Home Ranch Page 3

  I had to look around Mr. Batchlett to see who was talking, and then I wasn’t too sure. Four girls were standing in the doorway, and all but one of them were looking right at me. That one was nearly as tall as I, had long reddish braids that hung down in front of her shoulders, a snubby nose, and a million freckles. The others ran down in stair steps, to one who looked to be about three.

  “Well,” I said, “it wasn’t a very good picture anyway.”

  “I don’t know! I didn’t hardly look at it!” the tallest one said sharply.

  “You did too, Hazel!” the next tallest squealed. “You stuck it up on . . .”

  “I did not!” Hazel snapped, and ducked back into the kitchen without ever looking at me.

  I was just turning back to the table when I heard a crisp, “Toot-toot! Gangway!” from the kitchen. When I looked around again, one of the prettiest girls I ever saw was coming through the doorway. She must have been about twenty or twenty-one, and not more than five feet tall, with eyes just like Kenny’s, and honey-colored wavy hair piled high on her head. She was wearing high-heeled shoes, with a little white apron over a pink calico dress, and carrying a big plate of steaming flapjacks. Every move she made was quick and perky—like a sparrow’s.

  As I watched her, Sid sang out, “Hi, Jenny Wren!”

  “Hi, everybody,” she said as she put the plate of flapjacks down. “You’d better light right into these while they’re hot; there’s another batch on the stove.” Then she looked at me and said, “So you’re Little Britches?”

  “That’s what they call me, Miss Wren,” I said, “but my name’s Ralph Moody.”

  Everybody started laughing, even Jenny. Then she hugged her arm around my neck for half a second, and said, “Well, it’s only this runty little redhead that calls me Jenny Wren. My name’s Jenny Warren, and I teach school at Castle Rock. I saw you ride in the Littleton roundup last summer and the year before. You haven’t grown an inch, have you?”

  “Yes, Miss Warren,” I said, “I’ve grown nearly two inches.”

  “I’m Miss Warren only in school,” she told me, “and school’s out until after Labor Day. Here, I’m Jenny.”

  That first plate of flapjacks didn’t last more than five minutes, and it was Mrs. Bendt who brought in the next plateful. She was Jenny’s sister, but they didn’t look or act very much alike. She was quite a little older, taller, thinner, and had straight ash-colored hair, with sort of faded blue eyes. She looked tired, and her voice was kind of sharp.

  When she set the plate down, Mr. Batchlett said, “Helen, this is Little Britches, the boy I was tellin’ you about.”

  Mrs. Bendt looked at me without a word, then said, “Batch, you ain’t goin’ to take that little boy out with the trading crews, are you? Why, he can’t be no older’n Hazel!”

  Mr. Batchlett winked at me and said, “He’s older’n you think. He’s worked cattle a couple of summers; he’ll make out all right.”

  “Well, I’d never let him do it if he was a boy of mine! Thank the Lord I had mostly girls, or Watt would be trying to make cowhands out of ’em a’ready.”

  I poured more syrup on my flapjacks and thanked the Lord that I wasn’t a boy of hers. Mother was scary enough about my working around horses and cattle, but she’d never said I couldn’t do it.

  After the flapjacks, Jenny brought in a big platter of fried eggs, and sausage cakes, and fried potatoes, and hot biscuits. I ate until I was ready to pop, and Kenny ate almost as much as I did. Only his head and shoulders came above the top of the table, but he was trying as hard as he could to be a man. He’d pound his knife handle on the table and snap out: “Pass the spuds! Pass the bread! Pass the meat!” Once he looked over at me and said, “Betcha my life my burro can do more tricks than your old mare.”

  “Lady can’t do many tricks,” I told him. “My trick horse was a blue roan, named Sky High. He didn’t belong to me, but to the Y-B ranch where I used to work.”

  “Betcha my life my burro could beat him! Betcha my life you can’t ride Jack!”

  Hank was telling some long-winded story about the way he used to ride horses, but Mr. Batchlett pushed his chair back and said, “Well, it’s time we was gettin’ at it. Watt, how ’bout you and me riding out to look over the cow stuff while the boys round up the saddle stock? I want them that’s going to be working cattle to pick their summer string today, then we’ll put the rest of the bunch up on the mountain ranch. Need to save all the grass on the home place for cows.”

  He looked around at the men and went on, “I want every man to have a fair shake at the horses, so Watt and I’ll pick right along with you. We’ll pick in go-rounds; no changing your minds after you’ve made your pick. Hank, you and Zeb can go haul in the chuckwagon. Sid, you and Little Britches can go along with Ned and Tom to round up the saddle stock.”

  All through breakfast Sid had been trying to get Jenny to talk to him. She hadn’t paid any more attention than if he’d been a chipmunk chattering, but once she made his face redder than a thornberry when she asked me, “Does this other little boy go to school with you?”

  Zeb and Hank saddled up to go for the chuckwagon when we left the chuckhouse, but Sid had to go and change into his working clothes. I went to the bunkhouse with him, to get my chaps and spurs. He was a little bit grumpy, and grumbled at me, “Daggone you, Little Britches! You didn’t have to let on to Jenny Wren that I hightailed down to the chuckwagon to get my glad rags this mornin’. You put in your time gettin’ Hazel to hug you ’round the neck; that little Jenny Wren’s too growed-up for you.”

  I hadn’t liked it too well when Jenny hugged me right there at the table, and I didn’t like Sid’s joshing me about Hazel. I guess I was as grumpy as he, and said, “I didn’t come out here to get hugged; I came to work cattle.” Then I strapped on my spurs and went to saddle Lady, so I could look around a little before we went to bring in the remuda.

  Lady was as well rested as I when I tossed my saddle onto her that Sunday morning, but she wasn’t any more used than I to the kind of riding we were going to be doing. We’d always worked in prairie country where she could take and hold a steady gait, and we could see where we were going. It wasn’t that way at Batchlett’s ranch. The home place was tucked right up against the front range of the Rockies, and it seemed as if they had pushed the land out and crumpled it up into knolls, gulches, arroyos and mesas. There was hardly a place where a horse could get a straight run of a quarter mile. On the high ground clumps of scrub oak stood so thick we could seldom see a hundred yards ahead, and along the creek beds the trails wound through thickets of willow and alder. It made perfect summer shade and winter shelter for cattle, but it made the work of a prairie horse and cowhand a nightmare.

  It wasn’t only in the lay of the land that Batchlett’s home ranch was different from others. At the Y-B, or any of the prairie ranches where I’d worked before, the buildings—except for the house, where the help never went—didn’t amount to much. There was just a bunkhouse, chuckhouse, a few corrals, and a barn that was mostly saddle shop and forge. Beef cattle were born, grazed, branded, and doctored if they needed to be, on the open range. Only in the worst blizzards a few dogie calves were brought in to the corrals of the home place. Steers were trailed from the range to the railroad for shipping to market, and fences were hated worse than wolves and rattlesnakes.

  Ranching at Batchlett’s was just the opposite. It was half stock-raising and half dairy-farming, and the two halves didn’t mix any more than horses and cattle do. The outbuildings at the home ranch were a regular village, and the dairy part of it was entirely separate from the stock-raising and handling. No cowhand would think of milking a cow or feeding a calf or hog, and no dairyhand ever rode a horse. We even slept in separate bunkhouses. I don’t know what the dairymen thought about the cowhands, but the fellows in our crew didn’t have much use for dairyhands.

  Milk cows that were going to be traded to families in Denver couldn’t be branded and turned loose
on the range, to raise their calves as beef cattle did. It would have spoiled them for milkers, and they’d have grown too wild. Because many of them were not branded they had to be kept inside of fences. And they had to be brought in to the corrals often enough to keep them used to being handled. As soon as calves were born, they and their mothers were brought in and turned over to the dairy crew. There they were separated. The mothers were put into the dairy herd, and the calves were raised by hand until they were old enough to be put out to graze in the calf pasture.

  4

  Blueboy

  AS I RODE around the outbuildings and looked the place over, I kept an eye on the horse corral. And when I saw the others go to saddle up I brought Lady back there. Sid was cinching the saddle onto his giraffe horse, and when he straightened up, the horn stood six inches above the crown of his hat. He was all over his grumpiness, and didn’t get a bit peeved when Tom called out to ask if he wanted a ladder for mounting.

  “Nope! Got me a sky hook!” Sid called back, hopped, caught the shoulder-high stirrup with his toe, and flipped into the saddle.

  Mr. Batchlett and Mr. Bendt had already mounted, and were turning their horses onto a trail that led off toward the mountains when Hazel came running from the house. “I don’t have to go to Sunday School today, do I, Paw?” she called from fifty yards away.

  “Don’t know no reason why not,” he said, and turned his horse half back.

  “Well, I can’t, Paw,” Hazel panted, as she ran up to him. “Jenny wants to go, and . . . and I’ll have to stay to home to mind the baby.”

  “Jenny say so?”

  “Well . . . I know she wants to go, to . . . to wear her new . . .”

  From where I sat on Lady I saw Mr. Bendt wink at Mr. Batchlett, then he asked, “Sure you ain’t frettin’ ’bout the horse-pickin’, ’stead of Jenny?”

  Hazel was standing so close that her father’s stirrup nearly touched her shoulder. She turned her face up to him, and there were almost tears in her voice when she said, “I got to be here, Paw! I just got to be here!”

  Mr. Bendt leaned down toward her, and his voice was real gentle when he said, “You run on now, gal, and help your maw with the dishes. I reckon we might be able to hold off the horse-pickin’ till you womenfolks get back from church. What you think, Batch?”

  “I reckon,” Mr. Batchlett said with a grin.

  “Promise?” Hazel asked.

  Mr. Batchlett nodded, and said, “Promise!” Then Hazel ran back toward the house without ever looking around at the rest of us.

  Tom and Ned seemed to know just where we’d find the horse herd. They took a well-worn cattle trail that led northward along the foot of the mountains, forking off like branches of a river at the mouth of each canyon.

  Winding in and out through the brush, we’d followed the trail four or five miles when we topped a high bench. Below us, in a little green valley, there was a bunch of forty or fifty horses grazing. Suddenly, one of them threw up his head, pointing his ears toward us, whinnied shrilly, and raced away toward a canyon mouth. In a moment the whole bunch was racing behind him.

  “Blueboy!” Tom rapped out angrily. “Mighta knowed he’d wind us ’fore we could get around ’em! You and the kid cut acrost the butte and try to head ’em, Ned! Sid and me’ll work around to the far side.”

  I’d seen a lot of beautiful horses, but never one that caught my eye the way Blueboy did. From up there on the bench, with the horse band half a mile below us in the valley, he was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. The sun glinted off his racing back the way it glints off ripples in a deep mountain lake. His white-stockinged legs flashed like driving pistons, and his long white mane and tail streamed out like silken flags. He ran with his muzzle high, swinging his white-blazed head from side to side. As I watched, he circled to the back of the band, snaking his head out and raking his teeth at the laggards.

  I was so busy watching Blueboy that I didn’t notice Tom and Sid drop down over the edge of the bench, or that Ned was spurring away toward the mountains. I pressed my spurs against Lady’s flanks and went racing after him. As I caught up, I shouted, “Is Blueboy the stallion?”

  “No, gelding since he was a three-year-old, but he don’t know it,” Ned called back. “Crazy maverick! Out of a blooded mare, by a wild stud.”

  The canyon into which Blueboy had driven the horse herd wound in an S shape back between two low mountains. By cutting around one of them, and sliding down a shale bank, Ned and I reached the bottom of the canyon just as the horses rounded the last bend. At sight of us, they wheeled and started back, but Blueboy was behind them, slashing and kicking. For a couple of minutes I thought he’d drive the whole band past us. If they’d been unbroken range horses, he would have, but they were mostly saddle stock, and had too much respect for flying ropes. A shifty little claybank dodged back past him, and the rest of the band followed.

  I could hardly believe that Blueboy wasn’t a stallion. The remuda at Batchlett’s ranch was made up of almost every type of stock horse. There were young ones and old ones, mares with colts running at their sides, yearlings, a few unbroken three-year-olds, and geldings that showed the white saddle marks of many hard seasons, but Blueboy handled them all as if they were his harem.

  Tom and Sid were waiting at the far end of the canyon to turn the remuda onto the trail for the corrals, but Blueboy wouldn’t have it. Racing with his head low and his nostrils wide, squealing, wheeling, and slashing with his yellow teeth, he charged the lead mares time and again, turning them away from the trail and driving them into the brush.

  “Why in blazes Batch keeps that crazy mav’rick’s more’n I know!” Tom shouted, as we spurred to head the band back toward the south. “I’d have throwed lead into him when he was foaled if I’d owned the mare.”

  “Worthless half-breed!” Ned shouted back. “I’d throw lead into him now if I was packin’ a six-gun.”

  “Better not leave Batch catch you at it,” Tom called, and spurred away, yelling and swearing at Blueboy.

  Time after time we got the horse band headed back onto the trail, and the older ones would have followed it, but each time Blueboy raced to the lead and turned them aside.

  Sid tried to cut him away from the herd and drive him up the canyon alone, but his piebald was no match for Blueboy’s speed. He’d circle, with his head and tail high, and race back to turn the band again. Tom and Ned tried to corner him in a gulch and get a throw rope on him, but they didn’t have any better luck than Sid. Bounding up the side of the steep, rocky gulch, Blueboy whirled at the top, snorted at them, and came tearing back to the herd.

  It shouldn’t have taken us more than two hours to round up the remuda and bring it in to the corral, but it was well past noon before we got it there. And the only way we did it at all was by the other three fighting Blueboy away while I pushed the herd along the trail. He never gave up his fight for a second, and he wouldn’t give up his band. At the last moment he broke through the whirling catch ropes, raced up, and led the remuda into the horse corral.

  Mr. Batchlett and Mr. Bendt were still out looking over the cattle, Hank and Zeb hadn’t come in with the chuckwagon, and Mrs. Bendt and the children weren’t home from church when we brought the remuda in. There was nothing to do after we’d unsaddled, so we sat on the top rail of the corral, looking at the horses and talking.

  Tom and Ned had been on the home ranch the summer before, and knew every horse in the bunch, but there was no sense in asking them any questions. They’d know which horses they wanted for their own strings, and they’d tell us almost anything to keep us from finding out which ones they were. Sid was sitting beside me, watching half a dozen different horses as they milled and turned, but there was only one I could watch for more than a minute.

  Blueboy was never still an instant, and kept himself between us and the rest of the remuda, as though he were protecting it. With his head high, his eyes bright, and his ears pointing, he seemed to be trying to watch e
verything at once. He was neither fat nor thin, and the hide rippled over the muscles of his rump and shoulders like oil over running water. I had a feeling that, at any moment, he might race at the high pole fence and sail over it without touching. Ned was sitting next beyond Sid, and I asked him, “Has anybody ever ridden Blueboy?”

  “Half a dozen, I reckon. Why?”

  “I just wondered,” I said. “I’ll bet it would take a real buster to stay with him ten seconds.”

  “Pi’tcher horse! Crowhopper!” Ned said, without looking away from the milling remuda. “Takes brains to make a good twister; that mav’rick’s loco.”

  I’d seen plenty of horses that had been poisoned on locoweed. They acted half-drunk, stupid, and crazy, but Blueboy wasn’t that kind of horse. He’d proved all morning that he was smarter than any one of us. I began to think that maybe both Ned and Tom wanted him for themselves, and that they’d been running him down so that neither Sid nor I would pick him.

  I was still watching Blueboy and wishing I owned him when Sid leaned in front of me and asked Tom, “How come the boss holds onto the blue? Wouldn’t a circus pay good money for a showy lookin’ horse the likes of that?”

  Tom nodded, “Sure would, but Batch, he won’t give up on him. Got him in his blood, I reckon. I’ve heard tell he had the old stallion in his blood so strong he could taste it. Put in three summers tryin’ to lay rope on that wild stud when him and Beckman first come up from Texas. Run him clean down into the Sangre de Cristos and back half a dozen times. Spent the price of forty good stock horses on him.”

  “Catch him or give up?” Sid asked.

  “Reckon you don’t know Batch very good,” Tom said, as he and Ned climbed down from the fence. “He don’t give up his chips till the last card’s down. Couldn’t lay rope on the stud, but he had a thoroughbred mare shipped in here. Turned her loose in the mountains. Daggone shame he couldn’t’a got nothin’ better’n that blue devil for a colt!”