The Third Western Novel

by Noel Loomis

  The little man tried to moisten his lips, but his tongue was dry. “There has to be a Logan City,” said Hudson almost in a whisper. “There has to be!”

  His wife began to cry silently, and one of the small children started to whimper.

  Ferguson said, “There are lots of supplies needed by the emigrants when they get across. It might be you could freight up from Omaha City.”

  “I don’t know what to do with the wife and young’uns,” said Hudson dully, still trying to understand what had developed.

  “There’s Turner’s Tavern up the road a piece—a respectable place, and he might have some work for you.”

  “Two lots—right across from the railway station.” Hudson looked up at Ferguson, suddenly fierce. “Mr. Ferguson, if I ever see that man again, I swear I’ll strangle him with my bare hands.”

  “You won’t, likely. Would you like me to lead your team off the ferry?” asked Ferguson.

  “No, I can drive ’em off.” He picked up the reins while Ferguson went to the back post to pull the ferry up against the dock. The children—ten of them—streamed onto the deck before the team got into action; Mrs. Hudson was holding a baby in her lap by that time, and a small girl peered out from the opening in the canvas. The little man rolled the wagon out on the dock, with boards rattling under the weight of horses’ hooves and wagon wheels; then the little man called, “Whoa!” and got down from his seat, clambering awkwardly over the front wheel. “The fare,” he sail. “I forgot to pay.”

  Ferguson was on the point of telling him it was free, but thought better of it. “One dollar,” he said.

  Hudson dug into a grubby clamshell purse. “The man on the other bank said it was two dollars,” he said suddenly. Ferguson noted that the purse was almost empty.

  “It’s one dollar,” he said.

  Benson came up as they drove off. Ferguson signaled Teddy Root on the opposite bank and the ferry began to slip back to the east. Keller was leading the dun toward the watching men. No Horse came down the slope with the mules, and Keller stared at him. Ferguson watched, but Keller made no move. No Horse led the mules to the open space around the fire. “It’s time for their corn,” he said.

  Ferguson nodded, and No Horse went to the sack and dipped into it with both hands to fill a morral.

  “Why di’n’t you let Hudson go for nothin’?” asked Benson. “You’ve done it before.”

  Ferguson watched Hudson’s horses go into the pull as the wagon started up the incline to the slope. “That man is in a fair way to go to pieces,” he observed. “He needs something to save his pride.”

  “You know what that map means?”

  Ferguson looked sharply at him. “It means the promoters are about to move in,” he said.

  CHAPTER III

  While the ferry was moving back across the river, Ferguson climbed the short slope to the level prairie where Benson had unhooked his mules and was bringing them back to the starting point.

  “You collect the fares for a while,” said Ferguson, looking at Benson. “But, mind you, no fighting.” He looked absently at the leather-faced little man whose scraggly beard was beginning to turn gray. “It is possible,” Ferguson said, “that they will send over more strong-arm men to wear me down.”

  “Who?”

  Ferguson shook his head. “I don’t know—but these repeated disputes are no accidents. They are done to wear me down.”

  “Two fights before breakfast is overdoin’ it, I’d say.”

  Ferguson eyed him for a moment. “Remember what I said. If you get into an argument, tell them to come back later when I’ll be here.”

  “I ain’t afraid of them,” said Benson, “but you’re the boss.”

  Ferguson started up the slope, but Logan met him, his pointed black beard giving him a peculiarly satanic look.

  “You’re a scrapper, Ferguson. You proved it. Now stop this constant fighting and join our forces. There is a lot of money to be made here, and we can make it easier if you will quit standing in the way.”

  Ferguson looked him over. “I’m not sure I know exactly what you’re driving at,” he said.

  Logan gave a snort of impatience. “You’re either awful dumb or real smart,” he said.

  “Call it anything you like.”

  “Look, Ferguson. The ferry is the key to the country. You can, to start with, hold people up on the other side until they will agree to buy lots from us. You can let those cross first and let them cross cheap, while you hold the others back.”

  “It doesn’t seem exactly fair,” said Ferguson.

  “It’s business.”

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  “We could separate those with money from those without money, and pick out the ones with money for this area. You could quit sympathizing with those who have bought lots—send them on west to Kearny or some place. Ferguson, I tell you, there’s a gold mine here if you play it right.”

  “I am not much of a promoter,” said Ferguson.

  “You don’t have to promote. Come in with us, and we’ll see you’re taken care of.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Yeakel and me—maybe one or two others.”

  “Simmons?”

  “He is only a hanger-on; he does odd jobs,” said Logan.

  “Like taking Mr. Benson’s quarter?”

  “He did that on his own hook.”

  “Is Wiggins in with you?” asked Ferguson.

  “Never saw the man before.”

  “How about Keller?” asked Ferguson.

  He saw a reservation in Logan’s dark eyes, and the man said, “I’ve heard of him.”

  Ferguson said quietly, “You don’t really expect me to help you, do you?”

  “Every man has a price,” said Logan.

  “It may be,” said Ferguson, “but I will have to think on mine.”

  He walked a quarter of a mile to the north, where his sorrel saddle horse was staked in a draw, and saddled and rode out to the west. The broad trail of emigrant wagons and stock led first to Turner’s Tavern.

  Ferguson saw the older Turner girl go out back with a water-pail, and he turned the sorrel toward the dug well. The girl had snapped the wooden bucket onto the end of the rope and was lowering it, when she heard Ferguson’s horse and looked around.

  “Good morning, Miss Sally,” he said.

  Ferguson dismounted. She began to smile—almost shyly, he noticed for the first time. Did that mean she was growing up? He looked more closely at her, and realized that she had already grown up, that she was, in fact, crowding her thin dress in two places. He had better remember to tell Tom that she ought to start wearing something under the dress. Sally did not know about things like that, for the Turners had started west when she was little; her mother had died, and Ferguson guessed that Sally had never had a chance to talk to another woman until Tom had settled there and opened the tavern. He smiled at her. “You have boarders this morning?”

  She nodded, her eyes on his for a moment. “Some of them folks from Ohio. One wagon stopped last night; the otherne come by a little while ago.”

  He reached for the rope and she put her shoulder in the way of his arm while she jerked the rope a couple of times to tip the bucket, then watched the rope start through her fingers as the bucket filled and began to sink. Then she turned toward him and put the rope in his hands. He began the long pull, hand over hand, while she seated herself lightly on a kerosene barrel and swung her legs, hitting her bare heels against the barrel.

  “Why do you watch me so closely?” he asked.

  She smiled. “I jist enjoy seein’ you work—you move so smooth.”

  “Sally,” he said, “you’re getting grown-up.”

  She said, tossing her head, “I’ll be sixteen next week.” He reached down and lifted the bucket out and set it by the coil of rope. She left the top of the barrel and dropped lightly to her feet.

  She changed the bucket to the other hand. “You comin’
in, Mr. Ferguson?”

  “No, thanks. I have to get on to feed my stock.”

  “Pa made some mighty good pancakes this mornin’.”

  He grinned at her. “You almost talked me into it,” he said. “I’ll stop on the way back. I want to see how Noah is coming along with the well.”

  “He said last night he was down to a hundred and ninety-six feet.”

  He nodded. “No sign of water yet, though. How deep is your well?”

  “Almost three hundred, pa said.”

  “I’ll have a ways to go, I guess.”

  She pushed the door in a little. “If you don’t take too long, I’ll see there’s pancakes left for you, Mr. Ferguson.”

  He moistened his lips and said, “I’ll be back after a while, Miss Sally.”

  “You’re sure in an all-fired hurry for that well, Mr. Ferguson.”

  “Just because I have to spend so much time hauling water from the river. The time to be in a real hurry,” he said, “will be when it starts to show water. Then we’ll have to get down there fast and start digging in the right direction.”

  “Whyn’t you take your time?” she asked.

  “Because a little digging might open the sand and get a nice flow—but if you fool around, pretty soon the bottom of the well will be under water, and you’ll never have another chance.”

  It was two miles to his half section, and Tom Turner’s corn was a foot high; even without rain for three weeks, it would be knee-high by the Fourth of July. Ferguson’s own corn had gone in a week later, but was not far behind. It was rich soil, but nobody knew as yet whether the rain would come at the right time.

  His cabin, of logs skidded in from the river, was as large as he could make it from the timber available. Out in front were a freight wagon with the tongue propped up on a stump, and a wedge-shaped lizard that held three kerosene barrels for hauling water. He had put the well on the far side of the house, between the cabin and a one-walled barn. They were digging a four-foot hole, and if a man wanted to be safe, he would shore about every three feet down until he hit water. He lowered the boards, already sawed to length, and toenailed them into one another or sometimes nailed a two-by-two in the corner if he wanted to he sure; it depended on the character of the earth.

  He rode alongside the stone curbing he had put up to hold the windlass, and leaned over. For a moment he could see nothing; then Noah Turner’s voice echoed up to him, reverberating hollowly from one side of the well to the other: “That you, Mr. Ferguson?”

  “It’s me,” said Ferguson. “You got a lot of dirt to take out?”

  “A fair amount. It’s gittin’ too thick down here to dig.”

  “Fill the tub and I’ll get the mule.”

  He rode off to the west where the mule and the two oxen were lying in the shade of a big, wild-plum bush. They slanted the shoring out from the center at the bottom of every section, so they could raise a tubful of dirt without obstruction, but at two hundred feet, the job of raising the dirt called for a mule or an ox. The animals had grazed early and were sleepy, and he walked up to the mule and got it by the halter, and tied his hair-rope to the halter and trotted back, leading the mule. He put a collar and trace-chains on the mule, and a singletree, and looped the rope through the clevis. “All ready?” he called down the hole.

  Presently Noah’s voice floated back eerily: “Go ahead.”

  Ferguson got the mule started, and knew it would continue until he called, “Whoa!” He went back to the well. “All right down there?”

  “Fine,” said Noah.

  Presently Ferguson could see the tub below, and he went out to the mule, got it by the halter, and waited for the flag on the rope. When he saw it, he stopped the mule and left it leaning into the collar while he went back to lift the tub over the side and dump it; he would spread the dirt later with a drag. Then he lowered the tub back into the hole, and went to turn the mule toward the well.

  He took out four loads, and he guessed that Noah had been down as far as he could go; he lowered planks and nails, and then Noah came up for a breather. He was a small boy, a year younger than Sally, and dressed in nothing but overalls, which now were soaked with the good smell of fresh earth. He brushed the dirt from his overalls, and Ferguson said, “You better take ’em off and shake ’em.”

  “Ready to go for breakfast?” asked Ferguson. “I’ll ride you double.”

  “I got a lunch,” said Noah. “Pa killed a couple of wild turkeys day before yesterday, and Sally made me some sandwiches.”

  “Take your time eating. Then I’ll let you down again. Get lonesome down there?”

  “Sometimes it’s scary,” said Noah. “It’s dark when you first go down—but after a while you get used to it and you can see pretty good. Only thing, the sky is sure a long way off.”

  Ferguson had observed the boy’s work, and knew that he put up shoring as well as any man. “Don’t take any chances with those planks,” he said, “and be sure the rope is always where you can reach it.”

  “I ain’t worried, Mr. Ferguson.”

  They kept a strong stick firmly tied crosswise at the end of the three-hundred-and-forty-foot rope, and if a man should be inadvertently left alone, he could get out with the help of the rope, by taking advantage of the toeholds in the shoring. It wasn’t very risky, for they were doing it all over the territory, and nobody had been lost in a well yet.

  Noah came back wiping his mouth on the back of his forearm. “Guess I’m good till noon, Mr. Ferguson.”

  Ferguson held the rope while Noah got into the tub, then let it down, hand over hand. The mule felt the pull and began to back up, following the rope in to the well. Presently the rope stopped going down, and Noah’s voice floated up: “All right, Mr. Ferguson.”

  He unfastened the rope from the mule’s collar, examined the big knot some eight feet from the end, and made sure the stick was firmly tied crosswise. He threw a double half-hitch around the log upright, and called down: “So long!” He heard the sound of a pick in hard dirt, and then Noah’s weird voice: “So long, Mr. Ferguson.”

  He mounted the sorrel and turned back to the east, but struck out across the prairie to the north of east, toward a cabin that sat alone in the middle of a claim. A fire burned under an iron pot in the yard and as Ferguson drew near, a woman came from the cabin with a bucket of water. She lifted the bucket with an effort and poured the water into a V-shaped hopper, from which it drained into another bucket at the bottom.

  Ferguson dismounted. “Mrs. Talbot, can I help you?” he asked.

  “I have been taking care of my own work,” she said, and a calculating but otherwise inscrutable expression came into her black eyes. “Whether you can really help me,” she said, “I don’t know, and I am not sure I will ever find out.”

  He knew what she meant, and recognized it also as a challenge that stirred him in spite of its unexpectedness. He moved a step toward her, but said only: “I am sorry that trouble arose with your brother-in-law.”

  She said something he had not anticipated: “Wiggin is a man of no sense at all.”

  “It may be,” he said, “that he did not act for himself.” She moved to the pot and stirred the boiling fat with a bleached broom handle. Then she took an egg from her apron pocket and dropped it in the leaching water, watched it sink slowly, and fished it out with a big spoon.

  He said, “What are you going to do with your homestead, Mrs. Talbot? You can’t very well farm it by yourself.”

  “What else can I do?”

  “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  She turned to him with unexpected fire in her eyes. “I want to get out of this God-forsaken country—where there are no shoes, no men who aren’t married, no rain, and—”

  “Tom Turner isn’t married,” he pointed out.

  Her eyes flashed scorn. “He’s too fat to need a woman.”

  He tried to avoid the obvious answer. “People come into the territory every day.”

 
But she did not fall into his scheme to keep the discussion away from himself. She moved toward him. “And you, Mr. Ferguson, are thin enough, but I doubt you would know what to do with a woman if you had one.”

  He knew she was goading him, and he was aware that she was a beautiful woman except for that trace of hardness.

  He said, “It is a fair country, with the biggest sky I have ever seen.”

  He sensed her disappointment, and she turned away.

  “You own the ferry,” she said. “You are in a place to become the wealthiest and most powerful man in this part of the country.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “You know every person who comes into this part of Nebraska. You can sell them land, insurance, goods—anything they want. Or, you can keep them out if you want.”

  “I don’t try to keep anybody out,” he said. “I carry anybody who waits his turn and pays his fare.”

  She moved a step closer to him. “You could keep out the wrong people,” she said.

  “Perhaps I could—but I won’t.”

  “There is more money to be made from people than from tilling this sun-baked soil,” she said.

  “But not the satisfaction.”

  “Satisfaction means different things to different people.” She set the bucket back under the leaching-hopper. “I have made fresh coffee this morning,” she said, her black eyes again inscrutable. “You are welcome to come in for a while.”

  “I have to get back,” he said.

  “You have worked every day since I have been here,” she said. “Are you so important that you cannot take a few minutes for a neighborly visit?”

  He smiled wryly. “From the way things went this morning, I’m afraid not. But the fact is that I have a number of things to do.”

  “And perhaps,” she said acidulously, “you are more attracted to a barefoot girl with yellow hair than to a grown woman who knows her own mind.”

  He looked at her for a moment. He did not understand why she referred to Sally, for he and Sally had barely spoken to each other. Finally he said “I am sorry, Mrs. Talbot.” He put his foot in the stirrup. “I suppose I am a man who does not like to be pushed.”

  “I would suppose,” she said emphatically, “that you are a man who will have to be pushed—if you are a man.”