instructing me about reading the land and sky, about tracking a rider or a man afoot, about the proper way to make a camp or build a fire or dress game. He was always teaching me something. As often as not, Reuben would drift over to join us too and learn what he could. Uncle Cullen seemed content enough to let Frank provide most of our education in the ways of the natural world.
The first guns I ever fired were Uncle Cullen’s twelve-gauge double-barrel and his Winchester carbine, both of which he let me shoot as soon as I was big enough to steady them on a target. He did the same with Reuben. For my thirteenth birthday he gave me a .30–30 carbine of my own—then gave one to Reuben when he turned twelve. But it was Frank who really taught us how to shoot. He taught us which shooting positions allowed for the steadiest aim with a rifle. Taught us to get a spot weld and to let out half a breath and hold it as we took a bead. Taught us to squeeze the trigger not jerk it. He taught us about sight adjustment, about Kentucky windage and Tennessee elevation, about shooting uphill and down.
Actually, he taught all these things to Reuben—I already knew them, although I had no idea how I did. I was a deadeye from the start and I could tell that Frank knew he wasn’t teaching me anything. He called me a naturalborn shooter and I supposed that was all the explanation for it.
As good as I was with a rifle, my real talent was with handguns. I was fifteen the first time I held one— Frank’s .38 Smith & Wesson top-break revolver—and it was like handling some tool I’d used all my life. It was a strange but comforting sensation. I busted a beer bottle at forty paces with each of the first six shots I took. Reuben yelled “Yow!” with every hit. It was like I didn’t really have to aim, just point the gun like my finger at whichever bottle I wanted to hit—and
When I turned seventeen Frank gave me a rifle that once upon a time had belonged to his grandfather—an 1874 Buffalo Sharps. It weighed twelve pounds and fired a .50-caliber round that could carry over a mile. It had double-set triggers and a folding vernier peep sight mounted on the tang. Frank said his granddad had used it when he was an army scout hunting Apaches. The rifle came with a protective buckskin boot fitted with a rawhide loop so it could be hung on a saddle horn.
A month after he gave me that present Frank was killed in El Paso. Two men tried to rob him when he came out of a whorehouse. He was sixty years old and half-drunk but still managed to bust one guy’s head against a rock fence before the other one stabbed him from behind. The one with the fractured skull survived and got sentenced to forty years. The killer was executed in the electric chair.
Frank was buried in the Concordia Cemetery in El Paso. Reuben and I accompanied Uncle Cullen to the funeral. It was our first train ride and we stared out the window the whole trip, not seeing much of anything except more of the desert country we knew so well and marveling at how big West Texas truly was. Aunt Ava had come down with a bad stomachache that morning and stayed home.
There were about two dozen people at the graveside service, half of them from Frank’s ranch, including his foreman, Plutarco Suarez. Frank had bequeathed the place to him. And left his Mexican saddle to Reuben, who had always admired it. To me he left his .38 top-break.
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.
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.
