Riders of Judgment
Page 13
He filled the pail with water and went back to the cabin. Quickly he made himself a breakfast of sourdough biscuits, fried steak, fried potatoes, and coffee so black it looked like poured hot tar. He began to feel better.
He managed to keep busy all day, busy enough so that his thoughts wouldn’t stray down the Shaken Grass. He shaved. He washed dishes and cleaned up the cabin. He cleaned up on the yard around the cabin. He cleaned out the horse barn.
The work in the barn was hard going. The manure from last winter in Lonesome’s stall had dried to brittle shard. He had to break it apart before he could throw it out. Sometimes strands of grass bedding wouldn’t let go and then he had to toss out a whole pie of it in one big heave.
By four in the afternoon he was dead-tired. He went over and sat down on a red stone beside the flowing stream. “Not used to the blister end of a fork,” he muttered to himself, puffing. “My fingers are straight while the handle of a fork is round. The two just don’t go together. Me, I’m a rider, not a dummed home-sucker.” He skipped a flat stone across the brook. “When I get me my big spread, I’ll have some big-footed honyocker work the fork for me.”
Presently, as he brooded to himself, black thoughts came swooping back like buzzards smelling decay. Shake his head as he might, shake it until he saw fleeting blue sparks behind the eyelids, he still couldn’t keep his mind from going downstream to where Rory and Dale and Gram and the boy Joey lived.
Great granpap! Think of it. A good seven months gone and Dale still bothered her. Seven months. Yes, they were quite a pair all right. Black eyes one day; blind lust the next.
He sat lonesome on the red stone, elbows on knees, face in his hands. He watched the stream flow toward him from under the bridge; watched it flow down to the sea.
He saw where a cross-pole was broken in the corral. “Wish I hadn’t seen that. Now I’ll have to fix it.”
The sun shimmered on the silver sage over the hills. Flies himmed just above the surface of the water. A calf bellowed for its mother behind the barn. An eagle flew high overhead. Its shadow struck him sitting on the red stone; fleeted swiftly over the running pink water.
The shadow roused him. He groaned. And groaning again, he got up and fixed the pole in the corral. Then he went straight for the meadow and got up Lonesome and saddled him. He next led Lonesome to a small separate corral where he sometimes nursed sick beef. The week before he had penned up a lame cow with a fresh heifer calf. The calf had been born out of season and for some reason had hurt its mother aborning. He decided to take the calf away from the mother until she got back on her feed. Steady suckling would only keep the mother poorly, might even kill her.
He roped the frisky red calf; tied up its white feet with a pigging string; threw it up over Lonesome’s back behind the cantle. Lonesome snorted at the extra weight; crow-hopped once to show his annoyance. Cain let fly with a deep-toned “Whoa!” and Lonesome quieted. Cain secured the calf, at the same time making sure it could breathe. Then he swung a leg over and rode off.
They splashed through the ford below the bridge and climbed the far bank. Taking the Antelope road north, they ascended the slowly rising land. Alkali dust puffed up under Lonesome’s gray hooves, forming drifting veils of whitish gray in the late afternoon sunlight.
An hour later, they topped a final sage-tufted hill. It was just sunset. The valley ahead was full of thrown purple shadows, miles long.
Below lay a meadow of waving rust-colored bunch grass. Rust Creek ran through it, coming down from the Big Stonies on the left, crossing the Antelope road, and going out to the gray desolate wastes of the Bitterness River on the right.
Just this side of the creek two trails branched off the road, one trail going to a one-story combination store and saloon on the left, the other going to a small one-room log cabin on the right. There were no trees; not a switch.
The brown log cabin on the right was the home of Nella Wells. Depending on who one talked to, Nella Wells was a pard or she was a tramp. Most cowboys thought her a real stick of a woman, hard but good-natured. Most cowmen thought her a loose woman, pretty but good-for-nothing.
Some years before, Nella and a man named Avery Jimson had come riding up from Cheyenne, she on a smart paint mare, he on a jackass. Each led a mule laden with supplies. Nella rode her horse like she’d been born to the saddle. She was a narrow-waisted weasel of a woman, with hair the color and texture of a lion’s tail, and with eyes that were always alive with fire, light green, sometimes low, sometimes fierce. She wore diamond earrings. The diamonds were light green and glowed like her eyes, so that she sometimes seemed to be seeing with four glinting eyes. The impression depended partly on her quick movements. She was so quick that brother Harry once said of her she sometimes came awfully close to being in two places at the same time. She fancied green in her clothes, because it went with her diamonds and her eyes. Her chief attraction was a fulsome bosom. Long ago she’d given up trying to hide it. Her breasts were so large, in fact, that some of the more coarse-minded cowboys referred to them as fallen goiters. Also, she carried a tomtit revolver, a pet pistol that had just enough penetrating power to break a man’s skin.
Avery Jimson was small too. But where Nella was full of animal quickness and vigor, Avery was slow, even tired, in his movements. Avery was a sick man. He actually did have a goiter. It hung under his chin like a huge purplish gizzard, pulsing with every swallow he took, and getting in the way when he read or ate. Also, he had the popped eyes of a stepped-on squirrel, wet, bulbous, deep brown. Usually he was neatly dressed in blues. He made it a point not to wear cowboy boots. He scorned them. He obviously was not a cowboy and said he’d be darned first before he’d parade around like one. He was a Harvard graduate. He was bookish. And he hated the rich with a sulphurous hatred.
Nella and Avery liked the looks of the meadow beside Rust Creek. After proper inquiry they each took out a homestead of one hundred sixty acres, Avery to the left of the road, Nella to the right, with both homesteads straddling the creek. They built themselves a long one-story log structure, set up store and saloon, and kept a small garden. Later, Avery established a post office. A lean-to served as their living quarters. The place was some twenty miles from Antelope and right on the road to Cheyenne and other points south. While they didn’t get rich right away, selling whisky, clothes, stamps, and raising mules from Nella’s paint mare and Avery’s jackass, they still got along. Both were sure that the site would eventually become a flourishing western city.
Nella worked as barmaid. This was not a new role for her. Some of the cowboys up from Cheyenne remembered her as a waitress in a Union Pacific railroad restaurant. They also remembered her as a choosy woman with a sharp tongue. Rumor had it in Cheyenne that she’d killed her mother back in Sioux City.
No one could quite make out if Avery and Nella were married. They did things together, such as take trips, buy supplies, run the joint. In their attitude toward morality and religion they seemed to be of the same leather too. Yet, somehow, they didn’t act married. They were an odd couple. He talked like a professor who’d lost his job; she talked like a lady temporarily down on her luck.
Nella got restless after a couple of years and they had a fight. After a partial reconciliation, Nella built herself a one-room log cabin across the road on her homestead. She proceeded to live in it alone. She got herself a great black dog of an unknown breed, a dog who never barked but who tore things to shreds at her least command. She got some of her cowboy friends to build her a corral behind the cabin. Later she had the entire homestead fenced in with a new invention called barbwire. It wasn’t long before a couple of steers were seen butting each other in the pasture. To no one’s great surprise, the steers became fertile. In the space of two years the two steers begot themselves some hundred calves. This was ranchland breeding such as breeders Mayberry Hammett and Charles Goodnight had never dreamed of. In fact, not even the cattle kings of old Texas just after the Civil War had had such luck.
Cattle Queen, or Queenie, continued to be choosy, just as she’d been in Old Cheyenne. First, she had to like the cowpuncher. She just couldn’t find it in herself to be friendly to everybody. She was a lady by instinct. Also, she absolutely refused to let anyone visit her in her brown log cabin. The boys could bring their lost calves to the corral behind the house all right, but the party would be held in the lean-to, or the Hog Ranch as the boys called it, behind the saloon, where she kept a piano and a couch and a pet magpie. Also, she would not let a puncher kiss her until after he’d bought at least two drinks from Avery.
Once, when Harry brought her the present of a calf, she’d met him at the door of the lean-to with the remark, “Well, Harry, honey, I’m afraid I’ve already got my hands full for the night. I have a party of three in.” Then she added in a low whisper, “One of ’em is such a big rough son-of-a-gun I had to give him knockout drops. I hope the big studhorse never wakes up.”
Later Harry played a joke on her. She’d somehow acquired a milk cow, and he and the boys roped the cow one night and led it to the Antelope stockyards. When she gave him heck for it the next time he called on her, he explained, “Well, Queenie, honey, it was this way. After the boys got crocked on Avery’s whisky, they began to complain it was wrong for a decent cow to be seen around a whorehouse. So they decided to rescue her from a life of shame.”
Still another time, a rich gentleman adventurer from New York staying with Lord Peter called on Queenie. After the usual exchange of civilities, and a coming to grips of sorts, Queenie showed him the door with the remark, “I’m too good a girl to let a lily-picker like you teach me new tricks in this game.” The New York gallant said he was surprised that an old whore like her preferred “calf love with cowboys.” She snapped back, “Well, maybe at that I prefer a catch-calf from the boys to what you got to offer.”
Occasionally Queenie showed that she was bored with her life. Wizened wiry Stalker Smith told of such a time. He said he’d come to in her arms to the sound of someone chewing on an apple in the room. When he turned his head to see who it could be, he discovered Queenie had just taken a big bite out of a red apple. That was as much as it meant to her. Stalker said he let her have a calf in pay anyway. “Because, “he said, “it was worth the price of admission just to see them bubbies of hers. How they could get so big on so little a woman is one of the seven marvels of the world. You have to see ’em to believe it.”
Yes, Queenie was magnetic, and the punchers mostly did love her. And gradually over the years Cattle Queen built herself up quite a herd. To the growing irritation of Lord Peter and his general manager Jesse Jacklin, her brand was soon seen high up on the footslopes of the Big Stonies as well as far out on the gray Bitterness plains.
And Avery? His goiter increased; his skin slowly wrinkled over and yellowed; and his eyes stood out more popped than ever. Also, he took to writing letters to editors in which he attacked the big cattle kings.
When Cain trotted up to the front door of Queenie’s brown log cabin at dusk, he saw right away she wasn’t home. Her big dog was chained to the door stoop. The dog lay across the path like a black bear, blinking, silent, legs set for the jump. Cain decided Queenie was probably on duty at the Hog Ranch.
He stepped down. He opened the gate to the corral and led his horse through. Some half-dozen calves on the far side of the corral backed into a corner and, tails lifted slightly, stared at him. He untied his own red calf from the cantle and let it slip gently to the ground. Before loosening the pigging string from its feet, he went over and got Queenie’s branding iron hanging by the gate, built a small fire out of dry gnarled sage stems, and, heating the iron, scorched her brand onto the left side of the calf. Then he loosened the pigging string.
The calf lay still, all four feet spraddled out. Cain gave the calf a light prod with the toe of his boot. “All right, little dogie, up on your feet.” One of the bolder calves on the far side of the corral came up, advancing step by slow step, snuffing, sniffing, finally getting close enough to touch noses with the prostrate calf. The moment their pale noses touched, the calf on the ground bounded to its feet and scampered away. It was still clumsy with stiffness but by sheer crude speed managed to stay on its feet. Its sudden bolt startled the smelling calf, as well as the others, and in an instant all were stampeding across the corral. They hit the far side with a loud whack, like a wave hitting a Missouri River dock, and rose up the side of the corral in tossing splashes of red and white, tails whipping around like bits of flying white spray. They hung up near the top rail of the corral a second, all in a bunch, then gradually receded, falling back, stumbling all over each other like the weltering of little waves settling into each other. They steadied, leveled off, and stood staring at each other on spread-apart legs. Finally, after another moment, they bellowed once, loud, and, pairing off, began butting each other in aimless circles. Gray dust rose in a cloud against the windless purple dusk.
Cain laughed at their antics. Then, brushing calf hair from his pants, he covered the little fire with dust, led Lonesome out, and shut the gate.
He rode across the road and tied Lonesome to the hitching rack in front of the Hog Ranch. There were no other horses around. The dust underfoot was reddish, rusty. A boot scraper was set in a log on one side of the stoop; a withered wisteria bush grew on the other. Clusters of bunch grass grew right up to the brown puncheon door. A bullet hole gaped in the exact center of the near window, cracks radiating evenly to all sides. Someone had tried to fix it with a pair of black coat buttons, one on each side of the pane and sewn together with heavy thread. Behind the one-story brown log building, very far away in the falling blue dark, loomed the white peaks of the Big Stonies. From that point in the valley the Old Man and the Throne looked like a single peak, huge and white.
Cain pushed in. The hinges creaked. The saloon was wide, with a low log ceiling. Kerosene lamps glowed saffron on either side of the bar and along the wall behind the tables. At first Cain could make out only the shine on the bottles on the shelves behind the bar. As his eyes adjusted to the weak light, he saw Avery sitting on a stool beside the bar. Avery was writing a letter. Chin gaggling a little on the great tumor underneath, he mouthed the words as he wrote. As usual he was dressed neatly in blue vest and blue pants and white shirt and black armbands. His gray hair was brushed tight back. In the lamplight his sallow face was the color of aged paper.
Danglers on his spurs tinking musically, Cain stepped forward, step by slow step.
Avery looked up. He blinked. The edges of his eyelids came partway up the sides of his popped eyeballs. “Hammett. Well. Hello.”
“The same.” Cain put up a foot to the brass rail. He glanced around at the empty tables and chairs.
“Business is slow, I see.”
“Some.” With a sigh Avery pushed pen and paper aside. “It always is this time of the week.” An old sadness worked at the corners of his popped eyes, at the edges of his cut lips. “What’ll it be this time?”
“Rye.” Cain laid down a silver dollar. It rang on the dark shiny bar.
“Chaser?”
“Straight.”
Avery set up the drink; made the change; went back to his pen and paper.
Cain took a slow sip. He heard Queenie moving around in back. It bothered him that a man would permit his wife to entertain other men alone in back. A man had to fall pretty low to tolerate that, he thought.
Cain watched Avery scratch his pen across the paper. Avery wrote with intense concentration. Once he swallowed, and the swallow stirred up his blue goiter. The swallowing reminded Cain of a just-born puppy straggling to escape its bag of waters.
After a bit Avery felt Cain looking at him. He glanced up. “Sorry. But I’d like to finish this letter before Johnny Kling comes by on his pony express.”
“Don’t worry about me.” Cain sipped again. The rye glowed in his throat. “I don’t mind drinking solitary.”
Avery shifted on his high stool. “It’s a letter to the Weekly Bulletin in Antelope.”
“Hmm. Who you rimmin’ out this week, Avery?”
Again Avery glanced up, this time with burning eyes. “Who else but that great seizer Jesse Jacklin and his high-headed autocratic boss Lord Peter?”
Cain nodded. “They are a mite troublesome at that.”
Avery laid his pen aside. His eyes hazed over. He spoke as if it were a piece he had memorized, something he’d gone over and over again in hate. “Those land grabbers! They run cattle over the public domain like they owned it. Ain’t it wonderful to see how much land some of these land sharks think they own? And worse yet, have you noticed how they’ve organized to prevent this state from being settled up? And oppose everything that’ll improve the country? The poor small stockman doesn’t have a thing to say about the affairs of his own state any more. It’s enough to drive a man to murder to see this whole Bitterness River valley owned or claimed for a distance of seventy-five miles by one man and his hirelings.” Avery’s voice slowly rose. “I say: change the irrigation laws so that every bona fide settler can have his share of the water. I say: cancel the desert land act. Then you’ll see orchards and farms in this state such as the world has never known.”