HEN DAN GOT himself massacred, I felt like I’d hit bottom, but the bottom was soft and ashy like Nookie’s soap and I only kept sinking deeper and darker, like there warn’t no end where misery could take a body. I ended up working for Texas ranchers, wrangling their spare horses whilst the cowpunchers was drovering the cows along. I got paid less’n the others, and it was a desperate hard life, but on the trail nothing cost nothing, and it beat shooting Indians and their ponies. And I was comfortablest around horses. Tom always tried to learn me about nobleness from the books he read, and fact is, horses has a noble side and human persons don’t.
As the railroads growed, the ranchers borrowed old Indian trails to river crossings and cut some new ones, driving longhorns up through the tribal lands to the new Kansas railheads so’s they could be carriaged to their last rites out east where the main beef hunger was. The natives that was in the way didn’t like it and so sometimes them and their ponies had to get shot just like before, but cowpokes ain’t settlers, and the tribes was mostly pleased to let us ride through for a dime a head and two-bit jugs a whisky for the chiefs on the side.
Moving two or three thousand cattle over all them woesome miles warn’t no Sunday-school picnic. We rode slow, not to burn too much meat off of the beeves, pasted to our saddles for upwards of eighteen hours a day in all kinds of weather, with nothing for grub some days but bread and coffee. There were boils and blisters to tolerate, ague, dispepsia, piles, and newmonia, plus rustlers and rattlers, trail bosses and wolfpacks, prairie fires, hailstorms, and stampeeds. A crack of lightning and the cows’d go thundering off like they’d et too much locoweed, and sometimes under sunny skies for no reason at all other’n to aggravate the cowhands. Some days it rained like it warn’t noway going to stop, the mud slopping up so deep the poor creturs resked getting stuck and had to be cruelly lashed to keep them plodding ahead, whilst other days it was so dry and dusty, riding drag at the rear, where I generly was, was worse’n getting buried alive under a pile a filthy potato sacks.
Some of the range hands went crazy on account of the horrible moan of the wind, the awful emptiness, and the way the sun seemed to eat a body alive, but I growed customed to it and it suited me. The desert seemed as lonely and sadful as me, so we got on in a family way. I owned my saddle, my guns, my hat and bedroll, bought back when I was earning extra riding for the Pony, and I had old Jackson to get me about. There warn’t nothing else I wanted, including being somewheres else, without it was back on the Big River, and maybe I didn’t want that neither. Since Dan Harper had got killed, I had the blues down deep, but I reckoned I’d never not had them, and I’d growed customed to that, too.