She had curtains in the windows and the house was painfully neat. There must have been at least three more rooms, although this seemed to be the largest. “You met Mr. Balch?” That ‘mister’ surprised me, but I nodded. “He’s got a fine big ranch, he and Mr. Saddler. He brought lumber in from the eastern part of the state to build the house. It has shutters and everything.” It seemed to me I detected a note of admiration, but I could not be sure.
Womenfolks set store by houses and such. Especially houses with fixings. She should see our house up in Colorado, I thought. It was the biggest I’d ever seen, but Pa had been a builder by trade and he designed it himself—and did most of the work himself. With Ma helping.
“Roger says—“
“Roger?” I interrupted.
“Roger Balch. He’s Mr. Balch’s son. He says they are bringing in breeding stock from back east, and they will have the finest ranch anywhere around.” Her tone irritated me. Whose side was she on, anyway? “Maybe if you’re so friendly you should tell him to leave your father’s hands alone, and to let us gather our cattle where they happen to be.”
“Roger says there’s none of our cattle up there. His pa won’t have anybody coming around his place. I’ve told father that, and I’ve told Joe, but they won’t listen.”
“Ma’am, it’s none of my business yet, but from the way your Mr. Balch acted, I’d say your pa and Joe Hinge were in the right. Balch acted like a man who’d ride roughshod over everything or anybody.”
“That isn’t true! Roger says that will all change when he tells his father about—“ She stopped.
“About you and him? Don’t count on it, ma’am. Don’t count on it at all. I’ve known such men here and there, and your Mr. Balch doesn’t shape up like anyone I’d want any dealings with. And if he has any plans for that son of his, they won’t include you.”
She went white, then red. I never saw a woman so angry. She stood up, and her eyes were even bigger when she was mad. And for a moment I thought she’d slap me.
“Ma’am, I meant nothing against you. I simply meant that Balch wouldn’t want his son tying up with anybody he could ride over. If he wants somebody for his son, it will be somebody big enough to ride over him. The man respects nothing but money and power.”
Riding away from there I figured I’d talked out of turn, and I’d been guilty of hasty judgment. Maybe I’d guessed wrong on Balch, but he seemed like he didn’t care two whoops for anything, and had I not been there to more or less even things up he might have been a whole lot rougher. I wondered if Hinge and the boys knew that Barby Ann was seeing Roger. Somehow, I had an idea they knew nothing about it, nothing at all.
Riding over the country, I could see they’d had a dry year, but this was good graze, and they had some bottoms here and there where a man could cut hay. Riding over country I was going to have to work, I took my time, topping out on every rise to get the lay of the land. I wanted to see how the drainage lay, and locate the likely spots for water. Fuentes would fill me in, but there was nothing like seeing the land itself. Terrain has a pattern and, once the pattern is familiar, finding one’s way about is much easier. As I went east, the hills grew steeper and more rugged. Turning in the saddle I could see the cap-rock far off against the sky. What lay behind me was what was loosely called the Basin, and far off I could see the tiny cluster of buildings that was Stirrup-Iron headquarters.
It was midafternoon before I sighted the line-shack. It lay cupped in a hand of hills with a patch of mesquite a few yards off and a pole corral near the cabin. A rider’s trail came down off the hill into the trail to the cabin—a trail that looked fresh. In the corral were a number of horses, yet not more than a half dozen, one of them still damp from the saddle.
The cabin was of logs that must have been carted some distance, for there were no trees around. They had been laid in place with the bark on, and now, years later, the bark was falling off. There was a washstand at the door and a clean white towel hanging from a peg.
Tying my horses to the corral bars, and with my Winchester in my right hand and my saddlebags and blanket roll in the left, I walked up to the cabin. Nothing stirred. A faint thread of smoke pointed at the sky. I tapped on the door with the muzzle of my rifle, then pushed it open.
A lean Mexican with a sardonic expression was laying on his back on a bunk, with a six-shooter in his hand. “Buenos dias, amigo … I hope,” he said smiling. I grinned at him. “I hope, too. I’m in no mood for a fight. Hinge sent me up to watch you work. He told me he had a no-account Mexican up here who wouldn’t do any more work than he could help.”
Fuentes smiled, rolling a thin cigar in his fine white teeth. “Of all he might say, that would not be it. I was sent to gather cattle. Occasionally, I gather them, and occasionally I lie down to contemplate where the cattle might be—as well as the sins of men. More often I just look for cattle to gather. I am trying to figure out,” he swung his boots to the floor, “the number of miles to catch each cow. Then if I figure the wages they pay me, the expense of keeping horses for me to do the work, I should be able to figure out whether it is good business to catch cows.”
He paused, brushing the ash from his cigar to the floor. “Moreover, some of these steers are big, very, very big, and very, very mean. So I lie down to contemplate how to get those steers out of the canyons.” “No problem,” I said, “no problem at all. You send back to the ranch for one of those screw jacks. If they don’t have one there, go to town. If you go to town you can always have a drink and talk to the senoritas. “You get one of those screw jacks … You know, the kind they lift buildings with when they wish to move them? All right. You get one of those. Better yet, get several. You go back of the east rim of the country, and you stick them under the edge and you start turning. You turn and turn and turn, and when you get the country tilted high enough, the cattle will just tumble out of the canyons. And you wait here with a big net and you bag them as they fall out. It is very simple.”
He picked up his gunbelt. “I am Tony Fuentes.”
“And I am Milo Talon, once of Colorado, now of anywhere I hang my hat.”
“I am of California.”
“Heard of it. Ain’t that the land they stacked up to keep the ocean from comin’ in over the desert?”
Fuentes pointed toward the coals of a dying fire, and the blackened pot. “There are beans. There are also a couple of sage hens under the coals, and they should be ready to eat. Can you make coffee?”
“I’ll give it a try.”
Fuentes stood up. He was about five-ten and had the easy movement of a bullwhip.
“Did they tell you anything down there? About Balch?”
“Met him … along with Hinge and some others. I didn’t take to him.” We ate, and he filled me in on the country. The water was mostly alkali or verging on it. The country looked flat, but was ripped open by deep canyons in unexpected places. Some of these canyons had grassy meadows, some thickets of mesquite. There was also a lot of rough, rocky, broken country. “There are cattle back in those canyons that are ten years old and never been branded. There’s even a few buffalo.”
“About Balch,” I said.
“A bad one … and some other bad ones with him.”
“I’m listening.”
“Tory Benton, Klaus, Ingerman and Knuckle Vansen. They get forty a month. His regular hands get thirty, and Balch has passed the word that any of his hands who prove themselves will also get forty.”
“Prove themselves?”
Fuentes shrugged. “Rough stuff against anybody who gets in the way … like us.”
“And the major?”
“Not yet. Saddler doesn’t think they are strong enough. Besides, there are other considerations. At least, that is what I think, but I am only a Mexican who rides a horse.”