“That’s a fine-looking boy,” I said, deciding to outflank her on the arguments. “He will need an education.”
“I had a very good education,” she replied, “and I can teach him myself.”
“There will be no pretty clothes down here, no balls or parties, or talking with other women.”
“I shall miss them.”
“If it is money you need,” I began carefully, “I -”
“No,” she said firmly, “it is not money. I have a little – it is not that. We adopted a course of action, Mr. Dury, and my husband chose this place. It is wild, but there are cattle for the taking, and for a time at least there will be nobody to argue ownership. And by the time we are ready for it, the country will have built up to us.”
“If you’ll pardon me, ma’am,” I said gently, “you are either a very wise and very brave woman, or a bit of a damned fool.”
She smiled for the first time, and it was a lovely smile. “I wish I knew which it is, Mr. Dury. I really do.”
It was true there were wild cattle if you could get the twine on them, but how she figured to do that I had no idea. Roping, tying, and branding wild cattle is a job for a man with hair on his chest. I said as much.
She looked at me in that cool way she had, and she said, “How’s your chest, Mr. Dury?”
I did not answer that, but I said, “You’ll have to have a house, and that one isn’t in the right place.”
“I know,” she replied quietly, “but my husband knew little of such things, and he was trying very hard. I thought it better to help than to criticize.”
The hell of it was, I found myself admiring her nerve, and I was a bit puzzled by her, too. What kind of a background had built such a woman as this? Woman? She was scarcely more than a girl.
“I was just riding through,” I said, “going no place in particular. I’ll help until you can find some hands.”
She seemed amused. “Will you stay that long, Mr. Dury?”
She knew as well as I did that it would be a hell of a long time before she could hire anybody down here. It could be months, maybe a year, before anybody even passed this way.
“Tom,” she said, turning to her brother, “get some more wood. I am going to make some fresh coffee for Mr. Dury.”
While she was making it I scouted around, and before very long my respect for her husband began to grow. One of them, and it might have been him, had picked out a spot that would have been hard to beat in many ways. Admitted, the house was in a position that could not be defended, but there was water, grass, fuel, and from a nearby knoll, good observation and an excellent field of fire.
It was a small butte, actually, about an acre in extent, and a part of that was taken up by a huge pile of boulders. In among those boulders I found a spring with a nice flow of water. Bending down to drink, I felt a cool, pleasant breeze against my face, a really good draft of air coming through a hole among the rocks. The air was drawn through the hole and past the falling water of the spring.
I climbed on top of the boulders and looked around. Several of them were almost flat. In two places the surface of the butte below me was deeply cracked, one of the cracks leading out toward where Kate Lundy bent over her fire.
I knew then where I was going to build the house. But it was going to be brutally hard work.
Maybe this was just what I needed, for I’d been on the run when I crossed the Rio Grande. I was coming up out of Mexico with a killing behind me.
Luckily, most of the supplies the Lundys had brought into the Big Bend were still in the wagon, or stacked on the ground beneath it. There were tools, and a good bit of food, and it was not long before I added to it by killing a young heifer, and later a deer.
As time went on we saw nobody, and it was just as well, for we were working hard.
There was a meadow near the cottonwoods and a seep with a little standing water, and I built a crude fence around the meadow from dead-falls among the cottonwoods, and from brush and rocks. Then I rounded up some of the wild cattle and turned them in on the meadow. Picking the best ones I could for breeding stock, I branded everything I could dab my loop on. And every morning and evening I worked a bit, with young Tom helping, to get started on the house. I planned to include the spring in it, and to use the boulders around it.
Three good-sized rooms and a lookout tower would be built on top of the boulders themselves, and the rest of the house would be fitted into them on three sides. The fourth side was a sheer drop of about forty feet – straight, smooth rock without a hand-hold anywhere.
It took me two weeks to complete the first room, and when that was done we moved up there, with Tom and me bunking outside.
Working with a crowbar, and later with blasting powder, I cleared away every bit of cover within firing range of the house. At the same time I paced off distances to various objects within sight to get the exact range for accurate firing. Utilizing the deep cracks in the butte itself I built an undercover route that would take us to the stable and the corrals down below.
By the time we hired our first puncher, a Mexican renegade from across the border, we had a second room started on the new house, the original place was turned into a blacksmith shop, and we had a good stone and adobe corral finished. Meanwhile we were holding thirty head of selected breeding stock on the meadow.
It was the Mexican who saw the Comanches.
There were a dozen in the party and they were riding carelessly, not expecting to see anyone.
They saw the Mexican and he saw them at the same time, and they opened fire. He turned his horse and lit out for the ranch at a dead run. They killed his horse, but he sprang free and killed one of them as they charged down upon him. By that time both Kate and I were in action and we covered his retreat to the house.
That was the first of nine brushes with Indians during our first year, and we started a graveyard for warriors killed. By the end of that year there were seven graves up there, and the Indians used to come by to count them … we would sometimes find their tracks in the morning.
Each grave was marked with a coup stick or with the weapons of the departed.
Now and again the Mexican rode off across the Rio Grande, and then one time he did not return. We never knew what happened to him, but he had been a good man.
By the end of the second year we had four hands in the bunkhouse, and Red Mike was one of them. Kate found him on the Strawhouse Trail coming from the river, and he had three bullet holes in him, several days old.
We brought him to the house, nursed him back to health, and he stayed on. He never offered to explain the bullets, and we did not ask. It was simply not a polite question in that country, at that time.
By then there were thirteen Indians buried on the Trail, and we rarely saw any Indians around. At least, we saw no Apaches.
Apache attacks ended the day I found Alvino cornered by four Comanches in Paint Gap. His horse was dead and they had Alvino without water on a sparsely covered hillside, with only three cartridges and half a dozen arrows left. They had him, and they knew it and he knew it.
Red Mike and I were riding south after crossing Tornillo Creek, with the Paint Gap Hills off on our right. We had it in mind to spend the night at a spring near the base of Pulliam Bluff when we heard the first shot. After a minute, there was another.
Alvino had made a desperate try to escape from the trap, but had failed. We caught the last of it, and I recognized that odd run he had, for I’d played and fought with Alvino in the Sierra Madre when I was a prisoner. He was the son of an Apache by a captured Mexican girl, and he had become a top warrior among them. As a boy he had broken his leg, and it was badly set. Although he could use it, it was always shorter than the other.