Longarm laughed slightly. He said, “Mr. Hunter, I’m not on anybody’s side. I got sent down here to put a stop to this trouble, and that’s what I intend to do. The first thing I’m going to do is find out who’s causing the trouble, and then I’m going to make them quit it. Now, if it’s you that’s causing it, then I reckon that I’m going to have to make you quit, but if it’s someone else, then rest assured, I’ll be going after them.”
Hunter smiled thinly. He said, “Well, Marshal, I’m not too worried about you finding out that it’s been me causing the trouble. All I’ve tried to do is come down here and make a place for me and my family to live and prosper. Some of the other folks haven’t wanted me to do that. All I’ve been doing is defending what is mine.”
Longarm said, “Then you have nothing to fear from me, but I would like to have a talk with you. You’re the first of the homesteaders that I’ve had a chance to visit with.”
Hunter had hard, green eyes and he put them directly on Longarm. He said, “What about Barrett and Myers? You had a chance to talk to them?”
“They ain’t been real cooperative.” Longarm smiled thinly. “I sent word for them to meet me in town, but they never showed up. Sent some boys with guns they ought not to have been carrying, and I had to get stern with them, if you take my meaning.”
Hunter eyed him curiously. He said, “You say you had to get stern with them?”
“Let’s just say that they ain’t going to be welcome in town until this business gets settled. In fact, right now, the rule is that none of the Myerses and none of the Barretts can come into town until the big honchos come in and talk this matter over with me.”
Hunter pulled a face. He said, “Is that a fact? First I’ve heard of it. That’s kind of an unusual step. What do the townspeople think about all that?”
Longarm said, “Might surprise you to know that they don’t much care for it.”
Hunter scratched his jaw. He said, “I’ve got some coffee in the house that’s been on the stove since about six this morning. It could probably walk on its own legs. You want to take a chance on a cup?”
Longarm reached for the boot of his saddlebags behind his horse and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. He said, “We might could thin it down with some of this.”
Tom Hunter looked up at the sun. He said, “That might not be too bad of an idea. Normally, it would be too early for me, but this is Tuesday.”
“No,” Longarm said. “I think it’s Wednesday.”
“Well, either way, Tuesdays or Wednesdays are my days to drink early.”
Longarm laughed and they walked into the cool, dim house.
Chapter 5
They sat at a handmade table in the spacious kitchen of the cool house. Tom Hunter had told Longarm that with the help of two Mexicans, he had built the place himself. He said, “Marshal, I quarried this limestone out of the ground, transported it, mixed the mortar, trucked in the lumber on a box wagon, and built it from the ground up. I put in the plumbing so I could have indoor running water coming in from that windmill out yonder in the backyard. My wife could stand right there at that kitchen sink and pump that handle and get water without having to carry it in here in a bucket. I’ve got good barns, I’ve got good corrals, and I’ve got some good stock. Ain’t none of it worth a damned to me because of Jake Myers and Archie Barrett and that bunch. I started out with a hundred head of cattle and twenty horses. Now I’m down to ten head of breeding stock and five horses. On top of that, I can’t go further because I’m cut off from water.”
Longarm raised up slightly and looked out the back window. He said, “Mr. Hunter, I can see what appears to be a pretty good stream from here. At least, according to that line of willows.”
Tom Hunter made a snorting sound. He said, “Yeah, at one time, that was a pretty good stream, and I could water a lot of stock from it and at least part of it’s on my land. But the Barretts dammed it up about five miles upstream. They’ve got themselves a nice lake—on government land I might add—but I don’t get a drop. I have to drive my cattle to water every day and then drive them back. It’s a four mile going and a four mile coming. I can’t let them drift down there, or I’d never see them again. And my windmill dried UP.”
Longarm took a sip of his coffee. He said, “I don’t understand, Mr. Hunter, why you and the rest of the homesteaders let this matter get so out of hand. From what I understand, there’s about fifty homesteads around here.”
Hunter nodded. He said, “Yeah, you’d think we could have handled it that way. The only problem with that, Marshal, is that out of that fifty or so men, there’s only about twenty of them that’s willing to fight. The Myerses and the Barretts together could double that with gunhands. But that ain’t the big problem. The biggest problem is that we’re isolated. We’re four and five miles apart, some of us even farther. What happens when a crowd of them ride up in your front yard and go to shooting in the windows and you’ve got your wife and children under the beds, hiding, and you’re only one gun by yourself? What do you do then, Marshal? You do what a lot of them have done. You take what they’ll let you have or else you load the wagon and leave. I reckon we’ve lost maybe twenty families in the past year or two.”
Longarm adjusted his hat and grimaced. He said, “I see what you mean. They’re organized, and you’re not.”
“And there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it. I’m holding on here by the skin of my teeth. I’m doing it more out of plain old stubbornness than anything else. I’ve sent my wife and kids back to Junction where we came from. She’s gone back to teaching school and I go in and get what little groceries I need about every two weeks. I don’t know why I don’t just give up.”
Longarm looked around. He said, “Probably because this is yours, and nobody is supposed to be able to force you to give it up.”
“Marshal, I can build a house, I can build a barn, I can train a horse, I can farm, I can run cattle, I can shoot, I can help my neighbor, and I can damn near deliver a baby, but I can’t fight the odds I’m up against now. I can make a living back in Junction, but I don’t want to work for the other man. I want my own place, and this is it. Right now, I’ve been thinking mighty hard about just riding into Barrett’s place and calling him out. I’m not that good of a pistol shot, and there’s a good chance that he’d kill me, but that’s the way I feel right now.”
Longarm shook his head. He said, “No, Mr. Hunter, you don’t want to be doing that. In the first place, from what I understand, Mr. Archie Barrett is not the kind that’s going to be called out into a fair fight. You’d be dead before you got to within a half mile of him. This is my kind of work. I can’t build a house, I can’t run cattle, and I can’t farm, but I can take care of folks that are making other people’s lives not so good. You’re going to have to leave this one to me.”
Tom Hunter sipped at his coffee and looked doleful. He said, “Well, Marshal, I wish you luck. I would point out that there’s just one of you, but I reckon you already know that. Something is going to have to happen pretty soon. There’s too many like me, barely getting by from day to day. Some of them have made their peace with the Myerses and the Barretts, and they just stick to their own homesteads, but they can’t make a living off of what little land they hold in deed. They have to use the government land, and they ain’t allowed to. It’s just simple arithmetic. You need so many acres and so much water for every head of stock you’ve got, and when the government said 160 acres was a homestead, they were thinking of raising corn. I know they weren’t thinking about raising half-wild longhorn crosses. Hell, even purebred cattle would have a tough time rustling it out on what little land we have here. I’ve got three homesteads—480 acres—one in my name, one in my brother’s name, and one in my oldest boy’s name. Of course, he’s only six. I hear tell that Barrett is going to challenge a lot of our claims like the one that I got in my boy’s name and the one I got in my brother’s name. Man, you know the law. A man’s supposed to prove up his own claim. Well, hell, I could prove up 480 acres myself. I can work that much myself, but that ain’t what the law says. So, I guess if they wanted to, they could go to Austin with their money and their lawyers and the next thing we’d know, we’d be getting chucked off our own land because damned near every settler around here is just like me. We’ve got three or four homesteads in different names. Hell, we’ve got to. Of course, the Myerses and the Barretts ain’t no different. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t even have some in the name of some of their dead relatives, but there’s nobody that is going to challenge them at the land department.” He shook his head. “We’re just the little fellows, Marshal. All we can do is hang on and fight.”