The Sons of Grady Rourke (11 page)

Dick Brewer became more animated as the blood returned to his cold face. He was earnest and courteous. Like the amiable Billy Bonney and the wide-eyed Rob Widenmann now in jail, Tunstall seemed to attract decent young men trying to make an honest living in a clapboard town.

Patrick raised his tin cup to extend the momentary silence so he could think. He had a ranch to run single-handed and the Englishman was inviting him to take sides in a little war in which Patrick had neither an interest nor a stake—except for the cattle grazing on old weeds under new snow that paid him just enough to hang on to his father's land. The cattle belonged to John Chisum and Tunstall's bank was supported by Chisum's sterling name.

“All right, Dick. There's a cot up in the loft with some blankets. There's water and a wash basin in the kitchen.” Patrick gestured toward the back cranny.

“That will be fine. I ain't been horizontal for two days.”

Patrick nodded.

“And there's a jug of jack back there to warm you up, too.”

Brewer licked his cracked lips.

“Then I'll say good night. I appreciate the hospitality.”

Dick Brewer stood on legs still shaky. He shuffled toward the clay pot of whiskey and carried his tin cup.

Patrick laid his hands on the arms of his chair and began rocking slowly, like an old man. He looked above the hearth toward his holstered handiron that hung from a peg on the thick wooden mantle. The fire glowed red on his hard face.

“I
SHOULD GO
.”

Melissa Bryant reached up and placed her hand gently upon Sean Rourke's shoulder. As if her thin fingers were a great weight, he sat down slowly into the hard chair close to a black, pot-bellied stove. She placed a warm cup of coffee into his open palm.

“Maybe another few minutes.”

She nodded, turned, and ascended a wooden ladder toward a small loft illuminated by a single oil lamp damped low. Sean could not stop watching the white calves of her firm legs where her skirt ended as she climbed. She was barefoot in the stove's heat that filled her small, one-room home. The loft was little more than a ledge that obscured one-third of the pitched, timber roof.

Upstairs, Melissa had to crouch deeply to keep her head from banging into the roof's thick beams. Unlike the sturdier adobe structures erected throughout Lincoln, her home was slapped together from old barn siding. It had been the Wortley's storage bin until Jimmy Dolan offered her the place rent-free so long as she worked the cantina. That freed one more room at the hotel for Jesse Evans' men to triple bunk for a dollar per week.

The Apache raid in May 1870 had left her an orphan and pregnant. The town adopted the fifteen-year-old girl and gave her food. Lawrence Murphy had contributed one of the House's rooms at the Wortley. But Murphy was gone and to Jimmy Dolan, business was business. To Melissa, the live-in pantry was home. The House let her have odd pieces of fabric too short to sell. She used it for curtains of happy colors.

If Melissa gave up her voice when the painted warriors—boys mainly—took her innocence, she had carefully nursed the infant along with her fury. The eight-year-old child sleeping in the loft had never heard her mother sing her to sleep.

Melissa stroked the sleeping girl's forehead and blew out the lamp. When she came down the ladder backwards, Sean forced his eyes to watch the rusted old stove. Holes in its thin sides glowed like orange eyes from the burning logs within.

“Is Abbey asleep?”

Melissa nodded.

Sean took to the dark-faced child quickly. The first time she peeked from behind her mother's skirt to look up at him, Sean instinctively flinched. He knew what his burned faced did to the eyes of small children. But Abigail Bryant only blinked and smiled with her large black eyes. She showed no fear as if a child's inborn revulsion at the hideous had all stayed behind in her mother's abused body at the moment of birth.

For two weeks, Sean walked Melissa and her daughter the short distance from the hotel to their hovel. It was an accident. They had walked ten steps behind him when he was going outside to see to his horse for the night. In the iron-cold darkness, Sean offered to walk them home before he realized that he had no idea if they had a home nor where it might be. Melissa had looked up into his weary eyes and nodded. Something in his eyes made her accept the invitation of a stranger who wore a black revolver and who had dirty fingernails. She saw a place called Shiloh, Tennessee, in his battle-dulled eyes, but she did not know it.

The woman sat in a chair close to Sean so the stove could warm her, too. A lamp on the little table made her fine, pale skin appear yellow. The flame made shadows move quickly across her cheeks when she blinked or sipped her coffee. Only twenty-three, there were webs of small lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Having a child by violence—and having no mother to help—had aged her face beyond what New Mexico sun and cold could do to it. Sean watched her face with its deeply blue eyes, full eyebrows and inviting mouth. He only looked away when her eyes met his.

They sat without words for a long time after their coffee cups were dry.

“Sheriff Brady came by the hotel this afternoon. Wants me to ride with his deputies to Tunstall's place in the morning.”

A sudden gust of wind whined past the shuttered windows. Melissa turned to look at him closely. He saw the worry around her eyes.

“We just have papers to serve on Tunstall. Shouldn't be no trouble. I'm his deputy now. I need the work.”

Melissa looked away toward the stove. She folded her hands in her lap and lowered her face. In the gray shadows of the nighttime cabin, the man and woman sat side by side and two feet apart. They watched the stove together as if it were grand opera.

Sean waited another five minutes. Then he put a hand on each of his knees. He still wore his trail coat, open in front.

“Well.” He stood up and rubbed his hands together to warm them before opening the door to the night wind.

Melissa stood and handed him his hat.

“Thank you for the coffee, Melissa. We'll ride out tomorrow morning early. Should be back by Wednesday night late or early Thursday. I guess it's twenty-five miles to Rio Felix.”

Melissa stepped to the door and opened it. The moon made the left side of her elegant face shine ghostly white. Sean blinked at the sudden beauty of it. He fumbled with his hat.

“Tell Abbey I said good night.”

Melissa smiled tightly and Sean stepped into the snow. Putting his hat on for the walk back to the hotel, he felt stupid for having said such a thing.

W
ITH FIRST LIGHT
, Sean led his rested horse from the Wortley's paddock to the hard dirt road. He was surprised to look up at Jesse Evans who smiled broadly from atop his mount. Three of the captain's Boys sat their horses close by. Sean looked up into each unclean face. Jesse's blond hair glowed in the first light of daybreak. William Brady was nowhere to be seen.

“We're the posse, Sean,” Jacob “Billy” Mathews grinned. Jesse's Boys smiled too broadly. Only Billy wore a tin star on the outside breast of his fur, trail duster. Two of the men held the halter reins of pack horses loaded down for overnighting in the harsh country.

“Where's Sheriff Brady?”

“He ain't coming. No need, really. He's on his way to the jail to let young Rob Widenmann out before he pees hisself from fright.” Deputy Mathews chuckled.

Sean gathered his reins, mounted, and adjusted his Colt Peacemaker. With his outlaw deputies, he rode south out of Lincoln.

M
ONDAY AFTER MIDNIGHT, SLEET EXPLODED FROM THE WINTER
clouds atop the Sacramento Mountains to the west. Jagged ice pebbles pummeled the six riders and eight horses until they had to stop and pitch camp. Two of Jesse's men had bleeding faces from hail wounds by the time they pulled their blankets over their ice-crusted beards. They tied their scarves and bandannas around their horses' faces to prevent laceration of the equine eyeballs or, worse, a mass runaway of the terrified animals upon which their lives depended.

By midmorning Tuesday, February 12th, the posse's piss-and-vinegar bravado was frozen hard and yellow. Hiding their faces deep inside their raised collars, the riders walked their mounts and the pack horses slowly southward down the main wagon road. They dismounted to lead their animals by hand across treacherously lumpy ice that in two months would flow as the Rio Felix. Half a mile south of the river, the men stopped on the crest of a slight rise. They looked down with snow-blinded eyes to the large ranch carved out of the wilderness by John Tunstall, loyal subject of Queen Victoria.

“Nice horses,” Deputy Billy Mathews nodded as his sore eyeballs focused on the paddock beside Tunstall's fine adobe house. “The sheriff will be pleased with us.”

Jesse Evans' spurs jingled at his mount's sides and he pressed forward, leading the posse down the little hill. A white cloud of horse breath moved with the six men. With the enemy of the House in sight, Deputy Mathews did not mind the outlaw going first.

By the time the riders pulled rein in front of the ranch house, Tunstall stood on the front porch. He was unarmed. His ranch foreman, Dick Brewer, stood at his side and casually held a Winchester rifle pointed toward the manure-stained snow.

The front door opened and Billy Bonney came out. He carried an old Sharps repeating rifle cradled in the crook of his left arm. The boy smiled broadly around his squirrel, front teeth. Three more armed men came out of the house.

Six against six, Deputy Mathews thought. Been against worse, Jesse Evans figured silently.

“We come by order of Judge Bristol,” Mathews said calmly. Even odds encouraged him. But he pondered if twelve fire-warmed hands were better than a dozen frozen ones. “We have a lawful writ to attach Alexander McSween's horses boarded down here on your ranch. They be security for McSween's bail bond for the Fritz estate case.”

“These horses are mine,” Tunstall said with a forced smile.

“You and McSween is partners. What's his is yours.”

“You're on private property, Mr. Mathews,” the Englishman said firmly.

“Ain't that right?” Billy Bonney said cheerfully.

Jesse Evans rode forward one horse length to come up beside Mathews.

“We have papers,” Jesse said. His blue eyes quickly surveyed the men on the porch. They stood in the shade of the overhanging roof which put morning sun in a violet sky directly in the posse's faces. Damn, Jesse thought.

“Not today, boys. Sorry to send you back up that cold road empty-handed.” Tunstall's Oxford accent never seemed to sound hostile.

Without another cordial word, Tunstall waved his gloved hand. Slowly, five anned men came around the porch corner from the corral on his right. Four men came single-file from the paddock on his left. The last man around the corner was Patrick Rourke.

Behind Jesse, Sean Rourke's numb face hardened. Its live left cheek was an unhealthy white from the cold, and the right side above his frosted beard was the sickening purple of the poorly hanged. The two brothers glared at each other, but Sean, blinded by the sun, could hardly see Patrick.

Looking up, the younger brother saw a man he hardly recognized in the fierce sunlight and in the company of grinning outlaws.

Looking down and lowering his face until his hat shielded his burning eyes, Sean blinked at the kaleidoscope of starbursts and flaming diamonds on the backs of his eye balls, induced by snow blindness. Where Patrick's outline stood shimmering in the shadows, Sean saw a six-year-old boy raising his small hands to his bruised face to deflect the hammer blows from Grady Rourke's farmer-sized fists. The older brother blinked hard when he remembered those hammers on his own thirteen-year-old face after he rushed between his father and the boy.

Closing his eyes against the throbbing sunshine, Sean Rourke jerked his reins and pulled his horse out of formation. With his back toward John Tunstall, he walked his mount slowly up the road toward Lincoln, two bone-numbing days away.

“You ain't seen the last of the law, Englishman,” Jesse Evans said for Deputy Mathews.

“That's right,” the real lawman stammered toward fifteen armed men.

One by one, the posse with lowered heads and icicled beards turned northward to follow the swishing tail of Sean's horse.

John Tunstall turned smiling to his army.

“Well executed, lads. They won't be back. With luck, they'll freeze between here and Lincoln.”

Patrick swallowed hard and looked around Tunstall toward the snow-covered lane. His brother was invisible inside a soft blur of brown horseflesh and shimmering clouds of horse breath.

T
HE
T
EXAN EVEN
looked like Texas. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a clean-shaven chin square as a barn door, John S. Chisum stood in the sunshine and twirled his black, waxed mustache to make certain that it had not frozen. Deep-set dark eyes squinted at the expanse of South Spring River Ranch that stretched over the horizon in all directions on the west side of the Pecos River frozen north and south. The house stood just south of where the Rio Hondo met the Pecos from the west. Deep crows' feet creased from Chisum's eyes to his slightly prominent ears. His short, thick hair and lined, wind-burned face had the look of a middle-aged cowboy, but his crisp black waistcoat gave the cattle baron the solid presence of a well-heeled banker.

Chisum stood beside Alexander McSween, Attorney at Law. McSween's round face with its drooping mustache was red from the cold wind. Thirty-five years old, he was slightly round and pink from a lifetime hunched over a desk.

“Then I'll be on my way, Mr. Chisum,” the dark-faced Adolph Barrier said cordially. The Deputy Sheriff from San Miguel County, New Mexico Territory, had escorted McSween from his Las Vegas arrest down to Mesilla for the drumhead arraignment before Judge Bristol.