by Gary Paulsen
All around the herd, looking for bear tracks, then back to the wagon to make breakfast—some mystery meal from a can without a label—and straighten the camp, which really only took a few minutes. He put the sleeping bag out to air, washed any dirty socks or other clothing out in the stream, gathered enough driftwood for the stove for the next day or two and dried it beneath the wagon, put ointment on the feet of the two dogs he kept tied to the wagon, rolled the tarp up on the wagon to let fresh air breeze through (unless it was raining), and then it was lunch. Another mystery meal—he was amazed at how often he would guess wrong—and after lunch check the herd again.
All ordered and neat and correct and just falling from one day to the next. He kept a count of them, made the marks in the wagon, but he did not miss home, did not miss anything. It wasn’t that he wanted to be alone, or that he wanted to be here—he didn’t want anything.
A horse, he thought, and the dogs and the sheep and the mountains. That’s all he wanted. Or seemed to need.
Just like Tink had said.
But there came a day, when he had forty-seven days marked in the wagon, he was coming from the afternoon check on the herd and he looked back, down the canyon, and far off saw a figure on a horse emerge from the streambed cut, followed by another horse, a packhorse, and they came moving slowly up along the stream.
At first it was too far to tell who it was and John sat, watching, letting Speck pick her way back to the wagon.
Then he saw the shoulders, and the way the person was sitting on the horse and knew it was his father and he forgot how he hadn’t missed anything, how he liked being alone, how perfect everything was, and slapped Speck on the side of the shoulders with the reins and set her into a flat-out run, heading down the canyon waving his hat and yelling and whooping like a wild thing.
Chapter Twenty-four
THEY SAT BY THE FIRE.
His father had brought a canned ham and they had made a large supper of ham and canned baked beans and a loaf of bread his father had wrapped in plastic and kept from drying.
They’d eaten and washed their plates in the stream, each doing his own, and when the meal was finished John made coffee—strong, the way his father liked it—and they sat by the fire on two short pieces of wood and for a long time they didn’t say anything, just watched the flames as evening settled in.
John knew his father hadn’t missed anything. He’d seen the herd on the hill and the camp and the two resting dogs and once—John watched him out of the corner of his eye—he seemed to nod and smile to himself.
But they hadn’t said much. His father rarely talked a great deal and John found himself strangely shy.
When the talk came, as the darkness came in the mountains, it was quick.
“That Tink, he ain’t going to die—they cut some on him and did some other treatments and they say he’ll be back to work in a month or so,” his father said suddenly, smiling. “Tough old bird. The way I met your mother was strange. Did I ever tell you?”
It came so fast, slipped in on the end of a sentence, that John almost didn’t hear it. He shook his head.
“I was over to Cheyenne on some kind of business—I can’t remember what it was—and just as I walked out of a boot-repair place I tripped and went down flat on my face on the sidewalk. Knocked the snot out of me and while I was catching my breath I got up on my hands and knees and I heard this voice say:
“ ‘Do you know any other tricks?’ And I turned over and there she was, standing above me. The light was coming through her hair and I’d never seen anything that pretty, not even close. I stood up and I knew I was going to marry her. I didn’t know her name nor nothing—still don’t know much—but I knew by god I was going to marry her if I had to move a mountain to do it and I couldn’t think of nothing nor do nothing right until I married her nine months and four days after that, to the hour.”
He stopped just as suddenly as he had started and took a long pull of hot coffee and John almost stared at him. He’d never heard his father say more than a few words at a time and to hear him string them all together, talk about something that had happened, was a complete surprise.
And it wasn’t over.
“You take on a lot about the old man,” his father said abruptly. “That might be good or it might be not so good, depending, and I thought you ought to know some about him and the way he really was before you got to where you were trying to be—well, it just might be better if you know.” He took some more coffee, drained the cup, and chewed on the grounds before swallowing them and pouring a new cup.
“Reason I ain’t said anything before is that it wasn’t time.” He paused and looked around the camp, out in the coming darkness at the herd and the mountains and maybe something beyond the mountains. “Now it’s time.”
He put the coffee down and picked up a stick and began to whittle on it with his pocketknife, not making anything. John watched the curls of wood come off with the knife. Soft curls, colored like honey, falling off the knife into the fire to flare up and light his face and he sighed and spoke without looking up.
“Some people started that business about the old man being a cowboy and how he came out here with nothing but his gun and two horses and all that. Some of that is true but most of it … well, it’s said a lot different than it really ran.
“He come out here with a gun, for sure, and some horses—probably a whole herd of ’em—and some cows. But he wasn’t alone. There was a hand with him, name of Lincoln—Smiley Lincoln, they called him—and they was partners, or had been partners before that. Some of the details are fuzzy but it was said they rode out here together and took the spread as partners.”
“But I thought he was alone,” John said. “Everybody said he came out alone.…”
“It was what he said, not everybody else—just what the old man said. He said he did it alone. But there were other people to come along and they saw things differently. The other people said they was partners, the old man and Smiley, and settled the spread together and then the old man wanted it all for himself.”
He stopped talking for a moment. The knife kept peeling curlings off the wood, dropping them in the fire and John watched them. Drop, flare, drop, flare. He didn’t know what to think.
“So there come a day when the old man just said he was taking it, the spread, all for himself, and when Smiley tried to argue the old man up and shot him.”
“What?”
His father nodded. “That’s right. He shot and killed Smiley. He said later that Smiley took a rifle out of his saddle scabbard and started to point it at him but there were others who said Smiley was shot in the back. After he shot him the old man dragged Smiley up into a gully and covered him with rocks.…”
John thought of the coyotes and sheep, how he had dragged them away. “But …”
“… and that’s probably the truth of it all. He was mean, the old man, spit mean, and there were too many people who spoke of what had really happened to let the old man’s story stand.”
“He was a murderer?”
His father nodded. “That’s about the size of it.”
“So all this … this land that he took, the spread—he took it all by killing his partner?”
His father nodded again but said nothing.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“You were using it to live.” His father sighed. “You didn’t know the bad parts and you were using the good parts of the story to live and it seemed wrong to cut that down when you were using it. But now you’re getting older and taking things on yourself—here with the sheep and all—and it don’t seem like you need that other business anymore. I was … worried … that you would go too far with it and turn into something like the old man.”
“He was a murderer?” John asked again. “He just shot his partner? Why wasn’t he hung?”
“Things were different then. Or sort of different. Nobody saw it so they couldn’t prove it and then there were many who were afraid to speak up. He
shot several men. Seems he didn’t need much of an excuse to shoot somebody. Your momma, she hated him—the memory of him.”
“Did she know him?”
“No. Except for Tink none of us did. I saw him once in the old folks’ home but I was just a baby. They let him keep his gun there but took the pin out of it so he couldn’t shoot anybody. He died with the gun by his bed. They said he died alone. His wife—she was named Emma—she wouldn’t go to be with him though she was still alive. People think the ranch was lost to bad debts. It ain’t so. That’s just another story. It was Emma—she sold it all to the easterners. Sold every bit of it and then gave the money away to a church.”
“Why?”
“She said it was evil. Poison money from a poison place. But that ain’t so. A place is just a place. It’s as good to live here as it is anywhere—better than some. How it came to be isn’t our business. We just live.”
“So that’s why we don’t own it.”
“Yup.”
“All this time I thought it was just that the family didn’t manage it right and lost it. And she sold it.”
“Every square foot. She kept enough to pay for her own nursing home and to bury her and the old man and gave the rest to a church.”
John leaned back. The fire was dying down and he put more wood on it. Out in the night he heard the horses chewing. If they weren’t sleeping they were chewing, it seemed. Peg and Billy were tied to the wagon and Peg whined at something in the night, then lay back and slept. She was completely recovered from the bear and worked the herd but had stopped staying out with them when her time was done. She was spoiled and came in to sleep in the wagon. John didn’t mind although it bent Jenny’s nose a bit and they often growled at each other in the wagon at night.
“I’m sorry about this,” his father said. “About telling you all this.…”
John shook his head. “It’s all right. It’s better that I know.”
“I had me a brother.”
John stared at him. He had never heard that his father had a brother. “I have an uncle?”
His father took a deep breath, let it out. “No. You had an uncle. He took after the old man and turned mean and went to working as a roughneck on some oil rigs down in Oklahoma and another roughneck killed him with a piece of pipe in an oil camp bar.”
“You never said anything about him.”
“He wasn’t worth mentioning. He was mean from the get-go—born bad. That’s why I told you about the old man. My brother was the same way about him, took to talking about him all the time, had a picture of him. I was getting worried that you might be moving the same way.”
John leaned back and thought about the old man, what he knew of him, and now this new thing. He shook his head. “I don’t think you had to worry. I mean, wouldn’t I know if I was mean? And I don’t feel mean.”
His father smiled. “Well—I guess you’d be the first to know.”
“Are there more things about him?” John asked. “Any good things?”
“Not so many. In fact none. It was said of him that he never did a deal when he didn’t come out the best no matter what he had to do. And even when he made money he didn’t give any to Emma. He had silver Mexican eagle spurs and she had to make dresses out of feed sacks. He was just bad, that’s all. Sometimes they come that way—people. Just come bad.”
For a long time he was silent, the knife still sliding through the wood, and John closed his eyes and tried to feel disappointed and thought that he would have, he would have been sad except for the sheep. And the mountains. And the dogs. And what the past month and more had made him.
“I’m not,” he said quietly, after another long silence, “like him, I mean. I’m not like him.”
His father nodded. Then he took a breath and started talking again. “The night you was due to be born it come on to snowing so bad we weren’t sure we would get to the hospital. So we set out early and Tink came with us and he had a bunch of rags and I think that’s why you didn’t come for two more days. Your mother saw Tink sitting next to her in that pickup cab with all those rags he used on sheep when they had lambs and she told me she would wait, thank you, until we got through to Cheyenne even if it took another month.” He laughed. “Man, you were ugly when you came. Lambs are prettier than people. You were all over gunk and blood and the first thing you did was stick your fist in your mouth and try to eat and they hadn’t even cut the cord yet. They let me hold you right away and I could fit you in one hand, my right hand, and your momma, she worried that I would drop you but I never did, never did.…”
And he kept talking. John’s eyes closed and everything swirled together, the talk and how he looked as a baby and the old man and his father whittling and the fire and the sheep and the dogs and he could not stay awake.
He dozed, up on his elbow, facing the fire, and once when he opened his eyes nothing had changed. His father was still talking, talking about his childhood and a horse he had named Scruffy or Ruffy, it didn’t matter, and John dozed again and awakened once more to find his father tucking him into his sleeping bag, as he had when John was a young boy, and leaning down to kiss him on the forehead and John went to sleep smiling, thinking on how nice things could be.
Chapter Twenty-five
IT WAS THE NEXT MORNING.
His father was set for leaving. He’d talked most of the night and still got up early to make a fire and coffee and feed some oats to his horse to get ready for the ride.
The two were silent but it wasn’t uncomfortable. John saddled Speck to check on the herd and his father saddled his own horse and joined him.
John showed him where the bear had attacked, how he was working the herd up one side of the valley and back down the other to keep them on fresh grass, how the herd responded to his hand motions.
But at last they were back at the wagon and it was time for his father to go and just then, just at that moment, John didn’t want his father to leave. There was some new thing between them, from the talk all night, and he didn’t want him to leave and he finally said it.
“I don’t want you to leave.”
His father had just finished tightening the pack saddle on the packhorse and he turned and nodded. “I feel the same but there’s the ranch and Cawley and all.”
They said nothing more about it. His father mounted and caught up the packhorse lead and John mounted Speck and rode with him down the canyon, both of them riding in silence, until they were near the end and John stopped. “I’d better get back to the herd.”
His father nodded. “I’ll see you in a month or less.…”
And he left, went into the small hills and was soon out of sight, gone from the valley, and John waved at where he’d been. Then he turned toward the herd and thought he would miss something now, now because his father wasn’t staying with him. There was something special he would miss and he didn’t even know what it was and he was halfway back to the wagon when Speck stopped.
“What’s the matter with you?”
He nudged her into movement but she hadn’t gone twenty feet when she stopped again and this time turned her head and looked back, past John’s leg, back down the canyon.
John turned.
Way back at the mouth of the valley where the stream cut through the hills he saw the small figure of his father riding back toward him, picking his way slowly.
John turned Speck and set her into a lined-out run until he swung wide and pulled in next to his father so sharp she settled on her rear.
“I started thinking it wasn’t but three weeks till we take the herd down,” his father said. “And Cawley can handle things down there for three weeks and its been some time since I spent any time in the haymeadow and there’s some things I ain’t told you yet.”
John pulled Speck over and fell in beside him, the horses walking and thought: Ain’t it funny what makes a person glad? Just to see that little figure riding back with the packhorse in back of it and you could feel all glad.
“Like the time your mother was leading the parade in Cheyenne on a palomino that wasn’t good for nothing but show and her pants split? She always did wear them too tight, her pants, and they split like a gunshot and she went right ahead and finished the parade. I found some of that shiny tape and she put that over the split and pretended she was the Queen of Sheba and nobody said a word, not a word. Of course, she could do things like that, your mother.…”
Ain’t it, John thought again, ain’t it just crazy what makes a person glad?
And they rode up the canyon into the haymeadow. And the sheep. And the dogs. And the mountains …
Follow the adventure of Francis Tucket
in these novels by Gary Paulsen
MR. TUCKET
*“Here’s a real knock’em, sock’em, ripsnorter.… In 1848, a fourteen-year-old boy is captured from a wagon train by Pawnee Indians and saved by a one-armed mountain man.… Superb characterization, splendidly evoked setting, and a thrill-a-minute plot make this book a joy to gallop through.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred
A Yearling Book 0-440-41133-5
CALL ME FRANCIS TUCKET
“Continuing the fast-paced adventures of Francis Alphonse Tucket … Francis creates a stampede, foils a couple of crooks, and finds himself suddenly in charge of two small children. Like Paulsen’s other heroes, Francis meets adversity head-on—and survives.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“The narrative flow is smooth and uncluttered, the action gritty and realistic, the story thrilling.”
—Kirkus Reviews
A Yearling Book 0-440-41270-6
TUCKET’S RIDE
Francis Tucket and his adopted family, Lottie and Billy, are heading west in search of Francis’s parents on the Oregon Trail. But when winter comes early, Francis turns south to avoid the cold and leads them right into enemy territory. The United States and Mexico are at war, and Francis, Lottie, and Billy are captured by the most ruthless band of outlaws Francis has ever seen. The outlaws are taking them away—away from the trail west, away from civilization, and away from any chance of rescue.
