The Saddle

A STORY

by COURTENAY TERRETT

JIM sat up there, on the side of the hill, and tried to reckon the number of days to his birthday. His slicker was slung along the ridgepole of his horse, keeping the cold pre-dawn rain off Cricket’s loins and off the saddle.

Cricket was fourteen, and not a patch on Jim’s other horse, Snip, but he could still get sixty-five dollars, or maybe even ten better for Cricket. There wasn’t a smarter cutting pony anywhere on that range where the TL and the SH and the BUG and Quarter-circle S ran their stock between the Badlands which tapered off the Black Hills and the buttes beyond the Tongue. He put the thought of Snip out of his mind; he didn’t own the big horse, not yet . . . couldn’t until he drew his fall wages . , . might not, even then, if Charlie . . . no . . .

No. But he could think of the saddle. It was his saddle, the saddle he’d had Furstnow, in Miles City, make for him, the saddle he’d paid for from his own wages. It wasn’t one of those hundredpound double rigs with silver corners on the square skirts and a rawhide-covered horn you could spread a family Bible on and a thin black reata tied fast and forever, Texas style.

Nor yet was it center-fired, like the men from Colorado and Idaho and the Yakima country rode. His was three-quarter rigged, with the cinch far enough back from the withers so the horse couldn’t be galled, but not too far back so the saddle wouldn’t hold almost anything he dabbed a rope on. And no fancy work except the beading and his brand worked on the back of the cantle, J-bar-O.

It didn’t matter about the rain, really; he’d been alternately dripping and steaming for three weeks. It had been the longest rainy spell in that part of Montana and Wyoming and the West Dakotas that even the Cheyennes could recall for any late summertime. His blue chambray shirt was filthy and commencing to rot away along the shoulder seams and the armpits. His bluejean pants weren’t much better — all worn through in the seat with sweat and rain and saddle dirt.

The calluses inside his thighs didn’t matter, either.

No, that wasn’t the truth. They did mean something. He’d got those calluses the same way Bill Link had got his twisted leg and the same way the yellow-legs at Fort Keogh got their hash marks and the same way old Ivory Jones lost the finger tips on his right hand. It was the way you got to be a man.

Those calluses didn’t bother him. You could stick a saddler’s awl in them now and you wouldn’t get any more wince out of them than you’d get from a boot sole. But he could remember when, in the spring, the time of the first horse roundup, before the calf roundup, when he’d been fresh out of a winter at school and soft on the insides of his legs, when they’d been nothing less than two big blisters that broke and widened and formed again and broke again with blood all around them. But, now, hell. . . .

When he stood up and stretched his long, too thin body and stamped his feet in their run-over boots he was conscious that he was the only creature stirring. The horses were huddled under the dripping pines on the hill slope or under the cottonwoods marking the narrow line of the Rosebud. The coyotes he had heard at sundown were dry in one of the sandstone caves up above in the rimrock. Even Cricket only lifted his dripping head a few inches and lowered it again.

He walked over to the cow pony and felt in a pocket of the slicker and fished out a corncob pipe and a tin of tobacco. These — and the saddle — were the emblems of his manhood, as yet unproclaimed, unperceived, but to him as real as the rain that soaked his shoulders and the shaly soil that crunched beneath his feet.

Soon he would be a man. Fifteen wasn’t too young. Maybe on his birthday they’d see that he had grown up, not just to his ludicrous, stoopshouldered six feet, but to the full estate of a top hand who could ride, rope, and tie with all but the best of the fifty-odd riders sleeping down there by the chuck wagon.

Presently he saw a flare of light on the camp space down below. Old Lee Fong Yu had started his breakfast fire. It was time to round up the horse herd — the cavvy; remuda, the Texans called it — and move them down. He stripped his slicker back from the beautiful new saddle and swung astride Cricket, not bothering to slip into the oilskin, but shaking it like a blanket as he nudged Cricket’s ribs, and started yelling to rouse the drowsy cow ponies, to set them snorting down the hillside.

2

HE WAS always half ashamed of the theatrical thrill he got from driving those rebellious, kicking, squealing horses — five hundred and twelve of them — into the camp of sleepy cow pokes, into the flimsy enclosure rigged simply of stakes and ropes. Always he was surprised that they accepted that ridiculous restraint: one surge against the ropes and the stakes would have gone down and the cavvy could have spread to hell-and-gone; but invariably they recoiled from the touch of rope against hide, for they had learned bitterly that the rope was the symbol of their enslavement.

Quickly he unsaddled Cricket, slipped off his bridle, and gave the old horse a dismissive, affectionate slap. He picked up the saddle with one hand — it was forty pounds, by his own specifications and the bridle and the blanket and the slick in the other and toted them toward the campfire and laid the heavy Navajo saddle blanket over the gear, and the slicker over all. Then he joined the men, who already were sluicing down their dollops of fried steak, their fried potatoes, canned tomatoes, and soda biscuits, with big tin mugs of blindingly hot coffee.

A whipcord man, tall in the saddle under his ankle-length slicker, jogged up on a leggy gray and looked down on him with contemptuous appraisal. The boy was conscious of the shirt plastered to his back and ribby chest, of the levis wetted back to their original dark blue, of the squelch of his socks inside the run-over boots.

The tall man grunted, and reined his horse with a jerk that dug the savage spade bit against the tender roof of the gray’s mouth. “I suppose,” he said — loudly, top-boss style, so that the words would carry—“you put more store on that precious God damn saddle than a dry skin.”

The boy said nothing. His Uncle Charlie grunted again, with what passed for a laugh. “You put on more airs with your first made saddle than most grown men do with their first woman.” Four or five men laughed, but Lee Fong didn’t, nor Big Tex, the range boss, and the boy stood motionless and silent as Uncle Charlie wheeled the gray around with another jerk at the spade bit and a casually savage dig of his stave-point rowels, and loped off into the thinning drizzle.

The other hands hastily roped their horses and saddled and headed off after Charlie Hysham toward the ridge from which the first circle would be launched. Even the first to join him would be greeted with a “G’ afternoon, Frankie. Glad you could make it,” and the last, no matter if his horse had spooked all over the flat and damn near dumped him, would come in for one of Charlie’s carbolic jests, “You’re too big a boy, Luke, for that sort of dreamin’. I wait till I get back to a real feather bed and a real woman to get it warmed up.”

Some of them would snigger, and some would give a wry smile, and then one of the riding bosses from another outfit would say abruptly, “Reckon this is my circle,” and set out with the others stringing behind, some of them still ashamed of themselves for laughing to oblige a man who always boasted that he had the best horseflesh and the best womanflesh, and treated them both like he was a combination of a greaser vaquero and God Almighty.

Young Jim, standing by the dying cook-fire, was shivering naked in a blanket as the old Chinaman pressed the water out of his shirt and pants and rigged a cunning X-shaped clothes rope to dry them a bit.

“You cold,” said Lee. “Eat hot. Drink coffee.” It was then he realized that he was shivering not with cold, not with weariness, but with the rage that lately had seemed to come over him every time his Uncle Charlie made jokes about women, and made him think of his Aunt Helen, and why she’d ever married Charlie, and why she’d stayed with him . . . Helen. ... He felt that his fifteenth birthday was unbearably distant.

Presently he was eating, alone, squatted under the tail of the chuck wagon while the old Chinaman benevolently loaded his tin plate with slices of livei and poured lashings of blackstrap syrup over his hot biscuits.

Stuffed and drowsy, he hauled down his tarpcovered bedroll and spread it under the chuck wagon. Lee would wake him to help harness the four big broncs to the wagon; meantime he would get a couple of hours’ sleep, maybe three, before the outfit moved on to the site of the next gather.

3

WHEN he woke the rain was nothing but a ground haze, and the sun felt warm against his naked back when Lee fed him another cup of coffee and a steak cut away from the T-bone and stuck between two oversized biscuits fried in gravy fat.

Tex McCarren — Little Tex, the day wrangler, not Big Tex, the range boss — had picketed down Snip for him; as he pulled on his boots, still wet but steaming now, and retrieved his dried levis from a stake near the fire where Lee had hung them, he noticed with a curious pleasure that Snip was restless. The big bay was not trying to pull out his rope peg, but his ears were up and he couldn’t stand still and he didn’t graze.

Snip had never had a saddle on him until two months before, and the boy was the only one he’d ever let fork him — and they always had a brief battle, even so — but the big gelding had learned already to swing round sharply at the end of a rope and take a two-hundred-pound calf off his legs with a thump, and hold the rope taut while the branding irons smoked and the big bull calf writhed briefly under the deft strokes of the man with the knife.

He liked it; the boy knew it. Snip had even learned the art of cutting a cow and calf, or a big steer, or even a herd bull, out of the clamorous gather; a steady push of the shoulder, a patient pressure toward the outside, a sudden surge to thrust the blocky, stubborn, white-and-red opponent away from the protection of the herd and into the open where either a rope could be laid on him or he could be hazed off into the “cut.”

Snip, the boy thought eagerly, had the makings of being — was, almost, already — the best cow pony in the whole Powder River-Tongue River country. Another year and there wouldn’t be another like him. And he was the only one Snip would let throw a leg across his back without trying to kill. For Snip was a killer: he’d killed two men.

The first had been Tom Lecky, the first man to try to break him. In the squeeze gate, Tom had got a hackamore on Snip, then a saddle, and he’d lowered himself down on the plunging big bay with the white snip on the end of his muzzle, and had yelled to the flunks to open the gate, and Snip had corkscrewed out into the round corral, brushed Tom off against a gatepost, and then turned around and trampled him with his unshod front hooves.

Tom was the first.

Then Uncle Charlie had said, “That’s ahorse!” and they’d dragged Snip into the horse barn and put him into a big box stall with chain hobbles on his forelegs and no hay in the manger and no water in the bucket. Uncle Charlie had watched him for three days, watched until Snip’s eyes were red and his hind legs seemed to be folding a little, and then he’d sent Fred Gantt into the stall to sweat him out.

The boy hadn’t been able to watch that, for Fred had carried a quirt — one of those Mexican quirts — with half a pound of lead in the butt and little globules of Lad melted onto the end of the thongs. Standing on the gate, he’d cleverly slugged Snip between the eyes with the lead-loaded butt and then, while the big horse was still on his knees, had climbed over into the stall and had started cutting him up with the metal-tipped quirt. The boy hadn’t seen it; Little Tex had told him how Snip staggered up and, with his chain-shackled forefeet, had reared up and torn the front of Fred’s head away.

They were going to kill Snip then, after they’d dragged Fred’s body out, going to shoot him right there in the stall.

Jim had wanted to say something, yell it, scream it, but he couldn’t.

But then Uncle Charlie told the men he wasn’t going to have Snip killed; it was the second year of the First World War, and the British and French were paying up to $250 for big strong horses for their cavalry and field artillery, and Snip might fetch as much as $300 if Uncle Charlie could show the officer buyers that he was broken to lead, broken to handle and saddle, and broken to mount and ride.

Uncle Charlie had set his heart on that, selling him to the British or the French. He’d offered two of the top hands fifty dollars if they could wear Snip down enough so he’d lead at the tail of a hackamore rope, stand for a saddle, and take them once around the round corral. Snip had been sweated down to the hackamore; he’d even stood, sweating, while the saddle was slapped on and off, on and off, on and off, and the cinch pulled a little tighter each time. But he’d never stood for a man stepping aboard him; then he’d exploded, and if it hadn’t been for the hobbles and the snubbing ropes, he’d have trampled them to death the same as he did Tom and Fred. As it was, they’d been mauled more than a-plenty before the other hands jumped down from the corral rails and hind-legged the big bay.

The boy watched while Uncle Charlie used to go, three times every day, to try to talk to the big horse in his box stall, his front feet still hobbled, and try to sweeten him up and feed him winter beets or a pan of oats and bran, or lean over gingerly with a pail of water and cunningly flick a few drops on his muzzle until he’d come up and take a few gulps — and then he’d take the pail away and say, “I’ll see you tomorrow, you big bay bastard!” And he’d sort of chuckle, but it wasn’t a good chuckle. It was the way he had sounded last September, at payingoff time, when he had called the boy into the ranch office and had paid him twenty-five dollars a month instead of the thirty-five he’d been told he was getting.

4

THE boy was warm, now, in the hot early morning sun, and he was fed, and Lee had said, oddly, almost roughly, “You Jim-boy, t’at Snip-horse. . . . Cha’hlie som-beetch.” He didn’t answer the old Chinaman, for he didn’t know whether an answer was expected, or if it was, what answer. Instead, he walked over to Snip, and pulled the picket rope free and went up it toward the big horse’s head and talked to him all the while, and slapped his chest, and rubbed his muzzle, and stroked his big strong neck, and finally edged him over toward his saddle, and threw on the damp saddle blanket, and then the saddle, and slowly pulled up the cinch.

Snip didn’t seem to mind much. He’d learned the trick of swelling out his chest and belly when the cinch was pulled around, but the boy walked him out a few paces and jerked it up tighter, and Snip seemed to take it as part of a game. But still he didn’t climb on the horse. He walked him over to the chuck wagon, where Lee was lashing on the last of the bedrolls, and opened t he tail gate and poured a cupful of black syrup into a tin plate and held it up to t he big horse.

Snip sniffed at it. That was just pretending, just play. Then he lowered his pink muzzle, with its white snip, into the pan and licked it clean in long sweeping swipes of his pink tongue.

The boy gave him a slap along the jaw, plucked a clump of grass and wiped the plate, and walked him off a few paces.

“Don’t get spooky with me, you big bastard,”he said, and put his left foot in the stirrup and quickly swung astride.

Snip quivered for a moment, then stepped out quickly. The boy stuck a heel into his flank and they exploded into a dash down the river bottom, then a quick haul-up and a sprint back to the trampled ground where t he rope corral had stood.

Lee had the harness on his double span, but he was waiting for the boy; it was a quick and dangerous job to hook on the trace chains and thread the reins and then climb onto the high spring seat and kick off the brake while the four broncs plunged in their harness.

The boy came over, leaving Snip’s reins dragging. (He’d taught him that, too; to stay hitched to a nonexistent hitching rail.) He grabbed the bridles of the wheel team and held them steady while Lee hooked them to the doubletrees and then hiked them to the pole. Then he did the same with the leaders, and was thrashed about for a moment while Lee mounted to his seat and gathered the reins.

Lee put his foot on the brake, but before he kicked it free he settled his wide, low-crowned black hat firmly atop his coiled pigtail and gave the boy a shrewd look.

“’Member, Jim-boy, Cha’hlie left foot no good.”

He freed the brake, yelled “Hik’!” to the four broncs, and thundered down into the gully and up the other bank.

The boy stared after him; what did Lee mean about Charlie’s left foot? Charlie had busted his ankle a couple of years ago, he hobbled a bit sometimes, but he seemed to move as quickly as he ever had. As quickly and as unpredictably as a shedding rattler. Jim picked up Snip’s reins and put his foot in the stirrup and the big horse stepped forward with a rush that slammed him into the saddle, and broke into a fast, deceptively easy lope.

The cantle was high against the boy’s buttocks, and the swell of the pommel was just half an inch above the flat, hard beginning of his thigh muscles. Furstnow had built this saddle just the way he’d ordered it: a three-quarter rig, rounded skirts, a rawhide-wrapped steel horn, and a thirteen-inch seat. A working saddle, a top hand’s saddle, easy on a horse’s back, strong enough to hold anything he tied onto, and snug enough so that nothing but dynamite could blast him loose once he cramped his long thighs and dug in his spurs. And except for the beading around the edges of the skirts and down the stirrup leathers — and his initials on the back of the cantle — it had no fancy work, no stamping, no tooling. Maybe it had been sort of a kid stunt to have “J-O” tooled into the cantle back, but (he reiterated in secret assertion) they were his initials and this was his saddle, and God help anyone who ever tried to ride it away from him.

5

SNIP had followed the left bank of the little river; he’d smelled — or heard, maybe — the cavvy up ahead, the boy thought. And presently they picked up the trail roughly plowed by four-times-six-one-o horses. By the time he’d added that up (for addition was simpler than multiplication, only the teachers wouldn’t see it that way) he caught sight of Little Tex trailing the horse herd, and soon he was up with him.

“First change at the fork of Otter Creek,” said the day wrangler. “Dinner at Elder’s Flats. Last circle down by McDowell’s.”

“That’s a day’s riding,” said the boy.

“Charlie’s got cactus in his britches,” said Little Tex. “Or somethin’. . . . When a man don’t get married until he’s long in the tooth he don’t give a damn about anything . . . men, horses or cattle . . . anything except . . .”

But the boy was away, his spurs in Snip’s outraged ribs. He was being a damn fool kid again, but he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t help it if that was the way he always acted when anyone mentioned Charlie — and Helen.

Snip’s angry run modified to a poco-poco as they hit an old rutted buffalo trail, and the boy’s fury slowed to the horse’s pace, but although he kept his left hand light and easy on the reins he could not help beating the pommel with the fist of his right.

Why did Helen have to be married to Charlie? Put it the other way around, first: Why did Charlie have to make it Helen, of all the millions of women in the world? He’d had plenty others, if he’d wanted. And he never let anyone forget that.

But Helen? Maybe some day he’d understand, but not yet. Hell! she’d known lots of men back East richer than Charlie, probably just as goodlooking. And she wasn’t any silly little tip-over; she was, he puzzled, the wisest woman he’d ever known. Certainly the wisest since his mother died, and he was eight years old.

But Charlie had fooled her. Fooled her like he’d fooled a lot. Fooled her until he let slip, and all the ugliness changed him in a second.

Jim had seen him take his mask off and throw it in her face. It was the third day after their arrival at the ranch after the honeymoon. Little Tex had brought two saddle horses up to the house; they were going to ride over part of the ranch, Charlie’s ranch, Charlie’s kingdom.

Charlie gave Helen a leg up into the saddle, then gave his cinch a pull. It was tight, but he’d had a saddle slip under him once and he never took chances afterwards. He had kicked the horse in the belly in case he’d puffed up, and the horse reached round and bit his shoulder.

It didn’t amount to much — his shirt was ripped, but the skin was barely broken. But Charlie’s face had gone black under its Indian tan and he’d snatched up an axe handle and had grabbed the reins close to the bit and had beaten the horse until the blood poured from its mouth and nostrils.

When his rage was spent he found Helen had slipped from her horse and gone back into the house. He’d gone after her, looking as ashamed as a man of Charlie’s stripe could ever manage, and had come out in a frozen fury.

Helen had never ridden with him. Often with Jim, yes, and often with Big Tex or Little Tex or one of the other hands, or with the house guests Charlie frequently invited to try to ease the loneliness of one woman in an entirely masculine world. But never with Charlie.

They never quarreled, for when Charlie would go into a quick rage, or — it was the one-eighth Indian in him, Jim thought — would smilingly try to goad her into a row, Helen would merely walk away wordlessly. She never spoke of her marriage to anyone, not even Jim, but he knew that it was a failure— and that she’d stick it out.

Only once had she interfered. That was when Jim had demanded his full pay and Charlie had mocked, “Prove you’re a man and I’ll give you man’s pay,” and he’d lashed out wildly and Charlie had promptly knocked him down.

Helen had been in the next room and pushed Charlie back after he’d got one solid kick into the boy’s thin-muscled side. She didn’t say a word, but that day she moved her dressing table into one of the guest rooms. And Charlie hated Jim, made him move to the bunkhouse, and watched narrowly the rare conversations he had with Helen.

6

HIS thoughts had carried him to the flat on Otter Creek where the first gather was to be made. He slipped the bit out of Snip’s mouth, dropped the reins, and went gathering broken wood for Lee’s noonday fire. The sun had gone again; likely the men would gulp their dinner in the rain.

Soon the cattle started flowing onto the flat, driven down the draws and coulees and creeks by the riders, and by eleven o’clock—the rain was coming down dismally again by then—the fat steers had been cut from the gather, the cows and calves and bulls and young steers driven off, and the beef herd held by three or four men while the others came in for food and fresh horses.

Little Tex had driven the cavvy into the rope corral Jim had staked up, and after the men had roped their remounts and ridden off, Jim headed them in the direction of Cedar Creek, where the second circle would rendezvous, and then came back, took down the ropes, pulled up the stakes, piled them atop the bedrolls, and helped Lee hook up his four broncs again.

They were ready to start when Uncle Charlie came in. His horse was limping badly.

“Tore a frog goin’ down a shale bank,” he explained briefly, and swung down and dropped the reins. He strode over to Snip, who snorted and backed away, although the boy had taught him to stand “tied” when his reins wrere down.

“Stand still, you big bastard,” snapped Charlie, and grabbed the reins.

Jim was not conscious of leaping at the tall man, of screaming “Leave my horse alone!”, of swinging wildly and crashing his big bony fist into Charlie’s face, but Charlie’s blow shook him into awareness, and suddenly he remembered Lee’s curious remark that morning . . . about Charlie’s left foot.

Charlie had dropped Snip’s reins and was coming toward him. The boy’ instinctively waited until Charlie had stung him with a left and then took another step forward to drive home his right. He managed to step back just the two inches necessary and Charlie went off balance, and the boy plunged both fists into the man’s face again, and Charlie fell forward, clutching him, throwing him back upon the ground.

After the first three or four punches Jim was stunned. Later, when Lee had dumped a hatful of water in his face and dosed him from his hidden whiskey bottle, he realized that his uncle had kicked him, kicked him hard and more than once, for every breath was as if a mowing machine were chewing into his right side.

Lee put a hackamore on Charlie’s horse, tied him to the tail gate of the wagon, and helped Jim up to the seat. The boy was grateful that the little Chinaman said nothing.

“I’ve got to get out now,” he said to himself. “Charlie’ll haze me ragged after this.” He foresaw with sickening clarity t hat one day, if his fists failed again, he might very likely kill Charlie, snatch up a shotgun or a rifle and blast his face off, wipe away forever that contemptuous half-smile. “I’ve got to get out,” he said again, but aloud this time.

Lee spoke, keeping his eyes on the double span. “Mo’ betta ask pay suppa time.” The boy understood: all the riders would know, from his face — and Charlie’s — that they’d tied it on, and wolfish as they were they wouldn’t let Charlie savage him out of his wages.

When they came upon Little Tex and the miserably dripping horse herd, Jim swung off the wagon, untied Charlie’s horse, and roped another mount. Tex eyed him knowledgeably, but said nothing when he slung Charlie’s saddle atop the chuck wagon and rode his fresh horse bareback.

At the alder-fringed flats the gather had commenced — a steady trickle of steers and cows and bawling calves and skittish young stuff and lowering, heavy-headed range bulls, down from the pine-and-shale slopes, the lava-spattered hillsides, the dry gulches, the draws and creeks.

The cutting pairs rode through the herd, easing out the big grass-fat steers, and a few more latecomers were thrown in upon the main gather, but Charlie had not come in — only a couple of dozen scary steers that looked as if they’d run all the way down Boxelder Creek. But no Charlie.

It was when the cutting was finished that Big Tex said quietly, “Seem’s if we better make a cast for Charlie. Ain’t likely he stopped in out of the rain with them honyockers up Boxelder.”

Jim blurted, “He took Snip.”

Big Tex looked at him, as if seeing for the first time the boy’s purpling eyes, his swollen nose, the clumsy way he kept his elbow pressed in against his ribs. Wordlessly he put his spurs in and headed up Boxelder, the crew silent behind him, and the boy among them.

At the ridge he waved his arm. “Don’t fan out more’n twenty-five-thutty yards apart,” he ordered. “Take it slow, don’t spook up the horse, and don’t yell until you find him.”

Tim Horkan it was who loosed a brief shout. No one did anything until almost all had gathered at the steep edges of the gravelly cut, some eight or nine feet deep, where the big bay stood panting and sweating despite the rain, but with his head up in challenge.

Big Tex took down his rope, but the boy slipped off his barebacked horse and slipped down into the cut. The big bay horse shifted restlessly, and the tattered bundle which depended by one imprisoned boot heel dragged a few inches, but the boy was talking horse-talk, muttered and low and steady and reassuring, and in a minute or two he had the lead stall in his hands.

Other men slithered down, and freed the horse from his dragging burden, and hoisted what had been Charlie up onto the bank, where he was wrapped in some hand’s slicker, and roped him across a saddle with a diamond hitch.

The boy led Snip afoot down the cut to a place low enough for him to scrabble out.

Big Tex and Old Man Corbin, who’d been one of the boy’s grandfather’s oldest friends, were waiting for him.

He mounted the horse. Snip was still quivering, but he put his feet down steadily and surely. The saddle was scraped and scarred: the saddle rope had been torn loose from its buckle strap, the skirts were incised from rubbing against the rocky walls of the cut, the stirrup leathers were partly torn from the rig.

“Big stirrups,” said Old Man Corbin. “You got big feet, son.”

The boy said, “Yeah. It’s a made saddle. Made for me.”