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Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Wild Ride of English Jack
By Celia Hayes
If English Jack had another name - or even if that was his real one - only Fredi Steinmetz., the trail boss for the R-B outfit knew of it. He had turned up at their camp, just as the hands were preparing to swim the herd across the Colorado River a little south of Austin on a fine spring morning; about eight hundred feral, long-legged, long-horned cattle, every one of them as wild as deer and worth ten times as much in Kansas than they were in Texas. It was the first year that the R-B had sent cattle north up the trail, a full year after the end of the War. Times were hard, all across the South, and none harder than in the Texas hill country. A lot rode on this venture, and none knew it more than the R-B owners and investors.
“I’d say hire him,” Fredi squinted through a gust of cook-fire smoke as he conferred with the others, “We’re short a hand since young Stoller took sick and went home.”
“We don’t know him,” Hansi Richter answered his brother-in-law with a frown. He was a big man with shoulders like a bull-buffalo, who only appeared at first glance like the rough, hardworking teamster that he had been until one noticed the shrewd look in is eyes and the authority of his bearing. “What do you lads think?” Across the campfire, his nephews, Dolph Becker and Peter Vining exchanged glances,
“I’ve never met him, Onkel Hansi,” Dolph answered; a serious and careful young man, he was part owner in the herd. “I don’t like risking our investment mine and Mama’s by hiring someone like him since I don’t have any notion of why he wants to go to Kansas the hard way, eating dust with us.”
“He has a good saddle and a right nice carbine,” Peter offered cheerfully. He and his cousin looked alike enough to be brothers, although Peter was outgoing where Dolph was reserved. “Walnut with silver trim. He looks fit enough, and if he’s willing to work I don’t think we can be all that picky, at this point.” Fredi dashed the last of his coffee into the cook-fire and stood up,
“All right then Hansi. You made me the trail-boss, so it’s my decision anyway. I don’t know him, either, but I know of him. He can ride and he can fight. The rumor is that he left England after killing a man in a duel but there is also a tale that he stole silver from the regimental mess. Or stepped on the train of the Queen’s dress,”
“All right, then” Hansi laughed, “As long as he keeps himself out of trouble while earning wages from me! But someday, I would like to know what the story is.”
“Bad manners to ask, Hansi.” Fredi shrugged, “Me, I’d bet that he’s a younger son of a lord. He has disreputable tastes or filthy habits and his family pays him a remittance to keep him the hell out of England. Not that I care as long as he does what I tell him for the next three months and doesn’t bugger the cows in the middle of the trail.”
So the new hand threw his bed-roll into the back of the supply wagon that Hansi drove, drew a horse from the remuda and became one of the R-B’s hands, as they slowly moved the herd north towards Kansas and the railhead. They called him English Jack, to differentiate him from Nigra Jack, the horse-wrangler. There were thirty-three of them, aside from Daddy Hurst the cook; all young and single, clothed in motley of work clothes, canvas pants patched with buckskin, linsey-woolsey or homespun cotton work shirts. English Jack did not seem much different from them, aside from being much better spoken. At night, they slept in their clothes with their horses close to hand, penned in a rope corral. That is, unless they had night-guard; tirelessly circling the massed cattle, dark against the moon-brushed prairie, listening to the call of night birds and alert with every sense for some sudden movement, some sound out of the ordinary. They talked and sang to the cattle, to sooth and reassure them when fractious and unsettled. Most of the drovers had a vast array of slow lugubrious-sounding ballads to serenade the cows with. Fredi swore up and down that any number of gloomy German Christmas carols had the same soporific effect. English Jack recited something he claimed was the Iliad at them in Latin.
“Damn, these are going to be some eddicated cows!” commented Dolph, when Jack enlightened him on this, one midnight when they passed going in opposite directions.
“Almost a pity to eat them, don’t you think?” English Jack answered, with a broad grin which could hardly be seen from the growth of beard on his face. “Ah, but that would negate the purpose of this exercise, wouldn’t it? Forget I ever entertained such a heretical thought!”
“I would,” Dolph answered, as he continued his lonely circular patrol. “If I understood what the hell you just said.” The night breeze kicked up a little, bringing with it the faint smell of rain. The distant north-west quadrant of the sky had begun to be blotted out by swiftly moving clouds, clouds that began to be illuminated from within by brief pale flashes of lightening.
“Storm on the way,” he said to English Jack, as they passed again. “With lightening,” he added. “The wind’s blowing it this way.” Dolph listened admiring as Jack added another couple of comments. “That’s a right nice collection of cuss-words,” he said, “Wasn’t a waste of education, I’d reckon. I’m going to waken Onkel Fredi, let him know to put on some more hands. They’ll be right jumpy as that storm blows overhead.”
“Don’t take to long about it,” Jack advised. Dolph nodded, angling his pony away from the edge of the herd and towards the pale glimmer of the wagon covers. Hansi and Daddy Hurst had gone to bed long since; their last act before sleep being to pull the wagon tongues around to align on the North Star.
The remuda ponies shifted and whinnied uneasily in their grass-rope corral, sensing the storm’s approach. Dolph slid down from his saddle as he approached the camp, that eccentric circle of bedrolls spread out around the quenched cook-fire.
“Senor?” A sibilant whisper from the cook-wagon’s shadow and the faint metallic click of a Colt hammer drawn back.
“Alejandro?” Dolph whispered in Spanish, “It’s me. There’s a storm coming. I’m waking up Fredi.”
“Good,” Alejandro answered, “The horses, they are restless also. How many more riders, padron?”
“At least six,” Dolph whispered, “And if the cattle stampede, everyone!”
“Ay, ya ya!” Alejandro sounded every bit as dismayed as English Jack. So far, they had been able to head off any potential stampede, quench any panic before it started and infected the entire herd. Fredi usually spread his bedroll near the supply wagon: Dolph found him, and gently nudged his foot. Gratifyingly, Fredi shot upright after a single shake.
“Storm coming,” Dolph whispered; even more gratifying, his uncle needed no more than that and a swift glance at the sky. Very faintly, thunder grumbled in the distance, hardly louder than Hansi snoring, a few feet away. Fredi threw off his blankets, saying,
“Right. Go on back, lad, I’ll rouse…” The rest of his words were abruptly cut off by a clap of thunder that rent the air like a cannon shot, seemingly directly over their heads.
“Ah -----!” said Fredi, as other sleepers also started awake, most with similar curses. His heart sinking within him Dolph sensed a vibration in the ground under his feet almost before he heard the ominous rumble of distant hooves, and the bellowing of frightened cattle.
“Stampede!” he shouted, flinging himself towards his saddle as Fredi erupted from his own blankets. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Alejandro running from the remuda, leading four horses after him, his hands full of grass-rope and leather reins.
Peter shot out of dead sleep, instantly knowing what was happening. He caught up his hat with his good hand, and leaped for the reins of his horse. He had been supposed to relieve the night-watch at midnight, so his own horse had been saddled and close-hobbled at hand. Already panicking from the racket of the thunder and the noise of stampeding cattle, the pony danced restlessly as Peter tried to free it from the grass-rope hobbles.
“Damn ye, hold still!” Peter gasped, and swore as the frantic animal dodged at arms-length. There was no time for this; he wrapped the reins around his left arm, and slashed the hobbles with his knife. He dropped the knife as he vaulted up go back later to look for it, god if there was a later!
There was a rider ahead of him, perhaps two behind him, no time to look around and see who they were. He raked the horses’ flanks with his heels, crouching low in the saddle as the beast obediently leaped ahead, oh god oh god, oh god, rough ground, broken with small gullies and animal burrows. If his horse put a foot deep into one, it was a broken leg for the horse for sure and a broken neck for him, hitting the ground at this pace.
Regardless of that peril, he sent his mount careening parallel to the mass of cattle, a tossing sea of horns and backs as they ran, silvered by starlight and eerie greenish flickers of lightening, their hooves shaking the ground, shaking his heart in his chest. Catch up, catch up to that leading edge of the herd, catch up and turn them, turn them at a run, run them back on themselves, crashing and buffeting their horns together in a storm of dust.
Peter raked his booted heels along the horses’ flanks again. Now there was a skein of horsemen flying alongside the herd; himself and Dolph, Billy Inman and two of Alejandro’s wrangler boys, a fragile net to catch and turn the hurtling cattle, catch and turn before the panicky beasts harmed themselves, gored each other with their enormous horns, broke a leg in a prairie-dog burrow, hurled over the side of a ravine, rim-rocked themselves… oh god oh god, catch and turn them before it was too late, before Hansi and Ma’am Becker’s investment turned into so much buzzard-meat, rotting in the hot sun.
He and Dolph reached the leading edge, neck and neck, that dark and dangerous edge, a knife-edge. He could feel his mount’s ribs under his knees shuddering with every willing breath, thanking god again that he rode the tamer of his two, the paint-pony who minded the reins on his neck rather than the bit in his mouth. The paint-pony gallantly plunged into that maelstrom of frantic cattle. Peter took out his heavy Walker Colt, from the saddle holster where he preferred to leave the heavy and unwieldy revolver. Shouting, he pressed the paint-pony closer, firing shots into the air, shots that he could barely hear.
“Turn them!” Dolph shouted, “Turn them!”
“God-dammit, I’m trying!” he shouted back.
Another horse rode at his side, a horse with an empty saddle, flashing by in an instant and then out of sight in the dark tumult around them.
“Who’s horse was that!” he screamed into the dark, and Dolph shouted back,
“I don’t know, but if they’re down in this they’re dead!”
Wetness splashed on his arms, into his face. The storm had come upon them. Peter shouted curses at the cattle, at the wind rushing past, the rain that fell chill and plastered his clothing to him as cattle and horsemen hurtled on into the darkness.
“They’re slowing!” Dolph shouted, “Press ‘em hard, damn you! Press ‘em hard!”
He fired over the cattle, fired into the air until the hammer of his Colt clicked on empty chambers. Someone at his back still had a full load, though. A fusillade of shots crackled like fireworks. He shouted again, cursing and Dolph shouted also; they pressed closer and closer. The mass of cattle, mindless and unreasoning, began yielding to their will, bent in their flight, turning to the right, turning again as they fled across the hummocky ground. A flash of lightening split the air, an eldritch and momentary light on the heaving wet backs of cattle and horses.
“Damn you all, hold them!” shouted a voice at Peter’s back, lost in the crash of thunder. The cattle were mindless with terror, nothing could affright them even further after that, just men on nimble horses, waving their hats, shouting or firing their revolvers. After an eternity of galloping into the dark, it seemed to Peter that the mass of cattle had slowed in their headlong pace. They had run into a tract of wiry scrub. God only knew how far they had come, or where they were in relation to the camp, when they finally succeeded in turning the herd back in upon themselves. The land sloped gently up hill; Peter squinted into the dark, his face lasted lashed by constant rain.
“Where are we!” Billy Inman called, out of the dark. The cattle were quiescent now, uneasy but standing bunched together as if to shelter against the rain, their sides heaving like bellows from the exertion of their run. Water ran hoof-deep around them; their horse sloshed through churned-up mud.
“I think we’re west of camp,” Peter shouted in return, “Who else is here? Call out your names, all who can hear me!”
“To me!” Dolph shouted in Spanish. “Alejandro! Marcos! To me!” Out of the dark and rain, voices answered them; Alejandro, Marcos and Diego, Billy Inman, young Frank Brown and his cousin Alonzo. Nigra Jack splashed out of the dark, leading a rider-less horse after him, having found it straying among the mass of cattle.
“Whose?” Dolph asked quietly.
“Mastah Jack, de Englishmon,” the wrangler answered, “He had dis ol’ pinto, on watch ‘dis night.”
The rain pelted down, fat water-drops as big as bullets. Peter could not see his cousin’s expression. He was already soaked to the skin. The brim of his hat hung waterlogged like a dead leaf.
“I’d guess he was moving around, on the other side of the herd, when they broke,” Dolph said at last, “For I had just spoken to him, not three minutes before. They must have rolled right over him.” He did not have to say anything else about the fate of English Jack; unhorsed and on foot among eight hundred head of fear-maddened cattle. Only Billy Inman said aloud what they all knew, in the tones of a man deeply shaken and only just beginning to recover himself,
“Shit. They pro’lly stamped him as flat as a flapjack. Anyone know if he had anything on him worth going back and looking for?”
“Billy… you shut the hell up,” Dolph spat. “And we’ll sure as hell go looking for him, no matter what he had in his vest-pockets. The man deserves a decent burial.”
“In a cee-gar box, if nothing else,” Billy replied with a laugh in which humor warred with the kind of feelings that come from survived some great exertion and terror. Peter commanded,
“That’s enough, Bill. Help us get them settled down we can’t look for him until it gets light anyway.”
It wasn’t that Billy was heartless, Peter knew as he knew anything else. They had all been in mortal terror, pounding after the herd in the dark and rain, fighting the elements, fighting for control and knowing that in a split-second they might be unhorsed and trampled, as dead as English Jack. No, Billy was as relieved to be alive as any of them even soaked to the skin and lost somewhere on the night-darkened prairie north of the Red River. A cold wind followed on the storm, blowing out of the northwest, chilling them all cattle, horses and men indiscriminately. The cold bit deeper if they remained still, so Dolph, Peter and the others tried to remain in constant motion for the warmth generated thereby. It was with no small relief after many hours of this that they saw the eastern sky gradually begin to pale to a glowing primrose-yellow, and those few rags of clouds remaining after the storm turn the livid color of bruised flesh.
“How many are we missing?” Billy Inman asked, and Dolph replied,
“’Bout half. We’ll be all day, searching them out and rounding them up.” A bright thread of sunlight peeped coyly over the distant horizon. Peter, his cousin and a few of the others had ridden towards the higher ground in an attempt to see where they were and where they ought to take the herd.
“Well, I reckon they’ll have been too tired to run much farther,” Bill observed, yawning hugely. As near as Peter could discern, the herd had run several miles west and north in a long arc, traced across the rolling prairie in a line mud and trampled vegetation left in their wake.
“Can you see the wagons?” Young Alonzo Brown asked, his fifteen-year old countenance blotched equally with up thrown specks of mud and freckles, “Or any of the other hands?”
“Not to fret, ‘Lonzo,” Dolph answered, as the bright disc of the sun revealed more of itself, “I know they’re dead-east of us, somewhere along that little stream we had set up camp by. Look there…” he pointed to a tiny, threadlike spiral of grey smoke rising from beyond a far line of dark green brush. “I’m thinking that’s Daddy Hurst’ cook-fire… and I could sure use a good hot breakfast, now.”
“Me, all I care about is that it’s hot,” Peter nudged the ribs of his pony with his heels, the poor creature practically stumbling with weariness. “Let’s get these damned animals moving in a favorable direction, Coz. You ride point, I reckon you know the way at least as well as any of us.”
Moving slowly from at least as much exhaustion as care, Peter, Billy and the others assembled the remnant of the herd and began chivvying it towards that rising wisp of smoke. It was the tedious labor of several hours to do this. Peter reflected all the while on how quickly they had come the same distance during the night, seemingly in a matter of a few minutes.
Only a trifle less cheering than the smell of hot food and the odor of coffee was the sight of a good few head of cattle, grazing peaceably in the night-pasture from which so many had run in a panic not six hours before. Either they had not all stampeded, or the other hands had been able to cut the rear-most off from the main body and force their return. Not even the sight of their drenched blankets and bedrolls, left scattered on the ground where they had been abandoned could entirely quench Peter’s feelings of relief and no little satisfaction at having retrieved something from a potential disaster.
Fredi rose from where he had been sitting by the fire, in close conversation with Hansi. He looked as wearied as they all felt, but smiled with much the same cheerful relief, until he noticed English Jack’s horse, trailing after Alejandro.
“Not a sign of him,” Dolph answered the unasked question, “We came back straight, though. As soon as I’ve had some breakfast, I’ll take two of the boys and scout along the way the stampede went. How many are we short, otherwise, Onkel?”
“About twenty head,” Fredi answered, sighing. “We can rest the herd here for a day or two, while we search… I’ll send out everyone who isn’t minding the herd to go beating the bushes”
“Remember, lads,” Hansi added, “Every one of those missing cows is worth a months’ wages, in the cattle market in the north.” Daddy Hurst brought out hot bread and coffee, lavishly sweetened with molasses, fat bacon and apple duff made with dried fruit, which they fell upon as if famished.
“It ain’t as if it’s the best cooking I ever tasted,” Billy Inman ventured, with his mouth full, “But damn if it doesn’t taste prime!”
“My grandfather used to tell us that hunger was the very best sauce,” Dolph reached out for the coffee pot and poured a full cup for himself, “But as cooks go sorry, Daddy, I think Mama sets a finer table.”
“Yo’ mama ain’t tryin’ to keep de fire alight, when it’s coming down like Noah’s flood,” Daddy Hurst scowled, turning over another rasher of salt-bacon with a long-handled fork, “Dis ol’ nigra is all de cook you got, out there! You best ‘member dat, when you want seconds, Mistah Rudolph!”
“Ah, well, Daddy you mayn’t cook quite as well as Mama but you are right you’re here and she’s not.” Dolph’s face took on a melancholy cast, as he downed the rest of his coffee. “And we may have to trouble you some more for the use of your shovel.” No one needed to ask why. Dolph rose, tipping his plate and tin cup into the dishpan.
“I’ll come with you,” Peter said and Billy Inman rose also.
“So’ll I,” he said, adding defensively, “He was a stuck-up sum-bitch… but he was a damn good at what he done. An’ he was one of us.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Peter allowed and Fredi nodded assent.
But before they could even draw fresh mounts from the remuda, a drover at the edge of the heard stood up in his stirrups, waving his hat and pointing towards something just out of sight of those in camp.
“What the???” Peter ventured, for soon appeared a hatless man on foot, coming along the line of the creek bank towards them. “It’s Jack!” So it was, although he was much more thickly daubed with mud than any of the rest, as if he had been thrown down and rolled in it. He sauntered casually into the circle of bedrolls like a man out for a stroll on the promenade.
“Glory be!” Daddy Hurst exclaimed, as Dolph unobtrusively replaced the shovel to its place in the toolbox on the side of the supply wagon.
“I see you found my horse and saddle,” English Jack drawled. A broad grin split his bearded and filthy countenance. At some point his nose had bled copiously into his beard, neckerchief and shirt-front. “Don’t tell me you chaps had given up hope on my survival!?” Billy Inman whooped and thumped his shoulders. Peter exclaimed,
“Well, we did at that, Jack. We were just setting out to see to whatever might be left after the cattle finished riding over you last night! Where the hell were you, all this time?”
“Extraordinary thing,” Jack accepted a tin plate, “Thank you, Hurst. Coffee, too if it’s not too much trouble. I spent the night in a most uncomfortable ditch.” Between ravenous bites of bread and bacon, he added, “I see you were able to retrieve the herd… excellent! ‘Straordinary lucky, that; well done, all the way around.”
“Yes, pretty much,” Dolph said, “But what happened to you when we found your horse and not you…”
“Assumed the worst?” Jack grinned again, “Don’t blame you in the least. They broke and ran just about the place where I was, innocently and harmlessly sitting on Bone-Head or Mush-for-Brains, or whatever my wretched horses’ stable-name is. Stupid beast panicked too… and then compounded the folly by stumbling over a badger-hole, or whatever uncouth burrowing animal makes its home out here and throwing me clear. Interesting experience I don’t think I’ve been taken a fall like that in years.”
“But if you were in the middle…” Billy Inman’s face was screwed up in an expression of baffled incredulity. Jack continued,
“When I came off my horse, I landed more or less astride the neck of one of the cattle, going at a fearful pace. You can imagine, I hung on for dear life steeple chasing in a mob doesn’t have a patch on the experience. Oh, thank you, Hurst.” He took a cup of coffee from Daddy Hurst, wrapping his fingers gratefully around it. “Truly ambrosial… that’s the stuff the gods drink, Billy. Where was I?”
“Riding a cow through a stampede,” Fredi answered. He was grinning also; even if they did not quite believe English Jack’s story, it was still a damn good yarn.
“So I was,” Jack continued. “And damnably uncomfortable it was for the both of us. Fortunately I can only assume that bearing my weight must have had something to do with it that particular cow fell back among the herd almost immediately. In very short order I perceived that I was being carried along at a point where it might be safer to abandon such a precarious position than to continue on. So with a prayer on my lips, and recollecting every blessed bit of advice I had ever received about disembarking at a dead gallop, I threw myself sideways. To avoid the hoofs they say the trick is to cover your head in your arms and roll as soon as you hit the ground, you know. That being effected, nothing came to mind except try and curl up someplace out of harms way and wait until morning. I found a commodious ditch,” Jack shrugged elaborately, “Save for a small torrent flowing through the bottom, it was passably comfortable… although I confess I did not sleep all that well.”
“You ain’t gonna sleep all that well tonight, either,” Billy Inman warned, “The rain wet all the blankets.”
“And we’re still short at least twenty head,” Fredi stood up with a groan, “Which we must make an attempt to find, before moving on. Still I can’t tell you how glad I am that you survived last night, Jack. I’d have been in a hell of a pickle, otherwise.”
“Oh?” Jack looked up from his coffee, “And how was that?”
“I’d have had no idea of where to send all your things,” Fredi answered.
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