14 pounds beef soup bones
5 pounds onions
half cup vinegar
peppercorns
handful of salt
Crack bones. Cover with water in large pot, boil. Take off fire, skim. Return to fire, boil four hours. Throw away bones, gristle, and fat. Shred beef some. Pour into greased bread pans. When it hardens, slice onto biscuits.
THEY STRUCK THE ARKANSAS RIVER AT DUSK AND THE VAN FORDED, but the gap between van and main was too great; the tame steers in the van were clambering up the far bank before the longhorns reached the turbulent river. Though Story’s riders hollered and lashed them with rope ends, the longhorns swirled like a bovine merry-go-round and could not be persuaded into the water.
Nelson Story had provided his cocinero a new Bream and Company Dallas cookwagon with a fold-down table, two twenty-five-gallon water casks, and bins for flour, salt, baking powder, coffee, sugar, and white beans. Ratcliff’s thick-shouldered, short-coupled gelding, Pedro, was tied behind. Inside, frypans and Dutch ovens hung from the wagon bows, and tin plates, knives, forks, and spoons were contained in deep drawers. Each cowboy stowed his bedding in the rear compartment and when a bedroll wasn’t neat enough to suit him, Ratcliff threatened to boot it off, which was when George Dow started calling him “the nigger.”
The failure to ford the Arkansas put Ratcliff out of temper. He liked to reach the night’s bedground by late afternoon so he’d have time to build his cookfire and start supper before the riders arrived. If he couldn’t get his cookwagon through the longhorns, he couldn’t get his biscuits made. He had a buffalo tenderloin salted down; how was he to cook it? He yelled, “Unless you boys untangle those damn beeves, you’ll be eatin’ Rainy Day Stew tonight!”
They didn’t untangle them and come dark they bedded the main on the near shore. Nelson Story stayed across the river with the van. When the riders dismounted at Ratcliff’s cookfire, the coffee was hot, but the stew was as cold as the biscuits they spread it over.
“Christ almighty,” George Dow muttered. “Who said niggers could cook?”
“Who said you knew how to push cows?” Ratcliff snapped.
George had the pinched face and rotten teeth of a man who’d grown up poor. “Wish’t I had a hot meal in my belly.”
“Well,” Petty said, “I got a bellyful of your bitchin’. Shut your yap.”
“Why’s the nigger sayin’ we don’t know how to push cows?” George asked. “Might be before this drive is done I’ll find out just how much he does know.”
“Don’t let Mr. Story hear that bullshit,” Bill Petty said.
“Believe I’ll ride with you tomorrow,” Ratcliff said. “I believe I’ll show this white boy how to push beeves across a river.”
“Mr. Story won’t like it,” Bill Petty predicted.
“Believe I’ll ride with you anyways.”
An hour before sunrise Ratcliff banged his triangle and the nighthawks came in. A wrangler brought in the remuda, and Story’s hands saddled up in a melee of dust and whoops and bucking horses. Ratcliff threw a saddle on Pedro.
A couple hands swam their horses across the Arkansas, roped some leader steers, and after they were dragged into the water, the van swam back to the shore they’d left yesterday.
They withdrew both main and van a quarter mile behind a rise where the critters couldn’t see or smell the river and let them graze for twenty minutes. Then Nelson Story stood in his stirrups and waved his hat and all hell broke loose: pistol shots, popping rope ends, the shrill Confederate yip-yip-yip. The wide-eyed van thundered toward the river, and the main—nine hundred panicked Texas Longhorns—followed close on their heels.
If the van swam the river, the main would follow. But should the main pause for second thoughts at the water’s edge the merry-go-round of beeves would open for business. Van, riders, main, riders stretched out at full gallop.
The longhorns weren’t fifty feet behind Ratcliff and he put the spurs to Pedro. The beeves gathered momentum coming down the bank and as Ratcliff and Pedro hit the water, a Niagara of beeves tumbled in behind them.
Heads and broad horns out of the water, they swam mightily, eyes bulging, bawling in terror.
Eight or ten clambered onto a sandbar, Ratcliff swam Pedro to bump them off, and a longhorn charged Pedro, who couldn’t duck, since the longhorn had four feet on the sandbar and Pedro was swimming. The horn hooked Pedro behind his rib cage and jerked him up and Ratcliff went into the water.
Ratcliff was eye level with swimming longhorns. Their six-foot horns glistened with muddy water and clacked like castanets. The river water tasted like gritty coffee grounds. His hat was gone; when his boots filled, he kicked them off.
He blew out his breath and sank under a steer’s horns, and when he surfaced the steer’s buttocks were churning past, so Ratcliff grabbed the tail. When the steer felt the drag, he swam harder—so hard he set his front hooves on another’s back like he meant to climb over him. Ratcliff puked muddy water.
When Ratcliff’s longhorn got his feet on solid ground, he thought to spin and hook his uninvited passenger, but Nelson Story galloped up and offered Ratcliff a stirrup.
When they were clear, Story said, “If they’ll fit, I’ve a spare pair of boots.”
Ratcliff said, “That’ll be all right.”
Nelson Story said, “I got twenty-five cowboys. You get paid twice their wages account of you’re the cocinero. If there was something you had to prove, I suppose you proved it. Now on, you’ll stay with the cookwagon.”
A hundred yards downstream, Pedro stood shivering. Blood and muddy water pooled under his midsection.
“Pedro was a good horse,” Ratcliff said. “I’ll thank you for the loan of your pistol.”