The Busted Thumb Horse Ranch (16 page)

Right about this time the mare began to bag up,
which makes her udder begin to swell. We
weren’t sure if all was right, so Arm rode into
town and brought Tiny back with him. He looked
her over, checked her tail wrapping, and nodded
with satisfaction when he saw how clean the
stray in the birthing stall was, and that we’d
nailed lamps at each corner of the stall, high
enough to be well out of the way, but in good position
to cast all the light we should need.

Tiny washed his hands real good in the hot
water, lathering up with the lye soap. He gently
touched her teats and grinned when she didn’t
react. “Some of ’em get right tetchy about now,
but this gal don’t pay no mind. That’s good. You
boys wash her teats a couple times a day with
warm water from now on, hear?”

Tiny felt of her rear stomach and between her
legs.
“She ain’t gonna have no trouble or I miss
my bet,” he said. “Everything is where it’s supposed
to be. Sometimes you get a breech birth—the
ass end of the foal comes out first—but that
ain’t gonna happen here.”

“She is okay, no?” Arm asked.

“She’s good. Real good. Next thing’ll happen is
her udder’ll start to fill out. You already seen a
little wax on her nipples; that’ll get a lot thicker as
her time comes. Lotsa thick wax usually means
you’ll have a foal in a day or so, give or take.
She’ll probably get a little nervous, maybe kinda
pace in her stall. That’s okay. If she stops chowing
down like regular, that’s a good sign, too.”

Tiny came out of the stall and faced Arm and
me. “Lookit here. Mares have foaled for lots of
years without you two screwin’ around tryin’ to
help. She’s gonna do fine. Let her be.” We nodded.

Tiny had several horses to shoe and a couple of
oxen needed resets so he went on back to town.
Arm an’ me stood around the birthing stall not
saying much. We were a whole lot more nervous
than that good mare.

The whole thing went perfectly, naturally, just
as Tiny said it would. The mare went down on
her side after her water busted and she moaned
some and squealed a couple of times as the pains
hit her. We could see her muscles flex as she
pushed.

A front foot came out of her canal and then a
half minute later the other one followed, maybe
four or five inches behind the first. When the
forelegs were out to the knees, we saw the nose—
and then the snout—and then the entire head.

It was the most beautiful thing me or Arm had
ever seen.

When she’d passed the shoulders out she rested,
sucking air, moaning every now and again. I
wanted to jump into the stall and hold her head in
my lap and tell her what a great and brave girl she
was, but I stayed where I belonged, outside the
stall.

Their was a gauzy, wet, slick white sack all
around the foal that the mother kinda nipped to
break open. She rested again, breathing hard, and
then passed the hindquarters and rear legs. The
cord was still attached and we left it alone, just as
Tiny told us to. He said at that point, it was passing
blood and stuff between mother and foal. After
a bit of licking and cleaning of her baby, the
mare struggled to her feet and the cord broke like
a piece of light, wet rope snapping. Later, I said it
made a little noise but Arm said it didn’t, and his
hearing was better than mine.

It wasn’t but fifteen or so minutes later that the
foal lurched to his feet and nuzzled about for a
teat to suck. He was shaky on his feet and his legs
were just plain silly-looking things—like thin tan
sticks that could never hold the weight of his
body, but did. While the baby sucked, his ma
pushed out a mass of placenta.

And that was it. The Busted Thumb Horse
Ranch had its first foal—a colt with a light bay
color to him. Armando and I shook hands. We
both had tears in our eyes and on our faces and
neither of us were the least embarrassed.

You’d think neither of us had seen a mare or a
foal before, we spent so much time gawking into
the
birthing stall. We cleaned out the straw with
the stuff on it—blood, yellowish liquid, and particularly
the afterbirth, which smelled like very
sour milk. The mare was protective but not aggressive.
I knew a fella in Burnt Rock who’d had
his sweetest mare shatter his knee when he was
toweling down a foal, and me an’ Arm realized
that the maternal instinct was strong. We were
real careful around the foal and his ma—but we
never had a minute of trouble.

Spring came on nicely an’ our mare was getting
hungry for that that fresh grass she could smell
coming up outside. Also, the lady was bored, and
I couldn’t blame her. Standing in a stall with a kid
doin’ his best to suck you dry couldn’t have been a
real good time. The foal was bored, too; he started
nipping at his ma, waiting ’til she was asleep an’
then pestering her, and so forth.

Arm and I built an acre or so of fence while the
digging was easy, while the ground was still
pretty wet. We set 4’ × 4’ posts two feet deep and
ran good, stout, parallel boards—three of them,
one close to the ground so the foal couldn’t slide
out an’ go exploring.

We turned the pair of them out on a spring day
that was like a day in heaven—lotsa sun, a perfectly
blue sky, an’ not a breeze even whispering.
The mare hauled ass around that little corral,
kicking, squealing, running hard, havin’ a grand
time. The foal tried to keep up with her but he
didn’t have a chance.

Finally, when his ma was finished celebrating
and was tearing up that fresh grass, the foal
caught her and began to suck. He looked at that
sweet
green grass a few times, nuzzled it once,
and then went back to the teat.

I’ll tell you, it was a pure pleasure to watch.

The ladies needed supplies and I hooked up
their rig for them. We argued a tad about the
amount of liquor I ordered, but they finally gave
in. It’d been a while since they’d been to Hulberton
’cause the big wheels on their rig were bound
to find places to sink into up to their hubs or
more. Arm gave them a bunch of money—I don’t
know how much—an’ sent them on their way.

They seemed awful happy to get away from
their daily chores, me, Arm, and the whole ranch.

Arm had gone out on his horse to ride the land
a bit. When he came back, he told me he’d found a
lot of tracks indicating we’d been watched for a
good time. That was no surprise. Both of us had
seen a pair or so of Dansworth’s flunkies riding
our borders throughout the hard weather.

As spring came, the riders came closer. They
seemed to spend a good amount of time on a
rocky rise that’d give them a good view of both
the mare and the foal, and the stud in his corral.

Arm and I were in the barn an’ he was unsaddling
his horse. “We need some help,” he said.
“They weel come, no? You’ve insulted Dansworth,
we’ve keeled his men, he wants our horse.”

“We’ve got rifles at every goddamn window in
the house an’ in the barn. We’ve got more ammo
than—”

“
Dos
men fight a army? Ees stupid, my brother.
You know that.”

“We never needed no help before, Arm. We
can—”

“
Estupido.
We both die, our horses are gone, our
ranch is burned. No?”

“No.”

The argument was ended abruptly by the
sound of Blanca and Teresa screaming and the
clatter and bang of a rig being pushed too hard
over bad ground. They dragged to a stop in front
of the barn, the horses sweating and heaving,
both women yelling at once.

“Tiny—he is shoot! They shoot Tiny!”

“I’ll go into town, Arm—you gotta stay here to
keep watch. My horse is fresh.”

“We ride together,” he growled.

“No, dammit, not this time we don’t. I’m going
to check on Tiny an’ then find out where the nearest
telegraph office is. I guess maybe you’re right.
We need help. I’m gonna call in some debts.”

“Who you wire?”

“I’m not sure—I gotta think on that.”

“Tiny is how bad?” Arm asked the women.

“He has bullets in him an’ is no talking but was
breath—breathing. We don’ know no more.”

I was saddling my horse. “You ladies stay inside
no matter what. Arm—I don’t know what’s
going to happen but it ain’t gonna be good. Keep
a close watch but stick to the barn, okay?”

“
Sí.
Any Dansworth men come here, they die.”

I urged my horse harder than I should have,
taking crazy shortcuts over snow that could have
hidden rocks and holes that would have broken
both our necks if we hit on wrong.

I had to slow a few times to let my horse blow
and suck fresh air, but like I’ve said before, he
was a hell of a ride an’ he gave me the best he had
that day. We pulled up in front of Tiny’s shop and
I turned my horse into the corral an’ dashed inside.
The fire in Tiny’s forge was completely out,
which wasn’t a good sign. A few men I didn’t recognize
stood around Tiny’s cot. I pushed through
them and jolted to a stop. Tiny’s body was covered
completely with a sheet.

“When? Who?” I asked, my voice cracking with
both wrath and sorrow.

One of the men, his face tear-stained, answered.
“Late last night. I heard the shots an’
come runnin’ over. Tiny, I think he was already
gone. He was fulla lead—they musta emptied
their guns into him—the dirty sonsabitches.”

I stepped ahead and gently lifted the cloth
from my friend’s face and brought it down to his
waist. He was still dressed. He’d taken several
shots to the head and his shirt had a good dozen
bloody holes in it. I put the sheet back.

“You boys get the undertaker here an’ get Tiny
in a box. I’ll pay for everything—make sure he’s
cleaned up so he can be buried decent. If he
doesn’t have a casket big enough, have him make
one—a damn good one.” I handed over whatever
money I had in my pocket. “This’ll get things
started. Now—where’s the nearest telegraph office?”

An ol’ fella—one I’d seen around the shop an’
the saloon—said, “Couple hours east in Big Bell.
There’s a railroad depot there, too.”

I picked a tall gray from a stall who was
muscled up good an’ looked like he could cover
ground. Rasp marks on his hooves showed he’d
just been shod. I grabbed a stock saddle off a rack
and
fit it on him. I put a low-level port in his
mouth an’ led him outta his stall.

“One of you fellas untack my horse an’ rub him
down good. Feed an’ grain him, but not too much
water at first. I’ll pay…”

“You won’t pay nothin’,” the ol’ man said. “Tiny
was a good man—the best. Hell, it’s a honor to
see to your horse, Mr. Jake. You go on to Big Bell
an’ do what you gotta do.”

I guess it was pretty clear what I needed a telegraph
office for. One of the men said, “ ’Member—
Dansworth’s boys are hard cases an’ killers. You
get the best men you can, boys who ain’t afraid of
tradin’ lead.”

I nodded. “You can bet on that.” I mounted up
and set off east, getting the feel of the gray. He
had even, strong gaits and the rocking-chair lope
of a good quarter horse. His gallop was damned
near as fast as that of my own horse. He broke a
sweat right away, but his breathing stayed even
an’ he took whatever gait I asked for without a
touch of trouble.

I’d picked a hell of a good ride. This boy would
get me to Big Bell as fast as any horse I ever rode,
’cept my own. I held him to a lope, figurin’ who
might be where, and whether I’d be able to reach
as many men as I wanted to. Lots of our friends
had paper on them, a few must have been killed
or jailed since we last saw them, and others were
drifters who kept moving, not headed anywhere
in particular. Still, I was sure my offer of real
good money an’ the fact that many—or most—of
these fellas had some kind of debt—not money,
but
the important kind of debt, like jail bustin’
an’ gunfightin’—to me an’ Arm.

There were somewhere between a dozen an’
twenty of these boys I figured I could reach out
to. All of them were gunmen, killers—an’ all of
them paid their debts. Some were a touch crazy,
either from the war or ’cause they were born that
way, but that made no nevermind. I could trust
these fellas an’ I knew not a one of them would
hesitate to pull a trigger on an enemy of Armando
or me.

I ran into a light, misty rain that made footing
a bit more precarious, but didn’t slow our pace.
We made it to Big Bell. I dropped the gray at the
stable to be walked and rubbed down, found out
where the telegraph office was, and ran to it, my
boots squishing an’ sliding in the mud.

It seems to me that every telegraph operator I’ve
ever seen looked like a damn mouse, and this
fella was no exception. He had vaguely brown
hair, which was thinning, and a sharp face with
an even sharper nose. His shoulders slumped forward
like those of a mouse, too, probably from
leaning over his key all day. He was probably as
strong as a fried egg.

He looked up at me briefly when I walked in
and then went back to his tip-tapping. I was
dressed like a cowhand and he apparently had
more important things to do than fiddle about
with a saddlebum.

I’d figured out who I wanted to contact and sat
at a little table and wrote each name and the best
address I could come up with on a little yellow
sheet of paper provided for customers, using the
pencil on the table. My message was the same to
each man:

Me and Arm in trouble. Need help right now.
Will pay big. Bring ammo. Jake Walters’s horse
farm. Hulberton, W. Texas. Ask in town.

I read over my work and thought it wasn’t half
bad.
It said what I wanted it to say without a
bunch of useless greetings an’ such folderol.

I walked over to where the operator sat behind
the same kind of window a bank teller
uses.

“I need this to go out right away—now.”

The mouse looked up at me with oily little dark
eyes. “This is my busiest time of the day,” he said,
as if he were talking to a worm. “Stop back in the
morning if…”

I drew my pistol, spun it in my hand, and
smashed the mouse’s window with the butt. Then
I grabbed his tie an’ lifted him out of his chair. “I
said now and I meant now. That other horseshit
can wait.”

“B…but I can’t possibly…”

“Here’s what we’ll do,” I said. “You’ll either
send my messages now or I’ll shove your little
key thing up your scrawny ass.” I let go of his tie
and he fell back into his chair. I reached into my
back pocket and put some twenties on his table.
“That oughta cover it. Start sendin’.”

It took the rodent better’n two hours to get all
sixteen messages sent. As he worked, fat drops of
sweat rolled down his forehead, although it was
cool in the little office.

“There,” he said. He started adding figures on
a sheet of paper next to him. “Like I said, all them
twenties will cover it. You keep the change.”

I fetched Tiny’s horse from the stable, paid up,
and rode back to Hulberton. I didn’t push the
gray on the way back, but he held that lope beautifully.
I couldn’t help thinking it was too bad he
was a gelding. If he had his eggs, covering our
mare
with him might give us another fine foal.
That got me thinking about Tiny…

He slugged down half a schooner of beer, his grin as
wide as Texas. “So the doc hands the fella a big bottle
fulla thick brown liquid that smelled an’ tasted like
goat dung. ‘This here’ll take care of ya,’ the doc
says.
‘Slug the whole bottle on down.’

“Now the poor cowhand figured this doc knew what
he was doin’, so he set to drinkin’ from the bottle,
damn
near pukin’ as he did. Well, finally, he got ’er all
down.

“ ‘There,’ the doc says, ‘that’ll take care of
your
cramps.’

“ ‘Cramps!’ the cowhand yells, ‘I said crabs!’
”

I laughed, blowing beer outta my nose. Arm sat there
looking from Tiny to me, stone-faced. “Crabs? What is
this crabs?”

“Bush bunnies,” Tiny laughed.

“Boosh bonnies?”

“Bugs, Arm,” I said. “Ball bugs.”

“Ahhh. Then why didn’t the cowhand say that? Why
he say…”

“Let it go, Arm,” I suggested.

“Ees boolshit,” he said. “Domb Anglo joke.”

I shook my head, which made my horse a touch
nervous, but he calmed down and so did I. I reined
him in just a hair and I saw the tracks we’d left going
the other way. It made me shudder. Anyone
riding like that through the snow-covered, treacherous
terrain we covered hadda be a idjit.

We made it because we had to.

I was maybe a hair nervous as I approached the
farm. Arm had all the lamps in the barn on. Most
of the lanterns in the house were on ’cept in Teresa
an’ Blanca’s room. They were dark.

A slug hissed over my head a half second before
I heard the shot fired.

“Goddammit,” I yelled out, “Arm, it’s me!”

“I thought so—is why I shoot high.”

I rode up to the barn and dismounted. Arm
had a 30.30 over his shoulder an’ a half-empty
bottle of tequila in his left hand. There’s no easy
way to say what I had to say. “Tiny’s dead. He had
a lot of lead in him.”

Arm held my gaze for a long moment. “Tiny, he
never carried no gun. We jus’ talked about that.
’Member?”

My partner turned away from me for a moment
and swiped his sleeve across his eyes. He
turned back and said, “We will no let theese go
by.”

“No. We won’t. I got lots of wires out—we’ll
have all the men an’ firepower we need if even
half of them show up.”

“Who you wire?”

“Dirty Eddie, Snaker Ray, Li’l Tommy, Mick,
Big Elk—a bunch of men who’d do us the most
good. I offered good money.”

“Eddie—he’s
morte,
no?”

“No—that was his brother the Pinkertons got.”

“Ees good. I always like Dirty Eddie.”

There’s a thing about living as an outlaw an’
gunslinger. None of us ever ask another what his
last name may be. Arm an’ me, we didn’t have the
reputations most of the others did, so we didn’t
care. But a good percentage of the outlaws have
range names—like Snaker Ray an’ Dirty Eddie.
Boys like the Earps played on both sides of the
law and didn’t give a damn who knew their
names.
Billy the Kid was as crazy as a shithouse
rat an’ went by Bill Bonney as much as anything
else. The James brothers were too well-known for
range names—and too arrogant to use them,
anyway.

The men I wired were hard cases Arm and I
had come across and spent time with—usually in
various criminal activities. They trusted us; we
trusted them.

“The ladies,” Arm said, “have stew an’ biscuits
for us. You are hongry?”

“You bet.”

Teresa an’ Blanca had a big pot of venison stew
simmering, and the scent of it was enough to
carry a man off. Plus, there were biscuits that
might well have floated off, they were so light
and warm—and a huge bowl of mashed potatoes
and a dish of canned tomatoes an’ so forth.

I ate like a starving sow and so did Arm. It’s
strange how men like us see death. Gunslingers
an’ bank robbers an’ such almost inevitably die
in a fight or during a robbery. Some are grabbed
up by the Pinkertons an’ are hung. Others would
simply screw up an’ sit with their backs to a
window.

Tiny was different, and he deserved a lot more
than me or Arm meeting one man in a gunfight.
Tiny was a good man—a genuinely good man—
which is the sort of fella not many of us knew. Me
an Arm got lucky—he was our friend—our good
friend.

I knew as soon as I saw Tiny’s bullet-riddled
body that I’d face Dansworth. There was no question
about that. Not only would I face him, but I’d
kill
him and watch his eyes as he died. I’d take
that beautiful .45 of his and use it as my own.
Each time I drew it I’d remember Tiny an’ how
Dansworth died with my bullets in him.

See, that’s how lots of us lived during those
times.

We decided that we’d never leave the barn unguarded.
Tiny had boarded up Blanca an’ Teresa’s
windows with some of the lumber he had left over
from his working on the barn. We tol’ them to stay
on the floor if trouble started. Tiny said the Sharps
wouldn’t make it through the lumber—it was
fresh and hard—so we tried it out. All of us—the
ladies, Arm, and me—stood out by the barn. I
loaded up the Sharps, bored a clean hole through
timber across the window, and blew the slug out
through the back wall. The sumbitch might still
be goin’, as far as I know.

“We stay floor,” Blanca said.

The weather screws around as it generally does
in West Texas spring. We’d have days that were so
intensely and perfectly salubrious—a word M.
Chambery taught me in fourth grade, the year I
dropped out—that we never wanted them to end.
Other days—even the ones following the great
ones—must have been hangovers from February,
with cruel, biting winds and even snow.

The animals were fractious because of being
confined in stalls so much, but Arm an’ me didn’t
dare let them out into the corral or pasture with
only the pair of us to guard them.

Our stud turned ornery, climbing an’ striking
an’ being miserable. He ate, but that’s all he did
right.
We had to board his stall higher and make
the gate and front stouter with three-quarter-inch
planks.

The foal was looking real good, but he was
restless and bored. When he thought it’d be fun
to nip his teeth ’round his ma’s nipples, she spun,
knocked him off his feet, and chewed a tiny patch
of hide off his flank. He squealed like a scalded
cat—but apparently figured out that just sucking
was the way to go.

The Appy colt had not a problem in the world.
Arm had given him a pig bladder to play with.
He’d done the same with our own colt, but he
showed no interest at all. The Ap, though, nosed
and shoved that bladder around his stall, as
happy as a kid at a county fair with a pocketful of
pennies.

“That colt, when he is older, might throw a better
foal’n our mare’s done,” Arm said, as we stood
there watching the Ap play with the bladder.

I hated to admit it, but I said, “He’s got all the
personality he needs. He’s put together good, too.”

“Good? The Appy, he’s damn near perfect,
no? Lookit his chest, his forelegs, lookit how he
handles himself. Damn, Jake…”

I didn’t argue.

The first of our crew rode in about two weeks
later. He was called “One Foot,” for obvious reasons.
Union canister shot had taken of his heel at
Second Bull Run and the surgeons lopped off the
rest. He wasn’t what you’d call a pleasant fella.
His first words were, “What’re you payin’?”

“What do you want?” I asked.

“A thousand.”

“We’ll pay you two, you do what we need you
to do.”

He thought that over. “You need ears or scalps
or noses or peckers?”

“Nope.”

“You got a deal. Hacking stuff off men I’ve
killed never made no sense to me. If I say I killed
’em, then I killed ’em.”

Dirty Eddie showed up next and he an’ Arm
embraced like a pair of brothers. Eddie was somewhat
strange-looking: he had scalps acrossed his
chest an’ back, strung on latigo, and he was near
goddam a one-man munitions dump. He carried
four .45s—two in left an’ right holsters, an’ two in
cross-draw shoulder holsters. There was a 30.30
in each side of his saddle at his knees and behind
him on the cantle. The heft of a pair of Bowies
showed at his boot tops, an’ anyone who thought
he wasn’t carryin’ at least a pair of Derringers
was a damned fool.

Three Pinkertons thought they had him just
outside of Dodge a couple years ago. They’re
pushin’ up daisies now—they thought they’d
stripped him of weapons. They were wrong.

A gent named Mad Dog—half Paiute, half
Mexican, and all crazy—jogged in on a thoroughbred
horse he’d stolen way the hell off in Kentucky.
We put up the horses as men dribbled in.
They spread their trail blankets wherever they
cared to—in the living room, in the barn, and in
the kitchen. After another week or so we had ten
men and we figured that was plenty. Most knew
one another, but there was little chitchat or catching
up. These guys weren’t big on talking.

Blanca an’ Teresa shagged the kitchen sleepers
out early in the morning and prepared huge
breakfasts, probably more than most of the men
would eat in the course of an average day.

The ladies didn’t much care for our troops.
They were afraid of them, seeing them as partners
with Satan. “To keel for money is a great
sin,” Blanca said.

During the day the men hung around, playing
poker, drinking, and riding our land. One or two
would ride into town every so often, but encountered
little trouble. It was apparent to Dansworth
that we’d brought in help; he had riders posted all
around our farm.

One observer rode into rifle range and that was
a big mistake. Dirty Eddie picked him off and
then rode out to see if he had anything worth taking.
“His horse was a joke—wormy, underfed,
missing a shoe. I unsaddled him an’ sent him on
his way. The rider’s .45 was missing one of its
grips and was rusted to boot.” He held up a bottle
of cheap whiskey. “This was all that was worth
taking,” he said. “His saddle was held together
with spit an’ baling twine. If these are the sort of
men we’re after, a battle ain’t gonna take long.”

I didn’t have an actual plan an’ I called all the
men together at lunchtime a week or so after
they’d arrived. “They hang in that one saloon,” I
said, “but they’re generally all around town,
too—the general store, restaurant, and so forth.”

“Well, hell,” a fella named Chester said, “that
don’t seem to present no problem. Why not just
ride in an’ shoot their asses off an’ git this thing
finished up?”

No one—including Arm an’ me—had any
problems with that plan. It’d be quick, clean, and
would solve our problem in a big hurry.

“We’ll need at least a couple of men to stay an’
watch over the horses,” I said. “An’ one other
thing: I want Dansworth. Leave him standing.
You’ll recognize him by his fancy clothes an’ polished
boots. It’s personal between him an’ me.”

“I hear-tell he’s handy with that Colt of his,”
Dirty Eddie said.

“Maybe. I guess I’ll find out.”

Deciding who’d stay to watch the horses an’
farm took considerable debate, much of it loud an’
profane, bordering on gunfights.