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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Max Braden, Trail Blazer, Bronc Buster
By Tom Sheehan
He first hired out as a drover when he was 14, mother and father dead just weeks from unknown causes, sister married off quickly to advantage, the small cabin and plot of ground his to sell to the first bidder. He took 50 dollars and ran to the first meal ticket he could find, a herder’s chuck wagon at a round-up in a canyon a few miles away, adventure calling him by name, escape as well. The cattle, at a standstill, filled his mind with their immensity, the long drive sitting in the field of his eyes. On his cheek was a solid black birthmark he had fought over a dozen times. It was as big as a silver dollar and for a long time it was as ugly as dung. He managed the difference, control a natural dictate for him, given to him at birth and always well employed.
“What’s your name, son?” the cattle boss said, his eyes looking over a big, raw-boned kid whose age was hidden by a muscular body, big hands, a hard eye, and the ugly facial birthmark calling for scrapping. To Avery it looked like a small frog about to leap from that log of a cheek. He bet that the gross mark had been brought up before, in one scrap or another, on one dusty road or another, in one town or another. He was willing to bet that it would rival a sense of a military training program.
“Max Braden, and I’ve done everything you might ask of me.” His mind leaped with the old Indian sayings and tales he carried with him, as if they belonged in his saddlebag since the day he was born. One came at him now and he offered it up the way things might get explained; “Like Rain Walks High had said, ‘Ride the tall horse and all nations will know you.’” Rain Walks High had been an influence on him for the few years his father had brought him around.
Paul Avery smiled and said, “You ever break horse?” He liked the manner of the boy, how he looked straight back into his eyes, as if that damned, ugly black spot on one cheek wasn’t even there in the first place.
“If’n you got a horse needs breaking, I’ll get it done. If you need trail blazing, I’ll get it done.”
“You didn’t answer my question, son.”
“I already said I’ve done everything you could ask of me. No mysteries out here lest it’s injun lore, and I pack a lot of that from good teaching.” He caught a flashing glimpse of Rain Walks High, just enough to recognize him as though he passed on the faint horizon.
No nonsense in this boy, the cattle boss said to himself. “You got a job and a quick tongue, son. You been learnin’ and I like that in a fella. $20 and eats. Handle that?”
“If I don’t have to kill what I eat, I’ve got a job. My name is Max Braden.”
“You’ve got your ways, Max. Don’t let go of ‘em.” And as a judicious alert he added, “And don’t let loose that injun stuff. Keep it handy. They were here a long time before us and’ve learned a lot more than we have, all us standing on the same ground, under the same sky, day in, day out. The winds change on one man, they’ll change on another.”
When Max Braden heard those words from cattle boss Paul Avery, he spun them through his head a few times, trying to grasp the full intent of them, wondering about real meanings. Life, he would often think later on, was usually shaped by others who gave freely of themselves, like Rain Walks High and Paul Avery laying out the very ground he would walk on.
So there it was right in front of him, Max Braden beginning a long career of working for someone else, herding cows, blazing trail, busting broncs, working hard, feeling honest, and always broke after a town stop and a few social hellos. He ate sparsely in town, drank lightly, stayed away from the card table, the hustlers, and the cheaters. He was eight years on the Avery payroll with only muscles, intensity, devotion, and a full grasp on a special way of life to show for his efforts. He kept a two dollar gold piece stuffed in his saddle. It was all his, all earned, all he owned at the end of practically every month. But he’d carry on until the end of his time. “The great warrior,” he remembered Rain Walks High saying once at a campfire, “draws the bow string tightest on his last arrow.”
In time Max Braden thickened, darkened, grew trail-wise. What he learned he kept, his pockets deep, his saddlebags full.
When the rustlers hit the herd outside of Palmero, in a short gulley heading for water, Paul Avery caught a bullet in his chest. The herd was lost. Some of his own cowpokes broke off and ran. Braden stayed by Avery’s side as one cowpoke went to get the doctor, a full hour away.
During the wait, Avery asked for a pencil so he could write. He wrote out his will, leaving his ranch, “small as it is,” to Max Braden. “Son, you’re the best herder I’ve had, the best worker and, seeing as there’s nobody in line after me, you got yourself a ranch in Halden, Texas. “
When the doc came, just before he died, Avery got him to sign as witness. He was buried beside the trail beside a lonesome tree.
Max Braden was a property holder, back there outside Halden, Texas. It was less than 50 miles from where he spent his first 14 years in the hovel of a meager hut where he learned manners, hard work, a sense of loyalty that family demands for survival, and heard Indian lore and legends from his elders, all of them contending with the Indians for the land that spread around them from sunrise to sunset.
Back in Texas, near Halden, he came over a small rise, saw the Avery ranch house sitting in the sun, a small barn beside it, and three men sitting horses, as if studying the place or waiting for someone to come out the door. Otherwise, the place seemed idle, inert, care and attention off with the wind and the dust of the trail. A fence was broken in several spots, parted wire was not re-hung, and a gate sat on the ground in pieces. No cows were in sight. Two windows were broken in the house and boards had been put up from the inside. Care itself had apparently evaporated.
Max Braden couldn’t remember how long it had been since Avery had been home. It looked as if it had been years.
The three men appeared edgy, uncertain. A cowpoke-feeling crowded Braden, the kind he couldn’t get on without, or any cowpoke worth his salt. He drew his rifle from leather and laid it atop his lap as he rode in.
The first man, wide mustache hanging its ends, eyes like rifle bores, was a big gent armed with Colt revolvers. His face was flaccid and red, and he breathed hard just sitting in the saddle. He sat astride a nice looking Paint, looked at the rifle and said, “You always ride in like that, kid?”
“Only when I meet strangers I ain’t expecting to meet.”
“We’re here to buy this place.” The big man spoke. “Money don’t matter much.”
“It ain’t for sale.
“Says who? You ain’t Avery.”
“I don’t have to be Avery to own this ranch or to say it ain’t for sale.”
“No word in town about it being yours, whoever you are.”
“It is now, and it’s recorded in town, too. I must have left there just after you did. My name’s Max Braden. I used to live around here. Who are you gents?”
Comfort sat across his lap as he stared at the three strangers. “I’ve had a long ride to get here and I aim to get some sleep tonight. I don’t need company neither.”
The big rider, who’d done all the talking, said, “You could let us get some water. It’s just neighborly-like.”
“I think you best stay bunched and move off bunched. No sense floating all over the place if you ain’t abuying it. Town ain’t that far. There’s plenty water there. Me and my horse Banjo just had our share.”
“This ain’t going to set well with a certain party. He’ll pay extra good for this dump.”
“Can’t be a good businessman, can he, spending money on a dump?” He wagged his rifle, like a weathervane, pointing the way back to town. “I’m getting real sleepy, right about now.”
The big guy spoke again. “What happened to your face, kid? Get in the way of somethin’ foreign-like?” He was staring at Braden’s black birthmark like he was looking at a colt with extra legs.
Braden’s tone of voice was as hard as his neck muscles or his hands. “It gets bigger ‘n’ meaner to ill-account questions, and lack of sleep.” He leveled the rifle across the saddle.
The three riders, angry in the face but not in the hands, keeping those hands in sight while Max Braden’s rifle was swaying softly, menacingly, moved off. Outside the fence they stared back and then rode towards town. Max Braden set horse recognition in place; he’d be able to pick them out of a saloon’s horse rack, a busy saloon, the livery, the town street.
Braden scouted out the small ranch house, fixed a window, started a fire, put up his few supplies from a saddlebag. At darkness, the fire going good in the iron stove, Braden slipped out of the house with his blankets and spread his blankets beside the barn. Banjo snickered, hearing him hum as he had heard him hundreds of nights. The stars gathered when the clouds ran off with the wind. In the far distance a lobo established his territory. Banjo snickered again. Comfort crawled in the night, with a slight edge being slyly opened.
The wolf was closer. So were the stars. A hundred of them. The air had gone crisp. He had slept but a few hours. Scratching a board of the barn, his hum low and short, Banjo answered with a snort. Downwind another wolf called. From beyond the fence came the jingle of spurs, leather rubbing on leather, hushed talk, and a quick silence.
Braden slid his boots on, grabbed his rifle, one dark blanket, and slipped into the darkness behind the barn. In five minutes he was at the peak of the rise, at the fence line. He could hear horses from well outside the fence, down the trail a ways. On the blanket, spurs stuffed back there with his saddle, he was noiseless and flat on the ground, with his eyes locked on the front of the house.
He heard them before he saw them, sneaking closer to the house, five men bent on evil. One man gestured as he sent others to different spots, advantageous spots about the house. They crept off, almost silent. The one making the gestures was the big man from earlier in the day. Braden was sure of that. When the big one fired at the front door, Max Braden dropped him with one round, drove a second bushwhacker to the ground with a shot in the leg, set his sights on a dark form creeping up the rise. Fired at the deep darkness. Heard nothing from that point.
Yelling started. Swearing. Sharp queries. “Harry, you okay?”
Harry didn’t answer.
“Bergie, where are you? Who the hell is that up there?”
Bergie answered. “I’m shot. He hit me in the leg, whoever he is. I’m bleedin' bad. If he lets me out of here, I’m gone. That’s a promise.”
“Elmer, you there?”
“I ain’t talkin’ none.” Then stillness. An old Indian saying came to him; a dead brave can talk loosely in the night, for comes daylight his tongue gets stolen away by the Great Spirit.
Max Braden stayed where he was, wrapped in the blanket, as minimal sounds came through the night; the breath of a breeze, a wolf at a far cry, a horse loose on the trail, the grunts of a man as he dragged himself toward the sound of the horse, then the wolf again, or an answer.
At length he fell asleep and let the false dawn wake him, chilled but unharmed. In the barn Banjo was letting him know about thirst and oats, or decent grazing, that a new day was on him too. Braden’s first thoughts were wondering who was the boss man in charge of the purchasing committee the day before and the bushwhacker committee during the night. He imagined that he’d know the answers fairly soon; at least when he got into town the man or his intentions would surface quickly. That was sure as rawhide.
On inspection Braden found two men dead. One was the big guy, the gesture maker of the night before, the one who fired the first shot, now settled into his own blood . Braden’s shot had gone right through his chest, taking all vitality with it. Another man, gut shot, was dead against the side of the barn. Death was never a pretty sight to Braden, and this one was as grotesque as any he had seen on the trail. Some critter, small and toothy he figured, had gotten there before he did. One eye was gone, chewed out of place, like some delicacy taken first, as if that critter had known its taste before. That was a scary thought to Braden. The dead man’s lip was ripped loose, hanging in a stringy piece. Burying him would be the only way to prevent more rendering. Braden wondered about the pay scale in which the man was locked; was it worth all this? Would the man in town, the boss man himself, have worked for the same amount? He doubted the man would so. Such men always practice with other men’s hands; Paul Avery, around the campfire on many occasions, as if he was teaching a lesson on life, used to say that.
But it wasn’t a man who wore the mantel; it was a woman, dressed to the minute; booted heels, tight pants more blue than black, a shirt tight in the waist and otherwise somewhat explosive, as red as the flowing blood she had commissioned, a hat cocked on her head as if she was inviting the wind to blow her away, and knowing it couldn’t.
“I’m Nora Almond. You, sir,” she said to Braden when introduced, “are responsible for the death of four of my men. They meant you no harm. Their weapons were drawn to stave off wild animals that threatened your life, and those of your ranch hands. You had no cause in gunning them down.”
“I gunned down no body. Shot only those who shot at me. Their fusillade of bullets is caught up in my front door. If the sheriff counts them, he’ll find more than 30 of them.”
“Yes,” she answered, “if he could count that high, the clod. I have been informed that you profess to be the new owner of Paul Avery’s place.” Her words expressed a vain acceptance of self-importance, as well as her posture stretching up in the saddle, trying to be just plain tall in the saddle. Braden knew he didn’t like the cut of her from the first minute. Dislike glowed on her as if it lit her up from the inside.
“I don’t see that’s any business of yours, whether it’s true or not.”
“Everything out this way, everything beyond the divide back at Merci Duende, concerns me. On that you can count.”
Max Braden said, in quick reply, setting his own stance in place, marking his own ground, “To go along with that, lady, I’d say the only things that concern me are my horse Banjo here, my guns and a piece of land a dear friend gave me, a very dear friend.” He let that sink in all the way and then added, “And no one that touches them gets away with them.” He reined Banjo around and headed away from her, wondering what his luck would be in this new stretch of life … finally meeting a damned good looking woman after all this time, and her a stuffed toy all the while. An old Indian legend came to him, about a young brave being thirsty and finding a broken river, just as Nora Almond spoiled it all again.
Her retort flew against the back of his head as if she had hurled a spear at him rather than a taunt. “No one out this way ever touches a woman when she doesn’t want to be touched, by gun or otherwise.”
Braden marveled again at her continued sense of self-importance, and then wondered about her remark concerning the sheriff, “the clod.” That had made more impression on him than her whole person, even as a woman.
In the morning they found Nora Almond dead on the trail. “Back-shot,” a deputy said reporting to the sheriff, “as if someone was waiting behind a tree for her to pass. One round, up high, and heavy caliber at that. Might have blown a few bones ahead of it and out her front door, she was a mess up front.
The sheriff rode up to Max Braden as he worked on a broken fence the next morning. Still in his saddle, hat high on his head, he hailed Braden and said, “I understood you had words with Nora Almond yesterday. Threats, one way or the other, I take it? She get nasty? You get nasty? Someone back shot her last night. One of my deputies found her before the animals did. Why’d a man do something like that? Any call on your part?”
“I wouldn’t waste my time on a big mouth, sheriff. Anybody wastes time talking to your back, ain’t worth wasting a bullet on, woman or no woman. That woman was favored of her own mouth and though I didn’t have anything to do with her death, I can see it happening. She was a little too proud for my liking, but you sure must have some idea of who she didn’t fit with or who would profit from her loss. She have any partners in town? Share anything beside gab with anyone? You sure must have some suspicions other than me, being here a lot longer than me. I’m as new here as a store bought thing. Don’t know what twists to take or what turn. Don’t even know who serves the best meal around here, but I don’t suspect that it was that Nora almond, may she rest in peace.
“Well, I always thought I was somewhat in her favor, romantically speaking if I do say so. But too much business for me to handle being sheriff.”
Being what else, Braden almost said out loud, remembering how Nora Almond had long ago most likely put the skids to any romantic dealings. “Sure was an attractive lady, sheriff. That would have been a sweet coupling for you, if I do say so.”
“Ah, that’s okay, kid. I’ll get by, sad as it is. I think we’d of been married in a short order, though, way she favored me and my job. Star might have had a little to do with it. Some women just like the shine of it.”
It all sat hard in Braden’s mind, the way it really didn’t mesh, and the way they supposedly looked at each other; his statements standing against her one declaration about him as a man.
It was all worth a steady eye, Braden confirmed to himself.
He made sure it would be his steady eye.
One night, in town for a few supplies, he rode out as if heading home. In darkness, he came back into town and from a dark spot watched the traffic in and out of the sheriff’s office. It was too heavy to be usual company, like deputies, friends, and fugitives turning themselves in. None of it surprised Braden.
It was well after midnight when four men came out of the sheriff’s office, mounted up and rode out, on the route he would have taken if he had gone back to his place.
At a very discrete distance, muffled by night, a moonless sky, he followed them, stars his only direct company, now and then a hoot owl, a wolf calling out across the range.
Some of the talk that had come to him in his short stay in town came back upon him as he rode in the darkness. He could trail blaze with the slightest bit of information. It was a gift, he realized, that had set off much of the trail for him while working for Paul Avery, and what he had heard about the sheriff fell into place, judgments erupting, making way. “We’ve had better sheriffs,” was one comment, “ones with more than their own personal interests.” “Ever see a man’s eyes light up like his when he thinks his own spread is getting bigger.” “That man he don’t really know what Nora had in mind, and it wasn’t him no two ways of lookin’ at it, but more land for herself, the queen bee if you’ll have it on my say so.”
It was like a whole new package dropped into his saddle bag, and he’d make do with it.
The four riders halted above his ranch, in the very spot from which he had protected the place on the first night. The location, he believed, must have been passed on, so a number of things were in cahoots, narrowed down to cause and reason. He watched them from another vantage point, a bare notch lower than them, comfortable seeing the silhouettes making their gestures, wiping their noses, checking their guns, scratching. For nearly an hour they sat on the ground, jumped up, sat down again, and talked in hushed voices. He assumed they were planning a second bushwhacking attempt, as one of them kept pointing out different vantages about the area, all with a good view of the ranch house. At the end of the hour they rode back to town, as silent and as secretive as they had left it earlier. The four men went back to the sheriff’s office, Braden following them all the way, the provident moon still hidden behind the provident clouds, the owls no longer saying “who” but “how,” his mind full of confirmation.
“One eye and a sky full of stars are not enough to watch a full tepee,” kept sounding out in his head, the way promises or omens are made or kept, the words of Rain Walks High never far from his mind.
With what he knew, men and horses recognized and identified, motives and reasons brought into play, Max Braden knew the road he was going to travel. It would not be easy, but nothing ever was easy out here on the open plains, where each man, propelling his life along, did what was totally necessary, from dawn to dusk, and dusk to dawn.
He could feel the confidence riding high in him as he rode Banjo, that smooth and loyal animal, under the gift of clouds, within the art of stillness, a whole saddlebag of knowledge riding along with them, paired up until death would part them. They’d have a hard time moving him from what Paul Avery had given to his trust.
Dawn, it was obvious, would start up for Max Braden on a new note.
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