by Les Weil
It was a bad year at the Slash Y nonetheless, leaving a bad taste in the mouth of memory. Likely it was a bit of foolishness on the part of Jumping Joe Joslin that started things off wrong. Along in early spring, when winter had left the levels and was retreating for last holdouts in the hills, Jumping Joe noticed that his saddle cinch was worn thin and he meant to replace it and then he was fool enough for a few days to forget about it. Long enough to ride into a little trouble.
He was out riding line where the long low ridge fronted the mountains and an occasional silly cow, remembering the patches of early new-green grass summoned by melting snow in the badlands just beyond, sometimes went wandering and foundered in a snow-filled hollow. Joe had roped one such by one horn and yanked her out and coiled in his rope and was shooing her down to the wind-swept level when she showed stubborn and doubled back again. He slapped spurs to horse and raced alongside and when he swung to head heft that cinch let loose. Not all the way with a clean break whicli would have meant only a sudden spill with him and saddle sailing free, but partway through, just enough to slacken th grip and let the saddle start to slide around the horse's barrel. Down he went, right shoulder and back thumping hard, off foot still caught in twisted stirrup, and the horse, startled and frightened, raced on, dragging him over the rough ground.. He sloshed through wet snow and puddles and he bouned from bump to bump and he was too busy to do much more, than grunt. By the time he had heaved himself up some grabbing at his own leg and managed to free the foot, he was bunged plenty and had a strained ankle and an assortment of nasty nicks from flying hoofs. Worse than that, he was afoot, having been too busy to hang on to the reins. Wet with sweat and the dragging through snow and mud. And afoot. Out in the middle of apparent nowhere. Already shivering from shock and the chill air.
Jumping Joe Joslin stood with weight mostly on one foot and watched the horse hightailing into distance northeastward. He cursed it competently with all the epithets and obscene references he could cull out of long and various experience in many places. He thought better of that and cursed the cow. He thought better of that and cursed himself. That done, he shrugged battered shoulders. Such things happened. It could have been worse; in a rocky area his brains might have been scattered from here to there and everywhere in between. He hobbled to pick up his hat. He pulled his gun and wiped mud from it and raised it and fired twice into the air. Shorty Austin might not be too many miles away, on down by the lower end of the ridge. No response. He fired again, twice. Still no response. Shorty must have reached the lower, end and swung eastward through the broken land down that way. Jumping Joe shrugged shoulders again, wincing at the twinges beginning in them. He started hobbling in the same general direction as the horse--northeastward.
Back at the ranch headquarters Monte Walsh on a leggy dun was in the big corral checking the first batch of winter range saddle stock brought in a while before by Chet Rollins now gone for another batch, sorting out those that would need his personal attention before the real start of spring work, hazing these on into the smaller corral. He saw a riderless horse approaching at a steady trot, head at a left sideways angle to hold trailing reins from under forefeet, empty saddle tipped at a grotesque angle to the right. Three minutes later he had opened the corral gate and gone through and closed it without leaving his own saddle, unleashed his rope, flipped a loop over the head of the riderless horse, and dismounted to tie it by a rein to a corral rail and inspect the damage.
"Joe's," he said and was astride the leggy dun again streaking into distance southwestward.
* * *
Jumping Joe Joslin, as required by his calling, was made mostly of gristle and bone and guts with the constitution of a mountain mule. Any other time the banging he had received would have kept him in his bunk one day, maybe two, on a chair in the sun maybe one or two more, then he would have been limping around doing close-in chores and in a week would have been riding out again with nothing much more bothering him than the joshing of the others for being so damned careless and the half dozen new scars now added to the collection adorning his anatomy. But this time he must have been off his feed. After a day in bunk he was still there and after another day in bunk he was still there and the next morning when the others were up and gone he was still there and he was coughing till his throat was raw and his eyes were watering and his nose running and by evening he was still there, eyes and nose dry now, too dry, and he was running a fever.
Range manager Cal Brennan fussed over him all day like a hen with a sick chick and flipped through the pages of a home remedy book he had. "You lame-brain empty-headed coyote, you," said Cal. "If you was a cow, I might know what to do. Bein' as you're only a man an' a poor specimen at that; I just don't know."
Midnight and Cal had not gone over to his bed in the old adobe ranch house. He sat by Jumping Joe in the bunkhouse and in the light from a lone lamp on the table pulled close he laid damp cloths on Joe's forehead. There was not much sleep being enjoyed in the other bunks along the walls. Then Joe took to talking in a hoarse strained voice and what he said made no sense at all.
"That ties it," said Cal. "Hat. You better hop into town for Doc Frantz."
"Right," said foreman Hat Henderson, sitting up and reaching for his pants.
"The hell with him," said Monte Walsh, already pulling on a boot. "That overgrown ape'll lumber along and take a couple hours getting there. I'll make it in one."
In the dark of night on a big rawboned bay that fought the bridling and the saddling and tried to paw the stars out of the sky before leveling into full gallop Monte Walsh streaked eastward toward town.
* * *
Windblown, bleary-eyed, with a layer of irritation laid over his customary resignation at the vagaries of life in such a land, Doc Frantz stepped up on the stone doorstep and appeared in the bunkhouse doorway. A lean jacketed arm reached out of the night past the doorjamb by his legs and set a small brown leather bag on the floor and disappeared outside again. The sound of two horses being led away drifted in through the open doorway.
Doc Frantz picked up the small bag and stepped forward into the room. "You better have something here worth my coming," he said. "Pulled out of bed. Pushed all the way. Your Walsh behind me whipping my horse about every jump. Now what is it? It better be good."
While Cal Brennan held the lamp close, Doc Frantz sat on the edge of Jumping Joe's bunk, placed a hand on the flushed forehead, frowned, took an old-fashioned stethoscope out of the small bag, put the earplugs in his ears, opened Joe's old underwear to expose an expanse of hard hairy chest, and bent low, tapping with one forefinger and listening. He buttoned the underwear, pulled the blanket up over the chest, tucked the stethoscope in the small bag, and looked around. "Maybe you two-legged jackasses know cattle," he said. "Maybe you even know a few other things, though I doubt it. You sure don't know pneumonia when you see it."
"He ain't a-gonna die, is he, Doc?" said Sugar Wyman.
"Die?" said Doc Frantz. "I haven't found the sickness yet that can kill you range wolves. It takes bullets and knives to turn that little trick. But I'll have to have him in town where I can keep an eye on him. Leave him out here and you'll manage to kill him out of sheer stupidity."
* * *
Jumping Joe Joslin lay on a hard plank bed with a feather mattress over it in a small adobe house in the sparse small town of Harmony tended by a short fat ageless SpanishAmerican woman who continually chased innumerable small children of unknown paternity out of the room and slapped Joe down whenever he tried to climb out of the bed and made him take everything Doc Frantz said he should. His fever climbed and burned like a bonfire in him and he lay there alternately talking nonsense and cursing his own general foolishness and then that tough constitution began to assert itself and fought the fever and sent it flying. Four days and the crisis had come and passed and he lay there grinning kind of pale at the remarks of Dobe Chavez and Powder Kent in town for the mail. Four more and he was thinking of trying to inveigle the wom
an into the bed with him. Then he was sitting in a chair taking the sun in front of the house and telling long tall tales to the innumerable small children.
That was that, just one of those things that came along in the course of living, a minor incident, a ripple in the routine of the Slash Y that no one, not Jumping Joe himself, would think much about afterwards. But it had one important result as seen later in retrospect.
"No," said Doc Frantz. "Maybe you don't realize it, but you're still wobbly. You're not going back out and join your pack till at least a full month is up. Maybe two. I'm not having my good work undone. Maybe you don't know it, but it was touch and go there for a while with your lungs."
So Jumping Joe was still trapped in town while out on the range the Slash Y was sweating into the spring roundup short one man. Which again was not much of a problem. With the trail drives out of Texas slackening now, there were always a few fair cowhands out of work or congenitally footloose wandering through the territory, stopping for meals and talk, usually drifting west into Arizona where ranching was beginning to take hold. Cal Brennan looked them over and picked a temporary replacement.
"Why, sure," said the man. "I'll stick around an' help you over your hump."
He gave his name as Jim Kiens and likely that was right because several of the men remembered him by it from having bumped into him now and again in years past. He was of the right rawhide breed or certainly seemed to be. He sat a horse with easy assurance and never complained at any cut to his string and he handled a rope with the same assurance and he knew what to do and how to do it any time without being told more than once. He fitted into the outfit without any fuss beyond the inevitable horseplay and testing of temper and after the first few days he got along well with everybody. He did have a sometimes habit of talking in big ideas, that only a man with cotton in his head for brains would keep on working forever at forty and found playing nursemaid to other people's cattle, that a smart man would make his pile some easier way. But that was no original tune, being the usual growsing complaint of a ranch crew, only a little off-key at the Slash Y, and after a while this Kiens quit it anyway. He was a good worker, no doubt of that. By the time spring branding was done and Jumping Joe was back a bit soft and fat around the middle and raring to activate himself down to lean hardness again, Cal was thinking he might ask this Kiens to stay on permanent. Cal could juggle that into his working budget without too much finagling of figures. But Kiens took the notion away from him by asking for his time.
"Enough's enough," Kiens said. "I've seen you through your gather. Your man's here. Expect I'll be movin' west. Got friends over Tombstone way."
Cal even felt a bit sorry to see him go.
* * *
That was that again, nothing unusual in any way. But a little tag end of worry not tied to anyone or anything in particular kept nagging far back in Cal Brennan's mind and one evening, alone in the old ranch house, he took his little tally book out of his shirt pocket and looked at it and pulled open a squeaky drawer of his old desk and took out last year's little book and looked at it too. That tag end of worry in his mind clicked into clear focus. Somehow the calf count this year was not quite what he thought it should be. Maybe, just maybe. Not by much, not on the scale the Slash Y operated, and winter losses showing up in the spring were always unpredictable anyway. And Shorty Austin and Petey Williams had brought in a pair of wolf pelts about six weeks back. That could account for some early losses. But again, if so, why had no one mentioned coming across a cow or two with swollen teats? Well, then, maybe the men had been careless working the back country and had missed some stock.
Cal chewed a pencil stub in thought. He shook himself and tossed last year's little book into the drawer and tucked this year's into his shirt pocket. He was expecting too much, that was all, hoping to ring up a record every year, an oldtimer like him who knew only too well what the chances were in what was a gamble always, a gamble against luck and weather and nature's fanged competition and the natural perversity of cloven-hoofed cow-critters that sometimes seemed bent on suicide with only the muscle and know-how and sheer stubborn persistence of a few men riding long lonely miles in solitary trust to bring up the betting odds. Men like his, even if he set them to combing cattle out of the brakes of hell, would not miss many. And no more one year than another. The calf crop was down a notch. Such things happened.
Cal shut his mouth on his thoughts. He felt ashamed of having let even a flicker of a possibility his men had slipped up some slide through his mind. After a few days of trying he forgot about that curious little discrepancy in his tally book. He did not even think of it again until along in midsummer.
* * *
Monte Walsh ambled along seeming half-asleep aboard a rat-tailed roan, easing a half dozen plump grass-bellied horses toward the open gate of the big corral. Close in, facing the gap, remembering its meaning, two of them broke to the right, heads high sniffing for the freedom of the open range. Monte and the roan, in instant explosive partnership, swept to head them and turn them. Reluctant but resigned, they trotted in with the others. Monte leaned down from saddle to close the gate. He straightened, wiping sweat from under his hat brim. Out on the plain that stretched to the long low ridge he saw a rider approaching, followed by a strange humped shape. Monte squinted into the summer sun. As usual he recognized the horse before the man. A scrawny cat-hipped pinto with one flop-ear. That would be Jose Gonzales from his tiny valley behind the ridge, leading his one burro piled high with dry pinon branches under rope which he would unload in town and cut into cookstove lengths and peddle from door to door.
"Wonder what's doing," murmured Monte. "He don't have to come past here." Monte nudged the roan into movement. Roan and pinto stopped, nose to nose.
"Buenos dias, Senor Montee," said Jose. "There ees un poco something you must know."
"Why, sure, Jose," said Monte. "Likely there is. I don't claim to know too damn much."
"The canyon back of el ojo, the spring, what you call Black Caballo. You know eet?"
"Why, sure," said Monte. "You ain't lost me yet."
"I cut the wood," said Jose. "I see two of the calfs. Fat, they are. Big. Fat. But nothing of the brand. Nothing of the knife on the ears."
"What d'you know," said Monte. "A couple of mavericks. Must be your lucky day, Jose. You slap your brand on 'em?"
"You make of the joke, no?" said Jose. "The cows, I see also. They are Slash Y."
Back at the ranch buildings Cal Brennan sat in an old rocking chair on the veranda of the old adobe house reading the stock news in a two-week-old newspaper. He lowered the paper and looked over when a rat-tailed roan jounced to a stop a few feet away. He twitched a bit on the chair when Monte Walsh mentioned a couple of slick-ear calves. Suddenly, without any warning at all, that curious little discrepancy in his tally book was in his mind again.
"That Jose," said Monte. "So honest it hurts his pocketbook. Next time we slaughter a beef, maybe I better drop over his way with a quarter."
Cal Brennan said nothing. He was remembering too what he had heard recently, that a man named Kiens had not drifted on into Arizona but had been seen loafing around one of the small settlements beyond the ridge, on the other side of the mountains, along the river. He let the paper fall in his lap and looked off into distance.
"Shucks," said Monte. "Two calves. Me and Chet'll take an iron and ride out there in the morning."
"You do that," said Cal. "An' you do more'n that. You take Dally too. Find those two calves. Then I want you boys to work through that whole area out there an' see what else you find."
So early next morning when the light before dawn was creeping over the big land Monte Walsh and Chet Rollins and Dally Johnson rode out on three tough cow ponies picked for all-day endurance with the makings of several quick meals in their saddlebags and running-iron behind Dally's cantle and they were gone all day and into the night and they came back worn and brush-torn to leave gaunted horses in the corral with good
feed in the trough and went to the ranch house where Cal Brennan and Hat Henderson waited in the starlight on the veranda.
"Took you a while," said Cal.
"Damn right it did," said Monte. "Two calves my eye. We found nine more up the canyon. Seven on by the edge of timber. Five in that hollow back of the humps."
The big dark shape of Hat Henderson stirred on its chair and a kind of grunting sigh came from him.
"Twenty-three," said Cal gently. "An' all the same?"
"Damn right," said Monte. "There was more a course. But these I'm talking about--slicks, all of 'em."
The silence of the night, dark and somehow waiting, seemed to close in and hold the neighborhood of the old veranda.
"So you boys were careless," said Cal. "Lettin' 'em slip through you like-"
"Quit it, Cal," said Chet Rollina, voice flat, hard. "You know better'n that."
"Yes," said Cal gently, very gently. "I know better'n that. Maybe I'm wishin' I didn't. Dally. What do you make of it?"
"I don't like makin' a single goddamned thing of it," said Dally Johnson.
"Spell it out," said Chet. "We ain't a bunch of kids."
"Somebody . . ." said Dally slowly. "Somebody ... when we was gatherin' . . . must of been pushin' 'em back ... leavin' 'em where they wasn't likely to be noticed till fall ... figurin' to nip off some unbranded stuff along about weanin' time."
Cal Brennan sighed, long and slow. "Somebody," he said. `"That somebody's got to have a name. Hat. When you was workin' that part of the range, when you fanned men out, who'd you put in there?"
"Jeeeesus!" said Hat. "You know what you're asking me to say, Cal? Just where anyways? That's a lot of country."
"Certain it is," said Cal. "But maybe we can narrow it down some. From the humps on up past the spring. Think hard, man. Get it straight."
Hat Henderson twisted big hands together and stared down at them in the dimness. "Well, now, we held the gather on those flats below the ridge. We swung out an' I started dropping off where the Diamond Six's run that fence. There'd be nothing of ours other side of it. Dobe was first. That's for sure. Monte next, where that brush grows so thick in them dry arroyos. I remember that from figuring he's the only one crack-headed enough to go brush-popping like a damn fool an' snaking cows out of that stuff. Others here an' there on up. You say from the humps past the spring. Well, when we got up that way there wasn't many men left. We was saving north of the spring for the next day. Yeah, I got it now for that stretch. There was Chet here-"
