As the train rattled along, he reviewed in his mind what he knew about the situation. The Barrett family was primarily composed of three brothers, all married, who lived on separate but adjoining ranches. They had a number of cousins and uncles and other minor kin in their camp. Together, they had homesteaded twenty 160-acre homesteads for a total of 3,200 acres that they could lawfully control. The whole area, however, was right in the middle of a huge government free range reservation of better than a half million acres. It was generally considered that a man was allowed to graze on government land on the basis of 1,000 acres for each of his homesteads. That would have allowed the Barretts reasonable grazing rights to 20,000 acres plus what they owned, but of course, that would not be near enough rangeland for the amount of cattle they were running, which Billy Vail had said was around eight or nine thousand head. He had said that the Barretts were controlling upwards of 200,000 acres.
The Myerses, on the other hand, were one major family, with a father, Jake Myers, two grown sons at home, and two married sons that lived on adjoining but separate homesteads. They, along with their kin, controlled or owned twenty-two homesteads, almost the same number as the Barretts. And just like the Barretts, they took up the other half of government rangeland with their ten thousand cattle.
The best information Billy Vail had showed that there were some 50 or 60 homesteaders scattered around the area of the town of Grit, which was little more than a village of around 500 souls. According to Billy, the Myerses and the Barretts, when they weren’t fighting each other, were cooperating in making life very difficult for the individual settlers, farmers or ranchers who were trying to make a living off their land and the free government land.
It seemed to Longarm that there were to be two major battles: one was to be the fight between the Barretts and Myerses for control of the whole area; the other was the fight in which the Barretts and the Myerses were both trying to drive off the small settlers. Longarm imagined there was probably also a third fight where some of the settlers were trying to band together to fight back in numbers against the two big outfits that were making life difficult for them.
He got out a folded piece of paper from his pocket and looked at it. It had the names of all the main people involved in the Myers family and the Barrett family and some of the settlers who had been doing the bulk of the complaining about the treatment they had been getting. There was a lot of names, and Longarm didn’t expect to have them memorized by the time he got to Grit. Besides that, he was not planning on going into the situation with any preconceived ideas.
In the past, all too often, he’d gone into situations prepared by information he’d been furnished. All too often, that information had nearly gotten him killed. Now, he went in on a job with his eyes open and his ears open and his mind clear of any previous thoughts. He played the cards as he saw them being dealt. Anything else was foolhardy and asking for trouble.
But there were some points of the information that he thought worthwhile to remember. On the Myers side, it was said that the old man, Jake, while not physically very threatening, was dangerous because he was treacherous and tricky and appeared to have no concern about right and wrong. He was a bushwhacker and a back-shooter and was content with himself, so long as his rivals were dead and he was alive. Of his two sons, Jack and James, Jack was considered the more dangerous, but that really meant nothing since, in the flock of nephews and cousins, there were plenty of gunhands. On the Barrett side, the three brothers were all middle-aged and not considered any more dangerous than most middle-aged men who had led hard lives in hard country growing up against hard customers. But then again, there were plenty of younger brothers and nieces and nephews and cousins to make for a fair amount of people who could operate deadly hardware with good skill.
It was interesting to note that among the settlers, a man named Tom Hunter was a stubborn and tenacious nester who had given both the Barretts and the Myerses a fair share of trouble and who, it was said, killed several of the hired hands working for both of the families. There was another family of settlers, and Longarm didn’t know if it was a father and son or two brothers or an uncle and nephew. All he knew was that they had the common last name of Goodman. Their first names were Robert and Rufus. They, too, had given both of the wealthier families more trouble than they had expected.
But it didn’t really make any difference to him who was skilled in the use of firearms and who wasn’t; none of them were as skilled as Longarm. He was going to go down there and kick a few folks around, shoot a few if he had to, but the point was going to be made that they were going to live in peace or they were going to live in pieces. He was out of sorts and he was irritated, and he intended to complete the job just as fast as he could and get back to the delights of Miss Shaw and her infinite variety of pleasures. He’d only sampled two so far, and he was eager to see just how fertile her imagination was.
The way the train was traveling, it didn’t appear he was ever going to get to his destination. He was held up by a five-hour layover in Austin before he could finally get a train that could take him southward to the frontier town of Brady. But there was good news at that because they discovered that there was a rattler he could catch out of Brady that went east on a narrow-gauge track to Junction and then on down to Del Rio, down near the Mexico border. He was told that he could be put off at a siding that would be no more than five miles from the little town of Grit. He was sure that his horse was as sick of riding the train as he was.
He spent an uncomfortable night the rest of the way into Austin and then waiting for his train and the subsequent ride to the town of Brady. The rattler left at 6 A.m. and he managed to board it with his horse in a stock car without getting any breakfast. At least he had seen that the roan had feed and fresh water. The little rail banger did not have passenger coaches, so Longarm was obliged to ride in the stock car with his horse. It didn’t make much difference. Longarm was already as dusty and as dirty and bewhiskered as he could get, and he didn’t think the straw and dust blowing in through the slats of the stock car could get him much dirtier. Besides, his horse seemed glad of the company.
As the sun got up good, he was able to see the countryside. It was called the hill country for good reason. It was mainly comprised of low, rising mounds and sharp draws and craggy little cliffs, but it wasn’t rough country in the main. Between the brown, scraggly hills were many grassy meadows and pastures. The land was cut by many swift and clear-running waterways, some creeks only a few yards across and some tumbling and cascading rivers that were not deep, but were nonetheless dangerous by the force of their current. The air was crisp and bright, and there was a good feeling to the way the sunshine filtered through the clean air. It made Longarm feel like he was back in the high country of Colorado.
The main specie of plant life seemed to be the mesquite tree, which he knew was good for fattening cattle. The mesquite put out a pod of beans and in the fall of the year when the grass was all dried up, cattle and even goats could reach up into the trees and make a meal out of the mesquite beans. They were also a sure sign that there was plenty of surface water nearby because their root systems did not run very deep. Along with the mesquite, there was the usual Texas products of stunted post oak and cedar breaks, greasewood and brambles of briars and muscadine grapevines and patches of wild plum trees. He could only hope that his job would be anywhere near as pleasant as the country was. This had been a part of Texas that he really had always preferred.
Somewhere around ten that morning, the train came to a shuddering stop and a train man came along the line and opened the stock car door and helped Longarm put a ramp in place so that he could lead his horse down. Once he had his animal on the ground, Longarm slipped on the bridle and tightened the cinch and was mounted as quickly as he could. He had been out of the saddle far too long. His rump just naturally didn’t fit a chair as it did the back of a good horse. He thanked the train man for his help, flipped him a silver dollar, and then turned his horse in the direction the man had indicated led to the town of Grit.
