Feud On The Mesa

“Dammit, the next time ya gotta fight with some-one, make it a little guy, will ya? Why, that ox out-weighed ya close to seventy pounds.” There was a brisk thump on the back door and Britt started in his tracks, dropped his hand to his holster, and swung it open with a savage frown.

Bull Bear was standing there with a brand new fringed hunting shirt. He held it out ruefully and looked at Britt’s hand on his holstered gun. “No good. Bull Bear always get almost shot when he come in here. No good.” He smiled at Caleb and tossed the handsome shirt on the bed. “Running Horse send this shirt. He said you best fighter he ever seen. Some fight, by damn!” He turned abruptly and walked away.

Jack closed the door with a sigh as Sally raised her tearstained face and looked at the Indian shirt. “No, Caleb. You’ve worn the last one of those things you’re ever going to wear. From now on you dress like Jack an’ the rest of the respectable cattlemen. The frontier is changing. You have to change with it.” She tossed the fringed shirt into a corner and looked appealingly at Britt.

He cleared his throat again. “Uh, Caleb, uh…well, Sally an’ I’ve bought you a little herd o’ cows. Uh…like I told ya once before. Scoutin’s all over, pardner. It’s goin’ to be cows from now on, not buffalo. Uh…you can buy a chunk of land an’ be a cowman. Uh…how about it?”

Caleb looked sadly at the hunting shirt, over at Sally’s wide, pleading and tearstained eyes. He nodded to Britt. “I reckon you’re right, Jack. From now on I’m a cowman.”

Feud on the Mesa

I

There was a place called Purgatoire by the early trappers who came exploring across the Rockies, and the trappers, who the Indians did not kill or who were not assimilated into the plains culture, returned back where they had originated. When the next westering wave arrived, they were Yankees, called mountain men, instead of voyageurs as those earlier explorers had been called, and the Yankees turned Purgatoire into Picketwire.

Roughly the same thing happened upon the high, vast plateau above the New Mexico northwest cattle country, except that there the matter of corruption had a better, at least a more comprehensible genesis and evolution. For example, the first Spaniards to climb to the great plateau arrived there at a time of year when some contiguous areas beyond the immense sweep of pale grass were turning a tawny shade of reddish tan after the first light frost, and they consequently called the mesa Canela, which referred to the color of those sumac bushes as being cinnamon.

Then those lean horsemen passed along, wearing their fine casques and their leather armor, and several generations later the unarmored and much less hawk-like descendants of Spanish miscegenation rode up onto Canela Mesa, and in their imperfect, Indian-Spanish, called the mesa Canana, corrupting the Spanish name into something more relevant to them; they were also soldiers and explorers, and each of them carried a canana that contained their bullets. It was a little leather box that the French called a cartouche and that the next wave of newcomers—Yankees again—called a cartridge box, unless of course they were officers, then they used the French word, cartouche, because it sounded finer.

Finally a barrel-chested, black-bearded, fierceeyed dauntless man named Amos Cane arrived on the mesa with his Shoshone wife and their string of pups ranging from panther-like youths in their teens to a baby on a travois behind a gentle, spotted-rump horse, and spent a golden summer creating a fortress-like big house of logs, an even larger log barn, outbuildings for smoking meat and storing things like salt and flour and dried wild fruit, a blacksmith shop and a bunkhouse for the half-wild youths, and the name Canana underwent another change. The high plateau became Cane’s Mesa, and it remained known as Cane’s Mesa after Amos, old and bowed with wars and labors, yielded up the doughty ghost, his tribe scattered to the four winds, and finally his klootch was also tamped down into the rich earth at his side, and the last of their off-spring, a quiet, sober-eyed, golden- skinned woman of twenty-five named Elisabeth for some foreign queen her father had admired, but called Corn- flower by her mother because of her intensely blue eyes, was all that remained of the clan on Cane’s Mesa. She was the one who had come up the tortu-ous trail out of the inferno of a New Mexico desert lashed to a travois.

There still was no other permanent resident on Cane’s Mesa, although farranging cattlemen had been encroaching a little at a time, like wolves, as old Amos had become less able to mount his war horse, gather his sons with guns in hand to chase them away, and two summers after Elisabeth had buried her mother out back beneath the magnificent old cottonwood trees, within the little iron paling fence where old Amos also lay beneath his granite stone, a cowman named Arlen Chase had ridden into the yard, had sat his horse looking around at the massive old log buildings that were beginning to show signs of neglect and decay When Elisabeth had come forth from the barn, he had told her bluntly that he was there to stay, and had stepped off his horse—right into the barrel of a horse pistol that had belonged to old Amos and had nine notches upon its stag-handled grips.

Arlen Chase hadn’t stayed after all, but he had not left Cane Mesa, either. He had established his cow camp three miles northwest, close to where the ancient trail led off the mesa down to the lowland country, where it endlessly meandered until it came to the village—now the town—of Clearwater.

Chase’s obvious intent was to block access to the mesa. He was a lifelong free-graze cowman and knew a valuable asset when he saw one. Cane’s Mesa ran for roughly fifteen miles east to west, and from the northward high mountains to the sand-stone, rusty red bluffs southward, it ran another six miles. A man would never have to overgraze Cane’s Mesa to grow rich up there. All he would have to do would be to claim it and hold it. With that thought in mind, Arlen Chase hired riders who were more than range riders. Anyone could become a range rider, which required little enough talent, the Lord knew, but the other attributes Chase’s men possessed only came from being courageous and willing, and fiercely loyal. Most range men regarded loyalty as a primary virtue; they existed in a world of feudal concepts and convictions, but the surest way to strain a man’s sense of loyalty to the brand he rode for was to engage in activities that went against a man’s moral grain.

The men Arlen Chase hired were never moralists. If Chase chose to blockade the pass and inaugurate a quietly passive siege of that black-haired, blue-eyed woman in the clutch of old log buildings who never went anywhere without a gun that she could use as well as any man, that was entirely agreeable to his riders. They made jokes about it, and once in a while, with or without a little firewater inside them, they would swoop in close to the old buildings and let fly a few rounds into the mighty log walls, not with an intention of shooting the woman, but simply in order to see her race for her house and grab up an old rifle to fire back. It was something that endlessly amused them even though they had learned early that it would remain a source of laughter only as long as they remained well out of gun range. She was an astonishingly unerring marksman, and, while they respected her for that, it made the little impromptu attacks all the more zestful. They were a wild breed of men. Arlen Chase never made a point of enquiring into the past of his riders; he only insisted that they work hard and obey orders, which they usually did because that was how they had matured, but from time to time it was said, down in Clearwater, that, if there’d been any law in the New Mexico-Colorado border country beyond an occasional town marshal, Arlen Chase’s cow camps would have provided a jail-house full of fugitives.

For Elisabeth, imprisoned upon her mesa, existence was little different from what it had always been. She worked hard at keeping her band of horses where the grass was best, and, although her cattle had been steadily diminishing in number for several years, since even before Arlen Chase had squatted on the mesa chasing away all other encroaching cow-men, she tried to keep track of them, too.

Once, she had hired two riders down at Clear-water. They had lasted three weeks; subsequently one of them turned up in Chase’s camp, and the other one left the country never to return. After that, although she had tried to hire other men, none had ever arrived at her ranch. Not even the ones who had promised to ride up.

If they hadn’t been discouraged down in Clearwater, then they had been halted where the trail came up atop the mesa. Chase’s camp over there was a series of log corrals, some rough log structures thrown up in haste and with no genuine interest by his cow-boys, who did not like that kind of work, and an area of trampled earth and dead grass that covered about thirty acres of land. There was a fringe of trees along the mesa’s three borders, but