by Ralph Moody
Fred didn't say anything for a minute or two, and Father said, "Isn't there any court you can appeal to?"
Fred squirted a line of tobacco juice down between the off horse's heels and kept looking at the place where he had spit. After a while, he said, "Yep. We could haul 'em into court, and every one of 'em would lie like hell and say they never took more than the water that goes with their land. It would be their word against ours and we wouldn't have a snowball's chance."
Father said, "Can't you take enough witnesses up there to see what they're doing and outweigh their testimony in court?"
Fred spit between the other horse's heels, and said, "Yep, but they've all got their land posted, and we couldn't see what they're doing without getting on their land. They'd get us as bad for trespass as we could get them for stealing water."
Father said, "Isn't there a way of proving how much water passes through the ditch at their upper boundary and how much they let pass beyond them?"
Fred seemed to be thinking about it for a minute, then he looked up at Father, and said, "Look, Charlie, this is the hell of it for you and me: The water goes with the land. Your deed says you are entitled to so many inches of water, or 'such proportion of same as may be available!' There's nothing that says whether that means available at the head of the ditch, or available at your own sluice gate. It's been fought ever since there were courts and ditches here, and there are rulings both ways. Every damned one of us would break himself if we tried to fight it clear through the courts. And, besides, if we'd get a high court ruling that it meant available at our own sluice boxes, these ranches at the end of the ditch wouldn't be worth a damn an acre. There's only one way to do it; we've got to take the law into our own hands and fight the water through the ditch. And, by God, I'm going to start tonight."
Father didn't like me to be around when men were swearing, and Fred looked mad enough to begin any minute; but before he did, Father sent me to get our cows. They were picketed out on the prairie near the railroad track.
During supper Father hardly said a word. Mother didn't eat much and kept biting her lip the way she always did when she was nervous. Father always milked the Holstein and I milked the brindle. While we were milking that night, I asked him if he was going to do anything about the water. He didn't answer me for a while, then he said, "Son, there are times a man has to do things he doesn't like to, in order to protect his family." He didn't say any more, and I didn't think I ought to ask him.
Something woke me in the night. It must have been after moonset, because it was dark as pitch. I lay listening for a long time, then I thought I heard a man's voice from over toward the railroad track, so I got up and looked out the windows. There were three little lights moving around in our oat field, and two more in our bean field. They were so far away that they looked like fireflies. I thought Father ought to know about it, and went into the house to tell him. Mother was wide awake, but Father wasn't in bed with her. She told me to go right back to bed because I needed my rest, and that the lights out in our fields were all right.
I went back to the bunkhouse, but I didn't go back to bed. I pulled my overalls on over my nightgown and tiptoed out into the darkness. I knew Father was out there somewhere with a lantern, and I wanted to see what was going on. When I was almost to our oat field, the lights all came together in one place and moved up the railroad toward Fred Aultland's. I thought I heard water gurgling among the oats, and when I went a little closer my foot sank ankle-deep in soft mud. While I was standing there watching the lights from the lanterns grow smaller and smaller up the track, I heard the sound of half a dozen rifle shots from way off toward the west. I was worried about Father, and afraid he might not be one of the men with a lantern, but be farther up the ditch where there was shooting. I wanted to run after him and tell him to come home, but I was scared and went back to the bunkhouse.
I didn't sleep another wink all night, and when it was just light enough so that I could see the outline of Loretta Heights against the eastern sky, I heard Father come home and go in the kitchen door. I couldn't see him and would never have known him by his walk. His feet sounded as though they were dragging, and he had on rubber boots. I heard him take them off before he went into the house. A little later I heard him coughing. It was that dry, hollow cough he had after the windstorm. As soon as it was light enough to see in good shape, I got up and got the milk buckets. I milked both cows, watered the pigs, and fed the horses before I went in to breakfast. I got cramps in my hands before I got done milking the big Holstein. She gave a bucket brimful of milk, and her teats were large with little bits of holes in them.
Father wasn't up when I went to work, and at breakfast Mother wouldn't talk. She kept biting her lip and her eyes looked as though she had been crying. I didn't see a soul around Corcoran's place when I let the cows out of the corral, and there was nobody in sight when I went past Aultland's. The road was all muddy where our ditch went under it. The culvert was a good big one, too, so I knew there must have been a terrible head of water come down through there during the night.
I didn't see a moving thing, except the cows and Fanny, until Grace brought out my dinner pail. She said Father had just got up and that there was a big red lump on his forehead, and he had been coughing in his sleep all morning. Grace could usually get Mother to talk, but she hadn't been able to find out a thing. Mother had made her play out in the back yard with the other youngsters all morning. I told her about the water in our oat field, and the lanterns and the shooting up beyond us on the ditch. I thought maybe the lump on Father's forehead was where he had been hit with a bullet, but Grace said it wasn't. She had read lots of books about wars—she liked them best of all—and she said she'd bet it was where he had been hit with a clubbed rifle.
There must have been some terrible battles up the ditch those next few nights. Father would leave the house just after I went to bed, and wouldn't get home till nearly daylight. He had another big lump on his cheekbone that turned black and blue, and Fred Aultland and Jerry Alder and Carl Henry looked all beat up when I saw them. Jerry had his right arm in a sling.
Saturday night there was a meeting at our house. Men came from all the ranches west of us—halfway to the mountains. They must have started getting there just after I went to sleep, but I woke up when the first buggy came into our yard. It was Mr. Wright. I knew his voice when Father went to help him unhitch his team, and I knew there was going to be some kind of meeting, because the first thing Mr. Wright said was, "Ain't any of the rest of the fellas got here yet, Charlie?" And besides that, Mother had put Hal out to sleep with Philip and me.
Grace didn't get up till the third team came. Then she tiptoed into my room and we peeked out under the curtain together. The men all stood around the barn and talked till Carl Henry came—he was the last one—then they went into the house. Grace and I knew we shouldn't have done it, and that we'd get a good spanking if we got caught, but we crept out the bunkhouse door and crawled around to the kitchen window. It was open, so we had to hunker up against the side of the house and keep real quiet.
At first, everybody was trying to talk at once, and someone said the only way they could ever keep water coming down the ditch in dry spells was to put men with high-powered rifles up on the hills, and shoot hell out of any so-and-so that went tampering with a ditch box. Then somebody else said that wouldn't do any good because the sheriff would get out a posse and throw them all in the hoosegow. They talked, and talked, and talked. Some of them even shouted, but I didn't hear Father's voice till Fred Aultland said, "Charlie, you must have done some thinking about this, but I haven't heard you say anything."
Everybody got real still then, and Father talked so low we couldn't much more than hear him. He said, "Well, it seems to me that courts are usually the best places to settle disputes if men can't get together peaceably, but in this instance both sides are afraid of what the court's ruling might be. We've been able to fight enough water down through the ditch at night to
save our crops for the moment, but that won't do in the long run, because, sooner or later, somebody's going to be killed. When that happens, the matter will be settled in court whether we like it or not. It would be my idea that we ought to sit down and try to work out our differences with the men we've been fighting."
The men didn't seem to like that at all, and started shouting and talking all at once again. Some of them even swore—with Mother right in the other room. Mr. Corcoran called the men up near the head of the ditch some awful names, and said you might as well argue with a jackass as any one of them. At last Mr. Wright had to pound on the table and shout, "For God's sake, shut up and give Charlie a chance to tell us what his idea is, anyway."
Father didn't start to talk again till everybody was quiet, then he said, "Those fellows up there are holding the trump cards and they know it. I'm not too sure I wouldn't take pretty near my full measure of water if I were in their places and saw my crops drying up. I don't think they want a court fight, or a fist fight, or a gun fight any more than we do, but I don't think they're going to give up the hand without winning the odd trick. I wouldn't do it, and I don't think any of you fellows would. I'm inclined to think we'd be better off to have the assurance of a reasonable part of our share in dry time, than to take the chance of not getting any and losing all our late crops."
Father stopped talking as if he expected them to say he was wrong, but nobody spoke till Mr. Wright said, "Go on."
Then Father said, "I believe that if we approached them right with an agreement that we'd settle for 80 per cent of our proportion, based on ditch-head level, we might come to terms with them."
Jerry Alder and two or three of the younger fellows thought it would be better to keep on fighting the water down the ditch at night, but Mr. Wright, and Fred, and Carl, and even Mr. Corcoran thought Father's idea was best. It was right then that Mother pushed up the window in the front room, and Grace and I got scared, so we had to crawl back to the bunkhouse. In about half an hour all the men came out and started hitching up their horses. Mr. Wright was the last one to drive away, and before he went, he called to Father, "You'll be at my house, then, at ten o'clock tomorrow morning?"
Father called back, "I'll be there," and went into the house and closed the door.
There weren't any more fights over water that year, and when Willie Aldivote came up to the pasture to visit me a few days later, he seemed to think Father was quite a hero. I was proud because he said Father could fight like hell for a sick man, and that everybody thought he did a smart job getting the men up the ditch to agree about the water.
15
I Give Mr. Lake a Ride
ABOUT the only fun I had the rest of that summer was the two times Fred Aultland put up his hay. Father and I worked for him two weeks both times, and each time we got a check for fifty dollars. The more I herded Mrs. Corcoran's cows, the more I didn't like it. As the pasture dried up, the cows made more trouble about trying to get into the alfalfa fields, and as they got skinnier and skinnier Mrs. Corcoran kept blaming me and saying it was because I brought them in too early, or because I didn't graze them where the grass was best. Fred Aultland said it was because I didn't let them get into the neighbors' crops enough to suit her.
Just before school opened she gave me fits because I brought them back to the corral one night at five minutes before six. When she pinned the thirty-five cents into my shirt pocket, she told me that I hadn't earned half of it, and she was only giving it to me because we were so poor. We weren't poor, and I told her so, and yanked the pin out and threw the money right down by her feet. After that she wasn't so mean, and picked it up and passed it to me after I got on Fanny.
I was mad all the way home. When I got there Mother was feeding the hens and turkeys out beside the barn. After I'd pulled the bridle off Fanny so she could go and roll, Mother asked me what the matter was. I remembered what Father had told me about forgetting what Mrs. Corcoran said and not telling anybody, so I told Mother I was mad because I didn't think I was getting paid enough for herding the cows. She put her arm around me and pulled me up against her. Then she patted me on the head, and said, "Son, if you amount to as much as I think you're going to, some day you'll kick on a dollar and thirty-five cents a day." I did tell Father about it that night when we were milking, though. And from then on I never herded Mrs. Corcoran's cows.
School started about the first of October. Muriel was old enough to go that year, but she wasn't strong enough to walk the mile and a half, so Father let us drive Fanny. It wasn't a bit the way starting school had been when we first came there. All the kids knew we had a horse now, and that I had ridden up to the mountains to get Two Dog, and that I had made Mrs. Corcoran pay me thirty-five cents a day for herding her cows. They knew, too, about Father fighting to get the irrigating water and about his fixing Fred Aultland's stacker so as to make the hay fall where they wanted it. Everybody called me Spikes, and Freddie Sprague gave me half an apple at morning recess.
Mr. Lake was the chairman of the school board. They said he always came for the opening day, and he always rode his old white mule. He was a little man—quite a lot older than Father—and he had big joints at the knuckles of his hands. All morning he sat up on the little platform by Miss Wheeler's desk and watched everything we did. While he was watching us, he kept pulling his fingers, one at a time, until he made the knuckle pop. Just when you didn't expect it he would point at somebody and ask him to bound California, or what body of water the Mississippi River emptied into, or something else. He got me on the worst one. He pointed his finger right at me and said, "You! Little tow-headed fella! Go to the board and write me: 'Pare a pear with a pair of scissors.'"
The only two kinds I knew about were pear and pair, and I got all mixed up on whether there were two s's or two z's in scissors. He banged his hand down on the desk and told Miss Wheeler she wasn't a very good teacher, or I'd know better than that. Then he told her to put me back in the first grade in spelling till he came again. I was pretty much ashamed of myself, because we liked Miss Wheeler and I didn't want to get her in a mess with her boss, but Grace got mad. She jumped right out of her seat and told him that it wasn't Miss Wheeler's fault, because we were new there—and that I never could spell cat without a k, anyway. All the good it did was that he made her stand with her face in a corner till noontime. He said that would "learn her not to sass her elders."
Everybody was talking about old Mr. Lake while we were eating our lunches, and Willie Aldivote dared me to sneak out in the afternoon and put a burdock burr under his saddle. I pretty near lost my nerve, but the more I looked at him, the madder I got, so halfway between recess time and four o'clock I put up two fingers, and Miss Wheeler nodded at me.
Mr. Lake had a two-cinch saddle, and I only had to loosen the back one a little bit so I could get the burr well up under the middle. From then till school let out, I was so nervous 1 could hardly think at all, but he didn't make me answer any more questions, so I don't think he noticed me.
As soon as Miss Wheeler tapped the school's-out bell we all grabbed our caps and coats and ran for the carriage shed. The old white mule was tied away over at the east end of the shed, so the boys made a big piece of work about getting their harness down and getting the straps straightened out. All the girls knew about the burr, too, and they stood around twittering and giggling and trying to look as if they didn't see Mr. Lake when he came out and put the bridle on his mule.
Just as soon as he put his foot in the stirrup the old mule went crazy. Mr. Lake let go of the reins and sat kerplunk down against the board fence, and the mule bucked so hard he'd have made a bronco look like a carriage horse. After he had the saddle slewed way over on the side of his belly, he shot right out through the turnstile gate and raced off up the road. As he went through the gate he smashed the turnstile all to pieces and ripped the saddle off. Maybe Miss Wheeler wasn't a very good teacher, but Mr. Lake was. I learned at least a dozen new words from what he said about that o
ld white mule. I was still shaking from being nervous, but Rudolph Haas was as cool as watercress. He went over and helped Mr. Lake get up and asked him if he couldn't drive him home in his buggy.
Of course, Grace had to tell Mother all about Mr. Lake coming to school. While we were eating supper she told about my not being able to spell "Pare a pear with a pair of scissors," and about her being able to bound California, but she didn't mention having to stand with her face in the corner or my putting the burr under Mr. Lake's saddle. The next I heard of it was three or four nights later when we were out milking. Our Holstein cow's tieup was nearest to the barn door, then came the brindle, so that Father's back was toward her when we were milking. Everything was quiet in the barn, except for the music milk makes when it goes singing down into the buckets, and I was thinking about Two Dog, when Father said, "It's a dangerous thing to put a cockle burr under an old man's saddle. Mr. Lake might have been badly hurt."
I just said, "Yes, sir," and Father never mentioned it again.
I didn't have any more trouble at school for nearly a month —except for my glasses and the cellar door. I don't know why we had a cellar door, because there wasn't any cellar, but we did have one. It was one of those bulkhead doors that slant like a lean-to roof. Some of us were sliding down it one day, when I ran a big, long splinter into my behind. It broke off inside the skin and there was nearly an inch of it in there. Willie Aldivote tried to get it out with the little blade of his jackknife, but he couldn't, so he called Grace. She tried to get hold of it with her fingernails, but she didn't have any more luck than Willie. Then Miss Wheeler picked at it with a needle, and finally she sent Grace and Muriel to take me home.