The Busted Thumb Horse Ranch
Paul Bagdon
LEISURE BOOKS 
NEW YORK CITY
I’d been sleeping with my Colt under my saddle
blanket, which I used as a pillow. I eased it out and
thumbed back the hammer. In reality, the sound
was a minuscule, oiled
click
—but in the dark of
night it sounded like a couple of cooking pots being
slammed together.
Armando drew his boot knife. I could hear the
ten inch blade slide out of its leather sheath sewn
into his left boot, which left his right hand free to
draw his pistol.
I didn’t know any of the Indians in the area, but
that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Then I saw
the image of six dead men on the street in Burnt
Rock. Each of those cowpokes had friends, relatives,
maybe partners, and they’d want revenge.
Arm drew an arc on my shoulder, pointing me
off to the left. I got my feet under me and duckwalked
very slowly and as quietly as I could about
twenty feet. I assumed Armando was doing the
same think to the right, but I couldn’t hear a sound
from him.
All of a sudden, the place we’d been sleeping
erupted dirt and stone and sand into the sky. The
hollow, deep boom of at least one shotgun mixed
with the sharper, quicker pistol reports. One shot—
and then another—was deeper and louder than
the others. One of those boys was firing a Sharps.
Arm and I opened up on the muzzle flashes…
The document—that’s what the circuit rider judge
called it: the document—was ten or a dozen pages
long, tucked neatly into a black leather folder.
There were a herd of whereases, heretofores, perpetuities,
and parties of the first and second parts
on each page.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
Armando SantaMaria, my partner, poured
himself another shot of whiskey, and downed it.
“White-man bullsheet,” he mumbled.
“It’s quite simple,” the judge said to me, ignoring
Arm. “You’ve inherited a thousand acres, a
house, a barn, and six thousand dollars from
Hiram Ven Gelpwell, deceased.”
“But I don’t even know…”
“Whether or not you know or don’t know matters
not a twittle. Suffice it to say that he was
an…uhh…paramour of your mother’s. He felt
responsible, for some reason, for you.”
“Where is theese land?” Armando asked. “And
where is the six thousand dollars?”
The judge looked at Armando the way a new
bride would look at a squished cockroach on her
piece of wedding cake. “The land is in West Texas,”
the judge said. “I have here a certified bank check
made
payable to Jake Walters in the amount mentioned.”
“Bueno,”
Arm chuckled. “We can drink up the
dollars an’ raise prairie dogs on the rocks an’
sand. Or maybe the rattlers an’ scorpions, no?”
The judge ignored Arm. “The land is good for
the area,” he said, “and there’s a year-around
stream. It’s a tad slight in the summer, but it never
goes dry. The pasture is sparse but it’ll support
some beef.” He took a loose map from the folder
and handed it to me. The land I apparently owned
was outlined in heavy ink. It looked big. The
nearest town was Hulberton.
“What’s the town like?” I asked.
“I was through there once a few years ago,” the
judge said. “It’s much like any West Texas cattle and
Farmington town—a decent mercantile, two saloons,
a blacksmith and livery shop, a bank, a small
hotel with a restaurant, a house of soiled doves—
that’s about it. There’s a railroad spur not too far
away and that’s what brings in the business—
cowpokes with cash at the end of a drive.”
“What do I have to do?” I asked.
“Sign here—and here—and here—and here.
Then I hand the bank draft to you and our business
is concluded.” The judge handed me a pen
and a small ink pot. I signed in the places indicated
and the judge handed over the draft and a
copy of the whole mess.
Arm and me now had a prairie dog, rattlesnake,
and scorpion ranch—and $6,000.
“Ain’t that somethin’,” I said. “This here piece of
paper is worth six thousand dollars.”
“Maybe might could be,” Armando said. “Me, I
think it’s white man’s scribbling an’ will find
trouble for us.”
I looked across the table at my partner. He was
all Mexican, that was obvious, from the wet sand
color of his skin to the deep, unfathomable chestnut
of his eyes. He wasn’t what one would refer
to as handsome; he had deep acne craters from
the pox on his face as a youth, there was an elevated
four-inch scar running from his forehead,
through his left eyebrow and onto his cheek, and
his nose had been broken and not set several
more times than once. His mustache ran shaggily
over his upper lip, down each side of his mouth,
and then beyond his jaw a couple of inches to
dangle freely.
“What you gawkin’ at?” he asked. His voice
was a whiskey, tobacco, and cinders sound that
grated on the listener’s ears.
“Your beauty, Arm. At times it purely stuns
me.”
He grinned, showing a wonderful set of white,
straight teeth so many Mexicans are blessed with.
“Is true,” he said. “Let’s drink much cerveza,” he
said. “We celebrate theese ranch, no?”
“It’s
beer,
you damned fool,” I said. “You’re
not
a campesino in some adobe hut—you’re in America.
We drink beer, not cerveza.”
Armando stood, still grinning, and clutched
his genitals with his right hand. “Here is your
America, gringo. You fight a good an’ just war an’
get your asses shot off. The bes’ part of your country
couldn’t fight worth a damn, an’ now your
South, it is nothing, the remains of a campfire.”
Armando and I had been partners for better
than twenty years. We’d both run off from our
homes—my father was a drunken oaf of a sodbuster,
and Arm’s mother was a whore and he
had no idea who his father may have been. We
met near a long curve of railroad tracks close to
the Tex-Mex border, waiting to hop a train. We
joined up and haven’t been apart since.
Sometimes it happens that way, between boys
or between full-grown men. There’s something
there that holds them together—makes them partners.
I don’t know what that force is, but I’m right
glad it exists.
“Let’s drink lots of cerveza,” I said. “And talk
about our ranch.”
We commenced to do just that.
We were roughly 400 miles from Hulberton and
our ranch and had no real idea what lay between
us and our destination beyond sand, mesquite,
scraggly desert pines, little water, and wandering
gangs of screw ups from both sides of the war
who were as crazy as shithouse rats and bloodthirsty,
to boot.
The distance didn’t much bother us; we’d covered
more ground than that either running from
the law or headed in one direction or another
simply to see what was there. Rabbit isn’t a bad
feed, although a man grows tired of it when eating
it twice a day for long periods of time.
We figured we’d best cash the bank draft, provision
up at the mercantile, and set out. The bank
in this little town, Burnt Rock, was small, as was
the town itself. We had to talk to the chief officer,
a
turtlelike old fellow whose face showed he
didn’t like most people and, in particular, didn’t
like drifters who smelled like beer barrels and
looked like they didn’t have a penny between
them. The fact that Arm was a Mex didn’t cheer
him up any, either.
“What is it I can do for you?” he asked. A little
plaque on his desk said his name was alvin l.
terhune.
“Well, I’ll tell ya, Al,” I said. “We want to cash
this here draft.” I handed it to him.
“You’ll refer to me as Mr. Terhune,” he said, his
voice as frigid as a West Texas winter.
“I’ll refer to you as the tooth fairy if I care to,” I
said. “Just cash the damn draft.”
He began to reply when Armando released a
truly thunderous belch that was loud enough to
rattle the windowpanes.
“You swine!” Terhune snapped. “You can’t…”
Arm grinned. “Ain’t much I’d rather do with a
ol’ woodchuck like you than swing you by your
tail an’ whack your ugly head ’gainst a rock. Now,
you do like Jake says an’ we’ll saddle up an’ haul
ass.”
Terhune’s hand trembled as he inspected the
draft. Evidently, it was the sort of thing he’d have
to cash if Satan himself came walking in with it.
He pushed his chair from his desk and stood.
I noticed that Arm took a step to the side and let
the fingertips of his right hand just barely touch
the bone grips of the holstered Colt .45 he had
tied with latigo lower on his leg than a cowhand
would. He actually thought the old codger was
going to draw on us. I laughed.
“Get the money ’fore you get my partner all
sweaty an’ bothered, Al,” I said. “All fifties’ll be
just fine.”
Terhune glared at us for a moment longer and
then stomped off toward the line of three tellers
behind little windows across the room.
“You ever notice how silly a little man with a
fat ass looks?” I asked Arm.
“Sí.”
The safe must have been in a room behind the
tellers. Terhune used a key to open the door of the
room, went inside, and locked the door behind
himself. For a few moments there was no sound.
Then we heard the door unlock. Terhune emerged
with a cloth sack in one hand and relocked the
door. He walked to his desk and dropped the bag
on it. “Count it,” he said.
“No need,” Arm said jovially. “You ain’t got the
eggs to try to cheat us.” I picked up the sack and
liked the heft of it. We left the bank.
I’ve always liked a good mercantile, and the
one in Burnt Rock was the best I’d been in for a
long time. Everything was neatly arranged, the
glass of the cases glistened, and the scent inside
the place was a delightful mixture of leather,
wood, penny candy, fabric, apples, and the steel
of plows and other farm implements. We walked
up and down the aisles, checking out the saddles,
bits, and bridles, passed by the patent medicines,
dresses, and ladies’ hats, looked over the rifles
and pistols in a glass-fronted case, and went back
to the main counter. An ol’ gent dressed in a suit
with shoes shiny enough to hurt if you looked at
them in the sun gave us a large sack.
We picked up maybe six pounds of beef jerky,
1,000 rounds of Remington .45 ammunition, four
quarts of whiskey, a couple pounds of tobacco
and several books of rolling papers, four canteens
apiece, and a Buck knife that caught Arm’s fancy.
That filled the sack; I went back and got another
one. We bought a half dozen cans of peaches in
heavy syrup, a dozen or so apples, and a box of
cigars. I tried on a tooled leather vest that was the
nicest piece of goods I’d ever seen and left my ol’
vest in a trash barrel.
We didn’t need anything in terms of saddlery
—we both rode Texas-made double-rig
working saddles and used low-port bits, and everything
was in good shape. We picked up a can
of neat’s-foot oil and a couple cans of Hoppe’s
gun oil, and that was it.
When we put everything on the counter we
saw it’d be impossible to stuff everything into our
saddlebags.
“We need a pack animal,” I said.
Arm nodded. “I’ll go to the livery an’ buy
one—you get us a pack rig.”
I reached into the money bag and gave a few
bills to my partner. He stuffed them in his pocket
without looking at them. We both knew that it
was our money, not mine. That’s the way we did
things.
I picked out a pack rig. If a fella knew what
he was doing, a mule or horse could be loaded
securely with a single, long length of good rope.
Neither Arm nor I had that skill, and the leather
rig was a whole lot easier on the animal.
The mercantile owner was running a tally on a
sheet
of paper, and the more he added, the
broader his smile became. He offered me a free
cigar, which I accepted, and was just putting a
match to, when raucous laughter penetrated the
mercantile from the street. “Hey, Pancho,” a
drunken voice bellowed, “why not trade your ma
an’ your sister for a saddle for that nag?” The
laughter rose again, swelled, took on the sharp
edge of mockery.
“Damn,” I said, and set my cigar on the counter
and headed for the door.
There were six men—cowhands, from the
looks of them—mostly drunk, in a scraggly line
facing Armando and a ribby bay mare he had on
a lead line.
I left the mercantile and walked to a spot about
ten feet to Arm’s left. “Partner,” I said quietly.
Sneaking up on a man in the position Arm was in
could easily buy a fella a hole on boot hill.
Arm dropped the lead rope and let his hands
hang to his sides. I carried a Colt .45, too, and
wore it as Arm wore his—low, tied to my leg,
ready for action.
Three of the cowpokes had stepped forward, a
yard in front of their friends. One carried a lever
action 30.30 and the other two wore holstered
handguns.
“Maybe you boys better back off an’ grab another
drink,” I said. “If you don’t, most—maybe
all—of you are going down hard and going down
dead.”
Jagged laughter ran through the men. The one
with the rifle cranked the action, chambering a
round.
“You and the beaner gonna shoot us up?” the
rifleman asked. “You gonna kill us dead?” The
laughter covered my few quiet words to Armando.
“I got the rifle an’ the two to the left.”
Armando nodded.
The rifleman seemed to be the leader. I thought
that if I took him down fast, the others may turn
tail. It was far from a sure thing, but I guessed it
was worth a try.
The barrel of the 30.30 rose toward me. I drew
and blew a hole in the man’s throat. He took a
step back and then collapsed like a sack of grain
tossed from a wagon. The two men to his side
were scrambling to draw their pistols. I fired
twice: one slug entered through one cowpoke’s
right eye, the other in the middle of his friend’s
chest. I heard Arm’s .45 bark two or three—or
maybe four times, he fired so rapidly, it was hard
to tell—and his three targets were splayed on the
street, their blood soaking into the dirt and grit.
Arm and I both reloaded our pistols before we
reholstered them. We always do. It’s a good habit
to get into. There aren’t many worse sounds than
squeezing a trigger in a bad situation and hearing
a click instead of a bang.
“ ’Bout time to leave Burnt Rock,” I said.
“Sí,”
Armando answered. The packhorse had
run into an alley between buildings and Arm
went after him.
I went back into the mercantile to settle up our
bill and to retrieve the cigar I’d left on the counter.
“How’s the law around here?” I asked.
The store owner was white faced and a little
shaky. He’d obviously watched the action from
the
window. He stuttered slightly as he spoke.
“There isn’t any law just now,” he said. “Our sheriff
got gunned down two or three weeks ago an’
we can’t find nobody who cares to fill the job.
Deputy was killed, too. Goddamn army is out
chasin’ Injuns.”
I nodded. “Now, how about finishing adding
up our charges?”
He went back to his piece of paper and his nub
of a pencil, his lips moving as he ran the sums.
“It’s…uhh…a bit high,” he said, as if he were
apologizing.
“That’s not a big surprise,” I said. “C’mon—
what do you need to square us up?”