The Sons of Grady Rourke (9 page)

“Come on up, Sean.” The voice was Jesse Evans'.

Sean put his hat back on and climbed the ladder. He crouched down to get through the window which was quickly closed behind him when he stepped onto the wooden floor. He straightened and looked around while his eyes adapted to the dim light.

“Understand congratulations are in order ... Deputy.” Evans smiled warmly. “Welcome to the lodge room. You know Mr. Dolan here, and John Riley and Billy Mathews.”

Sean shook hands with Dolan, and then his two partners. John Riley spoke with another Irish accent, but Jacob “Billy” Mathews did not.

“Deputy,” Dolan nodded as if he need not bother to ask if the job were offered and accepted. “This is where the bachelor partners of the House live. We only eat over at the mess in the Wortley.”

Sean looked around at the rather tidy room which was wide open throughout the second story like a hay loft. Bunks against the walls were also neat as a barracks.

“Can't allow clutter when we all live together up here.”

“But there ain't no stairs?” was all Sean could mumble.

“Safer that way. In Lincoln, anyway,” Billy Mathews said cheerfully. “Heard you went with the Confederacy?”

“Yes.”

“Me, too. I was born in Tennessee. Been a miner too, before Lincoln.”

The Battle of Shiloh was in western Tennessee. Sean's mind was momentarily flooded with horrors. He turned toward Dolan.

“Just wanted to say thanks for the work, Mr. Dolan.”

“Glad to have you aboard, Sean. You'll earn your three dollars a week.”

Sean thought of the two silver dollars new to his pocket.

“Thanks. Sheriff Brady said he don't expect trouble.”

“Neither do we,” Jesse Evans answered before Dolan could. The cattle rustler gently laid his hand on his heavy gunbelt and sidearm. Sean nodded thoughtfully.

“The sheriff said that McSween should be coming back soon.” Sean focused on Dolan's completely clean-shaven face. John H. Riley stood at Dolan's side. Riley's face wore only a closely trimmed mustache on a triangular face with broad forehead and short hair. Dolan had the round, clean face of a schoolteacher rather than a merchant and occasional shootist. Riley looked more like a cavalry sergeant trying on civilian, bankers' clothes. Sean tried not to look at Riley's protruding ears and Riley tried not to study Sean's scarred face.

“McSween will be home soon enough,” Jimmy Dolan said without worry in his clear voice. “I wouldn't worry about one Protestant lawyer.”

“Sheriff says he rides with some rough people.”

“The captain here is rougher,” Dolan smiled with a glance sideways toward Jesse Evans who nodded with pleasure. “Don't give it another thought. If you don't mind going back the way you come up, we'll all go over to the mess for a bite.” Dolan took a gold watch out of his vest. “It's already one o'clock. Manuel should have his fire going by now, boys.”

A murmur of voices filled the bachelor quarters as half a dozen men pulled coats from wall pegs. Billy Mathews heaved the window open and gestured toward Sean.

“Watch your step going out. It takes a while to get used to it.”

“Thanks.”

Crossing the street in single file, Dolan paused for an instant to allow Sean to take his place behind Jesse Evans who led the way to the Wortley. Dolan fell into step behind Sean. Marching silently under a perfect sky, their long coats swayed across the ankle-deep snow, cutting a wide path from the House to the hotel. With eyes lowered against fierce sunlight, they looked like armed monks bound for vespers.

Just at the hotel side of the street, four small boys as dirty as the melting snow ran headlong into the House men. Waist-high to Jimmy Dolan, they skidded to a stop, panting hard in the cold, thin air. They had charged out of the hotel's corral where a dozen horses had ignored the boys' snowball fight with frozen clods of manure. When the leading boy bounced off Jesse Evans, Dolan recognized the bunch of them as scruffy sons of loyal House patrons. They returned the cheerful Irishman's smile.

The boys laughed in merry chorus until, one by one, they saw Sean Rourke who looked up from under his wide-brimmed hat. Sean grieved in the same instant that each boy gasped wide-eyed at the new deputy's destroyed face. He silently lowered his face into the lonesome shadow of his hat.

“Run along, boys,” Dolan said gently. They did, looking over their shoulders as they trotted into the street.

When the men entered the hotel with Sean between Evans and Dolan, everyone inside immediately understood the newcomer's place in the field troops of the House. The Mexican behind the front desk wiped his hands on his apron as he approached the group hanging their trail dusters along the wall. Jesse Evans stood close to Sean.

“
Buenos dias, Capitan
Evans.” The dark-faced man smiled at Sean, “Deputy.” Then he ushered them into the cantina. Melissa Bryant stood beside a large round table. She waited for the company to take their seats before she moved without a word to stand between Sean and Jimmy Dolan. Lincoln's newest lawman looked up into her blue eyes. In the shadows of a corner, a child stood in faded calico. With large black eyes in an Apache face, the little girl watched her mother whose arm gently touched Sean Rourke's shoulder.

P
ATRICK
R
OURKE LAUGHED
out loud when he caught himself speaking calmly to the nearest, droopy-eyed steer. That he would unconsciously take the counsel of beef amused and frightened the rancher. In the six months since Grady Rourke's death, the Chisum cattle had pushed over most of the post and rail fence that had stood in the rocky ground like a square parapet surrounding the little house on all sides. The fence once kept the cattle at least twenty-five yards from the house.

The fence could not withstand tons of shuffling hooves and months of winter wind howling down from Capitan Mountain to the north and the Sacramento Mountains to the west. Patrick wondered how long the fence had guarded the homestead and he wondered where the rails had once been trees. Lincoln was dotted with knotty little trees. But only the distant mountain ranges had stands of old wood, and even that was sparse under the summer's ferocious sun and winter's withering cold.

Patrick remembered the old fence as having always been there, gnarled and enduring. Its shadows were part of his boyhood memories when he and his brothers played at hunting and tracking his mother's barnyard hens. That his father must have hauled the timber down the mountain had never crossed his mind until his last solitary week of trying to repair half a year's neglect and abuse.

Where the posts had been snapped clean through at ground level, the frozen earth would not suffer ten strong men to dig another hole for a fresh beam. So he could only put back the horizontal rails between vertical posts that had survived the grazing herd. As sections of fence took shape, open segments between broken posts became funnels that seemed to attract the cattle into the gap. The breaks in the fence forced even more cattle to scratch their scrawny sides against the square, coarsely-hewn pillars holding up the front porch.

The lone rancher cursed the animals out loud and they only shook their uniformly torn, jingle-bobbed ears to mock him.

The steers' feet made so much noise crunching on the frozen ground that Patrick did not hear the lone rider come slowly up the lane that branched off the road to Lincoln. If the rider had heard the rancher conversing with his cattle, Billy Bonney did not say and Patrick did not ask.

“Patrick.” Billy climbed down from his horse. The mount's mousey brown ears were laid flat back in the uneasy company of hundreds of milling steers. “Mr. Tunstall wanted me to look in on you.” The rider stood beside his horse who twitched against the taught reins in Billy's gloved hand.

“Glad for the company, Billy. Better put your horse in the barn so these damned cattle don't spook him. You'll have a long, cold walk home.”

Billy nodded and walked toward the dilapidated bam. Inside, he untacked his animal and let him drop his face into a pile of still green hay. Three other horses nickered from inside their stalls. Bright sunlight streamed in through narrow fissures in the weathered siding and glowed brightly on a few nail heads on each stall door. Billy knew that these nails must be new. Patrick had been working hard during the week since his visit to town. Before leaving his saddle on the cold dirt floor, he retrieved a small sack, which had dangled behind his seat. Then he walked back into the sun, which hurt his pale eyes after his few minutes inside the barn.

“I brung you some coffee and sourdough. It's from Mr. Tunstall.” Billy spoke in normal voice and the thin air barely carried his words across the 20 yards to Patrick.

“Huh?”

“I said Mr. Tunstall sent some supplies with me.”

“Oh. Thanks. Come on in and I'll put on a pot.”

Billy Bonney was shivering by the time they reached the front porch. A warm horse under him had kept him comfortable for the easy ride from town. Patrick did not wear a coat and his shirt was damp with sweat from wrestling steers and timber. Perspiration leeched through the crown of his hat.

“You can hang it there,” Patrick said as his guest peeled off his trail coat which dripped condensation onto the floor under the wall peg. He adjusted the walnut-handled Peace-maker high on his baggy trousers. Two logs quickly flamed when laid atop red embers simmering in the main room's hearth. Billy held out his red palms toward the fire.

“That's better.”

Patrick opened the gift sack in the narrow kitchen. He smiled at a small bag of coffee beans. He threw a handful into a small, square mill, which he hand-cranked for half a minute. The aroma made him close his eyes and inhale deeply. He opened the stopcock on a water barrel and filled a tin pot. The fresh ground coffee floated on the icy water.

“This won't take long,” Patrick said as he set the pot close to the blazing fire. “That was nice of Mr. Tunstall.”

“Weren't nothing. Wanted me to make sure you was comfortable out here all alone.”

“Getting by,” Patrick nodded with fatigue in his voice. He pulled his father's rocking chair closer to the fire. Billy pushed a straight chair closer and sat down. He pointed his muddy boots toward the warming coffee pot.

Patrick studied Billy's face, which he had never really observed close up. Without his hat, Billy looked even younger. He was clean-shaven. Patrick noticed for the first time that Billy's two, upper front teeth protruded and gave him the look of a cheerful, gray-eyed squirrel. Even with a heavy six-shooter strapped to his narrow hips, Billy was as nonthreatening as a nineteen-year-old boy could be. It would have been hard for Patrick not to like him. It helped that Patrick was no more than six years older than Tunstall's clerk.

“Have you seen my brother?” Patrick tried not to sound very curious.

“Not hardly. I don't go to the House or the Wortley. Wouldn't be welcome. I seen him maybe twice on the street is all. Once he was with the dumb girl what works for the House.”

Patrick's face was poker blank.

“Melissa”

“Yeah. She's hung like a Holstein.”

“I ain't much noticed.” With the toe of his boot, Patrick nudged the coffee pot closer to the fire. The smell of fresh coffee was beginning to drift deliciously into the spacious room.

Billy inhaled slowly and collected a teenager's thoughts.

“I always thought Manuel or even Jimmy Dolan was doing her.”

Patrick shrugged and watched the fire.

“You'd think them boys would get all the mares they wanted at the Indian Agency.” Billy smiled. “I hear them Apaches put out for blankets.”

Patrick looked Billy in the eye.

“But I don't know that for sure,” the boy said earnestly.

The rancher nodded.

“Your brother got hisself a new job.”

“Doing what?”

“Deputy? Sheriff Brady hired him. Dolan, really.”

“Deputy? Sean?”

“According to Brady. Sheriff sticks his head into Mr. Tunstall's store maybe once a week. ‘Keeping the peace,' he calls it. But he's just nosing around for Dolan and Riley. But it's still a free country, mainly. So we don't bother him.”

“Why would the sheriff need another deputy?”

“Probably knows that McSween is on his way home. That makes Dolan nervous.”

Billy smiled toward the coffee pot where steam began to rock the tin lid. Firelight shining in the boy's eyes illuminated a face clearly content with being on the right side of the street.

“Guess my brother needs the money to live on.”

“Seems so.”

Patrick glanced toward the bureau with its browned glass portraits of his father and Sean, each in his generation's army uniform.

“Ain't like Sean to sell his gun.”

“But that's what he done. And took up with the dumb girl, too. All in the same week.” Billy sounded impressed.

“Is he riding with Jesse Evans?”

“The captain he rides for the House and the sheriff he rides for the House.”

Patrick leaned forward, half out of his chair. He picked up a kindling stick from a pile near the hearth. He used the stick to push the coffee pot away from the fire.

“Mr. Tunstall sent you out here to tell me about Sean?”

“Wanted to make sure you was still going to let Chisum's stock graze your land if your brother's took up with the folks what rustles Chisum cattle.”

Patrick sat back into the rocking chair.

“My brother needs the money and so do I.”

“Good.” Billy looked over at Patrick and he grinned innocently. “Only difference seems to be that your brother talks to the dumb girl and you talk to cows.”

The rancher brother's bearded face hardened.

“Is she a whore?”

Billy became thoughtful for a moment.

“Not strictly.”