Chapter 18

We had promised to help my uncle Henry get settled, but Sharon’s time had come and Jean-Louis was as nervous as a cat in the middle of a pack of dogs.

She had Priscilla to help, and after a while she came out and told Jean-Louis that he was the father of a daughter. We celebrated in good old Texas style, which made both our wives mad as wet hens. But by the following afternoon we were mostly recovered, and they soon got over it too.

The place Henry had picked out for his house was all wrong. It was too close to a low-lying area, meaning that Mosquitos would swarm in the summer, and if the creek flooded it would be under water.

After we told him what we’d noticed, he went with us and together we picked a nice spot farther upstream that was on top of a low bluff with a steep slope leading down to the creek. The Indians likely wouldn’t raid this far south, but if they did the creek and that bluff on one side would make fighting them off easier. Comanches being horse Indians, they couldn’t ride right up to the house on that side.

Then we got started on his house. The people who’d built our haciendas knew the way of adobe and they all had friends and relatives that needed work, so a day or two later the place looked like a beehive! People were coming and going, some I knew but some I was sure I’d never seen before, and all were busy on one thing or another. There was a lot of talking and laughing going on down along the creek and the sounds of axes and two-man saws never seemed to stop.

Both of our foremen had come over to help organize things, and after they talked to us we agreed to what they had in mind. Some of the new workers would stay on to work for Henry, the others would go back to what they’d been doing on my place or Jean-Louis’s.

Most of our employees were dark-skinned, and some were darker than that. As long as a man did his work without shirking and got along with the others, neither of us cared what his last name was. That’s the way of sailors, and we figured if it served when one man could kill a bunch of others by not doing his share it would work just as well on shore.

The wives fussed a little at first, not being used to it the way we were, but the nannies having names like Vargas and Rodriguez got them over that and our employees seemed to be satisfied to work for folks that thought as we did. Now and again we met with our foremen to see if there were things we ought to know about, but it was always “No, señor! ‘sta bien!” Even so, we kept our eyes open because a man can’t afford to be careless when his family’s life might depend on his alertness.

Every month, we made it a practice to get both crews together of a Saturday afternoon for a meal. Now and then, we bought a couple of pigs from Gus and had him deliver them on the hoof to either Jean-Louis’s place or mine. The next time, I’d have a word with my foreman and he’d round up a wild cow for the feast. Easy enough to do, because there were hundreds of them running loose along the creek, and all of them long-horned and bad-tempered. We also brought in a barrel of beer, and depended on the foremen not to let the drinking get out of hand. Nobody ever quit us, far as I know, but some who didn’t measure up got fired.

Time to time, with all the mixing, I wondered which one of us they figured they worked for. One week, you’d see a vaquero on my Ten Springs Rancho working wild cows out of the brush, the next week he might show up at Jean-Louis’s South Plains Rancho to help with breaking mustangs. But since we were partners, I figured it didn’t matter none.

Priscilla and Sharon, between mothering chores, got together once a week or so and decided how much money we had. More than enough, I figured, since both women now had store-bought dresses that they wore to town, and when they went outdoors put on hats that had come from far-away places like New York. It might have taken the hats two years to make their way down to New Orleans, then over to Galveston, and from there on the Eureka to Garcitas Cove, but most of the time they were still in good shape when they got to my place. Priscilla would send someone to let Sharon know when a shipment arrived so that they got first pick. The rest were sold to women in Victoria, which likely brought in enough profit to pay for those dresses!

My gun business was booming, so much so that I didn’t have time to work on that box of pistol parts. But by and by things slowed down, and I looked at what Sam Colt had sent. He should ought to have been more careful, the way I saw it.

After I got through counting the parts, I figured that by making replacements for the busted or missing parts myself, I had enough for at least twenty-four revolving pistols. There was also a set of drawings he’d sent along, of a proposed change that would make loading easier. Maybe that was why he’d sent me as much as he had; the old parts wouldn’t work with the new models.

I sorted things out and soon figured that the cylinders, along with the breech and arbor, were the most critical parts. I might be able to make them from stock if I had to, but it would be a lot of work and take considerable time. With all the new work that box represented, I understood right off that I would need good help. It came to me that instead of looking for journeyman gunsmiths, I might be better off with a pair of apprentices. So I looked around and found two young men who’d come down from San Antonio, needing work.

They were ragged and looked like they’d missed more than one meal, but they stood up straight and looked me in the eye when I talked to them. Good enough to start with, I figured. Turned out that they were cousins, orphaned during the cholera epidemic that had come to San Antonio before the Revolution. That was a bad year for the cholera, but at least things out here hadn’t been as bad as they’d been in Galveston. Folks there had also suffered from measles, yellow fever, and smallpox at one time or another.

The boys were glad to get the work, and now that Priscilla was out at the hacienda raising Little Ed, there was plenty of room to give Jeff Bell and Milt Harris their own rooms. I insisted that they work as hard as I did and be careful in the quality of what they made, but I remembered what it had been like for me at their age. I tried to treat them like my uncle Henry had treated me, and it wasn’t long before they were more like members of the family than apprentices.

That summer, and on through the winter, the news that came to us was a mix of good and bad.

The older Comanche peace-chiefs had kept things under control while Sam Houston was in charge, but even back then it didn’t do to feel like they were friendly. Being split into different bands the way they were, and with horse-stealing viewed as a test of manhood, there were bound to be misunderstandings.