by Ralph Moody
When Ted came riding out with the next bunch, I noticed right away that all the Indians were real ones, but there were a few more Hollywood cowboys, and four fall men were mounted on old crowbaits. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked to me as if only two of them were Wyoming boys, and they were evidently pretty well sobered up, because they weren’t doing any yipping and yelling. From the motions Ted was going through I knew he was telling them what they should do, and what they shouldn’t do, in trying to protect themselves in both the ride and the fall.
After Ted had talked to the fall boys for ten or fifteen minutes he took the musket from one of them, then traded mounts with him. He was barely up on the fall pony when everyone along the course began yelling, shouting, shooting off guns, and making all the noise they could. Frightened by all the noise, the pony bolted straight away, but he hadn’t taken three strides before he swerved to the right and skirted the edge of an open, gravelly patch of ground. At the same time, Ted threw the musket to his shoulder, hugged his chin against the stock as though he were taking careful aim, and fired. The direction he was holding the musket kept his head turned quartering from the way the pony was running. But the pony came pounding up the course toward me, weaving in and out to keep clear ground at his left during nearly every step of the way. Ted kept on shooting, with his chin hugged tight against the stock and his head turned quartering away.
At first I thought Ted must be riding a well-trained pony, but as he came closer I could see that he was swerving it this way and that with his weight and the pressure of his knees. And he wasn’t sighting down the barrel of the musket. Only his head was turned; his eye was watching the ground ten feet in front of his pony’s hoofs. Just as he passed the bushes where I was hiding, he threw his arms high, let the musket fall behind him, and dived down the far side of the pony’s neck. He didn’t unload, but straightened up after a few strides, turned the pony, and rode back to pick up the musket. He didn’t look toward my bush, but as he stepped down he asked, “Did you take note o’ that?”
“Nice going!” I said, without moving.
He still didn’t look my way, but as he swung back into the saddle he told me, “Stay where you’re at, kid, and keep your eye peeled.”
When Ted lined up his fall riders for that run I noticed that he left the two middle trip lines open. He put the two Wyoming boys way over to the right, and the other two far out to the left. Then he put the last riders among the Hollywood bunch about two or three lengths in front of them. With that much open space between themselves and the riders ahead, the fall boys had plenty of chance to watch where they were riding and to do it the way Ted had showed them. And spread out the way they were, every one of them could have made his fall with no horse behind him or within twenty feet.
They didn’t do it. The instant the director yelled, “ROLL!” all four of them swerved their ponies toward the center of the strip, and spurred as if they were trying to outrun a cyclone. Not one of them was aiming his musket at the Indians, but had it swung up as if it were an ax handle. The ponies of the two riders who had started from the inside positions came together quartering, shoulder to shoulder, and went down with their riders under them in a tangle of arms, legs, kicking heels, and twanging wire. The trip man dropped his hook just as the second Wyoming boy was swinging his musket at the head of a New Mexico rider. Off balance, he had no chance to save himself, spun over with his horse, and came down with it sprawled on top of him.
The New Mexico boy tried to make a decent ride of it as soon as he was left alone. By the time he came into camera range he had his musket aimed at the Indians, was handling his pony in good shape, and made his fall within five feet of my bush. His horse was tripped just as it reached out with the lead forefoot, so it went over in a lightning-fast somersault—straight forward. The boy barely had time to heave his musket back over his head, and was shot from the saddle almost as if he’d been an arrow leaving a bow. But the horse went over so fast that the rider was only three or four feet from the ground when he flew. And he still had his arms and head thrown back, from getting rid of the musket.
Without trying to twist or turn, the rider streaked through the air for eight or ten feet, hit the ground sliding, and skidded another five or six. If he’d lit on sod, or any sort of smooth ground, he wouldn’t have been hurt any more than a boy taking a belly-buster slide on a sled. But he didn’t land on sod; he came down right in the middle of a gravel patch, and before he’d skidded to a stop the pebbles had ripped his clothes to ribbons and scraped most of the hair off his chest.
At first it seemed to me that the best thing I could do was to stay where I was till noon, then eat as much as my belly would hold—on my last meal ticket—and head back to town before I got killed in one of those crazy rides. Then, after the mess had been cleaned up and I was waiting for Ted to bring out the last bunch of riders for the forenoon, I began thinking about the New Mexico rider’s fall—and I got an idea. The first thought that had gone through my head when I’d seen him sailing along, just a couple of feet above the ground, was that he looked like a boy who had made his run and was flopping down onto his sled. And sliding made me think of a hill, and that made me think about the new set Ted had shown me on the side of the mesa.
It’s funny how one thing will lead to another when a fellow is all alone, and in no hurry, and thinking sort of loose-jointedly. The next thing I found myself thinking about was that I’d seen skiers in New England jump nearly the whole length of hills that were fully as steep and a lot longer than the one on the edge of the mesa. Of course, they’d had snow to land on, but some of those jumpers had been as much as sixty feet above the hillside on their way down, and it wasn’t the softness of the snow that had kept them from being hurt when they landed. It had been because the hillside was falling away nearly as fast as they were, and because they kept right on sliding downward after they’d landed.
It seemed to me that it might work about the same way if a fellow took a horse fall down a steep hill like that. It wouldn’t do any good to somersault in the air and try to land on your feet, because you wouldn’t slide but would topple over like a felled tree. That wouldn’t happen if you went belly-bump, the way the New Mexico rider had, but the gravel on the new set was coarser and sharper than on the patch of ground in front of my bush.
I’d have given up any idea of trying a belly-bump fall on the new set if I hadn’t happened to remember the time one of our neighbor’s boys nearly got killed when we were hauling gravel for a new road. He was a smart-alec kid about ten years old, and had been amusing himself by throwing pebbles at the horses while we were loading wagons in an old pit that had been dug deep into a hillside. We were about ready to wring his neck before his father told him to go home, but he didn’t go. Instead, he climbed the hill and began tossing pebbles down at us from the edge of the pit.
Suddenly I heard a screech and looked up to see the boy tumbling down the face of the gravel bank. He skidded and slid about half the distance, then started a slide that buried him four feet deep at the bottom, and we got him dug out just before he smothered to death. That gravel was really rough, and we expected to find the kid torn to shreds, but there wasn’t a scratch on him, so we figured the stones had rolled under him like ball bearings.
I knew the stones on the side of the mesa wouldn’t roll that easily, because the grade wasn’t steep enough and the ground underneath was too rough and hard, but if they’d roll at all I thought I had an idea that would make me a lot of money. I didn’t wait to see the falls of the last forenoon run, but crawled out of my bush and slipped away to the edge of the mesa, keeping out of sight as much as I could. When I was sure I was alone I walked along the rim till I found a big open patch of gravel down over the edge, with no boulders or cactus on it. Then I took a run, jumped off over the edge, and landed like a baseball player stealing second base. I landed pretty hard on my hip, but the stones rolled under me, and I’d only torn my jeans a little when I skidded to a stop.
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Next I tried diving off headfirst, as if I’d had a sled to come down on, but I kept my head well back and my arms up. That didn’t work too well, because I stuck my chest out too far and didn’t have it full enough of air. When I lit on it I knocked the wind out of myself, but I didn’t skid very far, and I didn’t get scraped too badly on the gravel.
Before I could try another fall I had to sit there a few minutes to get my breath back, and it gave me a chance to do a little more thinking. I hadn’t seen Lonnie land when he’d dived off the freight train, but he’d told me that if you landed rolling you wouldn’t get hurt, so I decided I’d try it in making a fall. That time I took a fast run to the edge, dived high, and twisted myself crossways of the hill so I’d land rolling. I did. And I’d have rolled clear to the bottom of the hill if I hadn’t wound up in a tangle of greasewood bushes. But it hadn’t knocked the wind out of me when I landed, and I’d only got a few scratches from the gravel as I rolled.
On the next try I didn’t turn my body so far while I was in the air, but twisted a shoulder down, so I’d land on the back of it and roll diagonally. It worked all right, and after I’d tried it a few more times I found that I could steer myself pretty well in the air, so as to land and roll about where and how I wanted to. Then I brushed myself off a little and went in for lunch.
I hadn’t realized that I’d spent much time in practicing, but the last run of the forenoon had been finished for an hour before I got back to the lot. A stretcherman told me it was the wildest ride he’d ever seen. All four of the fall riders were in the hospital tent with broken arms or legs, and the rest of Group Three was in the chuck tent. I cleaned myself up as well as I could before I went over, but when I’d passed the serving counter Ted motioned for me to come and sit with him. “Where the devil you been, and what you been up to?” he asked me as I sat down opposite him.
“Practicing on the edge of the mesa,” I told him. “Who do I make a deal with for taking falls on the new set?”
Ted told me I’d have to make my deal with the production manager, and that he’d take me to him as soon as I’d finished my lunch, but it was more than half an hour before we left the table. First he made me tell him about my practicing; just how I’d done it and what I’d learned from it. Then he told me about the trouble he’d been having with our group that forenoon. He said it was divided into two war parties—the Wyoming boys against everybody else—and that a man might as well waste his time in trying to talk sense to a pack of fighting coyotes. The boys didn’t dare get into any more fist fights, because there were too many armed guards around and they’d get kicked off the lot, so they’d turned the fall riding into a crazy game of stump-the-leader. That was why he wanted to get started on the new set right away. He said that the way things were going, half the boys would bust themselves up before suppertime anyway, and they might as well do it on a set where the company could shoot some premium film.
The production man knew as well as we did that the other boys were steamed up enough to tackle the new set, and that they wouldn’t hold out for big pay to make the falls. Even with Ted’s telling him that I’d be worth more, the best deal I could make with the man was for twenty-five dollars a fall. Even at that it didn’t work out too badly. Ted was right in his guess that half the boys would bust themselves up before suppertime. They did, and the next day I was able to raise my price to thirty-five.
While we were over at the make-up tent getting ready for my first ride Ted got an idea that saved me a lot of grief, and probably made me a lot of money. I was so thin that the wardrober couldn’t find anything to fit me. He was trying to make an old jacket smaller when Ted winked at me and hollered, “Wait a minute there! You can’t go puttin’ no pins in a fall-rider’s duds, and I ain’t going to have no rider out there lookin’ like a dressed-up skeleton! Pad this kid up so’s’t he can fill man-sized cloze!” He slapped me on the back of the shoulders hard enough to rattle my teeth, and again on the chest. “Get it up high on him here, and thick,” he told the man, “so’s’t he’ll look like a man ’stead of a scarecrow! And pad out the points of them skinny shoulders!”
When we went out of there I looked like a fat bull with a starved calf’s head on him, but those pads saved me an awful lot of beating when I landed from a bad fall. Even at that, I got some pretty rough bumps, because a horse was seldom tripped where I could aim myself at a decent spot to land on. And even though the biggest staghorn cholla and yucca had been dug up and reset, they knocked the wind out of me when I hit them on the fly.
I made two falls that first afternoon, four on each of the next two days, and three on the fourth day. At the end of that last day I didn’t have a broken bone anywhere, but my face and hands looked like raw hamburger, every joint in me creaked as if it were rusty, and there was hardly a spot on my legs, arms, or body that wasn’t black-and-blue. The next morning I was so stiff and sore I couldn’t bend over to pull on my britches.
All the way through, Ted had looked out for me as carefully as if I’d been his own son. As long as the Wyoming boys lasted he never let one of them ride near me, but always put them on the other side of the strip. He saw to it that there was never a rider behind me, and always let me know about where I could expect my fall, so that I’d be as ready for it as possible. Then, at the end of every run, I collected my pay and gave it to him to keep for me. There was $435 by the end of that fourth day—more than I could have made as a cowhand in a whole year.
I was sure that with a day or two of rest I’d be able to ride some more falls, but Ted said there was no sense in crowding my luck, and that, stiffened up as I was, I’d probably break my neck the next time out. He sat on my cot and visited so long that he missed his breakfast, just talking about old friends we’d known in Colorado, and about going back as soon as spring came. Then he held the first run of the morning over for half an hour so he could see me off when I took the flivver back to Wickenburg. When we shook hands he said, “Keep your nose clean, kid, and don’t flash that roll o’ long green; there’s them around that would knock a man off for that much dough. Come Fourth o’ July, I’ll see you at the Littleton roundup.”
“I’ll be there,” I told him. And then the flivver jounced away.
It was because of my telling Ted I’d be at the Littleton roundup that I was lying flat in the ditch in the St. Joseph freight yards the night before the Fourth.
5
Friendly Phoenix
THE same Mexican who had driven me out from Wickenburg drove me back, and though I think he was trying to be a little more careful, I was off the seat about as much as I was on it, and by the time we reached town I felt as though I’d been through a dozen more horse falls. My legs were so wobbly when I got out at the depot that I walked as if I were drunk, and my bedroll seemed to weigh a ton. The only thing I could think of that I’d like to do was to crawl into a soft bed and stay there for a month. But there was no sense in staying in Wickenburg, and Lonnie had said he’d wait a week for me in Phoenix, so I went into the depot to buy a ticket.
It was only a little after nine o’clock when I went in, and I found that the next train didn’t leave until four in the afternoon, and the ticket office didn’t open till two. The seats in that depot were harder than the rocks on the horse-fall sets, so after ten or fifteen minutes I tried walking around a little, to see if I could loosen up the kinks in my back and legs. The first thing I saw when I went outside was a ramshackle old hotel across the street, with a sign that read, “CLEAN ROOMS $1.” I was lucky enough to get one on the ground floor, so I didn’t have to climb any stairs. It wasn’t too dirty, and the bed wasn’t bad, but I couldn’t get any rest on it. In the first place, there wasn’t a spot on me that didn’t hurt when I lay on it, and in the second place, the keeper for the bolt on the door was missing.
When I’d come in there had been four or five rough-looking men loafing around the lobby of the hotel, and when I’d signed up for my room the clerk had asked for my dollar in advanc
e. I hadn’t expected that when I’d gone in, a five-dollar bill was the smallest I’d had, and it was the outside bill on the roll in my pocket—with an elastic band around it. The first thing I thought of was what Ted had told me about not flashing my roll, so I fiddled around with my fingers till I could slip the band and peel off the five.
As I lay there trying to find a comfortable spot, I couldn’t help thinking about the way I must have looked while I was fishing around in my pocket for that five. With my fingers as swollen and clumsy as they were, it had taken me a couple of minutes, and a man wouldn’t have needed much brains to know that I was peeling a bill off a roll that was bigger than I dared to show. With no way of locking my door, and with me too stiffened up to fight back, it would be a cinch for those fellows in the lobby—or any one of them—to knock me for a loop and clean me out.
I didn’t have any use for $434, and if I’d had any sense I’d have left most of it with Ted, so he could keep it for me until I saw him at the Littleton roundup. But I didn’t think of that. I wasn’t really able to do much thinking during those last couple of days of fall riding, and I didn’t try to keep any close track of what I was earning. Right at the beginning I’d given Ted my mother’s address, and had told him to send her the money if anything happened to me. Then, when nothing did, I sort of had it in the back of my head that as soon as I got to town I’d buy a money order at the post office and mail it to her in a letter. But as I lay there on the bed I realized that I couldn’t do that either.
I’d already written her a big fairy tale about a job I didn’t have, and about having to use my next few pay checks to pay for my outfit. If I should write within a couple of weeks’ time and send her four hundred dollars, even she would have to think I’d robbed a bank or something of the kind. I couldn’t write and tell her about the horse falls, because that would scare her to death. And I couldn’t tell her I’d won it in a poker game, because that would make her feel worse than if I told her about the riding in the horse falls. In fact, I couldn’t write to her at all until my hands healed up enough that my writing wouldn’t look like hen tracks.