Border war, p.1
Border War, page 1
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Chapter One
THE MAN HAD kept his position for almost fifteen minutes without moving anything but his eyes—the steady controlled pulsing of his blood, the beat of his heart was all. Sweat eased silently from his pores and ran down both sides of his young face; ran down the smooth, handsome left cheek and collected on the sharp and clean line of his shaven chin; ran into the deep runnels of the double-tracked scar that marred the opposite side and collected there between the raised and reddened puckers of dead skin.
He was squatting on his heels, body keenly balanced, straight from the waist up. His hands rested on his knees and were as bereft of movement as everything else.
The back of his neck was partly shaded by some forty-two feet of towering saguaro cactus. Near the uppermost part of the cactus, a Gila woodpecker worked its beak through the tough fiber, widening out the hole that had been started by a gilded flicker and that would eventually give access to the woodpecker’s nest.
The bird was intent upon its task, just as the man was intent upon his: neither paid the slightest attention to the other.
The sun climbed slowly higher in a wilderness of blue sky.
A bead of sweat hung for a second from the tip of the young man’s nose before falling onto the dry, hot sand between his feet.
He did not move.
Neither did he move when some ten minutes later there was a small and quick scuffle amongst a pile of red rock thirty feet to his left, and an orange and yellow roadrunner emerged with the cordlike tail of a collared lizard protruding from its mouth.
A smile fleetingly crossed the man’s face. He knew that the rapier bill of the strange bird was lethal; he could picture the sudden, sharp thrust with which it had killed the startled lizard. He imagined the sideways movements of the mouth that had slammed the prey against the red rock, breaking its bones to make ingestion easier.
He understood the bird’s prowess as a killer and smiled for it.
Its long tail angled up into the air, the roadrunner knew nothing about the man save that he was something to steer clear of, something that might seek to steal his food. A garbled cooing note escaped from the bird’s throat and he was out of sight as suddenly as he had appeared.
The man allowed his eyes to sweep the arc of land in front of him. A downward fall of shrub that was broken here and there by tubular cholla and flat-stemmed prickly pear, by small trees like the paloverde and the ocotillo. The stalks of the latter were topped by bright red flowers, and the man knew this was a sign of a recent, rare fall of rain.
He knew much about the desert. He was able to survive there better than most other men. Almost as well as the Indians. Almost as well as his father. Only now his father was dead and he was alone: alone in the desert.
The smile returned: not alone.
He was not alone.
Almost one hundred miles due south from where the young man watched and waited, another man, a Mexican of an age to be his father, rode into a peon village in the foothills of the Serranías del Burro.
Jesus was in fact the father of some seventeen children, all of them growing up in various conditions of poverty and various places above and below the Rio Grande. He had never, to his knowledge, set eyes on any of these children and he would have been surprised if any of them would have known him had he done so. It was certainly less than likely that he had sired a gringo of some nineteen years.
Not that Jesus Martinez had saved his favors for women of his own race. He did not even restrict himself to women. But it was reasonable to assume that any son of his loins would have taken something of his stature, his color, his bearing, and made those features a part of himself
The young man north in the desert was slender and lean, tall and supple; his skin was clear, his eyes blue; his hair was light brown. Jesus Martinez weighed considerably in excess of two hundred pounds; he was no more than five foot seven in height; his hair was black, eyes dark brown; his skin always looked as though it was deeply sunburned and in need of a shave, even when neither of those things were true.
Neither man knew of the other’s existence: nor, at that particular moment in time, was there any reason that they should.
Martinez pulled a shade jerkily on the sorrel’s reins and moved it towards the stone well around which most of the houses were gathered. A woman, heavily pregnant, was hauling a bucket of water to the surface and she looked over her shoulder at the sound of the newcomer.
When she saw the man’s face, her hands let go of the rope and it ran fast between her palms, burning them. The bucket struck the surface of the water with a loud, echoing splash, which dissolved into Jesus Martinez’s laugh.
The laugh was deep and swelled up from the belly, rumbling out across the tightly-packed dirt of the square.
The woman glanced at her hands, feeling the sharp sting of the pain. She looked quickly at the man once more, turned her back on him and ran as fast as her clumsy body would permit off towards the shelter of the nearest adobe.
Martinez climbed down from the saddle and let the reins trail in the dust. He caught hold of the rope and pulled the bucket back to the surface of the well, rested it on the low stone wall and lifted the slightly warm water up to his face, splashing it vigorously. When he had cleared much of the trail dirt and sweat, he drank deeply. One more swallow and he lowered the bucket back into the well.
He was wearing a grubby white shirt that flapped loosely about his considerable body. He wore white cotton trousers with fraying bottoms and a wide-brimmed, high-peaked sombrero that was held underneath his chin with a length of cord. His pants were held fast with white rope, but below the rope belt was another of soft leather, a greased holster looped over the left-hand side. Sitting easily inside the holster was a .44 caliber Remington Army revolver that Martinez had taken from a Texas cattleman by the simple means of sliding it from his waistband at the same time as he slit his throat with an open razor. He had no idea where the cattleman had got it from.
He was pleased with the Remington; he treated it as well as he did his horse, which meant better than the men who rode with him, better than the men he rode against, far better than the women who were his quick and occasional lovers. When he had first owned the gun he had kept a count of the number of times he had aimed it at a moving target and scored a hit—but soon he became bored and the count was lost. Jack rabbits, white-tailed deer, men—what did they matter?
It was something he did and did well.
Things Jesus Martinez failed to do well he did not do. If they were important he paid someone else to do them for him. Otherwise they were left alone.
Now he glanced up at the sun and gauged the time from its position in the sky. They were already more than one hour late. Martinez’s teeth ground together. He hoped that nothing had gone wrong, nothing that had made their ride across the border more difficult than usual.
He decided to walk over to the cantina and wait.
The young man’s name was Ford. William John Ford Kilpatrick. Everyone called him Ford. He had been brought up in Virginia until the age of ten, but he’d learned the beginnings of his own strength and speed as a boy in Missouri; for the past five years he had been a Texan. His father owned a spread over to the east of the desert, ten miles north of Carrizo Springs. There along the higher reaches of the Nueces, Matthew Kilpatrick ran some ten thousand head of prime longhorns. Matthew had a dozen hands working for him, a cook and a handy man to keep things running at the ranch house, two sons and a daughter.
The second son was James. Two years younger than Ford, he lacked the elder brother’s ability with guns and horses, his prowess with a rope, his understanding of the wild. He was sandy-haired, light-skinned; he wanted to go back East to college and maybe study law, but his father didn’t see it that way. So James hung around the ranch, trying not to see the look of scorn that came into other men’s eyes. He worked at his father’s accounts, did the paperwork when cattle were sold or shipped or slaughtered. The rest of the time he read some battered leather-bound copies of English novels his late mother had bought in Virginia and that had been crated up and freighted from Missouri by mistake. His mother had stayed behind, and from time-to-time James thought about the plain stone cross that marked her grave.
Charlotte had been born between the two boys. For most of her growing-up a tomboy who would and could outrun the pair of them, and whose temper in a fight knew no bounds, she had changed on her sixteenth birthday into a sudden beauty. She was tall for a girl, two inches short of six foot; her limbs were strong but well-shaped and slender; her breasts small and high. She had fair hair that hung well past her shoulders, green eyes either side of a nose that freckled slightly in the heat of the sun.
Since her mother’s death she had more or less run the house, making sure that the cook worked as hard as anyone else in the place. She had persuaded her father to have new furniture made for the ranch, had traveled with a couple of the hands to San Antonio, even to Houston for rugs and material from which she had made curtains. China and glass had been sent by freight wagon from New Orleans. As the ranch went from success to success, so Charlotte made sure that a proportion of that gain was put over for her use.
Matthew Kilpatrick was proud of his daughter, proud of the beautiful home she had made for him. When h e had an excuse for inviting other folks to dinner—ranchers, cattle buyers, politicians—his face would glow when he saw their eyes widen in appreciation of what was his.
He was proud of his eldest son, too. He admired Ford for his spirit and his temper; admired him for his wildness and his tenacity. There were even times when he was almost a little frightened of Ford.
Matthew Kilpatrick was not a man who scared easily. If he saw cause to be afraid of his son, then likely his instincts were sound.
Jerry Jeff Harper was afraid of Ford as well, and maybe he had better cause. Jerry Jeff had been sitting out on the porch of the Lone Star Hotel in Crystal City when Charlotte Kilpatrick came in on the wagon for supplies. She drove the rig herself, the cook coming along for company and to help the storekeeper load the flour and coffee and such onto the wagon.
Jerry Jeff, he looked at Charlotte’s long legs tight in her riding britches and high leather boots and started thinking about her the way a man gets to doing when there’s been a long drought. He admired the sway of her long blonde hair as she stepped across the boardwalk opposite and shook his head with disbelief.
He’d been there in Crystal City the best part of a week and he’d never seen a woman half as desirable as this one—and that included each of the half-dozen up at the whorehouse and the few part-timers who earned a little extra something round back of the hotel on a Saturday night.
Jerry Jeff was torn between going inside for another drink or waiting where he was till she came out. In the end his thirst got the better of him and he had a beer with a whiskey chaser and asked the man back of the bar who in God’s name had just ridden into town.
He wandered back out again, cradling his whiskey glass in his hand and saying Charlotte’s name over and over to himself. As soon as he saw her coming out of the store he swallowed the rest of the liquor fast and went right across to offer a hand with the loading.
Charlotte smoothed her hair clear of her face with one hand and looked him over fast, seeing him for what he was—a good-looking, two-bit cowboy with a deal of cheap charm and about as much sense as his horse.
She told him she had all the help she needed and thanked him with a frosty politeness that would have warned most men off.
Unfortunately, Jerry Jeff didn’t have that much sensitivity.
He even thought Charlotte was teasing him, playing hard to get.
‘Hey, now, honey!’ he said, stepping close in front of her. ‘You know there’s things I could do for you you ain’t even thought of yet.’
Charlotte kept her feet planted where they were, arched back a little from the hips, gave Jerry Jeff a hard stare of contempt and brought up her right knee hard between his legs.
Jerry Jeff stumbled back off the boardwalk, clutching at his groin and moaning, eyes watering like he was crying real tears.
He shook his head and grunted a couple of times, pushed back the brim of his Stetson and pointed a finger at Charlotte’s face.
‘You ornery bitch! I’m gonna—’
Wrong again, Jerry Jeff. He wasn’t about to do anything. Charlotte was pointing at him, only it wasn’t with her finger. She’d pulled a little four-barrel Remington-Elliott derringer from inside her shirt and now it was aimed at Jerry Jeff’s chest in a manner that suggested if he said one more word out of place he’d get a .32 rim-fire slug close to his heart.
It wasn’t the kind of broken heart Jerry Jeff had in mind.
Charlotte spoke in her most ladylike tones: ‘Why don’t you get the fuck out of here, cowboy, before I blow your balls off?’
Jerry Jeff couldn’t think of a good reply. Glancing up and down the street at the small crowd of onlookers that had gathered, he gave his balls a rub, thankful that they were still there, however painfully, touched his hat and turned away. As he was walking slowly and bowleggedly back to the Lone Star, Charlotte figured that his touching his hat brim like that was about the best thing the cowboy had managed that day—maybe he had a little style in him somewhere; maybe she had acted a mite hasty.
But it was too late to do anything about it now.
Inside fifteen minutes the wagon was loaded and she was on her way out of town, while Jerry Jeff was inside the bar getting drunk.
A couple of hours later, he grabbed hold of the barkeep and hauled him close, knocking several glasses to the ground with a crash and a clatter. He kept his arm tight round the bartender’s neck while he told him in graphic detail what he would do to the high and mighty Ms. Charlotte whatever-her-name-was if he ever met her again.
Soon after that he collapsed.
Come dawn, he picked himself up from amongst the sawdust and the tobacco juice and the occasional trace of vomit and wandered outside to the horse trough. After ducking his head a half-dozen times, he collected his bronc and saddle from the livery stable and said goodbye to Crystal City and any further thought of Charlotte Kilpatrick for good.
So he thought.
Two days later, Ford was riding through town and he stopped off at the Lone Star for a drink. The bartender, who was a friend of his, took Ford on one side and repeated what Jerry Jeff had said he would do to Ford’s sister.
Some minutes before the lengthy description was over, Ford had vowed he would track down Jerry Jeff and kill him. Which is why Ford was out in the desert west of the Nueces, patient and still: he was about to avenge his sister’s honor.
Jesus Martinez was not interested in affairs of honor. In fact, he never thought about women in terms of honor at all. Had he ever seen Charlotte, he would probably have thought about her in ways similar to those which had come to Jerry Jeff in his anger and shame at being treated the way he had in front of others.
What Martinez was interested in most was money. Any kind of money. American, Mexican, bills, coins, gold, silver. Cattle as money. Furs as money. If there had been money in rabbit turds he would have had his men out scouring the land with sacks on their backs.
As it was he had them raiding over the border.
In the old days, they had cut out small batches of stray cattle and skinned them there and then, using the hides to make tallow for burning. Later, beef had been worth more than tallow, so they had rustled the whole animal. Now that Texas was becoming increasingly prosperous, Jesus Martinez was becoming increasingly prosperous along with it.
He stole cattle, horses, gold, dollar bills, jewelry, whatever he could take. He and his men raided isolated ranches, even banks in small towns, once a railroad station. They rode in large numbers, rarely less than twelve or fifteen men. They attacked fast and shot anyone who was fool enough to get in their way. As soon as they had what they wanted, they rode back across the Rio Grande and Martinez grew fatter and richer.
Right now he was fat and worried. Usually he rode with his men but on this occasion he had let Lopez lead the raid and they were at least three hours late.
He scowled and scratched his spreading gut, swatting a fly away from the rim of his glass with a fat hand.
He lifted the glass to his mouth and let the raw tequila burn the back of his throat. For months Lopez had been begging him to lead the men on his own, and grudgingly Martinez had agreed. After all, it was a simple enough business. They were to cross the river south of Piedras Negras and take the trail east and slightly south in the direction of Carrizo Springs. There was a box canyon in the hills where the rancher kept three dozen mustangs, one- and two-year-olds, and Martinez knew he could get a fine price for them down at Matamoros. All Lopez had to do was lead the men in, round up the horses and bring them out again. They would herd them back across the river lower down, close to Guerrero, and then back towards the mountains.
There was little that could go wrong.
Jesus Martinez cursed and squashed a fat, blue fly against the table, smearing the blood with the heel of his hand. He swung his head and called for a fresh bottle of tequila: unlike Ford Kilpatrick, he was not a man who waited patiently.
Chapter Two
RED CAULSON’S BODY was relaxed enough in the barbershop chair, but his eyes and mind were alert. He saw the stranger walk his lathered bronc past the plate glass window, watched him hesitate slightly before angling over to the trough that sat in the partial shade of the balcony of the Eagle Pass Saloon and Music Hall. He saw a youngish man, tall, lean, his body bent some from what had been a long ride. The black leather chaps that fitted close to his brown cotton pants, the black vest that was unbuttoned over a soiled and stained white shirt—both were heavy with dust. A red bandanna was loosely knotted at the man’s neck. His black hat had its brim pulled down to give as much shade as possible to his narrowed, keen eyes. Caulson saw all this and three things more.
