Dry Divide (14 page)

I had my checkbook out before he'd mentioned the barrel head. “Will a check do it?” I asked him. “You can call the banker over at Cedar Bluffs to find out whether or not it's any good.”

“No need of that,” he told me, “and no sense writing a check till we figure up what your steel will come to. From what your men tell me, it'll prob'ly run up to fifty, sixty dollars.”

There was no doubt in my mind that Doc had been taken with another seizure, but by that time I didn't care how much of a bender he went on; I was too happy about not having lost Gus and Lars, and that we were going to be able to set up a shop for almost nothing. “Come on,” I told them. “Let's leave the team here and go get some dinner. There's no sense in waiting any longer for Doc; he's probably holed up in some speakeasy. We can talk about what we'll do next while we're eating.” We decided that it would be best for Lars to stay at the blacksmith's shop, to pick out the tools, equipment, and steel, while Gus and I bought the rest of the stuff we would need.

If I'd been alone, I'd have gone into the office at the lumberyard, said I wanted top-grade hickory or white oak, given my order for the number of pieces and sizes, then let the yardman get me out the nearest he had to it. Gus didn't go at it that way. He insisted on going into the yard himself, examining the entire stock of hardwood, picking out heavy timbers with straight, flawless grain, then having the millwright saw and plane them into the exact sizes we needed. At the hardware store he was as slow and careful in choosing every tool, bolt, or other item. Most of my time was taken in finding Manila line for catch ropes, extender reins, collars for the new horses, and harness-mending supplies. It was late afternoon before we'd loaded the bricks, sand, cement, and coal for the forge.

During the afternoon I'd thought of Doc a dozen times, but had pushed him out of my mind, thinking we'd find him asleep in the pool hall when we were ready to go home. That wasn't where we found him. On our way back to the blacksmith's shop we were driving past the stockyards when, from among the cattle pens, I heard Doc's voice, “Gen'lmen, I have a purpose.” There was enough slur to the words that it left no doubt as to what his purpose had been, or that he'd accomplished it. I pulled the team up, passed Gus the reins, and said, “I guess I'd better go and collect Doc while we know where he is.”

There were a dozen or so men, hooting and laughing, at the far end of the yards, and Doc, rigged out in his medicine-man raiment, towered above their heads. Twice, as I hurried toward the group, Doc tried to make his pitch again, but both times he stalled on the “purpose,” and had to start over. I'd reached the edge of the crowd before I discovered what all the hooting was about. Doc was perched like a crowing rooster on the end of a long plank watering trough, and each time he filled his lungs to orate he lost his balance long enough that he had to regain it by flapping his arms as though they'd been wings.

“Doc!” I shouted to him. “Come on, we're heading out!”

I have an idea that Doc's sight was blurred enough to see a multitude, and that he couldn't recognize me in the throng. Although everyone else looked my way, Doc didn't but launched into his oration again. Sometimes a fellow gets ideas faster than he has time to reason them out, and a few flashed through my head when I couldn't catch Doc's attention. One was that he'd get polluted every time he dressed up and came to town. Another was that he might keep sober if he didn't have his fancy clothes, or if they could be so completely ruined that he couldn't wear them. And the third was that a good dousing in cold water might sober him enough that I could get him back to the wagon.

It all went through my head so fast that the crowd was still looking my way when I got the dousing idea. I winked at a young farm hand who was standing by the trough, and made a motion as though I were pulling a handkerchief out of my hip pocket. The boy winked back, then gave Doc's coat tail a quick jerk. He went over backwards faster than Kitten had gone over with me.

Water splashed ten feet high, and Doc came up blowing like a whale. I got there just in time to help him out over the edge of the trough, and the shock had sobered him enough to recognize me. “My dear companion,” he burbled, “some foul fiend has . . .” Then he had a spasm of coughing and blowing water.

I gave him a couple of slaps on the back, locked an arm under mine, and told him, “Let's get out of here before another fiend gets you. For a bone-dry town, this one seems to be full of them.” Reeling, hiccupping, and shedding water like a sprinkler wagon, Doc let me lead him to the wagon, where Gus helped me lift him aboard and lay him out on a bed of bricks.

Lars had everything we needed laid out and ready for loading when we got back to the blacksmith's shop, but Doc had given up the battle. He was snoring like a contented sow, and slept right through our hoisting him to the top of the lumber pile, so as to make room for the steel and blacksmithing equipment. The wagon was heaped high when we pulled out of town—and I was $223 deeper in debt.

As near as we could figure, our load weighed about three and a half tons, or as much as a hundred and twenty bushels of wheat, and there was a rise of several hundred feet from Oberlin to the Hudson place. It gave me a good chance to find out what lightweight horses could do with a heavy load on hilly roads, and I was more than pleased with what I learned. Where an upgrade was long and gradual, my horses had to pull with all their might, and I had to rest them often. On level ground they handled the pull easily, trotted right along on the downgrades, and swooped through the gulches like swallows. The thrust of the heavy load on the downhill run into a gulch was enough to carry the wagon well up the far side. Then my little mustangs drove into their collars with everything they had, scrambling to the top before the momentum was entirely lost. With a two-minute breather there, they were ready to do it all over again. Even with the heavy load and the rise, we covered the twelve miles home in a little over two and a half hours.

Gus and Lars unloaded Doc while I unharnessed, then we peeled off his soaking raiment, rolled him in a blanket, and left him to sleep off his seizure. Coal and cement dust had settled like soot when we'd loaded the wagon, and Doc's wet raiment had absorbed it as a blotter will absorb ink. Before we went in to supper I piled the soggy heap against the east side of the barn, where the morning sun would dry it into a fair imitation of granite.

After supper Judy and I sat at the kitchen table, trying to fit together a jigsaw puzzle, while the rest of the crew unloaded the wagon. Our puzzle wasn't really made up of pieces cut with a jigsaw, but was even more complicated, because we had a lot more pieces than we knew what to do with, and they wouldn't fit together worth a cent.

Judy had called at all the places from which I'd received hauling orders by Saturday, but the mailman had brought seven more since then, and there were still five days till August 10th—the date I'd set as a dead line in my letters. Worse still, the orders were scattered over an area of a hundred square miles, and some of the tenants hadn't yet set their thrashing dates, while others had arranged for the same weeks, extending into early October. If we'd started working on our puzzle the evening before, I'd have separated out for refusal all orders where thrashing would begin before August 29th, for Mrs. Hudson's hauling was expected to take eighteen days, beginning on the 11th, and I'd planned to buy barely enough horses and wagons to keep up with the thrasher.

All my figuring had been done on the hope that each four-horse rig could haul a hundred bushels of wheat twenty miles in a day. I'd reasoned that since the distance from the Hudson place to the elevator was eight miles, each rig could make two and a half trips, and that my six rigs could haul a maximum of 1500 bushels a day. I'd changed my mind while we'd been bringing the load home from Oberlin.

That trip with a heavy load had taught me that it was the lay of the land which would determine how many bushels of wheat I could haul in a day. If all my horses could swoop through gulches as the little team I'd been driving did, I'd only have to change my plans slightly in order to haul 120 bushels on each trip instead of 100. All that would be necessary was to put my tote teams at the long upgrades rather than at the deep gulches. If that would work, I'd be able to haul 1800 bushels eight miles in a day, and Mrs. Hudson's job would require only 1400. At the same time I was doing her work I'd be able to haul 400 bushels the same distance for some other customer, or 800 bushels half that distance. The problem was to pick out jobs where the output of the thrashing machine and the distance to the elevator would match the hauling I could handle.

Beyond that, if I could find enough hauling over roads that were ideally suited to my kind of horses, there was no doubt in my mind that I could stretch the distance of my hauls by a mile or two. But I'd be in trouble if I took any jobs that wouldn't work out to full round-trips, for I'd have to keep part of my horses and men at the wrong end of the line. With the number of widely scattered orders I already had, and from what I'd learned about the surrounding country while hunting for horses and equipment, I believed the problem could be solved.

Beaver Creek snaked its way from southwest to northeast where it crossed the line from Kansas into Nebraska. The valley floor was flat, and little more than a half mile wide, with the railroad skirting the foot of the hills that fringed the high, gulch-torn divide to the south, while the land to the north rose more gently. Cedar Bluffs was the last Kansas town on the railroad, with Marion, Nebraska seven miles below. Most of the hauling orders I'd received were for delivery to the elevator in one of those towns; some from up or down the valley, some from the gently sloping country to the north, and others from the rugged, high divide to the south.

The first thing Judy and I did was to weed out all the orders which required long hauls along the level valley floor. The roads there would become gummy if we had any rain, and it seemed better to let that business go to haulers with heavier, slower horses. Then we began matching orders where the big 1400-bushel-a-day thrashing rigs were going to be used. Unless the distances to the elevator averaged no more than five miles, there would be no sense in trying to keep up with two of such machines at the same time. Of course, I could do it by hiring enough extra horses, wagons, and drivers, but it seemed best to let someone else have one of the jobs. All we needed to decide was which one to keep.

Next we laid aside all the orders from the north side of the valley. The rises and falls were in much longer sweeps than on the high divide, and my little horses wouldn't be too good on those long uphill pulls. Then too, if I took jobs that far from the Hudson place, I'd wear my horses down too much in coming and going. That left us with fewer pieces for our puzzle, but still with too many, and at first it looked as though none of them would fit together. The distances from the ranches to the elevators ranged from three to thirteen miles, and the output of the machines from eight to fourteen hundred bushels a day. On top of that, I couldn't estimate how many bushels a day we could haul from any one of those places until I knew every detail of the road between it and the elevator to which we'd be hauling. I'd have to ask Judy, “How many miles is it from that Wickham quarter to The Bluffs, and how big is the thrashing rig the tenant is going to use?”

After she'd counted them off on the township maps, she'd tell me, “Well, it's ten and a half miles to the school house, so you might as leave call it eleven to the elevator, and Hunsinger is going to do the thrashing, so that will be about twelve hundred bushels a day—if he don't have no breakdowns, but he generally always does; his rig's kind of an old one.”

“Now try to remember,” I'd say, “how many hills will we have to pull that are as long and steep as that one just south of the buildings on the Moss place?”

While Judy chewed the end of her pencil, she'd mumble around it, “Well, there's that one by Wes Ridgeway's place, and that one by Blickenstaff's . . . no, you got three by Blickenstaff's; one before you turn the corner, and then two after.”

“Never mind,” I'd tell her, as I laid the order for the Wickham quarter section aside. “Suppose you take a look at the mileage from the De May place to The Bluffs.”

By eleven o'clock we had no two pieces of the puzzle fitted together, but we did know the pieces that we weren't going to use, and we'd found some others that came fairly close to fitting. There was no use in trying to go any further until we'd had a chance to drive the old Maxwell over every foot of the routes we'd have to travel for each job, so I could look the hills over carefully, and figure out which jobs would work best for my type of horses.

I expected the crew to have turned in as soon as they had the wagon unloaded, but when I left the kitchen I could see a torch burning near the corner of the barn, and another speck of light that I knew would be from the lantern. Until my eyes became a bit used to the darkness, I couldn't see the men, but they were all there—all but Doc. Paco was sitting with the old bellows in his lap, patching the cracked leather with pieces of rawhide, stuck tight with beeswax, and sewn securely with rawhide thongs. Old Bill and Jaikus were being hod carriers for Gus and Lars, who had already laid most of the bricks for their forge. All that was left to do was to set in the draft duct, attach the bellows, and lay the two top courses of bricks. About all the help I could be was in holding the torch where it would give them the best light until they were finished—just before one o'clock.