"The Cat King of Cochise County"
Loren D. Estleman
This comic masterpiece is Estleman at his best. It is a tale about the entrepreneurial genius of one Chickenwire, and the woe that befalls him and his cargo en route to Tombstone. This sort of tale was a frontier staple, and puts a reader in mind of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Dan De Quille. It was first published in Louis L'Amour Western Magazine in 1995, and this is the first time it has been anthologized. Loren D. Estleman is the winner of four Spur Awards, two for novels and two for short stories, and is widely considered to be one of the finest novelists writing in our time. He is also a well-known mystery novelist, specializing in the Detroit area near his home. He has devoted virtually his entire life to writing fiction, but has written many pieces of stirring nonfiction as well.
People in Salt Lake City called Chickenwire Chickenwire on account of the device he'd come up with to keep chickens from being eaten by Elder Evilsizer's Boar, Deuteronomy.
The business had started when Sister Gertrude, the elder's primary wife, had fed the carcass of a hen to the hogs because she wasn't sufficiently certain of what had killed it to cook it and didn't feel like digging a hole. The hogs, particularly old Deuteronomy, discovered a taste for chicken, and after that whenever a bird strayed near, the last image its pea brain carried to Pullet Paradise was of the boar's hairy snout and gnashing teeth. Feathers, bones, beaks, and claws were all grist for Deuteronomy's mill; often only a furious pattern in the dust of the barnyard and a pepper of blood remained to tie up the mystery of the diminishing local chicken population.
It wasn't long before the aging swine's dietary preference led it to neighboring farms, which was the reason a committee of whisker-faced, sad-eyed Mormons showed up at Chickenwire's mercantile store to ask him for some miracle that would protect their best layers from the predatory pig. Shooting the offender was out of the question. So, too, was demanding that Elder Evil-sizer take measures to keep his boar at home where it belonged. The violence of the elder's disposition, compounded by his reputation as one of the last of the Destroying Angels involved in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, was legend, preventing any word or action on the part of his gentler neighbors that might call down his wrath.
Chickenwire's response was to fashion a net from spools of wire he had rescued from a wagon abandoned by Western Union in the Shoshone country north of the Great Salt Lake. He reasoned that by stretching the screen around skates encircling the birds' scratching ground to keep Deuteronomy out, and above their heads to keep the chickens in, the farmers might put an end to the bloodshed without inviting retaliation.
The theory proved sound. The wire was bought, the pens built, and the pig, after a number of unsuccessful attempts to breach Ilium, was forced to settle for the turnips in its trough, together with such game as it could find out on the great alkali plain.
Moreover, the idea turned out to be an invention that outlasted its original necessity. Months after Deuteronomy got hold of a bad prairie hen and finished its existence on the Evilsizers' dinner table, orders for the remarkable wire continued to stream in. There were still wolves and stray dogs to contend with, and the participating Mormons' many wives had reported a secondary benefit in being able to cross their yards without dragging their hems through fresh droppings. Chickenwire, whose vision was not always equal to his entrepreneurial spirit, had reason when he parted with his last thirty feet to regret not commandeering the entire wagonload when he'd had the chance.
When he came to think about it, however, he thought perhaps it was just as well he ran out when he did. The wire was devilish to work with, having slashed up a dozen pairs of leather gloves he'd hoped to sell at a profit, and he was confident that as word got around that his store was no longer a source of the stuff, the farmers would stop calling him Chickenwire. Born Michael Aloysius Mc-Donough, he had been known as Iron Mike in the California gold camps, where he'd made his grubstake knocking down miners for wagers. He much preferred that address; although the thirty years since he'd given up prospecting and come to make his way as a Gentile among the Latter-Day Saints had packed forty extra pounds around his impressive musculature, he still introduced himself as Iron Mike.
He'd liked the raw life of the camps. Successful man of commerce that he was, he missed the rough company and unpredictable nature of a place that could double its population almost overnight once a major lode was uncovered, or lose a citizen in a heartbeat when the same card turned up twice in a poker game in one of the tents. Most of all he missed the candor. The Mormons were much like everyone else as to percentages of good and bad, but altogether too civilized for a man who liked to know right off what sort of person he was dealing with. In the camps you knew where you stood. If a man didn't like you he came at you with something, fists or a shotgun or some kind of club. In Salt Lake City he mouthed pleasantries to your face while spreading stories behind your back that the flour you sold contained rat poison.
It was fitting, then, that Chickenwire McDonough's vague dissatisfaction with his current circumstances should be turned into action by a man from the camps.
From the moment the fellow entered the store, some two or three weeks after the last ten yards of wire had been sold, it was obvious he was no Mormon. His beard was too scraggly, for one thing—more the result of late unfamiliarity with a razor than deliberate cultivation—and his filthy slouch hat, sun-blanched flannel shirt, and torn overalls were as far from the sober black that the faithful wore to town as one could come. He read aloud from a list scribbled in thick pencil on a greasy scrap of paper he held close to his sunken, red-ringed eyes. They were the items that a man traveling a long distance would request: axle grease, flour, cartridges, iodine for cuts and fistulas, beans, brogans, coal oil, and flour sacks of Ar-buckle's.
"Homesteading?" Chickenwire totaled the order in his ledger. "Prospecting. " The stranger's vocal cords grated against each other like hacksaw blades. "Bound for Montana and silver. " "I hear silver's growing scarce up that way. "
"I don't care. It's too cold there for rats and that's good enough for me. "
"Rats?"
"They're big as rabbits in Arizona. Had me a nice little claim a day's ride out of Tombstone, but the rats run me out. I can put up with lice and Apaches and highwaymen, but I sure don't warm to waking up with a large gray rat chewing on my big toe. "
"Can't you trap them?"
"Not the ones in Cochise County. They're too smart for traps. Some of 'em's smarter than either one of my partners. I sold out to them finally and hauled my freight north. My partners, not the rats; though they're big enough to do their share of the digging, and that's a fact. "
"The cats down there must be lazy. "
"Not lazy. Scarce. Cats go with barns. Ain't no barns down there, no farmers to build 'em. Just miners and Mexicans. Mexicans don't keep cats. "
Chickenwire ran broken-knuckled fingers through his whiskers. "How's the dirt?"
"Rich as Vanderbilt. The Can-Can Restaurant sells ham in champagne sauce. Two bucks a throw, and they ran out every Saturday.
Them nuggets don't get time to knock the dirt off on their way to some fancy man's pocket in town. "
The prospector paid for his supplies in silver and carried them out. Chickenwire never saw him again, and in time forgot his features. But what he'd said changed the merchant's life.
When young Lemuel Dent reported to the mercantile the next morning for his part-time delivery duties, he found the proprietor gummy-eyed from lack of sleep but sparkling with energy from some unknown source.
"How many friends you got, boy?"
Lemuel considered. His employer was perched on his stool behind the counter with a brand-new ledger flayed open before him. The pages were black with figures and the countertop was a litter of short chewed yellow pencils. It was obvious he'd been doing sums all night. At inventory time, Chickenwire's temper was shorter than his pencils, and a thing to tread carefully around. "I don't know, " answered the boy; and because that didn't seem specific enough he added, "Some. "
"Round them up. There's a quarter in it for you if you can have them here by noon. "
Youthful avarice flared in Lemuel's eyes, slightly crossed since an encounter he regretted with a mule's left hind foot on his tenth birthday. "What do I say?"
"Tell them there's money to be made. "
In the boy's absence, more than one potential customer found Chickenwire's door locked and the closed sign in the window. Had they been able to peer around the shade, they'd have seen the storekeeper removing slats from his inventory of wooden crates and replacing them with scraps of wire formerly deemed too short to mess with. By the time Lemuel rapped at the door, accompanied by eight of his closest friends and one or two boys he didn't like at all, Chickenwire had finished nine of a projected twenty cagelike contraptions, complete with doors hung on leather hinges and secured with tenpenny nails on the sliding-bolt principle.
Mopping his great bony brow with a smeared bandanna, the proprietor surveyed this bounty of boys barefoot and brogan-shod, over-alled and knickerbockered, dirty-faced and scrubbed pink. At length he grunted his approval and ostentatiously surrendered a disk of shining silver to the young man responsible, who pocketed it without ceremony. This transaction was observed closely by his companions, who then looked to Chickenwire for their share in the bonanza.
"A fifth part of that, " he announced. "Five cents, if you don't know your fractions. A nickel I will pay for every stray cat you lads bring to me between now and sundown. A dollar extra to the young fellow who delivers the most. Healthy cats, mind. I'll not pay for mange or palsy. Fly, now!"
The command provoked a thunder of feet and a brief scuffle on the threshold as a number of lithe bodies attempted to pass through a single doorway at the same time.
What occurred in the streets between midday and dusk on that date has achieved regional immortality as the Great Cat Hunt of Salt Lake City, and requires no extrapolation here. Suffice it to say the next day's Deseret News reported two discharges of rock salt by homeowners at undersize prowlers vaulting over back fences with wailing felines clamped beneath their arms, and one close call involving a dray wagon when a skinny youth in corduroys dived in front of the horses to snatch a flying Siamese. By the time these and similar incidents were connected with the increased demand at apothecary shops for iodine to treat cat scratches, and the whole traced to their source, Chickenwire Mc-Donough had crossed the territorial line, unaware of the animus against him.
In his defense it must be stated that when the day was done and the merchant found himself, among the noisy multitude, in possession of two cats wearing collars and bells, he instructed the boys who had brought them to return them to their owners: "Stray cats, I said!" The rest he paid for. The promised bonus went to Fatty Ambrose, whose corpulence did not prevent him from depositing no fewer than seventeen cats in the mercantile's back room.
The tally, once the boys had been ushered out with pockets jingling, come to forty-six, including thirteen tabbies, ten calicos, seven black witch's familiars, six tigers, one blue Angora, and nine hollow-flanked alley veterans of indeterminate color and pattern. Reluctantly—for he calculated their collective worth to be sixty dollars—Chickenwire released six cats by way of the back door; two per cage was crowding things well enough, and he needed to eliminate as many casualties due to disease and fights as possible during the longjourney ahead.
Every inch of which, he reasoned, would prove well worth the inconvenience.
For if the miners around Tombstone were content to part with two extremely hard-earned dollars for a dish of plain ham swimming in fizzy wine, how much would they pay on a one-time-only basis to be rid of the rats that plagued their digging and made their lives miserable in the tents when they slept? Ten dollars hardly seemed unwieldy. Thus, upon an initial investment of three dollars and twenty-five cents for inventory, plus an approximate fifty dollars to outfit himself for the trip, which would be covered six times over when he sold the store and its stock, Michael Aloysius McDonough stood to gross four hundred dollars at the end of the trail—far more than the amount required for a place to live and a healthy interest in a claim that showed promise. The adventurer in him embraced both the odyssey and the camp camaraderie for which he pined; the speculator in him warmed itself at the fire of the riches that would be his.
Elder Evilsizer, six feet four inches of fierce, white-bearded piety with a back as straight as a Winchester barrel, heard out Chicken-wire's proposition the next morning from the bentwood rocker on his front porch an hour's ride from town, where he was accustomed to keeping an eye on his hired man to ensure he plowed a straight furrow and avoided his secondary wife's rose bushes.
"Two hundred dollars, " he said.
Chickenwire shook his head. "Three hundred is the price, and a bargain at that. I have nearly a thousand tied up in the building and stock. "
"Two hundred dollars. "
The conversation continued in that vein for some minutes, at the end of which Chickenwire, no longer a storekeeper, drove away from the farm with twenty ten-dollar bank notes in his inside breast pocket. The sum was a disappointment, but the elder was the only member of the community who could put his hand on more than a few dollars at a time. Most of the others traded in chickens and homemade quilts.
Although he considered his own delivery wagon, a medium-size Studebaker designed for use as an ambulance by the federal army during the late war, more than adequate for his excursion, Chickenwire gave the blacksmith down the street from the store thirty dollars to replace a doubtful spring and reinforce the tires, axles, and hounds with iron. While that was being done he fed the cats, changed the shelf paper he had placed in the cages to collect waste, and organized the necessaries he had excluded from his transaction with the elder to carry him a thousand miles. Among these the item that consumed the most space was sardines—nearly a hundred tins packed in oil to sustain both him and his cargo. Casks of water, a bearskin for protection against the arctic blasts that sometimes occurred even in the desert, repair tools, and medical stores completed the kit. This last precaution came to mind while he was scratching a bothersome new itch, turning his thoughts toward witch hazel and the like.
The wagon was ready the following day. He loaded his supplies carefully, distributing the burden equally so that the construction would not pull against itself while lurching over uneven ground. He hitched it to a fine chestnut and bay he had taken in trade for an overdue bill owed by a farmer who had gone bust on the worthless ground west of the lake, and stacked the cages atop one another in the bed, lashing them securely. The cats, cranky from captivity and sensing more unpleasantness ahead, screeched and hissed and tried to claw him through the wire. And then he was on the seat and away, without once turning to look back at the enterprise that had supported him for close on three decades.
Allowing time for delays, he calculated the trip would take a month to complete. In the jockey box were railroad survey maps of die Utah and Arizona territories. Behind the seat, within easy reach, he had placed a Springfield carbine for shooting antelopes and jackrabbits when he tired of sardines, and a Walker Colt for shooting Indians and the highwaymen when they tired of local prey. The very thought of hazard set his blood to singing. He marveled that he'd stuck out city life as long as he had.
Three cats died the first week.
He blamed himself for the first, a moth-eaten tabby whose bones showed, but whose ravenous appetite and nasty disposition had convinced him the animal was heartier than it appeared and worth bringing along. After three days it stopped eating. On the fourth morning it was as cold and stiff as jerky. Then a pair of cage mates, a black and a calico, got into a savage fight, and although Chickenwire separated them by moving the calico in with the dead tabby's cage mate, the torn and bleeding combatants ' took infection and perished within twenty-four hours of each other. He cast out the carcasses, cleaned both cages, and used them to relieve the crowded conditions elsewhere. Thirty dollars shot to hell.
The itching he'd noticed back in Salt Lake City had by this time turned into an angry rash on his neck and between the fingers of both hands. Despite the application so far of half a bottle of witch hazel, it kept him awake nights in his bedroll and stung like bees when he sweated in the heat of the day. His eyes had become puffy, too, and uncontrollable fits of sneezing plagued him for an hour after he fed the cats or changed the paper in their cages. Although he knew nothing of allergies, he was no fool, and immediately connected this sudden breakdown in the aggressive health of a lifetime to his furry charges. But he had stood worse for much smaller  rewards. Come Tombstone he would be shut of the business.
He found the Fremont River three times wider than on his last crossing. Unseasonal rains in the Wasatch Mountains had made a mockery of its banks and accelerated its current, uprooting small trees and dismantling century-old beaver huts as if they were built of playing cards. Circumventing it would take him three days out of his way. While he felt he could put up with the itching and sneezing for the extended period, he was not as confident of the cats, two more of which were off their feed. Chickenwire tied one end of a hundred-foot length of hemp to a rock on the bank, unhitched the horses, swam the chestnut over with the other end of the rope in hand, and made it fast to a fir tree on the opposite bank. He then worked his way back, hand over hand along the rope, swam the bay across, and worked his way back again. After two hours' rest he spent the remainder of the day caulking the wagon.
When that job was finished he wanted desperately to make camp, but he feared the river would continue to swell throughout the night and become uncrossable by morning, leaving him stranded with his horses on the wrong side. He double-fastened everything, taking special pains with the cages, and, standing in the wagon bed up front, grasped the rope with one hand and pushed off with a shovel. The current snatched greedily at this fresh flotsam, trying to turn it downstream, but using the shovel as a paddle and gripping the rope until his fingers cramped, Chickenwire guided the wagon toward the opposite bank by force of his own might.
Halfway across, he felt the shovel slip and nearly fell overboard as he lunged to retrieve it. The river tore the handle free and took it away, the spade end ducking and bobbing until it was out of sight. Lest he follow, he grasped the rope in both hands, inadvertently creating a pivot. The rear of the wagon swung around, a corner dipped beneath the surface, the cargo shifted, and one of the leather harness straps that held the cages in place burst with an ear-splitting report. The top cage toppled off. Chickenwire, struggling to maintain his grip on the rope, watched helplessly as the cage containing two cats splashed into the water. The doomed animals squalled piteously; and then they, too, like the shovel, were beyond seeing.
The sudden absence caused a change in balance that brought the swamped corner up out of the water. Now the captain of the craft allowed the current to push it the rest of the way around and, sliding his hand along the waterlogged hemp, worked his way to the stern, which had now become the bow. He took with him the Springfield carbine. Leaning over the tailgate, he lowered the wooden stock into the water to act as paddle and rudder. Five minutes more and the submerged wheels came to rest against the original bank. He laid aside the carbine, leapt out, and with the river eddying around his hips, exhausted his remaining strength hauling the wagon up the slope and out of the Fremont's clutches.
In blue twilight he lay in the sparse grass on the south bank, soaked to the skin, caked with mud, his chest heaving and his heart hammering in his ears. He was sure it would stop. When it didn't, when his breathing slowed and he found he could move his limbs more than an inch at a time, he dragged himself to his feet and proceeded to assess the damage.
The wagon and its surviving contents had come through remarkably well. In addition to the cage, he had lost a water cask and a case of rifle cartridges, and two sacks of flour had become saturated. Some of the pegs holding the wagon together had loosened, but he was sure he could tap them tight with the blunt edge of his ax once they'd dried. The lost cats were the tragedy. One was the blue Angora, a beautiful, sweet-tempered female he'd hoped to palm off on some sporting lady with a soft heart and deep pockets for twenty dollars and recoup some of his losses.
However, he was a practical businessman who knew that every venture carried risks. If just half his cargo came through, he stood to realize a seven thousand percent return on his original investment—more than enough to satisfy any plunger, let alone one interested mainly in arranging a comfortable stake for mining. And so when the cats and horses were seen to and his bed prepared, dreams of avarice claimed him until the sun hit him in the face like a skillet.
In his charge was a particularly obstreperous tiger, a slat-sided alley fighter with one eye, a broken tail, and an ear that drooped from a lacerated muscle, who, unlike most of the others, had refused to adjust to the confined quarters. From dawn to dusk it spat and sprayed, and at feeding time swiped a set of claws nearly an inch long at the hand that opened its cage. Chickenwire bled copiously until he fell into the habit of pulling on a pair of the leather gloves he had used to work with the wire. More than once he had considered releasing the disagreeable creature to starve in the desert, but there were many miles to go and the value of each item in his inventory was climbing. Instead, rearranging the cages to restore balance, he placed the tiger's in the corner left vacant by the incident in the river. Should history repeat itself, the sacrifice would not leave him inconsolable.
Arizona offered no obstacles until the Colorado River, an unford-able torrent that made the Fremont seem a sleepy creek by comparison. There a weather-checked little ferryman loaded with big-handled pistols under a sombrero wider than his shoulders walked around the wagon, evaluating its features and cargo, and offered to take him across for twenty dollars.
"I never paid more than a dollar to cross water in my life!"
Quick as thought, the little man drew both pistols and thumbed back the hammers. The weight of the barrels bent his wrists. "Then I reckon you best do your business this side. "
Chickenwire chewed his whiskers, then paid over the requested amount. Halfway across the charging river, propelled by an ingenious lock-lever device attached to the guide rope, the little man stopped the ferry and demanded the rest of his passenger's poke.
"You're holding me up?"
"I got expenses, " said the ferryman. "What good's your stake if you can't get across?"
"What good is it if I don't have it at all?"
Out came the pistols. "I done my talking, mister. "
"I don't have it on me. It's in a false bottom in this cage. I'll get it. " Chickenwire undid the latch on the top cage.
"Back off! How do I know you ain't got a hogleg hid out there?"
"That's foolish. " He started to open the door.
"I'll blow you into Mexico if you don't back off!"
Chickenwire stepped back, raising both hands. Belting one of the pistols, the ferryman covered him with the other and swung open the door. The tiger cat pounced. Cursing, the ferryman snatched his hand back, bloody. Chickenwire stepped in, knocked aside the pistol, and threw a left hook from as far as the gold camps of California. He felt the ferryman's jaw give way and caught the pistols as he fell. He slammed and latched the cage door and pointed the pistol at the man groaning on the deck. "Can you swim?"
"What? No!" The ferryman was supporting himself on one hand and trying to hold his jaw together with the other.
"Pity. " Chickenwire laid the pistol inside the wagon bed, lifted the man beneath the arms, and pitched him over the rail. The big sombrero could still be seen riding the whitecaps long after its owner had gone under. Watching it, Chickenwire wished he'd thought to take back his twenty dollars.
He lost the best part of a week detouring around the Grand Canyon, whose size he had greatly underestimated, whipped the horses brutally over the San Francisco Mountains to make up the time, and sweated off twelve pounds crossing the desert west of San Carlos. Three calicos, a black, and an alley mongrel perished in the heat. The buzzards that perched in the mesquite bushes near his camp had grown too bold to frighten off, even when he fired at one with the Springfield and sent it dashing to the ground. He wasted no more ammunition on this project, there being more birds than he had shells.
The rash had spread over most of his body. When a sneezing fit came upon him he was forced to alight from the wagon and lead the horses, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the cats. Nothing else would bring relief.
It was during one of these intervals that he encountered his first Apache.
The suddenness of it took his breath away. He had been directing his eyes to the ground to avoid the glare of the sun, and when he raised them the Indian was there, straddling a rattle-boned paint not fifty yards in front of him. The man was naked but for a breech-clout and high-topped moccasins and carried a long-barreled rifle slung behind his back from a strip of braided rawhide. His eyes were fissures in a face the color and apparent texture of the pottery bowls that the merchant used to accept in trade from the tame Shoshone who had come to his store for supplies. This, however, was no tame Indian.
Instinctively, Chickenwire dropped the reins he was holding and lunged toward the wagon and the Springfield behind the seat. The seat exploded. He lost his balance and sat down hard in the sand. The Apache, having unslung and fired his rifle in less than a heartbeat, was already seating another charge, ramming it home with a thin wooden rod as long as the barrel of the ancient flintlock. It was ready to fire again before Chickenwire could regain his footing. He stood with his hands clear of his sides as the Indian heeled his paint up to the wagon.
Up close, the newcomer appeared to be younger than the white man had thought at first. His eyes, graphite colored, glittered between narrowed lids as they took in every detail of the wagon and its owner. At length he stepped down and, making it clear that he would raise and discharge his weapon at the first sign of resistance, inspected the horses in their traces, examining their teeth and haunches and squatting to feel their fetlocks.
Rising, the Indian pointed to the chestnut, then his own horse, repeating the gesture several times. Chickenwire stared doubtfully at the paint, which looked even bonier close up and motheaten besides, but nodded, observing that even an outmoded firearm was of enormous advantage in horse-trading. He unhitched the chestnut and accepted the horsehair attached to the paint's bridle.
The Indian showed no inclination to leave. Waving the white man away from the wagon and the rifle inside the bed, he walked to the rear and peered inside. For a moment he contemplated the strange cargo in silence. Then he reached inside, fumbled with the latch on one of the cages, opened the door, and pulled out a yowling black by the scruff of its neck. Now he grinned for the first time. Guessing his intent, Chickenwire took a step in his direction. Immediately the flintlock came up. The grin vanished.
Chickenwire stopped, raised his hands high. He watched as the man swung aboard the chestnut, expertly checking its attempts at rebellion with his knees as he slung the weapon over his shoulder and forced the cat into a reclining position, head down across the horse's withers. Then he wheeled, uttered a high-pitched cry, and was gone, galloping toward the horizon with his long hair flying unfettered behind him.
The puzzle of the cat's value to the Apache occupied the merchant's thoughts for a long time afterward. Companionship? An ingredient in some tribal ritual? Food for the family tepee? At which point he sought a better subject.
The paint proved a bad trade. It had never been broken to any kind of wagon, and when its new owner attempted to maneuver it between the traces, it fought the bridle and tried to rear. When he • dug in his heels, the horse arched its back, causing a sudden slackening in the reins, then rocked back on its hind legs and clawed the air. Ducking to avoid a slashing hoof, Chickenwire lost his grip on the reins. The paint spun and clattered away in the direction its late master had gone. In another minute only a cloud of dust remained to mark its passage.
This was not a good turn. Chickenwire was stranded in desert country with a wagonload of cats and a tired bay unequal to the burden.
He jettisoned everything that wasn't absolutely necessary. Axes were superfluous in that arid landscape, where buffalo chips served for firewood. Coffee, bacon, and flour were luxuries when sardines sufficed, weary though he had grown of them. Toiletries, tobacco, a fine old walnut rocker his grandfather had made and which had accompanied him all the way from his Ohio birthplace—out everything went. Doubling up the more compatible cats allowed him to discard a number of cages.
The load was still too much for the bay. When the animal stopped and hung its head after barely a dozen yards, Chickenwire raged, stamped about, and tugged at his beard until the roots popped. Then, as in a trance, he hoisted five cages to the ground and unlatched the doors. Nine cats bolted in nine directions. Despite his distaste for the noisy, irritating creatures, he hoped they would find enough roadrunners and pack rats to sustain them.
When the tenth cat did not emerge from its cage, he looked inside. One of the muddy-colored beasts of mysterious lineage lay licking a moist, pink, mouse-sized squirm with a squinched face. Two more were huddled inside the curve of the cat's body, sucking energetically at teats.
Chickenwire's face felt funny. He realized he was smiling—beaming, for the first time in recent memory. Enormous as were the odds against three kittens surviving the journey, he looked upon the miracle as a sign of hope. He secured the door and gently lifted the cage back into the wagon. Now he altered his plan to toss out a full case of sardines after releasing the cats and saved out a dozen tins. Mothers required more food.
New life does not greatly improve a grim situation. Not counting the kittens, he was down to half his inventory, with a wagon that was still too heavy unless he climbed down and walked beside it at regular intervals, and better than a hundred miles to go before Tombstone and the promised land. And he had a fresh scratch on his hand courtesy of the scrappy tiger, registering its disapproval at the prospect of a roommate after all this time. Already Chickenwire regretted his softhearted decision not to abandon the tiger to the desert with the others as a reward for helping out with the larcenous ferryman.
The monsoons caught him shortly after crossing into what he determined to be Cochise County, home of Tombstone and an area larger than some European countries. The rains transformed the
earth to ropy mud that sucked the wagon down to its hubs, slowing him to a crawl and obliging him often to step into the vacant harness next to the bay and pull with all his might when it stuck. At night he lay shivering in his bedroll, coughing up specks of blood, still sneezing and itching but too weak to scratch.
A kitten died. Two grown cats succumbed to pneumonia. He shared that malady and was certain that before long he would share their fate. Still he pressed on.
When a second kitten died he shed tears, but he wasn't sure whether they had more to do with his genuine sorrow or his runny eyes.
Huddled in his soaked covers beneath the wagon, he dreamt Death came to him. Deep in the folds of Death's black hood shone the yellow-green eyes of a cat.
Late into the next day he remained supine and swaddled. The sun was low when the plaintive meowing of his famished charges aroused him. His skin felt cool. The fever had broken.
After two days he felt strong enough to continue. In the meantime a calico had succumbed. He disposed of the carcass, moved its cage mate in with another, and threw out the empty cage. Resigned now to tragedy, he looked in on the mother and remaining kitten, and was surprised to find that both were doing well. The young one seemed even to have grown. Rather than encouraging him, however, the news found him numb. He was past all emotion.
The rains stopped. Almost immediately he longed for their return. He could actually see the puddles turning to steam, the earth drying and cracking like old plaster. He had not been out of his clothes in weeks; his own caked sweat grated beneath his arms and behind his knees. When he treated himself to a swallow of water from his suddenly dwindling supply, the liquid stung his weather-checked lips like acid. Despite reasonable rationing among the cats, two more calicos and a tabby dried up and died. He wondered what the next generation would make of the derelict cages along his trail.
Three days from Tombstone, he came to an arroyo that stretched to the horizon in each direction. It was steep and strewn with boulders, but he calculated that going around it would cost a week, with nary enough water left in his casks to sustain a man for half that time, much less a man and thirteen and a half cats. Gripping the brake lever to control the descent, he gave the reins a flip.
The bay picked its way over rocks of unequal size and loose shale, making gasping snorts as the wagon lurched behind, threatening to throw it off balance. A third of the way down, the animal lost its nerve and stopped. Chickenwire, who could feel rubble shifting beneath the wheels, cursed and smacked his whip at the horse's rump. It whinnied, shook its mane, and took another step.
A piece of shale the size and shape of a bishop's hat turned under its hoof. A knee buckled. The wagon lunged.
Chickenwire released the brake and lashed the whip, shouting at the top of his lungs. The bay bolted.
When the wagon's left front wheel struck a boulder, the merchant heard wood splinter. He was standing at the time and threw himself clear as the wagon heeled over and skidded on its side into the lead, pulling the screaming bay down the slope all the way to the base. Cages flew. The yowling of the terrified cats echoed in the arroyo for a full minute after the dust had settled.
Dazed, Chickenwire lay listening as the horse's cries grew feeble and finally stopped. When at length he tried to push himself up, his wrist bent suddenly, shooting white heat to his shoulder. He didn't know he'd passed out until he opened his eyes and saw a pair of caked boots inches in front of his face. "You dead, hoss?"
They were the first words he'd heard since the encounter with the ferryman. He made a reply, but his throat was parched and it came out a dry rattle. Boots squatted. Pain lashed Chickenwire again as his arm was lifted and probed from elbow to hand. The man smelled of sweat, earth, woodsmoke, and bacon. "That's as broke a wrist as ever I seen, hoss. " He raised his voice. "Syke, fetch me that busted shovel and a canteen. "
He was turned onto his back. A hand supported his head as he swallowed a blessed draught of mossy-tasting water. While Boots fashioned a splint from a splintered wooden handle and a length of hemp, Chickenwire observed that the arroyo was alive with men in filthy Levi's and flop-brimmed hats—miners, if he remembered his camp days at all—calling information to one another from their positions next to the ruined wagon and scattered cats. He learned the bay was dead of a shattered spine and that most of the cages were empty, having broken open on impact and freed their captives. Three contained dead cats.
"What about the rest?" he asked.
The man called Syke, shorter and stouter than the horse-faced Boots, returned from the wagon, mopping the back of his neck with a red bandanna. "Six in the wagon and one don't look too good. And a kitten, though I wouldn't count on it lasting. The mother's dead. "
"Dutch Bill's got him a goat, " Boots said. "He might could get it to suck goat's milk from a neckerchief. Don't know what your plans was, hoss, but we sure can use cats in these here parts. We got more rats than prospectors. "
Chickenwire made a decision.
"Take them. "
Boots's eyes rolled white in a face stained with silver clay. "This here's a problem. It ain't nothing to josh about. "
"I'm not joshing. You saved my life. I'll need a horse, too, and water and provisions to get me to town. Divide them up how you want. If I never see another cat it will be too soon. "
The miners moved swiftly, as if afraid he'd change his mind. Within the hour a gentle dun mare was produced, complete with a worn saddle and pouches filled with tins of beef and tomatoes. Boots helped Chickenwire straddle the mare and hung a canteen on the horn. One of the other miners, an honest lot, had found the merchant's poke and brought it to him.
From his high seat Chickenwire surveyed the wreckage of the wagon and its contents. "Help yourself to whatever you can salvage. I've had my life's portion of sardines, as well. "
Good luck to you, hoss, " Boots said. "My chewed fingers and toes sure do thank you. "
That night, thawing the evening chill from his bones before a fire and trying not to think about his throbbing wrist in its makeshift sling, Chickenwire pondered his future. The remainder of the money the elder had paid him for his store in Salt Lake City, while not enough to buy into a good claim, might net him a partnership in a store in Tombstone. In a year or two he might set a sufficient amount aside to invest in pay dirt. The enterprise would be a success after all, and it would not depend on cats. After all those weeks in their company he could still hear them meowing. Meowing.
He caught himself looking for the source of the fancied sound and smiled. The tinkling of the pianos in the all-night saloons would drown out the echoes soon enough. He would find the cure for his rash in the arms of a sporting lady. Chickenwire was picturing the enameled women in their bright dresses when a specter came into the firelight and slunk toward him, meowing.
He sneezed, and the fresh pain in his arm made him curse. The cat—for it was the one-eyed, vile-tempered tiger he had despised for a thousand miles—shrank from the oath, hissing and flattening its single undamaged ear; then started forward again.
Obviously, the beast had been among those that had escaped when the wagon overturned. How or why it had trailed him to this spot didn't concern him. The species filled him with rage. With his good hand he reached for the Walker Colt under the saddle he was using for a backrest, cocked it, and rested the barrel atop his raised knee, sighting in on the tiger's chest.
"Cat, you just went and spent the last of your nine lives. " Ignoring the weapon, the animal came forward the rest of the way. At his knee it paused and ducked its head, rubbing its body against his leg. As it did so, a velvety rumble issued from deep inside its throat. The sound caught a little from a lifetime of disuse.
Chickenwire said, "Well, I'm damned, " and let down the Colt's hammer gently.
Early Tombstone cherished its characters nearly as much as it did its heroes and villains. Well into a new century, when old-timers wearied of recounting the exploits of the Earps and Clantons and Johnny Ringo, they would wet their whistles and launch into the story of how Itchy McDonough, part proprietor of the Golden Gate Mercantile on Fremont Street, came to town with nothing to his name but an old mare and his one-man cat, Elder Evilsizer.