5

“WHAT ARE YOU doing down here, old man? You aren’t intending to draw your pay, are you?”

“And deprive the outfit of the best hand you got? Not no way I’d do that, Eli. But the other boys was getting kinda jealous, what with me bringing in all the beef and them not having much of anything to do once I got done with my gather. You know how it is.”

“Yes, I do know and that’s why I’m asking for the truth,” the foreman responded. He’d been crossing the ranch yard toward the chow hall when Jug stepped out of the bunkhouse and practically bumped into him.

“Yeah, well, maybe I had a little bit of a wreck,” Jug said. “Cost the outfit that brown horse. You can dock my pay if you like.”

“I’m not gonna dock your pay for a damn horse. Are you all right?”

“Will be but, well, maybe I need some mending. Jesse said I should come down and lay around a spell.”

“All right then. You’ll have to wrestle your own grub though. It’ll just be you and me and you don’t want any of my cooking. That’d set back your healing processes. Hell, it makes me sick eating it myself.”

Eli eyed him for a second or two, and Jug could read plain as plain in the foreman’s expression what he was thinking. He stopped short of asking it though, asking would Jug be willing to cook for the both of them. That would have been the next thing to stating outright that Jug was due for retirement from horseback work. Would have been almost, not quite, as bad as if Jesse or Eli lent some other hand a horse out of Jug’s string or asked the old cowboy to get down off his saddle and dig holes for fenceposts. Any of those would add up to being a suggestion that Jug either swallow his pride or draw his time. To which Jug would’ve had to ask for his riding-on pay. Bum leg and busted ribs or no, he was still a hand and expected to stay one just as far ahead as he could see.

“I can boil water an’ burn bacon, I reckon,” Jug said, then added, “for the both of us,” there being a whopping big difference between Eli telling him to cook and Jug himself making the offer.

“I expect we’ll make out all right then.” Eli took his hat off and scratched his head some. The man had hair as red as any beet that’s ever been grown and a full head of it, unlike some people. Jug didn’t know how old Eli Poole was, but would’ve guessed it at barely into his thirties. And already foreman of as fine an outfit there was anyplace in the Bear Creek drainage. He was a comer, Eli was. Everybody said that. And he knew cows and cowboys. Everybody said that, too. He’d grown up in New Mexico, cowboyed in Arizona for a spell, then got smart and came north onto the big grass country of Wyoming and Montana. Now here he was, boss of the M Bar C. He was a comer all right. Ambitious and a real go-getter. Everybody said that.

Jug didn’t like the son of a bitch. Didn’t know why. Just didn’t cotton to him much. Maybe it was all that damned red hair, Jug himself being the next best thing to bald. Or the tidy little mustache that lay curled over the top of his upper lip like a rat’s tail lying snug over a rat ass. Something. Jug couldn’t put a finger to it.

The good thing, of course, was that you don’t have to like a man to work for him. Thank goodness.

And Eli did know his business. Jug had to give him that.

And if Jug wished the job had gone to Jesse Canfield when the owners had to find a replacement for Clay Bannerman, rest his soul, well, that wasn’t any business of an ordinary working hand like Jug. Ranch management and high finance and all that stuff, that was beyond Jug’s ken and even farther from his interest.

All Jug wanted was to have a decent string of horses and use them to ride free like a man ought to. Give the outfit an honest day of work and have a good ol’ time once in a while when the town lights dazzled and the powdered ladies earned their pay . . .or his, which amounted to the same thing.

Anyway, what in hell was he doing standing around thinking dumb thoughts like that when there was yet work to be done? He might not be up for much but there ought to be something he could do to help Coosie get ready to pull out and head back to the gather come tomorrow daybreak.

Coosie would take care of his own mules—woe to anyone but him who laid a finger on any of those pampered long-ears—but there was a wagon to load and likely some other chores that needed doing, and Jug wasn’t useless yet, by jingo.

He told the foreman g’day and limped off toward the chow hall.