The Busted Thumb Horse Ranch by Paul Bagdon Page A

hate Mexes, too—an’ how many
you think it’d take to kill you, Arm?”
    “Me? Sheet. One crazy maybe half a mile off
with one of them Sharps, is all,” he answered
cryptically.
    We’d had enough by late afternoon. We came
on a small oasis an’ hauled in for the night. There
was some scruffy buffalo grass for the horses to
gnaw at and a few desert pines and a rocky little
pool maybe a couple of feet across and about that
in depth of the sweetest water God ever made.
    As we were settling in and gathering up some
firewood, Armando pointed to the east. “Look,”
he said.
    I looked. There was a stringy, barely discernable
line in the sky way beyond us.
    “The herd,” I said. “It’s gotta be the herd.”

Chapter Three
    There was no reason to hustle. Those horses
weren’t going anywhere we couldn’t find or track
them. It was possible, too, that the grit we saw
raised was put in the air by another group of
roaming mustangs—not the ones we were after.
Nevertheless, we were like a pair of kids on the
night before Christmas. It didn’t hurt that Arm
had shot three prairie hens while he was gathering
firewood, and they were all cleaned up and
ready to be skewered on sticks over the fire.
    Our final bottle of whiskey took a significant
hit that night.
    Neither of us mentioned that we may be chasing
something that doesn’t exist—this fantasmo
stallion—although that cruel little thought was
tucked away in the backs of our minds. We’d
know what was what as soon as we saw the herd,
so there was no sense in worrying over it.
    Our packer was loaded and we were in our
saddles a tad before first light. The false dawn—
that line of soft, almost pastel light that sneaks up
over the horizon before the sun makes its appearance
was enough for us to see by. Hell, either of
us could saddle up in full dark if it was necessaryand,
in fact, we’d done so more than a couple of
times.
    The skimpy cloud in the sky told us the herd
was still headed mostly east.
    “Mus’ be valleys that way,” Arm said. “Them
horses are already thinkin’ of winter, no?”
    “Must be,” I agreed.
    The day was a decent one for riding—hot but
not stifling. We’d let our animals drink their fill
and we topped off our canteens. Other than the
water we carried, we were going to have to count
on the mustangs to lead us to water during the
day. If they went thirsty, so did we.
    It’s difficult to gauge distance out there; the
only landmarks we had were foothills that
seemed way the hell ahead of us—maybe forty or
fifty miles—so we did the only thing we could,
which was to follow the brownish cloud raised
by the herd.
    About noon we rested our horses and gnawed
at jerky, which had all the flavor of dogwood.
    It was almost nightfall when we began seeing
relatively fresh piles of droppings from the herd.
“ Bueno. We come closer,” Arm said, grinning.
“Tomorrow we see them.”
    We saw them the next afternoon.
    There was a shallow valley with a ribbon of
water snaking through it, and some sparse grass
that was a whole lot better than nothing to a mustang
herd. We were at the lip, maybe a hundred
yards away. We dismounted and ground-tied our
horses behind us a good bit to make us less visible.
We had a perfect vantage point for observing
the herd.
    There were seventy-five or so mares, a bunch of
which had foals at their sides. The entire herd
was scrawny compared to how guys like me an’
Arm like to see horses. Many—most—were ribby,
and many of the mares showed painful-looking
reddish places about the size of a fist at the base
of their tails, meaning they had parasites and that
they’d rubbed their asses against trees or boulders
or whatever they came across to alleviate the
itching. The breeze was from them to us, which
was greatly to our advantage.
    The stallion was something else again. It’s
probably fair to say that every saddlebum and
cowhand knows a good horse when he sees
one—just as my partner and I do. This horse was
a