The man atop the gray did a curious thing… he turned to face the shotgun blast, and when he did his face seemed to come apart as pellets ripped away his cheeks. For a moment, there was no sound other than the banging of guns, until the cowboy slid off his charging horse into a stand of bulrushes growing along the edge of the water.
Fear-stricken cattle bounded in every direction, making a noise like honking geese. The herd split into three groups when trees blocked the longhorns’ path. One bunch ran northeast, and a second charged across the Pecos, where a shallow spot kept them from having to swim. A third portion of the stampeding steers went straight ahead, crushing everything in its way.
Jessie took careful aim and fired at a cowboy abandoning the herd on a piebald gelding, shooting him in the back between his shoulder blades, driving him out of his saddle with the force of a sledgehammer blow before his horse could cross the river.
“Nice shot!” Cooper yelled, levering another round into his Winchester.
Valdez fired just as Jessie was about to rein south after a lone cowboy making his escape back down the trail running beside the Pecos. The cowboy slumped in his saddle, yet he somehow held onto the saddle horn and continued to rake his spurs into a black gelding’s sides.
Jessie swung his horse south… there could be no survivors to tell Sheriff Brady about what happened here, or identify any of the attackers.
Behind him, he heard a gun crack. Pickett and Cooper would finish off any wounded men. Pickett would enjoy it. Of all the cold-blooded killers Jessie had known, Pickett had less feelings than any of them.
The cowboy on the black rounded a turn in the trail and for a moment he was out of sight. Jessie spurred harder, asking his big yellow dun for everything it had. The rhythm of its pounding hooves filled his ears. He stood in the stirrups for a better view of what lay ahead. A grove of cottonwoods lining the river prevented him from seeing the fleeing cowhand for a few moments, until his dun carried him past the trees.
A pistol barked suddenly. Jessie felt something tear the left sleeve of his shirt, followed by a burning sensation moving from his shoulder down his arm. In the same instant he saw the cowboy aboard the black horse sitting at the edge of the cottonwood grove.
“You bushwhackin’ son of a bitch!” Jessie cried, aiming his pistol carefully before he triggered off a shot while bringing the dun to a bounding halt.
The cowhand rolled out of his saddle… his horse bolted away as he fell. He toppled to the ground clutching his belly with a groan.
Jessie stepped off his horse, walking slowly, gun pointed in front of him, to the spot where the Chisum cowboy lay. Jessie gritted his teeth, for the moment ignoring the stinging pain in his left arm until he stood over the fallen man, casting his shadow over a face twisted in agony, the face of a young cowboy hardly old enough to shave.
“You yellow bastard,” Jessie hissed, “layin’ for me behind those trees like that. You’re gunshot, an’ I oughta leave you here to die slow. But you pissed me off when you shot me in the arm, so I’m gonna do you a favor. I’m gonna scatter your brains all over this piece of ground. That way, when Big John Chisum or one of his boys finds you, he’ll know we ain’t just fuckin’ around over this beef contract business. It’ll be like a message to Chisum, only I ain’t gonna sign my name to it.”
He aimed down, cocked his single-action Colt, and pulled the trigger, the bang of his .44 like a sudden bolt of lightning striking nearby.
The young cowhand’s head was slammed to the ground, blood shooting from a hole in his right temple. A thumb-sized plug of brain tissue dangled from the exit wound, dribbling blood on the caliche hard-pan. A momentary twitching of the cowboy’s left boot rattled his spur rowel, until his death throes ended abruptly as blood poured from his open mouth.
“I hope you get a good look at this, Chisum,” Jessie said tonelessly. “Maybe you won’t be so all-fired interested in the beef business.”
He turned away to catch his horse, bolstering his gun, examining a slight tear in the skin atop his left shoulder, finding it to be little more than a scratch.
He rode back to the scene of the attack just in time to see Bill Pickett standing over a motionless body, his shotgun pointed down. Pickett glanced over his shoulder when he heard Jessie ride up.
“This sumbitch is still breathin’,” Pickett said, “only he ain’t gonna be much longer.” Pickett thumbed back one hammer on his ten-gauge Greener and calmly pulled the trigger, as if he was merely swatting a fly. The big gun roared, pulverizing the skull and neck of the wounded Chisum trail hand, splattering blood and hair and flinty pieces of bone across a six-foot circle of dry buffalo grass.
Pickett grinned. “Pretty sight, ain’t it?” he asked, “like breakin’ an egg, only it’s got blood in it. Sumbitch hadn’t oughta signed on with John Chisum in this war. Folks in Lincoln County better learn whose side to be on.”
Another gunshot distracted Jessie before he could offer any comment. Upriver, Roy Cooper was down off his horse, his feet spread apart over another body. Jessie thought about how good it was to have men like Pickett and Cooper riding with him. He knew he could count on either one of them in a tight spot.
“Roy found him one,” Pickett muttered, sounding as if he had wanted the job himself.
“Let’s get those steers rounded up an’ head ’em for Bosque Redondo so we can change them brands,” Jessie said, reining his horse away from Pickett’s bloody execution spot. Off in the distance he could see Valdez and Barlow trying to gather up one bunch of cattle.
“I ain’t gettin’ paid to handle no runnin’ iron,” Pickett said as he rode off.
“We’ve got Mexican vaqueros to do it,” he answered back. “You’re the same as me… I’d rather have blood on my hands than cow dung. Don’t stink near as bad.”Eight
The cow camp at Bosque Redondo was hidden in a pinon forest in an empty section of Lincoln County. Pole corrals held steers being branded, made ready for market, most often with a running iron changing brands belonging to previous owners. Jessie knew few questions were asked by the Territorial militia, since it was merely a police arm of the powerful Santa Fe Ring, as most men called it, a group of crooked politicians headed by Catron and L.G. Murphy. Jimmy Dolan was Murphy’s ramrod in Lincoln County, and in this part of the territory, only John Chisum and a few of his followers were brazen enough to buck the Santa Fe Ring with bids on federal government contracts to feed reservation Apaches. But Chisum was bullheaded about it, refusing to knuckle under or sell to Murphy at a lower price. What was building here was a range war over beef. Folks were beginning to call it the Lincoln County
