That Old Ace in the Hole Read online

  He woke early, before the sun was up. The vast sky freckled with small flakes of raspberry-tinted clouds. He crawled out from under the Dearborn and looked at his horse. It was dead.

  In a little while he mixed a handful of cornmeal with water in his palm, laid the mass on some gathered leaves to thicken while he made a fire and heated two flat rocks in it. He baked the cornmeal cake on one of the hot rocks, roasted a few coffee beans on the other and pulverized them with the heel of the axe, boiled coffee in the oyster can. The hot can burned his hands and mouth. He strained the floating grounds through his teeth, chewed the escapees. He studied the horse again, thought it might have been struck by lightning as there was a discolored mark on its right shoulder and another near the fetlock.

  He hid his trunk as well as he could beneath an overhang of dirt bank, piled torn branches in front of it, heaped rocks. He looked again at his dead horse. Finally he set off west on shank’s mare, guessing that Woolybucket could not be more than two or three miles distant.

  Late in the morning a new difficulty assailed him. He could feel the cornmeal cakes and coffee and oysters whirling and sloshing in his gut. His bowels writhed. He thought of Dave Dudley and the clock salesman. For the next few hours he stumbled along with frequent responses to his mad intestines. He abandoned his valise. Soon he began to vomit as well and his head ached violently. In midafternoon he quit and lay on the ground in considerable misery. After an hour, feeling fever roast him on a spit of illness, he thought he smelled smoke. He rolled to his other side and scanned the prairie. Yes, there was smoke coming out of a mound of soil—might it be a volcano? A black rectangle suddenly showed in the face of the mound of earth and a figure moved into it and hurled something that sparkled briefly. The figure turned and disappeared into the dark rectangle that he recognized as an open doorway. He began to crawl toward it and when he was only fifty feet away, two horses in a makeshift corral began to whinny and snort. The door opened a crack and Martin Merton Fronk called out “Help,” in a feeble, choked bleat.

  “What the blue burnin hell is that?” said a voice and a seven-foot gink with white hair wearing a red shirt and too-short California pants came striding out of the dugout with a Winchester in his hands. He was followed by a shorter, younger man, a bench-legged, bullet-eyed rip with a luxuriant but multicolored beard that blew sideways in the wind.

  “Who the hell are you and why the blue tarnation are you creepin up on us? You one a them fellas with a sticky rope admires other folks’ horseflesh?”

  “Sick. Can’t walk. Meant no harm.” It seemed funny that they saw evil design in him. The talking made him vomit again.

  “Christ, you smell like you been shittin yourself as well as losin your okra.”

  “Yes. Sick. Sick.” He said a few words about the cornmeal cakes and the dead horse and the sudden diarrhea.

  “You get your water at Twospot? Little pond a water there?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s squitter water. It’ll make you want a die, make you think your guts is bein pulled out a your asshole with your mama’s crochet hook, but you won’t die and most gets better and some even drinks that squitter water again and has no ill effects. I done it. Anyways, we got the fix-up for it. Just wait here. You ain’t comin into this camp smellin like shit and puke boiled with skunk cabbage for a week. You lay out here folded up like a empty purse and we’ll bring it to you.”

  The cure, as they called it, was a tin cup of brown liquid toned up with some kind of cheap whiskey. He drank it and promptly vomited. The man with the multicolored beard fetched a second dose, which he took in tiny sips, willing it to stay down. When the cup was empty he lay in the grass and closed his eyes.

  “Give her a hour or two to work,” said the giant and they disappeared into the dugout.

  Near sunset they reappeared with a basin of steaming water and some folded garments. They pulled his noisome shirt and pants from him and poured the basin of hot soapy water over him, threw down a flour-sack towel and advised him to get into the fresh clothes.

  “My valise…” he said, pointing back the way he’d come.

  The tall man said, “Good idee. Why have him stink up our duds with his squitter shit when he can do what he wants with his own?” He saddled one of the horses and rode in the direction of the creek camp. Martin lay naked and cold on the prairie and began to shiver but at least he was no longer racked with spasms. The multicolored beard brought him a biscuit and some clean water.

  Before the sun went down the tall man was back with the valise, which he opened and went through with interest. He tossed a pair of pants to Martin and a striped cotton shirt. Martin asked for his spare underdrawers but the man laughed and closed the case.

  “Sonny, no man in Texas wears them. Just slows you down whatever you got in mind. I’n use them for a dishclout.”

  They gave him a corner in the dugout and the tall man who said his name was Klattner, late of Arkansas, promised—as soon as he learned there were coffee beans in it—that he’d get Martin’s trunk in the morning.

  “We been out a coffee a month. Tried to git a little in Woolybucket but they’re out too and no supply wagon due until June. So your coffee will be appreciated. What damn old Woolybucket needs is a good store. The one they got in Woolybucket now, it’s not no good. There’s a crazy doc half runs it when he ain’t layin on a sofa dead drunk. Couldn’t hit a elephant’s ass with a banjo. Used a have a regular storekeeper, but he lost the emporium to the doc in a game of chance. Doc don’t never order enough coffee, flour, sugar, what-have-you. All last winter no flour and no tabacca. My God, he got in a thousand pound a saleratus and not one teaspoon a flour. We horsewhipped him but it didn’t do no good. Bad as ever.”

  “Would his name be Doctor Mugg?”

  “It would. You know him?”

  “No. I was told he was well-regarded at curing sick folks.”

  “I don’t know who told you that but the informant was lyin. Doc Mugg couldn’t cure a ham if you gave it to him in front of a smokehouse. What Doc Mugg needs in the cure line is the water cure—for hisself. If I was you I’d get better on my own. Fresh air and whiskey is best and plenty work.”

  The multicolored beard chimed in. “If I was you I wouldn’t tie up to Doc Mugg for a minute. He’s filled up the graveyard complete and is startin on another. Why don’t you git his store away from him and run it good—run it honorable. Every man would greet you with hearty goodwill wherever you may go.”

  But Martin Fronk had fixed his sights on making a fortune as a cattleman, whether drover or rancher, found the idea of running a store repugnant and said so.

  “I spose you want a be a cattleboy,” drawled the multicolored beard whose name was Carrol Day, a curiously feminine name, thought Martin, not yet acquainted with the bearded Marions, Fannys and Abbys of Texas who, saddled by their unthinking mothers with dainty names, built savagely masculine frames of character.

  “I believe I’m too old to be a boy again of any kind.”

  “Age don’t matter. Some a the pertest cowboys is pushin seventy summers. Lookit old Whitey here,” nodding at the tall man who was wrapping rawhide around the helve and head of an axe. “He’s most eighty and he’s more cowboy than any ten ordinaries.”

  “He’s a cowboy?”

  “Hell yes. Been up the trail to Montana what, twenty times?”

  “Twenty-two. And that was enough. It’s too cold up there. Snows all summer. You git paid there’s no place to spend your money. Just turn around and come back to Texas.”

  “What about Miles City? What about Cheyenne? What about Denver? I understand you paid them towns a visit on your return journeys many a time.”

  “My money was gettin too heavy. Anyway, Martin here don’t want a be no cowboy or no storekeeper. I’n see he’s got bigger ideas in mind.”

  “I was thinking about the stock-driving business.”

  Both men began to scream with laughter. Carrol got down on the dirt floor
and rolled, moaning, “Oh my sweet cabbage patch, ‘the stock-drivin business.’”

  “You idiot,” said Klattner. “Make it in the stock-drivin business, you got to know cows like you know your own tweedle-dee. You got to have cowboyed, got to know the markets and men. You have to sweet-talk crazy farmers and handle Indans. We just got burned alive, me and Whitey, in the stock-drivin business. Stampedes, Indan troubles, blue-burnin Kansas farmers—”

  “Indians?”

  “Hell, they’re no bother,” said Carrol. “Just give em one a your cows and they leave you alone. A course after fifty donations you’re down fifty cows.”

  “They can be trouble,” said the other. “There’s Quanah Parker. And others. There was that clock salesman—”

  He didn’t want to hear about the clock salesman again.

  “I could run a store,” whispered Martin Fronk, giving up his plans to become a rancher or cattle drover. The waterholes were too chancy.

  The next day he felt distinctly better, packed his suitcase and asked his hosts if they could spare one of their horses so he could get to Woolybucket.

  “You buyin or borrowin?”

  “I’m agreeable to purchase one of your steeds. Preferably one that is docile and of gentle disposition.”

  “That one died last year. But we can let you have that sorrel gelding for twenty dollars. He’s got two names: You Son of a Bitch and Grasshopper. He don’t like grass a wave in the breeze and when it does so he hops. You purchase old Grasshopper and we’ll draw your wagon in next week. See if you can’t git that store away from Doc Mugg and do right by the town.”

  The other added his advice. “And, if you do, lay in plenty coffee. And keep your supply wagon outn reach a them damn red sloughs. Look like dry riverbed places along the Canadian but you break through to the mud, stickier than boiled molasses mixed with glue, and eight hunderd foot deep. It’s happened.”

  You Son of a Bitch disliked waving grass, birds, distant riders, prairie dogs, clouds, saddles and, as Martin Fronk came into the outskirts of Woolybucket, black-and-white dogs. One of the last named sent him into paroxysms of bucking until Martin departed the saddle. The horse stood trembling, facing the barking dog. Martin picked up a few stones and threw them accurately and hard at the dog, which ran yipping to a ragged tent. The side of the tent was painted with letters: GEN’L STOR DF MUGG MD PROP.

  He went inside the tent. There was an ungodly welter of stuff, from unfurled yard goods to bullwhips.

  “Got any coffee?” he asked the shambling wreck entangled in a bolt of blue daisy cotton. Was that a banjo on the cold stove?

  “June. Didn’t send it yet. Come back in June, sir.”

  He left, wondering if he’d seen the fabled Dr. Mugg, thinking he could run that store with his head in a bag and hobbles on his ankles.

  9

  THE BUSTED STAR

  Bob Dollar thought LaVon’s Busted Star Ranch, a little north of the Canadian River, a beautiful place. For the first time in his life he saw what extraordinary personal privacy a ranch family enjoyed. If he really were looking for a site to develop luxury homes this would be it. LaVon told him the ranch had been mixed-grass grazing land—bluestem, buffalo grass, gramma, wheat grass and Indian grass—when the first settlers came into the country in the late nineteenth century. Moises Harshberger, her peripatetic grandfather, arrived in the panhandle as a young man in 1879, a year after her husband’s ancestor Fronk had taken over Mugg’s store.

  Moises Harshberger and his brother Sidney, she said, had made a journey from Tennessee to California where they bought fifteen hundred steers, then on to Montana with the steers where they sold them at profit, down to Texas where they bought more cows and drove them to Kansas City and sold at a profit. There Sidney fell ill with cholera. After a quick funeral Moises drove a small herd to Wyoming, sold them to an arrogant English lord with a face like a mustached tortilla at a wonderful profit and so again to Texas, where he bought ranch land north of the Canadian breaks. On this land he found thousands of short, sharpened stakes scattered over the prairie, used by the buffalo hunters a decade earlier to peg out hides. There were thousands of bison bones underfoot as well.

  Perversely, Harshberger abhorred the shadeless plain, its grass and silvery sand sagebrush. He hired men to dig up and ship to him hundreds of sapling big-tooth maples and chinquapin oaks, five hundred young ponderosa pines, grudgingly watered by the wagon drivers on their jolting journey somewhat as Captain Bligh’s breadfruit trees had been tended by sullen sailors on the Bounty. Nor did his attentions fail once the trees were planted around his new house. After a month of mumbling and dodging by his mutinous ranch hands, who thought of themselves as pure cowboys to whom any action that required dismounting, hefting and carrying, as buckets of water, was demeaning insult, he hired a neighbor’s grown but mentally slow son, who, ignorant of the niceties of the cowboy code, daily sloshed water into the earth-reservoir built up around each young tree. Harshberger forbade the cowboys to use the saplings as horse hitches or pissing posts. But the young trees could not endure the sand-blasting wind and before he put sheltering lath fence on their windward sides, half of them perished. In time, the remaining trees, though they grew with a pronounced lean, struck their roots deep and a canopy of shade dappled the house.

  “He fenced ever inch a the ranch himself with but two helpers and a lot of that fence is still up today.” She did not say that in fencing the land a certain balance shifted. Now Harshberger felt that the land was servant to him and it owed him a living, owed him everything he could get from it.

  “Hard times come,” said LaVon. “He’d somehow got hold of a few cattle from below the tick-fever line, put them into the herd and pretty soon had a lot of sick and dyin cattle. At that time the panhandle was free of ticks.”

  “And now it’s not?”

  “I didn’t say that. Now the tick problem is over. We learned what a do about it.”

  “What?” said Bob.

  “Don’t you know anything about ticks?”

  “I know that in Colorado the Rocky Mountain spotted ticks can kill you.”

  “Well, the plain old cattle tick and the southern cattle tick can kill cows. They still got them in Mexico. Southern cattle was resistant to the fever disease but northern cows—where ticks can’t live—had no resistance. They were very susceptible and died in a few weeks after they came in contact with southern immune cows carrying the ticks.

  “Anyway, Graindeddy’s bad luck wasn’t over. His calves got blackleg. Then was such a droughty hot summer that his wells quit, the grass was pretty well gone and cows died. Come the winter he lost half the remainin herd in a blizzard. In the spring it rained like crazy and heel flies drove his cattle into the bogs where a good many of them perished. On top a all that his wife went into a decline and passed on Fourth a July. He buried her wrapped in a flag. It had took him ten years to build up his life to where he got his own place and in one year he went from sittin pretty to flat broke. He was so broke he had to rustle up all them old buffalo bones and sell them to the bone fertilizer man in Mobeetie. But he wasn’t a quitter. When he’d got all the bones, he swallowed his pride and took a job fencin for Griffith and Shannon. They had the contract a fence the XIT. And that sure changed everthing.”

  She was amazed that Bob Dollar not only knew nothing of ticks, he had never heard of the XIT. With relish she told him that this three-million-acre ranch of west panhandle range came into existence when the state of Texas deeded it to several Chicago businessmen in exchange for the construction of a new state capitol building in Austin, larger and grander than any other.

  “While Graindeddy was pickin up bones and horns, he got some a his cowboys a help him and one day they hauled a wagon-full down to Mobeetie. They couldn’t wait until they finished their business but proceeded a get drunk. And then they got fresh. Most a them still teenagers. They commenced a toss a few bones at hands from other ranches they seen walkin past. One a them other co
whands picked up a bone and throwed it back, not your gentle toss but a hard pitch. And that’s how the big Mobeetie Bone and Horn Fight got started. Cowboys was bleedin and bruised but they kept on until the wagon was near empty and the bones all over the street and the plank sidewalk. Anyway, Grainded got into fencin,” she said. “The XIT was more than two hundred miles long, north to south. The fencin crews would go out with a wagon and tools. The freight wagon that carried the war all the way down from the railroad depot up near Trinidad, Colorado, was supposed a drop off four spools a war every quarter mile. That much I know.”

  She clawed through a file folder, pulled out a photograph of a mule team hitched to a wagon stacked with posts. A bedroll had been tied on top and on the bedroll sat Moises Harshberger. A half-grown boy wearing a wagon-wheel-size hat crouched awkwardly on the posts.

  Now she was in another file and slapped a photograph of a freight team into Bob’s hands. It was a long, narrow photograph showing a ten-mule team connected by a wilderness of straps and lines, the driver mounted on the left-hand mule closest to the wagon. The wagon itself was a series of wagons, two short and covered, one immensely long. He counted the wheels—sixteen—and realized he was looking at the nineteenth-century equivalent of a semitrailer truck.

  “How did the driver manage that big team? How much could ten mules haul?”

  “I don’t know. You’d have to ask somebody like Tater Crouch. His graindeddy was a freighter before he started the Bar Owl. I imagine Tater knows how it was done.”

  She took a breath and resumed the story about her own grandfather. “So, after a year of it Moises got tired a fencin and quit. He took up cowboyin for the XIT, as he said, out of the fryin pan and into the fire. Every night they’d gamble. The XIT boys was a bad bunch in them days. This was before Mr. A. G. Boyce took over and cleaned the ranch up. The XIT had quite a reputation in the early days. Their hands rustled, they hair-branded, they took baby calves away from their mothers and said they was mavericks, they cut those calves’ eyelid muscles so they couldn’t see to get back with their mammies, they cut their tongues so they wouldn’t suck and burned their feet between the toes so they wouldn’t hunt out their mothers because their feet hurt so bad, they run fake tallies and counts and many a man got his personal start as a rancher with these mean practices.”