by Ben K. Green
The drive to town was kinda easy. This was a mixed bunch of cattle, all ages and sizes—and there was a mahogany-brown long-haired one that I believed to be a pure-blooded Scotch Highland cow. I had heard it said that these pure-blooded cows were probably twenty years old if any of ’em were still alive. (It had been about that long since Scotty Perth had imported them.) This cow looked to be that old; however, she apparently had not had a calf in recent years and was in good flesh and led the herd to town.
The railroad stock pens were at the edge of town and not too hard to get to from the road that I had brought these cattle on. It was late afternoon when me and Mustang pushed this bunch of cows into the railroad stock pens. I had just gotten the gate fastened and wired to and started to the depot to order a stockcar to ship these cattle in when up drove Scotty Perth in a one-horse gig. (He referred to this gig as his shay, which he had resorted to as a means of gettin’ around since he had lost his leg.)
As Scotty got out of his shay you could tell at a glance that his face was flushed with anger. He raised his heavy voice to a loud pitch, and I am sure that people could hear him all the way to the mercantile. He waved his hands and arms in the air as he threw a pure-blooded Scottish rage. It seemed that the thing that helped to provoke him most to this state of anger was the presence of the old pure-blooded Scotch cow in the herd that he referred to as one of his “lassies.”
Scotty was an old man in my eyes, crippled for life, and having some share of trouble. Although I was barely a grown man, he must have seen me as a smart-aleck kid, which made him all the madder.
I had ridden all day without any breakfast or dinner, and it was midafternoon and me and my horse were tired, thirsty, and hungry. I didn’t know what to say to Scotty, so I just reined my horse toward the depot and didn’t say anything. But as I passed his shay I was stunned when I realized that Scotty Perth was drivin’ one of the horses to his shay that I had shod for the doctor. I didn’t think he would have the nerve to unfasten the stockyard gates, and if he did he couldn’t do anything about that bunch of cattle in his shay, so I rode on about my business.
One of the things that he repeated several times in his broken Scottish brogue was, “I could gather the rest of them in me shay.”
The railroad agent, like everybody else, wasn’t very friendly and seemed to begrudge the opportunity for the railroad to move another carload of Scotty Perth’s cattle. He told me that he would have a car spotted the next mornin’ at the stock-pen chute, but he advised me not to load it with the cattle until after noon because the train wouldn’t pick up the car until about three o’clock.
I saw Scotty Perth goin’ back towards town in his shay as I rode toward the stock pens. The railroad had a stack of alfalfa hay just outside the stock pens for feedin purposes, so I broke several bales and gave it to the cattle, unsaddled my horse, put him in a separate pen where there was water, and gave him a lot of alfalfa and left my saddle and riggin’ laying in the corner of my horse’s pen. I covered it with some loose alfalfa I guess out of habit of hidin’ it, because I didn’t think anybody would bother it.
As I walked to town I felt betrayed over Dr. Turner havin’ me shoe Scotty Perth’s horse so I didn’t go to the drugstore where his office was, and I didn’t have any intention of spendin’ the night with him. So I went to the country hotel. It wasn’t much of a hotel—just an old frame buildin’ with eight or ten rooms upstairs and the dining room and lobby and a small pressin’ parlor at the back of the buildin’ on the ground floor. A cowboy never goes to his room in the daytime.
That cold mornin’ ride had caused me to believe I needed a pair of gloves, so I walked over to the mercantile. News had traveled fast and it seemed that ever’body knew there was another load of Scotty Perth’s cattle in the stock pens. It was noticeable that the people I saw ignored me or gave me some kind of a distrustin’ look.
I asked the clerk in the mercantile for a pair of gloves. He looked in his glove counter and looked at my hands, that are very small, and with a sneer on his face said, “We don’t have any gloves for kids.”
I put my hands in my pockets and turned and walked out of the store. I started across the street to the hotel, where I intended to eat up half a cow and a bushel of potatoes if they had ’em. I felt that I was that hungry.
Dr. Turner hollered at me when I was about in the middle of the street. I turned and looked at him and walked on across the street. He hollered again to “wait a minute!” adding that he wanted to talk to me.
We stood in the middle of the street, and he said in a rather strained voice, “Why are you stayin’ at the hotel? Why don’t you come down to the house? You know you are welcome there when you are in town, and I’ll have a hard time explainin’ to my wife why you would prefer to stay in that old hotel than in her guest bedroom.”
I looked him in the eye and cleared my voice and said. “You might tell her that I don’t want to shoe any more horses for Scotty Perth.”
He said, “Now wait a minute! The horses are full brothers, and Scotty Perth gave my horse to me, and until he lost his leg he had always shod both of ’em. He’s so awkward with his peg leg that he can’t shoe a horse, and you’re the first man that has come along since that could put shoes on them that they didn’t interfere with in travelin’. I thought that it might help to ease Scotty’s anger if he knew you could shoe a horse.”
I said, “So far as I’m concerned, shoein’ horses would be a damn poor way of winnin’ an argument, and I don’t care what Scotty Perth thinks. This stunt has begun to make me wonder whose side you are on.”
He looked at me rather painfully as he started to walk back across the street, and in a somewhat bewildered tone of voice he said, “We’ll be lookin’ for you to come to church Sunday and stay for the party my wife is givin’ for the preacher after the services.”
I didn’t answer him. I turned and walked across to the hotel. I ate up a big batch of grub and went to bed by dark.
The next mornin’ I killed time the best I could in a town where nobody spoke to me until the railroad spotted the car at the loadin’ chute about eleven o’clock. The cattle had watered good and were full of alfalfa, and I thought they could stand in the car to wait for the train just about as good as they could stand on the ground. There was a ruling by the railroad that all bulls that were shipped in cars of mixed cattle had to be tied with a rope in the car. So I went to the mercantile and bought some big, soft rope to tie these two bulls. I spent part of the mornin’ gettin’ these bulls in the chute and gettin’ the ropes on their horns. They were rank, mean, and bad to fight, but havin’ a chute to put them in and then gettin’ up on the fence over them was partly play to a cowboy that was used to catchin’ ’em outside and havin’ to tie them down before he could do anything with ’em. I loaded the cattle about eleven thirty, billed them out, and sealed the car and got on my horse and went back to the mountains.
I didn’t do much cowboyin’ the rest of that week, and I didn’t have any smart ideas about what I was goin’ to try next to catch a few of these cattle.
I laid in my bedroll kinda late until the sun came up and it began to get warm. I fed my horses and fixed breakfast, straightened up my camp a little bit, and fooled around until I cooked my dinner. Then I put on my best clothes and saddled old Charlie, my “road” horse, and rode into town just in time for church.
I stood outside under a tree where I tied my horse until the singin’ started, then I slipped in and sat down in the back row. Very few people saw me come in, and I don’t believe that my presence contaminated the meetin’ too much.
At the end of the service, as soon as the preacher said “Amen,” I reached down and picked my hat off the floor and started out the door. Dr. Turner’s wife was sittin’ in the choir where she could see me, and she took a short cut and headed me off before I could get to my horse and gave me a gentle kind of talkin’ to and told me in a kind but firm manner to ride on down and put my horse in the barn at her ho
use and stay for the party. I didn’t give her much backtalk—just said, “Thank you, ma’m.”
It seemed that the whole church came to the doctor’s wife’s party, and people were visitin’ and braggin’ on the new preacher. He was a nice kind of young fellow, and I kinda felt sorry for him—just wonderin’ if some of those good people might wind up treatin’ him like they had me.
Scotty Perth’s wife and teen-age daughter were in the crowd, and you could tell by her talk that she had pure Irish blood. (I learned later Scotty’s wife was the daughter of an Irish miner.) Several people asked her about Scotty and why he never came to church any more, and one old man commented on what a beautiful voice Scotty had and how he loved to hear him sing in the choir. I noticed that she was wearin’ a beautiful gold watch on a chain around her neck.
I stood around to one side and there were a few of the men who spoke to me in a rather hypocritical tone of voice, I thought. Dr. Turner took time out from his guests to visit with me some, and I tried to be nice (after all, up to a few days ago he was the only friend I had in town besides his wife).
Mrs. Turner opened the door to the dinin’ room and the table was loaded with sandwiches, coffee, some kind of sweet punch, and cake. Of course, most of the kids skipped the sandwiches and went on to the cake and punch, and I thought the kids around here are more like people than the grown folks are.
When I went back to the table for seconds, I met Scotty Perth’s daughter at the punch bowl. She was a very nice-lookin’ young girl and spoke very correct English in a beautiful feminine voice. She glanced at me with a quick eye and said, “You are Ben Green.”
I smiled and said yes, and she hastened to tell me that she was Scotty Perth’s daughter. As she poured the punch she said, “Father said when you give up or the weather drives you out ‘he will gather the rest of the cattle with his shay.’ ” She said this in a rather arrogant, smart tone of voice; Mrs. Turner heard her and I saw her look at me with an expression of concern.
I set my glass on the table and reached into my vest pocket and handed the young girl a mate to the watch that her mother was wearin’ and said, “Give this to your father and tell him that I rode my Texas pony past where his mountain horse fell with a big man and found his watch.”
Her voice broke, and she called to her mother, “He has found Daddy’s watch.”
As her mother looked at it, she said, “Thank heavens! These are the two watches that our daughters gave us on our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary!”
Then the daughter turned back to me, and she suddenly became very embarrassed and her good English broke and she spoke in the mother brogue of her parents and said, “Please do not be too hard on me father. You know he has had much trouble.”
I walked through the room and picked up my hat and started for the back door on the way to the barn. Mrs. Turner stopped me at the back door and asked where I was goin’. I told her that I didn’t seem to belong at even a church party in Scotty Perth’s town and that I would ride out tonight.
She said, “Ben, I am sorry for what’s happened,” and I said, “It’s no fault of yours.”
Dr. Turner followed me to the barn and gave me a letter that he said had come to the post office on Saturday, and he had gotten it for me on purpose so that he could give it to me when I came in on Sunday. It was dark, so I thanked him and shoved the letter in my pocket and rode on to the ranch.
He laughingly said as I rode off that half of the people in the church had been out there and looked for that watch while Scotty Perth was in the hospital with his leg, and he wondered how I had managed to find it. That was a secret and I didn’t answer him.
The fact was that I was ridin’ one day and the sun shone on it and caught my attention. It would be my guess that when Scotty Perth’s horse fell from under him, the fall threw it from his pocket and the chain was tangled in a low-hangin’ limb just the right height for a cowboy horseback to reach up and untangle it. And while they had looked on the ground for it, it was safely fastened to the limb of a tree.
As I neared the big double gates of the ranch, a thought occurred to me—Why didn’t I just take those gates off their hinges to where they wouldn’t be swinging back and forth and leave the gates open and take my chances on a few cattle driftin’ out into the road? After all, I would rather have ’em in the road than in the pasture—so why leave the gate shut?
These big double gates had a high arched pole at the top runnin’ from one gatepost to the other about six feet above the top of the gates. It is true that it was dark, but days and nights seemed to mean about the same to me. So I tied my lariat rope in the middle of each gate one at a time and threw my rope over the big pole that ran from gatepost to gatepost above. Then I tied my lariat rope to my saddle horn and lifted the gate upward off the bolt hinges and then let them drop back to the ground. I pulled the gates back to one side out of the way and propped ’em up against the fence and rode on to camp.
I built up a fire at my camp and read the letter by campfire light. It was from Mr. Merideth at the bank. He was instructin’ me to round up all the cattle as soon as possible because of the probability of bad weather, but not to ship any more cattle to the Kansas City market until I wired him and he could wire me back further instructions. I crawled in my bedroll and went to sleep.
When I waked up the next mornin’, the weather was still changin’ for the worst and as I laid there in my warm bedroll I began to wonder if maybe really the bank was at fault—and if they were, why they had taken advantage of Scotty Perth. With the whole town taking up for Scotty Perth and the fact that I hadn’t been able to hire any help from July to late September to ride with me all added up to the conclusion that there was somethin’ bad wrong. I had done a good deal of business with Mr. Merideth and the Kansas City bank, and I couldn’t bring myself to think they were at fault. But nobody had tried to fill me in on any of the details of the Scotty Perth deal.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it seemed that all the townspeople knew was that Scotty Perth had said the bank was “takin’ ” his cattle away from him. If there were some undiscovered facts on either side I was the one caught in the middle, and actually all I was tryin’ to do was to make more money gatherin’ wild cattle than I would ordinarily be paid for common ranch work.
I decided that I had better crawl out of that bedroll and move my camp off of Teepee Rock down into a canyon in the lower pasture. I had already found a good camp place on the west side of the canyon wall. It wasn’t exactly a cave—it was just where a big ledge hung over and there was a big curve in the canyon wall that would give protection from the north wind—and bein’ on the west side of the canyon the mornin’ sun would make it a little more bearable.
I caught the horses that I used mostly for pack horses and spent the day movin’ my riggin’ and camp to under the ledge in the lower pasture. I took an ax and cut some poles and built a makeshift fence around my camp. My horses were all pets, and I had to protect my feed and my camp by fencin’ them out.
When I finished movin’ it was late afternoon, but I still had time to drag a few dead trees up by the horn of my saddle for firewood. Dead timber was plentiful and by dark I had enough to last me for a week or two.
The next few days I tried callin’ these cattle since it was gettin’ cold weather and we had already had some light snow (that hadn’t stuck on the ground). I thought it would be gettin’ near enough feedin’ time of the year if these cattle had ever been fed that they would come to call. Another thing that caused me to think of this—I had remembered that when Scotty Perth throwed his high-pitched voice at the stock pens that old Scotch cow had thrown her head up and bawled a time or two after Scotty had gone.
There was still lots of cattle in the pasture. I didn’t know how many, but there was bound to be over two hundred head and I had gathered two hundred and sixteen. For several mornin’s I rode down in the valley and tried all the different cow calls that I had ever heard. But I
had never gotten a cow to answer nor act like they knew anything about the sound of a human voice.
I waked up one mornin’ and a good snow had fallen in the night, but the ground was still a little too warm and unless it got colder this snow would melt by night. I cooked my breakfast and saddled Mustang. I didn’t pick Mustang for any particular reason—it was just that he had several days’ rest and it was his time to do a good day’s work.
My horse was standin’ tied close to camp, and I don’t know why but I had walked back to stand by the fire and warm while I thought about what to do. A pretty good wind was building up and there was a dark bank formin’ in the northeast. It was just a little hard to do a day’s ridin’ when ever’thing you had tried in the last few days hadn’t worked, and I didn’t have a new plan to try this mornin’—except I intended to ride down into the valley to see if any cattle had drifted through the gates at the road.
So far as I know I crawled out of a cradle and on to a horse. Although I had a home, I had been a cowboy and drifter and camped all over the Southwest. I had never known any of the pangs of loneliness that I had heard people talk about, and I had never hated anybody and up till now didn’t suppose that anybody had been more than a little bit mad at me. But now to have had a whole town and the territory around it to say the least shun me for four months, and for that damn Scotchman to have hated me for every minute that I breathed, was a new and unpleasant experience. With the storm clouds hoverin’ over and the wind cold, and so far from Texas, I guess for the first time in my life I must have been lonesome—and it wasn’t a good feelin’.
There was a pretty brisk wind blowin’ up the canyon and directly I was brought out of this mood by more than a few cattle bawlin’ down the canyon below me. This bawlin’ increased and got louder, and I could tell that some of these cattle were on the move. Then I heard a faint sound of somebody singin’. I stepped on my horse and went to pushin’ down off the canyon wall as fast as was safe horseback.