The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

Kentucky for about a year after the war. I went to stay with a friend—”
    “But you are from Texas?”
    Was Rennie watching him too intently? No, he must ride a tighter rein on his imagination. There was no reason in the wide world why Don Cazar should expect him to be anyone except Drew Kirby.
    “Yes, suh. Didn’t have anythin’ to go back to there. Thought I’d try for a new start out here.” There was the story of several thousand veterans. Rennie should have heard it a good many times already.
    “Well, come and try some blue-grass training on our colts. And should you let this stud of yours run with a picked manada of mares, I could promise good fees.”
    “Suppose I said yes if the fees were some of the foals—of my own choosing, suh?” Drew asked.
    Rennie ran a finger across the brand which scarred the gray’s hide. “Spur R—that’s a new one to me.”
    “My own. Heard tell as how there’s a custom of the country that a slick this old can be branded and claimed by anyone bringing him in. I wasn’t going to lose him that way should he do any straying, accidental or intentional.”
    Don Cazar laughed. “That’s using your head, Kirby. All right. It’s a deal as far as I’m concerned. You draw wrangler’s pay and take stud fees in foals—say one in three, your choosing. Register that brand of yours with Don Lorenzo to be on the safe side. Then you’re welcome to run Spur R with the Double R on the Range.”
    He held out his hand, and Drew grasped it for a quick shake to seal their agreement. He was committed now—to the Range and to a small partnership with its master. But he still wondered if he had made the right choice.
    Two days later he dropped bedroll and saddlebags on the spare bunk at one end of the long adobe-walled room and studied his surroundings with deep curiosity. It was a fort, all right, this whole stronghold of Rennie’s—not just the bunkhouse which formed part of a side wall. Bunkhouse, feed store, and storage room, blacksmith shop, cookhouse, stables, main house, the quarters for the married men and their families—all arranged to enclose a patio into which choice stock could be herded at the time of an attack, with a curbed well in the center.
    The roofs of all the buildings were flat, with loopholed parapets to be manned at need. A sentry post on the main house was occupied twenty-four hours a day by relays of Pimas. A loaded rifle leaned at every window opening, ready to be fired through loopholes in the wooden war shutters. The walls were twenty-five inches thick, and mounted on the roof of the stable, facing thehills from which Apache attacks usually came, was a small brass cannon— Don Cazar’s legacy from troops marching away in ’61.
    What he saw of the resources of this private fort led Drew to accept the other stories he had heard of the Range, like the one that Don Cazar’s men practiced firing blindfolded at noise targets to be prepared for night raids. The place was self-contained and almost self-supporting, with stores of food, good water, its own forge and leather shop, its own craftsmen and experts. No wonder the Apaches had given up trying to break this Anglo outpost and Rennie had accomplished what others found impossible. He had held his land secure against the worst and most unbeatable enemy this country had nourished.
    There were other Range forts, smaller, but as stoutly and ingeniously designed, each built beside a water source on Rennie land—defense points for Don Cazar’s riders, their garrisons rotated at monthly intervals. And Drew had to thank that system for having taken Johnny Shannon away from the Stronghold before the Kentuckian arrived. Rennie’s foster son was now riding inspection between one water-hole fortification and another. But Drew was uncertain just how he would rub along with Shannon in the future.
    “ Señor Kirby, Don Cazar—he would speak with you in the Casa Grande,” León Rivas called through one of the patio side windows.
    “Coming.” Drew left the huddle of his possessions on the bunk.
    The Casa Grande of the Stronghold was a high-ceilinged, five-room building about sixty feet long, the kitchen making a right angle to the other rooms and joining the smoke house to form part of another wall for the patio. Mesquite logs, adze-hewn and only partially smoothed, were placed over the doorways, and the plank doors themselves were slung on hand-wrought iron hinges or on leather straps, from oak