Chapter 7

I sat on the porch talking with Liz for another few minutes, then excused myself and took Melosa back to the stable. On the way, we rode up on a couple of women walking down the street. I smiled to myself, stopped Melosa and doffed my hat with a bow. Melosa caught the movement of my hat and did the curtsy thing again. She stayed in place until I swung my hat back onto my head. The women smiled at me and cooed over Melosa. Oh yeah, there would definitely be a prize in my little chick magnet’s feedbag tonight!

I was in my room at the hotel by nine that night. I grabbed volume five of my law books (Jurisprudence in the Great State of Texas) and sauntered down to the hotel’s lobby to read. I wasn’t doing a little light reading; I was researching the laws regarding property rights, and the transferring of them to another party. I was researching what I needed to do to make Pen’s ownership of some land he’d won in a card game stand up in court.

By eleven, my eyes were blurry from the small print and my mind was mush from mentally translating flowery nineteenth century legalese into plain English. I trundled up to my room, stripped down to my skin and crawled into bed. It took a while for sleep to catch up with me, as my mind whirled around the convolutions of my new life.

The thing that I thought about the most was, ’why I was here in this time?’

Was I here for a purpose, or had some cosmically random event just hurled me backwards? The more I thought about it, the more confused I became. There were too many odd points about where I ended up, and what had happened to me since I’d been here, to make an argument for this all being a coincidence. I mean, even if I had known I was coming back to this time, I couldn’t have prepared myself much better than I already was. I had a skill set that gave me a better chance of surviving here than most people, and I was attuned to both the Mexican and Anglo culture. Yet, even those skills came to me by and large by accident.

Becoming involved with the Lopezes was another of those events that was beyond being a coincidence. What reason was there for me to become involved in the lives of my distant ancestors? I lay there half-assed hoping for some omnipotent entity to fill me in on what I was supposed to do. When I finally fell asleep, I actually had more questions than I had when I lay down.

Monday, April 16, 1877, dawned cloudy and overcast, as the Senora winds brought in a rare spring rainstorm. I peeked out the window and stared at the sheets of falling water. The street in front of the hotel was already a quagmire of mud. I cleaned up in the basin and headed down to the restaurant. As I bounced down the stairs, I pulled my pocket watch out of my vest and thumbed it open. It was seven-thirty in the morning, the earliest I’d been up and about since I arrived in town. I carefully wound the watch and tucked it back into my vest, as I eased into the dining room.

The place was about three-quarters full, but I managed to find a table against the wall and sat down. The gloomy weather and all the heavy lifting my brain had been doing last night had me in a melancholy mood. I was full of thoughts about the realness of my situation this morning. I mean, was I really back in 1877, or just dreaming it while passed out on an airplane hurtling towards the ground? Juanita’s arrival with a steaming cup of strong coffee broke my mood.

“Good morning Tyler, how did you sleep?” she asked sweetly.

I looked up at her and smiled. She looked entirely too gorgeous for this early in the morning.

“I didn’t sleep well at all, Nita,” I mock complained. “All night, for some reason, I dreamed of sweet-lipped señoritas forcing me to kiss them.”

She laughed quietly and leaned her hip against my arm as she sat my coffee cup on the table. She bumped me gently to get me to look into her eyes.

“I think you will perhaps have that dream again this afternoon, Señor,” she said, her voice soft and husky.

She spun lightly on her heels and swayed away from me before I could think of a rejoinder. Her eyes and voice made me hard enough to drive a railroad spike.

While I leisurely ate my breakfast, the rain stopped and the sky cleared. By the time I exited the hotel, only a few puddles and some mud remained from the shower. I picked my way across the street and down the block to Clem’s. El Paso didn’t have a newspaper back then, but with Clem in business, they didn’t need one. I was in the chair, my face covered with lather and a hot towel as Clem talked.

“So I hear you have a new job working for English Penny,” he said.

I gave a nod as he pulled off the towel with a flourish.

“That’s good,” he commented. “We need folks like you to move here. We get enough troublemakers from Ft. Bliss, the cattle trail and the railroad.”

Then he segued into the happenings of the weekend. There were two shootings Saturday night, both gunfights at a saloon. One of the shootings involved George Howard and a soldier from Bliss. The soldier wasn’t killed, but he’d be a while healing up.

“Of course, Little Georgie Boy was exonerated, his daddy saw to that,” Clem said with a sneer in his voice. “One day that boy is going to pick the wrong person to mess with, it’s only a matter of time.”

I took the opportunity to ask Clem about the situation with the salt flats. I claimed that I heard something about the dispute at church the day before. Of course, Clem knew all the details.

The squabbling was over almost chemically pure salt deposits located in the Guadalupe Mountains, one hundred and ten miles east of El Paso. The vast salt flats supplied salt to West Texas, New Mexico and north-central Mexico. Settlers in the region depended on the salt for their livestock and personal use, while Mexican farmers harvested the salt for income when crops were bad.

About ten years ago, a group of prominent El Paso men, both Anglo and Mexican called the Salt Ring, tried to gain control of the salt flats so they could sell the salt. Their attempt was thwarted in court, and the groups split apart with lots of bad blood that led to a couple of them being killed.

Enter Charles Howard, a master manipulator from Missouri, who was motivated by greed and a yen for political power. Howard teamed up with one of the former members of the Salt Ring, a prominent Mexican named Louis Cardis, who controlled the Mexican-American vote in El Paso County. By 1872, Howard was the District Attorney, by ‘74, he was District Judge, and Cardis was elected to the State House of Representatives. Jealous of each other’s political power, Howard and Cardis became bitter enemies in 1875. After splitting with Cardis, Howard pursued ownership of the salt flats on his own.

Howard was currently lining up political support for the take over, hoping that he could get state law authorities to enforce his claim to the salt. As a stand by, his son George had gathered a rough bunch of cowhands that were prepared to do the job. The involvement of the railroad man was further inflaming the situation, as he bought up lands between El Paso and the flats. Once the lands were purchased, the railroad man hired George Howard and his thugs to prevent trespassing on it.

My thoughts were gloomy again when I finished talking with Clem and headed back to the hotel. The more I learned about the Howards, the less inclined I felt to expend the effort to keep them alive.

Once I arrived in my room, I took out my new satchel and packed my clothes. I took the satchel, my books and my Winchester down to the lobby and checked out of the hotel. It might have been my imagination, but I think the deskman was sad to see me go. He thanked me profusely for staying with them and asked me to recommend them to my friends.

I lugged my possessions over to Molly’s place and dropped them inside the door. Molly came up and welcomed me. She looked very good that day, even the long plain dress she wore couldn’t hide that she was a well put together woman. She was smaller in the breast department than Liz or Juanita, but her backside didn’t need a bustle to stick out invitingly. There were the beginnings of some chemistry between my landlady and I. She didn’t overtly flirt with me, but she was much nicer to me than I rated as a mere tenant. I, on the other hand, made it obvious I thought she was a babe.

I was sitting in the winged back chair in the apartment’s little sitting room, thinking about how women in this era compared to those in my own, when Juanita knocked on my door. I opened the door and ushered her in. Juanita was wearing the uniform she wore at work, a simple, loose, white cotton blouse buttoned to the throat, tucked into a long black skirt with a high waistline. She wasn’t all dressed up, but she didn’t need to be. With Juanita, the woman made the clothes. She would have looked good in anything.

She walked around the small apartment and complimented me on it. Then she walked into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. She put her hands flat on the bed behind her and leaned back on them. A hank of her long shiny hair hung across one eye as she looked at me intently through lowered lashes. I almost tripped over my tongue walking towards her.