Sour Creek Valley Page 14

  “Put on some wood! Put on some wood!” said old Henry Randal. And he clapped his hands together.

  He was terrible impatient. Everything had to be done on the jump, to suit him. When you got it done, his brain was already turning the corner and busy with something else in the distance. I never saw such a man to make other folks nervous.

  The two colored men got the sign from their boss, and they ran over and took hold on a couple of the big chunks of wood and laid them on the fire. They grunted and groaned as they heaved at them. It takes strength to handle heavy timber, but there’s a knack to it, too—like handling baled hay, almost, but not quite so scientific as that.

  “Look at ’em!” said old Henry Randal, pushing back his chair and slapping his hands together. “Why, when I was young, one boy could’ve handled wood like that … and bigger. I tell you, the world is going to the devil, and so are the men in it. Foreman … what’s the name of your foreman, Harry?”

  Harry Randal give me a sort of a desperate look. He didn’t want my real name to leak out. He’d never give me any name on the ranch except Smith. Now he said, “His name is Jim Smith.”

  “Smith, hey? Seems to me like I’ve known somebody by the same name before this. I can’t recollect the face, though. Did you ever live in Kansas City? No? Well, Mister Jones, will you let me see if you can handle that wood any better than they could?”

  I was a little mad. I got up, picked up the wood, and chucked it on the fire. It really was light, and if the colored boys hadn’t been in each other’s way, they could’ve handled it like nothing at all, of course. I started back toward the table, dusting my hands, while Harry Randal smiled and swaggered in his chair a little, exactly as though he had done the work himself.

  “You see,” he said, “that people haven’t run downhill so far as you might think, Grandfather.”

  “You talk when your turn comes,” said the old man, very sharp. “By the way, that fire has no backlog. Why don’t you put in the backlog, Jones? Why don’t you do your work properly, once you put your hand to it? If you’re a foreman on a ranch, you’ve got to set an example of thoroughness to the other men. What sort of an example is such slipshod work as this? There’s the backlog, Jones! Go put it on the fire, will you?”

  I stopped and give the old chap a look. He was old, but even so, he made my hands itch. A ten-pound weight of words came boiling up in my throat. I had to shut my teeth with a click to hold them back, so I turned around quick and put my back toward that old devil.

  What he had pointed to for the backlog was a big, round section of a scrub oak that had been brought into the house by mistake a couple of months before, as Randal had told me. In the first place, it should have been split. In the second place, it should have been allowed a whole year of drying out and seasoning before it was so much as split.

  There it lay on the floor on a pair of boards. It was a darned big log, no matter what it was made of. But it happened to be made of oak—and that oak happened to be green. You take it, by and large, the wood was about as heavy as iron. I knew it, and so would anyone know it, by the look of the solid grain of the end of it. You could see where the teeth of the big saws had blunted on the hard fiber of that old tree, and how they had dulled and worked crooked, and just polished the wood instead of cutting through it. The tramp that cut through that tree would’ve earned a whole week’s board.

  That was the elephant that old Randal wanted me to put in the fire as a backlog. It weighed as much as a piano, and it had been such a job for the blockheads that had brought it in through the narrow doors from the outside, that it had been left laying near the fireplace all of this time.

  I looked at that whale of a stick sort of helpless, and Harry jumped up. “Let me give you a hand, Big Boy,” he said.

  “Sit down, sit down, sit down!” cried old Henry Randal at us. “Sit down, will you? And tell me if Jones has asked for any help? He’s big enough to do the job alone. And I hope that he’s not puppy enough to ask for help before he finds that the job has him beaten. I hope that he’s not just made of putty.”

  That old chap had a devil hidden under his tongue, and every time he talked, the devil jumped up and showed his face.

  I grabbed hold on the log and heaved, just blind with anger. All that I managed was to give it a twist that made it roll a bit from side to side. There was so much weight to it that it fair made the whole room quiver.

  “He is beat, you see?” said the old devil, as I straightened up again and turned toward the table. “One effort … that’s enough for him, and Jones is beat. Big but soft, that’s what he looks like to me!”

  When you get very mad, it’s like a red flame. But when you get still madder, you get a white flame instead. At first you could scream and yell and stamp and tear things. When the full anger comes, then you can stand still and smile. What you want to do then, is to poison.

  I give one look to old Henry Randal. Harry said, “Why, Grandfather, it took four men …”

  “Four … fiddlesticks,” said old Henry Randal. “Don’t tell me what a man and a man’s work may be. Don’t I know?”

  “Very well,” Harry Randal said, “but I’m afraid that you’re expecting the impossible, sir!”

  “Am I? Am I? Well … there he goes for a second try. I’m glad to see that your man Jones has a sense of shame, at the least.”

  You can’t imagine anybody talking like that. But Henry Randal was old enough and mean enough to say everything that came into his head. There was hardly anything that wouldn’t come into his head, some time or other.

  I laid hold on that log with such a grip that it hurt the ends of my fingers bad. Then I leaned back and sank my knees down and got my arms straight and my chest and hips and the balls of my feet as much in a line as possible. After that, I began to straighten. It was astonishing to me, but that log raised under my hands. I felt muscles and tendons strain, and there was snapping sounds in my shoulders, but that log heaved up with me. I dragged it back toward the fireplace.

  “Hold up!” yelled Harry Randal. “You’re scratching the floor to pieces.”

  “Shut up, you idiot!” cried Henry Randal. “Will you shut up and leave him be? Curse the floor and the scratches!”

  I got the log in front of the fire, and there all at once I staggered, for my foot had caught in the floor.

  “There he goes!” cried Henry Randal, clapping his hands together. “There he goes. Beaten right on the verge of success. Beaten and giving up right at the gate.”

  It fell on me like a whip. All that I would’ve liked to do to that old devil went into the strength of my hands and arms and shoulders. I lifted that whole log in my arms and dropped it into the fire. It sent a crash of sparks and smoke up into my face, and the released weight made me stagger backward.

  I went numb all over. The blood rushed into my head until I thought that my temples would burst. Through a cloud that had settled across my eyes, I managed to find a chair and to drop into it. A three-year-old child could have pushed me down at that minute, I was so weak. I felt, all over, the way an arm feels, when it has gone to sleep.

  The rush of the sparks had sent a shower out upon the floor. Harry Randal jumped up with a yell, swearing that the house would be sure to catch fire and to burn down. He set about putting the sparks out. But old Henry Randal, you would have thought, didn’t give a hang whether the house burned or not.

  When I came back to myself, there was young Randal pointing to the little black spots all over the floor, and to the way that the big log had squashed the life out of the fire, and clamoring about the big scratch in the floor. That old grandfather of his sat with his chin in one withered claw of a hand and blinked his bird eyes and never left off staring at me.

  “I thought so,” he said at last. “Maybe you had a mite of help in handling the punchers, Harry? Maybe this Jones, or Smith, or whatever he might be,
gave you a hand?”

  Smart? I tell you that old rascal could see through about anything. Harry Randal turned red, like a fool, and then he began to stammer something.

  Old Randal then heaved himself up out of the chair, saying, “It’s too hot to be staying indoors. Come along, Jones. You and me will take a ride around the place, today.”

  He went out. We got a horse for him, and I took another. Without another word to Harry and without another word to any of the boys, he took me off with him for a tour of the ranch.

  He was very brisk and very cheerful, now. The way that he asked questions, you would have thought that he was my boss and that Harry was just his hired man with no real interest in the place.

  About noon we were a long distance away from the house, and the old chap said, “Well, we’ll make us a fire and have a lunch. What have you got to eat with you?”

  I pulled out my saddlebag, and there was hardtack, a mite of bacon, some cornmeal flour, a bit of salt in a sack, some raisins, and a little package of tea. I always have a small snack of food like that along with me. You never can tell when it will come in handy. Two or three times I’ve had to make a hurry move across the hills. When those times come along, it pays to have some food put aside. If a lot of fellows are riding along behind you, they figure you’re heading for the nearest town or the nearest shack to get chuck, but if you can support yourself in the open, you’ll take a course that will fool them. At any rate, that’s been my experience.

  This Henry Randal looked into the bag, and all he seemed to see was the bacon.

  “Bacon!” he cried. “Bacon! You expect me to eat salt meat at my time of life? Bacon! I’m cursed if I ever heard of anything like it!”

  I had to bear down hard to keep from exploding, but I want you to understand just what a mean, prying, overbearing sort of a gent he was.

  Then he sang out, “There’s our fresh meat, Jones! Shoot that rabbit for me!”

  By the time that I had been able to pull my revolver and turn around in the saddle, the jack rabbit was a good long distance away. I was glad of that. I had done absolutely no shooting on that range, and I didn’t intend to do any, because I knew that before I had pulled the trigger half a dozen times, the whole gang would tumble to the fact that I was a dud, so far as guns were concerned.

  Here was I with a revolver, and yonder was a jack rabbit, just about out of range, and jumping back and forth in a twisting course as it ran, scared to death, its ears flagging back with its speed of running. Nobody is ever expected to hit a running rabbit with a revolver shot, no matter on what range—so there wouldn’t be any disgrace that I could see in missing here.

  I just tipped the muzzle of that gun up, hip-high, and shot without trying to take a bead. The rabbit jumped a mile into the air, and I thanked heaven that luck had taken my shot near enough to scare it.

  The rabbit came down. And where it hit the ground, it flattened out like a pancake!

  Yes, sir, I took hold of myself with both hands, as you might say, I was so surprised, but I forced any expression of surprise out of my face. I wanted to keep those squinting, narrowing, drilling eyes of the old chap from boring into me anymore, though. I touched up my horse with the spurs and rode right over to pick up my kill. Of all the shooting that I ever done, the killing of that rabbit was the only shot that I could ever call good.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Four

  Well, when I cleaned that rabbit for the fire, my bones were fair aching in me with a yearning that the boys might’ve been on deck to see that shot. Because everything was perfect. That rabbit was about as far away as a revolver shot would carry, and I’d fired from the hip so easy and natural and careless, as though I was never in want of any target easier than this here one. Of course, there couldn’t be anybody around, except this old withered goat that had no good words for anybody, and that would as soon cut his wrinkled throat as to pass a compliment along.

  He sat down and watched me roasting the rabbit. “You ought to let the fire burn down and toast that flesh on wooden spits over the coals,” said this old goat. “I never saw a grown-up man that called himself a mountaineer cook meat like that!”

  That was the way he carried on. It was maddening. I had to keep one idea humming through my mind all of the time—that I was going to get this ranch into my own hands, one of these days, and that this was just one of the bits of nasty work that I had to accept for getting it. One more price to pay, and not the smallest price either, you can bet.

  When I handed old Randal a stick with little chunks of roasted rabbit all along it, he took one bite and then said, “Why, this is an old buck of a rabbit that’s been gallivanting around these hills for the last fifty years. I’d as soon try to eat leather. Gimme some of that bacon!”

  He ate bacon then, with a lot of relish, and he left me to the rabbit. It was the sweetest and the easiest rabbit eating that I pretty near ever did.

  After that, we started on again in our rounds. Old Randal noticed everything—the condition of the fences, the amount of new fencing that had been done lately, the number of cattle, and the amount of fat that was on their ribs. Nothing missed him—nothing. He even saw the places along the edge of the water where some of the mired cows had been dragged out by the boys, and he seemed to be able to tell by the look of the spot just what had happened.

  I was glad, you can bet, that I had had the boys working like beavers, lately. They had done half a year’s work in that spell, and things looked pretty shipshape. Suddenly old Randal snarled at me—this was along toward evening when we were headed back for the ranch.

  “Young fellow, how long have you been with Harry?”

  I told him, and he whistled. “You been pretty busy, ain’t you?”

  “Busy?” I said. “Oh, no. You take a place like this, where all the boys are happy and contented, and where everything always runs along nice and oiled, things are kept up so well that it ain’t much work.”

  He gave me a grin, and his eyes wrinkled. “Son,” he said, “I saw the looks of the cavvy yard!”

  No doubt those horses were a little slab-sided and rough coated from the work that I had given them. I had not thought of that, but you could trust this old chap to think of everything.

  “These fellows are a free-riding lot,” I said. “They wear out their spurs digging them through horsehide all day long. They work themselves and their horses so careless that at the end of the day, when you might think that they had done enough riding and working, nothing will do them, but they have to get up races with each other. That’s what wears down the horses such a terrible lot. Hard on the horseflesh, but it keeps the boys feeling right, so I let them alone. You know how it is.”

  He only smiled. You wouldn’t catch him making any damaging admissions. “I’ll tell you, Smith … or is your name Jones?”

  Now, he had been switching from one name to another during the day, calling me Jones, and apologizing for not calling me Smith, calling me Smith and apologizing for not calling me Jones. So I’d got my own name sort of mixed up in my head, and I forgot what Harry Randal had called me—Smith or Jones.

  “Sure,” I said. “Jones is my name.”

  “I have a big place over yonder,” said Henry Randal, “and I’ve tried out one manager after another. Now, sir, I tell you that place of mine is a man-size job, but it hasn’t some of the problems that this place has. It hasn’t any mountains like those yonder with the cañons, y’understand?”

  I looked sidewise at him and then nodded.

  “Now, for a good up-and-coming man to work that place, I would pay a mighty handsome salary. I wouldn’t start down low with an offer to a man like you, Smith, excuse me … I mean, Jones. Right off, I’ll offer you a hundred a month, and all found. That includes a little house all for your own, in case you might happen to be the marrying kind of a man.”

  That was all very nice
and sweet, but I just laughed at him. Me that was playing for the whole ranch in Sour Creek Valley, how was I to be contented with the prospect of being a hired man all of my life?

  “More than that, eh?” asked old man Randal. “Well, sir, I know that you’ve taken this place in hand and prevented my grandson from ruining it.”

  “You know nothing of the kind,” I put in.

  He held up his hand. “And I’ll increase that offer of mine. I’ll go right up to my top figure. I’ll offer you four thousand a year, with everything in the way of a living expense thrown in free … horses, house, and a couple of servants. You hear me, young fellow?”

  Now, if you know anything about conditions on the range, an offer like that was almost too good to be true. Back in the times when a cowpuncher got his forty dollars a month, if he was lucky enough to have a job, the foreman of a great big outfit might get fifty or sixty—plus his house and his vegetable garden, and a couple of cows, if he was a married man. When a man got his promotion, it wasn’t his increased pay that counted—it was the increased importance of the responsibilities that were dumped on his shoulders.

  When you take these things into consideration, you can see how it was when old Randal said to me that he would pay me as much as four thousand dollars a year.

  It staggered me! I thought it over very serious, because no matter how much I could make out of the ranch, there was a big chance that I might not be able to make anything at all, if the rustlers got too thick for me. Four thousand a year was like a million, compared to what I had ever made before. But there were two things against it. One was that I would have to be working for this old crab. The other was that the gambling chance would be taken away from me. What’s life for a young man without the gambling chance?