Man of the Family, Page 2

  The schoolhouse was across the highroad from where we lived, and about a quarter of a mile nearer the main street. I knew that if I hurried I’d have plenty of time to get across the road and to the schoolhouse before the main part of the herd caught up to me. So I just fooled along till it was too late. Then I went home and told Mother that the only way I could cross the highroad was to ride Lady; it would be too dangerous to try it afoot.

  Of course, by that time she could hear the cowboys hooting, but I think she knew I could have got there all right if I’d wanted to. She buttoned her lips up tight for a couple of seconds, and her voice was sort of sharp when she said, “Ralph, you are going right now. I won’t have any more dawdling.”

  I had the bridle on Lady in two minutes, whistled for King, our black collie dog, and went streaking up the lane bareback—but not to the schoolhouse. From working at Cooper’s ranch, I knew that the drive foreman would be somewhere near the herd point; probably at the turnoff near Main Street. As soon as I got past the corner I swung Lady down toward the river, and turned into the footpath along the mill ditch. I had my head right up behind her ears, and we went through the willows so fast they never even had a chance to slap me. We came out onto the River Road just as the foreman turned the lead steer down toward the bridge. I knew he was the drive foreman because he was talking to the sheriff, and they seemed to be friendly.

  I walked Lady up toward them slowly so as not to spook the lead steer, but I didn’t want them to think I was trying to listen to what they were saying. And, anyway, I thought I’d better wait a little while. The cattle at the front end were following the point rider pretty well, and the outriders were pushing them up easy from the corners of the first cross street.

  The sheriff knew me because I had done some trick riding with Hi Beckman at the fairgrounds on Labor Day. Hi was Mr. Cooper’s range foreman, and the sheriff was his friend. Hi was the best bronc buster anywhere around, and everybody was his friend. I’d only been sitting there on Lady a couple of minutes when the sheriff saw me and called, “Come on over here, Little Britches. This here’s Sid Gibson.”

  Hi had named me Little Britches, and that’s all the name lots of people knew me by. I rode Lady over beside the sheriff, and he said, “Why ain’t you in school today? Hope you ain’t goin’ to have to quit.”

  Before I could answer him, he said, “Right sorry to hear about you losin’ your paw. Fine man. Mighty fine man. Never heard nothin’ but good of him. What you and your maw aimin’ to do for a livin’? Cal’lated you might go back to work for Len Cooper. Seen Hi lately?”

  After I’d told him I hadn’t seen Hi, I said, “I’d like to go back to work for Mr. Cooper, but I can’t. Mother needs a man at home nights, and it’s too far to ride every day.” Sid Gibson looked around at me kind of funny, and I saw the sheriff wink at him, but I didn’t let on.

  Just about the time the sheriff winked, I heard one of the cowboys on the next corner start hooting. When I looked up I saw a dozen steers dodge past him. They went tearing off on a cross street with their tails sticking straight up. I hissed to King, kicked my heels into Lady’s ribs, and we went tearing up the alley behind the livery stable. King got to the corner before the steers did, and Lady and I were right behind him.

  After we’d driven them back to the highroad, I followed along to where I’d left the foreman and the sheriff. Before I even got close to them, I could hear the foreman swearing like a mule skinner. “A man’s got to carry half a dozen extra hands to wrangle a herd through the damn town. Hundred dollars all shot to hell in a handbasket!”

  Ever since the steers had nearly run over me I’d been thinking I might be able to get a stockman to pay me five dollars to help him through town.

  There were five streets that crossed the highroad from the south edge of town to the River Road. A fellow could stay out of school any time he had an excuse—and a job was an excuse. I knew I wouldn’t have any trouble getting ten boys to stay out of school and watch cross streets for twenty-five cents a day. And if I was lucky I could hire ten who rode horses to school.

  As soon as Sid said “hundred dollars,” I crowded Lady right up close to his horse, and hollered, “I’ll bet I know how to save you ninety dollars.”

  Sid shoved his hat back on his head and grinned at me. “All right, cow poke,” he said, “fire away.” So I told him what I’d figured out about a boy on horseback to guard each side of the crossings.

  As soon as I’d finished, he stuck out his hand to shake with me, and said, “Little Britches, you’ve made yourself a deal. I’ll be drivin’ back this-a-way ’bout October tenth. Keep your nose clean.”

  I turned Lady and started for school. Of course, I couldn’t go on the highroad because it was full of cattle. So I turned up Main Street and swung back south past the blacksmith shop. I let Lady go in an easy lope. There wasn’t any hurry about getting to school now, and I felt as though I hadn’t done a very good job. Sid might forget all about our deal before October. And then, too, how was I to know just what day to be ready for him?

  We were nearly at the schoolhouse before I figured it out. Then I wheeled Lady around and raced her for the post office. I didn’t have a single penny with me, but the lady that ran the office knew me and let me have a postal card on credit till after school. I took it over to the writing desk and put my own name and our box number on it, turned it over and printed on the other side,

  “I will go through Littleton Oct. _____ 1910 and will pay you $10 for ten boys on horseback to help me, yours truly ”

  Then I remembered that Sid didn’t know my real name, so I printed “Little Britches” after our box number.

  Sid and Sheriff McGrath were still at the mill corner when we got back there, and Sid was swearing worse than ever. There were cattle in every yard as far as I could see, and I could hear cowboys hooting from clear up near the middle of town. I rode Lady up close to Sid, and held the postal card out—with the address side up. “If you’d mail this a couple of days before you get here, I’d know just when to have the boys ready,” I said. Then I kicked my heels into Lady, and went to school as fast as I could get there.

  At noon, Sid’s outfit was still trying to get their cattle wrangled through town. It would have been too dangerous for Muriel and Philip to cross the highroad, so I went home on Lady and brought lunch for all three of us. That gave me a good chance to talk to the other kids who rode horses, and to find out if I could get enough of them to help me.

  What I found was that my trouble was the other way. All the boys—and even some of the girls—who rode or drove to school wanted to work for me, and there were too many of them. Dutch Gunther, Johnnie Maloney, and Ace Alexander were my best friends, and each one of them wanted me to say he could be my foreman. Ace and Johnnie lived right in town, and didn’t even have horses, but Dutch’s father owned the express line and had half a dozen. I really wanted it to be Dutch, but I didn’t want to make Ace or Johnnie mad at me, so I said it would be whoever could get a horse and plow to help me plow our garden.

  I let Lady walk all the way home after school while I tried to figure out how I’d tell Mother. Of course, I knew it would be best for me to tell her before she found it out from somebody else.

  The principal said I’d have to bring an excuse for being so late to school, but I hated to ask Mother to write it. She was lying on the parlor sofa when I got home for lunch. First I told her that Dutch was going to bring a horse and plow to help me with the garden. After that, I said it was lucky no little children had been hurt with a herd of wild steers running all over town.

  Mother couldn’t always tell just what I was thinking, the way Father used to, but she usually knew when I was holding something back. She reached out and took hold of my hand. “What is it you want to tell Mother?” she asked.

  It wasn’t so much what I wanted to tell her as it was what I didn’t want to tell her, so I said, “I ran into Sheriff McGrath on my way to school. . . .”

  B
efore I could say another word, Mother’s face looked almost as if she were going to cry, and she said, “Ralph! What have you done now?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Anyway, nothing bad. He wasn’t looking for me; he was just talking to the foreman of the cattle drive. He’s a nice man; his name’s Sid Gibson. He’s a friend of Hi’s, and wants me to . . .”

  By that time the two little frown marks between Mother’s eyes were getting real deep, and she had her mouth squeezed up tight. “Ralph, you are not going away from home to work,” she said. “This Mr. Gibson may be a very fine man, but I don’t know anything about him. And, furthermore, you are going to school.”

  “He didn’t even ask me to,” I said, “because I told the sheriff you needed me at home nights.”

  The frown marks went away then, and Mother started rubbing her fingers up and down on the back of my hand, so I said, “They were just talking about how hard it is to keep the cattle on the highroad. Mr. Gibson said he had to hire half a dozen extra hands just to drive through Littleton, and it cost him an extra hundred dollars. He said he’d pay me ten dollars if I’d get ten boys on horseback to watch the cross streets for him when he comes back next fall.”

  Mother had been looking at my hand while I was talking, but she glanced up at my face and half smiled, “Are you sure he made you that offer? It rather sounds to me like one of your own schemes.”

  Then, of course, I had to tell her all about it. She didn’t say a word for a couple of minutes, but just lay there looking at my hand and rubbing it. Then she said, “Ten dollars does seem like a lot of money to charge him . . . when you’re planning to pay the other boys so little . . . but then . . . you will be saving him ninety dollars, won’t you?”

  I just said, “Yes, ma’am,” and she rubbed my hand some more.

  In another minute or two, Mother looked up and said, “Son, don’t try to be a man too soon. I want you to be my little boy for a long time yet.”

  3

  Plowing and Planning

  THAT Saturday morning Dutch Gunther came to help me plow the garden. We had a terrible time. The piece of ground out back of the barn hadn’t been plowed for years, and it seemed to have been used for a dumping ground. There were big rocks and pieces of old wire and iron, and even old washtubs buried in it.

  Dutch drove the horses and I tried to hold the plow, but the handles thrashed around like a fish out of water. They’d knocked me down half a dozen times before we’d plowed fifty feet. Then we hit a buried rock that threw me clear over the handle bar, and I came down with one foot on a broken bottle. It didn’t cut very deep, but I bled like a stuck pig. Dutch wanted to take me right down to Doctor Crysler’s office before I bled to death. I wasn’t worried about bleeding to death, but I didn’t want Mother to worry about it, so I had Dutch go to the house and get Grace.

  Grace liked to be a nurse. She had seen Mother bandage up enough cuts so that she knew how, but she always wanted to make every little thing look like a big operation. I told her all she had to do was to wrap a rag good and tight around it, but she wouldn’t do that. She pinched her upper lip with her thumb and finger—the way Mother always did when she was thinking hard—and said, “Mmmmm, mmmmmm, this looks like it needs stitches. . . . Anyway, we’ll have to probe it for glass splinters. Help me carry him to the barn, Dutch, where we can lay him on some hay.”

  I tried to tell her that was monkey business, and all I needed was a clean rag, but I might just as well have been trying to tell a doctor what to do. She stuck her head up like a bridle-shy old mare, and said, “If you won’t let me give this wound proper care, I shall have to turn it over to Mother, and I’m afraid it would upset her dreadfully.”

  She did let me hop into the barn instead of being carried, and she finally decided she wouldn’t have to sew me up—I think she’d have been scared to try it anyway. But she made me soak my foot in a pan of hot water with a mercury tablet in it. Then she poked around the cut place with her finger, and kept saying, “Now is there any severe pain under pressure?” just as the doctor did the time I broke my ribs. At last, I had to tell her that if she didn’t quit fussing with me and just put a rag on my foot, I’d go in and have Mother do it. Even then, she wouldn’t let me go back to plowing until she’d made me put on one of Philip’s overshoes to keep the bandage clean.

  While Grace was gone for the overshoes, Dutch and I figured out how to make the plow work. We started off by wishing we had a riding plow so there wouldn’t be any handles to hold. That was when we got the idea about the wagon wheels. And it didn’t take us very long to get them off the front of Gunther’s old express wagon, axle and all. We stood the plow up and dug it in to the right depth. Then we rolled the wheels close in behind the handles, and wired them tight with baling wire. Of course, we couldn’t lift the share out of the ground, and we did make sort of wabbly furrows, but the handles didn’t flop around any more, and it did plow.

  We’d wasted so much time before we figured out the wheel business that it took us till nearly two o’clock to plow the garden behind the barn. The people who lived in the house before we did had used the side yard for a garden, and it was as mellow as meal. It only took us a couple of hours to finish it; and all the time, Dutch and I were talking about how we were going into the garden plowing business, and how much money we were going to make.

  When we were right in the middle of it, Sheriff McGrath rode in from the highroad. He laughed so loud about our having the wheels hooked onto the plow, they could have heard him clear downtown. Dutch didn’t like to be laughed at, and told him the wheels were all my idea. That just made the sheriff squawk louder than ever.

  Mother was up and getting around the house a little that day. The sheriff made so much noise that she came to the front door to see what the matter was. As soon as he saw her, he took his hat off with a big swoop, and although it was afternoon, he hollered, “Mornin’, Miz Moody. Fine mornin’, ain’t it? This little shaver of yourn sure is full o’ idees. Dagged if he ain’t up to something all the time. Guess he’s goin’ to be another Thomas A. Edison.”

  Mother must have thought he was making fun of me, or else she just didn’t like having him holler at her. Her voice was quiet enough that it just barely reached as far as the garden when she said, “He comes by it honestly, Mr. McGrath. His father was a very resourceful man.” Then she went in and shut the door.

  When she shut the door, he put his hat back on and said to me—quiet as could be—“You ought to fine this dirt up while it’s new-plowed. I got a single-section spike-tooth harrow in my back yard. You can use it if you got a mind to come and get it.” Then he said, “So long, boys,” and started to ride back to the highroad.

  He’d only gone a few yards when he stopped his horse and called me over. “That wa’n’t a bad deal you made with Sid Gibson,” he said; “good for him, good for your maw, and good for me. You figgerin’ on tacklin’ any the other drovers this spring? Ought to be three, four more of ’em pass through town.”

  “I want to tackle them all,” I told him, “but I’ve got to find some way of knowing when they’re coming through. Is there anybody with a telephone south of town that I might get to call me when a herd’s coming?”

  Sheriff McGrath looked up toward our house, and asked, “How they goin’ to call ya, Little Britches? You ain’t got no telephone, have ya?”

  “No,” I said, “but Robertses have. Mrs. Roberts would let me know.”

  The sheriff pulled one corner of his mustache for a minute. “Well,” he said, “Hornses has got one, but that ain’t no good; too close to town. You wouldn’t have time to ride out and make a deal. Tell ya what we’ll do, by George. I’ll see Gus Larsen. Gus, he’s foreman at Wolhurst—three mile south. Give ya plenty time to ride out and make a dicker.”

  He wheeled his horse to go, then turned back and leaned out of the saddle, so that his face was right near mine. “Don’t leave none of ’em skin ya down on your price, Little Britches,” he whispered, “
it’s worth a tenner to ’em, and your maw’s a-goin’ to need all you can make.”

  As soon as we had finished the plowing and put the wheels back on Gunther’s express wagon, we went for the sheriff’s harrow. It did a fine job. Especially on the piece behind our barn. We set the teeth up straight, and they raked out all the rocks and wire and cans that were near the top, and left the ground as fine as duck feathers.

  When I got home from taking the harrow back, Carl Henry’s chestnuts were tied to one of the cottonwood trees in front of our house. Carl had been one of our neighbors when we lived on the ranch and was one of the best friends we ever had.

  I hadn’t been home two minutes, when Philip came out to the barn and said Mother wanted to see me. She and Carl were talking in the parlor, but they stopped when I came in. I could tell something was wrong from the look on Mother’s face and the way Carl said, “Hi, Little Britches!” Carl didn’t usually call me anything but Ralph.

  Mother’s voice was real quiet when she said, “Draw up a chair, Son. Carl and I have just been talking about his lovely Jersey cows. He tells me that one of them would give us all the milk and butter we would need for ourselves, and that we’d probably have some to sell. Don’t you think it would help out a lot on our food bills? You see, I could make cottage cheese and Injun pudding, and lots of things we haven’t been able to have since we left the ranch. You could take care of a cow all right, couldn’t you?”

  Of course I could take care of a cow all right, and Mother knew it. I’d herded cows for the past three summers, and had always helped Father milk. Before I even had a chance to say so, Carl began telling me how I could picket her out on vacant lots and along the river, so we wouldn’t have to buy her any hay.

  If he had kept quiet I might not have thought anything about paying for the cow, but that made me think of it right away. Carl wasn’t very old—about thirty. He had gone to a farming school and was all for purebreds; he had big charts in his barn where he kept track of every pound of milk each cow gave. Besides Jersey cows, he had a whole bunch of Berkshire hogs, and raised scads of little pigs. I’d never liked to work with pigs very well, and the first thing I thought of was that he wanted to trade the cow for my next summer’s work. So I said, “Well, I’d thought we might get a cow this fall, after I’d earned some money. But don’t Jersey cows cost a lot? I’d thought we could get one for about thirty dollars, like we did on the ranch.”