THE FIRST NOVEL CONTINUED

ABOVE THE CAPROCK

A Novel

by Charles F. Price
Copyright 2009
All Rights Reserved

CHAPTER TEN

When Miz Helen and Little Charley told Cant he could go along on the roundup, at first he didn’t know what to say. Having lived all his life in town and knowing nothing of ranching save the talk he’d heard around Dory’s whorehouse, he wasn’t sure what kind of experience it might prove to be. It sounded like it would be dusty and dirty and tiring and likely to give him another sunburn. The one time he’d ventured out of Pharaoh he’d got sun-blistered so bad most of his skin peeled off. And he’d run into that wolfer. He wasn’t sure he was all that well suited to the outdoor life.

Still, he was a nine-year-old boy though by his words and acts folk said he seldom seemed to be, and the prospect of riding a pony and herding cattle and living the life he’d so often heard Billy Casey describe stirred something in him that till now had lain so quiet he hadn’t even known it was there. The stirring seemed to offer him something that would be as wide and bright and free as his time on Mercantile Street had been dark and cramped and ugly. It tempted him to say yes.

But then he took thought of Slater. He felt his natural place was by Slater’s side. He couldn’t reason out exactly why this was so, except that they’d come together by chance because of the wolfer and it didn’t seem right that just because the trouble with the wolfer was over now, they should part so soon. Slater had done a sort of thing for him the like of which no other person in his whole life had ever thought of doing, not even Billy Casey and certainly not Tit Bit who was his own mother. In the world Cant knew, nobody ever did anything for anybody else unless there was a profit to be made.

But then he never let himself forget that Slater, in shooting the wolfer, had been saving his own life too. That wolfer had meant to kill them both. So maybe the shooting hadn’t been so generous a favor after all. He didn’t really believe this—everything in him said it wasn’t that simple—but still, he kept it in the back of his mind anyway because if he’d learned anything it was always to be guarded and ready for betrayal. That lesson was rooted deep in him even if it now seemed somewhat old and no longer of much use. What he actually believed was that Slater had truly gone out of his way to save his life and that he had saved Slater’s in return by staying with him and giving him water while those mules walked them all the way across the wilderness to Miz Logan’s, and that by reason of that unselfish giving and receiving they could be safely trustful of one another.

Trust was a new feeling. It gave him a sense of being secure and of belonging where he was. He’d never known such a feeling and he liked it. He was accountable to Slater, and Slater was accountable to him, and together they were one and not two. At the same time, though, he knew all of it could dart away in a second like a startled mouse. Eventually it would have to. After the roundup and the drive, Slater was going to leave; he’d already said so. Cant knew he meant to leave alone; he had no need of a boy, had no real need of anyone. But the new habit of trust would stay behind, Cant thought. Slater had taught him the habit. What he would have to learn for himself after Slater left was how to decide who was worthy of trust and who wasn’t.

All this was in his head when Miz Logan and Little Charley approached him about going on the roundup, and Cant fell to pondering. In a couple more months Slater would be riding out for good. The two of them might never meet again. A boy in Cant’s situation could learn a good deal in two months’ time from the man he’d come to know Slater to be—a man who’d fought a fierce battle with Indians and scouted for the soldiers and run a horse ranch as well as shot a wolfer—and besides he didn’t want to risk losing any smallest part of the new good feeling of trust Slater’s presence inspired. He asked Miz Logan for a day to make up his mind but from the first was inclined to think he should stay back with Slater.

Almost at once Slater seemed to sense his hesitation and even the reasons for it. By now Cant had observed that for a man so hard and closed-up, Slater was unnaturally tuned to things outside him. Slater could feel Cant’s feelings in the same way Cant had seen him feel the moods of his horses. Cant was sitting on the footbridge over the acequia madre dangling his bare feet in the water when Slater rode up on his spotted horse and got down slow and rickety owing to his hurt and came and squatted next to him and let quite a lot of time pass while they both waited and listened to the burble of the water and watched the dirt-dauber swallows coming and going to sip their drinks out of the canal. Finally Slater said, “Every minute, every day, chances come and go, like those birds yonder. You may not see ‘em, but they’re coming and going the whole time.”

Cant looked at him. “Chances? What chances?”

Slater watched the birds. “Chances to do. To see. To learn something you don’t know.”

Cant thought about the wolfer and gave a wry little smile. “I already learned a whole lot.”

A gleam of humor kindled in Slater’s eye but his expression didn’t change and he didn’t shift his gaze from the busy dirt-daubers. “You did,” he agreed. “But there’s always more. The more you learn, the more there is.”

“I learn from you.”

Slater shrugged. “I’m just one of those birds flying in and out. There’s Miz Helen and Charley and Fly. The Mex and Joe and Willie Pete. There’s others. People and things. Coming and going, all the time.”

“You’re telling me to go on the roundup.”

“It’s one chance flying by.” He paused and let a long silence build between them. Then he said, “I lived two years with flocks of ‘em going past, and I missed every damn one.”

Cant understood he was talking about his family. It occurred to Cant that even in his own short life he had likewise wasted many and many a chance. He thought of all the time he’d spent cleaning the rooms in the Prairie Princess, swamping out the bar, emptying cuspidors or holed up in that dark little space under the stairs, learning nothing but things he wished he hadn’t known. He watched the swallows coming to the water open-mouthed and flying away with mud in their beaks. Then he sighed and nodded and said, “All right.”

“Good,” said Slater. He rose and walked off the footbridge. The rowels and chains of his spurs went chink-chink with every thump of his bootheels on the boards. Little Charley had found one of Mr. Luke’s used-up hats for him, grimy and stained several hues of brown, its lop-eared brim stiffened with wire. The pants and shirt he wore had belonged to Mr. Luke also and were frayed and much-patched as well as too small for him, so that his wrists stuck a long way out of the cuffs and the pants wouldn’t stay stuffed in the boot-tops. Watching after him, Cant guessed he would have looked shoddy and no-account to some people. But to Cant he looked fine.

Slater caught the reins of his spotted horse and swung to the saddle with the small and grudging grunt every motion still squeezed out of his hurt lung, and turned to go. But without even meaning to, without thinking at all, Cant stopped him with a question that all of a sudden seemed of great importance. “Did you ever go to a house in Pharaoh called the Prairie Princess?”

Slater checked the horse and sat with his hands crossed on the horn and furled his brow and thought awhile before he answered. Then he said, “Yes.”

He couldn’t have been to the Prairie Princess in a long time or Cant would’ve remembered him. Still, it would be good to make sure. “You go there a lot?”

Slater considered that one quite a spell. Cant had a suspicion it was a subject he’d rather not address. But in the end he chose to reply, and his voice was flat and hard when he did it. “No.”

Cant took a big swallow of air and let it out slow before he spoke again. “When you went there, did you go with a woman they called Tit Bit?”

Slater examined him from under the bent brim of the old hat. The shadow of the brim hid his eyes but his mouth had turned down at the corners and his jaw had set itself square and Cant couldn’t tell if he was nettled or sorrowful or just tired of talk or what. One more of his uncomfortable stillnesses fell between them, before he finally said, “I don’t remember,” and turned the spotted horse with a flick of his reins and cantered off.



The first of the new chances Slater had promised him offered itself the very next day in the form of the chuck wagon. Cant thought it a marvel—a boxy four-wheeled rig with bentwood bows over it holding up a canvas shroud to ward off rain and sun, and a big water barrel fixed to one side and a tool chest fastened to the other, and best of all, mounted on the back, a big high squared-off cabinet that looked somewhat like Dory’s writing secretary back at the Prairie Princess and even had a flat wooden panel, hinged at the bottom just like Dory’s, that folded down, only the panel of the chuck wagon, when lowered, made a kitchen table instead of a writing surface, and stood one-legged on a pole. Taking down this panel revealed dozens of cubbyholes in the cabinet that held cooking utensils and a coffee pot and coffee grinder and rows of bottles and airtights and miscellaneous jars and containers and other mysterious items, every one of which Cant would have eagerly explored had Miz Logan let him. He watched wide-eyed as she finished stocking the niches and drawers of the cabinet—the chuck box, she named it. There was something new to learn whichever way one looked, just as Slater had said.

The inside of the wagon was full of bedrolls and slickers and guns and ammunition belts that belonged to the cowboys as well as two barrels of axle grease, an extra wagon wheel, a sack of horseshoes and one of nails, a sheaf of branding irons, a number of lanterns and some tin jugs of coal oil. Big lengths of rope lay coiled here and there. Tucked behind the seat were a keg of sourdough for biscuit-making and a little Dutch oven. Slung underneath the running gear was a leather boot Miz Logan called a cooney, where kindling wood and cow and buffalo chips were kept for campfire fuel. Two teams of mules pulled the thing and when it was time to go Miz Logan handled them as easily if she’d spent her life driving stagecoaches. She was going to be the cook of the roundup as well as its boss and Cant was certain she could do both those jobs and the cow-hunting and roping and branding too, if such proved necessary.

That first morning they left Slater sitting on the milking stool by the corral dressing his new reata with saddle soap. He didn’t even glance up to watch them go. For several minutes as the wagon pulled away Cant kept craning back to see him. But soon the sight of Slater dwindled to nothing and then the ranch buildings and corrals sank behind a roll of prairie and it wasn’t long till the sun and the sweet air and the broad grassy plain and the faint line of mountains on the horizon claimed Cant’s whole mind and heart.

Miz Logan had let him ride on the box seat beside her, and cruising along up there gazing out on the prairie lit slantwise by the early sun, he felt like a king viewing his own possession. He drew deep breaths of the crisp cool air and took its bitter smell of dust into his nose and remembered the dank odors of the house on Mercantile Street and knew he would never again want to be closed up between walls, sunburn or no sunburn, not even if twenty more murdering wolfers were waiting to be encountered.

Following behind was the new hand Willie Pete on his tan pony with his bandana pulled up over his nose and mouth to ease his sickly coughing. Willie Pete was herding along the extra saddle horses—the remuda, Little Charley had called them—that the cowboys would need during the roundup as their own mounts tired. Up front rode the one-armed Cotton-Eyed Joe, on a brown horse with a black mane and tail which, true to his boasts, he guided with no more than a gentle nudge of one knee or the other now and then, his reins lying slack while he smoked a cigarette or flailed a coil of rope at the remuda using the hand that remained to him.

Ahead on the flat immensity of the plain a dark spot appeared which slowly grew in size and shape as they approached it, till Cant could tell it was a cluster of large trees. “That’s the camp for the first circle,” Miz Logan told him.

“What’s the first circle?” Cant wanted to know.

“The first gather of the cows. We gather a day’s worth, put ‘em in a pen, rope out the new bull calves for branding and marking and cutting, do the tallying and such, then go on a few miles to the second circle, and so on, right across our range.” It sounded exciting; Cant tried to be his usual noncommittal self but couldn’t keep his heart from throbbing faster.

In the white blaze of a midday sun Little Charley and Fly and the new Mexican hand were waiting at the camp with a mesquite fire already going. When Miz Logan braked the chuck wagon by the fire Cant noticed that Charley and Fly, unlike Willie Pete and Joe and the Mexican, were wearing their pistols. They greeted Miz Logan and Cant with short nods and solemn faces but no words of welcome and Cant felt a slow but certain dimming of the brightness and pleasure of his morning. An apprehension made him look beyond them and he saw now, some distance off at the edge of the grove of tall thick-crowned trees, a big empty cattle pen made of double posts tied with rawhide, the rail-ends butted between the posts; and three men lounging against those rails, men he didn’t recognize; and back of the strangers a rope corral strung between tree trunks, with dark-colored unsaddled horses moving about inside. Miz Logan made a sniffing noise. “Boatwright’s reps,” she said.

She wrapped the reins around the brake handle and stood and dropped down off the wagon and as soon as she was on the ground one of the strangers at the pen pushed away from the rails and started toward her. He came with an easy, rolling, back-leaning gait, his thumbs hooked in his cartridge belt, his hat hanging behind by its bonnet string. He was neither a big man nor a small one but somehow by his walk and his manner he gave a striking impression of compressed power. He had a heavy mop of coiling black hair—as black as Slater’s—but the sun had bleached his mustache reddish-yellow and he was smiling in a way that made the ends of the light-colored mustache turn up and dimples appear in his cheeks so that he seemed full of whimsy and good intent. His dark eyes sparkled. Cant watched him come, and watched too how Little Charley and Fly-Speck moved up in seemingly casual fashion to range themselves on either side of Miz Logan so the three of them made a front against him. Charley was resting the heel of his hand on the butt of his six-shooter.

The smiling man came to a stand ten feet or so away from them and settled himself hipshot and negligent-looking. “Hello, Print,” Miz Logan said to him. “I didn’t think you’d come to do your own stealing. I figured you’d send your riff-raff hirelings.”

So this was the Boatwright everybody talked about. All of a sudden Cant remembered Billy Casey saying he’d been fired the last time by a rancher of that name. The fact added another small weight of badness to what he already knew of the man. He tensed on the wagon seat and watched Boatwright even more closely, surprised and proud that Miz Logan had addressed him impudent and unafraid. Despite what she’d called him and the sharp-edged tone she’d used, Boatwright laughed a large and boisterous laugh, as if he’d enjoyed her remark. “Why, Helen,” he answered lightly, “you know I never dispatch others to do a job of work I wouldn’t do myself.”

Little Charley spoke up at that. “So it must’ve been you murdered that boy Pumpkin.”

The black eyes shifted to Charley and held there. “No, Charley,” Boatwright said, patiently, like he was reminding a softbrain of something obvious, “that was Indians.”

Charley leaned aside and spat and turned back to Boatwright and said, “It was white Indians.”

Boatwright’s smile didn’t fade. He only shook his head as if he thought it unfortunate that Charley was so stubborn about being wrong. He looked back to Miz Logan. “We’re here to hunt cows, aren’t we? Why don’t we get at it?”

Miz Logan gave him a nod and then a sort of smirk. “Long as you remember, Print,” she said. “We’re hunting ‘em, not rustling ‘em.”



Pretty quick the campground was a boil of commotion. Charley and Fly caught up their horses, Charley his yellow one and Fly his gray one, and the Mexican went to his speckled one wearing its heavy saddle with the big horn shaped like an apple, and the three of them swung aboard and the Mexican walked his horse over to the back of the chuck wagon and Cant squirmed around on the seat to peer under the hood and saw him reach down into the wagon bed and grasp up his cartridge belt with its holstered six-shooter and lift it out and buckle it around his middle. Next he reached down again and fetched his saddle gun and hung it from his saddle horn by its lanyard, and flicked his dark eyes to Cant without any expression at all and then wheeled his horse and rode to join the others, who’d gone off a piece and turned again and now sat waiting while Boatwright and his crew ducked into their rope corral and commenced saddling their own animals. Willie Pete cast out his rope-end and stepped down and gave the rope a turn around a tree and strung the line across to another trunk, building his own corral for the Bluff remuda.

“What’s happening?” Cant asked, still on the wagon seat.

Miz Logan leaned on the left front tire-rim. “They’ll be doing a drag all around this first day’s circle, finding the cows wherever they’re hiding, running ‘em out and bringing ‘em here. Then we’ll pen ‘em and start working on the calves.”

Cant looked across to Boatwright and his two riders as they mounted and came cantering out of their corral. The two with Boatwright wore sidearms and had rifles booted under their stirrup fenders. “What about them?”

“It’s supposed to be Boatwright’s job to cut out any of his own stock that’s got mixed in with ours, and if we come across any Spur cows with calves we’ve got to give ‘em over to him, so he can brand and fix the calves.”

Cant frowned down on her. “But you can’t trust him.”

She lifted her pretty face to him and flashed a grin. “No, son, I can’t.” She reached up and laid a hand on his knee. “That’s where you come in. You’re a good watcher, Cant. I want you to watch him and the two with him. You see anything doesn’t look right, you tell me or Charley or Fly.”

“What do I look for?”

Yonder as they talked, Boatwright and his two reps rode to join Charley and Fly and the Mexican where they waited, and Cotton-Eyed Joe slewed in his saddle and opened his saddle pocket one-handed and drew out a pistol and stuck it down the back of his pants and kneed his brown horse and walked it over too, and they all sat talking for a minute, Spur men and Bluff men sitting stiff in their saddles, bad tempers barely held in check, while Willie Pete finished his rope corral and stood to the saddle again and trotted to the remuda and began to drive the twenty extra horses toward the corral.

Miz Logan answered Cant. “Watch the brands on the cows and steers. Ours is a circle with a B inside it. His looks like a spur. You see him cut out anything with a Circle B on it, you come and tell. If he gets hold of a Circle B cow, he’ll find a way to whisk it away somewhere and have his boys blot the brand with a running iron, make it look like a Spur.”

“Sounds hard to do.”

She gave him a dry smile. “Not for fellows with a lot of practice.” Then her mood turned serious again. “There may be some unbranded stock. Slick-ears, we call ‘em, or mavericks. Those are supposed to be evenly divided between the two outfits.” While she spoke, the group of seven riders, Circle B and Spur, ceased their ill-natured conversation and broke apart and with a slapping of quirts and thudding of hooves scattered out at a gallop, each man putting his horse in a different direction. Cant reckoned they were off to make the first gather. Willie Pete, driving the last of the remuda into the Circle B corral, paused to watch them go and looked after them a long time as if he wished he could go too.

Cant dropped his gaze back to Miz Logan, scowling. “What about the calves? How do we keep them from being stole?”

“When the branding starts, whoever’s branding for us’ll watch to see they’re marked right,” she said. “If Boatwright or any of his people are branding, you’ll watch.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Cant nodded, trying hard to remember it all. Then a fresh worry came. “Out on the range, though…”

She’d left her hand resting on his knee and now she squeezed it and her blue-green eyes turned somber. “That’s Charley, and Fly and Joe and the Mexican,” she said. She hesitated and her lips tightened and she took her hand away and gazed off into the distance, along the line Little Charley had ridden; Charley could still be seen out there, a small dark figure on the level plain, getting smaller and smaller all the time. “If there’s trouble,” she said, “and it comes to shooting—if you hear more than one or two shots, anything sounds like an exchange—you climb in the wagon right quick and get under the seat. Don’t you come out till it’s quiet again.”

THE FIRST NOVEL CONTINUED - FINALLY

NOTE: Sorry for the delay in posting the last three weeks; I've been in Colorado researching a new novel. Here's the latest installment:

ABOVE THE CAPROCK
A Novel
by Charles F. Price

Copyright 2009

All Rights Reserved

CHAPTER NINE

They were late starting the spring roundup that year - it was already the middle of August so it would be nearer to a fall hunt, with a drive at the end of it that would risk the bad weather that always plagued the Yarner when the seasons started changing. But Helen Logan had little choice. She must get the new calves marked and the threes and up to market but Boatwright’s pestering had left her with nobody to chouse the beeves out of the barrancas but Little Charley and Fly-Speck, and it was a sorry truth that even with all her toughness and determination Helen herself could never be anything approaching a top hand. And while Charley and Fly were as good men as ever forked a bronc, no two riders however reckless and worthy were going to be enough of a crew to gather near a thousand head, tally and brand the increase and drive a mixed herd seventy-five miles over the Yarner to the South Fork Agency.

It also had to be admitted that seeing to Cant and tending the wounded Slater had consumed a good deal of everybody’s time, and that covering up the Stringfield mess had been a serious distraction, not to mention implicating them all in a possible criminal act. Thinking back on that as she made the rounds in Pharaoh and Standish and the Bar W and the Bootjack trying to recruit new hands, Helen still wasn’t sure why she’d felt obliged to put herself and Charley and Fly crosswise of Cal Richardson by covering up a sure case of killing.

Partly it must have been the boy. Him more than Slater. She’d lived in this country long enough to know Slater’s kind when she saw it. But something bound Slater and Cant, and since she liked and trusted Cant, she couldn’t help also trusting whatever instinct had moved him to trust and care for Slater. And though Slater hardly ever spoke, it was clear he held Cant close. She suspected that in some way each had acted for the other in the trouble with the wolfer, and that was what bound them.

Finally, there was the odd feeling inside her, that rose like a flash-flooding river whenever she looked into Slater’s eyes, which were as flat and gray as his name. She knew about his woman and child, and what he’d done to avenge them, and what all that had cost him. He’d lost more than just his family. He’d lost a big part of himself. He was hurt worse in that way than he’d been hurt in the body. She couldn’t help feeling that, and feeling it made her want to believe in him even if he was a stranger and maybe a murderer too.

But Cant was a boy and Slater, though starting to mend, was hardly able to walk around, and neither of them was going to be much if any help on a cow hunt. She’d come back with only three new hands – an old Mexican vaquero called Patricio Vargas; a one-armed Texan who implausibly insisted his name was Cotton-Eyed Joe and maintained he could rein a horse and swing a rope and fire a pistol all at the same time in despite being shy one wing; and a pale and skinny lad with a rattling cough Helen surmised was a sign of consumption, who wanted to be known only as Willie Pete. If any of the three had ever heard of Print Boatwright or Spur Ranch they showed no sign of it, so she felt bound to tell them of the brewing feud and was impressed when none so much as turned a hair. In fact she thought the Mexican’s darkling eye might’ve flared with a certain brigandly relish. It wasn’t the biggest or fanciest corrida she’d ever seen, but it would have sand.

Custom dictated that Boatwright would send some reps to the roundup to cut out any Spur stock that might have strayed into the Bluff herd over the winter. Charley and Fly and the others would be keeping a close eye on those fellows, who Helen thought would try to make off with some of the eighty or so longhorns left over from the first range herd Luke had trailed up from the mesquitales eight years before. Over time Luke had bred up with shorthorn bulls, Herefords and Durhams, and now the Circle B mostly ran a good grade of whiteface, with those few old South Texas ladinos mixed in. She thought Boatwright’s reps would be going after the shorthorns too, as many as could be snatched without arousing suspicion. But they’d need to be careful. Already Print had shown a conspicuous increase in better breeds in a herd that had started out all scrub range stock.

Still, with others of Print’s bunch hanging around the edges of the Circle B looking for chances to make more mischief, she was going to need somebody to watch the ranch grounds while the roundup and the drive left the place unguarded. Slater might not be entirely whole; but then, Helen reflected, even when he’d been more than halfway dead, it seemed he’d managed to shoot the wolfer—she didn’t think Cant could’ve done that—so she figured he ought to be up to this job, as a way of paying what he owed for his care and keep.

When she and Charley put it to him he was sitting on the milking stool by the corral plaiting a reata out of four strands of moistened rawhide. His convalescence had shrunk him—molding the sharp edges in the bones of his wrists and face and raising the twisty sinews of his hands so they resembled piggin string—but there was no hint of frailty in the reduction. It was as if the wasting had somehow leached him down to the very hardest core of himself. Yet she knew he could not be as strong as he looked—he’d been hurt too badly for that. The illusion unsettled her, though. He tipped his head back and laid those pale eyes on her, and said, “I don’t know, if I was you, whether I’d put a trust like that into my hands.”

So seldom had he ever spoken she was momentarily startled to hear him utter so many words at once. Then their import struck her and she stared back at him in disbelief. “Whatever do you mean, Mr. Slater? Why, you’ve been a scout for the army and fought Indians, hurt them bad this last time. Seems to me you’re just the man.” She hesitated, frowning. “Is it because you’re wounded?”

She was really asking if his nerve was hurt now as well as his body and she could see he understood that. He dropped his attention again to his braiding, and after a noticeable period of time he answered, “No, ma’am. I’m fine that way.” He twisted a few more strands of wet rawhide while she and Charley waited to learn whether he meant to say more. It was as if he’d said so much at first that he now felt the need of a compensating silence. Finally, just as Little Charley lost patience with him and swore and turned to go, Slater chose again to speak.

“I know I’m in your debt,” he told Helen without looking at her. He gave a slow and serious nod of his head. “I want to make that debt good, and I will.” Another silence fell but it did not last as long as the first two. “But I don’t know as I’d want to discharge it in the way you ask. I’ve still got those good horses. I’ll keep the paint and give you the other four in payment…”

Helen examined him with a doubtful squint. “What makes you reluctant, Mr. Slater?”

His lips went flat and he lifted his narrow shoulders in a shrug. “I can’t say. I just don’t figure I’m your man.”

Helen thought she knew. She thought it was because of what had happened to his woman and his girl. It had been his duty to keep something like that from happening and he had failed in his duty. He did not want to assume another similar duty lest he fail in that as well. It was the way a man such as he had to think. Luke had thought that way. Had thought that by accidentally shooting himself in the leg and dying of it, he’d failed her. She felt a pang when she considered the burden duty was for a man in this hard country.

At this point Little Charley suddenly stepped in. “Let me tell you a story,” he said to Slater, hunkering next to him. “Print Boatwright came into this country from somewheres down in the Brasada, Live Oak County, I think, seven or eight years after Mr. Luke registered the Circle B. He had himself a little herd of cimarrones, wild as hyenas, horns out to here”—Little Charley stretched his hands as wide as they would go to indicate the spread of a brush-country longhorn. “He registered Spur for his brand—two X’s crossed on top of each other, which I guess he figured looked like a Spanish rowel—and settled east of here, on the high Yarner, where it’s bone-dry and the grass scant and poorly. All the good graze was already spoke for.”

The Yarner, Charley explained, was like an enormous shallow inverted dome whose western side inclined toward the Big Warrior and Bluff Ranch and its good water and whose eastern side sloped the other way into the Buffalo River Basin and Standish and the good water over there. Boatwright, at Spur, was in need of better range. Slater listened without comment, steadily plaiting his reata; it was evident he knew the lay of the Yarner as well as Charley did, if not better.

“Other than us out here at Bluff,” Charley continued, “there’s but two pieces of range in the whole of the Yarner that gives good grass and year-round water both, John Wilson’s Bar W up by the Wagon Wheels and Wes Yeager’s Bootjack on the east slope of the Basin. They’re running mostly whitefaces, like us. I reckon you know them two, they’re tough as whang leather, and they’ve got their manes up against Boatwright for bringing the Mexican tick onto the range, that’s killing off their stock.

“They didn’t favor Mr. Luke either, when he brought in that first bunch of yellowbacks that carried the tick. But he sold off his range bulls and separated the she-stuff and commenced breeding with blooded bulls, grading up, and keeping back just a few of the Texas stock, sentimental-like, you know, letting ‘em live out their time, grazing them apart from the rest. He was an old brush-popper, and loved to look at those skinny ugly-tempered old sons of bitches.

“Now I won’t claim I ain’t throwed a long rope in my time, nor that Mr. Luke didn’t make up his own herds in the early days with some pretty slick mavericking. Hell, Wilson and Yeager come up the same damned way. But times has changed, you know. Nowadays a man can’t make his raise by rustling and keep the name of being square. But Boatwright, he’s just a goddamn rustler; it’s in his damned low nature to steal stock.

“He commenced with Wilson and Yeager, then when Mr. Luke settled at Bluff, he started in on us too. Nothing big at first, just a few beeves here and there. Come roundup time, everybody’s tally but his would fall a little short. It caused some squabbling, not enough to lead to gunplay; besides, we’d all done it, and he was just starting out, and we were willing to give him some leeway. Still, he had to be easy about it on account of running mostly longhorns and if he showed too many whitefaces all at once, and if our tallies went too far down, there’d be trouble. But Print didn’t push none of us all that hard—no man of us that is—not till there was a poor widow-woman down here holding nine hundred-some head on two thousand acres of free grass and clean underground water.

“Now, since Mr. Luke passed, Boatwright’s herd has started showing more and more whitefaces. He says he’s buying ‘em. From who, he don’t say. He ain’t buying ‘em from anybody on the Yarner, I can tell you that. This year’s hunt’ll tell us how we’ve fared since then, but I’m betting he’s stole us down pretty bad. These last weeks, not content with rustling, he’s set his mind on grabbing the whole damn Circle B for himself. There ain’t a month gone by the bastard ain’t come at Miz Helen one way or the other, offering money, wheedling at her, making veiled threats. Even offered to marry her, if you can believe that, and him already married to Cal Richardson’s sister.”

He told how strange riders had been glimpsed from time to time on the outer edges of the Circle B. He’d trailed one bunch that he lost in a rainstorm who, by their sign, had rustled twenty or twenty-five head of Bluff steers. Then Bluff started losing hands. Some of them Boatwright had hired off, some he’d scared off, some had just disappeared and one, a likeable red-headed kid they’d called Pumpkin, rode out one morning to gather some strays over by the Single Rock, near the western boundary of Spur, and when he didn’t come back for supper Charley went looking for him and found him down in an arroyo shot to death.

“He was scalped, poor devil, and Cal Richardson, of course, he laid it on the Kioways.” Charley shook his head. “But Kioways never killed that boy. That was way before this last bust-out. Print Boatwright’s done murder.”

While Charley was talking, Cant had come out of the house and crossed to them to settle on his rump in the dirt on Slater’s other side. The boy closely watched Slater’s face while Charley told the rest of his story. Slater worked impassively at his braiding. Then when Charley was done, another of those stillnesses fell which raised doubts whether Slater had actually heard what was said, or had heard but thought Charley’s tale unworthy of comment, or had perhaps forgotten that Helen and Charley and Cant were even there. He sat on his stool with all his attention bent on the making of his lass rope.

Cant said nothing. He sat in the dust rattling some pebbles back and forth between his cupped hands but not looking at the pebbles even once, looking instead at Slater long and steady and with what Helen thought was an air of patient confidence. Slater darted one glance sidelong at the boy. Their eyes met and held for an instant, then Slater looked back to his work and the boy continued to juggle his pebbles to and fro. Another minute passed—an actual minute, sixty seconds that Little Charley later said he’d counted in his head, before Slater finally spoke. “I’ll watch your ground for you,” he said, “till you’re done with the roundup and the drive. Then I’ll be moving on.”

A NOTE ABOUT THE NOVEL

The technical advisor for Above the Caprock, when I wrote it in 2005, was Ms. Debbie Davis, past president and now registrar of the Cattleman's Texas Longhorn Registry in Gonzales, TX. Without Ms. Davis's generous help, the material in the book about the management of Texas cattle in the 1880's--which will begin to appear in the next chapter--would have been poorer indeed. Please consult the CTLR website (http://www.ctlr.org/) for information about her group's important efforts to conserve the old-time longhorn. Ms. Davis was kind enough to read my entire manuscript for accuracy, and while I'm indebted to her for advice on all things related to the working of cattle on the open range, I absolve her of any mistakes I have made in using what she told me.

THE FIRST NOVEL - CONTINUED

NOTE: I'll be in writerly retreat for the next couple of weekends, so I thought I'd post two chapters today instead of one, just in case somebody out there needs his or her Westerns fix weekly.

ABOVE THE CAPROCK

A Novel

by Charles F. Price

Copyright 2009 All Rights Reserved

CHAPTER SEVEN

All his life Cant had heard talk about ladies but as far as he knew he’d never seen one, not till now anyway. Ladies were a big topic of conversation with Tit Bit and the girls and with the men who came to the house and with Dory and Crawdad; and in the unified opinion of all of them, ladies were creatures whose many terrible faults far outweighed their one useful function of childbearing.

But now that he’d met Miz Logan, who he supposed must be a lady because in so many ways she was completely unlike Tit Bit and the other females in the Prairie Princess, he was confused. Miz Logan didn’t seem feather-headed or cold-pussied or to have a wire stuck up her ass or to think her shit smelled like roses, or to have any of the other disagreeable traits he’d heard mentioned of ladies, except maybe she was a little bossy, a complaint commonly voiced by the men who visited the house.

She sure bossed the two cowboys. He’d learned that while lying half-conscious by the canal, and later riding in the cart next to the hurt man—heard her giving orders like a general. After the little one rode off looking for the wolfer, she’d barked at the pock-marked one pretty sharp, telling him to take the wolfer’s cart and the mules on up into the mountains. It seemed the wolfer had lived up there when he wasn’t out wolfing, and Miz Logan wanted his outfit put back where it belonged, so if anybody came looking for him they wouldn’t find any sign of him about Bluff Ranch but back at his own place instead. Then it would just be a mystery why he’d vanished off his own ground. But even when she was bossing the cowboys, it seemed to Cant that Miz Logan’s bossing came from knowing best what to do, and not from bossing for the pure hell of it, which was what so annoyed the men who used to come to the house on Mercantile Street. He just thought it meant Miz Logan was smart and could make up her mind in a hurry.

Cant had also heard that ladies liked to pamper themselves and wore fancy dresses and bonnets and took baths all the time and kept themselves extra neat and clean and couldn’t stand dirt or untidiness, and that above all they divided the whole world into two kinds of people, those who were worth something and those who weren’t. Of course by that way of thinking, everybody on Mercantile Street was worthless. But Miz Logan didn’t look like she pampered herself nor did she behave as if she had any such high notions about place. She wore a frazzle-brimmed straw sombrero and a man’s pullover work shirt and a pair of corduroy britches both of which were about three sizes too big and held together with a pair of galluses hitched up tight. She had on lace-up shoes that were yellow with dust and carried a pistol on her hip that had a gutta-percha handle. She wasn’t nasty but neither did she look as if she bathed all that often, and there was grit and straw chaff in her yellow hair, and her fingernails were grimy and the palms of her hands were callused like a man’s.

The only persons Miz Logan seemed to think of as worthless were the wolfer and somebody called Boatwright, whose name Cant had heard her say a time or two as if it were a swear-word, and which he dimly remembered hearing somewhere before. That was in addition to the real cussing she frequently did. From this he deduced she judged folk one at a time and not in bunches as ladies were said to do; and the cussing was just more of the same kind of proof. She took Cant as he was and she took the hurt man the same way, laid him on a cot in a shed by the corral and nursed him for no better reason than that he needed nursing. He might have been anybody, it didn’t matter to Miz Logan.

She wasn’t squeamish either. When Cant first woke up clear from his faint he found himself lying under a quilt and a piece of cowhide on a plank-framed bed in a room with plastered walls and one shuttered window that made the room dark and pleasantly cool. The dry grass in the bed tick rustled when he moved and the rawhide webwork under the tick felt springy under him. After a while he revived enough to climb off the bed. He put his bare feet on the packed dirt of the floor and went limping out through a bigger room where there was an iron range in one corner and a trestle table and a bench in the middle and two windows with the shutters open, and then he’d stepped out through the front door into a sunlit yard. He’d seen her then, down at the shed by the corral standing with her back to him, the man stretched on the cot in front of her. Beside her stood a bucket brimming with sudsy water.

Cant had walked gingerly on his raw soles across to the shed and because he still felt wobbly and light of head sat down on the lowest pole of the corral to watch. He watched as she stripped the man naked and washed him all over with a sponge and cleaned out the hole in him and covered it with a poultice of fresh cow manure, all of it so quick and expert and businesslike he might’ve been a baby or a sick colt or calf or anything except a full-grown man with his secret part showing. Hell, she even washed that, and it might as well have been his feet as far as she was concerned.

Cant reckoned no lady would ever have done that. The act somewhat resembled what Tit Bit and the girls did with men on occasion in the house on Mercantile Street, although there were important differences. That accounted for his confusion. Miz Logan could do things like that and could cuss like Tit Bit and the girls and maybe wasn’t any neater than they were; but in most ways she was no more like Tit Bit and the girls than a flower growing in a jar was like a piss-pot.

When she’d got done with the man she’d turned and got hold of Cant and pulled him into the shed and stripped him too and washed him all over the same way she’d done the man, even including Cant’s own secret part. He enjoyed that a good bit but it didn’t seem to mean a thing to Miz Logan, who afterward dried him with a rough towel and gave him a man’s shirt to wear which nearly swallowed him up and then took him back to the adobe house and sat him down on the bench at the table in the front room and cooked and fed him a big plate of fried eggs and steak which in his hunger he gobbled down so fast he nearly choked.

All this had happened before dark on the same day she found him drinking out of the canal. That night he slept again on the bed in the cool room of the adobe house, smelling of the lye soap she’d scrubbed him with. Before going to sleep he wondered who the hurt man was. In his mind he kept seeing the man, lying half-dead in the cart, pointing his pistol at the back of the wolfer’s head, and the top of the wolfer’s head lifting away like a wig plucked off by a prankster jerking on an invisible string.

Miz Logan seemed to guess that something like that had happened to the wolfer but she didn’t seem to hold it against the man, or against Cant either. In fact she seemed determined to keep it a secret that the wolfer was dead. Why else would she have sent the pock-marked one up to the wolfer’s place with the cart and the mules? Or sent the little one out to bury the corpse? Cant’s mind was in a muddle trying to make sense of all that had happened to him since the marshal shot Billy Casey and he and Prince Albert left Pharaoh on the run. He was trying to figure all that out when he fell asleep.



Something wakened him in the middle of the night. He bolted straight up in bed with a yelp. His heart was pounding and he was bathed in sweat but couldn’t recall a thing about what had startled him. Presently Miz Logan came in carrying a lighted lamp and sat on a stool by the bed and told him he was safe and not to fret. Of course he denied having done any fretting at all. He’d just had some dream, was all. She was wearing a nightgown with pleats down the front. They sat together for awhile not speaking, then she asked, “What’s your name, son?”

As much as Miz Logan interested him, he’d learned not to trust too quickly and since the death of Billy Casey he was of a mind not to trust anyone at all, so he lay for a time with his mouth clamped shut determined not to tell her anything if she didn’t tell him something of equal value back. When he’d made that decision, he looked squarely at her and demanded, “What’s yours?”

“Helen,” she answered at once, giving him an easy smile.

He nodded, satisfied, and gave her exactly as good as he’d gotten, saying, “Cant.”

“That’s a name I never heard,” she remarked. “Is it a nickname?”

He scowled. “Is yourn?”

“No,” she laughed. She had a low and husky laugh that he liked in spite of himself. “Helen’s just Helen,” she went on, “and it’s a name you hear.” She shrugged. “Cant isn’t.”

He considered this and reckoned she’d made a fair statement. “I was called Acanthus,” he explained. “Only nobody can say that. They say Cant instead.”

“I see. Do you have a mother and daddy, Cant?”

He glared at her. “Do you?”

“I have a daddy,” she said, “back in Missouri.” Her usually stern face softened a little then, and he noticed she had a light scatter of ginger-colored freckles over the bridge of her nose that could only be noticed by lamplight. She added, “My mother died a long time ago.”

Cant wasn’t just sure how things were balancing out. He’d got more in that last swap than he’d counted on, and wondered if he owed her more in return. He chewed his blistered lip and lay thinking, and finally announced, “Well, I didn’t have no daddy.” He sulled up, remembering Tit Bit and how badly she’d treated him. “A woman had me,” he admitted, not looking at Miz Logan, glancing off to the side, “but she wasn’t no mother.” There was a moment of stillness but Miz Logan, when he looked back at her, seemed at ease with it when he did not. That impressed him. But as if to make up for having been impressed, he thought she’d got the better of him in that last exchange and set out to win back some points. “Where’s your man?” he inquired with deliberate rudeness.

“My man’s dead.”

Now Cant felt a little off his stride. It wasn’t that he cared about her husband dying, any more than he cared about Dory or Tarrant or Billy Casey dying. It was just that he felt her answer had cost him a point or two, and wasn’t sure how to proceed. “How come him to die?” he asked.

“A rattler coiled up under his horse one day and he went to shoot it and the horse jumped sideways and he shot himself in the leg instead. He got blood poisoning. His leg went bad and I tried to cut it off to save him—me, and Little Charley and Fly Speck, and a cowhand we had then, name of Pumpkin, using a butcher knife and a dehorning saw. But he died anyway. He told me how sorry he was. He told me he’d been a fool. He told me he’d wanted to show me how quick and sure he could shoot. He told me he was showing off so I’d think the more of him, and now he was going to die and leave me alone in a dangerous world. He said he’d go to Hell for being such a fool.”

Cant was full of awe to have such a story come at him all at once. “What…what’d you say?” he stammered.

“I told him I loved him,” she replied in a matter-of-fact way. “I told him not to worry, that I’d manage. I told him he’d go to Heaven.”

There wasn’t any way Cant could restore the balance of the conversation. Everything had tipped over to her side. He could only lie in the bed staring at her blue-green eyes and at the freckles on her nose and at her tangle of yellow hair and feel himself filling up with some feeling he couldn’t name but which threatened to choke off his wind. Don’t trust her, he told himself. Don’t trust nobody. But even if he couldn’t trust her, he knew he owed her an answer—an answer that couldn’t ever be the equal of what she’d just told him. So he said, “There was a man wanted to be my daddy, but he got killed. I don’t even know if there’s a Hell or a Heaven either one, for him to go to.”

Miz Helen Logan cocked her head to one side. “Was he a good man?”

“He was right good to me,” said Cant. “Better’n anybody else.”

“Then I’m betting he went to Heaven,” she said. She sounded confident about it. She let some more time pass and Cant lay thinking how peaceful he felt even though it wasn’t possible to trust her or any other person in the whole world. Outside in the dark he heard the hoot of an owl and the faraway yodeling of coyotes. He couldn’t remember feeling so easy. After a long time she finally broke the silence with her husky voice. “Do you want to tell me about what happened to the wolfer?”

He actually considered telling her. But then he knew he couldn’t, and said no, and she nodded and rose and left the room and took the light with her.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Slater’s circle of light got smaller and smaller till it was only a pinpoint faintly glowing like a campfire on a distant ridge in the black of a night without moon or stars. But this darkness was not the darkness of night but the darkness of his approaching death. The tiny gleam was all that was left of his living. There came a moment when he wanted to sink into a deep sleep—an immense weariness had crept over him—but somehow he knew that if he allowed himself to take that sleep he would never wake, that it would be the end of him, so he resisted the torpor that dragged him down and by force of will he fought up out of it in a silent and motionless but nonetheless intense struggle, keeping the little point of light always before him, and after a time—how long a time he did not know—the tiny gleam began slowly to brighten and enlarge, and the darkness to recede, and he understood that he would live after all.

Still, it happened quite gradually, this expansion of light and life, and he could only wait while bit by bit it revealed itself to him. At first the field of his awareness was very narrow; there was only the hard cot under him and the grainy mud-brown pattern of adobe bricks in the walls of the shed on either side of him and the vertical planks of the door in front with slivers of sun showing through the spaces between them. When the door was left open, which it mostly was, it framed a rectangular picture, a dusty stretch of ground with chickens pecking at it, the edge of an adobe house, the cornerposts of a pole corral.

A clutter of ranching gear lay piled about him—rusting rounds of barbed wire, pairs of old horse hobbles, branding irons, a wagon jack, an old wooden saddle tree with a big dinnerplate Mexican horn. Hanging from pegs driven in the walls was an assortment of half-rotted headstalls and bosals, rusty bits and bit-chains, frayed hackamores, ruptured cinches, old reatas and broken reins of plaited grass and rawhide. In the corners were a double-bitted ax, some different kinds of saws and clippers, a collection of hammers, a keg of nails, a spade, a pickax. All this gave him his first conscious thought since coming back from dying, that he’d been tossed in the storage shed with the rest of the broken and worn-out truck, and that he belonged there.

Coming back to life also entailed a goodly share of pain but, because he had often been seriously hurt before, he knew well enough how to abide it and did so with his usual stolidity. The weakness was harder to bear. For far too many days he could not feed himself or void himself without assistance, the woman spooning out his fare and one of the help handling the other business, none of them complaining or making a fuss but Slater burning with shame through it all. Worse than anything he hated being helpless, and because he knew only too well what kind of world he had let himself come back to, he dreaded the weakness that made it impossible for him to defend himself. His next most vexing complaint was the shortness of his breath, caused by the nick in his lung. Every time he inhaled, it was like a new stab wound. Owing to the weakness and the short wind, his mood was bad much of the time. But the woman and the cowhands bore it pretty well.

The boy would come and sit. He was looking better now but he still had eyes that were like the eyes of a dog that has been beaten once too often and didn't plan on being beaten any more. He didn’t say much, save to ask Slater sometimes how he felt. Slater did not reply to that because it was his custom never to respond to questions whose answers were self-evident, and the boy didn’t seem to mind. The one thing he did confide, and that Slater heard with close interest, was how the woman and the cowboys of the ranch had covered up the business of the wolfer and his outfit. Other than this, and unnecessarily asking how Slater felt, the boy would just sit silent and the time would pass and there was a wordless communication between them that made Slater feel composed, and then finally the boy would rise and nod and go away, and after he was gone Slater would miss him.

The woman tended his hurt. That made him uneasy. He wouldn’t let himself look at her. There was his own woman to call to mind, and the girl, and what had happened to them because of him going after whores when he should have stayed at home and done a man’s part. But this woman, whatever she was, whatever she might look like, struck him as a good deal out of the ordinary. She’d helped them, the boy had said. Hid the wolfer’s outfit. Sent that Little Charley to find the wolfer and bury him. Why? He was intrigued. He couldn’t see a reason why decent folk would want to take such a chance with a perfect stranger that most would have named a murderer.

He sensed a toughness in her with a gentleness inside it. She had rough hands and he thought well of that. She didn’t act as if she belonged to either one of the cowboys, though Slater could see that Little Charley fancied her. In fact she didn’t seem to be the sort of woman that would belong to anybody. She appeared to run the outfit. But he wished she’d let one of the men tend his hurt. There were times when he wished nobody would tend him. He’d get to feeling so low about his own woman and the girl that he’d start berating himself for having struggled his way back to life. He’d start thinking maybe it would have been better if he’d just let that circle of light fade out, if he’d just allowed himself to go on and die.

One day the woman—Miz Logan, she was called—came in to feed him and that was the first time she ever addressed him. She asked him his name. All this while she had never asked anything about him and, because he generally regarded reticence as the most valuable of qualities, he’d thought this a positive sign; but even so, even after she’d waited so long to ask, even after she’d helped him and the boy in the business of the wolfer, he still didn’t want to tell her his name. It wasn’t just because he approved of reticence, it was because of everything his name now meant, to himself and, probably, to others. He waited a considerable spell while she went on patiently ladling hot beans into his mouth. Then, slowly chewing, looking up at the planks in the roof of the shed and not at her, he told her.

“Why,” she gasped, “you mean you’re the Slater from up beyond No Name Creek? Mister, you’re supposed to be dead. Everybody thinks the Indians got you.” He felt her staring at him but wouldn’t turn his eyes down to meet her gaze. “Army patrol from Fort Mansfield found your horse dead up on the Pretty Medicine,” she was saying, “cartridge hulls everywhere, blood on the ground; they figured you’d crawled off and died, but couldn’t find your corpse.” I’m a sensation, Slater thought bleakly.

He heard the milking stool creak under her as she sat back in amazement. “Well, I declare!” she cried. “Do you know, those Kiowas slunk back to South Fork Agency with their tails between their legs, claiming you set on ‘em for no reason, and them just out hunting on account of the government rations going short. ‘Course everybody knows they’re lying. Everybody knows what they did at your place…” She paused then, but not long, and Slater was glad of that; it showed she wasn’t sentimental either.

“Everybody knows what you did, too,” she went on brightly. “Even the Kiowas told it, said the Hook-Nose that used to scout for Mackenzie lit into ‘em and made a big fight. They said you were a strong warrior even though you had no cause to do what you did. Said they wounded you and left you for dead.” She gave a little velvety laugh. “Government’s going to try some of ‘em. Likely they’ll want you to testify.”

He said nothing to that or to anything else she told him. He’d done what he set out to do with those reds and he wasn’t going to do any more. He sure as hell wasn’t going to swear in any goddamn courtroom to put any Kioway behind bars, Crazy Horse or not. What the Kioway already had was bad enough. Whatever they’d done to the woman and the girl and to him, they’d done because it was in their nature to do. And he’d done the same back. They’d had a fair exchange of each other. Blood had got blood. It was over now. And none of it, none of it, had made one whit of a difference to his woman or to the girl or to what they had suffered.

Miz Logan went on and tried to ask him about the boy and about the wolfer and about what had happened down toward the Bitter Water and of course he wouldn’t say a thing, even if she had helped them, even if she was maybe risking a breach of the law by helping them, but his silence didn’t seem to annoy her at all. He was grateful for what she’d done and would’ve liked to say so, would’ve even liked to tell her the truth about the wolfer, but he knew it was best to let nothing at all pass his lips—the less she and Little Charley and Fly-Speck knew, the better off they’d be if—no, when—Sheriff Cal Richardson came sniffing around.

Even in this wild country a killed man would sooner or later be missed and Cal would have to look into the matter. Cal was a dangerous man and disposed to rash actions. Slater needed to be careful not to do or say anything that would set Miz Logan and Charley and Fly-Speck in Cal’s sights. Especially Miz Logan. He still hadn’t looked at her yet and didn’t know for sure, but he thought in addition to possessing the important trait of reticence and lacking the pernicious flaw of sentimentality, she had a fine spirit and sound judgment, knowing when to stop prying and not minding it. He thought maybe she was all right. She deserved to be kept safe. But then he told himself he couldn’t be the one to do that. Once maybe, but not any more. Not after what he’d let happen to his own.


In another few days, Cal Richardson rode in just as Slater had known he would. The door to Slater’s shed was open and he was feeling well enough to sit upright on his cot with a sack of oats in the small of his back for a pillow and his six-shooter in his lap underneath the Saltillo Miz Logan had washed for him, when he saw the Sheriff canter past on his little grulla mustang that looked comically too small for him and step down by the cornerpost of the corral.

Fly-Speck was out on the range but Little Charley was in the smithy shoeing his horse and Slater heard him hail the Sheriff and saw Charley come up with his bowlegged gait to meet Richardson in the piece of yard framed by the doorway of the shed, directly opposite. They shook hands with an appearance of cordiality. Slater watched them as they talked. He thought Charley looked persuasively unconcerned.

Next he heard the door of the house swing open on its leather hinges and whack the outer wall, and in another moment Miz Logan stepped up to join Cal and Charley. He had not looked at her close till this very minute and from this distance he still couldn’t tell much, other than that she had yellow hair and light eyes and sun-bronzed skin and bore herself with a combination of grace and determination. She was wearing a straw sombrero and a pair of man’s britches held up with a knotted rope and one of her husband’s bib-front shirts. A little straight-handled Bulldog pistol hung on her hip. She pitched right into the conversation, confident and manlike. Slater took hold of his six-shooter under the Saltillo and kept on watching with his steadiest look.

Especially he watched Richardson. Cal’s jurisdiction was the eighteen thousand square miles of Surratt County, excepting the towns of Pharaoh and Standish. He was responsible to maybe nine hundred voters, less than half of whom had ever bothered to cast a ballot, and those three or four hundred were too scared of him ever to vote against him, nor had any candidate but one ever stood to oppose him and that one had died of a case of dry-gulching.

He was a big, rumpled, coarse, thick-shouldered man, deceptively docile-looking. As he and Miz Logan and Charley spoke, he stood casually, head down, drawing the romal of his reins through one hand over and over, occasionally nodding. They talked for maybe ten minutes. Then at last, when Slater could see the conversation had at last come around to him, Cal swiveled his big head toward the shed and set his regard on him and Slater felt the weight of it like a big stone suddenly laid against him.

Unhurrying, Richardson dallied his romal on his saddle horn and tethered the grulla to a corral post with his mecate and wheeled heavily and started across the dusty yard toward the shed, the spurs at the heels of his high-topped boots rattling with every step. Behind him Miz Logan and Little Charley waited as still as painted figures. The boy appeared around the side of the house and came to stand by Miz Logan, looking on intently with those eyes of a dog that has been beaten once too often. Cal gave his cartridge belt a hitch as he stooped to enter the shed. He seemed to fill up the small space as much as a horse would have done. He had brown eyes with flecks of yellow in them. He smelled of sweat and of the dust of his ride.

“I never liked you, Slater,” he said right off, using his growl. “Old army scouts don’t cover a white chip with me. They’ve never done a day’s honest work and like as not they leave the service and go bad when they see they’re supposed to earn their keep. Ever since you settled on No Name Creek, I’ve held you under suspicion of being a rustler.”

Slater kept still. There had never been any good reason for this suspicion but Richardson nursed it anyway. Slater thought it was simply because he’d never bothered to defer to Cal, and because he’d kept to himself up there in his canyon and tended to his business, which was to supply horses to Grant Shirley’s little dougherty line that used to run from Standish and Fort Mansfield over to Pharaoh and back. Grant’s line had folded last year and since then Slater had been getting by the best he could, cutting timber in the Crosscuts and Wagon Wheels, selling firewood, doing a little light freighting with his pair of mules and his spring wagon, trading horses.

Not getting any comment, Richardson bristled some, but then seemed to decide a change of topic was in order. “You was commonly thought to be scalped and dead up in the Blancas. I was surprised to hear you wasn’t.” He tipped his head westward. “Folk down below are all giving you the name of a hero for taking on them savages like you done.” He stopped to chew one end of his mustache, then offered with a grudging air, “I’ll say this, I’m sorry for what was depredated on your people.” But then, Cal being who he was and no possible other, he went right back to his starting point. “Still, I hold to the opinion you’ve been rustling.”

Slater reckoned that deserved an answer after all. He took a slow breath that sent its bolt of pain through him, and said in the whisper that was all he could manage, “If that’s so, then tell me where my stock is.”

“Why, you drive it over to the agency and sell it,” Richardson replied, as if nothing in the world could be any simpler or more obvious. Then he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and this motion seemed to signify a change of mood too. “But I’ve got something else on my mind,” he said, “other than your rustling and your surprise resurrection from a Kioway killing. Murder’s suspected.”

Slater drew another of those breaths, giving himself air enough to tell Richardson what deaths mattered and what didn’t. “Who’s murdered, aside from my woman and my girl?”

It jarred Cal a little, so much so that he broke his gaze away for a time. “A load of wolf pelts is overdue to Lou Rathbone, that runs the hide yard in Pharaoh,” he explained, scanning the contents of the shed without seeing them. “Over a month ago a man name of Stringfield, a wolfer that supplies Rathbone, come across a Mex charcoal-burner on the caprock and sent Lou word by this greaser that he’d be fetching down a load of pelts in a week’s time. He ain’t showed. He’s fallen afoul of something, I expect.”

Slater said nothing, and after an empty wait Richardson continued. “Maybe them Kioway breakouts got him. Likely that’s it. But I’m going about the country asking after him anyway, and halfway looking for a body. The road to the wolfer’s chosa runs right by this here spread. I’ve just talked to Miz Logan and Little Charley and they say they ain’t seen him. But they also say they found you and a boy looking like you’d come from down towards the Bitter Water. They say the boy don’t speak—can’t, I guess. So I’m asking you. Did you see any sign of this wolfer?”

Slater might have been in a bad way lying in the back of that cart down there toward the Bitter Water but he surely hadn’t forgotten the wolfer, any more than he’d forgotten blowing the old bastard’s head off. He fetched another of those fierce breaths and squeezed out his answer. “I don’t know nothing about any wolfer.”

Richardson assumed a reflective look. “My general belief is, a man that’ll steal cows will also kill. But no, I don’t reckon you’ve done for the wolfer. Miz Helen and Little Charley, they speak for you, and their word’s good with me. I’m asking you on account of it’s my job to ask. But if you know what’s good for you, when you get well from this Kioway hole in you, I’d advise you to give up your rustling ways. My eye will be upon you.” He leveled on Slater that selfsame eye in a fashion meant to be ominous.

One final time Slater took the breath he needed. “A man’s got to answer for his words, Cal.”

Richardson frowned and darkened. “That wouldn’t be a threat against the life of the sheriff of Surratt County, would it?”

Before Slater could find another sip of wind to confirm that it sure as hell was, Little Charley spoke up from the doorway and turned the temper of the moment. “By God, Cal, here you are abusing this fellow who just had his family massacred, calling him a rustler, questioning him for a murderer. You want to find a thief and a killer, why don’t you ride over to the Spur and have a talk with Print Boatwright and that crew of cutthroats he calls a cow crowd?”

Richardson swung to Charley and when he did Slater saw that the boy had come to the door too, and was standing to one side watching Richardson the way Slater had seen him watch the wolfer. “Print’s never done nothing wrong I know of,” Cal protested.

Charley sneered. “I reckon not. Not even after Miz Helen and me has been down to Pharaoh and tried to file charges on him.”

“You had no proof.”

“We had none you’d credit,” Charley shot back. “Hell, Print’s got your pecker in his pocket.” Charley was unafraid, even of Cal Richardson. Slater admired his grit but wondered if he hadn’t pushed Cal too far, with Cal already riled from Slater balking him. Under the Saltillo he tightened his hold on the pistol.

But Cal only shrugged and shook his head like a person sadly misunderstood and let the slur pass. It was as if he’d run up against so much righteous indignation this day that even he couldn’t find a good way around it. With a final scowl first at Charley and then back at Slater, he stepped out of the shed and crossed to his horse, tipped his hat to Miz Logan, fetched the mustang and rode. The boy watched him go and then walked out into the yard and watched him some more, till he was all the way out of sight.

THE FIRST NOVEL - CONTINUED

ABOVE THE CAPROCK

A Novel

by Charles F. Price

Copyright 2009 All Rights Reserved

CHAPTER SIX

The ranch Helen Logan’s husband had started four years before he shot himself in the leg trying to kill a rattlesnake and died of blood poisoning stood at a place where the Big Warrior River broke through the caprock on its way down from the Conquistadores. Runty bluffs of slate-gray stone stood on either side of this break and Luke Logan had called his spread Bluff Ranch because the river bluffs were just about the only feature of that country a man was likely to notice first off. Despite its name, at the best of times the river itself was little more than a narrow rill milky with gypsum and in summertime, like now, even that skimpy thread of wet dried up and left a bed of simmering pebbles and shale. Above the caprock the vacant expanse of the Spanish Yarner ran off eastward into infinity; below it was nothing but the long brushy plain going down toward Pharaoh and the valley of the Bitter Water.

Helen had thought it the most desolate spot on the face of the earth when she first came out from Missouri to see where Luke had set them up. But he showed her how this part of the Yarner for all its monotony grew a fine coat of short grass that had once sustained the buffalo and now was perfect fare for cows. He showed her that if the river was a miserable little trickle, there was abundant moisture under the ground springing up here and there in cienegas and tanks and feeding the mud-walled cistern he’d built and the acequias he’d dug that would keep them in water year-round.

He taught her how to see the stark beauty in the peaks of the Conquistadores looming high to the south and in the round crowns of the Wagon Wheel Hills on the north and, back of them, in the faraway snowy outline of the Piedras Blancas. He showed her how even the boundless sky with its masses of cloud could be a great and ever-changing spectacle if she only took the trouble to look. In the time since, she had come to love the place and the great wide land roundabout just as much as Luke had. She had kept on loving it even after Luke died and took most of her heart with him. Her love for the Circle B was why she would never let Print Boatwright lay hold of it.

That was why it was Helen, and not one of the two cowhands who still worked for her, who found the boy and the wounded man. Print Boatwright was making more and more trouble of late, and she had taken to arming herself and riding her own lines whenever Little Charley and Fly-Speck couldn’t do it, and that morning those two were replacing some poles one of Fly-Speck’s horses had kicked out of the corral the night before because of a skunk getting in and spooking it. Helen was on her way to the bluffs to patrol her western boundary when to her surprise she came across Ab Stringfield’s wolfing outfit pulled up next to the acequia madre.

Ab’s two mules and a small boy in grimy and shredded clothes and five horses all in a row had their faces down in the canal greedily drinking, and behind them lying on a pile of wolf pelts in the bed of the cart under a greasy Saltillo was a man with his head resting on a double-rigged stock saddle who looked to be either drunk or dead or fast asleep or hurt plenty bad. One of the horses, a deep bay gelding, had red and yellow handprints on its haunches; there was a pinto with feathers braided into its mane, and a chestnut whose tail had been clubbed and feathered. All five were roped together with enough length between them so they could line up along the canal. Old Stringfield himself was nowhere to be seen. Twenty paces away, Helen checked her pony, waited a moment to take in the improbable sight, then shouted, “Hey!”

The animals, intent on slaking their thirst, ignored her. But the boy’s startled face came up out of the canal with the cunning and alertness, and fierceness too, of something wild. She could see that a part of him wanted to bolt but, small as he was, another part of him wanted to defy her too. It was like watching a coiled snake, and that made her think of what had happened to Luke, and she couldn’t help feeling a chill. Still, he was only a child. “Where’s Stringfield?” she demanded.

The boy wiped his mouth with the back of a dirty hand. His eyes didn’t move. He let a deal of time pass. Then he said in the flattest tone she’d ever heard, “Who’s that?”

His coiled-snake manner unsettled her. She had to make an effort to keep her own voice stern. “The old man that owns this outfit. The wolfer.”

The boy rubbed his bottom with one hand but that was the only motion he made for maybe ten seconds. Then he turned his head, put a finger to one side of his nose and blew snot out of it. He did the same with the other nostril. After that, he faced her again and repeated with the same flatness, “Don’t know.”

Her temper rose. She did not approve of impudent children, even one giving off the menace of a rattler. She pointed her quirt toward the man in the cart. “Who’s that?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know.”

“How’d you get here?”

This time her question crackled with impatience and the boy finally stirred and looked down at his bare feet, which she saw with a stab of sympathy were crusted with old dried blood. “Mules brought us,” he murmured, scratching his elbows. So he was a child after all.

Helen nodded. That meant Stringfield was injured or maybe dead. When he wasn’t roaming the plains murdering wolves he lived in a rock chosa several miles up in the Conquistadore foothills; coming and going, he’d use the road by Bluff Ranch. His mules, if something had happened to Ab, would have headed home on their own account. Helen wouldn’t mind if it turned out old Ab had perished amid his barbaric pursuits. She’d never felt right having the old brute so close by. But if he was lying helpless somewhere out there in the wild, she supposed something must be done about it. Then there was the one in the cart.

She rode closer and stepped down off her pony, left him ground-hitched and crossed the little wooden footbridge over the canal. The boy watched her. Coming off the footbridge she noticed, nearer him now, that the boy’s eyes were hazel-colored and when he turned them to the light they went as green as the woodland moss she remembered from her Missouri girlhood.

The smell that rose from the cart was not of whiskey but of what had happened to Luke’s leg near the end. Leaning into the smell she forced herself to reach down and touch the man’s sweat-beaded brow with the back of her hand. It was like touching a stovelid that was almost ready for the skillet. Next she saw the cocked revolver next to him and gingerly picked it up by the barrel and turned it in both hands and let the hammer down and put it back. Then she used two fingers to lift the Saltillo away from him and when she did the smell came up even worse and as soon as she saw what was under the blanket she dropped the blanket and stepped away and turned to the boy and said, “I’m going to shoot now, to make a signal.”

The boy nodded but his expression did not change. When she drew her English Bulldog and fired the three shots into the air, he did not even blink, nor did the mules flinch, though the five horses jerked back from the canal and tried to get clear, forgetting they were tied one to the other with the lead one tied to the cart, so that they only strung themselves out, each to the end of its own length of rope. They pitched and jiggled in their crooked line, rolling their eyes, water from the canal dripping from their muzzles. They’d had a bad time. She wondered again about the war-paint and the feathers.

She looked once more into the moss-green eyes. “Did the Indians get the wolfer?”

“Don’t know,” the boy said, using his standard answer only this time not defiantly but with a deep weariness. Even under his fresh raw sunburn he suddenly turned pale. Then his eye-whites showed and his legs buckled and he sagged down in a faint. She knelt in time to catch him as he fell, and in her arms he was all slightness and sharp bone-ends, as if he were something stuffed with feathers and hard sticks. She laid him gently by the canal.


Little Charley and Fly-Speck, hearing her shots and reckoning she’d tangled with some of the Spur crowd, had left the corral on the jump. Charley, who was more than a little in love with her, was always fretting she was going to get hurt riding the lines alone with things the way they were. He came pelting up hatless, in his sweaty undershirt, bareback and on his little tiger dun, carrying his Henry rifle, his pistol buckled around him, ready for a scrimmage. Fly-Speck, though he’d waited to get saddled, wasn’t more than twenty yards behind him and in much the same state of dread and excitement. She could read the relief in both their faces, Little Charley’s especially, when instead of Long Lon Wentworth or Cipriano Casas or some other of Print Boatwright’s worst ladrones they found only a small boy swooning on the ground by the canal and a hurt man lying in Ab Stringfield’s wolfing cart and the five strange horses.

Helen explained what little she knew of the situation while the two sat their blowing horses. Charlie gave a brisk nod; he was always the quicker. “I’ll get myself outfitted and backtrack this rig.” He flicked a glance westward along the road. “I can see from here, them mules came up through the caprock by the bluffs.” He nodded. “Old Ab’s out there somewheres, ‘tween here and the Bitter Water. I’ll locate him.”

“Best take a spade,” Fly Speck dryly advised.

“I know what the hell to take,” Charley growled. “You just look out for Miz Logan while I’m gone.”

“You be careful, Charley,” Helen told him.

“You be careful, ma’am,” Charley said, laying a hard denim-colored eye on her. “Take my advice, stay close to the house. Let the lines go. And keep Fly Speck by you.”

She grinned up at him and gave back his own retort, “I know what the hell to do.” They both laughed with their easy familiarity and Charley wheeled the dun with his hackamore rope and went hammering back.

Fly Speck wrapped his romal around the saddle horn and got down and used his mecate to tether the claybank to the railing of the footbridge, then he and Helen together lifted the boy and laid him on the wolf pelts in the cart next to the wounded man, and then Fly reached in and took the man’s six-shooter from between the two and stuck it in his waistband for safety. All this time Helen had held her breath against the smell but now Fly drew back blowing air out his nose. “Whew,” he said. It was clear he figured the man for a goner.

Even so, he went to his horse and brought back his canteen and cupped a hand behind the man’s head where it lay against the saddle and raised it and poured a stream of water over the blistered face covered with frosty beard and into the cracked mouth. When the water got into his gullet the man choked and made a strangling sound but then swallowed and groaned and in another moment fell quiet. Fly Speck stood back and gazed in wonderment. “Guess the buzzards’ll have to wait a spell yet,” he said.

Helen bade him tie her pony to the tailgate of the cart and clambered in and picked up the knotted reins and unfastened them. The leather was black and greasy in her hands and she thought of old Ab Stringfield and his poisons and had to fend off a small wave of disgust. She wished she’d thought to put on her gloves, which were folded in her saddle pockets. Too late now, she thought. Anyway, she ought to be past all that. Since Luke died she’d had to put away everything that wanted to make her weaken or falter. What was a little filth, a little strychnine, to a woman who’d had to try to cut off her own husband’s rotten leg?

She shook the reins and spoke to the mules and reluctantly they turned their heads away from the canal and commenced their weary plod. The cart rumbled on the boards of the larger bridge over the acequia madre. Behind, Fly Speck picked up the lead rope of the five horses and the little cavalcade took the ranch road; and it was only then that Helen asked herself what she was doing and why she was doing it. But no kind of answer came.


Little Charley rode in near sundown of the second day. “I found old Stringfield all right,” he reported, standing in the yard covered with alkali dust, holding his high-crowned Puebla hat before him, “about twenty miles out, down towards Pharaoh, by a dry wash. But the wolves had been at him and had got into his strychnine and there was ten or twelve of ‘em dead around him, and his own dog too, dead of poisoning—how that happened I can’t figure.”

She could tell he hadn’t liked what he’d seen and understood it wasn’t because of any business about the dog or about wolves tearing up Stringfield’s body, which she knew looked to Charley, as it looked to her, like no more than simple justice. But rather than ask straight-out, she decided to wait and see what Charley would volunteer.

“Ab”, Charley went on, square-jawed and hunch-shouldered, always his demeanor when forced to give unpleasant news, “Ab was…well, he was right much of a mess and I couldn’t tell much. I buried him the best I could. Wolves had trampled the sign so I couldn’t make nothing out, ‘cepting there’d been horses picketed in the wash.” He stopped and drew a breath. “Five horses, looked like. That, and the cart-tracks coming out, that led thisaway.”

Helen glared, vexed to have to prod him. “You said you couldn’t tell much. What could you tell?”

“Well, Miz Logan,” Charley said, looking down at his hat which he kept turning in his hands by the brim, “I could tell somebody shot Ab in the back on the head with a big-caliber pistol.”

THE FIRST NOVEL - CONTINUED

ABOVE THE CAPROCK

A Novel

by Charles F. Price
Copyright 2009
All Rights Reserved

Photograph by the Author

CHAPTER FIVE

Slater had heard some of what the old one and the boy had said. Now the old one was drunk. Being drunk would help the old one do what he wanted to do but was unwilling to do sober. Slater watched him as if through a long tunnel. At the far end of the tunnel was a dime-sized circle of hazy light. All around the bright circle was darkness and for some time now the circle had been getting smaller and the darkness bigger and Slater knew that when the circle winked out he would be dead. As best he could, he kept the old one in the middle of the dwindling circle of light. But he could only turn his head a few inches to one side or the other. Much of the time, then, the old one was out of his line of vision. During those times he watched the boy.

In the lit circle the old one came up out of the draw leading the mules. He led them past the tailgate of the cart and out of the circle to the right-hand side. From behind his head Slater heard the rattle of trace chains and the old one cursing and he knew the old one was hitching up the team. The old one was tired of waiting and because he was drunk he had decided not to wait any longer. He was preparing to do it and then move on and come back later to fetch the wolves he’d get with the baited carcasses. Slater wondered if he would actually do it to the boy. He saw the old one come back into the bright circle, walking heavy-footed from drink, and go down into the draw and after awhile emerge again leading Slater’s horses roped over the necks with a good deal of slack between, some with a length of Slater’s own mecate rope and some with braided rawhide, just as the Kioway had tied them.

He brought the horses to the tailgate and made fast the lead horse there. He did not look at Slater. As soon as he had seen the old one coming Slater had closed his hand over the butt of the Colt and rested his forefinger on the trigger. But just now the old one made no move against him. He still wasn’t quite ready. Slater smelled the bad odor of the old one and of the whiskey he had drunk but he also smelled the good smell of the horses. It was fine to have that horse smell just now. He breathed it in and this stabbed him through with pain but he did not mind. A man could do worse than die having the smell of good horses in his nose. The lead horse was the paint. Domino, Slater said without speech. You are a steady horse, Domino. You are all right. You with the smooth rack and the sweet mouth good for the flash reining. Domino poked his head over the tailgate and nibbled at the toe of Slater’s left boot.

In the lit circle the old one turned away and went wobbly-legged to the lip of the draw. Here, where there was shade from one of the jack oaks, he slowly sat down. His head bobbed on his neck. He took off his hat and rubbed at his hair. Presently he tipped over sideways and lay huddled there in the shade. He had fallen asleep. Asleep from drink in the act of doing murder.

Slater moved the circle of light back to the boy. The boy had been watching everything with sharp attention. Now that the old one was sleeping, he was watching the dog. All this time the dog had been watching the boy too. It was as if the two had something between them. Something that was not good. But once the old one fell asleep the dog seemed to lose interest in the boy. It got up and trotted past the sleeping old one and down into the draw. Slater heard it whining.

Now the boy watched the old one. Slater could see the boy wanted to do something that he’d had to wait to do. Slater wanted to speak to the boy but knew he could not. He could only watch while the circle of light got ever smaller. Finally the boy got up and stood a little longer watching the old one where he lay. When he was satisfied the old one would not soon waken, he walked past him very quickly but very carefully on his bare feet and descended into the wash and soon returned carrying a metal-lidded wooden bucket. The lid of the bucket had a dent in it. The dog was following him eagerly, its eyes intent on the bucket. Its tail was wagging. It had forgotten whatever was between it and the boy. It wanted what was in the bucket.

The boy carried the bucket past the cart, the dog keeping anxiously to his side. He set the bucket down in the lee of a bed of paddle-cactus, just at the edge of Slater’s circle of light. Slater strained to move the circle farther over. It moved only a fraction of an inch but that was enough. In its narrowing light he saw the boy kneel and remove the dented lid and turn the bucket on its side. Several little greasy yellowish balls rolled out of it. Instantly the dog pounced and began to gobble up the balls. The boy sat next to the cactus looking on while the dog fed. He seemed satisfied. Then he looked across at Slater and held his look but Slater could not read his expression. It occurred to Slater that he was not a normal boy. Slater thought something more was happening than was evident. But he did not think he would live to learn what this was. His circle of light was shrinking more and more.

The dog ate its fill and then turned and loped off licking its chops and went to where the old one slept and made two turns and lay down beside him. Now the boy quit looking at Slater and sat watching the dog, and the dog watched back at the boy, and the feeling returned of something between them. But then a piece of time dropped out of Slater’s world and when time resumed, everything had changed. The dog was screaming and rolling over and over in convulsions, its head and spine arching violently backward, and the old one was coming up out of the draw stumbling and falling and getting up again, bareheaded and wild-eyed, hollering. At the edge of all this commotion sat the boy as still and composed as a stone.

Through his narrowing circle of light Slater saw the dog cease its struggling and drop and lie stiff-legged, its mouth wide with a soundless cry. The old one reached it and gazed down uncomprehending. Then the boy said something and the old one shouted and turned and ran to the cart, shouldering past Domino where he stood tied to the tailgate. He didn’t seem to remember that Slater was lying there. He reached into the cart and got hold of his sack of skinning knives lying by Slater’s head and pulled out one of the knives and Slater saw his eyes and knew what he meant to do. The old one was turning back toward the boy with the knife in his hand when Slater raised the Colt with all his strength. He aimed it down the dimming tunnel of his life and the Colt pounded back in his hand and Domino reared away from the burst of smoke and noise and the top of the old one’s head came off and he pitched forward out of the circle of light and another piece of time slipped out of the world and it was dark.

PERMISSIONS

A couple of readers of this blog have e-mailed me asking if I'll give them permission to print off the novel chapters for easier reading. The answer is Yes, to them and to anyone else who may be following the posts. I'm posting the novel in hopes it will find readers, and if printing it out is easier on the eyes than reading it on the computer screen, feel free. I'm glad someone out there is enjoying the story. And leave a comment if you care to. It'll help me know how many of you are out there.