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Updated: June 12, 2025
Might be some racing. You aim to stay on in Tubacca?" "Have to until Shadow can trail again. How’s the prospect for a job?" "With cattle—horses—teaming?" "Horses, I guess." "Well, Don Cazar—Rennie—runs the best manadas. You might hit him for work. He’ll be riding in to meet the wagons. Carmencita, did you bring all that was left of the supplies?"
So this was Tubacca! The rider shifted his weight in the saddle and gazed about him with watchful interest. Back in ’59 this had been a flourishing town, well on its way to prominence in the Southwest.
He had just returned from his vigil as night watchman at the Greens and was going the longest way around to his home. He leaned his gun against the house side and lit his pipe. Then he opened the sty door, softly, and said: "Morra, Hughie." "Morra, Con," came the answer, in calliope tones from our guest. "Haave ye a good stock ov tubacca?" Con asked Hughie.
Then the war.... The withdrawal of the army, the invasion of Sibley’s Confederate forces which had reached this far in the persons of Howard’s Arizona Rangers—and most of all the raiding, vicious, deadly, and continual, by Apaches and outlaws—had blasted Tubacca. Now, in the fall of 1866, it was a third of what it had been, with a ragged fringe of dilapidated adobes crumbling back into the soil.
There was an invigorating crispness in the air, and the dun gelding the Kentuckian rode savored the breeze as a desert dweller savors water. Drew was indulgent with his mount’s skittishness as they pounded along at the tail of the horse herd bound for Tubacca. From a rocky point well before them there was a flash of light.
Soon as Hunt set up here he sent for the boy and tried to give him a father." "It is a great pity he has no child of his own blood. I have seen him stand here in Tubacca giving toys and candy to the little ones. Yet he has only this wild one under his roof, and perhaps that Juanito will break his heart in the end...." Drew put down his cup. It was very hard not to turn and ask questions.
Any young feller what knows how to handle a gun, he’s welcome—" "Can’t leave Tubacca, at least for now. Have me a mare over in the livery that just foaled. I’m not movin’ until she’s ready to travel—" "Must be right good stock," Fenner observed. "Me, I has me a ridin’ mule as kin smell Apaches two miles off. Two, three times that thar mule saved m’ skin fur me.
The hum of voices, the bray of mules, the baa-ing and naa-ing of sheep and goats, kept up a roar to equal surf on a seacoast. Afternoon was fast fading into evening, but Tubacca, aroused from the post-noon siesta, was in tumult. A fighting cock tethered to a cart wheel stretched its neck to the utmost in an attempt to peck at Drew’s spurs.
"But ... Long Canyon ..." There was a shade of puzzlement in his voice. "All right, carry on, Crow. I’ll try to get back to the Stronghold before you pull south—if Johnny’s all right. Maybe I can bring him back with me." The grulla made what was close to a standing leap into a gallop and Rennie flashed along the line of wagons in the opposite direction toward Tubacca.
Both of them were so absorbed by what they were doing that Tubacca and what might be going on there had no more immediate meaning than the words in the books which had ridden to the Stronghold in Drew’s saddlebags. In the late afternoon of the third day the Kentuckian was walking a long-legged bay on a lead when León climbed to the top pole of the corral. "The patrón comes," he announced.
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