Ralph Compton the Empire Trail, page 3
“Yes, ma’am.”
Patsy’s mouth twisted playfully and the girls laughed as their father went to the basin.
Unlike deep yearning, dirt washed away easy.
CHAPTER THREE
Grace was spoken, as always, with Patsy leading. Despite running the kitchen, the household, the garden, and two daughters, she was never too busy to make time for God. Her husband had once said that this was when they should take a photograph or cut a silhouette, she was that still.
Patsy Wallach Buchanan was the daughter of Reverend Tudor Wallach, a Virginia abolitionist and Episcopalian preacher who came west to bring religion to the heathens. Patsy’s mother had died giving her birth and Wallach’s ways were the only ones she ever knew. The two traveled from church to church and then—farther west and south—from mission to mission. They would preach the word of God and His intentions for the wilderness, both tamed and untamed. Patsy learned to play the organ and accompanied her father’s fiery sermons.
Buchanan met the young woman in 1859. The Wallachs were just up from a two-year evangelical passage through Mexico down to Yucatán and had stopped at the Mission San Luis Rey. They were there on the one day a year Buchanan visited the sanctuary to honor the memory of his family—his lost brother in particular—by working beside the Indians and the Mexicans who were planting crops. That was not where his interests lay. He put his back to unearthing tree stumps and moving or breaking rocks. What Jacob had taken as a “sign” was exactly the opposite. Buchanan set himself a task that taxed his arms and back to the utmost as a form of scourging, of penance for having avoided the fate that took Jonathan Buchanan.
After morning services, Patsy was also in the field. She was sunburnt and thin from her arduous travels, but her spirit and eyes were unbowed. The two worked side by side long into the late summer night, falling in love by torchlight. Buchanan stayed the night, which he had not planned to do; after breakfast, it was she who proposed to the strapping rancher.
“God saw fit to place us here, together, like two lights in the dusky firmament,” she said. “Who are we, Andrew Buchanan, to deny His will?”
The rancher did not pretend to know the mind of God but he knew inner and outer beauty when he was in their presence. He accepted at once.
As God would have it, the night before, Tudor Wallach had learned from a passing French trapper of a northern race known as “Esquimaux.” Wallach had prayed through the night and God told him to go north; Patsy decided not to and asked Buchanan to marry her. Reverend Wallach tearfully officiated before their mutual departures.
The newlyweds rode south on a restless palomino that had never carried more than one rider. Proximity to each other was intoxicating and it took three days for them to reach the Buchanan homestead. The rancher was proud of his sod house but also instantly apologetic.
“It is not the smell of flowers and saintly portraits you may be used to,” he said as it rose from the horizon like one of the potatoes they had harvested.
“I have slept in houses that natives constructed in trees,” the twenty-year-old informed her husband. “This home, our home, will be a lovely reminder of the dust from which Adam was crafted.”
It was the first of many times she tried, mostly without success, to teach her husband to seek God’s purpose in everything, from sod to oranges.
Patsy had pinned back the window coverings for their meal, the sun spilling generously across the north side of the room. The table around which the family gathered was made of a light spruce, darkened as if with stigmata where Patsy folded her hands when she said grace. She believed it to be the shadow of the Christ’s own hands enveloping hers; Buchanan suspected, but never said, that it was grease from fowl and rabbit, whatever he had caught for supper. The table was made by Joe Deems, a humble work of carpentry to honor the Ultimate Carpenter. The twenty-seven-year-old Oklahoman had been a lusty, womanizing logger up north and was Buchanan’s second hire following the war, after Fremont. The native Californian had arrived shortly before Patsy and at once came under her reverent spell. He ended both his wrong-minded ways and salty language. Purchasing a Good Book of his own in Wichita, he became the drive’s unofficial preacher and, sometimes, its conscience.
The family received letters from Tudor Wallach on occasion. The reverend had remained in Alaska and married a converted Indian. The letters came on a Widmark boat and were delivered by Jacob. He did not have one today, which was why he had gone to see Patsy first. He knew she would be hopeful, hearing him arrive.
The last time he had written, seven or eight months previous, the reverend seemed content save for the frigid climate and oddly long or short days—although apparently, he said, God approved of his work, since the Almighty’s finger was at times visible in the night sky, draping the heavens with celestial gowns of green and yellow. Wallach was only unhappy about being unable to lay eyes on his granddaughters, and their inability to see him.
“But the Word of God surpasses the desires of men, so I remain in my chapel built of blocks of snow and ice.”
He had enclosed a new pencil sketch of the white church, domed with a cross made of seal bone. The drawing, on a cured pelt of some kind, hung framed beside a youthful daguerreotype of the reverend.
Grace ended with an expression of love and prayers for the preacher, followed by silent thanksgiving. Then the eight hands and four paws became active, along with youthful curiosity.
“Stay, King,” Patsy ordered. The dog dropped to the ground; the woman’s voice was the only one he obeyed.
“What did Mr. Jacob want, Daddy?” Diedre asked.
“Just to tell me about his oranges, kinda bragging.”
“You were talking for quite a spell,” Margaret said. She was the wise, intuitive one.
Buchanan cut and served the first duck. “Mr. Jacob had the same business proposition as last time. He wants me to stop raising beef and start growing oranges.”
“I don’t like the smell of them,” Diedre said. “They burn my nose.”
“You’re not being very practical,” the older girl replied. “Oranges are juicy and you can eat them.”
Diedre’s mouth turned down and her nose turned up. “I still don’t care for them.”
“Don’t make faces,” Patsy said. She passed the bread basket. “I saw you squeeze the orange Chester showed you, Andrew. You were, I trust, seeing if it was ripe?”
“I was making a point, Patsy.”
“I find that words are suitable for that.”
It was a gentle rebuke; she was not wrong. Jacob’s insistence—again—about orchards and the sea had frustrated him.
“Why did you turn him down, Andrew?”
“Because growing those things . . . it’d be like starting over again.”
“‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,’” she said.
“I am not one to say the Bible is in error, but I question whether one season has ended and another begun.”
“I like our garden,” Margaret said. “I could have helped grow oranges.”
“Thanks, Maggie,” her father said. “But we couldn’t’ve done what Mr. Jacob suggests without surrendering our stockyard and maybe the corral for the groves and irrigation. Growing oranges—growing anything—would be a commitment to doing only that.”
Plates full, the girls had started to eat. Patsy pretended not to notice her husband slipping King a sliver of duck meat. Looking away gave her time to consider her words carefully. “Would that have been so bad?”
“For a rancher?”
“For the family.”
Buchanan regarded her. “This has been on your mind since Chester first mentioned it at the new year.”
“Longer than that, and not this but something like it. You’ve said yourself we may—” She stopped so as not to alarm the girls. “We may have challenges with the size of the herd and their value. And then there’s the trip you’re considering.”
“I’ve done more than consider,” he said.
It seemed as good a time as any to say it. Patsy regarded him with a look he had not seen before, one that was uncustomary for her. It seemed lost.
“Pa, are you going somewhere?” Diedre asked.
“The drive. You know that, honeybunch.”
“In April?” Margaret asked.
“Don’t speak while you’re chewing, girls,” Patsy said. She was still looking at her husband. “Might you explain what you mean, Andrew?”
Buchanan tore his bread in half and buttered it. “You remember that gaucho and his hand who came through last month from Hidalgo looking to buy cattle?”
“Of course. You sold him a half dozen.”
“He wanted more but he’d already sent his own men back with twenty-odd head and didn’t have the manpower to handle extra. He asked if Joe and Miguel could be hired on loan to go back with him, but I needed them here.”
Miguel was Buchanan’s most recent hire, a newly arrived Mexican skilled with horses and men.
“Was the buyer not intending to return?” Patsy asked.
“He was not. He was turning back to try and breed what he bought. He said that the Mexican government was paying workers more money to become traqueros, to build railroads, than to raise cattle. Told me if he couldn’t raise a herd himself he’d move his family to Venezuela. It was clear from our talk that Mexico needs meat.”
“What about feeding them with the herds that are bunched in Texas?”
“It’s a long way to take the kinds of numbers that’re stockpiled there. The big ranchers seem content to wait and force the smaller ones into selling out to them. They can take the losses. They can also bribe the men at the rail yards to get their cattle out.”
The overproduction of beef had been a problem since the end of the war, when the Union no longer had to provide meat for its troops. The demand for meat in the East was greater than ever, but the three trails to get them to cattle cars—the Chisholm, Goodnight-Loving, and Great Western—were continually bottlenecked.
“You got them through last year,” Patsy said.
“Not without skinned knuckles.”
She shot him a look. “You never told me.”
“It wasn’t me so much as the men. Will, Reb in particular. They got fed up being pushed so they pushed back. It’ll be worse this time.”
Patsy ate in silence for a time. The sound of cutlery on plates called attention to the silence.
“Where in Mexico?” Patsy finally asked.
“Pachuca in Hidalgo.”
Her blue eyes widened. “That’s a trip of about a thousand miles!”
“It’s four or five hundred less than Wichita,” Buchanan pointed out.
“As the crow flies.” Patsy said. “To Kansas, it flies flat across the plains. That is not so with el estado libre y soberano de Hidalgo.”
“The mountains do lie inconveniently between here and there,” Buchanan admitted. “But I’ve been talking to Miguel. He says there’s a pass that curves between them. He went through it a few summers back. It’s called the Valley of the Ancient Lake on the railroad survey I saw. Miss Sally had the map in a paper-covered little book. I drew it down myself, exact.”
“I’ve heard of that valley. Cabazon, if it’s the same, with the Big Salt Creek beyond.”
“I saw that name Cabazon on a map, too. Tell me about it.”
“I don’t have firsthand experience,” she said. “My father and I spent time in the mission of La Purísima Concepción de Caborca. We reached it going south through Texas, along the Mexican coast, then turned east. But many travelers who attempted crossings spoke of the hardships.”
“What kind of hardships?”
“The ground, for one. Many said it was like quicksand.”
“Rains did that on our past drives, turned good trail to mud.”
“You’re going to have an answer for everything, aren’t you?” Patsy said. It sounded more like an accusation. “Then answer this. Miguel may not have realized that, going farther south, the valley runs into the Orocopia Mountains. You must cross them or circle them, but you cannot go south there and ignore them. Then there’s the inland sea, which is salt water surrounded by desert.”
“Perhaps those other travelers were unprepared.”
“It may well be. Even so, none of those I spoke with attempted to make the crossing with nearly three hundred head of cattle. And with a man at your side who has been thinking more and more about matters other than cattle.”
“He needs this drive to succeed as much as any man,” her husband replied.
She was referring to Fremont and his fancy for Miss Sally. Patsy did not know what cowboys knew: on a drive, home and romance were a separate life, as though they belonged to some other man.
Patsy’s voice had risen slightly while she spoke, and Buchanan did not comment further. He had learned to hold his peace while his wife said her piece.
“It would be at best an unforgiving trip,” the woman went on. “I do not see the sense of it—not at all.”
There was another silence, longer now. In fairness to Patsy, she had never discouraged her husband’s ideas or ambitions. She would not be protesting now, he felt, if there were no options.
“You have dismissed the notion of selling the herd and planting oranges,” she continued. “I do not understand why. I’m sure the Double-D or the Running S would take the cattle for a fair price. That would give us enough to live on and to pay the hands off until we have a crop for Mr. Jacob.”
“Mother,” Margaret asked, “does that mean we would never have steak to eat?”
“You will have no supper at all if you interrupt,” the woman answered firmly.
The older girl slumped over her plate. Even King retreated a little, on his belly.
“Sit upright,” Patsy said.
Margaret obliged and Diedre sat even straighter. Patsy once again fixed her eyes on her husband.
“Mightn’t the girls and I tend to the groves? You have spoken of raising horses.”
“As a part of raising cattle, not instead of,” Buchanan said. “I couldn’t afford to keep anyone on, maybe not even Fremont.”
The third silence was the last one.
The question of the southward drive went unmentioned for the rest of the afternoon, except in Buchanan’s mind. He did not like to worry his wife, especially when she was not wrong about the dangers and he was stubbornly holding a contrary view. It was no different from when he set out from Boston with only a vague idea and a lot of determination as to what he would find and what he would do. That afternoon, after he fed their barn animals and checked on men and cattle, he stood by the trough and gazed northward.
All I have to do is ride after Chester Jacob, agree to his proposal, and then there will be no further strife with Patsy, no danger to myself or the men, no hardships other than whatever nature might hammer down on us—
“And no reason to live past forty, other than to see the girls grow and keep my wife contented,” he said.
Dammit.
His afternoon chores done, Buchanan went to the stable and saddled his horse and rode at the mountains. They were too far to reach and barely moved but that did not matter. He wanted to ride, hard. Even his choice of the notoriously spirited mustang was made to challenge himself. The stallion was descended from the original Spanish horses and was among those left to grow wild. Riding him was a challenge, but Buchanan did not want him or his men to be riding a heavily domesticated animal when he tried to change the mind of a stray longhorn who was seven feet from tip to tip.
Just a few weeks from now, he thought. That was when the roundup would begin. And this year, Buchanan decided with finality, the drive would be going to Mexico. No other decision was possible, given all the considerations.
Excitement, not fear, began to build in the rancher.
The day was starting to turn rust-colored by the time Buchanan returned home, but the highest peaks of Old Greyback still gleamed with sunlight. Maybe if he read the Good Book along with his ladies, or paid better attention in church, Buchanan would know whether it was God or the devil who was bidding him, Approach . . .
CHAPTER FOUR
The AB Ranch was run by eight men.
In addition to Buchanan, Fremont, cookie Griswold, and Joe Deems, there was Reb Mitchell, a Floridian who had fought for the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon Line but was forgiven; roper-wrangler Lewis Prescott, a rodeo trick-rider before the war, a Union cavalry officer during it; and stable boy Pete Sloane. Sloane was a dead shot with a long gun and was single-handedly responsible for the many coyote and fox pelts that covered cots in the ranch house. The most recent addition, arriving in time for the previous drive, was Miguel López, a retired revolutionary. The thirty-three-year-old had spent most of his adult life fighting both Spain and the French alongside fellow freedom fighters. Common purpose made allies of farmers and brigands until there was no one to fight but each other. Not wanting to fight his own countrymen—many of them former comrades who had turned to waylaying travelers and raiding villages—he came north.
Reb Mitchell spent most of his time in the high country, in the small cabin at the fringe of the spread nearly a day’s ride from the compound. There was too much boundary for wire, and posts had a habit of drawing lightning and burning acres of dry grass, so Mitchell stayed there to watch the outlying members of the herd and to make sure that homesteaders and braves of the Yuma tribe did not make off with beeves. The Indians, who mostly lived and fished on the Colorado River, sometimes had a hankering for adventure or for something with larger bones than bass and trout. It was Mitchell’s wild hog–call shouts more than his Springfield rifle that gave them pause. The Rebel was also responsible for moving the herd in case the Mohave River flooded, which happened seasonally and suddenly.
