Monte Walsh

by Les Weil

  "All right, kid," said Hat Henderson. "Looks like you've been growing some. I'll speak to the old man. We start next week. "

  * * *

  Monte Walsh, coming seventeen, rode up the trail to Wichita wrangling the cavvy with another Circle Dot herd of longhorn steers and never lost a horse along the way though he had troubles enough to keep him from gaining weight and he did lose considerable skin and most of a shirt tearing through brush the night the herd, always spooky, staged a full-scale stampede and the cavvy, maybe out of sympathy as much as anything else, spooked too and led him a five-mile scattering chase. But he had enough changeover mounts waiting by the chuck wagon when the riders straggled in hollering for them, and he wore down the dun and a stocky gray finding the others and, by time the riders had the steers gathered plus a few could-be mavericks for good measure, he had them all. He took his pay this time in Wichita in silver dollars, straight, and found he could take his liquor the same, straight, standing up, and was not aware of the effect of this until he suddenly discovered that the drinks-on-me tune he had been calling to the amusement and cooperation of all and sundry along Rowdy Joe Lowe's bar had cleaned him out. He was in a sad state the two days it took his head to shrink back to size. He was in a sadder state when he learned that the dun had been found wandering loose in the street and turned in at a livery stable and a feed bill was waiting there. He was sad and hungry and wobbly but that did not stop him from being mad all through when he learned that the livery man, liking the looks of the dun, figured it had been eating enough for a herd of elephants and tallied the bill according. Monte disputed that the best he could in his condition and wound up, considerably battered, in a corner of the stable. He tried to come up off the floor again and his legs failed. But a local man who had a ranch a few miles out of town and who had enjoyed his performance at the bar happened by and saw and considered what he saw somewhat disagreeable and wound up knocking the livery man, equally battered, into another corner of the stable. The livery man, seeing things now in better perspective, tallied a better bill and the local man paid this and carted Monte, with the dun tagging, out to his ranch. Monte wore out that winter keeping the man's cows untangled from the other stock roaming the immediate range and wondering if the bold looks the man's daughter gave him meant what they might mean without ever working up nerve enough to find out. The man claimed he ate more than he earned, which could have been true from the way he was stretching up and hanging long lean muscle on his long knobby bones, but when spring branding was done the man paid him forty dollars anyway and he promptly blew most of that on a pair of high-heel boots and an old much-used cartridge belt and a rusty Colt he could get cheap because the hammer was bent. The boots near crippled him the first day but he managed to get them off without having to cut the leather and he put about a quart of shucked corn in each and poured in water and let them sit all night, stretching, and when they dried out on his feet next day he was mighty proud of them. He talked the local blasksmith into straightening the hammer of the Colt so it might function if he had money to buy bullets and he swung up on the dun and drifted southward. He found that the redheaded man on the Cimarron had sold out to a hatchet­faced halfbreed who thought meals should be paid for in cash in advance and he was enough of a trail hand by now to be properly indignant about that. On near Darlington he met an old Indian who remembered him and a certain dark gray mustang and took him to a village of patched buffalo­hide tepees for a surprisingly tasty supper of dog stew. Monte wasted so much time hanging around the village and learning to get along with signs and a few Cheyenne words and rounding up some scrubby wild horses with several of the old Indian's grandsons that when he drifted on down to Austin there was no Circle Dot herd on hand. That did not bother him long. Other herds were making.

  * * *

  Monte Walsh, coming eighteen, rode up the trail to Caldwell working the drag with a slow-moving Cross Bar herd of longhorn cows and calves, eating dust every mile, helping late cows calve, loading the weaker calves, unable to travel at first, into a wide flat-bottom wagon, sorting them out to their mothers again when the herd stopped for nooning and for night. Their smells would mix in the wagon and sometimes the mothers would not own them and Monte had his troubles. The driver of the wagon, a barrel-built man called Sunfish Perkins, was not much help except in offering advice for the first weeks, having sprained an ankle in a bad spill the second day out. But his advice was good and his patience in offering it the same, and Monte learned plenty about the uses of a rope and how to twist a calf's tail so it would bawl the right tune and the necessity of dodging fast when an answering mother went on the prod. He lost a calf that fell when he was heaving it over the low side of the wagon and it broke a leg and had to he shot. He lost an old footsore cow that always hung back and one day dropped out of sight, likely pinched off by one of the Indians usually watching from just over the nearest horizon. He worried about such things, backtracking in the evening to search for the cow, until the trail boss, maybe nudged to it by Sunfish, said quit frettin', kid, it happens, an' you ain't the worst hand I ever had tailin' a herd. When they were paid off in Caldwell he had more money to spend than before and he blew it on a big gray Stetson with a leather band and a younger Colt with working hammer and in finding out he had come of age with the helpful amused cooperation of one of the women at the Red Light Saloon. He stood up to the bars with the rest of the men and they tolerated him in a rough goodnatured way and even included him in their joshing but he knew he was still just a maverick dogie tagging along and a lonesome feeling had him when he watched them drifting away to other pastures in twos and threes, siding each other in the easy comradeship of the range. He wore out that winter hanging around town, doing odd jobs mostly around the stockyards, paying for sleep space for himself and the dun in a livery stable by gentling a few mean-trick horses for the proprietor. He got to be known in town, called on now and again to throw a leg over a stubborn horse and wear it down to easy riding for townspeople too lazy or too soft or too old to do that for themselves. He added some height and he filled out more and, when the grass was beginning to green up that way and the first trail herd swung into sight with its point men riding tall in the saddle, town life and even the Red Light suddenly seemed to lose all attraction and he and the dun headed southward.

  * * *

  Monte Walsh, coming nineteen, came up the trail riding flank with an Eight Bar Eight herd of longhorn cows and their calves able to travel. He could stand eye to eye with the tallest man in the outfit and give almost as much punishment as he took in a rough-and-tumble. Lean energy burst out of him in antics around the fire at night and one evening the others, figuring he was ripe for it, batted him about with grim good humor and laid him over the chuck wagon tongue and leathered him with their chaps. He sulked a while in his blanket but by morning, though his rump was sore in the saddle, his grin was back in shape. He lost the little dun crossing the Canadian at high water when a jagged branch cottonwood log swept downstream and set the cattle to milling frantic in the river around him. He was knocked from the saddle but he clung to the horn and the dun, fighting hard, kept him up until he could scramble over the backs of several cows to the near shore. He saw the dun go under, pounded down by wild-eyed cows trying to climb on it. He stood by the limp body caught by the current on a sandbar out from the bank downstream and the drops dripping from his lean young face were not all from the Canadian. He stooped and stripped his gear from the body and limped to the cavvy waiting its turn to cross and slapped a loop on a big rangy black in his string and was back in the river with the other men. They dropped three cows and five calves at that crossing but had good luck on the rest moving north. They bypassed Caldwell and drove on to Ellsworth and spent two days camping outside town and spending accumulated pay in town then drove on westering through Kansas and upper Colorado into Wyoming Territory and delivered the herd at Laramie. Monte took his pay this time in gold coins and the big rangy black he knew lacked looks and liked t
o catch him off guard and try to pile him into brush but he also knew could run when convinced that was wanted like a bullet out of a buffalo gun. After a brief spree the rest of the riders headed back south but Monte, feeling no particular pull to any of them and having caught the come-on smile of a waitress in a hash house, stayed on to sample Laramie some more. He blew the coins in fair style, learning that faro is a tricky game and that poker requires patience and sound judgment and that, for a spur-jingling trail rider with money in his pocket, a cooperative woman, in Wyoming as in Kansas, could be an interesting if not wholly satisfactory companion. When the money was gone and his welcome with it, he swung up on the black, not liking the chill winds beginning to blow out of the north country anyway, and drifted southward. Sometimes he camped alone, chewing on the jerked beef and soda crackers he carried in a little bag, sleeping in his blanket and tarp under the stars, and sometimes he picked up meals by chuck wagon fires and gossip of the trails from and about men he was beginning to know now in the long slow seasonal shuttling of the herds. Dropping down through Colorado he came into once-familiar country and he thought of things he had quit thinking about and a woman's voice calling "Monteeelius" and he rode looking for the old place. He found the two­room shack and the small half-dugout barn, both sagging into ruin, and the fallen rails of the little corral, the whole place deserted, and he rode on, asking questions where he could, and followed the answers and all he found at last was a slow­settling rectangular mound of earth and an unmarked wooden cross. He stood by this, lean and alone, and he looked long at it, head down, worn gray Stetson off and held in his left hand. He reached his right hand into the right pocket of his worn pants and pulled the pocket inside out, empty and frayed. Nothing and nobody, he said. That's what I've got like before. Nothing and nobody. And something stubborn in him said no, not quite. He raised his head and looked out into the distances merging into distances all around and he felt what he could not have said in words, what he could not even have comprehended in words. He had all that, his because he knew it and was a part of it, the big land, the great emerging cattle country, and he had a horse and the lean hard energy of youth ran strong in him and that was enough for any man; almost, almost enough. He swung up on the black again and moved on, angling always southward, and he stopped in several towns and acquired a little spending money racing the black against local horses whose backers thought his simple statement of fact the boasting of an overeager young one. He drifted steadily southward and he wore out the rest of that winter way down near San Antonio breaking horses for a mustanger who was temporarily on crutches, having let one of the horses pitch him into a fence­post.

  * * *

  Monte Walsh, coming twenty, six-foot-one in his socks when he had his boots off which was seldom, came up the trail to Caldwell riding swing with a Flying 0 herd of mixed Mexican longhorns. It was a hell-for-leather outfit, moving fast, maybe because some of the men had good reasons for leaving lower Texas in a hurry, maybe too because part at least of the herd had been slipped across the Rio Grande without what might be called proper purchase papers. Monte did not like it much, not for those reasons which were not exactly his business, but because there was not much comradeship around the fire at night and because the trail boss was a mean-tempered mean-talking man given to shouting unnecessary orders and shirking his own share of the work. But Monte had signed on and he gave the job all he had which was plenty now and he held to it through high water and forced dry runs and dust storm stampedes and several near-deadly disputes with other outfits over crossing time rights. On at Caldwell, when they were holding the herd while the boss dickered for a quick sale and they tangled with one of those outfits coming up still nursing a grudge, Monte did his share battering all fight out of one of the opposition and keeping another mighty bust until a third eliminated him by the not-quite-fair method of whanging him over the head with a gun barrel. When he was paid off, short-paid too like the others by the boss who left them little more than drinking money with the bartender of the Red Light and was long gone by the time they collected, he blew what he had with a sort of desperate eagerness to be rid of it and signed on fast with a Cross Bar herd moving on north. He got all the way up into Montana this time, to Miles City, and knocked around there a few weeks and was offered several regular ranch jobs but the chill winds were blowing and he drifted southward in company with a rawhide Texan called Powder Kent who claimed he never felt right too long away from the Brazos. Monte carried a Winchester in a saddle scabbard now and occasionally he picked off an antelope and he and Powder camped together, roasting meat on sticks over a fire, and they drifted along, stopping at what towns they came to for a look around and sometimes acquiring extra spending money by working together in their talk in the right places to raise interest in Monte's black. Then along down at North Platte a loser felt aggrieved and insisted on an argument with Powder who had needled him into a too-big bet and Powder felt obliged to live up to his name and use a little gunpowder, since the loser was already making motions toward the same with the result that, though the loser was in considerably worse condition, Powder had a bullet hole in one leg. Powder was a good hand, right comforting to have along in a tight spot, but not exactly Monte's style, too serious and touchy about being "Texas-born and too sorry for Monte not being the same, and Monte left him snug in a boardinghouse fortified with the recent winnings and the attentions of a solicitous landlady and drifted on alone. Early spring found him riding the rough string for one of the new ranches taking over west Texas. The foreman wanted him to stay on but when the first round of branding was done and the work slackened some and far over the horizon the dust of the trail herds hovered over the big land, he asked for his time.

  * * *

  Monte Walsh, coming twenty-one, lean and hard and squint-eyed from wind and sun, came up the new trail westward from the old Dodge City riding point with a Seven Z herd of wild woolly longhorns combed out of the brush below the Neuces. When the trail boss, who had lost ten dollars two days before betting on a sleek good-looking bay against the black, grinned somewhat devilish and cut to Monte's string five of the meanest trickiest half-wild horses any man might dare to straddle, Monte grinned too. That merely made life more interesting. Of a morning when he would swing up on one of them to top it off before the day's work, he enjoyed the wide-eyed admiration of a sixteen-year­old kid named Sonny Jacobs who was along wrangling the cavvy. Likely he strutted and showed off some for Sonny. There was no strutting when he was at work, a good all­around trail hand earning every dollar of his pay.

  * * *

  Sum it in a single sentence that would tell it all to any of his own breed: Monte Walsh came to Dodge the way a one­time thin knobby boy had known it could be, tall in the saddle, riding point with as hard-working and hard-playing and competent an outfit as ever came up a trail.

  "Mister Walsh? Who's he? Oh-h-h, you mean Monte. Whyn't you say so? Yep, I know him. Last time I seen him was down at a little old one-trough town in the handle. Behaving about as usual. Which if you don't know what that means you don't rightly know Monte. They had a little old old one-room jail in the place. Had a man in it doing three days. Old Jake Hanlon. He wasn't so old but they just called him that from the way he couldn't hold his liquor and had to blow his stack regular. Interfered with the steady drinkers. The judge--he was only a justice of the peace but he could judge right enough and make it stick--the judge he'd fined every cent Old Jake had out of him already so this time he said three days. He was a three-day judge. Used that so often it could come popping out without him having even to think. This particular day Old Martha Higgs had to go on a rampage. She wasn't so old too but they just called her that from the way she tried to run things all the time. She was a terror, that woman. A terror on temp'rance. Came from Kansas. Always fighting the Demon Rum though I don't recall rum ever being liked much in those parts, only whisky. No kids, no man, no nothing else to keep her occupied. So this particular day she gets herself all cooked up o
ver some pamphlet or other and comes into Mike's place and starts blasting bottles off the shelves with a shotgun. Sheriff runs in and grabs her. Mike makes such a fuss they take her to the judge. He starts saying something about a fine and she bellers she ain't paying not a single cent, even if she had it, for doing the Lord's work and the judge he gets kind of peeved and it pops out. Three days. Sheriff howls he can't do that, there's only one room, Old Jake's in there already. Immoral. Scandalous. Things like that. But the judge has his dander up and he says he's said it and got it writ down already and that's that. Not his problem, he says, carrying out the sentence, only giving it. Sheriff is yanking out his mustache and arguing with the judge and making motions like maybe going after the judge with his own gavel and all us gathered around are near choking and that's when Monte speaks up. Marry 'em, he says. Man and wife, he says, can occupy one room together all legal and proper. That notion takes hold like a fire to dry grass with a wind behind it. We're going to have a wedding right then and there despite all the bellering Old Martha and Old Jake too when he hears and even the judge himself can do. That or use some ropes, we kind of suggests, maybe not really meaning it but meaning it enough to get the notion across. I remember Chalkeye putting it that a woman cantankerous enough to go blasting wild with a shotgun where innocent folks might get killed and a man who couldn't hold his liquor proper and gets hisself where he'd have to be in close nnd indecent proximity to an unmarried person of the opposite sex didn't have no call to be standing,out against popular demands. Then that Monte pulls another one. Got to be a ticket affair, he says. Makes everybody ante up two dollars apiece to watch the tying. The whole town turns out along with all us roughnecks passing through and Old Jake's eyes bug some and Old Martha slows on her bellering when he dumps close to three hundred fifty in her sunbonnet. I ain't heard lately but last I knew them two was making out fair enough. Old Jake keeping sober and Old Martha too busy keeping him that way to worry the regulars at Mike's."