Ralph Compton the Empire Trail, page 2
Jacob regarded the rancher. “You don’t get hurt picking oranges, you know.”
Buchanan turned his bronzed forehead toward the mush on the ground. “Except if you’re an orange. How’re you going to fight them?”
“They don’t sail to the West Coast or Asia.”
Buchanan grinned. “Come on, I’ll see ya off.”
“Thanks, but fair warning: I won’t stop asking.”
“Doggedness is one of the things I admire about you,” the rancher slapped the man’s bony shoulder.
CHAPTER TWO
Buchanan and Jacob walked through the still, warm air to the agent’s buckboard. The dirt of the AB Ranch glowed golden under a cloudless sky. It did not seem arable to the rancher, since nature had not by its mighty self produced anything here. But the well had never gone dry even in the worst of any drought, and the state had men and equipment enough to irrigate a desert. He had seen that up Los Angeles way.
For a passing moment, the idea had some appeal for the reasons Jacob had said. But it was here and gone like one of those fast-flitting, guano-laying bats that flew from the Bernardino caves. This trade, these men, were as much a part of his life as his family. Not as dear, but more plentiful.
The agent’s wagon sat by the trough near the well. The two-horse team was peaceful, broken in a way his own horses were not. Maybe in a way that horses should never be, Buchanan thought.
The Connecticut-born Jacob had his own thoughts, too. He liked the rancher, a fellow New Englander. But like most men from the shipping centers in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, he did not understand men who were deaf to the bass and far-reaching voice of the sea.
“I’m confused, Andy. You grew up in Boston—”
“Just till age fourteen.”
“That’s growing up. How in the name of Sam Adams did you get dust up your nose?”
Buchanan laughed. “You mean where’d the salt air go? It was never truly there, my friend. I used to make my pa frown so much, my ma was afraid his face would set that way. I used to go on deck with him and my kid brother on the three ships we owned. Little Jonathan? He wanted to be a cabin boy since he was able to stand on his own. There was this mate we used to pal around with, a French-Canadian named Charles, who told incredible stories—most of them probably not true, but we didn’t know it then. Jonathan swallowed them whole. He was like some preacher who heard the calling before he could shave. I never had that. But you’re right about one thing. That sunset to the west? It was not so proud as it looks from here, but it beckoned me to come to the open country.”
“I still don’t understand why a man raised on a harbor—one of the great harbors—could turn from it so completely. Was it your brother?”
“Of course that affected me, but there was more,” Buchanan said. “Even before Little Jon was lost in a storm at sea, the ocean smelled dank, like an open grave. Morning tides were the worst when soaked, rotted wood and dead fish would bump the pilings and swirl around them. Those tides tainted the sunrise and everything its light touched, including our family. My brother’s death killed my father; he lived in terror that some tatter of clothing would be among the detritus one day. But he was lost before that, doing the same thing day after day after stinking day. My mother could not wait to sell our boats.”
“I’m sorry about that, Andy. Like I said, that’s a different world back there, whaling and crossing the Atlantic. Out here, the sea feels new.”
“Friend, you don’t have to tell me. I smell it when the winds turn east each day, late afternoon. It carries the same salt, the same augury of things I don’t want, just from a different direction. Hell, before you set sail, you got a checklist. Once you’re underway, the only thing that changes is the weather. One seaman’s the same as the next. Every day is the same. No, I got different plans, other things to try.”
“You hinted at such. I’m guessing you haven’t shared whatever you’re thinking with the men?”
“I’ve told them. They ain’t blind. They know we’ve got troubles with overstock and Dawson.”
“All ranchers have those troubles,” Jacob said. “Including Dawson, who doesn’t make friends the way he conducts business.”
The hard times were no secret to anyone. For years Buchanan and the other ranchers in the southwest had moved their herds through Texas up to Kansas and Abilene—most recently, among five million other longhorns. It was a struggle to make the journey and get a fair price. This past year, due to the ongoing overstock—compounded by a two-year boom of drives from Wyoming—ranchers were flooding the market with cut-rate beeves. The larger spreads, like Dick Dawson’s Double-D, could take the losses. The AB could not.
“Care to let me in on exactly what you’re thinking?” Jacob asked.
“Railroad’s a bunch of years out, the way the Southern Pacific is moving anywhere but here. Using existing rail to the east—Double-D and others pay for favors. We don’t stand a chance.”
“That’s why I’ve been pushing you to change tack. I don’t talk to Dick Dawson like this—”
“I hear what you’re saying, what you been saying”—Buchanan looked toward the San Bernardino range— “but I plan on going south with a mixed herd.”
It took a moment for Jacob to grasp his intention. “Mexico?”
“That’s right.”
“Over the mountains?”
“Not if I can help it, and I think I can.”
Jacob shook his head. “Andy . . . that’s crazy.”
“For a large herd, maybe. Not for us. I’ve been in contact by telegraphy with folks down there and my men agree. I tell you, Chester, there’s opportunity. Been talking to a trade exchange in Hidalgo.”
“What does Patsy have to say about that, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“She’s opposed. But you guessed that or you wouldn’t’ve shown her your oranges first.”
Jacob flushed slightly. “I gave her a few to flavor her stew or pie.”
“Right kind of you,” Buchanan said, his mouth twisting. “I guess I’ll hear from her later.”
“Honestly, I wish her more luck convincing you than I’ve had.” Jacob put the sack in the seat beside a pair of six-shooters. “Andy, I will say one last time: I urge you to consider what I said.”
“I considered it last year when you said ‘avocados,’ too.”
“Sacramento wasn’t behind those the way they are oranges.”
“Not sure that’s a good thing, but, anyhow, I just don’t have the patience for it.”
Jacob replied, “I think, rather, you have the impatience to ranch.”
Buchanan chuckled. “I’m not sure I understand that, but I’ll give it a think. You sure you won’t stay for a meal?”
“Thanks again, but I want to reach the Widmark office by sundown.” He gave his host one last, earnest look. “We’ll be shipping oranges from somewhere. Just sorry it won’t be from here.”
“Again, thank you.”
The men shook hands and, with guns and oranges as his companions, Chester Jacob set out, pausing at Griswold’s chuck wagon just beyond the barnyard to swap a pair of oranges for jerky and water to complete his journey to Los Angeles.
Buchanan lingered for just a moment, taking measure of his own answers to the man’s questions. They sat right, for the most part. And then a deeper feeling came over him, as it did so often—not one of the mind but of the heart. The earth was dry and the big wheels of the buckboard threw off dust. Even that little bit, wafting over, brought contentment to the rancher.
That and the lingering smell of Jacob’s team dispelling the tang of orange in the air, an odor he had already grown to dislike. The thought of that everywhere would be unnatural.
The smell of roasting rabbit also pleased him. Even though he would not be sharing a meal with the men, he turned toward the chuck wagon of Buck Griswold. Even temporarily one-armed—his left hand got too friendly with a cauldron the cookie thought had cooled—no one could set snares and catch juicy hares like Buck. Even when they were at the ranch, he cooked over an open fire instead of going to the stove in the lodge where the hands lived, a low-lying lodge beyond the stable. He said he had learned in the Texican revolt to be ready to move in a moment.
“Sachem, wildfire or enemy fire comes off the plains, you gotta have your chuck on the hoof,” he once told Buchanan. He used the Indian honorific as a way of separating Buchanan from the lesser men who owned ranches in the territory, notably their nemesis Dick Dawson.
Buchanan did not argue with Griswold when it came to his trade, although it forced him to keep the brush cut back far enough from the spread in case wind or a dust devil scooped flame from the fire pit and carried it about two hundred yards. Not impossible but also not likely.
When Buchanan arrived, Will Fremont was busy arranging the two stewpots on the wooden table while Griswold put out the tin plates. The sixty-year-old cookie looked like a fir stripped of foliage and bent partly forward from countless long, tough slogs on his chuck wagon.
“Y’all yakked for too long; I don’t need you now.” Griswold spoke without bothering to look up. “You want to be useful, summon the troops.”
Buchanan obligingly went to the bell that hung on a freestanding A-frame. He gave the cord a few tugs. It was a ship’s bell that had belonged to the Marie Darling, a British schooner that had gone down in a hurricane that hit Boston Harbor a quarter century before. The boat had not belonged to his family’s small fleet; the bell came with an auction of salvaged goods his father had bought. Buchanan had placed it in the small wagon he drove west—mostly for traction. It was all the rancher needed to remind him of the home he had left.
King responded first to the raucous sound. He emerged running from the ditch a good distance north of where he went in, and without his companion. The men would come from the fields and the stables soon after.
The dog reached Buchanan and pantingly eyed the spitted rabbits.
“Not for you, King,” the rancher said, petting him as his gaze returned to the retreating buckboard.
Fremont noticed his boss’s look.
“That Jacob is like tumbleweeds when he blows in,” Fremont said. The foreman got a pair of ladles from the chuck wagon and pointed one at the retreating agent. “After all these years he should know he can’t tangle you up.”
“Jacob isn’t wrong, Fremont,” the rancher said. “We’re gonna have trouble from those oranges one way or the other.”
“How do you figure? I’m thinking it’ll be like the Bellville gold rush of 1853. The boom didn’t last.”
“The boom wasn’t deep enough. Too many people, too little gold. This is different. The state will support the importation of a cash crop that can be et and drunk and don’t rot, not like avocados. Oranges’ll be eating up grazing land, acre by acre. Moving the herd west will mean a longer trip, thinner cattle. Then ya got San Diego spreading this way. How long before our need for feed and their need for timber and water clash?”
“I see yer point.” Fremont brought Griswold’s sourdough biscuits from the wagon to the table. “You worried?”
“Not for this year, maybe not for next. But after that, we got two hundred head going on three hundred. We’ll need more pasture for them, not less.”
The four cowhands had emerged from the stable and ranch house and went to the well. A fifth man was out in the field with the herd; he spent a good part of the year out there.
The men clustered around the well to wash. Fremont lingered.
“If you’re serious about Mexico, we can move the herd south, over to where there’s timberland,” the foreman said. “That’ll give us a head start.”
“I talked to Miguel about that. It’s all fish and timber, good for a day or two of grazing. We’d starve the cattle just getting to where there’s enough grass. Or maybe we can use your French balloons.”
“Are you serious?”
“Sure. Or maybe we’ll teach the cows to jump over the moon.”
Realizing he had been had, Fremont waved dismissively. “Boss, I don’t see us surrenderin’ to a fruit any more’n we did to the Confederates.”
The foreman joined the other men around the bucket. Buchanan turned from the stable and headed to the main house.
Damn Chester Jacob, he thought, angrier at himself than at the shipping agent. Life was easier when there were no decisions.
The Buchanan home was not tall or sprawling like on other spreads, but it was nothing like the sod structure Buchanan had built. That was when he arrived on the flatlands with a horse, two cattle, and a wagon with all of his worldly possessions, including a well-used rifle and a hatchet. Cow punching his way west, he had made temporary homes in Kentucky, Texas, and Arizona before settling here in 1856. Until the war, he sold the cattle he produced locally.
He had learned, from his previous homes, to use only grasses with thickly packed roots to make large, fifty-pound bricks, to cut straight poles made of cedar for support, and to secure enough muslin to suspend beneath the roof. Otherwise the roof made of tightly tied bundles of miscellaneous vegetation would drop dusty particles down on everything inside.
To this day Buchanan could vividly recall the smell and feel of the muddy bricks on his hands. He remembered the fear and excitement of his first drive, with thirty head of cattle and just Fremont to help him. A part of him—an insistent part—would have those days again. Not simply turning over earth to plant groves but challenging that earth in all its forms, whether plain or mountain, dry or soaked, windy or snow-covered.
The old home he had built still stood. It served as a root cellar behind the log home Buchanan built when he and Patsy were wed. A large stone chimney sat on one side. The two windows in the back were covered with greased paper to admit light but to keep out the direct sun and gnats; Buchanan did not see the point of buying glass windows when a good dust storm would smash them to shards.
The now-distant smell of Griswold’s rabbit had delighted his nostrils, but a Patsy Buchanan meal filled his soul. Before Chester Jacob rolled in, Patsy had been preparing the two fowl her husband had shot that morning at the creek. The girls, Diedre and Margaret, were busying themselves with freshly baked—now slightly burnt—bread as well as potatoes from their garden.
“Come on, Pa!” eight-year-old Diedre called out when she saw him through the open door. “The bread is already on the table!”
“Be right in, honey.”
As he reached the shade of the plank-floored porch, Buchanan turned and kicked the back of one heel and then the other against a post. Collected dust puffed from the leather. When he finished, he stood and looked toward Old Greyback. The rancher watched transfixed as the sunlight slowly shifted across the crags till it burst back at him from the snow-white peaks.
A beacon, he thought. But was it calling him forward or, like a lighthouse, warning him of shoals?
Buchanan was not a devout or superstitious man. Not like his wife, a preacher’s daughter. In war he saw firsthand how God had better things to do than look after individual soldiers or the families who would be grieving for their terrible losses. He had not fought for the same reason he had come west: to test himself. There were occasions when he felt compelled to do something. It was a sense of patriotic duty that had sent him into the Confederate Territory of Arizona to fight alongside the anti-secessionists. He was part of the Timber Squad, so called because they flushed out the enemy by letting themselves be seen and heard, like a falling tree. When the Rebels fired—revealing their positions—the eight Union soldiers had already dropped to the ground, presenting no target and returning fire.
“Pa!”
This time it was Margaret. He turned, considering this new challenge, the one he had set for himself. He felt now the way he had nearly a quarter century earlier when he left Boston. It was something like the feel and smell of raising a sod house. And the time for it was coming fast. April was here and he had to move the cattle within the next two or three weeks, after they’d fatted some on new grass—not June, as usual, when the rivers were swollen and the grasses high.
Just then King reached the door, having made short work of a few scraps of rabbit Griswold had slipped him. His tail vigorously swept the air as he looked up at his master.
“Speaking of getting fatted, old friend, let’s go get it!”
The dog barked and wound round him, padding to his place beside the rancher’s chair. Patsy was taking the crisp fowl from the hearth and Margaret was using a wooden spoon to press the potatoes in a wooden bowl.
“My arm hurts,” the ten-year-old complained. “I kept mashing and mashing so they wouldn’t be stiff when you got here.”
“Deeply appreciated.”
The girls resumed telling their mother about what they had learned in Miss Sally Haven’s classroom the day before about earthquakes, about a scientist who used gunpowder to cause sound waves that told him what the earth was made of. The two, along with ten other children, attended class outside of San Bernardino town three days a week. They were brought over by Will Fremont if he had no pressing duties; otherwise, Patsy took the wagon. Fremont did not seem to mind shopping for supplies, getting horses shod, and waiting outside the schoolhouse to bring the girls back.
Buchanan kissed his wife on the cheek. She was a petite woman with straw-colored hair worn on top of her head under a checkered blue kerchief. Her blue eyes spoke eloquently of her Scandinavian heritage.
“Sorry I was delayed. I wanted to hear what Chester had to say.”
“You may tell us after grace,” Patsy said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And save your impertinence until after you wash.”
