Chapter 13

Malik and Cowboy found Gabriela seated on the small “steps” of the stone above her daughter’s grave. She was holding a small bouquet of tiny, homely wildflowers, picked from grasses and shrubs further down the slope. They left their horses by the trail and, leading Josephine, walked up the twenty yards to the grave.

Gabriela looked up at them as they approached. “This is a lovely site, Emil. I’m further in your debt.”

“It was for your daughter. There is no debt.”

She said, “Cowboy, do you think she would be ... undisturbed up here?”

“Most likely. This trail can go years without a man comin’ by. I have to think that Lestly chose it because a’ that rather than as a good way to get to where he was goin’.”

“Will your uncle mind?”

“This is not our range. Our range stops at the top of the ridge. Last I knew, this was still on the books as state-held range and farmstead. Nobody’s been interested because of the poor grazing and because most of the good springs are on the other side. There’s only Jackrabbit Spring a bit further south, and it sometimes dries up, of a summer.”

“What about animals? Can they dig into her ... grave?”

Malik said, “When we came here with Marshal Lonegan, we improved the grave. We placed stones, like these...” he indicated, with the toe of his boot, the inch-and-a-half thick, flat slabs that covered the burial site, “ ... on edge, all around Anna’s body. It’s almost a sarcophagus. She actually lies here, along the front of this rock you’re sitting on, her head toward that end. Beneath her is bedrock and these surface slabs extend out at least a couple feet beyond where she actually rests. We placed a bed of pine needles under her and left her wrapped in my ground sheet.”

Tears were streaming down Gabriela’s cheeks. She looked up at Malik. “Can you show me where you found her?”

“I only wish I had that man to kill again!” Gabriela and Malik were walking back from the shallow wash where Lestly had so ineffectively hidden Anna’s corpse.

“Gabriela, I don’t mean to be indelicate, but why did you permit Anna to travel with him?”

“I didn’t! I was at the Tsosie ranch, looking at horses. I’d been thinking of trying to breed the Appaloosa strain into my herd. I’d planned to be there two nights. While I was gone, Granger arrived at the ranch with a message, purportedly from me, that he was to fetch Anna to the Tsosie’s so that she could pick out a horse for herself.”

“How did he know you wouldn’t be at your ranch?”

She stopped walking, but turned, to look out over the valley.

“I told him! And I curse myself for it!”

She went on, “I thought I was being clever. He’d come by with some business deal, in the middle of May. He was planning to purchase an Angus breeding herd, said I should buy in with him. I told him about my Appaloosa plans. To put him off, I implied I already had a contract with the Tsosies, that I was going to their ranch for a few days, right after branding. He knew that Brandon always did the branding and castrating of the new calves on the last days of May. I still do.

“When I returned and discovered he’d taken Anna, I sent my foreman and another man to see if they could pick up the trail. They couldn’t. Meanwhile, I’d ridden out to Border Wells to the Sonora County sheriff’s branch office. There’s the telegraph there, too. But getting there was another nine hours. I took two horses and rode them hard, switching every hour. Had to put one down, afterwards.”

She shook her head. “It was a futile trip. Before I had the deputy even agreeing to send a wire, one came in from the Franklin County sheriff reporting Anna as missing and asking all nearby counties to watch for her and to be alert for renegade Indians. The Sonora County deputy wired his sheriff, Sheriff Ulney, in Dorado Springs, to ask what to do and they finally agreed to send a wire that said Granger should be questioned regarding Anna. Franklin County sent back that Granger had been the one to report the matter.

“The next morning, there was a general law offices advisory from the Franklin County sheriff that US Marshals were mounting a search.

“I didn’t know what to do. I wanted the sheriff in Franklin to confront Granger, but he’d already returned to Waypoint. I knew that trying to enlist the aid of Sheriff Banks was a fool’s errand, but I wired him, nonetheless. He wired back that the culprits were renegade Indians and that efforts to divert him from confronting that peril was obstruction of justice. Reading that for the threat it was, I knew if I went to Waypoint to see Granger, I’d end up in jail. Even without that threat, I knew Granger would never admit to anything.

“I stayed in Border Wells until a wire arrived from Marshal Lonegan, confirming Anna’s death and burial, and that a detailed report would follow.” She was crying. Malik pulled a clean cotton handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. She looked at the kerchief and smiled wistfully.

“Did you bring the whole stack?”

“Only three.”

After they rejoined Cowboy, Gabriela made a last stop at Anna’s grave, then said she wanted to see Jackrabbit Spring. As Malik suspected, it turned out to be the spring where he’d first stopped when he’d fled from the posse. They decided to camp there.

They made a fire and had a stew from the beef jerky, potatoes, onions, and carrots Cowboy’s stepmother had packed for them. After the cooking gear was cleaned and put away, they stretched out on their bedrolls and watched the last embers of the fire, as the night sky became gray with stars.

Cowboy started telling stories about Malik when they were both still boys.

“Shadow’s plan was to surprise the stallion and turn him into the box canyon, along with his herd. He’d brought one of his ma’s white pillow cases for that job. When that stallion came boilin’ up the draw, Shadow jumped out, yelling and waving that pillow case, while I stood ready to close the gate on the herd. I still see it now, that small figure, in the middle of that draw, jumpin’ ‘round, yellin’ like a haunt, wavin’ that white pillow case all ‘bout. It was somethin’. Took more nerve than I had.”

“How many horses did you get?” Gabriela wanted to know.

Cowboy gave her a quizzical look. “Huh? Well, none. That stallion butted Shadow tail over teakettle. He must a’ rolled twenty yards. And the stallion had grabbed the pillow case with his teeth an’ ran off with it. Missus Malik tanned Shadow’s butt when he got home.”

Gabriela laughed. “So why ‘Shadow?’ Why not “Horse Haunter?”

“Well, if my pa or my uncle’d been there, might very well a’ been.

“But they gave him his name when we went huntin’ elk one fall. Emil was ten, that year. We hadn’t seen any elk yet, but there were some antelope down in a little valley, ‘bout a mile off. Pa was partial to antelope and was talkin’ ‘bout shootin’ one. Shadow said he’d catch him one by himself, no shootin’, said he’d done it down on their ranch. Pa and Uncle Sargent both laughed, then Pa said Emil should go ahead. He ran off into the trees and we didn’t see anything of him until near an hour later, when he sprang up out a’ the grass, jumped on a young buck, an’ slit its throat.”

“For truth?”

“Yeah, that was me,” Malik interjected. “When I was a younker, I would sneak up on Andy and scare the daylights out of him. Ma finally had enough of it and she got Pa after me. Pa said that, if I’d sprinkle some salt on the tail of an antelope, he couldn’t run away, so I should sneak up on one a’ those.”

“Well, I worked at it an’ worked at it for a couple years, an’ finally, one day, I got close enough to one to throw a handful of salt on its tail. Of course, it ran off.

“I reported this to Pa. He asked what kind of salt I was using, so I showed him a handful of kitchen salt, from Ma’s salt box. Pa looked at it and said, “That’ll never work. You need rock salt, from the Rocky Mountains.”

Gabriela chuckled. “Your pa...”

As they were breaking camp the next morning, Malik said, “Gabriela, do you have a need to return to Waypoint?”

She paused to think. “I left some town clothes there, and shoes, a few fineries, some papers.”

“At Missus Kuiper’s?”

“Yes. She promised to hold my room. Why do you ask?”

“Because, right here, we’re about midway between Waypoint and your ranch. I could accompany you to your ranch, then head out to catch the train at Dorado Springs. I need to get Petal from Cowboy’s place, anyhow, which would place us even closer to your ranch. Christina is familiar with shipping by rail. She could send your things to Dorado Springs or we could just store them for a more convenient occasion.”

“Let me think about it.”

“Of course.”

Cowboy led them on a west-by-southwest course over Green Ridge and back down into the Flat Grass Valley. They arrived at the Tsosie ranch mid-afternoon, to the usual greeting by the younger children.

Traditionally, the Navajo culture is matrilineal: clan identity, status, and personal property is passed down mother to daughter. When a man marries, he becomes a member of his bride’s family, or clan. However, Cowboy’s family was not traditional.

His father, Toh-ni-lih, or Moves-like-water, and his uncle, Tsétah tl?ízí, Mountain Goat, had been army scouts with Kit Carson’s campaign against the Apache. But then Carson turned against the Navajo and forced much of the tribe into the notorious Long Walk. When both their wives and their younger children died in the death camp that Bosque Redondo had become, the brothers escaped to the Indian Territory, taking along their only surviving children, Cowboy and his older cousin, Zahalánii, Mockingbird. In the Territory, they met and married two runaway slaves, sisters who had fled from east Texas at the beginning of the Civil War. By that time, Cowboy’s father was using the name Scout, and his uncle was called Sargent, names that stuck from how they’d been addressed in the army. The newly restructured families moved west, where the men eventually found work with Valerian Malik.

Valerian Lukasz Malik was a Pole who was born in 1824, in the Russian-occupied part of Poland. Valerian’s father, Karol Anders Malik, a widower, was a well-to-do merchant, trading in cereal grains and other agricultural products. He held major military contracts with the Russians, Prussians, and Austrians. He sent Valerian, his only child, to a Prussian military academy. After the young man completed his studies, he was commissioned a lieutenant in the Imperial Prussian Army.

In eighteen forty-six, Valerian, already promoted to captain, was sent to America as an observer during the Mexican-American War. He developed a deep admiration for America’s polymorphous society and he exulted in the mountains and plains of the semi-arid Southwest. Deeply grieved when word of his father’s death reached him at Monterrey, he realized he had little reason to return to Poland, and even fewer reasons to return to Prussia. Rather than go back to the formalities and strictures of the Prussian army and the politically-charged imperial court, he determined to remain in America. Having dispatched his reports and assessments to his superiors, he resigned his commission.

Turning west, he set out into the lands ceded to the United States by Mexico in the treaty that had ended the war. He was joined by three disaffected enlisted men, all sergeants. One was another Pole, his aide de camp, Casimir Kolkowski. The others were two Irish immigrants, Brian Kelly and Denis Byrnes.

On the journey west, Valerian met and married a young Mexican woman, Manuela de Ortega, who captured his heart with her flashing eyes and ready smile. She was the only daughter of a pre-war Mexican don, Jose Luis Alfonso de Ortega, who claimed to be of undiluted Spanish stock. Malik’s group of adventurers had stopped at Don de Ortega’s hacienda on the Rio Grande in the New Mexico Territory and worked for him for three years, gaining experience in the ways of ranching and farming in the territory.

De Ortega was impressed with the young man, both in his work ethic and in the respect shown him by his companions.

By the time Valerian decided to strike out on his own, two of Ortega’s Texas-born vaqueros, Esteban Valdez and Jorje Garcia, had attached themselves to his group.

Following a suggestion of his new father-in-law, the expedition headed northwest, into Arenoso Territory, driving a small herd of cattle, an old Mexican breed known as Raramuri Criollo, a gift from Don Jose.

When Valerian saw the land at the junction of the Rio Isabella and the early summer flow in Shepherds Creek, he realized the rich volcanic soil and dependable water represented an opportunity for a combined farming and livestock enterprise, despite the aridity of the climate. He approached the Sonora clan who hunted the area, offering to buy the land.

The Sonora Indians were a close-knit, but relatively large clan of Ibo-Mateca ancestry and were the easternmost—and last surviving—clan of the once-numerous Ibo-Matecan-speaking peoples of what had been northern Mexico. Unlike their nomadic Apache and Navajo neighbors, the Sonora were given more to agriculture, growing maize, beans, and squash, on irrigated plots, and also raising small flocks of sheep and goats for wool, milk, meat, and fertilizer. Even so, the idea of land ownership was inexplicable to the Sonora. Moreover, they’d already been driven from much of their range by treaties they’d been forced to sign. They would cede no more land to the whites voluntarily.

Valerian had read of a new approach being tried up in Nebraska Territory, with native peoples of the Black Hills region. He explained to Broken Nose, the chief of the Sonora clan, that he only wanted to use the land, to raise food and livestock there, not to take it away from the clan. Rather than buy the land from the Sonora, he set up a perpetual lease, in exchange for a two-and-a-half percent share of the net income and twenty head of cattle every winter. The Sonora could still hunt on the land, set up their camps on the land, and they would be welcome to irrigate their crops from the water he planned to impound.

In fact, the Sonora would have been happy with just the twenty cattle in payment; it was only at Valerian’s insistence that the profit share was included.

One of the benefits of the lease arrangement was that it bypassed the need for a large cash outlay to purchase land, so Valerian was able to apply his limited funds to operations and infrastructure. He capitalized the original venture with a sum inherited from his father—who had died while Valerian was in Mexico with the US Army—and a modest dowry that he had accepted from Don de Ortega upon his marriage to Manuela.

Valerian made the five men who came with him minority shareholders in the ranch, giving each a five percent share. Over the years, he added to his lease holding, until he held under lease more than a hundred square miles> The leasehold included grassland, timber, and cultivated bottomland and upland pasturage, the latter irrigated from the Rio Isabella and two reservoirs, Summer Lake and Lake Manuela.

Being in business with the Sonora vastly reduced the potential for problems with hostile natives. Twice, though, he and the other Pole, Casimir Kolkowski, rode with Sonora war parties on retaliatory actions against raiding Apache renegades. Kolkowski was killed on the second foray, captured, and tortured to death by the Apache outlaws. Not that the Sonora raiding party treated their captives any better.

Over the years, the ranch prospered.

After he hired the Tsosies, Valerian recognized the ambition in the two brothers.

Valerian had wanted to expand into sheep, so he put the brothers in charge of the project. They, in turn, hired several older Sonora boys as shepherds, who would take the sheep into summer grazing in the mountains and bring them back to the ranch for the winter. In turn, the Tsosies ferried supplies to the shepherds’ mountain camps. By offering the Sonora shepherds shares in the profits rather than monthly wages, they surpassed expectations in wool production by the second year and meat production by the third.

Later, when the Tsosies determined to go out on their own, Valerian offered to buy in for a minority share of the profits, but limited to only ten years, beginning with the third year of their operations. The arrangement provided the brothers with the needed start-up cash but kept Valerian’s share from being a long-term consideration. As it was, the Tsosies were able to buy out his share in its seventh year. They, too, leased their land from the Sonora.

While the Tsosies were working for Valerian, their children attended the one-room school house he had established for all the ranch children. Manuela was the teacher of academic subjects—the traditional ‘three Rs’—but the children also surveyed other topics, including the rudiments of farming and stock raising, gun safety and hunting, skinning and tanning, sewing and cooking. All the children, of both genders, were expected to have a basic knowledge in each of these topics. At the ranch in the Flat Grass Valley, after they left the Malik ranch, Mockingbird Tsosie took over the duties of teaching the younger Tsosie children the “Three Rs” and the domestic skills, while Cowboy covered those involving agriculture, animal husbandry, and the outdoors.

The years at the Malik ranch were the foundation for the friendship between Emil and Cowboy.

Cowboy’s Aunt Rebekah had died of childbirth fever in 1874. His father, Scout, died of cancer less than a year later. Now his Abízhí Sargent, or Uncle Sargent, and his step-mother, Tilly, lived as man and wife. Tilly ruled the roost, Sargent ruled everything that supported it. Cowboy, now thirty, was the second-oldest of all the children, which included two brothers, two sisters, two male cousins, and three female cousins, and, with the next generation now joining in, ranging in age down to a one-year old, the child of Mockingbird and her husband, Stands-To-Cougar, one of the former Sonora shepherd boys.

As the older children led their horses to the corral, Malik walked toward the sound of the clanging anvil. Cowboy joined him, while Gabriela went into the house.

Approaching an open shed some distance from the other buildings, Emil could see Sargent Tsosie hammering away at a piece of glowing iron he appeared to be curving into a cylinder. They waited several feet away, until he had placed the piece back in the fire, before Cowboy called out, “Ya’at’eeh, Abízhí. It is good to return home.”

Sargent, short and broad-shouldered, looked up and saw the men. He broke out in a huge smile, then turned and pulled the iron piece from the fire with his tongs and set it on the anvil. Still smiling broadly, he shed his long leather apron and walked quickly over to Cowboy and Malik, embracing each in turn. “You are back safe. And Missus Lestly?”