The Killer

by Stewart Edward White

  CHAPTER XIII

  RANCH ACTIVITIES

  Big as it was, the ranch was only a feeder for the open range. Way downin southeastern Arizona its cattle had their birth and grew to theirhalf-wild maturity. They won their living where they could, fiercelyfrom the fierce desert. On the broad plains they grazed during the fatseason; and as the feed shortened and withered, they retired slowly tothe barren mountains. In long lines they plodded to the watering places;and in long, patient lines they plodded their way back again, until deepand indelible troughs had been worn in the face of the earth. Otherliving creatures they saw few, save the coyotes that hung on theirflanks, the jackrabbits, the prairie dogs, the birds strangely cheerfulin the face of the mysterious and solemn desert. Once in a while a pairof mounted men jog-trotted slowly here and there among them. They gaveway to right and left, swinging in the free trot of untamed creatures,their heads high, their eyes wild. Probably they remembered the terrorand ignominy and temporary pain of the branding. The men examined themwith critical eye, and commented technically and passed on.

  This was when the animals were alive with the fat grasses. But as thedrought lengthened, they pushed farther into the hills until the boldestor hardiest of them stood on the summits, and the weakest merely stareddully as the mounted men jingled by. The desert, kind in her bounty, wasterrible in her wrath. She took her toll freely and the dried bones ofher victims rattled in the wind. The fittest survived. Durham died,Hereford lived through, and turned up after the first rains wiry, lean,and active.

  Then came the round-up. From the hidden defiles, the buttes and ranges,the hills and plains, the cowboys drew their net to the centre. Each"drive" brought together on some alkali flat thousands of the restless,milling, bawling cattle. The white dust rose in a cloud against the veryblue sky. Then, while some of the cowboys sat their horses as sentinels,turning the herd back on itself, others threaded a way through themultitude, edging always toward the border of the herd some animaluneasy in the consciousness that it was being followed. Surrounding themain herd, and at some distance from it, other smaller herds rapidlyformed from the "cut." Thus there was one composed entirely of cows andunbranded calves; another of strays from neighbouring ranges; and athird of the steers considered worthy of being made into beef cattle.

  In due time the main herd was turned back on the range; the strays hadbeen cut out and driven home by the cowboys of their several owners; thecalves had been duly branded and sent out on the desert to grow up. Butthere remained still compact the beef herd. When all the excitement ofthe round-up had died, it showed as the tangible profit of the year.

  Its troubles began. Driven to the railroad and into the corrals, it nexthad to be urged to its first experience of sidedoor Pullmans. There thepowerful beasts went frantic. Pike poles urged them up the chute intothe cars. They rushed, and hesitated, and stopped and turned back in apanic. At times it seemed impossible to get them started into the narrowchute. On the occasion of one after-dark loading old J.B., the foreman,discovered that the excited steers would charge a lantern light.Therefore he posted himself, with a lantern, in the middle of the chute.Promply the maddened animals rushed at him. He skipped nimbly one side,scaled the fence of the chute. "Now keep 'em coming, boys!" he urged.

  The boys did their best, and half filled the car. Then some otherimpulse seized the bewildered rudimentary brains; the cattle balked.J.B. did it again, and yet again, until the cars were filled.

  You have seen the cattle trains, rumbling slowly along, the crowdedanimals staring stupidly through the bars. They are not having aparticularly hard time, considering the fact that they are undergoingtheir first experience in travelling. Nowadays they are not allowed tobecome thirsty; and they are too car sick to care about eating. Carsick? Certainly; just as you or I are car sick, no worse; only we do notneed to travel unless we want to. At the end of the journey, often, theyare too wobbly to stand up. This is not weakness, but dizziness from theunwonted motion. Once a fool S.P.C.A. officer ordered a number of theCaptain's steers shot on the ground that they were too weak to live.That greenhorn got into fifty-seven varieties of trouble.

  Arrived at their journey's end the steers were permitted to get theirsea legs off; and then were driven slowly to a cattle paradise--theranch.

  For there was flowing water always near to the thirsty nose; and richgrazing; and wonderful wagons from which the fodder was thrownabundantly; and pleasant shade from a mild and beneficent sun. The thin,wiry beasts of the desert lost their angles; they became fat, and curlyof hair, and sleek of coat, and much inclined to kink up their tails andcavort off in clumsy buck jumps just from the sheer joy of living. Fornow they were, in good truth, beef cattle, the aristocracy of fiftythousand, the pick of wide ranges, the total tangible wealth of a greatprincipality. To see them would come red-faced men with broad hats andlinen dusters; and their transfer meant dollars and dollars.

  I have told you these things lest you might have concluded that theCaptain did nothing but shoot ducks and quail and ride the polo poniesaround the enclosure. As a matter of fact, the Captain was always goingto Arizona, or coming back, or riding here or driving there. When wewent to the ranch, he looked upon our visit as a vacation, but even thenhe could not shoot with us as often as we all would have liked. On theArizona range were the [JH] ranch, and the Circle I, and the Bar O, andthe Double R, and the Box Springs, and others whose picturesque names Ihave forgotten. To manage them were cowpunchers; and appertainingthereunto were Chinese cooks, and horses, and pump mules, and grublists, and many other things. The ranch itself was even more complicatedan affair; for, as I have indicated, it meant many activities besidescattle. And then there was the buying and selling and shipping. TheCaptain was a busy man.

  And the ranch was a busy place. Its population swung through thenations. Always the aristocracy was the cowboy. There were not many ofhim, for the cattle here were fenced and fattened; but a few werenecessary to ride abroad in order that none of the precious beef bemired down or tangled in barbed wire; and that all of it be moved hitherand yon as the pasture varied. And of course the driving, the loadingand unloading of fresh shipments in and out demanded expert handling.

  Some of them came from the desert, lean, bronzed, steady-eyed menaddicted to "double-barrelled" (two cinch) saddles, ox-bow stirrups,straight-shanked spurs, tall-crowned hats, and grass ropes. They wereplain "cowpunchers." Between them and the California "vaqueros," or"buckeroos", was always much slow and drawling argument. For the latterhad been "raised different" in about every particular. They used thesingle-cinch saddle; long _tapaderos_; or stirrup hoods; curve-shankedspurs with jingling chains; low, wide-brimmed sombreros and rawhideropes. And you who have gauged the earnestness of what might be called"equipment arguments" among those of a gentler calling, can wellappreciate that never did bunk-house conversation lack.

  Next to these cow riders and horse riders came probably the muledrivers. There were many teams of mules, and they were used for manythings: such as plowing, cultivating, harvesting, haying, the buildingof irrigation checks and ditches, freighting, and the like. A teamcomprised from six to twelve individuals. The man in charge had to knowmules--which is no slight degree of special wisdom; had to know loads;had to understand conditioning. His lantern was the first to twinkle inthe morning as he doled out corn to his charges.

  Then came the ruck of field hands of all types. The average field handin California is a cross between a hobo and a labourer. He worksprobably about half the year. The other half he spends on the road,tramping it from place to place. Like the common hobo, he begs his waywhen he can; catches freight train rides; consorts in thickets with hiskind. Unlike the common hobo, however, he generally has money in hispocket and always carries a bed-roll. The latter consists of a blanketor so, or quilt, and a canvas strapped around the whole. You can see himat any time plodding along the highways and railroads, the roll slungacross his back. He much appreciates a lift in your rig; and sometimesproves worth the trouble. His labour raise
s him above the leveldegradation of the ordinary tramp; the independence of his spirit giveshis point of view an originality; the nomadic stirring of his bloodkeeps him going. In the course of years he has crossed the length andbreadth of the state a half dozen times. He has harvested apples inSiskiyou and oranges in Riverside; he has chopped sugar pine in thesnows of the Sierras and manzanita on the blazing hillsides of SanBernardino; he has garnered the wheat of the great Santa Clara Valleyand the alfalfa of San Fernando. And whenever the need for change or thedesire for a drink has struck him, he has drawn his pay, strapped hisbed roll, and cheerfully hiked away down the long and dusty trail.

  That is his chief defect as a field hand--his unreliability. He seemsto have no great pride in finishing out a job, although he is a goodworker while he is at it. The Captain used to send in the wagon to bringmen out, but refused absolutely to let any man ride in anything goingthe other way. Nevertheless the hand, when the wanderlust hit him,trudged cheerfully the long distance to town. I am not sure that a newtype is not thus developing, a type as distinct in its way as theriverman or the cowboy. It is not as high a type, of course, for it hasnot the strength either of sustained and earnest purpose nor of classloyalty; but still it makes for new species. The California field handhas mother-wit, independence, a certain reckless, you-be-damned courage,a wandering instinct. He quits work not because he wants to loaf, butbecause he wants to go somewhere else. He is always on the roadtravelling, travelling, travelling. It is not hope of gain that takeshim, for in the scarcity of labour wages are as high here as there. Itis not desire for dissipation that lures him from labour; he drinks hardenough, but the liquor is as potent here as two hundred miles away. Helooks you steadily enough in the eye; and he begs his bread and commitshis depredations half humorously, as though all this were fooling thatboth you and he understood. What his impelling motive is, I cannot say;nor whether he himself understands it, this restlessness that turns hisfeet ever to the pleasant California highways, an Ishmael of the road.

  But this very unreliability forces the ranchman to the next element inour consideration of the ranch's people--the Orientals. They are goodworkers, these little brown and yellow men, and unobtrusive andskilled. They do not quit until the job is done; they live frugally;they are efficient. The only thing we have against them is that we areafraid of them. They crowd our people out. Into a community they edgethemselves little by little. At the end of two years they have savedenough capital to begin to buy land. At the end of ten years they havetaken up all the small farms from the whites who cannot or will not livein competition with Oriental frugality. The valley, or cove, or flat hasbecome Japanese. They do not amalgamate. Their progeny are Japaneseunchanged; and their progeny born here are American citizens. In theface of public sentiment, restriction, savage resentment they have madehead. They are continuing to make head. The effects are as yet small inrelation to the whole of the body politic; but more and more of thefertile, beautiful little farm centres of California are becoming thebreeding grounds of Japanese colonies. As the pressure of population onthe other side increases, it is not difficult to foresee a result. Weare afraid of them.

  The ranchmen know this. "We would use white labour," say they, "if wecould get it, and rely on it. But we cannot; and we _must_ have labour!"The debt of California to the Orientals can hardly be computed. Thecitrus crop is almost entirely moved by them; and all other producedepends so largely on them that it would hardly be an exaggeration tosay that without them a large part of the state's produce would rot infields. We do not want the Oriental; and yet we must have him, must havemore of him if we are to reach our fullest development. It is a dilemma;a paradox.

  And yet, it seems to me, the paradox only exists because we will notface facts in a commonsense manner. As I remember it, the originalanti-Oriental howl out here made much of the fact that the Chinaman andJapanese saved his money and took it home with him. In the peculiarcircumstances we should not object to that. We cannot get our work doneby our own people; we are forced to hire in outsiders to do it; weshould expect, as a country, to pay a fair price for what we get. It isundoubtedly more desirable to get our work done at home; but if wecannot find the help, what more reasonable than that we should get itoutside, and pay for it? If we insist that the Oriental is a detrimentas a permanent resident, and if at the same time we need his labour,what else is there to do but pay him and let him go when he has done hisjob?

  And he will go _if pay is all he gets_. Only when he is permitted tosettle down to his favourite agriculture in a fertile country does hestay permanently. To be sure a certain number of him engages in variousother commercial callings, but that number bears always a very definiteproportion to the Oriental population in general. And it is harmless. Itis not absolute restriction of immigration we want--although I believeimmigration should be numerically restricted, but absolute prohibitionof the right to hold real estate. To many minds this may seem a denialof the "equal rights of man." I doubt whether in some respects men haveequal rights. Certainly Brown has not an equal right with Jones to spankJones's small boy; nor do I believe the rights of any foreign nationparamount to our own right to safeguard ourselves by proper legislation.

  These economics have taken us a long distance from the ranch and itsOrientals. The Japanese contingent were mainly occupied with the fruit,possessing a peculiar deftness in pruning and caring for the prunes andapricots. The Chinese had to do with irrigation and with the vegetables.Their broad, woven-straw hats and light denim clothes lent theparticular landscape they happened for the moment to adorn a peculiarlyforeign and picturesque air.

  And outside of these were various special callings represented by one ortwo men: such as the stable men, the bee keeper, the blacksmith andwagon-wright, the various cooks and cookees, the gardeners, the "varmintcatcher," and the like.

  Nor must be forgotten the animals, both wild and tame. Old Ben and YoungBen and Linn, the bird dogs; the dachshunds; the mongrels of the men'squarters; all the domestic fowls; the innumerable and blue-blooded hogs;the polo ponies and brood mares, the stud horses and driving horses andcow horses, colts, yearlings, the young and those enjoying a peacefuland honourable old age; Pollymckittrick; Redmond's cat and fifty others,half-wild creatures; vireos and orioles in the trees around the house;thousands and thousands of blackbirds rising in huge swarms like gnats;full-voiced meadowlarks on the fence posts; herons stalking solemnly, orwaiting like so many Japanese bronzes for a chance at a gopher;red-tailed hawks circling slowly; pigeon hawks passing with their falcondart; little gaudy sparrow hawks on top the telephone poles; buzzards,stately and wonderful in flight, repulsive when at rest; barn-owlsdwelling in the haystacks, and horned owls in the hollow trees; thegame in countless numbers; all the smaller animals and tiny birds inspecies too numerous to catalogue, all these drew their full sustenanceof life from the ranch's smiling abundance.

  And the mules; I must not forget them. I have the greatest respect for amule. He knows more than the horse; just as the goose or the duck knowsmore than the chicken. Six days the mules on the ranch laboured; but onthe seventh they were turned out into the pastures to rest and roll andstand around gossiping sociably, rubbing their long, ridiculous Romannoses together, or switching the flies off one another with theirtasselled tails. Each evening at sunset all the various teams came infrom different directions, converging at the lane, and plodding dustilyup its length to the sheds and their night's rest. Five evenings thusthey come in silence. But on the sixth each and every mule lifted up hisvoice in rejoicing over the morrow. The distant wayfarer--familiar withranch ways--hearing this strident, discordant, thankful chorus faracross the evening peace of the wide country, would thus have known thiswas Saturday night, and that to-morrow was the Sabbath, the day of rest!