Everybody knew what close friends Uncle Cullen and Frank had been, and when the service was over they came up to offer their condolences. He introduced me and Reuben to several of them, including a wrinkled orangehaired woman who reeked of perfume and was red-eyed with crying, a longtime acquaintance, Uncle Cullen called her, named Mrs. O’Malley.
About a year later—and just a few days after I’d turned eighteen—we were hit by rustlers. Early one morning Reuben and I were saddling our mounts when the vaquero foreman Esteban came riding hard with the news that a dozen of our horses had been stolen in the night. Uncle Cullen was away on business and so Esteban had come to me with the report.
He had followed the tracks from the south range where the thieves had cut the horses out of a larger herd to a ford where the stock was driven across the river. The tracks told him that two thieves had done the work on this side, and when he crossed over to study the prints on the other bank he saw that there were two more men in the band. Judging by the droppings, he figured they’d made off about three or four hours earlier.
The YB Ranch was in Presidio County, a rugged region of desert country busted up with bald mountains and mesas and buttes—and with scattered scrubland holding enough grass to graze our herds. Uncle Cullen raised cattle and horses both, marketing beeves and horsehair and saddle ponies. A portion of the Rio Grande formed the ranch’s eastern boundary. Although rustling had been a constant problem all along the border in the old days, there hadn’t been trouble with stock thieves around this part of the river in years. Lately, though, we’d been hearing stories of a small Mexican gang stealing from both Mex and American herds along a stretch of border down below El Paso. We figured that maybe things had got too hot for them up there and they’d decided to move farther south.
Esteban said he’d heard that a buyer of stolen horses was operating at a pueblo called Agua Dura, just west of the Sierra Grande, a Mexican range visible to the south of us and running roughly parallel to the Rio Grande. Each time the Agua Dura dealer accumulated a worthwhile herd he drove it down the Conchos and over to Chihuahua City, where nobody gave a damn about U.S. brands. Esteban figured Agua Dura was where our horses were headed.
The only one of us familiar with that country was a vaquero named Chente Castillo, who’d grown up in a pueblo called Placer Guadalupe, about sixty miles south of the border and within view of the Rio Conchos. He was a breed—more like a three-quarter than a half-breed, since he had a Mexican daddy and Apache mother—and there was no telling from his looks how old he was. He might’ve been thirty years old or fifty. He didn’t speak much English but he seemed to understand it well enough. He anyway didn’t need a lot of English with the other hands, most of whom were Mexican, and even the American hands could speak a little Spanish. He was a damn good rider and liked to work with me and Reuben because we didn’t like cows any more than he did and we worked only with the horses. When Esteban mentioned Agua Dura, Chente said he’d been there and said it lay about forty miles to the south and the way there was through a pass in the Grandes. There was plenty of water and grass along the Grandes foothills to nourish the animals on the way to the pass, he said, and the forage was just as adequate on the other side of the mountains.
The way I saw it, the thieves wouldn’t be driving the horses hard—they’d want the stock to be in good shape and fetch the best price. They’d anyway probably think they were safe now they were back in Mexico. If they were feeling cocky enough, they might take a couple of days about getting them to Agua Dura.
The sky behind the Chinatis was turning red as fire but the sun hadn’t shown itself yet. If I started after them right away I thought I might catch up to them by noon. My black could do it. The only horse on the YB with greater endurance was Reuben’s appaloosa.
I knew Uncle Cullen would raise hell with me when he found out. He’d warned me and Reuben never to cross the border for any reason, and I had never set foot in Mexico. Uncle Cullen had repeatedly told us it was a whole different world down there.
“There’s nothing the other side of that river but meaner trouble than you can imagine. You get yourself in any of it and you’ll play hell getting out again.” He’d known two Americans who’d gone down there and were never heard from again. “Life aint worth spit to them people,” he said, and slid his eyes away from me.
One time when he was going on and on about what a murderous place Mexico was, Esteban was sitting within earshot on a corral rail behind him. The foreman widened his eyes and held his hands out and shook them in mock fright and it was all Reuben and I could do to keep from laughing. Uncle Cullen saw our faces and whirled around on his saddle to catch Esteban studying a buzzard way up in the sky like it was the most interesting creature he’d ever seen.
But Uncle Cullen was away in Fort Stockton and wasn’t due back till late in the day—and I couldn’t stand by and do nothing about a bunch of rustlers who thought they could help themselves to our stock as easy as you please.
I patted the black and waited for him to let out his breath and then I cinched the saddle tight. I mounted up and told Chente to pick out the best horse in the remuda for himself and get his rifle and meet me at the front gate.
As I heeled the black off toward the house, Reuben hupped his Jack horse up beside me.
“Where you think you’re going?” I said.
“With you.” He patted the Winchester he always carried in a saddle boot.
“Your daddy wouldn’t care for it.”
“We bring them horses back, I don’t guess he’ll be too awful red-assed with us.”
He wouldn’t quit his grin. What the hell, I thought—then smiled back at him and kicked the black into a lope and Reuben stuck right beside me.
I dismounted at the front porch and ran up to our room and took the Smith & Wesson from a dresser drawer and checked the loads and tucked it inside my shirt and under my waistband. I retrieved the Sharps in its buckskin boot from the closet and a box of cartridges off the shelf.
When I got back downstairs my aunt was standing just inside the open front door, her arms crossed, her face as impossible to read as always. Reuben was standing beside her, looking like somebody under arrest.
I’d wanted to avoid her, but there was nothing to do now except tell it to her straight, and so I did. I was hoping she wouldn’t forbid me to go because I was going to do it anyway.
She looked out the door in the direction of the river. “And you think you can overtake them?”
“Yes, mam.”
“And then what?”
“I’ll get the horses back.”
“How do you propose to do that, James Rudolph?” She was the only one who ever used my middle name.
“I just will.”
“You know Mr. Youngblood doesn’t want you crossing the river.” She always referred to him as Mr. Youngblood, even addressed him that way, when she addressed him by any name at all. He seemed pretty used to it.
“I know it, but…goddammit, they got our horses. Pardon, mam.”
She glanced down at the sheathed rifle in my hand, at the cartridges in my other, then looked at me for a long moment with those eyes that always made me feel like I was staring into my own.
“I’ll have Carlotta wrap food for you,” she said.
“Thank you, mam, but I can’t wait. Those fellas are farther away every minute I’m standing here.”
She placed a palm to my cheek for just a second and then folded her arms again. I couldn’t remember another time when she’d made such a gesture. I knew Reuben was thinking the same thing by the way his mouth hung open.