Cherokee Trails/Chapter 11
There was plenty to do in a preliminary way making ready for the big business of carrying the Block E bones, and the bones of the unknown unfortunates mingled with them, to market. Simpson was at it early next morning, trying out a team which he had selected from the most likely looking horses in the ranch pasture.
One of these animals bore harness marks, but the other's shoulders were smooth and uncalloused. Simpson, like most saddle-broke men, was not so much of a charioteer. He put on a lively show with that team. The horse that had worn harness appeared either to have forgotten about it or to hold an indignant recollection. It stood passively enough until Simpson got the tugs hooked up, when it took a notion to demonstrate to its companion how a free-minded horse ought to assert himself in the retention of his independent state.
Although not as practiced behind a horse as on top of one, Simpson had determination, courage, strength, a steady, calculative eye and a quick hand. He missed most of the obstacles in the barnyard and vicinity which might have been a bit harsh in collision with a big wagon, although he tore up several posts and wound considerable barbed wire around the hubs.
He had an appreciative pair of spectators, who saw nothing but the comic side of the adventure as long as Tom kept the grunting, bucking, side-swiping team clear of the picket fence and the house. But when the fractious rascals swerved out of hand and took a rod of the fence, the wagon almost grazing the porch, Mrs. Ellison concluded it was time to interfere.
"Take 'em out of here!" she ordered peremptorily, with more authority than reason, shaking her apron at the team to shoo it off.
Simpson was riding limber-legged in the swaying wagon, keeping his feet admirably over fallen fence-posts and horned skulls which had tumbled down from Eudora's mound. He guided the team in a more or less definite circuit of the large space between barn, corral, house and front fence, but he couldn't seem to hit the gate leading out into the road and the wide-open places where a high-minded horse might go till he hit the horizon in his protest against servitude beside a wagon tongue.
Tom was going around that limited enclosure so fast, his attention was so closely set on the work in hand, that he did not notice the arrival of a rider who had pulled up his horse and sat watching the lively proceedings with interest. This man had come up the road from the south, leading two horses, one of which carried his pack. He appeared to be a leisurely going man, in no haste to get wherever he was headed for, slouching limber-backed and restful, one hand on his saddle-horn, as he halted to watch the show.
Whether it was because the leader in that horse rebellion spied these strangers of his own species, or whether he took it into his head to go out where he might dump his oppressor into some prairie wash, only a horse psychologist would be qualified to tell. Certainly not Tom Simpson, who was altogether unprepared for the straightaway dash the team made for the gate. He did the best he could to center the wagon in that gateway, which was a broad one as gateways go, but perilously narrow in Simpson's eyes that moment of fast-flying things.
The near hind hub caught the gatepost, which was a very competent post, and deeply set. It stood almost as firmly as the original oak from which it was hewn, and the wrench of the sudden stop sent Simpson flying over the high dashboard. He came down in the road with more celerity than grace, landing within touch of the rebel who had asserted himself in one burst of defiance and now appeared quite satisfied to let matters hang on the gatepost, a wise enough conclusion, seeing that he was hopelessly stalled.
Mrs. Ellison and Eudora came running. The wagon was slewed across the gate, blocking both their passage and their view of Simpson in his embarrassment. Eudora jumped into the wagon and grabbed the lines, but the stranger on horseback had taken safety measures ahead of her by riding in front of the team.
Simpson got up, feeling somewhat clouded, for it had been a hard flop. He had a notion that his nose was bleeding, which is a common delusion after a lung-collapsing jolt, and that he looked confoundedly silly in the eyes of the women, whom he expected to hear break out in unconfined mirth presently, after the custom of male and female of the species on the range. Then he remembered that these women were different. They would not laugh at seeing a chap take a spill like that. Eudora was leaning out of the wagon, a hand on the dashboard, alarm in every feature, ready to jump down.
"Are you hurt, Tom?" she inquired anxiously.
"Are you hurt, Tom?" her mother chimed after her, tiptoeing to see him over the high wagon-bed.
"I ought to be," Tom replied in scorn of his bungling. "It's not due to any special amount of brains that I'm not. No, thank you, not a bit."
The women were hearty in their gratitude for his escape from a situation that had presented more perils to the onlookers than the participant, and the man on horseback, of whom Tom had been conscious in a confused way since hitting the ground, looked down with an expression of sympathy. He twisted his head in solemn appreciation of the lucky escape.
"If your hub 'd 'a' been three inches shorter you'd 'a' missed it clean," the stranger said.
This was such a generous, humane, altogether ridiculous way of excusing his wild driving that Simpson felt at once a friendliness for the stranger. He nodded ruefully, pretty much ashamed of himself.
"Are you sure you're not hurt?" Eudora pressed the question. To make sure his denial was not a deceit, she hopped down and felt him over, head and shoulders, that being the way he had struck.
"I ought to be if I can't do any better than that," he said.
Mrs. Ellison talked over the fence, saying she suspicioned that horse on account of the way he squatted when Tom threw the harness on him, and cautioning them to watch out, he might take another spell of devilment any minute. The stranger assured her. He was squared off in front of the team, which appeared to be satisfied, no more rebellion in it than a little snorting and shying would relieve.
The stranger said now was the time to take them, while they were hot, and run the livers out of them. They'd remember it, they'd know who was boss from that time forward, but if they were allowed to stand and cool off they'd entertain doubts which would break out in a flareup again. He offered his services, saying he'd had a little experience breaking horses. Tom was not inclined to have the team acknowledge mastery to any hand but his own, more boyishly stubborn than manly reasonable, considering that it was his first attempt and a lesson would be in order.
Eudora endorsed the stranger's proposal strongly, not wanting to see Tom take another spill. She suggested that Tom go along, and it was so arranged. The stranger hooked his bridle reins over the gatepost and took the lines, Tom standing in the wagon beside him to get the fine points, granting the stranger had any to give.
He had them, and plenty. He could have turned that team and wagon on a fifty-cent piece; he could have driven the outfit through a croquet wicket and never scraped a tug. Tom Simpson knew he had met a master of his craft, and was humble in his presence.
The stranger talked all the time while he drove, although he didn't seem to be saying much. He was a tall fellow, almost as tall as Wade Harrison, very bony and flat, wide in the shoulders like a man in an Egyptian sculpture, and narrow in the waist on the same order of art. He had a large bony nose with a down-curve at the end of it like a horse: his face was long and narrow, his cheeks and chin bluish-black with the stubble of a splendid stand of whiskers which had been mown that morning. He was cleanly dressed in the common cowboy garb, and seemed to be of a happy disposition in spite of the glum look his thinness, and dark, irrepressible stubble gave him.
He drove the team until it was a lather of sweat at every point where tug and backband touched. Then he said he guessed they'd got their dose, but it would be a good thing if they had a load behind them and a good long hill in front. Tom said he was projecting an expedition afield for bones. If the driver thought bones would answer, they could go over to the river where, he had been told, there were plenty. Bones would be admirable, the stranger declared with enthusiasm.
There were more bones along the willow fringe of that little stream than Simpson had allowed his most extravagant fancy to compute. He had supposed a few hundred cattle, at the most, had perished there, and those stretched out over a long thin line. Here lay not hundreds alone, but thousands, of skeletons, some of them still held together by dry integument. There, against the frail barrier of willows and cottonwoods the starving herds had lodged, eaten the willows and other small shrubs to the snow, and died.
The stranger stood in the wagon and looked over the desolate scene, amazement in his face, incredulity in his eyes. The grass was lush there, where no creature had grazed since the great tragedy; it stood tall among the bones, it grew rank through the ribs that unkind nature had served to the buzzards on the platter of that vast, green plain.
"Well, gee-mo-nee cripes!" the stranger said. "What killed 'em? when did it happen?"
Simpson repeated the story of the great winter kill as it had been told him by Mrs. Ellison.
"Gee-mo-nee! You could 'a' walked on 'em for miles," the stranger marvelled. "I've been through winter kills in Montany, but I never saw one that took 'em that thick. They're dead—they're all dead—ever' damn one of 'em's dead!"
It was obviously so, too plainly true to require any such tragically surprised comment as that, Simpson believed. But he hadn't got the trend of the man's thought, as his next words revealed.
"They ain't got a head left alive on the place! That's why I never run acrost no cows when I struck this neighborhood."
"You're right. Ellison saved a few hundred head, lost his life doing it, but his wife and daughter sold them. They're not in business now."
"Bones!" said the stranger, turning to look over the wreckage that nature, in its kindlier mood, was laboring now to hide. "Cripes! Look at the bones!"
"There'll be no trouble getting a load, anyhow," Tom said, scarcely less astonished than his unknown helper.
"No, nor a few hundred loads, from the looks of 'em. What do you aim to do with them bones?"
Tom explained. The stranger was surprised that anybody would want to buy bones, but said he guessed there was no accounting for tastes. He pitched into the loading with energy, and soon they had the wagon heaped with enough, as the stranger said, to make a considerable number of razor and corn-knife handles. Tom said he didn't suppose many of them would be put to that purpose, considering the time they'd been lying out in the sun and weather. It was a new marvel to the stranger to learn that bones were used to enrich land. He said it was comforting to know that; some good might come of him, after all, at least what was left of him when the buzzards got through, from which Tom gathered that he did not expect to lie down for his final rest under the sod, but on top of it.
"From what you said about the women sellin' off, I reckon you married into the fam'ly since the winter kill?"
"I'm not married into the family," Tom corrected him coldly.
"Oh, you ain't?" said the horse-breaker, turning his head with a sharp, inquiring, interested movement, not in the least taken down by Tom's cool retort.
"Not at all."
"You could do worse," the stranger declared with conviction. "I thought that young lady was your wife. She sounded like a man's wife ort-a sound when she ast you if you was hurt."
"Yes, a man could do worse—a great deal worse," Tom agreed, considerably warmer in his manner.
"Related?"
"Not even distantly. I'm almost a stranger to them; I've known them only a short time."
"I didn't git a chance to mention it to the ladies, but maybe you can tell me: has there been a feller goin' under the name of Simpson been along here the last day or two?"
"I never have gone under any other name," Tom replied stiffly.
"The hell you say!" said the horse-breaker.
He turned his head in that listening, sharp, chickenlike way and looked at Tom with the queerest sort of grin that ever distorted human features. Instead of opening his lips, or spreading his face as a grin usually spreads out the countenance of a man, this horse-breaker's smile worked the other way. He closed his mouth, half-shut his eyes, pursed his features in a way to gather the main portion of them around his nose, and looked very much as if about to cry. Then, sudden as a explosion, the whole thing changed, his face lit up with amazing animation, he threw his head back and let out a roar of laughter that made the horses jump.
Tom regarded this amazing conduct with stiff neck and high chin. It was the first time in his experience that his commonplace name had evoked such an outburst of mirth. It passed; the fellow's features gathered again in that lugubrious expression that seemed a certain forecast of tears.
"You're the feller the horse run off with and carried around that grip-sack full of money all night and didn't know it. Coburn was a sold man when he got that money back; he was a—sold—man!"
Comment seeming unnecessary, Tom didn't attempt any. He rode along on the load of bones, his seat being a masculine skull with particularly broad forehead, wondering who the fellow could be and what he was about.
"Well, Simpson, I come by to git my saddle," the stranger said, repressing both laughter and tears, coming back to normal state as he spoke.
"What saddle?"
"The one you borryed from Sid Coburn with a gun. You don't suppose Sid Coburn'd hand over a saddle of his own under them circumstances if he could lay hands on somebody else's, do you?"
"From the little I know of him I'd say he wouldn't. But how come your saddle? Do you belong to that outfit?"
"No, I'm on the drift. Wel-l-l, I did belong over there, but Sid fired me. I was up in Kansas City with him. I missed the train."
"Oh," said Tom, very much enlightened, his manner almost eager in its sudden change of friendliness. "I rode down in your place, then. You must be Waco Johnson?"
"I'm the rep-tile," Waco admitted, beginning to fix his face in that alarming smile again.
Tom offered his hand, to be met more than half way by Waco Johnson's broad paw, heartily and honestly, as a man without eyes would have known at the first grip.
"I'm glad to know you—I'm dev'lish glad to know you," Tom said. "I liked your name the first time I heard it."
Waco shook his head, as if to say it wouldn't do to go too far on names, unstable things that they were.
"You can have it," he said. "It never brought me no luck."