Hard Winter Read online

  The three of us was like the Musketeers, Tommy told me once. That’s a book Tommy had once read.

  I’m rattling on as senseless as one of those old reprobates at the Manix Store, ain’t I? Where was I? Oh, yeah, the fight me and Tommy was fixing to have along the drift fence.

  John Henry stopped it.

  Only, he wasn’t paying much attention to me and Tommy. What he did was just kick the tarnation out of the nearest fence post, kicked it so hard it started leaning to the east in that drying mud, and with that, me and Tommy was staring at him, and John Henry was just looking down that long line of wire, his gloved hands clenched so tight his whole body was shaking.

  We stood silent, a little worried.

  “This ain’t right.”

  I wasn’t sure I’d heard John Henry right, he’d spoken so soft, and usually you never had to ask John Henry Kenton what he had just said. I wasn’t about to ask him to repeat himself, though, and he let out this long sigh, then pulled off those gloves he was wearing and tossed them on the dead steer.

  “No, sir,” he said, louder now. “It ain’t right.” He swore, and turned to me and Tommy, mud and grime and blood caked on his beard stubble, brown eyes almost as black now as his boots.

  “Ain’t right. Ain’t suitable. Ain’t befitting us. I don’t know what we were thinking. Tommy, you ought to have known better.” He looked at me. “You lame?”

  “No, sir,” I said right back to him, and I was picking up my knife, thinking John Henry was pestering me to get back to work, but Tommy, he was smart, and he stopped me from making a bigger fool out of myself. He just reached out and grabbed my arm, pulled me back, and gave this slight gesture with his jaw to pay attention to John Henry Kenton.

  Which is what both of us done.

  “You think this is a job for a cowhand?” John Henry asked, but he wasn’t really talking to us boys, he was talking to himself. Practicing, I think, for what he’d tell Jenks Foster, who did the hiring and the firing at the Ladder 3E.

  “I ain’t drawing time for something I can’t do on the back of a horse,” he said. “Men pay me to nurse cattle, not skin them. I must have gone plumb out of my head to hire on for a job like this. Let’s go.”

  We saddled our horses, and rode away from the drift fence. John Henry left his gloves where he had dropped them. No matter. They was ruined from all that blood and guts.

  * * * * *

  I don’t think we said a word on the whole long ride back to the Ladder 3E headquarters. Jenks Foster was sitting on his rocking chair on the porch of the bunkhouse when we rode up late that afternoon, like he was expecting us.

  A good man, Jenks Foster. He had a chaw of tobacco inside his mouth that stretched his cheek out like he was eating a whole apple, and sat in that rocking chair, working his tobacco, and braiding something with horsehair. He wore a big hat, shapeless, covered with dirt from years on the ranges, plaid pants stuck in stovepipe boots, plaid shirt, and calico bandanna. And spurs with the biggest set of rowels that I’d ever seen.

  I liked old Jenks Foster. At the Ladder 3E, folks said Jenks had gone on drives to Abilene back when it was wild and cantankerous. They said he had worked with men like Shanghai Pierce and Ike Pryor. They said he had ridden on that first drive on what we later called the Goodnight-Loving Trail. He was a cowman all the way through, and I hated to quit him like we was about to do.

  He spit onto the ground, and set aside his horsehair, and just rocked, waiting, like he was expecting us to come.

  “If I wanted to be a skinner,” John Henry told him without getting down from his horse, “I’d have hired on with some buffalo-running outfit.”

  “No buffalo outfits any more, Kenton,” Jenks Foster said easily. “Not in a long, long time. No buffalo, either.”

  “I draw time as a cowpuncher,” John Henry said. “I work on the back of a horse. Skinning rotting cattle ain’t a job for me.”

  Foster’s bronzed head nodded. “Don’t blame you. You’ll be drawing your time, I reckon.”

  “Figure I got two weeks coming.”

  “And you?” Now, Jenks Foster was looking right at me.

  “We’s pards.” It was all I could think of to say.

  Old Jenks, he smiled at that, which made me feel a whole lot better, especially when he looked away from me and at Tommy. “You feel the same, Tommy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You want your books?” Jenks asked. “Along with the pay you got coming?”

  “The books?” Tommy blinked. “Those books are yours, Jenks.”

  “Not mine. They come with the bunkhouse. Don’t know who first brought them to the Ladder 3E, but the only time they ever got read was by you. Pack them in your war bag, Tommy.”

  Jenks stood, spit again. “I’ll get what money I owe you.”

  * * * * *

  One of the books was by Balzac. I don’t remember the title, but I do recall that Jenks Foster said he’d sure miss “that potbellied son-of-a-gun” and how Tommy used to read after supper. We’d packed up our possibles, which didn’t amount to much, other than the three books Tommy was getting as a bonus. I’d hoped to eat supper at the ranch, but the place was deserted that evening. It was going to be a long walk to Tascosa.

  Should point out that we didn’t own our horses, just our saddles and tack. The Ladder 3E had a company rule that cowboys couldn’t own their own mounts. Bunch of ranches done things the same way. So we’d laid out our war bags with our saddles and bridles on the porch, got our envelopes from Jenks Foster—didn’t bother opening them up to count the cash because we trusted Jenks. And we just stood there, waiting, knots on a log.

  “Where’s Fussy?” John Henry asked. Fussy was the cook. His name was Fussell, but everyone called him Fussy. Big fat guy, chewed on long-nine cigars all the time till they was soggy and torn up. Never smoked them. Just chewed on them.

  “Let him go,” Jenks Foster said.

  “Let him go?” John Henry turned, facing our ex-boss like he was about to go for his six-shooter. My mouth dropped open, too. Fussy wasn’t much of a cook, and I got tired of finding shreds of cigars in my beans, but he was a good man, quick with a joke, and I’d worked for worse belly-cheaters.

  After spitting out a mouthful of tobacco juice, Jenks Foster said: “You count how many cattle you skinned?”

  “No,” John Henry fired back.

  “I have. You and all the other outfits I had out there. The way things have averaged out, it comes to one hundred and seventy-nine per mile. Over twenty-six miles.” He looked over at Tommy. “Son, you’re mighty good with words. How are you at ciphering? Can you figure that out?”

  “Well. . . .” Tommy sort of grinned. Oh, he could figure out a problem like that, but he’d need a pencil and paper, and some time.

  “Four thousand, six hundred, fifty-four,” Jenks Foster said. “That’s just along the drift fence.” He was looking back at John Henry. “John Hollicot come over yesterday from the LX. He’s lost twice as many.”

  “Wire.” John Henry’s fists were clenched tight again. He cursed the wire.

  “It’s bad. Bad as I’ve ever seen. So I let Fussy go. Nobody to cook for here, anyhow, except me.” He let out a list of names of other riders for the Ladder 3E who had come in and quit. I think that disappointed John Henry. He’d hoped he had been the first one to show his pride, but, turns out, we was among the last.

  “Clu Marshall, Lavender Mills, and Chet Muller are still out there,” Jenks Foster said. “Lavender ain’t got the sense God gave a horned toad. He’ll skin cattle all the way to Kansas if he ain’t careful. They are the only ones left riding for the Ladder 3E.”

  “You’ll fire them, too?” John Henry asked.

  “Didn’t fire you, did I? You boys quit. Like the rest of them, except Fussy, and he’ll find a job somewhere else, or give up this crazy way of life, go to work in some restaurant. No, the Ladder 3E ain’t finished. Lavendar’ll stay on. Same as Chet. Clu? Probably not. Not when he f
inds out that he’ll have to eat my cooking till things recover down here. There’s work to be done. Hides to be picked up. Watering holes to be cleaned. Wire to be fixed. You boys could stay on, if you had a mind.”

  “I reckon not,” John Henry said. “We’ll drift.”

  Me and Tommy nodded our agreement.

  “Figured as much. Don’t blame you. There’ll be some tramps and drunks, bottom of the barrel, and greenhorns in the saloons. I’ll hire some of those boys to do the jobs needed to be done around here.”

  Silence filled the night. Coyotes started yipping. Jenks Junior, which is the name we’d saddled on the cur dog on the ranch, started yipping right back till those coyotes stopped making all that noise.

  “You boys need me to put in a word for you, I’d be right proud to do so.” Jenks spit again. “The only thing is this . . . jobs might be hard to come by in these parts. This year. For work befitting cowhands like you.”

  “Is it that bad?” Tommy asked.

  “Bad enough,” Jenks answered. “You saw it yourself. Skinning cattle. I’m thinking forty percent here. I hear the XIT is saying only fifteen percent. And I’ve heard some bookkeepers say that a bunch of us ranchers are exaggerating our losses, killing off what they call the book count, and not the actual count.”

  “You bring those bookkeepers to that fence,” John Henry said, his voice hoarse, edgy, “and you ask them if that stink comes from paper.”

  “Know what you mean, Kenton.” Jenks moved that mound of tobacco to his other cheek. “Tommy,” he said, “if you’d hitch up the spring wagon, I’ll give you boys a ride to Tascosa. No need in you boys having to walk all that way, lugging your traps.”

  Tommy took off. I should have followed him, helped him, but I didn’t. I figured Jenks Foster expected me to go, too, wanted to tell John Henry something private, but I wasn’t about to go till I’d heard him say something. That’s the one mistake I ever saw Jenks Foster make. He should have asked both of us to go hitch that team.

  “The Quarter Circle Heart is going out of business,” Jenks said. “Lost fifty percent over there. I’m sorry, Kenton. Know you used to ride for that brand. Didn’t want you to travel all the way over to Donley County for a job that ain’t there.”

  “Hadn’t planned on it,” John Henry said.

  “Can I ask where you’re thinking about going? Might know somebody there who could use three good hands.”

  “Somewhere,” John Henry said, “where there’s no wire fences.”

  Chapter Five

  Turned out to be Montana. At least, that’s what we thought, or what John Henry Kenton thought. ’Course, it was a rather roundabout way that we got here.

  First, John Henry blew all of his pay in Tascosa. Then he blew half of our pay, mine and Tommy’s, that he’d asked us to loan him. Only then, after John Henry had sobered up and gotten something in his stomach that was solid and not forty-rod, we started looking for a job. But our luck was on hold. The only job we could get was with dead cattle, only it was a whole lot better than skinning them.

  The Texas Cattle Raisers Association sent out instructions to all its members to please send all of the cattle hides to the market in Dodge City, Kansas. That way, the brass figured, the Texas Cattle Raisers Association would have a better idea of just how bad things were after the blizzard. So we got a job as freighters, hauling wagons from around Fort Elliott to Dodge City, tossing our saddles and bridles on top of those stinking hides. Hired on with Captain Andrew J. Jonas, the boss of the train, and he was a boss, let me tell you. He had lost his left arm all the way plumb up to his elbow during the war. Either at Gettysburg or Shiloh, charging with John Bell Hood or swinging a saber with Ulysses S. Grant, depending on who asked him, or how much John Barleycorn he’d poured down his gullet. Of course, Tommy, he suspicioned Captain Jonas’s stories, said he didn’t believe our boss had even fought in the War Between the States, yet Tommy never said so to the captain’s face.

  Wasn’t hard work as skinning dead cattle, or digging fence posts, or stringing barbed wire, though we had to work with mules, and I told Tommy that he had finally found a job that fitted him to a T. All he had to do was sit on his backside and yell cuss words.

  Wasn’t easy, though. It was turning hot. Hides attracted a million flies. Mules are stubborn, ignorant critters. Handling a team, freighting double-hitched wagons across the Panhandle and into Indian Territory and through southwestern Kansas was a chore. I’m talking about a team of twelve mules, hitched to two wagons with a little old repair caboose trailing the wagons. Loaded sky-high with stinking hides. That’s what each of us had to handle. John Henry worked the wagons right behind Captain Jonas’s team, followed by a couple others whose names I forgot years ago, then Tommy, with me riding drag. Tommy and me had drawed straws to see who come out sucking the hind teat, and Tommy’s luck generally run better than mine.

  Me and Tommy wasn’t cut out for that job, but we done our best. Most of those muleskinners avoided us, ignored us, never talked to us, and looked at us with contempt, probably disgust, but there was one fellow who kept us two boys from making bigger fools out of ourselves. Probably kept Captain Jonas from firing us, and firing John Henry because it was John Henry who had spoke up for us, gotten us the jobs. Anyway, this ’skinner, name was Harris, he helped us each morning and evening with the teams, gave us a few tips on what to do, sort of looked after us, which was more than John Henry done on that long, hot, stinking, dusty trip.

  I’ll tell you true, muleskinning and freighting ain’t no jobs befitting a cowboy. John Henry must have done it before, and, like I said, he told a few falsehoods about me and Tommy having some experience before, which is one reason Captain Jonas hired us. Truthfully the main reason we got hired was that four or five of his ’skinners had quit on him in Mobeetie, and pickings was slim for the return trip to Kansas. He filled one job with a soldier who had quit the Army, or the Army had made him quit, and Captain Jonas had to drive the other wagon himself. Usually he just bossed the job, or so he told us. That left him three muleskinners needed, and that’s where me and Tommy and John Henry come in. Now, we wasn’t the only cowboys out of work, but we was the only three who’d agree to work for his wages and do his kind of work. Most cowboys wouldn’t, and mostly on account of pride.

  Fact is, I couldn’t figure out why John Henry had agreed to such a job, and I up and told him so one night. I was sore, in more ways than one, ’cause I’d just gotten the daylights walloped out of me by a big sorrel jack that had kicked me so hard, I wouldn’t be sitting on my backside for the next day or two. Didn’t see how I was going to be able to sit on the wheeler and keep those mules moving, no matter how hard I kicked the wheeler’s ribs, how loud I cussed, or how hard I cracked that blacksnake whip.

  “It’ll get us to Dodge City,” John Henry answered.

  “And then what?” I fired right back.

  “Then we get us a real job.” John Henry grinned. “I hear the nights turn real cool in Montana.”

  “Montana?” Tommy sang out. That was the first we’d ever heard about Montana.

  “Montana,” John Henry said. “Good cow country. Lot of ranchers in Texas and Kansas have been shipping herds north.

  Boy I met in Fort Worth told me you wouldn’t believe the gathers they have in the Judith Basin. Says a man can mount his horse in Miles City and ride all the way to the Bitterroots and not see farmer or fence. That’s where we’re bound, boys. Montana.”

  Sounded good to me. As long as it was far from Vigo County, Indiana.

  “Montana.” Tommy tested the word, his head bobbing.

  “Well, I hope, for Jim’s sake, that there are no prickly pear cactus in Montana. Leave him bawling like a baby sister.”

  If my rear-end hadn’t been so sore from that mule’s hoof, Tommy and I would have had another go of fisticuffs.

  * * * * *

  We made it to Dodge City in one piece, and I ain’t never lowered myself to freight nothing for nobody si
nce then. Well, hardly since then. Had to haul supplies for ranches, things like that, but that’s different. Captain Jonas paid us off, even asked John Henry—but not me or Tommy—if he’d hire on with him again. The captain was going to freight some whiskey to Mobeetie and Tascosa, then come back with another load of hides. There was a lot of hides that year. I recollect hearing Captain Jonas say the man he sold his load to had already bought 32,579. That’s how bad that winter had been.

  “I’ll stick to cowboying,” John Henry told him.

  “There’s no future in cattle,” Captain Jonas argued. “Cattle are fetching ten dollars a head, not thirty. Hides are of more value than a steer. You’d do well to reconsider.”

  John Henry hooked a thumb back at me and Tommy, who was leaning against a hitching post on Front Street, waiting for our pard. “I got them two kiddoes to look after. We’ll push north.”

  * * * * *

  That was the first time me or Tommy had ever been to Dodge. Queen of the Cow Towns. That’s what she was. I’d been to Fort Smith in Arkansas, and Fort Worth, and The Flat in Texas, and Baxter Springs in Kansas, and, of course, towns like Tascosa and Mobeetie, but none of them could hold a candle to Dodge City. Wanted to be able to take in the sights, see some hootchie-cootchie show, maybe even try to buck the tiger at a faro table, but I hardly got even a look at Dodge. John Henry took us to a bathhouse while he went to get himself a whiskey, and by the time Tommy and me come out all clean, even behind our ears, John Henry had lined up another job for us.

  Things wasn’t so bad in Kansas. Not in Dodge City, at least. Oh, the market was hurting, like Captain Jonas said, with the price for cattle dropping, and, if I remember right, I think 400,000 was the number of cowhides that was shipped out of Dodge that year. That’s just Dodge. Ain’t no telling how many hides was just left for the coyotes and turkey vultures. Don’t know how many hides was shipped from other places.