It was a warm day and enough wind was blowing to raise the light, powdery, leachy dust that was so irritating to a man’s nose. He took a big bandanna out of his saddlebags and tied it around his face like a bandit, just over the bridge of his nose. His horse wouldn’t suffer because nature had put enough hair in a horse’s nose so that it would filter out such trouble.
He put the chestnut into a ground-eating lope and rode in a wide eastward swath until he located the headquarters of the James Castle ranch. They appeared to be running cattle that were a mixed breed of shorthorns and white-face Herefords with a base stock of longhorn mixed in with them. Only in the last ten years had the ranchers realized the necessity of breeding beef stock to the all-bone, longhorned cattle. The small gentle Midwestern beef stock couldn’t handle the harsh Texas climates by themselves, but if they were crossed with the hardy stock of the longhorn, then you got a good bit of the longhorn’s hardiness, and you put a little meat on his bones with the shorter-horned or Hereford cross.
He set his horse on the dirt road and looked out across the half mile between himself and the headquarters of the James Castle branch of the family. It was a big, two-story adobe or stucco structure with red Mexican tile on the roof. Even from that distance, he could see that it was a well-kept place, and around the barns and other outbuildings he could see men working.
He had no reason to suspect that the Castles had anything to do with the murders. It was just that they had come to his attention first, and if anyone would be interested in the welfare and management of the country around San Angelo, it would be the largest landowners, and that most definitely would be the Castle family.
He rode on, curving toward the north toward the little town of Wall, about seven miles east of San Angelo. He passed Wall and continued further north, disliking the country as much as he had from previous visits. They had done an excellent job of growing rocks, cactus, sand, mesquite trees, and a few scrub oaks, but there was damned little grass for cattle to eat and damned few cultivated crops. Here and there he saw some scraggly fields of corn, oats, and wheat, but he was damned if the country would handle more than one cow per one hundred acres. If a man was going to make a living ranching, he needed a hell of a lot of land.
The headquarters for the Vernon Castle ranch was about five miles northeast of San Angelo. The fort, he noted, lay in almost a direct line between San Angelo and the Vernon Castle ranch. It wasn’t significant because as Captain Montrose had said, the government land didn’t cover enough area to be worth anybody’s life, much less four troopers. Still, it was interesting to note that the Castles did have parcels of land that were much closer to the fort, some that were almost bordering the government land that the fort occupied.
The Vernon Castle ranch house was very much like that of the other brother, big and white with a red-tiled roof and plenty of outbuildings and corrals and barns. It too showed the effects of money and attention.
Having seen all that he wanted to see, he turned his horse and headed back toward town. His route took him very close to Fort Concho. He thought about stopping by to see Captain Montrose, but decided that the less he was identified with the garrison, the better off it was for all concerned.
But as he rode by, the thought came to him of just how folks in the East pictured a frontier fort. Most of them thought it had a wall around it, supposedly to keep the Indians out. That wasn’t the case now, nor had it ever normally been the case. First of all, there usually weren’t enough building materials to build a wall around a garrison fort. Secondly, there weren’t any Indians stupid enough to come and attack over a hundred soldiers on their own home grounds. The fort was a series of barracks, barns, and other buildings built around a large parade ground, or quadrangle as the army called it. He figured that the neat row of houses where the married officers lived would be a disappointment to the folks back East, who visualized the fort as being on constant alert against an Indian attack. Behind one officer’s house, he could see a Mexican lady hanging clothes on a line to dry. He reckoned the woman was completely unaware that at any second some wild Indian could put an arrow through her breast. It made him laugh.
He rode on back into town over the featureless land, broken only here and there by buttes that had stood the test against nature and reared up two or three hundred feet off the flat prairie. Other than buttes and arroyos and crevices and draws that slashed the ground here and there, it was hard to tell what part of the country you were in just by looking around.
He put his horse up at the hotel stable and went back to his room. First he had a drink and then a smoke. He sat there trying to think of something smart to do, but nothing would come. What he needed was information about the people of the area, about the history of the area, and about the attitude that was prevalent toward the soldiers. There didn’t seem to be any way to get that information without giving himself away as a U.S. marshal. That was the hell of it.
He couldn’t use his badge for any good purpose. In this case, it was a hindrance more than a help. He didn’t have the slightest idea of how he was going to go about tracking down the murderer or murderers of the soldiers. Hell, he thought, it could be anyone. Anybody could lay off the road between the fort and the town, and on moonlit nights he’d have no trouble knocking a bluecoat out of the saddle.
Of course, it was interesting, especially in view of the fact that one of the Castle ranches was to the south and another to the northeast, that while three soldiers had been killed on the road between the fort and the town, one had been shot out of the saddle south of town on the road that could be said to lead to the James Castle ranch. He didn’t know if he was being influenced by the fact that he didn’t like the Castle kind of people, the kind that wanted to control towns, the kind that wanted to control other people’s lives. That could be entering into it, he had to admit to himself.
He decided that that night might be the time to meet with someone he figured knew everything and everybody and every detail of what was going on in town, the madam of the whorehouse up on the third floor, Mabelle Russell. The only problem with that was he could not recollect if he had ever let on to her that he was a federal officer. It had been three or four years since he had been in San Angelo and he dimly remembered being incognito back then. It hadn’t been the same kind of a job, but as a general rule, unless there was a need for it, Longarm kept his badge in his pocket. He never paraded the fact that he was a marshal. If somebody was going to do something wrong, they seldom did it if they knew they were standing right next to a law officer. Besides, on a purely social basis people tended to shy away from you when they saw that big gold and blue enameled badge. It scared them, made them think that you were the bogeyman or maybe going to put them in jail.
He decided that he would have his supper if he could find a decent place to eat, and then have a few drinks at the Elite, perhaps with the opportunity to run into more of the Castle clan, and then go pay Miss Mabelle a visit.
On a tip from Todd, Longarm walked several streets back from the main drag to a Mrs. Browning’s boardinghouse. He got there about six-thirty, and it appeared to him that he was in time for either the second or third setting, judging by the number of men who were coming out. He entered through a long hall into two big rooms, each of which was centered by a long dining table around which a dozen men were busy in the sole pursuit of eating their fill. Here and there, harried-looking women and girls in aprons were carrying pitchers of iced tea or platters of food and rushing back and forth, trying to keep up with the demand.