FREDDIE SPRAGUE got the mumps in late October, and they closed the school. That month was one of the best I ever had in some ways. It started off bad because Bill, our old white horse, died. Father let me go up to Bear Creek Canyon with him to get another load of fence posts. We drove Bill and Nig, and while we were loading the poles it started to rain and sleet. It didn’t hurt Nig a bit, but from the time it started, Bill humped his back up like a sick old cow. We had to stop and rest him so often that we didn’t get home till long after dark, and that night he died in spite of all the doctoring Father could give him.
Mother wouldn’t let us quit studying just because the school-house was closed, so as soon as the supper dishes were washed we had to get our books out. One evening Fred and Bessie Aultland came over to play whist with Father and Mother before we had our arithmetic done, so they sat and talked till we got through using the table. Fred said, “For God’s sake, Charlie, don’t you know me well enough yet to let me lend you a horse? You could do me a favor by taking that three-year-old I bought at the auction, and gentle-breaking him for me this winter.”
“Fred, I couldn’t expect a brother to do the things you’ve already done for me and my family. No, Fred, I can’t take your colt. My record for losing horses must be the worst in the country—50 per cent in a year.”
Fred slapped his leg and laughed when Father said that. Then he said, “Those nags were 90 per cent dead when you got hold of ’em. A man’s just throwing his money away to buy that kind of plugs. They eat just as much as good horses and you can’t get any work out of them. I’ll bring the colt down in the morning.”
Fred brought the big bay colt right after we got done eating breakfast the next morning. He was a beauty, but Father wouldn’t let me go near him at first. He tied him up at the far end of the barn and gave him two quarts of oats morning and night, while Nig and Fanny only got peas—vines and all.
The day after we got the new horse Father and I went to Fort Logan with the box wagon. Fanny took Bill’s place, but she didn’t like it a bit. I guess she had forgotten all she had learned in the spring about working double. She slammed and banged around and threw herself down a couple of times before she decided she was going to have to do it. And all the way down to the Fort she danced and pranced like a two-year-old.
We did our trading with Mr. Green in Logan Town. He had the only general store, but there were nine saloons and a post office, beside the depot. Father had brought a couple of little bags to show Mr. Green. One was beans and the other was peas. There were quite a lot of little beans among them, because they didn’t get water enough when they needed it, and some of them were kind of black where the frost had hit them before they were ripe. Mr. Green looked both samples over and said he didn’t think he could handle many of the peas, but he’d take all the beans we had—in trade—if they were hand-picked so that we only brought him the full-sized white ones.
Mr. Green and Father talked a long time while I was looking around the store at all the things I hoped we would be able to trade our beans for. Then Mr. Green went into his back room and rolled out three empty barrels. While he was gone to roll out a barrel of flour, I smelled of the empty ones. Two of them had had vinegar in them, and the other one molasses. I ran my finger in through the bunghole of the molasses barrel, and there was still some in there. It tasted good.
You never saw so many groceries as we got that day. Besides the barrel of flour, there were hundred-pound sacks of corn meal, sugar and salt; ten pounds of seeded raisins, and cream of tartar, rice, soda, and saltpeter—and a pound of Baker’s chocolate. It seemed we would have enough stuff to keep us fed even if winter lasted clear till June.
That night after supper Father and Mother talked about peas and beans, and did arithmetic problems on the other side of the table from where Grace and I were doing our homework. Father was telling Mother how many square feet of ground he pulled the bean vines from to get the sample for Mr. Green, and the same thing about the peas. First she borrowed Grace’s arithmetic book to find out how many square feet in an acre, and after that she got her marked cup and measured each sample. Then she figured, and figured, and figured. When she was all done, I could tell that both she and Father were the happiest they had been since we came to the ranch.
She had all the answers down on one sheet of paper, and said, “Charlie, we’re going to be a lot better off than I ever thought we could be when I saw the leaves on those poor plants curling up in the summer. If I didn’t make any mistakes in my figures—and I’m sure I didn’t—we’ll have a hundred and sixty bushels of beans and a hundred and eighty bushels of peas. Supposing that thirty bushels of the beans are small ones which will only bring four cents a pound, and that thirty bushels are frosted and will only be good for pig food; that would leave a hundred bushels of good ones. At five cents a pound, our share will be worth a hundred and eighty-six dollars ...that is, if there are sixty pounds in a bushel.
“You know, practically all the peas of the variety we have are used for soup, so it doesn’t make a particle of difference if some of them are small—they should all bring the same price. Let’s say that will be four cents a pound; our half should bring in a hundred and ninety-two dollars. I can’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be able to afford a good horse like Fred Aultland’s.”
Right after breakfast the next morning, Father hooked Fanny to the buckboard, and Mother took all the other youngsters to Englewood to buy stockings and underwear and things. I had a day’s work helping Bessie Aultland pick apples, so I left before they did. We picked bushels and bushels of apples, and when Bessie took me home, just before supper, she helped me put two bushel basketfuls on the buckboard for us.
As we came near our house I could see what looked like three big white sacks of grain hanging from a crossbar at the back of our barn. I jumped off while the bays were making their circle in bur yard, and ran around the barn. Our three biggest pigs were hanging there dead, with all the hair scraped off them. It kind of startled me at first, and I guess Father noticed it. He came right over and bent down on one knee beside me. Then he put his arm around my shoulder, and said, “There isn’t a thing to be afraid of, or to feel bad about, Son. The only time to feel sorry for anything—or anybody—that dies is when they haven’t completed their mission here on earth. These pigs’ mission was to get big and fat so as to make food for us. They have done a good job of it and their mission is completed. And I do want you to know this: they didn’t know what was happening, and they weren’t hurt a bit—they didn’t even squeal.” Father could always explain things like that so I’d understand.
Everybody worked on the pork the next day. Father cut the hams and bacon and side meat, while Philip and I stripped all the fat off the insides, and ground up the scraps for sausage. Father made a separate pile of the leanest scraps, and we ground them for mincemeat.
Mother and the girls were just as busy in the kitchen as we were outside. They rolled all the sausage into little cakes the size of a turkey egg, fried them slow, and packed them away in stone crocks; tried out all the lard, and made the livers and hearts into sausage. Then they chopped apples and made the mincemeat. It was stewing on the back of the stove when we came in to supper. I never heard of making mincemeat with pork before, but it smelled and tasted better than any other I ever ate.
We got a lot of things done that month when school was closed. We were the only people anywhere around who didn’t have a corral and a dug-out cellar. Mother had been worrying ever since the big wind because we didn’t have a storm cellar, and Father had been saying he’d build one as soon as he had time to get to the mountains for poles. I couldn’t figure why we needed poles to build a cellar, but I didn’t like to ask Father. On things like that, he always used to tell me I could learn more if I kept my eyes open and my mouth closed.
Mother must have mentioned something about wishing we had a cellar half a dozen times while we were packing the barrels of pork away in my room in the bunkhouse. At breakfast the next morning, Father winked at me, and said, “Do you think we could spare time to go up the canyon for a load of poles today?”
Of course, I did think so. And right after breakfast he started putting Bill’s harness on the new colt. Then he sent me up to Aultland’s on Fanny, and said to tell Fred we’d like to borrow one to fit her. I was so excited about going to the mountains with Father that I didn’t think much about what we were going to do with three harnesses, but Fred did. As soon as I told him what I wanted and where we were going, he scratched his head and said, “Has your old man gone loco? If he thinks he’s going to harness that green colt and take him up to the mountains, along with Wright’s old mare, he’s either the bravest man I ever seen, or a damn fool.” I told him Father was the bravest man he ever saw, and wasn’t any fool, so he let me have the harness.
I had to walk Fanny all the way home, because the harness slapped around so much when I made her canter. All the way, I kept thinking about what Fred had said. I was kind of scared, too, about what would happen when Father got all three horses hooked up to the wagon.
When I got there, he already had old Bill’s harness on the colt, but he had it fastened on with three or four extra straps, and the traces were tied up around the back of the breeching. The colt was sweaty and nervous, but he wasn’t raising Ned at all.
After Father had hooked Nig and Fanny to the box wagon, and Fanny had got over slatting around, he led the colt out and tied him up close to the back of it. He hitched his head to both sides so that he had to keep it right in the middle of the tail gate. Then I ran to the house for our dinner pail, and we started off. You never saw a horse buck and kick much worse than that colt did when he felt the harness flopping around him, but Father had it strapped on so tight and his head tied up so short that he couldn’t hurt anything.
By the time we went past Aultland’s house he was soaking wet, but he wasn’t bucking any more—just dragging back on the halter ropes and trying to spit out the bit. Fred was standing out in the yard when we went past. When I waved to him, he waved back, and yelled, “I’ll take back what I said, Spikes.” I just grinned, because I knew all the time that whatever Father did would be right. Father must have guessed what Fred had said, because I didn’t tell him, but he looked over at me and grinned, too.
When we had loaded our poles and got down out of the canyon, Father tied the colt alongside of Nig. That time he fastened a strap from the colt’s outside trace over onto Nig’s breeching so that he couldn’t swing his hind end around sideways. At first he’d hang back till the singletree bumped against his legs, then he’d jump around and kick, but Nig didn’t care, and then he learned to stay up where he belonged.
Father unhitched Fanny after we got home, and while we still had the load of poles on the wagon he hooked the colt in her place. By that time he was used to the harness, and I guess he was a little tired, but he hardly made a bobble. In half an hour he was pulling like an old horse.
We hauled poles for three days, and took the colt with us every day. After the first one, Father put him in Fanny’s place just as soon as we got down out of the canyon, and from then on he behaved better than Fanny did.
Before we started hauling poles Father had dug a little ditch around a patch of ground in the back yard. He made a trough that ran out there from the well, and every morning and night it was my job to pump the ditch full of water. In three days the ground had softened up in good shape, so we borrowed Carl Henry’s slip-scraper and started digging our cellar. I had learned how to ease a horse up into the collar for a hard pull while we were stacking hay. Father hitched Nig and the new colt to the scraper and let me drive them while he held the handles. If I didn’t start the team real easy when Father raised the handles of the scraper, the cutting edge might catch and throw him up under the horses’ heels.
Father explained it to me before we started, and I was so afraid I might do something wrong and get him badly hurt that my hands were shaking when I reached out to take the lines. He wouldn’t let me take hold of them then. He said I’d have to stop a little while and get my mind straightened out, because a horse could tell through the feel of the reins if the person driving him was afraid. Then he told me I had already proved I could make a horse do what I wanted it to, so there was no reason to be afraid now. It made me proud to hear him say that, and when I reached out for the lines again my hands were steady. I wrapped the reins around them and called, “Get up,” with my voice as deep in my throat as I could make it go.
We scooped out a hole nearly as big as our kitchen. While Father dug the corners out square with a pick and shovel, I peeled bark off the poles with his drawknife. It took five days to build the cellar. After the hole was dug we cribbed the walls up with poles like a log house. We made the end walls half round at the tops and then laid poles across to make the roof. Grace and I stuffed all the cracks on the outsides of the walls and roof with straw while Father made the door and the steps. Then we hitched up the horses and, with the scraper at the end of a long rope, filled dirt in tight around the sides and over the roof till it looked like a little hill with a trap door in it.
The next week I peeled poles while Father built them into a corral. It was a good one, with a six-pole fence five feet high. Father set a big, high post for the gate to swing on. Then he made the gate out of slim poles with the butt ends toward the hinges, and a guy wire running from the top of the post to the lighter end of the gate so it could never sag.
While we were building it I got thinking how lonesome our little house had looked to me, sitting out there on the prairie, when I had first seen it from the hill by Fort Logan. When the last nail was driven and the hasp was put on the gate, I got Father to let me put Nig and the new colt and our two cows in the corral. Then he let me take Fanny and ride up to that hill again, so I could look at our place and see how much it looked like a real ranch now.