“I wouldn’t give my word if I didn’t think it could be backed up, Tom. That’ll have to do. John here is one of the best there is, so if you don’t hire him you’ll have to find someone to replace me.”
John glanced over at Duffy, surprised yet pleased with his friend’s stance. Lynch was staring hard at Duffy, unaccustomed to ultimatums. It seemed a long time before the cattleman spoke.
“Well, I reckon that’s as good a recommendation as I could ask for.” He turned to John. “If you want the job, you’ll switch between helping the cook and taking the night shift. That’s all I can offer.”
John held Lynch’s gaze. “I been in both those places a time or two before, boss. Never lost a man or an animal in either one of ’em.” He smiled, leaving unspoken that he was also well accustomed to having to prove himself twice as good as any man with a white skin.
Lynch held out his hand. “Thirty-five a month is what I pay. That’s what the other drovers are getting. It’s higher than usual, but I want that herd delivered in one piece. You boys be up at the Lost River by Wednesday afternoon at the latest. I want to be stirring up trail dust by Saturday.”
Outside, John asked Duffy, “Would you really have quit if Lynch hadn’t hired me?”
Duffy laughed. “Hell no! I want on that drive more’n anythin’. For a man who’s supposed to spend a lot of his spare time playin’ poker, I’m surprised he didn’t recognize a bluff when one was starin’ him straight in the face.”
John grinned. “Well, it was a nice thought. Might as well hang onto it for a while.”
Duffy slapped his companion on the back. “Not to worry, my friend, and so’s you know my heart’s where it’s always been, I’ll buy you a drink and a bath. The herd’s about sixty miles from here and after I square things away at the ranch, we’ll have a couple of days to get there, so I reckon there’s time for a little celebratin’.”
“It’ll have to be short, Duffy. I’m a little strapped for cash.”
“I ain’t. Leastways not for what I have in mind.”
As it turned out, Duffy’s generosity proved to be greater than a bath and a single drink. It supported several drinks, as well as a trip to the Pocatello Social Club, where business, though far from brisk, had picked up since the afternoon. Duffy happily paid twice as much for John, causing Mrs. Shadbolt’s face to alter into what might have been a smile, perhaps from a newly found faith that not everyone was after something for nothing. For her, it had turned out to be not such a bad day for business after all. For the reunited friends, the evening had all the earmarks of heaven.
TEN
Best not to fool with me about snakes.
Tom Lynch had provided John with a good saddle, but a mediocre horse that no self-respecting drover would have been happy with. A week into the drive, John went to Lynch and requested a better mount. Perhaps thinking that he could shut John up, Lynch pointed to a horse in the remuda known to have a mean streak. “You ride that one and it’s yours.” John rode it to a standstill without any difficulty, amazing everyone, including the trail boss. He always enjoyed the accolades that such feats invariably brought, but it was the acceptance, the subsequent invitation into the white circle, that he cherished most. Later, as they passed by Helena, Montana, one of the point men quit, and Lynch asked John to take his place. It was the end of peeling potatoes and riding night herd, but he knew it would not be the end of having to prove himself. Whenever he was among a new group of white men who did not know him, he had to start all over again.
The outfit crossed the border into Canada and the District of Alberta, where officials counted 3,014 head of cattle and 10 purebred bulls. When they reached the Highwood River, about forty miles southwest of Calgary, John was glad he had allowed Duffy to talk him into joining the drive. It was as pretty a landscape as he’d ever laid eyes on and he doubted he’d be Texas-bound anytime soon.
Back at the Lost River, the name North West Cattle Company, the owner of the herd, had sounded grandiose to John. He had pictured a large ranch house with several outbuildings on a wide prairie, something like the Flint Springs Cattle Company. Instead, it was a solitary log cabin nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, in the shallow valley cut by Pekisko Creek, a tributary of the Highwood River. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful setting, with the cottonwoods fronting the creek in full fall colour, the drooping willows, and the Rockies, with snow creeping down their flanks, as a western backdrop.
The boss was Fred Stimson, a loud man in his forties with an impressive set of black mutton chop whiskers. He had a deep, abiding love for the sound of his own voice, and it was sometimes hard to fit a word in edgeways once he got started. He hailed from Quebec, where his family owned a farm with cattle, so he had more experience with the vagaries of the creatures than most men. When his father died and left him a quarter interest in the farm, he sold it for twenty-five thousand dollars and decided that the West was a good place to reinvest it. Now he needed ranch hands and asked Lynch if any of his drovers who were not moving on were worth keeping.
“The Negro,” Lynch replied. “His name is John Ware and he’s got a way with horses and cattle that I’ve not seen the likes of before. You don’t want to let him get away.” Lynch had not recommended Duffy, though, saying, “He’s a good friend of Ware’s with lots of experience, but he might be getting a little long in the tooth to give you the mileage you’re looking for.”
Lynch and Stimson called John over and Stimson offered him twenty-five dollars a month to stay on.
“Does the same offer go for Duffy?”
“I hadn’t considered it,” was Stimson’s reply.
John looked at Lynch, then at Stimson. “Well, sir, I reckon it needs considerin’. I been his partner for too many years to stay on without him. He goes, and I’ll be ridin’ alongside him.”
John had never heard Lynch laugh as loudly as he did then, no doubt remembering a similar stipulation in Pocatello. He said to Stimson, “I’ve been down this road before, Fred, and was glad I took it. My guess is that you won’t regret taking it either.”
And so John and Duffy went to work for Stimson, who was part owner and manager of the North West Cattle Company and the Bar U brand. But the truth was, Duffy was getting older and feeling it too, a little sorer from long days in the saddle and a little stiffer from sleeping on the ground. Yet he was not about to admit it to anyone, least of all John, who had the strength and appetite of two men, though he did not move all that fast because of his size. Duffy could at least keep pace with his friend, which suited both of them.
In the spring, Stimson would have the herd burned with the Bar U brand, but for now, their temporary trail brand was wearing thin, and unbranded cattle on open range were up for grabs. So John and Duffy’s first job was to prevent the herd from mingling with another large herd that had followed them up from Montana and was passing through to a more northerly range along the Bow River. When the friends saw that herd of four thousand, more than a mile long, amble past their own charges, they knew they were in on the beginning of something big. Adding to that impression was the grass that billowed in every direction beneath a vast, blue sky uncluttered by clouds.
“It sorta takes the longin’ for Texas out of a man, don’t it?” John asked.
“Texas?” Duffy replied. “The name sounds vaguely familiar. Seems to me I mighta been there once but I don’t fully recollect it.”
Their job done, they returned to the ranch with the hot fall sun beating down on their shoulders, as it did for the next few days, deluding a man into thinking that he was living in paradise. But they went to bed one night after a warm evening that had seen a glorious sunset of pinks and oranges draped like a lush stole over the shoulders of the Rockies, and awoke to snow on the ground, brought on the back of a furious north wind.
Stimson knew that the cattle would turn their rumps to the wind and drift until it abated. “If it blows long enough and hard enough, those damned beasts could end up back in M
ontana.” He sent the men out to turn the herd, which had already broken up into smaller units as cattle are sometimes prone to do. But the wind was too fierce and the snow too stinging, and the cattle refused to turn. They plodded on, southward. The men had to separate and, afraid of getting lost in the storm, soon gave up. One by one, they fought their way back to the safety and warmth of the cabin.
Unaware of what the others were up to, John continued following a few hundred head, determined not to lose them to the storm. The more he tried to turn them, the more they wanted to disperse into even smaller groups. He figured he might as well let them drift and keep them all together. When the wind abated, he managed to hold them in the relative shelter of a draw where there was still grass poking through the snow. But a savage wind rose again and bit at the herd until they moved on. John felt frozen to the core, and his hands, in summer leather gloves, were so stiff he would not have been surprised if his fingers had broken off into little chips of ice. And to make matters worse, a huge gust of wind blew off his Boss of the Plains hat. He watched it somersault away until it disappeared in the slanting snowfall. He had been in worse winds and could not believe that it was gone. He lamented its loss, and memories of the Coles and Texas flooded his mind. It was as if the wind had severed his last physical connection to them. He wished at that instant to be back in the South, out of this brutal weather. But since that kind of thinking gets a man nowhere, he took his blanket out of his bedroll, wrapped it around his head and shoulders, and focused on the cattle. They were his responsibility now, every one of them.
For two days, the storm roared and kept the herd on the move. John had no idea how far they had gone. He dozed in the saddle and tried to ignore the hunger rumbling in his gut. Parts of his face had gone numb and he thought it might be from frostbite. He pulled the blanket up higher, leaving only a narrow gap to see through. On the morning of the third day, the wind weakened, patches of blue appeared in the sky, and the herd stopped. The drifts were two feet deep but enough grass showed in the sheltered areas that the cattle were able to eat.
John dismounted, so stiff he could barely move. He swung his arms to get some warmth into his body, pumped his legs up and down, and broke into a prolonged jig until he had enough movement in his limbs to gather wood and build a fire. While collecting windfall in a nearby copse, he spotted a deer, a small buck. He returned to his horse, slid his rifle from its scabbard, and, with a lucky shot, brought the animal down. Once he got a good fire blazing, he retrieved the deer, slit open its belly, and stuck his hands inside to warm them. Then he cut out the liver. He was so hungry that he considered eating it raw but instead seared it on the fire, his stomach in knots with the wait. After he had eaten his fill, he was so weary, he could barely keep his eyes open. He built the fire even bigger, got the rest of his bedroll, wrapped himself in it like a mummy, and slept.
He awoke to something prodding him. Pulling back his blanket and tarp, he saw Duffy and Fred Stimson standing over him. His face ached where the frost had penetrated it.
“Figgered you for dead,” said Duffy. “You look dead.”
“I can’t be,” John groaned as he moved. “Far as I know there ain’t no pain in bein’ dead.”
“Goddamn it, John!” Stimson exclaimed. “You should have left the herd and headed back to the ranch house like everybody else! You could’ve got yourself killed!”
“Thought of that many times, boss, but I didn’t want those beeves to get lost and maybe end up with someone else’s brand on ’em. Figgered you might appreciate it if I stayed close.”
Stimson shook his head in disbelief and gratitude. “Appreciate it? Without a doubt. Expect it? Not in the least.”
Later he told Duffy, “Damned if Lynch wasn’t right. I’m glad I listened to him. That man is one of kind, and I’ve at least got to buy him a new hat.”
Stimson did exactly that on his first trip into Calgary, a Boss of the Plains like the one John had lost.
John stayed around the ranch house until his face healed, then he and Duffy spent the rest of the winter leading an ox-drawn sledge with hay for the herd. After the lovely fall, the sudden onslaught of winter had taken the district by surprise and people had to get used to its ferocious persistence. By the time spring rolled around, many of the Bar U cattle lay dead, and most of the herd up along the Bow River had been wiped out.
“Remember that Texas place you talked about?” Duffy said to John. “The one I said I couldn’t recollect too good? Well, it’s all comin’ back to me now.”
•
Spring found them on a roundup along the Oldman River, some fifty miles south of the ranch, because that was how far the storm had pushed the cattle. Like Duffy, Stimson, and Lynch, the rest of the crew were old cattle hands, although new to John. Some had been wary of him until his plunge over the cutbank into the river on Mustard, the “fucker of a bucker” that no one else could ride, had brought them onside. Or so he thought.
One day, he reached for the horn of his saddle to mount up and his hand landed on a dead snake some prankster had looped around the horn like a lariat. He jumped back in shock and tripped and fell, cursing. It was only a large bull snake, but that did not matter. It was a snake and it had its usual effect on John. He was determined to find out who had committed the prank and confronted every man in the outfit. No one admitted to it. Duffy had no idea who might have done it, but his fear of snakes was almost as deep-seated as John’s, so he was not a suspect. John was incensed and let everyone know it.
“I ain’t afraid of nothin’ except snakes,” he told them, his eyes hitting hard on theirs. “I hate ’em, even dead ones. Somebody’s had a good laugh on me, but I’m warnin’ all of you, I don’t find it funny. Neither will the man who did it if I get my hands on him. Best not to fool with me about snakes.”
None of the crew was bold enough to scoff at the warning or ridicule what to many of them was an irrational fear.
Practical jokes were common on trail drives and roundups, but that spring they all seemed directed at John. One morning someone hid his saddle, as well as the spares, so he had to ride bareback all day, and one night his bedroll disappeared while he’d gone to relieve himself. A few days before the end of the roundup, he was bedding down next to Stimson’s floorless tent, which the manager shared with a cattleman named George Emerson. John preferred to sleep under the stars when the weather was nice, as did a couple of the others. He spread out his bedroll, went to relieve himself, came back, and climbed into bed. He had just managed to get comfortable when he felt movement against his back, like something trying to get out from under him. In his mind it could be only one thing—a snake! He shot out of his bedroll, fumbling for his pistol. At that point, he noticed a rope being pulled out from under his tarp and sliding into Stimson’s tent. He jammed his gun back in its holster and in two quick steps was at the front of the canvas shelter. He grabbed it with both hands and yanked it away from its occupants, throwing it to the ground. Stimson and Emerson were sitting up, with silly grins on their faces, and John saw the rope coiled on Emerson’s lap.
“I told you . . .” he yelled, lunging for Emerson, who raised his arms to fend off the attack. John had meant to grab the prankster, haul him up, and punch him. Instead, he tripped over Emerson’s feet and went sprawling on top of him, banging his mouth on Emerson’s head. He felt a tooth pierce his lip, heard Stimson shout, “John!” and felt the cold barrel of a gun against his temple.
“Back off! Back off! Goddamn it, John, don’t make me shoot you!” Stimson warned.
There was a tremor in his voice and John did not know whether that meant Stimson would pull the trigger or not, but he obeyed. He was angry, but not so much that he was willing to die over it.
“For God’s sake, John, it was a joke! That’s all. Just a joke,” the manager said.
John got to his feet but Stimson kept the gun trained on him. “I told you, those kinda jokes ain’t funny, and I’d punch the next man who pulled one on me.
” He said to Emerson, “Get on your feet and we’ll settle this like men.”
Stimson waved his gun. “I’ll be the only one settling matters here, John.”
Duffy came over and threw his arm around his friend’s shoulders. “Come on, John. Leave it be. This won’t get you nowhere.” He tried to steer John away, but John broke from his grip and faced Stimson.
“I’m done here. You get yourself another nigger boy to play with. I’ll be out to the ranch next week to collect my pay.”
“No need to be rash about this, John.” Stimson was still sitting up in his bedroll, although his gun was no longer pointing at John. “You’ll see it better in the morning light. George was just having a little fun.”
“Maybe so, but it’s always me you’re playin’ with to have your fun, and I ain’t nobody’s toy.”
Amid Duffy’s protestations, John collected his bedroll and tack, and stalked to the remuda. Saddling his horse, he ignored the night wrangler’s query about where he was going, and rode off, disappearing like a ghost in the star-filling dusk. He had not gone far before he heard a rider trotting up behind and Duffy joined him. They rode side by side in silence for several minutes in the descending darkness. Duffy was the first to speak.
“Fred’s kickin’ himself back there. He don’t wanna lose you.”
“Then I reckon he’s smart enough to figger out what to do about it.”
“I’d be surprised if he wasn’t workin’ on that right now.”
John considered Duffy’s words, trying to subdue his frustrations. “Well, it never shoulda been a job that needed doin’ in the first place, Duff. I don’t ask for nothin’ I ain’t worked hard to earn and that includes respect. It don’t seem right that I always have to work harder than everyone else to get it.”
High Rider Page 13