The next morning I was up by half past four. I had to wake Mother too, because I needed the key to Father’s tool chest. At first she told me to go back to bed and get my rest, but I think she could see that I wouldn’t sleep anyway, so she got up and gave me the key. And she let me have Father’s old black belt.
It wasn’t too hard to make the stilts after I’d found a two-by-two. I had to take one of the roosts out of the henhouse. It was a good long one—about fourteen feet—and it sagged in the middle, but that was so much the better. When I sawed it in half, it made the uprights a little bowlegged. I nailed the belt to the top ends, so I could buckle it around my chest, spiked on footrests with leather toe loops, and tacked on straps I could fasten above my knees. After half an hour’s practice, I could walk with them pretty well.
Ernie Ballad didn’t like the idea of my stilts at first. He was standing by the gate when I got to Gallup’s, and told me that he didn’t want any monkeyshines. Before he’d let me take them into the orchard, I had to put them on and show him how well I could walk on them, and how high I could reach. He liked it when I told him that most of the trees were broken from moving the ladders, and that, with my stilts, I wouldn’t need a ladder. So he let me try using them to pick cherries, and they worked all right. The glove Mother made me worked fine, too. I picked fourteen boxes of cherries that day, and didn’t break a single limb.
All the cherry pickers were a lot older than I, and a good many of them were grown men and women. But more than half of them wanted to try my stilts. Of course, I couldn’t let them do it while I was working, so I said that anybody who wanted to, could try them at noon. At least a dozen of them tried, and took some terrible spills. After one of the older boys nearly broke his arm, Ernie Ballad wouldn’t let them try any more. But that night, when I was ready to leave, he said, “Any other of you kids at home that can walk on stilts as good as you can?”
I said, “Sure, Grace could always walk better on them than I, and she’s a lot faster with a pair of scissors, too. She helps Mother with the sewing all the time.”
He nodded over toward where some of the ladies were getting their things together, and said, “Some of these old biddies ain’t too good. Bring your sister along with you in the morning.”
“I can’t bring her tomorrow,” I told him. “She has to help Mother with the cooking. And I’ll only be able to pick till about eleven o’clock myself. Philip and I have to take the cookery stuff around tomorrow afternoon.”
“Well, how about Thursday morning?”
“Sure,” I said, “and I could bring Muriel and Philip, too. They’d both be able to walk all right on stilts.” Neither of them had ever tried stilts, but I knew I could teach them how before Thursday morning came.
Ernie just squinnied up his eye at me a little, and asked, “How old are these other kids?”
I didn’t want to tell him in years, so I said, “They’re both old enough to pick cherries, and Philip’s bigger than I am—he weighs two pounds more.”
Ernie just grinned and slapped me on the shoulder, “Well, we’ll give Grace a whirl at it first. If she works out all right I’ll think about the other two. Is that fair enough?” I told him it was, and ran most of the way home to tell them.
Mother wouldn’t let me take the other roost out of the henhouse—so we had to buy three two-by-twos at the lumberyard. They weren’t very straight ones, and they cost seventy-five cents, but Mother said it was an investment that would pay good dividends in cherries. It did, too.
I made Grace’s stilts the same size as mine, and she didn’t have to practice any more than I did before she could use them fine. But Philip and Muriel might just as well have been trying to walk on a couple of telephone poles. Of course, I had to make stilts for them, too, but theirs couldn’t be nearly so tall.
Grace was better at most everything than I—except horses. Even her first day she picked sixteen boxes of cherries to my fifteen. Friday night, Ernie Ballad said we could bring Philip and Muriel with us on Monday, but we’d have to promise not to get sore if he didn’t keep them. He did, though, and they could each pick eight or ten boxes a day. We all worked together—one tree at a time—and we didn’t leave it till we had the very last cherry; so Ernie Ballad kept us till the very last. Grace and I picked from the higher limbs while Muriel and Philip picked from the lower ones. Then, all together, we’d move the ladder around so I could go up and clean the very top of the tree.
We got paid a quarter of the pick, the way the sheriff said we would, but not a quarter of all we picked. The way it worked was that after we’d picked four boxes for Ernie we could pick one for ourselves. We planned to leave all our picking for the last, so that Grace would be at home to help Mother with the canning after the picking was finished.
But we were all so busy with the picking that we didn’t notice till there wasn’t enough fruit left on the trees to pay us. Mr. Gallup was a smart man, and it didn’t take him two minutes to get us straightened out.
Ernie was looking at the little book where he always wrote down the day’s picking. He had added our number of boxes up twice, and was going back over it again, when Mr. Gallup said, “Well, Ernie, what seems to be the trouble, can’t you fellows get together?”
“I must be wrong some place, Mr. Gallup,” Ernie said. “I get four hundred and eight boxes, but them kids couldn’t have picked that many.”
“The devil they couldn’t,” Mr. Gallup said. “Didn’t you tell me they were hitting about fifty boxes a day?”
“Well, yes,” Ernie told him, “but Wednesdays and Saturdays the oldest girl laid off in the mornings, and the boys in the afternoons—none of them worked at all Sundays.”
“So,” Mr. Gallup said, “five days a week, two weeks, fifty boxes a day; four hundred and eight sounds reasonable enough to me.”
“Well, Mr. Gallup,” Ernie said, “there ain’t more than forty boxes left on the trees. Where they going to pick their share?”
“Good Lord,” Mr. Gallup laughed, “you don’t think their mother wants them lugging home a hundred boxes of cherries, do you?” Then he turned around to me and asked, “Wouldn’t you rather have cash than cherries?”
“Well, I guess it would depend on how much cash,” I said.
“That ought to be easy. Let’s see, I get six bits a box f.o.b. Denver. Take off a fifth for picking, that’s fifteen cents, then there’s box, packing, and hauling; say a dime for that. Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you a check for fifty dollars, and if you finish out the orchard you can have ten boxes to take home to your mother. How’s that?”
At first I thought I’d have to go and get Grace to help me with the arithmetic, but when he said “fifty dollars,” I just hollered, “That would be fine,” before I even thought about arithmetic.
I thought Mother was going all to pieces when we brought the check home. We’d let Philip and Muriel draw straws to see which one would give it to her, because neither of them had ever earned any money before. Muriel won. It was after dark when we got home—we had worked as late as we could see, so as to finish the orchard—and Mother had worried a good deal about us. She must have heard our feet on the boardwalk to the back door. Just as we came up to the steps she flung the door open, and her voice was pretty sharp when she said, “Where in the world have you children been till this hour of night? I was nearly worried to death, and Ducklegs has been lowing to be milked for the last hour.” Muriel went running up the steps, flapping the check in her hand, and squealing, “Look what we got, Mother; look what we got! Fifty dollars! And it’s all our own . . . and we’re going to get cherries, too.”
For about half a minute Mother looked as though she were going to fall down. Her mouth came part way open, and she teetered a little, as if she was dizzy. Then she put both hands over her face and began to laugh and cry all at the same time. Grace got her to sit down in a chair by the table, but Mother couldn’t hold her hands still, and she couldn’t stop laughing and crying. It must ha
ve been at least five minutes before she could say anything—it seemed like an hour—and Grace had to put a cold towel on her forehead. She was still catching her breath every two or three words, when she said, “Oh, children, you don’t know what a load this takes off my mind. I was so afraid of what’s coming, but now we are all right. Now I know God is taking care of us . . . and we’re always going to be all right.”
Then she said, “Father must be proud, proud, of the way his children are taking care of their mother.” She took her hands down from her face, smiled, and drew us all in close to her. “This is what we’ll do: we’ll all go down to the village in the morning and put this right in the savings bank. Won’t it be wonderful to have money in the bank that we don’t owe to anyone?”
Strawberries followed right after cherries. And I didn’t have to ask Ernie Ballad if Muriel and Philip could pick. He wanted them to. Mr. Gallup had more than ten acres of strawberries and, being up on the hill, they ripened earlier than any others around town. We were the first pickers that Ernie started, and we made the last picking of the season. We always liked to work at Gallup’s better than anywhere else, because he paid us in cash instead of berries, and we got more berries than Mother could can from other places where we picked. Almost everybody gave a quarter of the pick for strawberries, the same as they did for cherries, but Mr. Gallup paid us two cents a quart. Grace was the best picker in any of the fields, and I could do pretty well. We couldn’t make quite so much money a day on strawberries as we did on cherries, and it was a lot harder work, but the strawberries lasted longer. At first, we all thought our backs would break from bending over, and before Ernie showed us how to make pads out of gunny sacks, we wore all the skin off our knees.
Mr. Gallup paid us every week during the strawberry season and, whenever we got in a full week, the check would be for twenty-one or twenty-two dollars. Mother didn’t go with us any more, but we children all went together every time we put a check in the bank.
9
The Fourth of July
USUALLY I didn’t mind taking the other children with me when I went places, but on the Fourth of July I wanted to go to the fairgrounds all by myself. I knew that the fellows from Cooper’s would be there, and all the other men from out around our old ranch. That spring I’d been too busy to think much about them, but, with the Fourth coming on, I got a little bit homesick for the ranch—and for horses. I wondered if the men would remember me—especially Hi. He was Cooper’s range foreman, the one who really taught me to handle a horse. The year before, we had won a trick-riding contest together.
I think Mother guessed how I felt the night before the Fourth, and she let me sit up later than any of the other children. I was sure she’d done it so as to tell me I couldn’t ride any horses, and I talked about most anything else, just to keep her from it. But she only said she would worry if I planned to do any trick-riding, because I was out of practice and would be almost sure to have an accident. I told her she didn’t need to worry; that I hadn’t registered for the trick-riding, and that nobody could ride unless they were registered beforehand.
We were there by the kitchen table for a long time after that, neither of us saying anything. Mother had put her arm around me, and was stroking the hair back from my cowlick with her tender hand. I knew she was thinking about Father’s having been hurt by a horse, but she didn’t mention it. After she’d stroked and stroked, she said, “You’ve been such a fine little man. . . . I can’t have anything happen to you. . . . You will be careful, won’t you?”
Mother seemed terribly tired, and her voice was almost flat. It was two or three minutes after I’d told her I’d be careful, before she spoke again. She got up from the table, smiled, and said, “Ralph, I do want you to have a good time. Gracie will bring the other children down in the afternoon, in time for the races, but why don’t you go early in the morning?”
While she was saying it, she went to the clock shelf, got down her Wedgwood sugar bowl, and took out a half dollar. “Here, Son,” she said; “a man should have some money in his pocket when he goes to a roundup. And don’t try to skimp. I’ll see that Gracie has some for herself and the children, too. My, my, how the time has flown this evening; it’s nearly ten o’clock. We must hurry right to bed and get our rest. . . . Did I think to feed King tonight?” I reminded her that she’d fed King right after supper, picked up the lamp, and we went up the stairs together.
Always, on the Fourth of July and Labor Day, there’d been a roundup, with horse races, trick-riding, and side shows. There were chuck-wagon races, harness races, and Thoroughbred races; but it was the cow-horse races that everybody liked best. Those were the ones that the biggest bets were made on. Some of them were at a half mile—all the way around the track—but most of them were a quarter mile, from the middle of the backstretch to the finish line in front of the grandstand.
None of the fellows from Cooper’s, nor any of the other men from out west of Fort Logan, were there when I got to the fairgrounds. It was early, about eight o’clock, and the races didn’t start until one. But I thought, if some of them were going to race a green horse, they’d bring him there bright and early so he’d have plenty of time to get over being nervous.
There was plenty for me to do, though. The Littleton roundups were the best ones anywhere in Colorado, and they always brought good bucking and running horses from all over the state. They even shipped in outlaws from Wyoming and, sometimes, Thoroughbreds from Kansas or Nebraska. Of course, the Thoroughbreds were kept in the stables, but the bucking stock was in the corrals out in the infield. I went there the first thing. Hi Beckman and Jerry Alder were about the best bronc riders around our part of the state, and having been at both roundups with them the summer before, I knew a lot of the outlaws. There were nearly forty broncs in the big corral, and half a dozen of the meanest ones were closed up in the chutes.
Several of the wranglers around the corrals knew me, so nobody stopped me from climbing up on top of the pole fence to see how many of the buckers I could remember. There were a lot of them: Old Steamboat, Dead Easy, Shasta, Old Faithful, The Piledriver, and a dozen or so others. I was just sitting there looking at them and thinking what Hi had said the last fall about The Piledriver being loco, and how he ought to be taken out of competition before he killed a couple of good men. All at once I was yanked off the fence as though I’d been caught by a swinging hay hook. It was Hi. He swung me clear around him by one leg, and then tossed me up on his shoulder. “By doggies, it’s old Little Britches hisself,” he hollered. “How you been, pardner? Look a-here what I found, Len! It’s Little Britches! We figgered we’d find you some place around here. How you been, kid? It’s a long time, ain’t it? Where’s your chaps and boots?”
I hadn’t worn the cowboy clothes the fellows got for me when I was working at Cooper’s. It hadn’t seemed right to get all dressed up when I knew I wasn’t going to ride. And I couldn’t answer Hi, anyway. He’d pretty near swung all the wind out of me, and besides, I just couldn’t say a word.
By that time Mr. Cooper and a whole bunch of the ranch fellows had come up to the corral. There were Ted Ebberts and Tom Brogan, Fred Aultland, and Jerry Alder; and even Juan, the chuck wagon cook. Usually Hi didn’t talk very much, but that day he was wound up tighter than an eight-day clock. He wouldn’t even stand me down on the ground to shake hands with the other fellows, but kept me sitting on his shoulder, and he squeezed my legs till they hurt. “Betcha my life you can’t guess what I got over to the barn corral,” he whispered to me. It wasn’t really a whisper, either. It was that soft-talk voice he always used to a horse when he wanted to quiet him down. “Betcha my life you can’t guess?”
I could guess. And I was as homesick for him as I was for Hi. I was so excited that my voice went all squeaky. “Is it Sky High?” I asked.
“You’re dang right, it’s Sky High,” he chuckled. “I been ridin’ him every day to keep his foot in. Didn’t put him out to range all winter, but kept him
at the home place so’s he wouldn’t forget his schoolin’. Didn’t I, Len?”
Mr. Cooper nodded his head and got his mouth open to say something, but Hi kept right on going. “Yes, sir, me and Tom’s been puttin’ him through his tricks for the past two weeks, so’s he’d be all ready for ya. . . . Say, didn’t you bring your ridin’ cloze, Little Britches?”
“No,” I said, “I couldn’t ride, anyway. I’m not registered.” I didn’t want to tell him I’d promised Mother I wouldn’t try to do any trick-riding.
Mr. Cooper got his mouth open again, but Hi yelled, “Ain’t registered! Len! you didn’t forget to put Little Britches on the book along with the rest of us? Where’s Ed Bemis this time-a-day?” He started off toward the steward’s shack as fast as he could hobble on his high heels. He was still squeezing my legs and hollering, “By doggies, this kid’s goin’ on the book ’fore ever I straddle a bronc.”
As we started off, Mr. Cooper grabbed Hi’s arm, and laughed, “Get your tail out over the britchin’, Hi, you’ll pull a hamstring. The kid’s marked down second on the book—right between you and Ted. I ain’t saw you so het up since Juan put cayenne pepper in the apple pie.”
For about a minute I didn’t know what to do. It was easy to see how much Hi wanted me to be in the trick-riding with him, and I knew they’d done everything the way they had so as to surprise me. And I knew how much I wanted to ride in the contest, too. I really hadn’t promised Mother I wouldn’t. She’d just said she’d worry if I planned to do any trick-riding, and all I’d said was that I couldn’t do any because I wasn’t even registered. Of course, I didn’t have any idea, then, that I was. I guess I’d have gone right ahead and ridden, if it hadn’t been for Father. I could almost hear him saying all over again, “I don’t know a man I’d rather be in business with, if you can be open and aboveboard, but I won’t have a sneaky partner.” My throat tightened up, and I pulled on Hi’s collar. When he looked up, I said, “I can’t ride the tricks, Hi. Mother’s scared I might get hurt because I’m out of practice . . . and I’m kind of her man now.”