Yet the River Flows On

By Jack Lyle

In a story torn from the headlines of today’s newspapers, rancher and professor Wes Phillips faces the realities of the immigration and drug smuggling crisis facing America. Drug runners as well as human traffickers are moving their illicit cargoes to the north across the Phillips Ranch in the remote Big Bend area of Texas, and the authorities seemingly are powerless to stop it. From El Paso to Laredo, the Mexican Drug Cartels are at war with the Mexican government, and the US Border Patrol is distracted from their traditional mission by the events of 9/11, while the violence spreads to American cities.

Wes enlists the aid of the Border Patrol and the local authorities including the famed Texas Rangers, but in the end, no one can protect Wes and his new wife, Kathy, from the wrath of El Lobo, the chief of the local Mexican drug cartel. The forces arrayed against them are formidable, and their survival ultimately will depend on their own fortitude as well as the strength of family and friends.

ISBN-1-59431-773-9 OR 978-1-59431-773-6 suspense/thriller

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Chapter 1

Thursday, August 21

The water in the river was still warm, even though the sun had been down for six hours. The little group of a dozen souls gathered at the south bank of the Rio Grande at Rincon de Estradas, meaning "roadway crossings," a small town that was growing larger by the day by virtue of the local Mexican drug cartel and the fortuitous crossing of three roadways, making it a potential transportation hub. The spot where they were crossing was well traveled, being both on the trail to El Norte and being the spot where the local Pentecostals performed their baptisms. The members of the group were almost evenly divided between men and women, and some had come by bus and on foot from hundreds of miles inside Mexico for this night's opportunity. All had paid the coyote, the man who was leading them across the river and into El Norte, large sums of money for his services. The poorest among them had managed to pay the man two thousand American dollars for his supposed knowledge and contacts on the Texan side for jobs and housing. Several of the group were not Mexican at all and had paid the coyote much more to be included in the little flock.

They removed their shoes and carried them over their heads with their other meager belongings as they waded out into the muddy river. The warm water had hardly any current at all, and, when they reached the middle, it was only two feet deep. The bottom was hard packed clay that was as slippery as glass. There were no markings or other indications that this was the border between two worlds: one a wealthy, developed promised land of laws, and the other a poor, third world country where corruption was rampant, and opportunity was non-existent. All that the little band saw was a muddy ribbon of water a few dozen feet wide.

There was no moon and all of them were fearful of stepping on a cottonmouth water moccasin or an alligator snapping turtle with their bare feet in the dark. They tried to speed up the trip across, but the coyote made them slow down to minimize the noise of their passing. When they got to the north bank, they lingered long enough to put on their shoes or sandals and then, at the coyote's direction, they struck out north along an unremarkable cattle trail through the brush toward the interior of Texas and long dreamed of prosperity.

They could hear the massive four-wheeled drive vehicle that had followed them out of Rincon de Estradas begin its crossing of the river. It towed a trailer full of drugs. To the coyote and the drug cartel, the drugs were much more important than the people on foot. They made the peasants that were crossing lead so that if the American Border Patrol was waiting, the pilgrims would be caught but the criminals and their drugs would escape. At this place on the river, they had never seen the Border Patrol.

The night was quiet except for the cries of coyotes, the calls of loons, and the buzz of insects in the alluvial plain. Soon, though, they could hear a mechanical creaking sound that grew louder as they went. They broke out of the brush into a clearing where there was a small pool of water and the source of the creaking, an old windmill that was pumping water into the little pond. The coyote indicated that they were to take a break and get water if needed. All were quiet as they went about their ablutions.

The coyote and a man wearing better clothes than the others huddled on their haunches a few feet away from the group and whispered in English. The man summoned one of the young women to him with a gesture and a softly barked command - not English and not Spanish.

The three of them walked away from the little flock along the earthen dam that formed the pool. The young woman had a scarf that covered her hair and all of her head except her face. The man started pulling at the scarf, and she resisted, grabbing the man's wrists and trying to make him quit. He put one of his legs behind hers and pushed her over so that she fell flat of her back and struck the ground with her head making a resounding thump. The scarf was in the man's hand, and her hair spread out on the dirt around her head in a fan shape.

The impact with the ground knocked the breath out of her, and she was dizzy and having trouble focusing her eyes. The man tossed the scarf to the coyote who knelt, pushed the scarf into her mouth as far as he could, jerked her jeans and panties off of her, and raped her. When he was nearly through, he wrapped the scarf around her neck and began choking her so that her release from this world and his release were simultaneous. Only in Juarez where most anything could be purchased had he been able to experience such a thing. The cost was very high.

If the others realized what had happened in the darkness, they did not let the coyote or the other man know it. The little group was just eleven in number as it moved steadily north toward promised jobs and prosperity in Dallas and Houston, mythical names to these people who had heard tales of these cities all of their lives.

An hour before dawn when the sky was just beginning to change color in the east, the little band came to a dusty road where a truck and its driver waited quietly in the darkness for them. As they climbed into the back of the truck, the four wheel drive vehicle materialized out of the gloom, and four occupants of it began unloading and reloading their drugs from the trailer into the truck. They were very practiced and accomplished the task in just a few minutes.

The coyote and the driver of the truck exchanged a few words, and then the driver climbed into the truck and drove off toward El Norte with the illegals and the drugs. The coyote rode in the four-wheel drive back toward Mexico. The first rays of the sun were showing above the mountains in the east. All was well in their world.

* * *

Wes Phillips noticed the buzzards circling in the clear southwest sky near midmorning. He thought that whatever the scavengers were circling was sure to be getting ripe quickly in the hot Texas sun. Estimating the distance to the birds as a mile or so, he thought that whatever was dead was probably near his southwest cattle tank, about a mile east of the Rio Grande River and the border with Mexico.

"Damn!" he said aloud to himself. "What now?"

He turned Lily, his roan mare, toward the southwest and spurred her into a canter. The prevailing wind in Indio County is from the southwest, and the little mare must have caught the death scent immediately because she was being skittish. Wes had to turn her head back toward the southwest and had to spur her a bit to keep her headed in the right direction. He didn't want to go down there any more than she did, but he knew that if the dead carcass was in the tank, he had to drag it out before the water was fouled. Water was precious out here.

The part of the ranch he was on was primarily native grasses, some remaining from the land's natural state and some grasses that Wes had restored, but he was headed toward a low, dense thicket of whitethorn acacia, prickly pear cactus, and honey mesquite with breaks of blue sage and creosote bush here and there. That part of the ranch had been formed by swift waters from melting glaciers to the north flowing eons ago over a flood plain of much greater width than was needed now.

As he rode down the rocky escarpment into the flat Rio Grande flood plain and into the dense vegetation, Wes was glad he wore his chaps to protect against the thorns and brush but regretted that he had worn a red shirt. At his six foot two height he was high above the saddle and the brush. He stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb, and it made him a bright target. A man on horseback down there could see and be seen a good distance, but someone afoot was not visible at any distance at all. He thought that was taking too big a chance. There was too much random gunfire along the river nowadays.

He brought Lily to a slow walk and let her pick her way around and through the prickly acacia and mesquite. The creosote bush and blue sage were especially pungent, but overlaying all other scents was the unmistakable stench of death. His stomach turned at the odor and his mind flashed to the jungles of Southeast Asia. He fought those memories back.

Wes thought he was close enough. Lily made as much noise as an elephant moving through the vegetation, so just in case other humans were present, Wes dismounted and tied her off to a thorny mesquite tree, pulled his well-worn 30-30 from its leather saddle scabbard, and continued on foot, his booted feet sinking an inch or so with each step into the alluvial silt.

The southwest stock tank was ahead just a hundred yards. Wes could see the windmill even on foot. The tank was a small man-made pond sixty feet in diameter that was filled by a cool stream of sweet well water that the old, creaky windmill pumped to the surface. These tanks served as watering holes for livestock as well as wildlife, and it was not unusual to see whitetail or mule deer watering side by side with feral hogs and domestic cattle. In recent years, the illegals used the tanks, too, generally fouling them in the process. Wes began watching his step carefully because the closer to the tank he got, the more apt he was to find piles of human excrement scattered about.

Sure enough, he found waste within sight of the still tank. He could see through the vegetation well enough to see two coyotes tearing at what appeared to be a bundle of clothes laying on the top of the tank dam, but Phillips knew in his gut that's not what it was. He levered a round into his well-oiled 30-30, raised the barrel high, and shot over the scruffy coyotes' heads, frightening them away. He broke out of the brush into the small clearing around the tank and saw that there had been plenty of human activity around there recently. Human footprints obliterated the cattle and wild game prints, meaning that the people had watered since the animals had, and the animals watered at dusk and dawn.

The bundle of rags was the body of a chubby, light skinned young girl lying on her back with her head turned sideways, her left cheek in the dirt. A red scarf was twisted around her neck, and her face was blue, the eyes widened and protruding as if in surprise. Phillips concluded that she had been strangled. She was nude from the waist down, and her blue jeans and panties lay several yards from her body in silent witness to what had befallen their owner.

Coyotes begin eating bodies from the rump end, and this feed was no different. The wild animals had torn her legs and buttocks, but Phillips had scared them off before they did much damage. The girl's body was bloated and smelled horrible, but Phillips thought the coroner would have an easy time with this one. Ranchers in Indio County found bodies much more decomposed and disturbed by predators than this. Phillips himself had found half a dozen on his place in the past three years. That never made for a pleasant day.

He said a prayer for the girl and hoped that her suffering was brief.

Wes pulled his cell phone out of his shirt pocket and checked to see if he had service. It was hit and miss out there. The cell service was getting better since they had put a cell tower in Candlemas. Before that, the nearest was in Columbia, some miles away. Much to Wes' relief, he had three bars showing on his cell phone, and he speed dialed the Indio County Sheriff's office in the Town of Indio. The Town of Candlemas was closer, but it had one old Barney Fife policeman who generally didn't leave his office except to get coffee or lunch, and Wes' place was not in anyone's Town Limits. It was County jurisdiction.

"Indio County Sheriff's Office, Deputy Bearden speaking," a voice answered.

"Dick, this is Wes Phillips down in Candlemas. I've found another dead body. Strangled. It's down near the river in the southwest corner of my place. You can drive to it on the old road the well service company uses to service the gas well down there, but it's rough as a cob. Tell them to head for the windmill in the southwest corner of the property. They'll do better horseback"

"Can you stay with the body, Dr. Phillips?" the deputy asked.

"Yes, I can. Already had to scare off a couple of coyotes and the buzzards are circling. I'll be right here. How long before your folks can get here?"

"We're on our way right now, sir. Once we've secured the scene, we'll get your statement, and you should be able to leave. Unless you're the killer, Dr. Phillips?" The deputy joked.

"Very funny, Dick. Tell your daddy to hurry up. And no four-wheelers!" The Indio County sheriff, Dick Bearden, was the deputy's father. The deputy's name was also Dick Bearden, but not Dick Bearden, Junior. That was a source of great confusion for everyone. The locals differentiated them by calling the Sheriff "Big Dick" and the Deputy "Little Dick," but never to their faces and always to great howls of laughter.

Wes was adamant that no four-wheeler ATVs be used on his place because of the damage they did to the native grasses and the soil.

"We're on our way. No four-wheelers."

Wes disconnected the call and noticed that the coyotes were lurking off in the brush about twenty yards away. He picked up several small rocks and threw them at the coyotes. They retreated a few more yards and hunkered down to wait. Wes could easily have shot them, but he was committed to letting everything fill its niche in the ecosystem on his ranch. He only killed for meat, and then, reluctantly.

Phillips hunkered down too, waiting for the sheriff, squatting on his heels as cowboys have squatted around campfires for generations. He was in his early sixties but working outdoors much of his life had kept him in the physical condition of a younger man. His weight had not varied more than ten pounds from his weight when he left boot camp in the 1960s. His Scots-Irish complexion had darkened over the years of exposure to the sun and wind, and his tanned countenance made his blue eyes seem even brighter.

Wes surmised that the girl was an illegal who was being smuggled across to the US. The illegals had become bolder in recent months, and the men who led them across to safety, commonly called coyotes, were armed and not afraid to use their guns. More than once, Wes had heard the crack of an AK47 and the whistle of a random nearby bullet coming from the brush. He was a veteran of the Marine Corps and had served as a platoon leader in Viet Nam. He knew what an AK47 sounded like. He had never thought he would be dodging AK rounds on his own place in Texas, though. He had sworn when he left the service that he was through with violence and had determined to find a better way. So far, he had lived up to his oath.

The coyotes sometimes brought illegals across in broad daylight now, not using darkness as a cloak. Wes had encountered two small groups on his property just that summer. He had silently watched them as they traversed the property carrying paper sacks or cheap suitcases with their belongings. Without interfering, he was vigilant for any damage or disorder they might cause. He felt sorry for them even though they cut his fences rather than climbing them, and he wanted to be able to help them but didn't know how.

Like most Texans, Wes liked and respected Mexican people and loved their easygoing culture. He understood their desire to come to Texas to earn a living and make a future for their families. After all, Wes thought, the same motives had brought his ancestors here from Ireland and Scotland a century or more ago. The Latino family-centered culture was something gringos would do well to emulate, and their work ethic was far better than most Anglo/American young peoples'. They would be fruitful contributors to the communities where they settled if they were given half a chance. But, he also knew that their illegal status made them easy victims for employers who would exploit them, paying them less than minimum wage and trying to cheat them out of what pittance they did earn. Why couldn't the government come up with an immigration solution to allow these people to enter legally and be productive members of society? That's what they desperately wanted.

Wes was contemptuous of the employers that took advantage of the illegals, but his main argument was with the sleazy coyotes that exploited these poor people on the Mexican side. They charged them every last peso they had to guide them across. Often the unscrupulous coyote delivered them into the hands of Latino crooks on the Texas side who sold them into virtual slavery. The young women often were sold as prostitutes all over the US, and the old women would work in sweatshops. Men were taken to large cities to work as construction laborers and were housed a dozen men to a room. Wes, like most Texans, had a highly developed contempt for folks who acted unjustly, and he thought the coyotes to be the lowest of the low.

The coyotes, the four legged kind, had crept back closer to the body, and Wes threw several more small stones at them. They were getting bolder, and he hoped the Sheriff and his men would arrive soon before he had to shoot one of the creatures. The buzzards were still circling but as long as Wes was in the clearing, they wouldn't try to land and feed.

Wes heard the racket of the Sheriff's Ford Expedition scraping and bottoming out as it wallowed down the well service road toward the windmill and tank. Sheriff Bearden was familiar with the Phillips Ranch from his several prior official visits and many unofficial social visits over the years. The white Expedition lumbered into view on the east side of the tank and came to a creaking stop. Sheriff Bearden and the County Coroner, Bob Timmons, climbed down out of the vehicle and walked over to shake Wes' hand. The County Sheriff was a medium height, lean man who had once been described by one of Wes' acquaintances, referring to the Sheriff's nervousness, as "jicky."

"Howdy, Dick, Bob. How y'all?" Wes asked.

"Good." the Sheriff said. He fanned himself with his summer weave Stetson, showing his slicked-back, thinning gray hair, and said again "Good." Bob Timmons, a portly, balding man with a tattoo of a blue panther on his left forearm, walked over to the girl's bloated body with his beat up metal field kit and a digital camera and began taking photos of the body and the scene. The coyotes fled at the arrival of the Expedition.

"Saw the buzzards circling this morning, Sheriff." Wes said. "Came down here to investigate - thought maybe I'd have to pull a dead animal out of the tank. Found her instead."

"You didn't move her or disturb anything, did you Wes?"

"No, I walked around the top of the tank where the dirt's hard so as not to track the place up. The coyotes were at work on her when I got here. I don't know if they moved her or not."

Looking toward the girl's body. Wes saw Bob insert a long metal thermometer into her rectum, and start taking swabs around and in the genitals. Although he was the County Coroner, Bob was not a medical doctor. He was the local undertaker and had been appointed Coroner by the County Judge who presided over the County Commissioners. Bob had been to a Coroner's school in Austin. This situation is the norm in rural Texas counties. If a homicide, rape, or other violent crime required more expertise than the County Coroner possessed, the Texas Rangers were called in, and they had scientific and forensic laboratory resources that rivaled the FBI's.

Bob read the result from the long thermometer and pulled a small pocket calculator from his breast pocket. " She's been dead eight or nine hours, Dick," he said. "Bout two or three o'clock this morning I'd say. She's not quite in full rigor. Obviously she was strangled and raped. I don't see any wounds other than what the animals caused. Here, help me turn her over." Dick and Wes helped him turn the body, and her back was purple with post-mortem lividity. Blood had settled into the lower tissues and discolored them. Bob examined her closely and found no stab wounds, gun shot evidence, or other trauma.

Sheriff Bearden recovered the girl's jeans, and turned the pockets out looking for ID or personal possessions. Nothing.

"Well, Wes, you know the drill," he said. "We'll log her as a Jane Doe, suspected to be a Mexican national, cause of death homicide, and that will probably be that. We'll run her prints, but nothing will turn up. She was probably raped and killed by the coyote she had paid to bring her across to Texas. He may have killed her as an object lesson to the others. At any rate, they crossed your place, loaded them into a truck, and they're in San Antonio by now, or halfway to Dallas or Houston. Do you have any fences cut?"

"I'm sure I do, Sheriff. I guess I'll spend the rest of the day riding fence to see."

Bob went to the dusty back of the Sheriff's Expedition and got out a body bag. Wes had seen plenty of those in Nam. "I'd never get my hearse down in here to fetch the body." he apologized. The two of them bagged the body and lowered the back seats of the Expedition to make room for the bag.

"I'll write this up, Wes. Next time you're in Indio, stop and sign the statement for me, would you?"

"Sure thing, Sheriff." Wes said. The Sheriff and the Coroner climbed back into the Expedition and began the torturous climb back out of the Rio Grande floodplain and onto the high ground above. Once there, they would still climb almost two thousand feet in elevation back to the County Road that fronted the Phillips Ranch. From there, at the ranch house, you could see thirty or more miles in every direction, and the landscape varied from the river at the lowest point to the tops of peaks nearly eight thousand feet above sea level in both the east and west. It was a majestic view.

Wes untied Lily and climbed into the saddle. The perimeter of the ranch was ten miles around and crossed rugged terrain where the boundary could only be followed on horseback or on foot. Portions were so rough that a horse couldn't make it. A rider had to dismount and climb and sometimes crawl along and over the boulders along the boundary. Then there were miles of interior fences that needed inspection as well. The coyotes didn't want to slow down waiting for women and children to cross barbed wire, so they carried wire cutters and just cut any fence they encountered.

Not so long ago, it was a hanging offense in Texas to be in possession of wire cutters on someone else's property because those cutters marked one as a rustler. Nowadays it was just about as suspicious since cattle rustling was still a big problem. But now, the rustlers drove eighteen-wheelers. They'd see cattle in a field, stop and cut the fence wire, haze the cattle into the big rig, and take them off to sell at some remote auction where the brand on the cattle was unknown. Cattle brands in Texas were registered in individual counties, not statewide, so several different ranches across the state might use the same brand. And rustling was no longer a capital offense, although most ranchers thought it should be.

Wes rode the old fences that afternoon, and, sure enough, he found two interior fences and the road fence along the east boundary of the ranch had been cut. A few cattle had strayed though one of the interior cuts into a pasture that Wes had recently replanted in native grass. The cattle had raised havoc with the new plantings. He hazed them back through the cut and made temporary repairs to all three cut openings then headed to the ranch house in the dusk. The sun was setting, and Wes could already see stars shining in the east when he got to the house where he had grown up.

It was a prairie style, two-story Texas house that had been added on to three times in the past. The original structure, the center of the home, was a two-story frame facing east toward the county road and had a parlor and kitchen downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs that dated back to the 1870s. When his grandparents bought the place in 1908, they added a two story addition to both the east and west sides of the original house, adding a formal dining room, a kitchen expansion, and two more bedrooms to the house. Two bathrooms were added in the 1920s, and the house was wired for electricity with the coming of the REA in 1939. Nothing was insulated and Wes' memories growing up were of the place being either scorching or frosty.

Since he became the ranch's sole owner, Wes had stripped all of the old lath and plaster walls, insulated the house, and sheet rocked it for maximum efficiency. The foundation was solidly built of native stone and bois d'arc blocks. While the walls were open, Wes replumbed and rewired the whole house. He added a geothermal heat pump to heat and cool the structure. The standing seam metal roof was covered with 6 kilowatts of solar panels, and three vertical axis, maglev wind generators stood near the house. With better than 300 days of sunlight each year and a more or less constant wind blowing off the Chihuahuan desert, Wes' ranch house was off the grid and profit-making. The ranch actually generated more power than it used, and Wes got a check from the power company quarterly. He liked it that way.

The only problem was water, and that was the problem that had kept Southwest Texas undeveloped all of these years. Wes got good water from deep wells, and although the pumps were either wind powered or powered by solar cells, it was a constant maintenance nightmare keeping water flowing. And, the illegals migrating through stole the solar cells, pumps, and the wiring, making the maintenance effort even worse.

His large barn was clean and well lighted. He unsaddled Lily, brushed her down, scooped out a double ration of oats for her, and put her in her stall. He took his 30-30 out of the saddle scabbard and carried it with him to the house, intending to clean it since it had been fired.

Wes disarmed the security system and went into the cool interior of the house. His parents had never locked their doors and would have been hard pressed to find a key that would fit a door. But times had changed, and Wes had to be as security conscious as any big city dweller. Maybe more so, because out in the Big Bend, you didn't have nearby neighbors to call for help if you needed it. People out there had always been self-reliant and always would be. A man could call on his neighbor for help if he needed it, but no one made that call unless they were in desperate circumstances and had nowhere else to turn.

He threw together a quick nutritious supper of fresh vegetables from the garden and a grilled piece of venison backstrap from the freezer and sat down at his kitchen table with a tall glass of iced tea to wash it all down. As he ate, he planned his work the next day. He needed to make the permanent repairs to his fences and ride the stretch of his boundary along the river. That stretch wasn't fenced. Although it was hard to visualize at this time of the year, with only a foot or so of water in the Rio Grande, in the spring and fall, torrents of water rushing through the flood plain would wash out the stoutest fence. He hadn't looked over that area in a while. He needed to make sure there were no camps down there or other evidence of squatters on the property.

He always wore a sidearm as well as carrying his 30-30 on his saddle when he made that patrol. He cleaned the 30-30, oiled his .44 magnum, and made sure he had plenty of ammo in the gun belt loops. I might not hit the broad side of a barn with the .44, he thought, but I can scare someone into heart failure with it. He prayed he would never need either weapon, but he knew that the best defense was to have good offensive capabilities openly displayed.

His family had learned that lesson over six generations in Texas and four in that ranch house. They learned early.

His great-great grandfather, Zebediah Martin, had taken up six hundred forty beautiful acres in Dallas County near the close of the War Between the States. He was one of Quantrill's Raiders during that war. While they were in winter quarters, he moved his family from Missouri to Texas in 1863, then went back to finish out the war. Wes' father's grandparents were old Zeb's daughter and her husband who had the place just east of Zeb's on White Rock Creek. They all prospered raising horses until the first decade of the twentieth century, when the City of Dallas condemned large parts of both places to build White Rock Lake for a city water supply.

Old Zeb died in 1908 as the lake was being built, but the rest of the clan, left with places too small to raise horses, moved to the Trans-Pecos Big Bend country and took up one of the smaller places along the Rio Grande, only three thousand eight hundred and forty acres. They grazed fine Saddlebred horses, raised a few beef cattle to provide a ready cash crop, and scratched enough food out of a garden plot to feed the families. They never got rich, but the Phillips's had owned the property free and clear continuously since 1908.

They hadn't been there two years when the bloody Mexican Revolution against Porfirio Diaz started, and the whole political, economic, and social situation along the border changed. Mexican bands of desperados began taking over border towns and raiding across the Rio Grande at will on virtually a daily basis. As the banditos took sides in the civil war, they began raiding American villages and ranches for supplies and loot. When the lack of American defenses became obvious, the revolutionaries started adopting wild plans for the genocide of all whites in the states of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, California and Arizona. The fighting on both sides of the border intensified. Mexican neighbors rose up against the Texans. Texans from Brownsville to El Paso weren't safe. In 1915 alone, their Mexican neighbors and Villista guerillas killed more than 500 Texas men, women, and children.

The Texas Rangers massacred all the men over sixteen years in Porvenir, just a few miles north of the Phillips Ranch in 1916, so the killing wasn't one-sided. Before the decade was over, thousands of Texan and Mexican lives had been lost. The Phillips family had to defend their property and their lives almost daily for the first decade they were there and learned to trust no Mexican, a lesson that had not completely died along the border.

The Villistas had killed Wes' uncle in 1916. His grandparents had always referred to their son - his father's brother and his uncle - as Little Appie, even though Appie was sixteen years old when he was killed. He was down by the river looking for a lost new calf when the banditos spotted him. He made a run for it on his cow pony. His Saddlebred horse, part thoroughbred and part Morgan, outran the banditos all the way to the barnyard. He jumped off the horse and ran for the house. The Villistas arrived in the barnyard as he reached the back door, now Wes' kitchen door, and shot him in the back several times, virtually in his own mother's arms. Wes' grandfather shot and killed three of the Villistas and the rest of them fled. Appie was buried in the Caledonia Chapel Cemetery, and some of Wes' earliest memories were of going to the cemetery with his grandparents to clean up Little Appie's grave. Wes carried on the tradition and still went to clean up the family graves every Labor Day.

The Villistas were buried behind the barn in unmarked plots. Grandpa said a prayer for them, Wes' father said.

Although now they had been there for a century and had defended the land with their lives and their blood, they were still considered newcomers to that bloody country where all of the ranches were huge and had picturesque names, except theirs. It was just the Phillips Ranch.

Wes' father, Linc Phillips, got the place from his father, John Wesley Phillips. Wes' two sisters lived in Dallas and Houston with their husbands and had sold their interests in the ranch to Wes when his mother and father died within months of each other in 1988. Wes and his sisters had grown up there, but only Wes had any real attachment to it. His sisters could not get far enough away from the ranch. Wes was living in Dallas at the time his parents died and working as a geophysicist for a large oil company.

He had left the ranch to go off to college, not to Texas A&M as most of his high school classmates did, but to the University of Texas in Austin where he majored in Geosciences and stayed for a Masters. He spent his time in the Marine Corps serving as a First Lieutenant and doing one tour and a four month extension in Viet Nam, arriving in country just in time for the infamous Tet offensive in 1968. After the Marines, he applied for and received a prestigious fellowship to do his doctoral work in Geosciences at Yale, where he finished the program in three years and became concerned about environmental issues in the process. He taught undergrad beginning geology and earth science courses while he worked on his PhD and gloried in teaching, but by the time he completed the degree he had fallen in love with a fellow grad student, married, and had a child on the way.

When Mega Oil offered him the lucrative geophysics job in Dallas, the salary was three times what he could have earned as a college instructor, so he took the job, even though his wife, an Easterner, was not particularly happy to be going to Texas. He spent the next fourteen years helping search for oil all over the globe, but his real reward came from serving as an adjunct professor at a local University teaching Geosciences. He loved the interaction with the high caliber students that University attracted and the camaraderie with his fellow faculty members. He was able to pursue his interests in the environmental arena as well, being one of the few petroleum geologists to belong to the Sierra Club and other environmental groups.

The opportunity to buy his sisters out of the ranch arose, and he leapt at the chance even though he had to cash out his retirement account at Mega Oil to fund the purchase. His wife, Becky, was not happy about that, but Wes felt that he had to do it. He felt part of that land, and he had become somewhat of an expert on the environmental issues of that area of Texas. Becky hated the ranch.

The oil downturn happened just about the time Wes and Becky's only child, John Wesley Phillips, graduated with a degree in Environmental Science. Mega Oil, like many others, downsized, and their exploration people were the first to be let go. There was no point exploring for oil if the price of crude was below what it cost to get it out of the ground. Wes found himself out of a job but with a nice separation deal that gave him some time to find another. He talked to the Dean of the Geosciences Department about going full time, but their programs were tied in large part to the big oil companies that hired their graduates, so the prospects of a full-time job there were slim. The Dean did give him a flyer that had come in from Mountainside University in Mountainside, down in the Big Bend country about 65 miles from Wes' ranch, wanting to interview candidates for two open professorships in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department. It was a small college, known primarily for being the only school in Texas to offer a degree in Rodeo Cowboying. Wes was dubious but gave the Dean at Mountainside a call to see if the positions were still open. They were, and two or three faxes later, Wes had an interview. Becky was not happy about that, either.

Some people just can't adapt to the Big Bend country. They can't get used to the huge expanse of sky, the long-distance vistas, the constant wind whipping across the Chihuahuan desert, the intense heat in the summer and the numbing cold in the winter, driving eighty long miles to get to a grocery store, even farther to a doctor or hospital, but the night - most of all the night - when there is no light other than that cast from heavenly bodies, just freak city dwellers out completely. The darkness becomes palpable. Becky was one of those people.

Wes got the job at Mountainside, and they moved to the ranch, but Becky was gone within a year. She had remarried to a tax attorney in Oklahoma City. Wes settled into a necessarily frugal bachelor lifestyle and immersed himself in his teaching responsibilities, developing one of the most popular elective courses on the small campus dealing with the history, geology, geography, and environmental science of the Trans-Pecos region. Most of the students at Mountainside U. came from Southwest Texas farming and ranching families and were as connected to the land as Wes was. The students were not of the intellectual caliber that Wes had taught in Dallas, but they were much more enthusiastic about the subject matter than any group of students Wes had ever known. He was able to arrange his classes so that he only commuted the sixty-five miles each way from his ranch three days a week, and he spent the rest of his time working the ranch and pursuing his grasslands restoration projects. These days, trying to deal with the problems the illegals crossing his property brought to his doorstep took up more and more of his time.

Fall classes started again the next Monday, so Wes spent the rest of his evening getting lecture notes, syllabi, and handouts ready for the first week of classes. He had taught these courses for almost ten years now, so it wasn't hard getting ready. He was looking for ways to bring the material up-to-date and make it fresh. The part he enjoyed most about the fall semester was having his environmental science class out to the ranch for a weekend workshop. In September, when the weather cooled a bit, the students came out and camped on the ranch and started work on the term report they owed him as the capstone of the course. He had several graduate students and others who served as monitors and part-time chaperones to make sure the young adult hormones didn't get completely out of hand. The students had a good time, and Wes enjoyed having young people on the place.

Before going to bed, Wes checked the messages on his answering machine and found that his son, John, was driving down from Austin the next day for a weekend visit. He would be at the ranch by three in the afternoon, so Wes thought they would have plenty of time to catch up on things. He turned in happy and secure, looking forward to the new day, unaware of how his life was about to change.

His last thoughts were of the dead girl he had found.