A black mule came up beside Drew as he slowly pulled Shiloh down to a canter. Fenner, a wide grin splitting his beard, bellowed:
"That shore was a race! Need any help, son?"
Drew shook his head, wanting to bring Shiloh under full control at a rate which would quiet the colt before they headed back to the furor about the finish line. And only now did he have time to relish his own excited pride and pleasure.
Since he had first seen Shiloh on that scouting trip back to Kentucky in ’64, he had known he must someday own the gray colt. He had lain out in the brush for a long time that morning to watch the head groom of Red Springs put the horse through his paces in the training paddock. And watching jealously, Drew had realized that Shiloh was one of those mounts that a man discovers only once in his life-time, though he may breed and love their kind all his years.
Drew would have been content with Shiloh as a mount and a companion, but now he was sure that the colt was more, so much more. This gray was going to be one of the Great Ones, a racer and a sire—to leave his mark in horse history and stamp his own quality on foals throughout miles and years in this southwestern land. Drew licked the grit of dust from his lips, filled his lungs with a deep breath as Shiloh turned under rein pressure.
It was a long time before the Kentuckian was able to separate Shiloh from his ring of new admirers and bring him back to the stable. Drew refused several offers for the colt, some of them so fantastic he could only believe their makers sun-touched or completely carried away by the excitement of the race.
But when he found Don Cazar waiting for him at Kells’, he guessed that this was serious.
"You do not wish to sell him, I suppose?" Hunt Rennie smiled at Drew’s prompt shake of head. "No, that would be too much to hope for, you are not a fool. But I have something else to suggest. Reese Topham tells me you are looking for work, preferably with horses. Well, I have a contract to gentle some remounts for the army, and I need some experienced men to help break them—"
Drew could not understand the sudden pinch of—could it be alarm? Here it was: a chance to work on the Range, to know Hunt Rennie, and learn whether Don Cazar was to remain a legend or become a father. But now he was not sure.
"I’m no breaker, suh. I’ve gentled, yes—but eastern style."
"Breaking horses can be brutal, though we don’t ride with red spurs on the Range. Suppose we try some of the eastern methods and see how they work on our wild ones. Do you think you can do it?"
"A man can’t tell what he can do until he tries." Drew still hedged.
There was a trace of frown now between Rennie’s brows. "You told Topham you wanted work." His tone implied that he found Drew’s present hesitancy odd. And—from Don Cazar’s point of view—it was. Tubacca was still in a slump; the rest of the valley held about as many jobs for a man as Drew had fingers on one hand. The Range was the big holding, and to ride there meant security and an established position in the community. Also, perhaps it was not an offer lightly made to an unknown newcomer.
"I can’t promise you blue-grass training, suh. That has to begin with a foal." He hoped Rennie would credit his wavering to a modest appraisal of his own qualifications.
"Blue-grass training?"
As his father repeated the expression Drew realized the slip of tongue he had made. And if he took the job, there might be other slips, perhaps far more serious ones. But to refuse, after Topham had spoken for him ... he was caught in a pinch with cause for suspicion closing in on either side.
"I was in Kentucky for about a year after the war. I went to stay with a friend—"
"But you are from Texas?"
Was Rennie watching him too intently? No, he must ride a tighter rein on his imagination. There was no reason in the wide world why Don Cazar should expect him to be anyone except Drew Kirby.
"Yes, suh. Didn’t have anythin’ to go back to there. Thought I’d try for a new start out here." There was the story of several thousand veterans. Rennie should have heard it a good many times already.
"Well, come and try some blue-grass training on our colts. And should you let this stud of yours run with a picked manada of mares, I could promise good fees."
"Suppose I said yes if the fees were some of the foals—of my own choosing, suh?" Drew asked.
Rennie ran a finger across the brand which scarred the gray’s hide. "Spur R—that’s a new one to me."
"My own. Heard tell as how there’s a custom of the country that a slick this old can be branded and claimed by anyone bringing him in. I wasn’t going to lose him that way should he do any straying, accidental or intentional."
Don Cazar laughed. "That’s using your head, Kirby. All right. It’s a deal as far as I’m concerned. You draw wrangler’s pay and take stud fees in foals—say one in three, your choosing. Register that brand of yours with Don Lorenzo to be on the safe side. Then you’re welcome to run Spur R with the Double R on the Range."
He held out his hand, and Drew grasped it for a quick shake to seal their agreement. He was committed now—to the Range and to a small partnership with its master. But he still wondered if he had made the right choice.
Two days later he dropped bedroll and saddlebags on the spare bunk at one end of the long adobe-walled room and studied his surroundings with deep curiosity. It was a fort, all right, this whole stronghold of Rennie’s—not just the bunkhouse which formed part of a side wall. Bunkhouse, feed store, and storage room, blacksmith shop, cookhouse, stables, main house, the quarters for the married men and their families—all arranged to enclose a patio into which choice stock could be herded at the time of an attack, with a curbed well in the center.
The roofs of all the buildings were flat, with loopholed parapets to be manned at need. A sentry post on the main house was occupied twenty-four hours a day by relays of Pimas. A loaded rifle leaned at every window opening, ready to be fired through loopholes in the wooden war shutters. The walls were twenty-five inches thick, and mounted on the roof of the stable, facing the hills from which Apache attacks usually came, was a small brass cannon—Don Cazar’s legacy from troops marching away in ’61.
What he saw of the resources of this private fort led Drew to accept the other stories he had heard of the Range, like the one that Don Cazar’s men practiced firing blindfolded at noise targets to be prepared for night raids. The place was self-contained and almost self-supporting, with stores of food, good water, its own forge and leather shop, its own craftsmen and experts. No wonder the Apaches had given up trying to break this Anglo outpost and Rennie had accomplished what others found impossible. He had held his land secure against the worst and most unbeatable enemy this country had nourished.
There were other Range forts, smaller, but as stoutly and ingeniously designed, each built beside a water source on Rennie land—defense points for Don Cazar’s riders, their garrisons rotated at monthly intervals. And Drew had to thank that system for having taken Johnny Shannon away from the Stronghold before the Kentuckian arrived. Rennie’s foster son was now riding inspection between one water-hole fortification and another. But Drew was uncertain just how he would rub along with Shannon in the future.
"Señor Kirby, Don Cazar—he would speak with you in the Casa Grande," León Rivas called through one of the patio side windows.
"Coming." Drew left the huddle of his possessions on the bunk.
The Casa Grande of the Stronghold was a high-ceilinged, five-room building about sixty feet long, the kitchen making a right angle to the other rooms and joining the smoke house to form part of another wall for the patio. Mesquite logs, adze-hewn and only partially smoothed, were placed over the doorways, and the plank doors themselves were slung on hand-wrought iron hinges or on leather straps, from oak turning-posts. Drew knocked on the age-darkened surface of the big door.
"Kirby? Come in."
Here in contrast to the brilliant sunlight of the patio was a dusky coolness. There were no glass panes in the windows. Manta, the unbleached muslin which served to cover such openings in the frontier ranches, was tacked taut, allowing in air but only subdued light. The walls had been smoothly plastered, and as in Topham’s office, lengths of colorful woven materials and a couple of Navajo blankets served as hangings. Rugs of cougar and wolf skin were scattered on the beaten earth of the floor. There was a tall carved cupboard with a grilled door, a bookcase, and two massive chests shoved back against the walls. And over the stone mantel of the fireplace hung a picture of a morose-looking, bearded man wearing a steel breastplate, the canvas dim and dark with age and smoke.
Don Cazar was seated at a table as massive as the chests, a pile of papers before him flanked by two four-branch candelabra of native silver. Bartolomé Rivas’ more substantial bulk weighed down the rawhide seat of another chair more to one side.
"Sit down—" Rennie nodded to the seat in front of the table. "Smoke?" He pushed forward a silver box holding the long cigarillos of the border country. Drew shook his head.
"Whisky? Wine?" He gestured to a tray with waiting glasses.
"Sherry." Drew automatically answered without thought.
"What do you think of the stock you saw down in the corral?" Don Cazar poured a honey-colored liquid from the decanter into a small glass.
As the Kentuckian raised it to sip, the scent of the wine quirked time for him, making this for a fleeting moment the dining room at Red Springs during a customary after-dinner gathering of the men of the household. The talk there, too, had been of horses—always horses. Then Drew came back in a twitch of eyelid to the here and now, to Hunt Rennie watching him with a measuring he did not relish, to Bartolomé’s round face with its close-to-hostile expression. Deliberately Drew sipped again before answering the question.
"I’d say, suh, if they’re but a sample of Range stock, the breed is excellent. However——"
"However what, señor?" Bartolomé’s eyes challenged Drew. "In this territory, even in Sonora, there are none to compare with the horses of this hacienda."
"That is not what I was about to say, Señor Rivas. But if Don Cazar wishes to try the eastern methods of training, these horses are too old. You begin with a yearling colt, not three-year-olds."
"To break a foal! What madness!" Now Bartolomé’s face expressed shock.
"Not breaking," Drew corrected, "training. It is another method altogether. One puts a weanling on a rope halter, accustoms him to the feel of the hackamore, of being with men. Then he grows older knowing no fear or strangeness."
The Mexican looked from Drew to Don Cazar, his shock fading to puzzlement. Rennie nodded.
"Sí, amigo, so it is done—in Kentucky and Virginia. But this time we must deal with the older ones. Can you modify those methods, gentle without breaking? A colt with the fire still in him, but saddle-broke, is worth much more—"
"I can try. But you have already said, suh, that you don’t allow rough breakin’ here." Drew’s half suspicion crystallized into belief. Don Cazar had not really wanted another wrangler at all; he had wanted Shiloh—and his foals. Well, perhaps he would find he did have a wrangler who could deliver the goods into the bargain.
"No, but it is always well to learn new ways. I have been in Kentucky, Kirby. Perhaps some of their methods would not work on the Range. On the other hand, others might. As you have said—we can but try." He picked up the top sheet of paper and began to read:
"There was one," Bartolomé interrupted. "The mare, she was lost at Cañon del Palomas."
Rennie frowned, "Sí, the mare. Bayos-tigres—striped ones —three. Bayos-cebrunos—smoked duns—two. Grullas—blues—four. Roans—six. Blacks—three. Bays—four. Twenty-five three-year-olds. You won’t be expected to take on the whole remuda, Kirby. Select any six of your own choosing and use your methods of gentling on them. We’ll make a test this way."
Bartolomé uttered a sound closer to a snort than anything else. And Drew guessed how he stood with the Mexican foreman. Rennie might have faith, or pretend to have faith, in some new method of training, but Rivas was a conservative who preferred the tried and true and undoubtedly considered the Kentuckian an interloper.
"Now, the matter of Shiloh..."
Drew finished the sherry with appreciation. He was beginning to see the amusing side of this conference. Drew’s work on the Range settled, Rennie was about to get to what he really wanted. But Don Cazar’s first words were a little startling.
"We’ll keep him close-in the water corral. To turn a stud of eastern breeding loose is dangerous——"
"You mean he might be stolen, suh?" Drew clicked his empty glass down on the table.
"No, he might be killed!" And Rennie’s tone indicated he meant just that.
"How...why?"
"There are wild-horse bands out there, though we’re trying to capture or run them off the Range. And a wild stud will always try to add mares to his band. Because he has fought many times to keep or take mares, he is a formidable and vicious opponent, one that an imported, tamed stud can rarely best. Right now, coming into Big Rock well for water is a pinto that has killed three other stallions—including a black I imported back in ’60—and two of them were larger, heavier animals than he.
"The Trinfans are moving down into that section this week. I hope they can break up that band, run down the stud anyway. He has courage and cunning, but his blood is not a line we want for foals on this range. So Shiloh stays here at the Stronghold; don’t risk him loose."
"Yes, suh. What about these wild ones—they worth huntin’?"
"They’re mixed; some are scrubs, inbred, poor stuff. But a few fine ones turn up. Mostly when they do they’re strays or bred from strays—escaped from horse thieves or Indians. If the mustangers here pick up any branded ones, they’re returned to the owners, if possible, or sold at a yearly auction. By the old Mexican law the hunting season for horses runs from October to March. Foals are old enough then to be branded. Speaking of foals, you left your mare and the filly in town?"
"Kells’ll give them stable room till next month. I can bring them out then."
"We’ll have a delivery of remounts to make to the camp about then. You can help haze those in and pick up your own stock on return."
León appeared in the doorway. "Don Cazar, the mesteneoes—they arrive."
"Good. These people are the real wild-horse experts, Kirby. Not much the Trinfans don’t know about horses." Don Cazar was already on his way to the door and Drew fell in behind Bartolomé.
The Trinfan outfit was small, considering the job they intended, Drew thought. A cart pulled by two mules, lightly made and packed high, was the nucleus of their small caravan. Burros—two of them—were roped behind and, to Drew’s surprise, a cow, bawling fretfully and intended, he later learned, to play foster mother to any unweaned foals which might be picked up. The cart was driven by a Mexican in leather breeches and jacket over a red shirt. Behind him rode the boy and girl Drew had seen in the Tubacca alley, mounted on rangy, nervous horses that had speed in every line of their under-fleshed bodies. Each rider trailed four spare mounts roped nose to tail.
"Buenos días, Don Cazar." For so small a man the Mexican on the cart seat produced a trumpet-sized voice. He touched the roll-edged brim of his sombrero, and Drew noted that his arm was crooked as if in the past it had been broken and poorly set.
"Buenos dias, Señor Trinfan. This house is yours." Rennie went to the side of the cart. "The west corral is ready for your use as always. Draw on the stores for any need you may have—"
"Gracias, Don Cazar." It was the thanks of equal to equal. "You have some late news of the wild ones?"
"Only that the pinto still runs near the well."
"That spotted one—sí, he is an Apache for cunning, for deviltry of spirit. It may be that this time he will not be the lucky one. There is in him a demon. Did I not see him, with my own eyes, kill a foal, tear flesh from the flanks of its dam when she tried to drop out of the run? Sí—a real diablo, that one!"
"Get rid of him one way or another, Trinfan. He is a danger to the Range. He killed another stud this season. I am as sure of that as if I had seen him in action."
"Ah, the blue one you thought might be a runner to match Oro. Sí, that was a great pity, Don Cazar. Well, we shall try, we shall try this time to put that diablo under!"
An hour later Drew was facing a diablo of his own, with far less confidence than Hilario Trinfan had voiced. Just how stupid could one be? Around him now were men trained from early childhood to this life, and he could show no skill at their employment. All the way out from Texas he had practiced doggedly with the lariat, and his best fell far short of what a range-bred child could do.
Yet he had an audience waiting down at the corral. Drew’s mouth was a straight line. He would soon confirm their belief that Don Cazar had in truth hired Shiloh instead of his owner. But there was no use trying to duck the ordeal, and the Kentuckian had never been one to put off the inevitable with a pallid hope that something would turn up to save him.
Only this time, apparently, fortune was going to favor him.
"Which one you wish, señor?" Teodoro Trinfan, rope in hand, stood there ready to cast for one of the milling colts. Why the boy was making that offer of assistance Drew had no inkling. But to accept would give him a slight chance to prove he could do part of the work.
He had already made his selection in the corral, though he had despaired of ever getting that animal at rope’s end.
