Horse of a Different Color (13 page)
13
The Sign in the Window
M
Y JOY
was short-lived. The next day I received notice that suit had been filed against me by the First State Bank of Cedar Bluffs in the amount of $22,186, principal and interest owed to the plaintiff by the partnership of Wilson and Moody.
I took the notice straight to Bones and found him furious about the filing of the suit. “They know they haven’t a leg to stand on,” he stormed. “I told them before ever they bought the bank stock that there was no partnership between you and Bob. The trouble with them is that they’re new at the banking business, they’re scared, and the examiners will be here any day now. What these fellows are up to, now that Bob has taken bankruptcy, is trying to make a dead loss look to the examiners like a recoverable asset. There isn’t one chance in ten of the case ever coming to trial, but you’ll have to get a lawyer to make answer and defend you anyways. I suppose you’ll go to Jake Noble, won’t you, the same as Bob did?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“You tell him what I’ve said,” he told me, “and that he can count on me for the testimony to win the case if it’s ever brought to trial.”
I went directly to Mr. Noble’s office, gave him the notice, and told him exactly what Bones had said. “I don’t believe you have much to worry about,” he told me. “Not with Harry Kennedy backing you up. I’d be inclined to agree with him that this suit is nothing more than window trimming for the examiners. I’ll get in touch with Harry and file a reply, and if the case is called I’ll appear and get a continuance. I might have to get two or three of them before the suit is finally dropped, and I’ll let you know if there’s anything further to be done. In the meantime, don’t let it worry you.”
A few days later the examiners arrived and a card was put in the bank window, announcing that it was temporarily closed by the State Banking Commission. When Effie tried to pump Bones for information he told her, “The card speaks for itself. There’s nothing further I can tell you or anyone else.”
With the bank closed there would, of course, be no more shipping to be done for it, and Beaver Township had been so stripped of cattle and hogs that there would be little or no trading business for several months. Then too, since the grocery bill had been paid off, Bivans was less happy to be deluged with butter and eggs. The day the sign was put in the bank window I had a long talk with George Miner. That evening Bob and I made our plans for the rest of the year, based on George’s theory of a nine-month cycle in the hog market.
Hog prices had risen steadily during the first nine months of 1920, then plunged downward for six weeks, and were still slipping off, though at a much slower pace. George believed the trend would continue until the cycle ran out in June, and that hog prices would then rise rather sharply, but to nowhere near the 1920 peak. Bob and I decided to trade the stock we had on hand for weanling pigs, corn-feed them through the spring and early summer, and market them as bacon hogs in July. We wouldn’t operate as partners, but each would own his half of the hogs and furnish half the feed, then we’d split the profit. I told him that if he kept working as he had been, he could have all the profits from butchering, and half the net income from trading and shipping.
We had no difficulty in trading our stock for a hundred and twenty-two pigs, and Bob did excellently on the butchering. We had Effie put out line calls that we couldn’t take butter, eggs, and chickens any longer, but would exchange four pounds of beef or three of pork for each bushel of ear-corn brought in. By the end of February Bob had nearly a thousand bushels of corn cribbed up in the stackyard, and owed me only a hundred and fifty dollars for stock we’d slaughtered. In the meantime I’d collected and shipped the hogs I had coming to me for bulls and boars, and they’d brought nearly twelve hundred dollars.
From our March shipping profits Bob and I bought enough more pigs to bring our herd up to an even two hundred. I ran out of feed and it seemed a shame to use corn from our last year’s crop when I knew that a good many farmers would like some of it for seed. At George Miner’s suggestion, I had Effie put out a line call, saying that I’d trade one bushel of seed corn for two of feed corn. The trading brought in thirty-five hundred bushels of ear-corn that was plenty good for hog feed, and I still had enough seed left for our own field.
With Beaver township fairly stripped of livestock I was obliged to extend my trading territory farther to the west each week. When the distances became too great for traveling back and forth every day I stayed out in the territory all week, then shipped from the nearest railroad town on Saturdays. Bob stayed at home to take care of the butchering business, feed the hogs, and get ready for the spring planting. Although he’d ridiculed my fertilizing the corn field the previous spring, he began hauling manure without any suggestion from me. By the end of April he’d spread a thick layer of it over the entire south field, plowed it under, and planted the seed.
The weather turned unseasonably warm on the first of May, Bob had to quit butchering for lack of refrigeration, and for a few days I felt as though I had spring fever. My head and joints ached, my mouth became so dry I could hardly swallow, and I didn’t want anything to eat but canned tomatoes and cold milk. Then pimples broke out on my arms, legs, and the back of my neck. By the end of the week there were thirty-one of them, swollen the size of egg yolks, bright red, and as painful to the touch as if hot coals were being pressed into me. I had trouble in collecting and shipping the stock I’d bought, and Sunday morning I went to see Dr. DeMay. He had no idea what had caused the eruptions, but said they were carbuncles, poulticed them, and told me I’d have to come back every day until they’d all been brought to heads, lanced, and the cores removed.
To be where I could easily get to Dr. DeMay’s office every morning, I went back to working my old valley route in Beaver Township. There had been considerable change on the route since the end of the year. Most of the young farmers whose cattle and hogs had been foreclosed upon had been obliged to go into bankruptcy. A few had made loans from friends or relatives and were still hanging on; renting the land they had lost, trying to farm with too few horses, and to start new herds with a couple of brood sows and a few heifer calves. The rest had quit; some moving away, and others going to work for the more prosperous of the valley farmers.
Every man who quit had brought back the milch cow or two he’d had on loan, and each time Effie had put in a plea for some newly arrived sharecropper whose only cow had gone dry. Since the beginning of March several “croppers” had moved into the township from Arkansas or Missouri to farm the land lost by boys who had quit. They’d come by railroad, bringing their families and what little furniture, farm equipment, and livestock they had in a single emigrant car—simply a boxcar with a hole for a stovepipe to stick out through.
There were few cattle for sale in Beaver Valley, but the week my carbuncles were being lanced I bought two carloads of hogs. Saturday noon I hauled some corn to the Cedar Bluffs siding for baiting the cars, but the westbound train was late. It was a beautiful day, and Dad Hanes was sitting on the edge of the platform, whittling a stick and spitting tobacco juice out across the track. I hitched the team and went to sit beside him. He didn’t look up, but asked, “How’s the boils doin’?”
“Better,” I said, got out my jackknife, and started whittling a horse’s head from a scrap of soft wood I’d picked up.
There was no reason to ask Dad when the train would get in, because he didn’t know any more about it than I did, so we just sat and whittled. A hundred yards down the siding, just beyond the grain elevator, there was an emigrant car that had come in from Arkansas the day before. We’d been whittling for about ten minutes when I heard an angry-sounding voice shout, “Shut up and stay in there!”
I glanced up to see the tousled heads of three or four children in the car doorway, and a big stoop-shouldered man starting along the track toward us. He came on steadily until he was directly in front of Dad, then folded his arms across his chest and announced belligerently, “I’m movin’ onto the Bill Hornbuckle place. What kind of neighbors will I find there?”
For the first time, Dad looked up from his whittling, turned his head to spit, and asked in his quiet twang, “What kind of neighbors did you have where you come from?”
The mention of his Arkansas neighbors seemed to drive the man into a frenzy. In as violent an outburst of swearing as I ever heard, he told us they were the worst bunch of thieves and scoundrels in the world. When the tirade ended, Dad looked up again, spit accurately at a rail, and said mildly, “You’ll find ’em just the same here,” then went on whittling as if he were alone. For a moment the man bristled as though he might attack, then dropped his arms and lumbered back down the track.
With my carbuncles healed, the corn planted, our hogs growing like mushrooms, and the shipping business making us a good living, Saturday nights became our blowout time. When I’d get home from the territory Marguerite and the girls would be dressed in their Sunday best, Bob would have the chores done, and Betty Mae would come running to meet me, calling, “Huwwy up, Balp! We’re going to see Bibbins.”
To her, going to Oberlin was a trip to see John Bivans—looked forward to by both of them with equal joy. She’d hardly allow me time to take a bath and change into clean shirt and jeans, then we’d be off for town—Marguerite and the baby in front with Bob: Arvis, Betty Mae, a basket of eggs, and me in the back. We didn’t spare expenses but had the dollar dinner at the best restaurant, then went to the early movie. Before the show was half over we usually lost Betty Mae, but it didn’t worry us. She’d have sneaked out to the store, and we’d find Bivans waiting on trade with her riding pickaback on his shoulders, munching cookies and jabbering like a little monkey. If we weren’t his favorite customers he made us feel that we were, and he was certainly our favorite storekeeper.
Actually, our Saturday night blowouts were far from wild or extravagant, but they were enjoyable, and although we were working hard for every dollar we made, I’d seldom in my life been more contented. I’m sure Bob and Marguerite felt the same.
Since the bank closing Bones had aged terribly, avoided any question about its affairs, and kept to his house most of the time. The “temporarily closed” sign was still in the bank window, though everyone knew that the examination must have long since been completed. None of us had seen or heard from the new bankers since closing day, and not even George Miner had any idea what might be going on.
Mr. Noble phoned on the third Sunday in May, asking me to come to his house that afternoon, and to bring any books or records I’d kept on the livestock feeding business. When I got there he showed me into the parlor and told me, “The affairs of the Cedar Bluffs Bank have been taken over by the State Banking Commission and a receiver appointed. He’s a fine and reasonable man, but he’s obliged to prosecute any suits that have been instituted, and the bank’s suit against you is scheduled for trial before a justice of the peace on June tenth.”
For nearly an hour he questioned me about my dealings with Bob and the way we’d done our buying, feeding, and selling. He’d evidently spent several hours with Bones, for he had eight or ten pages of notes about our loans and the various agreements we’d made, including the provision for separating Bob’s stock from mine at any time by one-and-one choice.
My biggest worry was that I’d neglected to have Bones write on my last two notes, as he’d done on the first one, that he guaranteed not to hold me liable for any debt I hadn’t personally contracted. “It’s the intent of the parties that governs in such matters,” Mr. Noble told me, “and Harry Kennedy states definitely that all your loans were made with that understanding on his part. With him standing squarely behind you—and he is—I don’t foresee much danger of an adverse decision.”
He walked to the door with me, and as I was leaving he said, “You might ask Bob and George Miner to drop in at my office the next time they come to town. There’s no need for either of them to make a special trip, but there are a few questions I’d like to ask them. Don’t let this thing worry you, and go right on about your business in the usual way. I shouldn’t have to bother you again for a couple of weeks.”
Bob and George went to see him Monday, but for the next couple of weeks I was so busy that I had no time for worrying about the trial. I was working territory in the northwestern corner of Kansas, and business was good. The ranches were large, and I was sometimes able to buy eight or ten cattle from a single rancher. Our feed-lot hogs, nearing the two-hundred-pound mark, were stowing away fifty bushels of corn a day, and Bob ran out. As soon as we were sure our May profit was going to be a big one he bought twelve hundred bushels at forty cents, but had to haul it six miles.
On the last Sunday in May Mr. Noble phoned, asking me to come to his house again. When I got there he had only a few more questions to ask, and as I was leaving he said, “That just about wraps it up until June tenth. Barring the uncertainties of law, I can foresee nothing that should prevent us from defending against the action handily.”
14
Flood
T
HURSDAY
forenoon, June 2, I was working in the Republican Valley southwest of St Francis. There I heard of a cloudburst at Atwood, thirty-odd miles up Beaver Valley from Cedar Bluffs. Cloudbursts weren’t uncommon in spring, so I paid little attention to the report and spent a couple of hours dickering over a few cattle. When I moved on, the next rancher told me that a second tremendous cloudburst had followed the first and that Atwood was flooded, with water at the highest point ever known. Beaver Creek was certain to overflow at Cedar Bluffs in any such flood and Marguerite, the children, and the stock might be in serious danger unless there was plenty of advance warning, so I put in a phone call right away.
Effie said that word had been telephoned through within minutes after the first cloudburst struck, that she’d put out line calls up and down the valley, and that everyone was safe. Bob, she said, had left for a load of corn just before the word came through, but made it back in time to get the family, horses, and cows out. “Bill Justice and a couple of boys from town here fetched out the furniture,” she told me, “and they’re down there with Bob now, trying to get the hogs out. You’d best to get here just as fast as you can. Don’t try to come straight east on the Phillipsburg road; the Atwood bridge is out, and you can’t come by way of McCook because our bridge here is out. You’ll have to go south to Goodland and come on to Oberlin by way of Colby and Selden.”
Effie hadn’t told me that the probability of getting our hogs out was far from good, but I didn’t need to be told. The bridge on the McCook-Oberlin road—no more than fifty yards from the house—was four feet higher than our feed lot. If the bridge had been washed out there was little doubt that the feed lot had gone with it. The only hope was that Bob had managed to get the hogs to high ground before the bridge went.
The old Maxwell nearly rattled itself to pieces, but covered the 140-mile circuitous route from St. Francis to Cedar Bluffs in three hours. There was no need of my having rushed, though, and nothing I could do when I got there. From the corner where the road pitched downward to the town from the top of the bluff, Beaver Creek looked like the Missouri River.
Swirling brown water, spotted with floating buildings and all manner of debris, covered the entire valley floor. At the far side, the buildings of the Miner place stood at the water’s edge, the corrals already awash. On the near side, the eighteen or twenty houses of Cedar Bluffs huddled like frightened sheep at the foot of the high divide, saved from the flood only by the railroad grade that skirted the south edge of the valley. All I could see of our place was the tops of trees marking the course of the creek, the peak of the submerged house, and the bunkhouse—afloat and apparently caught in the big cottonwoods behind the barn. What puzzled me was a yellowish cast to the water in an irregular circle covering most of our corn field.
Guy and Effie Simons’s house was farthest back in the village, safely above any danger from the flood. There I found Marguerite and the children, frightened and worried, but unharmed. Bob, with the rest of the men, was filling gunny sacks with dirt and piling them along the railroad track to form a higher dike. He was mudsoaked, bedraggled, and nearer discouraged than I’d ever seen him.
“Daggone it,” he told me, “we done the best we could, but never saved one measly hog. A wall of water three foot high hit us before ever we got ’em out of the lot. It washed ’em away like rolling logs, and we’d a-gone with ’em if we hadn’t been on horseback. I’ve seen lots of floods, but never the likes of this one. The water come up so fast it was knee-high to a mounted man before we could get out of the dooryard, and when the bridge went out it stove the feed lot fence all to kindlin’. The worst of it is that there wasn’t any need of us losing a single daggoned hog. If I’d been there when the line call come through, instead of off . . . ”
“Forget it!” I told him. “A man has nothing to grieve over if he’s done the best he could, and we’re a long way from licked. There’s still time to replant the corn if this water drains off in a few days, and before another winter we’ll be right on top of the heap again. But if we don’t get this dike built up in a hurry the town’s going to be flooded. The water has risen six inches since I got here.”
Until the crest passed, just before sunset, every man and boy in town, and many who came down from the divide to help us, had to work furiously to build the railroad grade high enough to keep water out of the town. It was possible only because the creek channel turned away from the railroad just above Cedar Bluffs, crossed the valley to surround our buildings and feed lot in a U-shaped loop, then returned to the railroad line east of town. Strangely, the flow of water past our dike was sluggish and moving up the valley instead of down.
Old Kitten, being straight mustang, could swim like an otter, and I could do fairly well myself. Partly to find what was causing the backwash, but more to discover the reason for the yellowish appearance of the water covering our corn field, I decided to swim Kitten out there. Instead of bridling her, I braided a two-foot strip of rawhide into her mane, stripped to my B.V.D.’s, wound the rawhide around one hand, and plunged her off the built-up railroad grade at the shipping pens. The moment we hit the water I slid off her back and turned her head in the direction of the barely visible house peak, straight across what had been our corn field that morning.
The water was deep enough that Kitten swam over the fence without touching it, and by the time we were a hundred feet out from the track the reason for the yellowish color became joyfully apparent. The surface of the water was blanketed with floating ears of corn, moving in a clockwise direction as if they were laid out on a thirty-acre, slowly-revolving table. I eased Kitten into the edge of the mass and soon learned the reason for it. Trash and broken planks from the bridge and feed lot fence had lodged in the limbs of the big cottonwoods at the elbow-bend of the creek. It formed a bulwark against which the current hurled itself in a roaring, foam-crested torrent and was deflected southward across what had been the stackyard. Friction of the current as it followed the U-shaped channel was forcing water inside the U to turn in a slow-moving whirlpool.
To insure good drainage, I’d set the corn cribs on a knoll in the stackyard, standing about four feet higher than the surrounding land. That had kept the cribs from being swept away by the first wall of water, the whirlpool had been set in motion, and the corn had simply floated when the water level reached the tops of the fifteen-foot-high cribs.
There had been well over three thousand bushels in the cribs, and from the size of the floating mass I didn’t believe that we’d lost 10 percent of it—yet. If we’d been well-equipped fishermen we might have been able to surround the corn with a purse net and tow it ashore. But with neither nets nor boats there was nothing we could do but hope that by some miracle our corn would be left behind when the flood had passed.
In spite of all the change in Bob since the end of the year, he had never lost the illusion that he’d someday find a rainbow with a pot of gold at both ends. When I told him that little if any of our corn had yet been swept away, he began talking about putting in another two hundred pigs as soon as the flood went down. But Marguerite must have had a terrible fright between the time of Effie’s line call and his getting home to take her and the children out. Though the water level had dropped a foot and all danger was over before dark, she couldn’t look out across the valley without trembling uncontrollably. She wouldn’t let the baby out of her arms, or Arvis and Betty Mae out of her sight. At any mention of going back to the place she became almost terror stricken. In hope that talking to her mother would quiet her nerves, Effie put through a call to Junction City that evening, but it didn’t help much.
Nearly every bed in Cedar Bluffs was filled with women and children evacuated from homes on the floor of Beaver Valley, and the men spent the night wherever they had taken their livestock. Bob and I slept under his load of furniture, just outside Simon’s corral, but we were up at the first gray of dawn. The water level had fallen about six feet during the night, but when the sun came up it showed no yellow cast to the brown water that still circled slowly above our corn field.
The current above the channel was still swift but no longer a raging torrent. As near as we could make out from the railroad embankment, the water was even with the eaves of the house, and the bunkhouse appeared to have settled onto the barn roof. Not far outside the southeast corner of our corn field the creek had cut a new channel, ripping out the railroad along the foot of the bluffs for which the town was named. The water covering the corn field was draining off slowly in the direction of the washout, though the slope of the land was slightly the other way.
With our corn having disappeared Bob could find no rainbow, to say nothing of a pot of gold. He tried to keep up an appearance of confidence for Marguerite’s benefit, but couldn’t do a good enough job to deceive her. All day Friday he and I rode along the south margin of the flood below town, hoping to find some of our hogs that had managed to swim until they’d reached high ground, but we found only their bloating carcasses. The warning had come early enough that our neighbors had been able to save their horses, cattle, and most of their hogs. Almost no poultry had been saved from places on the valley floor, and drowned turkeys, hens, and roosters hung from the box elder trees all along the creek channel.
We and most of the men along the south side of the valley spent all day Saturday plowing trenches just above the mud line, dragging in carcasses, and burying them before the stench became unbearable. Although the valley telephone lines were down and all communication cut off, we knew that conditions on the north side must be equally bad, for we could see men with teams and stone boats dragging carcasses up from the margin of the flood.
When we went back to the village that evening, Effie took me aside and asked, “Has Bob got anything left that he can call his own besides that load of furniture?”
“Certainly,” I told her. “He doesn’t owe a nickel, his big team is worth four hundred dollars even with conditions as they are, and there’s the Buick, his saddle mare, and a couple of milch cows. I suppose you know that he’d just paid nearly five hundred dollars for corn and was hauling the last load of it home when the flood struck. But he still ought to have about a hundred dollars left, and I owe him seventy from last week’s shipment.”
“Well,” she said, “I don’t reckon it’s any news to you, but Marguerite’s expectin’ in September. When a woman’s that way she’s liable to get lots of notions into her head that she wouldn’t get otherways, and that’s what’s happened to Marguerite. She’s as scared of taking them little children back to live in that house again as the devil is of holy water, and ever since she talked to her mother she’s been so homesick she can’t hardly stand it. It’ll be leastways a month before that house can be dried out and cleaned up enough to live in, and she’ll go stark-starin’ crazy if she has to sit here that long with nothin’ to do but worry. What I been thinking was that if Bob could afford the train fare he’d ought to send that girl home to visit her folks till the house is ready and signs of the flood kind of wore off from the valley. Like as not, by that time she’ll be over her fright enough that she’ll be glad to come back. Why don’t you kind of drop a hint to Bob?”
I didn’t drop a hint, but told Bob straight-out what Effie had said, and that I thought she was right. He did too, and I never saw a woman happier than Marguerite was when he told her. There wasn’t much getting ready to be done, and Sunday noon she and the girls took the train from Oberlin.
By Monday the water had drained off enough that the creek was back in its gorge, leaving the floor of Beaver Valley a half-mile-wide morass of soft mud, spotted with mounds of wreckage and debris. From what remained of the railroad grade, Bob and I could see that the house and barn—protected from the main current by the big cottonwoods and the built-up bridge approach on the Oberlin-McCook road—appeared not to be badly damaged. The bunkhouse sat squarely atop the low-pitched roof of the barn, but all the smaller buildings were completely gone, along with the haystacks, corn cribs, and most of the feed-lot fence. Miraculously, the woven wire fence around the corn field looked to be very slightly damaged, though banked high with debris and mud.
Late Tuesday afternoon I thought the mud might have dried out enough to hold up my weight. Wanting to find out how much damage had actually been done to the house, I took off my boots and socks, rolled up my jeans, and set out from the shipping pens. The bank of the railroad grade was fairly firm, but at the first step onto cultivated ground I sank to my knee, and on the way down my bare toes raked across something that felt like an ear of corn. I reached into the muck with my hand and found the ear buried under five or six inches of silt that had been brought down by the flood.
There was no sense in trying to reach the house. But since I was already as dirty as if I’d fallen into a hog wallow I took a few more steps, and at each one my foot struck an ear of corn. I spent an hour wading around the field, and discovered the story of our corn as well as if I’d been able to watch every ear. The reason for its disappearing the first night was that the cobs became waterlogged and the kernels coated with mud, causing the ears to sink a few inches below the surface. Their position left no doubt that they had continued circling, and had settled gradually with the silt as the water, slowed by the debris caught in the fence, drained slowly away. The number of ears I found made me believe that nearly all of our corn was still right there on the place. Although buried under a few inches of mud, I thought it could be salvaged by turning hogs into the field as soon as it had dried out enough to bear their weight.
After scrubbing myself under the fire hydrant at the grain elevator, I took Bob to the edge of the field and showed him the bushel or so of corn I’d dug out of the mud. I explained why I believed that three thousand bushels might still be on the place, and told him how I thought it could be salvaged. He agreed that most of the corn might be there, but said it would rot before hogs ever rooted deep enough to find it. We were trying to figure out some other way of salvaging when Harry Witham shouted from the elevator, “Telephone!” As we hurried back along the track he sang out, “It’s for you, Bob. Effie say it’s Marguerite calling from Junction City.”