Free Hard Country by Michael McGarrity Page A

rifle away. As he gathered the small remuda and struck out for La Luz, he wondered if there was anything at all that might change Charlie’s mind about being an outlaw. He doubted it.
    In the tense few moments during his encounter with Turknet and his gang, Kerney had managed a quick look at their horses. None had belonged to his dead brother which didn’t mean much one way or the other. What did matter was that Turknet was without a doubt a killer who’d once had Tom’s stolen horses in his possession. That made him three-fourths guilty of horse thieving and murder in Kerney’s mind. He looked forward to seeing Turknet again in a more peaceable setting.
    * * *
     
    J ohn Good’s ranch was a few miles above the village of La Luz in a canyon that ran down the west slope of the mountains through a narrow gorge that opened onto broad meadows with tall, abundant grasses. In fact, the grass was fragile and easily overgrazed, a lesson John Good had learned the hard way by letting his cattle browse a higher pasture down to bare soil and dead roots.
    A wide, perennial creek with headwaters in the mountains flowed through the canyon to the carefully tilled fields in the Mexican settlement below.
    According to the story recounted by La Luz villagers, two Spanish missionaries stopped on their way to Santa Fe in 1719, baptized a group of Indians, and built a chapel, which they named Our Lady of Light before moving on. La Luz—“The Light”—remained a forgotten place for well over a century, until Mexican settlers moved in, followed a mere fifteen years later by Texas ranchers trailing cattle into the territory.
    The ranch was a family operation. John Good had a passel of sons to help him, along with a son-in-law and a brother. He also had a wife and several daughters to care for domestic matters. As the only hired hand, Kerney pretty much got the chores none of the male family members aspired to, including cutting wood for the cookstove, drawing water from the well, and helping the ladies in the kitchen when called upon to do so.
    He’d been given the job of fetching the new mounts from the fort because the menfolk had gone to Lincoln to testify in a hearing about John Good’s killing of a cowboy allegedly caught stealing cattle from the ranch.
    Kerney had heard that the dead man in question had been bushwhacked by Good because of some old feud back in Texas. Given the way Good bridled at any perceived slight or wrong, Kerney didn’t doubt the possibility.
    So far, he’d avoided Good’s mean streak by holding his tongue and doing his job, but he wasn’t happy with the situation and planned to move on after drawing his pay at the end of the month. To where, he wasn’t sure.
    The absence of horses in the pasture told him that Good and his kin had not yet come back from their visit to the circuit court. He turned the horses out into the corral, stripped to the waist, and cleaned up at the water trough next to the barn. Across the way, John Good’s wife, Jewel, watched him from the ranch-house porch.
    She was a tall, stern-looking woman with thin lips, a square jaw, and a quarrelsome personality that contradicted both her names. She turned and went inside without so much as calling out a howdy or giving a wave in Kerney’s direction.
    After feeding his horse some oats and putting it in the corral, Kerney chopped firewood, carried it to the cookstove, and hauled well water to the kitchen without one word passing between him and Good’s wife and daughters. When he finished his chores, Good’s plumpest daughter served him a meal of fried chicken and beans, again without a word spoken. He ate it on the porch stoop with the western sun hanging large over the distant mountains.
    As he sipped the last of his coffee, a horseman came into view on the lower meadow, approaching at a slow pace. Kerney squinted and recognized Cal Doran’s paint horse, Patches. Smiling, he stood, waved, and waited.
    Robertson’s hired gun on the