IN FRANK MCLAURY’S OBSERVATION, MODIFYING A brand on livestock benefited from a certain amount of artistry. A lot of people didn’t understand that. They thought it was simple to turn U.S. into D.8. Connect the ends of the S and you’ve got your 8. Square off the left-hand bottom of the U, close off its top, and you’re done. But Frank wasn’t the kind of man who settled for good enough. An altered brand looked more convincing if he added a little extra curving bit at the top and bottom of the D’s straight line. It wasn’t easy either, not when the artist’s canvas was an unhappy mule who preferred to be elsewhere. Frank had only finished with the third animal when his younger brother Tommy started to pace.
“C’mon, Frank. Doesn’t have to be perfect!”
“Don’t rush me. Go make supper, willya?”
“This’s a federal crime. Billy’s gonna bring the army down on us.”
Frank shoved the iron back into the fire. “The army can’t come on private property, and they can’t arrest anyone without an act of Congress. That’s Posse Comitatus.”
Tommy knew Frank was right, too. They’d both read law for a year, and their oldest brother, William, had stuck with it. Will had a practice in Fort Worth and gave them advice whenever Frank asked questions. For a friend, Frank always wrote.
“Soldiers can’t make an arrest,” Tommy allowed, “but they can shoot people. Billy Clanton’s gonna get us killed.”
“Tommy,” Frank reminded his brother patiently, “down here, people can get killed just for wearing a new shirt.”
Tommy knew that was true, too. A few days ago, they’d heard how a man by the name of Waters went into a bar wearing a new shirt his sister had sent him. The shirt had blue and black checks, the likes of which nobody’d ever seen before. Any sort of novelty was liable to get noticed, and everyone in the bar started ribbing Waters about his fancy shirt. Waters got mad, and then he got drunk, and then he swore he’d beat the hell out of the next sonofabitch who said anything about his damn shirt. Which he did. The matter seemed settled until the fella he beat up came back with a gun and shot Waters four times. Killed him stone-cold dead. Spoiled the shirt for further use, as well.
In a world like that, why worry? That’s how Frank saw it. You could never think up all the ways a bullet might find you. No point trying.
He finished the lower serif and let the mule go. “Anyways, we’re no worse than anybody else in this valley.”
“No better either,” Tom muttered before he trudged off to the house.
FOLKS HAD A HARD TIME telling the McLaury brothers apart, but they had their differences if you paid attention. They were both good-looking, blue-eyed brunets, but Frank had six years on Tommy, who’d just turned twenty-seven. When Frank took his hat off, you could see that his hair was beginning to go. And Tom McLaury wasn’t just good-looking. Tommy was so pretty, he attracted more attention than he liked, from women and men. It embarrassed him and always had, ever since he was a little kid.
Both brothers were slender and short, but Frank held his head high to put every inch on display. Tommy did what he could to avoid notice, keeping his eyes on the ground and sort of hunching over as he hurried along, especially when they went into town. Of the two, Frank had more ambition. He wanted to build up to a big cattle spread and get rich and hire men to do the work. Tommy liked farming. Plowing and planting and harvesting suited him fine. He didn’t see the need of a place bigger than they could manage on their own.
Frank enjoyed having a little excitement to spark up the workday now and then. Tom wasn’t timid exactly, but he didn’t like trouble. “Where’s your sense of adventure?” Frank would ask him, but Tommy was a worrier.
The funny thing was, moving down here was Tom’s idea in the first place because Arizona acreage was a lot cheaper than farmland back in Iowa. They’d invested everything they had in this spread before they found out what kept Arizona property values low: Geronimo’s Apaches were still up in the Chiricahua Mountains, a few miles away, and the Indians were none too happy about seeing their hunting grounds plowed up. Tommy was already concerned about the potential for mutilation and murder when Old Man Clanton came by on his first visit. Frank himself was not inclined to give his little brother’s fear a great deal of consideration. It only encouraged Tommy to fret. Besides, everybody in Sulphur Springs Valley was pasturing Old Man Clanton’s stolen Mexican stock.
“Greasers let their cattle roam free instead of husbanding them,” Mr. Clanton explained. “Damn beaners don’t deserve to keep stock they don’t care for, so there’s no harm in a quick trip to Mexico for a few strays. That’s how Americans see it.”
And it seemed like pure patriotism to agree.
The problem was, Mexican beeves were long-legged and the meat was stringy. “Used to be, you could only sell ’em to Indian reservations,” Mr. Clanton said, “but now we got a couple thousand miners who like meat, and plenty of it. There’s a big market right there in Tombstone, not to mention all the mill towns and lumber camps. You can get army contracts for beef at Camp Rucker and Fort Huachuca, too, but civilian stockyards give you the best price, and they want the cattle fattened some.”
So Mr. Clanton had the rustling trade all organized. His operation wasn’t just amateurs sneaking across the border for a couple of strays. No, sir! Clanton’s Cow Boys would dash into Sonora, round up a few hundred head, and run them over the border. “That’s where most rancheros give up the chase, lazy bastards, but if they come after us,” Mr. Clanton said, “we just drive the stock deeper into the mountains and wait ’em out.”
Soon as it was safe, the Cow Boys pushed the herds into grassy valleys like Sulphur Springs, where small ranchers like the McLaurys were perfectly positioned to act as middlemen. “Turn a steer into a steak, nobody asks where it came from,” Old Man Clanton said, by way of summary. “You graze the cattle till they put on some weight. Then you drive ’em into Tombstone or sell ’em to the army. We split the cash. You get twenty percent.”
“I don’t know,” Tommy said doubtfully. “Can we think about it?”
Mr. Clanton’s eyes went small, and he had his big horny hand around Tom’s windpipe, fast as a rattlesnake strike. “I wasn’t askin’ you a question,” he pointed out. “I was tellin’ you how this works, peckerhead.”
Tommy was ready to pack up and head back to Iowa the moment Clanton left. Frank was shook, too, but couldn’t see turning and running. Besides, they’d put every penny they had into this land—you couldn’t just walk away from an investment like that.
So Frank asked around to see how their other neighbors handled Clanton. If you cooperate, folks told him, you can be sure your own livestock won’t disappear in the night. And sometimes the Cow Boys would let you keep a few head of cattle for yourself—like a tip, sort of. Or let’s say you needed help building a barn or something. The Cow Boys might lend a hand if they were nearby. The money was good, too.
“I look at it this way,” one man told Frank. “Break the law, and you might have trouble. Cross Old Man Clanton, and he will come down on you. The sheriff’s office is way up in Tucson, son. The Clantons live next door.”
That settled it for Frank, and he had no regrets. Old Man Clanton’s Cow Boys didn’t stay at the McLaury spread long, but they always seemed nice enough, and Frank admired their style. They wore doeskin trousers tucked into tall boots with fancy designs on the shanks, and he liked the look of their big Mexican sombreros, which were sensible because the sun was so fierce down here. They wore fancy silk neckerchiefs and brightly colored shirts, and nobody joshed them, by God. The Cow Boys got respect.
Tommy being Tommy, he tried not to have much to do with any of them, but even he liked Curly Bill Brocius. Curly Bill was personable and lively and always seemed to have a joke going in his eyes. He could generally keep the rest of the boys in line and when they went on a spree, he made sure they just shot up little places like Galeyville or Charleston.
Course, Johnny Ringo was different.
But he was only trouble when he drank.