Stock driving had been our way of life since first we settled in the hills. It was old Yance Sackett who began it some two hundred years back, and he started it with turkey drives to market. After that, it was hogs, and, like turkeys, we drove them afoot, for the most part.
If you had turkeys or hogs to sell, you just naturally drove them to market or sold them to a drover.
Word came from Logan just after we’d sold nine hundred head of prime beef in Kansas. We’d actually sold fourteen hundred head, but some of the stock belonged to neighbors.
Cap Rountree, Tyrel, and I were at a table in the Drover’s Cottage when that man with the green eye-shade came up to me and said, “Mr. Sackett? This here message come for you a day or two back. I reckon it’s important, and I just now heard you were in town.”
“Cap,” I said, “if you and Tyrel will pardon me, I’ll just see what this is.”
“Shall I read it?” Tyrel asked me.
“You might,” I said, and was glad for the offer. When it came to schoolin’, I’d come up empty, and whilst I was learning to read and write, I was mighty short on words. There were still a good many I’d never driven into the corral to slap the brand of memory on.
Tyrel had only learned to read a short time back, but he could read handwritin’ as easy as print, nigh as good as any schoolmarm.
He opened up that message like he’d been gettin’ ’em every day. He looked over it at me. “Listen to this,” he said.
William Tell Sackett,
Drover’s Cottage,
Abilene, Kansas.
I taken money to deliver several hundred head of beef cattle before winter sets in. I got no cows. I got no money. I can’t get away to help. Withouten they get them cows, folks will starve, and I’ll be wearin’ a rope necktie.
Logan
P.S. You can expect Higginses.
“Higginses?” Cap said. “I thought you’d done rolled up their carpet?”
“By ‘Higginses’ he means we can expect trouble. For some reason he didn’t want to say that, but he knew we’d understand.”
“Those Higgins boys were rough,” Tyrel said, “and we sure didn’t dust off all of them. They were good folks, only we just didn’t get along.”
“Fact is,” he added, “there was one of those Higgins gals who used to give me the big eye back yonder in school. Boy, was she something! She’d give me a look out’n those big blue eyes, and I wouldn’t know come hither to go yonder.”
Cap, he was a-settin’ there lookin’ at me out of those wise old eyes. “He wants beef cattle, and we’ve just sold our stock. We got a piece of money, but we ain’t got near enough to buy at these prices. So what do we do?”
“We’ve got to buy,” I said.
“We haven’t got enough to buy, let alone to feed ourselves from here to Canada. It’s a far piece.”
Whilst we ate, I did some studyin’. The thought of not doing it never entered our minds. We Sacketts just naturally stood by one another, and if Logan was in trouble, we’d help. Undoubtedly, he’d given his word to deliver cattle, and a Sackett’s word was his bond. It was even more than that Anywhere a Sackett was known, his name was good for cash in the hand.
This was going to take every cent we could put our hands on, and worst of all, we had to move!
Cap put down his cup. “Got me an idea,” he said, and was gone from the table.
“This couldn’t come at a worse time,” Tyrel commented. “I need all I’ve got to pay debts back in Santa Fe.”
“Me, too,” I said, “but Logan’s in trouble.”
“You believe he meant that about hanging?”
“Logan is a man who takes hanging right serious, and he wouldn’t joke about it If he says hanging, he means just that.” For a moment there, I paused, looking into my coffee. “From that remark about Higginses, we can expect trouble along the way.”
“Sounds like Logan figures somebody doesn’t want the cattle to get through” — Tyrel glanced over at me — “which doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Cap was coming back into the room followed by a straw-hatted sod buster wearing shoes. Farmers were beginning to settle around, but a man didn’t see many of them yet, and almost never in the Drover’s Cottage.
“Set, Bob, an’ tell them what you told me,” Cap said.
Bob had wrinkles from squinting at the sun and wrinkles around his eyes from laughing. “My cousin’s come down from the north. Lives up on the Missouri near Yankton. He was telling me about some Indian cattle, and Cap here, he overheard us.”
“Indian cattle?”
“Well, some of them. Quite a few years back, two brothers brought some cattle into the Missouri River country. One of the brothers was gored by a steer, and by the time the other one found him, he was in bad shape. Blood poison, or whatever. He lasted a few weeks, then died.
“The brother took the body back home for burial, and when he came back, he was crossing a stream when his horse fell with him. Both of them lost — horse and man.
“So those cattle run wild. The Injuns around there are mostly friendlies, and they killed a steer time to time, but those cattle have run wild in some of the gullies leading back from the river. I’d say if anybody has claim on them now, it’s those Injuns.”
“But would they sell them?”
“Right now they would. They’d sell, and quick. You see, the Sioux have been raiding into their country some, and just now the Sioux learned about those cattle. They’ll drive them off, leaving the friendlies with nothing. If you were to go in there and make ’em a decent offer, you’d have yourself a herd.”
“How many head, do you figure?”
“Eight, nine hundred. Maybe more. There’s good grass in those bottoms, and they’ve done right well. What you’ll find is mostly young stuff — unbranded. What Texas folk call mavericks.”
So that was how it began. We met the Injuns and sat down over a mess of bacon, bread, and beans, and we made our deal. They didn’t want the Sioux to run off those cattle, and we paid them well in blankets and things they were needing.
There was a star showing here and there when I rolled out of my blankets and shook out my boots. The morning was cold, so I got into my vest and coat as quick as ever I could, and after rolling my bed, I headed for the cook fire and a cup of coffee.
Lin, our Chinese cook, was squatting over the fire. He gestured to the pot. “All ready,” he said.
He dished up a plate of beef and beans for me, and when I’d taken a couple of swallows of coffee, almost too hot to drink, I started on the beans.
“These are good. What’ve you done to them?”
“Wild onions,” he said.
My eyes swept the horizon. Far off to the west, I could see some black humps. “Buffalo,” I commented.
He stood up to look. “I have never seen a buffalo. There will be more?”
“A-plenty. More’n we want, I expect.”
Leaving the fire, I saddled up and then returned for another plate of the beef and beans. When a man rides out in the morning on a cattle drive, he never knows when he will eat again. Too many things can come up.
Whether it was the wild onions, I did not know, but his grub was the best I’d ever tasted in a cow camp. I told him so.
“I’ve never cooked but for myself.” He glanced at me. “I go home now, to China.”
“Isn’t this the long way?”
“You go to British Columbia? I have a relative there, and ships leave there for China. I had no money, and when I heard you were going to British Columbia, I wished to go with you.”
“It’ll be rough.”
“It often is.” He looked at me, not smiling. “It can be rough in China, too.” He paused. “My father was an official in the western desert country, in what we called the New Territories. It is a land where all people ride, as they do here.”
A low wind moaned in the grass, and long ripples ran over the far plain. It would be dawn soon. The cattle were beginning to get up, to stretch and to graze.
When I was in the saddle, I looked back at him. “Can you use a rifle?”
“Our compound was attacked several times by bandits,” he said. “We all had to shoot.”
“Before this is over, you may have another chance,” I said.