Dry Divide

by Ralph Moody

  Books by Ralph Moody

  Available in Bison Books editions

  American Horses

  Come on Seabiscuit!

  The Dry Divide

  The Fields of Home

  The Home Ranch

  Horse of a Different Color

  Kit Carson and the Wild Frontier

  Little Britches

  Man of the Family

  Mary Emma & Company

  Riders of the Pony Express

  Shaking the Nickel Bush

  Stagecoach West

  Wells Fargo

  The Dry Divide

  By RALPH MOODY

  Illustrated by Tran Mawicke

  University of Nebraska Press

  Lincoln and London

  Copyright © 1963 by Ralph Moody

  Renewal copyright 1991 by Edna Moody Morales

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Moody, Ralph, 1898–

  The dry divide / by Ralph Moody; illustrated by Tran Mawicke.

  p. cm.

  “Bison book editions.”

  ISBN 978-0-8032-8216-2

  I. Title.

  PS3563.05535D78 1994

  813'.54—dc20

  94-14522 CIP

  Reprinted by arrangement with Edna Moody Morales and Jean S. Moody.

  The University of Nebraska Press is grateful to the Lincoln City Libraries for assistance in the reprinting of this book.

  TO

  DOC

  Contents

  1. Ragtag Crew

  2. Blacksnake

  3. Judy’s Story

  4. Under the Lash

  5. Banker Bones

  6. Completamente Aplastada

  7. On My Own

  8. Wheat Harvest

  9. New Fields to Reap

  10. Bamboozling Bones

  11. Haggling and Horses

  12. Tricky Business

  13. Wagon Wheels

  14. Yimminy! Dat Is Fun!

  15. On Our Way to Heligoland

  16. Home on the Dry Divide

  17. Ragtag No More

  1

  Ragtag Crew

  MY luck had always run in ups and downs, sort of like riding a seesaw. But on the Fourth of July, 1919, I hit bottom as if the rider on the other end of the board had suddenly jumped off.

  At midnight on the third I was in St. Joseph, Missouri, down to my last dime, and had only one hope left. If I could get to the Fourth of July roundup in Littleton, Colorado I’d find plenty of old friends there, and could easily get a job as a cowhand. Back in 1910, at the time my father died, I’d been a kid trick-rider in that roundup. But there was only one way I could get to Littleton, and that was by hopping the night mail train for Denver. I hopped it just as it pulled out of the depot, flipping onto the blind end of the baggage car right behind the engine, but my luck seemed to have run out, clear down to the last drop. The fireman spied me when I came aboard, and he was at least twice my size. It seemed prudent to accept his suggestion that I shovel coal into the engine for the rest of the night. I did, and was kicked off at McCook, Nebraska the next morning.

  Weighing barely a hundred pounds, and having incipient diabetes, I hadn’t been in the very best of shape for shoveling coal all night, and my high-heeled boots hadn’t been much help to me. My back felt as though it were broken, I was so hungry I was trembling, and my hands and feet were raw with blisters. Besides, any chance of getting to the roundup was gone, and if I didn’t find some kind of job in a hurry I was going to be in a bad way.

  Although it was early forenoon, the sun was scorching hot, and behind the depot there was a little green lawn, with a stunted cottonwood tree at the center. It looked as good to me as an oasis must look to a man lost in a desert. I hobbled over to it, lay down in the shade of the tree, and must have gone to sleep within two seconds. When I woke up the sun was almost straight overhead, the shade had moved away from me, and my back, legs, and arms were nearly as stiff as though they’d been set in plaster casts. I crawled over to the tree, leaned my aching back against the trunk, and tried to think what I should do next, but I could think only of how hungry I was.

  At first I was determined that I wouldn’t spend my dime, for a man is never broke while he has a dime left in his pocket, but it’s hard to stay determined when you’re as hungry as I was. After a few minutes I fished out my dime, tossed it high, and told myself that if it came down heads-up I’d go and get coffee and doughnuts; if it came down tails-up I’d remain a capitalist. It came down tails-up, but I was still awfully hungry, so I told myself I’d make it two out of three, and tossed it up again. And again it came down tails-up. There was no sense in tempting fate any further, so I compromised. I decided to skip the coffee, but have two doughnuts and water. That would still leave me a nickel to hold me over until I could find some sort of job.

  When I went into the little hole-in-the-wall restaurant across from the depot, two railroad men were sitting at the counter, having coffee and doughnuts, and talking to the fat counter man about the wheat ripening early that year. I went a few stools farther on, sat down, and ordered doughnuts and a glass of water. Instead of bringing them to me, the counter man put two doughnuts on a plate, and skidded it toward me. Then he filled a glass with water, skidded it my way, and asked in a squeaky voice, “Pitcher?”

  I thought he was asking if I wanted a pitcher of water, so just shook my head, then paid no further attention until I’d finished my doughnuts, and heard one of the railroaders say, “I hear the wheat’s a’ready ripe on some of them high Kansas divides. Any of them big growers been in for harvest hands yet?”

  “A few,” the counter man told him, “but they don’t come way over here less’n they’re looking for topnotch pitchers and stackers, or less’n their reputation’s so bad they can’t hire no help close to home. There’s one or two of ’em . . .”

  That’s as far as he got. Right at that moment the screen door opened, and for a couple of seconds I thought it must be William Jennings Bryan who was coming in. The man’s bushy hair duck-tailed up under the wide brim of his hat in the same way, and he was dressed as I would have expected Bryan to be: a frock coat, striped trousers, a stand-up collar, and a flowing bow tie. He had no more than pulled the door open before he spoke, and his voice filled the little room so full that the walls seemed to vibrate.

  “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” he orated. “May I present myself: Doctor J. Holloway Merriweather, benefactor of mankind and dispenser of the elixir of longevity. Gentlemen, I have a purpose! Show me a man without a purpose, and I will show you a man without . . .”

  I hadn’t heard a medicine-man spiel since I was a youngster, and was fascinated by it, but the fat counter man wasn’t. “If you come in here for a handout, Doc,” he squeaked, “you come to the wrong place. Beat it!”

  Instead of getting out, Dr. J. Holloway advanced with all the dignity of a Southern gentleman whose honor has been attacked. He rapped his knuckles against the counter, and intoned, “My dear fellow man, I ask no largess. I assure you that any comfort and sustenance accorded me shall be repaid tenfo. . . .”

  He was interrupted by a big, rawboned man who stepped into the doorway and shouted, “Any harvest hands been in, Pete?”

  “There ain’t today, Myron,” the counter man called back, “it being the Fourth o’ July and all, but I’ll keep an eye peeled for you. What you paying?”

  “Five for drivers, seven for pitchers, and I’d go as high as eight or nine for a topnotch stacker,” the man told him.

  I didn’t know anything about stacking wheat, but I’d pitched plenty of hay, and wanted a job so bad I didn’t dare let the man ask if I’d had any experience. I thought it would be best to put on a bold fr
ont, so I called out, “I’ll take that stacking job, but not for less than nine dollars a day.”

  Before the man could say whether or not he’d take me, Dr. J. Holloway Merriweather’s voice boomed out, “My good man, albeit below the dignity of my profession, I offer my services as driver of one of your . . . ah . . . conveyances, at the paltry stipend of five dollars per diem.”

  The farmer looked at Dr. J. Holloway as blankly as if he’d been speaking a foreign language, but one of the railroaders helped him out. “What Doc means is that he’s dead broke and stranded. Last night he come aboard the Denver mail train at St. Joe, making out to be a postal inspector, but Bill Hawley smelt a mouse—and his breath—’fore they was ten minutes out of the depot. They kicked him off here this morning. What he wants is a job driving header barge, and he’ll take anything you pay him.”

  “No, no, my good man,” J. Holloway interrupted, “not less than five dollars per diem.”

  No one paid any attention to Doc, but one of the railroaders told the farmer, “The good harvest hands ain’t started coming in yet, not this far north, but a few green horns come in on the last freight. They was still hangin’ around the yards when we come over for coffee. You might find a couple amongst ’em that wouldn’t be too bad.”

  The farmer didn’t answer, but looked back at me, and ordered, “Wait here, stacker!”

  He’d barely gone before the railroaders got up and started out. Halfway to the door, one of them turned back and asked, “Wasn’t that Hudson, from over on the high divide?”

  “That’s him,” the counter man answered, and there was an inflection in his voice that said a lot more than the words.

  Windy as Doc was, and fraud that I knew him to be, I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for him. Even if he hadn’t shoveled coal all night, I knew he must be about as hungry as I’d been, and I didn’t think he had a chance of either finding a job or mooching anything to eat. Besides, there was no need of my holding onto my last nickel any longer. Farmer women always set a good table, particularly at harvest time, and even if I fell down on the stacking job and got fired after the first day, I’d get at least enough pay to see me through to Colorado. As soon as the screen door had banged shut, I called to the counter man, “Two more doughnuts, please.”

  I intended to invite Doc back to have one of them, but there was no need of it. As the plate came skidding down the counter, he followed it like a bloodhound on a fresh scent. He sat down on the next stool to mine, leaned toward me with his eyes fixed on the doughnuts, and whispered confidentially, “I trust you will pardon this intrusion, my dear friend, but I find myself emboldened by the ravages of starvation. Due to adversities quite beyond . . .”

  “Never mind the adversities, but have a doughnut,” I told him. “I just had two, and they’ll last me till I get to the supper table.”

  Doc wolfed down the doughnuts ravenously, and during the hour till Hudson came back, he told me in flowing oratory the cause of his adversities—leaving out the fact that he’d been on a colossal bender. Since early spring he’d been working southward along the Missouri River with his own medicine show. He claimed to have had a fine pair of horses, a specially built show wagon, a couple of trained poodles, and a dancing girl. But at St. Joseph fortune had turned against him. He was taken with a seizure, and the dancing girl made off with the poodles while he was, “desperately ill, hovering on the brink of death.”

  Then, in his “delirium” he had made the unfortunate mistake of pasting Elixir of Longevity labels on a gross of bottles filled with his Wonderworker horse liniment. The sale had been tremendous, but some of his customers had been in such a hurry to prolong their lives that they’d sampled their purchases before he could get out of town. They’d run to the police, some of them even claiming their gizzards had been singed, and a heartless minion of the law had stripped him of all his worldly possessions in settlement of their fallacious claims. He was on his way back to Montana, where judges were more tolerant of mistakes, and the populace less tender in the gullet.

  I was having so much fun listening to Doc’s eloquence that I forgot about Hudson until the counter man squeaked, “How’d you make out, Myron? Scare up enough hands to start harvesting tomorrow?”

  “If you’d call ’em hands!” Hudson told him angrily. “Worthless a bunch of bums as ever I seen!” Then he looked back at Doc and me, and shouted, “Come on, you! I ain’t got all day to waste!”

  If I hadn’t been dead broke I’d have told him to go fly his kite, but I didn’t. Instead, I said to Doc, “Let’s go. We can stick it out for one day, and that will give us enough to get to Denver on.”

  When Doc and I followed Hudson out to the street I couldn’t help agreeing that his crew looked a bit worthless. And I knew what he didn’t: that with the possible exception of Doc, I was probably the most worthless one in the bunch. They were gathered around a topless, dilapidated old Maxwell touring car, and looked more like the side-show people from a carnival than a harvest crew.

  One of them was a dried-up little man, barely over five feet tall, who couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, or been less than sixty years old. Beside him were two hulking great men, more than double his weight, and well over a foot taller. There was no doubting that they were Swedes and brothers, both in their middle forties, and carrying bedrolls half as big as themselves. Standing to one side, their faces as eager as if they were starting off on a holiday, were two boys about my age, and I didn’t need to see the D.U. pennants stuck to their suitcases to know they were college boys. Both were wearing brand new straw hats, and their trench boots and khaki coveralls couldn’t have been out of an army surplus store for more than two days. To complete the motley collection, there was a Mexican boy, not over seventeen or eighteen, and a chunky little Irishman, with a pug nose and a twinkle in his eye.

  For the past week the newspapers had been filled with news of the Versailles Treaty and the forming of the League of Nations, and the Irishman must have been reading them. He looked around as Doc and I followed Hudson out of the restaurant, then turned to the college boys and sang out, “Jaikus Jack, lads! ’Tis the League o’ Nations we’ve j’ined. Look what’s comin’ now!”

  Hudson was in no mood for joking. He yanked the crank up to start the engine, jackknifed in behind the steering wheel, and ordered, “You big ones get in! The rest of you’ll ride the running boards, and you’ll walk the hills.”

  Doc needed no ordering. He was already clambering into the front seat, with the air of a condescending senator who knows himself entitled to the place of honor. The springs of the old Maxwell groaned as the two big Swedes settled on the back seat. By the time the bedrolls, suitcases, and odd dunnage had been piled around their knees, the back end was filled level with the door tops, but Hudson looked around at the little man and snapped, “Get in with the Swedes!”

  Little as the old fellow was, he’d have been smothered if he’d tried to wedge himself in between those two behemoths, so he perched on top of the dunnage, looking like a monkey in a circus parade. Hudson raced the engine, nearly stripped the gears out of the old jalopy, and we creaked away—the two college boys clinging gleefully to one side; the Mexican boy, the Irishman, and I, apprehensively to the other.

  As soon as we’d pulled out of town, Doc tried to start a conversation with Hudson, but he never got even a grunt in reply. The Irishman chattered like a magpie; asking our names, where we were from, and anything else he could think of—all in a brogue so thick I could hardly understand him. Only Edgar and Everett, the college boys, seemed willing to put out any information. For the past seven months my partner had called me Buddy, and I’d become used to the name, so I simply said I was Bud. And to my surprise, Dr. J. Holloway Merriweather said, “Just call me Doc.”

  The two big Swedes looked straight ahead, with no expression on their faces, and the only sign they gave of having heard the Irishman’s questions was when one said, “Gus,” and the other, “Lars.”

/>   The little man gave his name as Bill Weaver, and the Mexican boy looked confused and a bit frightened. I guessed that he might not know a word of English, so asked, “Como se llama?”

  His face brightened as if he’d just found an old friend from home. He flashed a smile up at me and said, “Paco,” then added, almost questioningly, “amigo mio.”

  I’d picked up a little Spanish when I was a kid working on the ranches, and when I heard that bit of question in Paco’s voice, “Para siempre,” (always) came out as easily as if I’d been speaking the language every day. From then on Paco was my boy, and though he left me way behind if he got excited and talked too fast, we had no trouble in understanding each other.

  Every time the Irishman saw something that caught his attention he’d shout, “Jaikus Jack!” so that’s what we called him—either that or Jaikus. Hudson stood his babbling for maybe three or four minutes, then half turned his head and bellowed, “Shut up!” I couldn’t blame him much, but I thought I knew why he’d had to come to McCook for a harvest crew, and had taken anything he could get.

  For the first mile our road lay southward across the Republican River valley, between fields of shoulder-high corn. Then it wound like a tortured snake up a steep, rough gulch to the top of a high divide. As soon as Hudson shifted into second gear, those of us on the running boards dropped off. Jaikus, Paco, and I started plodding up the roadway behind the roaring, rattling jalopy, but the college boys capered away like a pair of colts let out to pasture, evidently set on beating the Maxwell to the opposite side of the switchback. They’d taken no more than half a dozen bounds before Hudson yelled, “Get back, you fools! There’s rattlers in them gulches!”

  The boys scrambled wildly back to the roadway, then it dawned on Everett that they’d been insulted, and he shouted, “Stop! We’re quitting and want our suitcases. Stop! Stop, I tell . . .”

  Hudson paid no attention, but Edgar grabbed Everett’s arm, and shushed him. If he’d yelled it out, he couldn’t have told us any more clearly that they were dead broke, and had spent their last dimes for their outfits.