The Cowboy Way

by Elmer Kelton

  Hamp made good time in getting back to the house. The banker stood by while Hamp told Charlie what had happened.

  Pale, sitting weakly in his chair, Charlie frowned, looking out the north window. “It’d be hard to drive them in this norther, mighty hard. It’d be blowin’ up a storm by the time anybody could get to that well a-horseback.”

  The banker spoke up, “Like you said, Charlie, they’re the bank’s sheep. I wouldn’t ask you to ride out in the face of that storm. We’ll just write off those lambs.”

  Charlie kept frowning. Suddenly he stood up and headed for the coat rack. “Catch up the horses, Hamp,” he said. “The quicker we start, the quicker we get those sheep to water.”

  Vera grabbed Charlie’s arm. “Charlie, you’re sick. You can’t.…”

  But Charlie was pulling on his coat. Watching him, Hamp felt a glow begin inside him. He forgot he’d ever been disappointed in Charlie Moore.

  The huge brown dust cloud was rapidly swelling out of the north. For the three horsemen, riding into it was like heading into the mouth of a gigantic howling cave. Prewett rode with Charlie and Hamp—he had been a ranch hand before he had been a banker. It took an hour or more to reach the mill. By that time Hamp’s sand-burned eyes were afire with pain.

  Throwing the sheep into a bunch was a hard job. It’s the nature of sheep to drift into the wind, unless it’s too strong. Heading the ewes away from it at an angle took the hardest chousing Hamp had ever done in his life. The only way to turn them was to ride along beside them, whipping at their faces with an empty gunnysack.

  The wind lifted to a new fury, the dust so thick that sometimes Hamp couldn’t see Charlie fifteen feet away. It became too much for the sheep. They wanted to stop and huddle in helpless confusion.

  Desperation swelled and grew in Hamp. He dismounted, and leading his horse, went to shoving against them, slapping at them with his bare hands. Hope flagging, he pulled over beside Charlie and shouted, “It’s no use. Let’s let them go.”

  Charlie was walking too, bent painfully, stumbling over his own feet. But doggedly he shook his head. “No! We’ll fight them a little longer.”

  Hamp pulled back and went to shoving again, shouting until the voice finally left him. But somehow they were getting the job done. They had the sheep angled toward the house. And they were keeping them moving.

  They finally struck a net-wire fence, and it was easier after that. Through one gate, then another, dragging one ewe so the others would follow.

  It was dark when they shoved the last ewe through the gate at the headquarters, and the sheep bunched up around the two long water troughs in the holding corral. Hamp saw that Charlie was smiling. Then Charlie’s legs buckled.

  In the house, Vera had a pot of coffee on the stove, hot and waiting. Wearily Hamp and Prewett sat with steaming cups in their hands, watching Vera go back and forth to and from the room where they had put Charlie. The kids sat quietly with their lessons, but they weren’t studying much. Hamp coughed from deep in his throat. Vera hovered over him worriedly, telling him she’d better put some medicine down him or he would be sick like Charlie.

  “I’ll be okay,” Hamp told her hoarsely, his throat raw. “I’m just give out, and got a chestful of dust. It’s the same with Charlie. He’ll cough it out.”

  She forced a smile. “Maybe, Hamp, maybe. The point is, he just doesn’t care now. Losing this ranch and all…”

  The idea had come to Hamp somewhere in that long drive, and it had grown with every step he had taken back toward the house. He’d need a good partner—and right here he could get a partner who had something better than money. Charlie had been sick. He hadn’t had to go out there in the face of a duster, to save sheep that didn’t belong to him anymore. But he had gone.

  “Looky here, Vera,” Hamp said, “you-all don’t have to lose this place. You could take on a partner.”

  Her blue eyes widened. “A partner?”

  “Me.” He explained to her about the money he had saved, about the plan he’d had to take over the ranch when they left. “With the money I’ve got, we can pay Mr. Prewett here enough to satisfy the examiner. We can feed these sheep till it rains in the spring. And leave it to me to whittle Sam O’Barr down on the lease; I can be mean when I have to.

  “It’ll take the range a long time to recover, but the sheep that’re still on the place now can be a foundation for us to start with. We can let the flock grow back as the range does.”

  Excitement bubbled within him. “What do you think, Vera? Reckon Charlie would take me on as a partner, fifty-fifty?”

  The two kids were grinning. Vera’s round face was all mixed up, her eyes laughing and crying at the same time. “He will, Hamp,” she said. “I know he will.”

  Hamp walked out onto the front porch where the wall sheltered him from the wind. Prewett followed him. Hamp rolled a brown-paper cigarette while the banker stuffed his pipe. The wind howled as if there was nothing between there and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence.

  Well, let it blow. Pretty soon it would be spring, and things would change.

  In the darkness he could sense the banker smiling at him.

  Defensively Hamp said, “I always have wanted a place of my own. And I used to wish I had me a family. Well, sir, I’ve got that too. What better could a wore-out old ranch hand ask, for just twenty-three thousand dollars?”

  NO MUSIC FOR FIDDLE FEET

  This would be remembered in west Texas as the year of the drought. Even more, it would be remembered as the year of the fence-cutting war. The war had been brewing a long time, but the drought brought it to a boil. It left its black mark in dozens of forlorn gray tombstones. They all ended the same way: died 1883.

  It wasn’t worrying young Johnny Clayton as he jogged along the dusty old wagon road on his bay gelding. Nothing was worrying Johnny. A few more months and he would be twenty-one. The only things he owned were the bay horse, a saddle, a bedroll and an old fiddle. He drew his wages every month, and the world was peaches and cream.

  A new fiddle tune was leisurely working itself out in Johnny’s mind. The fingers of his left hand played upon his bridle reins as if they were fiddle strings. He grinned. He knew Dottie Thurmond would like it when he played it for her at the square dance next Saturday night.

  Clyde Thurmond, Johnny’s boss, reined up his horse a little way ahead and looked back. He lowered the leather blab that protected his chapped lips from the sun and hot wind.

  “What do you think we are, Johnny,” he grinned, “a couple of Indians riding along single file? Come on and catch up.”

  Johnny grinned back. Clyde was middle-aged now, at least thirty-five, and his mind was always on cattle. But Johnny was young and his mind was on music, or on Clyde’s younger sister.

  His thoughts went back to the fiddle tune after he caught up with his boss. An oath from Clyde snapped him to reality right in the middle of a bar.

  “The fence, Johnny! The fence cutters have been here!”

  Clyde hit a lope toward a new wire gate just ahead. Johnny spurred after him. The older man reined up at the gate and began to swear.

  The wire was cut between every post for fifty feet on each side of the gate. The soft dirt showed tracks of a dozen horses. A crudely-printed placard was nailed to one of the cedar gate posts.

  Clyde Thurmond was quick to grin or quick to anger. Fury showed scarlet in his face now. Johnny could see Clyde’s knuckles turn white as he clenched his work-roughened fists.

  “So they finally got here. They’ve hit nearly every fence in the county. I wondered when they’d get to me.”

  Clyde stretched out of his saddle and snatched the placard from the post. His gray eyes smouldered as he read it, then handed it to Johnny. The penciled sign read:

  You have three days to tear the fence down. If you don’t, then we’ll be back!

  “Free range men,” Clyde gritted bitterly. “They wouldn’t buy the land when they had a chance. Thought there would
always be free grass. And now they cut down our fences so they can crowd cattle and sheep onto our range.”

  Johnny knew. It hadn’t meant much to him one way or the other, but he had seen it come on. Even he could remember when there hadn’t been a wire fence in west Texas. Range had been free to any man strong enough to hold it.

  But in the last few years, Texas state, school and railroad lands had started going on the market, and men had bought them. Fences had sprung up.

  Now drought had come to west Texas. Free range men suddenly found that the best range and the best waterholes were under private ownership and fenced off. Men with no range of their own were being crowded together on poor, sun-baked land where watering places were nothing but bogholes. In desperation they had turned to wire pinchers and sixguns.

  Clyde Thurmond was still swearing. “I have to pay for my grass. It’s me that’s got to pay the interest and meet the bank note on this land. It’s my family that’s got to eat rabbit stew if I don’t make a go of it.

  “My dad brought us kids out here when his old buffalo gun was the only thing between us and a Comanche scalp pole. He hasn’t bowed under the fence cutters and I’m not going to either.”

  His hard gaze bore into Johnny’s eyes. “It’s liable to mean some fighting, Johnny. I don’t want you running out on me when I really need you. If you don’t want any part of it, you better quit now.”

  Johnny felt a faint irritation and wished Clyde wouldn’t look at him that way. He didn’t want to fight anybody.

  But he couldn’t quit now. Dottie Thurmond had called him a fiddlefoot. When he had gone to work on her brother’s ranch, which neighbored that of her father, she had laughed at him. He hadn’t stayed two months on any other outfit—liked to fiddle and play too much. She had said he couldn’t stay here.

  But he had stayed six months already. Dottie was beginning to look at him as if she thought he might amount to something.

  So he just couldn’t quit now. Maybe this would all blow over, like stormclouds do sometimes in March.

  Remembering the placard, Johnny started counting on his fingers. “Thursday, Friday—why, the third day’s Saturday, Clyde. This might even make us miss the dance.”

  Clyde was looking at him queerly. “We’re liable to miss a lot of dances before this is through, Johnny. But my fence is staying up! Come on. We got some patching to do!”

  On the way home, Clyde told him he wanted to keep this from his wife as long as he could.

  When they rode into the corral and dismounted at the barn, Helen Thurmond stepped out of the raw lumber ranch house and came walking out to meet them. Their three-year-old son came toddling along behind her, stopping to throw a rock at an old white hen.

  Clyde avoided her eyes, and it didn’t take her long to sense trouble. “There’s something wrong, Clyde. I can tell. What is it?”

  Clyde looked back at Johnny an instant, as if for help. Then he told her what happened. She didn’t speak for a while, just dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.

  Finally she said, “Maude Tatlock’s husband tried to stop them on his place. They killed him.”

  Johnny felt sorry for his boss. One child was already depending on Clyde, and another was on the way. It must have been tough to tell Helen about this. Johnny wondered. If life got so hard for people with responsibilities, why did they look down on a man who didn’t have any?

  The next couple of days Johnny could feel the tension mounting. Helen had usually been as cheerful as her little son Bobby. After supper she usually sat beside Clyde on the front porch, while they watched the night come on.

  But now Helen Thurmond had little to say. Hollow fear showed in her blue eyes as she sat down at the table and said grace at meals. At night Clyde sat on the porch alone. Johnny could see Helen in the parlor, reading her family Bible by lamplight.

  Saturday morning Helen broke. At breakfast she set the steaming coffeepot on the table, then stood there gripping the cloth she had used to protect her hand from the hot handle. Her face was the palest Johnny had ever seen it. Her hands trembled.

  “The dance tonight, Clyde,” she said tightly. “I want you to take me.”

  Clyde stared at her, his mouth open. “But you’re not in any condition—Helen, this is the third day. They may come tonight.”

  She began to sob. “That’s why I want you with me. There’ll be too many. They’ll kill you like they did Jed Tatlock. Oh Clyde, please take me to town!”

  Clyde tenderly put his arms around her shoulders, and Johnny watched a brave man give in.

  It looked as if half the county had come out to the dance. Orange lamplight shone through the schoolhouse windows and fell on tied horses and buckboards. Johnny happily untied from his saddlehorn the sack in which he always carried his fiddle. In front of the schoolhouse door, Clyde was carefully helping Helen down from the buckboard.

  Dottie was already there. Her father, old Floyd Thurmond, had come in from his ranch earlier in the day. Dottie broke away from an admiring group of young cowboys as Johnny came in the door.

  Johnny thought his heart would melt when she came up, smiling at him. He tried to hold back that foolish grin he always seemed to get when he was around her.

  “I composed you a tune, Dottie,” he said, and he felt that grin come on. “I’m going to name it after you.”

  She stood there smiling at him. His knees got weak. “I can’t believe it, Johnny,” she said. “You’ve been out at Clyde’s place six months now. Dad used to keep telling me you’d never amount to anything but a fiddlefooted saddle tramp. But he’s wrong. You’ve proved that.”

  Johnny nervously shifted his weight from one foot to another and studied his polished boots.

  Finally he looked back up at her and said, “I’d like to keep proving it to you, Dottie. From now on.”

  The thought of what he had just said scared him. A tinge of red crept into Dottie’s cheeks. But he knew she had liked it.

  Then the guitar player called him. “Come on, Johnny, we need us a fiddler. Quit making eyes. Come on up here and make music.”

  It was a while before midnight when the word started spreading through the crowd. Ten or fifteen of the free range men suspected of wire cutting had been hanging around the Golden Eagle saloon most of the evening. Now they were all gone. And it was too early for them to leave on Saturday night.

  A worried look was on Clyde’s face as he trotted up to the fiddlers’ stand. “They’ve ridden out to cut somebody’s fence, Johnny,” he said grimly, “and it’s liable to be mine. We better get out there in a hurry.”

  Johnny lowered his fiddle and looked at Helen. She was trembling. There was a prayer in her eyes.

  “Look here, Clyde,” Johnny reasoned for Helen’s sake. “You can’t take Helen home now, and you sure don’t want to leave her here in town by herself. If they cut the fence, we can fix it.”

  Clyde stared at Johnny unbelievingly. Then that red anger crept into his face, and his eyes were hard. “You’re getting scared. That’s what’s wrong. You’re trying to get out of it.”

  Anger flared in Johnny, too. “Now hold on, Clyde. I’m just trying to make you think about Helen. What if you got yourself killed? Look at her, and answer me that!”

  But Clyde didn’t look around at Helen. His gray eyes smouldered. “I thought you’d changed, Johnny. I ought’ve known you’d quit when things got tough. Well, I don’t want a coward in my way. You came here to fiddle. Now fiddle your head off!”

  Clyde turned on his heel and strode toward the door. Helen called him, but he didn’t look back. He was probably afraid to. Helen almost fainted. Dottie caught her and helped her sit down.

  For a second Johnny’s eyes met Dottie’s. He saw nothing there but scorn. He started to go after Clyde. But drumming hoofs fading into the distance told him Clyde had borrowed a horse and was already gone.

  Other ranchmen who had fences were gathering up their cowboys and getting ready to go home. Johnny half wanted to
go too. But a stubborn pride gripped him. Clyde had jumped off the deep end, like he often did, and hadn’t given Johnny a chance.

  Well, Johnny wouldn’t go now and give in in a quarrel where he had been falsely accused. There was slim chance the fence cutters would be going to the Thurmond ranch, he told himself disconsolately. There were a dozen other fenced ranches in the county, and they had all had threats.

  Maybe in the morning Clyde would be over his sudden anger. Then Johnny could go back and talk sense to him.

  The dance crowd was quickly depleted to about half. Johnny had seen old Floyd Thurmond take his one cowboy out. Then Dottie started escorting Helen out into the night. Johnny put down his fiddle and ran to help.

  Dottie turned on him with contempt. “Get away from us. Leave us alone, fiddlefoot!”

  Numb, Johnny stood in the door and watched Dottie take Helen down the street to the little hotel.

  Johnny stayed on and fiddled. But he seemed to have lost his taste for it. The exhilaration he usually felt just wasn’t there now.

  He decided a fiddle string was loose. He tried to turn the peg, but it seemed stuck. With impatience sharpened by the last hour’s experience, Johnny braced the fiddle against his shoulder and gave the peg a sudden hard twist.

  The string snapped and hit his face. He quickly rubbed his cheek to ease the burning.

  His stomach for music was gone now. Gloom settled over him. He said good night to the other musicians and wearily made his way to his horse. He swung into the saddle and trotted dejectedly toward a burning lantern that marked the livery stable down the street. He unsaddled and rolled out his single blanket on top of some straw in the back of the stable.

  He lay there a long time, trying to go to sleep. In the distance he could hear the sound of music from the schoolhouse and an occasional whoop from a celebrating cowboy. There were people all around him, Johnny thought moodily. But never in his life had he felt so lonely.

  The Sunday morning sun was high when rapid hoofbeats awakened Johnny. He heard someone slide a horse to a stop at the doctor’s home near the livery stable, and start pounding on the door.