English had only one thought. “The colt?”
“Saw him, too. He looks good.”
English closed his eyes. Davey touched the man on his back, shaming himself with the gesture. Miss Katherine said nothing; they were trapped in an unnatural quiet.
Mid-morning the next day, Miss Katherine came looking for Davey. Her hair was plaited under a brown bandanna and she held a wicked-looking wire wisp in one hand. Davey flinched. Sometimes she came after one of the hands with that thing, asking him to take swipes at the heavy rugs Meiklejon favored. As much as Davey idolized Miss Katherine, he didn’t want any part of that particular chore.
But she smiled and said that there were spools of wire waiting in Socorro, and Meiklejon wanted Davey to go get them. According to her, Meiklejon felt Davey was the least likely of his men to get into mischief that far from the ranch and on his lonesome. She handed Davey an envelope with cash, for the wire she said. She didn’t ask him to wallop those rugs, and he realized he would almost have enjoyed the task, being near her, instead of having to leave on his own.
At the corrals he looked over the stock. A pair of flashy bays chewed on their hay and pretended to spook when Davey leaned on the railings. They were all style and speed and not much for strength. Barbed wire weighed a lot, Davey mused, chewing on his own bit of stemmy hay. So he checked the big sorrel, paired now with a smaller mealy bay. The other sorrel had pulled up lame on an infected hoof, was stalled in the barn, the hoof poulticed and wrapped in burlap. Souter was against the effort but Davey thought he could rescue the old son.
The untried bay snorted. It was no more than sixty miles to Socorro; the mealy bay would do just fine. The team was harnessed and ready by noon, and Davey spent the first few miles keeping the unbalanced team to a steady trot, trying to get a handle on the different horses, a horseman’s exercise to occupy his wandering mind.
The sorrel gelding was stubborn but willing. The mealy bay had Davey stumped. At times the good-looking bronco would step up to the collar and pull hard and fast enough so that the sorrel almost loped to keep up. Then just as suddenly the bay would slack off and leave the winded sorrel to pull the whole shebang.
Davey drove into the night, finally reining in to make cold camp. The team got a bait of grain; Davey got the usual tortilla and cold beans. By early morning they’d reached the plains and Davey had decided the mealy bay w asn’t harness broke at all, and that, by God, Mr. Meiklejon would have a well-broke bronco by the return trip. Must have come from Donald or Quitano. Around horses, Meiklejon would never learn.
He held in the team and rubbed his eyes against the glare of the white sand and grass. He was thinking it was too bad he hadn’t put up more supplies when leaving the ranch, like another canteen of water and some decent food. The bay kept jerking the sorrel, and Davey’s hands and temper were raw from guiding the miserable team. When they came up to water in the Gallinas Mountains, Davey let the team drink their fill,then walked them by hand, slipped their bits, and let them graze for an hour. It wasn’t going to be a turn-around trip.
While the horses grazed, Davey napped. It was the squeal of the mealy bay that woke him from a sound sleep. He came up with his hand to his rifle, laid close by just in case. An old man sat a bony white mule. The bay and the sorrel squirreled around, threatening the mule and wasting energy. The old man watched as Davey came full awake.
“Son, I got me a broke leg…be riding to the doc in Socorro. Be a sight easier on me iffen I can catch a ride with you in that wagon.” Here the old-timer briefly ran out of breath, before he began again. “Curandero up to Quemado, he says the leg’s gone rotten and he can’t do nothing more with it.”
The man was over sixty, and the mule he rode looked close to that. But taking in the calm eyes and seamed face, Davey had no doubt the old man could make the trip, broken leg and all. He had some doubts about the mule.
“Sure enough, old-timer. Let me harness up and I’ll get you settled. These bronc’s’ve had enough grass.”
The old man stayed put on the mule while Davey worked with the team. The sorrel and the mealy bay showed temper when he tried backing them into the traces and Davey cursed both animals as t hey kicked and stepped over the lines.
The old man allowed it could be the mule. “Horses don’t take to Bert, he’s some contrary and they know it. Get me in the wagon, and turn the old son loose. Bert won’t follow and he won’t worry ’bout being left alone. And no honest, respecting thief would try to steal him. By the time this leg gets set and wrapped, old Bert’ll be filled with this here good grass, and ready to carry me home.”
The white mule wandered out of sight. The team backed up right smart and stood while Davey finished his work. Only the team breathing in unison and the fat old man’s wheezing broke up the daytime sounds. Davey climbed in, pushed a place for himself against the old man’s bulk, and picked up the lines, talking to the bay and the sorrel as they moved as a team, eager to be gone from the white mule’s miserable being.
The old man spoke up finally. “The name’s Eager Briggs. I seen you…working for that Englishman to the L Slash. He ain’t so bad, for a foreigner. I knew old Littlefield. Your Englishman, he’s right ’bout the wire. I don’t much like it myself, too old for that. Dangerous, spiteful stuff. But it’s the only way now. Open range’s gone, too many folks crowding in.”
Davey listened to the old man and was reluctant to think him right. But now that Briggs had got his mouth open, he didn’t stop. “You be Davey Hildahl…come over from Arizona. With a reputation behind you that you swung a wide loop, hired out your gun. Got ridden out of good country ’cause folks didn’t trust your name.”
These were words for fighting, but Davey didn’t bother. An old man earned some few privileges, and talk was one of them.
Briggs shook his head, a sour smell coming from him. “Ain’t easy to understand, you being the peaceful one to the L Slash.”
These words were a steel trap, closing in on Davey. He’d thought that time in Arizona long gone. It had been close to three years since he’d left. He’d never killed a man, never even let off a shot. Just rode with the wrong bunch. Now an old man with a broken leg was recalling all the supposed truths. He grinned, and shook the lines to the slowing team.
Briggs rambled on. “Son, I come up from Texas. Too many years ago to make a difference. And I come up the same way you did, from over west. Had a sheriff after me, asking questions ’bout what I knowed and seen. What I did. No one else to blame but my youth, son, and my greed. Now I got over that, like you done…it seems to me.”
Davey said the first thing that came to mind. “How’d you break that leg? It don’t look pretty, and it sure don’t smell recent.”
Eager Briggs smiled, and that wasn’t a pretty sight, either. Few teeth, and the wrinkled face folded up in layers of fat and grease. “Mule kicked me, ’course. Kicked me before, but this’s the first time it took. Broke the leg bone clear through and I set it, then the durned mule went and kicked me again. More’n I could set this time. Curandero said I waited too long…herbs ain’t strong enough. Need a doc, he said. So I’s headed to Socorro.”
Two miles of silence, with Davey hoping the worst of the revelations were done. Then the old man began talking about things too close to Davey’s mind.
“I seen that mesteñero you got to the L Slash. I seen him before.” Then he changed direction. “You know, I rode out of places years back ’cause they was stringing that wire. Rode out o’ Kansas in ’Seventy-Seven. They was putting up wire faster’n my buckskin could pace a mile. Had a talk once with a man, setting on his land and guarding it with a musket. Black powder it was, big enough to stop a whole family o’ grizzlies.”