House of the Rising Sun (Hackberry Holland 4)

“Somebody cut my wire and let out my Brahmas and busted down my hog pen last night. Most of my pumpkins are ruined. I’m going to spend most of the day rounding up my stock.”

“Why are you telling me about it?”

“You hear or see anything unusual early this morning?”

“No, I did not.”

“Your light was on at about four-twenty. It was a warm night. You must have had your windows open.”

“I was in my office. I heard thunder. I don’t know anything about your pumpkins. Now go home.”

“Arnold Beckman has been making inquiries about my son. Did you tell him about my boy?”

“The one you drove from your home? How dare you speak to me like this?”

“You once said I was going to get my comeuppance.”

“If I said something like that, I was probably justified. But I don’t remember doing so. Regardless, I’m not the issue. You’re a violent and primitive man, pitied by your neighbors and, by all accounts, an embarrassment to the Texas Rangers. There’s a foul odor about you that you’re not even aware of. Be gone, sir. You gave up your claim to membership in decent society many years ago.”

“Cod, I’m convinced God sent you here to show us the fallacy of white superiority. Don’t hide your light under a basket. Many are called, but few are chosen.”

Bishop slammed the door in his face.

DURING THE MORNING and early afternoon, Hackberry and three of his Mexican workers salvaged a wagonload of his pumpkins and mended the hog pen and the barbed wire in the pasture and rounded up most of his stock. While he drove his cattle back into the pasture, he never took his eyes completely off the bluffs along the river or the dirt road that led to his house, or the deep green arbor of oak trees on the far end of his property. At three o’clock he left his horse saddled in the lot and went into the house and shaved and bathed and put on fresh clothes. Then he put a jar of lemonade and a jar of mustard and a loaf of bread and a chunk of uncooked roast and a whole onion and a fresh tomato in a canvas bag, along with a box that contained his stationery and fountain pen and postage stamps. He also picked up his holstered .44 Army Colt, the loops on the belt stuffed with cartridges, and hung it on the pommel of his horse, along with the canvas bag. He went into the barn and picked up an iron rod that had a wood handle on one end and on the other a hooked tip, blackened by fire.

The river was so low he could ride his horse across it on a sandbar. He came up on a stretch of beach shadowed by cypress whose lacy branches were turning gold with the season. Above him were gray limestone bluffs carpeted on top by lichen and moss and hollowed with depressions Tonkawa Indians had ground corn in. He rode up a sandy path lined on either side with fallen stone, and dismounted in front of a cave and tethered his horse to the limb of a willow tree. Down below, under the riffle flowing between two giant bounders, a shaft of sunlight had pierced the trees and lit the pebbled bottom as brightly as a rainbow.

A folding canvas chair was propped against the cave wall. He built a fire and cut strips from the uncooked roast with the bowie knife he had taken off the Mexican soldier he had killed two years earlier, and hung them on the iron rod and propped the rod across the rocks that ringed his fire. The smoke flattened against the roof, then corkscrewed through a crevice that formed a natural chimney into the top of the bluff. He sat down in the canvas chair and began a letter on top of his stationery box.

Dear Ishmael, it read.

I hope you received my earlier correspondence. Whether you have the opportunity to answer my letter is not important at the moment. I am writing to warn you about a man named Arnold Beckman. He has taken an interest in me for reasons I won’t go into now. He has also used his contacts, all of which I suspect are nefarious in nature, to find out the name of the hospital where you are recuperating from your wounds.

Have nothing to do with this man or his minions. He’s an arms dealer, and like most arms dealers, he sells to both sides. I also believe him to be a sadist. In a word, he’s evil.

I love you, son. I let you and your mother down. One day I hope to make it up to you.

Write when you have time.

Your father,

Big Bud

A shadow fell across his handwriting. He began to write a postscript, not looking up. “You’re standing in my light,” he said.

“Saw your smoke. We were hunting down below,” a voice replied.

The speaker was rail-thin, over six feet, his shirt unbuttoned on a bony chest, his hair streaked with gray and soggy with sweat, tied up on his head. He propped his long rifle butt-down in front of him and leaned on it. It was a Mauser, one with a straight bolt. He grinned. “Sir? Are you there?”

“All the property from here on down to the river is mine. I don’t allow hunters on it.”

The second man was smaller, hatchet-faced, his sleeves cut off at the armpits, both of his arms tattooed with blue ink that had started to fade. He had black hair that grew like snakes, and a lazy eye that drifted back and forth in the socket the way a marble would. He carried a double-barrel shotgun crooked over his arm, the breech open, both chambers loaded. His body odor seemed to hang like an invisible curtain over the cave’s entrance. “What’s the good of a big ranch if you cain’t hunt on it?”

“I don’t believe in hurting animals unnecessarily.”

“A rancher who sends his cattle to the packer but don’t hurt them? That’s a challenge to my thinking powers.”

Hackberry capped his fountain pen and put it and his letter inside his stationery box and replaced the top on the box. “I’d figured y’all would be along.”