Duster (9781310020889) (26 page)

Jesus laced his coffee stiff with sugar like
we always did, and I poured a bunch of it in my tea. There was a
little tin pitcher of milk on the table too, and since I knew it
wouldn't of been for the coffee I filled my cup all the way up to
the brim with some of the cream-heavy milk. It didn't taste bad
when it was all stirred together.

Near where he had set down the cup of tea,
there was a tiny little plate with thin slices of fruit on it. I
took that to be a side dish that went with the tea, something like
serving a scone when you had folks in for a cup of coffee or
putting out a bowl of nuts with cider. Anyhow I reached for one and
took a bite.

I must of made a face for Jesus asked,
"What's the matter? It ees spoilt mebe?"

"It sure must be. That's the awfulest
tasting stuff I ever had. It's sour, not a bit sweet like fruit
should be."

"It looks sweet." Jesus reached across and
tried one of the fruit slices, and his face puckered up into a
knot. "Aieee, thas terrible." He looked like he wanted to spit, but
the floor was clean so he swallowed quick and drank the rest of his
coffee off in a hurry to get rid of the taste.

"You should tell the man about his fruits
bein' no good."

"Urn ... naw, I don't
think so. He's treated us nice and
his
boss might get mad at him if we put up a fuss. Besides, they'll
find out quick enough about the fruit. Bad as it is it'll start to
smell soon an' then they'll know."

"Hokay." Jesus laid two half-dimes on the
table and we left to look over the rest of the town.

We walked around and looked at the sights
for a while. There was all manner of stores that we poked into and
a good number of saloons that we stayed out of. Down at one end of
town there was a saddler's shop that we spent a while in, me
admiring the things he had for sale and Jesus explaining how his
daddy's stuff was so much better. One thing Jesus had to agree
about, though. This man sure had his pick of hides to work with. He
tanned them himself out back of his store and we looked that over
too. Considering the way the rest of the town smelled, the tannery
didn't stink much at all, and that's right unusual for a tannery to
not smell bad even if it is only in comparison with something
else.

From the saddler's we headed back uptown,
browsing our way along slow and easy. As we was going past Hogan's
place we waved inside to him. A few steps further on we heard
someone calling out.

"Hey, boys. Hold it a minute." We turned
around and it was Mister Hogan.

"Yessir?"

"Are you boys called Duster and Jesus?
'Cause if you are I got a message for you."

"That's us. Duster Dorword and Jesus
Menendez."

"Well, Sam Silas stopped by here. I've been
knowing Sam a long time, and he stopped in for a talk. Anyways, Sam
asked if I seen you for me to tell you they'll be needing you boys
to ride watch on the herd again tonight an' then to help move them
into the factory pens tomorra."

"That means he got a buyer an' we can git
home soon. That's good."

"Uh-huh. Word gets around, you know, and I
heard he got a average price for your animals. Not real good, but
not bad neither."

"We bes' get back, eh, Duster?"

"Yeah, we better."

"Okay, boys. I'll see you again." Hogan
turned away but then he snapped his fingers and turned back toward
us. "I near forgot. They was a couple of fellas asking for a pair
that must have been you two. Described you boys just as pretty as
you please, but it was the way you looked afore you got your new
clothes. Even knowed you didn't have a hat, Duster.

"But they gave me some cock-and-bull story
about you two runnin' off with some cooking gear and a slab of
bacon and they wanted paid for it. Shee-oot, I already knowed you
worked for Sam but I wouldn'ta told them fellers nothing even if I
hadn't. You boys ain't the thieving kind, and anyway it ain't
stealing to take food if you're hungry. Anyhow I thought you boys
oughta know about these birds, whatever it is they're up to."

Hogan described the two men to us, and they
commenced to sound an awful lot like that pair I'd talked to away
back on the Atascosa, the pair with guns and a hard look to them
who'd mistook me for a dirt farmer.

If it was the same pair I might recognize
them when I saw them again, but I sure didn't know who they were or
what they wanted. And the more I thought on it the less I wanted to
know—anybody who'd lie about us like that, calling us thieves and
maybe worse!

"Duster, old amigo, I been thinkin'," Jesus
said while we was riding back toward the herd. "I bet them lyin'
gringos has been looking for us for a long ways now, eh?"

"You figure?"

"Si. I been thinking back,
eh? You 'member at Fort Ewell while we are up the river to visit
with Senor Alfredo Valdez there was somebody asking for somebody
like us at Senor
Stuart's store? Then
Tomas Lucas, he say someone look for us down the river, eh? And now
these mens look for us here een this town an' even they know you
have lost your hat. I don't like this."

"I been thinking just the same as you,
Jesus, and I don't like it neither."

I told Jesus about them fellows I'd seen
back on the Atascosa, but neither him nor me could make sense of
any of it. We sure agreed we wanted to stay away from whoever those
fellows was.

I GAVE A tug to the brim of my hat to get it
set right on my head and pulled my jeans in place. They still felt
like I'd have to bend a whole lot sooner than them. Then I propped
a foot on the lowest bar of the rail fence and watched the
longhorns move down the chute and into the hide factory's big
holding pen.

Mostly, I was feeling pretty cocky in my new
rig and some cash money in my pocket, but I was a little bit sad
too. It's funny, but after a while you get so you can recognize
near about every animal in your trail herd, and it's almost like
you know them personal.

You would think that a herd of nearly nine
hundred wild cattle would be just that many sets of horns and
hooves moving along in a bunch, but it isn't so. When you've lived
with them awhile you come to know this one and that, and pretty
soon you know most of the herd.

Watching them go past on
the other side of the fence I could see by the upthrust noses and
rolling eyes which ones was nervous, and I could tell by the dull
gait and level horns which was the quiet followers that would go
wherever the one in front led. But it come to me that I would of
knowed before they ever
got into that
chute how this one would act or that some other one would get mad
and toss his horns until they jammed cross-ways in the chute and
had to be pulled loose before the rest could go in.

Going past me just then was the dusty roan
lineback that had liked to cut for the brush every chance he got.
I'd had to turn him back myself I don't know how many times, and I
had tailed him down twice and remembered seeing Ike bust him down
once too. It was kind of sad to think that he'd lost his last
chance for a run at the thorn thickets. He'd never again hoist his
muzzle up in the air and then all of a sudden drop it down low and
make a dash away from the herd. Nor would he again go flying down
onto his side in a swirl of dust when a horse and rider lifted his
hind legs and tumbled him over.

There behind him came a skinny little
cow with pinched-in flanks and ribs showing plain under a scruffy
hide. She plodded along as meek as you please with her head down
and her eyes moving just the least little bit. She looked as though
she hadn't gumption enough to bawl for water, nor strength enough
to walk three miles, but all of us had come to know her real well.
She'd hang back at the tail end of the herd and plod along, just
about the most miserable and forlorn creature you ever seen and
plain impossible to hurry. She'd hang back like that until you'd
near forgot she was supposed to be up in the herd and then when a
rider would come close she'd give a playful little toss of her head
and try to punch a horn tip into a horse's belly or maybe into the
rider's leg. She'd hooked one of B. J.'s horses in the shoulder
once, a bad gouge, and screw worms got into the wound so B.J.
borrowed a long knife from Digger Bill and cut the horse's throat.
He said it was a poor horse to start with or it wouldn't of got
itself hooked, and it wasn't worth the trouble of doctoring. I
don't know as I agreed with him, coal oil being cheaper than
horseflesh and not a bad medicine for screw worms, but it was his
horse and his business.

Pretty soon I seen a steer
come past with a jinglebobbed left ear and a cropped right one and
I knew it was one of mine and that there was a still fresh DD
marked on the shoulder that
I couldn't
see. Not that I needed to see the marks to know it was one of mine.
It was the prettiest DD animal in the herd with a rich,
liver-colored hide that was speckled all over with dots of pure
white, and I'd been admiring it the whole way along. I would of
sent it back home to wait another year except it was maybe five
years old already and couldn't do anything except run the risk of
getting lost or mired or having a leg broke if I left it
loose.

"I always feel just the same way when I sell
off some animals, Duster."

"I didn't know it showed, Mister Silas,
sir." I hadn't heard him come up beside, but he was standing there
with his linen coat open and his hands stuck down in his pants
pockets.

"Not so much that I would have noticed it if
I hadn't been feeling low myself."

"Do you think...next year, I mean..."

"North? Yes, I think maybe so. This fall
I'll have some business to tend to in San Antonio and maybe in
Uvalde. I intend to ask around and see if we should try going north
next year. Maybe we'll bring a small bunch back here so we know we
have something in our pockets and then we can take a good herd
north even if it is a gamble."

"Yessir," I said. I knew he didn't want my
say-so about it and was just thinking out loud like folks will do
sometimes. I hadn't thought of it before, but things weren't all
that easy on Mister Silas. Him being rich and everything, you'd
think he wouldn't have any cares, but here he was saddled with the
decisions about what to do with his own cattle and everyone else's
too. That's a big load for anyone to carry. "I know whatever you
say will be the right thing," I told him.

He gave me a funny little look and said,
"Thanks, Duster." Then he brightened considerable. "You won't feel
so low when you hear what we got for these cows. We got six dollars
and a quarter a head. It's twenty-five cents more than we figured
so it isn't bad even if some did go for six and a half last
month."

"No, sir. That's fine." I tried to figure
out in my head what that would mean for us, but he already had it
worked out.

"If you haven't lost any along the way your
share will be $487.50, Duster. I'll leave your poke in with mine
until we get home unless you want some of it now. If you don't
mind, that is."

"Nossir, I'd 'ppreciate it. I wouldn't feel
right carrying all that money. I never seen so much, not half so
much at one time, and I wouldn't know how to act with it."

"All right then, I'll put it in a sack and
give it to Bill to hold with mine."

Like a lot of folks, Mister Sam Silas left
his poke of hard money with his cook so's it could be carted around
with the rest of the heavy stuff. Coin comes heavy when there's
much money involved and you can't just slip it into your pocket.
And not many would trust paper money, especially in the cow
business where there was so many thieves and grafters trying to
think up legal or near-legal ways to steal cows or to give false
counts on a tally.

It was an odd thing, though, that you could
leave a sack of gold coins by the cook fire for a week at a time
and it would be safer than in a bank. Some places, specially down
along the coast I'd been told, a man riding out alone might be shot
for a five-dollar half-eagle, but a poke of coins laid next to a
fire or hung up in a tree near a cow camp wouldn't be bothered even
if all the hands was ten miles away working cattle.

When Mister Sam Silas had left I set down to
some serious thinking. He'd said if I needed some cash money I
could get it, and I sure could use it. I still had $5.40 left over
from my pay, and that meant I was short of enough to buy a pair of
boots by less than two dollars.

The cows sold for more than we was
expecting. And I hadn't thought to have any DD cows in the herd to
start with. Ma wasn't counting on me to bring home more than ten or
maybe twelve dollars, and here I would be fetching back a poke big
enough to meet taxes two years easy and pay off what we owed
besides.

I could round that poke
down to an even $480 if I just took seven and a half from it, and
that would give me enough
money to buy
them boots from Mister Hogan and still have money left over to take
some presents home for Ma and the small fry. I'd tell them what I
done, of course. It wouldn't be fair not to. But they wouldn't
mind. After all, I was the one that done the work to bring that
money home, and a man needed to be rigged out proper if he was to
run his own spread and care for a whole family and all. I knew
they'd figure it to be fair as fair could be.

I left the chute fence and climbed up on the
steeldust. "Mister Silas, sir, would it be all right if I go over
to the Emporeum for a bit?" I called to him.

He waved me on. The cattle were most all in
the pen and we weren't needed for anything, and Hogan's store was
just in town about a quarter mile away.