by Willa Cather
trough under the pump. Then he called me to come and pump water on his
head. After he'd stood the gush of cold water for a few seconds, he
straightened up with his teeth chattering.
"That ought to get the whisky out of a fellow's head, oughtn't it? Felt
good, Tom." Presently he began feeling his side pockets. "Was I dreaming
something, or did I take a string of jack-pots last night?"
"The money's in your grip," I told him. "You don't deserve it, for you
were too drunk to take care of it. I had to come after you and pick it
up out of the mud."
"All right. I'll go halvers. Easy come, easy go."
I told him I didn't want anything off him but breakfast, and I wanted
that pretty soon.
"Go easy, son. I've got to change my shirt. This one's wet."
"It's worse than wet. You oughtn't to go up town without changing.
You're a stranger here, and it makes a bad impression."
He shrugged his shoulders and looked superior. He had a square-built,
honest face and steady eyes that didn't carry a cynical expression very
well. I knew he was a decent chap, though he'd been drinking and acting
ugly ever since he'd been on our division.
After breakfast we went out and sat in the sun at a place where the
wooden sidewalk ran over a sand gully and made a sort of bridge. I had a
long talk with him. I was carrying the grip with his winnings in it, and
I finally persuaded him to go with me to the bank. We put every cent of
it into a savings account that he couldn't touch for a year.
From that night Blake and I were fast friends. He was the sort of fellow
who can do anything for somebody else, and nothing for himself. There
are lots like that among working-men. They aren't trained by success to
a sort of systematic selfishness. Rodney had been unlucky in personal
relations. He'd run away from home when he was a kid because his mother
married again--a man who had been paying attention to her while his
father was still alive. He got engaged to a girl down on the Southern
Pacific, and she double-crossed him, as he said. He went to Old Mexico
and let his friends put all his savings into an oil well, and they
skinned him. What he needed was a pal, a straight fellow to give an
account to. I was ten years younger, and that was an advantage. He liked
to be an older brother. I suppose the fact that I was a kind of stray
and had no family, made it easier for him to unbend to me. He surely got
to think a lot of me, and I did of him. It was that winter I had
pneumonia. Mrs. O'Brien couldn't do much for me; she was overworked,
poor woman, with a houseful of children. Blake took me down to his room,
and he and the old Mexican woman nursed me. He ought to have had boys of
his own to look after. Nature's full of such substitutions, but they
always seem to me sad, even in botany.
I wasn't able to be about until spring, and then the doctor and Father
Duchene said I must give up night work and live in the open all summer.
Before I knew anything about it, Blake had thrown up his job on the
Santa F�, and got a berth for him and me with the Sitwell Cattle
Company. Jonas Sitwell was one of the biggest cattle men in our part of
New Mexico. Roddy and I were to ride the range with a bunch of grass
cattle all summer, then take them down to a winter camp on the Cruzados
river and keep them on pasture until spring.
We went out about the first of May, and joined our cattle twenty miles
south of Pardee, down toward the Blue Mesa. The Blue Mesa was one of the
landmarks we always saw from Pardee--landmarks mean so much in a flat
country. To the northwest, over toward Utah, we had the Mormon Buttes,
three sharp blue peaks that always sat there. The Blue Mesa was south of
us, and was much stronger in colour, almost purple. People said the rock
itself had a deep purplish cast. It looked, from our town, like a naked
blue rock set down alone in the plain, almost square, except that the
top was higher at one end. The old settlers said nobody had ever climbed
it, because the sides were so steep and the Cruzados river wound round
it at one end and under-cut it.
Blake and I knew that the Sitwell winter camp was down on the Cruzados
river, directly under the mesa, and all summer long, while we drifted
about with our cattle from one water-hole to another, we planned how we
were going to climb the mesa and be the first men up there. After
supper, when we lit our pipes and watched the sunset, climbing the mesa
was our staple topic of conversation. Our job was a cinch; the actual
work wouldn't have kept one man busy. The Sitwell people were good to
their hands. John Rapp, the foreman, came along once a month in his
spring-wagon, to see how the cattle were doing and to bring us supplies
and bundles of old newspapers.
Blake was conscientious reader of newspapers. He always wanted to know
what was going on in the world, though most of it displeased him. He
brooded on the great injustices of his time; the hanging of the
Anarchists in Chicago, which he could just remember, and the Dreyfus
case. We had long arguments about what we read in the papers, but we
never quarrelled. The only trouble I had with Blake was in getting to do
my share of the work. He made my health a pretext for taking all the
heavy chores, long after I was as well as he was. I'd brought my Caesar
along, and had promised Father Duchene to read a hundred lines a day.
Blake saw that I did it--made me translate the dull stuff aloud to him.
He said if I once knew Latin, I wouldn't have to work with my back all
my life like a burro. He had great respect for education, but he
believed it was some kind of hocus-pocus that enabled a man to live
without work. We had Robinson Crusoe with us, and Roddy's favourite
book, Gulliver's Travels, which he never tired of.
Late in October, Rapp, the foreman, came along to accompany us down to
the winter camp. Blake stayed with the cattle about fifteen miles to the
east, where the grass was still good, and Rapp and I went down to air
out the cabin and stow away our winter supplies.
Chapter 2
The cabin stood in a little grove of pi�ons, about thirty yards back
from the Cruzados river, facing south and sheltered on the north by a
low hill. The grama grass grew right up to the doorstep, and the rabbits
were running about and the grasshoppers hitting the door when we pulled
up and looked at the place. There was no litter around, it was as clean
as a prairie-dog's house. No outbuildings, except a shed for our horses.
The hillside behind was sandy and covered with tall clumps of deer-horn
cactus, but there was nothing but grass to the south, with streaks of
bright yellow rabbit-brush. Along the river the cottonwoods and quaking
asps had already turned gold. Just across from us, overhanging us,
indeed, stood the mesa, a pile of purple rock, all broken out with red
sumach and yellow aspens up in the high crevices of the cliffs. From the
cabin, night and day, you could hear the river, where it made a bend
round the foot of the mesa and churned over the rocks. It was t
he sort
of place a man would like to stay in forever.
I helped Rapp open the wooden shutters and sweep out the cabin. We put
clean blankets on the bunks, and stowed away bacon and coffee and canned
stuff on the shelves behind the cook-stove. I confess I looked forward
to cooking on an iron stove with four holes. Rapp explained to me that
Blake and I wouldn't be able to enjoy all this luxury together for a
time. He wanted the herd kept some distance to the north as long as the
grass held out up there, and Roddy and I could take turn about, one
camping near the cattle and one sleeping in a bed.
"There's not pasture enough down here to take them through a long
winter," he said, "and it's safest to keep them grazing up north while
you can. Besides, if you bring them down here while the weather's so
warm, they get skittish, and that mesa over there makes trouble. The
swim the river and bolt into the mesa, and that's the last you ever see
of them. We've lost a lot of critters that way. The mesa has been
populated by run-aways from our herd, till now there's a fine bunch of
wild cattle up there. When the wind's right, our cows over here get the
scent of them and make a break for the river. You'll have to watch 'em
close when you bring 'em down."
I asked him whether nobody had ever gone over to get the lost cattle
out.
Rapp glared at me. "Out of that mesa? Nobody has ever got into it yet.
The cliffs are like the base of a monument, all the way round. The only
way in is through that deep canyon that opens on the water level, just
where the river makes the bend. You can't get in by that, because the
river's too deep to ford and too swift to swim. Oh, I suppose a horse
could swim it, if cattle can, but I don't want to be the man to try."
I remarked that I had had my eye on the mesa all summer and meant to
climb it.
"Not while you're working for the Sitwell Company, you don't! If you
boys try any nonsense of that sort, I'll fire you quick. You'd break
your bones and lose the herd for us. You have to watch them close to
keep them from going over, I tell you. If it wasn't for that mesa, this
would be the best winter range in all New Mexico."
After the foreman left us, we settled down to easy living and fine
weather; blue and gold days, and clear, frosty nights. We kept the
cattle off to the north and east and alternated in taking charge of
them. One man was with the herd while the other got his sleep and did
the cooking at the cabin. The mesa was our only neighbour, and the
closer we got to it, the more tantalizing it was. It was no longer a
blue, featureless lump, as it had been from a distance. Its sky-line was
like the profile of a big beast lying down; the head to the north,
higher than the flanks around which the river curved. The north end we
could easily believe impassable--sheer cliffs that fell from the summit
to the plain, more than a thousand feet. But the south flank, just
across the river from us, looked accessible by way of the deep canyon
that split the bulk in two, from the top rim to the river, then wound
back into the solid cube so that it was invisible at a distance, like a
mouse track winding into a big cheese. This canyon didn't break the
solid outline of the mesa, and you had to be close to see that it was
there at all. We faced the mesa on its shortest side; it was only about
three miles long from north to south, but east and west it measured
nearly twice that distance. Whether the top was wooded we couldn't
see--it was too high above us; but the cliffs and canyon on the river
side were fringed with beautiful growth, groves of quaking asps and
pi�ons and a few dark cedars, perched up in the air like the hanging
gardens of Babylon. At certain hours of the day, those cedars, growing
so far up on the rocks, took on the bluish tint of the cliffs
themselves.
It was light up there long before it was with us. When I got up at
daybreak and went down to the river to get water, our camp would be cold
and grey, but the mesa top would be red with sunrise, and all the slim
cedars along the rocks would be gold--metallic, like tarnished
gold-foil. Some mornings it would loom up above the dark river like a
blazing volcanic mountain. It shortened our days, too, considerably. The
sun got behind it early in the afternoon, and then our camp would lie in
its shadow. After a while the sunset colour would begin to stream up
from behind it. Then the mesa was like one great ink-black rock against
a sky on fire.
No wonder the thing bothered us and tempted us; it was always before us,
and was always changing. Black thunder-storms used to roll up from
behind it and pounce on us like a panther without warning. The lightning
would play round it and jab into it so that we were always expecting it
would fire the brush. I've never heard thunder so loud as it was there.
The cliffs threw it back at us, and we thought the mesa itself, though
it seemed so solid, must be full of deep canyons and caverns, to account
for the prolonged growl and rumble that followed every crash of thunder.
After the burst in the sky was over, the mesa went on sounding like a
drum, and seemed itself to be muttering and making noises.
One afternoon I was out hunting turkeys. Just as the sun was getting
low, I came through a sea of rabbit-brush, still yellow, and the
horizontal rays of light, playing into it, brought out the contour of
the ground with great distinctness. I noticed a number of straight
mounds, like plough furrows, running from the river inland. It was too
late to examine them. I cut a scrub willow and stuck a stake into one of
the ridges, to mark it. The next day I took a spade down to the
plantation of rabbit-brush and dug around the sandy soil. I came upon an
old irrigation main, unmistakable, lined with hard smooth cobbles and
'dobe cement, with sluices where the water had been let out into the
trenches. Along these ditches I turned up some pieces of pottery, all of
it broken, and arrowheads, and a very neat, well-finished stone pick-ax.
That night I didn't go back to the cabin, but took my specimens out to
Blake, who was still north with the cattle. Of course, we both knew
there had been Indians all over this country, but we felt sure that
Indians hadn't used stone tools for a long while back. There must have
been a colony of pueblo Indians here in ancient time: fixed residents,
like the Taos Indians and the Hopis, not wanderers like the Navajos.
To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about
finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty
country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel
differently about the ground you walk over every day. I liked the winter
range better than any place I'd ever been in. I never came out of the
cabin door in the morning to go after water that I didn't feel fresh
delight in our snug quarters and the river and the old mesa up there,
with its top burning like a bonfire. I wanted to see what it was like on
; the other side, and very soon I took a day off and forded the river
where it was wide and shallow, north of our camp. I rode clear around
the mesa, until I met the river again where it flowed under the south
flank.
On that ride I got a better idea of its actual structure. All the way
round were the same precipitous cliffs of hard blue rock, but in places
it was mixed with a much softer stone. In these soft streaks there were
deep dry watercourses which could certainly be climbed as far as they
went, but nowhere did they reach to the top of the mesa. The top seemed
to be one great slab of very hard rock, lying on the mixed mass of the
base like the top of an old-fashioned marble table. The channels worn
out by water ran for hundreds of feet up the cliffs, but always stopped
under this great rim-rock, which projected out over the erosions like a
granite shelf. Evidently, it was because of this unbroken top layer that
the butte was inaccessible. I rode back to camp that night, convinced
that if we ever climbed it, we must take the route the cattle took,
through the river and up the one canyon that broke down to water-level.
Chapter 3
We brought the bunch of cattle down to the winter range in the latter
part of November. Early in December the foreman came along with generous
provisions for Christmas. This time he brought with him a super-cargo,
a pitiful wreck of an old man he had picked up at Tarpin, the railroad
town thirty miles northeast of us, where the Sitwells bought their
supplies. This old man was a castaway Englishman, Henry Atkins by name.
He had been a valet, and a hospital orderly, and a cook, and for many
years was a table steward on the Anchor Line. Lately he had been cooking
for a sheep outfit that were grazing in the cattle country, were they
weren't wanted. They had done something shady and had to get out in a
hurry. They dropped old Henry at Tarpin, where he soon drank up all his
wages. When Rapp picked him up there, he was living on hand-outs.
"I've told him we can't pay him anything," Rapp explained. "But if he
wants to stay here and cook for you boys till I make my next trip, he'll
have plenty to eat and a roof over him. He was sleeping in the livery
stable in Tarpin. He says he's a good cook, and I thought he might liven
things up for you at Christmas time. He won't bother you, he's not got
any of the mean ways of a bum--I know a bum when I see one. Next time I
come down I'll bring him some old clothes from the ranch, and you can
fire him if you want to. All his baggage is that newspaper bundle, and
there's nothing in it but shoes--a pair of patent leathers and a pair of
sneakers. The important thing is, never, on any account, go off
skylarking, you two, and leave him with the cattle. Not for an hour,
mind you. He ain't strong enough, and he's got no head."
Life was a holiday for Blake and me after we got old Henry. He was a
wonderful cook and a good housekeeper. He kept that cabin shining like a
playhouse; used to dress it all out with pi�on boughs, and trimmed the
kitchen shelves with newspapers cut in fancy patterns. He had learned to
make up cots when he was a hospital orderly, and he made our bunks feel
like a Harvey House bed. To this day that's the best I can say for any
bed. And he was such a polite, mannerly old boy; simple and kind as a
child. I used to wonder how anybody so innocent and defenceless had
managed to get along at all, to keep alive for nearly seventy years in
as hard a world as this. Anybody could take advantage of him. He held no
grudge against any of the people who had misused him. He loved to tell
about the celebrated people he'd been steward to, and the liberal tips
they had given him. There with us, where he couldn't get at whisky, he
was a model of good behaviour. "Drink is me weakness, you might say," he