The Diamond Hitch. Frank O'Rourke
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on the old U. S. trail going up into the Costilla.”
“Sounds like a pretty good outfit,” Hank said.
“It was,” Dewey said. “The ranch was twenty-eight by seventy-one miles. There was streams in every valley, and springs come out of most hills. Plenty of grass when it showed from under the snow. But hell, Hank, it gets cold in that country. Nothin’ uncommon to get ten, fifteen below zero.”
Hank looked around them at the rocky slopes and the cloudless sky that forewarned of blistering summer days. Hank said wistfully, “We could stand some of that cold, running water here.”
“Say,” Dewey said, “about this horse-breaking. How many you got to break, are they all raw broncs, how does the horse-breaking fit in with cooking on this outfit?”
“You ever done both before?”
“In New Mexico,” Dewey said. “You know, when I’m in camp and cooking don’t take full time, I like to use that spare time breaking a few broncs. But very seldom out of the breaking pen back in New Mexico because if a man has stuff acookin’ and turns his bronc out, he’s apt to stampede and you might not get back till everything is burnt up. What do you think about me asking how much extra some bronc breaking would be worth?”
Hank said, “What’s Cochrane payin’ you for cooking?”
“Eighty-five a month.”
“What do you think about forty a month for whatever bronc breaking you can do?” Hank said. “But understand, I don’t want you to neglect the cooking job. Cooking and keeping these cowboys fed is worth a lot more than the bronc breaking.”
“Fair enough,” Dewey said. “My breaking’ll be in the corrals, hackamore breaking them because I understand these broncs has got to be turned out every night to feed.”
“That’s right.”
“Well,” Dewey said, “I cain’t have drag ropes on over two or three at a time, so when that Indian boy wrangles the horses he can pick up the drag ropes on a couple of broncs and tie them to a post and then, as I get time, I can tie up a foot on those broncs and saddle and unsaddle ’em and as they go along I can ride them quite a bit in the corrals and have them pretty well on the way to be broken by the time roundup is over.”
“That’s fine,” Hank said. “So the price is agreed on?”
“Suits me fine,” Dewey said. “I sure don’t like laying around camp. Once I get things lined up, I can turn out the meals pronto. I got fifty pounds of corn-meal and onions and sage, and I think a good roast beef will produce just as good corn-meal dressing as turkey or chicken, and it sure breaks the monotony of these sourdough catheads.”
“Sounds good to me,” Hank said, “but I never heard of that corn-meal dressing before.”
“Hell,” Dewey said, “you never get too old to learn, Hank.”
Hank Marlowe laughed softly. “You New Mexico punchers might not be worth a damn in Arizona, but your cooking routine sounds fine to me. . . . Squab, keep them burros moving!”
Hank was evidently satisfied with their talk because he rode out on the flanks through the remainder of the day, scouting the country as they moved along. They hit the main ranch at five o’clock, unpacked the burros, and carried the groceries into the kitchen and the big storeroom at the other end of the ranch house. The boys had arrived earlier but nobody had started a fire in the kitchen, so Dewey built a blaze in the double-oven Majestic Range and began throwing a fast meal together. Squab carried in plenty of dry piñon wood and hung around close, watching Dewey with sharp black eyes in a dark face that never moved with outward emotion. Dewey cooked a feed of baking powder biscuits, cream gravy, beef, and stewed apples for dessert. After supper Squab helped him clean up the kitchen and once everybody had spread their bedrolls on the grass outside, Dewey got right to work on his sourdough.
He boiled two medium-sized potatoes until they began falling apart. He strained them through a cloth that took the juice off, poured that juice into the five-gallon wooden keg that originally held kraut. He added a cup of sugar and then flour until he had a thin batter. He set the keg on the hot water reservoir and clamped the wooden lid down tight. The lid had two cleats on top and side handles, so when packing it, the pack cover fitted down over the keg and the diamond hitch held it snug all the way.
Dewey had to keep the keg warm all night. He got up at two and made sure the sourdough was warm. Whenever it started working—some folks called it rotting—it was on the road and would be ready for making biscuits in another twenty-four to thirty-six hours, depending on weather conditions. If the weather was rainy and damp, it took sourdough twelve to twenty-four hours longer to work than in bright, warm times.
Next morning the boys brought in sixty head of burros from surrounding hills and canyons. Dewey wondered what in hell they wanted with so many burros, but the best way to learn was keep his mouth shut and listen. He watched the boys feed each burro a quart of oats and half a pound of cotton-seed cake; next morning those burros were right in camp, johnny-on-the-spot, braying and bawling for more. Then Raymond told Dewey that after being fed that way three or four days, the burros would always come back here.
That night Dewey made sourdough biscuits along with a big beef roast. The boys ate everything and yelled for more. They were talking easy with him by then, for they knew he could handle the cooking job, and he was on time with meals when they rode in tired and hungry. Driver Gobet said, “Dewey, where’d you learn to cook?”
“All over,” Dewey said. “When I was a kid in Texas, then on shows and around cow outfits.”
“Raymond was sayin’ you rode and bulldogged,” Jim Thornhill said. “You ever stick a bronc till the last whistle?”
Dewey grinned and took a seat on the doorstep facing the others who were sprawled out on the grass with their coffee cups and after-supper smokes. “I stuck a few,” he said, “but I sure been in plenty of balloon ascensions.”
“Was you ever at Prescott?” George Spradley said. “I was there four years back.”
“Not that year,” Dewey said. “But I hit the show two years ago.”
“When’d you start bronc ridin’ and bulldogging like that?” Driver Gobet asked.
“I was thirteen,” Dewey Jones said. “My older brother was on a show; I run off and joined him.”
“It sure always sounded to me like a good life,” Spradley said. “That big prize money and all that travel.”
Dewey Jones looked at them, and through them, down the lost years at all the shows and the money that came and went so fast, at the broken bones and the broke spells when a man tightened his belt and hoped for luck in the next town. They saw that life with the eyes of anyone who did not know, and he saw it as he had lived it, and he could not lie to them.
“No,” Dewey Jones said gently. “It ain’t a good life, George. I been at it, off and on, for sixteen years, an’ I got off the train in Holbrook with a dollar and eighty cents to my name. There’s a few boys can make it pay, but most of us have got to work half the year to make enough money to catch the next big show and do some more hoping again. If I had any sense I’d quit.”
“You goin’ back?” Raymond asked.
“I figure,” Dewey Jones said, “on hittin’ the Las Vegas, New Mexico show right off this job. I’ll give it a good try. If I don’ finish in the money I ought to be old enough to get some of that sense.”
“I rode at Prescott,” George Spradley said. “Four summers ago. I figured I knew one end of a bronc from the other, Dewey. I sure found out different. Them boys are really good.”
“You get that way,” Dewey Jones said. “For whatever it means or what it’s worth.”
Hank wandered off to the storeroom and came back with a thirty-foot length of new lariat rope cut from the big coil. He sat down