Spanish Acres

Front matter

ornia 95204

By bal G. Evarts

Tur Cross Purt Tuer PASSING oF THE OLD WEST

II

Four Tasao horsemen threaded the sandrock breaks in the vast canyon of the Rio Tasao by way of the old Mescalano Trail and topped out in the southern edge of the Rolavi Sink. The regular Tasao crossing was some fifteen miles to the east and the Mescalano Trail had been used but little of late years, being known to but few whites.

Just north of them lay Sand Crawl, a twentymile expanse of blow-sand, so named from the impermanency of its topographical features. The sands shifted with every desert gale, one hill being whittled away as a new one formed. Crawl Sand was waterless and verdureless. Stock never penetrated this inhospitable area, so riders seldom visited it. The Tasaos, to reach the old Castinado hacienda and Pueblo Tasao, must make a long detour or cross through Sand Crawl. They elected to cross.

The blazing ball of the sun was reflected from the brassy sands with furious intensity. After traveling for an hour through this flaming inferno, the Tasao who rode in the lead reined in his pony and lifted a hand to impose silence upon his companions. They listened. Then a scream, a piercing shriek of mortal agony, ripped through the heated silence.

One of the Tasaos assumed that it was some poor devil dying of thirst and would have ridden forward to his assistance, but the leader detained him, giving it as his conviction that the man had just met a violent end. Leaving the four ponies in the charge of one, the remaining three crawled to the crest of a sand wave just ahead and peered cautiously forth.

Three saddled horses stood at the far edge of a sand flat some two hundred yards away. One man held two of them. A second man was engaged at some task near the third horse. As the Tasaos watched, he stooped to pick up some object and inspected it before tossing it from him into the sand.

One of the Tsao ponies nickered and the scene beyond became one of swift activity. The man slashed the horse with his hat and made for his own mount, swung to the saddle and the two riders left on the run, disappearing in the maze of sand hills.

The remaining horse sidled away from a dark object that seemed to drag from its left side. The Tasaos understood. Even a very gentle horse will strive to move away from some object that drags close beside it. The object follows _ and the horse speeds up and wheels away. That something still follows, evidently with sinister intent. The animal, seeking to escape, sideslashes the thing with its heels and stampedes, kicking as it runs. By the time the horse has reached a state of exhaustion, the object has been reduced to pulp or slit to ribbons by those slashing heels. The Tasaos watched. ‘The horse, strangely enough, stood as if petrified, except that at intervals it side-stepped daintily away from the thing that dragged.

The Tasaos eventually rode across the flat and one of them whirled his reata and put his loop on the horse before it could gain headway. ‘The dead man dragged by one foot from the left stirrup. His boot heel had been pried off with a knife and his foot had been thrust through the stirrup. The knife had been broken in the operation and it was this that the man had tossed from him into the sand.

Taking the back track of the three horses, the Tasaos studied the signs in the sands that revealed every track as clearly as if made in new snow. The victim had been riding between the two others. The one on his right had suddenly seized his gun and plucked it from its holster, apparently tossing it off into the sand, where the Tasaos found it some ten feet removed from the three lines of horse tracks. At the same instant the man who rode on his left had seized him and dragged him from the saddle, dismounting with his struggling victim as easily as a cat would carry a squirming kitten, and had crushed the life out of him as a python might crush the bones of a half-grown pig. 'The evidence revealed that the final moment had come when the killer had thrown his victim flat in the sand, placed a knee on his chest, while hands that possessed terrible strength had exerted an upward pull upon the prostrate form until the whole chest gave way between the opposing pressures.

White men, the Tasao leader reflected, seldom troubled to conceal the evidence of a killing.

They did it more or less openly. Why, then, should these two have taken such pains, when it was so simple a matter to shoot a man in the back? It was, of course, to make the killing appear accidental — as if the man’s boot heel had come off while his horse was in a refractory mood and his foot had slipped through the stirrup. By the time some rider discovered the horse — far from the spot, since the animal would head out of these sands and make for its home range and water — the winds would have covered every track in Sand Crawl. There would be no bullet wound or knife mark on the body, only shattered bones. It mattered nothing to the Tasaos if these two wished to conceal the evidence of their deed. It merely roused their curiosity. What did matter to them was the fact that the victim was one Gillfoyle, the most recent owner of the Castinado Grant and Pueblo Tasao, the fourth to meet a strange end since the tribe had been exiled from their ancestral home. This killing, then, must be an act of providence. The Red Gods still looked kindly upon their people, for the tribal curse was working with incredible proficiency. This would be a gala occasion for the tribe of Tasao and one night very soon the drums would sound once more in the hills above the Valley of Springs.

The quartet elected to turn back at once. The killers might have waited beyond to determine who had intruded upon their privacy. They would think nothing of picking off four Tasaos from behind some sand hill. The Tasaos were never a wasteful people. There was no adequate reason why good equipment should rot in the sand when its owner had no further need of it. So they stripped saddle and bridle from the horse, the gun belt from the victim, and headed back into the south on the Mescalano Trail.

III

Tue squat *dobe buildings of Rolavi Wells were mainly of a tawny hue that blended well with the pervading tones of the landscape. Now they seemed to absorb a roseate tinge from the crimson flame of the sunset and so continued to merge with the general color scheme.

The place was laid out in a hollow square about the wells. Coulard’s various establishments occupied one whole side of the square. The Golden Nugget, his barroom and gambling hall, stood at one corner. Coulard’s Trading Store graced the corner at the far end of the block, these two pretentious establishments being connected by a long chain of ’dobe structures, each a room unto itself, that constituted the lodging facilities of Rolavi Wells. The two adjoining sides of the square were scatteringly occupied by the office, freight shed and corrals of the stage company, the Rolavi Livery and Boarding Barn, sundry other adobe structures, mostly untenanted since the collapse of the miming boom, a

Mexican eating place and a Mexican saloon, gambling and fandango hall. On the far side of the square two flat adobe dwellings stood apart. Three women, one white and two of Mexican extraction, sat on the porch of one. Perhaps thirty houses, chiefly tenanted by Mexicans, were scattered about the adjacent flats.

Behind the camp, well up on the barren flank of the Palo Verde Hills, were the ragged scars of former mining operations and the buildings of the Three Strike Mine, located on the one vein that had proved sufficiently rich to be worked at a moderate profit. Rude frame shacks, blistered and paintless, housed the score or so of miners.

A dusty, plodding figure, herding two burros before him, shuffled across the flats toward Rolavi Wells. His outfit was that of the typical desert rat. The handle of two miner’s picks protruded rearward from one pack, one on either side to balance. A short-handled shovel showed atop the pack. A rifle was thrust beneath the lash rope of the second pack. The man seemed to sag a bit to one side as he walked, as if thrown slightly off center by the weight of a great single-action forty-five that swung from his right hip. A typical member of the fraternity of wandering prospectors in appearance and outfit, even to the crown of his dilapidated hat, he was also typical of his clan in that his spirit was serene and untroubled. ‘The despondent droop of his white mustache was contradicted by a pair of keen old blue eyes that peered forth humorously upon all the world.

Dad Whetzel sang as he shuffled along:

“A dead man’s horse in the hills.’

A rider, leading a saddled horse, overtook him and slowed his pace.

“ Howdy, Farrel,” Whetzel greeted. ‘“ Your party ain’t come yet?”

“ Any day now,” Farrel prophesied. “TI been meeting the stage every day for most a week. He'll be along. I left Alden camped with the outfit at a water hole ten mile east along the base of the hills.”

Farrel too was a drifter, but of a different type. Some two weeks before he and the man to whom he referred as Alden had crossed in over the Palo Verde Mountains with a pack outfit. They waited for the arrival of a third member before taking up their avowed occupation of — trapping mustangs in the Rolavi Sink.

The dusty stage, at the end of its long run over the Palo Verdes from Quenemaro, rolled into Rolavi Wells and disgorged a single passenger. Farrel introduced the newcomer to old man Whetzel as Stanley Hollister.

“Told you he’d be along,” Farrel announced triumphantly.

“Yep. Everything happens in time if you wait patient for it,’ the old desert rat stated philosophically.

“Dad, here, has been scratching round in the Sink for upwards of three months,” Farrel explained. “He’s acquainted with the past, present, family connections, antecedents, social standing and disposition of most every worth-while citizen of the Rolavi Sink. They'll a good many of ’em be in Coulard’s to-night and he can tell aes

“ There’s only three big owners in the Sink,” the old prospector stated. “ They’ll likely all be in to-night, planning round-up. Starts next week.”

Later he pointed out each of the three men.

“The big fellow there — weighs over three hundred on the hoof, he does — is Doc Slaven, owner of the Cross T V. Man there beside him, one with the brindle whiskers, is Jessup of the J T. That’s Langford of the Bar Z Bell over there at the wheel. ‘Them’s the three you'll be mainly int’rested in.”

Hollister sized up these three owners of outfits operating in the Rolavi Sink. Their holdings he already knew. Art Langford had come into the Bar Z Bell, once the Martinez Grant, at the death of his father, old Tom Langford, a few years before. His cows, possibly totaling twenty thousand head, ranged all of that portion of the public domain between his own holdings and the eastern boundary of Spanish Acres, as the old Castinado Grant was locally known. Doce Slaven had bought out the few sections of land that had been settled by Mormons on Solada Arroya at the western extremity of the Sink, owning but little ground, yet running twenty thousand head of cows on the open range. Halfway between his place and the west boundary of Spanish Acres, though farther south by thirty miles, lay Jessup’s place, a homesteaded half-section of ground in a valley watered by a stream that headed in a goodly group of springs, only to dip underground, its moisture sucked up by the desert within a mile of its source. Jessup ranged perhaps four thousand head of cows. These were the only stockmen in the Sink. Between their holdings, and insulated by miles of open range, lay Spanish Acres, now deserted and in ill repute, an empire fallen into disuse. The cows of others ranged over its broad miles as they did over the public domain.

Jessup was a quiet, uncommunicative person. Langford, dark, tall and tremendously powerful, seemed gloomy and morose as Hollister observed him at his favorite pastime at the roulette wheel. Twice he heard him curse savagely as some big bet was swept in by the house-man.

Hollister turned his attention to Slaven. The man’s vast bulk made the chair in which he sat seem frail and insecure by contrast. He overflowed it. He had tilted it back until his head reclined against the wall. His eyes seemed ever half-closed as if the man were wrapped in habitual lethargy, but occasionally they rolled open to their fullest extent as might the eyes of a sleepy lion when roused from a nap. He rose to make a trip to the bar, lifting his weight with apparent effort. He dropped one arm across the shoulders of a man who stood facing the bar, the gesture seeming to be a mixture of friendliness and a desire to help support his sagging weight.

“Now that little posture of friendliness and affection is one I’d sure fight shy of if I’d ever had a cross word with Slaven,” Whetzel volunteered. “That big sleepy-lookin’ spider is always real wide awake. He appears slow, but he’s quick as a panther and stronger ’n a pack-mule. If ever he’d clamp down on a man, inadvertent like, he’d squeeze out his vitals like you or me’d compress a tube of glue.”

The old prospector kept up a running commentary and Hollister learned that Langford, a cowman from his boot soles up, had developed a mania for roulette and had lost vast sums, the total unknown, on Coulard’s wheel in the past two years.

“There’s a girl who is half-owner in the Bar Z Bell?” Hollister asked.

* Not her. Old Tom Langford was obsessed to own Spanish Acres and he preached it mornin’, noon and night till it become the chief part of the boy’s upbringing,” Whetzel said. “ His notion was in accord with the old man’s. The girl was sure sick of war. So old Tom Langford fixed her up with a sum of cash and left the Bar Z Bell outright to the son as the one who would carry out the old man’s aims to the bitter finish.”

“* Does she still live hereabouts? ” Hollister inquired.

“Yes. She’s been away considerable, off outside somewheres to school. She was raised motherless, like a boy, and she tracks round through this country regardless, bedding where night overtakes her.”

Langford snarled surlily as the house-man swept in another heavy bet.

“ He’s an ill-grained critter when he’s riled, and ready to debate the opposite side of any question, but real likable when he’s not crossed, and mostly the folks hereabouts all like him,” Whetzel said.

Hollister learned that the pudgy old fellow with the blurred, indistinct features was Judge Sloane, a relic of the mining boom, where he had lost his small stake and lingered on, to accept food and drink from any who invited. The judge was ever profound and impressive.

A newcomer invited him to the bar and the Judge as promptly accepted. He touched glasses with his host, bowing.

“The most triflin’ circumstance of life is a real ceremonious occasion for the Judge,’ Whetzel commented. “ The party he’s imbibing with, the pop-eyed gent with the yaller mustache, is Garcon, the Indian agent on the Tasao reservation down south of the canyon. He’s a pompous acting coyote with less brains than either of my jennies. When he ain’t up here drunk he’s down there drunker. I can’t look at them bulgin’ eyes an’ that radiant mustache without thinkin’ of a cat that’s just took one startled look at a dog and fluffed its tail.”

The place began to fill up. Two buckboards rattled up to discharge groups of miners from the Three Strike. Riders from the various outfits left their ponies at the hitchrails and fraternized at the bar. All games were going full blast. The place seemed to be run in the free-and-easy manner of the old placer-camp resorts. When a man was broke he played upon credit. Hollister commented upon this matter.

“Yes, Coulard is real generous and openhanded that away,” the old desert rat assented. “ Tf a man loses fifty or a hundred in cash he can go right on and drop a similar amount on credit before Coulard shuts him off. Of course, Coulard gets the cash, and all he’s out in return for the credit is wear and tear on cards, dice an’ the wheel. Son, are you anyways superstitious? ”

““ Not any to speak of,” Hollister denied.

“Do you believe in curses?” Whetzel asked.

““ T’ve heard some that was uttered so heartfelt as to carry conviction,” said Hollister.

“T don’t mean profanity, neither plain or embellished,” Whetzel explained. “ I was referring to a curse of the ha’nt variety —a spell that’s Jaid on folks or places.”

“Oh!” said Hollister. “That kind. As a general rule I'd say that if one of ’em worked it would maybe need outside support.”

“Um,” Whetzel assented. “ Maybe then, not being superstitious you hold with coincidence.”

“Unless it happens so frequent that it don’t appear altogether spontaneous and haphazard,”

Hollister qualified. “But it can be manipulated.”

“Curious chain of coincidences that’s happened over Spanish Acres way since the Tasaos laid a curse on it,” Whetzel said musingly. “Cates was the next owner of the grant after old Al Porter was drug to death by his horse. It wan't more ’n a year or two before Cates was found on the desert. He’d been bit by a rattler. In fact, he’d been over-bit, so to speak. Remarking general, lightning don’t strike twict in the same place, as the proverb has it — or rattlers neither. It’s almost a set rule for a man not to allow a rattler to bite him more than once at the same sitting; but Cates had been bit on both arms and one leg. Two dead rattlers alongside him. Odd he didn’t get no further away, but died right off.”

“ Real strange,” Hollister agreed.

“Well, anyway, the next owner is a fellow named Briggs,” Whetzel continued. “ A practical cowman, Briggs was, and he checks all this up to coincidence. After a year or two his stock started to dying off mysterious. It appears like he acquired a touch of the same malady himself and set down on the front porch to die. What with all that had happened before, the place got a bad name, and it set idle for close on to a year, maybe more. No one would pay much of a price for it with every owner meeting a strange end, and the certainty of acquiring a first-rate feud with Langford and the enmity of the Tasaos as soon as the papers was signed. Directly a party named Gillfoyle turned up, saying he owned it. Coincidence overtook him, no one knows how, some three months back. He strayed off somewhere and failed to come back. Every time an owner of Spanish Acres has passed out, the Tasaos have sounded their drums in the hills above the dead village. What do you make of it all?”

“Jt does appear like somebody had maybe gone into partnership with coincidence,’ Hollister submitted.

“Don’t it now!” Whetzel agreed. “ It looks like that curse was doing business as a firm. Spanish Acres is a sizable tract of ground — twenty-four hundred sections of land in it.”

Five men drifted in and grouped themselves at one end of the bar.

“'There’s Doc Slaven’s warriors,” Whetzel said. “All top hands, but real apt with their guns as well. Things wasn’t any too quiet hereabouts when Slaven started up six or eight years ago, what with the Porters and Langfords at war and a band of Mexican guerillas making an occasional sashay up this way along Solado Arroya. He put on a fightin’ crew for his own protection, and done right well at it. The Mexican marauders made their last raid right after that and failed to get back to their hang-out, wherever it was. Slaven constitutes what little law there is south of the Palo Verdes, by common consent of the populace. They call him sheriff, but really he ain’t. Half the riders hereabouts live in the Sink because they can’t live anywheres else, which is quite all right. Slaven’s activities chiefly consist of discouraging the pastime of shooting up the town when the boys come in from the range. Coulard objected to the damage, so Slaven, by remonstrating a bit, sort of extinguished the practice. Cole Webber, there, is the Cross T V Foreman. Cotton Moss is next in rank.”

Hollister sized up Slaven’s chief retainers.

‘Webber murders folks good-naturedly,” the old desert rat said. “ He’s sort of quit practicing haphazard homicide now.”

Coulard, the proprietor, moved continually behind the bar, dabbing at real or imaginary specks with a towel. He wore a pointed black beard, which he caressed at intervals, and his black eyes beamed cordially upon all who entered. He spoke little but heard everything as he prowled behind the bar.

Farrel wandered to the roulette wheel and Whetzel turned to Hollister.

“Well, that’s about all I’ve picked up in three months,” he said. “Is it helpful, or did you know all that before?”

“Not all— some of it,” Hollister said.

Hollister presently sauntered over and accosted Jessup and Doc Slaven, introducing himself.

“Tm figuring to trap mustangs hereabouts, hearing there’s a surplus of fuzztails in the Sink,” he explained. “So if you find some of your water holes flagged or rag-fenced you'll know it’s to keep mustangs from using that particular water and force ’em to slake their thirst elsewhere — where I'll be waiting to receive ’em. Rag-fencing won’t keep your cows from going in to water.”

Jessup nodded.

“The more you catch the better. They’re a nuisance in the Sink. Clean ’em up an’ welcome.”

Slaven assented without troubling to open his eyes.

“'They’re mowing down good grass that had better be fed into cows,” he agreed.

At that moment Langford, at the wheel, gulped a drink that had been carried to him by the bartender. He cursed fretfully as the croupier raked the board clear of chips. The imperturbable house-man idly twirled the wheel and snapped the little ivory ball in the reverse direction. The moods of gamblers meant less than nothing to him. He had seen and heard much. It was only the game that mattered. He plucked a thousand-dollar stack of chips from the check rack and pushed them toward Langford. At that moment Slaven hailed him. Langford turned impatiently but joined the group in response to Slaven’s signal.

“Well?” he demanded shortly.

‘“« This here is Mr. Hollister,” said Slaven; and Langford nodded. “ He’s a mustang hunter and we've just give our permission, Jessup and me, for him to ply his trade on the range and trap our water holes.”

“Not mine,” said Langford. “I don’t want any bunch of Gypsy mustang peelers hazing fuzztails round amongst my cows and churning em up till they run all the fat off ’em.”

“But your cows will be throwed up on the mountain for the summer inside a month,” Hollister submitted.

“No difference, I don’t give permission to trifle round after mustangs on my range,” Langford declared with finality.

““T wasn’t asking permission, I was just telling you,” Hollister answered equably.

Langford had believed the interview terminated and was turning back toward the wheel, but he halted in mid-stride.

“Just what do you mean by that?” he demanded.

“That your range, as you call it, ain’t your range at all, but public land that’s as free to me or to any man as it is to you,” Hollister stated.

“It’s always been my range by usage,” Langford retorted. “ What affair of yours is it to question? ”

“Range apportionments between local outfits are interesting and convenient but noways binding,” Hollister commented. “ However, if it’ll ruffle you to see me operating up your way, Ill confine myself to Spanish Acres and on west from there, just in the interest of peace and good will.”

“ My cows range Spanish Acres too, every foot of it,” Langford asserted. “ You can keep off there too.”

“But I thought Spanish Acres was owned ground,” Hollister submitted mildly.

“Ttis. But I’ve got an offer up to buy it from the estate and I’ll consider the use of it mine until that offer is definitely turned down,” said Langford. “So that ends that.”

“On the contrary,” Hollister amended. “ It just starts that. I can’t seem to get together with you, so I’ll act separate — and hunt mustangs wherever it damned well suits me.”

Slaven had heaved his great bulk forward till the front legs of his chair rested on the floor.

‘“‘ Having two jobs, so to speak, I'd rather act now in the capacity of sheriff and save myself a chore in the capacity of coroner a few minutes hence. You all might quit wrangling, just as a favor to me.”

Slaven rose ponderously and drew Langford aside.

“ Artie, yore acting up unreasonable,” he said. “You and me has been friends for a long spell now. No bit of use to crowd this Hollister over nothing much at all and set him on the warpath. He’s quiet, but a killer, that hombre. I could see it in his eye, once you got him riled.”

“ He needn’t hold himself in leash on my account,” Langford returned.

“Which I know all too well,” Slaven answered. “ But this whole thing is too triflin’ to get yourself killed over. I wouldn't.”

“No, neither would I,” Langford agreed. “ T someway didn’t figure it would be me.”

“Well — now you all forget it,” Slaven advised.

Langford returned to his game.

Slaven draped one huge arm across Hollister’s

Spanish Acres AI shoulders, a gesture half of friendliness, half as a measure to help support his weight. Hollister could feel the sagging drag of the man’s bulk, but the arm, limp though it was, betrayed a hint of limitless power.

“Don’t mind Art,” Slaven advised Hollister. “He’s unreasonable by spells but nice enough ’ when you catch him right.”

“We didn’t catch him just right, did we?” Hollister returned.

“ Not exactly; I reckon I timed it wrong,” said Slaven. ‘“ Anyway, don’t cross him. Give him a month to get over this and he’ll maybe forget it. He’s headstrong, Langford is, and has to be handled careful.”

“ All right,” said Hollister, “ Vll handle him — careful.”

Eventually the crowd thinned out. Langford and Jessup had departed. Hollister left with Farrel to ride out to the spot where Tommy Alden was camped with the outfit.

Slaven shifted his bulk in his chair, apparently just roused from a long period of slumber.

“There'll be trouble between them two,” he predicted.

42 Spanish Acres “ What two?” Cole Webber, the Cross T V foreman, inquired.

“Langford and this horse hunter, Hollister,” said Slaven.

“Then Langford had better walk soft,” Webber observed. “ This Hollister is a bad hombre to trifle with or I miss my guess — and I haven’t missed many or I’d be among those absent.”

“Langford will crowd him hard,” Slaven prophesied. “ He’s turned terrible argumentative of late, Art has.”

“He’s picked the wrong man to debate with this time,” Webber declared again.

“Um,” Slaven mumbled doubtfully. ‘“ Maybe. But Langford is right previous himself. I expect he can extricate himself from anything he starts.”

Webber laughed indulgently, but shook his head.

“My money is on the stranger,” he insisted mildly.

Dad Whetzel had been nodding sleepily in his chair. Now he yawned and stretched, emitting a hearty chuckle.

“ Difference of opinion is what makes betting good,” he said. “Is there only two horses entered in this race?”

“ Meaning which? ” Webber inquired.

“The more entries there is in a race the longer the odds agin some o’ the contenders — with public interest centerin’ round the favorites,” said the old desert rat. “I always did favor a twohoss race.”

IV

A girt rode down a draw in the hills above Pueblo Tasao. A movement in the brush on an adjacent ride caught her eye. She started to ride toward the spot. A horse nickered and a mounted Tasao Indian appeared on the sky line.

She proceeded down into the Valley of Springs. A hawk screamed three times in the hills behind her. ‘The three screaming notes sounded again, but from a different direction, as she reached the edge of the deserted village and traversed the narrow, crooked lanes between the adobe dwellings of Pueblo Tasao. Blown sand had banked in these deserted galleries and drifted into open doorways. A rattler writhed out of her path and retreated to a fissure at the base of an adobe wall. Darting, many-hued lizards scurried on all sides. A few weeds had reared their heads in the unused lanes and now stood as dry and dead as the village itself. A ghostly silence pervaded the spot, broken only when an occasional grasshopper whirred aloft with a crackling flash of bright-colored wings or when some vagrant breeze stirred the dried skeletons of the weeds and rattled their brittle bones as if in warning to the intruder.