by Ralph Moody
I didn’t try to bluff at either of the other employment offices. I just walked up to the counters and told the agents I’d pay five dollars for any kind of a job they could send me out on right away, and that I didn’t care how small the wages were. Both agents were real pleasant when I first went in, and they both thought I was a soldier just back from the war—but when I told them I wasn’t, they didn’t treat me so well. The one in the last office I went to shouted loud enough for everybody in the place to hear him, “I ain’t got no job for a slacker today, nor no other day. Get on back where you come from!”
I hunted for another employment office until dark, then went back to the depot for my suitcase, and started out to find a room and some supper. I found a little room near the stockyards that wasn’t too bad, and cost only seventy-five cents a night, but I didn’t make out very well on supper. I went into half a dozen restaurants that looked as if they wouldn’t be too high-priced, but none of them had any leafy green vegetables or fish, and the only kind of chicken they had was fried. I finally had to settle for three boiled eggs and a cup of coffee, but they charged me thirty-five cents, though I had neither bread nor potatoes.
I didn’t really feel homesick when I went back to my room—I’d worked away from home too much for that—but I did feel sort of all alone. When I couldn’t go to sleep, I got out Mother’s little notebook to look up a few Bible verses, but I didn’t do it. Before she had written down the chapter and verse numbers, she’d filled all the pages with things she’d wanted to say to me before I came away. At the end she wrote, “Son, you are in God’s hands, so I shall not let myself worry, and I won’t expect long letters, but do let us hear from you often, even though it is only a penny postal card.”
I never was much good at writing letters, but regardless of what Mother said I knew she’d be worrying, so I got out the pad she had put in my suitcase and sat down to write her a little note. Then, once I got started, I couldn’t seem to quit till I’d written a dozen pages. Ever since I was knee-high to a toad the thing she had insisted on most was that I tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” But it didn’t seem to be the right thing to do in that letter, so I just wrote whatever I thought would keep her from worrying.
After I’d written about how much I liked my diet and how warm the weather was, I told her about having landed a fine job on a big cattle ranch right near town, where they had lots of leafy green vegetables and a cook who knew all about making gluten bread, and where I could get in to see the doctor every week. Then I told her that I’d have to spend my first couple of months’ wages to buy a saddle and outfit and wouldn’t be able to send any money home till spring, but that I’d be getting my keep as part of my pay. In that way I wouldn’t need a penny for anything except the doctor, so she should cash the Liberty bonds right away, to hold the family over until Philip had finished his apprenticeship. In the rest of the letter I just told her things I made up about how big the ranch was, and how many cattle there were on it, and how friendly everybody had been. When I’d finished, I almost believed it myself.
It was a week before I wrote home again, and I had to do some more lying, but I found it a lot harder that time, and I couldn’t make myself believe a word of it for a single second. I wrote that the place where I was working was the home ranch for one of the biggest cattle outfits in the Southwest, and that the owners had other ranches scattered all around Arizona and New Mexico. Then, after I’d told how much better I was feeling and how well I was getting along on my job, I said that the boss was sending another cowhand and me to one of the ranches near Phoenix, that I didn’t know exactly what my address would be, but that I’d write again when I got there.
What had really happened was that I had gone broke. I’d talked to every cowhand and every cattleman who came in to the stockyards that week. They had all been friendly when I first talked to them, and I think a couple of the cattlemen might have given me a job, but they all froze up when I told them I hadn’t been in the service. I went to every employment office in Tucson, looking for a job of any kind. I found only one, and I’d have been better off if I hadn’t found it. The agent charged me three dollars for a job as night dishwasher in a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant, then the boss fired me within an hour. I couldn’t blame him for it because there were lots of returned Arizona soldiers, a good many of them Mexicans, who were looking for any kind of job. One just happened to come along at the wrong time for me.
That job, and the doctor, and gluten bread were the reasons I went broke so fast. The morning after I wrote Mother my first letter I had to pay thirty-five cents for three more eggs and a cup of coffee. Three eggs alone don’t go very far, and neither does money if you have to buy them at ten cents apiece. I decided that until I found a job I’d better try to live on the gluten flour I’d brought from home, so I asked the cook in the restaurant what he’d charge me to make it up into bread. Even though I was furnishing my own flour, the best deal I could make with him was fifty cents. But that didn’t seem too bad, because I expected I’d get five or six loaves.
Before I took the flour back to the restaurant I wrote out Mother’s recipe for making gluten bread, but the cook got huffy and wouldn’t take it. He said he didn’t need anybody to tell him how to make bread, and if I knew so much about it I could make it myself. I’d have been fifty cents better off if I had. I don’t think he’d ever seen gluten flour before, and I don’t think he put anything but salt and water into it before he baked it—and he must have baked it all day. When I went back that evening he made me pay him before he’d bring the bread out of the kitchen, and when he brought it I knew why. He’d baked the whole five pounds of flour into two loaves that were the same size, shape, color, and hardness as paving bricks. If I’d been a dog with good teeth I might have been able to gnaw a corner off one of them, but I couldn’t make a dent in it with the teeth I had. After I’d tried for about ten minutes, I threw both loaves in an alley and bought a can of salmon for my supper. For the rest of the week I made out on a ten-cent pound of peanuts and a fifteen-cent can of salmon a day. I just about had to because of a mistake I made the first time I went to the doctor. And then too, they were the only things on my diet that I could eat without cooking.
In the first letter I’d written to Mother I’d told her I was going to a doctor the next morning, before I went out to my new job on the ranch. Even though I didn’t have any job, I didn’t dare not to go to a doctor, because I knew Dr. Gaghan would tell Mother if he failed to get a report card every week. I put one of the cards Grace had written out for me in my pocket when I took the flour to the restaurant, then hunted up a doctor. He was a kindly old gentleman, and visited with me nearly half an hour before he made his tests on the sample I’d brought. He wanted me to tell him when I first noticed that I was losing weight, and what the specialists in the hospital said, and what Dr. Gaghan said, and what diet he’d laid out for me.
“Hmmmm. Hmmmm,” he said after he’d looked at the diet pages in my notebook. “Don’t know but what I’d agree with your family physician instead of the specialists, but you’ll find this diet rather hard to live on in this country, particularly if you’re planning to do ranch work. Most of the grub will be bully beef and beans and biscuits, or chili con carne and tortillas. On ranches that hire more than one or two hands you won’t find any green vegetables, and unless the foreman has a family of youngsters he won’t be milking a cow or keeping chickens. And, of course, there is no fresh fish in this country. It seems to me you’ll have to depend heavily on gluten bread, nuts, and canned salmon. You can make out all right if you have plenty of fresh milk, but without it you might run into trouble. However, you’ll have to lay in a supply of gluten flour here, and I’d advise you to take plenty of it along. In any other town except Phoenix they’d have to send away for it.”
The doctor tested the sample I’d brought him in a little back room, and when he came out I noticed that he’d made three or four check marks on
the report card. Then, as he weighed me, and took my pulse, temperature, and blood pressure, he wrote down the figures. After he’d finished he said, “Except for the sugar, it’s not too bad. That will be two dollars. I’ll mail the card to your physician when I go to lunch.”
If I’d known I wasn’t going to find a job I’d have told him I’d do my own mailing, but, of course, I didn’t know it then. That’s why I had to save out two dollars before I went stone broke, and go to see him the second time. That time I told him not to bother about mailing the card, that I’d take it with me and enclose it in a letter to Dr. Gaghan. So he scrawled his name at the bottom of the card and gave it to me. I didn’t write any letter, and I didn’t plan to, but I copied all the check marks and figures onto another card before I mailed the one the doctor gave me. I didn’t bother about trying to copy the signature because no two doctors write the same anyway.
After two nights in the hotel I could see that I was living beyond my means, and that seventy-five cents a night would break me in a hurry. Besides, I wouldn’t have any more use for my suitcase or the pinchbacked suit I’d worn on the train. A fellow would look pretty silly to be carrying a suitcase and no bedroll when he went to work on some ranch as a cowhand. He’d look even sillier with a pinchbacked suit and tan oxfords instead of a denim jumper and riding boots. Before I started out to look for a job that third morning I took my suit, suitcase, watch, and empty lunch basket, and went hunting for a pawnshop where the owner would do a little trading.
I had to try three or four pawnshops before I found one where I could make a decent deal. Of course, I expected to come out at the little end of the horn, but I didn’t get stuck too badly. The suitcase wasn’t new, I’d had the shoes six months and the suit a year, but the lunch basket had double covers and was brand new, and the watch had cost five dollars. After an hour’s haggling I traded them for a pretty good blanket, a tarpaulin that looked as though it would still shed rain, a pair of boots that were just a bit scuffed and run down at the heels, a jumper and pair of jeans that had been worn only enough to fade in good shape, and a throw rope that was almost new. I could have made the deal a lot quicker if I hadn’t held out for the throw rope, but I needed some practice to get my hand and eye back in, and I couldn’t do it without a rope.
From the pawnshop I went back to my room, folded everything I had inside the blanket, and wrapped it in the tarp. When I had it corded up it looked like a good husky bedroll, so I took it down to the stockyards and tossed it into one corner of the scaler’s office, just as if I were a cowhand in with a bunch of cattle for shipping. During the day I tried to get a job from every cattleman who came to the yards, and in my spare time I practiced with the rope. It’s hard to get in any good rope practice without a horse and some cattle to work on. But I’d have made the drovers sore if I’d worked on any of the cattle in the pens, so I just sat astraddle of a fence to practice; trying to lay my loop around some pebble in an empty pen, or to make it stand close to the ground where some imaginary critter would step into it.
That night, and for the rest of the week, I slept by a feed stack just outside the pens, and I wasn’t alone. There were eight or ten other fellows sleeping there, every one of them broke and looking for a cowhand job. That’s where I met Lonnie, and I don’t know yet whether it was good or bad.
2
Land Rolling!
LONNIE was about my age, and told me he’d been brought up on a Wyoming ranch, drafted, and honorably discharged from the service after he’d nearly died with the flu. Ever since spring he’d been drifting around the Southwest—mostly by hopping freight trains—and hunting for a job as top hand or bronc buster. I think he was too lazy to have made a top hand, and I don’t know about his bronc riding, but he was friendly as the dickens and could handle a rope to beat the band; he showed me a couple of real handy tricks on turn-around forefooting. I couldn’t run past him fast enough that he couldn’t snag me by either foot he wanted to. It was because of Lonnie that I wrote Mother about being sent with another cowhand to a ranch near Phoenix.
I was down to less than a dollar when Lonnie asked me how about catching the night freight and going up to Phoenix. He told me we’d be there by morning and that he knew a lot of fellows around the stockyards. He said that if we didn’t go out for top hands, but would settle for jobs at thirty or forty dollars a month, it would be a cinch to get them up there. Right then I’d have been glad to get a job anywhere, doing anything, for five dollars a month and my keep, so I told him I thought it was a good idea.
It isn’t easy to flip a rolling freight train for the first time, especially if you have a bedroll lashed onto your back, but I didn’t have too much trouble that night in Tucson. Lonnie showed me how to do it on some empty boxcars out near the end of the freight yards, then we hid under them until the night freight pulled out. It was just beginning to pick up a little speed when we ducked out and ran along beside it. Lonnie flipped onto the step of one boxcar as it went past, and I flipped onto the next. We might have been better off if we’d been caught right then, but we weren’t. It was about half an hour before the brakeman came down along the top of the train and spied us. He kicked us off at the first stop, about twenty miles out from Tucson.
That was the first of a dozen times we were kicked off freight trains before we reached Phoenix four days and nights later, and we must have walked the tracks thirty miles of the way. Lonnie could get by pretty well by mooching meals at houses in the little towns where we were kicked off. But it wouldn’t have been any good for me, even if I’d have done it, because they didn’t have any of the things I could eat—unless it might have been boiled eggs. By the end of the second day I’d spent my last dime for salmon and peanuts, and if Lonnie hadn’t been a good forager as well as a good moocher I’d have come close to starving.
It was Thanksgiving morning and I was down to my last handful of peanuts when we had our worst luck. A brakeman about the size and disposition of a grizzly bear kicked us off right out in the middle of the desert. I think he must have seen us flip aboard just after daylight, and had waited to catch us at the very worst spot he could. If he hadn’t he wouldn’t have been carrying a club when he came after us. We were sitting in the end of an empty gondola car, about half asleep, when I heard a thumping above our heads. At the same moment Lonnie scrambled to his feet, grabbed his bedroll, and yelled, “Watch it, buddy! Land rolling!” Then he dived out over the side of the car.
For a second I was kind of bewildered, then I looked up and saw the brakey coming down the ladder of a boxcar right above me. The club he was carrying looked as big as a fence post. I don’t remember anything about throwing my bedroll over the side, but I did it. Then I grabbed the edge of the car and vaulted over. I didn’t dare dive the way Lonnie had, but I had sense enough to throw myself far out, and not try to land on my feet. I was lucky enough to come down in a patch of rabbit brush, so I only got the wind knocked out of me and scratched up a little. The brakey must have thrown his club at the same second I went over the edge; it was lying within four feet of me when I was able to catch my breath and sit up.
It’s a wonder that Lonnie and I didn’t get killed, because that train was rolling at least fifty miles an hour. He couldn’t have unloaded more than five seconds before I did, but he landed at least a hundred yards farther back, and my bedroll was halfway between us. When he caught up to me he cussed the tar out of me for vaulting, and said I’d have broken my back if I hadn’t landed in the rabbit brush. Then he told me that if you dived straight out you’d land rolling, and if you weren’t unlucky enough to hit a fence or a rock you wouldn’t be hurt too badly.
It had been cold the night before, and we didn’t get much sleep because we’d had to be ready to flip that freight when it came through, but by the time we got kicked off, the desert was as hot as summer. We had to walk eight or nine miles to reach the first little town; just a flag stop, with five or six adobe houses and a section hand’s shack. It was past noon b
efore we got there, and I was so dried out that my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. After we’d drunk about a gallon of water apiece we sat in the shade of an old tumble-down cattle pen for a while, then Lonnie went to see if he could mooch something to eat. While he was gone I finished the last of my peanuts, one by one, and watched half a dozen hens and a rooster that were scratching in the dust of the cattle pen.
Lonnie was gone nearly an hour, and when he came back he was carrying a bucket about half full of water.
“What you doing with that bucket?” I asked him as he sat down beside me.
“Brung our Thanksgivin’ dinner,” he said. “You know, buddy, some of these Mex women ain’t so dumb. One of ’em made me pack her five buckets of water ’fore she’d give me a bowl of chile, about half of it gristle.”
“Half a bucket of water won’t make much of a supper,” I said. “I wish it was milk. Did you find out when the next train stops here?”
“Ain’t none,” he told me as he fished a long piece of string and a chunk of gristle out of his pocket. “Nine miles up the line there’s a water tank where all the freights stop at to fill the boiler. We’ll have to hoof it.”
As Lonnie talked he tied the piece of gristle—about the size of a small grasshopper—onto the end of the string, then tossed it out into the middle of the pen. The rooster saw it sailing through the air, ran toward it, and gobbled it the instant it touched the ground. It was so big that he had to crane his neck two or three times before he could swallow it. Lonnie cussed in a whisper because the rooster got the gristle instead of one of the hens, but as he mumbled he kept drawing in slowly on the string. At first the old rooster tried to hold back, but, with that piece of gristle in his craw, Lonnie had him hooked like a fish. Step by step he brought the rooster closer until he could snatch him by the neck. Then he whispered to me, “Grab that bucket o’ water and duck into the brush!”