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  He limped. The saber had slashed his hip to the bone, if Tess remembered right. When she heard the front door close, she refilled the glass with two fingers of Scotch and sent it down straight—not even caring that Teeler Lacey’s filthy hands and mouth had touched that glass just moments earlier. Scotch purified, she told herself, and then she found the cook, gave her orders to warm up the beefsteak, potatoes, biscuit, and coffee and bring a plate to the saddle tramp waiting in the bunkhouse.

  * * *

  “Will you hire him?” Tess asked.

  “It’d be hard not to,” Mathew said. He sat behind the desk, going over a ledger book, frowning. “That’s up to Laredo, though.”

  “Laredo’s more sentimental than you are,” Tess said.

  Mathew looked up. “Teeler was good with a gun twenty years ago. Good with a horse. Good with cattle. And he knows the country better than anyone.”

  Tess shook her head. “Lightning will be on this drive, too.”

  “So will Tom,” Mathew said. “And Groot. Joe Nambel. And anyone else we can hire on.”

  “You know what I mean, Mathew.”

  He slammed the cover of the ledger. “We could end that right now, Tess. Tell Lightning that you’re not his mother and that I’m not his father. Hell, we raised him. We’re the only parents he has ever known. He’s not the first kid to be adopted. Hell, Dunson adopted me.”

  She picked up the derringer she had left on his desk. “You know Tom better than you know Lightning.” She looked at the gun. “I know Lightning.” Her head shook. “I should have shot Teeler Lacey when I had the chance.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “What’s the pay?” the dark-mustached cowhand asked.

  “Thirty a month and found,” Mathew answered. He sat at a table on the boardwalk, or what passed for a boardwalk in Dunson City, in front of the Rio Saloon. He drank tea, but he had a bottle of Old Overholt to offer anyone who signed on or made his mark. “Twenty-dollar bonus if the herd brings in better than thirty a head at market.”

  The bottle of rye whiskey remained full.

  “But you don’t pay till Dodge City?”

  Mathew shrugged. “That’s the way things are.”

  That’s the way things had been back when Dunson made that first drive, and he had been pushing five thousand head—in one herd. Such a number in 1886 seemed unfathomable. Even the three thousand head Mathew hoped to gather would be larger than most herds being driven north. Two thousand seemed to be the average size of a trail herd these days. But then there was the matter of money. Dunson, of course, had spent the last of his silver just to pay for the roundup. This year, Mathew didn’t even have enough cash money to pay the hands doing that.

  “And if Indians take the herd,” the cowhand said, “or we lose ’em to bushwhackers, or if the country goes broke like it did back in ’73 . . . ?”

  “Then you lose three months’ wages,” Mathew said. “And I lose everything.”

  The man pushed up the brim of his hat. “Garth, my mommy didn’t raise no fool.” He pushed through the batwing doors, leaving Mathew alone with his unsigned book, a cup of tea that had more dust than liquid, and a full bottle of rye whiskey.

  He had expected this to be hard, but maybe not this tough. Mathew had friends, or so he thought, and cowboys usually didn’t mind not seeing their pay till the end of trail. There weren’t many places to spend it on the trail. He figured he would need to leave three or four, maybe five, men at the ranch to look after things. He had some steady hands, but not enough to get a herd to Kansas.

  “So you’re hiring?”

  Mathew looked up. So lost in thought, he hadn’t heard the man approach him. He looked the man over in a quick glance.

  Rawhide thin and juniper tough. High-topped stovepipe boots, spurs, chaps, a bib-front shirt of black and red checks, yellow bandanna, gauntlets, and a dun-colored Boss of the Plains Stetson. A Schofield revolver in a cross-belly holster.

  The man grinned. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Mathew scratched his nose, then shook his head. “Can’t say I do.”

  “You remember this name? Bradley Rush?”

  Again, Mathew had to shake his head.

  “I rode with Dunson,” he said. “After you.”

  Mathew looked harder into the man’s face. The blue eyes seemed cold, and the man’s face had been bronzed by wind and sun, but his hair showed no gray, not even flakes in the mustache.

  “Figured you ought to know that,” Rush said. “Never been one for secrets.”

  “That was twenty years ago,” Mathew said. “You interested in a job?”

  The man smiled, and those blue eyes showed life, not death. “Grew up in Houston,” he said. “Killed ten men. Fair fights. But I haven’t done anything along those lines since ’72.” He tugged off one gauntlet and held up his hand for Mathew’s inspection.

  What Mathew saw was a hand full of calluses and the top two joints of the pinky finger missing. The hand of a working cowhand, not a professional gunman—no matter how Bradley Rush wore his Schofield.

  “Rode for the Diamond 10 till the owner sold out in March. Just south of Pleasanton. Been riding the grub line since. Thought I’d see what was going on in New Mexico, maybe Arizona, but then I heard that you were planning to go to Dodge City. That’s fine with me.”

  “What might not be fine is that you won’t see a dime till we get to Dodge,” Mathew told him, “and if we lose the herd, you’re broke as me. It’s a gamble.”

  Bradley Rush reached down and took the pen by the ledger. “Life’s a gamble, Garth,” he said as he signed his name neatly.

  “Can I offer you a drink?” Mathew said, and reached for the bottle.

  “No, thanks. I don’t drink.”

  * * *

  Bandannas pulled over their mouths and noses could not stop their eyes from watering as Mathew and Lightning carried the greasy, stinking skinned carcass of a dead calf to the raging fire. The smell made both men think how they might never look at a fried steak again without vomiting.

  Mathew nodded and they swung the dead calf back and forth, picking up momentum, three times, and then released the remains of what might have grown up to be a fine, profitable steer. Orange flames and wretched smoke swallowed the animal as it crashed into the pit, sending sparks showering like Roman candles on the Fourth of July.

  He could have been gathering longhorns for the cattle drive, riding with Laredo Downs to the south, or Bradley Rush off to the northeast. That hiring job in town the previous week had netted him three men, Rush, an old Seminole-Negro scout named Blasingame, and one of the vaqueros working with him now. The way Matt figured things, he needed two more men to make the drive. No, three—and even that would leave him a hand or two short, but manageable. Yet if he kept this crew skinning and burning dead cattle, he would lose some of his recent hires. Even Lightning and Tom seemed to be on the verge of telling Mathew to go to hell, that they were riding off to find a decent way to make a living. This, Mathew decided at that moment, would be the last day they would do this miserable chore. Let those “floaters” drifting in from the ranges to the north take over. Better than half of the dead cattle were theirs, anyhow.

  Silently, he and Lightning walked back to the drift fence where Tom, Joe Nambel, and four vaqueros worked at skinning more hides. Mathew stopped, staring at the rising dust and hearing the hoofs of a galloping horse. He pulled down the bandanna and spit.

  Noon. Sun burning like the hinges of hell. Too hot to be riding a horse that way, and Mathew recognized the rider as Laredo Downs, a man who knew how to treat a good horse in hot weather.

  Beside Mathew, Lightning pulled down his bandanna. Tom and Joe Nambel stopped skinning what once had been a fat brindle heifer. Even the four vaqueros stopped to look and stare.

  The lathered bay gelding slid to a stop as Laredo pulled hard on the reins. He whipped off his hat, pointed it south, and began talking, out of breath.

  “Teeler and me
was . . . roundin’ up . . . down near the river. Had herded . . . what we’d found . . . into . . . Arroyo Lindo. Come back . . . with ten more head. But what we’d . . . already gathered . . . wasn’t there . . . no more.”

  Beside Mathew, Lightning swore. Mathew said nothing, waited for Laredo to finish.

  “Six horses . . . trailed them to the crossin’.”

  “Rustlers!” Lightning snapped, and started for his horse.

  “Hold it,” Mathew barked. He looked at Laredo. “Shod or unshod horses.”

  “What difference does that make?” Lightning said.

  “Plenty,” Mathew said. Back in the day, even Thomas Dunson wouldn’t begrudge a few cattle to Kickapoos or Lipans. Most of the Indians were gone now, but every now and then some braves would cross the Rio Grande if their wives and children and old men were really hungry.

  “Shod,” Laredo answered.

  Which, Mathew thought, might be different. Shod ponies could mean bandits, white or Mexican or Indian or a mix. But in this day and age, even Kickapoos and Lipans were likely to be riding shod ponies.

  “How many cattle?”

  “Thirty head.”

  Mathew spit again. Indians had never stolen that many beeves. And even if they had, thirty head were too much to write off to hungry Indians. He did quick math in his head. Even if cattle would bring only $25 a head in Dodge City, that was a loss of $750. He couldn’t afford that, not with debts and bills and loans due in months.

  “Where’s Teeler?” Mathew asked.

  “Crossed the river. Trailin’ ’em.”

  Mathew frowned.

  “I told him not to start the ball without us,” Laredo said.

  With a curt nod, Mathew turned to Joe Nambel and Tom. He glanced at the vaqueros.

  “Well,” Lightning said behind him. “What the devil are we waiting for?”

  Mathew’s first inclination was to leave Lightning behind. Let him skin the cattle with Tom and one or two vaqueros, but he knew what would happen if he had ordered that. Lightning, and most likely Tom, too, would leave the two hired hands and follow the posse Mathew would organize. Better, he thought, to keep both of his sons where he could see them.

  He spoke to the vaqueros in border Spanish. The oldest of the crew, Juan Quinta, nodded and answered in English. Three would finish skinning the animals while he, Juan Quinta, would ride to tell la patróna—what they called Tess—what had happened and then proceed to Dunson City and send a telegraph to the county sheriff.

  Not that he could do anything. The rustlers had crossed into Mexico. They were out of the law’s hands.

  But, Mathew thought, not mine.

  * * *

  Riding with purpose, they forded the Rio Grande, flowing high from all the snowmelt but still nothing like the rivers to the north, the Red, the Canadian, the Arkansas. Laredo Downs, having swapped his winded bay for one of the vaquero’s blacks, led the way. Teeler Lacey would have no trouble following the trail. A blind man could follow it.

  Cattle rustlers couldn’t hide their trails, especially not trying to maintain thirty rambunctious, half-wild longhorn steers.

  “White men,” Laredo Downs said. “Not Mexicans.” He was leaning low in the saddle, studying the trail.

  “How can you tell?” Tom asked. His voice betrayed him. Mathew smiled. The kid was nervous.

  “Don’t know the country. Movin’ the herd too fast.”

  A voice running through his head sent a chill up Mathew’s spine.

  “They know me. Know I’m after them.”

  Looking up, Mathew saw the eyes of his sons and his friends, heads turned to look back, staring at him. He sucked in a breath and realized he had spoken those words. Tom and Lightning blinked in surprise. Laredo Downs merely smiled.

  Swallowing, Mathew pointed up the creosote- and cactus-lined trail. “How much of a head start now?”

  With a shrug, Laredo turned back and stared ahead. “Two, maybe three hours. Teeler and me must’ve come back to Arroyo Lindo right after they’d lit a shuck.” He pointed at the haze in the distance. “My bet, Teeler’s already found ’em, just a-waitin’ for us.”

  They kept riding, but smart enough to save their mounts. It was still hot, and Mexicans did not like gringos in their country. They rode at a steady, but not rushed, pace, trying to keep the dust to a minimum.

  And while they rode, Mathew did some remembering. . .

  * * *

  “They know me,” Dunson said. “Know that it’s me who’s after ’em.”

  He reined up his black gelding, removed the dust-coated black hat with his left hand, and wiped the sweat off his forehead. “Damn that Don Diego. Damn Juan Cortina.”

  Damn, Mathew Garth thought with a smile, the whole damn human race.

  “Damn,” Dunson said, “the whole damn human race.”

  Over the past seventeen years, Mathew Garth had done a lot of growing up. You grew up quickly in this country. Or they buried you. He had survived, though, and he had to thank Dunson for that.

  During those first years back in the 1840s, Don Diego Agura y Baca and Thomas Dunson had bickered and had fought like two bulls fighting for control of the herd. Sometimes it had almost seemed like a game. Don Diego’s men would cross the border, steal horses or cattle, and head back to the sprawling hacienda in Mexico. Dunson would soon return the favor, taking Mathew along with him, teaching him the art of retaliation.

  By the time Mathew had turned twenty, most of those raids had ceased as Don Diego conceded his holdings north of the river to Dunson. The two would even meet every now and then for a game of dominoes. Now that Mathew was pushing thirty years old, raiding had returned. Dunson was right, too. This wasn’t Don Diego’s fault, even if his vaqueros and gunmen and sons were stealing Dunson’s cattle. Mathew, like everyone else in Texas, blamed Cheno Cortina, that old Red Robber of the Rio Grande.

  His real name was Juan Nepomuceno Cortina Gosea-cochea, who wasn’t old at all, only five or six years older than Mathew.

  Since the Mexican War had ended, more white settlers were coming to the Rio Grande Valley. Even when Dunson and Don Diego were challenging each other for authority in the 1840s, Texas, then its own independent nation, and Mexico had disputed the border. Texas, and then the United States after it had annexed the republic, had set the border as the Rio Grande. Mexico claimed the Nueces. The Treaty of Guadalupe had supposedly settled that dispute, making everything official. The border was the Rio Grande.

  Cortina objected . . . with guns.

  If you listened to Dunson, Cortina was just another Mexican bandito, a cattle rustler, a horse thief, a murdering little punk who deserved nothing more than a rope around his neck. In 1859, he had shot the town marshal in Brownsville, had raided the town, held it for a couple of days before fording the river and returning to Matamoros. But the Cortina War wasn’t over, not even after some of John “Rip” Ford’s Rangers and U.S. Army troops had routed those Cortinistas on the Rio Grande a few days after Christmas. When Ford’s Texans crossed the river in March at a place called La Mesa down in Tamaulipas and drove off what was left of Cortina’s men, that had ended the Cortina War.

  In Brownsville. In points east. Out here where the Rio Grande began to bend south, things were different. There was no army nearby to help protect anyone who dared to settle in this country, and few Rangers ever made their way this far west of Brownsville.

  “I’ll horsewhip him first,” Dunson said. “Then I’ll hang him.”

  “Cortina has his reasons,” Mathew said.

  He rode alongside Dunson, as he had been doing for ten years. In those first years, of course, Dunson had kept Mathew behind him, protecting the boy with that barrel chest and thick skull of his.

  Dunson turned sharply at the young man riding alongside him. Mathew grinned, but kept his eyes on the trail ahead. It was the first time he had summoned up the nerve to challenge his foster father’s iron will.

  “That Brownsville marshal deserved a horsewh
ip and rope himself,” Mathew said, still not looking to his left at the big man from England. “He ran roughshod over Cortina’s men, beat up one of his riders. Cortina,” Mathew repeated, “had his reasons.”

  “I’m not talking about Cortina,” Dunson said, even though he had been. “I’m taking about those damned vermin who stole our cattle.”

  “They might not be Don Diego’s men, either,” Laredo Downs called out.

  Mathew and Dunson looked ahead. Downs, who had stopped his horse, pointed south. “Don Diego’s spread lies down that way.” He kicked his mount back into a walk and rode into an arroyo. “These boys is ridin’ east.”

  “East.” Dunson nodded. “Laredo.”

  Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, Mexico. One of the oldest crossing points on the Rio Grande. The original village, Villa de San Agustin de Laredo, had to be a hundred years old by then. Of course, it didn’t matter what side of the river you were on. Laredo or Nuevo Laredo remained tough, hard, lawless. A man could sell stolen livestock on either side of the border.

  Dunson shook his head. “They won’t make it to Laredo. They’ll just make it to hell.”

  * * *

  Thomas Dunson had been right, Mathew remembered as he spurred ahead to take the point with Laredo Downs and Joe Nambel. Back then, Mathew had believed that Thomas Dunson could never be wrong. At least, he had told himself that, much as he had been telling himself that since he had watched Dunson shoot down the first Don Diego vaquero who had challenged him.

  Joe Nambel had loped off ahead as Mathew slowed his horse to a trot alongside Laredo.

  “What is it?” Mathew asked.

  “Joe got to suspicionin’,” Laredo answered.

  Mathew waited.

  “Don’t make much sense, do it?” Laredo said. “You cross the border. You steal thirty beeves. And then you drive ’em east. Laredo? Wouldn’t you go south? More places to hide. More towns to sell that beef. More chance of runnin’ into some Rurales to back your play.”

  Mathew shrugged. “Could be they’re not interested in beef.”