WITH THE TRAIL-HERD
In the first gray of morning, a caravan swung out from the corral at
the Three Sorrows. They were making a start at dawn. You can go
almost anywhere if you start at dawn. Indeed, there are worlds that
may be penetrated at no other hour. A group of riders were in the
lead, the remuda, or saddle-band, following, herded by the wrangler;
the chuck wagon, driven by Pearsall, brought up the rear; Hilda,
beside Uncle Hank on the high seat, with heaven knows what dreams
under the thatch of dark hair, peeping out sometimes from the clear
windows of her eyes.
Early morning on the bald plain. To Hilda, moving along in its
wonderful dimness, curiously the thought of Pearse Masters was
almost as present as though he, and not Uncle Hank, had been beside
her on the wagon seat. She remembered the long evenings together,
the games they had played, the talk about books they had agreed on,
the talk about books they disagreed on—one was as interesting as the
other. She had so wished they might have had one ride together. Oh,
if only he were riding with them now—one of Uncle Hank’s hands!
She’d let him be a right hand. She’d be willing to be the left.
People said jokingly, when they offered it in shaking hands, that it
was nearer the heart. She nestled a little toward the big arm beside
her.
“Happy, Pettie?” he questioned, without looking around.
“Awfully happy.”
They pushed on all forenoon, under the waxing sun, stopping at noon
beside a well and windmill for dinner. And so the trip went,
sleeping at night under the open sky, near lonely little Llano,
where they had bought supplies; listening to the boys telling
hunting and cattle stories till the big bass voices became a
dream of a bumble-bee; waking in the early morning, in response
to Uncle Hank’s hail: “Roll out! Roll out! Roll out! All the big
two-fisted fellers that hires for this trip has to get up soon of
a-morning—ladies the same as gents.” Then breakfast, and once more
the starting on the day’s journey.
They came to the outskirts of El Capitan about three o’clock on the
fifth afternoon. Uncle Hank halted the outfit and took Hilda with
him over to the courthouse, which also included the jail. The
sheriff, a most obliging person, was, in point of fact, at that
identical moment, sitting out behind the building playing checkers
with Tracey Jacox. The latter, who seemed very cheerful, greeted
Hank warmly and introduced the official to him as Berry Henson. Mr.
Henson then courteously withdrew, saying:
“I know you gents will like to have some private talk, and I’ll be
right inside here if—er—I’m needed.”
A lithe, black-haired, gray-eyed man, deeply weathered, Jacox had
white teeth that showed often in smiles beneath a black mustache.
The suggestion of him was swift, elastic, lawless, irresponsible,
like a child or a pleasing animal. Hilda’s pulse had quickened with
the first sight of him—this careless Tracey Jacox, who had finally
“shot up the wrong feller” and was taking his medicine so
uncomplainingly. Now, when he was formally presented to her, the
little-girl heart in her bosom fluttered its short, fledgling wings
toward him in dumb salute. Was he not in some sort a prince in
misfortune, a fellow-sufferer with Pearse?
The two old partners sat down on their heels close together,
cowpuncher fashion, to a long pow-wow. Hilda, looking on, thought
how different they were. Uncle Hank, not more than ten or twelve
years the elder, looked like Tracey’s father; indeed, he looked like
the father of all the world, with those kind, shrewd, tolerant eyes,
that benignant brow, that air of paternal solicitude. Jacox was the
typical soldier of fortune, the gamester, light-hearted and
reckless—a thoroughbred cowpuncher. Hilda’s eyes continued to dwell
upon him with pleasure until the sheriff hove in sight, coming
slowly around the corner of the building, coughing apologetically.
Jacox stood up and spoke out loud to Pearsall, with emphasis:
“You have the contract drawn like I tell you—hear? Why, great Scott!
I’d stand to lose the whole herd—fixed like I am—less’n I had an
honest man and a mighty good friend to hold ’em and pertect my
interests. You make a good thing out of it? Well, you needn’t fret
about that—I want you to.”
“All right, Trace.” Uncle Hank’s answer was lower, but the little
girl heard it.
“Well, that’s settled,” said Jacox. “Come on, Berry; we can finish
our game now. Me an’ Pearsall’s all done.”
Uncle Hank and Hilda went back to the Three Sorrows outfit, which
camped on the fifth night at the Lazy W., three miles beyond
Capitan.
The cattle were all rounded into a fenced pasture for tally. With a
little sack of pink Mexican beans, Hilda, on her pony, was stationed
to one side of the gate, while Uncle Hank, pencil and paper in hand,
held Buckskin quiet on a rise a little way inside the pasture. As
the boys drove the cattle up and strung them out through the gate in
single file, Hank put down a straight, upright mark for what he
called “every cow-brute” that passed him. When the same cow-brute
got to Hilda, she dropped a bean from the full sack into an empty
one she held on the saddle horn before her. When Uncle Hank had
marked down ten animals he drew a slanting line through the ten
upright ones. His record was going to look a good deal like a picket
fence. Hilda kept no record of tens. She was only the checker. When
the herd was through into the other pasture, where the boys were
rushing the road-branding, Uncle Hank would add up his tens into
hundreds, and then Hilda would sit down in some quiet spot, if she
could find any such, and count her beans one by one.
She was very proud of coming out within three of Uncle Hank’s
reckoning. She had made it three more than he did, and she told him
she believed they got by him that time the new hand interrupted
their work with a call from the branding-pen. He agreed, and said
they’d give Trace the benefit of her count, not his.
Ten new hands had been hired for the work, and on the second day the
big herd was put in motion; one of the new men drove the grub wagon,
and after herd, riders and wagon were all started, Uncle Hank and
Hilda rode out side by side.
“We’ll swing around by way of town. I want to stop and say good-by
to Trace,” he told her.
At the courthouse he dismounted and went up to his partner, who was
sitting with the amiable sheriff on the shady side of the jail,
their chairs tilted back against the adobe wall. Hilda saw that
there was a long, speechless hand-grip; and when Hank was mounted,
he wheeled again to answer the other’s “Good luck!” which
accompanied the free-hearted, open movement and smile of one who has
no complaints to make and to whom a few years in jail comes as one
of the fairly plentiful bad jokes of the cattle-country life.
A lump rose in her throat as she thought of that man of wind and sun
and open plain shut away from it all for four years. Maybe, too, the
“poplar man” was offensive; maybe prison would be as terrible to
Jacox as it would have been to Pearse Masters. But there had been
nobody to hide him and bring him food and lend him a horse. Uncle
Hank, wrapped in his own somber reflections, did not see the furtive
wiping of tears; and, presently, as by mutual understanding, they
put their ponies to a lope and caught up with the outfit. The drive
up the trail home was actually begun.
The column of cattle, with attendant riders—Hilda being one of
these—strung out over a mile long. It looked like a great snake on
the face of the open country, a vast snake that, day in day out, in
dawn or noon or dusk, moved always northwestward, traveling with
rustle and swish of twelve thousand hoofs in the short plains grass,
or sending forth a murmur as of a smothered rain-storm when it
inched itself over naked places; this continuous undernote
punctuated and picked out by the plaintive bleating of calves; the
occasional more remonstrant lowing of a steer, the clinking of
stirrups or bridle bits, the squeak of saddles, the swift patter of
galloping hoofs and the calling back and forth, as the boys rode up
and down along the flanks of the herd.
They were up in the morning at daybreak, so as to travel as much as
possible before the heat of the day. At noon there was a long rest,
with dinner, the men lying at ease to smoke afterwards, the cattle
scattered out under the fewest herders, grazing. On the trip down
they had scouted out and marked the route, noting places where a
herd of this size could be watered, and each afternoon there was the
eager looking for a curving line of growth that advertised the
expected stream, or the clumps of tall cottonwoods about a carefully
fenced-in spring or water-hole.
There was some rough country to be traversed. They crossed
steep-sided arroyos, breaks and gulches, where lariats were attached
to the back of the wagon as it plunged down, the ponies “setting
back on the rope” to prevent the big vehicle from coming bodily on
the mules that pulled it. Once down, the ropes were transferred to
wagon-tongue and singletrees, and, with a whoop and a great
whip-cracking, snorting ponies and straining mules rushed the bank
ahead.
One stormy night Hilda awakened to find all about her lumbering,
plunging cattle, clashing horns, yelling men and, for a few moments,
cracking pistols. It seemed to her like a pandemonium—chaos—the end
of the world. Later, from the safe spot under a handy mesquite where
she had been placed, she dimly saw the heading back of the cattle,
the milling of them round and round and, finally, their safe bedding
down.
Then came, thin and airy on the night wind, the broken strains of
“The Sweet Bye and Bye.” Indian Joe, one of the hands hired at El
Capitan, played beautifully on the mouth organ. He was riding night
herd; she got snatches of the tune as he circled the quieting
cattle. She fell asleep on it and waked next morning to hear the
talk of Buster and a casual rider who had stopped at the camp to
borrow tobacco.
“Had a stampede?” suggested the stranger, as he rolled his
cigarette, and Buster shook his head negligently above the broken
stirrup strap he was mending.
“Shucks, no. They run a little—nothin’ much,” was his notion of last
night’s frightful hazards, its inhuman toil. “You’re welcome, old
timer,” he nodded to the other’s thanks. “So long!”
That drive, with its vicissitudes, its new, strange experiences, its
open sky and measureless outlook, lay like a bright baldric across
Hilda’s childhood, dividing what went before from what came after.
She watched, day by day, how the boys buckled to their labors, how
they faced with a laugh all the hardships of the trip, making light
of the long night watches, going without sleep sometimes in
emergencies till they nodded and almost fell forward in their
saddles. She heard them jeer each other mercilessly for the least
mistake or shortcoming, clothing their rare praise of each other in
half-sarcastic terms; she believed they would have jeered a broken
leg—their own or another’s. Not “be good” but “make good” was their
slogan. Life was mostly a joke; a sour one or a gay one, but still a
joke. The impression of unquestioning, off-hand fidelity to exacting
duties, of uncomplaining bravery and good nature, was laid
ineffaceably on the young spirit. The code all this contributed to
build up was, inevitably, more a man’s than a woman’s.
Fourteen men the outfit traveled; fourteen strong they snailed the
big herd across the face of northwestern Texas toward Lame Jones
County. But it was the fifteenth, the limber, swift fellow, with
eyes keen and bright like daggers, that was the life of all. Him
they never saw, this lively comrade, this clever adversary; only his
voice they heard in the deep note of the water that rolled down like
a wall on the face of treacherous Maricopa, from a cloudburst above;
in the thunder of hoofs at night when skulking rustlers flapped a
blanket in a steer’s face and the sleeping cattle rose as one and
broke away; the gleam of his eyes they caught dancing in those
curious little flames that play sometimes on the tips of clashing
horns, in the furious night stampede that followed; a flash of his
flying hair upon the wind, or amid the dust-cloud that enwrapped the
approach of a bunch of bad men or hostile Indians.
Ah, that fifteenth rider—viewless and unapparent, but vividly
present—that one who, in the eighties, crossed the plains with every
trail herd and gave zest and spirit to the trip, in whose company no
labor, no hardship could become mean, commonplace, sordid; he who
was never licked—or being so for the moment, always came again,
fresher, more vigorous, more inciting, more taunting than before,
whispering: “My name is Danger—come out and face me!”—the opponent
with whom every man in the outfit was always eager to try a fall—the
fifteenth rider rescued all from the dullness of routine, maintained
men and enterprise ever upon the iris-hued border of true romance.
So faring and so companioned, they arrived within one more day’s
drive of the Sorrows, Hilda brown as an Indian girl, men and cattle
in good shape. Yet Hank had planned the drive economically, with as
few hands as he dared. This made hard work for all, and the boys
were so tired that there was less talk and story-telling around the
fire now; sleep was instant and deep the moment they got from their
horses and into their blankets. They camped that night near the
breaks of Seboyeta Creek, where there was wood, water and shelter,
and Hilda’s bed was tucked in by some scrub cedars. With but one
more day to go, they put the herd under very light night guard, and
the rest of the outfit were soon snoring. It seemed to Hilda only a
few moments later that they were all turned out by the cry:
“Herd’s on its feet and actin’ restless!”
Instantly every man grabbed his boots and ran, Uncle Hank calling to
her as he rode out:
“Make a good fire, Pettie, and stay by it.”
“What do you suppose started them?” Hilda asked of Buster, who was
the last to get away.
“Couldn’t say; coyote, maybe. Or it might have been no more than
some one riding past cutting across here for the trail. If them
long-horns were as tired as I am, they wouldn’t stampede none,” and
he galloped away into the dark.