by Elmer Kelton
“Wade’s old daddy has got money enough to hire all the help he needs,” Gordon went on. “He don’t need Wade.”
Heat roared back into Matt’s face. He doubled his fists and said with anger, “Doesn’t need him? You haven’t got any idea how much old Foster does need him!”
Matt reached down and pulled Wade’s hand away from the trailer hitch. “You can just unhitch that trailer, Wade. You’re staying here!”
Wade looked up in surprise. His grey eyes leveled on Matt’s. “I’ll go where I please and do what I want.”
Matt thundered, “A few times when you were a kid I had to take my belt off and warm the seat of your britches with it. You’re still not too big for me to wallop the daylights out of you!
“I hoped we could wake you up a better way. But wake you up I will, even if I’ve got to work the hound out of you. Now you unhitch that trailer and go find yourself some working clothes.”
Wade stood staring at him, his mouth open. Surprise seemed to have knocked the argument out of him. Now there was a trace of a smile in his eyes.
“I’ll stay and help you brand if you’ll hire my two buddies here.”
Dismay was in the two men’s faces. Matt didn’t like it. “They couldn’t work their way out of a wet paper sack.”
“If I stay, they do.”
Matt gave in disgustedly. “All right. They’re on till we finish branding. Regular day wages, seven dollars a day. And if they don’t work, by dogies, they don’t eat!”
The whole crew was up and out before daylight next morning. Foster Harbison came along despite Matt’s protest. Matt didn’t like the pale look in the old ranchman’s face this morning.
The men stopped at the back side of the pasture to smoke and wait for daylight to make it light enough to work. Ed Gordon carelessly flipped his cigarette butt away. A moment later the grass began to crackle where it fell. Orange flames licked at the dry grass, and the pungent smoke bit at riders’ nostrils.
“Put it out, quick,” Matt shouted. “A fire in this dry grass could burn off a couple of sections.”
Wade quickly swung to the ground, unbuckling his leggings. He and another cowpuncher used their chaps to beat out the fire. Gordon was on the ground too, but he stood helplessly, his mouth half open, as if he didn’t know what to do.
When the last sparks had been tromped out and Wade had remounted, Matt said to him, “Tell your friends to watch their cigarettes from now on. We ain’t firemen.”
They got the cattle into the corrals, separated them and had the branding half done before Molly drove up in the ranch’s second pickup, bringing their lunch. Matt noted sadly the uneasy way Wade looked at Molly and kept his distance from her. He noted too the way the girl avoided looking at Wade.
After the meal, Molly stayed around and watched the rest of the branding. Matt had a couple of cowboys drive the first pickup over to a windmill to fill the power sprayer, bolted to wooden skids fastened to the pickup bed. He mixed up a batch of DDT and poured it into the sprayer. He started the pump’s motor, picked up the end of the long hose, and began spraying a heavy fog of insecticide over the cows and calves as boys pushed them through a narrow chute.
“This’ll cut down on the flies and the tail switching this summer, Foster,” he said happily. “Wish we’d had this years ago. But there’ll be more beef to sell this fall.”
Foster grinned. But Matt still didn’t like the hollow look under the old man’s eyes.
As soon as the pairs were sprayed, Matt had the two regular cowhands start driving them toward a new pasture. After a while the cows without calves had been sprayed.
“Gordon,” Matt said, “you and Bragg drive these dry cows down the draw and put them out that gate over yonder a mile.”
Matt, Wade and Foster finished up around the branding pens and cleaned out the power sprayer.
Gordon and Bragg had been gone perhaps thirty minutes when Molly yelled, “Fire, Dad! Down the draw!”
Matt’s heart leaped right up into his throat as he saw the grey smoke curling upward from the draw. He started to curse the two careless cowhands. But there wasn’t time for it.
“Wade,” he shouted, “you fill up that power sprayer with water. We can use it to fight fire. Foster, you and Molly and me’ll take the other pickup down there and get started on the fire.”
Matt tore an old worn-out tarp into large pieces and quickly soaked them in a water trough. Then the three jumped into the pickup and bounced across the cow trails and ditches as fast as the thing would run.
Matt’s heart sank when he saw the fire. It was already well out of hand. The wind was blowing right down the draw, carrying the fire rapidly in the direction of the windmills.
Gordon and Bragg were both swinging at the fire with their chaps. But about all they were doing was spreading it. Their horses, both loose, stood a long distance out on one side. The cows had scattered.
“Grab those wet tarps and get to working with them,” Matt yelled. He told Foster to stay with the pickup, in case it had to be moved. But a minute later he saw the old ranchman right out front, beating at the fire as hard as he could swing. His heart couldn’t take much of that, but how could you argue with a man like Foster?
Matt concentrated on the fire, and wished Wade would hurry up with that sprayer. The wind got stronger. The flames rose higher and spread swifter. They would hit the big mesquites and swoop up the dry grass clustered around them.
Sweat dripped from Matt’s face and burned his eyes. Heat blistered him. His lips were dry as old leather. As he slapped desperately at the fire, he felt his breath getting shorter and shorter. It seemed the world was beginning to swing mad, fiery arcs back and forth before his seared eyes.
A scream brought him out of it suddenly. Molly! He looked around him but could see nothing but the wild, dancing scenes made by the blistering heat waves. Molly screamed again. Matt dropped his piece of tarp and went running toward her voice. Then he saw.
Foster had let the fire surround him. He stood in a small bare island out in the middle of a river of licking orange flames and wicked grey smoke. Molly was running toward him, dodging flames, jumping nimbly from one bare spot to another.
Matt called her excitedly but knew she never heard him. He saw Gordon and Bragg standing together outside the belt of fire, neither one making a move to help Molly or Foster.
Suddenly Matt saw Foster grip his shirt front painfully and slump to the ground. His heart!
Matt called again, panic seizing him. Forgetting the flames, he started running toward the girl and the old man. His foot caught between the forks of an old stump, and he felt the breath leave him as he sprawled out on the hot ground.
Black ashes choked him. He struggled for breath, beating at the sparks that burned his flesh in a dozen places. Pain and fear and desperation all grabbed hold of him, and he hardly heard Wade’s pickup come bouncing to a stop.
Then he was painfully conscious of Wade bending over him, helping him get his foot loose and slapping the breath into him. “Come on and help me,” Wade was calling.
Gordon’s scared voice sounded as if it was a mile away. “And get burned up? Lord no!”
Wade was hastily helping Matt to the pickup and beating at the flames that were burning the foreman’s clothes in places.
“I’ll help you get up in back, Matt,” Wade was saying quickly. “You’ll have to handle the nozzle on that sprayer. We’re going on in to get Dad and Molly!”
Flames were already licking up at the pickup, but nothing had caught fire. Almost automatically, Matt grabbed hold of the sprayer. Then the pickup was bouncing crazily through the flames. Matt held his breath until it got to the little island in the middle.
While Matt kept a heavy spray of water going on the flames, Wade jumped out. Matt didn’t miss the quick look that passed between the boy and the girl as they stood together in peril—a look that told much better than words ever could of love and thanks and forgiveness.
They put Foster in the pickup. Then Wade swung the pickup around and they were bouncing back out again. The heavy grass smoke choked Matt and burned his eyes until he could hardly see.
Outside the belt of fire again, Wade jumped out and took a quick look under the pickup and beneath the hood to make sure no flames had caught hold. Matt blinked his stinging eyes and saw the two regular cowboys spurring their horses as hard as they could run, coming to help.
Quickly Wade and Molly got Foster into the other pickup. Matt jumped off the fender and felt his sprained ankle give way beneath him, burning worse than the fire had.
“Molly and I are taking Dad to the doctor,” Wade told the newly arrived cowboys. “You all take the power sprayer and hold the flames in check the best you can. We’ll phone the neighbors and send out the county fire truck. Watch after Matt.”
As an afterthought, he added, “Matt, get rid of Ed and Cecil, will you? Send them to town. Tell them if they’re still here when I get back, I’m liable to kill them both.”
The doctor let Foster come home Saturday morning. He would be all right, the medic said. It usually took one attack to show an old mossyhorn like Foster that the doctor was right.
Matt bedded Foster down in the Cooper house, where Molly could watch after him. With his sprained ankle bound up like a Christmas present, Matt wasn’t getting around much himself.
Wade Harbison came in at noon, his face dusty, his clothes showing sign of hard work. Molly greeted him with a warm smile.
“Wade,” Foster called irritably, “come make these people let me up. There’s too much work around here for me to lie in bed.”
Wade put his hand on his father’s shoulder and gently pushed the old man back into bed. “You’re staying there till the doctor says you can get up. From now on, if there’s any work to do around here, I’ll do it.”
The irritation left the old man’s face, and a pleased smile replaced it. “What about that rodeo circuit your friends were talking about?”
Wade looked at Molly. “My friends? From now on I’ve got the same friends you have, Dad.”
Wade stood watching Molly. Nervously he put his weight on first one foot, then the other.
“Molly,” he said at last, “that sure was a pretty dress you had on the other night. I’d like to see you wear it again. There’s another dance tonight.”
Happiness shone in her eyes. “I’d love to go, Wade.”
That night Matt Cooper and Foster Harbison sat on the front porch and watched as Molly and Wade went out to the car, arm in arm. Just like the old days, Matt thought, and he enjoyed the warm glow of satisfaction that began to spread within him.
“Matt,” Foster chuckled, “I’ve decided I’m going to stay around a while. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to have those grandchildren yet.”
POISON
It was the prairie-dog law that brought Dev Leindecker to Old Man Edgewood’s Long E outfit.
You don’t find many prairie dogs in Texas any more. But forty years ago the hole-studded dog towns spread over so much of the state, crippled up so much livestock and ruined so much grass, that the legislature passed a law requiring every ranch owner to exterminate prairie dogs on his land.
Old Man Edgewood never would have hired Leindecker’s kind if he hadn’t been so tightfisted about everything but whisky.
He liked to throw a big, long binge every now and again, but otherwise he never squandered a nickel.
He was close-herding his money the day he rode into Midland looking for a man to poison his prairie dogs so the county wouldn’t do it and assess him a stiff price for it.
Leindecker was a big, brawling bear of a man, so tall he had to duck to walk through a saloon door. He had a broad, sun-darkened face with a flat mouth and the coldest wolf eyes a man ever saw. Few ranches would hire him anymore. He’d generally last about a week or two before his mad-dog temper would bust loose and he left some cowboy beaten half to death.
The sheriff had been eyeing Leindecker pretty close for a day or two when Old Man Edgewood propositioned him, offering him ten dollars a month less than the going wage. Looking over his shoulder, Leindecker took it.
“I got a roundup crew goin’,” Edgewood told him. “Any time you’re workin’ close to the wagon, just ride over there and eat. Otherwise, you camp and cook your own.”
Then, hating roundup work like poison, the old man took the TP train for Fort Worth and a wine and wild women spree that was apt to last a month. That’s how it was that nobody had the authority to fire Leindecker. And there wasn’t anybody big enough to run him off.
Besides his black temper, Leindecker had another strong characteristic. He was as lazy as a hound dog in the sunshine. The first thing he did after he mixed up a batch of strychnine and grain and loaded it into the ranch’s rickety old wood-hauling wagon was to hunt the roundup crew and chuckwagon. He didn’t aim to cook any more than he had to.
The wagon cook was the first man to spot him coming. Old Cooney Peale spat disgustedly and wiped the biscuit dough off his gnarled hands onto the flour sack apron tied around his flat middle.
The kid horse wrangler missed that. Jinx Cavenaugh’s blue eyes lifted in interest over the rim of his steaming coffee cup. “Stranger comin’.”
Cooney’s age-paled eyes narrowed. His voice had an edge to it. “No stranger to me. Go see about your horses, boy.”
The horse jingler drained his cup, lingering a little to satisfy a kid’s curiosity about the man coming in the wagon. He stooped over an open Dutch oven and picked up a cold biscuit left from breakfast.
Cooney hollered at him, “And you quit feedin’ biscuits to that paddle-footed sorrel of yours. He’s a bigger pest than a pot-lickin’ hound.”
Grinning, the gangling button untied his sorrel from a thorny mesquite fifty yards out of camp. He took a bite out of the biscuit and fed the rest to the horse.
Swinging into the saddle, he hollered back, “Old age is ruining your cookin’, Cooney. Them biscuits ain’t got any more salt in them than you have.”
Cooney hurled a chunk of firewood in his direction, missing him on purpose but coming close enough to make the sorrel spook and almost spill the kid. He chuckled as Jinx wildly grabbed leather.
Old Cooney never had married and had kids of his own. He often thought that if he had, he’d have hoped for a boy about like Jinx Cavenaugh.
Dev Leindecker halted his gray-horse team a respectful distance from the cook’s fire and climbed down. Tying the reins to the wheel, he swaggered into camp. “Howdy, Cooney. If I’d knowed it was you a-cookin’, I never would’ve hired.” It was meant as a joke but sounded more like the truth.
He extended his big hand. Cooney didn’t take it. Instead he wiped his hands again on the flour-dusty apron. Curtly he said, “There’s coffee in the pot. It’s two hours till dinner.”
Resentment flicked in Leindecker’s narrow eyes, then went back into hiding. He poured coffee into a battered tin cup and squatted on the run-down heels of his worn-out boots. This kind of hostility wasn’t new to him. Seemed like he ran into it most everywhere he went.
Old Cooney Peale went on about his business, kneading dough or limping around the chuckbox lid to check the dried apricots soaking in water there. Now and then he stopped and leaned against the wagon, favoring his right leg. It was that leg which had taken him out of the saddle and put him behind a chuckbox fifteen years ago—that leg and an owl-headed bronc.
Cooney recognized the wood wagon Leindecker had been driving. “You workin’ for this outfit now?”
Leindecker nodded. “Edgewood hired me to poison off his prairie dogs. Told me to eat at the chuckwagon as much as I could.”
Cooney scowled like he had swallowed a half-raw mountain oyster.
“All right, but you better keep that wagon covered up. First time a horse sticks his nose in that poisoned grain, somebody’s gonna’ take an ax handle to you.”
Before long a column of gray dust began a slow move across the
buffalo-grass prairie toward the two wooden windmills where the chuckwagon was camped. The warm west wind brought with it the bawling of cattle. Cooking, Cooney could watch the cowboys working the herd out yonder on a tromped-off roundup ground along a barbed wire fence, half hidden by swirling dust.
Presently the main body of the herd was pushed into the big wire pens below the windmills. Three cowboys stayed behind with the cattle that had been cut out of the herd. Boyd Runnels, wagon boss, was with the first men who spurred their horses up to the wagon for chuck. Tying his horse, he glimpsed Dev Leindecker sprawled in the shade.
“Cooney,” he muttered darkly, pointing his whiskered chin toward Leindecker, “what’s he doin’ here?”
Cooney told him. Runnels’ jaw clenched.
“Hank McKee’s out yonder with the cut,” the boss said worriedly. “Apt to be trouble when he rides up here and finds Leindecker.”
Cooney looked up sharply. “What’s Hank got against him?”
“Leindecker prodded Hank’s brother into a fight over at the 7B last year and beat him unconscious. He’s a murderous devil when he cuts loose. Hank’s brother can’t hear thunder now, and the doctor says he never will.”
It happened about the way the wagon boss figured. Hank McKee saw Leindecker the minute he rode into camp. His lips tightened, but he didn’t say a word. He filled a plate and cup, then sat down cross-legged to eat. But he never ate much. He and Leindecker sat there smouldering, their angry eyes stabbing hate at each other till McKee jumped to his feet and flung his cupful of hot coffee into Dev Leindecker’s wolf face.
Leindecker burst up at him with a roar.
McKee was big, but Leindecker was bigger. His huge fists relentlessly drove the strength from McKee until the cowboy was down in the sand, groggily shaking his bloody head.
Leaning down, Leindecker grabbed a handful of McKee’s shirt and jerked the cowboy erect. His crunching fist swung. McKee’s body jerked and fell limply. Ferocity gripped Leindecker. He fell to his knees on top of the half-conscious cowboy and beat him with his rocky fists.
