Cherokee Trails/Chapter 12
That was the way the bone company came to enlarge its membership, even though its capital was not increased to any appreciable degree. Waco Johnson was out of a job, the world before him and nowhere to go. He said he'd like to help—he pronounced it h'ep—around the place a while, breaking in some horses for the work, leaving them to pay him what they thought he was worth. This proposal he made to Simpson while they were unloading the bones.
Tom said an expert horse-breaker was needed around that place more than anybody else but, speaking for the bone company, nobody had any spare cash to hand out for such services, or any other. Well, said Waco, money was no object to him, anyway; somebody always got it away from him before it had time to get warm in his pocket. The more men to haul bones the more money they would make. Take him in on some kind of a split. He'd leave it to them.
Although Tom had elected himself general manager of the bone firm, he demurred about admitting another member on any kind of terms without consulting Eudora and her mother, Eudora especially. He told Waco he'd consider it if he cared to hang around the rest of the day. That place suited him as well, if not better, than any, Waco said. Meanwhile, they'd might as well make it plain to that team who was boss. Accordingly they went after more bones.
Waco bent his long back to the work as readily as if he already had a large share or stock in the concern. While he worked he sang, not continually, but by unexpected bursts, and this was his unvarying song:
If it wasn't for my dhur what'd I do?
Certainly, Simpson could not tell him, although he soon wished fervently for somebody to come along who could, and put a rest to Waco's doleful melody. But Waco was a genial cuss, for all his limited repertory, radiating a feeling of cheerfulness and honest fellowship that was a pleasure to share. Tom felt as if he had known him for years instead of hours, for he was transparent as a clean windowpane, a typical cowboy whose home was, indeed, wherever che hung up his hat.
Waco was not particularly young, although of that tenuous dry type that never grows old. About forty, Tom judged, with what history of roving and adventuring in the rough life of herdsman nobody but himself could tell. If he was for a man, he was all for him; if against him, he'd stay that way until one or the other of them lay on his cooling-board.
Tom took up Waco's proposal with Eudora and her mother after the noonday meal, Waco modestly retiring to the barn to look over the material for the further exercise of his art. Mrs. Ellison, who did not see any great future to the bone business, said it was only fair to divide such proceeds as might arise out of it in three, a share each to the two men, who would do the work, a share between Eudora and herself, who would supply the wagons and teams.
That was too generous, Tom said. Neither he nor Waco had anything to lose, nothing to venture but their time, and the time of an unemployed man was worth no more on the range than elsewhere. Make it fifty-fifty, he proposed, on the condition that Eudora turn all the work over to them and stand clear.
Eudora was indignant over this proposed elimination of herself, although she colored up like an autumn apple when she recalled the garb Tom had seen her in when he first rode up to the gate. She was as good as any man at bones, she declared, and if she didn't keep an eye on them along the river the homesteaders would haul all of them away.
All right, said Tom; that would be her job, then. Ride out and around as often as she liked and keep an eye on the bones, but keep her hands off them. The work was too rough and heavy for a girl.
Mrs. Ellison applauded Tom's apportionment of duties.
"I've always been against her straddlin' around in man's pants," she said. "You know what even them scoundrelly horsethieves thought of you the other morning. If you'd been dressed like a young lady ought to have been dressed, your modesty'd 'a' been spared."
"I don't care what any man thinks of me, horsethief or no horsethief!" Eudora blustered, but the deep red of her cheeks, her averted eyes, all betrayed her in the sight of at least one man whose opinion she valued.
"There was a glimmer of mirth in Tom Simpson's knowing eyes. He shook his head solemnly, as if deploring the defiance of irresponsible girlhood. Eudora gave him a push, with a little snort of a laugh at his solemn teasing.
"Oh, you shut up!" she said, although Tom had not opened his close-latched and apparently most dignified mouth.
"If you want something to do you can cook for Tom and Waco," Mrs. Ellison told her hot-cheeked, red daughter. "That'll be more becoming to a girl than straddlin' around"
"Can't you think of any other word, mother?" Eudora asked pettishly. "It's not so very elegant, to say the least."
"It's as elegant as the doin's it describes. You can cook for the boys; that'll be"
"Well, then, I will cook for them."
"Not at all," said Tom, with the voice of high authority. "Delightful as it would be, I can't permit it."
"You can't permit it!" Eudora fairly gasped, facing him with genuine rebellion in her eyes. "Well, I like your nerve!"
"Just so," said Tom, inflexibly, calmly. "Pleasant as it is, delightful as it would be, Mr. Johnson and I can't continue living at your expense, madam. That isn't part of the bargain, you know. Mr. Johnson and I will provision ourselves, cook for ourselves, and make our quarters in the bunk-house when not on the road. You are both very-very kind."
"You'd just as well let her cook for you, Tom," Mrs. Ellison said persuasively. "Shell have to cook for some man, sooner or later."
"'Sufficient unto the day,'" said Tom.
He looked at the flushed, pouting, half angry Eudora, a slow smile breaking up the solemnity of his face. It was like a caress to ease the hurt of necessary chastisement.
"It'll be some noble cookin' you'll do!" Eudora scoffed, but nothing in her way of saying it rough enough to take off any skin. She gave Tom a sidelong, humorous look, her mouth pursed in a little pout that was nothing more than the puckering string around a laugh.
"Noble's the word," he said cheerfully.
"I'll bet you could knock a mule down with one of your biscuits."
"Strong meat for strong men," said he.
"But you boys haven't got any supplies, Tom," Mrs. Ellison protested.
"I'll be going to town to-morrow morning, very early, to send a telegram to that gentleman who is to buy our goods," Tom told her. "I'll carry out certain food"
"Food!" Eudora repeated, the humor of the situation further provoked by that unusual word.
"Chuck, perhaps, would be a better word," Tom amended, making a pretense of bowing gravely to her superior knowledge.
"Much better," said she.
"I'll bring out enough chuck to hold us nicely till we make the first trip with the wagons. After that we'll be in the hunky dory."
"In the what?" Eudora asked, suppressing an outburst with difficulty.
"Just so," said Tom, with the equanimity of one who knew his buttons.
"But you don't get in a hunky-dory, simple!"
"No?" said Tom, in a manner of challenge to simplicity. "Why not?"
"Well, I don't know what a hunky-dory is, only that it's a—it's a—a state of affairs, not something you get into."
"Wrong, my lady. A dory is a nice little boat, and one gets into a nice little boat, doesn't one?"
"Generally two. But that don't account for the hunky. Nobody ever gets into a hunky, alone or with somebody. I don't know what it is—it don't go alone that way, Tom. You say it hunky-hyphen-dory. It's all one thing, and it's a state of affairs, a pleasant state of affairs, not something you get into for a ride, dunce!"
"I fancy a hunky is something nice and comfortable, anyhow, and that amounts to the same thing. But it's like that other word you objected to, that word straddling, you know. Not so very elegant, when it comes to that."
The women had their laugh at Tom's serious way of humor, which seemed ponderous compared to the sharp quips they were accustomed to. Tom stood by as solemn as a priest, but with that gleam of lively appreciation in his eyes which lit up his sacerdotal countenance like firelight upon a wall. Waco Johnson was standing around the corral gate in the way of a man who waited the verdict of a jury. Tom went out to tell him he had been admitted to the bone company without bond.
Tom was on the road next morning after an early breakfast. He had explained to Waco that retaliatory measures were to be expected from the Wade Harrison gang, and left that worthy gentleman armed and hopeful. Waco was harnessing up a fresh pair of horses, neither of which ever had felt harness on its back before. From the way he went about it Tom knew there would be no fence knocked down that morning, no wagon hung up on the mighty gatepost. If there ever lived a master of his craft, Waco Johnson was that man. He went about his job so serenely, so cheerfully, and with such sublime confidence, that the raw team was conquered before the belly-band was buckled.
It was well past noon when Tom reached Drumwell, the rifle that he had used with such good effect against Wade Harrison in a scabbard under his leg, the revolver that had supplemented it in the fight strapped on him in regulation style. He had said nothing at the ranch about possible trouble awaiting him in town. He hoped, on his arrival, to pass unnoticed, or at least unrecognized by the marshal or any of those who had seen him in Kane's place on the night of his arrival at the border.
Another row with the marshal at that stage of his business development would be most undesirable. It might even amount to his forced retirement from the enterprise. He believed his chances of escaping notice were good, as he had changed his garb completely. Mrs. Ellison had assembled a cowboy outfit even to boots, which fitted him nicely, out of the accumulation of raiment around the place. He rode into Drumwell a changed man, as far as outward covering went, with chaparejos to his legs, spurs to his heels, a broad-brimmed sombrero that Ellison himself had worn. He carried the costume as one who had a right to all that it signified, which was in every sense true.
That was a lucky day for Tom Simpson to come to Drumwell. There were three cow outfits in town, one of them loading, the others holding their herds on the range near at hand waiting their turn at the pens, most of the men at liberty to amuse themselves in their most favored way.
There was much activity, much dust, a constant riding through the short street, a constant shifting of men and horses here and there. Tom had carried no feed, there being precious little of anything in that line on the Ellison place but hay. He put the horse in the livery stable for a feed of oats, sent his telegram to the Kansas City hide man and waited around the station for a reply.
Meantime he talked with the station agent about bones. The lumber dealer was the bone buyer in Drumwell, his business being brisk. How would a competitor's bones fare, Tom wanted to know, piled around there near the sidetrack until a carload could be assembled? The agent didn't know; it never had been attempted. He advised selling to the lumber dealer, although railroad property was pretty well respected there, and bones piled on the company's right of way might be perfectly safe. He would undertake to keep an eye on them during the day, but couldn't answer for what might happen at night.
All of which was in line with what Tom had been thinking as he rode to town that morning. He wondered if it wouldn't be just as well to let the whole thing slide, go on his way and forget it. There wouldn't be anything in hauling bones that long distance at five dollars a ton, the lumberman's price. It would require several trips to transport a carload, even with two wagons in train to each of them, as he and Waco had worked out their plan. Here in Drumwell the business did not appear half so promising of profits as it did at the Ellison ranch, under the influence of Eudora's sparkling enthusiasm, the crop sown by the great winter kill ready for its melancholy harvesting.
It was late in the evening, the sun had gone down red in the dust of trampling herds and horses, when the answer from the hide man came. At once the bone business loomed up with new importance, its possibilities far in excess of Tom's, even Eudora's, most extravagant hopes. The bone market was active as never before; the Kansas City dealer was enthusiastic in this prospect of a new source of supply and quoted a price far in excess of that current in Drumwell. Send all he could get, and as fast as possible, the hide man urged.
This was news to cheer a doubting, despondent man, indeed. Tom stepped high as he made for a restaurant, feeling that he could afford a good supper with such prospects ahead of him. After enfolding a large tough steak, with the canned corn and tomatoes which invariably accompanied it in Drumwell and other towns of its type, Tom made his purchases of supplies out of the joint fund subscribed for that purpose by Waco and himself that morning.
While his outlay was not large, the sack behind the saddle increased the horse's burden considerably. But the animal had been well rested and regaled; it would have set out on an eager canter on the homeward road if Tom had not held it back. Better to be all night on the road and have a fit horse under him at the end, than gain an hour or two in the going. Riding a strange road in an unfamiliar land a man never knew when he'd need all there was in a horse.
He had come and gone without a glimpse of the marshal. If anybody had recognized him it hadn't caused a ripple in the town. He had not gone to Kane's resort, that being the kind of place he did not much frequent out of choice. Whether there were gun-slingers hanging around there to even Eddie Kane's score he did not know. Certainly he did not care greatly as he rode through the clear moonless night.
Tom was thinking and planning very much like any ordinary, healthy young man as he rode. He welcomed this turn of affairs that took him away from cow-camps and the rough adventures of that life. He had followed it for seven years almost without a break, not considering the job as mine guard in Colorado, his last employment before staking his savings on the real estate checkerboard in Kansas City. Like Waco Johnson's name, the pursuit of a cowboy's life never had brought him any luck. It was time, and good time, to make a change.
Perhaps fortune changed, as a man's body is said to change, every seven years. If so, the time was up for a revolution in his affairs. It looked promising. Tom roughly estimated how many cattle had perished along that little river running through the Ellison estate, during the winter kill, basing his calculations on what he had seen and what Mrs. Ellison had told him. He figured how many tons of bones lay waiting to his and Waco Johnson's hands, allowing so much weight to each of the skeletal remains. From the result he believed he and Waco could at least treble the ordinary cowboy wages between then and spring. If things came along well, they might even buy bones from the homesteaders, enlarging their business to considerable importance.
They'd forget that little squabble in Drumwell very soon, probably had forgotten it already. The farther he rode away from Drumwell that night the more remote the likelihood of that incident being revived to disturb his business activities appeared. He had such a great feeling of elation, of satisfaction, of desire to push ahead with the new enterprise which seemed to offer so much, that his imagination was coursing up and down that long prairie road as if reviewing the past instead of projecting into the future.
There was a home-feeling about that country for him; an invitation in its untried possibilities, it seemed, to match his youth and strength against it and make his place. Queer thing how the turn of a man's life hinged on chance, sometimes. If there never had been that mixup in horses at the livery stable door; if he never had galloped off with Coburn's money, Coburn's bullets—which he had thought were the marshal's, so dev'lish difficult to identify bullets under such conditions—singing about his ears, there never would have been any Eudora Ellison in the scheme, and no bones.
Tom had left home mainly on account of an aversion to hides apart from living creatures that rightfully wore them. Hides had been the foundation of the family fortunes over there; bones were to be the foundation of his own separate and independent fortune here. So there it was; all out of a cow, take it or leave it, as one liked.
Why did Eudora have her hair cut short that way? he wondered, turning from fortune to Eudora as readily as if one were the concomitant of the other. Had she got cockleburs in it, or had she been sick with a depilating fever? Perhaps neither. Very likely, independent and precedent-setting young lady that she was, she had cut it off because, like trousers and boots, it was easier to get around with when she worked about the place.
One would think that girls on cow-ranches would cut off their hair right along, considering the riding and wild-flying tresses he had seen. But not so: in all his experience with girls of cow-ranches he could recall but one other who wore her hair short like Eudora Ellison. That was black curly hair, also, but the wearer of it was not slim and shapely. Rather squat and thick-ankled, like a squaw. Johnson was her name—strange if she should turn out to be Waco's sister, which was improbable, considering that she had no brother—Fanny Johnson, called Buffalo for reasons unknown. Away up on the muddy North Platte in Wyoming; the dingy, low-banked, thick-running, swirling, roiling, unlovely, melancholy North Platte.
They had gone in for sheep later, the Johnsons. Buffalo was living in a sheep wagon the last time he saw her. He had been following a bunch of stolen cattle, the trail leading to the river, and the end of those beeves as far as he ever knew.
In that way of past mingling with present and future, Tom rode on with his comfortable thoughts, serene, happy. He had a feeling that he was coming into peaceful waters after a rough voyage, his long watches and hard riding at an end. He could see no farther into a wall, to be certain, than the last man to ride that road ahead of him, or the next one following behind.