With Blood in Their Eyes

Chapter Eight: 1901

Chapter Eight 1901 Back in Cliff, New Mexico, after working odd jobs in Texas and New Mexico, Jeff found a faltering cattle ranch looking for an infusion of cash. He bought a half interest in the ranch. Within four months he understood that the ranch was failingbecausetheowner,hisnewpartner,wasadrunkand,worse,anignoramus. Jeff was no teetotaler, but he despised those who were weak enough to have their lives overtaken by a bottle. He took what little money he had left and half the cattle from the ranch, and then he headed upriver away from Cliff and started his own small ranch. It was good to be living with Granny Jane and the children, but he hated like hell to be leaving Mattie again. He wasn’t about to lose all his hard-earned money on the foolishness of a rummy, though. He personally couldn’t stand the type. He hated weak. He prospered yet again. Prospering seemed easy. Holding on to prosperity was a lot harder. It seemed that things just stacked up against a man. By late 1902 he had a herd of 1,145 cattle, which made him neither rich nor powerful but showed him for the quality of man he was, a hardworking, smart operator, able to march right through the tough times. His former partner had sold out what remained of the herd for three years’ worth of whiskey and considered himself successful as well. A drought is a terrible thing. You’re deep into it by the time you realize that’s what this is. Not that it matters. There’s little to be done about a drought. It had started with a mild winter that seemed benign, dropping only a couple of feet of snow in the lower elevations of the Mogollon Mountains. But come spring, the snowmelt was only a few trickles in the streambeds that were gone by June. The clouds built in the summer as they were supposed to do but hung in the south or skirted off to the east. By fall the situation was getting dire. He hired a team to dismantle his windmill and drop dynamite down the well to bust up the rock and free the deeper water to come into the basin. The dynamite merely blew hell out of the rock, and he ended up with a well ten feet shallower than before. The flakes of snow that swirled in January and February seemed only to mock him. He wished he held more with the idea of a kind and merciful God, because he wanted to curse hell out of Him. 73 Thomas Cobb He had no choice but to start selling his herd. It was underweight, and the price of beef had gone completely to hell, as everyone else was trying to sell their beef as well. He kept a couple hundred head that could live off the few springs that still ran, and he used the rest of the money to buy alfalfa from southern Texas, where it seemed all the clouds were heading. He had enough cattle, water, and feed to last six months. If the rains started up before then, he was well set to start building the herd again. If the drought continued, he and every other rancher as far as he knew were just waiting to be cut up for silage by the banks. Then, in February, the rains came. February rains were good rains. They fell light but endured, sometimes falling for a couple of weeks, off and on. There was some snowpack up in the mountains that could fill the streams. And the rains kept up, harder and harder, unrelenting. They melted the snow, and they saturated the ground. The little streams swelled up, and when the river couldn’t take any more, the streams overflowed. Jeff went out one morning to ride his fences, plodding through the steady, soaking rain to find a good half acre of his land gone with nearly three dozen cattle. What forage there had been had been washed away or trampled by the goddamned cows. The roads were washed out, and there was no way, and no money, to bring in more hay. Every day, he found more of his cattle foundered in the mud or just washed downstream. In the early spring of 1904, when the rains finally stopped, Jeff Power was broke again. He went back to Cliff. It seemed that in the worst of times, the nearness of Mattie was...