The Cowboy Way Page 11

  All in all, Jim did a better job than most of us hands thought he would. That is, till we got to the Red River.

  It had been raining off and on for three days when we bunched the cattle on the south bank of the Red. The river was rolling strong, all foamy and so muddy you could almost walk on it. You could hear the roar a long time before you got there.

  The trail had been used a lot that year, and the grass was grazed down short. Will Peril set out downriver to find feed enough that we could hold the cattle while we waited for the water to run down. He was barely out of sight when Jim Buckelew raised his hat and signaled for the point man to take cattle out into the river.

  “You’re crazy, Jim!” exclaimed the cook, a limping old Confederate veteran by the name of Few Lively. “A duck couldn’t stay afloat in that water!”

  But Jim might have had cotton in his ears for all the attention he paid. When the point man held back, Jim spurred his horse out into that roaring river with the same wild grin he had when he waded into those San Antonio gamblers. Him shaming us that way, there was nothing the rest of us could do but follow in behind him, pushing the cattle.

  The steers didn’t like that river. It was all we could do to force them into it. They bobbed up and down, their heads out of the water and their horns swaying back and forth like a thousand old-fashioned rocking chairs. The force of the current started pulling them downriver. Up at the point, Jim Buckelew was fighting along, keeping the leaders swimming, pushing them for the far bank.

  For a while there it looked like we might make it. Then, better than halfway across, the lead steers began to tire out. They still had heart in them, but tired legs couldn’t keep fighting that torrent. Jim Buckelew had a coiled rope in his hand, slapping at the steers’ heads, his angry voice lost in the roar of the flood. It was no use; the river had them.

  And somehow Jim Buckelew lost his seat. We saw him splash into the muddy water, so far out yonder that no one could reach him. We saw his arms waving, saw him go under. Then we lost sight of him out there in all that foam, among those drowning cattle.

  The heart went out of all of us. The main part of the herd milled and swam back. It was all we could do to get ourselves and the cattle to the south bank. Not an animal made it to the far side.

  It was all over by the time Will Peril returned. We spent the next day gathering cattle that had managed to climb out way yonder down the river. Along toward evening, as the Red dropped, we found Jim Buckelew’s body where it had washed in with an uprooted tree. We wrapped him in his blankets and slicker and dug a grave for him. A gentle rain started again like a quiet benediction as Will Peril finished reading over him out of the chuckbox Bible.

  The burial done, we stood there numb with shock and grief and chill. Will Peril stuck the Bible inside his shirt, beneath the slicker.

  “We haven’t got a man to spare,” he said tightly, “but somebody’s got to go back and tell Hardy.”

  His eyes fell on me.

  * * *

  It had been bad enough, watching Jim Buckelew die helpless in that boiling river. In a way it was even worse, I think, standing there on the gallery of the big house with my hat all wadded up in my hand, watching old Hardy Buckelew die inside.

  He never swayed, never showed a sign of a tear in his gray eyes. But he seemed somehow to shrink up from his six feet. That square, leather face of his just seemed to come to pieces. His huge hands balled into fists, then loosened and began to tremble. He turned away from me, letting his gaze drift out across the sun-cured grass and the far-stretching tangle of thorny mesquite range that he had planned to pass down to Jim. When he turned back to me, he was an old man. An old, old man.

  “The cattle,” he whispered, “did Jim get them across?”

  I shook my head. “No, sir, we lost a couple hundred head. The rest got back to the south bank.”

  “He never did quit, though, did he? Kept on tryin’ all the way?”

  “He never quit till he went under, Mister Buckelew.”

  That meant a lot to him, I could tell. He asked, “Think you could find Jimbo’s grave for me?”

  “Yes, sir, we marked it.”

  The old man’s voice seemed a hundred miles away, and his mind too. “Get some rest, then. We’ll leave at daylight.”

  Using the buckboard, we followed the wide, tromped-out cattle trail all the way up to the Red River. We covered more ground in one day than the herd had moved in three or four. And one afternoon we stood beside Jim Bucklelew’s grave. The cowboys had put up a little brush fence around it to keep trail cattle from walking over it and knocking down the marker.

  The old man stood there a long time with his hat in his hand as he looked at his son’s resting place. Occasionally his eyes would lift to the river, three hundred yards away. The water had gone down now. The Red moved along sluggish and sleepy, innocent as could be. The dirty high-water marks of silt and debris far up on the banks were all that showed for the violence we had seen there.

  Then it was that I heard Hardy Buckelew speak in a voice that sent fingers of ice crawling up my spine. He wasn’t talking to me.

  “I’ll be back, Jimbo. Nothin’ has ever beat a Buckelew. We got a debt here, and it’s goin’ to be paid. You watch, Jimbo, I’ll be back!”

  I had never really been afraid of Hardy Buckelew before. But now I saw something in his face that made me afraid, a little bit.

  He turned toward the buckboard. “Let’s go home,” he said.

  All those days of traveling for that single hour beside the river. And now we were going home again.

  * * *

  The old man wasn’t the same after that. He stayed to himself, getting grayer and thinner. When he rode out, he went alone and not with the boys. He spent a lot of his time just puttering around the big house or out at the barn, feeding and currying and petting a roan colt that had been Jim’s favorite. He never came to the cookshack anymore. The ranch cook sent his meals up to the big house, and most of the food would come back uneaten.

  When the trail crew finally returned from Dodge City, old Hardy didn’t even come out. Will Peril had to take his report and the bank draft up to the big house.

  Will was shaking his head when he came to the cookshack for supper. Worry was in his eyes. “The thing’s eatin’ on him,” he said, “turnin’ him in on himself. I tell you, boys, if he don’t get off of it, it’ll drive him out of his mind.”

  Knowing how much Will loved that old cowman, I didn’t feel like telling him what Hardy had said at the grave by the Red River. The way I saw it, Hardy Buckelew was pretty far gone already.

  When winter came on, he just seemed to hole up in the big house. He didn’t come out much, and when he did we wished we hadn’t seen him. For a time there, we didn’t expect him to live through the winter. But spring came and he was still with us. He began coming down to the cookshack sometimes, a living ghost who sat at the end of the long table, deaf and blind to what went on around him.

  Time came for the spring cow hunt. Hardy delegated all of his responsibility to Will Peril, and the chuckwagon moved out.

  “He won’t live to see this roundup finished,” Will said. You could see the tears start in his eyes. “One of these days we’ll have to quit work to come in and bury him.”

  But Will was wrong. As the new grass rose, so did Hardy Buckelew. The life that stirred the prairies and brought green leaves to the mesquite brush seemed to touch the old man too. You could see the change in him from one day to the next, almost. He strengthened up, the flesh coming back to his broad shoulders and his square face. He commenced visiting the wagon more and more often, until one day he brought out his bedroll and pitched it on the ground along with ours.

  We thought then that we had him back—the same old Hardy Buckelew. But he wasn’t the same. No, sir, he was another man.

  The deep lines of grief that had etched into his face were still there, and we knew they would never fade. Some new fire smouldered in his eyes like camp c
oals banked for the night. There was hatred in that fire, yet we saw nothing for him to hate. What had happened was nobody’s fault.

  As the strength came back to him, he worked harder than any man in the outfit. Seemed like he never slept. More often than not, he was the one who woke up the cook of a morning and got the coffeepot on to boil. He was always on the go, wearing out horses almost as fast as we could bring them up for him.

  “Tryin’ to forget by drivin’ himself into the grave,” Will Peril said darkly. “I almost wish he was still mopin’ around that ranch house.”

  So did some of the others. Hardy got so hard to follow that three of his cowboys quit. Two reps for other outfits left the Box H wagon and swore they wouldn’t come back for anything less than his funeral. Hardy didn’t even seem like he noticed.

  We finished the regular spring works, and we had a sizable bunch of big steers thrown together for the trip up the trail to Dodge. For those of us who usually made the drive, it was a welcome time. We were tickled to death at the idea of getting away from Hardy Buckelew awhile. I think even Will Peril, much as he thought of the boss, was looking forward to a little breathing spell himself.

  We spent several days getting the outfit ready. We put a fresh trail brand on the steers so that if they ever got mixed up with another bunch we could know them easy. We wouldn’t have to stretch a bunch of them out with ropes and clip away the hair to find the brands.

  You could tell the difference in the men as we got ready. There wasn’t much cheer among those fixing to stay home, but the trail crew was walking around light as feathers. Trail driving being the hard, hot, dusty, sleepless, and once-in-a-while dangerous work that it is, I don’t know why anybody would look forward to it. But we did.

  The night before we started, Hardy Buckelew dropped us the bad news. He was going too.

  Will Peril argued with him till he was blue in the face. “You know what it’s like to go up that trail, Hardy—you’ve done it often enough. You’re not in any condition to be makin’ the trip.”

  Will Peril was the only man Hardy Buckelew ever let argue with him, and even Will didn’t do it much.

  “Who owns this outfit?” Hardy asked.

  “You do,” Will said.

  “What part of this outfit is yours?”

  “None of it,” Will admitted.

  “Then shut up about it. I’m goin’, and if you don’t like it you can stay home!”

  Right about then I imagine Will was tempted to. But you could see the trouble in his eyes as he studied Hardy Buckelew. He couldn’t let the old man get off on that trail without being around someplace to watch out for him.

  Hardy didn’t bother anybody much the first few days. It was customary to drive the cattle hard the first week or so. Partly that was to get them off the range they were used to and reduce the temptation for them to stray back. Partly it was to keep them too tired to run at night till they were used to trail routine.

  Hardy rode up at swing position, leaving everybody pretty much alone. Once in a while you would see him turn in the saddle and look back, but he didn’t have anything to say. Seemed like everything suited him—at first.

  But one morning after we had been on the trail a week he changed complexion. As we strung the cattle off the bedgrounds, Will Peril told the point man to slow them down. “We got them pretty well trail-broke,” he said. “We’ll let them start puttin’ on a little weight now.”

  But Hardy Buckelew came riding up like a Mexican bull looking for a fight. “You don’t do no such of a thing! We’ll keep on pushin’ them!”

  Will couldn’t have been more surprised if Hardy had set fire to the chuckwagon. “Hardy, if we keep on like we started, they won’t be nothin’ but hide racks, time we get to Dodge.”

  Hardy Buckelew didn’t bother to argue with him. He just straightened up and gave Will that “I’m the boss around here” look that not even Will would argue with. Hardy rode back to the drags and commenced pushing the slow ones.

  From then on, Hardy took over the herd. The first couple of days Will Peril tried every way he could to slow things down. But Hardy would just run over him. Will finally gave up and took a place at swing, his shoulders slumped like he had been demoted to horse wrangler. In a way, I guess you might say he had.

  Hardy Buckelew was as hard to get along with on the trail as he had been on the cow hunt—harder, maybe. He was up of a morning before first light, rousing everybody out of bed. “Catch up on your sleep next winter,” he would growl. And he wouldn’t let the drive stop till it was too dark to see. I remember an afternoon early in the drive when Few Lively set up camp on a nice little creek. It was about six o’clock when the point came even with the place. If Will had been bossing the outfit, right there’s where we would have bedded the herd. But Hardy Buckelew rode up to the wagon in a lope, looking like he was fixing to fight somebody.

  “What’re you doin’ here?” he demanded.

  Few Lively swallowed about twice, wondering what he had done wrong. “I always camp here. Good water, plenty of grass. Ain’t nothin’ ahead of us half as good.”

  Hardy’s face was dark with anger. “There’s two more hours of good daylight. Now you git that team hitched up and that camp moved a couple more miles up the trail.”

  As cook, and as one of the old men of the outfit, Few wasn’t used to being talked to that way. “There ain’t no good water up there, Mister Buckelew.”

  “We’ll drink what there is or do without. Now you git movin’!”

  Hardy was like that, day in and day out. He would wear out four or five horses a day just riding back and forth from drag up to the point and back again, stopping every little bit to cuss somebody out and tell him to push them harder. We rode from can-see to can’t, Hardy’s rough voice never very far away. Not able to fight Hardy Buckelew, and having to work it off someway, some of the boys took to fighting with one another. A couple of them just sneaked off one night while they were on night guard. Didn’t ask for their time or anything. Didn’t want to face Hardy Buckelew.

  Time we got to the Red River, the whole outfit was about ready to bust up. I think if one man had led off, the rest of us would have ridden out behind him, leaving Hardy Buckelew alone with all those steers. Oh, Will Peril probably would have stayed, but nobody else. That’s the way it usually is though. Everybody waits for somebody else to start, and nobody does.

  Like the year before, it was raining when we got to the Red. The river was running a little bigger than usual as Will Peril rode ahead to take a look at it. He came back and told the point man to keep on going till he reached the other side.

  Hardy Buckelew had loped up right after Will Peril and took a long look at the river. He came back holding his hand up in the air, motioning the men to stop.

  “We’re campin’ right here.”

  Middle of the day, and Hardy Buckelew wanted to camp! We looked at each other like we couldn’t believe it, and I think we all agreed on one thing. He’d finally gone crazy.

  Will Peril said, “Hardy, that river’s just right to cross. Got enough water runnin’ to swim them and keep them out of the quicksand. Not enough current to give them much trouble.”

  Hardy shrugged his shoulders as if he had already said all he wanted to say about it. “We’re goin’ to camp—rest up these cattle.”

  Will was getting angry now, his face red and his fists clenched up. “Hardy, it’s rainin’. If we don’t get them across now, we’re liable to have to wait for days.”

  Hardy just turned and gave him a look that would melt a bar of lead. “This is my herd. I say we’re goin’ to rest these cattle.”

  And rest them we did, there on the south bank of the Red, with the rain falling and the river beginning to swell. Will Peril would go down by the river and pace awhile, then come back and try arguing again. He had just as well have sat down with the rest of us and kept dry under the big wagonsheet stretched out from the wagon. He couldn’t have moved Hardy Buckelew with a team o
f horses.

  We were camped close to Jim Buckelew’s grave. Old Hardy rode off down there and spent a while. He came back with his eyes aglow like they had been the fall before, when I had brought him here in the buckboard. He spent little time under the wagonsheet, in the dry. He would stand alone in the rain and stare at that mud-red river.

  “He’ll catch his death out there,” Will Peril muttered, watching the old man like a mother hen watches a chick. But he didn’t go out to get him.

  The old man had never said a word to anybody about Jim. Still, we knew that was all he was thinking of. We could almost feel Jim right there in camp with us. It was an eerie thing, I’ll tell you. I would be glad when we got out of that place.

  The second day, after standing by the river a long time, Hardy walked in and spoke to Will Peril. “Is the river the way it was the day Jim drowned?”

  Will’s eyes were almost closed. “No, I’d say it was a little worse that day.”

  The old man went out in the rain and watched the river some more. It kept rising. He came back with the same question, and Will gave him the same answer. Now alarm was starting in Will’s face.

  Finally the old man came back the third time. “Is it as big now as it was that day?”

  Will Peril’s cheekbones seemed to stand out as the skin drew tight in his whiskered face. “I reckon it is.”

  The look that came into the old man’s gray eyes then was something I never saw before and have never seen again. He turned toward his horse. “All right, boys,” he said evenly, “let’s go now. We’re puttin’ them across.”