This would be remembered in west Texas as the year of the drought. Even more, it would be remembered as the year of the fence-cutting war. The war had been brewing a long time, but the drought brought it to a boil. It left its black mark in dozens of forlorn gray tombstones. They all ended the same way: died 1883.
It wasn’t worrying young Johnny Clayton as he jogged along the dusty old wagon road on his bay gelding. Nothing was worrying Johnny. A few more months and he would be twenty-one. The only things he owned were the bay horse, a saddle, a bedroll and an old fiddle. He drew his wages every month, and the world was peaches and cream.
A new fiddle tune was leisurely working itself out in Johnny’s mind. The fingers of his left hand played upon his bridle reins as if they were fiddle strings. He grinned. He knew Dottie Thurmond would like it when he played it for her at the square dance next Saturday night.
Clyde Thurmond, Johnny’s boss, reined up his horse a little way ahead and looked back. He lowered the leather blab that protected his chapped lips from the sun and hot wind.
“What do you think we are, Johnny,” he grinned, “a couple of Indians riding along single file? Come on and catch up.”
Johnny grinned back. Clyde was middle-aged now, at least thirty-five, and his mind was always on cattle. But Johnny was young and his mind was on music, or on Clyde’s younger sister.
His thoughts went back to the fiddle tune after he caught up with his boss. An oath from Clyde snapped him to reality right in the middle of a bar.
“The fence, Johnny! The fence cutters have been here!”
Clyde hit a lope toward a new wire gate just ahead. Johnny spurred after him. The older man reined up at the gate and began to swear.
The wire was cut between every post for fifty feet on each side of the gate. The soft dirt showed tracks of a dozen horses. A crudely-printed placard was nailed to one of the cedar gate posts.
Clyde Thurmond was quick to grin or quick to anger. Fury showed scarlet in his face now. Johnny could see Clyde’s knuckles turn white as he clenched his work-roughened fists.
“So they finally got here. They’ve hit nearly every fence in the county. I wondered when they’d get to me.”
Clyde stretched out of his saddle and snatched the placard from the post. His gray eyes smouldered as he read it, then handed it to Johnny. The penciled sign read:
You have three days to tear the fence down. If you don’t, then we’ll be back!
“Free range men,” Clyde gritted bitterly. “They wouldn’t buy the land when they had a chance. Thought there would always be free grass. And now they cut down our fences so they can crowd cattle and sheep onto our range.”
Johnny knew. It hadn’t meant much to him one way or the other, but he had seen it come on. Even he could remember when there hadn’t been a wire fence in west Texas. Range had been free to any man strong enough to hold it.
But in the last few years, Texas state, school and railroad lands had started going on the market, and men had bought them. Fences had sprung up.
Now drought had come to west Texas. Free range men suddenly found that the best range and the best waterholes were under private ownership and fenced off. Men with no range of their own were being crowded together on poor, sun-baked land where watering places were nothing but bogholes. In desperation they had turned to wire pinchers and sixguns.
Clyde Thurmond was still swearing. “I have to pay for my grass. It’s me that’s got to pay the interest and meet the bank note on this land. It’s my family that’s got to eat rabbit stew if I don’t make a go of it.
“My dad brought us kids out here when his old buffalo gun was the only thing between us and a Comanche scalp pole. He hasn’t bowed under the fence cutters and I’m not going to either.”
His hard gaze bore into Johnny’s eyes. “It’s liable to mean some fighting, Johnny. I don’t want you running out on me when I really need you. If you don’t want any part of it, you better quit now.”
Johnny felt a faint irritation and wished Clyde wouldn’t look at him that way. He didn’t want to fight anybody.
But he couldn’t quit now. Dottie Thurmond had called him a fiddlefoot. When he had gone to work on her brother’s ranch, which neighbored that of her father, she had laughed at him. He hadn’t stayed two months on any other outfit—liked to fiddle and play too much. She had said he couldn’t stay here.
But he had stayed six months already. Dottie was beginning to look at him as if she thought he might amount to something.
So he just couldn’t quit now. Maybe this would all blow over, like stormclouds do sometimes in March.
Remembering the placard, Johnny started counting on his fingers. “Thursday, Friday—why, the third day’s Saturday, Clyde. This might even make us miss the dance.”
Clyde was looking at him queerly. “We’re liable to miss a lot of dances before this is through, Johnny. But my fence is staying up! Come on. We got some patching to do!”
On the way home, Clyde told him he wanted to keep this from his wife as long as he could.
When they rode into the corral and dismounted at the barn, Helen Thurmond stepped out of the raw lumber ranch house and came walking out to meet them. Their three-year-old son came toddling along behind her, stopping to throw a rock at an old white hen.
Clyde avoided her eyes, and it didn’t take her long to sense trouble. “There’s something wrong, Clyde. I can tell. What is it?”
Clyde looked back at Johnny an instant, as if for help. Then he told her what happened. She didn’t speak for a while, just dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.
Finally she said, “Maude Tatlock’s husband tried to stop them on his place. They killed him.”
Johnny felt sorry for his boss. One child was already depending on Clyde, and another was on the way. It must have been tough to tell Helen about this. Johnny wondered. If life got so hard for people with responsibilities, why did they look down on a man who didn’t have any?
The next couple of days Johnny could feel the tension mounting. Helen had usually been as cheerful as her little son Bobby. After supper she usually sat beside Clyde on the front porch, while they watched the night come on.
But now Helen Thurmond had little to say. Hollow fear showed in her blue eyes as she sat down at the table and said grace at meals. At night Clyde sat on the porch alone. Johnny could see Helen in the parlor, reading her family Bible by lamplight.
Saturday morning Helen broke. At breakfast she set the steaming coffeepot on the table, then stood there gripping the cloth she had used to protect her hand from the hot handle. Her face was the palest Johnny had ever seen it. Her hands trembled.
“The dance tonight, Clyde,” she said tightly. “I want you to take me.”
Clyde stared at her, his mouth open. “But you’re not in any condition—Helen, this is the third day. They may come tonight.”
She began to sob. “That’s why I want you with me. There’ll be too many. They’ll kill you like they did Jed Tatlock. Oh Clyde, please take me to town!”
Clyde tenderly put his arms around her shoulders, and Johnny watched a brave man give in.
It looked as if half the county had come out to the dance. Orange lamplight shone through the schoolhouse windows and fell on tied horses and buckboards. Johnny happily untied from his saddlehorn the sack in which he always carried his fiddle. In front of the schoolhouse door, Clyde was carefully helping Helen down from the buckboard.
Dottie was already there. Her father, old Floyd Thurmond, had come in from his ranch earlier in the day. Dottie broke away from an admiring group of young cowboys as Johnny came in the door.
Johnny thought his heart would melt when she came up, smiling at him. He tried to hold back that foolish grin he always seemed to get when he was around her.
“I composed you a tune, Dottie,” he said, and he felt that grin come on. “I’m going to name it after you.”
She stood there smiling at him. His knees got weak. “I can’t believe it, Johnny,” she said. “You’ve been out at Clyde’s place six months now. Dad used to keep telling me you’d never amount to anything but a fiddlefooted saddle tramp. But he’s wrong. You’ve proved that.”
Johnny nervously shifted his weight from one foot to another and studied his polished boots.
Finally he looked back up at her and said, “I’d like to keep proving it to you, Dottie. From now on.”
The thought of what he had just said scared him. A tinge of red crept into Dottie’s cheeks. But he knew she had liked it.
Then the guitar player called him. “Come on, Johnny, we need us a fiddler. Quit making eyes. Come on up here and make music.”
It was a while before midnight when the word started spreading through the crowd. Ten or fifteen of the free range men suspected of wire cutting had been hanging around the Golden Eagle saloon most of the evening. Now they were all gone. And it was too early for them to leave on Saturday night.
A worried look was on Clyde’s face as he trotted up to the fiddlers’ stand. “They’ve ridden out to cut somebody’s fence, Johnny,” he said grimly, “and it’s liable to be mine. We better get out there in a hurry.”
Johnny lowered his fiddle and looked at Helen. She was trembling. There was a prayer in her eyes.
“Look here, Clyde,” Johnny reasoned for Helen’s sake. “You can’t take Helen home now, and you sure don’t want to leave her here in town by herself. If they cut the fence, we can fix it.”
Clyde stared at Johnny unbelievingly. Then that red anger crept into his face, and his eyes were hard. “You’re getting scared. That’s what’s wrong. You’re trying to get out of it.”
Anger flared in Johnny, too. “Now hold on, Clyde. I’m just trying to make you think about Helen. What if you got yourself killed? Look at her, and answer me that!”
But Clyde didn’t look around at Helen. His gray eyes smouldered. “I thought you’d changed, Johnny. I ought’ve known you’d quit when things got tough. Well, I don’t want a coward in my way. You came here to fiddle. Now fiddle your head off!”
Clyde turned on his heel and strode toward the door. Helen called him, but he didn’t look back. He was probably afraid to. Helen almost fainted. Dottie caught her and helped her sit down.
For a second Johnny’s eyes met Dottie’s. He saw nothing there but scorn. He started to go after Clyde. But drumming hoofs fading into the distance told him Clyde had borrowed a horse and was already gone.
Other ranchmen who had fences were gathering up their cowboys and getting ready to go home. Johnny half wanted to go too. But a stubborn pride gripped him. Clyde had jumped off the deep end, like he often did, and hadn’t given Johnny a chance.
Well, Johnny wouldn’t go now and give in in a quarrel where he had been falsely accused. There was slim chance the fence cutters would be going to the Thurmond ranch, he told himself disconsolately. There were a dozen other fenced ranches in the county, and they had all had threats.
Maybe in the morning Clyde would be over his sudden anger. Then Johnny could go back and talk sense to him.
The dance crowd was quickly depleted to about half. Johnny had seen old Floyd Thurmond take his one cowboy out. Then Dottie started escorting Helen out into the night. Johnny put down his fiddle and ran to help.
Dottie turned on him with contempt. “Get away from us. Leave us alone, fiddlefoot!”
Numb, Johnny stood in the door and watched Dottie take Helen down the street to the little hotel.
Johnny stayed on and fiddled. But he seemed to have lost his taste for it. The exhilaration he usually felt just wasn’t there now.
He decided a fiddle string was loose. He tried to turn the peg, but it seemed stuck. With impatience sharpened by the last hour’s experience, Johnny braced the fiddle against his shoulder and gave the peg a sudden hard twist.
The string snapped and hit his face. He quickly rubbed his cheek to ease the burning.
His stomach for music was gone now. Gloom settled over him. He said good night to the other musicians and wearily made his way to his horse. He swung into the saddle and trotted dejectedly toward a burning lantern that marked the livery stable down the street. He unsaddled and rolled out his single blanket on top of some straw in the back of the stable.
He lay there a long time, trying to go to sleep. In the distance he could hear the sound of music from the schoolhouse and an occasional whoop from a celebrating cowboy. There were people all around him, Johnny thought moodily. But never in his life had he felt so lonely.
The Sunday morning sun was high when rapid hoofbeats awakened Johnny. He heard someone slide a horse to a stop at the doctor’s home near the livery stable, and start pounding on the door.
Johnny swayed sleepily to his feet and rubbed his eyes. He was surprised he had slept so late. But it had taken him hours to get to sleep. He rolled up his blanket and tied it to his saddle. Then he strolled out and took a look down the street.
Old Floyd Thurmond’s rider came out of the doctor’s door and worriedly stepped down off the front porch. Apprehension quickly rose in Johnny. He trotted over to the doctor’s house.
“What’s wrong, Harvey?” he asked the rider. “What’s happened?”
The cowboy eyed him coldly. “So this is where you spent the night. When he really needed you, you weren’t there to help him.”
Johnny felt weak. Clyde!
“We guarded the old man’s fence last night,” the cowboy said. “When sunup come and nothing had happened, the old man decided to go over to Clyde’s and see how he made out. We found the fence jerked down and cut in places for a quarter of a mile. And Clyde was shot.”
Shame flooded through Johnny. He stared down at the toes of his boots. “Is he—is it bad?”
The cowboy nodded. “Looks bad. We didn’t dare bring him to town. The doc’s going out to the ranch. I got to go to the hotel now and break the news to his wife and Dottie. If I was you, I’d keep out of their sight.”
Harvey turned contemptuously and mounted his horse. He rode on up the street.
Johnny choked. He wanted to cry, something he hadn’t done in years. They had all been right, he told himself bitterly. He was just a no-good, fiddlefooted loafer that wasn’t worth his weight in river rocks. For the first time in his life, people had begun to have confidence in him. And he had let them down.
He turned and started back toward the livery stable, kicking up dust as he went.
The anger against himself slowly turned into anger against the fence cutters. Gunning down a man for trying to protect his own land and feed his own family! They probably figured they had licked the Thurmond outfit now—gunned down Clyde and scared off the kid cowboy.
Well, it wasn’t going to be that easy, Johnny told himself. Even a fiddlefoot takes root sometimes, and Johnny was going to do it right here. If they wanted to tear down the fence, they’d have to gun him down first. He’d show the fence cutters, and he’d show Clyde and Dottie.
He swung a fist at a horsecollar hanging on a peg and knocked it ten feet across the stable. He saddled up, tied on the sack containing his fiddle and paid the grinning hostler. He struck a brisk trot down the sleepy street. He shot one quick glance at the Thurmond buckboard beside the hotel.
Idly his gaze settled on the Golden Eagle saloon. He reined up a moment, then angled his horse across to the saloon. He tied him loosely, stepped briskly up onto the sidewalk and pushed through the swinging doors into the empty saloon.
A swamper looked up in surprise and stopped mopping the floor. Johnny saw the saloon owner idly wiping the wooden bar.
“Selkirk,” he said evenly, not moving, “I’m going to put up Clyde Thurmond’s fence where the wire cutters dropped it last night.”
Selkirk stared at him, a trace of a smile on his bland face. “So what? Why come to me about it?”
Johnny doubled his fists. “Everybody knows the fence cutters hang out in here—and that you’re a friend to them. Well, you can tell them that if they want to come back tonight and tear down what I put up, I’ll be there waiting. And they won’t do it cheap!”
He turned and walked out. The doors were still swinging as he mounted and rode on toward the wagon road.
The fiddle kept bouncing against his knee as he jogged along. If it hadn’t been for the fiddle, people might not have regarded him as shiftless ever since he had started out on his own, he thought bitterly. Clyde and Dottie might not have condemned him. And maybe Clyde wouldn’t be lying there in the ranch house now, possibly dying of bullet wounds.
Johnny untied the sack. He hefted the fiddle a minute in indecision, then hurled it away. It landed in a bush at the side of the trail. Johnny glanced at it blackly, then rode on.
At the ranch he wanted to go into the house and see how Clyde was. But he recognized old Floyd Thurmond’s horse tied in front and knew he had better not. The old man would turn on him like a bear. Clyde likely wouldn’t want to see him either.
Johnny stopped at the little bunkhouse. He found a couple of cans of tomatoes and some sardines he had bought on another trip to town and hadn’t eaten. He dropped them into a sack. At the barn he picked up a pair of wire pinchers, a sackful of staples and as much barbed wire as he could carry coiled up across his saddlehorn. Then he struck out for the fence.
He didn’t have any trouble finding where the fence cutters had been. In their haste to tear down as much of the fence as they could, they had not done much actual cutting. Instead, it looked as if they had tied ropes to the wire and pulled down big sections of it, jerking staples out of the posts.
All the rest of the day he worked in the blazing sun, stopping only to eat a can of sardines and gulp down the canned tomatoes. He untangled the snarled-up wires and stapled them back to every fourth or fifth post, splicing where necessary. By dark he had much of the damage repaired in a temporary way.
But the coming of darkness made him reconsider his problem. He had been angry when he had made his little speech in the saloon. He hadn’t given any real thought to the consequences.
But now the anger was gone. In its place was a cold realization of the danger he had stepped into. The wire cutters were sure to come tonight. If Clyde Thurmond hadn’t been able to stand them off, what chance did a footloose kid have?
One thing sure, he couldn’t just ride away. He would be branded a coward wherever he went. He had to stay.
Cold sweat popped out on his face and a clammy fear rose in him. He rubbed his hand across his face and remembered the burn of the fiddle string.
The fiddle string! He caught a sharp breath. If a little string did that, what might a big wire do? His heart raced as an idea struck him. A slim chance, but it might work. He had to try something.
Johnny decided to make his stand at a gate. He cut off a fifty-foot piece of wire. He wrapped the wire around the gate post about chest-high to a man on horseback and fastened it down securely with four staples.
The riders would likely come down the fence looking for him, he reasoned. No matter from which direction they came, he would have the wire and pivot post waiting for them.
As the full moon rose, Johnny squatted on the ground to wait. Every night sound quickened his pulse as he listened for hoofbeats. Jack rabbits rustled the scattered dry mesquite beans. Night birds called. A coyote came close, then bounded away. One hour went past, then two.
Finally he heard them. They were coming down the fence from the west. They didn’t seem to be trying to keep from making noise. Maybe they hoped to scare him away.
Johnny was scared, but he wasn’t leaving. He swung into the saddle, grabbed the end of the wire and wrapped it twice around his saddlehorn. He moved back and out from the fence until the fifty-foot wire was drawn fairly taut. Then he sat quietly and waited.
They showed a moment against the moonlit skyline as they topped a rise. There weren’t many. They probably figured it wouldn’t take many to booger a kid like Johnny.
Apparently they didn’t see him until they were within fifty feet of him. “There he is, boys,” the man out in front said cautiously.
They rode up to within twenty feet. They sat there and eyed Johnny a full minute. He counted six men. He didn’t think they could see the wire tied to his saddlehorn.
“Well, button,” the leader said, “you had your chance to clear out. Now you’ll take what’s coming to you.”
Johnny tried to keep his voice even. His hands trembled a little. “And just what is that?”
The leader rested his hands on his saddlehorn and leaned forward on them, his arms straight. “Well, in the first place, we brung along an extry set of wire pinchers. We’re going to make you help us cut that wire.”
Another rider pushed up even with the leader. “Say, Jake, ain’t he that fiddling kid?”
The one called Jake nodded.
“Well, then, I got a good notion to stomp them fiddling fingers when we git through with him.”
The leader grunted. “All right, button. Let’s git started. And don’t reach for your six-shooter. We’ll do what we done to Thurmond.”
Johnny acted as if he was going to dismount. Suddenly he leaned low over the right side and spurred his horse. He let out an ear-splitting yell and started a wide swing around the fence cutters.
“Stop him!” the leader yelled. “He’s getting—” The wire caught him across his chest and jerked him off the saddle before he knew what had happened. The second man clawed at his gun, but the wire dragged him down.
Johnny knew he had caught them by surprise. Shouts and curses rose in the night as the cutting, gouging wire hit man after man and dragged each one off. In a few seconds only one man was left in the saddle. He was outside the wire’s range.
Johnny knew it was time to get out of there. Desperately he struggled to get the wire loose from his saddlehorn. The jolt of hitting the men had drawn it taut.
Some of the downed men were feeling on the ground for guns that had fallen from their holsters. One was firing wildly at Johnny.
Now the mounted man was coming in. Johnny freed the wire just as the moving rider fired at him. He stood his ground, jerked out his own gun and triggered two fast shots at the man. The rider twisted in the saddle, then fell to the ground.
Not waiting a second, Johnny spurred back around behind the wounded man’s horse and hazed it toward the others. The gunfire had scared the horses. Not a man had been able to get back in the saddle.
Johnny bent low over the horn as the men on the ground fired at him. He wanted their horses now, all of them.
One man had managed to catch a horse and had one foot in a stirrup. Johnny spurred by him. He swung the barrel of his gun down across the man’s head. Then he was in the clear—with all six horses in front of him!
Behind him, two or three men were still firing. He snapped back a couple of parting shots as he loped away. Suddenly he felt as if someone had hit his arm with a hot branding iron.
He swayed in the saddle, sickened and dizzy from pain.
Somehow he managed to stay astride. He got the horses headed for town and let them slow down to a fast trot. His head swirled, and he was sick at his stomach. He gripped the saddle horn grimly with one hand and kept himself on.
Much later he reined up in front of the sheriff’s house beside the jail. He tried to swing down, but sprawled weakly in the street. He struggled to his feet and staggered to the front steps. After a long minute’s pounding on the door, he got the sheriff out.
Johnny sank down onto the edge of the porch and quickly told his story. “You’ll find them all out there afoot some place.”
The sheriff put his big hand on Johnny’s shoulder.
“I’m taking you over to the doc, son. Then I’ll get me some men together and we’ll round up your fence cutters.”
The doctor found that the bullet had gone on through Johnny’s arm. As he cleansed the wound and bound it, he told Johnny that Clyde was going to pull through.
“You’ve lost a lot of blood, youngster. I’ve got an extra cot in the back room. You’d better lie down and get you some sleep.”
Wearily Johnny lay down. Later on he couldn’t even remember his head hitting the pillow.
The midday sun was bright when something awakened him. He blinked a minute and saw old Floyd Thurmond standing in the door.
“Didn’t mean to wake you up, son,” Thurmond said quietly, hat in hand. “How you feel?”
Johnny tried to raise up, but nausea pulled him down again.
“That’s all right, son. Stay there. You know, it looks kind of like you’ve stopped the fence cutting in this country. The sheriff found your six men.”
The old man went on. “One of them was shot up pretty bad. He got scared he was going to die and told about how they shot Clyde and killed Jed Tatlock, and who all was with them. The sheriff’s out now rounding up the whole bunch.”
Suddenly Dottie came into the little room. Johnny felt his pulse quicken. She looked at her father, grinned sheepishly, and leaned over and kissed Johnny. She stayed there a long moment, looking proudly at him.
Finally she said, “I’ve got something for you, Johnny.”
She stepped out of the room, then came back carrying something. She held up his fiddle and bow, and laid them across his cot.
“We found them where you had thrown them into a bush, Johnny.”
His eyes burned a little. His throat was choked. He let the fingers of his good hand rove lovingly over the fiddle.
“When your arm gets well,” Dottie was smiling, “I want you to play that tune for me. You know, the one you made up for me.”
A warm glow spread through Johnny, and he grinned. Sure, he would play it for her, play it as many times as she wanted him to.
With a little luck, he might be playing it for her the rest of his life.