Dry Divide (15 page)

13

Wagon Wheels

W
HEN
we'd stripped Doc of his ruined finery we'd put his arms at his sides, rolled him in a blanket, and laid him out on a bed of straw as though he were a mummy. The next morning he was exactly as we'd left him, his mouth still open, and snoring like a geyser on the verge of erupting. I had two reasons for leaving him right there when we went to breakfast. In the first place, he wouldn't be worth a nickel until his hangover had worn off, and in the second, I wanted the sun to have plenty of time to dry his wadded raiment and harden the cement in it.

As we left our camp we stopped to look at the little forge Gus and Lars had built, and I could see that the other fellows were much more interested in the work that would be going on at the place than in cultivating corn, but it was as necessary as any of our other jobs. I'd planned that, with three teams in the field, the job would take four days, but to let the men know they weren't being pushed aside, I said, “I sure hate to spare you fellows at a time like this. Would it help to hurry the job along if you took three extra teams this morning, so you could change horses at noon?”

“Sure would,” Old Bill told me. “If we could trade teams at noon, and if the missus would put us up some dinner, so's't we didn't have to come back here to eat, we could wind that job up by tomorrow night.”

In the month we'd been together Paco had picked up maybe a hundred words of English, but he'd learned them all from Jaikus, so they had an amusing Irish twist to them, and he never used them with me. As we walked toward the windmill to wash for breakfast I told him in Spanish what I'd told Old Bill and Jaikus. I didn't intend for my talk to set a fire under them, but they acted as if it had. They stuffed away ham, eggs, and flapjacks to beat the band, while Mrs. Hudson packed a milk bucket with dinner for them. Paco left the table with half his breakfast in his hand, and even Gus and Lars seemed to have caught the fever.

I stopped to tell Judy that, as soon as she'd made her calls about the new orders, I wanted her to look for haulers who might like to take the jobs we were going to turn down. Then I wrote a list of the farmers who had offered to rent me teams, and said they'd probably be the best ones to start off with. I couldn't have spent more than ten minutes with her, but just as I left the kitchen the cultivator crew pulled out of the yard at a spanking trot, leading six spare horses behind the wagon.

Gus and Lars were at the barn, cribbing up sections of old wagon tongues to make a base for their anvil, and I went to help them with it. I knew only enough about blacksmithing to shoe a horse or weld a point onto a plowshare, but woodworking was no novelty to me, and though I didn't know much about wagon building, Gus and Lars would show me the new tricks I'd have to learn.

We spent our first couple of hours building work benches along the front of the barn, putting up shelves for our tools and hardware, and in sorting out our various sizes and shapes of steel and lumber. Then we started tearing the old wagons down; lifting off the bodies, removing the wheels, cold-chiseling rusted bolts out of bolsters and axles, and building a bonfire to burn the steel fittings off cracked or broken singletrees, neck yokes, seats, end-gates, and wagon tongues.

Chopping bolts with cold-chisels doesn't produce lullaby music, but Doc slept through it until nearly noon. Then he came shuffling from behind the barn, back in his overalls, and with his face so swollen it looked as if he'd been in the poison ivy. I caught a glimpse of him as he came around the corner, but kept right on with the bolt I was chopping, and didn't look up again. He came over to the wagon I was working on, and I could see by his shadow that he was standing there dejectedly. He waited until the head snapped off the bolt, then mumbled, “I'm sorry, Bud. I didn't aim to let you down like . . .”

“You didn't let me down; I let you down—into the watering trough,” I told him. “It was the only way I could think of to get you home, and I couldn't risk losing you at a time like this. There's nothing for you to be sorry about, unless it's that hangover, and if ever a man earned a blowout, you have. I couldn't have lasted a week at that stacking job. Get yourself a bellyful of cold milk, and take it easy for the rest of the day, then you and I will light into this carpentry work tomorrow.”

Doc had been standing, head down, and facing toward the barn. When I'd finished, he looked up at me, came as close to grinning as he could with a hangover such as his, and said, “You can count on me from here out, Bud. Looks like you did a right good job of getting me out of the medicine-show business. Knew all along that you'd never go into it with me.”

Before I could think of anything to say, Doc walked to the heap of almost rock-hard clothes that lay at the end of my bench, picked it up, and tossed it into the center of the bonfire. During the afternoon he worked as hard as any one of us, but I'll bet it was one of the toughest afternoons he ever put in.

It was after sunset before either Judy or the cultivating crew came back, and by that time we had every piece of cracked, worn, or broken lumber out of the old wagons, the fittings burned away, the old rivets and bolts chopped out, and were ready to begin the rebuilding the first thing next morning. Judy had found seven or eight men who were glad to take on part of the hauling work we were going to turn down, and Old Bill said the corn field was already two-thirds finished.

That night the crew turned in early, but Judy and I sat up until after midnight, driving the roads, and working on our puzzle. We started by driving very slowly over the road from the Hudson place to the elevator in Cedar Bluffs. There was a steep little rise to pull just after leaving the place, then two long upgrades farther on; one of them three miles from the ranch, and the other three miles out from town. Except for the two deep gulches, the rest of the way was mostly downgrade, with the last mile quite steep.

Right from the beginning I'd planned to use my old mares as an extra team for pulling wagons out of the fields. By leaving them hitched on for another half mile, the sharp little rise would be no trouble to us. Then I could put a hired tote team at the foot of each of the two long upgrades. I wouldn't need drivers for them, but would keep feed at the foot of the rise, so the horses would return after each pull. With help up those long grades, and with the rest of the way mostly downhill, my only big worry was the gulches. If all my teams could swoop through them at an all-out run, we could easily haul 120-bushel loads, and I'd be able to handle a smaller job along with the Hudson hauling. By running the gulches, my fast horses could easily haul a load to town in two hours, and return with the empty wagons in even less time. But if I had to use tote teams there, I'd lose a half hour at each gulch, so it wouldn't do me any good to haul an extra twenty bushels at each trip. My teams couldn't get over the road fast enough to keep up with more than one thrashing rig.

Every man I had would be glad to work a twelve-hour day, but the horses, tough as I knew them to be, couldn't do it on that kind of work. I was pretty sure they could travel forty-two to forty-four miles a day, half with a load and half without, but I'd risk breaking them down if I tried to stretch it.

Even if my horses could run the gulches, I didn't want to take an additional job where we'd have to haul more than 800 bushels a day, and only five miles instead of eight. Then too, it would have to be over the last five miles of the route we'd be using for the Hudson job, so as to use the same tote team on the last upgrade. There wasn't any such job among the orders I'd received, but there were six—for quarter-sections, and two halves—that would fit in fairly well. They were all between the Hudson place and Cedar Bluffs, the dates matched up all right, and the thrashing was going to be done by two fairly small rigs. There were only two big difficulties; the distances averaged nearly six miles instead of five, and one of the machines was rated to thrash a thousand bushels a day, the other eight hundred.

I didn't like to take an unreasonable risk, but decided to take all those jobs. It didn't seem probable that all three thrashing rigs would operate at full capacity every hour of every day. There would surely be a few breakdowns, and the smaller machines would lose time in moving from one place to another. Besides that, I could hire extra wagons and drivers on the days I'd need them, so there wasn't too much danger that I'd fall down on the job for any of my customers.

I'd been lucky enough to get the hauling from the next two jobs to be done by the thrashing rig Mrs. Hudson had engaged. They were both full-section jobs, a few miles farther to the north, and the hauling was to be done to the Marion, Nebraska elevator. It was ten o'clock before we had the first part of our puzzle put together, then I had Judy drive me over the route for the two big jobs.

If I'd had my choice of all the wheat hauling jobs to be done in Kansas, I couldn't have found two that would have been any better suited to my little horses. Both sections were at the very top of the high divide between Beaver and Sappa creeks, and both were within a mile of the county road; one of them seven miles out from the elevator, and the other eight. The first two or three miles were nearly level, then the last five were almost a toboggan slid down to the elevator. There was only one bad stretch of a half mile in the whole distance, and an extra team could easily take care of that.

The second half of our puzzle was just the opposite of the first. Although I still had more orders than I could handle, there weren't enough of them on that high divide, or on the slope between there and Beaver Valley, to keep all my teams busy every day. If I had to fill in with hauling from any other part of the area, I'd only wear my men and horses down, and couldn't hope to make but very little profit from their work.

As soon as Judy had driven me down to have a look at the elevator in Marion, I had her take me back to the house, and there we fitted into our puzzle the smaller orders I'd received for hauling from the high divide. Some of them overlapped enough that there would be days when I'd have to hire five or six extra wagons and drivers. And there were some good sized holes, where I wouldn't have work enough for more than half of my own teams.

By midnight I'd decided that we'd better fill in the schedule with scattered jobs, and we were looking through the orders to see which ones might work out best when Judy said, “You know, Bud, it ain't only owners that live someplace else that let out hauling. Most of them that farm their own places can't handle more'n half their hauling at thrashing time. They have to let the rest of it out, and they pay the same price as the landlords. It's cheaper for 'em to do that than to hire haulers by the day, 'cause a man don't work his horses very hard when he's hiring 'em out by the day. If you'd leave me try, I'll bet I could get us enough fill-in jobs right over there on the divide, or on the way down to Marion. Lots of people don't think nothing about letting out their hauling till thrashing time's right on top of 'em.”

I not only liked Judy's idea, but I liked her saying, “get
us
enough fill-in jobs.”

“You go after them as hard as you can go,” I told her, “and don't pass up any that come in our slack times, no matter how small they are, or even if they're out of rugged back country. We'll put on whatever extra teams we need, and with those short, downhill runs we could handle half the haul from three or four thrashing rigs. Now run along and get yourself some sleep, and don't you start out before nine o'clock tomorrow morning. I can't afford to have you wear yourself down to a nubbin before we ever start the hauling business.”

She tried to tell me I was the one who was wearing himself down, and that I was getting skinnier every day, but I knew I wasn't and that the toughest end of the job was already behind me, so I stayed up until I'd written to all the owners whose jobs we couldn't handle, giving each one the names of other haulers who would take their work.

Thursday morning the cultivating crew was away by sunup, Gus and Lars were starting the fire in their forge, and Doc and I were shaving new spokes for wagon wheels. An hour later I heard the old Maxwell backfire, then Judy drove away to begin hunting for fill-in jobs on the high divide.

With only four days left until thrashing time, the wheels worried me more than any part of our job, for the success of my business would depend as much on sturdy wheels as on tough horses. There was hardly one on the wagons I'd bought that didn't need a couple of new spokes or fellies, and a few needed twice that many. Reinforcing bands had to be forged for the weakened hubs, all the tires cut, rewelded to the proper size, expanded by heating, then forced onto the repaired woodwork to bind it in a viselike grip as the metal cooled and shrank—and twelve wagons meant forty-eight wheels.

Once the wheels were out of the way, the rest of the job wouldn't require too much carpentry. Gus had been so careful in selecting the lumber, and so insistent that it be milled to exactly the right sizes, that the stretchers, bolsters, axle beams, side boards, and end-gates would require only sawing and shaping. The tongues and singletrees would need only to be tapered with a drawknife, then smoothed with a spokeshave, and the seats would need only to have the corners rounded. In mounting the metal fittings to the wood there'd be hundreds of holes to be bored, bolts and rivets to be driven through, and nuts and washers to be turned and peened tight, but most of it was work that Old Bill, Jaikus, and Paco could do.

Within an hour we'd settled into a steady routine. Although Doc wasn't a highly skilled carpenter, he had an excellent knack for using tools, his hangover was completely gone, and he seemed anxious to make up for the time he'd lost. With hardly a pause between each one, he'd snatch up a spoke that needed replacing, saw a piece of lumber to exactly the same length, clamp it into his vise, strip it roughly round with a few strokes of a drawknife, and smooth it with a spokeshave. Then, as I cut tenons on the new spoke, he'd rough out a felly for me to mortise and finish.