And when they checked at first light the next morning before mounting up and leaving for town, they found it had been.
MISTER WELLS
Berta’s was crowded and loud, as on every morning. The café was owned and operated by a family named Hauptmann. It was the most popular breakfast place with the town’s Anglos, but a number of Mexican businessmen and ranchers were regular patrons too, men who had more in common with Anglo ranchers and merchants than with Mexican laborers. The twins wore suits and ties, and like other men in the room they carried guns under their coats. They had made it a point to arrive early so they could have the rear corner table. It afforded good views of both the front door and the passageway to the kitchen, where the back door was.
At five minutes before eight, there entered a stocky Anglo of middle years with a big broom mustache and wearing a cattleman’s hat. He paused by the front wall and scanned the room as he received a chorus of greetings, some hailing him as Jim and some few addressing him as Mr Wells.
The twins knew who he was. It was Marina’s custom to save the daily newspaper for them to read on the weekends and they had seen Jim Wells’s picture in its pages many times. On some Saturdays they had seen him driving his cabriolet along Elizabeth as he commuted between home and law office, trading waves with friends as he went. The basic facts about his life were well and widely known. He’d been born and raised on a ranch near Corpus Christi and earned his law degree in Virginia. He came back to Texas and settled in Brownsville and became law partner to a man twenty-six years his senior and with the fitting name of Powers. An easterner with a New York law degree who once served as an American consul to Switzerland and had a gift for languages and for making and keeping friends, Stephen Powers had been living in Brownsville since right after the Mexican War. He had at various times been mayor of the town, a Cameron County judge, a district judge, a member of the Democratic state central committee, a state representative, and a state senator. To say he was the most powerful man in Cameron County was akin to saying the sky was blue, and if Jim Wells could not have had a more suitable mentor in the four years of their partnership before Powers’s death, Stephen Powers could not have had a more brilliant protégé. Moreover, when Wells married Powers’s niece, Pauline Kleiber, he joined an august circle of prominent families into which Powers himself had wed.
Powers’s specialty was real estate law, and Wells fast became as expert as his partner in land grant litigation. Their firm’s clients included Mifflin Kenedy and Richard King, who owned the largest cattle ranches in the state and were part of a coalition Powers had formed of the region’s most important ranchers, fewer than a hundred of whom owned almost all of Cameron County—which in that day stretched a hundred miles from the mouth of the Rio Grande up to Baffin Bay. This alliance of ranchmen was the core of Powers’s political strength. Each ranch employed hundreds of mestizos who would in any election cast their votes as their bosses directed. Like all mestizos in South Texas, regardless of their actual nationality, the ranch workers were all of a category and called Mexicans—“my Mexicans” by the ranchers who employed them—and if some or even most of them who voted were not American citizens, well, who could prove it in a rural world largely devoid of birth certificates? On their arrival in Texas the twins had recognized that the relationship between a rancher and his mestizos was not much different from that of a Mexican hacendado and his peons. A relationship that had developed, after all, from the same cultural traditions.
In return for Powers’s protection and promotion of their interests in the state capital, the ranchers delivered their workers’ votes to whichever candidates he pointed. It was a form of political brokering as old as the republic, and Powers was a master of it. And Jim Wells became a wizard. He was as affable as his partner, but having grown up on a cattle ranch he was one of the ranchers’ own and hence even more adept at dealing with them. He knew their ways, talked like they did, was given to the same gestures. But in his rapport with the peons he had no Anglo equal. Like Powers he was fluent in Spanish and familiar with Mexican culture and respectful of Mexican traditions, and having converted to his wife’s Catholic faith, he shared the peons’ religion. More than any other Anglo of authority, Jim Wells had a genuine concern for the local Mexicans, and they recognized his sincerity and repaid it with steadfast personal loyalty. He knew hundreds of them by name, and in times of want provided for them from his own pocket. He defended them in court for a nominal fee, when he charged them anything at all. He got them out of jail with reduced fines and sentences. He visited with them in their homes and played with their children and was a godfather many times over. Many a Mexican child had been named in his honor—Santiago or Jaime or Diego. The peons venerated Wells as a patron saint and not even their employers had greater sway with them. When Señor Wells—or Don Santiago, as he was widely known—said he would grateful it if they would vote for a particular political candidate, so did they vote. In the thirteen years since Stephen Powers’s death, Jim Wells, who had never held public office except for a brief stint as Brownsville city attorney, had expanded the political machine he inherited from his partner and enhanced its operation. His influence now reached not only to the Texas capitol but to the Washington offices of Texas congressmen he had helped to get elected. El jefe de los jefes, the Mexicans called him.
But to see him standing by the café wall and surveying the room, his hat pushed back and his hands in his pockets, you might have taken him for a grocer or a hardware dealer—albeit a popular one, to judge by all the invitations he received to join one or another table. He declined them every one with a smile and small wave. Then his gaze fixed on the twins across the room and he started toward them, still swapping hellos as he went. “Well now, what’s this?” Blake Cortéz whispered.
Some of the other patrons turned to see who Mr Wells was headed for and saw it was those Wolfe twins nobody could tell apart and who you hardly ever saw in town but on the week’s end. Been building a house in that downriver palm swamp for well-nigh three years on account of they were doing it all themselves, if you could believe that, which was about as crazy as building a house out there in the first place. Said to be from Galveston. Their daddy some kind of bigwig diplomat down in Mexico till him and their momma got took by the yellow jack. Elmer at the bank said they come with scads of money but had near spent the last dollar of it, what with their Mex wives and children and a house in town to support besides building the one in the swamp. Oh, they were finelooking young fellas, no disputing that, and always good to return a howdy and a smile. But you had to admit that none of them—meaning their wives too—were given to passing the time of day. Pleasant and all if you ran into them at the market or the bank but always ready to move along. Odd clan, truth to tell. What would old Jim want to see them about?
“Howdy boys,” Wells said as he got to their table. He looked from one to the other. “Had to see for myself if you the spittin images I been told. Begosh if you aint. About as hard to believe as we never met in all the time you been here.” He put his hand out. “Name’s Jim Wells.” They each shook his hand in turn and said their names. He asked if he could join them and they both glanced at the wall clock. In a voice that couldn’t be heard at the nearest tables, Jim Wells said, “Evaristo aint coming, boys. I’d be obliged if yall could spare me a minute.”