She said, "Well, don't you ever do that again."
I said, "Okay, I won't unless you tell me to again."
I often wondered if some of my brothers sort of hated me because I wouldn't drink and gamble with them. It wasn't that I thought I was too good to do those things. I just didn't enjoy doing them and didn't want to. I didn't hate them for doing what they did, so why should they cast me out for not joining them?
A little note here, Joel was working in Stamford in a drygoods store in those days. He wasn't included with us in these gambling and drinking affairs. Now, I only gambled one time and I didn't drink their beer. I tried it one time and couldn't stand the stuff. I was sick with influenza and they told me it would be good for me. I took two swallows and decided to leave off drinking and keep the flu.
But now back to the farm at Royston. Most people think of cattle drives as something that happened long ago; and that's mostly true. But soon after we moved to Royston, I got Lester Whitley to help me drive a little herd of cows to Carriker's farm in Kent County. Lester would ride Old Nancy and I would ride Old Buck. We would carry a bite to eat for lunch, but there was no need to go to a lot of trouble and try to take everything as though we were heading up the trail to Abilene, Kansas, like back in 1885. After all, we wouldn't be far away by nightfall, and my brother would have all day to put a few things in my car and drive out to find us about sundown. He would need to bring us something to drink, something to eat, something to sleep on and some horse feed and a rope or two.
Lester and I got an early start and had the cows headed in the right direction when we learned that we had one old Jersey cow that thought she was a racehorse. Right away she started running straight up the road ahead of all the others. And she kept right on trotting until one of us got ahead of her and brought her back. We could see we really needed three horses, one for that old trotter and two for the rest of the herd. But we had to get by with one for her and one for the others. We thought surely she would settle down after awhile but she didn't. It was the same thing all day long, one of us behind to drive and one in front to hold her back.
Sundown found us about where we had planned to be. There was a place where the fence was set quite a way back from the road, embracing an extra two or three acres of Johnson grass and weeds and a puddle of water, all within the right-of-way. So we turned the cattle into that little pocket and held them there while they grazed and settled down.
If it had not been for that one old cantankerous Jersey cow, our entire day would have been dull and uneventful. There wouldn't have been anything of value to mention in our story during that day. Without that cow, our story could just as well have started after we got them bedded down for the night.
We could have begun our story with,—We waited and we waited. It got dark, and we still waited for my little brother to drive up in the car, but he didn't. We had no horse feed, so we didn't feed our horses. We had only one rope, so we staked Old Buck out and hoped that Old Nancy would stay with him through the night. She was tired from the day's work and fortunately she didn't try to leave. Nor did the Jersey cow give any further trouble. I know she was tired. There is no way a cow can run as far as she had run that day and not be tired.
We had gathered firewood before dark and our fire was warm and friendly in the cool of the darkness. It seemed that we should be eating something in the light of the campfire, but there was nothing to eat. I kept thinking that perhaps my brother would show up yet. Maybe he had car trouble. Any one of a dozen things could have happened to delay him.