Shortgrass Song Read online

  Dutch paused, then filled his cup. “We rid abreast on bullet-proof horses down Apache Canyon,” he said. “Here’s to him.”

  * * *

  Caleb was half asleep in the dark when Caroline rolled away from him to light the lantern. “You better put your britches on,” she said. “I’ll have another one in here before the dance is over.”

  The wick took the flame of her match, and Caleb saw her naked as the light grew. She didn’t seem to care in the least that he stared at her. Matthew was right. Soaking his rope had made it stiff, and he wanted more of her. But she stepped into her dress and told him to hurry up and get out.

  He put his pants and boots on and stood at the door. She hadn’t asked him for any money. He didn’t know whether or not he should offer her a few dollars before he left. The moment he had waited for and wondered about for so long had come and gone too quickly. Now her dress was back on, and he had hardly had the chance to look at her without it. He had scarcely taken the time to think about what she felt like under him. He wanted more. He stared at her as she tied her hair back. She was humming a tune he had sung only minutes before.

  “What?” she said, impatiently, noticing his stare.

  “Should I … Do you need any money for anything?”

  She ridiculed him with her laughter again. “No, Matthew already paid for you,” she said.

  “Matthew?”

  “Yes, your brother paid me. You don’t think I’d have let you in without seeing some money first, do you? Tell ’em you’re through with me when you get back in there.”

  Caleb didn’t know how to feel as he heard Caroline bolt the door behind him. In one way it was the only decent thing Matthew had ever done for him, besides calling him the hardest-working man in the outfit. But he knew what was going to happen. Matthew was going to take credit for everything. He was going to tell everybody on the ranch he had to do it for Caleb, because Caleb didn’t have the spine to do it on his own. Caleb wasn’t going to let him get away with it. He was going to march back to the sawmill and give Matthew a lesson or two on what he was man enough to do.

  * * *

  “To Colonel Chivington!” Matthew said, tossing back another cup of Taos lightning.

  Dutch raised his cup in return. “Chivington! Damn the Congress and all its investigations! If God tells a son of a bitch to kill Indians, I guess he’s gonna kill ’em!”

  Buster and Javier were latching the lids of their instrument cases. “What’s he doin’ drinkin’ with that crazy old man?” Buster said. “And where has Caleb gone off to?”

  “We better get out of here,” Javier said. “That Dutch gets crazy when he drinks that much Taos lightning.” He casually untied the thong that held his pistol in the holster.

  Buster nodded. “Pete, go find Caleb,” he said.

  Pete added up the circumstances quickly and left the sawmill to find his brother.

  “To Sand Creek!”

  “The battle of Sand Creek! I’ll gut the bastard calls it a massacre!” Dutch drained his cup. “Now, here goes Palousey for that filly with the yaller mane.”

  “One more,” Matthew said. “To good old Governor Evans!”

  “To hell with governors. If I drink another, my rooster won’t peck.” He slammed his tin cup on the lumber and took a step toward the door.

  “To spotted horses!” Matthew said.

  Dutch waved him off.

  Matthew drew his Colt.

  The old trader stopped when he heard the lock catch. He turned slowly to find Matthew’s irons leveled on him.

  “Matthew!” Buster shouted across the sawmill.

  The few railroad workers and whores remaining in the mill ran for the doors, or dove behind stacks of boards when they saw the gun pointing at Dutch.

  “Have you shot every soul that won’t drink with you?” Dutch said calmly.

  “You don’t have to drink,” Matthew said. “Just stand still until I tell you to go.”

  “Palousey goes when he pleases. Goes horselike, spotted rumped, and bulletproof.”

  “Buster, go get Caleb,” Matthew ordered. “He’s in the third cabin down the row. Get him in the buggy and get him the hell out of here.”

  Just as Buster started to move, Pete and Caleb came in, freezing as they saw Matthew aiming at the mountain man.

  “Caleb, you and Pete git!” Matthew said.

  “Who’s this Caleb?” Dutch asked.

  “My little brother.”

  Dutch began to laugh. “Would you shoot me for beddin’ your brother’s whore?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” Matthew said. “I just didn’t want you to find him there. You said you’d take a quirt to whoever you found with her.”

  Dutch waved his hand. “Talk,” he said. “I’d quirt no boy for whorin’.”

  Matthew gnawed his lips and dropped his sights to the floor in front of Dutch. “I reckon I made a mistake then. As long as you won’t hurt my brother.”

  “No, I’ll not touch a hair of him.”

  Matthew eased the hammer forward and watched Dutch for a second. He put the pistol in the holster. “No hard feelin’s.”

  Dutch laughed. “No, I’ll quirt no boy for whorin’. But old Palousey, he’ll scalp any son of a bitch points a gun at him.”

  The old man yanked a revolver out from under his deerskin shirt as Matthew reached for his holster again. Pete pushed Caleb behind a stack of lumber.

  The first shot hit Matthew between the eyes and pitched him dead onto his back in the sawdust.

  Javier drew his pistol and put a hole in the whiskey keg five feet from Dutch. The mountain man merely turned his head toward the vaquero. Javier’s second bullet caromed off the steel saw blade. His third and fourth shots ripped splinters from the lumber. The fifth bullet clipped the tip from the eagle feather on the top hat.

  Dutch faced the vaquero, not even bothering to raise his weapon. “Shoot your last!” he said. “Bullets go round Palousey!”

  Javier took deliberate aim down his barrel and squeezed the trigger. The slug hit Dutch in the chest and slammed him against the lumber. His moccasins slipped, and he sat hard on the floor, sawdust settling around him. He dropped his pistol and cupped his hands to catch the blood that ran from his chest. “Goddamn Indian magic,” he said. His voice gurgled in his own blood. He looked up at the spectators through the blue gun smoke in the sawmill. “There’s a new face in hell tonight, boys.” His head fell forward, and the top hat dropped into his lap.

  * * *

  A barber in Colorado City served also as the settlement’s undertaker, and to this man’s shop the Holcomb Ranch cowboys carried the body of Matthew. A gang of drunks followed with the corpse of Cheyenne Dutch. Pete and Caleb sat with their dead brother, staring blankly at him, while Buster and Javier went to the ranch to wake Ab.

  The barber decided to wait for Ab to tell him what to do with Matthew, but he and his wife went right to work on Dutch. They chose to dress the corpse in a suit and keep the buckskins as souvenirs. As they stripped the body, they attempted to match the scars they found with legends of Dutch’s exploits.

  “This must be where that crazy Indian woman chopped him with the ax up at Holcomb’s Ranch,” the barber said.

  “Oh, my Lord,” the wife said, “I thought that was just a story.”

  “Old chief Long Fingers got him here in the side with a knife at Sand Creek.”

  “That’s the one that almost killed him, wasn’t it?”

  “I heard he laid up at Bent’s Fort for three months after the massacre.”

  They pulled off the pants and the wife said, “Oh, goodness, what got him there?”

  “Confederate lancers down at Val Verde, New Mexico. They say it went clean through his leg.”

  “Let’s turn him over and see.”

  When they rolled Dutch over on the table, the wife gasped and the barber just stood and stared for a minute. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he finally said. “Honey, go get those two Holcomb boy
s. They might want to see this.”

  When Pete and Caleb came into the room, they found Dutch’s naked body lying facedown on the table. Each buttock had five solid spots tattooed to resemble the rump of a Nez Perce horse.

  “I thought you’d like to see,” the barber said. “He was a crazy old bastard. I guess some Indian tattooed ’em for him.”

  Pete walked around the body. “Papa said he bragged about his spotted rump a lot when they were down at Glorietta Pass.”

  “I never heard Papa tell that,” Caleb said, staring at the dark spots on the pale rump of the corpse and feeling ill.

  “You were fiddlin’ around over at Buster’s when he told us.”

  The bizarre scene swam before Caleb’s eyes. It had happened again. Matthew had taken his place under the ridge log. People were always protecting him, rescuing him, risking their lives, giving their lives. He was more trouble than he was worth. Pete would die next, or Buster. He had never even learned to be friends with Matthew. Now it was too late.

  It was his fault. He was whoring, for God’s sake. Pete had told him it wasn’t right. His father was going to hate him. He hated himself. He wanted to leave before he got someone else killed. The dormant guilt surfaced again, marking him indelibly. He tried to cover his shame, but it showed through, like the tattooed spots on Dutch’s pale rump.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Caleb considered breaking virgin prairie through buffalo grass the worst form of livelihood man had ever invented. He thought it bad enough that he had to farm his father’s land and help on Buster’s, but Buster often hired out to work other homesteads as well, and Caleb frequently joined him. Many of the destitute settlers downstream didn’t have the money to buy teams and plows, so they called on Buster, who had the best collection of draft animals and equipment in the valley. He charged two dollars an acre for plowing or traded for whatever the homesteaders could afford, and he split the earnings with Caleb when the boy came along to help.

  Caleb managed to get out of some plowing by going to school. He was taking his last year of lessons at the schoolhouse in Colorado City. He didn’t like school, but he hated it less than farming.

  Today the schoolmarm had let classes out early, and the students had gone screaming with joy into the afternoon, except for Caleb. It only meant that he had to spend an hour longer than he had planned letting the plow handles jerk him across a homesteader’s field. He didn’t consider a dollar an acre fair wage for the worst work on earth.

  At length the sun bedded down in the Rockies, and Buster told Caleb to load the implements in the wagon. While they were heading back to the ranch, Sam Dugan joined them on horseback. He trotted alongside, honing his roping skills on everything that stuck up out of the ground as he pestered Buster for stories.

  He made the black man recount his escape from slavery, his rescue of Caleb in the Indian Territory, and his adventure with the wolf-getter gun in Monument Park.

  “I sure wish it was you that shot ol’ Cheyenne Dutch last fall and not Javier,” Sam said. “That would have made a whole chapter by itself.”

  “Why don’t you write a story about a Mexican hero and put Javier in it?” Buster asked.

  Sam scoffed. “Because there ain’t enough Mexicans can read. There ain’t no market for it. Besides, it took him six shots to finally git him. What kind of a hero do you call that?” He looped the coil of rope over his saddle horn and got out the makings of a smoke, shaking the last slivers of tobacco from a drawstring pouch.

  “Can I have that empty pouch?” Buster asked.

  “Hell, I guess. What do you want with it?”

  “I use ’em to put flower seeds in.”

  Sam stared at Buster so long that the cigarette paper dried and he had to lick it again. “That ain’t gonna sound very good for a hero to be a posy sniffer.”

  “You don’t have to write down everything he ever did,” Caleb snapped. Sam Dugan irritated him something fierce. The man was forever complaining about having to live the life of a cowboy, when Caleb could imagine no finer existence.

  When they reached Buster’s farm about dusk, Pete loped over on a bay filly, all excited about something. “You’ll never guess what happened,” he said.

  “I’m too tired to guess,” Caleb replied. He wasn’t really all that tired, but he had made a practicing of complaining to Pete in hopes that his brother would convince Ab to let him take up cowboying.

  “Javier’s uncle died down in New Mexico.”

  Caleb slid the wagon tongue out of the ring in the breast yoke and began stripping the big draft horses of rigging. “I don’t see why that should make you so happy,” he said.

  “Javier’s leavin’ first thing in the mornin’ to take over his uncle’s place. He already sold his homestead to Papa.”

  Caleb looked over the backs of the horses at Pete’s grinning face. “He’s leavin’ for good?”

  “Yep.”

  “What do you want to get rid of Javier so bad for?”

  “I don’t want to get rid of him,” Pete said.

  “Then what are you grinnin’ about?”

  “Papa made me manager of the ranch. Startin’ tomorrow.”

  “Oh. Congratulations. Now, help me get these horse collars loose, will you?”

  “You don’t understand what I’m sayin’. If I’m manager, I can run this place like I want, hire who I want. Come tomorrow mornin’, you won’t have to mess with horse collars. I’m hiring you on to ride a cow pony.”

  Caleb dropped the rigging between the horses and passed under the throatlatch of the one between him and his brother. “But I don’t have any horses,” he finally managed to say. “I don’t even have a saddle.”

  “I already thought of that. You can have Matthew’s saddle. And we’ll put his horses and mine together and draw for ’em. About time we divvied his outfit anyway.”

  Caleb looked back at Buster.

  “That’s what you always wanted, wasn’t it?” Buster said.

  Caleb nodded.

  “Then go ahead and holler or somethin’.”

  Caleb turned to Pete. “What did Papa say?”

  Pete took some scraps of paper from his pocket and shook them up in his hat. “I didn’t tell him. I’m not goin’ to either. He told me to run the place the way I wanted, and that’s what I mean to do. Here, you get the first draw.”

  Caleb reached into the hat and pulled out a piece of an old peach can label.

  “Which one did you get?” Pete asked.

  Caleb read the writing on the back of the label. “Five Spot.”

  “Dang it! I was afraid you might get her.”

  * * *

  Caleb barely slept at all that night for thinking about horses and saddles and ropes. He was starved for action. His thoughts had been mired in guilt for months, and he had had no excitement to relieve his shame. Ab had forbidden him to play at any more dances, taking from him the one thing that gave him pride and identity. He was glad that Pete had finally taken a stand for him. With Pete to help him, he thought he could stand up to his father and finally take his rightful place as a Holcomb. He knew he could not do it alone.

  When Caleb arrived at the bunkhouse in the morning, Javier was saying his farewells to the cowboys.

  “You damned borrachos better not come to see me when Señor Ab gets your land and says adios. I don’t want any Tejanos with short ropes working on my ranch.”

  “Hell, Javier,” Slim Watkins said, “I’d go to ropin’ with a piggin’ string before I went to work for you again.”

  Javier couldn’t be rankled this morning. He just laughed and shook hands with all the boys, then rode south with his three best horses, stopping only to say farewell to Buster.

  As Caleb cinched his saddle around Five Spot, he heard some of the cowboys pestering Pete about something. They wanted to know who would get to fill the vacant foreman and straw boss positions.

  “I don’t know yet,” Pete said.

  “I hope you’re not p
lannin’ on makin’ your little brother a foreman,” Piggin’ String said.

  “I will if I see fit,” Pete answered.

  “Every man in the outfit’s got time on him. He hasn’t branded a single head.”

  “His name is Holcomb and this is the Holcomb Ranch. I’d be a liar if I told you I didn’t favor him.”

  “I won’t take a top job until you all know I’ve earned it.”

  The cowboys turned around to see Caleb sitting on Five Spot, fastening the end of his rope around the saddle horn.

  “He looks like he means to go to work,” Pete said. “I’d find my saddle if I was you boys.”

  After the men got ready to ride, they walked their horses away from the corral and started past the cabin.

  “Do we have to ride by the house?” Caleb asked. “Papa might see me.”

  “Let him see you. He’s gonna see you sooner or later.”

  The dread he felt of his father almost overwhelmed him. He felt as if he were going to meet someone for a fight. He had thought often of leaving Holcomb Ranch, of finding his freedom alone in the mountains. But he had rarely envisioned himself standing up to Ab. He would never have even tried without Pete’s help. He looked at his brother with admiration. Pete’s face showed that he was actually taking joy in the coming confrontation.

  Caleb tried to keep hidden behind the other riders, but they were too strung out to give him much cover. He strained to keep his eyes on the plains, but his eyes kept straying back toward the log house. He knew his father was in there. Ab hadn’t gone much of anywhere since Matthew died. The sun was streaming over the stalks of the shortgrass plains, enriching the hues of the wildflowers on the two graves and tinting the windowpanes.

  Suddenly the curtain pulled open, and Ab’s face emerged from the darkness of the cabin. It surfaced behind the glass like the face of a corpse bobbing up from a dark pool. Week-old whiskers caught the fire of the morning sun. Caleb tried to look away in time, but his father’s eyes locked onto his and flared as the face sank back into darkness.