This Calder Range (5 page)

Judd Boston didn't like that answer. All his plans had been flowing along smoothly until Chase Benteen Calder had muddied the waters with his suspicions.

“I had the feeling the old man had gotten wise to what was going on when he bunched his herd close in to the ranch.” His mind went back over the recent events before he turned the force of his hard eyes on his foreman. “He waited until Benteen came back before showing his hand. Now you say Shorty Niles and Trumbo are drawing their pay to go to work for Calder.”

“They claim he's putting a herd together to take north,” Loman explained stiffly. “As many trail drives as he's made, he's probably got his eye on makin' a big profit with a herd of his own.”

“And if he makes a bundle, what will he do with it?” The question was asked aloud, but Boston wasn't interested in Loman's opinion. He didn't trust any man's judgment but his own. “Dump it into the Cee Bar,” he concluded grimly.

“Trumbo was spreadin' talk about Calder stakin' claim to some land in the Montana Territory,” the foreman inserted.

“Talk.” He showed his contempt for cowboy gossip. “There's nothing up there but Sioux and Cheyenne. It's only been two years since they wiped out Custer and his men. He's just trying to throw us off the track.” That's what Boston would have done in his place, so he could believe nothing else.

“They're talkin' about free grass up there.” Loman knew cattle and cattlemen—and the magic of that phrase.

“And they've got grass right here—and water and cattle,” Boston retorted. “I've waited ten years to get my hands on that water on Calder's ranch. With it, I'll have the whole area sewed up.”

He had directed a lot of behind-the-scenes maneuvering to get Seth Calder in his present desperate situation. Judd Boston had coveted the Cee Bar land since he'd arrived, but he had soon learned that no amount of gold could buy it. Long ago, he had learned to bend with the wind or run with it. He knew when to push and when to bide his time. Patient and inscrutable, he had waited. The Cee Bar was on the verge of collapse. This was the time to push.

“I want you to find out where Benteen is now, how many men he has with him, and what he's doing,” he ordered.

“And the old man?” Loman asked.

“He hasn't got much of an operation left.” A cold, humorless smile lifted the corners of his heavy mouth. “Soon he's not going to have any.”

Loman knew better than to ask what his boss planned. He was in awe of Boston's intelligence and respected the ruthless determination in the man. There was a perverted sense of pride in being associated with the kind of power Boston held. Loman Janes was content to be the brawn to Boston's brains. He knew Boston needed someone as closemouthed and merciless as he was to carry out his plans. In Loman's mind, they were a team. Boston gave the orders and he took them, but they were dependent on one another. The more powerful Boston became, the more powerful Loman became by association.

There were no trails in the brush country of Texas. There wasn't any room for trails. The brush grew in a dense thicket, defying the passage of man or beast and choking to death the prairie grass that had once covered these millions of acres of Texas land.

It was downright unfriendly country, with every plant baring its forbidding set of clawlike thorns and needle-sharp spines. Among the scrubby mesquite trees dominating the landscape grow the palo verde, its green-black thorns more visible than its leaves, and mounds of prickly-pear cactus. There's the catclaw that the Mexicans call “wait-a-minute,” a much more descriptive term, as anyone snared by its thorns would testify.

No one claimed that God had a hand in making this black chaparral. It was said He gave the land to the devil as his playground.

The short-tempered and sharp-tusked javelinas called it home, as did the rattlesnake. No horse and rider ever rode the thickets without the constant company of a rattler whirring its warning. There wouldn't have been any reason to venture into the brush if the cunning and wild Longhorn cattle hadn't hidden themselves in it.

The hardy Longhorn wasn't much to look at; flat-sided, narrow-hipped, with a swayed back and big drooping ears, it was a caricature of a cow. The long, sweeping set of horns that gave the breed its name would normally span four feet but they were rarely
straight. One tip might point down and the other up. They drooped, twisted, and spiraled in unusual convolutions. The Longhorn came in all colors: washed-out earth colors, dull brindles and blues, duns and browns, and drab clay-reds—solid, speckled, or spotted.

Slow to develop, a Longhorn didn't reach its maximum weight of eight hundred to a thousand pounds until it was eight years old or better. But the tall, bony beast could travel for miles, fight off wolves, bears, and panthers, endure the droughts and blizzards, and adapt to the wildest land and roughest climates.

So cowboys penetrated the thorny ramparts of these boundless thickets in search of maverick cattle that belonged to anyone who was man enough to catch them and drive them out. Cowboys fought the vicious brush country, cursed it, and acquired a healthy respect for it.

With Shorty Niles riding beside him, Benteen walked his line-backed dun horse into a sparse section of the chaparral. It was late afternoon, time for one last sashay through the area before they lost the light. Two days before, they'd spotted a couple of cows with yearling calves in this vicinity, but they hadn't been able to put a rope on them. Benteen wanted to make another try for them.

Winter was the best time to search these thickets. The sharp-edged leaves had fallen, enabling a rider to see farther. The weather was cooler, so horses could run longer without becoming wind-broken, and there was less chance of cattle dying from overheating.

Cow hunting in the brush country required clothes and equipment that offered the most resistance to the thorny vegetation. The leather chaps protecting Benteen's legs were smooth and snug, without any ornamentation that could be snagged by a prickly branch.
Tapaderos
hooded the stirrups of his saddle to prevent a limb from poking through to gouge his boot or prod his foot from the stirrup. His jacket fit snugly around his shoulders, ribs, and waist, leaving no loose folds to
be snared by the spiked brush, and his hat was lowcrowned.

Benteen wore leather gloves to protect his hands from the skinning thorns, but Shorty didn't, claiming they choked him. His hands, littered with painful scratches and scars, paid the price.

Being a small man, Shorty always figured he had a lot to prove. He was ready to risk life and limb at the blink of an eye. There were some who wondered how he managed to reach the age of seventeen and still be alive. His short, stocky build had the iron muscles of an older man, and the experience of countless frays was etched in his broad-featured face. Shorty was always the first to volunteer and the last to quit. He was a feisty friend, but Benteen wouldn't have wanted him for an enemy.

Neither man spoke as they slowly walked their horses through the brush. Talking required effort, and energy was saved for the chase. They rode past a coma bush with dirklike thorns. Its winter blossoms of small white flowers scented the air with a cloying fragrance; even that couldn't cover up the stench of the four-foot-long rattlesnake lying in their path, trampled to death two days before. It was a sickening but familiar smell to any man who frequented the thickets, emitted by angry rattlers in their death throes.

The line-backed dun hesitated in its stride and stopped. Benteen was immediately alert to the signals of his brush-wise mount. The dun's nose and pricked ears pointed toward a solid wall of mesquite. As the horse trembled eagerly beneath him, Benteen spotted the almost camouflaged roan cow, and the twisted horns of a second. The animals remained motionless, hunkered down in the brush, until they were certain they'd been seen.

Beside him, Shorty let out a Texas yell, a piercing sound that crossed a Comanche war whoop with a rebel yell. With the nerves released, both riders spurred their
horses at the hidden Longhorns. Nature bred the Longhorns with the agility of a deer, enabling them to bound to their feet in one leap and be in a dead run by the next.

There didn't seem to be any opening in the thicket, but where a cow could go, a horse could follow. It was up to the riders to stay on board the best way they knew how.

Benteen took after the roan cow while Shorty split away after the second Longhorn. They hit the brush at a run and tore a hole through it—a hole that seemed to close up the instant they were through. Branches popped and snapped; thorny limbs raked his leather leggings and tore at his clothes. To avoid being scraped off his horse, Benteen was all over the saddle, dodging and ducking, flattening himself along the dun's neck, then stretching along the opposite side. He used his arms, his legs, his hands, his shoulders, his whole body, to shield his head from the thorny branches trying to gouge out his eyes. Benteen didn't dare close them or he'd lose control and not see the next limb. Like the tawny horse he rode, Benteen was oblivious of everything but the curved horns of the roan cow racing through the brush ahead of them.

It was a brutal, hair-raising race to catch up with the red roan. In this dense growth, there wasn't room for long ropes and wide loops. As the dun gelding closed in on the wild cow, Benteen waited until he had a small opening in the brush the size of a saddle blanket. With a short rope, he reached over and cast his loop up to circle the cow's head, taking advantage of the sparse plant growth close to the ground.

The dun horse bunched and gathered itself to absorb the yank when the cow hit the end of the rope. When the loop tightened around its neck to pull it up short, it let out a bellow of fear and anger. Plunging and fighting at the restraint, the roan cow hooked its horn at the rope, but didn't charge the rider, as some of her breed did.

After an initially lengthy struggle, the cow turned out to be one of the more amenable ones, and grudgingly obeyed the pull of the rope, permitting Benteen to lead her from the thicket. Sometimes the wild cattle had to be left tied to a tree for a few days until they were tender-headed enough to lead. In extreme cases, the eyelids of outlaw cattle were sewed shut so they would blindly follow another animal to avoid treacherous branches.

With the reluctant cow in tow, Benteen turned the dun gelding in the direction of the main camp, where they penned their catch. He didn't wait for Shorty. The young cowboy was on his own. It wasn't uncommon for brush riders not to make it back to camp before night fell, in which case they bedded down wherever they happened to be.

Shorty caught up with him, though, about a mile before Benteen reached camp. Both horse and rider bore the marks of pursuit. There was a gash on the right wither of the bay horse where a horn had slashed through its hide. Like Benteen's mount, the horse's legs were scratched and studded with dislodged thorns. Shorty was sporting a long cut on his cheek, the blood from it starting to dry and cake.

“I had to leave mine back there necked to a tree,” he told him, grinning widely. “I'll go get her in a couple of days.”

Benteen nodded and glanced at the broken pieces of branches sticking out of the fork of Shorty's saddle. “You've got enough wood there to start a small fire.”

“Reckon I do.” Shorty laughed and began pulling it out.

By the time they reached camp, the yellow light of dusk was filtering over the brushland. Jessie Trumbo already had a cook fire going. Steaks from a steer they'd butchered the day before were frying in a skillet. The coffee had already boiled, and the pot was sitting near the warming edge of the coals. When he saw
Benteen leading in the maverick cow, Jessie stuck a branding iron in the fire.

In front of a mesquite-pole pen, Shorty roped the hind legs of the animal. With Benteen at the head and Shorty stretching out the tail, they put the cow on the ground, flankside-up. The glowing iron was curved in the shape of a C. Jessie stamped it three times onto the cow's hide, burning through the hair into the hide just deep enough to leave a permanent scar that read Triple C.

In Jessie's absence, another cowboy named Ely Stanton took over the cooking chores. In a cow camp, everyone pitched in to do whatever tasks needed to be done, without complaint. Counting Benteen, there were five riders working out of the camp. Four more, Andy Young and Woolie Willis and two others, were holding a herd of twelve hundred captured cattle on the prairie. There was a sizable bunch in the pen, enough to be driven out to the herd.

After the cow was branded, Benteen turned it loose in the pen and unsaddled the dun gelding. Before turning it out with the cavvy, he extracted the thorns from its legs and treated cuts that needed attention.

Night was thickening the sky when he finally joined the other riders at the campfire. Bruised and battered from the day's work, he paused wearily to pour a cup of pitch-black coffee, then settled cross-legged on the ground. After three grueling months, it was almost over. He had a good-sized herd of mixed cattle carrying his brand. With the eleven hundred dollars he'd managed to accumulate these last three years from a combination of trail-boss wages and money from the sale of maverick cattle that he'd roped, branded, and driven north with the Ten Bar herds, he'd have enough to buy a remuda, a couple of wagons, and trail supplies. At Dodge City he could sell off some of the prime steers and get enough money to pay the drovers' wages and have a good chunk left to carry him through the first lean years—if he was lucky.

His glance swept the faces of the other men around the fire. “Anybody seen Spanish today?”

The half-breed Mexican cowboy had been absent for three nights, but Spanish had practically been reared in the brush. He knew all its secrets. Of all the riders, Benteen was least concerned by the prolonged absence of Spanish Bill, but he took note of it.