Shortgrass Song

by Mike Blakely

The cabin door burst open, and Ab hopped out onto the porch. He hadn’t even taken the time to strap on his peg. The hollow length of his pants leg flailed wildly as he struggled to balance himself. “Pete!” he yelled. “What’s he doing on that horse?”

  “I made him a cowhand,” Pete said, reining his horse to face his father.

  “His job is farming. Get him off that horse.”

  “You told me to run this ranch as I see fit,” Pete said. “I see fit to make Caleb a cowhand. He’s almost a grown man, Papa. He’s old enough to pick the kind of work he wants.”

  Caleb didn’t feel almost grown, not with Pete doing all his talking for him. He felt Sam Dugan looking at him with disgust. He felt hollow and gutless. A spark of resentment flared within him, and a deep simmering rage began to move.

  “Get him off that horse, or you can get off this ranch,” Ab said.

  “You made me manager. I say Caleb is gonna work cows now.”

  “I’ll go draw your wages, then.” Ab spoke as if addressing a common ranch hand. “I can get another manager.” He hopped back toward the cabin door.

  “Wait!” Caleb shouted. “You don’t have to draw anybody’s wages. If you don’t want me workin’ your cows, I won’t work ’em.”

  “Caleb!” Pete scolded under his breath.

  Ab held the doorframe and balanced on his one leg. “Now that’s talking sense,” he said.

  “What the hell would you know about talking sense?” Caleb’s ire began to boil. It felt good.

  “What did you say to me, boy?” Ab growled.

  “I said what the hell would you know about talking sense, old man? You don’t know your sons from your wage hands.”

  Sam Dugan and Piggin’ String McCoy traded looks. But Pete was worried. He knew Caleb was slow to anger but had a tendency to erupt once in a while over the smallest thing. He had once seen Caleb chase Matthew over a fence in a snarling rage simply because Matthew had called him a plowboy one time too many.

  “You get off that horse and stand there till I get my leg on,” Ab ordered.

  “You can stick that leg up your ass for all I care,” Caleb said. He opened a floodgate on a world of frustration he had held back for years.

  “Come here!” Ab shouted, red-faced.

  “Come out here and get me, you crippled old son of a bitch. I’ll be in those mountains before you open the gate.”

  “You’ll be in that cornfield by the time I get my leg on, or you’ll feel my razor strap on your hind end! I won’t let you run off to those mountains and get yourself killed like you did…” Ab caught his words in his throat but made the mistake of glancing at the graves.

  Caleb let his old festering guilt turn to wrath. He advanced on his father, feeling the power of the horse through his spurs. “I didn’t get my mother killed. A log fell on her. And as for Matthew, it was your old war pal that killed him. You should have shot Cheyenne Dutch a long time before Javier did. It was your fault.” He took devious delight in turning the guilt back on his father.

  Ab’s leg was trembling under him. “Come here, boy!”

  Caleb reined Five Spot back toward the bunkhouse.

  “Caleb! I’m strapping my leg on!” Ab turned into the cabin and slammed the door behind him.

  “Hot damn,” Sam Dugan said.

  Pete spurred his horse and overtook Caleb. “Where are you goin’?”

  “I’m gonna roll some clothes up in a blanket and get some money.”

  “Then what?”

  Caleb pointed at the Rampart Range. “I’m goin’ up to see those mountains, first. Maybe I’ll hire on at one of those ranches over in South Park for the roundup. Then I thought I might go up to the Palouse country and see those Nez Perce horses.”

  “What?” Pete said. “Now slow down and think for a minute. You’re makin’ up your mind too fast.”

  Caleb chuckled and felt a great wave of oppression gush from him. “It ain’t sudden, Pete. It’s a long time comin’.”

  “Well, how far away is the Palouse country?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out.”

  Pete grunted, trying to formulate his thoughts into words. “Well … Come back in a month or two. Maybe Papa will change his mind by then.”

  Caleb chuckled again. “He won’t come to it that quick. I’ll give it a year.”

  “A year!”

  “Yeah.” He looked toward the cabin. “I’ll see you when Buster’s flower garden starts in blooming again next spring. I don’t care if Papa changes his mind or not, but I’ll come back to see you and tell you what all I’ve done. That’s a promise.” He shook Pete’s hand and loped toward Buster’s house.

  Ab’s wooden leg tapped down the steps of the front porch. He stalked toward the group of mounted men as Pete returned to them. “Where’s that boy going?”

  “He’s leavin’,” Pete said.

  “Well, go catch him!”

  Pete looked down on his father. He had become an old man in one winter’s time. “Go catch him yourself,” he said. “It was you that ran him off.” He spurred his horse for the open range and all the cowboys followed, not wanting to stand alone with old Ab Holcomb.

  Though Buster had not heard the words, he had watched the entire confrontation from his cabin and knew something had gone wrong with Pete’s plan to make a cowboy out of Caleb. “How long?” he asked, when Caleb told him he would go away.

  “I promised Pete I’d come back and tell him some wild stories when your wildflowers start in blooming next spring.”

  “You got enough money?”

  “Yeah. But I need a rifle. I’ll trade you my other four horses for your Winchester repeater.” He was tying his blankets and clothes in a roll.

  “You can have the rifle,” Buster said.

  “I don’t want you to give me anything. I’ll trade you the horses for it.”

  “The rifle ain’t worth that much. You can take it on loan, and my fiddle, too.”

  “I can’t take your fiddle.”

  “Yes you can, and you will take it, too. A man who can fiddle won’t never go hungry.” Buster carried the fiddle and the rifle outside and tied them to Caleb’s saddle. “Won’t get rich, but you won’t go hungry.”

  Caleb tied his bedroll down to the saddle’s cantle strings and mounted. “Well, so long, Buster,” he said. He wanted to say more, but he looked back toward the cabin and saw his father coming. He shook Buster’s hand and rode around the cornfield toward Monument Creek. The mare grunted and heaved under him as she ran, feeding on the excitement she sensed through the saddle. Caleb gave her rein as he embarked upon the quest for a vision he had seen of himself: riding by day, singing by night, surrounded by admiring friends who held him at fault for nothing.

  Buster stood in the shadow of his cabin and watched the young man mount the Arapaho Trail. He wanted to take Ab and shake some sense into him. He had seen friends sold south before the war. He had watched Miss Ella fall under the ridge log. He had lost touch with Long Fingers and left his own unborn child in the Indian Territory. Matthew was dead and Javier was gone. But none of it caused him the kind of despair he felt watching Caleb ride away.

  He heard a splash in the irrigation ditch and saw Ab floundering across.

  “Buster! What in Hades do you mean, letting him ride off like that?”

  Buster watched Caleb top the bald hill across the creek. “He ain’t my son.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  It took Milt Starling about fifteen minutes every morning to work the cricks and cramps out of his legs before he could get up. The left knee and the right ankle usually gave him the most trouble. A California mule had kicked the knee in ’49, and a Cherry Creek sluice box had collapsed on the ankle in ’61. He was getting too old for mining camps.

  Milt finally got on his feet and hobbled out of the back room, into the store and saloon he kept at the lower end of Gregory Gulch, below Black Hawk. He grabbed the sign he had painted the day before and limped to the front door
.

  North Clear Creek rushed under the boards of his porch, which stood on stilts in the water. A single step led down into the current, as if someone might walk up out of the creek for a cocktail. Customers normally used the steps on either side of the porch, however, where they could step onto the porch from the creek bank without getting their feet wet.

  Milt looked around the side of his building to see if his men had gotten up for work yet. The back room he slept in butted up against the canyon bluffs, forcing the porch into the creek. The canyons of Gregory Gulch and North Clear Creek did not facilitate the laying out of towns, but where gold was found, men would build.

  Near the bottom of the bluffs Milt found his two employees lounging in front of their tent. “Joe! Sonny!” he shouted. “Get off your tail ends and make some sawdust!”

  “Wait till we finish our coffee, old man,” Sonny said. “We’ve got lumber piled up head high anyway.”

  Milt hung the sign on a peg beside the front door. He would have left it hanging overnight, but somebody would probably have taken it for stove wood. He glanced at Sonny and Joe again and turned back into his saloon, cussing under his breath. It was a wonder he could make a living with the kind of help he had to rely on in a mining camp.

  About the time he had finished his breakfast, someone came into the store with the sign Milt had hung out on the peg. “Here, now, put that back, boy!” he said.

  “But it says carpenter needed,” the boy replied.

  “I am well acquainted with what it says, seein’ as how I painted it myself. Now put it back.”

  “But, I’m a carpenter. I’ve come to fill the job.”

  Milt slammed a stove lid and went to picking his teeth with a splinter. “You’re no carpenter. You’ve been in Gregory Gulch well-nigh two weeks, and I guess you’ve told about every worthless soul from Black Hawk to Nevadaville you’re a cowboy looking for a ranch to work on.”

  “I am a cowboy.”

  “Two seconds ago you was a carpenter. Will you be a surgeon with the next breath?”

  “I’m a carpenter and a cowboy. I’ve run out of money. I need work.”

  “And I need a carpenter to build sluice boxes. Have you ever built a sluice box?”

  “No, sir, but…”

  “‘But,’ hell! I can’t pay a cowboy to build leaky boxes. You have to know what you’re doin’ to get in my employ.”

  “I can build ’em so they don’t leak. I’ve built irrigation flumes that never spilled a drop.”

  Milt spit the splinter out of his mouth. “Flumes!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s the same damn thing as a sluice box, ain’t it? Why didn’t you say so in the first place? What’s your name?”

  “Caleb Holcomb.”

  “Call me Milt Starling or Old Milt or whatever you please so long as it ain’t blasphemous. Where did you learn to build irrigation flumes?”

  “On a farm across the Front Range.”

  Milt rubbed the bald knob of his head. It looked like one of the hills around Black Hawk, merely studded where once whole thickets had grown. “You’re a farmer, too?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Milt grumbled, paced on his rickety legs, kicked a spittoon. He placed his face in his hands.

  Caleb thought he was weeping.

  “I’ll give you a try,” the old man finally said. “A dollar a day plus board. Find your own lodgin’. Now git up and git to work.”

  “Yes, sir,” Caleb said. “Only, I wonder if you might advance me a meal. I haven’t et since the day before yesterday.”

  “A meal? A meal!” Milt kicked the spittoon again. “You won’t expect me to cook it for you, will you? Help yourself, there’s the stove! Hurry, boy, before the coals burn down. Wood’s scarce.”

  Caleb slapped a slab of bacon into a skillet. “Where am I to build these sluices, Mr. Starling?” he asked as he licked his lips in anticipation.

  “Up at the Littlefield Camp.”

  “Where’s that?”

  Milt looped an apron over his head. He smiled at Caleb with the sweet expression of a doting grandmother. “Would you like me to come along and hand you your tools as you need them?” The smile melted to a scowl, and Milt’s brown teeth gnashed at his words. “Find it yourself! It’s the last damn placer left in Gregory Gulch!”

  After his breakfast, Caleb walked around the side of the building where Sonny and Joe were whipsawing lumber from a tree trunk resting horizontally on a trestle ten feet high. Sonny stood on the trestle with one handle of the eight-foot saw. Joe worked below. By pulling the saw through the tree trunk they laboriously turned out rough slabs of lumber.

  Caleb learned from Sonny and Joe where he might find his carpenter’s tools, his wagon, and his ox team. It took him all morning to collect them, as they were scattered from Black Hawk to Central City at various businesses and boardinghouses. Caleb wasn’t really sure who they all belonged to but felt fairly secure in his right to use them. Sonny helped him load some lumber into the wagon and directed him to the Littlefield Camp.

  “Bring the lumber from the old sluice boxes back with you,” he said. “Old Milt will have you saw it up for stove wood.”

  “How long have you been workin’ for him?” Caleb asked.

  “Nobody works for Old Milt long,” Joe said. “The work ain’t steady enough.”

  “Yeah, take your time buildin’ them sluices,” Sonny added. “There won’t be no work for you when you’re done with ’em.”

  Caleb had never heard such a suggestion. Make a job last longer than necessary?

  “Quit and take up another job if you find it,” Joe said. “Milt keeps saying he’s pulling stakes for Montana pretty soon, anyway.”

  Caleb found the Littlefield Camp on a small stream above Nevadaville. He patterned the sluices after the old boxes he found running parallel to the stream. Each box was twelve feet long, fourteen inches wide, and six inches deep. Riffles, nailed across the bottom about four fingers apart, caught the gold particles.

  The Littlefield men used six sluice boxes end to end. A ditch leading from the creek conducted a steady stream of water through the boxes. The miners shoveled in dirt and gravel from either side of the sluice, the current washing away the lighter particles while the riffles caught the heavier grains of gold. The old sluice boxes were so eroded from such use that the knots stood out a quarter inch from the general surface of the lumber.

  To make the work pass faster, Caleb ran a set of rhymes repeatedly through his head. The song he had started to the rune of “Sweet Betsy from Pike” was growing and had taken on a tune of its own. The new tune had a minor chord in it, which Caleb thought lent a lonesome and mysterious aspect to its sound.

  When he came of age, he decided to roam.

  He said, “There’s a life I must live on my own.”

  And he promised his brother, that day, one sure thing:

  He’d return with his tales of adventure next spring.

  At sundown he loaded his tools and drove his oxen back down toward Black Hawk, studying the diggings harder now than he had the two weeks he had been here. As Old Milt had said, the Littlefield Camp was the last placer mine in the gulch. The rest of the miners had gone to sinking shafts and tunneling into the hillsides for gold. As he followed the oxen, Caleb counted rotten shaft houses crumbling over abandoned mines, and idle stamp mills standing in rusting hulks all over the hills. A few active mills used sluices, but there weren’t enough of them to keep even a single carpenter busy.

  He realized Sonny was probably right. The end of the Littlefield Camp job would bring the end of his carpentering career in Gregory Gulch. Still, there was no call for taking Sonny’s advice in making the job last longer than necessary. That seemed dishonest.

  “Well, this ain’t what you imagined,” he thought. “I’m herdin’ cattle, all right, but they’re wearin’ oxbows.”

  One thought comforted him. He was going to eat tonight. Two meals in one day. But he’d
starve to death before he went crawling back to his father’s ranch.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Every day, before and after work, Caleb had to take Five Spot to water, then stake her in some fresh grass, which was difficult to find in quantities around Black Hawk. He hid his saddle and other gear in brush and slept near his horse on the bare ground every night, using a tarp to turn the occasional rainfall.

  Between work and tending his horse, he found little time for anything else. But on his fifth day of working for Old Milt, he finished the Littlefield job a couple of hours before nightfall and found a spare hour to play his fiddle for Sonny and Joe.

  Five customers were trading gold dust for drinks in Milt’s saloon when the music started. In less than a minute, they had all vacated the place and gathered around the whipsaw trestle to hear Caleb play.

  It took Milt a while to catch on and a while longer to catch up on his lame joints. “Stop!” he said when he finally got close enough to drown out the fiddle. “Stop the music! You’re takin’ my customers, boy. Play in the saloon if you’re gonna play. Why didn’t you tell me you could saw a fiddle same as a sluice box?”

  Caleb put his hat upside down on the bar and played past midnight. When he looked into his hat on his way out, he found three dollars in money and maybe half an ounce of gold dust. “What will I do with the gold?” he asked Milt, plowing his finger through it in the crown of his hat.

  “Let me see it,” Milt said. “Looks like you have about five dollars there. Give it to me and take five dollars worth of supplies from the store.”

  Caleb stacked up four dollars’ worth of canned goods and gewgaws but couldn’t find anything else he wanted.

  “Take a whiskey for the difference and leave me be,” Milt said, pouring a shot glass.

  The fiddler lifted the chipped glass and held it against the lantern light to inspect the color. He sniffed it. He swished it around in the glass to judge its fluidity. He had never dared to taste liquor at the Colorado City dances. Not with Buster or Pete around, or someone who might tell his father. But now he knew no one would care one way or the other. He stuck his finger in and sucked the whiskey off—the driest liquid he had ever tasted. He slurped a little over the rim of the glass. It seemed to disappear before he could swallow. It soaked right into his mouth. His nose drew the vapors into his head like a chimney with an open flue.