“Jist as I teched the crown a feller yelled out.”
“The next day we counted ’em out, and we hadn’t lost a head; not a single cow-brute was missin’. If it hadn’t been for that cyclone, we’d been gathering cattle for a week, and then likely we wouldn’t of found ’em all.”
“That’s the way it is,” said Red. “Some winds is good and some winds is bad, but I’d rather have sandstorms and risk a cyclone once in a while than to have mud in the rainy season like they have on the Black Land divide.”
“We found lots of mud when we drove through last fall,” said Lanky.
“You jist thought you found mud,” replied Red. “You ought to have seen them flats before they begun makin’ roads. When I first hit that country, they was jist fencin’ off the lanes, and when I got a job, the boss put me to ridin’ fence. One day I was ridin’ along by the lane, and I looked over and there was a good, brand-new Stetson hat layin’ on the top of a mud-hole. I thinks to myself, ‘That’s a good hat, and I might as well have it as the next feller.’ So I got down and got a-holt of a fence-post to steady myself, and reached out to git it. Jist as I teched the crown a feller yelled out: ‘Hey, what you doin’ there?’ he says. Then I noticed for the first time that there was a man’s head stickin’ out of the mud. I asked the feller if he needed any help, but he said he was ridin’ a mighty good hoss, and he guessed he’d make it through all right. He afterwards got to be a mighty good friend of mine. Pete Jackson was his name.”
“Well, sir,” said Joe, “speakin’ of mud, that puts me in mind of one experience I had goin’ up the trail in ’83. We was kinda late in gittin’ through, and the rainy weather had already set in before we crossed the Black Land divide. We hadn’t hardly got across when we begun to notice that our hosses was losin’ all their pertness. The boss’s pet cow-hoss got as lazy as a jackass. My own favorite hoss, Brown Jug, jest got sleepier and sleepier, till finally he jest laid down and went to sleep and never did wake up. We lost half of our remuda jest like that.
“The boss was terribly worried because he didn’t like the idea of trainin’ on foot, and besides he didn’t know whether his hands would stay with him or not if he didn’t have nothin’ for ’em to ride. Well, I figured there must be a cause of hoss sickness jest as there is for everything else. So I begins to take note. I notices that all the sick hosses has mud-balls on their tails. Then I guesses what must be the matter. The weight of the mud on the critters’ tails was makin’ sech a pull on the brutes’ hides that they jest couldn’t shet their eyes. And I figured that bein’ unable to shet their eyes, they was jest naturally dyin’ for sleep. I tells the boss, and we cuts off the balls of mud. As soon as we would cut one off, the critter would fall into a deep sleep, jest like Adam in the Bible. Some of the worst ones slept steady for four days and nights, and then woke up fresh and pert as ever.”
“Still,” said Red, “it ain’t the mud and it ain’t the wind that makes Texas weather bad; it’s the sudden and quick changes.”
“That’s right,” said Hank; “that’s right, as our new boss found out once. He ’lowed he was goin’ to keep a record of the weather. So he comes home with a brand-new thermometer and hangs it up on the front porch, and calls us boys to look at it. Well, sir, while we was standin’ there the mercury runs up to about ninety or a hundred to git a good start. Then all of a sudden, down she goes with sech a jar that she jest naturally knocks the bottom right out of the tube and ruins the boss’s new thingamabob. Good instrument it was too; not jest a mercantile advertisement, but a good one that he had bought and paid money for.
“But that didn’t faze that man none. He sent off back East somewheres and had one made to order with a rubber cushion in the bottom of the tube to take up the jar when the mercury fell. He got a patent on the idear and got rich. His thermometers are in use all over the Southwest. They’re the only kind that’ll stand the climate.