George Washington's Ghost

Rancho Mendoza had an outstation – a couple of well-made cabins and some holding pens – located about six miles north west, where a couple of hands, and sometimes their families, wintered, keeping an eye on the northern extremities of the range. They might be cut off up there for a couple more weeks at this rate, especially if the coming rains were as bad as they had been in the last few days.

“I guess so,” Connie conceded.

The other two men exchanged looks and shook their heads. They were a father and son whose family had been in the service of Rancho Mendoza forever. Like many so-called Texans, their tanned faces and lean, whiplash frames were the result of generations of inter-mingling tribal, Spanish and New England-settler bloodlines. In these parts, few people were readily identifiable as ‘English’ or ‘European’, like the father and daughter. However, whereas other ‘old world’ ranching dynasties in this part of Texas tended to import East Coast wives for their sons, the sons of the man everybody in this part of the territory called ‘El Jefe’ – the Chief – or just, respectfully Don Jorge, had married local girls. George junior, whom all his contemporaries just called ‘Jorge’, the Hispanic version of his given name, had married a Creole girl with Mexican blood, and Jedidiah had got hitched, only last year, to the youngest daughter of a Tawakoni elder.

“The rains will come again, Don Jorge,” the older of the two Spaniards – Texas had been a mixing pot of the empires of New England and New Spain for centuries and hereabouts, allegiances were familial, political, emotional rather than an inheritance from the place one’s ancestors had been born – observed, with a sigh and a shrug which in another context might have seemed positively Gallic. “That landing field down at Trinity Crossing will be flooded again, I shouldn’t wonder.”

The tall man on the Chestnut mare nodded.

He was a man of few words who was content with in his thoughts. Many assumed he was aloof but actually, his distance and his quietness, was an innate shyness he had never really thrown off other than in the company of his family and closest friends.

Trinity Crossing was the nearest real town – no kind of city, just a community straggling along the Trinity River either side of a seasonal ford – some thirty miles to the south. In the last few months the Army had started setting up re-supply depots on the east bank of the river, work had started on a spur off the railway line down to San Antonio to connect Trinity Crossing to the West Mississippi network, and the small, dirt strip aerodrome outside the town had been taken over by the Colonial Air Force. From what they had heard out in the country the military had not been in any kind of a hurry; and the thirty or so troops billeted in the town had, or were in the process of pulling out. Supposedly, the airstrip was still not ‘operational’, whatever that meant.

From what people up country could see the Army and the Air Force had been even less well prepared for this war than they had been for the last two or three!

The tall man grunted, turning to the older of the two men in the party.

“I’ve been thinking, Pablo,” he confided, as the sound of an aircraft, its engine buzzing like an angry bee, fell down to earth from the south, “about what happens if the Mexicans come north.”

The two men had known each other all their lives.

Although one was master and the other faithful retainer, no man or woman listening to their discourse would think they were anything other than very old friends.

Which, in fact, they were.

“We could drive the herd to the east?” The other man murmured, without enthusiasm.

“I know, but that’s back country. The spring is late this year…”

“The Army might requisition the herd?”

The tall man nodded and the two men lapsed into silence.

Pablo’s son, Julio, and Connie had let their mounts track backwards a few paces; they grinned, one to the other. They were of an age, not quite twenty and nobody could figure out why they were not sweethearts.

Well, not in public, at least.

Out here on the range with only their fathers for company, chaperones far too preoccupied with ‘big matters’ to watch over them, they were safe to ‘carry on’ as they pleased.

They had been sweet on each other since they were children; yet as ranch siblings they were also inbred with a pragmatism that had long ago made them older and wiser than their years. Connie was going to a college in the East that summer; she might not be back for two years. By then she and Julio would both be twenty-one, and that would be the right time to decide what to do next.

Connie took off her hat, sat forward on her mount, a handsome black gelding her father had given her for her eighteenth birthday. They had all been in the saddle for several hours and her face was a little grimy as she turned to look up as an antique biplane wobbled towards them, and then turned over the arroyo to head almost due south.