Doug Monahan walked up to the town’s smaller livery stable and found the owner out front, patiently hitching a skittish young sorrel to a two-wheeled horse-breaking gig, a light buggy with long shafts that would keep the animal from kicking it to pieces. Doug watched with interest while the man tied a rope on one of the pony’s forefeet, then drew it up through the ring on the hames.
“He starts to run,” the liveryman volunteered, “I’ll just pick up that forefoot. He can’t make much speed on three legs.”
Cautiously the man climbed up on the rig, and it looked as if the horse was going to break and run. “Whoa now, be gentle,” the man said in a soothing voice.
“You seen Dundee?” Doug asked quickly, for it looked as if the horse was going to run anyway. “They told me he was here.”
The liveryman pointed with his chin and took a tight hold on the reins. “Out back yonder, shoeing his horse.” The sorrel moved forward, quickly stretching into a long-reaching trot, looking back nervously at the rig which wheeled along behind. The liveryman had him under full control.
Doug glanced up and grinned at a sign over the door: COWBOY, SPIT ON YOUR MATCH OR EAT IT. A livery stable fire was a thing to dread.
Passing through the dark interior and its musty smell of hay, he found Dundee behind the barn, shoeing his good bay horse in the shade. This was one of those mildly warm Texas winter afternoons when an idle man enjoyed leaning back in a rawhide chair and soaking in the fleeting sunshine, while a man working came to appreciate the shade.
Dundee had shod the hind feet first. Now he lifted the horse’s left forefoot and ran his thumb over his preliminary hoof-trimming job. He straddled the foot and held it between his legs, rasping the trim job down to a smooth finish. The horse began to lean on him, and Dundee heaved against him. “Get your weight off of me, you lazy ox.”
He glanced up at Doug Monahan. “Gettin’ him in shape to travel. Looks like we got to, if we’re both goin’ to eat much longer. The captain’s got the word out he don’t want any ranch around here hirin’ men who worked for Gordon Finch.”
“Got any plans?”
Dundee shrugged and carefully felt of the hoof, noting an uneven place in it. “Never had a plan in my life. I get tired of a place, I just move on and hunt me somethin’ else. I’d purt near used this place up anyhow.”
Doug squatted on his heels and examined the shoe Dundee was going to put on the horse’s hoof. “How’d you like to work for me?”
Dundee stopped the rasp. “Doing what?”
“Building fence.”
Dundee smiled indulgently. “You still on that? Somebody’d have to hire you before you could hire me. And who’s goin’ to, after what happened out there on Oak Crick?”
“Somebody already has.”
Dundee straightened. “Who?”
“Noah Wheeler. Nobody knows it yet, and I want it quiet as long as we can keep it that way.”
“I won’t say anythin’.”
“What do you think about that job?”
Dundee dropped the horse’s foot and wiped his half-rolled sleeve against his forehead, leaving a streak of sweat-soaked dirt. He dropped the rasp into a box. “I never could get a shovel handle or a crowbar to fit these hands of mine,” he said, holding out his right hand and bending the fingers.
“Fit a gun all right, though, don’t they?”
Dundee smiled. “They always considered me a fair to middlin’ good shot.”
“Maybe I’ll need that gun hand more than the shovel-handle hand. I never was any great shot, myself.”
“It’d take more than just me. You’d have to have several good men, Monahan, if you was to really make it stick.”
“That’s where you come in, Dundee. I need a good crew. Most of mine left the country. I figured you might know some good men who can work hard and at the same time could handle a fight if one came at them.”
A strong flicker of interest was in Dundee’s eyes. “I think maybe I could rustle up a few.”
Relieved, Monahan said, “It’s a deal, then? I’ve got Stub Bailey left, and maybe one or two more. If you can find me as many as six or seven more, I can use them. What’re cowboy wages around here?”
“Vary with the man. Average about thirty dollars a month, and found.”
“I’ll pay forty. And a little bonus if we get the job done without too much cut wire or other damage from the R Cross.”
Dundee grinned with admiration. “You get your mind set on somethin’, you just don’t quit, do you? I thought they’d quit makin’ that kind anymore.” He turned back and patted the bay horse on the neck. “Well, old hoss, looks like we may stick around a while and watch the show.”
* * *
IT WAS A fifty-mile ride to the cedar-cutters’ camp, down on the river and out of Kiowa County. That was a long way to haul posts in a wagon. It would have been easier to use mesquite or live oak, but Doug was convinced that cedar would make better, longer-lasting posts.
He reached the camp in time for supper. The night chill was moving in with a raw south wind, and he was glad for the sight of the big side-boarded tent the Blessingame men used for a home. They would set it up in the heart of a cedar thicket and proceed to cut the cedar down from around it. When the posts were all cut and sold, they would simply hunt another thicket.
In the edge of camp, amid a tinder-dry litter of trimmed-off limbs and browning dead cedar leaves, Monahan saw dozens of stacks of cedar posts, some of them no more than three inches across the top, and some of the longest ones a foot or more, stout enough to build an elephant pen.
He could hear a clatter of pots and pans. The noise stopped, and huge old Foley Blessingame ducked through the tent flap, looking to see who was riding up. His big voice boomed, “Git down, Doug, and come on in here. We’ll have a bite to eat directly.”
Foley Blessingame was crowding sixty, Doug knew for a fact. If he hadn’t known, he wouldn’t have been able to guess within twenty years. Foley stood six feet four, and his powerful shoulders were axe handle–broad as he stood there, his tangled red beard lifting and falling in the cold wind. The man had arms as thick and hard as the cedar posts he cut for a living.
“You ain’t going to like the supper,” Foley said, “but it won’t be any worse on you than it is on the rest of us. Mules spooked the other day and run over me with a wagonload of posts. Bunged up my chopping arm. I got to do the cooking now till I kin handle an axe ag’in. The kids are out yonder workin’.”
From somewhere in the brush echoed the ring of steel axes biting deep into heart-cedar.
“Just bunged up your arm?” Doug asked wonderingly. “Is that all the damage it did?”
“Well, it like to’ve tore up an awful good wagon.” Blessingame motioned at Doug’s horse. “Just skin the saddle off and turn him loose. He’ll find our bunch and stay with them. The kids’ll put out a little grain directly.”
Doug unsaddled and followed the old man through the tent flap. A big woodstove had it much warmer inside, but the place reeked of scorched grease and burned bread.
“Never did care much for cookin’,” Blessingame complained. “I’d rather cut fifty trees with a dull ax than stick my hands in a keg of sourdough. I always leave this chore up to the kids. Ain’t no job for a growed man anyhow.”
“Let me take a turn at it,” Doug offered, and the old man stepped aside. “I’d be much obliged.”
Paco Sanchez had taught Doug a deal about camp cooking. There wasn’t much he could do about old Foley’s sourdough now. It was too late for a new batch to rise before supper, so he’d just have to use this. He sliced thick venison steaks off a tarp-wrapped hind quarter hanging from a tree outside. He salted them and flopped them down, one by one, into a keg of flour, until they were well coated. The Blessingames made their living cutting cedar, but Monahan noted with relief that the fuel in the woodbox was all dry mesquite. It was better for cooking.
Old Foley sat on the edge of a cot, grinning. “You missed your callin’, boy. You ought to been a wagon cook.”
That brought up a memory of Paco Sanchez, and Doug Monahan’s face went tight. Blessingame was quick to sense the change.
“One of the kids was in town day or two ago and heard a rumor,” he said. “Heard you lost that good old cook you had.”
Doug nodded, dipping lard out of a big bucket and dropping it into a skillet. News sure could get around. He told Blessingame the whole story.
The old man nodded gravely. “Looks like a good country for a smart man to stay out of. There’s plenty other country needin’ fences anyway.”
“I’m not staying out of it,” Doug told him.
Blessingame’s bearded face showed a little of a grin. “I figured that. I said a smart man.”
When the supper was about done, Blessingame walked outside and gave a great roar. His voice was as strong as his bull shoulders. That yell should have reached to Kiowa County.
In a moment he returned. “Here come the kids.”
The “kids” were four huge, brawny men with red hair and red whiskers. The youngest was in his mid-twenties, the oldest probably thirty-five. Every one of them showed the gross stamp of old Foley Blessingame in the breadth of shoulder, the deep boom of voice. Doug had made a point to have flour and dough on his fingers so he wouldn’t have to shake hands with them as they came in. Those great ham-sized hands would crush his own like an egg. Even as it was, they pounded him on the back till his breath was gone.
Here was a family known all the way back to East Texas, old Foley Blessingame and his four “kids,” Foy, Koy, Ethan and John. Nearly three-quarters of a ton of hard muscle among them, and not an ounce of it fat. Most of the time they stayed out in the country and never bothered anybody. But when they came to town for a little unwinding every two or three months, townspeople took up the sidewalk, locked their doors and hid their daughters.
Widowed fifteen years, old Foley never let his boys outpace him. “Snow on the roof ain’t no sign the fire’s out inside,” he often said.
When the hangovers were done, he always went back to town alone and sober, remorsefully paying for the breakage. “Bunch o’ growin’ boys,” he would explain; “a man can’t always hold them down.”
None of the boys had married yet. The sight of them, Doug imagined, was enough to stampede a girl anyway. Even if one ever got interested, she was bound to reason, and correctly so, that she would immediately find herself burdened with cooking and washing and scrubbing up after the rest of the family as well as the one she took on.
There wasn’t much extra room in the tent, what with five cots and a cookstove. Doug left supper in the pans he had cooked it in, letting the five men file by and take what they wanted. They took plenty.
“Doug’s havin’ a little trouble convincin’ some of the boys over in Kiowa County that he likes his fences to stay up,” old Foley told his sons. “I think mebbe we ought to some of us step over there and give the folks a little lecture.”
Doug fidgeted uneasily. “Well, that’s not exactly what I came over here for. Mainly I need a big order of posts.”
“We got ’em,” Foley said. “We been choppin’ more than we been sellin’ here lately.”
“I noticed that,” Doug replied, “and I’ve been thinking. Maybe you ought to quit chopping awhile and let the demand catch up with the supply.”
“Got to eat someway,” said Foley.
“You could work for me, building fence.”
Foley frowned. “Sounds like hard work. That’s the main reason I quit farmin’ back in East Texas, wanted to git away from that hard work.”
Doug grinned. There wasn’t any harder work in the world than cedar-cutting, and Foley Blessingame knew it better than anyone.
“The way I see it, Foley, you and your boys could have a hundred yards of fence built while most people were still gouging out that first posthole. And when the folks over in Kiowa County see the size of the Blessingame bunch, they’re going to study awhile before they do anything to sour your temper.”
“Well,” Foley conceded, “I’ve noticed folks gin’rally let us have our way about things. Not that any of my kids ever loses their temper. We’re easy to get along with.”
“I’ll pay you good.”
Foley nodded. “I know you would. But I ain’t sure about it. Never did cotton to working for the other feller. Always liked to be my own boss, you know what I mean? Never any argument thataway. I worked for a man once when I was jest a button, twenty-five or -six years old. He got to sassin’ me one day, and I let my temper git the best of my good judgment. Always did feel sorry for that feller afterwards. I just rode off and never even let him pay me the wages I had comin’, I felt so bad about it.”
He frowned. “Course, I would’ve had to wait a week to git it. He was that long comin’ to.”
Foley got up and began gathering the boys’ tin plates, dumping them into a tub. “Say, Doug,” he asked pleasantly, “you like to play poker?”
Doug shrugged. “Used to, a little.”
Foley commented, “I’d rather play poker than eat, only I can’t get these shiftless kids of mine to play anymore.”
Doug didn’t feel like playing, and he caught the friendly warning in the eyes of the Blessingame boys. But he wanted to keep on Foley’s warm side. “I’ll play you a game or two, if we don’t put much money in it.”
“Penny ante’s fine. Ethan, you go fetch us some matches to use.”
In two hours Foley seldom lost a hand. He had a pile of matches in front of him that could burn off all the grass in three counties. Doug never had seen anybody with such a phenomenal streak of luck. Even at penny ante, he had lost more than he wanted to.
“Bedtime,” Foley yawned at last, raking up the matches and starting to count them out. “Unless you want to keep on and try to win it back.”
Doug shook his head. “I can’t beat your kind of luck.”
Foley walked outside a few minutes, and Ethan Blessingame whispered, “We tried to give you the high sign. It ain’t all luck. He cheats!”
Next morning Doug got up and cooked the breakfast. He started a pot of red beans and mixed up a new batch of dough before he left the Blessingame camp. Foley watched admiringly as Doug put the dough together.
“You ought to been a woman,” he said. “But on second thought, if you was, you wouldn’t be out here. I reckon we’d best leave well-enough alone.”
Doug said, “Made up your mind yet about working for me?”
Foley nodded. “Full stomach always weakens my judgment, Doug. We decided we’d take you up on that proposition. Jest one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“Make sure there’s somebody in your outfit can play poker. You play a mighty poor hand, yourself.”
* * *
FROM THE BLESSINGAME camp Doug rode on to Stringtown, the nearest point on the railroad from Twin Wells. He struck the rails several miles out and followed them in. They still had a little of the new shine to them, and the ties hadn’t weathered out badly yet. It hadn’t been more than a couple of years since the line had come through.
Stringtown wasn’t fancy to look at, but it was all new. The original paint coat still stuck to those frame buildings which had been painted at all. Stringtown had sprung up because of the railroad.
Doug’s first stop was the railroad depot, where the telegrapher was tapping out code on the key. “Can you take a message to Fort Worth?” Doug asked.
“If you can write it to where I can read it,” the little man said and nodded at some sheets of yellow paper weighted down by a small gear wheel from a locomotive.
Doug wrote the address of a Fort Worth hardware company and asked the price of a hundred spools of No. 9 barbed wire, including freight to Stringtown. He handed the message to the telegrapher. “I’ll be back around directly for the answer,” he said.
He walked out of the depot building, thinking he might cross over to a saloon and while away the time where it was warmer. On the platform, he heard the whistle of an approaching train, and he leaned back against the yellow-painted wall to watch it.
It was an eastbound passenger train. It whistled again, coming into town, and began slowing down. A conductor hung precariously off the side of one car as the train’s momentum slowed, and he jumped down to the ground, his shoes sliding on the grime-blackened gravel. A Negro porter stepped down and set a wooden platform in place.
Suddenly Doug wished he wasn’t standing out in the open this way, for he saw Sheriff Luke McKelvie of Twin Wells, walking up to the train. A sullen young man was handcuffed to him. A tall man in a dark suit stepped off the train, looked around, then moved directly toward the pair. McKelvie shook hands and motioned toward his prisoner, saying something. Taking a key from his pocket, he removed the handcuffs. The other man immediately brought out his own cuffs and locked himself to his new prisoner. The engine whistled a warning. The two boarded the train and disappeared inside.
McKelvie watched until satisfied. Then he turned and walked toward Doug Monahan, dropping the cuffs in his coat pocket. “Hello, Monahan. Saw you as I came up, but I was too busy to say howdy. Had to transfer a prisoner.”
Monahan shook hands with him, wishing he hadn’t had the misfortune to run into the Kiowa County sheriff.
“Got my job done, and now I can relax,” McKelvie said. “Care to have a drink with me?”
Monahan declined as gracefully as he could. “I got some business to attend to, thanks.” He didn’t care to have McKelvie pumping him, and he had a notion the sheriff could worm a lot of information out of a man without really seeming to.
“Well,” replied McKelvie, “that’s too bad. But I think you’re showing good judgment, getting out of Twin Wells.”
A sharp thrust of stubbornness brought a reply from Monahan before he could stop himself. “I haven’t left there for good. I’ll be back soon enough.”
The sheriff’s easy smile faded. “I’m sorry, Monahan.” Regret clouded his gray eyes.
Monahan watched the sheriff walk down the street, and he felt like kicking himself. Whatever secret there might have been was out now. McKelvie would probably poke around until he knew just what Monahan was up to, and the report wouldn’t be long in getting to Captain Rinehart.
Well, that was the way it went. A man got mad and said things he didn’t mean to. There wasn’t much he could do about it now except go right on as he had planned. He didn’t go across to the saloon, though. Instead, he went back into the depot and sat down on a hard wooden bench, leaning back against the wall and waiting for the answer to his wire. When it came, he sent another message constituting an order for wire and staples to be shipped to him at Stringtown. He promised to send a check immediately. Mailed here, it would be in Fort Worth before they got the order ready to ship.
Handing it to the telegrapher, he asked, “Who’s a good freighter around here? I’ll want him to haul this shipment out for me.”
The telegrapher said, “Try Slim Torrance over at the livery barn. He’s got new wagons, and he’s a good man. Besides, he’s my brother-in-law.”
“Reason enough for a recommendation,” Doug said.
The livery barn bore the name Spangler & Torrance, and it smelled strongly of dry hay and liniment and oil, horse sweat and manure. A practical combination, Monahan thought, livery barn and freighting outfit. He found Slim Torrance in the rear of the barn, rubbing some evil-smelling concoction on the leg of a lame mule.
“I got a shipment of barbed wire due from Fort Worth in a few days,” Doug told the chunky, red-faced freighter. “I’d be much obliged if you’d haul it over into Kiowa County for me.”
Torrance nodded. “Freightin’s my business. You jest tell me where you want it, and I’ll git it over there.”
Monahan gave him instructions as to the trail. He added, “It wouldn’t be a bad idea if you skirted around town. Folks don’t have to know about it for awhile. Wouldn’t hurt to cover the load with a tarp, too, so it won’t stand out if somebody happens to pass you on the trail.”
Torrance frowned. “Wait a minute now. If it’s one of them kind of deals, I don’t know…”
“I’ll pay you half of it in advance.”
Torrance wrestled with himself a minute, and the money won. “All right, I’ll do it.”
Writing out the check, Monahan said, “It’ll be better for all of us if nothing’s said about this till the shipment’s delivered. No use setting out bait to catch trouble.”
“No use atall,” Torrance agreed, carefully folding the check and shoving it deep into the pocket of his denim pants.
“By the way,” Monahan said, “I sure could use a wagon cook. Know anybody around here who can cook and needs the job?”
Torrance said, “Got jest the man for you. Come on back in here.”
Later, riding out, Monahan saw McKelvie’s horse tied down by the depot.
In there now pumping the telegrapher, he thought, more angry at himself than at McKelvie. He won’t leave town till he knows.