1
1874
Big John Anthem had laid claim to his land in the wild west Texas mountain country back in 1850. He had fought Indians and Mexican raiders, petty thieves and jealous cattlemen, to keep his claim.
He called his kingdom Luminaria and took a wife who bore him two sons and two daughters. And in all this golden, lonely, lovely range his word was law; his judgment, justice.
In the fall of 1874, eleven years after the blooding of his son, Cole, John Anthem rode out of a thicket of scrub oak and mesquite and down into a washed-out arroyo where two raggedly dressed hide-hunters were busily skinning a fresh-killed steer whose hide wore the Slash A brand, John Anthem's mark.
Slash A was the only brand worn on cattle that grazed over four hundred thousand acres of range. If there were any cattle to be killed, John Anthem or one of his men would do the killing and there would be a good reason: for food or to cull a sick steer from the herd.
Anthem had no use for hide-hunters. And his thoughts were of retribution as he walked his sorrel gelding past a high-sided wagon half full of skins. Flies were thick as grit in a sandstorm around the campsite where carcasses rotted in the sun. Anthem studied the two men in the morning light and sensed the tension rise in their gullets. A third hide-hunter emerged on horse-back from behind a cover of mesquite and monks-hood.
The skinner on horseback—a young man, no more than eighteen years old—sat astride a brown mare and cradled a Spancer carbine in the crook of his arm. The youth's features were hidden beneath the brim of his battered hat.
Anthem shifted his attention to the men by the campfire. One was a hard case nearing forty, sporting a scraggly beard and deep-set eyes. His lips peeled back to reveal a row of crooked teeth. Stringy blond hair hung to his shoulders. His partner looked a few years younger, a lifetime hungrier. There didn't seem enough meat on the man to cover his bony frame. He was tall and bearded, wearing a rancid-smelling woolen coat despite the warm autumn air. All three of the hide-hunters wore homespun shirts and buckskin britches.
The older of the threesome glanced at his companion and took a step forward, angling himself so that the revolver holstered on his right was hidden from view. The bearded man started to move to get himself in a better position.
"That's far enough, Stringbean," John Anthem said, walking his range horse up the arroyo and reining the sorrel to a halt about thirty feet from the hide-hunters' campfire. The bearded man halted in his tracks as Anthem's cold blue eyes bore into him, for Anthem's tightlipped, weather-scarred face showed the mercy of a cornered cougar.
John Anthem was a big man, six feet tall and at forty-four years, a touch thick in the waist, but slabs of work-hardened muscle crowded the shoulders and sleeves of his faded red shirt. He held the reins of his mount in his left hand, his right already resting on the grip of his Colt Dragoon. The percussion pistol had been converted and bored out to handle a big .45-caliber cartridge. The gun was heavy and hard to handle, and packed a wallop as mean as the man who wore it.
"Reckon you be Big John Anthem hisself," the older of the three remarked. He seemed to be the leader of the disputable-looking trio. "Well, folks call me—"
"I know who you are," Anthem growled, in obvious bad temper. "You're the three sons of bitches who have been butchering my cattle and leaving them to rot. I'd rather Apaches steal 'em. At least they do it to fill their bellies. But you three scum . . . The hell with your names, I don't intend to erect any markers over you. I'll leave you where you fall, like you've done my stock for the past month."
There was silence then, for the three men needed to weigh their chances or find the courage, to grow wings perhaps and fly like all hell away from Anthem's land. It was morning—late, though—and the sun was crawling toward noon.
The smell of blood was in the air. If there had been a breeze, the fragrance of chino grass and sage and the faint scent of pines would have favored the arroyo, for mountains loomed behind the campsite. But there was no breeze and the stench of blood clung to the clearing like a gloomy portent of trouble to come.
"You talk mighty bold." The stringy hair hide-hunter grinned.
"I've talked enough," Anthem replied with an air of casualness that belied his actions. He yanked the Colt Dragoon from its holster as the two hide-hunters afoot reached for their own weapons. The Dragoon spat flame and followed with a deafening boom. The leader of the three flew backward into the flames of his own campfire.
The hungry-looking man in the coat levelled a Confederate-issue cap-and-ball and loosed a wild shot that blew away a clump of trumpet flowers and sent a hummingbird winging to safety.
Anthem fired once more and the bearded man screamed, clutched at his chest, and dropped to his knees. He seemed to shrink into his coat as he doubled over and died.
The young rider broke for cover, dropping his rifle and lashing his horse unmercifully. He gained the cover of the trees as Anthem brought his Dragoon to bear.
John Anthem held his fire, cursed, and dug his heels into the sorrel, and the range-bred gelding broke toward the camp. The leader of the thieves rolled out of the fire and sat upright, smoke rising from the back of his shirt and the charred wisps of his matted hair. His eyes widened as he looked at the crimson stain spreading over his shirt. He raised a Navy Colt at Anthem on his charging sorrel. It took an eternity to cock the damn gun, and an eternity was too long. The hide-hunter shrieked and tried to cover his face, but fell back as Anthem rode him down, leaving the hide-hunter's trampled corpse in the settling dust, the dead man's blood mingling with that of the freshly skinned steers.
In the glare of the sun-washed walls of the arroyo, upon the hard packed earth, treacherous with the residue of flash flood and the wind's erosion, Lendel Bass rode for his life. He raked his rusted spurs along the mare's flanks and chanced a glance over his shoulder just in time to see John Anthem on his sorrel burst from the thicket and leap a cache of deadwood left by a now-vanished flood. Young Lendel Bass felt his heart shoot into his throat and he turned his attention to the trail ahead. But there, too, he found the winding escape route blocked.
Where the walls fell away and the arroyo widened into an open meadow, another horseman waited astride a hammerhead Appaloosa. The rider was a slight man in his mid-thirties. His hair was long and raven-black. He wore a sombrero, a nut-colored short coat, and flared pants. His blousy shirt was open to the waist, revealing the smooth coffee-colored expanse of his chest. A gun belt circled his narrow hips and a bandolier hung from his right shoulder, its loops crammed with shells for the sawed-off scatter gun he gripped in his left fist.
Lendel knew that horeman by description, and if his spirits sagged at the sight of John Anthem, they plummeted now. The vaquero could only be JoaquÍm Almendáriz, called Chapo for the wild horses of the barrancas.
Like his father before him, Chapo Almendáriz was segundo of Luminaria. It was rummored he had once been a cutthroat and bandit who had roamed the Sierra del Hueso to the south. Whatever his past, Almendáriz was no man to ride the wrong side of, but what choice was there.
Lendel Bass whipped his horse and rode straight on toward the Appaloosa as it pawed the air.
Chapo fired the shotgun into the ground a few feet ahead of the oncoming hide-hunter. Both barrels spat fire and black smoke as double-O buck-shot blasted a small crater in the path of the brown mare.
The animal leapt sideways and neighed in terror as gravel stung its legs like a swarm of wasps, and Lendel Bass lost hold of the reins. He felt his feet slip out of the stirrups, and a second later he was airborne. The young man slammed into the side of the arroyo and slid down the wall as his legs buckled. For a moment, he lost consciousness. But the sharp rocks digging into the small of his back brought him around. He fumbled at a sheath at his waist, dragged free of his skinning knife, and forced himself to stand. He stumbled and staggered toward the segundo on his Appaloosa.
Chapo's hand dropped over in a cross draw and a long-barreled Colt appeared in his right fist, its seven-and-a-half-inch barrel centered directly on Bass. Chapo shook his head as if silently scolding the young man for his foolishness.
Bass noticed that the segundo had dropped the reins and yet the Appaloosa obeyed the vaquero's shifting weight and the pressure of his knees. The animal advanced a few paces and stopped. As Chapo thumbed the hammer of the Colt, Lendel Bass lowered his head and dropped his knife. He heard the sound of an approaching horse and looked up at the creased, leathery face of John Anthem.
The man on the sorrel holstered his Dragoon, and Bass took comfort in the gesture. It was his first time at rustling and stealing hides, and he hoped the two men would understand that he was a good boy at heart. He even owned a bible tucked away in the saddlebag on his brown nag. He mustered up a sheepish grin.
"Pilgrim, your two friends are dead," Anthem said.
"Seems to me, sir," Bass said, doffing his hat and looking from Anthem to the segundo and back to Anthem, "Uh . . . seems you've saved me from bad company."
Anthem raised his eyes to study the projection of volcanic rock upthrust out of the flood-scarred wall behind Bass. It looked to be about twenty feet up the arroyo and was the proper angle to support a man away from the gravel-strewn wall. John Anthem looked over at Chapo, whose expression was one of slow realization and disapproval.
The man on the sorrel removed his own weathered stetson and wiped his forearm across his forehead and close-cropped pale-red hair that the sun had almost bleached the color out of.
"I don't know how I can ever thank you, Mr. Anthem. I had one foot on the path to perdition, but you sure have helped me pluck it off and set it square on the road to righteousness," Lendel Bass exclaimed with all the fervor of a camp preacher leading his wayward flock to a river baptism.
Anthem untied his lariat, tossed it upward over the projecting rock, and caught the loop where it dangled.
"Mr. Anthem . . . uh . . . sir, what do you intend for me?"
"Son, I aim to hang you."
Bass paled and almost collapsed right then and there. Again he appealed to the rancher's sense of mercy. "Sir, this act demeans you."
"Like you demeaned my herd by about forty-three steers, according to my segundo's count," John Anthem snarled. He dropped the loop over the hide-hunter's neck and jerked it tight.
Compadre, no," Chapo blurted out. He nudged the Appaloosa forward to try to block the sorrel, but Anthem veered his mount to the side. With the end of the lariat wrapped around the saddle horn, Anthem backed the sturdy mare away from the wall of the arroyo, jerking Lendel off his feet and into the air. As the rough hemp bit deep into his flesh and choked off his wind, Bass reached up and grabbed for the length of rope overhead to take the strain off his neck.
"Damn. What a piss-poor hangman I'd make," Anthem grumbled as he tied the rope off around the base of an ocotillo growing out of the slope.
Chapo looked around at the hide-hunter, who slowly and painfully was working his way hand over hand up the length of the rope to the rock projection. He would have a nasty flesh burn, but he would live.
"I had to spend so much time hunting you and your ‘bad company' that it's likely I'll miss my son's wedding," John Anthem called up to the dangling figure. "Be glad my wife isn't here; she'd have tied your hands. And the next time I catch you on my land, I'll remember to tie your hands myself." Anthem shook his head in disgust. He glared at Chapo, who grinned and slowly exhaled.
"You had me fooled that time, Big John."
"Yeah," Anthem replied. He glanced up and saw that Bass had reached the projection and was struggling to loosen the noose around his neck. "You can keep the rope, sonny. Better think long and hard before you ever drop it over something that isn't yours."
"I think he's been read to from the book," Chapo said. "He'll remember."
"What day is it anyway?" John Anthem asked.
"Near as I can reckon, September twentieth."
Anthem winced. His son Billy was due to be married on the twenty-first. Rose had been making preparations for nigh on to a month and had extracted a promise from John that nothing would interfere with his being present for the vow-taking and fiesta. "And here I sit a good two days' ride from my own front door."
Smacking his lips and running a hand over his stubbled jaw, Anthem raised his eyes to Lendel Bass, who had finally freed himself from the lynch rope and was clinging gratefully to the slope. Compared to the tempest that awaited John Anthem back at the ranch, the hide-hunter got off light.
