Father and I Were Ranchers

by Ralph Moody

  I didn't say a word about it, and he didn't either, until we were out milking that Sunday night. Then I heard the milk stop singing in his bucket, and he passed the paper to me down under Brindle's belly. All he said was, "You'd better ride on over to Cooper's tonight. Hi may want to get an early start in the morning."

  Always, when I went back to Cooper's on Sunday nights, I'd put Sky High in the big corral, and go right on in to bed. There was always a poker game going on in the bunkhouse, and Father didn't like me to hang around out there.

  It was just after dark when I got back that night, and there was only a dim light in the bunkhouse. After I'd hung up my saddle and started for the house, Hi called to me from the bunkhouse door, "Come on over here, Little Britches. Bill Engle left a box here for you." Bill Engle was the express driver to Morrison, but I couldn't imagine why he'd have a box for me.

  When I got over there, there wasn't any poker game, and all three lanterns were turned down low. I thought Hi was all alone, but when I went through the door, fellows poured out of every bunk, and started yelling, "Surprise, surprise!" Hi grabbed me up in his arms, and Mr. Cooper turned up the lanterns.

  There was a big package sitting in the middle of Hi's bunk. It had SEARS ROEBUCK in big printing across one corner, and the lettering on the tag was so big I could see it before Hi got me halfway over there. It said, "Little Britches, c/o Y-B Ranch, Littleton, Colorado."

  My hands were shaking so I couldn't untie the strings, and Hi had to cut them with his knife. There was everything in that box that I ever hoped to have. And it was all just my size. There were a pair of mountain goat chaps with long white hair; a ten-gallon, light tan hat; Spanish high-heeled boots with pointed toes; and a peach-colored silk shirt, with a bright red neck scarf. I didn't find the silver spurs till Hi told me to look in the box again. It must have been ten o'clock before the fellows got done making me try my things on, and let me go to bed—and then I couldn't go to sleep for a long time.

  Hi took me to Littleton early Labor Day morning, and I wore all my new cowboy clothes. He wanted Sky High to get used to town noises and hearing the band play, so he wouldn't be nervous when it came our turn to ride. Sky spooked and crow-hopped a little the first time we rode up Main Street, and it took him quite a while to get used to the band—they hadn't had one the Fourth of July.

  By eleven o'clock he had quieted down, so we put both roans in the livery stable while we went up to the hotel and had dinner. Hi had fixed it up with Father to meet us there, and when we came out after eating, our spring wagon was standing right in front of the hotel steps. Mother and all the youngsters were there, and I don't know when I was any more glad to see them all. I had hoped Father would come to see me ride, but I hadn't ever thought he'd bring the whole family clear down there. I knew Mother would have a fit if she ever knew what kind of stunts we were going to do, and I wasn't a bit sure Father would like it either. Of course, if he'd asked me, I'd have told him, but he didn't ask.

  Each rider or team in the trick-riding contest had to draw a number out of a hat to see when they would get their turn. We drew the highest number so we had to be last. There were some real good tricks—a lot better than the Fourth of July. The nearer it came to our turn, the more nervous I got, and I think I would have chewed all my fingernails off if Hi hadn't been standing right there beside me. I was sure we couldn't win one of the prizes with all those fancy trick riders, and once or twice I almost wished that something would happen so we wouldn't have to ride at all.

  Every nerve in me was singing like a telegraph line on a cold night, when the man with the megaphone hollered, "Hi Beckman and Little Britches on Sky Blue and Sky High, representing the Y-B spread." Then we rode out onto the race track.

  Hi couldn't help seeing how nervous I was, and the first two or three tricks we did were the easy ones we had shown Father and Mother at home. I don't know when I got over being nervous, but after the easy tricks were finished, I forgot all about the grandstand being there. Trick riding doesn't take nearly as smart a fellow as most people think, but it does take smart horses—and we had them. Sky High and Sky Blue didn't make a misstep anywhere, and everything went as if we had been practicing for years. We saved the dive trick for the end, and when we raced up toward the center of the grandstand, dived, and bowed, it sounded as if all the Indians in the world were practicing war whoops together. I was lucky. I came clear over onto my feet—and my hat stayed on all the way. I swept it off, the way Hi did, when I bowed.

  Father must have thought I was going to get hurt, because he had come down from the grandstand, and when I looked around I saw him standing by the track gate. I guess I forgot where I was, and about Hi and Sky High and Sky Blue, because I dropped my reins and went running down to him. I think I expected him to scoop me up in his arms the way he used to when I was only six or seven years old, but he didn't. He just stuck out his hand and shook mine. Then he said, "Better get your horse, partner; I think the judges are going to call you," but his voice had that silver bell sound in it.

  I was nearly back to where Hi was bringing the horses, when the man with the megaphone hollered, "First place in the trick-riding contest: Hi Beckman and Little Britches, of the Y-B spread! Hi, bring Little Britches on over here to the judges' stand."

  Most of the men in both Arapahoe and Jefferson counties must have come over to the judges' stand while they were giving Hi and me our gold watches, and I shook so many hands that my arm ached. Mother was still wiping her eyes when Father and I went up into the grandstand to show her my watch. I guess it would have been better if I had told her a little more about our new tricks before we did them. Grace said Mother thought I was going to get killed every minute, and was scared nearly out of her wits.

  I let all the other youngsters, even Hal, hold my gold watch and listen to it tick. And after the bucking contest was over— and Hi had won another watch—we all went up to the drug store, and Father bought everybody an ice-cream soda. It was the first one I had ever had, and I liked it even better than birch beer or sarsaparilla. Grace and the other youngsters liked theirs, too, and so did Father, but I think Hi would rather have had whiskey.

  29

  We Face It

  THINGS didn't change much at Cooper's during the rest of September, but they hadn't been going so well over to our place. Father wouldn't talk much about the court trial, except to say that it would probably be long-drawn-out. But Fred Aultland told me more about it one night when he was over to see Mr. Cooper. He said Father had rigged some sort of a recording gauge at the headgate of our ditch, so they were going to be able to prove in court how much water had been stolen by the water hogs. He said our neighbors were lucky we had moved there, because if it weren't for Father's agreement and gauge, they would never be able to win damages in court for the crops they had lost. He told Mr. Cooper that Father was going to show his gauge readings in court the next day, and that the water hogs were going to be the most surprised men in the world.

  I left Cooper's as early as I could the next Saturday night and got home just before sunset. Father and I put Sky High in the corral and fed him. Then we stood out there by the corral gate quite a while and watched him eat. I don't know just how long we were out there, but it must have been ten or fifteen minutes. We didn't talk. We just stood there leaning on the gate and watching Sky eat. Father was different from most people; you didn't have to talk much to visit with him.

  After a while, I told him what Fred had said about our neighbors being lucky we had moved there, and asked him to tell me about his recording gauge at the ditch-head. He said it was nothing but an old coal-oil can he had rigged so that the flow of ditch-water past a paddle wheel would make it turn clear around in a week. Then he had rigged a float with a pencil fixed to an arm. As the water rose or fell, the pencil moved up or down on the paper he had wrapped around the can. He said he had shown the readings in court, the jury had been up there to test it, and had found it to be accurate, so he thought our case wo
uld turn out all right.

  Mother came to the back door and called us to supper just as he finished telling me about the gauge, so we started to go and get washed up. The washpan and a bucket of water were on the back porch. I had dipped up a pan of water, and was just ready to reach for the soap, when we heard what sounded like a couple of gunshots down the road. It wasn't, though. It was a horseless carriage—the first one that had ever come up the wagon road since we had lived there.

  We called Mother and the youngsters out on the porch to watch it come. It was a two-seater, black, with a round hood over the engine. After it crossed the bridge at the gulch, it banged a couple of more times as it chugged up the road toward our house. There were two men in the front seat and two more in the back. When it was almost up to the front of the house, I saw one of the men in the back seat lean over, grab up a gun, and swing it toward us.

  Father leaped like a horse going into a low buck, and knocked everybody over but me. I guess I just got bewildered and stood there. Not more than a tenth of a second before the first bullet ripped a hole in our bunkhouse, Father grabbed my arm and yanked me down. There were two more shots. The second one couldn't have missed his head an inch.

  The carriage didn't stop, but kept right on up the road. Mother fell back inside the kitchen when Father hit her, and all the youngsters except Grace and me were crying, but Father didn't pay any attention to us. He jumped over Mother as she was getting up, and it seemed less than two seconds before I heard him firing from the front of the house. By the time I got around there, there was nothing but a cloud of dust a quarter of a mile up the wagon road, and Father was standing with Hi's empty six gun in his hand.

  He reloaded it as he ran to the corral for Lady. I saw he was going after them, so I ran to the front gate. Lady streaked through before I had it more than half open, and I never saw such a look as was on Father's face.

  It was getting to be deep twilight, but it was still light enough so I could see the dust cloud turn south along the road between our place and Fred Aultland's. It seemed ages before I saw the other puff of dust that Lady's feet made when she turned the corner.

  Father didn't come back for an hour. Mother wouldn't let me take Sky High and go after him, but she was as worried as I was. She hadn't even cried when Father knocked her over, but before he got back she had bitten her underlip till it was bleeding. She let me stay in the house with her, but she didn't light a lamp, and made all the other youngsters go down into the storm cellar.

  When Father did get home, he had Fred Aultland and Jerry Alder with him. They didn't come from the west, though, but from the east, and they were wearing their six guns. Father said the automobile had gone clear around our section, and headed north on the West Denver road. He said it went so fast that he doubted if a man on horseback could have kept up with it for a hundred yards and that it was probably hidden away already in some barn in Denver. He told mother that Carl Henry had ridden to Fort Logan for the sheriff, and then he asked her to get his camera out of the trunk.

  He had Fred and Jerry take gunpowder out of a dozen or so cartridges while he was cleaning the camera and putting the plate in it. I wanted to go out to the wagon road with them while they took a flashlight picture of the wheel tracks, but Father told me I'd better stay in the house with Mother because her nerves were all jangled up.

  The sheriff came and looked at the wheel tracks and at the holes in our bunkhouse. He knew me right away, and asked if I had got any more pheasants.

  We sat down to supper while everybody was there, but the sheriff was the only one who ate much of anything. He said he would come back the next morning and get the camera plate after Father had developed it, but that all automobile tires looked alike so he didn't think there would be a Chinaman's chance of ever tracing it down. Father had already said he had never seen any of the men in the horseless carriage before, but Fred kept asking him if he was sure one of them wasn't this or that rancher from up near the head of our ditch. Of course, everybody was pretty sure that the shooting was because Father had proof in court about the water stealing, but the sheriff said there was nothing we could do unless we could prove it, and we never could.

  Haying was over at Cooper's in early September and, until school started at the end of the month, I worked at the mountain ranch with Hi. It was fall branding time, and Hi was too busy to spend much time with me.

  I was homesick. Of course, I knew that if somebody was going to shoot at Father again, my being there wouldn't stop him. But I got it in my head so much that I couldn't think about anything else. And two or three times Hi had to scold me a little because I forgot to take water to the fellows up in the canyons.

  I had been so busy thinking about riding in the Labor Day roundup that I didn't notice things around our place the way I should have. It wasn't until I came home that middle Saturday night in September that I noticed that Billy was gone. I might not have even noticed it then if it hadn't been for milking. Lots of fellows don't like to milk, but I always did. It seemed as if milking was the time when Father and I were kind of away by ourselves, and as if he belonged just to me. He always saved milking on Saturday nights till I got home.

  Right after supper that night, Father picked up the big bucket —the one he always used for the Holstein—and lit the lantern. When I started to pick up Brindle's bucket, he said, "Grace is curious to know how you tell which calves on the open range should be branded with the Y-B mark. Suppose you tell her while I do the milking; I'll only be a jiffy." Then he put the lantern over his arm and went out.

  I knew right then that there was something wrong. So I told Mother I'd have to water Sky High before I left him for the night. It was a story, though, and I never did it. I went right out to the barn where Father was milking. Brindle wasn't there.

  Father heard me come in the door. And I guess he knew what I was thinking, as he always did. He had his head against Holstein's side, and he didn't look up, but he said, "Old Holstein's holding up so well this fall that it would be a waste of fodder for us to keep two cows, so I let Mr. Cash have Brindle."

  It was then I noticed I was standing right in Billy's stall, and it was dry and clean. I don't believe I even thought, before I said, "Did he take Billy, too?"

  Father didn't say anything till he got done stripping Holstein, but the bunches of muscle were working out and in on the side of his jaw. Then he set the bucket over, and turned around on the milking stool so he was looking right at me. "Partner," he said, "we might as well look it right in the face. We're not going to make it here. We haven't enough feed to see two head of stock through the winter, and I haven't had but five days' outside work all summer. The court has only given us damages for ten acres of crops, and that's all we're entitled to, because we have rights to only ten inches of water. It won't amount to much more than you've earned with Mr. Cooper."

  I wanted to say something, but I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just stood there. In a minute Father hung the stool up on the peg, and rumpled up my hair. "Don't worry about it, son. And let's not worry Mother. There's always a living in this world for the fellow who's willing to work for it, and I guess we're willing, aren't we? Let's go in and pop some corn."

  Fred Aultland brought me home from Cooper's the last Saturday before school started. He was there at the home place when I came in from the mountain ranch, and waited for me to change my clothes and get my things together.

  Fred and Mr. Cooper were talking out by the cook shack while I was getting my things packed. It was hot and the window was open, and Fred was talking so loud I couldn't help hearing him. "Damn bull-headed Yankee," he was saying. "God and everybody knows we'd never got a dime for our crops if he hadn't rigged that water gauge at the ditch head. And there he stands with a hundred and twenty dollars in his hand for a year's work, and too God damn proud to take a bale of hay from a neighbor. What the hell you goin' to do with a man like that?" I knew he was talking about Father, and I knew Father wouldn't like it, so I grabbe
d up my suitcase and went out, without even saying good-by to Mrs. Cooper.

  Father didn't get home that Saturday night till after I did. He was helping a man build a house over west of Denver. From then till Christmas he just came home Saturday nights, and left before daylight Monday mornings. He did stay home a few days in the middle of December, though. Hal got pneumonia on my eleventh birthday, and until Dr. Stone said he would get all right again, Father didn't go back to work.

  I never did know who bought Nig or Lady's two-year-old colt, or the wagons and harness. Grace told me who had bought some of our things, but all she knew about the others was that Father had taken them away and hadn't brought them back. I never asked him, because I knew he wouldn't want to talk about it. When the West Denver job was finished, he let me stay home from school one day, and we went down to Fort Logan to settle up the grocery bill with Mr. Greene. It was eighty-six dollars, and Father let me put my last check from Mr. Cooper in on it. Just before Christmas, he got another job. That time it was helping build a big house in Littleton.

  It seemed as though our best Christmases were the ones when we were the poorest. Mother had saved a turkey, and we had all the things to go with it. Packages came from our folks back in New England, and Father must have brought the tree with him when he came home on Christmas Eve. Mother had it trimmed with cranberries and popcorn strung together on long strings, and there were half a dozen oranges hanging from the limbs, like colored lanterns. The presents were wrapped in white tissue paper and tucked in under the tree the way they always were. There was one sled with Grace and Muriel's names on it and another for us boys. And everybody got new shoes and stockings.

  It snowed all Christmas afternoon and nobody came to call. Mother had made a big plate of fudge and we popped fresh corn and divided the oranges into sections. We had to do it that way because there were only six oranges and there were seven of us. At first Father said for us not to divide them because they always made his teeth sting, but Mother just laughed at him, and we divided them anyway. I didn't see him squinny up his eye when he ate some of the sections, either. Mother got a new book for Christmas called When Knighthood Was in Flower. She must have read us a hundred pages of it that afternoon and evening.