Little Britches

Illustrated by Tran Mawicke
W • W • NORTON & COMPANY • INC • 1962
Scanned by Highroller and RyokoWerx
Proofed by eBooksmith

I NEVER really knew Father very well till we moved to the ranch on the Fort Logan-Morrison road, not far from Denver. That was just after my eighth birthday—right at the end of 1906. When we lived in East Rochester, New Hampshire, he worked in the woolen mill, but it wasn't good for his lungs. He was sick in bed the winter before we moved—the one after Hal was a year old.

Cousin Phil lived in Denver, and came to see us the next spring, right after Father got well enough to go back to work. I liked him a lot. He had a gold front tooth, and wore a derby hat cocked way over on his right ear. And he sold goldmine stock.

One afternoon when Grace and I got home from school, he and Mother were talking in the parlor. I didn't have much chance to listen, because Mother told Grace and me to take Philip and Muriel outside to play till suppertime. But I did hear Cousin Phil say, "Why, Mame, there just isn't any work at all to ranching in Colorado. We have three hundred and sixty-five sunshiny days in a year, and all a man has to do is toss out seed in the spring and harvest his crop in the fall. With my connections, I could make a deal to put you folks on one of the finest ranches in the country, where you'd have all the milk, butter, and eggs you could eat, and half of all the crops you could raise. Why, in one year Charlie'd be a new man—and make as much money as he'd make here in East Rochester in a lifetime."

I guess Father and Mother believed what he said, because there were letters from him all through the summer and fall. Then, just after Christmas, we had our auction and took the train for Denver—all seven of us: Father and Mother and Grace, Muriel, Philip, Hal, and I. Grace was older than I was, but the rest were younger. All the way out on the train, I kept guessing how big the house and barns on our ranch would be, and how many hundred horses and cows there'd be on it.

It was late when we got to Denver, so we rented a room in a little hotel on Seventeenth Street. The next day, Cousin Phil lent us his rubber-tired buggy and Prince, his sleek little seal-brown driving horse. Father let me go to see our ranch with him and Mother. I didn't really have to ask him to let me go. I guess he just knew how much I wanted to and said to Mother, "Do you think there'd be enough room for you and the baby if we squeezed Ralph in between us?"

We could see our new house from a couple of miles away. We knew it must be ours, because Cousin Phil had told us it was three and a half miles west of Fort Logan—the first house on the Morrison wagon road. From the hill beyond the Fort, it looked like a little dollhouse sitting on the edge of a great big table, with a brown tablecloth smoothed out flat all around it. It was right near the edge of the mesa, where the land started dipping northward into Bear Creek Valley. Away toward the south there were brown, rolling hills, as though the tablecloth had been wrinkled a little. And not far beyond it, toward the west, the hogbacks rose like big loaves of golden-brown bread sitting on the table. High above them the snowcaps of the Rockies glistened in the afternoon sunshine.

As we came nearer, it looked less like a dollhouse and more like just what it was: a little three-room cottage that had been hauled out from Denver. It was propped up on four cribs of mover's timbers, and sat at the corner of an unfenced quarter section of barren prairie land. The chimney was broken off at the roof and most of the windows were smashed. When we turned off the wagon road, a jack rabbit leaped out from under the house and raced away through the clumps of cactus and soapweed. But it was going to be
our
ranch—it looked all right to me.

Father and Mother didn't say a word, but when I looked up, the bunches of muscle at the sides of Father's jaws were working out and in. They always did that when he was trying not to get mad. Mother's face was as white as Hal's stocking cap, and her eyes looked as though she were going to cry, but she didn't. After Father tied Prince and helped Mother out of the buggy, he held me up so I could look in one of the windows. There wasn't much to see, except that the floor was covered with broken glass, and plaster that had fallen off the walls and ceiling.

While I was still looking in the window, Mother said, "Charlie, I don't see how in the world we can do it… with only three hundred and eighty-seven dollars. I thought, of course, there'd be good buildings and stock and machinery on it. We've got a lot of planning to do." Her voice sounded hoarse, and seemed to be coming from way down in her throat.

Father didn't say anything until he had stood me down and taken Hal from Mother. Then he put his arm around her shoulder and hugged her up against him. Father was real tall, but slim, and Mother's head fitted in under his chin. "There's only one thing to plan about, Mame," he said, "and that's getting tickets home while we've still got the money. I won't have you live in any such God-forsaken place as this."

They stood that way for two or three minutes while Father's hand patted up and down on Mother's shoulder. And there wasn't a sound, except that dry little cough that Father had then. When Mother lifted her head, her lips were pressed tightly together, and her voice wasn't trembly any more. "The Bible says, 'Trust in the Lord and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.' The hand of God has led us here; we have set our shoulders to the wheel, and we will not turn back."

The next two days were not good ones for me. We stayed right in the hotel room, and Father was away from early in the morning till long after dark. There was nothing for us children to do, and I guess we made Mother nervous. Grace and I had two or three squabbles. She was the oldest, nearly two years older and always smarter than I, and I always got the spankings. When Father came in, the second night, Mother said, "Ralph can neither stay out of mischief himself, nor let any of the others. I declare, I shall go frantic if I have to have him cooped up in this little room another day."

Father didn't scold me at all, though. He just put his arm around Mother's shoulder, and said, "There, there, Mame. I know how hard it is for all of you. We'll get out of here just as soon as we can."

The next morning I went with Father, and we got a team of horses, and a wagon and harness. They were all kind of old and secondhand, but they were
ours
and I was proud of them. Father let me name the horses. I called the white one Bill, and the other one Nig.

We got up before daylight every morning for the next two weeks, Sunday and all. First, we'd pick up any of the bargains Mother had found for the house, then buy secondhand lumber, plaster, glass, and other things we needed, on our way out to the ranch. And Father would never stop working till it was so dark he couldn't see to drive a nail.

He got a man to come and help him dig the well, and some days Cousin Phil drove out and worked on the barn with us. It just had three sides and a corrugated iron roof. By Thursday night the barn was all finished, and Father had built a new chimney, patched the places where the plaster had fallen off, put glass in all the windows, and made front and back steps for the house. My part of the job was to sweep up all the broken glass and plaster, and pile up all the little pieces of board beside the back steps. There was nothing left to build but the privy.

It was just five o'clock when Father and I drove up to the depot platform Friday morning. After the baggage man had found our two trunks, we went around to the hotel and picked up everything we wouldn't need for one more night in the room. We had to tiptoe in to get the things, because all the other children were still asleep in the shakedown. I hadn't seen any of them when they were awake since the Sunday before.

The sun looked only about a foot high when we stopped at a feed barn on the outskirts of Denver. Father bought a sack of oats and four bales of hay there, and we fed the horses. While they were eating, we went to a little store up the street, and Father bought a pail of milk and a whole custard pie. We ate it sitting on the curb beside our wagon. Father knew just how to buy a good breakfast.

At Fort Logan we stopped at Mr. Green's general store, and bought more groceries than I thought we could ever eat. There was a barrel of flour and a hundred-pound sack of navy beans; and salt pork, molasses, sugar, rice, and a whole case of evaporated milk. We got out to the ranch long before noon.

Cousin Phil drove out that afternoon and helped us with the privy. Father sawed the two-by-fours and spiked them together. Then, while he was making the door and the seat, Cousin Phil cut boards, and nailed them on the sides and roof. He cut some of them too long, and some too short. After a while he tossed the folding ruler over to Father, and said, "This confounded rule isn't accurate, Charlie."

Father folded the ruler up and put it in his pocket. He didn't say anything till Cousin Phil had gone for another board, then he said to me, "If you just remember to measure twice and saw once, you'll get along all right."

The last thing we did was to tie Bill and Nig in their new barn, and Father hung the harness on spikes he had driven high up on the barn wall. He said that was so the coyotes couldn't gnaw on them during the night.

The sun had gone down, and the whole sky beyond the mountains looked as though it were on fire. I looked back at our ranch as Cousin Phil drove us in to Denver, and I wouldn't have traded it for anything else on earth.

A narrow-gauge spur of the Colorado and Southern left the main line at Petersburg Junction, then followed Bear Creek to Fort Logan, where it climbed to the tableland, and ran west to Morrison. It was a single-track line, and crossed the center of our ranch. There were no passenger trains, but one freight each day had a passenger car hooked on the end of it.

We were all down at the depot early Saturday morning, and Father asked the conductor if they would stop the train so we could get off on our own place. As we were climbing down, the engineer blew three sharp toots on his whistle, and we all looked toward where he was pointing at something on the track ahead.

A quarter of a mile west there was a deep gulch where, after storms, water from the hills had cut the land away in running off to the creek. The railway crossed it on a high trestle, and something that looked to me like a big black whale was floundering around in the middle of it.

Father ran toward the front of the train, and I ran after him. The engineer cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted, "Horse through the trestle. Is it yours?"

Father motioned for Mother to go to the house as he swung up on the engine. But he could run so much faster than I that the train started moving when I was at the back end of the first box car. After going everywhere Father had for the last couple of weeks, I didn't want to be left behind then, so I grabbed hold of the foot rods and pulled myself up. I heard Mother scream, "Ralph!" but I held on tight, and the train didn't stop till it got to the trestle.