by John Shirley
“We’re meeting to . . . to have a kind of picnic. Well, anyhow, I’m gonna help her pick some wild berries, come Sunday. Then I’ll have her alone enough we can talk it over. If there’s nothing doing, I’ll give up then and there.”
“That’s tolerably fair. But what’re we supposed to do round here while you’re waiting for your glorious berry-picking expedition, Seth?” Franklin asked as he dumped a shot of whiskey into his mug of beer. “Because all the activity I can figure to round up is getting drunk and playing gamblin’ games I end up sorry I played.”
“There’s a pool hall in town,” said Seth. “And we could do some hunting.”
“I done spent enough time on the prairie. Some billiards now, that might go. You know this town hasn’t even got a whorehouse. Doesn’t seem quite civilized.”
Seth drank a little of his beer and looked out the warped glass of the saloon’s only window. A big sorrel horse, tossing its head, was pulling a buggy in toward town; seen through the cheap glass, it seemed to ripple and dance as it went. “We could find some work to pull in a handful of cash. Day’s worth of work or so.”
“Ain’t that just like you?” Franklin said, shaking his head. “Looking for every last chance to wear yourself out. And me with you.”
Seth turned to look at the four men at the other end of the bar. He had heard them talk about branding cattle and having too much of it to do in the time allotted. He turned to the bartender, a sallow man with a plump face, muttonchops, and eyes so small and dark, they were like raisins in dough. “Say, friend, those fellas down there”—he kept his voice low, using the discretion of frontier men avoiding offense—“they work at a ranch hereabouts?”
“Black Creek Acres,” said the bartender, scratching somewhere under his greasy apron. “That tall fella, that’s Heywood Kelmer. His pa owns the place. Biggest spread for a hundred miles.”
Seth nodded and sauntered over to the cowboys, lifting his beer in greeting. “Gents.” He touched his hat to the tall man. “Would you be Mr. Heywood Kelmer?”
“I am,” said the tall man, looking at Seth with a faint expression of disdain. He was wearing a riding suit with a black-velvet tailcoat, shiny black boots to his knees, and a riding cap tilted back on his thick curly black hair. Seth had only seen riding suits in magazines till now, in illustrations of plantation owners out in the Carolinas and suchlike places. Heywood Selmer looked like a man from a magazine in another way, too—his features were so regular, he was like some paragon of male beauty in a lithograph. Paler than the other men here, with a mustache that closely followed the supercilious curve of his lips, he looked at Seth as if he were about to laugh. But Seth soon learned he looked at most folks like that.
“My name’s Seth Coe, sir, and I heard you speak about a power of work to be done and not much time to do it. My pard and I, we just finished the Cullin Ranch drive. We done it twice in two years. I was second ramrod for Mr. Cullin. We’ve both done as much branding as any man alive, and we work quick.”
“Little pitchers have big ears,” chuckled a cowboy with long gray hair, a bushy mustache—so bushy it quite hid his mouth—and a curled-back hat on his head.
The other two cowboys grinned at that.
“Kind of short, aren’t you?” said a big man with a low-crowned hat and bristling black beard. “We breed the biggest cattle in the state!”
“Never found one too big for me to rope. I rode a couple, too.”
“Rode them!” Heywood’s perfectly formed sable eyebrows bobbed in surprise. He gave a small affected laugh, like something he had practiced. “We prefer to herd them, ha-ha!”
The other men dutifully laughed.
Seth grinned. “Rode ’em in competition, down to Dallas. They’re not made to be ridden, and they let you know it! If a man can stay aboard for half a minute, why, he wins ten dollars.”
“Remarkable!” said Heywood, snorting. “They have branding competitions, too?”
“Roping and branding, yes, sir. I won second place. Y’all don’t have rodeos in Kansas?”
“Haven’t time for such things. Well, we may have a day’s work for you. Come over to Black Creek with us, and if Vince here thinks you’re all right, you can get started this evening.” He turned to the cowboy with the bushy mustache. “Vince, you and the boys take him and his pard out to Black Creek. See how they do. If they’re all right, put ’em up in a cabin, and they can work tonight and tomorrow.”
He turned his back on Seth, then, bending to talk to a compact hand with a ferret face and a door-knocker mustache.
Seth was surprised to be dismissed in that way. Most men in Texas settled wages and then shook a man’s hand at a time like that. But it was short-time work, and he decided he wouldn’t let it stick in his craw.
He returned to Franklin and said, “Got us a free place to stay and something to do!”
“I heard! You got us a miserable bunk, a lot of work, and you didn’t even ask how much they’re paying.” Franklin sighed. But his partner had made a deal for the two of them, and Franklin wasn’t inclined to buck it. Kicking now wasn’t the cowboy way, after riding with a man for so long. “Hell—let’s go and get it done.”
* * *
* * *
Josette was surprised to see Heywood Kelmer ride up on his palomino quarter horse; he was wearing a tailcoat and a funny little cap that tied under his chin. She’d never seen a man in a riding suit before either. Must be showing off a new acquisition.
She was on the wooden sidewalk in front of the millinery, on her way back from the café, bringing her father a covered dish with thick oxtail soup, for he’d given over his breakfast and now found himself famished. Bread and cheese to accompany the soup could be had at the store.
“Hello, Josette,” said Heywood, touching his hat and bowing a little in the saddle.
“Afternoon, Heywood,” she said, nodding. She paused, squinting up at him in the bright sunshine. What a picture of a man he was. Tall and straight in the saddle, riding in finery, and that look on his face like a man giving a child a treat. As if she were lucky to encounter him. “I’m just taking my papa his lunch.”
She expected him to get down and offer to carry it for her, but he didn’t. “You know the summer ball is coming up,” Heywood said.
“I seem to have heard it remarked upon.”
“How coy you are! You’re coming to it with me, aren’t you? Your father spoke to you?”
“He mentioned it. Are you so sure no one else has asked me first?”
“Mr. Dubois gave me to understand he wouldn’t permit such foolishness.”
“My father thinks he can speak for me. Maybe he can. Maybe he can’t. Still and all, I might be persuaded to go to the dance with you. If I choose to go at all.”
“It’s at Black Creek Acres, you know.”
“I do know that. It was there last year and the year before. My father allowed me to watch but not to dance.”
“This year he’s promised you’ll dance with me!”
“Has he? You will have the wooden dance floor set out?”
“With flowers and bunting! We’ll have a bigger band this year, too. Musicians coming all the way from Kansas City!”
She shrugged noncommittally. “It’s two weeks off, so there’s still time for you to decide if you prefer to escort Maybelle Skupper.”
“Maybelle! You saw me riding with her once, and you jump to conclusions.”
“Or Georgiana Potts. I hear from Melody Winters you’ve been escorting her to Sunday services.”
“Pah!” But then he chuckled. “Most interesting to find you have been on a gather of my doings!”
“You belittle me with such remarks, Heywood. The ladies at my sewing circle tell me of your doings without my asking—as they report everyone’s doings.” Josette smiled. “We’ll talk on it later. This pot’s gett
ing heavy. Good afternoon, Heywood.”
She made the faintest curtsylike bob, as her mama had done when taking leave of folks, and hurried off down the walk to the store, clasping her covered dish and thinking that Papa would have wanted her to be far more agreeable to Heywood. And Heywood himself seemed surprised that she didn’t do a little girlish dance of delight at his invitation. But some instinct told her to wait, to just wait and see what happened.
* * *
* * *
The second day of work at Black Creek Acres was a long one and more pressed than the first by reason of a different supervisor. Seth didn’t mind the first day under Vince’s bossing; he rather liked Vince. But Saturday morning, Heywood Kelmer had taken over.
“In the name of efficiency,” he’d said.
Chance Grogan, the little man with the door-knocker mustache, had muttered to Seth that Heywood was “like to talk of efficiency, since he come back from that business school out east.”
They were working in a cattle pen out by the biggest barn that Seth had ever seen. The barn contained dairy cows on one side and horses on the other.
To the north, between here and the tree-lined Black Creek, a quarter mile off, was an alfalfa field, ripe for harvest. The place interested Seth because the Kelmers seemed to be doing something—successfully, too—that Seth himself wanted to accomplish: a sizable spread with a mix of enterprises. Should one enterprise fail, the others would keep the business alive. It seemed to have worked for the Kelmers; a good distance off, Seth could see the splendid three-story white house, done up in the Colonial style complete with pillars.
A warm breeze lifted dust up around the cattle bunched at the far end of the pen, away from the branding fire, and Seth, at four in the afternoon, had sat astride his mare since their short, Spartan lunch. Grass lariat in hand, he waited for Franklin and Sweeney to separate out a yearling for roping and branding. Sweeney was a gangly fellow with sunken eyes and a curtain of lank brown hair around his half-bald pate—the others called him Peanut, maybe because of the shape of his long head.
“How is it you prefer a grass lariat?” Sweeney had asked Seth.
“Why, it’s lighter, and the leather ones can crack on you.”
Sweeney shook his head in disapproval. “Stock needs a good firm leather loop.”
The black-bearded fellow, naturally enough called Blackie, was working with Vince, the two of them tending the red-hot branding irons at the stone-ringed fire. Chance sat calmly on his horse, waiting his turn to rope a calf. There were eighteen more hands off on other chores around the property, not counting the sharecroppers working on the alfalfa.
Heywood Kelmer mostly watched from the fence, calling out suggestions, which usually slowed things down. Now he strolled up beside Seth’s horse, thumbs hooked in his belt. Heywood was wearing a spotless white hat with a high-peaked crown, a white cotton shirt, and blue dungarees tucked into shiny black riding boots.
“You do most of your cowboying on a mare?” Heywood asked, cocking his head to look up at Seth. “I figure a gelding is better.”
“Why, some prefer a gelding, but all that matters, to my mind,” said Seth, cricking his back to the left and right to ease the stiffness, “is how biddable a man’s horse is for the job. Now, mares are a little smarter, I find, and take training right quick. And if they like you, they’ll work harder for you.”
“If they like you!” Heywood snorted. “Around here they like what the whip tells them to like.”
Seth shrugged, dallying one end of his lariat around the saddle horn with his left hand and grasping the rope just under the loop with his right. “My pa used to say there’s a place for the quirt, but getting a horse to bond, why that reaches deeper, makes the horse more loyal.”
Heywood’s brows knit at that. “Your pa, huh?” He snorted again and pointed. “Well—there’s your calf. Let’s see how quick that mare of yours can be.”
Franklin and his mount had nudged the young beef away from its protective, moaning mother and out into the middle of the pen. It was more a yearling than a calf, and was looking for someplace to run as Seth nudged Mazie into action. She had seen the yearling and knew just what to do, immediately dashing in a tight circle, pushing the yearling away from the other cattle, making it run. Seth whirled his loop, then whipped it out flat for a heel catch, sending it unerringly to slide under the yearling’s rear hooves. Leaning back in the saddle, he said, “Ho!” to Mazie, and she dug her hooves in, the rope tightening from the saddle horn and, the honda closing the loop, jerking the yearling off balance. The horse began backing up, pulling the calf in reach of the branding men.
Blackie held the yearling down with his knee, driving the sizzling brand home on the bawling beef, while Vince made a couple of quick cuts in one of its ears for an additional branding mark.
On the work went for a few hours more, with Seth and Franklin and sometimes Blackie trading off jobs. Sometimes Sweeney branded or cut out the calves, but he didn’t seem to have the skill to rope them. Heywood watched, did a little branding, made some more unhelpful suggestions, then went off to some unknown business in the barn.
Almost time for supper—and for Seth and Franklin, being paid off for their work over the last couple days—the men had just finished branding for the day when Sweeney made his bet.
“That horse of yours, Coe,” he said, “that’s a sound horse. Kinder quick, too. But I bet you she’s got no legs for jumping.”
“Mazie can jump over the moon, she wants to,” declared Seth, untying the mare from the fence.
“That right? Boss has a horse can jump over that fence there. Seen him clearly like a breeze. Bet your horse cain’t do it. Not without dropping you along the way.”
“Is that so?” Seth said as Heywood returned. “I’d take your bet on that.”
“What bet is that?” Heywood asked.
“Wouldn’t do it unless it was okay with you, boss,” said Sweeney meekly. “Just that he thinks his mare could jump over that fence like your stallion. I’m saying it’s not a jumping horse.”
Heywood took off his hat as he looked over Seth’s horse. He took a blue kerchief from his pocket and dabbed sweat from his forehead. “Could not envision that horse jumping a fence myself. Tell you what. As the day’s work is over, and if we use that fence over there, the one missing the top board—balance another board so’s if the horse hits it, we don’t get a broken-leg horse lying in the way round here—why, I’ll put twenty dollars on it.”
Sweeney suggested raising it to forty dollars, and Heywood consented. Franklin bet forty on Seth, and Seth took the bet himself.
Vince shook his head. “Not a-gonna bet on this. I reckon this man knows his horses. And I am sure not going to bet against the boss.”
“Here’s one condition,” said Sweeney. “She’s got to carry you over without you falling out of the saddle!”
Seth shrugged. “Never going to fall out of this saddle.”
No one else took the bet, and Vince went to get another piece of lumber to set at top-board height on the section of fence where it was a mite low. Seth calculated that the distance across the pen was more than enough for Mazie to do it. She was the only horse he had ever felt comfortable jumping—for he didn’t like risking a horse ending up with an injury, nor himself either—but he couldn’t keep that mare from jumping when she was of a mind to do it. She loved jumping over any obstacle at all, with or without a rider. Seth handed Sweeney the reins, took the board from Vince, and went to place it himself, making sure it was balanced right. He wanted it to be set up so one clip of hoof would knock it down. He didn’t want Mazie hurt.
He walked Mazie back to the far end of the corral, talking to her as they went along. “We’re gonna jump us a fence, girl. . . .”
Seth climbed up in the saddle and set himself for the jump. “Seth, wait!” Franklin called. “Maybe check t
he—”
But Mazie was already running, picking up speed to a gallop, leaping—and the saddle gave a sudden lurch, throwing Seth into the air. He was half over the fence when it happened, and he fell on the far side, deliberately turning in the air to catch the impact in a belly flop, the only way, at this angle, to keep from breaking a bone.
The mare sailed over the top board, coming down beside him, taking another ten steps before digging in to stop. Seth was gasping, the air knocked out of him, and then coughing in the dust, when Mazie came over and nudged him with her muzzle.
“I’m”—he coughed—“all right, girl.” He got to his feet, and, still wheezing, stared at the saddle—it was askew on the horse.
Franklin vaulted over the fence and put a hand on his shoulder.
“You bust anything?”
“Don’t believe so. What the hell happened to my saddle?”
“I was trying to tell you. . . .”
“You lost, Coe!” Sweeney called. “You fell off! Pay up! You other gents, too!”
Franklin and Seth went to Mazie and looked at the saddle. Seth swallowed a cussword. “The damn strap’s been loosened!”
“I tried to tell you I saw that Sweeney foolin’ with your saddle. He was making it look like he was being sure the strap was tight, but I don’t trust him and . . . well, off you went!”
Seth didn’t anger easy. But he had a mad on now. He might’ve put his hand on his gun, only none of them wore a gun for this kind of work.
He turned and shouted, “Mr. Kelmer! Will you—” He had been about to say, Get over here and look at this! But he thought better of it, not wanting his pay docked for talking rough to the boss, and called, “Would you mind having a look at this?”
Vince opened the gate, and the men followed Heywood through to inspect the horse.
“I’ve ridden with this man for years, Mr. Kelmer,” Franklin said. “He has never buckled his cinch loose.”
“I thought it felt kinda funny when I got on,” Seth said, “but I figured I imagined it, since I knew how I cinched it, which was good and tight!”
