by Rod Miller
Nothing seemed to upset the camels. Shrieking wheels, screeching brakes, overturned drays, distressed draft animals, bellowing bullwhackers, mad muleskinners, and scattered cargo made nary a dent in the dromedary’s disposition. The animals plodded along chewing their cuds as if they were the road’s only occupants.
But the catastrophes the camels caused did slow the progress of the parade. The animals repeatedly squatted at the side of the road in respite while Major Wayne, Lieutenant Scott, Happy Harry, Hurry, Ibrahim, and Rawhide Robinson righted wagons, reloaded freight, calmed crazed critters, and re-harnessed and hitched ill-tempered teams to help freighters get back on their way. All the delays meant the train was lucky to make twenty-five miles a day—considerably less than the accustomed distance for the animals.
And so they met the oncoming cavalry escort from Camp Verde near the end of the fourth day of the journey. The detachment was under the command of a second lieutenant fresh out of West Point who still struggled to stay aboard a horse, so it was Sergeant Donald O’Donnell who ramrodded the outfit.
Once the troopers espied the caravan in the distance, O’Donnell ordered the bugler to blow the call to canter, anticipating a brash spectacle of military gallantry.
The military mounts snuffled nostrils at first sniff of the camels.
The horses went wall-eyed at first sight of the dromedaries.
The cavalry equines trumpeted in terror as they drew near the outlandish animals.
The formation fell apart in chaos as startled steeds stopped and wheeled, quivering geldings galloped away in disarray, panicked ponies paid no heed to reins or bridle bits, and alarmed chargers upchucked riders right and left.
The camel caballeros halted the caravan and sat atop their unruffled rides as pandemonium proliferated around them. Try as they might, they could not contain their laughter, which upset the tangled and twisted and tromped and trampled troopers all the more.
The addled cavalry officer could not function, so Sergeant O’Donnell strode through the turmoil hollering orders, dispatching every trooper on two feet to pursue the fleeing four-footed hayburners. While the cavalry righted itself, Major Wayne and his minions assembled the camels into a compact group, uncinched the saddles and settled the animals on the ground, where they lazily watched the military maneuvers and contentedly chewed their cuds.
“Who’s in charge of this %^#*@ bunch of beasties?” Sergeant Donald O’Donnell screamed, striding into the camel collection with sweat streaming and spit flying.
“That would be me, Sergeant,” Major Wayne said, fiddling with the tie strings on his camel saddle.
“You infernal eejit! You—”
“That’s ‘infernal eejit, sir’,” the major said, turning to meet the stampeding sergeant.
O’Donnell snapped to attention, turning even more florid in the face, far beyond the normal rosy hue further enhanced by the afternoon’s anger and exertion. “Major Wayne, sir! Sorry, sir! I lost my head, I’m afraid.”
“That’s all right, Sergeant. Get your men and mounts sorted out, calm yourself down, and we’ll try again.”
“Yes, sir!” As the sergeant stomped away, he saw Rawhide Robinson halfway reclined against the side of a camel, whittling on a stick. “You!” he said, sliding to a stop and aiming a quaking index finger at the cowboy’s face. “You!”
Rawhide Robinson looked up and grinned. “How you doin’? Sergeant O’Donnell, ain’t it?”
The sergeant steamed and stammered. “You! It ain’t no surprise to me to see the likes of you responsible for all this uproar!”
“Me? I’d have to say it’s your fault, Sarge. Had you not woke me up from a happy nap and dragged me off to Fort Brown all those months ago, I’d be off punchin’ cows someplace.”
The sergeant steamed and stammered.
“By the way, this outfit you’re with came down from Camp Verde. How is it you’re not at Fort Brown still?”
“Got transferred, you eejit! It happens. Had I known I’d end up in the company of you and these—these—these stinking, slobbering excuses for animals I’d have asked to be re-assigned to hell instead!”
“Why are you so down on me? We only just barely met back then, and only for a minute or three.”
“It don’t take me long to spot a troublemaker, boyo. You don’t have to drink a whole bottle of whiskey to know if it’s bad! I could see with my eyes shut you were naught but a sassy, disrespectful, no-account cowboy.”
“Well, I reckon you’ve a right to your opinion about me. But I’m a-warnin’ you right now, Sergeant Bogtrotter, you mind your tongue when talkin’ about these here camels. You don’t know nothin’ about them, so you ain’t entitled to no opinion.”
The sergeant steamed and stammered. “You impertinent—”
“—Sergeant!” Major Wayne interrupted. “Get back to your duties!”
“Yes, sir!”
It took a while, but the troopers eventually rounded up the horses and picketed them safely away from the camels. Their mess was no better than the caravan’s as they, too, were living on trail food out of haversacks and had not brought cook nor supplies along. Curious about the animals they were sent to escort, the troopers filtered into the camel camp to look them over and question the handlers about the beasts.
The assemblage, satisfied for now on the subject of dromedaries, sipped coffee and shifted the conversation to encounters with other odd animals.
One soldier, who had spent time in the mines of the South American Andes, climbed the camelid ladder from vicuña to alpaca to guanaco to llama.
Another, formerly an able-bodied seaman on a merchant ship, told tales of wallabies and kangaroos.
They heard of narwhals and capybaras, hippopotamuses and sloths, the platypus and the ostrich.
“You’ve read ’bout every bit of ink ever been put on paper, Ensign Ian,” Rawhide Robinson said. “I reckon you know lots of oddball animals.”
“It’s lieutenant. And, yes, I have read about remarkable fauna found on every continent.” He entranced the audience with wombats and aardvarks, fruit bats and ring-tailed lemurs, mandrills and manatees, jaguarundis and giraffes until winding down. “How about you, Rawhide. You’ve always got a story to tell.”
“Oh, no, Ensign Ian—”
“—Lieutenant.”
“—Lieutenant Ian. Plenty of other folks to carry on the conversation. Ain’t no need to hear from me.”
“Aw, c’mon, cowboy,” a trooper said. “What’s the strangest critter you ever come across?”
“Well, if you insist,” Rawhide Robinson said. He refilled his tin cup at the campfire pot, settled back against the pad on his camel saddle, blew the hot off his coffee and took an experimental sip, and tipped back his thirteen-gallon hat.
“All right, already,” an impatient soldier said.
“Get on with it!” said another.
“We ain’t got all night.”
“The bugler’ll be blowin’ taps if you don’t get a move on!”
The cowboy sipped his coffee. “Take it easy, boys. I’m thinkin’. And having thought it over, I’d have to say the strangest animal I ever encountered was an armadillo.”
“Armadillo! They’re as common as cow flop here in Texas!”
“Now, take a tater and wait, trooper. I ain’t meaning armadillos in general. I’m talking about this one particular armadillo I met one time.”
Again, he paused to lubricate his talking apparatus with hot coffee.
“Well, what about it!?”
“Here’s what happened,” Rawhide Robinson said once the tension was taut enough. “I was gatherin’ strays one time on this ranch in Arizona Territory. Might’ve been New Mexico, come to think of it. Fact is, I was so far south sometimes I might’ve been in Old Mexico—”
“C’mon, cowboy! It don’t much matter where you were. What about the armadillo?”
“Don’t get all het up. I want to make sure what I’m sayin’ is the truth. So, anyhow, t
here I was, all by my lonesome and out in the middle of a million miles of nowhere sittin’ next to a campfire much like this one. It was so quiet out there it got a mite uncomfortable—no bugs chirping, no coyotes howlin’, no nothing.
“Then, real easy like, I hears this singing. Real soft—so soft I wasn’t sure it was there at all. Bein’ the curious sort, I perked up my ears to listen and stepped out into the desert in the direction that sound was a-comin’ from. There was a full moon that night, so it was near bright as day. Soon enough I was sure it was out there—but I wasn’t sure where.
“But I reasoned out it was coming from somewheres in this jumble of rocks. So I started to clambering around in there, stopping every step or two to listen. It got to where it sounded like that song was comin’ up right from underneath my feet. And I’ll tell you, boys, it was about as sad and mournful a song as I’ve ever heard. In Spanish it was, so I couldn’t catch it all. Besides, it was some strange kind of Spanish, it was. Not like the border lingo I was used to, but sort of old-fashioned, or something. A lot more of a lisp to it, see, and more rolling of the R—”
“—Oh, for heaven’s sake! Tell the story! We don’t care about no lesson is the finer points of the Spanish language!”
“Listen here, soldier—I’m telling this story the way I’m telling it. Take a lesson from these camels here and calm down. Now, where was I?” Rawhide Robinson paused for a moment to collect his thoughts.
“Right. That singing was coming right out from under the rock I was standing on. So I hunkers down and starts to pokin’ around and sees that this boulder was wedged in a crack and whoever it was that was singing was down in that little cave or crevice or whatever. That stone wasn’t so big I couldn’t shift it, so that’s what I did. When I rolled that rock off, I looks down that hole and there’s this armadillo lookin’ back at me.”
“What!?”
“That can’t be true!”
“You’re pullin’ my leg!”
“Sorry, boys, but what I’m saying is as true as thorns on a mesquite tree and spines on a prickly pear cactus. I reached down in there and hauled that armadillo out of that hole and carried him back to the campfire. And all the while, he kept on singing that sad song.
“I figured he might be some kind of thirsty, bein’ stuck down in that rock hole like he was, so I uncorked my canteen and poured a puddle in a tin plate. He didn’t seem to even notice, or know where he was at, so I took a cup of that water and tossed it in his face—you know, like you would to wake up a feller who’s passed out from too much tonsil varnish.”
“Ha! Now I guess you’re going to tell us that armadillo was drunk!”
“Drunk! Don’t be silly—what kind of spirituous liquor could an armadillo find out in the desert? No, he wasn’t drunk, but he was sure discombobulated. The shock of that splash of water brought him right to his senses. He kind of looks at me, looks around, and looks at me some more.
“ ‘¿Como se llama?’ he says to me—which kind of means ‘who are you?’ or ‘what do they call you?’ So I tells him my name. ‘Muchath graciath, theñor RRRawhide RRRobinthon’ he says to me, rolling them Rs and lisping them Ss as he does. ‘You have freed me from a long imprisonment and you shall be rewarded.’ I asked him what he was wagging his chin about—hold on a minute! Do armadillos have chins?”
“Oh, never mind! Tell the story!”
“Anyhow, he tells me he’s a magic armadillo and a long, long time ago—we’re talking centuries here—an old Aztec bruja imprisoned him in that hole on account of he went around doing good, and she was evil and wanted no more of his interference. Then he says that on account of I rescued him, and on account of he was magic, he would give me three wishes—anything I wanted, anything at all—”
“—Hold on there! If he was magic, why didn’t he make a spell and get himself out of that hole?”
“Oh, he didn’t have that kind of power,” Rawhide Robinson said. “Said he couldn’t use his gift to help himself, only other folks. I asked that same thing myself, but that’s the kind of magic that armadillo said he had.”
Rawhide Robinson again paused to sip his coffee and collect his thoughts.
“Well?” an antsy soldier soon asked. “What did you wish for?”
“That armadillo, he said I had three wishes, mind you, and that I could wish for anything I wanted. ‘You can wish for riches, señor. There is no limit to my power to reward you.’ So, I thought it over for a time and said I wished I would always have a comfortable saddle to sit on, and good horses to cinch it to. ‘It shall be so,’ he said.”
“What!? You could have anything in the world, and you wished for that?”
“It ain’t such a strange thing to want,” the cowboy said. “I’ve spent lots of hours and days and weeks and months and years horseback in my time, and any cowboy will tell you a good saddle is worth wishing for. And the way them horses of yours behaved this afternoon, well, it ought to be clear even to you army boys how valuable good horses can be.
“And I’ll tell you right here and now, them wishes of mine came true. I ain’t never been chafed or chapped, sore or swollen, irritated or inflamed by my saddle. And I have always had the pleasure of good horses between my knees. Oh, some of them might bow their backs in the morning, but you want some spirit in a horse. So that armadillo did me right.”
“Wait! What was your third wish?”
“Well, that armadillo reminded me I had one more wish. And he reminded me I could have anything I wanted. And he reminded me he could lavish me with wealth and riches, jewels and gems, silver and gold. I ain’t never been the greedy sort, but I thought, what the heck, and I told that armadillo I wanted a thousand bucks.”
“A thousand bucks! That’s all! You could have had a million!”
“Like as I said, I ain’t the greedy sort, and I figured a thousand bucks would keep me a good long time. Anyway, that armadillo gave me a funny look and said, ‘A thousand bucks, señor? This is what you wish for?’ I assured him a thousand bucks would be plenty. Then that armadillo sort of shrugged his shoulders—if armadillos have shoulders—and said, ‘It shall be so . . .’ as he just sort of faded away. And he was gone. Plumb disappeared, he did.”
After a moment, one of the troopers, overcome with curiosity, asked what he did with the money.
“Money?” Rawhide Robinson said. “Well, that’s where this story gets a mite strange. See, I was sleepin’ like a calf with a belly full of mama’s milk when along about dawn I was woke up by all this racket. I flung off my sougans, hitched up my britches, pulled on my boots and rubbed the night out of my eyes so’s I could see what all the noise was about.
“I looks around, and darned if I wasn’t surrounded by a whole herd of baaing, bleating sheep. Sagebrush maggots everywhere, there was! For a cowboy, that’s about as insulting as it gets. Once I got over the shock of it, I started lookin’ them sheep over and it dawned on me that every last stinkin’ one of them hoofed locusts was a sheep of the male variety—a whole herd of rams, it was. Then I set to countin’ them and you won’t never guess how many of them woolies there was—there was one thousand of them—exactly one thousand male sheep. . . .
“A thousand bucks!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
* * *
With assistance from the cavalry escort, the journey proved less eventful. Troopers rode out ahead of the caravan, warning others on the road of its approach, allowing teamsters and muleskinners and drivers of wagons and drays, buckboards and buggies, carriages and carts, horseback travelers and even those afoot to secure their means of conveyance and avoid—or at least prepare for—the possibility of pending panic and pandemonium.
The cavalry horses eventually became somewhat accustomed to the presence of the camels. But while rodeo-style uproar subsided, suspicion did not. Close calls were common, and skittishness and sidewise shying accompanied every equine encounter with a proximate dromedary. It was all the troopers could do to keep their se
ats in the saddle and their horses’ hooves on the earth.
The upshot of it all was that the soldiers were less accepting of the camels than even their jumpy mounts were. Various venomous attacks in the form of copious unkind words, profuse profanity, and recurrent cussing caused anxiety among the camel handlers. Major Wayne and Lieutenant Scott harangued the cavalry officer and Sergeant O’Donnell regularly, but to no avail. The enmity would not be eased, let alone eliminated.
Among the horsemen, only Rawhide Robinson—more horseman by far than any of the blue-clad troopers with yellow stripes down the sides of their trousers—accepted the presence of the camels. Beyond acceptance, the cowboy’s appreciation of the bizarre beasts ever increased.
As the caravan approached San Antonio, the cowboy’s excitement elevated. The city—whose population exceeded 20,000 souls—was familiar to Rawhide Robinson and as close to a hometown as the wandering cowboy could claim—although the amount of time spent in its environs was negligible when compared to his time on cattle trails. Many of the cattle drives on his curriculum vitae originated in the vicinity of San Antonio, as it had long been a center of the beef business. Much to his chagrin—and that of others with bovine proclivities—San Antonio de Bexar now trafficked in considerable quantities of wool, shorn from imported herds of sheep in the nearby hill country.
The afternoon prior to the company’s arrival in the city, Rawhide Robinson rounded up the camel crew and invited the commanders of the refractory cavalry troops to the confab.
“More than likely, these here camels will cause some excitement in San Antonio,” he said.
“No doubt about it,” offered the uneasy army lieutenant. “I am not confident in our ability to maintain order.”
Sergeant Donald O’Donnell snorted. “Mark my words,” he said—those words directed at Major Benjamin Wayne, “there will be hell to pay when these sand maggots of yours—”
