The Americans Read online

  Beaufort showed Will how to set each limb vertically so the fork supported the rope, and how to brace the limbs in the ground. Then the cowboy untied the end of a rope attached to one of the wagon wheels and handed the rope to Will.

  “This is your gate. Swing ’er open. Jump to it! Here comes the night man with the herd.”

  Will had been too busy to pay much heed to a rumbling behind him. Now he turned, and his jaw dropped. A yelling rider was barely visible in a cloud of dust billowing behind sixty or seventy ponies. The four leaders of the horse herd were within a dozen yards of Will, and coming lickety-split.

  He ran to the right, carrying the rope and thus opening the gate—the side of the corral nearest the horses. Beaufort, meantime, started uncoiling a second rope to be strung below the first. He tossed the end of that rope to Will, who had to leap for it, his left hand outstretched. He stumbled.

  Down he went, tangled in rope. From the ground he had a distorted view of manes streaming, hooves pounding, white eyes rolling. Then he himself rolled, frantically churning the dust. He escaped the trampling hoofs of the first horses with only inches to spare.

  As he lay on his belly, blinking and coughing in the dust, he realized something had nicked his forehead as he rolled to safety. A hoof, most likely. He touched the site of the nick. No blood. But the narrowness of his escape hit home, and his heart began to thump.

  He scrambled up and ran to help Beaufort, who was attempting to close and retie the gate rope Will had dropped. The mounted wrangler who’d come in with the horses was driving them into a circle within the enclosure while loudly cursing them, Will, and the situation in general.

  The black wrangler moved fast and expertly. He kept his eye on the rope he was swiftly retying to the wagon, saying to Will at the same time, “You in one piece?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry I dropped that rope.”

  “No harm done this time. You’re the one who almost got the worst of it.”

  Beaufort straightened up and wiped calloused palms on his jeans. Twisting his bandanna up to his jaw, he mopped perspiration from his face. “Five seconds more and you wouldn’t have been alive to apologize.”

  With a shiver, Will nodded. Cowboys were starting to emerge from the chuck wagon to pick their horses for the afternoon’s work. Beaufort climbed under the top rope, which was now strung taut to form the perimeter of the large circular corral. The horses were milling and, to Will’s surprise, staying inside the enclosure. Beaufort picked up the second rope and began to loop it around the tree limbs. As Will moved to help him, the black wrangler closed the conversation in terse fashion.

  “Just don’t make the same mistake again. We need more help round here, not less.”

  ii

  It seemed to Will that never again would he be allowed to sleep past sunrise. In fact, the hour for rising seemed to get steadily earlier. On his second day at the roundup, he was wakened in the dark by the cook’s hoarse cry.

  “Get up, get up an’ greet the little birds an’ other signs and symbols of the Good Lord’s handiwork.”

  He asked the time of Bob Beaufort, who was just climbing out of his wagon. Will had slept on the ground beneath.

  Beaufort tugged out his pocket watch. “Quarter to three.”

  It was freezing cold. Will pulled his top blanket off the lower one and rolled them together. He was about to complain about the early hour when he spied Roosevelt at a nearby fire. With the aid of a scrap of mirror and a tin cup of water, the Elkhorn’s owner was shaving.

  Beaufort noticed Will watching, and chuckled. “He’s just about the only man in the crew who shaves and uses a toothbrush.”

  Will didn’t have a toothbrush, so he had to settle for a leafy twig. For a toilet, there was a bush to step behind. Beaufort gave him ten minutes to prepare for the day. Then they began stringing the morning corral. Since the roundup was constantly on the move, the corral had to be put up and taken down twice a day.

  Soon the night wrangler and another young hand brought in the cavvy. The two men had stood guard as the animals grazed and rested during the last four hours. Before that, Will and Beaufort had taken their turn on watch.

  The night wrangler and his helper saw the horses safely inside the corral, then went off for their breakfast. After eating, both would sleep a while, then help bring the wagon and the cavvy forward to the noon campsite.

  The roundup proceeded along a route which had been agreed upon ahead of time. Every morning a line was mapped out, along which the chuck wagon and horse herd would travel until midday. The riders, meantime, fanned out through the countryside on either side of the line, scouring every creek bed and hidden gulch for strays and newborn calves. The methodical search was called covering the dog. About noon the cowboys circled back toward the rendezvous point, herding the animals they’d found.

  While the cowboys rode the long circle during the mornings, Will helped Beaufort and the other wranglers drive the cavvy forward. The horses raised great clouds of dust, and he soon learned to keep his water-soaked bandanna tied tightly over his nose and mouth. Little more than his grimy eye sockets showed beneath his hatbrim.

  He noticed that Roosevelt rode the long circle, wrestled calves to the ground at the branding fire, and took his turn standing night guard over the growing herd. But he never slung a rope or attempted to cut a cow from the herd for branding. One noontime he asked Chris Tompkins about this. Tompkins told him Roosevelt knew his limits—the ones imposed by bad eyesight.

  “He don’t like ’em, but he lives with ’em. Does a right smart job of it, too. First time he come out on the roundup, a lot of the boys snickered and called him a damn dude. They don’t no more.”

  In the afternoons, Will usually had some time to watch the activity at the branding fires. There the air rapidly clogged with smoke and the stench of seared hair and hide. The first time he observed the afternoon routine, Bob Beaufort was with him. The black man took notice of the calm way Will studied the contents of the work bucket next to the tallyman—the cowhand who kept the official count of the recovered strays, a list of their brands, and notes on the disposition of all unbranded calves and mavericks. In addition to the tallyman’s work sheets, an informal second count was provided by the contents of the bucket. There was one bucket at each fire. Into it went a bit of ear from every branded animal, and bloody scrotums cut from the steers with metal loppers.

  “Doesn’t it make you sick to look at that stuff?” Beaufort asked, and his lips tightened in queasiness.

  “Not particularly,” Will said. “I’ve never been bothered by the sight of blood. Guess a lot of people are, though.”

  A cowboy grunted, and snapped the loppers shut. The castrated steer howled. Beaufort pressed his fingertips to his mouth for a few seconds. “Yes, indeed. First time they spy what’s in one of those buckets, most new hands puke up a stream big as a geyser. Ever thought about being a sawbones?”

  “A doctor?” Will shook his head.

  “Well, it certainly appears you’ve got the stomach for it, if nothing else.”

  iii

  Toward the end of each afternoon, the chuck wagon and the cavvy once again moved forward to the site chosen for the night camp. There, after nearly sixteen hours of work, Will could finally eat a solid meal and spend an hour talking to the black wrangler before exhaustion, their bedrolls, and then more guard duty claimed them.

  Bob Beaufort was older than he looked. He’d been sixteen when horsemen in Union blue galloped up the lane of his owner’s South Carolina rice plantation. The horsemen of Old Linkum—come to set him free.

  “They came too late for my papa, Robert Senior. He died six months before Old Gray Fox Lee surrendered. All at once I had my liberty and no family left to share it with—”

  Beaufort’s owner had been a relatively benevolent one. He’d permitted a few of his best house slaves to learn to read, write, and cipher. In long night sessions before his death, Robert Senior had retaught each lesson to his
only son. Neither of them knew where young Bob’s mother was. Eight years before the war, the fluctuations of a dwindling rice economy had made it necessary for the master to sell her off.

  “No matter what else the master did for my daddy and me, it never made up for that. I hated him and I prayed he’d burn in hell when he died.”

  Lonely but hopeful, Beaufort had gone North right after the war. He’d had no last name, so he’d picked one he liked—the name of a small but fashionable seacoast town in the Carolina low country near the plantation.

  The industrial North had proved a mighty disappointment to Robert Beaufort, freed man. He’d spent eight months tramping the streets of Pittsburgh, finding no work and sometimes sleeping in snowy alleys. On three occasions he’d been beaten by gangs of white steelworkers who resented all the blacks pouring in from the South in search of jobs.

  The experience convinced Beaufort he wanted no part of the North. But what could he do? It was his ability to read that led to the answer. In a discarded newspaper he chanced upon an article about the rapid postwar development taking place in the Western beef cattle industry. War-ravaged Texas was pulling itself up by its bootstraps.

  He’d traveled all the way to Texas on foot, with only determination and his wits to help him make the journey. The effort had been worth it. After a number of setbacks, he’d gotten a ranch job and settled down to learn cow, as the saying went. Eventually he’d worked his way north to Kansas with a trail drive, and pushed on alone to the Dakota Territory. He meant to spend the rest of his days as a cowboy.

  “Can’t think of a finer existence. ’Specially for a man of my color. That’s why you see quite a few black cowboys. I wouldn’t say they love nigras out West. But most white men leave you alone if you pull your weight.” With a teasing smile, he added, “Why, sometimes they even break down and act friendly for as long as five or ten minutes. Only time I don’t like being a cowboy”—slowly he raised his right hand toward his neck—“is when it gets this warm—”

  Smack.

  He studied a smudge on his fingertips. “My Lord, the skeeters look big this year.”

  The weather had turned sultry during the day. A south wind blew intermittently. Will started to wrap himself up in his tarp—which was like consigning himself to an oven, but was the only decent protection against the attacks of the mosquitoes.

  Suddenly he felt the wind begin to change. He looked at Beaufort. Firelight glinted in the cowboy’s eyes as he turned his head and gazed into the northwest. He watched a moment. “I saw lightning, Will.”

  “Storm coming?”

  “I think so.”

  Neither of them needed to say more. Will lay down and shut his eyes, but tension kept him awake. Soon he could hear Beaufort’s shallow breathing up in the wagon. He was awake too.

  After a while, Will heard a rumble of thunder. A silver flickering filled the northwest quadrant of the sky.

  Beaufort jumped down from the tailgate of the wagon. “I’m going to saddle my pony. Yours, too.”

  “I’ll help.”

  “No need for two of us to get up. Stay put.”

  He vanished in the dark. Will’s mouth grew dry. His stomach began to hurt. He knew stampedes were dreaded above all else. He also knew that if one started, every man had to be in the saddle to help stop it.

  He lay rigid, listening as Beaufort saddled his own horse, then Boston. Far out in the darkness, beyond the campfires beginning to stream sparks in the rising wind, a man started to sing.

  It was a wordless, nearly tuneless song. More of a chant than anything else. A second singer began somewhere else, with a little more melody.

  “Are those the night herders?” Will whispered as Beaufort returned.

  “Yes, indeed. When they start Texas lullabies, you know they’re getting worried.”

  Will rolled on his belly. A third man began singing to the cattle, trying to distract and soothe them. A fourth voice joined the others. Will saw men damping the blowing fires. The last thing anyone wanted now was a sudden eruption of flame in the prairie grass.

  Behind a low sentinel butte in the northwest, another white glare lit the sky. Will held his breath. There was thunder, but muffled. After it died away, you could almost hear the silence—an eerie, oppressive kind of silence in which the only sounds were the herders’ voices. The herders matched their chants to the slow rhythm of their walking ponies.

  Dust blew against Will’s cheek. He started to speak to Beaufort again, but there was a new burst of lightning followed by a deafening roll of thunder. Oddly, the thunder didn’t die away as it had before. It continued. Will heard rather than saw Beaufort grab his hat and scramble to his feet. All at once Will realized the thunder wasn’t coming from the sky.

  The earth began to vibrate. “They’re up,” Beaufort said in a hoarse voice. “Move!”

  The thunder of running cattle grew louder, interrupted all at once by a cow’s bellow. Then another. A night herder yelled the warning that was already unnecessary, “Stampede! Stam-peeeede!”

  iv

  The sky roared and the ground shook. Lightning flashed almost continuously as the storm came scything out of the northwest at incredible speed, whipping the grass all around Will’s galloping pony. He and. Beaufort were part of a group of riders racing along the left flank of the charging herd—two or three hundred animals strung out over a distance of a half mile.

  The herd was stampeding south, along a dry, shallow watercourse. Once the stampede was on, the night herders had immediately ridden to the left side of the herd. Will and the other men had fallen in behind. Now, up ahead, cowboys began firing their revolvers into the air. As they shot, they hallooed and edged their racing ponies toward the leaders of the stampede, hoping to turn them to the right and keep turning them, until the leaders were into a spiral that would wind in upon itself and thus spend the stampede’s force.

  But turning the leaders was no easy trick, especially when the cattle were aware of the men riding alongside. The presence of the cowboys only heightened the animals’ fear and fury. Long horns shiny with lightning, a big steer came lunging out of the herd at Will and his pony.

  One horn pricked Boston’s right haunch. The pony leaped. Had the watercourse not been fairly level, horse and rider might have fallen. But Boston came down with a jolt, and barely broke stride.

  The charging steer had already turned away and been absorbed back into the herd. Will tore his hat off, slapped it against his right leg, and yelled himself hoarse. Boston was moving so fast, he could only trust to the pony’s instincts and hope they didn’t chance onto some unexpected gully or unseen animal burrow. He kept yelling. Ahead, spurts of flame showed in the darkness. The gunfire was continuing. But the herd refused to turn.

  Lightning again.

  Thunder.

  More lightning—

  Will felt as though he were aboard a train hurtling out of control. In the next flash of lightning, he saw a cowboy lying on the ground ahead of him. The man’s pony had broken a leg and was sprawled on its side, bellowing. The man’s leg was pinned beneath the animal. Will reined Boston to the left to avoid a collision.

  Before the lightning faded, the man saw Will coming and redoubled his efforts to pull his leg free. Thunder pealed. Will and Boston bore down on the cowboy at incredible speed.

  Boston wasn’t a cutting horse. Will had to rein him very sharply to signal that the fallen rider was the object of his attention. Once the little pony understood, he dug in his front hooves so suddenly, he nearly pitched his rider off.

  Will clung to the saddle and mane as Boston rocked to a stop, stiff-legged. He shot his right hand down, shouting over the bellow of the injured horse, “Grab hold and pull yourself up!”

  The other cowhand freed his leg at last. But all the commotion attracted some of the charging cattle. Two steers and six or seven big cows left the main body of the herd, lumbering straight at Will and the man he was attempting to help.

  Will leane
d down further, his hat falling off and getting lost. He touched the man’s fingers. Boston was shying away from the charging cattle, making contact difficult.

  “Hurry up!” Will shouted. “Grab on!”

  The man seized his arm as if it were a tree limb. For a moment Will’s back felt as though it might break. But he stayed in the saddle.

  He jerked his right leg back to permit the fallen man to use the stirrup. With a grateful cry, the cowboy swung up behind him. Will yanked the rein to the left, to get them out of the way of the cattle bearing down on them.

  Boston answered the rein and spurs, and bolted. They’d have made it safely away but for one of those burrows Will had fretted about. The pony’s left foot went straight down into the hole. Bone snapped. With a shriek of pain, Boston fell, spilling both the cowboy and his rescuer directly into the path of the charging animals.

  CHAPTER IX

  THE VICTIM

  i

  WILL LANDED ON HIS side and took a severe jolt—perhaps the only thing that saved him.

  The pain goaded him to his feet. Without a conscious thought, he twisted his hands in the fallen cowboy’s collar: The man was stunned, groaning. Will groaned too, from exertion, as he pulled.

  Fortunately the cowboy wasn’t too heavy. And there was desperate strength in Will Kent at that moment. The snorting steers were only fifteen or twenty feet away, coming fast.

  He dragged the cowhand one more yard, dropped him and jumped in front of him, waving his arms and yelling at the top of his lungs.

  On came the lead steer, head dipping, horns glinting as lightning streaked down the sky. Will’s insides turned to water. But he stood his ground, shouting himself raw in the throat and waving his arms like a madman—

  At the last instant, the steer veered away from the noise and motion.