That Old Ace in the Hole (9 page)

“Yes.”

“That’s squitter water. It’ll make you want a die, make you think your guts is bein pulled out a your asshole with your mama’s crochet hook, but you won’t die and most gets better and some even drinks that squitter water again and has no ill effects. I done it. Anyways, we got the fix-up for it. Just wait here. You ain’t comin into this camp smellin like shit and puke boiled with skunk cabbage for a week. You lay out here folded up like a empty purse and we’ll bring it to you.”

The cure, as they called it, was a tin cup of brown liquid toned up with some kind of cheap whiskey. He drank it and promptly vomited. The man with the multicolored beard fetched a second dose, which he took in tiny sips, willing it to stay down. When the cup was empty he lay in the grass and closed his eyes.

“Give her a hour or two to work,” said the giant and they disappeared into the dugout.

Near sunset they reappeared with a basin of steaming water and some folded garments. They pulled his noisome shirt and pants from him and poured the basin of hot soapy water over him, threw down a flour-sack towel and advised him to get into the fresh clothes.

“My valise…” he said, pointing back the way he’d come.

The tall man said, “Good idee. Why have him stink up our duds with his squitter shit when he can do what he wants with his own?” He saddled one of the horses and rode in the direction of the creek camp. Martin lay naked and cold on the prairie and began to shiver but at least he was no longer racked with spasms. The multicolored beard brought him a biscuit and some clean water.

Before the sun went down the tall man was back with the valise, which he opened and went through with interest. He tossed a pair of pants to Martin and a striped cotton shirt. Martin asked for his spare underdrawers but the man laughed and closed the case.

“Sonny, no man in Texas wears them. Just slows you down whatever you got in mind. I’n use them for a dishclout.”

They gave him a corner in the dugout and the tall man who said his name was Klattner, late of Arkansas, promised—as soon as he learned there were coffee beans in it—that he’d get Martin’s trunk in the morning.

“We been out a coffee a month. Tried to git a little in Woolybucket but they’re out too and no supply wagon due until June. So your coffee will be appreciated. What damn old Woolybucket needs is a good store. The one they got in Woolybucket now, it’s not no good. There’s a crazy doc half runs it when he ain’t layin on a sofa dead drunk. Couldn’t hit a elephant’s ass with a banjo. Used a have a regular storekeeper, but he lost the emporium to the doc in a game of chance. Doc don’t never order enough coffee, flour, sugar, what-have-you. All last winter no flour and no tabacca. My God, he got in a thousand pound a saleratus and not one teaspoon a flour. We horsewhipped him but it didn’t do no good. Bad as ever.”

“Would his name be Doctor Mugg?”

“It would. You know him?”

“No. I was told he was well-regarded at curing sick folks.”

“I don’t know who told you that but the informant was lyin. Doc Mugg couldn’t cure a ham if you gave it to him in front of a smokehouse. What Doc Mugg needs in the cure line is the water cure—for hisself. If I was you I’d get better on my own. Fresh air and whiskey is best and plenty work.”

The multicolored beard chimed in. “If I was you I wouldn’t tie up to Doc Mugg for a minute. He’s filled up the graveyard complete and is startin on another. Why don’t you git his store away from him and run it good—run it honorable. Every man would greet you with hearty goodwill wherever you may go.”

But Martin Fronk had fixed his sights on making a fortune as a cattleman, whether drover or rancher, found the idea of running a store repugnant and said so.

“I spose you want a be a cattleboy,” drawled the multicolored beard whose name was Carrol Day, a curiously feminine name, thought Martin, not yet acquainted with the bearded Marions, Fannys and Abbys of Texas who, saddled by their unthinking mothers with dainty names, built savagely masculine frames of character.

“I believe I’m too old to be a boy again of any kind.”

“Age don’t matter. Some a the pertest cowboys is pushin seventy summers. Lookit old Whitey here,” nodding at the tall man who was wrapping rawhide around the helve and head of an axe. “He’s most eighty and he’s more cowboy than any ten ordinaries.”

“He’s a
cowboy
?”

“Hell yes. Been up the trail to Montana what, twenty times?”

“Twenty-two. And that was enough. It’s too cold up there. Snows all summer. You git paid there’s no place to spend your money. Just turn around and come back to Texas.”

“What about Miles City? What about Cheyenne? What about Denver? I understand you paid them towns a visit on your return journeys many a time.”

“My money was gettin too heavy. Anyway, Martin here don’t want a be no cowboy or no storekeeper. I’n see he’s got bigger ideas in mind.”

“I was thinking about the stock-driving business.”

Both men began to scream with laughter. Carrol got down on the dirt floor and rolled, moaning, “Oh my sweet cabbage patch, ‘the stock-drivin business.’”

“You idiot,” said Klattner. “Make it in the stock-drivin business, you got to know cows like you know your own tweedle-dee. You got to have cowboyed, got to know the markets and men. You have to sweet-talk crazy farmers and handle Indans. We just got burned alive, me and Whitey, in the stock-drivin business. Stampedes, Indan troubles, blue-burnin Kansas farmers—”

“Indians?”

“Hell, they’re no bother,” said Carrol. “Just give em one a your cows and they leave you alone. A course after fifty donations you’re down fifty cows.”

“They can be trouble,” said the other. “There’s Quanah Parker. And others. There was that clock salesman—”

He didn’t want to hear about the clock salesman again.

“I could run a store,” whispered Martin Fronk, giving up his plans to become a rancher or cattle drover. The waterholes were too chancy.

The next day he felt distinctly better, packed his suitcase and asked his hosts if they could spare one of their horses so he could get to Woolybucket.

“You buyin or borrowin?”

“I’m agreeable to purchase one of your steeds. Preferably one that is docile and of gentle disposition.”

“That one died last year. But we can let you have that sorrel gelding for twenty dollars. He’s got two names: You Son of a Bitch and Grasshopper. He don’t like grass a wave in the breeze and when it does so he hops. You purchase old Grasshopper and we’ll draw your wagon in next week. See if you can’t git that store away from Doc Mugg and do right by the town.”

The other added his advice. “And, if you do, lay in plenty coffee. And keep your supply wagon outn reach a them damn red sloughs. Look like dry riverbed places along the Canadian but you break through to the mud, stickier than boiled molasses mixed with glue, and eight hunderd foot deep. It’s happened.”

You Son of a Bitch disliked waving grass, birds, distant riders, prairie dogs, clouds, saddles and, as Martin Fronk came into the outskirts of Woolybucket, black-and-white dogs. One of the last named sent him into paroxysms of bucking until Martin departed the saddle. The horse stood trembling, facing the barking dog. Martin picked up a few stones and threw them accurately and hard at the dog, which ran yipping to a ragged tent. The side of the tent was painted with letters:
GEN’L STOR DF MUGG MD PROP
.

He went inside the tent. There was an ungodly welter of stuff, from unfurled yard goods to bullwhips.

“Got any coffee?” he asked the shambling wreck entangled in a bolt of blue daisy cotton. Was that a banjo on the cold stove?

“June. Didn’t send it yet. Come back in June, sir.”

He left, wondering if he’d seen the fabled Dr. Mugg, thinking he could run that store with his head in a bag and hobbles on his ankles.

B
ob Dollar thought LaVon’s Busted Star Ranch, a little north of the Canadian River, a beautiful place. For the first time in his life he saw what extraordinary personal privacy a ranch family enjoyed. If he really were looking for a site to develop luxury homes this would be it. LaVon told him the ranch had been mixed-grass grazing land—bluestem, buffalo grass, gramma, wheat grass and Indian grass—when the first settlers came into the country in the late nineteenth century. Moises Harshberger, her peripatetic grandfather, arrived in the panhandle as a young man in 1879, a year after her husband’s ancestor Fronk had taken over Mugg’s store.

Moises Harshberger and his brother Sidney, she said, had made a journey from Tennessee to California where they bought fifteen hundred steers, then on to Montana with the steers where they sold them at profit, down to Texas where they bought more cows and drove them to Kansas City and sold at a profit. There Sidney fell ill with cholera. After a quick funeral Moises drove a small herd to Wyoming, sold them to an arrogant English lord with a face like a mustached tortilla at a wonderful profit and so again to Texas, where he bought ranch land north of the Canadian breaks. On this land he found thousands of short, sharpened stakes scattered over the prairie, used by the buffalo hunters a decade earlier to peg out hides. There were thousands of bison bones underfoot as well.

Perversely, Harshberger abhorred the shadeless plain, its grass and silvery sand sagebrush. He hired men to dig up and ship to him hundreds of sapling big-tooth maples and chinquapin oaks, five hundred young ponderosa pines, grudgingly watered by the wagon drivers on their jolting journey somewhat as Captain Bligh’s breadfruit trees had been tended by sullen sailors on the
Bounty
. Nor did his attentions fail once the trees were planted around his new house. After a month of mumbling and dodging by his mutinous ranch hands, who thought of themselves as pure cowboys to whom any action that required dismounting, hefting and carrying, as buckets of water, was demeaning insult, he hired a neighbor’s grown but mentally slow son, who, ignorant of the niceties of the cowboy code, daily sloshed water into the earth-reservoir built up around each young tree. Harshberger forbade the cowboys to use the saplings as horse hitches or pissing posts. But the young trees could not endure the sand-blasting wind and before he put sheltering lath fence on their windward sides, half of them perished. In time, the remaining trees, though they grew with a pronounced lean, struck their roots deep and a canopy of shade dappled the house.

“He fenced ever inch a the ranch himself with but two helpers and a lot of that fence is still up today.” She did not say that in fencing the land a certain balance shifted. Now Harshberger felt that the land was servant to him and it owed him a living, owed him everything he could get from it.

“Hard times come,” said LaVon. “He’d somehow got hold of a few cattle from below the tick-fever line, put them into the herd and pretty soon had a lot of sick and dyin cattle. At that time the panhandle was free of ticks.”

“And now it’s not?”

“I didn’t say that. Now the tick problem is over. We learned what a do about it.”

“What?” said Bob.

“Don’t you know anything about ticks?”

“I know that in Colorado the Rocky Mountain spotted ticks can kill you.”

“Well, the plain old cattle tick and the southern cattle tick can kill cows. They still got them in Mexico. Southern cattle was resistant to the fever disease but northern cows—where ticks can’t live—had no resistance. They were very susceptible and died in a few weeks after they came in contact with southern immune cows carrying the ticks.

“Anyway, Graindeddy’s bad luck wasn’t over. His calves got blackleg. Then was such a droughty hot summer that his wells quit, the grass was pretty well gone and cows died. Come the winter he lost half the remainin herd in a blizzard. In the spring it rained like crazy and heel flies drove his cattle into the bogs where a good many of them perished. On top a all that his wife went into a decline and passed on Fourth a July. He buried her wrapped in a flag. It had took him ten years to build up his life to where he got his own place and in one year he went from sittin pretty to flat broke. He was so broke he had to rustle up all them old buffalo bones and sell them to the bone fertilizer man in Mobeetie. But he wasn’t a quitter. When he’d got all the bones, he swallowed his pride and took a job fencin for Griffith and Shannon. They had the contract a fence the XIT. And that sure changed everthing.”

She was amazed that Bob Dollar not only knew nothing of ticks, he had never heard of the XIT. With relish she told him that this three-million-acre ranch of west panhandle range came into existence when the state of Texas deeded it to several Chicago businessmen in exchange for the construction of a new state capitol building in Austin, larger and grander than any other.

“While Graindeddy was pickin up bones and horns, he got some a his cowboys a help him and one day they hauled a wagon-full down to Mobeetie. They couldn’t wait until they finished their business but proceeded a get drunk. And then they got fresh. Most a them still teenagers. They commenced a toss a few bones at hands from other ranches they seen walkin past. One a them other cowhands picked up a bone and throwed it back, not your gentle toss but a hard pitch. And that’s how the big Mobeetie Bone and Horn Fight got started. Cowboys was bleedin and bruised but they kept on until the wagon was near empty and the bones all over the street and the plank sidewalk. Anyway, Grainded got into fencin,” she said. “The XIT was more than two hundred miles long, north to south. The fencin crews would go out with a wagon and tools. The freight wagon that carried the war all the way down from the railroad depot up near Trinidad, Colorado, was supposed a drop off four spools a war every quarter mile. That much I know.”

She clawed through a file folder, pulled out a photograph of a mule team hitched to a wagon stacked with posts. A bedroll had been tied on top and on the bedroll sat Moises Harshberger. A half-grown boy wearing a wagon-wheel-size hat crouched awkwardly on the posts.

Now she was in another file and slapped a photograph of a freight team into Bob’s hands. It was a long, narrow photograph showing a ten-mule team connected by a wilderness of straps and lines, the driver mounted on the left-hand mule closest to the wagon. The wagon itself was a series of wagons, two short and covered, one immensely long. He counted the wheels—sixteen—and realized he was looking at the nineteenth-century equivalent of a semitrailer truck.

“How did the driver manage that big team? How much could ten mules haul?”

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask somebody like Tater Crouch. His graindeddy was a freighter before he started the Bar Owl. I imagine Tater knows how it was done.”

She took a breath and resumed the story about her own grandfather. “So, after a year of it Moises got tired a fencin and quit. He took up cowboyin for the XIT, as he said, out of the fryin pan and into the fire. Every night they’d gamble. The XIT boys was a bad bunch in them days. This was before Mr. A. G. Boyce took over and cleaned the ranch up. The XIT had quite a reputation in the early days. Their hands rustled, they hair-branded, they took baby calves away from their mothers and said they was mavericks, they cut those calves’ eyelid muscles so they couldn’t see to get back with their mammies, they cut their tongues so they wouldn’t suck and burned their feet between the toes so they wouldn’t hunt out their mothers because their feet hurt so bad, they run fake tallies and counts and many a man got his personal start as a rancher with these mean practices.”

“Did Mr. Harshberger do those things too?”

“He always claimed not, said what got him was the gamblin. They gambled terrible on the XIT. Monte, that was their game. The men would get right down in the road dirt and play at it. In the end he lost our ranch on the turn of a single card. He hit bottom. He said later that it is a good thing for a man a hit bottom because that’s when he learns what he’s made out of. The XIT lasted more than twenty-five years as a cattle ranch and never turned a dollar a profit. There was lawsuits against it for that reason. Wait a minute, I got some good pictures of my grainded.”

She went into the adjacent room and he could hear her churning through papers and folders. She came back with a large soiled envelope, withdrew a handful of photographs, passed them to him. There was the usual shot of half a dozen cowboys seated cross-legged on the ground with tin plates in their laps, an arrow pointing at a small-headed youth wearing a striped, collarless shirt, chaps and a tall-crowned hat. Another showed the same young man with his left foot in the stirrup preparing to mount a muscular horse. In this picture he could see Harshberger’s legs were extremely long.

“What happened with Mr. Harshberger? I mean, you’ve got the ranch now so he must have got it back.”

She smiled enigmatically and said, “That was the
Harshberger
ranch. This here is the
Fronk
ranch. My husband’s people’s place. The Harshberger place is all wheat now. It passed out a the family permanent in 1947. It’s over in Roberts County.”

He took up the last photograph, not quite understanding what he was looking at. It seemed to be a man’s back, raked and bloody, as though someone had taken the cat-o’-nine-tails to him.

“Is this Mr. Harshberger too?” He held it out.

“Yes. That’s quite a picture, isn’t it? He carried the scars to his grave.”

“But how did he get them? Was he horsewhipped?”

She laughed. “I don’t want to use up all my stories in one go,” she said, sliding the photographs back into the envelope.

Bob thought there was little chance of that.

“But I will say that it was a experience made him to get merried and start a family. He went back to Tennessee to find a wife and she was Fern Leake. When she was mad she told it that he had looked her and the other Tennessee girls over like horses. He didn’t care about pretty—he wanted a strong woman with a wide pelvis and he just about measured them off with a axe handle.”

At that moment he began to think of LaVon as a faded panhandle Scheherazade. She was the talkative type Ribeye Cluke had told him to find but his head ached with the torrent of information.

Every evening, if the wind was not too strong, Bob sat on the bunkhouse porch and, until the light failed (for he always forgot to buy a lamp), read Abert’s account of riding down from Bent’s Fort and then southeast to the Canadian River and across what later became the Texas panhandle.

As he read, a few hundred feet away an old windmill made a shambling rattle and, with each revolution of the bladed wheel, a stream of water arced into the tank, the liquid pulse of ranch life. The tank had been in the ground so long and so many dust storms and gritty winds had blown over it that a deep layer of silt lay at the bottom and a clump of cattails ten feet across had grown up in the center. The original corner pipes, set for a larger tower, stood a foot outside the legs, which were fastened to the corner pipes with bolts and flanges. The whole mill floated in the air on three points. The platform at the top was rotted out, a single decayed board hanging by a rusted bolt. Another board lay on the ground. Green scum covered the surface of the water except where the mill pumped in fresh, a waxing-waning stream the diameter of a quarter. The vane had been shot up, but he could still read the stenciled letters
MELKEBEEK
&
CROUCH WINDMILLS
. At the grain elevator he’d learned that a single cow needed six to eight gallons of water a day, every day. He began to see the difficulties of the old trail drives with their hundreds, even thousands, of thirsty animals. What made a good trail, he thought, must have been access to water.

The old windmill quit pumping one dark morning before sunrise and the silence woke him. When he went for water to LaVon’s kitchen he told her and by noon an elderly man and his helper were replacing the ash sucker rods, for the drop was not quite plumb and one of them had worn through and broken. In the background a dark snarl of branches showed the fuchsia blossoms of redbud.

Bob, reading on the porch that evening with the repaired windmill clanking reassuringly and pushing out its regular gush of water, discovered that the Canadian River, which he had thought named for French Canadian fur trappers, was more accurately named the Cañadian (and so noted on Abert’s original map), from
cañada
, an old Mexican-Spanish word meaning “a small canyon,” especially a cliff edge along a river that functioned to hold sheep on their range, a natural barrier. Government printers had dropped the tilde from the lieutenant’s report and so inadvertently renamed the river. He thought it a shame. Before that, he knew, the Indians had called it the Gualpa, a name Lieutenant Abert spelled “Goo-al-pah.”

Abert seemed to take particular pleasure in observing and sketching the Cheyenne, and his friendly personality and sense of humor gleamed from the fine-print pages. From time to time Bob glanced up from the book and looked west across the pasture. The odd dark shape in the grass he had noticed the first evening was still there, still unidentified, but it was too dark to walk among the rattlesnakes of the rough field. As usual the fading light left him with the book to his nose, squinting at the small type, and he stretched, went in to bed, not the least sleepy, to toss and turn for hours and wish for electricity, to swear again he would buy six lamps, a vow always forgotten in daylight.