The day Scott was due to arrive in Morro Coyo I waited in the Great Room. Doc Jenkins was still fussing about me not spending too long driving at any one time, so Teresa had taken the buckboard into town to meet the stage.
His thousand dollars was ready in an envelope in my desk, along with Johnny's. Pinkerton's had given no exact time for when Johnny would arrive but I'd made sure I had his payment and the partnership agreement ready for whenever he turned up. Meantime, as I waited for Scott, I planned how I should welcome my elder son. A friendly greeting, offer him a drink, I supposed I had better ask after his grandfather. Then hand over the envelope and start giving him the background on Pardee. From there, spell out the offer of one-third of the ranch in return for helping to fight off the land pirates and see how he reacted. I wondered if he would even stay out the stipulated hour.
When I heard the shouts of the ranch hands I went to the window. The buckboard was approaching; seated beside Teresa was a young man, fair, tall and elegantly and expensively dressed – Scott. Then as the buckboard rounded the curve to pull up outside the house, I saw there was someone riding in the back. Another young man, dark-haired, in Mexican-style clothes – Johnny.
I turned away from the window. This couldn't be happening! Both of them at the same time. I would have to make the offer to both of them, together, and Johnny would know that Scott had refused. I frantically tried to think what to do, but there was no time. Even as my mind raced, there was a knock on the door.
"It's open," I called. The double doors were pushed apart and Scott came into the room, Johnny close behind. I gazed at the two of them for a moment; they looked back, neither moving, neither speaking. It was up to me to break the silence. I said the only thing that came to mind:
"Drink?"
"No, thank you." Scott's reply was freezingly courteous.
I turned to Johnny.
"You drink, don't you?"
"When I know the man I'm drinkin' with, yeah." His tone took me back some twenty years.
"You've got your mother's temper!" I looked at Scott, seeing what took me back even further. "You've got your mother's eyes." I allowed myself a moment of gazing at my son's face, then said, "Well, I want a drink." I was stalling for time, and besides I really did feel like I needed one. I started for the tray but stopped as Johnny growled,
"You got somethin' to say, old man, say it."
I went to my desk, pulled the two envelopes out of a folder and threw them onto the desktop.
"A thousand dollars apiece." Johnny snatched one of the envelopes. "Maybe you'd better count it," I said, half ironically.
"I plan to." There was no irony in Johnny's voice. I looked over to where Scott was still standing.
"Come and get your money." Why hadn't he reached for it as fast as Johnny? After all, that's what he came for; it was the money that had brought him here. Then Scott gave me the first surprise.
"I'll settle for this drink," he said.
"You'll do as you're told!" Even as I said the words, I realized how absurd the order was.
"Will I?" Scott's words were as sharp as my own. And I knew he had the right of it. He was a grown man, independent; he would act as he chose. I decided to back down a little, and to make the reason for payment clear.
"I want no favors from either one of you."
Scott accepted the compromise – maybe regretting his own harshness? – and picked up the envelope.
"Far be it from me to spoil a family reunion. Thanks." He put the envelope in his coat pocket without opening it. "What do I call you?" he went on. "Under the circumstances 'father' hardly seems..."
So he didn't want to call me father?
"Call me anything you like. We're strangers to each other. Maybe that's my fault and maybe it isn't." I was thinking no, it wasn't my fault but Scott apparently thought otherwise.
"No apology necessary," he said. An implication that I owed one.
"You'll get no apology from me! If the air needs clearing, then let's clear it." I stood up and came around the desk to face Scott.
"Your mother's family thought she was daft to marry me, not a year off the boat from Inverness – and maybe they were right. You were born; she died; I left you in their hands. Period." I turned to Johnny. "A couple of years later I met your mother down in Matamoros. She . . . We got married. Two years after that, I woke one morning, found her gone, you along with her."
"That ain't the way I heard it!" There was anger in Johnny's voice and I wondered briefly what he had heard, but this was not the moment to go into it.
"I don't care what you heard. It's past. Bad or good, right or wrong, it's past and gone. We're talking about now, what's happening out there, to this ranch."
Scott came over and sat on the edge of the desk.
"The girl Teresa said you were having some trouble."
It was time to get down to business.
"Last fall, somebody made off with one of our horses. My segundo and I trailed him to a place called Morro Coyo. We walked right into it. O'Brien was killed and I ended up with this leg that's gone sour on me. Since then, my fences have been cut, beef stolen, workers frightened off, burned out. Three months ago I had a hundred and fifty vaqueros, now I've got eighteen."
Johnny looked down for a moment, then back at me.
"Well then, that's the, uh, ranch you're worried about, huh?" There was an odd tone to his voice, almost like – disappointment? Bitterness? Of course, he couldn't know, could have no idea of what the Lancer ranch meant to me.
I turned towards the window and looked out over the land.
"I love this ground more than anything God ever created. I've got a grey hair for every good blade of grass that you see out there." I turned back to the young men. "They're trying to drive me off this place."
"Who?" from Johnny
"You'll hear them called land pirates. That's close enough."
"You mean to tell me that men can just come along and drive you off your land?" Scott queried incredulously.
"They're doing it. Since I was hit, they've taken three other estancias."
"What about the law?"
"There isn't any. They killed two good men, Joe Carbajal from Modesto, Petersen from San Jose. The others quit, found business elsewhere. The only law we got here is pack law, the big dog gets the meat. By summer, they'll own half of this state."
"Has 'big dog' got a name?" asked Johnny.
"Pardee."
"Day, Day Pardee."
"You know him?"
"Oh yes, I know 'im. He's a gunfighter, and he's pretty good. Yeah, I'd say you have some kinda trouble." Johnny didn't look troubled; in fact, he was almost smirking.
"Just how many men does he have, this Pardee?" Scott asked.
"Twenty or twenty-five." The answer obviously astonished him.
"That doesn't exactly put him in a class with Attila the Hun!" Well, he could have no idea how gunfighters like Pardee operated but I was curious to know what suggestions, if any, he might offer, so I said,
"You've got the floor."
"Well, it seems to me you have a very simple military problem here," he said, crossing the room to the map on the wall. Military – of course, Scott had been in the army in the war. How had I forgotten? He gestured over the map with his hand. "One, find the enemy; two, engage him; three, destroy him."
A wry laugh from Johnny.
"Something funny?" asked Scott.
"He's saying it's not that kind of a fight," I responded, "but," facing Johnny, "you could be wrong. I've got eighteen good men; only the best stayed. You two make twenty."
"Now wait a minute, this is listenin' money," Johnny objected. "Now all of a sudden, you're talkin' 'bout gun money. Let me tell you something, that's extra, that don't come on no lunch."
"I want more than your guns," I told him.
"What more?"
"I want your arms and your legs and your guts, if you've got any." I looked briefly at Scott, then back to Johnny. It was, after all, Johnny Madrid's arms and legs and guts – yes, and gun – that I needed.
"All right, say I come up with all these arms and legs and guts you're talkin' about. What do you come up with?"
"One third."
"Of what?"
"Everything you see out there. One hundred thousand acres, twenty thousand head of beef, the finest compañera de palominos in the San Joaquin."
Johnny moved to the window and gazed out for a moment, then turned back.
"One third, huh? You wouldn't mind puttin' that down on a piece of paper would you? No offence."
I pulled out the partnership document.
"This do? An agreement of partnership. Equal shares to each of us but I call the tune. Agreed?" I looked from one to the other. This was the moment. What would Johnny do, what sort of bargain would he try to drive when he found there was more than one-third to be had?
But again a surprise from Scott. He nodded. No fuss, no hesitation, just a straight out acceptance. In one moment my plan was back on course. It was one-third that Johnny Madrid was being offered, and no more.
Johnny wasn't so quick.
"You didn't sign it."
"Nothing for nothing. You'll get your share of this ranch when you prove to me you're man enough to hold it."
"When's that?" Johnny snapped.
"When you get the man that put the bullet in my back!"
"Pardee."
"That's the one."
"Well lemme tell you, old man, you want a lot." Was he going to bargain for more? Well, I wasn't going to go any further.
"Take it or leave it."
The clanging of a bell from outside the hacienda interrupted us.
"Fire bell!"
Fire. Neither of the young men questioned whether or not to go. Fighting fire is an instinct that goes pretty deep. They dropped their jackets in the hallway as we ran; I followed them as fast as my injured leg allowed me to. A field about half a mile from the house was burning. Every hand on the place, including Teresa, was there, throwing water and beating at the flames but it was no good. The fire had taken too strong a hold. At last I gave the order to quit.
"Let it go! It's already got too much of a head start on us. Let it burn up to the ridge."
"Isn't there something we can do?" asked Teresa.
"No, the field's gone, honey. It'll burn itself out by nightfall." I turned to the two young men.
"Take a good look at it. This is the third field that Pardee has destroyed. I told you, you would have to fight to hold onto this place. What do you say?" I looked at Scott first, wondering whether this demonstration of what we were up against would make him change his mind. But he said simply,
"I've already given you my answer."
I turned to Johnny.
"What about you, boy?" He across the blackened field for a moment then said,
"Hate to see my property go up in flames."
"Our property," Scott put in. I felt myself smiling, for the first time in a long while. My sons were standing beside me on Lancer.