by B. M. Bower
Buddy was afraid of something, but he could not think what it was that frightened him. He began to think seriously about water, and to listen uneasily to the constant lowing of the herd. The increased shouting of the niggers driving the lagging ones held a sudden significance. It occurred to him that the niggers had their hands full, and that they had never driven so big a “Drag.” It was hotter than ever, too, and they had twice stopped to yoke in fresh oxen. Ezra had boasted all along that ole Bawley would keep his end up till they got clah to Wyoming. But ole Bawley had stopped, and stopped, and at last had to be taken out of the yoke. Buddy began to wish they would hurry up and find a river.
None of the cowboys would take him on the saddle and let him ride, that day. They looked harassed—Buddy called it cross—when they rode up to the wagon to give their horses a few mouthfuls of water from the barrel. Step-and-a-Half couldn’t spare any more, they told mother. He had declared at noon that he needed every drop he had for the cooking, and there would be no washing of dishes whatever. Later, mother had studied a map and afterwards had sat for a long while staring out over the backs of the cattle, her face white. Buddy thought perhaps mother was sick.
That day lasted hours and hours longer than any other day that Buddy could remember. His father looked cross, too, when he rode back to them. Once it was to look at the map which mother had studied. They talked together afterwards, and Buddy heard his father say that she must not worry; the cattle had good bottom, and could stand thirst better than a poor herd, and another dry camp would not really hurt anyone.
He had uncovered the water barrel and looked in, and had ridden straight over to the chuck-wagon, his horse walking alongside the high seat where Step-and-a-Half sat perched listlessly with a long-lashed oxwhip in his hand. Father had talked for a few minutes, and had ridden back scowling.
“That old scoundrel has got two ten-gallon kegs that haven’t been touched!” he told mother. “Yo’ all mustn’t water any more horses out of your barrel Send the boys to Step-and-a-Half. Yo’ all keep what you’ve got. The horses have got to have water—tonight it’s going to be hell to hold the herd, and if anybody goes thirsty it’ll be the men, not the horses But yo’ all send them to the other wagon, Lassie Mind, now! Not a drop to anyone.”
After father rode away, Buddy crept up and put his two short arms around mother. “Don’t cry. I don’t have to drink any water,” he soothed her. He waited a minute and added optimistically, “Dere’s a big wiver comin’ pitty soon. Oxes smells water a hunerd miles. Ezra says so. An’ las’ night Crumpy was snuffin’ an’ snuffin’. I saw ’im do it. He smelt a big wiver. That bi-ig!” He spread his short arms as wide apart as they would reach, and smiled tremulously.
Mother squeezed Buddy so hard that he grunted.
“Dear little man, of course there is. We don’t mind, do we? I-was feeling sorry for the poor cattle.”
“De’re firsty,” Buddy stated solemnly, his eyes big. “De’re bawlin’ fer a drink of water. I guess de’re awful firsty. Dere’s a big wiver comin’ now Crumpy smelt a big wiver.”
Buddy’s mother stared across the arid plain parched into greater barrenness by the heat that had been unremitting for the past week. Buddy’s faith in the big river she could not share. Somehow they had drifted off the trail marked on the map drawn by George Williams.
Williams had warned them to carry as much water as possible in barrels, as a precaution against suffering if they failed to strike water each night. He had told them that water was scarce, but that his cowboy scouts and the deep-worn buffalo trails had been able to bring him through with water at every camp save two or three. The Staked Plains, he said, would be the hardest drive. And this was the Staked Plains—and it was hard driving!
Buddy did not know all that until afterwards, when he heard father talk of the drive north. But he would have remembered that day and the night that followed, even though he had never heard a word about it. The bawling of the herd became a doleful chant of misery. Even the phlegmatic oxen that drew the wagons bawled and slavered while they strained forward, twisting their heads under the heavy yokes. They stopped oftener than usual to rest, and when Buddy was permitted to walk with the perspiring Ezra by the leaders, he wondered why the oxen’s eyes were red, like Dulcie’s when she had one of her crying spells.
At night the cowboys did not tie their horses and sit down while they ate, but stood by their mounts and bolted food hurriedly, one eye always on the restless cattle, that walked around and around, and would neither eat nor lie down, but lowed incessantly. Once a few animals came close enough to smell the water in a bucket where Frank Davis was watering his sweat-streaked horse, and Step-and-a-Half’s wagon was almost upset before the maddened cattle could be driven back to the main herd.
“No use camping,” Bob Birnie told the boys gathered around Step-and-a-Half’s Dutch ovens. “The cattle won’t stand. We’ll wear ourselves and them out trying to hold ’em-they may as well be hunting water as running in circles. Step-and-a-Half, keep your cooked grub handy for the boys, and yo’ all pack up and pull out. We’ll turn the cattle loose and follow. If there’s any water in this damned country they’ll find it.”
Years afterwards, Buddy learned that his father had sent men out to hunt water, and that they had not found any. He was ten when this was discussed around a spring roundup fire, and he had studied the matter for a few minutes and then had spoken boldly his mind.
“You oughta kept your horses as thirsty as the cattle was, and I bet they’d a’ found that water,” he criticized, and was sent to bed for his tactlessness. Bob Birnie himself had thought of that afterwards, and had excused the oversight by saying that he had depended on the map, and had not foreseen a three-day dry drive.
However that may be, that night was a night of panicky desperation. Ezra walked beside the oxen and shouted and swung his lash, and the oxen strained forward bellowing so that not even Dulcie could sleep, but whimpered fretfully in her mother’s arms. Buddy sat up wide-eyed and watched for the big river, and tried not to be a ’fraid-cat and cry like Dulcie.
It was long past starry midnight when a little wind puffed out of the darkness and the oxen threw up their heads and sniffed, and put a new note into their “M-baw-aw-aw-mm!” They swung sharply so that the wind blew straight into the front of the wagon, which lurched forward with a new impetus.
“Glo-ory t’ Gawd, Missy! dey smells watah, sho ’s yo’ bawn!” sobbed Ezra as he broke into a trot beside the wheelers. “’Tain’t fur—lookit dat-ah huhd a-goin’ it! No ’m, Missy, dey ain’t woah out—dey smellin’ watah an’ dey’m gittin’ to it! ’Tain’t fur, Missy.”
Buddy clung to the back of the seat and stared round-eyed into the gloom. He never forgot that lumpy shadow which was the herd, traveling fast in dust that obscured the nearest stars. The shadow humped here and there as the cattle crowded forward at a shuffling half trot, the click—awash of their shambling feet treading close on one another. The rapping tattoo of wide-spread horns clashing against wide-spread horns filled him with a formless terror, so that he let go the seat to clutch at mother’s dress. He was not afraid of cattle-they were as much a part of his world as were Ezra and the wagon and the camp-fires-but he trembled with the dread which no man could name for him.
These were not the normal, everyday sounds of the herd. The herd had somehow changed from plodding animals to one overwhelming purpose that would sweep away anything that came in its path. Two thousand parched throats and dust-dry tongues-and suddenly the smell of water that would go gurgling down two thousand eager gullets, and every intervening second a cursed delay against which the cattle surged blindly. It was the mob spirit, when the mob was fighting for its very existence.
Over the bellowing of the cattle a yelling cowboy now and then made himself heard. The four oxen straining under their yokes broke into a lumbering gallop lest they be outdistanced by the herd, and Dulcie screamed when the wagon lurched across a dry wash and almost upset, while Ezra p
lied the ox-whip and yelled frantically at first one ox and then another, inventing names for the new ones. Buddy drew in his breath and held it until the wagon rolled on four wheels instead of two, but he did not scream.
Still the big river did not come. It seemed to Buddy that the cattle would never stop running. Tangled in the terror was Ezra’s shouting as he ran alongside the wagon and called to Missy that it was “Dat ole Crumpy actin’ the fool”, and that the wagon wouldn’t upset. “No’m, dey’s jest in a hurry to git dere fool haids sunk to de eyes in dat watah. Dey ain’t aimin’ to run away—no’m, dish yer ain’t no stampede!”
Perhaps Buddy dozed. The next thing he remembered, day was breaking, with the sun all red, seen through the dust. The herd was still going, but now it was running and somehow the yoked oxen were keeping close behind, lumbering along with heads held low and the sweat reeking from their spent bodies. Buddy heard dimly his mother’s sharp command to Ezra:
“Stand back, Ezra! We’re not going to be caught in that terrible trap. They’re piling over the bank ahead of us. Get away from the leaders. I am going to shoot.”
Buddy crawled up a little higher on the blankets behind the seat, and saw mother steady herself and aim the rifle straight at Crumpy. There was the familiar, deafening roar, the acrid smell of black powder smoke, and Crumpy went down loosely, his nose rooting the trampled ground for a space before the gun belched black smoke again and Crumpy’s yoke-mate pitched forward. The wagon stopped so abruptly that Buddy sprawled helplessly on his back like an overturned beetle.
He saw mother stand looking down at the wheelers, that backed and twisted their necks under their yokes. Her lips were set firmly together, and her eyes were bright with purple hollows beneath. She held the rifle for a moment, then set the butt of it on the “jockey box” just in front of the dashboard. The wheelers, helpless between the weight of the wagon behind and the dead oxen in front, might twist their necks off but they could do no damage.
“Unyoke the wheelers, Ezra, and let the poor creatures have their chance at the water,” she cried sharply, and Ezra, dodging the horns of the frantic brutes, made shift to obey.
Fairly on the bank of the sluggish stream with its flood-worn channel and its treacherous patches of quicksand, the wagon thus halted by the sheer nerve and quick-thinking of mother became a very small island in a troubled sea of weltering backs and tossing horns and staring eyeballs. Riders shouted and lashed unavailingly with their quirts, trying to hold back the full bulk of the herd until the foremost had slaked their thirst and gone on. But the herd was crazy for the water, and the foremost were plunged headlong into the soft mud where they mired, trampled under the hoofs of those who came crowding from behind.
Someone shouted, close to the wagon yet down the bank at the edge of the water. The words were indistinguishable, but a warning was in the voice. On the echo of that cry, a man screamed twice.
“Ezra!” cried mother fiercely. “It’s Frank Davis—they’ve got him down, somehow. Climb over the backs of the cattle—There’s no other way—and get him!”
“Yas’m, Missy!” Ezra called back, and then Buddy saw him go over the herd, scrambling, jumping from back to back.
Buddy remembered that always, and the funeral they had later in the day, when the herd was again just trail-weary cattle feeding hungrily on the scanty grass. Down at the edge of the creek the carcasses of many dead animals lay half-buried in the mud. Up on a little knoll where a few stunted trees grew, the negroes dug a long, deep hole. Mother’s eyes were often filled with tears that day, and the cowboys scarcely talked at all when they gathered at the chuckwagon.
After a while they all went to the hole which the negroes had dug, and there was a long Something wrapped up in canvas. Mother wore her best dress which was black, and father and all the boys had shaved their faces and looked very sober. The negroes stood back in a group by themselves, and every few minutes Buddy saw them draw their tattered shirtsleeves across their faces. And father—Buddy looked once and saw two tears running down father’s cheeks. Buddy was shocked into a stony calm. He had never dreamed that fathers ever cried.
Mother read out of her Bible, and all the boys held their hats in front of them, with their hands clasped, and looked at the ground while she read. Then mother sang. She sang, “We shall meet beyond the river”, which Buddy thought was a very queer song, because they were all there but Frank Davis; then she sang “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Buddy sang too, piping the notes accurately, with a vague pronunciation of the words and a feeling that somehow he was helping mother.
After that they put the long, canvas-wrapped Something down in the hole, and mother said “Our Father Who Art in Heaven “, with Buddy repeating it uncertainly after her and pausing to say “trethpatheth” very carefully. Then mother picked up Dulcie in her arms, took Buddy by the hand and walked slowly back to the wagon, and would not let him turn to see what the boys were doing.
It was from that day that Buddy missed Frank Davis, who had mysteriously gone to Heaven, according to mother. Buddy’s interest in Heaven was extremely keen for a time, and he asked questions which not even mother could answer. Then his memory of Frank Davis blurred. But never his memory of that terrible time when the Tomahawk outfit lost five hundred cattle in the dry drive and the stampede for water.
CHAPTER THREE
SOME INDIAN LORE
Buddy knew Indians as he knew cattle, horses, rattlesnakes and storms—by having them mixed in with his everyday life. He couldn’t tell you where or when he had learned that Indians are tricky. Perhaps his first ideas on that subject were gleaned from the friendly tribes who lived along the Chisolm Trail and used to visit the chuck-wagon, their blankets held close around them and their eyes glancing everywhere while they grinned and talked and pointed—and ate. Buddy used to sit in the chuck-wagon, out of harm’s way, and watch them eat.
Step-and-a-Half had a way of entertaining Indians which never failed to interest Buddy, however often he witnessed it. When Step-and-a-Half glimpsed Indians coming afar off, he would take his dishpan and dump into it whatever scraps of food were left over from the preceding meal. He used to say that Indians could smell grub as far as a buzzard can smell a dead carcase, and Buddy believed it, for they always arrived at meal time or shortly afterwards. Step-and-a-Half would make a stew, if there were scraps enough. If the gleanings were small, he would use the dishwater—he was a frugal man—and with that for the start-off he would make soup, which the Indians gulped down with great relish and many gurgly sounds.
Buddy watched them eat what he called pig-dinner. When Step-and-a-Half was not looking he saw them steal whatever their dirty brown hands could readily snatch and hide under their blankets. So he knew from very early experience that Indians were not to be trusted.
Once, when he had again strayed too far from camp, some Indians riding that way saw him, and one leaned and lifted him from the ground and rode off with him. Buddy did not struggle much. He saved his breath for the long, shrill yell of cow-country. Twice he yodled before the Indian clapped a hand over his mouth.
Father and some of the cowboys heard and came after, riding hard and shooting as they came. Buddy’s pink apron fluttered a signal flag in the arms of his captor, and so it happened that the bullets whistled close to that particular Indian. He gathered a handful of calico between Buddy’s shoulders, held him aloft like a puppy, leaned far over and deposited him on the ground.
Buddy rolled over twice and got up, a little dizzy and very indignant, and shouted to father, “Shoot a sunsyguns!”
From that time Buddy added hatred to his distrust of Indians.
From the time when he was four until he was thirteen Buddy’s life contained enough thrills to keep a movie-mad boy of today sitting on the edge of his seat gasping enviously through many a reel, but to Buddy it was all rather humdrum and monotonous.
What he wanted to do was to get out and hunt buffalo. Just herding horses, and watching out for Indians, and kil
ling rattlesnakes was what any boy in the country would be doing. Still, Buddy himself achieved now and then a thrill.
There was one day, when he stood heedlessly on a ridge looking for a dozen head of lost horses in the draws below. It was all very well to explain missing horses by the conjecture that the Injuns must have got them, but Buddy happened to miss old Rattler with the others. Rattler had come north with the trail herd, and he was wise beyond the wisdom of most horses. He would drive cattle out of the brush without a rider to guide him, if only you put a saddle on him. He had helped Buddy to mount his back—when Buddy was much smaller than now—by lowering his head until Buddy straddled it, and then lifting it so that Buddy slid down his neck and over his withers to his back. Even now Buddy sometimes mounted that way when no one was looking. Many other lovable traits had Rattler, and to lose him would be a tragedy to the family.
So Buddy was on the ridge, scanning all the deep little washes and draws, when a bullet ping-g-ged over his head. Buddy caught the bridle reins and pulled his horse into the shelter of rocks, untied his rifle from the saddle and crept back to reconnoitre. It was the first time he had ever been shot at—except in the army posts, when the Indians had “broken out”,—and the aim then was generally directed toward his vicinity rather than his person.
An Indian on a horse presently appeared cautiously from cover, and Buddy, trembling with excitement, shot wild; but not so wild that the Indian could afford to scoff and ride closer. After another ineffectual shot at Buddy, he whipped his horse down the ridge, and made for Bannock creek.
Buddy at thirteen knew more of the wiles of Indians than does the hardiest Indian fighter on the screen today. Father had warned him never to chase an Indian into cover, where others would probably be waiting for him. So he stayed where he was, pretty well hidden in the rocks, and let the bullets he himself had “run” in father’s bullet-mold follow the enemy to the fringe of bushes. His last shot knocked the Indian off his horse—or so it looked to Buddy. He waited for a long time, watching the brush and thinking what a fool that Indian was to imagine Buddy would follow him down there. After a while he saw the Indian’s horse climbing the slope across the creek. There was no rider.