George Washington's Ghost

“WHO DO YOU THINK IS GOING TO PAY FOR THIS WAR THE ENGLISH HAVE GOT US INTO?”

The great and the good of the city were heading for the exits.

“WHEN THE SPANISH COME MARCHING UP BROAD STREET AND TAKE A LEFT DOWN CHESTNUT STREET: WHO IS GOING TO STOP THEM?”

Only the converted were still sitting, uneasily in their seats.

Roger Lee did not care; at the back the reporters were scribbling like Empire Day had come early and their lives depended on submitting their copy first!

None of this would go down well north of the Potomac but Roger Lee did not care a fig about that. He knew that back in Richmond and across the Carolinas and in deepest Georgia this would make a positively seismic impact. Perhaps, his Planters’ Group on the Virginia Colonial Legislative Council would finally, after a gap of nearly a dozen years, regain its majority?

War was not just good for business.

It was good for politics, too!

Chapter 5

Monday 24th April

Rancho Mendoza, Unincorporated District of Northern Texas

The horsemen looked down into the jagged shadows filling the arroyo which carved across the rocky desert. Last week’s rains had transformed the now, mostly dry, channel into a raging torrent for a couple of days. Judging by the dark clouds gathering in the west and north, in a day or so all the gullies and dried up streams feeding the stream would flood again. Every time it rained up country, the waters slashed the ranch in half and there were always cattle who were in the wrong place at the wrong time; as every cattleman knew, there was nothing quite so dumb as a steer sheltering from the wind in an arroyo in a rain storm.

A rancher working this country found out about the vicissitudes of the life soon enough. In the olden days – fifty years ago in the time of Don Carlos Mendoza, whose family had run herds on this land since the early nineteenth century – there had been sporadic troubles with the Comanches and the Wichitas, and now and then very occasionally, with the Tawakoni. Nowadays, a wise rancher co-existed with the native peoples, took care to cultivate good relations with tribal elders, turned a blind eye to hot-headed young bloods cutting out the odd steer, especially when winter was biting hard.

These days the Buffalo hardly ever came this far south, not for twenty years now. People said the rate of settlement on the Great Plains east of the Mississippi had thinned the herds that the first western explorers had claimed stretched from horizon to horizon. Some scientists said the herds of Bison had only grown so big because the diseases the Spanish had brought to the South West in the sixteenth century, had ‘winnowed’ out the heart of many of the tribes, and that it was only recently, as the natives gained some natural immunity from those pestilences that their populations were gradually on the rise again, albeit from a level that was a pitiful fraction of what it had been two or three hundred years ago.

Not that many Texan ranchers gave a damn about that; it was hard enough running herds in this country without wasting time pondering the consequences of ancient history.

Several neighbouring ranchers had started to fence off their ranges, not so the owner of Rancho Mendoza. Nothing so antagonised the tribal elders as white men stringing mile upon mile of barbed wire across their stolen ancestral lands.

The tall man sitting on his loyal chestnut mare, at ease in the saddle as if he had been born with the reins loosely held in his right hand as he rested his left on the worn, leather pommel as he studied the country around him with hooded eyes beneath the broad rim of his canvas hat, had been brought up to respect the ground, and to live in harmony with nature. To work with it, not to fight it. And besides, when it came to barbed wire, he had already seen way too much of the filthy stuff in his life.

There were four horsemen resting their mounts on the bluff above the arroyo, three men and a young woman whose straw blond hair tangled and whipped in the gusting breeze. They all felt the strange, desert moisture in the air and knew it threatened another storm overnight.

“Junior reckons there are five hundred head over there, Pa,” the young woman said, waving into the distance across the other side of the deep gully.

The arroyos cutting across the ranch filled with wind-blown sand most of the year; presently, they were ‘clean’, their sides sharply delineated by the recent rains which, in places, had drained into them so hard it had over-topped their sides.

“Nothing for it, Connie,” the tall man told his daughter.

Christened Constance Dandridge, the latter, middle name in the now out of fashion southern tradition of preserving a girl child’s maternal family name, his youngest issue had been ‘Connie’ from the day she came squalling, lustily, into the world.