Chapter 19
Circle L Ranch outside Bosler Wyoming 1875
As they rode into the valley approaching the ranch, they noticed I.P. standing on the porch with Rosita awaiting their arrival. They had been driving the cattle for three days now only stopping to rest the cattle for six hours a night. So they were all dead tired. As Tom and the boys drove the calves to the back of the ranch, Walcott and the Texas Kid led Horace Plunkett to I.P.
As they approached Isom, Walcott asked, “Did Nick and Ray get here yet?”
“Yep,” replied Isom. “They got in last night. I sent ‘em back out on the range to look after the rest of the herd.”
That figured. Walcott thought. The boys were probably dead tired and instead of letting them catch a good night’s sleep in the bunk house for one night, Isom sends them out on another six hour ride.
“Ain’t no question those are your stock, Mr. Olive,” Walcott said, “and Horace here was takin’ mighty good care of ‘em for you, weren’t you Horace?”
Horace didn’t respond. He just sat on his horse with his head down and his face hidden under the brim of his hat.
“Red Angus and his boys didn’t seem to think we should take what was rightly yours, so we had to bury him and his boys behind his spread. So I had Nick and Ray take your cattle and head back here while we went to have a talk with Mr. Plunkett here.. What do you want us to do with him?”
“Tie him up and take ‘im around back and get down one of them cow hides stored in the shed” Olive replied. “I have a special way to deal with this pig farmer.”
Walcott was holding the cow hide he had pulled out of the shed and was standing around with everyone else with Horace waiting for Olive.
When I.P. finally made his appearance he took the cowhide and dropped it in the water trough, soaking it through and through. He then laid it out in the sun.
Turning to The Texas Kid, Olive said, “Grab him and turn him around in front of that hide and then toss him on top of it.”
Olive wrapped the hide around Plunkett getting it as tight as he could.
After a few minutes he had the Texas Kid help him tighten the hide some more. He was going to leave him here, letting the sun shrink the hide and suffocate the man wrapped in it.
Walcott thought they would be hanging Plunkett, not torturing him. He had heard of this being done before, but he never saw it and didn’t care to see it now either.
“You sure you want to do this, Mr. Olive?” the Major asked.
“Damn right I do. Anyone want to watch and see how it’s done?”
“I do,” replied the Texas Kid.
“Alright then, grab one end of this thing and let’s drag him over here where the sun can get at him all afternoon.”
It was a long slow agonizing death, which Walcott and the boys didn’t hang around to watch, only the Texas Kid. The rest of them had work to do.
After Major Walcott and the boys left, Isom and the Texas Kid stayed and watched the cowhide shrink as the heat from the day’s sun intensified.
Isom recalled when he was about seven years old and his father, Jacob, did the same thing to a Mexican worker, Jorge, accused of stealing a sack of meal flour. His father beat that Mexican mercilessly until he confessed before wrapping him in the hide. Isom didn’t want to watch the man die, as Jorge had been his friend.
“Come little Isom, you can feed the chickens while I collect the eggs,” called Jorge
“Next we clean the stalls. You can walk the mare with the sore leg. Do not run her, just walk. Pretty soon she will be back to normal and we can put her out with the rest of the herd. While you walk her, I will clean up the manure she leaves for me. Then we have lunch.”
Jorge was the only friend Isom had on the big ranch. He didn’t believe Jorge would steal from his father.
“Papa, Jorge didn’t do that, I know.”
His father slapped Isom hard in the face when he told him that. “Maybe it was you, Isom? Maybe I should wrap you in that hide along with Jorge”, he said with a wicked sneer. Isom was scared and believed his father would do that, if for no other reason, then to watch another person die. His father had enjoyed beating his mother until she could take it no longer and left one night and was never heard from again. She was the only person who protected Isom from his father’s explosive temper. Many nights she would step between his father and Isom and take the beatings for him. When Isom asked his father where his mother was, he was beaten and told never to speak her name again.
The Mexican woman he brought in to take care of the house and Isom was subjected to his father’s fierce temper as well, enduring nightly beatings. At night, when his father would drink, his temper would rage. He would rant on about anything and everything. If you were in the room with him, you would be the focus of his rage. Isom quickly learned it was best to stay out of sight if he could. At night his father would stumble into Isom’s bedroom and beat him with his belt for some imagined offense until his backside bled. One day he woke to find his dog, Duke, strung up and dressed out like a deer on the front porch. He ran crying into the house asking his father what happened. His father beat him for crying like a baby and said Duke had it coming.
As Isom got older, he started taking out his frustrations and anger on the workers and animals on the ranch. He would steal something and blame it on the housekeeper, or he would catch a feral cat and beat it mercilessly until it died. He was especially cruel to the mustangs they would bring in to break for ranch work. He would stub them out in the middle of the corral in the hot sun for an entire day without food or water. He would then beat them into submission before he would have one of the vaquero’s saddle and ride the buck out of it. These horses’ eyes showed fear whenever he was present. He liked that. He called it respect.
The first time he ever wrapped a man in cowhide to watch him die was when he turned seventeen. The boy, Brad Crandall, the son of a sod buster who just moved to the Bosler area, had taunted and humiliated him in front of his friends, attempting to get Isom to fight him. Isom new better as Brad was a big young man and Isom was short and overweight. By getting beat up Isom would only make his humiliation worse. So, Isom planned to ambush Crandall and make him pay. His chance finally came one day when he was riding back from Bosler and he saw Crandall riding his father’s mule toward town. Isom pulled off the road and dismounted. Pulling out his carbine, he sighted in on the unsuspecting boy and fired off a round. His first shot was high and to the left. He fired again, this time hitting Crandall. The mule took off running. Isom approached Crandall as he lay bleeding and moaning alongside the road.
“What are you doing Isom?” Brad cried.
Isom threw his lariat around Brad and had his horse drag him about one hundred yards off the trail behind some Cottonwood trees.
“You better stop, Isom. Let me go or I’ll kill ya’,” Brad yelled.
“You’ll kill me, Brad? I think you got this turned around. I’m going to kill you.”
Isom tied him up and went home to get one of the cowhides his father kept in the shed behind the house. After soaking it in water, he spurred his horse to a gallop and returned to Crandall. The boy was close to death due to all the blood he had lost during the time Isom was gone.
As he wrapped Brad in the cow hide, Crandall begged, “Don’t do this, please Isom.”
Close to six hours later, the last thing Isom heard was Crandall crying, “I can’t breathe, please help me,” he gasped, and then he died. It was six of the most enjoyable hours of Isom’s life. Isom dragged the body to a nearby arroyo where he dug a shallow grave and buried him. He threw some rocks over the grave to keep the scavenger’s from digging it up and possibly having some passerby find the remains.
They never did find him and after a year the Crandall family sold their ranch and moved to the Big Horn Basin area outside Cody never knowing what happened to their son.
Now as he watched the cowhide slowly squeeze the life out of Horace Plunkett he felt that intoxicating feeling begin to stir within him. A sexual arousal he first felt when he was about thirteen and he was beating a mustang in the south corral behind the big house. Isom turned, “Rosita”, he yelled, as he walked toward the young Mexican girl. He would show her again what he expected of her. What she owed him.
After Plunkett took his last breath, Isom said to the Texas Kid, “Bury the son of a bitch and then get outta here.”