A Tale Out of Luck Page 3

  She still remembered clearly what her mother told her when she got to visit with her that one time in jail, before the lynching. Her mother hugged her and stroked her hair as if she were a little girl again, though she knew she never would be. She closed her eyes against the tears, and sniffed in the aroma of the pine forests outside. Then Jane had started to cry.

  “Mama, what are they gonna do to you?”

  “Listen to me, Jane. You’re a very pretty girl. You’ve got to watch out for men who want that—men like that son of a bitch I shot. But you can use it to your advantage. Use it to find a nice man with money. You don’t have to be in love with him, and he doesn’t have to be young or handsome. Do you hear me?”

  Jane nodded, but didn’t understand why her mother was telling her all this right now. “But, Mama . . .”

  “Hush, girl. Just listen. Go to my cousin Jenny’s in Luck, Texas. It’s out past Austin somewhere. You’ll find it. Luck, Texas. Remember that. Go there and find Jenny and tell her what happened. Find a nice man with money. You promise me, right now!”

  Jane had promised. She had come to Luck, but no one knew what had become of her mother’s cousin, Jenny. Flora Barlow had taken her in, but Jane was still looking for that kind, not-so-handsome, rich man her mother had told her to find six years ago. Neither man nor boy had gotten close to her since her mother shot that freighter. She held them all at bay with an icy demeanor and a knack she had developed for keeping to herself.

  Jane knew everyone thought of her as tough, but she just felt scared most of the time. The truth was, she was a little relieved to have a safe escort in the form of Jay Blue Tomlinson walking her home tonight. But he was not the man her mother told her to look for. He was just a cowboy.

  “Her face launched a thousand ships,” Jay Blue was declaring. “They started a war over her.”

  She realized he was still talking about Helen of Troy. “A thousand ships?” She surprised even herself with the depth of sarcasm in her voice.

  “Can you believe that?”

  “No, I can’t. It’s just a stupid old story.” They had passed the blacksmith shop and the lumberyard, and Jane could now make out the adobe walls of the house she stayed in at the edge of town. It was just a vacant shell with a leaky roof, but no one objected to her staying there. “I can see my house from here,” she announced. “You can have your coat back now.”

  “Not at all. I’ll walk you all the way to the door. A gentleman wouldn’t leave a lady out in the cold right here in the street.”

  “I’ve got a mean dog in there, so don’t think you’re coming in. He’ll tear you to pieces.”

  “I didn’t figure on coming in tonight.” Jay Blue left his pony at the rail and accompanied her up the walkway to her front door.

  “Not tonight or any night.” She stopped at the door and started removing the coat.

  “You want to put some money on that?” he suggested.

  “As if you had money? Take your coat and go home. You’re just a boy.” She shoved the garment at him, feeling the cold night air envelope her again.

  “I’m older than you are.”

  “You’re older in years, maybe. But that’s all. Good night, Jay Blue.” She reached for the latch on the door.

  “Hey, let me meet your dog,” he said.

  She slammed the door in his face, shutting herself inside the cold, dark room. Too bad he wasn’t the one her mother told her to find. She kind of liked him. She felt very alone there in the dark. The old adobe smelled musty. She wanted to cry, but that had never gotten her anywhere, so she sniffed her childish sorrows aside and felt her way to the bed. Perhaps the lynch mob would stay out of her dreams tonight. She just wanted to go to sleep, and wake up to her mother’s voice in her ears, and her mother’s gentle hands brushing her hair back from her cheek.

  Skeeter woke, briefly, from his dreams of girls in calico dresses and fried chicken on a Sunday afternoon. He thought he had heard something outside. A rattle of hooves, the squeal of a strange stallion. But there were so many different kinds of snores in this bunkhouse that they could sound like almost anything. That wheezing noise in Long Tom’s nose must have been what had sounded like a stallion, and Tonkawa Jones’s teeth popping together could have easily passed for hoofbeats in his sleep. Skeeter pulled his pillow over his head and went right back to sleep.

  5

  JAY BLUE still felt the percussion of the heavy door she had slammed in his face.

  “Good night!” he yelled. He stood there awkwardly, as if he might hear a reply through the thick wooden slabs. He put on his coat. It smelled like her. It was warm. His chest ached. He fought an urge to knock on the door, deciding he had done enough damage. He turned, trudged to his horse, and mounted for the long ride home.

  “Stupid,” he said to himself. “You don’t meet a dog.”

  He could have offered to carry some firewood in for her, but let me meet your dog?“Some sweet-talker you are, Jay Blue.”

  Maybe his skull was fractured from the beating he had taken. Maybe that’s why he had made such an idiot of himself. It was hard to see the road in the moonlight because his left eye was beginning to swell shut. His lip was already as swollen as a snake-bit pup. His ribs were hurting like hell where one of those bastards had kicked him. He should have just taken his ass-kicking and left town.

  But, he had stood up for her honor. That had to impress her, even if she didn’t show it. And that bit about Helen of Troy was inspired. He smiled a little, but it hurt his split lip. He felt as if his face had launched a thousand ships.

  What if the worst was yet to come? What if his father had found out that he had slipped off to town. You didn’t want to see Captain Hank Tomlinson mad. He touched his bleeding lip. Oh, shit. Now the dread really sank into his stomach. His father would want to know what had happened to his face. He could lie about it—make up some wild story about falling out of the loft or something—but sooner or later somebody in town would mention the beating he had taken in the saloon at the hands of the Double Horn boys. Then he would be in trouble for lying on top of the unauthorized trip to town.

  “You’re in for it, Jay Blue. You stupid . . .”

  His father was going to . . . He didn’t even want to think about it. There was nothing worse than that old Ranger’s wrath. Five hundred stampeding cattle didn’t spook him as much. Maybe it was time to leave home. Go off on his own. He could write a note and leave it on the door.

  But leave the ranch? Miss Flora was right. He would have to earn that ranch, and he couldn’t do that by running off to avoid his father’s rancor.

  Jay Blue resorted to prayer. “I’m sorry, God. I’m so . . . gosh darn sorry. Help me out of this one, will you? I’ll go to church someday. I’d give my left nut. . . . Let me retract that, Lord. I forgot who I was talkin’ to. I’ll clean up my act, if you’d just get me out of this one with my hide.”

  He had no idea whether or not God was listening.

  What’s he gonna do? Is he gonna take the ranch from me? Like old Gotch said, my ass is gonna be exactly in a crack when my daddy finds out.

  When he finally rode under the Broken Arrow Ranch sign, he was tired, and his head hurt, and he just wanted to go to sleep, more so to forget the trouble he was in than to catch up on his rest. He would lie down awhile and wait for the beginning of the worst day of his life.

  As he rode among the outbuildings, he didn’t see Skeeter anywhere. He left his horse in the barn and trudged to the bunkhouse, where he usually stayed after guard duty. Entering quietly, he saw Skeeter fast asleep on top of his covers. Jay Blue could only shake his head. He pulled the latch string in so no one could enter from the outside. He went to the spare bunk and, like Skeeter, collapsed fully dressed. The snores sounded like the growls of a hundred grizzly bears. He’d rather face a hundred grizzlies than his father. He welcomed sleep. It held the only freedom from misery he was liable to know for a long, long time.

  6

  CAPTAIN HA
NK TOMLINSON possessed a rare reputation for vigilance. It was said that the wing beats of an owl could wake him from a sound sleep. The captain himself always dismissed the claim with a snort, for he knew owls’ wings made little or no noise at all. He doubted even the owl could hear its own strokes cutting the wind.

  “No, I can’t hear the owl’s wings,” he’d reply, “but I can hear the mouse shit right before the owl catches him.”

  The truth was, Hank realized that his hearing was not all it once had been. He attributed that to too many hours spent practicing his marksmanship, testing firearms, and using them in hunting and fighting situations. A lot of gunshots had gone off in his ears, not to mention the occasional artillery blast.

  But this morning, instead of waking to a noise, Captain Hank Tomlinson woke to the absence of one. His eyes flew open, and he gasped his first waking breath. A faint glow of almost-dawn filtered in through the curtains. His ears told him something was missing.

  He realized that the stud horses had not screamed their desire for that estrus Thoroughbred mare for hours. The first half of the night, they had caught her scent every so often, each time singing their desperate love songs to her. He’d heard the stamping of hooves, too, as the animals looked for ways out of their enclosures. Then, at some point in the night, the lusty stallions had fallen silent.

  He threw the quilt all the way off the bed, felt the morning’s chill grab him. He winced at old wounds and aching joints on his way to the window. Though only a hint of daylight bathed the grounds outside, one look told him the mare was gone.

  “There’d better be an explanation,” he muttered.

  Two minutes later, dressed and armed with his Colt, he reached the bottom of the steps. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, all bowlegged, with his long gunfighter’s hair jutting every which way. He pulled his hair back, Indian-style, jammed a felt hat down on his head, and burst out onto the porch.

  “I did not give orders for that mare to be moved,” he grumbled aloud.

  He was beginning to get mad, and that was a bad way for Hank Tomlinson to start his day. For all of the qualities he knew he possessed, and all of the improvements to his character that he constantly strove to refine, Hank admitted that he had a bad temper.

  He took a few deep breaths and then stalked toward the barn. He was hoping one of his men had put the mare in a stall, but a quick search proved the Thoroughbred was nowhere to be found.

  He was growing seriously angry now, in spite of every effort to control his temper. Perhaps there was an explanation, but his hunches were telling him otherwise. That mare was gone. He could feel it. There was a great dearth of her being all around him. Whoever should have been standing guard last night had messed up on a grand scale.

  Captain Hank Tomlinson turned on his heels and locked his glare onto the door of the bunkhouse. He began to stomp toward it. On his way to the old plank door, he noticed that the latch string had been pulled in. He wasn’t in a mood to knock. His pace quickened, his body leaning, building momentum. As soon as he got to that bunkhouse door, somebody was going to catch something that would make hell seem like a Sunday afternoon church social.

  The latch on the bunkhouse door was of hand-carved wood. Inside the door, two old boot soles had been nailed on to hold the plank door to the log wall. With one mighty kick, Hank splintered the wooden latch and ripped the makeshift boot-sole hinges clean off the log wall. Among the surprised men inside, he saw Jay Blue and Skeeter sitting upright in their bunks, still dressed, right down to their boots. His voice came out as a roar.

  “Which one of you girls had guard duty last night?”

  Jay Blue pointed toward Skeeter’s bunk, but when he looked, he only saw Skeeter pointing back at him.

  “It was your night,” Skeeter said.

  “You said you’d cover it for me!”

  The argument ended there as Jay Blue’s father reached for the nearest culprit, and that was Skeeter. But Skeeter was quick when he was scared, and he ducked aside, hurdled the broken door, and escaped with the foot speed of a cottontail rabbit.

  Jay Blue saw his father descend on him next. He rolled off the mattress as the ex-Ranger pounced. Landing on the old puncheon floor, his ribs and his head flared with pain from last night’s scuffle. Under the bunk, he could see daylight through the open doorway, so he rolled that way under the bed frame, avoiding his father’s next attempt to grab him. Once on the other side of the bunk, he sprang to his feet, ran right over Long Tom Merrick’s shins, and burst outside into the gray light of the morning.

  He saw Skeeter duck into the barn and thought that was a good place to grab a horse and skedaddle.

  Behind him, he heard Policarpo Losoya, the ranch foreman: “¿Que pasa, Capitán?”

  Then the roar of his father: “Somebody stole my mare!”

  Jay Blue stopped just inside the door to the barn, his father’s announcement sinking into his brain. Skeeter had been trying to saddle a horse, but he had heard the captain, too, and now he was just standing there with his mouth open. He looked toward the empty corral where he had left the mare the night before, then back at Jay Blue. “Oh, shit!” he said.

  “Hell’s bells, Skeeter!” This was even worse than Jay Blue had imagined. He was in deep enough trouble for sneaking off to town—but the loss of that mare . . . His father might kill him. Well, okay, he wouldn’t literally kill him, but right now Jay Blue was almost wishing he was dead.

  “She was there when I went to sleep,” Skeeter said.

  “Christ almighty!” Jay Blue grabbed a bridle. “We’ve got to get her back, or we’re dead.”

  Skeeter nodded as he went back to saddling the pony. “Seguro que sí. Even worse than dead.”

  The captain stormed into the barn just then, and both Jay Blue and Skeeter had to quit everything in order to climb the railings into the adjoining corral, staying just out of the captain’s reach. Skeeter hid behind a trough as Jay Blue kept the horses between himself and his father.

  “Come out of there and face the music, damn it!” The angry rancher was working the outside perimeter of the corrals, trying to catch sight of the boys. Jay Blue managed to stay hidden behind the moving horses in the corral, but lost track of where Skeeter had gone. As he played hide-and-seek with the most dangerous ex-Ranger in Texas, Jay Blue heard Policarpo giving orders, in a rather low tone of voice, to some of the other cowboys: “Saddle those boys two mounts so they can get out of here. Tonk, come look at the tracks around the mare’s pen with me.”

  Jay Blue hoped his father, who had gone a bit deaf, might have missed all that. He was well winded from hiding behind the moving horses by the time Policarpo called out to Captain Tomlinson: “¡Jefe! You better come look!”

  Under the bellies of the horses, Jay Blue watched his father break away from the barn corrals and stalk over to the circular bronc-busting pen. “Skeeter!” Jay Blue hissed in a loud whisper. “Now’s our chance. Where the hell are you?”

  Skeeter dropped from the loft into the barn corral. Crouching with Skeeter, Jay Blue caught his breath as he peered between the corral rails at the foreman, the captain, and the captain’s trusted Indian scout, Tonkawa Jones—known as Tonk. Policarpo had pulled on some pants, but was still barefooted. Tonk wore his moccasins and a nightshirt. They were all studying and discussing the evidence on the ground around the mare’s pen.

  Jay Blue heard Policarpo talking to his father: “Tonk says one horse circled her pen. No shoes.”

  “Indians?” the Ranger growled.

  Jay Blue didn’t wait around to hear anymore. “We better p’alla,” he suggested.

  “Vámanos,” Skeeter agreed.

  They crawled between cedar rails, back into the barn, where they found two cowhands, George Powers and Beto Canales, cinching mounts for them.

  “You boys better git,” said Powers. “Never seen the old man this mad.”

  Beto only shook his head at the boys in disapproval.

  Jay Blue mount
ed. As he spurred his horse out of the barn, he heard a curt little whistle and saw Long Tom Merrick in his long handles at the bunkhouse door, two hats and two gun belts with holstered six-shooters in his hands. Jay Blue reined his pony over to Long Tom, took his six-gun rig, and put his hat on.

  “¡Mira!” said Americo Limón, stepping out of the bunkhouse. He tossed a Winchester to Jay Blue, and another to Skeeter. “¡Corran, pendejos!”

  Jay Blue took the advice. Spurring his mount, he looked over his shoulder at his father, still standing at the bronc pen. The captain’s stance said he was still hopping mad. The Ranger saw the boys making a run for it, and he shouted, “You little turds better get back here!”

  Jay Blue could only think of one reply. “We’ll get the mare back, Daddy! I promise we’ll get her back!” It was only then that he remembered how seriously his father took a promise.

  The galloping gait of the horse made his battered skull and rib cage feel as if someone had dropped burning coals into them, and yet the power of the animal coupled with the relief of his narrow escape filled him with an unexpected euphoria. Skeeter came up beside him, all wide-eyed with the confusion of the whole rude awakening. Jay Blue couldn’t help it. He flashed Skeeter a grin. A second later, a wild yelp of joy burst from his lungs. Skeeter answered it with his own grito, and the boys galloped away down the river valley toward town, hollering like liquored outlaws after an all-night spree.

  Hank Tomlinson stood back at the mare’s pen with Policarpo and Tonk, watching the boys ride away. “Aw, hell, now what have I done, Poli? Over a damn horse.”

  “They’ll come back, Jefe. Anyway, they’re going the wrong way. Tonk says the mare jumped the fence. You believe that? Whoever took her, ran her off to the west.”