Jailbreak

Book 2: Justa Williams Western

by Giles Tippette

Genres: Action & Adventure; Westerns; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

Acclaimed western writer Giles Tippette takes the action south of the border, where blood is thicker than water no matter how many bullets are fired . . . Running the Half-Moon ranch is all the excitement Justa Williams needs in his life. But when his brother Norris looks into a squatter situation near the Mexican border and lands in a Monterrey jail for his troubles, Justa rides out to get his kin released. When the usual channels get rebuffed, Justa enlists the aid of a dozen kill-crazy banditos to get the matter resolved the old-fashioned way. Now there’s just a hundred miles of Mexican desert to cross before they can reach the Texas border. Hopefully they’ve got enough bullets left to get them there . . . Praise for Giles Tippette and The Bank Robbers “Tippette can plot away with the best of them.” — Dallas Morning News “Like True Grit. . . a small masterpiece . . . brilliantly written.” — Newark News “Spine-jarring, bullet-biting intensity.” — Houston Post “Tough, gutsy, and fascinating.” — NY Newsday “Impressive authenticity.” — Booklist “His fiction is taught and gripping.” — Houston Spectator

Release date: October 11, 2016

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 234

Sample

At supper Norris, my middle brother, said, “I think we got some trouble on that five thousand acres down on the border near Laredo.”

He said it serious, which is the way Norris generally says everything. I quit wrestling with the steak Buttercup, our cook, had turned into rawhide and said, “What are you talking about? How could we have trouble on land lying idle?”

He said, “I got word from town this afternoon that a telegram had come in from a friend of ours down there. He says we got some kind of squatters taking up residence on the place.”

My youngest brother, Ben, put his fork down and said, incredulously, “That five thousand acres? Hell, it ain’t nothing but rocks and cactus and sand. Why in hell would anyone want to squat on that worthless piece of nothing?”

Norris just shook his head. “I don’t know. But that’s what the telegram said. Came from Jack Cole. And if anyone ought to know what’s going on down there it would be him.”

I thought about it and it didn’t make a bit of sense. I was Justa Williams, and my family, my two brothers and myself and our father, Howard, occupied a considerable ranch called the Half-Moon down along the Gulf of Mexico in Matagorda County, Texas. It was some of the best grazing land in the state and we had one of the best herds of purebred and crossbred cattle in that part of the country. In short we were pretty well-to-do.

But that didn’t make us any the less ready to be stolen from, if indeed that was the case. The five thousand acres Norris had been talking about had come to us through a trade our father had made some years before. We’d never made any use of the land, mainly because, as Ben had said, it was pretty worthless and because it was a good two hundred miles from our ranch headquarters. On a few occasions we’d bought cattle in Mexico and then used the acreage to hold small groups on while we made up a herd. But other than that, it lay mainly forgotten.

I frowned. “Norris, this doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. Right after supper send a man into Blessing with a return wire for Jack asking him if he’s certain. What the hell kind of squatting could anybody be doing on that land?”

Ben said, “Maybe they’re raisin’ watermelons.” He laughed.

I said, “They could raise melons, but there damn sure wouldn’t be no water in them.”

Norris said, “Well, it bears looking into.” He got up, throwing his napkin on the table. “I’ll go write out that telegram.”

I watched him go, dressed, as always, in his town clothes. Norris was the businessman in the family. He’d been sent down to the University at Austin and had got considerable learning about the ins and outs of banking and land deals and all the other parts of our business that didn’t directly involve the ranch. At the age of twenty-nine I’d been the boss of the operation a good deal longer than I cared to think about. It had been thrust upon me by our father when I wasn’t much more than twenty. He’d said he wanted me to take over while he was still strong enough to help me out of my mistakes and I reckoned that was partly true. But it had just seemed that after our mother had died the life had sort of gone out of him. He’d been one of the earliest settlers, taking up the land not long after Texas had become a republic in 1845. I figured all the years of fighting Indians and then Yankees and scalawags and carpetbaggers and cattle thieves had taken their toll on him. Then a few years back he’d been nicked in the lungs by a bullet that should never have been allowed to head his way and it had thrown an extra strain on his heart. He was pushing seventy and he still had plenty of head on his shoulders, but mostly all he did now was sit around in his rocking chair and stare out over the cattle and land business he’d built. Not to say that I didn’t go to him for advice when the occasion demanded. I did, and mostly I took it.

Buttercup came in just then and sat down at the end of the table with a cup of coffee. He was near as old as Dad and almost completely worthless. But he’d been one of the first hands that Dad had hired and he’d been kept on even after he couldn’t sit a horse anymore. The problem was he’d elected himself cook, and that was the sorriest day our family had ever seen. There were two Mexican women hired to cook for the twelve riders we kept full time, but Buttercup insisted on cooking for the family.

Mainly, I think, because he thought he was one of the family. A notion we could never completely dissuade him from.

So he sat there, about two days of stubble on his face, looking as scrawny as a pecked-out rooster, sweat running down his face, his apron a mess. He said, wiping his forearm across his forehead, “Boy, it shore be hot in there. You boys shore better be glad you ain’t got no business takes you in that kitchen.”

Ben said, in a loud mutter, “I wish you didn’t either.”

Ben, at twenty-five, was easily the best man with a horse or a gun that I had ever seen. His only drawback was that he was hotheaded and he tended to act first and think later. That ain’t a real good combination for someone that could go on the prod as fast as Ben. When I had argued with Dad about taking over as boss, suggesting instead that Norris, with his education, was a much better choice, Dad had simply said, “Yes, in some ways. But he can’t handle Ben. You can. You can handle Norris, too. But none of them can handle you.”

Well, that hadn’t been exactly true. If Dad had wished it I would have taken orders from Norris even though he was two years younger than me. But the logic in Dad’s line of thinking had been that the Half-Moon and our cattle business was the lodestone of all our businesses and only I could run that. He had been right. In the past I’d imported purebred Whiteface and Hereford cattle from up North, bred them to our native Longhorns and produced cattle that would bring twice as much at market as the horse-killing, all-bone, all-wild Longhorns. My neighbors had laughed at me at first, claiming those square little purebreds would never make it in our Texas heat. But they’d been wrong and, one by one, they’d followed the example of the Half-Moon.

Buttercup was setting up to take off on another one of his long-winded harangues about how it had been in the “old days” so I quickly got up, excusing myself, and went into the big office we used for sitting around in as well as a place of business. Norris was at the desk composing his telegram so I poured myself out a whiskey and sat down. I didn’t want to hear about any trouble over some worthless five thousand acres of borderland. In fact I didn’t want to hear about any troubles of any kind. I was just two weeks short of getting married, married to a lady I’d been courting off and on for five years, and I was mighty anxious that nothing come up to interfere with our plans. Her name was Nora Parker and her daddy owned and run the general mercantile in our nearest town, Blessing. I’d almost lost her once before to a Kansas City drummer. She’d finally gotten tired of waiting on me, waiting until the ranch didn’t occupy all my time, and almost run off with a smooth-talking Kansas City drummer that called on her daddy in the harness trade. But she’d come to her senses in time and got off the train in Texarkana and returned home.

But even then it had been a close thing. I, along with my men and brothers and help from some of our neighbors, had been involved with stopping a huge herd of illegal cattle being driven up from Mexico from crossing our range and infecting our cattle with tick fever which could have wiped us all out. I tell you it had been a bloody business. We’d lost four good men and had to kill at least a half dozen on the other side. Fact of the business was I’d come about as close as I ever had to getting killed myself, and that was going some for the sort of rough-and-tumble life I’d led.

Nora had almost quit me over it, saying she just couldn’t take the uncertainty. But in the end, she’d stuck by me. That had been the year before, 1896, and I’d convinced her that civilized law was coming to the country, but until it did, we that had been there before might have to take things into our own hands from time to time.

She’d seen that and had understood. I loved her and she loved me and that was enough to overcome any of the troubles we were still likely to encounter from day to day.

So I was giving Norris a pretty sour look as he finished his telegram and sent for a hired hand to ride it into Blessing, seven miles away. I said, “Norris, let’s don’t make a big fuss about this. That land ain’t even crossed my mind in at least a couple of years. Likely we got a few Mexican families squatting down there and trying to scratch out a few acres of corn.”

Norris gave me his businessman’s look. He said, “It’s our land, Justa. And if we allow anyone to squat on it for long enough or put up a fence they can lay claim. That’s the law. My job is to see that we protect what we have, not give it away.”

I sipped at my whiskey and studied Norris. In his town clothes he didn’t look very impressive. He’d inherited more from our mother than from Dad so he was not as wide-shouldered and slim-hipped as Ben and me. But I knew him to be a good, strong, dependable man in any kind of fight. Of course he wasn’t that good with a gun, but then Ben and I weren’t all that good with books like he was. But I said, just to jolly him a bit, “Norris, I do believe you are running to suet. I may have to put you out with Ben working the horse herd and work a little of that fat off you.”

Naturally it got his goat. Norris had always envied Ben and me a little. I was just over six foot and weighed right around a hundred and ninety. I had inherited my daddy’s big hands and big shoulders. Ben was almost a copy of me except he was about a size smaller. Norris said, “I weigh the same as I have for the last five years. If it’s any of your business.”

I said, as if I was being serious, “Must be them sack suits you wear. What they do, pad them around the middle?”

He said, “Why don’t you just go to hell.”

After he’d stomped out of the room I got the bottle of whiskey and an extra glass and went down to Dad’s room. It had been one of his bad days and he’d taken to bed right after lunch. Strictly speaking he wasn’t supposed to have no whiskey, but I watered him down a shot every now and then and it didn’t seem to do him no harm.

He was sitting up when I came in the room. I took a moment to fix him a little drink, using some water out of his pitcher, then handed him the glass and sat down in the easy chair by the bed. I told him what Norris had reported and asked what he thought.

He took a sip of his drink and shook his head. “Beats all I ever heard,” he said. “I took that land in trade for a bad debt some fifteen, twenty years ago. I reckon I’d of been money ahead if I’d of hung on to the bad debt. That land won’t even raise weeds, well as I remember, and Noah was in on the last rain that fell on the place.”

We had considerable amounts of land spotted around the state as a result of this kind of trade or that. It was Norris’s business to keep up with their management. I was just bringing this to Dad’s attention more out of boredom and impatience for my wedding day to arrive than anything else.

I said, “Well, it’s a mystery to me. How you feeling?”

He half smiled. “Old.” Then he looked into his glass. “And I never liked watered whiskey. Pour me a dollop of the straight stuff in here.”

I said, “Now, Howard. You know—”

He cut me off. “If I wanted somebody to argue with I’d send for Buttercup. Now do like I told you.”

I did, but I felt guilty about it. He took the slug of whiskey down in one pull. Then he leaned his head back on the pillow and said, “Aaaaah. I don’t give a damn what that horse doctor says, ain’t nothing makes a man feel as good inside as a shot of the best.”

I felt sorry for him laying there. He’d always led just the kind of life he wanted—going where he wanted, doing what he wanted, having what he set out to get. And now he was reduced to being a semi-invalid. But one thing that showed the strength that was still in him was that you never heard him complain. He said, “How’s the cattle?”

I said, “They’re doing all right, but I tell you we could do with a little of Noah’s flood right now. All this heat and no rain is curing the grass off way ahead of time. If it doesn’t let up we’ll be feeding hay by late September, early October. And that will play hell on our supply. Could be we won’t have enough to last through the winter. Norris thinks we ought to sell off five hundred head or so, but the market is doing poorly right now. I’d rather chance the weather than take a sure beating by selling off.”

He sort of shrugged and closed his eyes. The whiskey was relaxing him. He said, “You’re the boss.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Damn my luck.”

I wandered out of the back of the house. Even though it was nearing seven o’clock of the evening it was still good and hot. Off in the distance, about a half a mile away, I could see the outline of the house I was building for Nora and myself. It was going to be a close thing to get it finished by our wedding day. Not having any riders to spare for the project, I’d imported a building contractor from Galveston, sixty miles away. He’d arrived with a half a dozen Mexican laborers and a few skilled masons and they’d set up a little tent city around the place. The contractor had gone back to Galveston to fetch more materials, leaving his Mexicans behind. I walked along idly, hoping he wouldn’t forget that the job wasn’t done. He had some of my money, but not near what he’d get when he finished the job.

Just then Ray Hays came hurrying across the back lot toward me. Ray was kind of a special case for me. The only problem with that was that he knew it and wasn’t a bit above taking advantage of the situation. Once, a few years past, he’d saved my life by going against an evil man that he was working for at the time, an evil man who meant to have my life. In gratitude I’d given Ray a good job at the Half-Moon, letting him work directly under Ben, who was responsible for the horse herd. He was a good, steady man and a good man with a gun. He was also fair company. When he wasn’t talking.

He came churning up to me, mopping his brow. He said, “Lordy, boss, it is—”

I said, “Hays, if you say it’s hot I’m going to knock you down.”

He gave me a look that was a mixture of astonishment and hurt. He said, “Why, whatever for?”

I said, “Everybody knows it’s hot. Does every son of a bitch you run into have to make mention of the fact?”

His brow furrowed. “Well, I never thought of it that way. I ‘spect you are right. Goin’ down to look at yore house?”

I shook my head. “No. It makes me nervous to see how far they’ve got to go. I can’t see any way it’ll be ready on time.”

He said, “Miss Nora ain’t gonna like that.”

I gave him a look. “I guess you felt forced to say that.”

He looked down. “Well, maybe she won’t mind.”

I said, grimly, “The hell she won’t. She’ll think I did it a-purpose.”

“Aw, she wouldn’t.”

“Naturally you know so much about it, Hays. Why don’t you tell me a few other things about her.”

“I was jest tryin’ to lift yore spirits, boss.”

I said, “You keep trying to lift my spirits and I’ll put you on the haying crew.”

He looked horrified. No real cowhand wanted any work he couldn’t do from the back of his horse. Haying was a hot, hard, sweaty job done either afoot or from a wagon seat. We generally brought in contract Mexican labor to handle ours. But I’d been known in the past to discipline a cowhand by giving him a few days on the hay gang. Hays said, “Boss, now I never meant nothin’. I swear. You know me, my mouth gets to runnin’ sometimes. I swear I’m gonna watch it.”

I smiled. Hays always made me smile. He was so easily buffaloed. He had it soft at the Half-Moon and he knew it and didn’t want to take any chances on losing a good thing.

I lit up a cigarillo and watched the dusk settle in over the coastal plains. It wasn’t but three miles to Matagorda Bay and it was quiet enough I felt like I could almost hear the waves breaking on the shore. Somewhere in the distance a mama cow bawled for her calf. The spring crop were near about weaned by now, but there were still a few mamas that wouldn’t cut the apron strings. I stood there reflecting on how peaceful things had been of late. It suited me just fine. All I wanted was to get my house finished, marry Nora and never handle another gun so long as I lived.

The peace and quiet were short-lived. Within twenty-four hours we’d had a return telegram from Jack Cole. It said:


I read the telegram twice and then I said, “Why this is crazy as hell! That land wouldn’t support fifty head of cattle.”

We were all gathered in the big office. Even Dad was there, sitting in his rocking chair. I looked up at him. “What do you make of this, Howard?”

He shook his big, old head of white hair. “Beats the hell out of me, Justa. I can’t figure it.”

Ben said, “Well, I don’t see where it has to be figured. I’ll take five men and go down there and run them off. I don’t care what they’re doing. They ain’t got no business on our land.”

I said, “Take it easy, Ben. Aside from the fact you don’t need to be getting into any more fights this year, I can’t spare you or five men. The way this grass is drying up we’ve got to keep drifting those cattle.”

Norris said, “No, Ben is right. We can’t have such affairs going on with our property. But we’ll handle it within the law. I’ll simply take the train down there, hire a good lawyer and have the matter settled by the sheriff. Shouldn’t take but a few days.”

Well, there wasn’t much I could say to that. We couldn’t very well let people take advantage of us, but I still hated to be without Norris’s services even for a few days. On matters other than the ranch he was the expert, and it didn’t seem like there was a day went by that some financial question didn’t come up that only he could answer. I said, “Are you sure you can spare yourself for a few days?”

He thought for a moment and then nodded. “I don’t see why not. I’ve just moved most of our available cash into short-term municipal bonds in Galveston. The market is looking all right and everything appears fine at the bank. I can’t think of anything that might come up.”

I said, “All right. But you just keep this in mind. You are not a gun hand. You are not a fighter. I do not want you going anywhere near those people, whoever they are. You do it legal and let the sheriff handle the eviction. Is that understood?”

He kind of swelled up, resenting the implication that he couldn’t handle himself. The biggest trouble I’d had through the years when trouble had come up had been keeping Norris out of it. Why he couldn’t just be content to be a wagon load of brains was more than I could understand. He said, “Didn’t you just hear me say I intended to go through a lawyer and the sheriff? Didn’t I just say that?”

I said, “I wanted to be sure you heard yourself.”

He said, “Nothing wrong with my hearing. Nor my approach to this matter. You seem to constantly be taken with the idea that I’m always looking for a fight. I think you’ve got the wrong brother. I use logic.”

“Yeah?” I said. “You remember when that guy kicked you in the balls when they were holding guns on us? And then we chased them twenty miles and finally caught them?”

He looked away. “That has nothing to do with this.”

“Yeah?” I said, enjoying myself. “And here’s this guy, shot all to hell. And what was it you insisted on doing?”

Ben laughed, but Norris wouldn’t say anything.

I said, “Didn’t you insist on us standing him up so you could kick him in the balls? Didn’t you?”

He sort of growled, “Oh, go to hell.”

I said, “I just want to know where the logic was in that.”

He said, “Right is right. I was simply paying him back in kind. It was the only thing his kind could understand.”

I said, “That’s my point. You just don’t go down there and go to paying back a bunch of rough hombres in kind. Or any other currency for that matter.”

That made him look over at Dad. He said, “Dad, will you make him quit treating me like I was ten years old? He does it on purpose.”

But he’d appealed to the wrong man. Dad just threw his hands in the air and said, “Don’t come to me with your troubles. I’m just a boarder around here. You get your orders from Justa. You know that.”

Of course he didn’t like that. Norris had always been a strong hand for the right and wrong of a matter. In fact, he may have been one of the most stubborn men I’d ever met. But he didn’t say anything, just gave me a look and muttered something about hoping a mess came up at the bank while he was gone and then see how much boss I was.

But he didn’t mean nothing by it. Like most families, we fought amongst ourselves and, like most families, God help the outsider who tried to interfere with one of us.

Norris got away on the noon train the next day. I took him in myself as a good excuse to go by and see Nora. The last thing I told him was not to spend much time or money on the matter. I’d said, “Just put it in the hands of a good lawyer and then get on back here. Your time is too valuable to waste fooling around with that worthless land.”

He’d said, “I’ll wire you my plans.”

I’d said, “You just wire me what train to meet in the next couple or three days.”

I’d come into town in the buckboard because I intended on bringing home a few supplies. So before I went to hunt up Miss Nora I took the wagon and team over to the livery stable to see to their watering and feeding. Besides, it was the noon hour and I didn’t want to just drop in . . .