As Sid ducked low, Trinidad threw his arms out wide and drove a knee up. Sid saw it coming and tried to jump back, but he wasn’t quite quick enough. The knee caught him square in the stomach and threw him higher than my head. He came down in a crumpled heap, and Trinidad swung a foot back to kick him as he landed.
I’d been so excited as I watched Sid rip his punches in and dance away that I hadn’t moved from my chair or noticed Zeb. Then, when Trinidad kneed him, I caught my breath and froze, but Zeb didn’t. A split second before Trinidad’s boot would have smashed Sid’s ribs, Zeb’s shoulder slammed into him and nearly knocked him out the doorway.
Trinidad caught himself against the door jamb and didn’t go down. He whirled and charged at Zeb, with his fists held wide apart and high. Zeb neither fisted his hands nor put them up, but just stood there in front of his bunk—crouched a little and with his long arms hanging as his sides, as if he were bewildered.
The punch Trinidad threw at Zeb’s face would have killed a man—but Zeb’s face disappeared. He dropped, almost as if he’d been shot. Then he came up like a wild bull. His head rammed into the pit of Trinidad’s stomach so hard that it threw him flying back onto the table in front of me. There was a ripping, tearing sound as the table legs buckled, then a crash as Trinidad hit the floor, and the ringing of broken glass from the lamp.
When the table went down I got knocked over, and scrambled for the corner where Sid lay holding his stomach and gasping for breath. I pulled him farther back into the corner, then realized that the bunkhouse had become so quiet it almost hurt. I looked around and saw Zeb and Trinidad facing each other across the broken table. Zeb was motionless, in that half-crouch, with his arms hanging loose at his sides. Trinidad was on his feet, edging around the table toward him. Blood trickled from his nose and a small cut high on his cheek.
Zeb didn’t move a muscle or blink an eye as Trinidad edged around the broken table, creeping toward him like a mountain lion ready to spring. I was behind Trinidad then, and could have knocked his knees out from under him, or thrown something at his head, but neither my body nor my head was working. I just knelt there, holding my breath and feeling my heart pound against my ribs. I couldn’t even yell for Zeb to watch out when I saw Trinidad pull his foot back to kick.
How Zeb did it I’ll never know, but he caught that flying foot in mid-air, flung it high, and sent Trinidad crashing back over the broken table.
I’d been scared plenty of times before, and I’d seen men plenty scared, too. But I’d never been so frightened as I was then, or seen a man show fear the way Trinidad did when he crawled to his feet. Zeb had moved around the table and was standing motionless in front of him. Trinidad backed away until he was against a bunk post—with his eyes darting this way and that, hunting for any sort of weapon he could get his hands on.
Sid gasped, only half-conscious, but I hardly noticed him. Zeb was closing in on Trinidad, inch by inch. I could no more have stopped watching him then a cow can stop watching a rattlesnake that is coiled in front of her. Trinidad was watching, too. His lips were white, and, even under the blood and tan, his face was a muddy gray. Once he pulled his foot back to kick again, but changed his mind and crowded tighter against the bunk post.
Zeb crouched lower and lower, then drove up and forward. His shoulder caught Trinidad square in the chest—crushing him against the post. He crumpled, but before he could fall Zeb’s arms were around him in a grizzly bear hug. I’ve heard horses scream in a burning barn, and it’s a sound that no one can ever forget, but there isn’t the fear in it that was in Trinidad’s shriek. I was afraid Zeb was killing him, and my voice squeaked when I yelled, “Don’t kill him, Zeb!”
My yell seemed to bring Zeb to himself. He dropped Trinidad in a limp heap, turned, and in his usual slow drawl, said, “Don’t reckon he’s worth it nohow. You all right, Sid?”
Sid was still yawping for breath, but pulled himself to his feet, saying he was all right, and trying to thank Zeb for helping him.
“Ain’t got no thanks a-comin’,” Zeb told him, then went back to his darning. A couple of minutes later he was mumbling, “She wore a yella ribbon around her neck. She wore it for her lover who was far, far away.” That was the first and only time I ever heard him sing the second line.
As soon as Trinidad could get up, he gathered his stuff and took it outside. Even if Sid wouldn’t admit he was hurt, he could hardly straighten up, and began getting ready to turn in. Hank had been so far back in his bunk during the fight that I hadn’t seen him, and I’d forgotten all about him till he shouted at Sid, “Why’d you let him knee you in the belly? By dogies, if he’d a-raised a hand agin me, I’d a- . . .”
If I hadn’t been so nerved up—and ashamed of myself for having been a coward—I’d have kept still. But, before Hank could go on, I’d blurted, “You’d have run, like I would!” Then I pulled off my clothes and turned in, too.
I was hardly in my bunk when I heard the sound of horses’ hoofs coming toward the bunkhouse. Zeb shuffled to the doorway, and stood leaning against the jamb until I heard the hoofs again. As the sound faded away, he went back to his darning, but all he said was, “Reckon them six-guns Batch is a-holdin’ ought to be worth a lamp and table. ‘Pears like Trinidad’s moved on.”
27
Cloudburst
MR. BATCHLETT never mentioned the fight in the bunkhouse, nor asked any questions that I know of. I didn’t hear him come in during the night, but he was dressing when I woke up Monday morning. At the breakfast table, he looked over at Mr. Bendt, and said, “Reckon you could spare Ned to go along with Zeb till I pick a new hand? The way the trade’s goin’, I don’t like to pull a team off the trail.”
Mr. Bendt winked at me, and said, “The way old Little Britches and me had our crews workin’ Saturday, I reckon we’ll make out—find a new hand or no.”
That was the last of our having a regular home ranch cowhand. Mr. Bendt, Hazel, and I were in the saddle every morning at sunrise, and, until it went down again, we were only out long enough to eat. But we seldom missed a half-hour’s practice on the tricks, and it wasn’t too long before Hazel and her father could do them as well as Hi and I ever had.
Little by little, Lady learned to handle cattle in brush as well as on open prairie, but Blueboy was almost useless. I tried him at cattle-sweeping a dozen times when I had both Pinch and Lady worn down, but I could never stop him from plunging and ripping. I knew he should have been turned out to the mountain pasture, but I couldn’t seem to give up on him. Night after night, I rode him at a high run for eight or ten miles, to see if I could work some of the drive out of him, but it never did any good.
Most of the time Mr. Bendt, Hazel, and I worked as a team—sweeping the canyons and gullies during the day, bringing in the stock we’d gathered before the sun was too low, then cutting, sorting, and booking in the early evening. If we got behind with our work, Jenny would come out and help us for part of the day.
Jenny didn’t know anything about our naming cows until she began working with Hazel and me. She thought it was a lot of fun, and helped us until we had nearly every cow on the home ranch named. Of course, we ran out of last names after the first few weeks, so we had to name some of the older cows, “Mrs. Arthur Jones,” or, “Mrs. Frank Smith,” but we saved all the girls’ names for the heifers.
By mid-August we’d used up all the trading stock on the home ranch, so Mr. Batchlett decided to bring in the best yearlings from the mountain pasture. It was about twenty miles up there, and we started out at dawn on Sunday morning—taking spare horses, grub for two days, and Clay to do the cutting. I was riding Lady, and as I led Pinch and Clay out of the horse corral, Mr. Batchlett said, “Why don’t you take Blueboy along and leave him up there? It won’t be long till Labor Day, and you’ll have to be goin’ back to school anyways.”
I didn’t know I cared so much about Blueboy, but a lump came into my throat when I tried to say, “All right.”
My feeling
s must have showed in my face, too, because Mr. Batchlett grinned, and said, “Aw, leave him stay! We’ll run him out with the rest of the horses when the tradin’ season’s over.”
I remembered to say “Thank you,” but I hurried away before he could change his mind.
Our ride up to the mountain pasture would have been fun if Hank hadn’t got on everybody’s nerves. He was wound up tighter than I’d ever known him to be, and couldn’t keep still two minutes at a stretch. First he was bragging about things he used to do when he was young, then about how much better trader and trail herder he was than Sid, and in between he kept telling us that a cloudburst was coming.
“By dogies, Batch,” he shouted, so loud that the echoes overlapped each other in the canyon, “I’d be danged careful ’bout a-puttin’ men and hosses up this here canyon with a sky the likes of that there one yonder to the east! Cloudburst sky! That’s what it is! Why, I recollect when . . .”
“Aw, recollect to yourself!” Tom called to him. “You wouldn’t know a cloudburst if you was caught in one!”
“By dogies, I’m a-tellin’ you!” Hank yelled back, but Mr. Batchlett looked around hard at him, and he kept still a few minutes. When he began again, it was about my being a fool for not bringing Blueboy along to pasture.
The mountain ranch was really Government land that Mr. Batchlett leased. I don’t know how many miles square it was, but, if it had been smoothed out flat, I think it could have covered the whole state of Delaware. There were no fences, but old Tom Haney lived up there in a little cabin, and kept the stock from drifting. With the mountains and canyons for natural fences, old Tom didn’t have much to do. He was deaf and old, with long white whiskers, but he knew every foot of that mountain ranch, and just where we’d find the stock Mr. Batchlett wanted brought in.
Mr. Bendt knew the mountain ranch almost as well as old Tom. They bossed the roundup crews, while Mr. Batchlett, Hank, and I did the sorting, cutting, and holding. Mr. Batchlett told me which yearlings to cut out, took them away from the herd, and ran them into a box canyon for Hank to hold. I think he gave Hank that job just to keep him from bothering the other men. We worked until full dark Sunday night, then were at it again by dawn Monday. By mid-afternoon, we had a hundred and sixty yearlings ready to move back to the home ranch.
Even with young stock, there isn’t much work to driving cattle through mountain canyons. There’s hardly any place for them to go except where you want them to. After a hard day and a half of rounding up and cutting cattle, we were all tired and wanted to rest a little, but Hank kept up a steady stream of howling about a cloudburst coming.
When we were within a mile of the canyon where I’d first heard Zeb sing, “Yella Ribbon,” I saw Mr. Batchlett wink at Mr. Bendt. Then he stopped his horse and called out, “Where’s them three brindle steers that was laggin’? Hank, you let ’em slip past you! Go on back and hunt ’em! And don’t show up again till you’ve found ’em!”
Hank pulled in a lungful of air to shout something, but I guess the tone of Mr. Batchlett’s voice changed his mind. He let his shoulders sag, turned his horse, and jogged it back up the creek bed.
I couldn’t have been the only one who saw Mr. Batchlett wink. As soon as Hank was out of hearing, all the men—except Zeb—began to laugh, and called back and forth to ask if anybody had seen three brindle steers. Sid had wanted to visit with Jenny that week-end instead of going to the mountain pasture, and he’d been a bit grumpy. But, as soon as Hank was gone, he started to clown and act as if he were trying to do trick-riding stunts.
Sid had everybody, even Zeb, laughing when the lead yearlings headed into high-walled Yella Ribbon Canyon. Suddenly, we heard shouting and the pound of a horse’s hoofs in the dry creek bed behind us. In another minute, Hank raced his horse around a shoulder of the mountain, waving his arms and shouting, “It’s a-comin’! It’s a-comin’! Cloudburst! Cloudburst! Flood’s a-comin’!”
The sky above us was clear and bright, but there was no mistaking the terror in Hank’s voice. And, above the sound of his shouting, I could hear a low, dull rumbling—kind of like thunder that’s a long way off. I had never heard that exact sound before, but Mr. Batchlett and Mr. Bendt seemed to know all about it. Mr. Bendt spurred his horse out of the creek bed, and ran it along a narrow, rocky ledge—racing to get in front of the herd and turn it back from the narrow canyon. Mr. Batchlett was right behind him, shouting orders as he spurred: “Split ’em! Split ’em, boys! Turn ’em back and up the mountain side!”
With ropes flogging and spurs flying, we fought our way through the frightened, bewildered yearlings; splitting the herd, stampeding it, shouting, yelling, and driving it up a mountain side that was steeper than a church roof.
I was lucky to have my saddle on Pinch. He seemed to sense the danger as well as any man in the outfit, and he was no longer pinching. His bare yellow teeth ripped and cut, driving the frightened yearlings in a swarm before him.
There were only two men who were not shouting at the top of their voices—Zeb and Hank. A dozen or more times I saw Hank, striking with his rope-end as a rattlesnake strikes with its head, but his mouth was clamped tight, and there was no fumbling. Each time his rope flashed out, the knot caught a yearling on the rump, and no man in the outfit kept his head any better.
We had most of the stock out of danger when I saw a wall of water come around the shoulder of the mountain where Hank had raced three minutes before. It didn’t look very dangerous, or as if it were moving very fast, but within another three minutes the creek was a racing, raging river, ten or twelve feet deep. Where it sucked in to shoot through Yella Ribbon Canyon—the one we’d have been in if Hank hadn’t saved us—it leaped and plunged, with white foam whipping back and forth like the mane on a fighting stallion.
Mr. Batchlett stepped down from his horse, took off his hat, and with it in his hand, climbed along the mountainside to where Hank sat his horse. We couldn’t have heard him if he’d spoken, but I was watching his face and knew he didn’t. He just reached up, shook hands, then turned and put his hat on as he went back to his own horse.
There was no way out of the mountains except through Yella Ribbon Canyon, and any stock that went through it that night would be coyote food. Three or four of our yearlings did go down fighting wildly for a minute or two, then being rolled and swept along with the deadwood that rode the crest. There was nothing to do but cling to our perches on the mountainside until the flood passed and dawn came.
I think all the men expected, as I did, that Hank would brag of his having been right about the cloudburst’s coming, and of his saving our lives—but he didn’t. One by one, they climbed to where he was perched, took off their hats, and shook hands. When I put my hand out and told him he’d saved my life, he said, “Reckon that leaves us even. I ain’t forgot the time I got us lost up here.”
I know I dozed off a little during the night, wedged behind a boulder so I wouldn’t roll into the flood, and I think most of the others did, too. A heavy dew fell, and toward morning a chilly wind came down the canyon. It made our teeth chatter and our legs and stomachs cramp, but I didn’t hear anyone complain. I guess they were all thinking, as I was, that we might have been tumbling and rolling like the dead calves and driftwood on the crest of that flood.
By dawn the flood had passed, and the creek was only a sprawling brook again. But the high-water mark showed, black and far above my head, as we pushed the nervous yearlings through Yella Ribbon Canyon. When we’d passed through and come out between the hogbacks, the buildings of the home ranch came into sight across a sea of brush-covered ridges. They were little more than specks among the brush, but few places have ever looked better to me.
It had been less than two and a half months since I’d first come to the home ranch, and then it had meant little to me. I’d looked forward to being a real cowpoke, like the ones who brought the Longhorns up from Texas, but it hadn’t worked out that way. Instead, with the exception of the dust-storm trip, I’
d only been a ranch boy, doing the things that hundreds of other ranch boys were doing—and my partner had been a freckle-faced little girl with pigtails.
As I rode along behind the bawling calves, I tried to feel sorry for myself, but I couldn’t. After the first week, there’d hardly been a minute all summer when I’d have traded my job for anything in the world. I didn’t care if I did have a girl for a partner; there were few cowhands who could do a better job with milk cows—or that I liked to work with any better. Much as I wanted to see Mother and the children at home, I found myself being a little bit sorry that I’d have less than three more weeks on the home ranch.
It was mid-forenoon when we brought the yearlings into the big cutting corral, and there was no chance for any rest before we got the trading herds cut and ready to take the trail at dawn next morning. Mrs. Bendt and Jenny had breakfast waiting for us, and as we ate, Mr. Batchlett told us what his plans were.
“This’ll be the last go-round,” he said, “and I aim to strike out for the Purgatory again. There’s need for good young bulls to improve the range stock in that country, and they’ll take yearlings if they can’t get older stock. Zeb, how about you and Ned takin’ a bunch of steers along the foothills between The Springs and Pueblo? You could figure on tradin’ two for one. Take farrow cows if you have to; there’s grass enough here to winter ’em through.”
Zeb was stuffing away flapjacks, half a one at a mouthful, but he nodded, and Mr. Batchlett went on. “Reckon I’ll let you and Tom go back into the South Park country, Sid. Take heifer stuff along, and trade out as best you can—two for one; three for one if you have to. We’re getting a late start, but I want you back here by two weeks from tonight. It’ll take a few days to round up the Denver herd, and I aim to have it in Littleton by Labor Day.”