Jim Kane - J P S Brown (58 page)

"
Are you a Texan?" he asked Kane in English
with a heavy Mexican accent.

"
No, an Arizonan," Kane said. .

"What brings you this far out of the way of the
other Americans?"

'Tm taking a bunch of cattle to Chihuahua. We would
like your permission to pass through your ranch. We would like to bed
the cattle near here tonight, Senor Esmit.?

"
How many cattle?"

"
Two hundred sixty-five head," Kane said.

"
I only have this pasture of cornstalks. The
stalks were picked over by my stock through the winter. But the dam
is full of clear water. You are welcome to
sabanear
your cattle here if you like."

"
This would be a good place for us, thank you."
‘

"
Then bring your cattle," the man said.

"
I will go and tell the vaqueros to come on with
the cattle," the Lion said and mounted the bay horse and rode
away.

"Do you speak Spanish?" Carlos Esmit asked
Kane.

"
Yes," Kane said;

"
Better. It would be better if we spoke Spanish.
I haven't spoken English in seventeen years."

"You speak good English."

"My father was an Englishman," Carlos Esmit
said. Kane had never heard of the name Esmit.

The two men walked to the house. Kane took off his
chaps and spurs outside the kitchen door. They went in the house and
sat down in the front room. The man had a good collection of books.
The furniture in the room was simple and well made. Kane, for the
first time since he had come to the Sierra, was sitting on stuffed
furniture. The house was lighted by electricity supplied by a diesel
generator in a shed near the house. Carlos Esmit took a pipe from his
collection on a rack near his chair, filled it with the roughly cut,
home-grown tobacco of the  Sierra, and lit it.

"
You don't smoke a pipe by any chance, do you
Señor Kane?" he asked.

"
Not very often," Kane said.

"I thought perhaps you might have some good pipe
tobacco with you. The only place I can get pipe tobacco is in
Chihuahua and I haven't been to Chihuahua in eight months."

"
I thought you would go to San Bernardo and Rio
Alamos for your provisions. Aren't you closer to San Bernardo?"

"
Yes, San Bernardo is one long day's ride
horseback. But I completed a road this spring from this ranch to the
road the government built from Creel for use in the construction of
the railroad. I bought a pickup and now I can use it to bring my
provisions from Chihuahua. I make the trip to Chihuahua in the pickup
in two days and I can bring back more than ten mule-loads in the
pickup. As you know, there are no roads except horseshoe roads from
here to San Bernardo. With the pickup I can bring equipment and
material like lumber and glass that I could not bring from San
Bernardo on mules. I brought my generator in the pickup."

"
I see. Progress has found you in the Sierra
Madre, Senor Esmit."

"
Yes. In a year or two the railroad will be
completed across this Sierra between Creel and Topolobampo and I will
have only a half-day's drive to take my cattle to Temoris on the
railroad. It sounds odd to hear you, an American, call me Esmit,
Señor Kane."

"
I was wondering about your name. It is an odd
name."

"
Odd? The name should not sound odd to you.
Smith?"

"
Smith?" asked Kane.

"
My name is Charles Smith," the man
laughed. "I write it Charles Smith. The
serrano's
pronunciation is Esmit. Didn't anyone tell you that you
had a countryman living in the Sierra?"

"
No one. Not even the Lion."

"
That is the way of the
serrano
.
Some of them may be too young to know my father was English. Some may
have forgotten. But though I was raised in Chinipas, I am an
American. I was born in El Paso. My father was a mining engineer and
he became an American citizen. He was working for a British mining
company when he bought this ranch. When the company moved out of
Chinipas he went back to the United States. During the Second World
War my wife and I worked in an aircraft factory near Los Angeles,
California. We saved our money and came back here and bought the
ranch back by paying the taxes owed on it. We also bought more land
and we bought our livestock.

"
I want to tell you it was hard when we first
came back. We didn't have much money left after we bought our
livestock and the additional land. We tightened our belts many holes
during the first years we were here. We had the radio. We had our
books. We had our work and that is all we had. We built this house
and the furniture in it. We built the barns, the stables, the
corrals, the fences. Our cattle were very far removed from the
market. There is very little demand for
corriente
cattle and the only cattle that thrive here are
corriente
cattle, so,
naturally, we raised
corrientes
and
barely made enough each year on beef and cheeses to make a living.

We managed to save a very small amount of money. Most
of the money we paid for the pickup was money we got from our car
when we sold it on leaving California and interest that money accrued
in the bank these last seventeen years.

"
The Sierra, the mountains, is the society we
always craved. The people and the Sierra are parts of the same
element. The mountains are as much a part of the society here as the
people are. We have found that the people and the factories and the
freeways and the pricetags of California were all one and the same
element. The people were good and bad as they are everywhere, but the
freeways and the pricetags on everything were bad for us. Have you
ever seen a pricetag on anything in the Sierra, Senor Kane?"

"No," Jim Kane said.

"
People in the Sierra know the worth of what
they own. If you go into a store in Chinipas to buy goods you ask the
storekeeper how much they are worth to him and then you bargain with
him for what they are worth to you. When you leave the store you are
in possession of goods that are of real value to you and you are not
made poorer in acquiring them.

In California the merchant sold articles that didn't
last. If he had sold goods that would have endured, he would have
gone out of business. The buyer needed goods he could use and throw
out of his way because his environment demanded conveniences of this
sort, goods he did not have to husband. The merchant put pricetags on
the thousands of these conveniences because he could not remember
what they were worth, the same goods could be worth twenty dollars
today, five dollars in six months, and nothing next year."

Charles Smith and his wife fed Kane and the Lion and
put them up in beds with clean sheets and mattresses that night. The
vaqueros
camped on the
dam and ate fresh meat from a yearling Kane bought from the Smiths.
The cattle filled on the cornstalks and rested their feet on the soft
ground of the basin pasture.

In the morning at breakfast Charles Smith asked Kane
to look at his best bull. The bull was a good, red Brahma Smith had
bought in Chihuahua. The bull was suffering. The end of his penis had
swollen and he was unable to draw it into the protection of his
sheath. The long sheath, characteristic of Brahma cattle, nearly
dragged on the ground and the skin of the end of the penis was
swollen and dirty from bumping the ground. The bull would never again
be serviceable if the sheath were not shortened so that it cleared
the ground. The senior bull of Rancho El Término needed a
circumcision. Kane told Charles Smith he had never performed the
operation but had seen it done. Charles Smith asked Kane to operate
on his bull.

The Lion and the vaqueros caught the bull in the
corral and stretched him out on the ground for Kane. Kane cut a V out
of the hide of the front of the sheath and sewed it back together,
shortening it so that it did not hang down but lay along the bull's
belly. Then he tied a cloth sack fashioned for the purpose by Mrs.
Smith around the swollen end. This sack he filled with cotton and
soaked with salt water.

"
You should keep the sack soaked with boric
acid. I know of no better medicine you could use. Now, how much money
do I owe you for the yearling and the
sabana
?"
Kane asked.

"
Nothing.
Nada; No mas
.”

"
¿Cómo que nada?
"
Kane asked.

"
How much do I owe you for operating on the
bull?"

"
Nada
," Kane
said, smiling.

"
Then you owe me the same
nada
for the yearling and the sabana," Charles Smith said.

Kane went to the house and thanked Charles Smith's
wife for her hospitality. Then he led Pajaro to the gate where
Charles Smith waited to close it after Kane passed through. "When
they give you your American money for these weeks of work in the
Sierra, bring it back to the Sierra. You can do more with it here,"
the rancher said to Kane, shaking his an .

"
Thank you," Kane said. "We'll see."
 

33
The
Horse Killers

Vultures wheeled in the floated as though on a step,
and rolled lazily again in their own circular paths in the sky above
the trail ahead of Jim Kane's herd.

"
The horse killers," the Lion said. "They
must be killing now even though this is the wrong time of the year."

"
What horse killers?" Jim Kane asked.

"
These men buy and steal horses and burros and
butcher them, dry their meat, and sell it in Mexicali and Juarez."

"Who would buy horse and burro jerky?"

"The city people who don't know they are buying
horse and burro jerky."

"
These horse killers must be nice people,"
Kane said.

"
They have the right."

"Who has the right?"

"
The ones who make the horse jerky and the ones
that eat it," the Lion said, laughing. "Be nice. No fights.
We will
sabanear
with
them. They will have
tasol
for
their horses and these cattle aren't going to get anything to eat on
the trail until we get out of this horse country. I know how to keep
you out of trouble, Jim Kane."

"
How is that?"

"
You don't talk Spanish."

"
Sure I do."

"
I mean you don't talk Spanish while we are with
the horse killers. I'm going to tell them you don't know a word of
Spanish. That way I'll do all the talking and we'll have some fun.
We'll get the feed cheaper that way too."

"
Yes? How will I know that?"

"
Don't be a
pendejo
.
You'll be hearing us talk."

"
I don't know, Lion. I might bite off my tongue
trying to keep silent."

"
Understand me! It will be a diversion from this
dirty, dusty monotony of a trail. And it will probably be profitable?

"
Bueno
. I'll try it,"
Kane said.

"I'll tell them the herd is mine. Before we
leave here they will owe me and we might get off without paying them
for the fee."

"
That is fine. How will they owe you, Lion?"

"
I know every brand in this country and the
owners of the horses might not know the horse killers are killing
their horses."

"
How do they keep from getting caught if they
steal horses when the vultures are always marking their
sabanas
?"

"
They kill seldom, they kill many, and they
move, how else? They 'water at night,' they pay the
mordida
to the judicial, and they stay away from the villages
and ranches. They play the
ladino
,
the
mostrenco
, the
mustang, like you do, Jim Kane. None of them are from this country.
They are not known here and people who may see them do not bother
them. If these horse killers are the ones I know, they are from Rio
Alamos."

A rider on a black horse came off a hill toward them
from one side of the herd. He was covered by stiff, poorly tanned,
bullhide chaps and jacket. His lean, baked face was scratched from
running horseback in the brush. He rode toward Kane and the Lion and
they stopped their horses.

"
What are you skulking about for, Lion?"
the rider asked, smiling.

"
Skulking? Yes, I'm skulking along behind two
hundred sixty-five head of
toretes
,"
the Lion boomed at him.

"
Where do you take them?" .

"
To Creel."

"
Ooooooo! It is closer to San Bernardo. Are they
yours or are they the meestair's?" the rider asked, indicating
Kane.