Cowboy Life on the Sidetrack Part 6

"Let us up and be doing and build a big merger trust, And sell stock to suckers and let them go bust, And for every steer issue millions of shares, Let other people worry how to get railroad fares.

"We will issue bonds and certificates and thus raise our stock; In place of breeding Shorthorns we will make a swift talk; Have our shares all printed in red, green and gold, Sell them in the stock market to the young and the old.

"And thus live by our cuteness and work of our brains In place of starving on special stock trains.

We will have servants and waiters, the best in the land; Governors and princes will give us the glad hand."

Just then the front brakeman stuck in his head, Saying in the car next the engine an old cow was dead.

The old cowman gave a gasp and his spirit started to ride To round up that old cow that in the front car had just died.

CHAPTER XX.

A COWBOY ENOCH ARDEN.

Just after leaving North Platte, a train of immigrants on their way from Oregon to Arkansas with mule teams went by us, and we found they had a letter for us from Eatumup Jake, who had returned to Utah long ere this to look after his domestic matters. One of the reasons why he abandoned us was to return and look after the education of the twin boys. However, the main reason was that so many reports had come to us from travelers in wagons and sheepherders trailing sheep east, who had come through our neighborhood in Utah, who said that all our friends had given us up for dead, and Eatumup Jake's wife, after putting on mourning for a proper season, had begun to receive the attentions of a widower, who was part Gentile bishop and part Mormon elder.

As Jake was in a hurry when he started back home, he bought him a cheap mustang in place of accepting the transportation which was urged on him by all the princ.i.p.al officers of the railroad. He wrote us that when he arrived on his ranch, his wife was out in the hayfield putting up the third crop of alfalfa. She was driving a bull rake, hauling it into the stack, while one of the twins was driving the mower and the other twin was doing the stacking. The half-breed Mormon-Gentile bishop was standing round with a cotton umbrella over his head, giving orders.

Jake's wife didn't know him at first, he had changed so, but the bishop tumbled to him at once and started to leave. However, Jake overtook him and persuaded the bishop to turn aside into a little patch of timber with him, and Jake getting the loan of the umbrella in the painful interview that followed, he left most of the steel ribs of the umbrella sticking in the anatomy of the bishop, and then let the house dog, with the help of the twin boys armed with their pitchforks, a.s.sist the bishop clear off the ranch. This was so much better than the old style of Enoch Arden business that Dillbery Ike made up a little rhyme about it after we got Jake's letter, and here it is:

In Utah a cattleman got married in the glow of summer time, Married a buxom Mormon girl, warm heart and manner kind.

And as the autumnal sun began to tinge things red, He rounded up his cattle herd and to his bride he said: "Come hither, dear, and kiss me and sit upon my lap, For I am going a lengthy journey with my cows and steers that's fat.

I'm going on the Overland with a special, long stock train."

His bride, she wept and trembled and said, "I'll ne'er see you again.

O Jake, my darling husband, give up this wrong design, If you must go east with cattle, then try some other line, For I have heard the stockmen talking and this is what they say, That if you drive your stock to market, that then there's no delay.

But if you get a special train, the railroad has a knack Of letting you do your running when your train is on a sidetrack.

Some stockmen they have starved to death, and others grow so old That none knew them on their return, so frequent I've been told."

But Jake was young and hearty and his mind was full of zeal To load his beef on a special and eastward take a spiel.

So he started with his steers and cows in the golden autumn time.

Some neighbors also loaded theirs; the cattle were fat and fine.

But they run the stock on the Overland, so slow and awful b.u.m That stockmen get old and care-worn, staying with a special run.

Their wives get weary waiting for hubby's coming home And flirt with the nearest preacher who drops in when they're alone.

Jake's wife was no exception, and, as time went by, she said, "If Jake was alive I know he'd come back; he surely must be dead."

The good woman put on mourning and mourned for quite a time, But when thus she'd done her duty, she suddenly ceased to pine, And when a Gentile-Mormon preacher dropped in one night to tea She put on her new dress of gingham and was chipper as she could be; Had him eating her pies and jellies that she knew how to make, Had him sit in the easy rocker, without ever a thought of Jake.

And when the twins got drowsy, she packed them off to bed, Sat and played checkers with the bishop, just as though poor Jake was dead.

When she jumped in the preacher's king-row, and had eight men to his five, She cared not (she was so excited) whether Jake was dead or alive.

But at four o'clock next morning, she roused from sleep with a scream; She'd seen Jake pushing behind a stock train in this early morning dream.

And that evening when the l.u.s.ty preacher came hanging around again, He got but a scanty welcome, for she thought of the special train.

For a time she was silent and thoughtful, the dream an impression had made, She could still see Jake pushing the special, as it slowly climbed the grade.

Now we know how the brave-hearted Jake with the stock train had to stay, How he camped by her side night times as on a sidetrack she lay.

We know how he pushed so manfully whene'er she climbed a hill, In fact every one pushed, even the sheepmen, Cottswool and Rambolet Bill; How hunger and famine o'ertook them as slowly they crawled along, Their hearts almost broke with home-longing when Jackdo sung a home song.

Eyes filled with tears that were unbidden, hearts o'erflowing with pain-- No pen can paint their sorrow as they stayed with this special stock train.

The pa.s.sing of poor old Chuckwagon, who slowly starved to death, On account of the smell of the sheepmen, he couldn't get his breath; Their camping ahead of the special after they had buried Chuck, The washing away of the sheepmen, who surely were out of luck.

They lived in snow huts on the mountain that's known as Sherman Hill, Where the last was seen of the sheepmen, Cottswool and Rambolet Bill; Their arrival at the Windy City that's known as the dead Shyann, Some things about Burt and Warren and mayhap another man.

And now with their party diminished by old age, privation and death, They still kept plodding on eastward, what of the party was left Till Jake talking with wandering sheepmen, who had trailed by his cabin home.

Heard of the scandalous preacher, who came when his wife was alone; Heard of the nightly playing of checkers when the twins were safely in bed, About his wife all the neighbors were talking, her claiming that Jake was dead.

Finally through very home-sickness, he started to take the back track, And because he was in such a hurry, he rode all the way horse-back.

Arriving in sight of his meadows, a-waving fresh and green, The alfalfa growing the highest that Jake had ever seen; Two red-headed boys the hay were pitching; their mother was hauling it in.

There was only one blot on the landscape that made Jake feel like sin.

'Twas our Gentile-Mormon bishop in the shade of his old umbreller.

With his long-tailed coat and eye gla.s.ses, he looked like Foxy Quiller.

When Jake got close to the bishop he booted him out the field, The house dog and twins, with their hayforks, finished making the elder spiel.

Then Jake gathered his family around him, work was laid by for the day, They told all their joys and their sorrows, so I've finished my lay.

_Moral._

The old-fashioned Enoch Arden story was a tale well told; I can't approach or rival it, nor make a claim so bold.

But the ending of my cowboy Enoch Arden I really like the best, For he fired the interloper out the modern Arden nest.

CHAPTER XXI.

GRAND ISLAND.

Before we arrived at Grand Island we learned from Jackdo that most cowmen unloaded their cattle there and drove them back and forth through the stockyards awhile in order to acc.u.mulate a large amount of mud on them. This Grand Island mud is very adhesive and once steers is thoroughly immersed in it the mud sticks to them for weeks and helps very materially in their weight. A shipper told him that before he stopped at Grand Island he used to wonder what cattlemen meant by filling their cattle at Grand Island, but now he knew it was filling their hair full of mud. Sometimes he said the mud was a little too thick, kind of chunky and fell off, and sometimes it had too much water in it and drained off, more or less. But when it was mixed just right it would settle into their hair like concrete cement. It's quite dark in color, fortunately, and if they've had a rain it is easy to get pens where you can immerse your cattle all over and thus make them the color of the Galloways, which is the most fashionable color for cattle in the market.

He said there was cases where cattlemen had got a good fill on Grand Island mud and sold their cattle weighed up there to feeders who put them on full feed for six months and they weighed less in the market than to start with, because the feeders had curried the mud off them.

Sometimes he said after people left Grand Island with their cattle and before the mud got well set, there would come a hard rain on them and the mud washed off in streaks and gave the cattle kind of a zebra appearance. Especially was this true where the cattle had originally been white. He said we would be expected to order some hay and pay for it and get the mud for nothing. It was just like a boot-jack saloon, where you bought a high-priced peppermint drop and got a pint of whiskey throwed in.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Joe Kerr Loading Sheep for South St. Joe._]

'Twas here at Grand Island that we met Joe Kerr again. We had met him in Utah before we shipped, and he had tried very hard to get us to ship our cattle to the coming live stock market of the United States at St. Joe.

Kerr travels in the interest of the St. Joe stockyards, and while in the fullness of our youth and conceit when we first loaded our stock we wouldn't have taken a suggestion from Teddy Roosevelt, yet we had grown older and had lost some of our self-confidence; in fact, I've often thought since these experiences that the old proverb, "He who ships his range cattle to market place of selling them at home leaves hope behind," would apply to most range shipments.

Now it seems Joe Kerr had kept posted as to our movements right along through friends of his who were in the sheep business and who had trailed their herds past our train at different times on their trip East to sell their sheep for feeders, and Kerr had made such nice calculations by casting horoscopes and looking up the signs of the zodiac that he knew to a month when we would arrive in Grand Island, and was waiting there to persuade us to ship our stock to St. Joe in place of Omaha. He was right on the spot to help us unload them; knew all the pens where the mud was the deepest, even helped us smear the mud into their hair on the few spots that was missed, when we were swimming them through the mud batter. Joe had loads of statistics for sheepmen, cattlemen, hors.e.m.e.n and hogmen that would convince any man that wasn't too suspicious that St. Joe was the best market. He had beautiful colored maps of the yards, showing the clear limpid waters of the Missouri River, flowing along at the foot of the bluffs; the waters swarming with steamboats and smaller craft; the city of St. Joe covering the bluffs and river bottoms for miles, and just down the river at the lower end of this great city was stockyards and packing plants laid out like some great city park and hundreds of acres, all paved with brick, laid into walks and floors for the pens with perfect precision, and all divided in different compartments for all kinds of live stock; everything arranged so sheep could be unloaded one place, hogs another place, cattle another, so as to admit of no delay in unloading when stock arrived. He told us that their yards were kept so clean that ladies could walk all over them in rainy weather without soiling their costumes. Said no Sheenies were skinning people in their yards. He made such a square talk we finally agreed to split the shipment and let part of the train go to St. Joe, and sent Jackdo along to take care of the cattle.

CHAPTER XXII.

"SARER."

The rainy season had now set in in good earnest all through Nebraska, and while the natives have typhoid fever and malaria to a more or less extent, yet most of them live through it, but people from the dry mountain regions that have been used to pure air and water all their lives fare worse from these fevers ten times over than the natives, and Dillbery Ike fell a victim right in the start. One evening soon after we left Grand Island I noticed his face was flushed very red, and he complained of a dull headache, but as he had the headache a good deal ever since the railroad police had scalped him at Cheyenne in mistake for a striker, I didn't think so much of his headache. But when I come to look at his tongue and feel his pulse I found every indication of high fever. In a few hours he was out of his mind and talked of shady mountain sides, babbling brooks and clear mountain springs of water, and he talked of his hosses and cattle, his cow ranch and alfalfa meadows, but most of all he talked of "Sarer."

Now Dillbery had only one romance in his life that we knew of, and that happened in this way: Several decades previous to our story the few families living in the vicinity of Dillbery's ranch in Utah had got together and built an adobe school-house, and voting a special tax on the piece of railroad track that run through their part of the country had raised enough money to pay for the school-house and hire a school-teacher. At first each of the three married women in the neighborhood wanted to teach the school. Then each of them offered to take turns about teaching it so they could divide the money, but their husbands, who was the directors, wanted a school-marm, so as to have a little young female blood diffused through the atmosphere in that part of the country, and after advertising for a school teacher, the New England brand preferred, got hundreds of answers very shortly. So putting their heads together they selected one that had a kind of crab apple perfume attached to the application, and was worded in such way as to give the reader a notion of pleading blue eyes, with a wealth of golden brown hair and heaving bosom, not too young to teach school nor too old to be romantic and sympathetic, and closed a deal with her to come West and teach their school. She had signed her name Sarah Jessica Virginia Smythe, but was always known as Miss Sarer. When she was about to arrive at the railroad station, thirty miles away, all the married men wanted to go and meet her. All of them had particular business in at the station that day, but none of their wives would stand for it. They said that Dillbery Ike was a bachelor and the proper one to get her.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Arrival of Miss "Sarer."_]

Now Dillbery Ike was a long, gangling, bashful, backward plainsman, never had a sweetheart and was considered perfectly harmless around women by every one who knew him. The old married men finally agreed to let Dillbery meet the school-marm, but not till each had went through a stormy scene with his wife, in which that good woman had threatened to tear the blanket right in two in the middle with such forcible language that you could almost hear it ripping. Dillbery had got shaved, had his hair cut, put on his best black suit he had bought from a Sheeny, the pants being a trifle of six or eight inches too short for him at the top and bottom both, his coat rather large in the waist, but short at the wrists like the pants; and hitching his mules to his spring wagon, he started bright and early to the station of Kelton, Utah. He arrived about noon, him and his mules white with alkali dust, and finding that the train was twenty-three hours late, stayed at the section house till next day, there being no hotel in Kelton. When the train came along next day about noon, a large, portly lady of uncertain age, with her frizzed-up hair turning grey, her hands full of wraps, lunch baskets, sofa pillows, telescope grips, umbrellers, band-boxes and bird cages, climbed off the train, and the baggageman put off a large horse-hide trunk, from which most of the hair had been worn off, or perhaps scalped off in the troublous times when Washington was crossing the Delaware. When she got this old, bald-headed looking trunk and a couple of shoe boxes with rope handles (that were probably full of Century Magazines) piled up with her other baggage, the newsboy said it looked like an Irish eviction.

When Dillbery saw this old man-hunter and all her luggage, his heart failed him, and he went to the saloon three times to liquor up before he got sand enough to talk to her. Of course, Dillbery expected to marry her, no matter what she was like, as the whole neighborhood where he lived had planned it ever since the school-marm was talked of, and he couldn't expect to disappoint the neighbors and still continue to live there. Still she wasn't exactly what he had figured in his mind after reading a great many novels about the rosy-cheeked, small-waisted, dainty-feet, lily-white hands, wondrous brown hair, blue-eyed New England darlings, with pretty sailor hats and tailor-made suits, who come West to teach our schools and incidentally marry the most expert roping, best broncho-busting, chief cowpuncher. And now here was this dropsical-looking old girl, with fat, pudgy-looking hands and feet like a couple of poisoned pups, with all this colonial luggage.