way things used to be?
That next morning after the ruckus with Curnutt and Warren, Smith took Thompson with him and rode south through the hills to have a good look at what herds might await them on the ranchos in that direction. And Williams took Bass to scout the look of things on west of the Mission San Gabriel along the foot of those loftier mountains timbered with yellow pine and fragrant cedar.
Not very far beyond the soldiers’ post, Titus had his first gander at the strangest cattle he had ever laid eyes on.
“Longhorns,” Bill explained. “Leastways, that’s what such critters ought’n be called.”
Like nothing else, these Mexican cattle were. Unlike the full-bodied, short-horned breeds raised by those farmers back in the States, these were rangy and far leaner animals, head-heavy with a pair of saberlike horns that curved and swirled gracefully out from their bony skulls.
“You s’pose these here longhorns are a Mex breed?”
Williams shrugged. “Maybeso the Spanyards brung ’em over to Mexico like they is.”
“Longhorns,” Bass repeated, almost under his breath, trying hard to imagine more than a handful of the creatures crowded together, stuffed down in the belly of those huge, tall-masted oceangoing ships he had seen so long, long ago in New Orleans. “I’ll be go to hell.”
Could be they were the perfect breed for such arid country as this, a land where it didn’t rain all that much, despite the proximity of damp ocean winds. Farmers back east in the States did well with cattle that required a lot of the lush grasses that grew in a country where a lot of rain fell. But out west … well, now—maybe those Spanish did have something right when they brought those longhorns to Mexico a few centuries ago.
Near midafternoon Williams and Bass spotted a confused cluster of buildings in the distance and pulled up on the side of a hill that overlooked the extensive settlement.
“You make that for a rancho?” Bill asked.
“Naw, I don’t,” he squinted in the light. “Too many folks.”
There were. Many of them coming or going, some moving in or out of the settlement on horseback, in wagons or carriages. Besides, there simply wasn’t any sign of those sorts of structures a man assumed he’d find on a Mexican ranch. No corrals or barns or outlying huts where the servants lived, no rows of those low-roofed barracks where the vaqueros slept when not in the saddle.
“Lookee there, Scratch,” Williams said. “See them sails in the harbor there? By blazes, that’s a town!”
When Bass turned his head he found Bill grinning at him. “What you up to, Solitaire?”
“I figger the boys are due a grand spree afore we go round up the biggest cavvyard ever took from California and get high behind for the mountains again,” Williams declared with a matter-of-factness. “A li’l likker, and some wimmens too.”
Titus sighed, recalling the heady numbness of Workman’s corn whiskey down Taos way. “Maybe some pop- skull and a spree could take the edge off things for all of us afore we gotta leave Californy in a hurry.”
“Let’s circle to the south for to get back to camp,” Williams advised, eager to be on the way again. “See what horses there are for the taking.”
It was well past dark and the moon had risen when they found their way back to the others. Already Smith and Thompson had come in to report there had to be more than two thousand head of Mexican horses. The Americans and Frenchmen were growing anxious to get on with their raids.
From their springtime camps in the central Rockies, these men had ridden something on the order of a thousand miles or more to reach Mexican California, the land of the horse. They had suffered hardship the likes of which few men would ever choose to endure. Besides being forced to drink their own urine and blood to cross the southern desert that early summer, these twenty-four had subsisted on skinny, played-out horseflesh and bitter- tasting cactus pulp. Not hard to understand that these trappers had grown restless, anxious to be gathering up horses and turning them east for the Bent brothers’ post on the Arkansas … eager to be doing just about anything instead of cooling their heels in these California hills.
“Peg-Leg, I figger it’s ’bout time for me to dust off the bad news and tell the boys what I got in mind,” Williams announced around a chunk of Mexican beef Silas Adair had managed to cut out of a nearby herd early that afternoon.
Smith nearly choked on his coffee as he sputtered at Bill’s surprise. “I found a lot of horses for the takin’, Solitaire. There ain’t no bad news in that!”
“Couple thousand ain’t near enough,” Williams grumbled dramatically, then quickly winked at Bass as the other men around them began to groan and grumble in disappointment. “I figger it still ain’t the right time to steal horses.”
Smith bolted to his feet, some coffee sloshing out of his tin. “Your brains run out your ears back there in all that desert, Bill? I tol’t you: We found us plenty horses south of here.”
“Ain’t yet the time, boys,” Williams repeated. “Not yet, sorry.”
“Dammit to hell!” Philip Thompson flung his whetstone down at his feet. “So when does the high-an’-mighty Bill Williams figger on it bein’ time to gather up the horses we come across the desert to steal?”
Williams slowly dragged the back of his hand across his mouth and chin, then licked the shiny grease from his hand and fingers. “We’ll go steal horses soon enough, boys. But not till me and Scratch lead you all down to a li’l California town to have ourselves a spree.”
“A sp-spree?” Peg-Leg sputtered.
“You mean likker?” Reuben Purcell asked.
“Mexican likker,” Titus confirmed with a smack of his lips.
With a bob of his head, Williams said, “Likely that means some lightnin’ for those of you wanna smash your faces on the floor just once afore we head back home. And for the rest, some sweet California wine or pass brandy—”
“Women too?” Jake Corn interrupted. “They got women down there?”
Titus gaped at Corn a moment, then said, “How the hell you figger California gone and filled up with Mexicans, if’n there wasn’t no women to pleasure all them damned
Smith leaped around the fire and pounded Williams on the back. “We go find this village of yours in the morning, Bill?”
“Damn, if we won’t!”
Peg-Leg flicked his eyes up at Bass. They twinkled with devilment. “So tell me, Scratch—what’s the name of this here village you boys found?”
The
A sprawling, no-account coastal village by some standards. Hardly worth remembering, and of little redeeming value … but for the fact that it lay a long stone’s throw off the bay where the high-masted seafaring ships anchored to supply the ranchos and that mission of San Gabriel.
None of that international trade mattered to those twenty-four thirsty interlopers invading a foreign land. Soon enough would come the work. Soon enough would come the trials and the gunfire, then enduring another desert crossing they had to survive. So for now, these
That many horsemen, every one crudely dressed in buckskin, calico, and wool, were certain to attract notice. By their unkempt beards, trail-leathered skin, each rider bristling with weaponry, there could be no mistaking the two dozen for strangers come calling on this coastal village. Just as apparent too was that these twenty-four were not seamen who had just jumped off a Boston merchant ship anchored in the nearby harbor. No, these men and their distinctively jug-headed Indian ponies and mules had come a long, long way to reach this little village nestled between the hills and that green ocean.
Streetside conversations stopped as the Mexicans turned to study the strangers. Shopkeepers and customers crowded in doorways or peered from windows as the horsemen moved slowly down the rutted lanes littered with refuse, dung, and the occasional body of a dead cat or dog. As the horsemen passed one knot of the curious after another, Bass caught snatches of words the villagers mumbled among themselves.
