I always brought Tom a half-gallon jar of Jack D when I came calling. He regularly told me it was a welcome change from the moonshine he habitually drank. Even five years into his second century of life, and a couple of years into his third century on earth, Tom was still whipcord tough, and he had most of his own teeth. He maintained his longevity was a combination of his bloodline and pure meanness cured with 'shine and baccy'. Maybe he was right. I was pushing forty and I'd have bet that at age eighty, the old man could have still beaten me over a hundred yards and take me down if he had to. Now a mass of aches from his much-broken limbs had slowed him down some. He needed a stick on bad days, but he still redefined tough for me. He maintained his shooting eye was just as good as it ever was, despite the bifocals he needed for close work.

Now, as he sat contemplating where to begin his tale, his expression had a softer set to it than was usual. I'd grown used to the little changes in the years I'd known him. The further back his razor sharp memory went the softer the expression, for the most part anyway. Tonight he was pushing back the mists of a time long ago. When he started to talk, there was a touch of longing there as well, mixed in with that whisky and smoke gravel voice.

'We got news that a woman was missing. She was well known in the Texas and New Mexico borderlands. Her name was Mary. She was maybe 55 or so, bit strange in the head but she was okay. Real loner! Didn't have any truck with men, or women for that matter, 'cept one man. Mary was a prospector of sorts. She had a little cabin on one of the ranches. It was an old line shack and she just set up home there. The fella who owned the place let her stay for free. Some said that he maybe looked after her in return for a few favors. Never did know the truth of that, but I think they did have something going.' The old man took a reflective sip of his drink.
My lips and tongue tingled at the memory of the taste of bourbon. I hadn't had a drink since 1987. Not since I'd buried Jenna and our unborn son. Memories again, the curse of being who I was. It took an effort, but I pushed my black thoughts aside to concentrate on the old man.

'I never saw Mary at her best,' Tom gave a faint grimace at an image that crossed the place behind his eyes. 'In fact I never saw her alive, but from what I'd heard, she had been a looker at one time. So if that rancher, Dace Royal was his name, was getting a poke occasionally, it obviously suited them both. He was a widower. Some said Mary had been a whore up in Tucson before she came south to the border. It didn't matter either way. She didn't deserve what happened to her. No one deserved that, not even the devil himself.'

Tom dropped the remains of his smoke into his ashtray. It was an old Chevrolet hubcap that sat on the porch boards by the whisky jar. He took another big shot from his glass. I saw the whisky shudder its way through him. What he was seeing in his mind's eye wasn't pretty, that's for sure. I don't think in all the years I had known him, I'd ever seen Tom so close to being truly upset about anything. He proceeded to tell me about the woman called Mary, about how she spent half her time camping out alone in the badlands. He said she had been searching for something, but no one ever knew what.

'She had a mule with a packsaddle, and an old '95 Browning lever gun.' said Tom. 'Apparently she could use it pretty good.  Anyway, this time she'd not long come back from one of her spells away. Dace swung by the shack to say 'howdy' but found her gone again, along with the mule. Thing was the packsaddle was there along with her boots and what Dace guessed were most of her clothes.  There was a half-ate meal on the table. The door was open and a chair tipped over. The lever-gun was gone. You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure she'd been took. Dace wore out his horse getting back to the ranch. We put up a search party, four Rangers including me in my first year, and every cowhand from the neighboring ranches. We had a tracker too. He was a mean Apache dog soldier everyone just called Snake, on account of his eyes. Never seemed to blink.'

Tom started rolling another cigarette one-handed, as always. As he fashioned the smoke, he continued to scratch Pawnee's ears with the tips of the fingers of his free hand. The cat's purring seemed as loud as the sound of a two-stroke trail bike up real close. Perhaps it wasn't that the old cat had wound up its motor, it might have just been the hush that seemed to have fallen into the air around us. Even the night insects seemed to have lost their collective voice for the moment. 

'There were maybe twenty-five of us on the search. The Captain split us into five groups. Plan was we all fanned out from Mary's shack and covered as much ground as we could. 'Cept for the group that had Snake in it. That group was made up of the Captain, Dace Royal, a cowboy from the Circle Deuce, the next door ranch, and me. Captain put Snake on the trail. He had already checked out the yard and said there were at least three men and Mary who was barefoot. That was before they got on their horses. Said the barefoot woman had been put on the mule. A drop or two of dried blood in the dirt pointed to her having been cold-cocked and tied on the pack animal, he said. I learned to hate that Snake over the next few years, but hell he was a tracker and a half. I ended up shooting him in 1918 or '19, but that's another story.' Tom paused for a moment and did his thing with a match to fire up his smoke.

'To cut it all down to size,' he said through the sweet blue haze. 'We found her about twenty miles from her shack. They'd cut down an arroyo heading for the river up Presidio way. They stopped by a grove of cottonwoods to have their fun.'  Old Tom stopped again and tried to blink away another image which had painted itself...behind his eyes.

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