Tascosa Gun Read online

  Tascosa Gun

  The Story of Jim East

  By Gene Shelton

  Second Edition, Revised

  BOOKS BY GENE SHELTON

  Houston Madam : The Story of Pamelia Mann, Texas Pioneer

  Red River War (as Ray Rosson)

  Manhunter : A Novel based on the Life and Times of Frank Hamer

  How the West Was Lost

  Unwanted: Dead or Alive

  Texas Horsetrading Co. Series

  Texas Horsetrading Co.

  Hangtree Pass

  Skull Creek

  Devil's Deathbed

  Texas Legends Series

  Last Gun: The Legend of John Selman

  Captain Jack: The Story of John Coffee Hays

  Rawhider: The Story of Print Olive

  Tascosa Gun: The Story of Jim East

  Brazos Dreamer: The Story of Major Robert S. Neighbors

  Day of the Scorpion

  Track of the Snake

  Common Sense Self Defense

  Copyright © 2017 by Gene Shelton.

  All rights reserved.

  All of the characters in this book except for certain historical figures are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  First published in hardcover, 1992 by Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.; large print edition, Thorndike Press, Thorndike, Maine; Berkley Publishing Group, paperback edition, December, 1999.

  Rights reverted to author, 2017.

  To Barbara, my wife of 50-plus years, who picked a cowboy-turned-journalist from an Amarillo College chemistry class, with love and thanks.

  — Gene Shelton

  Foreword

  This is a work of fiction based on the life of James H. (Jim) East, who came to the Texas Panhandle as a working cowboy, joined Pat Garrett’s posse in the pursuit and capture of Billy the Kid, and later became sheriff in one of the West’s legendary frontier settlements—the brawling cattle town of Tascosa—during one of the most turbulent periods in the development of the Texas High Plains.

  Many of the individuals portrayed in this work existed, but the reader should draw no conclusions as to their actual characters, motivations and actions on the basis of this story.

  Every effort has been made, within the framework of the fiction novel, to portray as accurately as possible the actual dates, locations, and sequence of events that shaped the life of Jim East and his role in the history of the state of Texas.

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to express his appreciation to the staff of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum and Society on the campus of West Texas State University in Canyon for their courteous assistance in providing many details critical to the development of this story. Thanks also to the staff of the Texas A&M University-Commerce library for valuable assistance.

  While no definitive biography of Jim East has been compiled, to this author’s knowledge, a number of scholarly works contributed greatly to the research and preparation of this manuscript. Among those of significant value to the author were:

  John L. McCarty, Maverick Town: The Story of Old Tascosa , University of Oklahoma Press; Pauline Durrett Robertson and R. L. Robertson, Cowman’s Country , Paramount Publishing Company; Leon C. Metz, Pat Garrett: The Story of a Western Lawman , University of Oklahoma Press, and The Shooters , Mangan Books; Dulcie Sullivan, The LS Brand , University of Texas Press; and Jon Tuska, Billy the Kid , Greenwood Press.

  And finally, heartfelt thanks to fellow members of the Silver Leos Writers Guild at TAMU-Commerce, for their collective and individual encouragement, help and comradeship.

  ONE

  LX Ranch, Texas Panhandle

  November 1880

  Jim East flipped the tie rope from the legs of the weanling calf and stepped aside. The heifer bawled again, finally got her feet under her and bounded up, snorting. She ran toward the cedar thicket that flanked Frio Creek, tail curved over her back like a figure nine.

  Jim kept a cautious eye on the calf’s mother, a leggy brindle Longhorn wearing the LX brand. The cow stood at the edge of the brush, pawed the ground and shook impressive horns at Jim from time to time. She was worried about her baby, but at least she wasn’t on the prod. Many a cowboy working alone had caught a horn from an enraged mother cow.

  “Take it easy, Mama,” Jim said casually to the cow, “I didn’t hurt her.” Within a few weeks, he knew, the cow would kick the calf off the teat. When the weaning was complete she would lose interest in her offspring.

  Jim watched as the calf raced to its mother. The two disappeared into the brush. Jim’s scowl deepened the lines in a square-jawed face browned by sun and wind. In his twenty-seven years, a dozen of them spent chasing cows from South Texas to railheads in Kansas and Colorado, Jim East had seen his share of “sleeper” stock.

  That didn’t stop him from getting mad about it.

  The weanling was the fourth sleeper he had found this week. Somebody was stealing stock from the LX, and Jim rode for the brand. The cows might belong to Bates and Beales, the ranch owners, but Jim took the thefts as a personal insult. Any cowboy worth his pay took pride in the brand he rode for and protected it as if it were his own.

  Jim stowed the tie rope, re-coiled his Plymouth Manila hemp lariat and secured it to the saddle. He paused for a moment and stared toward the brush where the calf and its mother had disappeared.

  He had no real quarrel with legitimate mavericking. Catching and branding grown, unmarked stock was about the only way a man who worked for cowboy’s wages of thirty dollars a month and grub could ever build a place of his own.

  But sleepering wasn’t the same. The calf had been earmarked with the LX overbit, a quarter-moon shape cut from the upper side of the ear. The cut was still fresh, not much more than a week old. The animal had been earmarked but not branded; when spring roundup time came the cattle would still be wearing their thick, shaggy winter hair. Odds were the cowboys working the herd would see the earmark and assume the calf wore the LX brand as well, so they would pass her by. Later, the man who had earmarked the calf would find her, brand her, alter the earmark with a new cut, and add the critter to his own spread.

  The way Jim East saw it, sleepering was worse than outright theft. It was deliberate creation of maverick stock. Something that took that much time, effort and patience had to be done by someone who knew the country and the cattle well. Possibly someone who rode for the LX itself. A true rustler would just steal the calf. It seemed less painful to lose stock to an honest thief than to a dishonest cowboy.

  Jim reached into a pocket for the makings. He crouched on the downwind side of his sorrel cowhorse and dribbled tobacco into the brown paper. The north wind still held a bite of the early season norther. Patches of snow remained on the shady side of the scrub brush, Spanish dagger plants and stunted cedars sprinkled amid the short native grama grass of the Texas Panhandle. Jim finished rolling the smoke, lit the quirly and pinched the head of the match until he was sure no heat or spark remained. The last thing the LX needed was a prairie fire to wipe out a section or more of winter graze. It looked like a long winter was taking shape.

  He dragged the raw smoke into his lungs, held it for a couple of heartbeats, and exhaled through his nostrils. He didn’t yet know who was behind the sleepering. It could be almost anyone who rode for the LX, and that included more than fifty hands during peak seasons. There were twice that many cowpunchers on the big nearby ranches and no shortage of nesters looking to build breeding herds the easy way.

  Jim hoped he could find out who was responsible. He had to catch them at it or come up with other solid proof. You didn’t call a man a rustler without being able to back it up. That was a good way to stop a bullet.


  “If I do find out who you are,” he muttered to the unseen stock thief, “you’ll get your pick of a tall cottonwood tree, a lead slug or a jail cell. Man so lazy he’d steal instead of work doesn’t deserve more than that.”

  Jim finished the smoke, ground the butt beneath a boot heel and mounted the sorrel. He glanced at the low, cold sun a handspan above the western horizon. He had just about enough time to make it back to the dugout line camp on the banks of Palo Duro Creek before dark.

  Jim topped out of the Frio Creek breaks onto the windswept, rolling plains, and abruptly pulled his sorrel to a stop. A horseman moved toward him at a brisk trot two hundred yards away. Jim’s hand instinctively dropped to the scabbard of the Winchester slung beneath his right leg, then fell away as he recognized the rider. His frown dissolved into a grin. The rider on the gray was the last man Jim would ever suspect of stealing stock.

  He crossed his forearms over the saddle horn and waited as the rider drew near. Then he waved a greeting to Tom Emory, a top hand on the neighboring LIT Ranch. Tom was a few years younger than Jim and had the lanky narrow-hipped build of a bronc rider. His blue eyes sparkled with the mischievous glint of a young colt most of the time, but when he quit grinning any thinking man paid attention. Tom Emory could handle a rifle or a handgun as well as he handled horses and cattle. Jim East and Tom Emory had taken a liking to each other at first sight on Jim’s first big roundup after he signed on with the LX more than a year ago. The friendship had grown with the passing months until either man would trust the other to hold his horse and watch his wife and be sure his friend wouldn’t get the instructions backward.

  “Wasting the boss’s time and money again, Jim?” Tom asked by way of greeting as he reined up alongside. A wide grin lifted the corners of his shaggy mustache and crinkled laugh lines at the corners of his dark blue eyes.

  “You’re one to talk, Tom,” Jim said. “I’ll lay a dime against a dollar you haven’t hit a day’s work in the last two months.”

  Tom chuckled aloud. “Ah, the glamorous life of a cowboy,” he said. “Nothing to do but ride along, admire your shadow on horseback, court the senoritas, get drunk and shoot up the town every Saturday night.”

  Jim answered with a wry smile. Nothing could be further from the truth and both of them knew it. Other hands bitched constantly about the back-breaking work. Jim East and Tom Emory just did it.

  Jim noticed that Tom’s grin had faded. “Problem, Tom?”

  “Maybe. Major Littlefield told me there’s a war council brewing at LX headquarters. Sent me as a rep.”

  Jim’s frown returned. When Major George Washington Littlefield smelled a war, a man could look for the gunsmoke. “What’s up?”

  Tom shook his head. “Not sure. But I think maybe it’s got something to do with the Pecos River cow thieves over in New Mexico. They hit the LIT pretty hard this year.”

  “We lost more than our share, too,” Jim said, a hard edge on his words.

  Tom pulled a twist of tobacco from his pocket, gnawed off a chew and settled it into a cheek. “So did Torrey’s outfit. And the LS. The Major’s kind of upset about people stealing livestock. Especially when they steal his.”

  “We going after them?”

  Emory turned his head downwind and spat. “Looks like it, Jim. The Major says the cattlemen’s association wants to put an end to it and get our stock back. The two of us got invited to help with that little chore. Bill Moore sent word to the LIT that he wants you in on the parley. Said he’d send somebody else up here to ride drift in your place.”

  Jim’s scowl deepened. He didn’t completely trust LX foreman Bill Moore. There was something about the man that didn’t set right, and it wasn’t just the yarns that he’d killed a couple of men before drifting into the Texas Panhandle. Jim reached for his tobacco sack and glanced at the lowering sun.

  “Guess we’ll find out soon enough, Tom,” he said. “Meantime, we’ll overnight at my palatial estate on Palo Duro Creek.” He reined his sorrel back toward the one-room dugout grubbed from a rocky hill overlooking the creek. The dugout came complete with its own set of scorpions and centipedes, but it was warm and dry. He winked at Tom riding alongside. “Had to let the servants have the weekend off. You’ll have to make do with my cooking tonight.”

  Tom’s gray gelding backed its ears at Jim’s horse and tried to take a nip at the sorrel’s neck. Tom yanked on the reins, barked a curse, and rammed a spur into the gray’s side. The horse got the message and calmed down in a hurry.

  “How’s Hattie?” Tom asked.

  Jim felt the corners of his mouth lift in a smile at the mention of his wife’s name. “Aside from the fact that she’s thirty miles away, doing fine,” he said.

  “Damn me for a sore-pawed badger if I can see what a woman like Hattie finds in a broken-down saddle bum like you, Jim East,” Tom said.

  Jim chuckled. “She knows quality when she sees it.” The two men rode in silence for a time. Jim’s thoughts stayed with Hattie. He had made three cattle drives from the chaparral country in South Texas to Kansas railheads and learned something from every drive. On the first trip he’d learned how to handle Longhorns—just leave them alone as long as they’re headed in the right direction. He used that same philosophy in dealing with men, and it worked just as well as it did on cows. He’d also learned on that first trip north that a Texas cowboy was a lot better off if he stayed out of the saloons, whorehouses and gambling dens at railhead. A ringing headache and a flat wallet had taught him that lesson.

  On the second drive he had kept his spending to clothes and supplies, stayed out of the rougher parts of town, saved a little of his pay—and met Hattie Boulding. Memories of her soft Virginia drawl, the lively sparkle in her eyes, and her quick, bubbly laughter rode with him all the way back to Texas.

  When he started the third trip he was determined to find the girl again, marry her and bring her back to Texas. He fretted all the way to Dodge City about how to ask her and what he’d do if she turned him down. He was more than a little surprised when she said yes. Sometimes he still had trouble believing it. She could have had any man in four states, a man with money and breeding and a better education, and more of a future. She picked a Texas cowboy.

  That was the kick in the pants Jim East needed to get serious about the future. He landed the job with the LX, rented a small three-room adobe house in Tascosa and settled Hattie into her new home. There wasn’t a decent place on the ranch for a married couple, so Hattie had accepted the arrangement. Jim got one weekend a month off except in the busy times, and on those two days they enjoyed what other couples spent a lifetime trying to find. They had been able to save a few dollars a month from Jim’s paycheck. Soon, he figured, he would start drawing top hand wages. That was another ten a month. Then maybe wagon boss and another ten. Eventually they would have enough saved to start something of their own—a ranch, maybe, or a freight line. Or buy into a business in town.

  Jim had confidence in himself because Hattie had faith in him. That meant he could do nearly anything. There were lots of opportunities in a part of the country growing as fast as the Texas Panhandle . . .

  “Jim,” Tom finally said, “you run across any sleeper stock over here lately?”

  “Four in the last week. Turned one loose just a few minutes before you rode up. You?”

  “Yeah. Half a dozen in the last ten days.”

  “Any sign as to who might have done it?”

  Tom shook his head. “Nothing you could count on. But I’m beginning to get some suspicions. Does it seem funny to you that the sleepers start showing up just after Bill Moore takes a three-man crew through checking drift brands?”

  “It is a tad curious,” Jim said, “now that you mention it.”

  ***

  Pellets of sleet pecked against the stubbled faces of East and Emory as they paused to scrape the mud and ice slush from boots on a garden hoe blade nailed to the porch at LX Ranch headquarters.

 
; “Looks like we’re in for one bitch of a blue whistler,” Tom said.

  Jim glanced at the low gray sky overhead and nodded. He swung the door open and instinctively ducked as he stepped inside. They didn’t make doors quite tall enough for a man who stood six-two and packed a hundred ninety pounds, most of it muscle from years of wrestling broncs and Longhorns. A gust of frigid air trailed in behind the two riders and stirred the tobacco smoke that hung blue against the ceiling. A potbellied stove glowed faint red in the center of the big room. To Jim the heat felt oppressive, the air tight and close, after the long ride in the cold outside. His fingers and toes began to ache as they warmed.

  Five men sat around the pine table in the center of the room. Jim’s brows arched in surprise . Tom was right , he thought . This is a war party if I’ve ever seen one; some of the toughest men and best guns in two states here.

  Bill Moore held down the chair at the table’s end. At Moore’s left were Frank Stewart, range detective for the newly formed Panhandle Cattleman’s Association, and Charlie Siringo, the lanky LX rider who was as good with a gun and a horse as he was bad with the cards. Luis Bausman of the LIT, a solid, broad-shouldered man whose perpetual scowl hid a hearty sense of humor and an eye for the absurdities of life, sat at Moore’s right. Sprawled in a chair at Bausman’s side was the six-foot-five, pale-eyed Pat Garrett, sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico. Garrett clutched a fat cigar in long, thin fingers.

  “Coffee’s hot, Jim, Tom,” Moore said. “Grab a cup and warm your gizzards. I reckon you two know Sheriff Garrett?”

  “We’ve met,” Jim said as he stripped off his gloves and offered a hand. Garrett’s grip was firm. “Good to see you again, Sheriff.” Garrett merely nodded, the cold expression in his eyes unchanged as he silently greeted the two cowhands.