Shaking the Nickel Bush

by Ralph Moody

  Other Titles by Ralph Moody

  Available in Bison Books Editions

  American Horses

  Come on Seabiscuit!

  The Dry Divide

  The Fields of Home

  The Home Ranch

  Horse of a Different Color

  Kit Carson and the Wild Frontier

  Little Britches

  Man of the Family

  Mary Emma & Company

  Riders of the Pony Express

  Shaking the Nickel Bush

  Stagecoach West

  Wells Fargo

  Shaking the Nickel Bush

  By RALPH MOODY

  Illustrated by Tran Mawicke

  University of Nebraska Press

  Lincoln and London

  Copyright © 1962 by Ralph Moody

  Renewal copyright © 1990 by Charles O. Moody

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Moody, Ralph, 1898–

  Shaking the nickel bush / by Ralph Moody; illustrated by Tran Mawicke.

  p. cm.

  “Bison book editions.”

  ISBN 978-0-8032-8218-6 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS3563.05535S48 1994

  813′.54—dc20

  94-14503

  CIP

  Reprinted by arrangement with Edna Moody Morales and Jean S. Moody.

  The University of Nebraska Press is grateful to the Lincoln City Libraries for assistance in the reprinting of this book.

  TO

  ANDY

  Contents

  1. In a Bad Way

  2. Land Rolling!

  3. Movie Location

  4. Horse Falls

  5. Friendly Phoenix

  6. Outfitting

  7. Shiftless

  8. Back Country

  9. Christmas Eve

  10. Rice Pudd’n

  11. Little Clay Horse

  12. We’re in the Dough

  13. Cowboy Artists of the Southwest

  14. Leave Me Try It!

  15. City Slickers

  16. Two of a Kind

  17. Ladies’ Man Lonnie

  18. End of the Trail

  19. So Long, Buddy

  1

  In a Bad Way

  NOBODY likes to go back to his home town dead broke, but I’d made up my mind to do it anyway. That was in St. Joseph, Missouri, on the night before the Fourth of July, in 1919. And that’s why I was lying flat in a ditch in the freight yards, a couple of blocks beyond the passenger depot.

  At the beginning of World War One I’d been old enough for the draft, but the board in Medford, a suburb of Boston where we lived, had passed me by because I was the head of our family. Then, when I tried to enlist, the doctor turned me down, so I went away to work as a carpenter at a munitions plant. By working seven days a week I made enough money to support our family and buy half a dozen fifty-dollar Liberty bonds. But during the summer and fall of 1918 I lost so much weight my clothes looked as if they were hung on a fence post.

  When the armistice was signed and I went home, Mother sent me right up to see our family doctor. Dr. Gaghan was a gruff, blunt old Irishman, and the best doctor anywhere around, but he wouldn’t tell me what the trouble was until he’d put me in a hospital and had me examined by several specialists. Then he pulled a chair up beside the bed, sat down, and looked at me over the top of his steel-rimmed spectacles.

  “Son,” he said, “you know me and you know I don’t shilly-shally around. You’ve got diabetes, and when a lad of under twenty years gets diabetes he’s in a bad way. These specialists think you can’t make it for more than six months, but I don’t hold with their notion. There’s few things that God’s good sunshine and fresh air—with a bit of common sense thrown in—won’t cure for a lad. Why don’t you go back to Colorado where you were raised—or better still, to Arizona where ’tis warm weather all the winter long? Wear as little clothes as the law allows and let the sunshine at your body; there’s no end to the wonders it works. Fetched up as you were in a saddle, you could likely enough make your way at some easy job on one of the big cattle ranches they have out there. Only the other day I was reading about one o’ them in the newspaper. I’ll be dropping past the house and having a talk with your mother, and I’ll write out a diet for you to follow. ’Twon’t be tasty, but what’s the odds if it does the trick? Now get your clothes on; ’tis no good it’ll be doing you to lie abed.”

  My mouth went as dry as dust when Dr. Gaghan told me what the specialists thought, but before he was through talking I was all right again. Maybe it was because he said I should go back to Colorado; I’d been homesick to go back ever since we’d moved East, the year after Father died. Then too, Dr. Gaghan thought I could make it, and I had more trust in him than in all the specialists in the world.

  He must have driven straight from the hospital to our house, and the talk he had with Mother must have worked about the same way as the one he had with me. When I got home that afternoon her eyes were red from crying, and she couldn’t talk without choking up, but by the time the three youngest children came from school they couldn’t have guessed there was anything wrong. Then, when Philip came in from his job, she seemed almost happy. “Ralph has decided to go back out West for a while,” she told him. “Isn’t that nice? You know, he has missed his cowboy friends ever since we moved here, and working on a ranch again will do him a world of good. I’m sure that within a few months he will have gained back all the pounds he’s lost. He is going to Arizona for the winter, then back to Colorado when spring comes.”

  I think that’s all she ever said to the younger children about it, but Grace, my older sister, knew. She’d already gone to Boston for gluten flour and other things on the doctor’s list before I got home from the hospital.

  That evening Mother sent the others to bed early, and she and Grace and I stayed up till nearly midnight. While Grace darned my socks, mended my underwear, and packed my suitcase, Mother cooked things I’d have to take with me, and she hardly stopped talking for a single minute. I think most of it was to keep Grace and me from worrying, but some of it was to keep herself from being afraid.

  “Now you must not let yourself worry about us a particle,” she told me as she mixed dough for gluten bread. “Dr. Gaghan tells me that fear and worry are the very worst things for diabetes, and we shall be perfectly all right. Philip will finish his apprenticeship in the spring, and as a full-fledged cabinetmaker he will earn us a good living. Gracie, would you bring that little notebook from the upper drawer of my dresser, and the postcard Dr. Gaghan left?”

  While Grace was gone Mother slipped two loaves of gluten bread into the oven, put a dozen eggs on to boil, and told me, “Wherever you are, you must go to see a doctor every week and take him a sample—the first in the morning—then have him mail a postcard of his findings to Dr. Gaghan. In that way I shall feel as safe about you as if you were under his personal care. Gracie will write you out a whole stack of cards with all the questions on them, so the local doctor will have only to fill in a few check marks and figures.”

  When Grace brought the notebook, Mother had her write down the recipe for making gluten bread and a list of the things I could and couldn’t eat. In between, she kept talking to me, trying to make the diet sound better than it really was. “This recipe is a very simple one, and I’m sure you’ll find that any housewife or ranch cook will be able to make you excellent bread by it. I suppose Dr. Gaghan told you that you must eat nothing that is either sweet or starchy. But you may have any sort of leafy green vegetables, fish, chicken, milk, eggs, and tea or coffee without sugar. No red meat, and nothing fried. But stewed or fricasseed or roasted chicken is very n
ice. And you remember what delicious trout you used to catch in the Platte River. Broiled trout are marvelous, and they’re almost as good poached as fried. Then, you can have almost any kind of nuts. That should help a lot, for nuts are very nourishing—and easy for one to carry in his pocket.”

  The last few minutes of going away from home are never easy, even if you know right where you’re going and when you’re coming back. I thought it might be harder that time than ever before, but it wasn’t, because nobody said good-bye.

  I was taking the morning train from Boston, so Mother woke me quietly just before daylight. She and Grace must have been up for an hour or so. Breakfast was on the table when I came downstairs, and my suitcase and a big basket of things I could eat were set by the front door. During breakfast Mother kept talking about friends we used to have in Colorado, and telling me things to say to them when I saw them, but she never mentioned diabetes. Grace didn’t talk at all; I think she knew that Mother had to. And she didn’t go to the door with me either. As I was leaving the kitchen she just squeezed my arm, real tight and only for a second, then turned back toward the stove.

  I thought Mother might break down when we reached the front door—and I was a little bit afraid I might, too—but neither of us did. When I stepped out onto the front porch she took the little notebook from the front of her dress and slipped it into the breast pocket of my coat. “It has always seemed to me that one is never alone when he has his Bible with him,” she told me, “so I put the little one your father had when he was a boy in your suitcase. I’ve jotted down in this little book a few of the verses that have brought me comfort when things seemed darkest.” She started to say something else, then turned back quickly and closed the door.

  Mother had wanted me to cash my Liberty bonds before I started West, and to take the whole three hundred dollars with me, but I couldn’t see much sense in that. It isn’t safe to carry much money in your pockets when you’re traveling around, and besides, I was sure I’d need only a few dollars more than my train fare to Arizona. Even if I did have diabetes I wasn’t sick and, though I wasn’t quite as strong as I had been the year before, I was a long way from being puny. Then too, I wouldn’t be going West as a tenderfoot. By the time I was ten I could handle a horse and a rope better than some of the cowhands I worked with, and the summer I was twelve I’d had a job at full cowhand’s wages. I knew exactly what I’d do when I got to Tucson: I’d go down to the stockyards and help some of the cowhands who were bringing cattle in. As soon as they saw how well I could handle a rope, some one of them would get me a job with his boss. That’s why I cashed only two bonds, and took only twelve dollars in my pocket.

  When I reached Tucson things didn’t work out just the way I’d thought they would. The stockyards there weren’t nearly as big as the ones they used to have in Denver; there were only a few cattle in the pens, and only a few cowhands hanging around—every one of them out of a job. When I borrowed a throw rope from one of them and tried to hindfoot a steer, I found that I’d either gone rusty or forgotten how. The loop would close before the steer could step into it, or I’d toss it clear up against his hocks. The nearest I came to making a catch was when I snagged a cow by the tail, so I decided I’d better not try for a top-hand’s job till I’d got back into practice. I’d just take any sort of ranch job I could get hold of—even mending fences—and I had a pretty good idea how to get hold of one.

  I knew that in every cow town there were employment offices that made a specialty of furnishing ranch help, but a fellow didn’t have much chance of getting a job at one of them unless he could lay five dollars on the line. With only twelve dollars in my pocket I didn’t like the idea of spending five for a job, but it seemed to me that I’d better hunt up one of those offices and do it. That morning I’d finished the last scrap of the food Mother had packed for me; that is, all but the five-pound sack of gluten flour she’d put in the bottom of the basket. And, of course, I couldn’t eat that till I’d found a job where there’d be a cook to make it into bread for me. Then too, I hadn’t brought a bedroll, so I couldn’t sleep outdoors, but would have to rent a room. And between room rent and meals a fellow can run through five dollars pretty fast.

  I didn’t have much trouble in finding an employment office, but when I stepped in, my mouth went dry for a couple of seconds—the way it did when Dr. Gaghan told me the specialists didn’t think I could make it for more than six months. There were at least twenty cowhands sitting around that office, and half a dozen or more had real good rigs lying at their feet; saddle, bridle, bedroll, and a good fat war bag. Men like that might be drifters, but they’re top hands or awfully close to it, and they’re not dead broke.

  Between the time I stepped through that doorway and the time I reached the counter at the back of the room I did some fast thinking. Every man in the place had “working cowhand” written all over him. They were as stout and tough as range bulls. The sun wrinkles were deep around their eyes, and their faces and hands were as leathery as tanned cowhide. I could barely scale a hundred and two pounds—with my shoes on—and was as pale as skimmed milk. Even though I was wearing a blue shirt, jeans, and the old Stetson I’d had ever since I was a kid, it would have been hard to find a tenderer-looking tenderfoot. If jobs were scarce enough that men like these were sitting around an employment office, I was really in a bad way.

  Of course, I still had two hundred dollars’ worth of Liberty bonds at home. But Philip couldn’t make a living for the family until he’d finished his apprenticeship in the spring, and Mother would need that money to keep from going into debt. Besides that, even if I did sell one of the bonds, it would take at least a week to get a letter home and the money back. Unless I got a job right away I’d go broke.

  I was so busy thinking that I didn’t notice the big man behind the counter till I was right in front of him and he said, “Hi’ya, stranger.”

  It’s funny how the sound of a man’s voice and what he says can take you back ten years or more in a half a second. Hi Beckman, foreman on a ranch where I was waterboy when I was nine years old, had a voice exactly like that man’s. And no matter how well Hi knew a man, he’d say, “Hi’ya, stranger,” when they met.

  It’s funny, too, how a long-forgotten sound like that will bring a picture back into your head. For a split second I could almost think I was a kid again, sitting by Hi’s elbow in the old bunkhouse on the Y-B ranch while he was playing stud poker. The cowhands on the Y-B didn’t play a very big game, and the bets were usually a nickel or dime—or sometimes a quarter—but Hi had been losing all evening and was down to two cartwheels and a couple of quarters. I watched as he turned up a corner of his hole card and peeked; it was the four of spades. Then he drew a six, and stayed when Tommy Brogan bet a dime on a king up. On the next round Hi drew another four, but Tommy drew another king and bet another dime. There was already a four showing in the hand to Hi’s right, and a six in the hand to his left. But he sat for a full minute or more, seeming to study every one of the seven hands. Then, without saying he was making a raise, he shoved a quarter into the pot.

  I knew there must be some pretty good hole cards, because everybody stayed in to see the raise. On the last up card Tommy got a queen, Hi a deuce, and Mr. Cooper, the boss, drew an ace to make him a pair. I was sure Hi would drop out, but he didn’t. He stayed for Mr. Cooper’s bet of a dime and for Tommy’s raise to a quarter—even when I knew that Tommy would never buck the boss unless he had another king in the hole. I was afraid Hi might not have thought about that, so I reached a toe over and touched his boot, real easy. He moved it just enough to let me know he’d felt the touch.

  After Hi drew his down card and we’d peeked at it, I thought he’d gone out of his mind. It was the nine of diamonds, leaving him only a pair of fours, and beaten in sight by every hand on the table. Mr. Cooper must have known as well as I did that Tommy had three kings and his pair of aces topped, for he opened the betting with a nickel. But Hi was sitting between t
hem, and slid both cartwheels into the pot without saying a word. Nobody else said a word either, but they all turned their hands down, and Hi pulled in the pot. From there on his luck changed, and he must have had twenty dollars when Mr. Cooper said it was time to turn in.

  The last thing at night Hi always walked around to see that everything was all right in the corrals, and I always went along with him, if still awake. That night we were barely out of earshot from the bunkhouse when I asked him, “Why did you pick a time to bluff when you had the very worst hand at the table?”

  “Ain’t no time for bluffin’ like when you’re beat in sight,” he told me, “and there ain’t no sense waitin’ till you’re broke. How’s a man goin’ to run a bluff when he’s broke?”

  It was certain that every cowhand in that employment office had me beat in sight, and I’d decided to tell the man behind the counter that I’d pay five dollars for any kind of a job he had, regardless of the wages. But when Hi’s words flashed through my head, I changed my mind in a hurry. I slapped my ten-dollar bill up on the counter and said, “I’ll shoot the whole ten for a job if you’ve got a good one. I don’t mind riding the rough string, and can rope with the best of ’em—once I get my hand back in.”

  “Only got one job, and it’s a pretty fair one,” the man told me. Then he smiled and said, “Lookin’ a bit puny; been in the hospital?”

  “Yep,” I said, “but I’m all right now.”

  “Gas?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, “I wasn’t in the service. I was. . . .”

  The man had been looking right into my eyes when he asked if I’d been gassed, but the moment I told him I hadn’t been in the service his eyes drifted away and he shook his head. “Not a chance!” he told me, almost as if I’d asked him for a hand-me-out. “There’s too many boys that’s done their bit looking for jobs; you’re in the wrong town!”