost pleading for answers to the questions he’d been asking himself for two days. “I mean, your tracks were the onliest ones we saw for miles.”

  Peebo erupted with a curt laugh, shut it off as quick as it had started. “After the bunch split up, I already knew why and what them other two would do. So I followed the Swede, who was slow and stupid as a sackful of sash weights.”

  “But how’d you know where Cullers and Hoxie would go?” Anson asked before his father could form the question.

  “Cullers is follering a line,” Peebo said. “He’s got him a sailor’s compass or something. But he’d go off the line and double back to check his back trail every so often, then come back to the line. I marked it out in my head. After I strung up the Swede, I just took a ride alongside Cullers’s main route and aimed it so’s I’d catch up to him, and that’s what I just about done.”

  “I still don’t know how you beat him here,” Martin said.

  “I knew Cullers was doubling back. Him and Hoxie took turns. They been doin’ that all along. I just rode faster and made twice the time. I was waiting for ’em, but that flood come up and they beat me across the creek.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Martin said. “Now that I think back, Cullers was checking his back trail, but I didn’t notice it.”

  “No, you probably didn’t because he was slick about it. He made Hoxie wait for him and dusted off his tracks. When he come back, he just took up where he left off.”

  “Slick is right,” exclaimed Anson.

  Peebo looked at the young man and laughed low in his throat. “Once you get on to what a man does, you can figure him pretty good to stick to what he knows how to do best. That Hoxie’s been run to hounds before, I reckon.”

  “I reckon he has,” Martin said.

  “Well, he’ll change his pattern now,” Peebo said. “But I’ll catch him just the same.”

  “What do you figure his next move is?” Martin asked.

  “I figure he’ll make a beeline for San Antonio. But he’ll be counting the minutes, all the time wondering how long that flood will keep us stuck up on high ground. Then
he’ll find another way to throw us off.”

  “But you don’t know what?” Martin asked.

  Peebo grinned and water dripped from his lips so that it seemed his teeth were moving when they were really standing still.

  “I don’t know what exactly, but whatever he does he’ll give himself away and I’ll figure him out same as before.”

  “You’ve tracked men before.”

  “I was a guard over to Huntsville and I ran a chain gang down in Georgia, and I’ve hunted game from the Florida swamps clear up to Montana. Man or beast, they lay down a track that suits ‘em and I can track ’em.”

  “Ever work cattle?” Martin asked.

  “Whatever men work at, I’ve done it,” Peebo said. “I’m workin’ on a ranch right now, in fact. These horses ain’t mine, but they was in my keep and I aim to see they get back where they belong, come hell or that damned high water out there.”

  Martin and Anson laughed. Peebo couldn’t have been much over five feet tall, but he had the rounded shoulders of a man used to hard, heavy work, and his boyish face—he seemed a man in his mid to late twenties—only contrasted with his powerful build. Even squatting he looked as if he could lift a ton of iron and walk off with it.

  “Well, if you’re ever looking for a job with good pay and plenty of hard work, you come over to the Box B in the Rio Grande Valley and I’ll put you on.”

  Martin stuck out a hand. Peebo looked at it for a minute, then stuck his out, and the two men shook over the offer. “I’ll surely keep you in mind, Mr. Baron.”

  “Call me Martin.”

  “Martin, you just might have yourself a hand one of these days. But I got business to take care of first.”

  “Understood,” Martin said.

  “Ever fight Apaches?” Anson asked.

  “Nope, that’s one thing I ain’t done,” Peebo said. “But I’ve waded into Seminoles, Tuscarorys, Shawnee, Paiute, Crow, Sioux, Utes, ‘Rappyhoes, and every other kind of red nigger ’twixt here and the Atlantic Ocean. Apaches any different ?”