Duster (9781310020889) (19 page)

Rain hitting on my face and dripping into my
eyes made me realize that I didn't have my head rag on, and I
commenced to take some notice of myself. When I looked down I could
see that I was mud all over from rolling on the ground, and some
sand and leaves and bits of thorn and other trash were stuck to my
leggings and britches.

The rag I'd had tied
around my head had kept at least
some of
the water off my forehead and out of my eyes, but it had come off
when I rolled away from the snake. When I found it again, it was on
the ground, smack under the heel of my left shoe. It had been wet
before; now it was muddy. I wasn't about to put that thing back on
my head. Feeling real disgusted—with the rain and the wood and the
rag and everything else—I threw that rag as hard as I could toward
where the rattler had disappeared. Then I turned and stomped back
to camp.

I hiked it in and started to dig another rag
out of Bill's stuff before I remembered how touchy he was about
that.

"You got another chunk of cloth or an old
sack? I lost my fine headpiece."

"Sho ... I'll find it for you. While I'se
doing that whyn't you fetch in the wood I thought you was gonna
have brung in already."

"There ain't nothing out there that'll burn.
Nothin'. I been looking all this time and ain't found anything but
one rattlesnake and a lot o' water."

"Boy, I cain't fix up special cookin' over a
rattlesnake an' a pail o' water. You can do better'n that. Just you
haul in what you can, wet or not, an' let me worry about settin' it
to fire—all right? "

"All right," I said. But I figured he was
going to be in for a big surprise when he found out how wet all the
wood was.

I went out and collected the best I could
find. Nothing so thick it would be hard to catch fire even if it
was dry and nothing so small it was likely to be sopped through and
worthless even if it did catch fire. I brought in a couple good
armloads of that kind of wood, but it was awful wet.

When I got back and dumped the second load,
Bill left off his fussing over a big pot and came over to the place
he'd picked out for a fire.

"We'll need another two loads more anyhow,
boy, but you kin get it in a little bit. First, you looky
heah."

I bent close to watch
while Bill picked out some finger-thick stuff and looked it over
careful; then he took out his belt knife and split the sticks in
half lengthwise. The inside wasn't too wet. I could see where the
wet part was from it being darker,
but
that didn't go very far into the inside wood. Bill tucked the two
pieces of stick under his shirt and went to splitting some more,
putting most of them in his shirt when he was done and tossing
others away if they were too wet or rotted hollow or
something.

Next thing he did was to take a piece of
tarp about five foot square. He shook it out and held it over the
place where he figured to light the fire. He didn't say
anything—just looked up to me and there wasn't any question but
that he wanted me to hold the tarp over there, so I did.

While I held the cover in place Bill went
and rummaged through his sacks, which he had piled over another
piece of tarp. Then he came back holding two things in his
hands.

One, a block of lucifers, was obvious. The
other I didn't understand right off, but I did when I thought on it
for a second. It was a plain old tallow dip candle.

What it was for was easy to see once it was
pointed out. Damp wood won't light off to a match for anything. But
a candle, something that will burn for a long time without getting
your fingers charred, now that could be held to a piece of even
pretty darn soggy wood long enough to get a fire going.

Sure enough, that's what Bill did. As easy
as you please, he took a lucifer and snapped it alight, touched the
candle on fire with that, and then held a piece of split stick over
it. Didn't take him more than five minutes to get a little fire
going. In ten minutes, I didn't need to hold the tarp anymore. And
inside of fifteen minutes, I couldn't of held a tarp there without
getting both me and it burnt up. There wasn't enough rain in the
state of Texas to put that fire out by then.

Bill never said a thing,
just went back to fussing over his
pots. I
went over and brought back more wood until we had a real good pile
there. By the time I had enough to satisfy myself, Bill came over
with another rag for me to use for a hat.

"I'd give you some paper or something fer a
brim, but it wouldn't hold up in th' rain. This here's the best I
can do."

"It'll do. But when we get to Rockport and
get them animals sold, the first thing I'm gonna do is get me a
proper hat— real fur felt, maybe."

Bill nodded and kept on
with his work. Now, he was reaching inside a pot that was covered
over so the rain couldn't get in. He worked his arms up and down
like pistons, up and down and up and down just as steady as the
driving rod in a steam engine like the ones I'd seen drawings of in
the
Police Gazette.
I got the notion that whatever was in there was going to be
worked to death so it wouldn't be anything I'd want in my stomach.
But I sure was wrong.

When the rest of the bunch came wandering in
from the herd it was still pretty early, but they were wet and cold
and beat. They came in and sat quiet, pulling long drinks of hot
coffee out of the tin cups that Bill had ready for them. They ate
their steaks and fried beans without talking much.

Then, still feeling low, they were about to
clomp back to their horses when Bill came over, not saying a word,
and lifted the covers off a couple of low pans that he'd had
covered and sitting beside the fire to keep warm. We'd all figured
they was just more beans to be refried later. Instead they were
about the prettiest deep-dish dried apple pies any man ever laid
eyes on.

I'd not seen Bill put them together, but he
had somehow, some time. They sure perked up everybody's
spirits.

Mister Sam Silas went over and punched Bill
on the arm, and most everyone had something to say.

It's sort of customary that nobody ever says
anything nice about a trail cook's food, but everybody around that
fire busted the custom right down to nothing that day. Even Tommy
Lucas mumbled "fine" when he handed over his plate for seconds.

I guess what really made
it so remarkable about all the compliments was that the pies really
didn't taste too good. Bill
hadn't had any
coals to get his Dutch ovens working right so the crust was soggy
and sort of runny and the apples kind of mushed in together with
what was supposed to be crust. But it was a mean and miserable day,
and we hadn't been expecting anything special, and that seemed to
make the apple and flour mixture taste near as good as anything Ma
had ever baked at home. We went back to work that afternoon feeling
a lot warmer and a lot less wet than we might have.

"WE'RE GONNA HAVE to change your name,
boy—call you Mud instead o' Duster." Crazy Longo sat up on his
horse all high and dry and comfortable and grinned at me. He had
sort of a wide, squared-off face with a great, broad mustache that
was a dark, rich red in color even though his hair was as brown as
fancy-tanned leather. When he smiled, the bottom half of his face
split open straight across, and it seemed like he had a line of
teeth that went clear from one end of that mustache to the
next.

He must of thought he was in some position
to brag from, and in a way he was. He was up on top of that horse
and wearing britches he had got to wash out the night before, after
the rain quit.

As for me, I was on my feet again, like it
seemed I always was any more even if I had signed on for a riding
job, and I was just about covered over with sticky mud from
carrying in armloads of wood. Half my waking hours I seemed to
spend on my feet with a load of damp, dirty wood clutched tight
against my chest.

The night before, I'd
tried to get my stuff clean too, but I didn't have an extra pair of
britches or another shirt, so the
scrubbing hadn't really done too much to improve my
appearance. By noon that next day I was near about as dirty again
as ever I had been—but not so wet, so there was something to be
thankful for. My shoes was heavy with caked and drying mud until it
was becoming a real chore to walk, especially since they stayed wet
and they were beginning to gall me some.

That night I surely intended to wash my
stuff out again and then, by golly, I'd sleep in my drawers so my
clothes and shoes could get dried out proper for a change. "Just
you wait," I told Crazy Longo. "I haven't hardly had a chance to
get clean, what with fetching wood for the rest of you dandies to
dry off by. I ain't a bit nastier than the rest of you, an' even
dirty I smell better than some I could name. And what's more, some
people I know don't stick a fistful of hair into everything they
drink. That ain't clean either, you know."

Crazy Longo was always a great one for
joking and he never minded if it was him or someone else that was
on the taking end of a joke or a prank. He just grinned a little
bigger and brushed his mustache up tall and ruffly with the back of
his hand. Then he turned around and started to walk his horse past,
making a big show of going around me but actually coming so close I
had to be careful I didn't get knocked down or didn't step backward
onto a patch of real slick, greasy-looking mud just behind. He was
likely figuring I didn't know that was there and would step back
and slip on that bit of slick clay and go falling down in the mud,
wood and all.

What I did instead was to hop over to one
side, right up next to his horse. It was one he'd brought along on
the drive with him and I'd noticed it was awful touchy about
anything coming close to its left flank. There was a big, jagged
scar on it back there, and maybe that had something to do with it.
Anyway, I stepped in real close and gave that horse a good, hard
scrape with the broken off end of a pecan branch. The stick rubbed
straight across that old scar. And did that old horse ever move. He
squatted down just long enough to get his muscles bunched right and
then he jumped like a bobtailed cat being shot out of a cannon.

Crazy Longo's head snapped back till his hat
come clean off his head, and for about two seconds, there, he was
moving probably as fast as he ever would in his whole lifetime. He
was a good one for staying up on a horse, though, and I never had
any notion I'd get Crazy Longo flung off his own horse. Which I did
not do.

Something else I did not do was to reckon
just where I stood and just where that horse was going. When it
commenced to jump out like it did, it sort of favored the side with
the scar on it. And that threw it just a little bit to one side as
it went. And that put me and my fool self right up against one
corner of a nine-hundred-pound piece of fast-moving hide, meat, and
bone.

I got belted a little by the hip and nudged
some on my leg and shoved over just enough to knock me off my
balance. When I went to step out to get my balance back, I hit that
patch of clay and mud and my left foot went sliding forward at a
good clip. Since my right foot stayed planted right where it was, I
pretty much had a choice. I could end up on the ground stretched
out with my feet front to rear or I could take a fall. Not that I
had time to think it out—just natural-like, I took the fall.

Crazy Longo seen it all. He come back and
leaned down and picked up his hat and then kind of hung there
upside down and watched under his horse's neck while I picked
myself land my wood up off the ground, but he never said a thing
while I got myself back on my own feet where I belonged.

I got up and shot him what I hoped was a
real mean look, and to show him I wasn't letting it bother me none
I stuck my nose up in the air and beat at the seat of my britches
to sort of dust myself off. Instead of getting anything off of me,
though, that pounding just smeared it around some. From the feel of
it, I was all over slick, red mud from hipbone to tippy-toe. I
didn't look, though. I wasn't going to give Crazy Longo that
satisfaction. I just brushed away like it was doing some good, got
my bundle of wood back together when I'd brushed at my hip long
enough, and proceeded back toward camp.

Crazy Longo rode alongside
of me, still not saying a word until we got back to where Digger
Bill was working over his
slabs of
slightly soured beef. "Sure hope you get caught up on your wood
gatherin' soon, Duster. You shorely need that chanct to get cleaned
up. But let me know if you need help picking out a puddle to wash
in, 'cause you don't pick 'em so good for yer-self." He gave me a
real serious and helpful nod and rode off back to the crew to tell
them where we was and where they could hold the herd close to both
us at the fire and some good graze.

I slapped the wood down next to the fire and
told Bill, "I'm tired o' being all covered over with mud. Do you
need me anymore?"

He never even glanced up from what he was
doing. "Naw, take off. Go on up the river four-five miles to a
crick that comes in from the nawth. Has a stand o' willas maybe
three chains upstream. Get me a good pile o' wood on the far bank
an' then do whatever you want," he said. "On the far bank, mind
you. They'll want t' cross over tonight."

I waved him a quick thank-you and got out of
there before he could change his mind.

The horses had had enough time for a
breather and were ready to go, or anyways they weren't so unready
that they were going to make trouble about it. As soon as the boys
had their afternoon horses, I eased them along, then picked up the
pace some when we was going good.