“Bucking,” Highpockets got his bid in. Followed by Peerless Peterson: “I can handle a mower team if they ain’t runaways.”
The Jersey Mosquito laid his claim. “Maybe it don’t look it, but I c’n still climb onto a rake seat.” Pooch mustered, “Damn straight. Me, too.” Midnight Frankie chose driving a mowing machine and Fingy, the simpler task of riding a dump rake, while Shakespeare, the last person I would have picked out as a teamster, announced he was a buckraking fool. So tense that my skin felt tight, I prepared to spring up the instant when the man doing the hiring would realize he was one haymaker short and announce he lastly required a stacker team driver.
Instead came the awful words “Good enough. That finishes the crew, so let’s get a move on. The pickup’s parked up the road.” Jones gestured beyond the brush of the hobo jungle. “Come on up when you’ve got your bindles together and I’ll pull out the daybook to talk wages and catch whatever you’re using for names. Soon as we’re squared away on that, we’ll go make hay.”
? ? ?
AS HIGHPOCKETS and Harv and the others started making their farewells to Oscar the Swede and Snuffy and Overland Pete and Bughouse Louie and the California Kid and the others from the last bus who would wait for other haying jobs to come along, I turned as numb as a cigar store Indian. This was clearly inconceivable, that a Big Hole horse outfit would not use a teamster but some automotive monstrosity like a Power Wagon on the stacker. Yet it all too evidently was about to occur that bright-as-a-new-penny Jones was committing the same kind of sin against common sense as dumb Sparrowhead on the Double W. Some lofty writer who probably had never held an honest job once claimed that the ability to grapple with two contrary facts at the same time was the mark of higher intelligence, but I must not have been marked that way. Trying to do so only made my head swim.
Seeing how stricken I looked, Herman leaned down anxiously, telling me there were other ranches, nothing to worry, we would be haymakers yet somewheres.
Then I glimpsed it when the foreman stopped to check on something with Highpockets and turned his head a certain way, the wink of morning light as the sun caught the small silvery clasp, not much bigger than a locket but distinct as anything, that held his fancy hatband together.
I grabbed Herman’s arm so fiercely he drew back from me in a pained squint. “We absolutely have to get on this crew.”
“Hah? How?”
That, I had no idea of, but I knew our best chance in the Big Hole was about to be lost if we didn’t try something. “C’mon, grab our stuff, we need to catch up with him.”
? ? ?
WE DID SO, crashing our way out of the hobo jungle so loudly the foreman looked around at us in surprise as he reached his pickup. “Hey, wait, Mr. Jones, sir. Didn’t you maybe forget you need a stacker team driver?”
The ranch honcho leaned against a rear fender, crossing his arms at my challenge. “Not really. I figure to handle that myself, be right there at the stack with the crew that way.”
“But then what if there’s a breakdown and you have to go to town for parts or somebody’s cows get into a field and you have to go and dog them out or there’s a runaway and a dump rake goes all skoogey from hitting a ditch and maybe the raker does, too?” I started down a well-remembered list of the Double W haying mishaps. “Or what if the cook throws a fit and quits and—”
“Hey, hey, I have enough keeping me awake at night already,” the foreman put a stop to my onslaught.
Thinking over what I’d reeled off, he pushed away from the pickup and turned to Herman, who was trying to encourage our way onto the crew with nods and shrugs and grins while keeping a silence and leaving things to me. “Your boy here makes a pretty good argument for you. It’s not necessarily nutty to have somebody else drive the stacker team and free me up for whatever the hell else happens. You do look like you’ve had experience of some kind”—maybe too much experience, from his tone as he eyed Herman’s lined face and general muss from sleeping in a culvert—“but where’d you last do your teamstering?”
“Not him,” I rushed the words before Herman could say something guaranteed to confuse the issue. “Me.”
“Yeah?” Jones laughed. “You’re the horseman of the family?”
“Oh sure, you bet. I’ve been a stacker driver since I was eight. On a big ranch. Up north.”
“Eight, huh.” He played that around in his mustache as he studied me. “Just how old does that make you as we’re standing here on the green earth?”