City of Widows Read Online Free Page B

countryside was ablaze with that dry heat that opens your pores and sucks out the moisture like lemon carbonate through a straw. For all that it was a green land, dotted over with juniper and scrub oak connecting in the distance to create the illusion of a grass ocean. The mountains too were flecked with green, cloud-capped, the air so clear around them I might have been looking at them through a glass. The sky came down to the ground.
    The ranch road led past a long low adobe house with a red tile roof and a corral next to it containing half a dozen horses. Behind the house I found a Mexican cook and his Negro helper scalding a hog in a cauldron the size of a bathtub. The cook said I’d find Señor Whiteside stringing fence in the northwest corner. I didn’t waste time leaving the pair to their work. I don’t mind the smell of singed bristles, but a dead hog looks too much like a naked man to my taste. On my way back to the road I paused to look over the horses in the corral.
    John Whiteside is in most of the history books now as the man who opened up New Mexico to the cattle trade. Severely wounded at the head of his own regiment at Cold Harbor and mustered out, he got a head start on the other barons who went west after the war, rounding up the red-eyed, ladder-ribbed descendants of Cortez’s longhorns wandering wild in Mexico and booting them up into the territories, inventing a new business in the process. Comanches raped and killed his Mexican wife of six months and ran off his first herd, and when he got through fighting them the Apaches came and burned his headquarters and strung his partner head down over a mesquite fire until his brains boiled. Whiteside was still fighting them at the time I caught up with him in the summer of 1881, but his fame had not yet spread north of Taos and I didn’t know him from General Grant. He was just a short twist of rawhide seated on a wagon loaded with spools of barbed wire in a faded blue flannel shirt, canvas breeches, and a wide Mexican sombrero, holding the team while a trio of men in overalls and leather gauntlets spun the jacked-up left rear wheel to seat the wire around a fencepost. He had brown whiskers going gray around his mouth and restless blue eyes in a thicket of wrinkles. His left arm was gone above the elbow, the empty sleeve pinned back.
    â€œI require all the horses I have.” He’d glanced at me when I rode up, then returned to his seemingly aimless study of the horizon. If an irregularity appeared there he’d spot it.
    â€œI’m no hand at bargaining,” I said. “The truth is I stink at it. I’ll pay two hundred for that claybank in the corral.”
    â€œMurdock, is it? Mr. Murdock, I’m in the fence business. I used to trade in cattle but right now I spend most of my time restringing wire. I’ve strung this section six times. Billy the Kid showed the world how easy it is last October when he cut it the first time and spirited out five hundred head. Between the goddamn thieves and those Apache bastards and that greaser son of a bitch Don Segundo del Guerrero down in Chihuahua and every lost tramp who cannot be bothered to ride half a mile to the nearest gate I have strung more wire in this one corner than Western Union. You will pardon me if I don’t feel the necessity to add a livery operation to this here booming fence trade I have going.”
    â€œThe sheriff gave me your name.”
    â€œSheriff.” He snarled the word. “Dolan men counted the ballots. They were only just through counting when the first silver shipment to the bank in Socorro City went missing. It was Frank’s brother Ross done it and he has been behind all the others since. I supply beef to all the bigger mining companies in the territory and what injures them injures me. When I suggested taking this to Lew Wallace, Frank started arresting my best hands for shooting up Mexicans.”
    â€œHe said something