by Les Weil
The one calf was a fact, though, and for once he'd wished for Indians, for the draggle-tailed root-diggers who had begged for beef before. They would have liked it fine. Heap good, this pale flesh, soft as jelly yet. With the calf knocked in the head, there was still the goddam cow. She would bawl her jaw off and keep seeking, always seeking, breathing at the tailgate until the carcass was pitched out and then straining back and trying to turn, necked to a steer that dragged her on.
A sure-fire, all-round nuisance, that's what she would be, and more so when they got her necked and she balked against the rope. That's what she was that first day. She trailed the wagon close, mooing, mooing, looking, smelling, her bag swinging to her steps. A damn squaw grieving couldn't beat her bawl and bawl. A good mother, if something in her favor must be said. Worth all of fifteen dollars, too much to put an end to or to leave behind. She could bawl then! She could whiff and seek and stumble in her hurry! Montana left no time for birthings.
He hadn't seen much of her then, but noon and morning were enou;h. The job of trail boss in uncertain country kept the boss out front. Let her bawl!
All day that way, and then he had found a fair bed ground and. signaled back and ridden back while the wagons with the cow behind rolled on to set up camp.
When he rode in with the boys, Sally had supper on the way. Jerome, the nighthawk, his sleep finished, had climbed down from the bed wagon and was rolling up a smoke. Old Oscar had tended to his team. The riders swung off one by one and just stood there as if no chores were left to do. The cow nosed at the tail of the bed wagon, nosed and bawled and bawled and nosed. After a day of it, a man would think she'd lose her voice.
"We'll neck that cow now," Butler said. No one moved.
"What's trumps here? Someone tell me."
It was Carmichael who had answered, on his face a little, asking smile. "I went accordin' to my definition, Ram. Dispose, you said."
"I don't get this loco talk."
"We named him Slips," .1erome put in. "Doin' smart, too." He didn't need to add, "Just listen!" The feeble bleat from the bed wagon spoke for itself.
They looked at Butler, all of them, like men waiting a decision, like hopeful men, and the fact dawned on him as he glanced from face to face. They wanted the calf to live. They would go to the time and trouble of nursing it along, each of them, Carmichael, Jerome, Oscar, Evans, others. The fools! The crazy fools! A crazy little flood ran in him.
He unforked his horse. "Thing now is to get him with his ma," he said.
Looking back, it hadn't been at all bad. He'd done all right, that Slips. Got so he could travel some and not be always in the wagon, though Jerome seemed actually to like him there. Regular pet he was, a little boost to tired spirits.
Ahead now was some grass, a place to bed on that was as good as any they would find this day. Time to call a halt, too, to let the cattle rest, to make a fire and burn some mulligan and give the calf a chance to suck.
Butler reined his horse around and waved a circle with his hat to show this was the spot. The wagons had speeded up as suppertime drew near and weren't more than two rifle shots away. A breeze was tattering the lava worm. Lat Evans, riding some jug-head bronc, had brought the horses close. Good enough. Good enough.
You'll be rounded up in glory by and by.
4
LAT EVANS lay on his back, putting off for a moment the business of getting up and stepping away from his bed. He guessed it must be nearly midnight, for he could hear the cattle stirring. The moon was right for midnight, too, being a hand span west of plumb. Any minute now he'd be routed out for the twelve-to-two watch that had fallen to him when they drew straws last. Not much use to go back to bed once he'd got up, though he ached for sleep. Fourteen hours on the trail and then a two-hour watch, and no one got rest enough. Carmichael had said all he wanted at the end of the line was six solid months in the soogans.
He sat up. The mountains they had trailed through stood to westward, silver-purple in the moonlight. North and east was one long shine of land, leading to the Shonkin and the Musselshell and other ranges maybe still unnamed. He shivered a little, not from cold, shivered a good shiver while he waited for his need to prod him up.
The chuck wagon, its tongue pointed toward the North Star that the moon had since drowned out, bulged pale against the western slopes. The lantern hanging from the tongue was a ground star to guide the night shifts in. Underneath the wagon was a hump that would be Sally, for in these fine days they didn't pitch a tent for him -Sally maybe dreaming of the time he needn't cook. Out from the gray-coal fire the other sleepers lay, their bodies under cover making mounds like newly spaded graves. The night horses, staked out or tied up to the bed wagon, drowsed on their feet. One of the men -Moo Cow, it was- was snoring a long, hard, worn-out snore. Out of that little mouth so much, like a calf out of a heifer. Off somewhere a coyote lifted a call that was answered somewhere, distant as the echo of an echo. A cow lowed, and another and another. By listening hard a man could hear the splash and plop the herd made before settling back to rest. He could catch the soft singing of the men on guard, the cavvy jingle in the sleepy distance where the nighthawk would be napping in his saddle.
There were these sounds and over them a silence that was a sound itself, a ringing in the ears that might be time or distance or wind around the moon. Or the breath of prayer from loved ones far away and too often lost to mind. Poor Ma, who'd worked so hard. Poor Pa, too, high in the right but low in worldly goods. At this distance, in this freedom, Pa's moods went for nothing against the total size of him. So little had the pair had and yet stood stout, and so little now was left. Nothing much except himself and the hopes they pinned on him and he would satisfy, God willing, the kind God there who rode the moon. He'd show Pa yet! He rolled out of bed and stood up. Maybe the cows hated to get up, too, though they had the best of it, being always ready-dressed. How would they feel in skin feet and underwear for hides?
By accident he brushed a shrub, and, off a little toward the wagon, Tom Ping came alive in his covers, the black head rearing up and one hand feeling for the old Sharps that he always took to bed.
"Just me," Lat said, low-voiced so's not to wake the rest. He walked a little further and unbuttoned and let go and, seeing Tom still sitting, stepped that way.
"That damn moon!" Tom said.
"What's wrong?"
"Injun moon." Tom scowled up at it as if to put it out. "You ain't never seen Comanches, but just let the moon shine bright-" The thought made him silent, the thought perhaps of other nights down south and the sky lit up and then the sudden, fierce hi-yi of Indians and the earth-pound of the running herd.
"Oregon is all I know."
"Hmm. I come up from Texas ten years ago first time. Just a cub, o' course, and scared like blue be-Jesus." His eyes left the moon and fixed on the hump that was Moo Cow. "We used to fight shy of a snorin' gent. He'd give away your camp to a dead Comanche out of hell. I even knowed a man the law caught up with just by his pardner's snore."
Lat waited to see if he was done. "Tom," he said then, "what you aiming to do when this job's done?"
It always took Tom a little while to face a change of subject. "Why," he answered, grinning, "find me a woman. What you aim to do? Squirt on the moon?"
"I don't mean that."
"I s'pose it ain't on your mind, too?"
"All right. Sure," Lat said. Tom was forever bringing women in, as if a man could think of nothing else. "I mean afterwards."
"Afterwards?"
"I'm not going to die poor, Tom."
"Lived poor so far, is that it?"
"We had enough to eat. You too?"
"Never so much as a pot. Goin' to live rich, are you? By bein' real nice? By extry flunkyin' like you been doin'?"
"Like what?"
"Need wood? Want the teams unhitched? Anything I can do? Sure, glad to do it."
"Why not? Someone has to."
Tom took a deep breath and hitched his seat
on the ground. "Lat," he said and stopped, as if the thought was heavy. "You ever see a badger and a coyote pardnered up? Good friends, they say. Pards from away back. But I taken notice that the badger can dig and the coyote can't. The badger he digs out a prairie dog or gopher, and the coyote grabs it and slopes off, bein' a faster runner."
"Meaning what?"
"Workin' men is badgers."
"You think so?"
"Even Ram, the goddam fool! Workin' for coyotes. Knows cows, knows trails, knows how to manage, and winds up with a little stake that coyote gamblers take and has to go back to his diggin'."
Sally's yell cut off an answer. "Will you sons-of-bitches shut up!"
The yell stopped Moo Cow's snoring.
Tom called back, "A man has chores to do."
"You got to make a party of it every time you piss?"
"First two gents to the right of the ring and swing Sally Goodin," Tom sang in a whisper.
Lat walked soft back to his bed, shivering a little now that the night air had fingered to his skin. He could see the other men shifting, getting set for more sleep after being disturbed by Sally's yell. Off in the darkness one of the night guards was singing, just loud enough to be heard:
Eyes like the morning star,
Cheeks like the rose,
Jennie was a pretty girl,
God Almighty knows.
Maybe he had time for another wink after all. He tunneled back into his bed, hearing Moo Cow settle again into his strangled rhythm.
So Ram was a badger, but he had led them through the desert and up the mountains and down this side, down Red Rock Creek to the Beaverhead, through a bob-tailed town or two and by the bigger town of Helena, across the Dearborn River, beyond the Sun, and here they were close to the end. All along he'd shown his savvy, in handling men and animals and the hungry Indians who had begged along the way for whoa-haws, which to them meant cows. And to Tom he was just digging for coyotes!
Two days or so, and then goodbye, so long, good luck. Ram and others of the crew were striking south, maybe never to be seen again, soon after the cattle were delivered; and this time, this work, this life they'd had would small down to the leavings of a dream.
But north, not south, was the country for a man. It had opened like the Promised Land after the brown lava, the gray sagebrush, the heat that dried the juices up. Down from the pass the air blew clean and streams ran cold and hills and benchlands riffled with grass like growths of grain. "My lip feels betteh just from lookin'," Ram had said and smiled as others, topping the divide, had thrown up hats and fired off guns and yelled the Rebel yell and the cows moved on with purpose, too eager to be scared.
This was even better, though, this country now around, this giant spread of land, this plain on which the herd had spilled out from the hills. Everywhere but to the mountained west it flowed forever. Farther than a man could think, beyond buttes blued by distance, floating in it, the earth line lipped the sky. And hardly anything, any living thing, to see. Wolves, coyotes, prairie foxes, gophers and the like of these, which didn't count. Now and then a bunch of antelope. No buffalo so far. Cattle to be counted on the fingers except back on the Sun where early ranchers had a scattered few. Beyond them, here, just emptiness and open sky. Air like tonic, days like unclaimed gold. And grass and grass and grass. Grass beyond the earth line, which wasn't any line but just the farthest reach of eye. World without end, that was it. Ma reading from the Book. "World without end." She closed it and looked at him and smiled her mother smile, so gentle that it turned the heart. She put her hand on his shoulder, and her voice came out as gruff as a man's, "Your watch, kid!"
5
RAM BUTLER paid off in gold, standing at the bar and counting time and money and afterwards buying drinks for all. The saloon was a long, low box with a false front and a sign that said HERE's LUCK. Inside were a poker table and a wheel and two lamps hanging from the ceiling and a barrel of whiskey on a butcher's block behind the bar. The bartender was fat and solemn and untidy and kept a Henry rifle on a deer-horn rack behind him. It couldn't be a top place, Lat thought as he sized it up. It was just one they'd happened on and entered, being too eager to be finicky.
It was early yet for business. Besides the crew there wasn't anyone around, barring two who stood silent and apart. One of them was a tangle of whiskers that a face might lie behind. He acted pretty drunk and even at a little distance gave off a smell like souring hides. The other was an old man who had looked them over openly as they came in and then stared straight ahead. The first of them mouthed "How" to Ram before he poured the drink into his whiskers. The other gave one bob of his head.
"To Texas, wheah a boy don't freeze his pa'ts," Ram said and drank his drink and called for more. Now that he'd got the herd delivered, he seemed like a different man.
"I seen icicles a foot long hangin' from my horse's bit down on the Yellowstone," Slim George Stevens said. "Slobber ice. And I seen the time with no snow on the ground but cold as Christmas just the same that I would kick a steer up so's I could lie down on the spot he'd warmed."
"I made out through a heap of winters." It was the old man, speaking slowly, looking at them out of eyes that seemed to speak old times themselves. "Since 'sixty-five I made out."
"And all the time you could've been in Texas," Tom Ping butted in. He smiled up and down the bar as if joined with the rest in having fun at ignorance.
"Texas ain't to my taste."
"It makes a man real sorry for you."
"Texas?" The old man thought about it. "It's all room and no furnishin'. Just bare room from line to line, and all your jawin' don't make it any different, thank you kindly."
Tom glanced at the faces right and left as if to read there what to answer. He answered, turning, "It would be kind of dangerous for you to talk that way if you was half your age." Just the last track of his smile remained.
"I ain't had to call for help yet." The old man still spoke slowly.
Tom shouldered from the line so as to have no one between. The old man twisted around and raised his face, asking what came next. Nobody interrupted, not Ram, not Carmichael, not any of the older men that Tom felt bound to show his mettle to.
Lat stepped to Tom. He put a hand out. A saying of Ram's came to his tongue. "Tastes have a right to differ." It wasn't like himself to speak up so. He made his tone soft. "Come off your high horse, pardner."
Then Carmichael said, "Can't convert the heathen, Tom."
"It's a free country," Ram added quietly, "and that means people's free to pick the sho't end of the stick."
They smiled at Tom, and he smiled back uncertainly and in what seemed a little flood of relief turned back to the old man. "Hang on to your principles, Pop."
"Yup."
Tom ordered up another round. While it was being poured, the old man gazed on and off at Lat, his mouth unsmiling.
Two breeds came in the door. Tom motioned them to belly-up. They smelled of willow smoke and grease.
"Any girls around here?" Tom asked the bartender. With his long black hair and long black beard he didn't look like company for girls; he looked like something from a cave.
"Some."
Slim George was going on about Montana weather as if they'd had no hint of trouble. "And the days get so short it's like the sun come up just to say good night. In a month now the whole damn country'll begin freezin' up."
The old man didn't show he'd heard.
Tom kept staring at the bartender, his question in his eyes. The bartender pulled out his watch as if the doing of it was a chore. "Likely they'll parade later. Generally they do."
Lat asked Stevens, "There's a warm wind they call a chinook, isn't there?"
"A chinook is a windjammer's name for a wind that don't blow. It's like the answer to a prayer, mighty slow a-comin'."
"I might go callin'," Tom said to the boys down the bar. "Hey, Lat?"
"Men've been known to." The bartender spoke as if there wasn't much men hadn't been
known to do."
"Damn you, Tom!" Slim George said. "We get lined out on a nice, elegant subject like the weather, and you start bawlin' for the hook-shop!"
"My mind just tracks that way," Tom said and gave a grin around as though this hunger, being a shared thing, was an open subject. "Where my mind goes, I go."
"You can't be goin' far," Sally Goodin told him.
There was a twinkle in Carmichael's eye. "You got the cart before the horse, boy. It's your mind bein' pulled, I couldn't guess by what."
Tom grinned. "It don't matter which goes first, the cart or horse, just so we both get there."
One of the breeds plucked at Tom's arm. "One dollar. Good. Heap good. I show."
Tom pulled away. "I don't need no guide."
"Them goddam pimpin' breeds." The bartender's voice was louder than before. "Like as not it's his wife, or anyway some old hay bag." His eyes swung from breed to breed.
"Git out, both of you! You ain't got a dime between you. Git!" The one breed backed off from Tom.
"Good. One dollar?"
The bartender yelled, "Git!"
"Guide! With the compass that Tom has already!" Sally said.
"Now if I aimed to take me courtin'," Ram told Tom as the breeds shied out the door, "I would cut off a ya'd or so of beard and wash down just to that second coat of lava dust. It would be right risky to scrub it all off in this climate."
Tom stroked his whiskers. "My papa said never to grow on your face what grows wild on your tail." He asked the bartender, "Barber got a bath?"
"Two bits. And dump your own slop."
"Take along a shovel." The advice came from down the line, from Drury, who'd been talking on the side to Codell.
"That water ain't goin' to pour."
Old Oscar spun a gold piece on the bar. "Thirst comes first. Your old man tell you that?"
Tom didn't answer. He was looking toward the door. A tall man with a clipped mustache and a nose like a curved blade stood there. The face and height of him alone first struck the eye, and then the light gray hat without one sign of wear, the shirt small-checked of red and blue, the fancy vest, the pearled revolver, the dress pants tucked in shining boots.