The Lawless Read online

  “Nothing for you to worry about, child. The banshee stay in Ireland and don’t travel. Mose, you and the boys hunt around and see if there’s anything left that we can use. I’ll take a look inside.”

  “May be snakes in there, Miz Kerrigan,” Moses warned.

  “Mose, I am not in the least afraid of snakes after St. Patrick chased them out of Ireland. But I’d better take my rifle just in case.”

  The cabin was empty but for the remains of a table and some chairs. The walls were scorched and blackened and smelled of smoke, an acrid odor that lingered long after the fire was out. Since there was nothing more to be seen, Kate stepped back outside.

  “Miss Kate, you better come see this.” Moses stood at the corner of the cabin. “Best Quinn keep the girls away.”

  Trace stood staring down at scattered bones in the grass. “Five skulls here, Ma. Looks like maybe two grown people and three children. It’s hard to tell if there were more.”

  “Animals do that. Scatter unburied folks’ bones around,” Moses said knowingly.

  Kate nodded in agreement. “Somebody took the time to lay out the bodies, but didn’t have time to bury them. That’s how it looks to me.”

  “Maybe there was another Indian attack and he had to run,” Moses said.

  “Well, we’ll bury them now. I’m sure they were decent Christian folks and deserve to lie in the ground.” She looked around the site.

  Moses pointed. “Up on the bluff there, Miz Kate. It’s a good place to bury folks. Peaceful up there among them trees.”

  “Yes, good. We’ll start a cemetery up there where one day my bones . . . and yours, too, Mose . . . will rest.”

  “But not too soon, no,” Mose argued. “First we got a ranch to build.”

  Kate smiled. “I know, and we already have the door for the house.”

  “Number twenty-seven, Pecos River Street,” Trace said.

  They all laughed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Cornelius Hagan had helped Kate Kerrigan and her family escape a life of poverty in Nashville and took them to Texas. He was a rich man, kinfolk and good-hearted, but Kate had had no wish to impose on his charity any longer than necessary. When she’d proposed moving west to settle her own land, he had resisted. But seeing how determined was her decision, he’d insisted on giving her a stake to get started.

  Although proud as only the Irish can be, Kate was a practical woman. She knew she could not establish a ranch without funds. “It’s a loan, Cornelius, only a loan,” she’d said the day she left. “I’ll pay you back with interest, I promise.”

  “Then pay me when you sell your first herd,” Hagan had said.

  More than anything else that was Kate’s goal, but she was a long way from selling a herd. As she cleaned out the stone cabin and rehung the door, she didn’t even have a herd.

  But the cattle were there, out in the thicket country where some of the mossy horns hadn’t seen a human being in years. Brush popping was hard, dangerous work, and it required suitable horses and experience that Trace and Quinn lacked.

  Kate needed grown men of courage. She found one such man in Steve Keller, a lean, mean, slow-talking man with sky blue eyes whose stare seemed to bore right into a person and come out the other side.

  He explained. “Ma’am, the Texas brush popper is a feller who knows he’ll never catch a cow by looking for a soft entrance into the brush, so he hits the thicket, hits it flat, hits it on the run and tears a hole in it. Like his rider, a good brush horse is game and tough as they come. Between rides, a man gets a chance to rest up and let the thorns work out and his wounds to heal. But no matter how stove up he becomes, he’s ready to hit the brush thickets every chance he gets.”

  “Where can I find such horses and such men?” Kate asked.

  “You can find them through me, ma’am. I can supply men for the gather, and they’ll work for seventy-five cents a day. They’re vaqueros, ma’am, Mexican riders. You got any objection to hiring Mexicans?”

  “Not in the least if they do their work,” Kate answered.

  “They’ll work, ma’am. They’re good hands, every last one of them.” Keller’s eyes moved beyond her to the cabin where Trace and Quinn worked on the roof. “Your boys are almost man-grown, ma’am. Do you want the vaqueros should teach them? Mind you, ma’am, they cuss and sin like any other men.”

  Kate ignored the question and asked, “Can you supply the horses?”

  “I sure can, ma’am. Them big English studs of your’n ain’t cut out for brush work.”

  At five dollars a day, Steve Keller didn’t come cheap, but he was as good as his word. Eight vaqueros gathered fifty head the first day, mostly heifers and young stuff. The big bulls were wary as antelope, fought like tigers, and were hard to catch. Trace took to brush popping like he was born to it, but Quinn held back. He was not as good a rider as his brother and had no real understanding of cows and where they might brush up. On the fourth day, Keller pulled him out of the thickets and set him to riding herd on the increasing number of cattle that had been driven to graze east of the Pecos.

  A week passed and then another. The days grew hotter and the big steers became fewer and harder to find in the thickets. One of the vaqueros holed up with a broken leg after a roped mossy horns rolled on him and another just quit, saying he was heading back home to his wife in Mexico.

  Then came a day of trial and tribulation for Kate Kerrigan, a terrible event she was destined to remember for the rest of her long, eventful life.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A vaquero named Vasquez and another rider, Pablo Morales, were hunting the draws for strays, but without much success, when they stumbled onto a camp set among the mesquite. Two white men broiled meat over a fire and close by was the butchered carcass of a young heifer.

  When the men saw the vaqueros ride in, the older of the two made a grab for his rifle. Vasquez was quick with the iron and a bullet just two inches in front of the man’s reaching hand convinced him that he should leave the rifle alone.”

  They were ragged men, possibly father and son, dirty, slovenly and overgrown with hair. They wore old Confederate greatcoats and lace-up infantry boots and both looked tired, beaten, part of the tens of thousands aimless, wandering flotsam and jetsam washed up by the late war.

  Morales swung out of the saddle and inspected the heifer. He straightened up and asked, “Which one of you shot this animal?”

  The older man rose to his feet. “I did. We were hungry.”

  The pair still under his gun, Vasquez said, “This is the land of the Kerrigan Ranch. The cow was not yours to shoot.”

  “Like I said, we were hungry.” The older man’s pale blue eyes were defiant.

  Vasquez left Morales to guard the rustlers and returned to give his report to Kate. “You must hang them, I think.”

  Kate disagreed. “I won’t hang a hungry man for shooting a cow.”

  Steve Keller’s face looked like it had been carved out of a granite block. “Then pack up your wagon and move out now, ma’am. When the word gets around that Kerrigan cattle can be shot or rustled with impunity, you soon won’t have a ranch.”

  “But . . . but it wasn’t even my cow,” Kate said.

  “It was on your land, was it not?” Keller said.

  “Yes. I aim to claim the land as far as the thickets and even farther east.”

  “Then it was your cow,” Keller said.

  “Hang two men for stealing a cow?” Kate said. “That’s . . . that’s barbaric.”

  “This is a hard, unforgiving land, ma’am. We saddle our own broncs and fight our own battles. The strong survive in this country. The weak go to the wall and then they leave and nobody ever hears of them again. If you think that’s barbaric, then don’t stick around, ma’am. If you’re not strong enough to fight for what’s yours, even one cow, then this country doesn’t need you. Texas doesn’t need you.” Keller touched his hat. “Ma’am.” And then he walked away.

  “Wai
t!” Kate said, her temper flaring. “I will fight for what’s mine. I’ll let no man take from me or my family.”

  “The cow was yours, ma’am,” Keller said. “A man shot it and now two men are eating it. Let this go and they’ll be back . . . and they’ll bring others with them. A no-good, shiftless bunch too lazy to work, but who know how to steal. If they’d shot a hundred of your cows, would you ignore it?”

  “You’re talking nonsense, Mr. Keller,” Kate said.

  “No, ma’am. I’m talking numbers. How many cows can a man shoot on the Kerrigan ranch without consequences? A hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? In case you’re stuck, ma’am, the answer is, not one. There is no law here. On Kerrigan range, you are the law. You are judge and jury. There is no one else.”

  Kate, despairing, turned to Moses Rice. “Moses, tell me. Must it be so?”

  “I don’t want to talk out of turn, Miz Kate, get above my station, no,” Moses said.

  “Tell me. I order you to tell me.”

  Moses bowed his head and talked to his feet. “My granddaddy tole me this one time. He said that in Africa where he came from a man’s wealth is measured in cows. If you steal a man’s cow you take mealy bread out of the mouths of his children. That is why, in Africa, when they catch a cow thief they kill him.”

  “Black man talks sense, ma’am,” Keller said.

  Since Trace and Quinn were out with the cattle, Kate said, “Mose, take care of the children.” Her throat tight, she added, “I may be gone for quite some time.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The two rustlers were still under Pablo Morales’s gun when Kate arrived at the scene of the cow killing. She dismounted and Steve Keller and Vasquez flanked her, their Colts drawn.

  The day was hot, the air still. A tiny lizard did pushups on a rock and insects made their small sounds in the grass.

  Keller, more used to the breed of men he faced, talked first. “This land belongs to the Kerrigan Ranch. And you’re on it.”

  “We didn’t know that,” the older man said. “How could we know that? One wilderness looks much the same as any other.”

  “Well, you should have known. Who shot the cow?”

  “I did. I was hungry.”

  “Plenty of folks around here willing to feed a hungry man,” Keller said. “But you’d rather thieve than ask. Ain’t that right?”

  “The war made many a thief, mister, and Reconstruction made me a pauper. Before the war, I taught school.” The man smiled, revealing bad teeth. “It’s kinda funny when you think about it.”

  “Nothing here is funny.” Keller motioned to the younger man. “Is this your son?”

  “Nope. We just met up on the trail. If you look in his shirt pocket, you’ll find the medal he won at Kennesaw Mountain.”

  Keller nodded. “I’ll do him honor by burying him in it. Now, if you got prayers to say do it now. Your time is short.”

  The older man was defiant, the younger frightened.

  “What’s your age, son?” Kate asked.

  “I don’t rightly know, ma’am, but the cavalry told me when I enlisted that judging by my teeth I was sixteen. “

  “You’re about a hundred and sixteen now, judging by what I can see. What’s your name?”

  “Toby Tyrell, ma’am.”

  “Then you bear the name of great Irish lords,” Kate said. “That is to your credit.”

  Keller said, “Vasquez, Morales, throw loops over a bough of one of the wild oaks. Make sure it’s strong enough to bear the weight of two skinny fellows. When you’ve done that, put them up on your horses.”

  “Sí, patrón.” Vasquez’s face was stiff, unreadable.

  Kate knew that the older man’s fate was sealed. There was no stepping away from it. Any sign of weakness in the wild country would be seized on and the result would be that she’d lose what she had and all she would ever have.

  But she could save the boy.

  “Just one loop,” she said to Keller. “Let Toby Tyrell go free. I think he can make something of himself and I will help him.”

  That last was overheard by Pablo Morales, who stepped up to Kate and said, “I spoke with him while you were gone, señora. His real name is Max Harley. He has no medal in his pocket and he was not in a great battle. He said he was conscripted into the army but deserted three days later.” The vaquero reached into his pocket and produced a pocketknife. “He said he killed a man for this up Fort Concho way. If you look at the handle—right there, señora—you see the initials L.S. They must be those of the murdered man.”

  Kate looked confused. “But he told me—”

  “That he had an Irish name. That’s because I told him an Irish lady owned the ranch. He’s a murderer and liar who tried to get into your good graces, señora.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that earlier?” Kate said.

  “Because if he was to be hanged anyway, there was no point in burdening you with his real story, señora.”

  “The damned greaser is lying,” Max Harley yelled. “He knows I was just funnin’ with him. Are you going to take his word over a white man’s? Answer me, you gal!”

  Keller grinned and said to Kate, “As the nice old ladies say at a hanging tea party, ma’am, one loop or two?”

  Kate swallowed hard. “Hang them both. Then put a sign around their necks and make it say, ‘I shot a Kerrigan cow.’”

  For the next couple weeks, Kate was withdrawn and irritable. She had a fine singing voice and used it often, but it fell silent until Moses told her he missed the old Irish songs, and him a black man who’d never been in Ireland.

  She began to sing again and by the end of the gather was almost back to her former self.

  The cabin had been cleaned and made habitable. Moses used the carpenter trade he’d learned as a slave to build furniture and beds for Kate and the children. Trace and Quinn bedded down wherever they could but mostly spread their blankets outdoors near the cattle.

  Nearly a thousand head grazed on Kerrigan land and one of the nearby ranchers, a man named Colonel Jason Hunt, stopped by with his segundo, a taciturn man named Kyle Wright, to offer Kate a proposition. “I’m pushing two thousand head north to Abilene on the Chisholm Trail, Mrs. Kerrigan. Mix your cows in with mine and I’ll get the best price for them I can, I promise.”

  Every inch a former soldier and Southern gentleman, Hunt was forthright and courteous and nothing about him rang false. What you saw was what you got, a tall, rawboned man in his mid-fifties with iron gray hair and blue eyes that had seen much. He’d been wounded at Chancellorsville and again at Spotsylvania. Just a twelve-month before, Comanches had put a strap iron arrowhead into his left thigh and he still walked with a pronounced limp.

  “That is most kind of you,” Kate said. She was serving tea outside the cabin under the shade of an oak and both men seemed to enjoy her sponge cake, a favorite of Queen Vic, which was vanishing at a rapid rate. “Do I bring my herd to you, Colonel?”

  “No ma’am. I know how shorthanded you are. My riders will pick up your herd on the way to the Chisholm.”

  “You are most gracious, sir.”

  “No trouble at all, Mrs. Kerrigan. If you feed us cake like this, I’ll drive your herd with mine every time.” Hunt looked at Wright. “Isn’t that so, Kyle?”

  Wright, his mouth full, could only nod.

  “I would be honored, Colonel,” Kate said, her eyelashes fluttering. “You may stop by for tea and cake anytime you wish. Ah, Mose, more tea for Colonel Hunt, please.”

  Moses poured the tea and when his eyes met Kate’s he saw a twinkle. Kate Kerrigan could play a man like a fish and then land him on her side of the riverbank.

  “A beautiful service, Mrs. Kerrigan,” the colonel said, holding up his cup. It looked as fragile as eggshell in his big work-worn hand. “Is it Chinese?”

  “It’s English actually. Staffordshire I believe. A parting gift from a relative before we headed west.”

  Hunt gently laid his tiny cup in the
equally tiny saucer. “I had an ulterior motive in coming to visit you today, Mrs. Kerrigan.”

  “Ah, that’s very mysterious, Colonel.” Kate’s sun-dappled hair rippled to her bare shoulders and shone like burnished copper.

  “Mrs. Kerrigan, I came to see the woman who hanged two men for shooting one of her cows. You’re not what I expected.”

  Her eyes were very green. “And what did you expect, Colonel?”

  Men who are not often around woman don’t know when to tread lightly, and the colonel smiled and barged on. “Oh, I don’t know. Mannish maybe, with cropped hair and a bigger mustache than mine.”

  “And you were disappointed, Colonel Hunt?” Kate said.

  “Oh dear no, Mrs. Kerrigan. Just surprised. Why, you are a beautiful woman, and right now you look as though you’re ready to attend a ball in Richmond. Hanging is work for mighty rough men.”

  Wright swallowed a drink of tea. “I heard tell those two died hard.”

  Kate nodded. “Yes they did. It took a long time.”

  “Well, they deserved it,” Wright said. “I’ve got no time for rustlers and their ilk.”

  “I’ll never hang a man again,” Kate said.

  “You’re probably right about that, ma’am. Shooting is better, less messy.”

  Colonel Hunt said, “You have our complete admiration, Mrs. Kerrigan. You stood up to a testing time very well. Thugs, vagabonds, and no-accounts must be taught a lesson and in that you did not fail.”

  The colonel moved in his chair. “And now, dear lady, I must leave you. We will collect your herd in three days and hope that beef prices are better in Abilene than they were a few months ago.” He bowed and kissed Kate’s hand. “By all that’s holy, ma’am, under all that gingham and lace you are a woman to be reckoned with. You will go far and cut a wide path or I’ve never seen a rancher before.”

  Wright rose. “Mrs. Kerrigan, don’t you concern yourself none about them two you hung. They were men who needed killing, and that’s the beginning and the end of it.” He touched his hat. “Good day to you, ma’am.”