Martel had spent several weeks posing as a fertilizer salesman from Canada before the Germans became suspicious and chased him across the Rio Grande. Patton and Ike had both joked that selling bullshit was something Luke handled very well.
They glanced at the map of Mexico which sported a number of colored pins. The green ones showed the last known locations of German units, and the red ones, the Mexican Army. The information had changed little in the last few months. Word had come from Washington that no more forays like Martel’s would be tolerated. Too provocative to the Mexicans, Liggett and Connor were told. Thus, the only information they got was from Mexican refugees fleeing from their latest civil war. When interrogated, they generally knew little.
The clock on the wall chimed three. “Damn,” said Connor. “We’ll have to break this up and go back to duty. I have a meeting with Liggett. Just a reminder, Lieutenant Martel is carrying dispatches to Washington and will be gone for several weeks. If you have anything you want him to take, see him now.”
Both Ike and Patton grinned at Martel. Connor had thrown Luke a bone. He was actually going to Washington to attend a cousin’s wedding, but, since he was being used as a courier, didn’t have to use any of his accumulated leave time, and the government would pay for the trip. It was characteristically thoughtful of Connor.
Patton jabbed Martel on the shoulder and grinned wickedly. “Just try and stay out of trouble. Don’t want to hear anything about Germans chasing your ass across the Potomac.”
Kirsten Biel liked to ride in the early mornings. It was relatively clear and cool and southern California could get very warm; especially that part located close to the Mexico, and her home was only twenty miles north of the border.
Mornings also let her think without interference from her cousins who still didn’t believe she was capable of running the ranch she’d inherited from her late husband. Ridiculous. She’d been raised on a ranch in Texas and under far harsher circumstances before being swept off her feet by Richard Biel. She admitted that the rough and hilly ground was marginal at best, but so far she’d been able to make a go of it. The land had been cheap for a good reason, yet was able to support a number of cattle that were sold for a decent profit. So far. She just hoped the troubles in nearby Mexico stayed in Mexico.
She shook her head sadly as she let the horse lead the way. Poor Richard, she thought, so suddenly dead of an infection that developed from a bruise on his leg. That was two years ago and now, at twenty-five, Kirsten found herself running an operation that included hundreds of head of cattle, hundreds of acres of land, and a half dozen full-time employees.
She wondered what she and her cousins would argue about today. Fred and Ella Biel were decent people, but it was clear that they resented the fact that she, an outsider, was in charge of the ranch and their collective futures. They thought it would be nice if Kirsten remarried, moved out, and sold the ranch to them, at an extremely reasonable price of course.
Remarriage was not on her agenda. Although Kirsten considered herself attractive enough, she knew she did not conform to classic definitions of feminine beauty. Despite long blonde hair and green eyes, at five-eight she was a little too tall for many men’s tastes, and at one hundred and forty pounds, just a little too sturdy and athletic for the average male. She’d long decided that the average male was very insecure, and her intelligence, education, and outspokenness had turned away a number of potential suitors.
She was especially outspoken when it came to political matters.
Attitudes regarding women were changing nationally. Women could now vote throughout the country even though women in California had been able to vote since 1911. Not too many people looked askance at her when she went riding while wearing a pair of Levi’s denim jeans instead of something more demure. Of course, very few people, other than family and hired hands, actually saw her on horseback. She also liked it that hemlines were rising and that women going swimming could actually wear bathing suits that didn’t endanger them by being so bulky they dragged the swimmer under water.
With all that was happening south of the border, she’d been told it was dangerous to ride alone. She agreed to a point and carried a model 1899 Krag carbine that had belonged to her father, and a Colt revolver she’d bought for herself in San Diego a few months ago. She was an excellent shot. She was not so familiar with the Bowie knife strapped to the outside of her boot. She jokingly said she mainly used it to clean her nails, while her cousin Ella once quietly accused her of using it to castrate suitors. Kirsten had the feeling that Ella was a fragile creature who was having a difficult time dealing with the harshness of ranch life.
Motion in the sky caught her eye. For an instant, she thought it might have been an airplane. She’d only seen a couple of them and they fascinated her as they did just about everyone. Even though they’d been invented more than fifteen years ago, they were still so rare that the very sight of one resulted in gasps of wonderment. Someday she would like to go up in one. Maybe she could use some of her precious savings to buy a ride from one of those pilots people were calling barnstormers.
But no, it was just a vulture. Then she saw a couple of more. Something had disturbed them and caused them to take off from the ground. They were a mile or so away and she wondered what they were feeding on. Was it one of her cattle, perhaps a calf that had wandered off? Or was it something else?
Kirsten pulled the rifle from its sheath and checked to see that it was loaded. It always was but she always checked. She urged the horse into a trot and hoped it was only a calf.
It wasn’t. Kirsten fought down the bile in her throat at the sight of the two dead men lying face down on the ground. They were Mexicans and had been shot in the back, executed, hands tied behind them. She did not dismount and examine them more closely. No point, she decided. Their wounds were just too massive.
That was about as much as she could tell after the vultures had been working on them. Their clothes were in rags and they were barefoot. More casualties from the long and bloody civil war being fought in Mexico, she thought, but these two had been chased or followed into California. They were likely soldiers of defeated General Alvaro Obregon, murdered by the victorious forces of Mexico’s current president, Venustiano Carranza. If the newspapers were to be believed, Carranza had essentially proclaimed himself a dictator, thanks to the backing of Imperial Germany.
That Mexicans were killing Mexicans was nothing unusual. They’d been doing it for decades. But now they’d begun taking their fighting and their vengeance killings into the United States. The presence of the two dead men meant that they’d passed close by her ranch in order to get where she had found them, and that was very unsettling. She didn’t want her ranch to become the front lines in a Mexican civil war.
What to do now, she wondered? First, she decided, she would send a detail out to bury the two men and, second, notify the sheriff. The sheriff would be powerless to do anything but take down a report and forward it to the state capital at Sacramento where they would also do nothing.
Kirsten wiped her brow with a neck kerchief. Her cousins, however well meaning, would use this as further ammunition in their argument that she should sell and move on. Maybe they were right.
She rode home and gave the instructions for the burial detail, ignoring Ella’s look of concern. She went to her room, poured several buckets of water into the cast iron tub, stripped, and settled in. The water was comfortably lukewarm. She wondered what her late husband would have done about the situation she’d discovered.