The Cowboy Way Read online

  It didn’t take me long to get on the outs with the big Thompson boy, who was two years older and a hand-and-a-half taller than me. He was always looking for somebody to be on the outs with, and he usually won whatever contest resulted. I stayed close to the grown-ups to keep my nose clean, and listened to the fiddle music.

  Cleve’s girl seemed to make a lot of trips to the kitchen, and pretty soon she was wobbly on her feet. She was dancing with just about every unattached man there, though I noticed the married men didn’t seem to ask her. Cleve quit asking her too.

  Jeff and Ellie took most of their dances with each other. Cleve was watching them, and the devil was looking out of his eyes. Presently Jeff went to the kitchen to get Ellie some punch. Cleve pulled Ellie out onto the dance floor. She put up a little quiet resistance, but not enough to attract much notice. There was anger in her face.

  The sight made me ashamed. I pushed through the crowd and went out into the cool night air. In front of the house the big Thompson boy was daring anybody to come and wrestle with him. I had been through that with him once and didn’t want any more, so I walked on out into the darkness, away from the yellow lamplight. The door opened, and Cleve came out, holding Ellie by the wrist and pulling her along.

  “Now, looky here,” he said, with his voice full of indignation, “I was always nice to you, but you always treated me like I was a dog with the mange. That Jeff Bowman comes along, and you take right up with him. Now I want to know, what’s the matter with me?”

  Cleve acted like he had been in the kitchen too many times himself.

  Ellie was not one to raise her voice, but she left no doubt where she stood. “If you could see yourself right now, you’d know what’s the matter. You’re an egotistical—”

  That was all she got to say, because Cleve pulled her to him and kissed her. She was making an angry noise and beating her little fists against him.

  The door opened, and Jeff Bowman stood there against the bright lamplight. He took three or four long strides and spun Cleve around like he was a bottle-fed calf. “You take your hands off of her!” He had his fist drawn back, but Ellie grabbed his arm.

  “No, Jeff, please. Let’s don’t have a fight and get everybody out here. It isn’t worth that.”

  Cleve stood there looking like a whipped dog. He was sobering up in a hurry, realizing what he had done. “I’m sorry, Ellie,” he said. “I’ve had too much to drink, or I wouldn’t of touched you. I’d cut off my arm before I’d hurt you. I don’t want him hurtin’ you either, so I’m goin’ to tell you. He ain’t long out of jail.”

  Ellie looked as if he had hit her. She turned toward Jeff. “Jail?”

  Cleve said, “Not just no little old county jail either. He’s been in the pen at Huntsville.”

  Ellie stood waiting for some kind of word from Jeff, and no word came. She sounded as if she was about to cry. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’ve tried. I just couldn’t. I didn’t know how you’d take it.”

  She turned and ran back into the house, sobbing.

  Cleve said, “Well, now you know how she took it.”

  I was awfully disappointed in Jeff, not because he had been in jail, but because he didn’t hit Cleve. Jeff stayed out there a long time, rolling a cigarette, smoking it, then rolling another. Ellie’s father and mother went home early, and she went with them. Pretty soon I recognized the sound of the company pickup, hitting the road back to the ranch.

  Jeff and Cleve kept their distance the next day. Dad must have smelled a storm brewing up. He sent them out on separate jobs and kept them that way until time for the roundup.

  It was his custom to go to Midland for extra day-help to add to the regular ranch hands and the helpful neighbors during the “works” each year. He brought back five or six, plus Tom Grammer, who had been wagon cook for the Y roundups about as long as I could remember. Dad and Tom went to work bolting the chuckbox to the wagon, and Dad sent me to fetch a monkey wrench.

  I couldn’t find one in any of the usual places where such tools were apt to stray. I went to the big garage and looked in the back of our car, but we didn’t have one either. Cleve’s green coupe was sitting there, and it occurred to me a man with a car that nice was bound to have a monkey wrench in it in case he ever had to fix a flat tire. All I found in the front was a shiny-barreled rifle he always kept there. I ran my fingers back and forth over the wonderful cold steel of it and wished I had gotten off to a better start with Cleve, so he might’ve let me fire it sometime.

  I thought I heard Dad holler all the way from the barn. He probably hadn’t, but I was always listening for him to. That reminded me about the wrench. I got up on the back bumper and opened the trunk. It surprised me. Unlike most cars that had to travel over our dusty roads, this one was as spotless as a washerwoman’s scrub board. It looked like it had been cleaned out often.

  There wasn’t any wrench. There was a short-handled shovel, though, and a carpenter’s saw. I wondered what Cleve wanted with a saw. He never did any carpenter work.

  Rolled up and shoved way back was an old section of tarpaulin. Curiosity around our place had not been restricted to the cat. I pulled the tarp out and found it had been washed lately, but it still had some dark stains. Blood-stains, they looked like, the kind on the tarp Dad always used to wrap fresh-killed beef. I was so interested in what I had found that I didn’t hear Cleve come into the garage.

  He grabbed me and jerked me off of the bumper, then let me fall to my knees. He bent down, and his face looked black with a flash of anger there in the half darkness. He grabbed the front of my shirt and demanded, “What do you think you’re doin’, prowlin’ in my car?”

  I tried to stammer that I was just looking for a wrench, but something was in my throat as big as an apple. My heart was pumping like the old gasoline engine that was used sometimes to pump water when the wind wasn’t blowing enough to turn a windmill.

  I thought Cleve was going to draw back and hit me, so I saw a little daylight off to the left side of him and ran for it as hard as my legs would carry me. I fell once and hit the ground with my face, but I was back on my feet and running while the dust still swirled. I was so scared I didn’t realize I was bleeding until Jeff Bowman caught me at the corner of the bunkhouse and looked at me with a deep concern.

  “Good Lord, button,” he exclaimed, “what happened to you?”

  I guess I looked scared, and I glanced back toward the garage in time to see Cleve come out of it. Jeff saw him too. I didn’t tell him anything, but he put two and two together. He stood there and flexed his hands while his face went dark with anger.

  “He hit you?” he asked.

  I had to admit Cleve hadn’t, but he had made me think he was going to. Jeff nodded grimly. “I wouldn’t go tellin’ your dad about it, if I was you. Just tell him you stumbled and fell. Cleve’ll pay, when we get him where we want him.”

  My heart sank in disappointment. I didn’t know where Jeff wanted Cleve, but I wanted him gone. A sharp suspicion began to gnaw at me. Jeff hadn’t done anything about Cleve at the dance, and he wasn’t doing anything about him now. Maybe Cleve had finally run his bluff on Jeff, like he had done on Buddy, not to mention me. I tried to shake the doubt from my mind, but it clung there like a grass burr.

  As the roundup got started, camp moved from the ranch headquarters to the Mayfield place, to the Crier windmills, then over to the Magnolia trap. It was there that I heard Cleve make some remark about Ellie at the campfire. A couple of the cowboys hung their heads, embarrassed. Jeff jumped up with his fists clenched and his back stiff, but he just stood and looked at Cleve for a minute, then walked out away from the campfire, kicking soft sand with his worn-out boots.

  My face burned with shame. I went off and crawled into my bedroll and pulled the tarp up over me like I expected rain. It was a long time before I went to sleep.

  Finally the chuckwagon moved across the sand country and onto the chalky alkali flat toward Horse Well
. That place had always fascinated me. It wasn’t any different in appearance from the other camps except that it probably had the dustiest pens to brand calves in. But there was a difference.

  About as far back as I could remember, I had heard the legend about Horse Well. One of the hands had shown me an unmarked grave over in the big south pasture. In it was buried a cowboy from way back in the 1880s, he said, killed by a band of horse thieves. The cowboy’s friends had trailed the murderers, shot them all, then dumped their bodies into the deep hand-dug hole over which the windmill tower now stood at Horse Well.

  Cowboys claimed that if you listened on a dark night, you could hear the dead men’s spirits moan from down deep in that black hole. I had been to school and didn’t really believe that kind of thing anymore. Still, that old windmill used to groan enough to make your hair stand on end, especially at night. Greasing and releathering it didn’t seem to help much. Any time we camped at Horse Well I always stayed close to the wagon and kept my bedroll on the off side of it.

  It was a comfort to know that Tom Grammer kept a .45 pistol in the chuckbox, though what good that would do against spirits I never had taken time to worry out.

  The day the wagon moved to Horse Well, Dad sent me with Jeff on drive. Any other time that would have made me proud, because Dad usually kept me close to him so he could give me Hail Columbia when I made a mistake a-horseback, which was usually. But now I couldn’t hold my eyes to Jeff without feeling that he and I shared a guilty secret.

  We weren’t far from camp when my horse Blackjack suddenly shied and jumped sideways. I gulped a mouthful of air and grabbed at the saddle horn too late. I got up spitting sand as Jeff caught my horse.

  Smelling something putrid, I looked around to see what had boogered Blackjack. Off to the left was a hole where the wind had blown the sand away. Holding both snorting horses, Jeff swung down and took a look at it. He handed the reins to me, then poked around in the hole with a dead mesquite limb. He dragged out two sandy but fairly fresh cowhides. Beneath them were the heads and guts of two butchered cattle.

  “Bet some thievin’ oil fielders done it,” I said indignantly, as I figured a good cowboy ought to. Anything that went wrong, it was the custom of the times to blame it on the oil fielders. Usually it turned out they had nothing to do with whatever it was.

  Jeff’s jaws bulged out a little, and his mouth was grim. “Yeah,” he said quietly, “probably some oil fielders.”

  After supper, and before it got dark enough to be spooky, I borrowed Jeff’s rope and went off toward the mill to practice roping fenceposts. I wanted to be far enough from the wagon that the real punchers couldn’t watch me and hooraw me for missing most of my loops.

  My brother Myrle came out directly. He was only about shoulder high to a Shetland pony then, and too young to know he was supposed to be scared of the place. He quickly tired of watching me miss and walked on over to peer at the old well. Pretty soon I dropped the rope and followed him, leaving the loop still attached to a fencepost, which I had caught from a distance of at least five or six feet. I thrilled as I looked at the wooden tower, and let my imagination carry me back to the good old days of high adventure.

  Myrle spoiled it. He leaned over the wide hole and said eagerly, “Bet you if we had us a lantern we could look down there and see the skeletons.”

  The hair on the back of my neck began to bristle, and I suddenly noticed dusk was gathering around us. I said, “Tom probably wants us to help him dry up the utensils.”

  Not until we were back at the wagon did I remember that I had left Jeff’s rope hanging from a fencepost. I had no intention of going back for it, because dark was closing in.

  Car lights began showing through the gloom. A man from Crane came bouncing up in a Model T. I had seen him at some ball games, selling people something to drink out of a fruit jar, and I remembered once seeing him and Cleve talking together on the sidewalk in town. He called Cleve off to one side. I could hear them arguing, though the words were not clear, and Cleve was waving his arms a lot. In a little while Cleve came up to the campfire and said to Dad, “I got some business in town that won’t wait. Be all right if I go with Albert here?”

  Dad nodded, and Cleve rode off in the bootlegger’s old car. A look passed across Jeff’s face, one I had seen a few times in camp when some cowboy won a big poker hand and raked in all the matches.

  I didn’t sleep very well that night. The mill got to groaning louder and louder, and I could almost hear those old horse thieves crying for help. The night closed in on me, thick as pudding and dark as a sack of black cats. I could hear voices, fighting voices. I awoke and sat straight up, throwing back the tarp. It had all been a dream.

  Or maybe it hadn’t. The voices were still there, muffled and distant, but I could hear them though I had both eyes wide open. I recognized Jeff’s voice. For just a second a fanciful notion struck me that the spirits had come up out of that well and somehow gotten ahold of him. The notion passed as I came completely awake.

  Somebody was fighting with Jeff, though; I could tell that by the sounds. My pulse racing, I pulled on my boots to keep from stepping barefooted into a patch of goat-heads, then moved cautiously toward the voices, my throat as dry as old leather. I had slept in my shirt, but a cool night breeze brought goose pimples to my bare legs.

  It was not so dark as I had thought. A full moon was up. In a minute I could tell the other voices didn’t belong to any spirits. They were Cleve’s, and the bootlegger Albert’s. Jeff held Tom Grammer’s big .45 in his hand and had the two men backed up against the Model T.

  “I was ready to forget about goin’ to jail for what you did, Cleve,” he said bitterly, “but you changed my mind for me the night of the dance. I’ve taken a lot from you since then because I was waitin’ for you to make a real mistake. It’s plain to me what you’ve been doin’ with the stuff the kid found in your car. These nights folks thought you was in town, you’ve been out spotlightin’ and shootin’ Y cattle for your friend here to peddle.”

  I was so relieved that I almost forgot and showed myself. It had hurt, thinking Jeff was letting Cleve put a bluff across on him.

  Jeff said, “You haven’t had time tonight to clean up that Model T. I expect a cattle inspector is goin’ to be awful interested in what he finds there. And you can’t move it without this key.” He held the key up for Cleve to see, then pitched it off into the brush.

  Cleve had quit talking, and I thought Albert was going to sink into a dead faint. “Now looky here, cowboy,” he begged, his voice quavering, “don’t you wake up the foreman. I’ll pay you every cent I got in my pocket—close to a hundred dollars.”

  Jeff shook his head. “The only pay I want is to see Cleve go to jail, like he let me do.”

  Somehow it didn’t seem to me that Cleve looked as worried as he ought to. He looked past Jeff and said, “All right, boys, I reckon you’ve heard it all.”

  Jeff was a cowboy, not a lawman, or he probably wouldn’t have fallen for that stunt. He looked back, thinking some of the hands had come up behind him. Cleve bowled him over with his fist. The pistol fell to the ground.

  Jeff and Cleve waded into each other, fighting like a couple of strapping big bulls. To be as much smaller as he was, Jeff was putting up a mighty good scrap. The brush popped and cracked as they struggled back and forth through it.

  The gun still lay on the ground, its barrel gleaming in the moonlight. My heart pounded as I looked at the thing, deadly as a rattlesnake. I reached for it twice, then drew back my shaking hands. Finally I made myself pick it up.

  The bootlegger was on his hands and knees, frantically searching for the key Jeff had thrown away.

  I didn’t know much about pistols, and I never had touched Tom’s .45 before. In my nervousness I must have touched the trigger, because it exploded in my hands with a great roar and the biggest flash of fire I had ever seen. The recoil sent it flying off into the dry weeds. Not for a hundred dollars in silver would I
have picked it up again.

  A commotion started down at the wagon as the shot woke everybody up.

  Jeff and Cleve were still fighting. Cleve had picked up a piece of a discarded windmill sucker rod and was swinging the heavy metal end of it. A good lick with that thing could brain a mule. Jeff was backing away, trying to keep beyond reach. He stumbled over something—his rope that I had left hanging from a post. For a second it looked as if Cleve had him, but Jeff jumped to his feet, one end of that rope in his hand, and made a run around Cleve. Cleve got the sucker rod caught in that rope and dropped it.

  They were fighting again then, slugging it out, moving closer and closer to the old well. Boards had been nailed around the base of the tower to keep cattle from falling into the hole, but the boards were rotten. Jeff took some hard licks from Cleve but finally ducked, leaned down, and came up with a hard fist from about the level of his boot tops. It slammed Cleve back against those old boards, and he broke through. With a wild yell he tumbled backward into that deep, dark hole.

  His body hit the big pipe casing as he slid down, and somehow he managed to get his arms around it. I could hear his shirt ripping as he hugged the casing and tried to stop his fall.

  In a moment his voice floated upward, broken with panic. “Throw me a rope! Hurry up, or I’ll lose my hold.”

  Several cowboys got on Jeff’s rope and helped haul Cleve up out of the well. He was dirty and torn, trembling and sniffling. It was a poor time to think of such things, but I desperately wanted to ask him if he had seen anything of those old horse thieves while he was down there. I had the good judgment not to bring the matter up.

  Cleve was too shaken to talk, but his friend Albert wasn’t. He told it about the way Jeff had guessed.

  The Y lost two hands then, Cleve to the sheriff, Jeff to the man he had worked for before he had been sent away for the cattle stealing Cleve had done. The rancher came down to the Y and apologized for past misunderstandings. He offered Jeff a foreman’s job at top pay—what passed for top pay in those days anyway.