Little Britches

by Ralph Moody

  Grace’s shoes hurt my toes and the stockings made my legs prickle, so Father let me take them off till we were almost in to the Capitol building. First, we went right to the Golden Eagle and got my new shoes; then we drove by Cousin Phil’s office, and Father sent me up to get him. The office didn’t look a bit the way it used to; there was nothing left in it but two chairs and a desk. The stenographer was gone—desk, typewriter, and all—and Cousin Phil looked terrible. He told me to stay there and look at the newspaper on his desk while he went down and talked to Father.

  He was gone a long time, and when he came back he said I was to stay with him while Father went to do his trading. There wasn’t a thing for me to do in the office and nobody to talk to. Cousin Phil just kept reading the newspaper and looking at his watch every once in a while. About noontime he went out and brought me back a couple of doughnuts, but he didn’t bring himself any and he wasn’t gone long enough to have eaten lunch. But he did talk a little after he came back. He told me he had a big deal all ready to go through, but the panic had knocked the bottom out of everything. Then he asked me how I’d like to have Prince to drive instead of old Fanny, and said he thought a while on the ranch would be good for the little bronc.

  All afternoon I watched from the window for Father to come back, but it was nearly suppertime before he got there. Prince was tied to the tail gate of the wagon, but Cousin Phil didn’t even come to the window to look down. He just told me to run along so as not to keep Father waiting, and said he’d be out to see us before too long.

  As soon as I climbed up on the wagon I could see that Father had several good-sized bundles piled up in the front end, and half a dozen boxes with pictures of canning jars on them. When I asked him how he got so many things with only fourteen dollars and a quarter, he kind of chuckled a little bit and pulled his leather pouch out of his pocket. There was still some money in it, and from the sound of the jingle I knew some of the pieces were as big as half dollars. Then he told me that Mother had overlooked the fact that everything was a lot cheaper since money got so scarce, but he wouldn’t tell me what was in the packages. He said I’d have to wait till we could all look at them together.

  After that I asked him what was the matter with Cousin Phil, and why he didn’t have the stenographer and her things in his office any more. He didn’t answer me for a few minutes, then he told me we hadn’t stopped to realize how well off we were to have enough to eat every day, and to have a good home and clothes enough to keep us warm, when there were people who were actually starving. I remembered about eating both of the doughnuts Cousin Phil brought back at noon, and asked Father if he thought maybe he was starving. He said no, Cousin Phil would never starve, but he thought the panic had clipped his wings a little bit.

  Father and I were both as hungry as we could be, and just talking about having plenty to eat made us hungrier. When we got out by the lumber barn we bought a custard pie and a pail of milk in the same little store where we had got them when we were first moving out to the ranch. While Billy and Nig were eating their oats, Father and I ate our pie and talked about all the new things we had been able to get since we had been sitting there eating a custard pie less than two years before. It seemed to us then that we were going to be rich people before very long. And the next morning it seemed to everybody at home that we already were.

  School didn’t start that fall till we had everything from our garden that we hadn’t peddled put away in the cellar. We got some more canning jars and sugar from Mr. Green in trade for a pig and vegetables. Mother filled every one of them with green corn, tomatoes, peas, and green beans. Father built bins on the cellar floor, and we loaded them with carrots, table beets, and turnips; but we had put horse manure under the potatoes when we planted them, and they went all to tops as my cowboy friend, Hi, had said they would.

  It was Mother who got the idea about selling vegetables at the Fort. She said that officers in the army got paid cash whether there was a panic or not, and she’d bet their wives would buy fresh vegetables. I think Father would rather have taken a beating than do it, but we went from one back door to another, all through the officers’ quarters in Fort Logan, till we’d sold all the garden stuff we didn’t need for ourselves. It brought in nearly twenty-one dollars.

  Denver must not have been a good place to be during the panic, because Prince looked nearly as bad as Cousin Phil. He was skinny and didn’t have anything like the pepper he used to have when I first saw him. Father started giving him two quarts of oats every morning and night, and by school time he’d run like a rabbit again. Father let us drive him once in a while till he found out what was going on at school, but after that we had to take Fanny. He might not have found out about it at all if I hadn’t got my face skinned.

  Willie Aldivote rode a horse to school that fall instead of his old spotted donkey. It wasn’t much of a horse, but he had a saddle for it—and it was a good saddle. It was wide in the pommel, with a short seat and double cinches. Willie said it was a breaking saddle. We put it on all the horses at school and tried to make them buck, but Prince was the only one that would.

  At first he didn’t buck very much harder than Willie’s donkey used to, but the more we tried to ride him, and the more oats he got, the harder he bucked. After a while he didn’t crowhop, but would bounce from one side to the other and turn almost end for end while he was in the air, and he’d get his nose right down between his front hoofs. It got so only Willie and I could stay on him at all—and we got tumbled off plenty of times. I couldn’t reach the stirrups, and I didn’t dare put my feet into the stirrup straps with my shoes on, for fear one of them would stick and drag me when I got thrown, so I always had to ride barefoot. Even at that, my foot stuck one noontime when I went off sideways, and Prince dragged me a few feet. Miss Wheeler fixed me up all right with a little court plaster, but, of course, Grace had to tell Mother what happened. Maybe it was just as well, though, because after that Prince bucked so crazy there was hardly a man in the neighborhood who could ride him.

  Right after Thanksgiving Hal came running up the wagon road to meet us when we were coming home from school. He was just past four years old then, and nearly as wide as he was tall. We could hear him jabbering as he came, and he was so excited he could hardly wait for Fanny to stop before he started trying to climb up over the wheel of the buckboard. In between gasps he was hollering, “We got a new horse . . . and she’s got a colt . . . and she’s brood . . . and her name is Bread.”

  I guess we all got about as excited as Hal was, and I turned in at the gate so fast that I nearly slewed him off the seat. Father and Mother were out at the corral with the new mare and colt. The mare was a nice-looking bay, a little bigger than Fanny and as smooth as butter. The colt looked to be a yearling, and was a bright sorrel. Father let me walk right up to the mare and pat her. I wanted to be gentle with her and have her like me, so as I went close to her I said, “Easy, Bread. Easy, Bread.”

  Mother heard me, and said, “What is that you’re saying?” So I told her Hal said that was the mare’s name. Mother’s face looked kind of funny for a minute, and she pulled her lip down as if she were trying not to laugh. Then she said, “No—no. Hal must have been mistaken when he heard Father talking to Mr. Cash about her. No, she doesn’t have a name yet, but she’s going to have another little colt pretty soon. Isn’t she beautiful? She’s a perfect little lady.” Mother didn’t know it then, but she’d named our new mare. Nobody ever called her anything but Lady after that. Grace named the colt Babe.

  Afterwards Father told me that we had bought Lady and Babe with receipts for eight of the tons of hay we had earned during haying time. He said I had a part interest in her, but I could never ride her hard as I did Fanny, because she was a brood mare.

  Christmas that year was even better than the year before. Father bought a whole box of yellow Bellflower apples, and we had our biggest young torn turkey and cranberry sauce, and even celery. We all got new shoes and stockings, and
Mother had made new winter coats for Philip and me without our knowing about them. And I got a set of dominoes and a two-line bit for a riding bridle. Muriel’s cat thought she ought to give some presents, too, and she must have counted noses, because she had a litter of five kittens Christmas Eve.

  We had taken three good cuttings of alfalfa off the field we sowed our first year on the ranch, and the stand on the new field was rank and good. Our beans had ripened before the frosts came, we’d had enough water to fill the oats, and there were tons and tons of sugar beets. The only trouble was that we could sell hardly anything.

  Father had Mr. Lewis bring his machine and thresh our oats and beans. It took two days to thresh them, and I stayed home from school to carry water and milk and doughnuts around to the men. When the job was done, Father paid Mr. Lewis in oats and beans, but all the other men owed us hay, so we just changed each man’s receipt to show he owed us a little less hay. It was fun to watch the stream of clean white beans come pouring out of the threshing machine, and then think about all the work we had had the winter before to flail, winnow, and sort them.

  Our nineteen pigs did far the best of all those in the neighborhood, because they lived on sugar beets from the time we started thinning out the rows in the spring. And the sugar beets made the meat so much sweeter that we could trade our pork in at Mr. Green’s store when other people couldn’t. Grace and Philip couldn’t get jobs away from home like Father and me, but they were the ones who really got us the groceries that winter, because they thinned the beets and fattened the pigs.

  And it was getting the pigs fat that helped us more than anything else. Everybody had wanted some of our beets to fatten their hogs, and nobody had any money, so Father traded beets for all the tools and machines we needed to make us good ranchers who wouldn’t have to borrow. Of course, none of the things he got were new, but Father didn’t need new things; he could fix up the old ones so they would work just as well. Our landlord came out just before Christmas, and Father gave him part of our share of the oats and beans for his share of the beets. Father made a deal with him for us to work out the land taxes by helping build roads, too. That way we didn’t have to give up so many beans.

  Road work started right after hay baling, and I liked it best of all the work we did. The county allowed a dollar and a half a day for a man, and a dollar a day for a wagon and team of horses. Lady had foaled her colt—a pretty sorrel filly that we named Bonny—so she was able to work. And with the wagon and harness Father got in trade for beets, we had two teams to put on road work. Father drove Lady and Fanny, and I drove Billy and Nig—and they allowed a dollar and a half a day for me just like a man.

  All the land was adobe. In the summer the roads baked as hard as brick, but when they were wet the mud clung to wagon wheels till they were a foot thick. The only way to fix that kind of road was to spread gravel over the adobe during the winter and let it work down with the spring rains. The men who had big teams worked on the grader that cut the side ditches and rounded dirt up to form the roadbeds, but those with lighter teams hauled gravel.

  Father and I hauled gravel. There was a crew of men, down on the gravel bar in Bear Creek, to do the loading, and another crew did the unloading, so all Father and I had to do was drive team. The bar was on the far side of the creek from the road we were building, and we had to come through the ford with the loaded wagons. Several of the men got stuck coming through the ford, and I was always afraid it would happen to me.

  One day Father and I got loaded at the same time, and he was right behind me when I started through the ford. If there was ever a time I didn’t want to get stuck, it was when Father was right there to see me. Before Billy and Nig had their feet in the water, I started clucking and popped them with the end of the lines. When the line end hit his rump, Billy jumped ahead and nearly threw Nig off balance. I yelled, “Get up, Nig,” and swung the end of the line at him. He was wearing an open bridle and he must have seen it coming, because he lunged into his collar so hard he jerked Billy back against the wagon. Then I guess I lost my head and started snapping the line-end out the way a mad snake does his tongue. The wagon was right in the middle of the ford, where the sand was deepest, when Father called, “Stop!”

  I didn’t have to say “Whoa” to the team. There was something in Father’s voice that they understood as well as I did. He jumped off his wagon, waded right into the creek, and stood beside my front wheel. “If I ever see you abuse a horse again,” he said, “I’ll put you at a hard job and give you the same treatment. Now pass me those lines!”

  What Father said hurt me so bad my throat felt as if I were trying to swallow a baseball, but it didn’t scare me. It was his wading into the icy cold water that scared me. Whenever he got cold and wet at the same time, he always took a bad cold and would cough, sometimes, till there was blood on his handkerchief. I passed him the lines, but I was sure we were stuck so hard it would take another team to get us out. Father drew the reins tight, so both horses were even; then he clucked once, and the team set their shoulders and leaned into the collars.

  It was beautiful to watch. At first the wagon didn’t budge, but it looked as though Father were pushing on those lines instead of pulling, and it almost seemed that I could see his will passing through them to the horses. The muscles bunched out on their thighs until they quivered, and the wagon inched forward. With their feet planted deep in the sand, they kept it moving, moving, until they were stretched out like show horses in a stance. Then their two nigh hoofs moved forward as if they had both been lifted by the same brain. Step by slow step, the wagon moved through the deep sand and up the bank. As soon as we were on level ground Father passed me the lines and waded back to his own team without a word. I always loved him more after he scolded me than I did at any other time.

  While Billy and Nig rested and got their wind, I watched Father come through the ford with Lady and Fanny. He had as heavy a load as I did, and my team was once and a half as big and strong as his. I couldn’t see how he would ever get through the deep sand. At the brink of the far bank, he stopped them for just a minute. Then he drew up the lines, and said, “Hup!” quick and sharp. The light mares went down the bank with a rush, over the bar, through the ford, and up the bank. I watched their feet and they were in perfect time every step of the way. I got tears in my eyes, and when Father stopped his team to rest I wanted to go back and tell him I was sorry and would never abuse a horse again, but he waved for me to drive on.

  I didn’t feel a bit good, and as I came up to the grader Fred Aultland asked me what was the matter. I told him I had got stuck in the creek and Father had to wade in to get me out. Fred knew about Father’s cough as well as I did, and he was boss of the road gang, so when Father drove up, Fred sent him right home to get on some dry clothes. When he had started, Fred yelled after him, “And tell Mame to give you a big slug of brandy.” I don’t know whether she did or not, but Father didn’t get a cold that time.

  That was the best winter we ever had. New Year’s Eve, Mother got out her little red book and figured up all the money we had taken in during 1908. It was only fifty-four dollars and eighty-five cents, but there was never a time when we were hungry, or when we didn’t have railroad ties enough to keep our fire going. Our cellar was full of bins and jars of vegetables and barrels of salt pork. Father had built a little smokehouse where we cured the hams and bacon and pork shoulders with corn cobs. So the bunkhouse rafters were hung with all the smoked meat we could eat till summer. And the floor was piled high with sacks of oats and beans. We even had a half bushel of popcorn.

  It was a cold winter with only a little snow, and we didn’t have much work to do, except to take care of the stock and saw ties for the fire. But the evenings were the best of all. Grace and Muriel and I would do our lessons as soon as we got home from school, so as to have all evening to play. We learned two plays that winter, but Grace and I usually had an argument over which one we’d do. She liked The Merchant of Venice best, beca
use she was Portia; but I liked Julius Caesar best, because I was Julius and got killed at the Capitol. Mother had to take most of the long parts like Cassius, but Father was Mark Antony, and even Hal learned the lines for Metellus Cimber. If we weren’t doing a play, Mother had us make cross-stitch chair covers while she read to us and Father popped corn or mended a harness.

  Some evenings Carl Henry would bring Miss Wheeler over to play whist with Father and Mother. Three or four times, his friend, Doctor Browne, came with them. Those nights Mother let Grace and me sit up till nine o’clock, and Doctor Browne would play casino with us. He liked it better than whist, and we liked him a lot.

  23

  Tornado and Cloudburst

  THE WEATHER was what Fred Aultland called “spotty” during the winter and spring of 1908–9. Where we lived, and through the mountains right west of us—up toward Evergreen in the Bear Creek watershed—there was only a little snow all winter, but just south of there, along the headwaters of the Platte River, the snowfall was heavy. That was why Bear Creek ran low all summer, while the Platte and Turkey Creek ran full.

  In March we had a tornado. It came on a warm Sunday afternoon when Father and I were down by the creek. It looked like a big black balloon with its tail tied to the top of Mount Morrison. Father saw it first, and called, “Tornado!” Then he started running back toward the house. I ran after him as fast as I could go, but his legs were so much longer than mine that he beat me by five rods. That was the first time I noticed how much better he had got during the winter—he didn’t even cough with all that running.

  As he went past the house, he called, “Tornado!” to Mother, and kept right on to the barn. We turned all the stock loose and drove it out through the gate—past our barbed-wire fence. Then we propped poles against the house, tipped over the hayrack and wagons, and ran for the cellar. The first hard blast of wind hit us just as we got to the door, but in five minutes it was all over. When we came out, Father showed me where the twister had veered off to the north and cut a regular road up over Larson’s hill—two miles straight across Bear Creek Valley from our place.