Part 2 (2/2)

”You bring those bookkeepers to that fence,” John Henry said, his voice hoa.r.s.e, 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 a.s.sociation 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 bra.s.s figured, the Texas Cattle Raisers a.s.sociation 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 s.h.i.+loh, 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 ch.o.r.e. 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 s.h.i.+pping 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 p.r.i.c.kly 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 n.o.body since 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 s.h.i.+pped 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 s.h.i.+pped from other places.

But cattle was moving. Drovers wasn't stopping them in Dodge to get s.h.i.+pped out East, not for no $10 a head. They was pointing those herds north, to fatten up on better pastures in Wyoming and Montana, to wait for the market to recover. So we got hired on by an outfit driving 2,200 steers to Ogallala, Nebraska. Me and Tommy rode drag the whole time. Never ate so much dust, but, like I say, it was a whole lot better than what we had been doing that spring in the Texas Panhandle. And from Nebraska, we went even farther north, pus.h.i.+ng another herd when we got hired to help take some cattle on into Montana.

Miles City it was. Place was full of Texas cowboys and Texas longhorns-although both cows and cowhands looked half starved-and I figured we'd just hire out there, but that's not what John Henry Kenton had in mind. The boss man of the outfit we had worked for, Bill Bennett, the one that took 2,500 four-year-olds from Ogallala to Miles City, he said he knew this feller who was s.h.i.+pping three breeding bulls to Helena, and this feller was looking for three cowboys to play nursemaid to those bulls, get them to Helena, then push them up to the Sun River range.

We wandered over to the man at the Northern Pacific depot, and he looked us over, talked to John Henry a minute or two, then took us down the tracks to this car, and let all three of us peek inside.

”What the Sam Hill are they?” John Henry asked the fellow. And the fellow replied: ”Aberdeen Angus. Spectacular-looking animals, aren't they? As black as a raven's wing at midnight. I have papers on all three from the American Aberdeen Angus a.s.sociation in Chicago.” He spoke with a thick Scottish accent, like he'd just stepped off the boat from Aberdeen.

The bulls didn't seem interested in nothing the man had to say. Didn't look so spectacular to me.

”Those three boys can trace their lineage back to Old Jock and Old Granny, Hugh Watson's original Angus doddies.” The man pa.s.sed out cigars to all three of us. ”You have experience with cattle?”

”Longhorns,” John Henry answered.

”St.u.r.dy animals, your Texas beef,” the Scotsman said as he lighted John Henry's cigar. Tommy was still staring at his. I'd put mine in my vest pocket. ”You'll find the Aberdeen Angus also strong. With an even temperament, but not as timid as any Hereford. They adapt well to their environs, and their marbled meat is better than any beef I've ever tasted.”

”Wouldn't know.” John Henry smiled. ”Eat your own beef, it'll make you sick.”

Well, the Scotsman roared with laughter over that one, and I knew we had the job right then and there. Didn't need no recommendation from Bill Bennett.

”But those bulls don't even have horns,” Tommy blurted out.

”No, they don't, laddie, but those black bulls are tough. Only one thing you need to know about Angus.” The man grinned. ”All cattle will kick. But an Angus never misses.” He held out his hand. ”The name's Gow. Tristram Gow.”

And that's how we come to Montana. Took those bulls with Tristram Gow-Camdan's pa-from Miles City, through Billings, all the way to Helena. Then herded them north to the Sun River range.

<script>