Little Britches (30 page)

After a while, I told him what Fred had said about our neighbors being lucky we had moved there, and asked him to tell me about his recording gauge at the ditch-head. He said it was nothing but an old coal-oil can he had rigged so that the flow of ditch-water past a paddle wheel would make it turn clear around in a week. Then he had rigged a float with a pencil fixed to an arm. As the water rose or fell, the pencil moved up or down on the paper he had wrapped around the can. He said he had shown the readings in court, the jury had been up there to test it, and had found it to be accurate, so he thought our case would turn out all right.

Mother came to the back door and called us to supper just as he finished telling me about the gauge, so we started to go and get washed up. The washpan and a bucket of water were on the back porch. I had dipped up a pan of water, and was just ready to reach for the soap, when we heard what sounded like a couple of gunshots down the road. It wasn't, though. It was a horseless carriage—the first one that had ever come up the wagon road since we had lived there.

We called Mother and the youngsters out on the porch to watch it come. It was a two-seater, black, with a round hood over the engine. After it crossed the bridge at the gulch, it banged a couple of more times as it chugged up the road toward our house. There were two men in the front seat and two more in the back. When it was almost up to the front of the house, I saw one of the men in the back seat lean over, grab up a gun, and swing it toward us.

Father leaped like a horse going into a low buck, and knocked everybody over but me. I guess I just got bewildered and stood there. Not more than a tenth of a second before the first bullet ripped a hole in our bunkhouse, Father grabbed my arm and yanked me down. There were two more shots. The second one couldn't have missed his head an inch.

The carriage didn't stop, but kept right on up the road. Mother fell back inside the kitchen when Father hit her, and all the youngsters except Grace and me were crying, but Father didn't pay any attention to us. He jumped over Mother as she was getting up, and it seemed less than two seconds before I heard him firing from the front of the house. By the time I got around there, there was nothing but a cloud of dust a quarter of a mile up the wagon road, and Father was standing with Hi's empty six gun in his hand.

He reloaded it as he ran to the corral for Lady. I saw he was going after them, so I ran to the front gate. Lady streaked through before I had it more than half open, and I never saw such a look as was on Father's face.

It was getting to be deep twilight, but it was still light enough so I could see the dust cloud turn south along the road between our place and Fred Aultland's. It seemed ages before I saw the other puff of dust that Lady's feet made when she turned the corner.

Father didn't come back for an hour. Mother wouldn't let me take Sky High and go after him, but she was as worried as I was. She hadn't even cried when Father knocked her over, but before he got back she had bitten her underlip till it was bleeding. She let me stay in the house with her, but she didn't light a lamp, and made all the other youngsters go down into the storm cellar.

When Father did get home, he had Fred Aultland and Jerry Alder with him. They didn't come from the west, though, but from the east, and they were wearing their six guns. Father said the automobile had gone clear around our section, and headed north on the West Denver road. He said it went so fast that he doubted if a man on horseback could have kept up with it for a hundred yards and that it was probably hidden away already in some barn in Denver. He told mother that Carl Henry had ridden to Fort Logan for the sheriff, and then he asked her to get his camera out of the trunk.

He had Fred and Jerry take gunpowder out of a dozen or so cartridges while he was cleaning the camera and putting the plate in it. I wanted to go out to the wagon road with them while they took a flashlight picture of the wheel tracks, but Father told me I'd better stay in the house with Mother because her nerves were all jangled up.

The sheriff came and looked at the wheel tracks and at the holes in our bunkhouse. He knew me right away, and asked if I had got any more pheasants.

We sat down to supper while everybody was there, but the sheriff was the only one who ate much of anything. He said he would come back the next morning and get the camera plate after Father had developed it, but that all automobile tires looked alike so he didn't think there would be a Chinaman's chance of ever tracing it down. Father had already said he had never seen any of the men in the horseless carriage before, but Fred kept asking him if he was sure one of them wasn't this or that rancher from up near the head of our ditch. Of course, everybody was pretty sure that the shooting was because Father had proof in court about the water stealing, but the sheriff said there was nothing we could do unless we could prove it, and we never could.

Haying was over at Cooper's in early September and, until school started at the end of the month, I worked at the mountain ranch with Hi. It was fall branding time, and Hi was too busy to spend much time with me.

I was homesick. Of course, I knew that if somebody was going to shoot at Father again, my being there wouldn't stop him. But I got it in my head so much that I couldn't think about anything else. And two or three times Hi had to scold me a little because I forgot to take water to the fellows up in the canyons.

I had been so busy thinking about riding in the Labor Day roundup that I didn't notice things around our place the way I should have. It wasn't until I came home that middle Saturday night in September that I noticed that Billy was gone. I might not have even noticed it then if it hadn't been for milking. Lots of fellows don't like to milk, but I always did. It seemed as if milking was the time when Father and I were kind of away by ourselves, and as if he belonged just to me. He always saved milking on Saturday nights till I got home.

Right after supper that night, Father picked up the big bucket —the one he always used for the Holstein—and lit the lantern. When I started to pick up Brindle's bucket, he said, "Grace is curious to know how you tell which calves on the open range should be branded with the Y-B mark. Suppose you tell her while I do the milking; I'll only be a jiffy." Then he put the lantern over his arm and went out.

I knew right then that there was something wrong. So I told Mother I'd have to water Sky High before I left him for the night. It was a story, though, and I never did it. I went right out to the barn where Father was milking. Brindle wasn't there.

Father heard me come in the door. And I guess he knew what I was thinking, as he always did. He had his head against Holstein's side, and he didn't look up, but he said, "Old Holstein's holding up so well this fall that it would be a waste of fodder for us to keep two cows, so I let Mr. Cash have Brindle."

It was then I noticed I was standing right in Billy's stall, and it was dry and clean. I don't believe I even thought, before I said, "Did he take Billy, too?"

Father didn't say anything till he got done stripping Holstein, but the bunches of muscle were working out and in on the side of his jaw. Then he set the bucket over, and turned around on the milking stool so he was looking right at me. "Partner," he said, "we might as well look it right in the face. We're not going to make it here. We haven't enough feed to see two head of stock through the winter, and I haven't had but five days' outside work all summer. The court has only given us damages for ten acres of crops, and that's all we're entitled to, because we have rights to only ten inches of water. It won't amount to much more than you've earned with Mr. Cooper."

I wanted to say something, but I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just stood there. In a minute Father hung the stool up on the peg, and rumpled up my hair. "Don't worry about it, son. And let's not worry Mother. There's always a living in this world for the fellow who's willing to work for it, and I guess we're willing, aren't we? Let's go in and pop some corn."

Fred Aultland brought me home from Cooper's the last Saturday before school started. He was there at the home place when I came in from the mountain ranch, and waited for me to change my clothes and get my things together.

Fred and Mr. Cooper were talking out by the cook shack while I was getting my things packed. It was hot and the window was open, and Fred was talking so loud I couldn't help hearing him. "Damn bull-headed Yankee," he was saying. "God and everybody knows we'd never got a dime for our crops if he hadn't rigged that water gauge at the ditch head. And there he stands with a hundred and twenty dollars in his hand for a year's work, and too God damn proud to take a bale of hay from a neighbor. What the hell you goin' to do with a man like that?" I knew he was talking about Father, and I knew Father wouldn't like it, so I grabbed up my suitcase and went out, without even saying good-by to Mrs. Cooper.

Father didn't get home that Saturday night till after I did. He was helping a man build a house over west of Denver. From then till Christmas he just came home Saturday nights, and left before daylight Monday mornings. He did stay home a few days in the middle of December, though. Hal got pneumonia on my eleventh birthday, and until Dr. Stone said he would get all right again, Father didn't go back to work.

I never did know who bought Nig or Lady's two-year-old colt, or the wagons and harness. Grace told me who had bought some of our things, but all she knew about the others was that Father had taken them away and hadn't brought them back. I never asked him, because I knew he wouldn't want to talk about it. When the West Denver job was finished, he let me stay home from school one day, and we went down to Fort Logan to settle up the grocery bill with Mr. Greene. It was eighty-six dollars, and Father let me put my last check from Mr. Cooper in on it. Just before Christmas, he got another job. That time it was helping build a big house in Littleton.

It seemed as though our best Christmases were the ones when we were the poorest. Mother had saved a turkey, and we had all the things to go with it. Packages came from our folks back in New England, and Father must have brought the tree with him when he came home on Christmas Eve. Mother had it trimmed with cranberries and popcorn strung together on long strings, and there were half a dozen oranges hanging from the limbs, like colored lanterns. The presents were wrapped in white tissue paper and tucked in under the tree the way they always were. There was one sled with Grace and Muriel's names on it and another for us boys. And everybody got new shoes and stockings.

It snowed all Christmas afternoon and nobody came to call. Mother had made a big plate of fudge and we popped fresh corn and divided the oranges into sections. We had to do it that way because there were only six oranges and there were seven of us. At first Father said for us not to divide them because they always made his teeth sting, but Mother just laughed at him, and we divided them anyway. I didn't see him squinny up his eye when he ate some of the sections, either. Mother got a new book for Christmas called
When Knighthood Was in Flower
. She must have read us a hundred pages of it that afternoon and evening.

WE MOVED to Littleton between Christmas and New Year's. Father and Mother found a seven-room house on the south edge of town, and Fred Aultland helped us move. There was a barn and a chicken house, and a little piece of ground where we could have a garden. Besides King, we took Lady, Babe, and the chickens with us.

We didn't live very far from the schoolhouse, and Mother took us over the first day after New Year's. It seemed to us like an awfully big school; there was a separate room for each grade. After the principal had asked us some questions and had us read to him, he put Grace in the eighth grade and me in the sixth. Muriel went into the fourth grade and Philip in the second.

Starting school in Littleton wasn't a bit like starting in at the ranch. Of course, I didn't know any of the kids, but they all knew who I was. I guess there had been something in the paper about my riding in the roundup.

It was right after we moved to Littleton that Father was made boss on the house-building job. I don't think I ever saw him more pleased about anything. He told us about it one night when we were eating supper. I knew he had been worrying about the house, because I had heard him tell Mother the framing wasn't true and there'd be trouble when they went to put the roof on. That night at supper he told us the owner had come out and caught them splicing rafters that had been cut too short. Mother took a quick little breath, and said, "Charlie, does that mean—"

Father looked up and smiled. "Yes Mame, that means—" he said, "that he made me boss carpenter. I'm getting four dollars a day, and I know I can make a good job of it." He took a couple more mouthfuls and then he looked up again. "How does that line near the end of Hamlet go? The one about there being a divinity."

Mother knew them all, I guess. She got tears in her eyes and in her voice, too. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will," she repeated.