Outside the barn, horses neighed and sputtered. The cattle roared, and his men shouted. These were the familiar, beloved sounds of home to North. And of doom.
For more than a hundred years this ranch had been owned and run by Blacks. The pictures of his ancestors hung inside the ranch house, their grim expressions setting standards and demanding impossibilities of him in these modern times.
Inside the stall now, North was still sweating profusely as he picked up a scalpel, still in its wrapper. He picked up the irritated, very pregnant cow’s tail, then let it drop. She didn’t react.
“Looks like the spinal’s okay, King,” Jeff said behind him.
“Good.”
Jeff was wide as a beam and nearly as tall as North; he was red-haired, bowlegged, narrow-eyed, and bullheaded. But a lady’s man nonetheless. His daddy had been the ranch foreman before him, and his daddy before him. Jeff had grown up on the ranch just like North had. They were closer than most brothers. El Dorado was that kind of place.
“So, let’s get to work—fast,” Jeff urged.
North inspected the shaved area and the black lines Jeff had drawn along the reddish brown hide. When he was satisfied, he injected a topical anesthetic along every inch of the line. After he sliced through the hide with the scalpel, Jeff injected more anesthetic inside the incision. North began to cut deeper.
There were a lot of bleeders, but North deftly stopped them. Within a minute he was popping hooves out of the cow’s belly and Jeff was pulling the rest of the calf free. They worked together, in harmony, as they always did, smiling at each other after it was over because it was a helluva rush to look into those wet brown eyes and witness the beginning of a new life.
Another life saved.
But for what? North wondered silently as he knew Jeff did. If it didn’t rain? For an early death in a slaughter-house…his short life bartered for a few peanuts? Worse, he might get himself rustled and hauled south to Mexico.
Again, North thought of Melody who’d become a vegetarian just to spite him after her first and only visit to the ranch.
North frowned as he dropped antibiotics into the uterus and then began to sew up the cow, barking questions at Jeff to distract himself from Melody. “Calf breathing okay?”
North remembered Melody saying after he’d finished a long day at the squeeze chute, “I won’t ever eat a hamburger again. I keep seeing a cute little brown-eyed calf peeping its head out of my hamburger bun and pleading for help.”
He stared at the cute new calf. It galled him that Melody thought he didn’t care about his animals.
“He’s a cute little cuss, ain’t he, King?”
Forget Melody Woods.
“Get him tagged and shot!”
Within minutes, North was done and striding out of the barn in shotgun chaps made of scarred leather. He made his way toward the cloud of dust that muted the harsh sun somewhere up above in that bluish white sky.
He pulled his bandanna up and took Mr. Jim’s reins. As he rode toward the herd, Jeff and the other cowboys seemed to float in a golden haze of dust.
When North got closer, Mr. Jim shook his long red mane and neighed. His vaqueros nodded in deference, and Mr. Jim reared.
“Easy, champ,” North whispered to Mr. Jim.
He flicked the reins and began shouting orders to his men in fluent Spanish right before he galloped into the herd. Then, and only then, as he cut cattle alongside his day-labor cowboys, was he able to forget the impossible Melody Woods.
Because he had to drive in to Corpus Christi, he quit earlier than he had in weeks. Before going to the house, he returned to the barn.
The calf he’d delivered was doing fine, so he made a final stop at that stall occupied by the mama llama and her pitifully skinny baby.
“Jeff,” he shouted.
Jeff came running. Hell, everybody came running when the king yelled.
Everybody except…her.
When the baby llama forgot his shyness for the first time and moved toward him trustingly on shaky legs, North melted. He remembered a skinny little girl on the ground, drying her tears with the back of her hand before throwing herself into his arms.
“How long since my baby camel here ate?” North demanded in an oddly rough voice.
“Three hours. Want me to feed her again?”
“Him. No,” North said, surprising himself as he strode toward the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of fresh milk. “Warm this. I’ll do it.”
“You’re wasting a lot of time on that runt,” Jeff said as North squatted near the fragile newborn.
“I guess I’m a sucker for lost causes.”
Melody had said he had no heart.
The barn phone began to ring as North cradled the llama across his knees and offered him the bottle. As the camel nibbled tentatively, W.T. banged inside the stall with the cordless. The llama shivered and stopped suckling. If anybody had the look of a dimestore cowboy, it was W.T. Scuffed high-heeled boots, wide hat, the shiftless fraud carried himself with more style than anybody on El Dorado.
“Take it easy when you come in here,” North whispered testily.
“Border Patrol. Delfino’s at the gate in his Dodge Ram-charger demandin’ access—”
North grabbed the phone. “Delfino, you’d better be here to tell me you’ve got a lead on the Midnight Bandit. He damn near made off with a truck—”
“No. Some half-starved illegals. Kids. Not ten miles south of your headquarters. From our helicopter. Brush too dense to land.”
“Damn,” North muttered.
Tough as it was in Texas, it was tougher in Mexico. And getting tougher. Ejidos, small Mexican settlements, sprang up along the southern edge of El Dorado almost weekly. The people who lived in them were unemployed. They didn’t have a damned thing to do but watch the goings-on at El Dorado.
North had started wearing his Colt when he worked remote pastures of his ranch. He never knew anymore who or what he might run into on his own land. Anytime he spotted illegals, he called the Border Patrol.
Melody’s voice piped up in his mind. “Americans spend more than four billion dollars a year on pet food. You know what else, Bertie? We don’t spend a fourth of that on food to feed starving people in third world countries.”
Bertie. That was Melody’s special name for the king. If ever there was a sissy nickname—
More and more, intense, desperate men seemed to be making border crossings. Not just men these days. Women and children, who were pitifully unprepared to attack the desert.
Delfino repeated that single word, “Kids.”
Ten miles. Illegals never carried much food or more than a gallon of water. In this heat, on foot, they’d be dead before they reached his headquarters.
North nodded glumly. “Keep an eye out for my bandit, you hear?”
After North hung up, the llama suckled indifferently. Still, North fed the baby camel with a vengeance till the bottle was completely empty. When he was done, he touched his brow to the furry ear. “You’re not going to starve on me, Little Camel. Not if I can help it!”
When North was done, he found Jeff in the tack room. “You gonna take care of Little Camel, here, while I’m gone