“Did he know oxen?� the young man asked out of his beard.
“Oh, yes, and they knew him. They liked him.�
Then for a little while there was silence.
As Mr. Cude began drawing up his rawhide whip, again the offerer of help, pleading now, asked for a chance to try his hand.
“Very well,� Mr. Cude agreed slowly, “but every time you try to make ’em pull and they don’t budge the wagon, they’re that much harder to get against the yoke the next time.�
The young man asked the names of the oxen and got them. Then he took the long whip, not to lash the animals—for that was not the whip’s function—but to pop it. He swung it lightly and tested the popper three or four times, as if getting back the feel of something long familiar that had been laid aside. Then he curved the fifteen feet of tapering plaited rawhide through the air—and the ringing crack made the sky brighter. At the same time he began calling to the oxen to come on and pull out. He talked to Brindle and Whitey and Sam Houston and Davy Crockett harder than a Negro crapshooter talking to his bones.
The oxen, without a jerk, lay slowly, steadily, mightily, into the yokes. The wheels began to turn. The whip popped again, like a crack of lightning in the sky, and the strong voice rose, pleading, encouraging, confident, dominating.
The oxen were halfway up the bank now. They pulled on out, but nobody was talking to them any longer. No welcome of feast and fatted calf ever overwhelmed a prodigal son like that, initiated by four faithful old oxen, which Tim Cude received from his mother and father on the banks of an insignificant creek in a wilderness of mesquite. All the gray in the world was suddenly wiped out by sunshine, and all the mockingbirds between the San Antonio River and the Rio Grande seemed to be singing at once.
The oxen, silent and slow, kept on pulling down the road.