He was twisting the ends when the angry buzz of a bullet passed about eight inches above the Appy's ears and just over the rancher's right shoulder. At the same time the bullet spanked a tall scarp on the downslope to his right, the rifle's crack reached Vannorsdell's ears, echoing shrilly around the canyon.
Starting at the noise, the Appaloosa jerked to one side, bucked, and reared. It was really more of a crow hop, and Vannorsdell would have been fine had he not instinctively reached for the old Walker Colt jutting up from the holster on his right hip. The rancher lost his grip on the reins, as well as his balance.
As the horse twisted sharply left, Vannorsdell's freshly polished black half-boots popped free of the stirrups, and the rancher flew off the Appy's right hip. As the horse bolted down the trail, nickering and kicking, Vannorsdell hit the ground on his right hip and arm.
Feeling a sharp pain up close to his elbow, he rolled downslope, rocks and cactus scraping and gouging before, after about six slow rolls, a tangle of boulders and juniper shrubs broke the heavy man's descent.
On his belly, hands splayed on either side of his head, Vannorsdell grunted and gritted his teeth. He'd lost his leather hat in the fall, and his thin gray hair swirled about his head. Sand and debris stuck to his red cheeks.
“Son of a bitch!”
He looked around for his revolver, saw it propped against a rock twelve feet away, and pushed himself onto his hands. Nothing seemed broken, but blood dribbled down his arm, beneath his torn sleeve. He crawled up the slope, grabbed the gun, thumbed the hammer back, and continued crawling, loosing sand and scree in his wake.
Ahead and above rose the slow clomps of walking horses, iron shoes ringing off stones.
The rancher stopped and stretched a look over the brow of the slope. Two riders in bright serapes and huge straw sombreros rode slowly down the slope toward the trail. Both men carried Winchester carbines over their saddle bows.
“Mr. Vannorsdell!” one of the riders called, his voice pitched high with mocking humor. “Are you all right, senor?
Sacramento!
I didn't mean to shoot. I thought you were a deer!” The speaker and the other man chuckled.
Cursing and breathing hard, Vannorsdell heaved himself to his feet. Holding the pistol down at his side, he regarded the two with fury flashing in his gray-green eyes. “Thought I was a deer, did you, Alejandro?”
The lead riderâtall and slender, with a weak chin, heavy eyelids, drooping mustache, and thin brown eyebrows beneath the brim of his red-and-gold sombreroâjerked his gaze to the rancher and reined his Arabian to an abrupt halt. Continuing with feigned concern, he said, “Ah, there you are, senor. I was worried I'd killed you. I recognized you just in time to pull the shot!”
The other man, a small hombre with a patch over one eye and a long face hideously pitted with smallpox scars, showed his teeth through a broad grin. Chisos Gomezâone of the several pistoleros who'd suddenly appeared on the de Cava roll. “There he is, uh? He's okay.”
Vannorsdell spit out several bits of sand. He'd known Alejandro de Cava all the young man's twenty-two years. Alejandro had always had a wild streak, which, coupled with a rough sense of humor, often gotten him in trouble.
Canting a squint-eyed look at the two Mexicans, Vannorsdell said, “What you both need is to be taken over a knee and have a belt laid across your behinds.”
“Your knee, Senor Vannorsdell?” Gomez said, challenge brewing in his good eye.
Vannorsdell nodded. “If I was twenty years younger, I'd pull you two young scrubs off those horses and kick the holy hell out of you both.”
Gomez started swinging his rifle toward the rancher. Alejandro slapped his arm. “Don't be a
pendejo.
” When the rifle lay across the one-eyed man's saddle bows, Alejandro smiled down at Vannorsdell and asked conversationally, “You go to see mi padre?”
“It's Sunday, isn't it?” the rancher grunted. He picked up his hat, brushed it off, donned it, and stuck two fingers in his mouth. He loosed an expert whistle, which echoed several times before dying.
Alejandro snugged the butt of his carbine against his right hip socket and canted his head at Vannorsdell, smiling knowingly, without humor. “You convince mi venerable old padre to sell to you, no? Make you big, rich gringo. Double the land you have now.”
“It's no secret I'd like to buy Rancho de Cava if Don Francisco decides to sell. Lord knows you and you brothers can't run it.”
Hoofbeats sounded to Vannorsdell's right. He turned to see the Appaloosa trotting toward him along the hill's shoulder, stirrups batting the tall horse's sides. Seeing the strangers standing with its owner, the horse stopped and eyed the two warily, twitching its ears and lifting an angry whinny.
The rancher turned back to to Alejandro. “It's in everyone's best interestâincluding your family'sâto sell Rancho de Cava to me, but I don't intend to pressure your father into a sale. We're just gettin' together tonight like we do every Sunday, to discuss the old days, when him and me were the only two men within a hundred square miles of Bullet Creek, fightin' the Injuns together and sharin' our stud bulls. Now, if you boys'll excuse me . . .”
Vannorsdell holstered his Colt, walked stiffly up to his horse, toed a stirrup with a grunt, and pulled himself into the hurricane deck. With a parting glance at the two vaqueros watching him from where he'd left them, sitting their tall Arabians with disdainful sets to their shoulders, he reined the Appy around and set off once again in the direction he'd been heading before becoming the butt of Alejandro's practical joke.
As he rode, he couldn't help wondering how the joke might turn out the next time around. Maybe Navarro had been right.
Maybe, knowing how Don Francisco's sons felt about him these days, Vannorsdell should've taken an escort.
Â
The grass became more and more plentiful as Vannorsdell, a half hour after leaving Alejandro and Gomez, descended the broad valley of Bullet Creek. When he was within a mile of the ranch headquarters, three vaqueros appeared on his flank, keeping their distance but making their presence known. They disappeared as he gained the creek, a trickle between broad, sandy banks, and followed the willow-lined cut into the cottonwood-shaded compound.
He rode past the peeled-log corrals and squat adobe hovels of the blacksmith shops and wagon sheds, and the two long bunkhouses, scattering chickens and attracting three dogs from the bunkhouse shade. The curs barked in circles around the Appaloosa, until the cook called to them from the cook shack door, admonishing them in Spanish.
The day was winding down, and the vaqueros sat smoking in the deep shade of the buildings. Some played cards, while two others butchered a goat hanging head down from a viga pole, blood from its slit neck trickling into a dented coffee tin. The segundo, Guadalupe Sanchez, met Vannorsdell at the wrought-iron gate surrounding the sprawling main house with its red tile roof glowing like pennies in the gathering dusk.
“Con mucho gusto! How good it is to see you again, senor!” greeted the medium-tall Mexican, whose abnormally dark features betrayed his Mexican Indian, or Quill, blood. He wore the traditional bell-bottomed trousers, fancily stitched and adorned with hammered silver conchos, and a fresh blue neckerchief. His gray mustache, recently waxed and combed, stood out against his deeply etched near-black face. Spying the rancher's torn sleeve, he frowned. “What happened, senor?”
“A little trouble on the trail,” the rancher said, dismounting with a grunt, then removing his pistol belt from his waist and coiling it over his saddle horn. From seemingly nowhere, a young Mexican in rope sandals ran up, nodded, and took the Appy's reins, leading the horse off to a stable for fresh oats and water.
“Banditos?” the segundo inquired.
“No,” Vannorsdell said, still seething. “Alejandro and Chisos Gomez. Decided to have a little fun at this Yankee's expense.”
“Ah,” the segundo said with a grim, knowing nod. “I see.”
“No real harm done,” Vannorsdell said as he stepped through the gate, which Sanchez held open for him.
He followed the segundo across the patio, past the transplanted orange and pecan trees, into a breezeway, and through a heavy oak door, the men's boots clacking on the cracked stone tiles as they wended their way between cool brown adobe walls.
The casa was a sprawling old adobe, built by Don Francisco's grandfather, with two stories, and inner courtyards to take advantage of every stray breeze. Vannorsdell had known the place when around every corner was a servant wielding a broom, feather duster, or mop. Masons armed with trowels were forever maintaining the adobe.
Now, however, a sepulchral silence lay amid the heavy doors and fissured walls. Dust had settled in corners and on the rich Brussels carpets, and the mahogany and toya wood furniture, dull and splintery, had gone too long without oil. Too many drought-ridden years, as well as poor speculation and failing health on the part of the Rancho de Cava's current hacendado, were chipping away at the old estate's very foundation.
“Ah, my good friend, Paul,” the venerable old Mexican intoned when Vannorsdell and Sanchez entered a small patio and terrace surrounded by a low rock wall. “How good it is to see you again, my friend!”
“Francisco, how the hell have you been?” Vannorsdell said.
Don Francisco sat against the southern wall, at a wrought-iron table, in a wedge of golden sunshine. Across from him sat a lovely senorita, small and long-limbed, with high cheekbones and flashing black eyes and hair. A jeweled comb sat back in her hair. A lacy white mantilla hung from the comb, framing her face and setting off those lustrous eyes and full red lips like diamonds in a cameo pin.
On the table between the girl and the old Mexican rancher was a checkerboard and checkers.
Vannorsdell saw the girl only after he'd given his customary greeting and caught himself with a start. “Oh . . . pardon my English, Doña Isabelle.” He gave the girl, the daughter of the housemaid, a nod. “It's so dark in your corner, I didn't see you there.”
The girl's smile was set like a well-trimmed lamp. Regally, she rose, standing no higher than Vannorsdell's elbow. She bowed to Don Francisco and said in Spanish, “I shall leave you gentleman. I will come back with refreshments?”
“The usual,” the don said, grinning up at her like a love-stricken schoolboy, showing decayed yellow teeth below his trimmed black mustache. The gold light glistened in his oiled black hair, which, in spite of his infirmities and seventy-odd years, bore not a single strand of gray. He cupped a hand to his mouth and said in a conniving whisper, “And a couple of those rum-soaked cigars from my office. Do not tell Lupita.”
“Don Francisco, you mustn't!”
The old man held two fingers to his lips, his shoulders rising and falling with laughter.
“As you wish.” Isabelle turned, nodded politely to Vannorsdell, and strode into the house, her beaded leather sandals ticking quietly along the tiles.
His hat in his hands, Vannorsdell glanced at the girl, then turned to Don Francisco with a conspiratorial grin. “She's becoming better company for you all the time. How old is she nowâeleven, twelve?”
“Fourteen,” the old don said, smiling after the girl, the orange-and-almond scent of her perfume lingering behind her. “She is a joyâone of the few I have left.”
Vannorsdell collapsed into the chair the girl had vacated and set his hat on the stone wall to his left. “How are you, Francisco?”
The smile faded from the don's deeply seamed face, the bruise-colored pouches below his rheumy eyes sagging nearly to his mouth. He raised and lowered his hands to the quilt covering his legs. “Essentially my back has been broken these past twelve years, the doctors in Nogales have told meâfrom the fall I took when we were chasing those Coyoteros, remember? And my heartâit gurgles and leaps so that I can't catch my wind.” He sat up straight and smiled broadly. “Other than that, I am spry as a young colt in green timothy.”
The don's eyes fell on Vannorsdell's torn, bloody shirtsleeve. He nodded to it. “Dano?”
Guadalupe Sanchez had been standing quietly to the left of the arched doorway. Now the segundo cleared his throat and said quietly, “Alejandro and Gomez.”
“Tell me,” the don said, beetling his trimmed black brows at Vannorsdell.
“It's nothing. They were just trying to discourage me from making another offer on Rancho de Cava.”
“Ahhh,” the don said knowingly, his face flushing with sudden anger. “I will have them flogged. Sanchez!”
Vannorsdell jerked his eyes at the segundo, who stood in the shadows of the arched doorway, regarding his boss warily. The man's countenance bespoke little confidence in his own power at Rancho de Cava. Little confidence, it seemed, in his boss's authority, as well. Don Francisco and his first lieutenant may have ruled the rancho with an iron fist in their day, but the old wolves were losing their luster, and the jackals were starting to strut with their tails up.
Vannorsdell had seen it coming, with a raw feeling of dread in his loins. Once solely in the hands of Don Francisco's wild sons and their gun-savvy charros, who had more interest in outlawry than stock raising and range tending, Rancho de Cava would become a devil's lair, a parasitic neighbor.
“Not on my account,” Vannorsdell said, raising a placating hand. A whipping would only inflame the men's rage. It might even jeopardize the old man and Sanchez. “Like I said,
de nada
. Let's let it go.
Estoy de ecuardo.
”