Shortgrass Song (18 page)

But Ab merely turned the boy around and dusted him off, looking at him with distant eyes as he would inspect a piece of property for damage. “Don't you boys know any better?” he growled. “If you've got strength left to fight, you're not working hard enough.”

Satisfied that Caleb was unhurt, he stalked toward the cabin. “You two take care of the horses,” he said to his oldest sons.

Pete watched his father, the puzzlement plain on his face. But Matthew shook his fist at Caleb, and glared with eyes misted in anger. He sprang into his saddle and rode to the corral. Pete followed on foot, leading the other two mounts.

Buster, having seen the whole thing from the wheat field, followed Caleb into the shed after a few minutes and found him sulking on the tool crate. “Hey,” he said, nudging the boy. “How would you like to do somethin' they can't do?”

“Huh?”

“They're all the time ropin' and ridin' and stuff you don't get to do. How would you like to ride somethin' they can't ride?”

Caleb crooked his upper lip at Buster. “Like what?” He sniffed and rubbed his palms into his eyes.

Buster stepped out of the shed and looked both ways before sidling up next to the boy and speaking in a tone of utmost confidentiality. “I'm gonna build me somethin'.”

“What?”

“A wind wagon.”

“A what?”

“Don't you tell nobody, and I'll let you ride in it with me. Just you. Not Matthew or Pete or nobody else. But you got to help me build it and you got to keep it a secret.”

“I won't tell anybody. What's a wind wagon?”

“It's a wagon with a sail on it like a boat. I believe it'll beat horses,” Buster said. “You sure you won't tell nobody?”

Caleb put his hand over his heart. “I promise.”

Buster patted the boy on the back and left to make supper, but just before he made it out of the shed, Caleb called his name.

“Do you think it was my fault?” the boy said.

“What's that?”

“What happened to Mama.”

“That was two years ago, boy.”

“I know, but … She did it because of me.”

Buster stepped back into the shed. “Listen, boy. It was my fault more than anybody. I shouldn't have left that log loose up there where it would roll off. I should have pegged it down. But I can't blame myself all my life for that. I wasn't tryin' to do nothin' wrong. I always try to do right. It just happened. The Lord took her. It was her time.”

The boy sat in the shed alone after Buster left. He knew Buster was going to say it wasn't his fault, but it didn't really help. He didn't understand how God could just take his mother. He knew his mother could have explained it to him. She knew all about God and heaven and the Bible. But she was the one who was dead and causing him to want all the explanations in the first place. The longer he sat alone, the worse he felt.

Suddenly, he knew how to beat the sick guilt he felt. For a while anyway. He wanted to feel the strings under his fingers, see the toes tapping as he played. He left the dark shed to find his fiddle. The bow wouldn't jump lively on his strings tonight, but it would moan a little sorrow from his young soul, howl a primitive dirge over the grave of his lost mother. Oh, it would wring sad beauty from his heart.

TWENTY

“There's a farmer living on Camp Creek,” Javier said when he got to the supper table. He had been riding all day, looking for strays.

“A farmer?” Ab sounded as if he had never heard of the profession.

“He says if we don't keep our cattle out of his corn, he is going to shoot them.”

“Why in Hades doesn't he build a fence? Buster's got a fence around his corn.”

Javier shrugged.

“What's a farmer doing on Camp Creek, anyhow?”

“He said he got a homestead. He's going to own the land.”

“Own it?”

“The government is going to give it to him.”

“The government doesn't give anything to anybody. Buster, what do you know about this homestead business?”

Buster raked his face with a napkin. “The paper said they had a land office up in Golden City. Said you had to file on a piece of land, pay a fee—I think fifteen dollars—and you can keep the land if you live on it five years and farm it.”

“How much land?”

“A hundred and sixty acres.”

“A hundred and sixty! A man can't live on a quarter section out here!”

“Maybe he can barely,” Buster said. “If he irrigates. Some of them homesteaders might make out all right on the creeks.”

Ab pondered the possibilities. The watercourses would fall into the hands of the homesteaders first. He could see them cropping up along Monument Creek. “I guess we ought to file on this place before somebody else comes along and wants it. Before we know it, they'll be all up and down the creek. Our cattle won't have anyplace but right here to come to water. They'll probably bring their milk cows and plow horses with them and eat all the grass in the park.”

“If they get upstream of us, they can get all our water,” Buster said. “Dam it up to irrigate.”

Ab rubbed his head. He was suddenly thinking of homesteaders as he would have thought of termites back in Pennsylvania. “How are we going to keep them out?”

“Ain't no way to keep 'em out,” Buster said. “We'd have to own the whole creek all the way to the head.”

Javier waved his table knife in the air. “Why not get a quarter section for Señor Holcomb, one for Buster, and one for me, too? All of them along the creek.”

Ab's eyes brightened. “That'll give us three times as much.” He shook his head. “It still isn't enough. Only three quarters of a section. How far will that go up the creek, Buster?”

“If the quarter sections have to be in a square,” he answered, figuring in his head, “it will only go a mile and a half up one side.”

“That won't do us much good. If we wanted to keep this whole creek to ourselves, we'd have to have I-don't-know-how-many men to file on land with us.”

“Let's figure it out,” Buster said.

Ab kicked a piece of charcoal out of the fireplace with his wooden leg so he and Buster could make computations on the hearth. “Figure eighteen miles of creek bank,” he said.

“That's just one side of the creek,” Buster replied. “You have to double it to take in both sides.”

“Well, double it, then. Write it down.”

“What are they talkin' about?” Caleb whispered to Pete.

Pete shrugged and sopped up some gravy with a biscuit.

Buster's arithmetic showed that no fewer than seventy-two homesteads would take up the entirety of Monument Creek.

Ab sank back into his chair and sighed. “Seventy-two. Can you imagine seventy-two men working one ranch? How many men do we need, Javier?”

“We don't need any more men right now because we don't have very many cattle.”

“If we had enough cattle to graze all of Monument Park, how many men would we need?”

“Maybe twenty.”

Ab sulked silently in his chair for a while as Buster picked the dishes up from the table. “We need some more cattle. Where are we going to get them, Javier?”

“Maybe we can get some in New Mexico. But not very many. The most cattle you have ever seen in your life are in Texas. That is the place to get a thousand of them at one time.”

“Not with the war going on. We'll have to wait till the Rebels are whipped, and that might take more years than it's taken already.”

“Won't be much homesteadin' goin' on till the war's over, though,” Buster said. “Then when it's over, all them out-of-work soldiers will come out here looking for a farm.”

“We'll have to be ready,” Ab said. “Soon as the war ends, we'll go to Texas for cattle. If we get more cattle, we can hire more men. With more men, we can file on more land and keep those homesteaders off of our creek. Off of part of it anyway.”

But part of the creek would not satisfy Ab. He would have to figure out a way to get seventy-two men, or however many it took, to file on every quarter section of land for him, on each side of Monument Creek, all the way to its source. Then he would control the entire park.

One possible solution had already come to him. As soon as his first batch of men proved up on their homesteads in five years, he would buy them out, fire them, and hire another twenty or so to file on another twenty quarter sections. Even at that rate, it would take twenty years to own the whole creek.

But one way or another, he was going to own every drop of water above his ranch. With no farms on the creek to bar his cattle from water, he could build a herd that would graze all the grass clear to the Plum Creek divide—sections and sections of land. He wouldn't even have to buy the grazing land or pay taxes on it. No one else could possibly use it. It was too dry to farm without creek water to irrigate. He wouldn't let anybody else's cattle drink at his creek, so no one else could start another herd in Monument Park.

He sensed that it all went against what the Homestead Act intended, but Congress didn't have sense enough to understand. A man couldn't live on a quarter section in the West. He had to have more. And the men who came first should have the most. He was only planning to do what Ella would have done. She would have found a way around the laws. She had broken statutes by the volume to smuggle her fugitive slaves through Pennsylvania. In Ab's view the Homestead Act was as much of an injustice as slavery, and if he had to defraud the government to overcome injustice, it was due to the ignorance of Congress, not any criminal intention on his own part.

“I'm going to Golden City in the morning,” he said. “I'm going to see what it takes to file a homestead claim. Then the three of us can file on our quarter sections. When you two prove up in five years, I'll buy you out at a fair price. Is that agreeable?”

Javier nodded with satisfaction, but Buster looked glumly at the mathematical calculations drawn in charcoal on the hearth.

“What's wrong, Buster?” Ab asked. “Doesn't it suit you to help me build a ranch in this valley?”

“Yes, sir, but…”

“But what?”

“I want to build me somethin', too. I've been figurin' on makin' my own farm here. When I prove up, I want to keep my land.”

Ab smirked. “Your own farm? Who's going to run mine?”

“I'll run mine and yours both,” Buster said.

Ab folded his arms across his chest and studied for a few seconds. “Well, I guess you have a right to a quarter section if you want it. I suppose you'll make as good a neighbor as any.”

“Thank you,” Buster said. Ab didn't hand out many compliments.

*   *   *

While Ab was away at the land office in Golden City, a train of freight wagons arrived at Holcomb Ranch from Denver. Eight yokes of oxen pulled each of the huge Conestogas. The axles groaned for want of grease, and the bull whackers cussed hoarsely at the beasts as often as they blinked. One of the wagons carried the lumber Ab had ordered so Buster could build his irrigation flume. And behind it, dwarfed by the dimensions of the Conestoga, a black lacquered spring buggy trundled in the dust. The bull whackers veered from the Fort Bridger Road and camped near the cabin about sundown.

“That's it,” Buster said, pulling Caleb aside. “That's gonna be our wind wagon.”

“That's ours?”

“Sure is. I ordered it four months ago. Came all the way from St. Louis.”

As soon as the train stopped, Caleb jumped up on the buggy and tested the spring seat.

“Remember…” Buster warned.

“I know. I won't tell anybody. They wouldn't believe it anyway.”

“They'll believe it when they see us ridin' it. But for now just let 'em think we want to pull it behind horses like regular folks.”

The captain of the bull train marched back to unhook the spring buggy. He was a full-chested, hairy individual whose fingers looked like wheel spokes radiating from his palm. “Where's Holcomb?” he asked.

“Gone to Golden City.”

“Who are you?”

“Buster Thompson.”

“This is your buggy then. What the hell do you want with a damn buggy in this country?”

“Tell him, Caleb.”

“Me?”

“Tell him what we're gonna do with the buggy.”

“Well … We're just gonna pull it behind horses like regular folks.”

“Good boy, that's exactly what we're gonna do with it.”

“Regular folks straddle their horses in this country,” the captain said.

As Buster helped the freighters unload the sawmill lumber, Pete rode up on Crazy. He was leading Blue Eyes, who was wearing a red blanket under the saddle. “You want to ride?” Pete asked.

Caleb searched the plains. “What about Matthew? He'll tell Papa.”

“Him and Javier went over to the Pinery to find some cows. They won't come back till supper.”

Caleb looked at Buster.

“I don't need your help here, but I don't know nothin' about ridin' no horses either.”

Caleb bounced off the blue-eyed mustang's ribs and landed behind the pommel.

“Where do you want to go?” Pete asked.

“I'll race you to the hill,” Caleb answered, raking Blue Eyes with his heels.

They galloped across the plains like cavalry soldiers on a reckless charge, reining their horses back only for a second or two at the brink of the creek bank. Pete led down the slope, but Crazy was usually a little shy of water, and paused long enough before leaping to let Caleb take the lead. The horses splashed through the stream and climbed the west bank, snorting for air. Pete found a straighter path through the trees on the far bank and came out ahead on the last leg of the race.

Blue Eyes finished a neck behind Crazy, but Caleb accepted defeat with pleasure, thrilled to be holding his reins. The hill seemed twice as high from horseback, and he felt as if he could see all the way to the Comanche country from the saddle.