Fourteen

 

About ten miles west of Tularosa the legendary white sands began. Gene halted the horses for a breather and dismounted to stretch his legs. Removing his beat-up cowboy hat, he ruffled his unruly thatch of blond hair that rose up in a crest like a cockatoo’s. The broncbuster waved a hand toward the rolling dunes of sparkling white sand as Gillom hopped down, too.

“The gypsum sea. Ain’t she beautiful?”

The teenager nodded, drank deep from his canteen. “Makes me thirsty.”

“Those white sands look pure, but they hide treachery and tragedy. The only creature who sleeps out here with his eyes closed is dead.”

“The sands are a dangerous place?”

“Bet you’ boots. Not as bad as the Jornada Del Muerto on the othe’ side of those mountains, though. That’s where the Apaches used to attack, constantly. Known as Scalp Alley.”

Gillom watched his companion take a sack of Bull Durham out of his shirt pocket and begin to roll a cigarette. The wrangler’s hands were rough and one finger appeared to be permanently cramped.

“What happened to your finger, Gene?”

“Oh, knife fight, cut the tendon. Same bout bent my nose. Don’t carry a gun, but I fight when challenged.”

Gillom shifted his heavy saddlebags off the black gelding and onto the Mexican saddle of the bay mare he’d been riding. “Gonna ride my stronger horse through the pull of this loose sand.”

“Good idea,” agreed the shorter wrangler, striking a sulphur match off a copper rivet on his jeans. “Smoke?” He offered his lit cigarette to his companion.

“No thanks.”

“Bad habit.” Rhodes pulled a green coupon from the tobacco sack, and held it up for inspection. “But I’m hooked on these coupons. Four of ’em are good for a dime novel from Munro’s Library in New York City. They’ve got all the best stories—Dickens, Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson. I’m gonna read all three hundred and three a those books if I don’t cough up a lung first.”

Gillom grinned. He liked this literate horseman with a penchant for harboring killers like himself. He now understood why lonely bank robbers and cow thieves sought this genial host out. The kid swung back up onto J. B. Books’s big saddle.

“Daylight’s burnin’, boss.”

*   *   *

Their plod through the sparkling white sands was slow going and the glare off the dunes shimmering in the afternoon sunlight really tired one’s eyes. But finally they were through the dunes and began pulling the last five miles of double track wagon road up, up into the deep notch in the San Andres Mountains. On either side westward ran a ridge of black cedars drawing the two men and five horses higher until they reached a dark mountain at the head of the pass, seventy-four hundred feet high. Around this summit was a hidden country of grassy parks and cedar motes, gentle slopes and low rolling ridges of juniper, with wide, smooth valleys falling away to the north and south.

“My ranch up here is homestead land, and since I control the spring on it, my cattle can range free out into miles of unfenced graze all about in these mountains. I just have to flush ’em out come spring and fall to burn my ‘61’ brand in and sell ’em. Hell, I’m better at breaking horses and driving cows than I am at owning them,” Gene explained as they rode ever upward.

They reached Five Springs at dusk, greeted by bats from a nearby cave dipping down for evening drinks in one of the springs. Rhodes’s ranch was a single-room, flat-roofed fortress of red stone, maybe fourteen feet by eighteen, with a fenced yard on a low red flat expanse, looped about by the canyon. Out behind were several horse pens, but the maybe twenty mounts were all resting tonight in the biggest, farthest water pen in which another spring bubbled up. To its rear the ranch was protected by a mountain of red sandstone, while across the trail on the other side it faced a mightier mountain of white limestone. Five springs gushed forth at the contacts of red stone and white. It was a fine spot for a horse ranch.

“My daddy Hinman’s house was only six miles away, that’s how I came to know this hidden spot. Man could get lost up here for months. Hallo the house!”

They reined up outside the fence and waited, so as not to startle anyone inside. Gillom saw smoke rising from the stone chimney. There were no windows in the cut stone, so the front door opened tentatively until they were recognized.

“Gene, you rascal! Welcome to what’s left of supper!”

“We can cook some more, if you’ll help wrangle these packs.”

A fair-skinned six-footer with reddish blond hair ambled out to help Rhodes untie his packs. The man was built from the ground up and armed with some kind of pistol in his right holster. He was somewhere over forty, 170 pounds, and he never took his pale blue eyes off Gillom.

“Who’s this smiling gallant?”

Gene Rhodes watched both armed men take the measure of each other.

“This is my new friend, Gillom. From El Paso.”

The heavily freckled man with the sandy mustache hefted loaded saddlebags, but never turned his back on the young stranger as he sidestepped back to the house.

“Gillom who?”

Rogers hoisted his own heavy saddlebags to follow the men inside.

“Gillom’s good enough. What’s yours?”

Gene Rhodes stopped at the doorway. “This is Mister Jones. And don’t you bulls start pawing around fo’ turmoil ah I’ll kick you both off my ranch.”

They watered their horses and fed them in the dry pen, away from Gene’s unfamiliar string that first night. The two riders washed themselves in the near spring and toweled off in the darkness as they walked back to the little house.

Mr. Jones had a couple more steaks sizzling on a long-handled spider skillet set up in the soapstone fireplace in the middle of the back wall. A pot of beans hung from a crane hook swung over the blazing logs and a pot of coffee bubbled in the hot ashes. No beds could Gillom see inside, only bedrolls against a wall, and a rough wood table with a couple benches and stools around it. The only luxury in the place was a beautifully turned rocking chair Gene mentioned he liked to read in by coal oil light.

The horse wrangler knifed their dinners out of the flames and pulled utensils from a box as his dining companions chucked off spurs and unpacked their personals.

“You can put those big pistols away, kid. I promise not to shoot you in your sleep,” laughed Jones as he accepted a bottle from his host. “Gene don’t drink, but join me in takin’ a jolt of the critter, junior?”

Gillom looked at his host, then nodded, trying to be sociable. Two cups were filled and Mr. Jones tapped his to Gillom’s with a tinny clunk.

“To love, wherever her pretty ass may be.”

Gillom tried to match Jones’s big gulp, but the harsh liquid and the fumes burning his throat and nasal cavities caused him to gasp like a landed fish.

“Not used … to,” he rasped.

“Me, neithe’, Gillom.” Gene smiled. He sat down on a bench at the wooden table with the teenager across from him. The hungry horsemen dug into their meals, while the stranger, who had already eaten, nursed his toddy from the rocking chair.

Gillom took a more tentative sip. “How come you abstain from hard drink, Mr. Rhodes?”

“When I was a wild-assed youth like you, I couldn’t afford liquor. At seventeen I was riding as a nonenlisted guide fo’ the Army during the Geronimo outbreak of 1885. We didn’t catch the wily Apache then ah catch up with much liquo’ in the field, eithe’. What little money I saved from my service went toward my education at the University of the Pacific over in Stockton, California. Methodist school. Had to work as a harvest hand between school terms and even then I could only afford a couple years of college before I dropped out, broke, and came home to New Mexico to get back to horse wranglin’.”

“Don’t need college to learn ranchin’,” groused Jones.

“No, unless you want to study accounting ah animal care, become a vet. But I took courses in history, philosophy, and literature, learned to love the great books and good stories. That little education is what’s compelled me to try some writin’ myself.”

The drinking hombre put another oar in. “Ahh, book learnin’ jus confuses a man’s mind. Start questionin’ everything, before you know it, you can no longer think straight.”

“Well, schoolin’s quite like whiskey then. Just makes men dumbe’ and quarrelsome, right?”

“Exactly,” said Mr. Jones, draining his cup of hooch and helping himself to another. “Shall we shuffle some pasteboards tonight, Gene?”

“Played all last night, pard.” Rhodes finished a last bite of steak. “Long ride today, need some shut-eye. Gillom can play if he wants?”

“I’m tired, too.”

“Damn! You jaspers been havin’ too much fun in Tularosa, shootin’ its lights out and kissin’ the dawn, while I’ve been holdin’ down the fort by my lonesome up this damned mountain. Then, when I want to play—”

“Let’s have a smoke outside. Got news of you’ brothe’.”

This got Jones’s attention and he clumped out the low front door swigging cheap whiskey straight from the bottle. Gene Rhodes looked at Gillom and pointed to a water pail near the fire.

“Dishes.”

Rogers scrubbed dirty dishes with a bar of soap in the wooden wash bucket and was laying them out to dry on the wooden plank shelf jammed into the stone wall. The front door was open and he could barely hear the two men speaking low as they strode the front yard in the stiff-legged gait common to men riding constantly in high-heeled boots.

Suddenly Jones let out a squall, a long, shrieking howl that rose from his bowels and stretched his mouth wide in mortal pain.

Somebody got stabbed! Gillom was startled alert. He almost dropped a dish, but quickly put it down and ran out the front door. There he saw Jones, head up and eyes wide, wandering into the darkness, moaning at the moon.

“Is he hurt?”

“Only in his heart.” Eugene Rhodes shook his head, looking forlornly after his mysterious friend. “Told him something unfortunate about his younge’ brothe’.”

Gillom forgot his host’s admonition about asking personal questions. “What?”

“He just got hung.” The older horse wrangler put his arm over the teenager’s shoulder, as they watched their companion wander off, taking a huge swig of redeye from his half-empty bottle.

“Let him drink it off. We need sleep.”

But they didn’t get much rest, for a few hours later they were awakened by more human screeching and bullets flying into the house’s wooden door. Rhodes was up in an instant, running to his damaged door in his long johns, flinging it open and jumping outside. Gillom took a little longer to roll from his bedroll and fumbled about for a coal oil lamp and lit it, then rose to peer cautiously outside to see what in hell was going on? In the darkness, Gene Rhodes appeared to have his outlaw caretaker in a headlock, one arm around his neck, squeezing, his left arm stretched trying to wrestle the revolver away from the thoroughly drunk, bigger man. Another report in the moonlight!

Gillom ducked, but still held his lantern above him in the doorway. A fourth shot missed it but cracked the door frame, so the teenager pulled his hand and the light back out of range. He heard a big oomph! then a thud and he had to peek out again. By the lantern’s glimmer he could see that Gene had flipped Jones over onto his back, yanked the pistol loose, and was now astraddle the larger cowboy with his knees digging into his heaving chest, almost riding him like a jockey in his bare feet.

“Stop it, Sam! Don’t want to hurt you!”

His midnight plea didn’t faze the inebriated outlaw, who sputtered and yelled and heaved like a wild man in his grief. Gene grabbed the Colt from where they’d dropped it in their fray and with a mighty swing, cracked his guest upside the head, squelching his howling and putting him out of his misery, for a while at least. Mr. Jones let out a final moan and was still.

Eugene Rhodes got shakily up off his knees and stood over his victim a moment in his underwear, panting, then wobbled back into his ranch house carrying the other man’s gun, while Gillom lit his way.

“Damn it! Hate to poleax a man with his own weapon, specially when he’s drunk.”

“Throw some water on him?”

“No, just leave him lie. He’ll have a headache in the morning to remembe’ this foolishness by. Sam’ll be all right. He won’t bother us again.”

Maybe not, but as Gillom lay down in his underwear again and damped the lantern near his bedroll, he noticed his host had barred the front door and took his guest’s gun to bed.