Chapter 2 The Verde
A half-hour later, following the gently swerving Verde River, the party of five men and their recaptured 'spy' entered the wide, grassy space of Travers' yard. Beyond the big, two-story house, with its wraparound porch and rail, were his barn, sheds and corrals. It looked like it took it a lot of work—and sweat—to build up such a place as this, Maverick thought. But how much of it had been built on stolen horses?
"Take him into the barn," Travers said, indicating a huge building of strong planks to the side of the house. "Use the leg irons. We'll find out later who he is, after supper."
Two or three men yanked him from the horse and pushed him, fighting the whole way, toward the barn's double doors. Swinging one of the doors back, they shoved him inside the mote-filled space. His vision swam for a minute as he focused on the rich dark of the great, manmade cavern.
Before he could see, he was thrust down into some straw in a stall and fitted with an iron ring around his ankle, the other ring bolted well into the heavy planking of the stall. His horse and saddle shared the same space with him.
After they were gone, he sat back in the shadows and wondered how he had come by such luck. In the feeble light that shot through the chinks in the barn walls, he called to his horse and Ollie nickered. How he wished he could just get on Ollie and be on his way again before Bart began to worry he'd never show up in Flagstaff and come looking for him.
That evening, he had a surprise that really caught him off-guard. Slightly drowsing, he looked up as one of the big barn doors was pulled open. It was not Travers or one of his men, but a very expectant lady. She had a tin bucket with a lid, a stoppered jug and a tin cup in her hands. How she made it across the straw-strewn floor with all of that was a mystery.
She approached Maverick warily, sliding slightly away from him as he reached for the things she had brought him. Then she reconsidered and let him have them.
"You must eat," she said, and her voice was as quiet as a cat's whisker moving in a breeze.
"Thank you," he said, settling the stuff in his lap. "Who—who are you?"
She was pretty, far too pretty to be burdened by baby, shawl, dress, the dark night, and far too pretty to be serving a prisoner chained to a barn stall.
"I'm Mrs. Travers. My name's Bessie."
Could this be the rustlers' way, a soft way, of getting information out of him, information he'd already given them?
"Why are you out here, helpin' me? Did Travers send you? He's taking a big risk."
"Dale, no. He didn't want anyone coming out to the barn tonight. Meaning, I guess, he didn't care whether you ate or not. But I care."
"Why?" Maverick pulled the lid off the tin bucket. With a spoon she handed him, he tucked into the stew. "Awfully good. I was hungry."
"I know what my husband has done to you," she explained. "I figure, you're just like any other man riding through. You had no evil intentions towards us."
"You're right about that, ma'am. If I had my leg out of this iron, my horse and saddle, I'd be on my way for good, no need to worry."
"But I do worry." Bessie slipped down with a small moan into the straw at Maverick's feet. "Are you a spy for the army?"
He laughed, but all through their talk continued to eat. "No, I'm not a lawman, either. Just a gambler."
"Then I will tell you. You're in some danger here. Dale's about to drive some cattle—not his cattle—into Mexico again. I know who he sees there, and what he does. I don't like his rustling—or that… other thing… very much."
"You can't leave 'im?" From Bessie's few, but pointed words, Maverick realized that Dale Travers had a paramour in Mexico, one in all likelihood not heavy with child.
"Where would I go, where would I want to go?"
He smiled wryly, and shook his head. Bart, over the card table, had often bragged he could understand them, the fairer sex, but Bret never maintained that he himself could.
Chewing thoughtfully, he asked, "Do you know what he intends for me?"
"I don't think he'll kill you—he didn't kill those others." She stopped abruptly, a hand rising to touch her lips, as if she'd said too much. She grabbed the stoppered jug in order to be busy and poured him out a cup of hot, black coffee. Looking up again, she said in apology, "I hope you like it without cream. I ran out of it with Dale's coffee."
"If it's like the stew, it'll be good anyway."
"I do my own cooking, though just for Dale and me. We have Carla, who helps out. The men cook for themselves, but she makes them doughnuts and other treats sometimes. My husband eats with me, not the boys." She said that with some pride in her eyes.
"Food this tasty, ma'am, it's hard to see why he'd want to take a bunch of beef to Mexico."
Bessie caught the significance of what Maverick had just said. With such a pretty, accomplished wife at home, why would he run to Mexico for some other's affections?
"I must be going." She rose this time quite easily for one in her 'predicament' and before she was gone, he noticed that she was barefoot.
"Do you always run around the ranch barefoot?" he asked, merrily nodding down at her feet. "Especially at night?"
She laughed a little, warmly. "Oh, it was quieter. Hide the bucket and things in the straw. Now I must get back."
With that, she trotted swiftly to the door and was gone. The big door remained open, too heavy for her to push it to, though she had pulled it open easily enough.
He enjoyed the coffee, as well as some biscuits she'd pressed in his hand. At the last moment, she had liberated them from an apron pocket. After he had eaten everything, and drank the jug of coffee dry, he buried the tin bucket, the earthen jug and the cup, all of it evidence of her charity, in the straw at the back of the horse stall.
Cattleman and rustler, born for command and a saddle, thirty-two, thirty-three, he pursued both an honest living, and a dishonest one. Canyons, caves and creeks made up the setting where he operated. In these oak hills he could elude a whole army, and one day might have to, for horses and cattle wearing doctored brands could get a man hanged in these parts.
He had married Elizabeth Dwyer. Though the crude stage had never known her beauty, Bessie was an accomplished singer and pianist. Young ranchers who attended her pa's soirees, teased by her comeliness, could talk of nothing else in addition to her devil-dark eyes and rosy lips but the tunes she put to music and sang so sweetly.
Most of those who asked for her hand in marriage she turned down. She fought them off until Travers himself had come from outside her circle, from the great Pacific Ocean in the west, where the skies, he told her, held a strange mist and men struggled in watery canyons to find gold.
At first Bessie had taken no notice of him, though her pa had. He had had some doubts about Travers' character and his motives. While not exactly rich, Bessie's pa was well off. He wanted her to marry the rancher's son next door, or the itinerant preacher who came by every other Sunday to speak the Gospel. Travers won her.
With a book of romantic verses, some discreet hand-holding, and a few walks in the moonlight, he trapped her, a fairytale princess with scant knowledge of men and the world. Though she felt shame now, being married to a rustler, she favored him over all the others then, and she still loved him. She eagerly awaited their child, joyfully longing for it after eight years of a childless marriage.
Even so, in her secretive way Bessie wondered if she'd lie for him if she ever had to, or cover up his activities. Or would she say tell what she knew, even if she lost him in the end?
The next day, she watched him head for the barn where the strange still lay chained up. A feeling of angst passed through her that she had lost him, Dale Travers, father of her baby, already. He was not the same man he seemed to be when he courted her all those years ago.
Inside the barn, Travers squatted down next to Bret and asked, "Have you ever done any horse-breakin', Maverick?"
The captive gambler nodded, glumly, not liking where this was going to. He'd rather stay chained to a wall than ride a wild bronc.
"You can ride, can't you? I mean more than Ollie. He doesn't seem like much of a challenge to a good rider."
"Ride? About as well as I can shoot, Travers."
Travers chuckled at that. Two of his cowboys who stood sentinel in the light of the thrown-back door never twitched a hair. One kept his thumbs hooked in his belt, near twin holsters. The other was too far away to see clearly, standing a bit behind the first. They could have been twins of each other, and neither one a beauty contest winner.
It was a staggered force, the leader and his two men, like dominoes.
Travers was acting pretty well, but then the rancher's eye drifted to the straw at the back of the stall. He got up and moved back there, shoving Maverick's horse aside. Clearing the straw away, he hoisted the empty stew bucket and earthen jug. He didn't find the tin cup, but he didn't need to.
"I see Bessie's found another yearling to take care of," he said, a play on Maverick's name. Bret didn't so much as nod, but sat motionless with his back to the slats of the stall. "Only she'd worry about a stranger's dinner. Even at a time like this!"
He stomped out of the stall and left the cowboys to unchain Maverick. Unsteady on his feet after so much sitting, he swayed to and fro for a second, then got his bearings.
"Get your horse saddled," said one of the men, Abel Turner. The other, Jesse Byrne, frowned at him, that was all. Maverick nodded and turned to obey, throwing on a blanket, then lifting down his saddle from the stall and hoisting it onto Ollie's back.
"Breakfast," Travers said from the doorway, his voice pre-occupied sounding. Was he thinking jealous thoughts? Then he brightened up. "I want to show you something," he said to his 'guest.' "Come along."
For two or three miles they rode, pretty much in silence, until they came to a large prairie where bunches of cattle stood munching the three-foot high grass, sideoats mostly, as tall as a horse's belly. Over against the creek, there were dozens more, and still more across it to the west.
"Stolen stuff, too?" Maverick asked. "Like the horses?"
Travers shot him a rather grim look. "No, most of them are mine. We run the 'other' cattle to Mexico, but these go up the trail to the Kansas Pacific railroad at Ellsworth. They'll be meat for the tables of Chicago in a couple of weeks."
Maverick leaned over the saddle horn to see further up the draws angling off the creek. He straightened. "With a baby on the way, Travers, you'd risk bringing the army down on you, and all for what?"
Travers thought about it for a long moment. "Gold, that's part of it. But there's something else, too. Have you ever wanted to go somewhere, Bret, and found yourself tied down? I go on a raid to get—get out."
Maverick shook his head. "Is that what you want?" he asked. "To wander about, tempting the powers that be to destroy you?"
"I have an upcoming drive to Mexico, and that's where I feel the freest. Round-up's goin' on now," added the cattleman-thief. He pointed to a spring under some willow trees. "Let's go water our horses."
While they were making their way to the spring, a dusty man on a dusty mount rode up to Travers and mentioned some things to him. Was it just a routine check with the boss?
When he had said his piece the dusty man rode off. Probably the foreman, or a trusted hand. An honest sort of man. Travers stood taller—in Maverick's eyes—when he was dealing with him, but oh so much smaller with Texas Pete and his ilk.
In a day or two, Travers had shown him hundreds of acres of creek bottoms, river meadows, and mountain mesas. Most of it belonged to Travers, the honest cattleman, but some of it to Travers, the rustler. Maverick soon knew too much about the operation. He had a feeling, with what he knew, getting away from Travers' enormous spread wasn't going to be easy. He didn't look forward to the day when the stockman would put it to him, did he want to throw in with him… or die?
For that is what Maverick felt Travers was leading up to. A partnership of sorts. Even though a thief, Travers wasn't the kind of man to murder any more than Bret Maverick was. He'd keep him alive if he could, but kill him if he had to.