The Busted Thumb Horse Ranch (15 page)

I hadn’t taken into consideration the murkiness
of the air in the saloon, which had been increased
by the smoke from Dansworth’s pistol. I could
barely see the new shot glasses that’d been set up.
The outlaws backed away—far away—from the
beam and my diminutive targets. I pretended to
check the load in my .45 as I scrambled for a plan.
The only one I could up with was not only risky
but foolish, but it’s all I had. After all, if I couldn’t
see my targets, I couldn’t very well hit them. I
stood and pushed my chair back, .45 hanging
easily, comfortably in my hand. I looked things
over once again and fired my first round. The
kerosene lamp hanging a few feet from where
Dansworth stood detonated nicely, casting more
than enough orangish white light for my purposes.
I picked off the next four glasses with no
trouble at all. Then came the challenge. I fired my
sixth shot so that it hit and smashed the very
edge
of the sixth glass, but blew enough glass at
the fifth to bust it up. I let out a breath I’d been
holding.

“Holy sheet!” Armando exclaimed.

“Some shootin’, Jake,” Tiny added. “I never
seen nothin’ like it.”

If the truth be known, I probably couldn’t pull
off that little trick again in a thousand tries, but
that didn’t matter none. It worked this time.

I remained standing and Arm stood, too, and
moved several feet to my left. The buzz and snarls
from the other end of the saloon were as ominous
as the warning of a rattlesnake. I knew this thing
wasn’t over, an’ so did Arm.

After a few moments the one-eyed, hatchet-faced
fella walked toward us, headed to Arm
rather than to me. I looked him over. His .45 was
tied low on his leg and his holster was well-worn.
He had a sheath of banknotes in his left hand. He
stopped about eight feet from Arm. “This here’s
your pard’s money, Pancho,” he said. He opened
his hand and the bills fluttered to the floor. “All
you gotta do is pick ’em up with your teeth and
you’ll walk out of here. You don’t, you’ll be carried
out—dead.” He paused for a moment and
smiled. “Pretend they’re tamales, Pancho—that’ll
make it somethin’ you’re used to doin’.”

Armando grinned. “S’pose I put a slug right on
through that patch over your eye,” he said, his
voice conversational, calm. “An’ then I pick up
the money?”

“Well, lemme tell you somethin’, Pancho. See,
what I’m offerin’…”

It was a gunfighter’s trick that was already old
when
Methuselah was a infant. Get the opponent
to shift his mind for the tiniest part of a second
and draw then. His hand flashed to the grips of
his Colt.

There was one round fired. Arm’s slug passed
on through the black cloth patch. A spurt of blood
and grayish glop spat out of hatchet-face’s eye
socket and a sizable piece of the back of his head
sailed the length of the room, struck the wall, and
stuck there to the rough wood. I drew and kept
my pistol leveled on Dansworth’s group. Arm
picked up the cash. I nodded to Tiny and the
three of us backed on out.

For once, Dansworth had no parting words.

Tiny was pale-faced as we stood out in the
street, the wind snapping grit and discarded
newspaper pages past us. “Maybe I oughta start
carryin’ iron,” he said.

Arm’s voice was low and serious. “Don’t even
theenk of it, amigo. Jake an’ me, we been doin’
this all our lives, no? You know the Bible? It says,
‘He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.’
Ees good advice.”

“You start carryin’,” I said, “an’ you’d kill
two
men.”

“Two? I…”

“
Sí. Es verdad.
You an’ the man who killed you.
Me an’ Jake, we take him down.”

Tiny looked up at the sky. “You boys got some
daylight left. Let’s put a dent in my tequila supply
an’ talk this over.”

The low fire in the forge provided all the heat
we needed. Arm an’ me sat on bales of hay, but
Tiny
was antsy, pacing. We passed his bottle of
tequila around a couple of times.

“I take me a deer whenever I need meat,” Tiny
said. “A bear killed two of my best dogs an’ I put
a dozen shots into the sumbitch, but I killed him.
I ain’t new to guns, boys.”

“You’re new to handguns, Tiny,” I said. “And
you’re brand-new to takin’ the life of another man
if it ever come to that. ’Course you kill a deer for
meat, an’ that bear, an’ a barrel fulla rattlesnakes
an’ rats to boot.”

“Sí,”
Arm said. “Keeling a man is different. I
dream sometimes about gunfights an’ I sweat an’
sometimes I cry.”

“Yeah, Tiny,” I said. “It ain’t just a matter of
bein’ a little faster an’ pullin’ a trigger. The boys
who died had mas and pas an’ maybe wives an’
children. Sometimes…sometimes…I wish I’d
lost.”

Tiny sucked the bottle for a long moment.
“Jake—if you’d lost, then Arm woulda settled the
score. Isn’t that right?”

“Score? Bullshit. There ain’t no score in gunfighting.
We do what we gotta do.”

“So—if a ’slinger dropped you, he’d jus’ ride
away?”

“No,” Arm said. Tiny and I waited a moment
but Arm didn’t say anything else and it was clear
he wasn’t going to.

“We gotta saddle up,” I said eventually. “And
for a while, we gotta cut out our trips to town—
the two of us together, I mean. Dansworth knows
we’d track him down if he grabbed our mare, but
we
can’t leave the place unprotected.” I turned to
Tiny. “You’re our very good friend,” I said.
“You’ll
have to come to us ’stead of us comin’ to you—
but you do that whenever you take a mind to.
Hear? Anytime at all. We have whiskey an’ food
an’ we want you to be free to come by anytime.”

The air took on a fresh sweetness not long thereafter,
and the melting snow runoff sounded like a
distant river. Gutsy grass sprigs began to poke
their heads through the remaining snow and
here and there were good-size patches of rich-looking
mud and soil. Riding in the mud loosened
shoes quickly, kinda of sucked them away
from the hoof with each stride. Both of us could
renail a shoe, so it was no trouble. The smith
skills—shaping a show from bar stock, leveling it,
screwing on nubs for traction, all that, was beyond
us. A lame horse is as useless as teats on a
boot heel; we took our horses to Tiny for that
kind of work.

Our stallion was gettin’ as nervous as a whore
in church, sniffing the spring air, hustling about
in his corral as if he expected a magic door to
suddenly appear, giving him freedom.

I worked him daily on a long rope, running
around me at the end of the rope at a pretty good
clip, even with that stumble-footed gait of his. He
hadn’t offered to attack me in quite some time,
but I was still leery. He’d been born in the wild
and had gone where he wanted to when he
wanted to his entire life. I doubt that he’d ever get
used to captivity. He was looking good. He’d
filled out some and his coat had taken on an almost
brassy
shine to it. The work on the rope kept
him muscled up and tight.

The mare was looking good, too. She was showing
that she was pregnant and that the youngster
had moved back inside her toward her birth canal.
She ate almost nonstop, but we figured she
was eating for two, and let her have at good hay
and grain. It put some fat on her but we’d work
that off after she’d given birth.

Neither Arm nor me had much experience with
birthing. We’d see it happen now and again on
our travels, but knew little about the process.

Arm rode into Hulberton to borrow a couple
books on the process from Tiny and to discuss the
whole procedure with him. Arm did better than
that—he and Tiny rode in late that night, drunk,
laughing, having a hell of a time, with a sack of
thick books in Arm’s saddlebags. The ladies
hustled about in the kitchen preparing a fine meal
of venison stew and mashed potatoes, biscuits to
sop with, canned tomatoes, and all sorts of treats,
an’ then left us alone. We ate like three sows at a
trough and our bottle took some hard use, too.

Dansworth, Tiny told us, had bought a string of
eight horses from a couple of Mexican traders.
There were a couple of nice mares and one stud
that looked good—but not near as good as our
stud. He—Dansworth—was still running his
mouth about owning our mare. Tiny said it looked
like he’d added a few more saddlebums and drifters
to his army.

The next morning Tiny looked over the mare
very carefully. He said it was time to start
keeping her tail wrapped and to grease up her
exterior
womb a bit with udder balm daily. He
felt of her gut an’ said the foal was a big ’un, but
she looked like she could pass it okay when the
time came. We studied the books at the kitchen
table an’ Tiny told us what supplies to have on
hand an’ how to cut the cord right and clean the
afterbirth and all that. He told us how the mare
would act when she was about due, and how her
teats would wax up, a sure sign birth wasn’t far
off. We kept a pair of large buckets of water simmering
on the stove at all times, and a tall stack of
freshly laundered towels outside the stall. One of
the buckets was for us to wash our hands with if
we had to reach inside her to help things along,
and there was a big chunk of lye soap on a shelf
above the bucket.

Tiny asked that one of us come to town and
fetch him when the mare started contractions
and we promised we would—very gratefully.

Teresa an’ Blanca were excited about the bambino
and spent lots of time talking to and stroking
the
mamacita.
The mare just ate up the extra
attention, grunting and sighing and poking about
for the treats the ladies brought in their aprons—
like carrots and quartered apples.

It hadn’t rained much this spring and the
ground was fairly well dried out. I was standing
in the stud’s corral near the snubbing post, moving
dirt around with the toe of my boot. The horse
was antsy, looking for action, bored with his life,
I suppose. I thought I’d given him some new sort
of exercise. I hooked the rope to his halter and led
him up tight to the post. Then, I went into the
barn.

Arm was rewrapping the mare’s tail as I hefted
my stock saddle an’ blanket an’ started back out
to the corral.

“You are nots, no?” he said. “You canno ride
that horse, Jake.
Jesús.
”

“I’m not ‘nots’—I just wanna give him a little
exercise, is all. I know he’ll never be a ridin’ horse
’cause of that hoof—but, well—what the hell.
Won’t hurt to set on him for a second.”

“An’ get your seely neck busted.”

I ignored that.

I’d been sacking out the stallion for several
weeks, so the feel of the blanket on his back was
no big deal. He eyed my saddle, however, like it
were about to attack an’ eat him. Arm had followed
me out and was untying the bandana
from around his neck. He sidled up to the horse,
stood there for a moment, and then, quickly and
smoothly had the bandana over the stud’s eyes
and tied under his jaw. I’d tied a short length of
rope to the halter to use as a rein.

I eased the saddle onto the horse’s back as if I
were settling it on a giant, fragile egg. The stud
went stiff and began to tremble as I pulled the
cinch. I put my hand in a stirrup and pressed
down some. The stud’s trembling increased—it
was as if his whole body was in motion.

“He gonna come apart,” Arm said quietly.

My partner was right. A few more seconds and
his fear of the weight on him would overcome his
fear of blindness and he’d explode. I put a boot
into a stirrup and swung into the saddle, calling,
“Pull!” to Arm. He unsnapped the rope from the
halter and yanked the bandana free.

We stood statue-still for the barest part of a
second and then the horse went up like one of
those Chinese Fourth of July rockets. He came
down hard, but I could feel that he kept weight
off the twisted hoof. He went up again, higher
yet, and came down with his weight on his rear
hooves, as if he was rearing. I kicked out of the
stirrups so’s I could push free if I had to. I’d rather
hit the dirt like a sack of grain than do the same
thing with 1,200 pounds of horse on top of me.

It seemed like we stood there forever, my hands
and arms stiff against the saddle horn to push off
if I needed to, my legs free. Then we were in motion
again, leaping forward. I was shifting all
over the saddle until I was able to get my boots
back into the stirrups.

I’d expected a spin, and I got it. The stallion
spun away from his lame foot, and the sumbitch
went around as fast as one of them tops kids
play with. He stopped faster than a horse in a
spin can stop, and my momentum carried my
upper body forward—particularly my head. My
nose slammed into the horse’s poll—the space between
his ears—and I was immediately choking
on blood. The only thing louder than the stud’s
bellows-like wheezing and gasping for air was
Arm’s laughter.

I’d like to say I rode that hellhound to a stand-still.
I didn’t. He spun again and went up again
and that was pretty much it for me. I was seeing
little black spots in front of my eyes from the
blow to my face and I was dizzy and off balance.
I hit the ground like a cow flop and Arm hustled
over to me in case the horse wanted to play some
more.
He didn’t—he rolled on the ground until
he busted my cinch and ran to the far wall of the
corral, head hanging, sweat dripping, sides
heaving.

“You give him a good ride, amigo,” Arm said.

I couldn’t think of an answer.

I ended up with a nose that was at least twice
its normal size that hurt like a sonofabitch, and a
pair of black eyes that made me look like a raccoon.
Other than that, I came through my ride
pretty well. Tequila and a long night’s sleep didn’t
hurt, either. A taste of tequila the following morning
helped out. Teresa made a poultice for my
nose that tied around my face like a mask. I have
no idea what she put in it, but it sure cut the pain
way down.