May 9,1996

"Must of been halfway on to Marfa, your grandpa had us rest his cattle with some folks across the Pecos. The ranch house sat down in a basin; the people had lived there long enough to grow some big shade trees. But when we rode up to unsaddle, we seen a man staked on a chain by his hindleg to a tree trunk. A wild-looking feller. Kept making whining sounds and slobbering like a dog.

"That night when the wind stilled, nobody could sleep from that wild man rattling his chain. There was an Eclipse windmill by the bunkhouse. Chain on the balance arm of the mill running up and down made things worse. Don't nevah run from a drouth, boy. Your grandpa lost his whole calf crop by moving them cows out to Marfa. Nevah did know why that feller was tied to a tree."

— Verbatim story taken down at the bunkhouse of the old ranch in the summer of 1948.

A cowboy we called "Pea Picker" told us the tale. The Big Boss was always bringing old hands out to stay at the ranch to heal up from woman troubles, or to stop shaking from a mean drunk. Part of the mystery is this Pea Picker hombre made me promise to keep his right name secret; the other part was, the Boss sat right through the story, like he hadn't heard of his father's cattle being moved West.

Two or three months later, the Boss left the two of us holding a herd of sheep at a waterhole. By then, Pea Picker could ride a gentle horse. To cement my memory, and to test his veracity, I asked him to repeat the story. Once again, he retold it word for word, the sure test of a big league liar, or a man of exceptional memory.

Grandfather Noelke did run from the drouth of 1917. Sent his cattle way out West to good grass on the Texas side of the Mexican border. Pea Picker was wrong about the losses. He lost more than his calf crop. Bandits from across the Big River stole the cows and the calves on the raids made on the Bright Ranch and other outfits close to the border. Uncle Goat Whiskers claimed the return trip took a lot less help as the herd was smaller and the cattle thinner.

But the lesson had to be relearned during the drouth of the 5Os. The pasturage deals of those times needed a bandit raid to relieve the tedium of big freight bills and short head counts. Whiskers and the Big Boss tried bitter Kansas winters on short-haired Texas cows and lost piles of dough feeding hay on deceptive meadows in alien pastures in Central Texas.

They moved too close to the desert one winter and not far enough from the Gulf the next. Some outfits were too stingy to salt the cattle; others put out salt but cheated on the feed. Toward the end, no score was needed of the successes and failures, as the bankers in Angelo had down the figures in a long tally of fluctuating collateral and devastating overhead.

The Big Boss was determined to save his father's bloodlines, especially the sheep. We ran woollies in places where grassburrs and cockleburs ruined the wool and crippled the lambs. We jumped stuff off upper decks onto old loading chutes propped from the sides by planks and loaded them back to come home off flooring supported by rocks and fence posts. Chicken pens and yard fences were converted to crowd pens at weaning time. We rode so many borrowed saddle horses at these places, our off-side cinches looked like the tack from a riding academy.

One pleasant memory was the amount of ranches that still had women to cook for cowboys. I may have written one time of the old gal who packed a lunch for Jose Aguirre and me down at Cedar Canyon on the Pecos before an all day ride. Jose and I were to have a lot of picnics in the shade of water tanks and under mesquite trees for the five years we trailed the Boss's sheep and cattle across the state. I still flinch driving past a gate where he and I rode together on a morning's roundup, or seeing a windmill off on the horizon where we held a few drouth cattle.

Pea Picker's story ended like this: "We stayed around the outfit three days. Might as well not had our bedrolls along for the amount of sleep we got. The owner sat by the back door of the kitchen. Had a Winchester propped behind his chair. Every time he finished a bite, he looked out toward what he called his 'staking tree' and toward the road in from the river.

"One night at supper he up and said for no reason: 'Little John Will cut Uncle George loose one time. He jist sit moaning and looking at the chain. Maudie here grabbed a six-shooter and emptied it out the door. She never has said why she done it.'"