Then there was the movement of a person-perhaps a woman-maybe the same woman who took a good look across the back yard just before dark. It was dark in the house now, and she couldn"t be seen, but her movement could be followed by your ears as the floor squeaked and groaned under her weight, as she tiptoed between the pallets and through the hall door, getting faster now as she neared the back porch, and still faster as she left the porch and crossed the back yard. Then suddenly and without warning there was the noise of a heavy soft object against a clothes line, followed by the noise of the same soft object as it fell flat on the ground. And then, after a moment of silence, there came the voice of a woman sitting on the ground and saying, "Oh well, I wouldn"t have made it anyway."
I have a lot of memories of things that happened at Royston when our kids were growing up. I was working on the windmill down in the field one day, about a half-mile from our house. I needed a wrench from home and I needed Ima to help me a little. It was getting late and I wanted to keep working, so I sent Dennis and Anita in the car to get Ima and the wrench. I told Dennis not to try to turn the corner up by the barn, but to switch off the motor there and walk to the house and tell Ima what I needed. I put the two kids in the front seat of the car, then I put the car in low gear, got it started toward home, and then I got out.
Dennis was upwards of five years old, at least past four. He could drive the car by getting up in the seat on his knees. All he had to do was guide it and switch off the motor when he got to where he was going. But Dennis thought he was smarter than I was. He still thinks that at times even now. I can"t seem to convince him otherwise.
Anyway, he thought he could turn the corner by the barn, and he almost did. But he sideswiped a fence, taking a post or two with him until the car got so involved in the barbed wire it couldn"t go any further and the motor died.
The little wreck scared both of the kids. They got out of the car and went to the house, Dennis crying and Anita trying to tell Ima what had happened. Ima was about as upset as a wet hen in a rainstorm as Anita told her, "Car run in pense." Ima was still upset when she drove the car back to the windmill. She seemed to think I had done something wrong. How was I to know that Dennis wasn"t as smart as I had been at his age? My goodness, I was planting with a two-row planter before that age. Was Ima going to admit that her son wasn"t as smart as his pa?
I had always wanted to become a school teacher. I thought I had the ability to teach kids a lot of things. At times it seemed hopeless but I kept trying and some of my ideas worked. When Dennis was about four, Ima saw him reach up under a car fender, break off a chunk of dried mud and start eating it. She scolded him and told him to stop it. But after Ima went in the house I took Dennis around the other side of the car, where Ima couldn"t see us from her kitchen window, and showed him a lot of good lumps of dried mud and I told him he could eat all he wanted. He ate a little and quit, and we never caught him eating any dirt after that.
During the 1930s most of my brothers and sisters were married and had kids of their own and we often took our little children and all went to visit Papa and Mama on Sundays. During those visits, many times my brothers would go away to do their thing and I would be left in the house with Mama and Papa and a bunch of sisters and sisters-in-law. Then when Papa would leave to go play golf, which I didn"t have enough money to do, I would find myself with a house full of women.
So one day Mama asked me why I didn"t go on out with the other boys. She said, "There must be something wrong with you. You just can"t get along with your brothers." Well, I got out all right as she suggested, and I found them out in the freight warehouse, drinking beer and shooting dice. If I"d had a dollar, I guess I might have been out shooting golf with Papa. But all I had was 18 cents, so I asked if I could get in their game.
They let me in and I soon had $1.50. I decided this game was more interesting than I had thought. At this rate thought I might really learn to like it. Then after playing quite awhile they planned to stop the game at a certain time, and since I was not "hooked" on the game as yet, I began trying to lose back down to my original 18 cents.
But I wasn"t that lucky. I kept winning now and then and when the game ended, I still had 98 cents. I took my 18 cents and left the 80 cents lying there. I told them I was only playing for fun, it was their money. But they said they were playing for keeps and didn"t take it.
Later that day some of the smaller grandkids were playing in the warehouse and took the 80 pennies into the house and showed them to their Grandma.
Meanwhile, my brothers had gone some place in their cars and I went back in the house. Mama was afraid the little ones had gotten into Earl"s desk out in the warehouse and had taken his money. She asked me if I knew about the money. I told her, "Yes, I won it in a c.r.a.p game with my brothers, and I tried to give it back but they left it on the loading dock."
Mama asked, "Is that what they do on Sunday afternoons?"
I told her, "Yes, that and drink beer."
She was horrified as she asked, "Why haven"t you told me this before?"
I told her, "Because you never asked me before."
She said, "Well, don"t you ever do that again."
I said, "Okay, I won"t unless you tell me to again."
I often wondered if some of my brothers sort of hated me because I wouldn"t drink and gamble with them. It wasn"t that I thought I was too good to do those things. I just didn"t enjoy doing them and didn"t want to. I didn"t hate them for doing what they did, so why should they cast me out for not joining them?
A little note here, Joel was working in Stamford in a drygoods store in those days. He wasn"t included with us in these gambling and drinking affairs. Now, I only gambled one time and I didn"t drink their beer. I tried it one time and couldn"t stand the stuff. I was sick with influenza and they told me it would be good for me. I took two swallows and decided to leave off drinking and keep the flu.
But now back to the farm at Royston. Most people think of cattle drives as something that happened long ago; and that"s mostly true. But soon after we moved to Royston, I got Lester Whitley to help me drive a little herd of cows to Carriker"s farm in Kent County. Lester would ride Old Nancy and I would ride Old Buck. We would carry a bite to eat for lunch, but there was no need to go to a lot of trouble and try to take everything as though we were heading up the trail to Abilene, Kansas, like back in 1885. After all, we wouldn"t be far away by nightfall, and my brother would have all day to put a few things in my car and drive out to find us about sundown. He would need to bring us something to drink, something to eat, something to sleep on and some horse feed and a rope or two.
Lester and I got an early start and had the cows headed in the right direction when we learned that we had one old Jersey cow that thought she was a racehorse. Right away she started running straight up the road ahead of all the others. And she kept right on trotting until one of us got ahead of her and brought her back. We could see we really needed three horses, one for that old trotter and two for the rest of the herd. But we had to get by with one for her and one for the others. We thought surely she would settle down after awhile but she didn"t. It was the same thing all day long, one of us behind to drive and one in front to hold her back.
Sundown found us about where we had planned to be. There was a place where the fence was set quite a way back from the road, embracing an extra two or three acres of Johnson gra.s.s and weeds and a puddle of water, all within the right-of-way. So we turned the cattle into that little pocket and held them there while they grazed and settled down.
If it had not been for that one old cantankerous Jersey cow, our entire day would have been dull and uneventful. There wouldn"t have been anything of value to mention in our story during that day. Without that cow, our story could just as well have started after we got them bedded down for the night.
We could have begun our story with,-We waited and we waited. It got dark, and we still waited for my little brother to drive up in the car, but he didn"t. We had no horse feed, so we didn"t feed our horses. We had only one rope, so we staked Old Buck out and hoped that Old Nancy would stay with him through the night. She was tired from the day"s work and fortunately she didn"t try to leave. Nor did the Jersey cow give any further trouble. I know she was tired. There is no way a cow can run as far as she had run that day and not be tired.
We had gathered firewood before dark and our fire was warm and friendly in the cool of the darkness. It seemed that we should be eating something in the light of the campfire, but there was nothing to eat. I kept thinking that perhaps my brother would show up yet. Maybe he had car trouble. Any one of a dozen things could have happened to delay him.
Now, when a man is hungry, he can take a drink of water and go to sleep in a warm bed and forget his hunger until morning. But we had no water and no warm bed, and the night was too cold to sleep without cover. We built a large fire but it cooked us on one side while the other side froze. And I"ve got to tell you, saddles make very poor pillows. In the movies I have seen cowboys use saddles for pillows, but this was no movie, this was for real. And furthermore, I was no cowboy, just a poor farmer trying to pick up an extra dollar to keep body and soul together while fighting my way through a wicked depression.
Again it looked as if the devil was after me for sure. But I didn"t really think he would stoop so low as to get my own blood brother to help him. I didn"t see how the devil could do this to me, after all the things I had done for him. Just the thought of some of the things I had done for him caused my spine to tingle, and I moved a little closer to the fire. I wondered whether it was the chill of the night, my fear of the darkness, or the thoughts of my past that made me shiver and move closer. Anyway the night was totally dark and cold and damp, and I was completely miserable. In such misery the one best thing I could wish for was daybreak, and when it finally began to push the black out of the eastern sky, it was a welcome sight, and I was glad.
We saddled up early and pushed on. Before noon we left the highway and funneled the herd through a gate and out into open ranch pasture. Still the Jersey cow simply refused to stay with the others. On the highway she could only go forward between the fences, but here in the pasture she could go all directions. When we came to the next ranch house, we borrowed a corral long enough to catch the cow and put one end of a rope around her horns and the other end around the neck of a large Hereford cow. That ended our trouble with the Jersey cow. Things went so smoothly after that, we could hardly believe it.
When we got to the nearest corner of the Carriker pasture, it was still a long way to the gate that opened into the pasture. We were tired, sleepy, hungry, thirsty, weary, and almost entirely angry at one little brother who had contributed so much to our misery. So instead of making the long drive to the gate, we took wires loose from the fence posts, tied the bottom wires down, propped the top ones up, and drove the herd through the fence and into the pasture. This ended our drive, but there was still one little ch.o.r.e to do.
I wanted to cut the rope between the Jersey cow and the Hereford cow and let them run free. The terrain was rough and almost completely covered with trees and cedar bushes. I prepared my catch rope and made one desperate attempt to rope one of the cows. I threw the loop and it went over one horn of the Hereford. I knew the herd would vanish into the brush before I could get ready and try again. So I jumped to the ground and tried to flip the rope around the other horn also. I had hoped to delay them long enough to rush in and cut the rope between them. But I had no such luck. My throw rope came off the one horn and they quickly disappeared into the thick brush. They were all gone, vanished into the bushes.
I looked for Old Buck and he was gone too. Then I looked for Lester and he was nowhere in sight. I called to him and he came riding up out of the brush. I asked if he had seen Old Buck. He hadn"t, but he rode off to find him. We found Old Buck working alone and holding back a bunch of cows that were trying to run away. There were two ways for the herd to escape. Lester had gone one way and had tried to hold the cows back, but had failed. Old Buck had gone the other way alone and had cut off the escape route of the other half of the herd. Not a single cow had gotten by him, but the two cows we wanted had escaped down the way Lester had gone. I could write a book telling about the splendid work Old Buck did for me while we were together.
Anyway, we fastened the fence wires back in place and were riding toward home when night overtook us out on the highway. After dark some men from our community drove by in their car, recognized us, offered to take us home and we accepted. We still had only one rope, so we staked out Old Buck as we had done the night before and hoped that Nancy would stay with him one more night.
Needless to say, when I got home I ate everything I could get my hands on. I was hungry enough to eat anything that wouldn"t fight back and couldn"t outrun me. And my bed was so much better than the one that had tortured me the night before.
Early the next day when we returned to get our horses, Old Nancy was not there. We searched for her but in vain. We returned to the area every day for a week looking for horse tracks either in the lane or in the pastures on both sides of the highway. But we found no clue whatsoever as to where she had gone. Then finally a thought came to me. Down in the valley of Texas there was a woman I had heard on radio-I believe her name was Ethel Duncan- who claimed to have aided many people in locating lost articles. If you would send her a dollar she would answer three questions for you. I knew it would be worth a dollar to me to have her answer just one question. So we went to the telegraph office in Rotan and I wrote my question on a telegram form, "Where can I find my lost saddle mare?" The telegraph operator read the question, looked at me, and shook his head just a little, as if to say, "There"s one born every minute." But money talks, and since I had the dollar to send to Ethel and enough left over to pay the man for sending it to her at McAllen, he took my money and sent the question and the dollar.
About an hour later the following message came over the wire, "In my opinion your mare is grazing along the right-of-way of the railroad which runs into Rotan from Nugent, about three miles from home."
The railroad ran beside the County road all the way to my home in Royston. It would be easy to look for the mare, and we did look all the way home. But there was nothing, no horse, no cow, no sign of any animal of any kind, except maybe a few jackrabbits. There were not even any horse tracks.
Well that was the last straw. As far as I was concerned, the mare was gone for good. I gave up. I had spent too much time away from my farming already. There was work to be done and I had better get with it. I knew we would miss Old Nancy, but we could live without her.
Then at home, while I was getting ready to get back to plowing, some thoughts were running through my mind. I read the telegram again."...along the railroad which runs into Rotan from Nugent." I knew it didn"t run from Nugent, but then it did run to Rotan. I couldn"t see anything wrong with that. But wait- something still wasn"t clear. I was trying to figure whether there was something I was overlooking. I read a little further, "...about three miles from home, "THAT"S IT, HOME. Where was my home? Was it Royston? Was it my house? Come to think of it, neither of those places was mentioned in my telegram to Ethel, Rotan was the only place mentioned. That had to be it, three miles from Rotan. That would be about nine miles from my home.
I got back in my car and drove almost to Rotan. When I thought Rotan was still about three miles away, I pulled up to a farm house and asked a farmer whether he had seen a stray mare.
"How long she been gone?" the farmer asked.
"One week today," I answered.
"Nope, haven"t seen her. Got one been here two weeks; couldn"t be yorn."
"Mind if I see her?"
"Nope, she"s out in the lot with the other horses."
We walked to the horse lot and I looked.
"That"s her all right," I told him.
"How long you say she"s been gone?"
"One week today."
"Seems like she"s been here a lot longer"n that. No, guess not,-today"s Wednesday ain"t it? Yep, yep, that"s right, she come last Wednesday. That"s the day I drove into town. She was here when I got back."