Telegraph Days: A Novel

by Larry McMurtry

  In the afternoon I applied myself to the household books, which looked simple enough to keep. Then I applied myself to the Wild West files, in which there was a high pile of bank drafts written from every place under the sun. I uncovered an invoice for a diamond necklace Bill had bought from a jeweler in Chicago. I doubt this diamond necklace had been destined to fit around Lulu’s sturdy neck. But I had not been hired to preach, and what business was it of mine, anyway? I’m surprised that Lulu Cody hadn’t found that receipt—or maybe she had.

  For all the record of extravagance that followed Bill Cody like a wagon track, he still—if I was reading the figures right—had nearly ninety thousand dollars sitting in that little shack of a bank in North Platte.

  And I held his power of attorney. Despite Mr. Applewhite’s low opinion of me I intended to account for every penny of Bill’s money that I spent. I did conclude that there was no economic reason to skimp on improvements, plenty of which were needed.

  We needed a cat, for example, one with good skills as a mouser—otherwise that aggressive colony of mice in the attic would soon converge on us denizens of the lower floors.

  There was a hole in the buggy seat that you could drop a baby through—it was fortunate that we didn’t have a baby (though, close observer that I am, I thought I observed a suspicious bulge in the vicinity of Gretchen’s belly button).

  There being no men around to stir my susceptibilities, I decided to fling myself into action, get the buggy repaired, reduce the mouse population, and find myself a good saddle horse for my trip to the Dismal River. The Rita Blanca roan had worn out my patience on our trip to Dodge City, so I allowed Cody to sell him for me there.

  Though I was lonely for the first few nights in North Platte, I was not the sort to stay lonely for long. Ripley Eads often stopped by for supper, and Danny Mueller was always there. Gretchen and Sigurd were passionate domino players—most nights the five of us would either click the ivories or play rummy.

  Before a week had passed I had begun to make friends in North Platte, the first and foremost of which proved to be Senior Applewhite. Of course, he had every right to be suspicious of me when I first walked in and snatched the Codys’ power of attorney. It was soon clear that he knew more about Bill Cody’s love life than I did. He knew about the expensive necklace and the actress Bill had given it to. He was correct to be suspicious of me, but it didn’t take much more than a week for me to turn him. I was honest, energetic, decisive, and smart, and Senior Applewhite was not slow to figure that out.

  “Bill Cody makes so many mistakes being his impetuous self that it’s possible to forget that sometimes he gets it right,” Senior said. “And if you don’t mind my saying so, he hit the bull’s-eye when he hired you.”

  “I don’t mind your saying it—a girl needs encouragement now and then,” I admitted.

  Senior and I formed the habit of taking coffee in his bank every day or two, and I invariably came away from our coffees better informed than I had been. Senior explained how stocks and interest and bonds and dividends worked. He was just a small town banker but he knew much that I didn’t know and needed to. But for the fact that my susceptibilities seldom stir for fat bald fellows, I suspect I would have made Senior Applewhite a beau. He had no wife and drank nearly as much as Bill Cody, but I liked him.

  “Nellie, you’re just what this town’s been needing,” he told me, one clear morning. “You’ve got snap, and not many young women have snap.”

  Senior got a little misty-eyed when he said it. I think he really liked me, and I suppose he saw that I wasn’t likely to want him for a beau.

  He was right, but being right just made it worse. I walked home from that coffee feeling a little sad.

  16

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND the cattle business,” I admitted to Danny Mueller, who had kindly consented to accompany me on my inspection tour of Bill Cody’s ranch on the Dismal River—the name, I soon discovered, could not have been more appropriate.

  It was a cold day, gray and sleety; to my untrained eye the absence of landmarks was total. If Danny hadn’t volunteered to go with me I would have got lost and frozen within five miles of where I started out.

  “Is there a cabin up there, or are we expected to sleep out?” I asked, a little apprehensively.

  “Well, there’s a cabin—pretty smelly, I fear,” Danny said. “The cowhands don’t wash very often, specially when it gets wintry.”

  “How many cows are supposed to be up there?” I asked.

  “I think about fifteen hundred. Uncle Billy’s in it with Major North—I think the Major’s working in a circus right now. He helps train the trick riders.”

  As we plodded north, sleet began to freeze on my eyelids. Not only was the icy sleet sticking to me, I was stuck in a situation that didn’t make sense—at least it didn’t to me.

  Every day, back in North Platte, I toted home at least a dozen telegrams for Buffalo Bill Cody, most of them wanting him to come to Chicago or New York or Charleston or Boston, most of them wanting him to be in plays. Even a few weeks in some of those shows would make him thousands of dollars.

  So why was he bothering to run cattle on the Dismal River, in partnership with a retired major who was off somewhere training trick riders?

  “How much can you make, per cow, in this ranching operation?” I asked Dan.

  I believe young Danny, who was as nice a man as you’d ever want to know, was beginning to find my questions just a little tiresome.

  Many men soon reach that stage, once I start asking questions.

  “Not much right now,” Dan admitted. “Uncle Bill says the cattle industry is bad.”

  “Do you think this sleet storm is apt to get worse? What I don’t want to do is ride all day and then arrive in a blizzard so thick that I can’t see the critters I came to inspect.”

  “It’s bound to get worse—maybe we better go home,” Dan suggested.

  “What if your uncle Billy’s there when we get home?” I asked. “Do you think he’d fire me for backing out?”

  “He won’t fire you!” Danny insisted.

  I hesitated, I admit. The weather was decidedly uncomfortable, and it was getting more so. I thought of that big fireplace in the Cody kitchen, so bright and cozy. No doubt Gretchen and Sigurd already had a big fire going. It would be nice to be sitting in that kitchen, having a cup of tea with a spoonful of honey in it.

  I could almost taste the tea, and the honey.

  But I’m a stubborn woman: it would be easy to find a squadron of males who would testify to that. When I set out to go someplace I intend to get there.

  Bill Cody had hired me to run his Nebraska operation, which included looking after his cattle on the Dismal River. I didn’t know one thing about cattle herds, and the main thing I knew about cowboys was that they were quick to develop stiffies if I let them kiss me much.

  Bill Cody had hastily reposed his trust in me. He took one look, decided I was organized, and that was that. In my case, stubbornness probably counted as a big part of what Cody meant when he said organized.

  At the sleety moment I just tapped a little deeper into my stock of stubbornness and put away thoughts of the cozy kitchen, the cup of tea, and the roaring fire.

  “This weather is bound to improve eventually,” I told Danny. “We’re not going back.”

  I think Danny was startled at my decision. Probably he too had been dreaming about the kitchen and the roaring fire.

  “What if it gets worse?” he asked. “What if it turns into a blizzard?”

  “Have you read much about Eskimos?” I asked him.

  “I haven’t read much about anything,” Dan admitted.

  “There’s an unpleasant woman named Ros Jubb who’s likely to show up here someday. She wrote a book called Jubb’s Journey to Igloo Land. She says when Eskimos get caught in a blizzard they build a little house out of blocks of snow and crawl in and stay warm.”

  “But this ain’t a snow blizzard, thi
s is a sleet blizzard,” Dan pointed out.

  I realized I had chosen a bad example, but my decision had been made: we weren’t going back. Fortunately I had a thick woolen scarf and adequate gloves.

  “Think we’ll make that cabin by dark?” I inquired.

  “We’ll make it by dark,” he assured me. “It’ll be a shock to the boys.”

  All afternoon, as we plodded on north with the sleet in our faces, I felt Danny Mueller watching me. He had expected me to do what most young women would have done in our situation: head back to the fire. But I hadn’t, and here we were.

  Fortunately, just as we reached the icy banks of the Dismal River, the weather, instead of getting worse, got better. To the west we could see a thin strip of pale blue sky.

  “I guess we won’t have to build that igloo after all,” I said. And then I asked him about a subject that was frequently on my mind: Gretchen’s belly.

  “Gretchen’s such a pretty girl,” I said. “Think she’s got a fellow?”

  Danny was horrified by my question—he pretended he hadn’t heard me.

  “I’ve heard that Finnish girls are not narrow-minded,” I said. “I’m broad-minded myself, which is probably why I get along so well with Gretchen.”

  Danny looked miserable.

  “Nobody’s supposed to know,” he mumbled finally.

  “Maybe not, but from the look of things everybody will know, soon enough.”

  Danny kept looking straight ahead.

  “It’s not yours, is it?” I persisted.

  Danny jumped so at the mere suggestion of such impropriety that his hat fell off.

  “It’s not mine,” he managed.

  “Good,” I said.

  17

  “HOW MANY YEARS since you gentlemen have washed?” I asked, in an attempt to break the ice once I’d been introduced to the three unfortunate cowboys who had been left in charge of the Dismal River herd.

  Their names were Ned, Lanky Jake, and Sam. The first two were stringbeans and silent as stumps, but Sam welcomed the opportunity to complain.

  “Why would we wash, abandoned as we are?” he asked.

  “Nonsense, you’re not abandoned,” I said. “Mr. Cody sent me all the way up here to see that things are in good order.”

  That was a bald lie. It was the welfare of the cattle that interested Cody. The notion that he should worry about three cowboys was the kind of notion that was foreign to his mind.

  “We ain’t seen Bill Cody since the day he left us with these stinking cattle,” Sam complained. “And why would he send a dern girl all the way up here to chouse us?”

  “Nobody’s chousing you,” I told him. “I’m in charge of all Mr. Cody’s operations in Nebraska. If you’ve been doing your jobs correctly you have nothing to fear.”

  Then Ned decided to contribute two cents’ worth of complaint.

  “The dern wolves are eating most of the calves,” he told me.

  “Sometimes they eat the cow too, if she don’t hop up and act lively,” Sam said.

  Meanwhile I was surveying the grimy cabin—in my estimation it was little more than a lice plantation.

  “A bear et one of them little yearling bulls,” Lanky Jake put in.

  Danny Mueller, warming his hands at the fireplace, began to look unhappy.

  Finding the cabin had been his triumph, but the news from the north was not good.

  “There’s too dern many varmints up here,” Ned said. “A wolverine et one of my boots.”

  “Good Lord,” I said. “You men are undergoing hazardous duty. I’ll be sure to inform Mr. Cody about the excess of varmints.”

  For supper I had a hard-boiled goose egg, packed by Sigurd, and three biscuits that were a challenge to the teeth. I had already made a decision not to spend the night in the lice plantation.

  “I believe I’ll bunk outside, if I could be provided with a good roaring fire,” I told them. “If you can build one that will keep me from freezing I’ll tell Bill Cody you’re princes of the prairie.”

  “No, just tell him we need a good sharp raise,” Sam announced.

  “I’ll table that suggestion until I see the condition of the livestock,” I told him. “I’m the company treasurer at the moment and I try to train a fine eye on expenses.”

  Nothing will tongue-tie a man quicker than a well-spoken woman. Ned, Lanky Jake, and Sam stared at me as if I were a different order of being.

  “Where in tarnation did you learn to talk?”

  “Virginia,” I told them. “How about that roaring fire?”

  18

  I SLEPT, OR at least dozed, in the space between the roaring fire and the back wall of the cabin. Dan Mueller slept inside and got so deep into the lice beds that he practically had to be scalped, once I got him home.

  Not long after daybreak we were in the saddle. The prairies had a light dusting of snow.

  “According to the books, Colonel Cody and Major North branded fifteen hundred head of cattle in this herd,” I mentioned. “How many can you account for at the moment?”

  The three cowpunchers, all of whom I had rather come to like, gave the question earnest consideration.

  “No idea,” Sam admitted. “A count would not be easy to come by, as you’ll see.”

  I did see. The first critters we saw were a small herd of deer—the critters chose to stand and look at us.

  Then we saw an idle group of antelope, who scarcely gave us a glance.

  But when we came over a ridge and surprised a herd of about forty cattle, they farted, threw their tails in the air, and went racing away. Pretty soon they were over the next ridge and gone.

  “A person who didn’t know better, such as myself, might get the impression that the game up here is tamer than cattle. Is that the way it’s supposed to work on a well-run ranch?”

  “There’s just the three of us,” Lanky Jake pointed out.

  “Do hunters ever show up, after all this game?” I asked.

  “Oh plenty of dudes come hunting,” Sam said.

  “Well, if the dudes want sport, why don’t they hunt the cattle, since they’re a lot wilder than the game?”

  This sensible suggestion shocked the three cowboys and Danny Mueller as well.

  “They’re not supposed to hunt cattle,” Danny informed me.

  Before I could push my inquiry further we came trotting over a ridge and saw a sight that lodged in my mind’s eye so firmly that I never forgot it. A large red cow was sprawled on her side, attempting to calve. She had only got the calf partway out when a pack of wolves attacked, snarling and ripping at the poor half-born calf, splattering blood on the thin snow. The cow was bawling hoarsely, but she had no chance and neither did the calf, who was being eaten just as it emerged into life.

  A little further on, beyond the cow, there were a number of coyotes, waiting to help themselves to whatever the wolves left.

  As I watched, horrified, the half-eaten calf plopped out and several of the wolves began to eat the cow, who had yet to drop her afterbirth.

  I had seen the deaths of several members of my family, but those had been peaceful deaths. The spectacle in front of me was not peaceful—it was terrible.

  “Shoot ’em!” I said. “Shoot them!”

  The men looked at me strangely.

  “No point in shooting them,” Danny told me. “The calf’s dead and the mother cow’s dying. It would just be a waste of bullets.”

  I was too shocked to accept this passive wisdom. Sam had a Winchester in his saddle scabbard. I jerked it out and charged the wolves, firing as fast as I could lever the gun. I am no markswoman. I didn’t hit a single wolf, but I did scatter them, though only for a bit. Then I put the cow out of her misery by shooting her in the forehead at point-blank range. Her hoarse bawling was a sound I will never forget.

  Before I even handed the rifle back, the wolves had covered the calf again.

  “I’ll replace those shells at my expense,” I told Sam. “You will not be out a
cent.”

  The men looked at me as if I had gone crazy and they were not far wrong.

  “What do you want to do now—I fear it may snow,” Ned asked me.

  “I want to inspect the cattle—that’s my job,” I reminded them. “If it snows we’ll build an igloo.”

  The cowpunchers did their best. They got me fairly close to several bunches of cattle, all of which, at least, were healthy enough to run. The snow fell off and on—no igloo was required and it didn’t affect our strange inspection. I could not get the bovine Madonna off my mind, or the calf who passed from the womb of his mother to the bellies of wolves without even drawing breath.

  Once back at the cabin, Lanky Jake prepared a substantial supper of spuds and beans. Again I slept out rather than risk the close company of lice. That night I dreamed of blood red snow, a dream that was to recur now and then for the rest of my life.

  The cowboys were so lonesome for fresh company that they teared up when we left.

  I doubt I spoke five words on the trip back to North Platte—and don’t ask me what the five words were. It’s all a blank in my mind.

  19

  I WAS JUST coming into the hall at the big house in North Platte, stamping snow off my feet so as not to track it in, when I happened to glance down the hall into the big sitting room and glimpsed about the last thing I would have expected to see in North Platte, Nebraska: a young woman practicing ballet! She was a beauty too, black-headed and so pretty in the face and figure that I was in danger of being jealous of her before I even met her. And limber, my Lord! While we watched—Danny had come in too—she stuck one leg straight up, higher than her head. Then she turned and saw us, which produced an immediate blush.

  “Don’t spy, come in, it’s your house,” she said, making us a little bow.

  “I am Giuseppina,” she said, with an accent no different from what an Italian might have.

  I heard a chuckle and a tall, lanky fellow in buckskins who came within a hair of being as handsome as Bill Cody ambled up and put an arm around his petite wife.

  “Texas Jack Omhundro,” he said, shaking both our hands. “And this little wildcat is the peerless Morlacchi.”