God, but I hated sitting around twiddling my thumbs. ’Course Boz proved the exact opposite. I am convinced the man was the most creative porch sitter and all-around loafer I’ve ever run across.
We wasted another four hours rubbing blisters on our rumps in San Antone’s fancy, palatial station house. Ole Boz was happier than a gopher in soft dirt. He pulled his hat down over his eyes, and I don’t think he moved a muscle the whole time. I still harbor the belief that the man had a bit of Messican blood in him.
We rode the Southern Pacific line’s day coach on west to Del Rio. Not much of a town, but it was nice and green. Greenest spot in that part of Tejas. Still and all, train didn’t even stop there ’less a passenger forced the issue. While growing at a pretty fair clip, the isolated berg could just barely boast of anything like a real depot. Nothing more than a sap-oozing, one-man shack constructed of warped, rough-cut boards, midways of an even rougher loading platform.
Once called San Felipe Del Rio, because of its proximity to San Felipe Springs, most of the town’s permanent population made its living as sheep herders and ranchers. If memory still serves, good many of those as didn’t ranch plied the trade as railroaders for the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio line, as it continued on west to link up with the Southern Pacific again.
Constructed of adobe bricks and topped with tin or wooden roofs, most of the visible buildings were scattered hither and yon in the most haphazard of manners. The village appeared to have grown up like a crop of overnight mushrooms after a rain. A single central thoroughfare, labeled Main Street by signs all along the way, bustled with people, animals, and a constant parade of wagons that rattled back and forth along the rude street’s entire expanse.
The meandering main street moseyed its leisurely way from south of the tracks and headed north. We rode past the remains of an old stockade, once used in the Indian fights, and the typical businesses you’d expect in a slow growing, barely civilized town. There were several nice-sized cantinas here and there—three as I recall, one of ’em pretty good-sized. Couple of recently erected hotels, a gun shop, meat market, liquor store, and one thriving mercantile. Even had a spanking new post office that couldn’t have been more than a year old, along with a number of other commonplace businesses scattered about.
Must admit I was tickled slap to death to get off that train’s day-coach seat and onto the back of a horse. Tell the God’s truth, I ain’t never cared a hoot in hell for trains. Mechanical monsters stink of hot grease and burning coal no matter where you picked to sit. And, Lord God, every one of those iron beasts rattled like a bucketful of loose gravel in a metal barrel.
Besides, ain’t nothing to do on any kind of a train car except stare out the window till your eyes feel like they’re about to drop onto your chest. Hell, anyone who’s seen a mile’s worth of south or west Texas has seen just about all there is to see. So, mostly, only thing left for a body to do on a train is sleep.
But even that weren’t easy. Those passenger benches were covered with a worn piece of padding about as thick as a single page from a family Bible. Damned uncomfortable seats could just by God beat a man to a mumbling, whimpering pulp in a matter of hours.
Entire trip, including that horseback jaunt from the fairly pleasant climes of Del Rio then north on up to Rio Seco, took the better part of two and a half days. By the time we finally reined up outside Rio Seco, situated along the east bank of the Dry Devils River, the pair of us were tired to the bone.
Boz stood in his stirrups and swept the town with a narrow-eyed gaze. “Don’t know ’bout you, Lucius, but I’m damn near wore to a fuzzy-assed frazzle.”
Rio Seco’s dust-blown main thoroughfare kind of started on the west side of the near nonexistent waterway. The rutted, dirt road oozed up out of the sandy stream’s waterless bottom like a lazy snake. It wandered in a more-or-less southeast-to-northwest direction. Buildings on either side of the street appeared to have grown out of the ground in much the same fashion as those we’d observed in Del Rio earlier that day. It was almost as though nothing by way of serious thought had gone into the rapidly dilapidating town’s initial planning.
We crossed the dust-choked watercourse’s exposed bed and didn’t get a drop of liquid on either of us, or the horses. Rode past a wagon yard, a run-down liquor store, a Chinese laundry, a boot and shoe shop, and an abandoned saddle-making operation. Hard to make definitive comparisons, but the graveyard-quiet town actually appeared a bit larger than Del Rio, leastways on the surface of it.
The street out front of the town marshal’s office was as empty of people as a Baptist church and sing-along on Saturday night. At first, we didn’t see a living soul. Hell, as I remember it, weren’t even any skillet lickers, or free rovin’ pigs, in evidence to greet the weary traveler.
“Town’s got a serious ghostly look ’bout ’er, don’t she?” Boz muttered.
I nodded, then ran an appraising gaze from one end of the street to the other. “Appears as how Rio Seco, Texas, is sure ’nuff locked in a losing battle with the sun and wind to me, Boz.”
A runtified branch of the Texas State Bank stood kind of catty-cornered and across the street from the jail. It was cheek by jowl to the Barnette Brothers’ Hardware and Mercantile operation on one side and a saloon on the other. The boardwalk out front of the shabby, well-worn emporium was littered with piles of galvanized washtubs, racks of ready-made clothing, and wooden barrels decorated with hand-printed signboards. Whole shebang appeared designed to draw the prospective customer into partaking of pickles, crackers, and blocks of hook cheese, as could be easily purchased within.
We stepped off our animals out front of Marshal Jacob Cobb’s sturdy blockhouse of a jail. Building appeared to have been constructed from a pile of discarded cross-ties. Couldn’t have blown up that jailhouse with a Concord coach loaded to the roof with dynamite. We both went to hobbling around like all the gears in our hips and backs were out of mesh soon as our feet hit the ground.
Rubbed my aching rump. “Tell you what, Boz, don’t know ’bout you, but my dauber’s sure ’nuff dragging in the dirt. ’Bout another hour on that damned train, or ole Grizz here, think I’d be needin’ a cane right now. Swear ’fore Jesus, seems like the older I get, the tougher these raids of ours get.”
Tatum swayed in the street beside his hammerhead like a weeping willow in a wind storm. A thin cloud of powdery grit swirled around his feet. He stooped over at the waist and massaged his back. “Right there with you, pard. You know, way I’m going, be willing to bet that I’ll be a hobblin’ cripple by the time I turn forty.”
I straightened up, stretched, and grinned. “Yeah, ole buddy, can see that ’un comin’ myself. Worse, you’ll still be uglier’n a hatful of horned toads, on top of it, by God.”
Boz threw his head back and guffawed. I glanced around just in time to notice a pair of indolent-looking, heavily armed gun hands push through the batwings of the Saratoga Saloon, across the alley from the bank. They slouched their way up to the nearest porch pillar. Slumped against either side of the veranda’s wooden prop, then cast sneering, self-important glares our direction and passed a smoking, hand-rolled ciga-reet back and forth. Looked, for all the world, like they wanted to amble on over and slap us nekkid just for the belligerent, hellacious fun of it.
Don’t think Boz noticed the gunnies. He sliced a smirking look back at me. “Should be hereby noted that I take umbrage at the snide remark you just made about my personal handsomosity, Dodge. Want you to know they’s many a beautiful woman in Tejas as will gladly testify that I’m a damned good-lookin’ man, and will likely be so till the day I die.”