The Baron Range Read online

  “Don’t dillydally,” Martin said to his son.

  Anson stiffened at the rebuke. Sometimes he felt like a slave. The vaqueros had more freedom than he had. At least none of them had his father riding them all the time, cussing them out, giving them stupid orders. He went back inside the barn and pushed the flat trowel through the mud and straw and droppings, grunting as the load piled up.

  Martin finished currying the colt and led him into a stall.

  “We’ll geld this one,” he told Anson.

  “When?”

  “Soon as we get this barn cleaned up, a new roof put on.”

  “What about New Orleans? You said you’d take me on a drive.”

  “The stampede pretty much fixed that. We’ll have to get a gather together again sometime.”

  “How long?”

  “You ask a lot of questions for a runt.”

  “I ain’t no runt,” Anson said quickly.

  “Well, no, I guess you aren’t no more. Still wet behind the ears, though.”

  Anson suppressed his anger, said nothing.

  “I been thinking about selling the boat,” Martin said after a long silence. He looked up at the missing roof, squinted at the column of light. “We could use some cash money. Your mother’s been after me to get rid of it. It has been a-settin’ there in Matagorda for a time.”

  “How come you never let me sail with you, Daddy?”

  “Never thought about it. Didn’t know you wanted to.” He had sailed the boat for a long time to finance the ranch, hauling goods up and down the Gulf Coast.

  “I’d like to.”

  “Well, we could run up to Galveston or New Orleans, see if we might find a buyer.”

  Anson stopped pushing the wooden blade. His face brightened.

  “Me and you, Daddy?”

  “I could use a hand.”

  “You’d show me how to sail?”

  “Wouldn’t do you no good if I sell the boat.”

  “I don’t care. I’d like to learn how.”

  “I guess I could show you a thing or two. Things old Cackle Jack taught me.”

  “I ‘member you talkin’ ’bout old Cackle Jack with Mother. What happened to him?”

  “He died.”

  “How?”

  “We got caught in a storm in the Gulf. Cackle Jack made a mistake.”

  “Was he a good friend?”

  “The best a man could have. I miss him like hell sometimes. ’Specially when I’m out on the boat.”

  Anson’s senses quickened. This was a side of his father he hadn’t known. For a second or two he thought his daddy was going to cry.

  “Was he as good a friend as Juanito?”

  “They don’t come no better than Juanito. Just different, that’s all. Cackle Jack and me were like father and son. Juanito’s more like a brother.”

  “I wish I had a brother.”

  Martin laughed. “Maybe you will one of these days.”

  Anson knew his mother was in a family way, but he hadn’t thought beyond that. He might have a brother or a sister. It wasn’t something he felt like talking about much. “When can we go out and sell your boat, Daddy?”

  “Why, I guess when the work is done here we can go give it a look.”

  Anson beamed. He was ready to leave right then. But at his father’s warning scowl, he took up the wooden rake and began pushing debris out of the barn into the sun, where he wished he could stay all day dreaming his young dreams.

  6

  JUANITO SALAZAR STOOD up in the stirrups watching the Mexican with Yaqui blood scout the ridge near the line shack at Frontera Creek. He admired the way Chato Manzana could track, the way he hugged his horse so that he presented no target to any waiting Apache. But Chato was half Indian himself, his mother Yaqui, his father Spanish. Years before, Juanito knew, Chato had been captured by the Comanches when he was a boy. They called him Pug Nose, which stood for years until the Texans fought the Comanches and freed him, sent him back to Mexico, where he was treated like an outcast because he was more Comanche than Mexican. They saw his nose and called him the same name as the Comanches had—Chato, or Pug Nose.

  It was a tragedy in a way, since Chato did not remember his parents, who had been killed when he was taken prisoner. When the Comanches took away his Mexican name, they reduced him to a slave, and now that he bore a Mexican name from the family that had adopted him, Manzana, and a first name that had been translated from the Comanche, he was even more removed from his roots. But that was the way of the New World, Juanito knew. He himself was an Argentine, but he had seen this Texas land and it had grabbed his heart, as it had grabbed Martin Baron’s.

  Just before the big storm, Chato had ridden up to the Box B headquarters at La Loma de Sombra and said that he had seen Cuchillo, the Mescalero Apache chief responsible for many depredations in the Rio Grande Valley, at the Frontera Creek headquarters. Martin knew that Cuchillo was on the rampage, but was powerless to stop him. Instead, he had hoped the Apache would attack him, since he had a cannon, a four-pounder, hidden in the barn. But the storm had stopped Cuchillo somewhere on his raid, and Chato figured he might be near Frontera Creek.

  Now Juanito watched as Chato guided his horse along the shallow ridge above the scattered adobes that comprised the Frontera Creek section of the Box B. He reminded the Argentine of the jaguar in his native country. Chato moved his horse slowly along the ridge, hanging over its side so that you couldn’t tell from this distance whether you saw a long horse or a horse with rider.

  Chato stopped, motioning for Juanito to ride up. Juanito tapped spurs gently to his horse’s flanks. The lean Arabian mare moved toward the ridge, its ears stiffened to sharp cones, twitching back and forth. He called her Scheherazade and she was black as anthracite, with big brown eyes and just the slightest blaze of white on her forehead.

  Scheherazade climbed to the top of the ridge and Juanito reined her up when he came alongside Chato. The little adobes looked almost golden in the dazzling sunlight, their square corners etched sharply by the shadows. Droopy flowers in clay pots hung disconsolately around the doorways. It looked, Juanito thought, like a miniature ghost town. Not even a dog was to be seen.

  “The creek rose above the banks,” Chato said in Spanish.

  “That is true. Do you see any sign of Lopez?” Ramon Lopez was the foreman. He and his son and his wife watched over the Frontera herd and property.

  “No, I do not see him. There is water in the adobes.”

  “Let us ride down there and see if anyone is alive.” Juanito had a queer feeling in his stomach, as if he had drunk from an alkali well. “I told Ramón not to build his adobes so close to the creek.”

  Chato said nothing.

  It was very quiet. A water snake slithered away from one of the adobes as the two riders approached. The corrals were empty and the little garden that Lopez’s wife, Conchita, had grown was under four inches of mud. Green stalks, bent to the weather, could be seen curving out of the mud like the tentacles of some sea creature.

  Juanito would have expected to see some sign of the Apache depredation, but he saw no dead bodies or signs of a fire, no indication of any destruction by anything other than water. The soil was smoothed clean by the wash of the creek through the tiny settlement, that was all.

  “Hola, Ramón,” Juanito called.

  There was a long silence in the dead air. The adobes looked like little earthen tombs on some stark plain where once life had teemed. It was as if the villagers had vanished into thin air.

  “Listen,” Chato said. He gripped his rifle, ready to bring it to bear at a moment’s tick.

  “Is that you, Juanito?” called someone.

  “Where are you, Lopez?”

  “I am coming,” Lopez yelled back. A few moments later, Ramón, his wife, Conchita, and their son, Jacinto, accompanied by two young vaqueros emerged from the brush down the creek, a place that had not been cleared of mesquite. They looked to Juanito like the tattered remnan
ts of a decimated gypsy band who had lost their homes and all their belongings. Their faces were smeared with mud, their clothes saturated with it. The men carried old flintlock rifles held together, stocks and barrels, with rawhide. Conchita looked a thousand years old, her hair stringy and matted with clay, her eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep. The men looked little better.

  A clutch of small children emerged from the mesquite thicket looking like beggars on some street in a faraway country. Their eyes seemed too big for their skulls and their dirty clothes were tattered and wrinkled.

  “Qué paso?” Juanito asked of Ram6n. “Were you driven away by Cuchillo?”

  “There was a fight,” Ramón said. “The Apaches. They came out of the trees, but we were ready for them. They could not see us. Our casitas were too scattered for them to come in close and they could not see us all. It was a trick we had planned for them.”

  “I do not see any dead here,” Juanito said.

  “We killed two of them, and they took them away. One came back after Cuchillo and the others had left. We shot this one, and I shot his horse. And then we had much rain and we had to leave. I think we can find this wounded Apache. He and his horse were swept away in the flood.”

  “What happened then?” Juanito asked.

  “The water came flooding into our houses and we ran away into the mesquite. We thought Cuchillo might come back like the other one, but he did not. I do not know where he went. But we hid ourselves and waited in the thicket. If the Apaches had come back we would have been ready to fight them.”

  Juanito looked at Ram6n and the other vaqueros. They were truly brave men, he thought, good soldiers. With their old rifles, they had fought off Cuchillo and killed two of his men. And they had possibly wounded or killed another.

  “You have done well, Ramón, you and your vaqueros. You are very brave. Show us where you saw the wounded Apache go. Chato and I will track him.”

  “I think maybe he is dead,” said one of the vaqueros. “There was much water, so much that one could not swim in it. It was like a little ocean.”

  “We will see if he is dead,” Juanito said.

  “And, if he is alive, we will kill him,” Chato said, a chilling tone in his voice.

  “We will clean up our homes and bring the stock back in,” Ramón said.

  “Ten cuidado,” Juanito told him. “Take care.”

  Chato and Juanito rode off in the direction Ramón had pointed, the Apache in the lead, scanning the ground for signs that he might read. The two men carried their rifles across their pommels, thumb on the hammer, index finger inside the trigger guard.

  The ground was still wet from the flooding. Debris was strewn everywhere—branches, plants, pieces of cloth and wood and clay utensils from the adobes. The ground was smooth where the creek had washed over its banks, the earth flowing in the direction of the raging waters that had swept overland the previous day.

  Chato began to range back and forth over the course of the flash flood as Juanito followed, unable to spot anything but deer and turkey tracks and the occasional imprints of javelinas, doves and rats. In low places, pools of water stood shrinking under the heat of the sun.

  Juanito kept watching for any signs of an ambush. He still did not know where Cuchillo had gone during the storm and suspected that he might be nearby. And if he was missing a man, he might come back for his wounded. Or he might also lie in wait for anyone who might track such a wounded man.

  The trail wound in and out of the brush, and Chato found signs that the horse had gone down, floundered to get back up again.

  “The blood washed away,” Chato said, “but horse bad hurt.”

  “How about the Apache?”

  “Hurt bad, too. Look.” Chato pointed to a place where a man had dug into the mud with his fingers. Probably, Juanito thought, to pack his wound, or wounds. The digging had been done off to the side of the path of the flooding, possibly after the waters had subsided.

  “How old is this track?” Juanito asked.

  “Three, four hours.”

  “So he did not go far after he rode off.”

  “He wait for blood to stop.”

  Juanito looked back over his shoulder. So the wounded Apache had waited near the adobes after he had been shot. Probably heard everything that went on. Probably knew that Ramon and the others had gone away to hide.

  There were signs, too, that the wounded Apache had tried to cover his tracks. Chato pointed out where brush had been cut with a knife and the tracks wiped away with leaves, like a broom. His trained eye could spot such things. He was slow and careful, sometimes riding around a place where the tracks were plain. Juanito appreciated Chato’s attention to such things, for the skin on the back of his neck prickled at every fresh track that emerged seemingly from nowhere. He was a fair tracker himself, but Chato was uncanny.

  Chato found another place where the horse had gone down. There was an impression in the earth that showed the wounded Apache had had a difficult time getting the horse back up. Several yards later, moccasin tracks showed that the Apache was no longer riding the injured horse. And as Chato pointed out, the horse was becoming difficult to lead. In several places the horse had stood long enough for its weight to sink the hoofprints deeper, and it was dragging one foot when it started up again.

  Later on, there were signs that the horse the Apache had ridden was stumbling. Once or twice Juanito saw places where the horse’s knees had left impressions. Chato rode on more slowly than before, circling the tracks, making little sound. Juanito followed warily, his senses attuned to every breeze, every breath of his horse. It seemed that hours had gone by, but he knew that that was only an illusion. The tracks seemed fresher, bolder, more pronounced, the longer the two men rode. Far off in the distance he heard the cry of a crow, and then Chato flushed a rabbit, which startled Juanito.

  He wondered if the rabbit had gone into hiding because the Apache had passed close by only moments before, or if the Apache was still hours away, perhaps gaining strength as he walked. It was then that Juanito noticed that they were well away from the creek, heading in a southwesterly direction.

  When they came to a shallow draw that wound through the mesquite, Chato reined up his horse. He waited for Juanito to ride up to him, then turned in his saddle. “We cannot see ahead, but I think we will find the horse there,” Chato said.

  “Why do you think that?” Juanito asked.

  “Look at that place there. The horse went down and dragged his hindquarters a little ways. Then he got up again, but I do not think he could have walked much farther.”

  Juanito saw the place where something heavy had made a bowl-like depression in the sandy bottom of the draw. And there were signs that whatever had fallen there had been dragged or pulled itself for several yards before getting up again. There were clear hoofprints after that, disappearing around the bend in the draw.

  “Do you think the Apache is in there?” Juanito asked.

  “No. I think the horse is in there. The Apache would not stay with it.”

  “What would he do?”

  “He would kill it and go on, I think.”

  “Maybe we should ride around it and come in from the other end,” Juanito said.

  “I will go in from this side.”

  The two men parted company. Juanito circled the draw and came in from the other end where it was again shallow. He saw the horse, a pinto pony that would probably run fourteen hands high when standing. Then he saw Chato ride around the bend and come into view.

  Chato dismounted and examined the brown, white and black paint horse as Juanito rode up close.

  “It has not begun to smell yet,” Juanito said.

  “No. The horse has not been dead long.”

  “Did he cut its throat?”

  Chato bent down and looked at the large slash in the horse’s throat, just above the chest. The windpipe had been severed. The hair was matted down on the neck where the Apache had knelt on it to hold it down as it
convulsed in its death throes. He lifted its head by its long black mane and the slash in its throat opened wide.

  Juanito’s stomach churned. “Bueno, it is dead,” he said.

  Chato rolled the pony over so that its belly faced Juanito. As it rolled, the belly opened wide. The pony had been slit from breast to anus. It made a hollow, rubbery sound as it came to rest, its sides jiggling. It was then that Juanito saw the entrails piled up on the other side of the pony, the intestines coiled and gleaming blue-gray in the sun, a cloud of bluebottle flies swarming over the heap.

  Chato reached inside the empty belly of the pony and felt around with one hand. When he withdrew his arm, it was splotched with blood.

  “He took the heart and liver,” Chato said. He wiped his arm on his breeches—whap, whap—and stood up.

  “Some reason?” Juanito asked.

  “He ate them while they were still warm.”

  “The Apaches do that?”

  “He wanted the horse’s strength.”

  “We have to run him down.”

  “I know.”

  Juanito knew that Chato would make no judgment. He too felt bad about the Apache. But he was an enemy. He had to be found. If he fought back, he would have to be killed.

  Chato mounted his horse. “Did you see the Apache’s tracks when you rode up?”

  “I was not looking for them. Sorry.”

  “It is no matter. We will find them.”

  The two men rode out of the shallow ravine. Chato picked up the Apache’s tracks, sure enough, and Juanito felt ashamed that he had not been more alert. They were quite plain to see.

  The moccasin prints led into the brush, along a game path that might have been present for thousands of years. The path wound through the mesquite and over dunes in sandy and rocky terrain. The spoor was sometimes difficult to follow, but Chato always found signs where the Apache had passed.

  And now the trail grew warmer as Chato examined bent grasses that were still trampled down, some still quivering.