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hacendados off their ranches or hung ’em or shot ’em, and there wasn’t nobody to do business with. Jeff was having a helluva time finding steers at the right price on the American side of the line, and that was putting a crimp in his plans, which were to start to making himself a cattle baron.
It was me who come up with the solution. If it was true that the hacendados had been run off or shot or hung, then their cattle must be a-wandering around with no one to look after them, meaning we didn’t have to go through the formality of buying them. We’d just take them. Couldn’t get ’em no cheaper than that, could you? Jeff and Ben thought it was a fine idea, Ben on account of he was getting bored punching cattle and was looking for some action. Jeff saw the sense of it from a business angle.
Back in those days it was common for Mexicans to cross the line and steal cattle from us gringos—and it was common for gringos to return the favor. It was a kind of game. We didn’t think of it as rustling, and the Mexicans didn’t neither. Of course, if you was the one getting rustled, then you saw it different.
Two of the ten sections Jeff had leased was right on the border, and that’s where we crossed. The rancho grande on the other side was called the Santa Barbara, and it must’ve run halfway down to Mexico City. It was owned by a Spaniard name of Álvarez, and owing to the fact that the revolucionarios hated Spaniards more than anybody else, we reckoned he’d been one of the first run off, shot, or hung. The big comet was gone from the sky by this time, but we had us a full moon. We rounded up, I think it was fifty-odd head without a hitch and drove them across and built a fire for our running irons and put our brand to ’em.
It was so damn easy, we tried it again the next night, while we still had a moon. We’d gathered up maybe twenty of these corriente steers when the Spaniard showed up with a few of his vaqueros and caught us red-handed. So there was one hacendado who hadn’t been run off, shot, or hung, and wasn’t we surprised! Asked us, polite like, what we thought we was a-doing, and Jeff said that some of our cattle had got away and we were sorting out ours from his. I had to translate that to the Spanish fella. Álvarez pulled a pistol and about stuck it in Jeff’s face and told Jeff that if we didn’t clear out muy pronto, we’d leave our bones there in Old Mexico. Before I could translate that, Ben drew his six-gun and stuck it in Álvarez’s ear and said that his bones was gone to be laying right next to ours if he didn’t put that pistol away. It was a peculiar-looking pistol, a kind I’d never seen before.
There I was on my horse, figuring the vaqueros was gone to open up any second, but Álvarez was between them and Ben, and I thought they didn’t shoot because they were afraid of hitting their boss. Turned out that wasn’t the case. They were afraid of hitting Ben! Right in the middle of that good old-fashioned Mexican standoff, one of the vaqueros called out, “¡Hola Ben! ¡Soy yo, Francisco!” Found out later on that Ben and this Francisco had become compadres on one of Ben’s trips into Sonora a while before—one of them “adventures” Jeff said he went on. Well, Francisco said to go ahead and take the cattle from that hijo de puta of a Spaniard. That kind of distracted Álvarez. He turned in the saddle to see which one of his vaqueros had called him a son of a bitch, and Ben took advantage and cracked him up the side of the head with the barrel of his six-gun, but he didn’t hit him hard enough to knock him out, and Álvarez pulled the trigger of that peculiar pistol. Must have shot four, five rounds quicker than I can say it. He’d shot in the direction of his own men, but I can’t say if it was on purpose or accidental. He didn’t hit a one of them, and then that Francisco fella shot him off his horse, and the other vaqueros plugged him while he was on the ground, and that