Centennial (107 page)

“I would never want you to,” Perkin said evenly.

“You sure sound as if that’s what you wanted.”

In some dismay Jim took his problem to Mr. Skimmerhorn, who slapped his leg and said, “Damn! He followed the same line with me.”

“What’s he up to?” Jim asked. “Why’s he testing Mr. Seccombe after what we’ve been through?”

Skimmerhorn pondered this for some minutes, drumming with his fingers on the headquarters table. “The logical conclusion,” he said slowly, “is that he hasn’t been testing Mr. Seccombe at all. He’s been testing us.”

“What have we done? Saved his cattle, that’s all.”

“He was testing to see whether we were loyal to the man we’re working for.”

“I was. How about you?”

“I’m loyal to my boss till the moment he goes to jail.”

“You think Mr. Seccombe may go to jail?”

“Not after the blizzard. Could Mr. Perkin possibly go into court and say to the judge, ‘Some of our cattle are missing.’ If the judge owned any, he might reply, ‘Hell, all of mine are missing.’ Perkin has no case and he knows it.”

“I don’t like that little son-of-a-bitch,” Jim said, and he was not on hand when the Scotsman said goodbye.

Seccombe and his wife took the clerk to Cheyenne, where at the railroad station Perkin said his farewells. “You did a remarkable job, Oliver, bringing us through that blizzard. You have our thanks.”

“But you’re determined to press the lawsuit?”

“Not if you resign, Oliver. You’re almost seventy. Resign.”

The train pulled into the station. The conductor cried, “All aboard for North Platte, Grand Island, Omaha!” and Charlotte bade the little clerk a restrained farewell. Oliver shook hands with him formally, then led Charlotte to the Cheyenne Club.

He found there an autumnal mood, as if the end of an era were at hand. Instead of the vivacity that had always marked the card rooms and the bar during March, when winter was ending and polo about to begin, he found solemnity.

“Claude Barker? Wiped out. Hasn’t a sou.”

“Moreton Frewen! Dreadful shape, poor fellow. Said something about South Africa.”

“The Chugwater people? No celebrations in Dundee this year. Someone said their losses were so heavy they may run sheep.”

And so the mournful litany went: thousands of head of cattle starved; on some ranches ninety percent; no more money from Boston; seventeen club members, mind you, seventeen of our most secure men, eliminated—gone bust.

The club itself was in sad shape. More than half the members had lost heavily and were relinquishing membership. The dining rooms, which had once been so gay in spring, were desolate areas where bleak white tablecloths served only to remind the few diners of their fields covered with snow. Even the room in which the Seccombes stayed seemed shabby.

How sad, how infinitely sad it was. Oliver bore it for two days, then told Charlotte with gray despair, “It’s all ending so poorly, so very poorly.”

“Forget that little worm,” she snapped. “He’s powerless to hurt us.”

“It’s not Perkin, it’s me.”

“There’s nothing wrong we can’t put right. What’s book count? If we’d had the damned cattle, they’d have frozen.”

He was dismayed to realize that she had no comprehension of the anguish he was feeling or its cause, and he tried to explain: “When I watched Jim Lloyd in the blizzard ... and Texas Red ... and saw them taking command, doing the things a cattleman ought to do.”

“They’re paid to do it. It’s their job.”

“Even Claude Barker rode through the storm thirty miles to summon help ... lost two fingers ...”

“Claude Barker is a silly, ineffectual man, and if he’d stayed home, he wouldn’t have frozen his fingers.”

He said no more. There was an acceptable way for men to behave if they presumed to run cattle, and he had failed. All heart was gone out of him and much of his strength. He longed for the cleanliness of the great ranch he had put together, but when they returned to the preposterous castle which had diverted so much of his energy, he brooded, barely hearing Charlotte’s efforts to cheer him up, avoiding the staff, snapping at Skimmerhorn, drinking each day more heavily and far into the night hours.

Then one day in April, when the sun gave signal that winter was ended, he seemed rejuvenated and moved about the mansion as if he had reached a significant decision. When he came down from his tower he told Charlotte, “I’d like to see how the grass is doing,” and he walked far to the east, where he could see the limitless plains of the empire he had created.

It was Jim Lloyd who heard the shot echoing in the thin spring air. He could not imagine rustlers so close to the main buildings, but he saddled his horse and rode over the rim of the hill, where he found a white-haired man lying on the prairie, his face against the earth. After a while he rode back to the castle, calling in a soft voice so as to cause no panic, “Mrs. Seccombe! Mrs. Seccombe! I think you’d better come.”

Levi Zendt received one more letter from his family in Lancaster. It was written in brother Mahlon’s cramped, ungenerous script:

Brother Levi,

We have just heard the most exciting news. The United States government is passing a law which permits any white man who married an Indian woman under pressure I mean when he married her to help keep the peace before there were soldiers to shoot the Indians, why he is free to divorce her. All you have to do is go to the postoffice and tell them that you had to marry the Indian and they will tell you how you can get divorced and it wont cost you nothing.

This is a fine chance Levi to correct a bad thing because as you know your brothers and me have been mighty ashamed of you being married to that Indian, and she being sister to the Paskinel murderers, and we have kept it very quiet unless the people in Lancaster heard about it. Now you can make everything right. Just go to the postoffice.

Your brother,

Mahlon

Levi was so appalled by the letter that he threw it down, then stared at it, unable to believe that another human being could write in such manner of a woman he had never seen and about whom he knew nothing, except that she was an Indian. He shook his head in disgust, then lifted the sheet of paper by one unsavory corner and with his left hand applied a match to it. He did not want it about where Lucinda might stumble across it, but as it was burning close to his fingers his wife passed, tall and graceful, and she saw the fire and asked, “What are you doing?”

“Burning an old bill,” he said.

“I hope it’s paid.”

“Long ago,” he replied, and the ashes fell to the floor.

But he could not protect her from the indignity of the new law. One morning as he was sweeping out the store he heard her laughing, and when he turned to see her standing in sunlight, she was holding a printed broadside. It explained things pretty much as Mahlon had reported, except that the husband who wished to be free should go to the courthouse, not the post office. She thrust the handbill at him, and after reading only a few lines he crumpled it, uttering several Mennonite obscenities.

“I’m sorry you saw it,” he said.

“You knew about it?”

“Trust Mahlon. That bill I said I was burning, it was Mahlon telling me of my wonderful opportunity.” He put his arm about her and said softly, “This is a disgraceful thing for the government to do. The last in a long line ...”

“They’re confused,” Lucinda said, feeling very Indian in her resentment. But as a woman, she could not resist testing the man with whom she had lived for so long, through so many divergencies and trials. “You can get rid of me,” she whispered.

He had led her to a chair, and as she sat he stood before her, a heavy-set Dutchman nearing seventy, a man who had wanted her more than anything else in life. “Get rid of you!” he repeated. “If you were back in St. Louis again, I’d crawl on my knees to fetch you.”

She looked up at him and smiled, and reached out her hand.

As soon as Finlay Perkin returned safely to Bristol, he drafted one of the sagest documents ever to come from the cattle country. It was addressed to the Venneford directors, but with his customary prudence he saw fit to send copies to Skimmerhorn and Lloyd. After a brilliant analysis of the industry as it would have to operate following the blizzard, he gave these instructions:

And then he added, out of the blue as it were, an eighth directive which would in the long run be more determinative than any of the others, making Crown Vee the famous ranch of the next forty years:

He ended with a clerk’s summary, a sensible conclusion to the disaster of 1886-1887:

When the first carload of Herefords reached Centennial, Jim Lloyd’s life assumed a new direction. He was at the station, of course, when they arrived, and after the planks were carefully laid and the first two cows descended and he saw those handsome white faces and reddish bodies, the sturdy legs and the long, straight backs, he knew that real cattle were at last coming under his care.

But when the bull came down, Jim and all those watching caught their breath, and you could hear sighs, for here was one of the finest animals England had so far produced, King Bristol, close to a ton in weight, with a flawless white face and ponderous red body. His horns sloped down at a sharp angle, ending well below his eyes. His forehead was ample, studded with bone and covered with white curly hair. His snout was a healthy pale pink and his mouth drooped as if he had a surly disposition, while down the back of his neck ran a heavy line of twisted white hair.

What made him most memorable, during those first few minutes, so that people throughout Colorado would soon be talking of King Bristol, was the majestic way he walked, flexing the knees of his forelegs, pulling the hoofs far back, then plopping them down heavily, as if he owned the earth. The cows had come down the ramp tentatively, for to them this was a new, untested land; but the bull came clumping down as if to occupy an empire.

He took possession of the ranch, siring calves from each of the six Hereford cows and from eighteen of the longhorns, too. From his pure Hereford offspring came four bulls, three of whom would be kept for the herd; the bulls from longhorn cows were castrated to be sold later as fat steers.

But the half-longhorn, half-Hereford heifers were kept, and bred back to Hereford bulls, and their offspring were three parts Hereford, one part longhorn; and after five such crosses, Crown Vee had cows that were thirty-one parts Hereford, one part longhorn, and at that point, biologically speaking, the famous longhorns of Texas were extinct so far as Venneford Ranch was concerned.

How beautiful the Herefords were! In the morning when Jim went out to check them in the distant pastures he would delight as a line of heifers turned to face him, their white countenances shining in the sun, their red flanks swollen with unborn calves. No domesticated cattle had ever had the capacity to generate love in a man’s heart the way a string of Herefords could. They were clean beasts, easy to handle, responsive to good treatment and astonishingly able to fend for themselves in unfavorable conditions.

“Herefords will survive where others will perish” became the axiom of the unprotected range. The cows were good mothers too, but most of all, they were beautiful and well suited to range conditions in the west.

“They stand on the range as if they had been carved there,” Jim told Skimmerhorn one morning as they surveyed the new calves. “A calf one day old looks ready to fight a wolf.”