A recognized authority on the lower Pecos River country, PATRICK DEAREN has authored eighteen books. He grew up in Sterling City, Texas, and earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. A backpacking enthusiast and ragtime pianist, he makes his home in Midland, Texas, with his wife Mary and son Wesley.

 

To Hell or the Pecos

A Novel

By Patrick Dearen

TCU Press

Copyright © 2012 Patrick Dearen
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87565-505-5
CHAPTER 1

Sarah!

How many times he had silently voiced her name. He had never spoken it aloud since that black hour, but how many, many times he had called it in his thoughts and dreams, through fitful nights and dawns such as this, breaking empty and alone and as gray as the ashes of his campfire.

Sitting cross-legged before the mesquite flames that lapped a smutty pot, he took the 1860 Colt Army revolver by the walnut stock and watched the smoke curl over the tarnished brass trigger guard and cylinder caked with rust. He ran his fingers down the eight-inch barrel, feeling the brief but distinct bulge, and re-lived the blood and foul gun smoke and ringing ears of that distant night when he had rammed in too great a charge in his haste to reload. In those desperate moments, he had never known for sure which round had ballooned that barrel, but now his mouth went dry and the .44 trembled in his hand at the idea that it had been the last shot—the round for which he had placed the muzzle gently beside her ear, deliberately slipped forefinger over trigger, thumbed back the hammer to an ominous click.

Tom Rowden swallowed hard, the years of regret, and worse, exploding inside him like that final round must have done between those crumbling walls. Funny how his mind spared him those last few details—his finger squeezing the trigger, the hammer snapping forward against the percussion cap, the quick—and merciful, he had believed—end to it all. But the memory of her lifeless body was vivid enough, lowered into a shallow grave of alkali dust.

He lifted the .44 higher, its three and a half pounds strangely heavy before the glowing coals, and suspended it, a blur before his cheek. He curled his forefinger through the trigger guard and bent a sweaty thumb across the hammer. Closing his eyes, he could smell the axle grease sealing the cylinder chambers and feel the barrel nudge his hat.

Sarah.

He was always closer to her like this than any other way, the revolver a strange bond across time and distance. Yet, it was never close enough, not even when he slipped the muzzle under his hat brim, as he did now, and met the upright barrel with his hanging head.

Sarah, I’m sorry.

On that long-ago night, the barrel had grown too hot to touch, but in a few days the muzzle would be cool and tender against his temple, just as soon as he reached Horsehead Crossing and those blood-stained adobe walls where Sarah had waited for him all these twenty years.

And finally, he would have peace.

A horse nickered quietly from nearby, and Tom opened his eyes to 1886 again and glanced over his shoulder at his hobbled bay. The animal did its best to graze nubs of grass on the hard-packed ground before a line of yellowed pecans, stunted plums, and shriveled gooseberry vines crowding the Middle Concho River. Even after all these years, Tom remembered this flat as a favorite camping spot, in a good season. To the west, it was only a few miles to Centralia Draw, and from there, seventy-nine barren and waterless miles to Horsehead and the Pecos. But in this valley’s narrows, the Middle Concho made an oxbow bend around a jutting bluff and caught Kiowa Creek flowing out of the north—two streams in a West Texas wilderness always thirsty.

Still, in this drouthy August—eleven months past the last rain, so he’d heard—Kiowa Creek had gone bone-dry, while fly-blown cattle carcasses bearing a 7L brand had turned the Middle Concho’s muddy trickle into buffalo tea. Even over the clinging scent of wood smoke, the stench was almost unbearable.

It would have been a hell of a place to have asked Sarah to dip up drinking water.

Sarah.

He closed his eyes, searching for her again across the years, and finding her only when he dwelled on the touch of that upright barrel against his hanging head. He wondered if she would even know him today, or if the haunting remorse had aged him beyond recognition. If she were looking down on him from somewhere, down as far as hell, he knew what she would find under the stained brim of a grayfelt hat creased extra deep. Crow’s-foot eyes. An unshaven, angular face burned dark by the sun and crusted with skin cancers. Deep scoring at the corners of a gray mustache. A lost man, looking every bit his sixty years, with a linsey-woolsey shirt buttoned to the top and duck pants stuffed inside high-top boots with mule-ear tugs at the sides.

And a gun hand unsteady, but not so unsteady that it would deny him his final moment at her wind-swept grave.

Buried in thought, Tom didn’t know how long it was before a sudden commotion stirred him. But even as he opened weary eyes to the sunrise mesquites to find the vertical barrel of the .44 splitting three riders—two reining up ahead of an emerging chuck wagon and remuda, and the third to the side riding hard toward him through the rising dust—he was still in another time, another place. Sarah was there, her limp head bloodying the hollow of his neck. He should have ended it there. He should have slipped the muzzle up against his temple and ended it there, but a sudden voice was calling through the dawn. It was hallooing, asking if anyone was there, still alive, still—

“Name’s Jess Graham, with the 7Ls.”

Tom squinted at the sunrise bursting through the legs of a horse that stirred sand acrossfire from him. Its rider was a silhouette through the gray smoke, but as the animal shifted, Tom found trail dust and tawny stubble in a lean, mid-twenties face stricken with the kind of paleness only the dead should have. And those blue-gray eyes—they almost seemed to look through him, burned by a vision of their own private hell.

A looking glass, thought Tom. Me in a looking glass, every day of my life.

“Mister,” said the cowhand who called himself Jess, “you don’t look so good.”

Tom lowered the revolver. They’d told him that twenty years ago. Daylight had broken and those passing freighters had climbed over the adobe wall and told him that. He wondered if he would look any different those final few seconds, huddled one last time against those mud bricks with Sarah’s memory and a cylinder rammed full.

Tom coughed; old alkali dust hung in his throat. “Never seen a man yet looked good in hell or a Big Dry,” he rasped in a voice drained of caring.

He saw Jess take a deep breath, as if trying to steady himself, and nod to the revolver. “Man’s got to be careful with one of those things.” There was a long, awkward silence, and that peculiar anguish seemed to burn more intently in the cowhand’s eyes. He laughed a little nervous laugh. “Guess you know that.”

Tom searched for the worn holster, a black flap-top, beside the tin cup of Arbuckle’s coffee and found it with the .44’s muzzle. He looked up again and saw that Jess’s eyes had followed the weapon, to fix now on the ash-powdered leather that hid it. Strange, how the cowhand continued pale, and how his rein hand trembled until he steadied it against the horn. Tom’s own child—a son, maybe—would have been nearly as old now, but Sarah’s hadn’t been the only heartbeat he had stilled that black moment when he had last whispered her name.

“You comin’ or goin’?” asked Jess. His voice seemed to quiver a little. He nodded back to the deeply scored ruts bearing east into the browning scrub mesquites. “Just pushed a bony herd downriver. Marked the whole forty-odd miles to San Angelo with dead 7L stuff. Headed back in this mornin’—the 7Ls is just three, four miles off-trail from here. You can fatten up plenty quick, if you’re a mind, even practice tipping your hat. Seventeen and pretty.”

Seventeen. That’s how old Sarah had been when they had married, the two of them sitting in a buggy outside the preacher’s house, nine childless years before they turned the bois d’arc wheels of their eight-oxen wagon into the ruts of a California-bound emigrant company at Texarkana. Eighteen sixty-six, five years after ousted Yankee troops had turned the frontier over to the Comanches, and there they were, headed for a hostile wilderness, six wagons and seventeen people with little more than sunbonnets and hats to keep their scalps from dangling on some savage’s trophy lance.

“Hell of a country for a woman,” said Tom. He turned, remembering, and scanned the lacy-leafed mesquites and the point of the gray, rock-rimmed bluff signaling the way west.

“Hell of a country for anybody right now,” offered Jess. “Didn’t catch your name, mister.”

“Answer to Tom.”

“Surprised to run across somebody who’s not countin’ dead cows from between a horse’s ears.”

Tom tasted the stench and turned back. “Don’t think that bunch was countin’ many in the dark last night.”

“Who’s that?”

Tom turned a hand over in a half-shrug. “Midnight, little after. Some riders ‘cross-river, talkin’ Mex. Don’t think they knowed anybody was around. Watered-up and crossed between here and the bluff. Sounded like they was headin’ north, four or five horses.”

“Up Kiowa?” asked Jess.

Tom tossed a mesquite twig into the fire. “Don’t think they was well-intentioned. Talked about takin’ some saddles, a quirt, off some ranch night before.”

“You sure? You speak Mex?”

Still, Tom had no energy. “About enough to cuss, but I savvy a little.”

Jess turned away with a wag of his head and looked back stern-faced. “Hell, we never have any trouble around here. Been six, seven years since even any Apaches, they tell me. Now, over on the Pecos, that’s a damned bandits’ hideout, I hear. But Mr. Buckalew—he’s all stove-up—he and his daughter’s by themselves at the 7Ls … right up Kiowa four miles.”

Favoring one leg, Tom stood to stare in his eyes, then through the V formed by Jess upright at saddle horn and the long uplift of the horse’s neck, he saw two roans approach, the nearer with a tight-lipped rider who picked at a flaring, alkali-dusted mustache. A couple of years Jess’s senior and sitting taller in the saddle, he had a face oddly long and jut-jawed—almost horse-faced, thought Tom—with little pleasantry in the narrowed eyes or the veins that bulged at his flushed temples.

Grinding his crooked jaw, the quirt-lean cowhand pulled rein, and Jess turned and quickly addressed him. “Sorrels, this man here says—”

“You spurred that horse over here like the heel flies was after you,” interrupted the older hand, without even a glance at Tom. “Keep on sittin’ here gabbin’ and that damned sun’ll be high enough to give us sun stroke. I’ve seen it a-many a time.”

Jess breathed sharply. “Don’t get your tail over your back. This man here tells me some Mexes passed by headin’ for the 7Ls in the night. Seemed to be up to no-good.”

“Hell, just peons thinkin’ they’re cowhands. Down in the San Antone country they’re thick as molasses.” Then finally lifting his eyes to Tom, “Anyhow, I’ve got to disagree with you there, old fellow—you didn’t see nothin’, way that moon was all hid in dust last night.”

The trailing rider, with a worn, leather vest and a flop-brimmed hat, pulled up alongside to tug at an earlobe and snicker. “Sorrels, if you was to stick your nose up under an ol’ cow’s tail where you couldn’t see,” he asked in an exaggerated drawl, “could you still smell somethin’?”

Sorrels turned, obviously agitated, and sneered at the freckled cowhand with bushy mutton-chops and scraggly red hair. Twenty-three or so, the latter sat grinning like a cowboy on his first visit to the kind of place no one ever spoke about in polite company.

“What the hell you smartin’ off about?” Sorrels snapped. “I can whip a whole cow pen like you with one arm and guard the gate with the other.”

The freckled cowhand only grinned more. “Just how big is that gate, anyhow?”

Tom knew this was no time for jawing, and he was damned glad when Jess spoke up.

“What Gabe’s tellin’ you, Sorrels, is there’s more to knowin’ than just seein’.” He looked at Tom. “Heard five, six?”

“Not over.”

“Yeah,” spoke up Sorrels authoritatively, “the rhythm of ever’ horse’s gait is different enough where you can tell ’em apart sometimes. I ‘member one time—”

“B-By gollies, Jess!” cried a kid-of-a-hand who held dusty horses beside the wagon white-loaded with bedrolls. He pointed excitedly to the north. “Hey, J-Jess! B-By gollies, you s-seen all that over th-there?”

Over the angular nose of Jess’s chestnut horse, Tom looked through the upper fringe of wavy mesquites across-road and scanned a cedar-specked upland ending at sky and a smudge of gray. He cringed—for it stirred sudden nightmares of that attack at Horsehead, when he and Sarah had stumbled back over the bodies of women and children and fought their way to the adobe ruins of the stage stand. There, bleeding and helpless in the dying light with only a near-empty pocket flask of powder and a dwindling bullet bag, they had watched the Comanches throw the men up against the wheels of wagons out-of-range and lash them there. Then night had fallen, and the red devils had doused them with coal oil and set them—

“Looks like fire!” cried Jess.

“That’s up Kiowa!” exclaimed Gabe. “What’s left to burn in this boneyard?”

“Ain’t prairie,” said Sorrels.

“Looks like the 7Ls!” yelled Jess, whirling his horse. “Let’s go!”

But Tom, the holstered .44 in hand, already was limping toward his own animal, his mind whirring with thoughts of two seventeen-year-old women and all the could-haves and would-haves of twenty years’ past, had only somebody who cared come along just a little sooner.

CHAPTER 2

Jess was troubled, damned troubled.

Up the side valley with its broken, gray hillsides, he rode hard, keeping to the trail that rimmed dead Kiowa except where its bank and brush line bent away from north. The unshod hoofs of his stocking-legged chestnut reached out again and again to catch bare ground or brittle clumps of grass and lift plumes of dust. This land was a burden for any grass-fed animal, but the burdens Jess carried inside were a hell of a lot worse.

Not for years had his father weighed so heavily on his shoulders, spurred by a stranger’s grasp of a revolver. It had been a .44 cap-and-ball Colt the old man had held so close to that gray temple, just as Jess’s crying father had done those seventeen years before when Jess had looked in through a crack in the shed wall. Jess had been only eight then, and maybe he couldn’t have done anything to change things, considering the hell that had followed his father home from the war. Still, Jess had just stood and watched, and he would have to live with it for the rest of his life.

If he had just burst inside—hell, if he’d just said something, the way he had to the old man …

Jess had kept a lot of things bottled inside, all right, but even worse right now, he was damned spooked by what he might find up ahead. He had always liked old man Buckalew for his Christian ways, even though Jess had backslid a little since camp meetings as a kid in East Texas. But Buckalew wasn’t the half of it—Jess was sweet on his daughter, Elizabeth Anne.

Like most cowboys, Jess generally longed to see new country after a season or two on a spread, but his feelings for Liz Anne, as her father called her, had kept him hanging on at the 7Ls ever since the rains had stopped nearly a year ago. For much of that time, she had been away at school, but now she was at the ranch house every day, although he seldom found a good enough excuse to drop by and conduct business with Buckalew. It was probably for the best, for all Jess seemed able to do around this only woman for forty miles was stammer like a damned fool.

But Jess figured he wasn’t the only 7L cowboy smitten—he supposed it was the same with all the hands pushing hard up Kiowa with him. There was fun-loving Gabe, a few strides behind, often given to humor at inappropriate times but soberly polite around Liz Anne; young Dee back with the remuda, proudly apprentice-wrangling the horses while looking upon the older hands and Liz Anne with an impressionable sixteen-year-old’s admiration; even scraggly Otie, probably cursing those chuck wagon mules with a buffalo skinner’s vocabulary that never failed to melt into sweet innocence at her sight.

(Continues…)Excerpted from To Hell or the Pecos by Patrick Dearen. Copyright © 2012 Patrick Dearen. Excerpted by permission of TCU Press.
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