by Elmer Kelton
Jake flinched at the slap of the gunshot. Limbs popped as the dead tom fell. Jake turned and watched the dogs, especially the new pup, wooling the lion’s body around at the base of the tree.
Quincy Budge’s face slowly relaxed. The lines in it seemed to soften a little. The sag was gone from his shoulders.
Colleen touched Jake’s hand. “You wanted to make that shot yourself. Thanks for lettin’ Dad do it.”
“He’s payin’ me two hundred dollars,” Jake said.
She smiled. “You know that’s not it, Jake.”
Jake nodded and took the hand she extended toward him. “I reckon it isn’t.” He looked at the dead lion. “I’m not mad at anybody anymore. Or anything.”
He caught the mule and led him up to the Yellow Devil. Time they packed this lion it would be time to get started. It was a long way home.
DRY WINTER
It had been a dry winter all over the Trans-Pecos country, and there wasn’t a harder-hit ranch in it than Charlie McDermott’s place.
Every day since late in September he had taken his worn-out pickup truck over the dusty pasture roads to pour out cottonseed cake for his cattle and sheep. Now it was March, and there wasn’t any end to it. The calf crop had come, and it was lambing time. It was bad business to feed through lambing. Hungry ewes would abandon their lambs and go chasing after the rattling pickup. Lots of them never paired up again.
Pain would lance through Charlie every time he saw a pitiful little body crumpled under a mesquite—but there wasn’t any way out. If he didn’t feed, the ewes would starve too.
Charlie finished pouring the cubes out of the last sack and onto the ground, then worked back afoot through the hungry sheep. As always, his tired eyes searched the late afternoon skies for any trace of a rain cloud. And as always, he was disappointed. A west wind fanned his face, and the west wind never brought anything but trouble. It carried the pinching smell of dust.
Charlie McDermott was only thirty, but he looked forty. He had had high hopes when he came home from the war in Europe and put the money he had saved into livestock. Now the drought had put a sag in his long back and carved deep lines of worry into his face.
Out on the flat, he saw a young ewe running in toward the feed ground. Far behind her a two-week-old lamb struggled to keep up, its stubby legs wobbling.
Futile anger whipped through Charlie. He hurled a rock toward the ewe. “Damn your worthless hide!” he exploded. “Get back there and act like a mother!”
The hungry ewe kept coming on. Charlie fought down his unreasoning anger. This lamb would catch up, but countless others wouldn’t.
A mile from the house he stopped and picked up a weak, flat-ribbed lamb that he found tottering aimlessly along beside the road. The grating anger still worked in him. He felt better only when he pulled up at the barn and saw the brown curl of smoke from the tin chimney of the tired old house. No matter how bad the day, it was always a pleasure to come home to Mary.
He tossed the empty tow sacks into the barn. They would bring a few cents apiece, if there weren’t any holes in them. He saw Mary out in the milk lot. He picked up the lamb and carried it along.
Mary’s smile touched Charlie like the warmth of a fireplace on a wintry day.
“I got another dogie lamb for you,” he said.
The pretty young woman’s smile changed to a frown of pity as she took the lamb out of his hands and cradled it in her arms. “Oh, Charlie,” she said, “I’ll bet it hasn’t had any milk in two days.”
Tenderly she took the woolly little animal under the milk shed. There she had been feeding milk to more than a dozen other abandoned lambs.
Charlie watched her, marveling at the patience she showed in trying to get the lamb to take warm milk through a nipple on a soda pop bottle. For the thousandth time he told himself how lucky he had been in marrying her. There in that dusty cowlot, wearing an old, washed-out cotton dress and one of his frayed jackets, she didn’t look as if she had been brought up in the biggest house in the country. But if she had ever had a regret in the two years they had spent together, she had never let it be known.
But her father, old Stace Tolliver, did plenty of talking about it. Charlie had walked up behind the big ranchman at Gamlin’s wool warehouse one day just in time to overhear Stace remark, “He’s making her live like a sharecropper’s wife. My own daughter! I warned her before she married him. But she wouldn’t listen to me. What’s he got? Nothing but a leased starve-out ranch, a handful of cattle, and a mangy flock of sheep he’s had to mortgage.”
Charlie had let his fiery temper rip loose that day. “It won’t be that way forever,” he had declared, his flaming face as close to Stace’s as he could get it. “Some day we’ll have a good ranch of our own, and the best cattle and sheep in the country. We’ll build it ourselves, with our own hands, Mary and me. Maybe I’ll even start my own bank, and run yours out of business. Mary won’t always have to live like a sharecropper’s wife. You’ll see.”
Mary had heard about it later. With her warm hand on his cheek and laughter dancing in her eyes, she had chided him softly. “Your pride, and your temper! They’ll keep getting you in Dutch, Charlie, till you finally learn to boss them instead of letting them boss you.”
Charlie rolled and smoked a cigarette as he waited for Mary to finish caring for her family of dogie lambs. He had gotten out of the ready-roll habit these last few months. Walking toward the house, his arm around Mary’s slender waist, he said, “Feed’s getting low again. I got to go in tomorrow and get some more.”
She bit at her pale lips. “We owe an awful lot on feed already, don’t we, Charlie?”
He nodded thoughtfully. “More than our next wool clip will bring. And we’re starting to feed up the lamb crop too. The way things look right now, I’m afraid we won’t raise much of a lamb crop. I don’t know how we’re going to pay to hold our option on the lease.”
On the sagging front porch, she stopped and faced him, her work-roughened hands resting lightly on his arms. “Look, Charlie, you know I have the money my mother left me. Why won’t you forget your vow and use it?”
Charlie’s face hardened. “You know why. I won’t have your dad claiming I bought my way along with your money. We can use it some day to buy us a place. But first I’ve got to prove to Stace Tolliver and everybody else that I can make good on my own.”
She kissed him and smiled. “Sure you can, Charlie. Sure you can.”
* * *
Charlie pulled his pickup to a stop in front of Archie Gamlin’s feed store and wool warehouse. Climbing the concrete steps to the loading ramp, he shoved his hat back. “Morning, Archie.”
Gamlin pitched a hundred-pound feed sack onto the back of a truck. “Be with you in a minute, Charlie,” he said.
Stace Tolliver stepped out of the wide warehouse door. He saw Charlie, and a frown weighted his face. Mary’s father gave Charlie a hostile glance, and then walked off down the ramp.
Stace was a big man with an ample frame that still retained most of the strength of his younger days. But middle age had spread out his beltline and sprinkled gray through his coarse black hair. The flesh was beginning to sag around a powerful jaw that had scared half the men on the Pecos at one time or another.
“Haul that load over to the Gonzales camp,” Stace ordered the truck driver. He climbed into his big black car and drove away with his boot heavy on the accelerator.
Watching, Charlie tasted the anger that rode in him and knew it was doing him no good. Stace didn’t like him, and probably never would. He hadn’t spoken a dozen words to Charlie since Mary had slipped off and married him.
Charlie knew what much of the trouble was. For years Stace had set his heart on seeing his daughter marry the son of his old homesteading partner, Dike Rutledge. It was hard to tell which one had gotten the wealthiest, Stace or Dike. And when Dike had died four years ago, all he had owned had gone to his son Jake. Mary Tolliver and Jake Rutledge. Two family fortunes�
�a perfect marriage, Stace had thought. And Charlie had sunk the boat.
Presently Archie Gamlin dusted his hands on the legs of his khaki pants and ambled over.
“I need some more feed,” Charlie told him. “I have barely enough to run me another four days.”
Gamlin frowned and looked down at the scarred concrete floor. “I’m sorry, Charlie. But I got word from the bank that they aren’t honoring any more of your drafts.”
That was a hard blow. Charlie argued, “But my credit ought to be as good as any other small rancher’s around here. I had better than a thousand ewes clear of debt when fall started. I haven’t borrowed all they’re worth.”
Gamlin scratched his head. “Might as well face it, Charlie. If it was anybody but you, the bank’d carry you. But old Stace’s the lever that keeps the wheel going around. He passed the word to Fred Purvis and the directors that you weren’t to get any more credit.”
Weakly Charlie sat down on a row of salt blocks. A thought came to him. “Look, Archie, it’s only a month or so till shearing time. If I could get my wool contracted, that’d take care of most of my feed bill.”
Gamlin shook his head. “Not much chance, Charlie. Ain’t been a wool buyer around here in weeks.”
Leaving town, Charlie stopped and looked wistfully at the bank. But he knew it wouldn’t do any good to go in and talk it over with Fred Purvis. Like Archie had said, Stace was the lever that made the wheel go around.
Mary saw it in his face the minute he stepped into the old, high-ceilinged living room. He hung his greasy hat on an aged set of deer antlers and told her what Archie had said. Then he turned loose the hold he had held on his anger.
“Stace Tolliver,” he gritted bitterly. “The old horned toad’s been trying to break me ever since we married. Now he’s got me where he wants me. I’d like to take those feed sacks and cram them down his throat.”
Color flooded into Mary’s face. Her hands trembled with anger for the first time in months. “He’s still my father, Charlie,” she said, her voice strained.
Suddenly shamed, Charlie managed to force down his bitterness. He caught Mary’s hand. “I’m sorry, Mary. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She turned away from him and looked out the window. “Give me the pickup keys,” she said. “I’m going to town.”
“What for?” he asked worriedly.
“I’m going to talk to Fred Purvis.”
“It was your dad’s idea, not his.”
“I’ve known him as long as Dad has. I’ll talk to him.”
Even before Mary returned, Archie Gamlin telephoned Charlie to tell him the feed would be hauled out by late afternoon.
“I got a call from the bank,” he said. “They told me to give you whatever you want.”
Charlie met Mary as she stepped down out of the pickup and happily swept her into his arms. For a moment he thought she was still angry. But then she smiled with him, and he knew everything was all right.
* * *
For weeks Charlie had been looking at the calendar in the kitchen, watching the date he had circled in red. It was almost here now, the specified date by which he had to put down the money for an option if he wanted to renew his lease on the ranch. The five-year lease was expiring this fall. He wanted the place again, but right now he had no forfeit money to pay Ernie Pope, who owned the land.
Mary went with Charlie the day he drove into town to talk to Ernie. It wasn’t hard to find him. Charlie made the rounds of the domino halls and located the pudgy man slouched over a game of forty-two with three other loafers.
“I’m busy right now, Charlie,” Pope said, shifting a nervous glance at him. The man’s eyes gave evidence of a hangover, nothing new to him.
“I drove in just to see you, Ernie,” Charlie said.
Irritably Pope pushed his dominoes to the center of the table and stood up. Charlie followed him past the pool tables to the back of the hall. Ernie eased into a wire-braced chair that groaned under his weight.
“It’s about the lease, Ernie. I got to have the place again. It’s time we were getting some papers signed.”
Pope studied the floor and pursed his thick lips nervously. “Contract says you got to show me the money.”
Charlie’s heart began to sink. “I can’t right now, but I will. You could take my note. I’ve done well by you the last five years.”
Ernie Pope took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow with a dirty handkerchief. “There’s another man wanting the place. He’s offered me a year’s lease, in advance, to hold the contract. You got a deadline. If you can’t pay, I’ll have to let him have it. I got creditors too.”
Fury strained to break loose in Charlie. “Who’s trying to get my lease, Ernie?” But he already knew.
“Stace Tolliver.”
Stace didn’t really want the place. Charlie had once heard him call it the sorriest ranch in the county. This was just another move in his game of freeze-out.
Choking down a curse, Charlie turned on his heel and made for the front door in long, angry strides.
He met Stace Tolliver a block up the street. Mary was with him.
“You’ve pulled some raw deals on me, Stace Tolliver,” he exploded, “but this one is the snakiest yet.”
Mary stared wide-eyed at him. “Charlie! Have you gone crazy?”
“No,” he thundered, “I’m not crazy. But I’m mad, clean through. I’ve stood for a lot from you, Stace, and I haven’t said much. But this is the end of it.
“You’re leasing my place out from under me. But any improvements I’ve put up, I’ll take down. I’m keeping the place till my last day, and if you or anybody you send tries to get on it, I’ll be waiting with a shotgun.”
Tolliver was standing quietly, his thick arms folded. “Are you about through?”
Charlie nodded. “I’m through.”
Stace showed a hard, flat grin that had no humor in it. “You’re puffed up like a Christmas turkey, McDermott. You think you’ve gotten by on your own, but you haven’t. If it hadn’t been for Tolliver money you’d be out begging for a job right now.”
Mary McDermott grabbed her father’s arm. “Stop it, Dad.”
Ice began working through Charlie’s veins as he guessed what was coming. “Let him talk, Mary.”
Stace narrowed his eyes. “You thought it was the bank that extended your feed credit—that it was strictly business. But it wasn’t the bank, McDermott. The only thing that’s kept you going has been Mary’s money. The money her mother left her.”
In bitterness Charlie looked down on his wife. “Is that true, Mary?”
Tears crept into her eyes. “Charlie, it was the only thing I knew to do. It’s been terrible, watching what this drought has already done to you. I couldn’t let you lose everything.”
“You lost your faith in me. You as much as said I’m a failure.”
Mary’s face was white, her lips trembling. For a moment her stricken eyes dwelt on his. “Charlie, you know that’s not—”
She broke off. She whirled away from him and hurried blindly down the street, covering her face. Stace gave Charlie a hard look and went after his daughter.
Dumbly Charlie looked after them, and slowly he realized what he had done. Pride and anger had done this to him. He ached to follow them, to talk to Mary. But even now the pride was still in him. He wouldn’t crawl in front of Stace. After an hour or so, he could talk to Mary alone.
But when he went to the Tolliver house, the Mexican maid met him at the front door. Miss Mary didn’t want to see him, the woman said. He argued, but she shook her head.
He drove home alone, a great emptiness tugging within him. The dusty pastures seemed more dismal than ever. The house was vacant and cold. He thought about cooking supper, but he wound up drinking black coffee and smoking cigarettes, sitting in his rawhide chair and listening to the bleak wind rattling the sagging front gate.
* * *
The pile of empty feed sacks kept growi
ng in the corner of the barn. Dry day followed dry day. Occasionally a good looking set of clouds would drift over with a promise that set his blood to tingling, but then a strong west wind would drive the rain away. The old West Texas brown clouds would come rolling in, and the surface of the ground would start to move.
Every day he telephoned the Tolliver house, and every day the answer was the same. Miss Mary didn’t want to talk to him.
One night the old wall telephone rang, and Charlie knocked over the coffeepot in his haste to get to the phone.
His heart sagged. It wasn’t Mary. “Charlie?” came the voice. “This is Archie. Archie Gamlin. I know it’s a little earlier than you like to shear your sheep, but I got a chance to sell a little wool. A wool buyer needs a small clip to finish out a carload of stuff he bought on contract.
“I know you can’t shear ewes that have got lambs. But if you could shear your yearling ewes and deliver the wool here inside of two days, I could get you sixty-five cents a pound.”
Sixty-five cents. Charlie made a rapid calculation in his head. It wasn’t what it had brought last year, but it would be enough to pay Ernie Pope the option on that lease, the way the contract required. He’d stomp Tolliver’s toes yet.
“You tell him he’s bought him some wool,” Charlie said.
An hour later he had pulled his pickup into the Mexican settlement at the south end of town. Leaving the lights burning, he got out and walked up to an old adobe house. After he knocked, he heard the shouting of four or five children. Heavy footsteps tromped toward the door. A big Mexican stood there in trousers, socks and long underwear.
“Evening, Vincente,” Charlie said. “Is your shearing outfit in good working shape?”
“Si,” the Mexican nodded. During regular shearing season, which wouldn’t start for three or four more weeks, there were always enough transient shearing crews to take care of rush needs. Other times, there was no crew here except that of Vincente Castro.
