The Brothers O'Brien Page 2

It was enough to make a thinking man wonder what the hell he was doing out there in the first place.

  Saraid, young Samuel on the seat beside her, was up ahead driving O’Brien’s Studebaker wagon and four-horse team. With her was a stowaway. Nellie, fearing retaliation from the Federals, hid in the back of the wagon and only revealed herself when there were fifteen miles of git between her and the settlement.

  Ahead of Saraid rolled the chuck wagon. Goodnight and his partner Oliver Loving rode point.

  Luther Ironside leaned over the side of his buckskin, spat, then rubbed off his mustache with the back of his hand. “How you figure Miz O’Brien and the younker are holding out, Colonel?”

  O’Brien pulled down his bandana. “Just fine, I’m sure. Saraid is a strong woman. Why, back in the auld country she could plow a field as well as any man, and her only a slip of a girl.”

  Ironside nodded, pleased. “Young Sam will hold up. He’s a quiet youngster, but he’s got sand.”

  “He did all right back at the cabin,” O’Brien said. “He was scared, I could see that, but he held his ground.”

  Ironside nodded. “He’ll make a fine cavalry officer when the South rises again.”

  O’Brien replaced his bandana. Luther would never accept that the Confederacy had been beaten and beaten badly. It was an old argument between him and his former first sergeant, and one that O’Brien didn’t care to renew.

  Luther Ironside was forty-seven that summer, his black hair shot with gray, not from age but from four years of war. He was a man of medium height, stocky and strong, and he still wore his yellow-striped cavalry breeches, tucked into mule-eared boots. A buckskin shirt and a battered gray kepi completed his attire. Around his waist he wore a heavy black belt with a CSA buckle and a Colt Navy butt forward in a holster of the same color.

  He was tough, enduring, and hard to kill. The new breed of Texas draw fighters who were making all the headlines in the Eastern newspapers stepped wide around him and called him Mister Ironside.

  O’Brien and Ironside rode drag for several weeks to the herd’s jumping-off place on the Concho. There the cattle rested on good grass, ready for the ninety-three-mile trek across the waterless Staked Plains.

  They lost a hundred cattle to thirst and a dozen more to a band of Comanches who demanded tribute. Since the Indians were traveling with their women, children, old people, and slaves, they showed little inclination to fight nearly two dozen men armed with Henry rifles, and rode south without further incident.

  Saraid and Samuel stood up well to the rigors of the drive and the boy was riding ahead on the back of Goodnight’s saddle when the man caught his first glimpse of the Pecos.

  When the herd reached Fort Sumner in mid-July, the army had eleven thousand Indians to feed, and beef was selling at a premium price, sixteen cents a pound dressed, eight on the hoof.

  After paying his drovers, Charlie Goodnight realized a profit of twelve thousand dollars in gold. Shamus O’Brien’s share was ten percent, the return on the money he’d invested, laboriously saved during the war by Saraid, who had traded Confederate scrip for Yankee dollars at exorbitant rates.

  It was enough, O’Brien decided.

  In his pocket was the foundation on which a man could build a dream.

  Chapter Four

  Fort Sumner, New Mexico Territory, July 23, 1866

  “That’s my proposition, Shamus,” Charlie Goodnight said. “Is it to your liking?”

  “Your terms are generous, Charlie,” Shamus O’Brien said, “but it is not in my mind that I return to Texas.”

  “But only to pick up another herd, and next time we drive all the way to Colorado. I’m told the miners are willing to pay for beef with pokes of gold dust.”

  “It’s a tempting offer, Charlie,” O’Brien said. “I will not deny you that.”

  He and Goodnight sat in one of eight tents huddled under a painted canvas sign as big as a sail that proudly proclaimed:

  THE BON-TON HOTEL

  —Silas Meriwether, prop.

  O’Brien’s eyes moved to the open flap as an infantry company with slung rifles and full packs marched past, kicking up dust.

  Apaches had raided the Navajo camp the night before, wounding two men before they made away with a woman and a dozen horses.

  Patrols were out hunting the raiders, but O’Brien reckoned the Apaches were already long gone.

  “How tempted are you, Shamus?” Goodnight said.

  “Not much.” O’Brien’s blue eyes softened, like flowers opening in sunlight. “I want my own land, Charlie.”

  Goodnight nodded. “And you shall have it. There’s plenty of land for the taking in Colorado.”

  O’Brien shook his head. “Saraid and I talked it over and we decided that we’ll put down roots here, in the Territory.”

  “It will be hard, Shamus.”

  “It’s hard everywhere.” As though it made all the difference, O’Brien added, “Luther Ironside agreed to stay on with me.”

  Goodnight considered that. “He’ll do.” Coming from Charlie, that last was a great compliment, and an endorsement of Ironside as a gentleman and a fighter.

  O’Brien picked up his coffee, the tin cup almost disappearing in his big hand. “I’m pulling out tomorrow at first light.”

  Before Goodnight could respond, Saraid stepped inside. She still showed the rigors of the trail and O’Brien had noticed little arcs at the corners of her mouth when she smiled that were not there before.

  “Where’s Samuel?” her husband said.

  Saraid, big in the belly, sighed as she gratefully sat on the bench beside him.

  “He’s out with Nellie, watching the soldiers. I think he hopes the Apaches will come back.” She smiled, her teeth strong and white. “He found a cartridge case over at the Navajo camp, and he’s convinced it was fired by an Apache warrior.”

  “Maybe it was,” O’Brien said.

  “More likely by a Navajo,” Saraid said.

  Goodnight had listened to this exchange with growing impatience. Finally he looked straight into Saraid’s face. “Can you talk some sense into this stubborn Irish husband of yours?”

  She smiled. “I’ve been trying that for six years and haven’t succeeded yet.”

  “Charlie wants me to head back to Texas with him and bring up another herd,” O’Brien said.

  “I thought we’d agreed to stay here in the New Mexico Territory?”

  “We did, but Colonel Goodnight is a man who hates taking no for an answer.”

  “I’m due in two months, Charles,” Saraid said. “I won’t have my baby born in the back of a wagon.”

  “Hell, woman—” Goodnight snapped his mouth shut, appalled by what he’d just said. “I’m sorry, Saraid, I didn’t mean to talk like that.”

  Her voice was calm. “Charles, we’ve all been under a good deal of strain in recent weeks. You have no need to apologize.”

  Goodnight looked at O’Brien. “Shamus, I meant no disrespect to your wife.”

  O’Brien smiled. “Charlie, you couldn’t disrespect a woman if you tried.”

  Goodnight smoothed his closely trimmed beard. “What I was going to say is that Saraid might be better off having her baby in a wagon than under a juniper in some godforsaken wilderness.”

  O’Brien rubbed the back of his wife’s neck with the thumb and forefingers of his left hand. “Charlie makes a point.”

  “With luck and God’s tender mercy, our baby will be born on our own land, Shamus,” Saraid said. “I will hear no more about it. As for me giving birth under a juniper tree, there’s no use building houses on a bridge we haven’t crossed yet.”

  Charlie Goodnight smiled through a sigh. “You’re as stubborn as your husband, Saraid. But there’s steel in you and that I admire.”

  “When I was a girl, only the great English lords lived in their own houses. My mother and father paid rent for our poor cottage and a patch of dirt to the Earl of Sunderland, a man who never set foot in Ireland.
After Shamus and I wed, we came to America and made plans to build a home of our own. It was our dream, you understand. But then came the war and Shamus went off to fight and our house was never built. The dream vanished like a fairy gift in the morning light.”

  Saraid was talking more to herself than Goodnight, her eyes searching the space between the two of them. “Our home will be built by Shamus and me, here, in the Territory, and we’ll pay rent to no one.”

  Goodnight smiled. “Then I can see that your mind is made up.”

  “Indeed it is.”

  “Shamus, you’ll need cattle to start a herd,” Goodnight said. “I have a hundred head of mixed young stuff the army passed over, and they’re yours if you want them.”

  “I’ll pay you for them, Charlie,” O’Brien said.

  “No you won’t. They’re my gift to Saraid, and, unlike a fairy gift, they’ll still be there in the morning.”

  “We’re beholden to you, Charles,” Saraid said.

  “For everything you’ve done for us.”

  Goodnight waved away the woman’s thanks. “Where will you head to find your land, Shamus?”

  O’Brien smiled. “Why, north, of course. When I was in the army I always enjoyed marching north and that’s the course I’ll set.”

  Goodnight rose and stuck out his hand. “Good luck to both of you.” He smiled. “Come visit me in Texas sometime.”

  Shamus O’Brien was not yet finished with Fort Sumner.

  Silas Meriwether, a giant of a man who’d worn the gray, had told him the army was selling off old Mexican land grants clustered around the Glorieta Mesa country that had been confiscated by the United States under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.

  “If it’s fertile farmland you seek, then the grants are not for you, Colonel,” Meriwether had said. “But ranching is a different matter. The land will support longhorn cattle.”

  Later O’Brien walked to the fort, talked to a colonel who sent him to a major, who passed him on to a captain, who told him to talk to a first lieutenant, who palmed him off on a second lieutenant, who collared a civilian government employee who sold him the grant.

  “We’re now the owners of a deed to fifteen thousand acres southwest of the town of Santa Fe,” O’Brien told Saraid, flourishing the document.

  She was shocked. “Shamus, there’s not that much land in all of Ireland. How did we pay for such an estate?”

  “Six hundred dollars, my love. Half of all we own, but ’tis a fine bargain to be sure.”

  Saraid’s quick brain made a calculation. “Shamus, four cents an acre seems a low price for so vast a tract of land.”

  For a moment, O’Brien’s face shuttered, and his wife pushed him. “What are you not telling me, Shamus?”

  “A ghra mo chroi, my heart’s beloved, do not imagine the green fields of the auld country. ’Tis a wild, unforgiving land we have bought, fit only for the wolf and the buffalo and the Apache, but our cattle will thrive there, of this I am sure.”

  “It is our land, Shamus, is it not?”

  “Indeed it is.”

  “Then we will tame it and make it our home and our children’s home.”

  “And the Apache?”

  Saraid did not hesitate. “Husband, we will fight for what is ours.”

  “Amen,” O’Brien said.

  Chapter Five

  Glorieta Mesa, New Mexico Territory, August 1866

  A cobalt blue sky arched over the top of Glorieta Mesa and a white cloud rested on the summit, pinned in place by the arrowhead canopies of ponderosa pines. Lower on the slopes grew thick stands of piñon, juniper, and mountain oak. Lower still on the flat, stretched brush flats and vast swathes of grama grass.

  Borne on the hot August wind, the air smelled of cedar and of secret places in the high mountain meadows where mint-green frogs dived off ferns without a splash into mossy pools.

  Saraid drove the wagon across rolling hill country, a new cast iron stove clanking in the bed. Samuel and Nellie were wedged on the seat beside her and a hundred yards back, Shamus O’Brien and Luther Ironside rode herd on ninety longhorn cattle, only a third of them beeves.

  O’Brien had been silent for the last mile or so, and looked around with quickening interest. “Luther, I think this is the place.”

  “Hell, it all looks the same to me,” Ironside said.

  He swung to his right and hazed a young cow out of a patch of brush and whistled it back to the herd, swinging his coiled rope. When he returned to O’Brien’s side, the younger man was consulting the map he’d taken from his saddlebags.

  After a few moments of head nodding, O’Brien said, “Yes, we’re on our land.” He pointed to the forested slope of the mesa. “You see the outcropping of rock shaped like the prow of ship?”

  Ironside allowed that he did.

  “According to the land agent’s map, that’s right in the middle of our acres.” O’Brien grinned. “Damn it all, Luther, we’re home.”

  He looked at Ironside. “You don’t seem too excited.”

  The older man’s face was grim. “I’ve got something to show you, Colonel.”

  “Where?”

  “Come with me.”

  Ironside turned his horse and trotted back to the brush patch where he’d rousted the cow. When O’Brien drew rein beside him, Ironside pointed. He had no need for words.

  Two skeletons lay on the ground, partially covered by brush and other debris. Several arrows that had lodged in bone still bristled from their rib cages. Scraps of leather from boots and belts, along with patches of cloth from plaid shirts, still clung to the bones like rotting flesh.

  It took O’Brien a while before he could muster some words, but in the end he settled for only one. “Apaches.”

  “That would be my guess, Colonel. I’d say these were prospectors by the look of them.” Ironside’s eyes searched the surrounding ground. “Animals must’ve run off with some of the bones.”

  “How long ago, do you reckon?”

  “Who knows, Colonel? Months, years. It’s hard to tell.”

  O’Brien turned his head, his eyes fixing on his companion’s face. “I don’t want Saraid to know about this. Later we’ll come back here and bury these men decent.”

  “That’s fine by me.”

  O’Brien smiled. “This is a happy occasion, Luther, and I won’t let some old bones spoil it for us.” He swept off his hat, let out a wild rebel yell, and galloped his big sorrel toward the wagon. Even when he was still a distance away, he shouted, “Saraid, we’re home! We’re home!”

  She reined the team to a stop as her husband drew up beside her. “This is it, Shamus? Are you sure?”

  “According to the map, we’re right in the middle of our land. We own this valley and a lot more beside.”

  Saraid crossed herself. “The Lord be praised. This is a green and pleasant land.”

  O’Brien nodded. “Better than I expected. ’Tis high desert country and I thought we’d see only miles of sand and cactus.”

  The herd trotted past on both sides of the wagon, followed by Ironside. “They’ve got their tails up, Colonel. There’s water ahead.”

  O’Brien reached out his arm. “Behind me, Saraid, let’s see where the cows lead.”

  Saraid stepped lightly from the wagon seat despite the encumbrance of her big belly and straddled the horse behind her husband’s saddle.

  Mindful of his wife’s condition, O’Brien rode at a walk into the dust of the retreating herd.

  The cattle lined the bank of a brawling creek about twelve feet wide, shaded by cottonwoods. The water ran over a sandy, pebbled bottom and fish the color of gunmetal hovered in the eddies.

  Shamus O’Brien was mighty pleased. The spring melt was long gone, yet the creek flowed full and clear, an excellent sign in a thirsty land.

  “Shamus, help me down,” Saraid said. “I want to drink of our water.”

  He stepped from the saddle and assisted his wife to the ground. She ran to the c
reek, and with an effort kneeled on the bank.

  Cupping water to her mouth with her hand, she swallowed, and then turned to her husband.

  “The water is sweet, Shamus,” She lifted her arms and O’Brien helped her to her feet. “What shall we call this place?”

  O’Brien took his wife in his arms, looking down at her from his great height. “If it pleases you, we’ll call this place, our ranch, Dromore.”

  Saraid glanced over her husband’s shoulder to the towering mesa. Knowing Dromore, in Gaelic meant the Great Ridge, she said, “It’s a fine name, Shamus.” She said the name again, tasting it on her tongue. “Yes, I will be happy here . . . at Dromore.”

  They made camp that night close to the creek, under a sky that glowed with stars. A rising wind whispered among the piñon and juniper and higher, an owl roosted in the pines and asked its eternal question of the night. A pair of coyotes hunted close by, yipping to one another in the lilac darkness.

  “I’m afraid of coyotes,” Nellie said, huddling closer to Ironside, the flames of the fire staining her face scarlet. “They come in the night and steal babies.”

  “Maybe it’s the banshee,” O’Brien said, smiling. “Oh, I heard the terrible cry of the banshee many a time during the war.”

  “Shamus, don’t tell Nellie such things,” Saraid said. “She’s scared enough already, poor thing. And look at Samuel. He’s white as a sheet.”

  “I’m not scared, Ma,” the boy said. “Honest I’m not.” But Ironside was intrigued and wouldn’t let it go. “What is a banshee, Colonel?”

  “Ah, a terrible creature to be sure,” O’Brien said. “The bean si is a woman who lives in the fairy mounds by day and only comes out in the darkness of night.” His eyes shone like jewels in the firelight. “She has the face of a skull and long white hair to her waist and she borrows her voice from the cry of the wolf.”

  Nellie gave a little yelp of alarm and buried her face in Ironside’s shoulder.

  “Shamus!” Saraid said. “I told you not to frighten the girl. Now, stop it at once, please.”