Little Britches (20 page)

Father and Mother went to Denver again a couple of days before Christmas. That time they hitched Nig and Fanny to the big wagon and took a whole load of peas. They didn't come home till way after dark. Grace and I could hardly wait for them to get back. She had been telling me that Father and Mother had to help Santa Claus with the Christmas presents, and that they would be bringing them when they came home. We both ran down the wagon road to meet them as soon as we heard the wagon come over the bridge at the gulch. Father stopped the team and let us climb up into the wagon, but there wasn't a thing in it.

While Father was unharnessing, I poked Grace with my elbow and told her she had been making up all that stuff about Father and Mother having to help Santa Claus, but she just looked at me smart and said if they didn't there wouldn't be any presents. When Father hitched Fanny up the next morning and said he was going to the mountains to see a fellow about a dog, Grace poked me right back and said I'd find out if she wasn't right as soon as he came home. I didn't, though. There wasn't a thing in the buckboard, except his little shingle hatchet, and Grace told me we were too poor for Santa Claus to come that year because the beans got frozen.

Whether Father and Mother helped him or not, we had a fine Christmas. And I never saw anything that looked as though he were getting any help—except the packages that came from our folks back in New England.

Christmas Eve, Mother told us we couldn't get up till daylight, but when the sun first peeked over Loretta Heights we were all dressed and waiting inside the bunkhouse door. Father and Mother were still in bed when we went tearing into the house. There was a big Christmas tree in the corner of their room—all decorated with strings of popcorn and whole cranberries—and there was a big stack of presents under it, but Father said he never even heard the sleigh bells when Santa Claus came.

We all got new shoes and caps with earlaps, and stockings and heavy winter underwear. And I got a jackknife with two blades, and a new geography book. We didn't have any turkey, but Mother baked a whole ham, and we had all the trimmings to go with it… and a big plate of fudge.

There wasn't any school between Christmas and New Year's. That's when Fred Aultland started baling his hay. Father and I worked for him all week. Fred said hay had gone to such a low price that he could only afford to pay half as much as he paid us in haying time, but he'd give us ten tons of baler chaff for our week's work. It was good cow feed, and Father said that we could boil it with frozen beans to make the best hog feed in the world.

The baler chaff was all alfalfa leaves and little short stems, so the only way we could haul it was in a wagon box, and Fred said it would take five loads to make a ton. As soon as my month of punishment was over and I could drive horses again, Father let me start hauling the chaff. At first he went with me to be sure I could handle Billy all right, but after that it was my job to go alone and get one load every night after school.

I didn't have a bit of trouble with Billy, but I guess Fanny kind of forgot me during that month. The first day I went to put her bridle on, she kept jerking her head up, so I couldn't get the bit in her mouth. I was standing up in her feed box, and the more she kept bobbing her head the madder I got. At last I grabbed her by one ear to pull her head down. Quick as a wink, she snapped at me with her teeth. She had snapped at me a thousand times before, but had never touched me, so I didn't dodge that time. There was a rip and a burn over my wishbone, and when I looked down blood was coming out of the hole in my jumper.

It scared me a lot more than it hurt, and I went running in to Mother—hollering like a dog with a stepped-on tail. I guess she was as scared as I. Father was working on some little ditch boxes, out in the bunkhouse, and came in to see what had happened. While Mother took off my clothes, he made me tell him what I did to Fanny to make her bite me. Then he just looked at the skinned place before he went back to his work, and said, "Well, I don't see any reason for me to punish you; I think she handled the matter very well herself."

Ever since Christmas, Father had been working on the ditch boxes and a little system of canals. It ran from the well to the far end of the bunkhouse. The Saturday afternoon before Easter, all the ranchers on our side of the creek—clear up to the mountains—came to our place for a meeting. Father explained how the boxes worked so that each one took the right percentage of any water that was coming through the canal. He said that if everybody used them, the ranchers near the head of the ditch would get 60 per cent of the water, and the rest of us would get 40 per cent. Then somebody pumped water into one end of the system, and everybody else watched it work, and said, "Well, I'll be damned."

After they'd played with it till the yard was four inches deep in mud, Father went into the house and brought out a paper he and Mother had been working over every evening for a week. Then he passed it to Mr. Wright, who read it aloud. All the signers agreed to use Father's boxes and not to tamper with them or take any more water than the boxes measured out to them. Fred and Mr. Wright were the last two to go. They both shook hands with Father and told him that if he hadn't figured out the new system, somebody would have been killed in the water fights.

Father told them that he hoped they didn't think his new boxes would be a cure-all. He said that if one man really wanted to be dishonest, another man couldn't keep him from it, but the boxes would make it harder for him to be dishonest without being caught.

Mother and I were proud of him, too. She hugged him around the neck as soon as Fred Aultland was gone, and told him he was the smartest man in the world. I was waiting to tell him the same thing, but he said for me to run along and get the cows.

Our sow—the pig we saved when we were butchering—had her litter on Easter Sunday. There were eight good ones and one runt. Father said the runt would never get his share of milk and would always be sick, so we had a funeral for him in the afternoon. Grace let me be the minister so she could be the head mourner.

From then till plowing time Father was busy every day making ditch boxes. He made them for every rancher between our place and the mountains, but he didn't get any money for them. The men would bring him the boards and spikes and bolts, but none of them had any money, so Father had to trade them his time for little pigs or chickens, or other things we could use. He got a heifer calf from one man and a weanling colt from another. By plowing time we had nineteen little pigs, eight turkeys, and a whole bunch of hens.

It was about that time that I first heard anybody talking about the gold panic. But from then on everybody talked about it. I didn't know what it was, but anyway, you could hardly get money for anything. Fred Aultland couldn't sell his alfalfa, Mrs. Corcoran couldn't sell all her cream, and when Father took peas and beans to Denver he'd come home with more than half of them unsold.

After Father got finished with the ditch boxes, Fred and Bessie Aultland came to see all the new things Father got for his work. While Mother was telling Bessie where we got this chicken and that turkey, Father and Fred were talking about crops and the panic.

Fred said, "We've all got to face the fact that it's going to be hard to sell anything for money this year. I think you're better off to have got a little stock around you than you would have been to get cash for your boxes. If I was in your place, I'd raise stuff I could feed my stock, and something I could trade in at the store for groceries."

"That's the line I've been thinking along," Father said, "but I don't want to get out more crops than I can get water to raise. Having the stock is fine, but it's left me less than twenty dollars to buy seed with."

Fred always chewed tobacco, and when he was thinking hard he had to spit a couple of times before he said anything. I bet myself he'd spit between the off horse's heels first, but he fooled me—it was between the nigh horse's. Then he said, "I'll tell you what, Charlie, ten of that twenty'll get you seed enough for five acres of sugar beets, you've got beans enough left to sow five acres, and you can flail out oats enough to seed twenty acres from what's left of your last year's crop. I've got a little stack of seed alfalfa that's two years old. I'll trade it to you for four days' work in haying time. With that machine you made, you could clean enough seed to put alfalfa in with your oats, and then you'd have a hay crop all laid down for several years."

Father said, "Fred, you're the best neighbor a man ever had, but I'm afraid you're an optimist. If I should get my full share of water, I'd only have enough for ten acres. I've already got ten acres of alfalfa; you're talking about my putting down another thirty. I couldn't expect to do much more than lose my seed."

Fred chuckled a little, then he said, "Man alive! You're the only one in the country that will be helped by this damned panic. You don't need money as much as you need food for these kids. I'll make you a bet you'll get all the damned water you need for eighty acres this year. Nobody up the ditch can hire hands this year any more than I can. The big fellows near the head of the ditch can't use all their share of water without help; they'll have to let part of it come on by, except when the ditch is lowest. If you get your ground soaked deep during the spring, and keep a dust mulch over it, you'll have moisture enough to make a crop. By another year your alfalfa roots will be deep enough so they won't need so much summer irrigation."

That's the way we did it. We put Mother's garden and the beets and beans way up at the southwest corner of the ranch— where the irrigation ditch came in—and put alfalfa in with oats on the northwest field. Father got the bean field all plowed, harrowed, and marked off in squares before school let out for the summer. Afterwards, we dropped all the seed by hand, so we would be able to cultivate in all directions and keep a good dust mulch. I would drop five beans where the lines crossed, then Father would hoe some dirt over them and tread on it.

SWEET clover grew in thick all over our last year's pea field. Fred told Father it would make pretty good hay if it was cut while it was still young and tender. He let us take his mowing machine to cut it, but Father wouldn't let me go anywhere near the mower while the horses were hitched to it. I'd had my ninth birthday just before Christmas, and had been driving teams for a year. It seemed to me I was old enough to drive the mowing machine just a little while, and I knew it would be fun to sit up on the little iron seat and watch the cutter bar flash back and forth while the clover tumbled down.

I guess I came pretty near begging Father to let me do it, but he said no. Then he told me it was too dangerous, but that he would let me drive the horse rake after the clover had dried into hay.

I could hardly wait for it to get dry enough to rake. I knew just how to kick the foot pedal so the teeth would fly up and dump the hay in straight even rows. I had watched Father do it all one evening the summer before.

When the day for raking came, Father had to put a low seat on the horse rake, because my legs weren't long enough to reach the foot pedal. He used the little iron one off the mowing machine. I could sit clear back in it and still reach the pedal.

At first Billy had been nervous on the mowing machine. The cutter bar went clackety-clackety-clack right behind his heels, and two or three times he acted as though he wanted to run away. But old Nig kept right on plodding, and after three or four times around the field Billy settled down. Father thought he might do the same thing when the horse rake dumped, so he drove the team for the first couple of rounds. Billy behaved as if he'd been pulling horse rakes all his life, so Father boosted me up on the seat and passed me the lines. All he said was, "See if you can keep the windrows straight clear across the field, and don't hurry the team at the corners."

Right at the start, I had a little trouble in kicking the pedal at just the right second to keep the windrows straight, but I got the knack after the first two rounds. Everything went fine till the train came through, and I was planning how I'd be able to get a man's pay in haying time. Old Joe was the engineer on the combination train that went up to Morrison every forenoon and came back every evening. I had known him ever since Bill and Nig fell through the trestle, and we always waved at each other.

I was so busy watching to see that I would kick the pedal just at the right moment—and maybe thinking about being old enough to earn a man's pay—that I didn't even wave to Joe when the train went through. I guess he wanted me to see him wave at me, though. He blew three sharp blasts on the whistle when he was right even with me.

You'd think the whistle might have scared Billy, but it was old Nig that started to run first. He jumped quicker than our tomcat did the time I hit him with a tomato. That made the singletree bump Billy on the hocks, and he took off like a greyhound.

The ground was bumpy where the bean rows had been, and the big high wheels of the horse rake bounced over them so that the iron seat jumped in every direction. The iron was smooth and slippery, and my bottom hopped around on it like a drop of cold water on a hot stove. I couldn't grab hold of anything with my hands because I had to haul on the lines for all I was worth.

Billy could run so much faster than old Nig that we kept turning a little and a little, till we were headed right into the passenger car at the end of the train. It just got out of our way before the horses galloped up over the track. I didn't know I was doing it, but I guess I grabbed hold with my toes when I couldn't hang on with my hands. When the wheels hit the first rail it must have jarred the foot pedal down. The rake teeth flew up to dump the hay. That turned the angle iron bar I was holding on to with my toes, and jammed them in between it and the stay-rod.

When we hit the other rail the teeth flew down again and caught the rail. As the teeth went down, it let my toes loose, but the doubletree broke right at the middle. Of course, that left the team free from the horse rake—and me, too. I had the lines wrapped good and tight around my hands, and I don't think I could have let go if I'd tried. I didn't try; I was too scared to think about my hands.