“We took it back. I’m going to run some yearlings there, till I see what’s what.”
“You and your aunt?”
“No, me.”
“Come on, Joe!” shouted Smithwick in the hog-calling voice.
“Really,” said Joe, sincerely.
“You’re running yearlings and you need a horse.”
“Yup.”
“What are you going to do with that no-good, low-bred, yellow-livered, whey-faced, faint-hearted Smitty?” Bill shouted.
“He’s part of the cost of doing business on that particular ranch.”
“I foller you now.”
“What you got around here in the way of a broke horse?” Joe asked.
“Well, all grade horses. And no appaloosas! Know why the Indians liked appaloosas?”
“Why?”
“They was the only horses they could catch on foot. And by the time they rode their appaloosas to battle they was so mad it made them great warriors.”
“I have four hundred dollars I will give for a gelding seven years of age or less that you say is a good horse.”
“Done.”
Joe looked off at the pen of loose horses. “What did I buy?”
“Your purchase is a five-year-old bay gelding with black points named Plumb Rude, a finished horse. He’s as gentle as the burro Christ rode into Jerusalem. How about a dog?”
“Have one, a dilly.”
“I got two I could let go. One’s fifteen and one’s sixteen. The sixteen’s the mother of the fifteen. The fifteen’s got a undescended testicle but not so’s a man’d notice.”
Joe gave him the four hundred, which he had already rolled up in his shirt pocket with an elastic around it. Smithwick stuck it in his back pocket next to his snoose can.
“Let’s go look at him,” said Smithwick. He pulled his lariat down and they walked to the bronc pen. Plumb Rude was in a bunch of eight horses, easily spotted by the way he was marked, and by his habit of walking sideways and pushing other horses out of his way. He wasn’t very big.
Smithwick made a loop and pitched his houlihan. The rope seemed to drop out of the sky over the head of Plumb Rude. Smithwick drew the horse up to him with the rope. The horse must have been caught this way regularly; he didn’t seem to mind. “Appear all right to you?” The gelding looked like a horse in a Mathew Brady photograph, long-headed, rawboned, with sloped, hairy pasterns.
“Looks fine.”
“He’s a little cold backed but that ain’t gonna bother you. Saddle him and let him stand for a few minutes and he’ll never pitch with you. And he’s hard mouthed ’cause I got hard hands! Haw!”
“Bill, I don’t have a trailer. Can you drop him by when you get a minute?”
“Where’ll I leave him, in your dad’s old corrals there?”
“That’d be fine.”
Smithwick turned around and put his hands on his hips and gazed at the pen of broncs. He was the very picture of what Joe took to be happiness. “Lemme see,” Joe heard him say, “who am I gonna mug today?”
12
About a week later, the yearlings started coming in on partial loads, eastbound. They never could get it together to make up a whole semiload. Joe just had to pick them up as they arrived. The truckers left them at the stockyard in Deadrock and stuck the receipts and brand inspections under the door at the scale house. Joe went out there with a stock trailer in the evening and an old irrigator’s cow dog he had borrowed for the day. The low buttes on the prairie to the north of the stockyards were ledged with hot weather shadows, and blackbirds were lined up on the top planks of the cattle pens. Joe’s cattle were bunched around an automatic waterer at one end, a mixed batch of light grass cattle. Joe backed the trailer to a Powder River gate and used the dog to load the cattle. He closed the door and looked in along the slatted sides of the trailer where the wet muzzles pressed out. He took his time going back out the river road and hauled them right through the wire gate on the south pasture. He stopped and opened the trailer just at dark. A few yearlings craned and looked out into the space; then one turned and stood at the rear edge of the trailer looking down. The others crowded in front, bawled, and the one looking down jumped. After a pause, the rest poured out to look at the new world. They scattered and began to graze. Joe felt something inside him move out onto the grass with the cattle. It was thrilling to feel it come back.
The house was below the level of the immediate surrounding hills. Before sunrise, the tops of the cottonwoods lit up as though they were on fire, while the lower parts of the trees and their trunks continued to stand in the dark of night. Gradually, the conflagration moved downward, revealing the trees, and finally raced out along the ground, emblazoning the horizontal sides of the ranch buildings.
Into this bright scene came old man Overstreet on a bony little grulla mare, and wearing an overcoat. Alongside of him, a middle-aged man hurried to keep up. He was wearing hiking boots and a buffalo plaid shirt. Overstreet gazed around the buildings from his trotting horse until he spotted Joe.
“Joe, I’m tickled to death to see you back. This here is Mr. Prendergast of the town of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.” Joe shook Mr. Prendergast’s hand. He had a horsy, eager, well-bred face. “Mr. Prendergast is writing about our area for … for what?”
“For a German travel magazine,” said Mr. Prendergast.
“How are you, Mr. Overstreet?” Joe shook his hand. The old man had aged startlingly to a kind of papery fierceness like a hornet.
“Where’s Otis Rosewell?” Joe asked.
“He rode a sedan to the bottom of the Gros Ventre River. Otis has been gone for years.”
“I’m sure sorry to hear it.” Joe was startled that he had never heard this before.
“I’ve been seeing these mixed cattle coming in. Who do they belong to?” Overstreet asked crossly.
“Really, they’re Lureen’s steers. I’m taking kind of a break. I told her I’d watch them for her.”
“Why didn’t she come to me?” Overstreet demanded.
“She said you had given up your lease.”
“I had, I had! But I didn’t expect her to cut off communications!”
“I don’t think she meant to do that, Mr. Overstreet. But like I say, I was willing to watch them for her. And the grass was already coming.”
“Let me tell you something, young man. This outfit sets slap in the middle of me. I would have had it long ago if it hadn’t galled me to let your dad stick me up. But you people need to clear some of these ideas with me before you go off half cocked.”
Joe was not happy with the phrase “you people.”
“Mr. Overstreet,” he said, “we don’t need to do any such a thing.”
“I’m only interested in what’s neighborly,” said Overstreet, turning to go. “That’s how the West was won.” Prendergast laughed uncomfortably and the two of them went off, Prendergast having to jog to the horse’s walk as old man Overstreet shouted, “Prendergast, write that down!”
There was a dog living underneath the house, a mass of gray fur living in solitary misery. Joe had glimpsed it three different times, just at dusk when it sat on a low ridge, looking out over the empty country north of the ranch. He began to leave a pan of kibble on occasion to see if he couldn’t get this dog to accommodate itself to some degree to the human life of the ranch. But it was pretty clear he was going to have to shoot it; skunks were showing up with rabies and an untended dog like this would be held responsible for all depredations on local livestock.
Joe sat on a nearby hill with a rifle watching the pan of dog food, often drifting off into a nap during which he inevitably had bad, guilty dreams about shooting the dog. It was a job Joe didn’t want.