“Dad?” Candy spoke quietly. “I want you to understand. If you go through with this I’ll go and fight beside Barry Merrano. I will take a rifle and stand beside him and what happens to him will happen to me.”
“What!” He stared at his daughter, consternation in his eyes. In that instant he looked not only into his daughter’s eyes but into those of his wife, and something more, he saw a reflection of himself, thirty years before.
Without another word, Candy turned and left the room. The big old man behind her stared after her, hurt, confusion, and doubt struggling in his mind. He sat down suddenly in the big hide chair.
Suddenly he felt old and tired, staring into the fire, trying to think things out and seeing only his dying cattle and the failure of all he had done. The cracked mud in the dried-up water holes, the leafless trees, all his years, all his struggle, all his work and his plans gone.
That was Friday night. Early Saturday morning a buckboard left Mirror Valley and bounced over the stones and through the thick gray dust toward Willow Springs and the turnoff to Merrano’s tunnel. Clyde Mayer had made a decision, and he was following through. He knew nothing of the action taken by the ranchers at the TD ranch. He was threatened by foreclosure by the wholesalers, and in this emergency he was turning to the one man in the valley who seemed to have money.
The tunnel was unguarded, and he turned in hesitantly. When he emerged into the bright sunlight Barry Merrano was standing in the door of his house. The sound of hoofs in the tunnel was plainly audible within the house at any time.
Mayer pulled up in the ranch yard and tied the lines to the whipstock. He got down carefully, for he was not as agile as he had once been.
“Howdy, son!” He peered at Barry over his glasses. “Reckon this visit’s a surprise.”
“Come in,” Barry invited. “I’m just back from patching a hole in a dam. A badger dug into it, and the water started to drain out.”
“My, my!” Mayer looked around slowly. “Your mother would be right proud, young man! Right proud! She was a fine woman, your mother was!”
“Thanks. That’s always good to hear from somebody else. She was a good mother to me.”
When they were seated over coffee, Mayer said, “Son, I’ve come to you for help. The wholesalers have shut off my credit, and they are demanding money. I am low on stock, and the ranchers will be coming in for supplies.”
“How much do you need?”
“An awful lot, son. I’d need five thousand dollars. I’d sell you a half interest in my business for it. I know I’ve been foolish to extend credit, but these are good men, son, and basically they mean well. Every one of them will pay off if it is the last thing they do, but that won’t help me now … nor them.”
“If you don’t get the money, you go broke?”
“That’s right.”
“Then what happens to the ranchers?”
“They’d starve or get out. The drouth’s hit this country so bad there isn’t a head of cattle fit to sell. It will take two really good years to get them out of the hole they’re in. They’d never be able to stick it out. They have no food, no feed, no water.”
Merrano stared into his cup, his brown, wind-tanned face thoughtful. After a moment he said, “All right. I’ll buy a half interest in your store on one condition. I don’t want anybody to know about it.”
Mayer hesitated. “What about credit for the ranchers? They are my friends, and I’d hate to turn them down.”
“Don’t. Give them what they need. Somebody has to have faith in this country. Maybe after this they will learn their lesson and handle their stock sensibly.”
Mayer stood up, his relief obvious. “I don’t mind telling you, son, I was scared. I hadn’t anywhere to turn.”
He started for his buckboard and paused before getting into it. “Son, you be careful. That Joe Stangle is a mighty mean man, and so is Dulin.”
“Thanks. I’ll keep my eyes open.”
After Mayer had gone Barry returned to the house and got his Winchester. Then he slipped on his gunbelt. It was time to begin moving the cattle off the Long Valley range and back into the basin. No use to let them feed there too long. In a few weeks he would take thirty head over to Aragon for sale. It would save on feed and water and give him a little more working cash.
He had saddled up and was about to mount when he heard a rattle of horse’s hooves. It was Candy Drake.
At her expression he caught her hand. “Candy? What’s happened?”
Swiftly, the words tumbling into one another, she told him of the meeting and its result. “Please, Barry! Don’t think too hard of Father! All he can see now is his cattle dying!”
“I know,” he agreed. “The trouble is that the little water I have wouldn’t help much. With that mass of cattle coming in, my smaller pools would be trampled into mud within hours and the bigger pools behind the dams would last no time at all. It would simply add my ruin to the rest of them. Believe me, Candy, I’d like to help.”
“There is a way, if they will work. There’s water in the White Horse Hills. It would take a lot of work, but they could get at it.”
“They wouldn’t listen, Barry. Not now.”
“There’s only one thing I can do now, Candy. They broke my mother’s heart on this ground, and they turned Father from a laughter-loving young vaquero into a morose and lonely man.”
“There’s only one thing I can do, and that’s what your father would do or any of the men with him. I am going to fight.”
He waved a hand. “There’s four years of blood, sweat, and blisters in this. Days and nights when I was so bitterly lonely I thought I’d go insane. I built those dams with my own hands. I gathered the stones for this house, cut and shaped the planks for the floors. I made the chairs. These things are mine, and I’ll fight to keep them.”
“If a single cow crosses The Fence, that cow will cross over my dead body, but believe me, it won’t be lying there alone. Candy, if you can talk to your father, tell him that. Blood won’t save his cattle, but if it is blood he wants, that’s what he will get.”
“They’ll kill you, Barry. There are too many of them.”
“I won’t be alone. This may sound silly, but my mother and father will be with me. This land was theirs before it was mine. The ghosts of a thousand other men who fought for their homes will be there, too!”
“Barry, I told Father that if he came I’d fight with you.”
Surprised, he looked up at her. “You said that?”
“I did, and I meant it.”
Speechless, he hesitated, then shook his head. “No, as much as I’d like it, I can’t let you fight against your father. This is my fight. I am obliged for the warning, but you’d better ride on now. But no matter what happens, I’ll not forget this.”
“All right, I’ll go, but Barry, be careful! Joe Stangle hates you! And that other man, Curt McKesson … he frightens me!”
For a long time after she was gone, Barry sat staring down the valley, thinking. He would leave the cattle where they were.
Accustomed to working and planning alone he now turned all his thoughts to defense. It was a problem he had considered since his first day, and his position was excellent. Table Mountain and the Neck barred access to Mirror Valley, and only the tunnel and The Fence offered ingress. In the other direction lay the canyon that opened into Long Valley, and he had no worries about that direction. It was a seventy-mile ride, much of it through the reservation lands, to get to that approach, and the Indians would resent any armed band crossing their lands.
Despite the selfishness of those who would destroy all he had built to save their own cattle, he could feel sympathy for them. He understood what it meant to a cattleman to see his stock dying, yet the water he had would save them for a few days only.
They were clutching at straws, egged on by the hatred of Joe Stangle and by Dulin. Behind it was the leftover hatred for the young Mexican who had married pretty Molly O’Brien, the girl they all wanted.
With cool calculation he began to study his problem.
By noon on Saturday he began work, using a double-jack and a drill. These holes he loaded with powder, determined to blast it shut if need be. It was late afternoon before he completed the work.