“Luck is the star we steer by,” he invoked for the how manyeth time. I was in agreement for once.
“You know what, Herman?” My mood was so high it was a wonder my head wasn’t hitting the roof of the pickup. “We’ve maybe got it knocked, once and for all.”
“Donny, you are extra happy. These jobs are that good?”
“Didn’t you see the clasp in his hatband? The livestock brand?”
The French salute, meaning No.
“It’s the Diamond Buckle. Guess who owns the ranch.”
26.
ALL BUT EXPLODING with excitement, I managed to pass the harnessing test—I will say, avoiding a ten-mile walk back to town is no small incentive—even though in the team of workhorses I was given, I had to stretch higher than I thought possible to struggle various straps into place on the lofty back of the huge mare, Queen.
Panting as I finished up on the other workhorse, a sleepy-looking black gelding called Brandy, I couldn’t help asking about the gray mare looming out of her stall like the giant mother of the horse race. “How come she’s called something nice like Queen instead of Big Mama or something?”
All during my flinging on of harness and scrambling to buckle up this and that, Jones was leaning against the barn wall with his hands in his pockets, critically observing. “The owner’s idea, from cards,” he replied, appropriately poker-faced. “Named her that way because he always draws to a queen, thinks it brings him luck. Worthwhile females being as scarce in poker as they are in life generally, according to him.”
“Hah, he is some thinker.” Herman, nervous spectator, took that way of warning me not to point out half of that problem could be solved with the French bible deck in his duffel.
Curiosity got the best of me, all this talk of “the owner” as if it were some deep dark secret. Feeling invincible after my harnessing success, I rashly brought the matter out into the open.
“Is Rags around?”
The foreman looked at me sharply, then included Herman. “All right, geniuses. How’d you already figure out the place is his? Most of these ’boes could be working for Hopalong Cassidy, for all they know.”
When I related sighting the purple Cadillac at Crow Fair and what ensued, and with Herman chiming in about what a bee-yoot-iffle ride Rags had made, Jones relaxed his scrutiny of us somewhat. “Well, good for you. I don’t advertise who owns this outfit, right off the bat, because guys can get the idea somebody like Rags ought to pay higher wages. No worries about that with you two who are just lucky to be here, am I right?” He secured headshakes from Herman and me as if Oh no, any notion of a larger paycheck would never cross our minds.
“Anyway, Rags is riding the circuit” the topic was finished off. “He’ll pull in here big as life sooner or later.” Shoving off from the wall, the foreman headed out of the barn saying gruffly, “Leave the team tied up until I get the rest of this world-beating crew lined out on their jobs. Come on, let’s go to the bunkhouse and settle you in.”
? ? ?
MY FEET BARELY tickled the ground, I was on such a cloud as I crossed the yard of the ranch owned by the champion saddle bronc rider of the world. Was this perfect or what? Miles better than my try at talking Gram into letting me hang on at the Double W back at the start of summer. Look at all that had happened since—in the giddiness of the moment I folded the high points of dog bus life over the low ones—and hadn’t I gained not only the black arrowhead that was big medicine, but Herman, who was something of a found treasure himself except for being a few kinds of a fugitive? Out here he was hidden away, in hobo company, where nobody inquired too closely about one’s past. To top it all, even if I didn’t have a framed certificate to prove it like the gallant Twin Cities newspaper van driver, I now was a teamster!
Accordingly, I was half into another world, one totally without any Bible-dispensing pickpocket nor MOST WANTED posters nor the kid prison called an orphanage—nor for that matter, Aunt Kate—when Herman gradually dropped back a few steps behind Jones’s purposeful strides toward the bunkhouse and I heard a significant “Ssst.”
Slowing until I was next to him, surprised at his perturbed expression, I whispered, “What’s the matter?”
“We are hired, ja?” he made sure in a return whisper. “Knocked, we have got it?”
“Yeah! Out the far end!”
“Good, good. But one something is on my mind,” he fretted, quite a change from his usual Nothing to worry.