The Blue Mustang Read online

  The Blue

  Mustang

  Will Henry

  LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY

  Dedicated to the memory of a gallant and long vanished

  breed, the pureblooded Spanish mustang.

  And to the proposition, in fiction, that the beloved Texas

  legend of the five-dollar saddle and the fifteen-dollar

  horse will not die with the wonderful old men who

  created it in fact.

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  About The Author

  Other Leisure books by Will Henry

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  I was seventeen that spring, coming eighteen in July. And there never was a north of Texas ranch boy more glad to be alive than I that early May morning of ’74. It was all I could do to wait for daylight. The minute it came sneaking in around the edges of the old cowhide hung across the open doorway of the lean-to, I was off and running.

  Outside, no matter I was so raring to go, I just had to hold up and look around a spell. That was how beautiful our old place was in the springtime.

  Here was a boy who had never been farther away from home than Fort Worth, an easy day’s jog, east. An uncurried ranch kid who in something less than an hour was due to be setting out on the biggest ride of his life. Yet that old home-place on the Brazos was so breathtakingly lovely, so quiet and blessed peaceful, he just had to stand and have a head-shaking look at it.

  Over east, the sun was no more than a sleepy pink nod, still yawning and stretching somewhere past the Sabine Basin. On out west, looking over the ridgepole of the big house, there wasn’t a thing but two hundred fifty miles of buffalo grass between us and the New Mexico line. Down south there was nothing save the five o’clock rustle of the dawn breeze wandering through the chaparral and mesquite trying to make up its drowsy mind whether to ease on down another four hundred miles to Matamoras and the Gulf, or fool around another forty-eight hours up there in Palo Pinto County. But north! Oh, there was something all right! It was just about the prettiest sight, I reckon, there ever was in the prairie world.

  Did you ever see the upper run of a high plains river in early May? Way up high in its course where the water runs bright and clean and sun-dance shallow over the bottom sand? And where it hasn’t yet got all muddied up with squatter’s silt, nor been ditched and channeled and spread out to die irrigating some bottomland Mexican’s forty acres of pinto beans and tortilla corn?

  It’s just plain beautiful.

  All tall cottonwoods and fat willows and reed-bird rushes and the border meadow grass growing up high and graceful enough to brush a pony’s underside or stand wither-high to a yearling heifer.

  Well, that’s the way the Brazos was where it curled around our lower pasture and looped back to run and laugh and play lazy in the morning sun just beyond our workstock corrals and the cool shade of the six big cottonwoods that landmarked our place for half a day’s ride coming in from any direction.

  But a boy of seventeen, even one only sixty days shy of eighteen, can stand still for just so much beauty. After that, providing he was as full of sap and springtime as I was, he’s got to cut and run. Especially when he’s set, the minute breakfast’s done, to saddle up and ride with his two big brothers clean down to Mason County to pick up a 1600-head trailherd of Llano River longhorns.

  What brought me down out of those rosy daybreak clouds was the rattle and bang of Doak fumbling around in the cook-shack to get the coffee on and the sidemeat sliced for frying.

  At the same time I heard Brack and our old daddy stomping into their boots in the main house. I had to grin. Dad, as usual, was wheezing and coughing and carrying on like a mossyback herd-bull that had spent a damp night on low ground and wasn’t yet quite sure whether he was going to get his feet under him or not. Or whether, once he had, he was going to live long enough to walk to water.

  But I wasn’t really worried about the old gentleman.

  He’d lived a long time. Long enough to carve that beautiful upper Brazos spread of ours out of the brisket of Comanche country with nothing but an old Sharps buffalo gun and more guts than you could hang on a forty-mile linefence. He sure wasn’t going to break down now that he was right on the edge of closing the biggest deal any old-time cattleman could hope to work up in one lifetime. No, Dad wasn’t cut out to die in bed. Nor in getting out of bed either. He was all he-coon and two Texas yards tall, and no three boys could ever have been prouder of their tough old daddy than Brack and Doak and me were of ours.

  When I’d finished scrubbing my teeth with a forefinger full of the wood ash and salt we’d been taught to use since we could stand up and stick a thumb in our mouths—Dad always said he wouldn’t give a Union nickel for any horse that didn’t have a clean mouth—I went in to help Doak.

  We all had our jobs. Doak was cook, being the middle boy and made to learn because he was the younger when Mother died. Brack was the oldest and from that had been the first taught on cattle. So he looked after the range stock, with Doak naturally siding him when he wasn’t rustling grub or riding into Mineral Wells for supplies. Me, I was the horse wrangler. There were two reasons for that. First place, the wrangler was the lowest form of cowranch life. Second place, I had a way with horses. “A light hand and a thick head,” Dad called it. So I got to ride herd on our remuda from the time I was tall enough to climb on a thirteen-hand mustang with the help of an eight-hand rain barrel.

  Doak didn’t even look around when I came in.

  He knew it was me from the “sneaky” way I walked. “Like a damn Comanche,” he used to say. But he always grinned and mussed up my hair when he said it and I knew that when it came to me he was pretty partial to Comanches.

  Of course I wasn’t any Indian, nor any part of one. Doak just said that to rile me. Our family was one of the few in that part of Texas that didn’t have at least some strain of what Brack called “red bronco blood” running in it. Most did. For in those early days the Caddo and Kwahadi squaws were a lot handier than white women and a sight easier to sign on, not having any more morals than a wet dog wanting to get into a warm tent. I reckon most likely half the famous families in Texas got started on a Comanche blanket, but ours wasn’t one of them. Dad was right straight out of Red Dirt Georgia stock and Mother was pure Blue Ridge Virginia. I don’t say all this to run down the Indians nor yet to be waving the Confederate flag. It’s just that I was little and dark and on the scraggly side, not big and handsome and light colored like Brack and Doak. I really did look like a scrub breed alongside of them and so felt all the time called on to fight back when anybody said “Injun” looking my way.

  “Hello, Button,” Doak grinned, keeping r
ight on cutting the fatback. “How many slices you good for this mornin’? You ain’t rightly big enough to be fed with the men but as long as I left the gate open and you got in, we’ll overlook it this once.”

  That was another thing. That cussed “Button.” So I didn’t answer him right away.

  I had a name as good as either him or Brack but they never used it on me. In the old Bible Dad hadn’t looked at since he’d closed it alongside Mother’s bed seventeen years ago, it said “Walker Austin Starbuck, July 7, 1856.” To my way of thinking “Walk” Starbuck was every bit as ringy a Texas name as Brack or Doak.

  Yet, even there, I knew they had me topped. Walk just didn’t have the class and snap to it that Brack and Doak did. Still I never let on that it didn’t.

  “Better fry me about a dozen,” I came back at him. “I don’t set in the back of the buckboard to nobody when it comes to hanging on the feedbag.”

  That was true, anyway. I could eat half my weight in buckwheats the weakest morning I ever crawled out of my bunk. They knew that and somehow always kind of admired me for it. Maybe it was because of the way Dad looked at it. “First thing I do with a new hand,” he’d say, “is watch him eat. If he ain’t a good doer, he don’t stay on my ranch long enough to loosen his cinch.”

  Doak grinned again and said, “Well you sure don’t, Button, that’s the skyblue gospel. Never yet saw the hand could win a chuck wagon go-round with you.” He glanced past me, out the door, his blue eyes crinkling at the edges in that crispy, crow’s-foot way that warmed you through like a woodfire on a frosty morning. “Set down and dive in. Yonder comes the Old Bull of the Brazos, along with brother Brack. You don’t get your share now, you’re apt to weigh in short come saddlin’ time.”

  While we all four ate, I let Brack and Doak and Dad do the talking. That was just some more of the way things were run on our ranch. Up to the time you were old enough to vote for president you just sat back and listened.

  Usually that took some doing, but not that morning. I was so excited about the big ride and so set on not missing a word of what they were saying about it that I only ate six griddle cakes, which wasn’t the half of what I was ordinarily good for.

  Dad did most of the talking, and even though he had pawed up the same ground a dozen times in the past ten days we all stood back and gave him respectful room to toss its dust over his shoulder. It settled out about this way.

  Deep back in the past winter, when the terrible cowmarket panic of ’73 was still on and when it had gone ninety days down our way without a drop of rain or a single snow flurry to offset the driest summer and fall since the big die-up of ’68, Dad had got one of his sometime cow hunches.

  It was the kind that had kept him in the cattle business right on through the war and the ruinous $3-a-head days that followed it—that disastrous stretch of Texas time that busted half the big beef outfits south of Red River and all the little ones except his and maybe four or five others in the whole state. It was the kind of a hunch, the dry-grinned way he put it, “that made a steer keep tryin’.” He knew it wasn’t going to do him any good but damned if he wasn’t going to rear up and ride it for all it was worth, anyway.

  He’d had a notion, along about the middle of February, that ’74 was going to be one of the best grass years in a granddaddy coon’s age. He’d right away gone down to his bank in Dallas and mortgaged our place four feet over the fence posts. Then he’d saddled up Old Samson, his pet personal pony that was shaggy as a sheepdog and never been clipped because he said it would sap his strength, and rode off south with $1000 of the mortgage money in one saddlebag and six pounds of dried beef and red beans in the other.

  He was back in a week, grinning like a catfish gumming a chunk of raw liver with no hook in it. And that was the first we found out what he’d been up to.

  All he had done—with our range sprouting nothing but sand drifts and our own stock staying alive by picking mesquite beans and chewing the prickly pear cactus me and Brack and Doak spent the winter burning the spines off of—was sashay down into Mason County and contract 1600 head of four-year-old steers for May delivery at $15 a head.

  We thought he’d slipped his bit for sure. We’d heard they’d had upwards of 400,000 head of Texas cattle jamming the yards up along the railroads in Kansas that past summer, with the eastern buyers turning down choice grassfat stuff at $13 and $14 a head. Now here was Dad contracting for range-run scrubs at $15! It was plumb crazy.

  We spent the next thirty days moping around the place like three draggletailed fryers down with the croup and hoping to die by sunset.

  I was the worst.

  I was so bad hit by the thought of losing the ranch that I went off feed and began dropping weight. Every day I rode out to say good-bye to another of my secret places along the Brazos; the ones I looked at like they were real people and old friends and not just spots of land. Places like the upper sandbar bend where I had my summer swimming hole. And like the cottonwood grove over on “Little Sam” Island where they said Houston had camped with his Comanche bride for their honeymoon, and where I snuck off to read the books Mother had left me. That was maybe the best place of all, that little island. For you see I had to be careful about those books. I was the only one who had been to school and could read. So I didn’t dast let Brack nor Doak catch me at it for fear it would make them feel funny or get onto me about showing off my book learning.

  But I never did get done saying good-bye to my secret spots. Before I got down to the last one— the old south bank bluff at the ranch house bend, where I used to daydream something scandalous while keeping count of how many minnow chubs my pet family of kingfishers were spearing out of the cattail shallows and how many times an hour my mother reedbirds flew in and out to feed our babies—it began to cloud up off southeast.

  Within an hour it had come on to set in as gentle and sweet a rain as ever pocked the prairie dust with that wonderful spring shower smell every ranch boy can remember long past when he’s forgotten everything else in his whole happy life.

  And it kept right on coming. Up from the Gulf and the warm rain country down around Matamoras. Not hard nor sudden enough to be a gully washer, cutting away more grass than it grew. But regular and easy, with always two or three days of sunny clouddrift in between to settle it deep and grateful into the thirsty ground. It was just as though God himself was turning it off and on the careful, cautious way he would to water his own back pasture.

  By May 1 the whole range, from Red River to the Rio Grande, was so green it hurt your eyes to look at it. The cattle were tallowing up better than a pound a day and the only thing that was filling out faster than our steers was the Missouri and Kansas trail markets. From early April, when grass-fed stuff was limping along at $16 a head, with the big packers laying off and their commission men scarce and scary as shot-at coyotes, to that first week in May, the market climbed $13 a head. And that was pasture delivery down south, not up there trackside at Abilene or Ellsworth on the Kansas Pacific, or Newton on the Santa Fe.

  All it meant was that inside of thirty days Dad had made close to $20,000 on his Mason County contract. And without doing a blessed thing to earn it save to set on the ranch house galería listening to the grass grow.

  Also, it meant, as he and Brack and Doak now tailed off their talk, that within the next ten minutes us three Starbuck boys were going to saddle up and head on down to Mason City with a $25,000 letter of credit on the Stockman’s National Bank in Dallas in our hip pockets. The same to be handed over to a man named Ransom Buchanan for contract delivery of the herd he had figured he’d been smart enough to stick Dad with back in the bone dry middle of February.

  But like they used to say down in that Palo Pinto country of ours, “the pony ain’t bin saddled that won’t stumble if you leave off watchin’ his feet.” We were, all of us, Brack and Doak and me, so all-fired worked up about Dad’s big kill on the market rise that none of us were keeping our eyes on the ground in front of our horses
the way we’d ought to have been.

  Within those ten minutes of mine that I was so sure were due to see us cinched up and hitting out for Mason City on a high laughing lope, we had run our little mustangs into a set of prairie dog holes that broke our hearts and brought us down harder than any real fall off a leg-snapped pony ever could have managed.

  Chapter Two

  Outside the cookshack Dad had just handed Brack the downpayment receipt and our copy of the Buchanan delivery contract when Doak, who had just come out, squinted off east and nodded quickly. “Yonder comes trouble or I cain’t read a dustboil no more.”

  All of us looked down the river, not arguing any. Doak had the best eyes for far seeing in the county, and could outlook an antelope when the light was right. Which it was. Brack just nodded back and grunted, “Likely you’re right. Who do you make it out to be?”

  We could all of us see that it was a rider on a dun or light bay horse and in a six-foot, four-inch hurry. But it was only Doak who could cut his saddle sign. “It’s old Sec,” he said. “There ain’t nobody else sets a full gallop thet clean and straight.”

  Secondido Gonzales was our first neighbor down the Brazos. He was a mesteñero, a Mex mustang hunter, who broke horses for us in the off season and was a par tic u lar friend of mine. He had taught me all I knew about horses, wild or tame, and I looked up to him more like a favorite uncle than like a Mexican. But I never was much of a one to worry what color a man was so long as we had the same way of seeing things. Which me and old Sec sure did.

  “That’s Mozo he’s riding,” I said.

  “It is,” agreed Doak.

  It was a pretty bobtailed exchange, even for us Starbucks, but it said a lot in six words.

  Mozo was the old man’s top running horse, a genuine criollo, one of the last of the pure Spanish horses. Sec had bought him off the Escadero Ranch six hundred miles down in Coahuila State, giving three hundred American dollars for him as a green-broke yearling. He could walk down the toughest mustang that ever lived inside of two weeks or run him to death in twenty miles, whichever way he wanted it. And what made all that important to us standing there in front of the cookshack was that old Sec would never saddle him short of having something mighty serious on his mind.