Читать книгу: «Philip of Texas», страница 4

STANDING GUARD

If I imagined that all of us were to lie down in the wagons and take our rest on this first night after arriving at the Trinity, I was very much mistaken. Father made me forget all about sleep and rest, when he said that unless we kept sharp watch against the coyotes we were likely to lose several sheep before morning, and that it was necessary that at least two of us stand guard throughout the night.

If only the oxen or the mules had been in danger, perhaps I would not have been so eager to shoulder my rifle and, in company with Zeba, tramp around and around the animals until midnight. As it was, however, I did my duty faithfully, and when the night was half spent, father came out with John to relieve us. I was so weary that when I crawled into one of the wagons on to the soft feather bed, it seemed to me as if my legs would drop from my body, and my eyes were so heavy with slumber that it was only by the greatest exertion I could keep them open.

When next I was conscious of my surroundings, the rising sun was sending long yellow shafts of light beneath the canvas covering of the wagon; the little chaparral cock was calling out from the pecan motte near at hand, as if to assure me he still stood my friend; while far away could be heard the shrieks, yelps, and barks of the cowardly wolves which had been sneaking around our flock of sheep all night.

A TURKEY BUZZARD

I came out of the wagon with a bound, determined that from this on until I had my flock of five thousand sheep, there should be no dallying on my part.

As I started toward the stream for a morning bath, a big black shadow came between me and the sun. Looking up, I saw for the first time a turkey buzzard, his black coat and red crest showing vividly against the sky as he flapped lazily in front of me to alight in the near vicinity of the chaparral cock. I was so superstitious as to believe for the moment that the sudden appearance of this disagreeable-looking bird at the very moment when the little cock was bidding me good morning, threatened disaster to our scheme of making a home and to my plan of raising sheep.

With the air fresh and bracing, the sunlight flooding everything with gold, and even with the dismal shrieks and yelps in the distance, it would have been a pretty poor kind of fellow who could have remained long disheartened, simply because a grumbling old turkey buzzard chanced to fly in front of him.

The stream by the side of which I hoped to live for many a long year was not deep at this season, but clear as crystal, and just cool enough to give me the sensation of being keenly alive when I plunged in head foremost. I floundered about until I heard mother calling for me to hurry while the corn bread was hot, lest I lose my share, for both she and father were ravenously hungry.

While we ate we decided where the cook camp should be put up and how we would care for the cattle, the sheep, and the mules while we were building our house. In fact, very many plans were laid during those ten or fifteen minutes, some of which were carried out at once.

PLANS FOR BUILDING A HOUSE

As for the cook shanty, we were not inclined to spend very much time over it. Simply a shelter from the dew and the sun, where mother might be screened from the wind, so she could use the cookstove we had brought with us, was all we needed.

Father intended to build a house of lumber, even though at that time he knew that he would be forced to pay anywhere from twenty to thirty dollars a thousand feet for cheap boards, and then haul them no less than two hundred miles.

After he had told me about the lumber I asked in wonder and surprise if he counted on spending so much money, when we might build a house as the Mexicans do, of adobe brick, with no more timber in it than would serve to hold up a roof of mud. He laughingly replied that when we had made a saw pit, he would show me how we might get out our own building material, and said that I was to have a hand in the manufacture, for he thought I could do my share of the sawing when I was not looking after the cattle or the sheep.

Before leaving home he had made arrangements to keep with us the three negroes whom we had hired in Bolivar County, until we were fairly settled. Therefore we had seven pairs of hands in this house building, which should put the work along in reasonably rapid fashion, even though five of the laborers were not skilled.

We spent no more time at breakfast than was necessary for eating and for roughly sketching out the plans for the day's work. After this each set about his task. I drove the sheep a short distance away toward the farther end of the valley, where they could conveniently get at the water and yet find rich pasturage; John and Zeba picketed out the mules; and father with the three negroes rounded up the cattle.

THE COOK SHANTY

This done, we set about making a shanty by digging to the depth of two or three feet a space about three yards wide and four yards long, around the sides of which we set branches of pecan trees. We planted poles at the four corners so that we could use the wagon covers for walls and roof.

When this rudest kind of rude building was so far finished that it would screen us from the wind, we set up the cookstove, and mother began what in Bolivar County she would have called her regular Saturday's baking. After this we put on a roof of canvas, pinning the whole down as best we might with mesquite bushes, until we had a shed which would serve, but which was most crude looking.

Although there was nothing on which we could pride ourselves in this first building, it had occupied us nearly the entire day, and I had no more than an hour in which to rest my weary limbs before it was necessary to stand guard over the sheep, lest the wolves carry off the beginnings of my flock.

It was during this night, when it cost not only great effort, but real pain, to keep continually on the move lest I fall asleep, that I decided that at the very first opportunity I would build a corral. While our flock was so small, it would not be a very great task to build a pen sufficiently large to hold the animals together, and at the same time shut out the wolves. There were enough mesquite bushes, or trees, to provide me with the necessary material, and I decided upon the place where I would build a pen, figuring in my mind how the work could be best done.

Therefore, when father relieved me at midnight, I had in my mind's eye the first sheep pen put up on the West Fork of the Trinity, and already in imagination was on the high road to prosperity.

A STORM OF RAIN

When another morning came, my dreams of what the future might bring me had become decidedly cloudy, for the rain was falling, not furiously, as in the case of a norther or a short-lived tempest, but with a steady downfall which told of a long spell of disagreeable weather, and I was not the only member of our party to come out from the beds in the wagons looking disheartened, and uncomfortably damp.

At our old home in Bolivar County the first sound in the morning which usually broke upon my ear was that of mother's singing as she prepared breakfast. On this day she was in our cook house, but working in silence. So, forgetting my own discomfort in the fear that something might have gone wrong with her, I asked why I had not heard her morning song. In reply she pointed first to the heavens, and then to our stock of household belongings, which were strewn here and there where they had been taken from the wagons. To give her cheer, I tried to laugh, saying there was little among our goods which would come to harm because of the rain, and such as might be injured I would quickly get under cover. She replied in an injured tone that father had told her there were few rainstorms in Texas during the year, save when a norther raged.

A DAY OF DISCOMFORT

I ventured to jest with her, by saying most likely it had been arranged for our especial benefit, as we were newcomers in the country and needed to be introduced to all varieties of climate. The light words failed to bring a smile to her lips. So, without loss of time, I set about carrying such of our belongings as might be injured by the rain to the shelter of the wagons, and had hardly more than begun the task when father returned, his face quite as gloomy as mother's.

He tried to apologize for this sort of weather, and began by saying that from all he had learned during his first visit there was little danger that we should be visited by a very long storm.

Even the negroes were out of humor, and although the morning was not cold, all were shivering, and looked as if they had been taking a bath in the stream. I asked Zeba what had happened. In sulky tones he told me that while he had been rounding up the cattle and bunching them at the upper end of the valley, so that they would not stray too far on the prairie, he had been treated to a veritable shower bath from the moisture on the mesquite bushes and the pecan trees.

THINKING OF THE OLD HOME

The chaparral cock was silent. Even the turkey buzzard had forsaken the pecan motte. The mules, which I could see in the distance, were hanging their long ears dejectedly, and the cattle in a most forlorn manner stood humped up with their heads away from the wind. Only the sheep grazed with seeming contentment.

When I went into the cook camp, in order to get my breakfast, I was thinking of the old plantation in Bolivar County, where, when it rained, we had good shelter instead of being homeless in the wilderness, as one might say.

And surely we were in a wilderness, there on the banks of the Trinity, exposed to all the downpour, save when we crawled into one of the wagons to shelter ourselves while mother continued her work. There is no need that I should say the breakfast was inviting, for my mother could cook the meanest of food in such a manner that it would appeal to one's appetite, yet we ate as if it were a duty rather than a pleasure to break our fast after so much watching.

When the meal was ended, father set the negroes to gathering up the remainder of our goods that might be injured by dampness, and I, rather than remain idle when there was so much work to be done, took part in the task, until we had nearly everything sheltered.

The only places of refuge against the storm were the miserable shanty we had put up so hastily and the small two-mule wagon in which father and mother had ridden.

We were a mournful-looking company of emigrants, when, the last of the goods having been stowed away, we sat under one of the wagon bodies, while mother continued to work in the shanty regardless of the rain which came in through a hundred crevices.

WAITING FOR THE SUN

The negroes gathered about father and me, in order to take advantage of the shelter afforded by the wagon. We remained silent a full ten minutes before father strove to cheer our spirits by suggesting that a storm at this season of the year could not last very many hours, and that by the following morning we should be rejoicing in the heat and the brightness of the sun.

He was at fault in this prediction, however. During the remainder of the day we came out from the shelter now and then to make certain that the cattle, the mules, and the sheep yet remained within the valley, and then crept back once more to keep mournful silence, seldom breaking it, save when the meals were ready.

The rain continued to fall steadily, and yet it was necessary we stand guard against the coyotes, who began to howl, and scream, and bark as soon as night came. No longer dreaming of making my fortune at sheep raising, I went off with Zeba just before darkness covered the earth, to begin the weary march around and around our herd of cattle and flock of sheep. I was soon drenched to the skin, and wished that father had never been attacked by the Texas fever.

I wondered during that long, wet, disagreeable time of watching where the other newly arrived settlers had begun to make homes in Texas. I knew that hundreds of families near us in Bolivar County, and from Kentucky and Missouri, had come into this republic of Texas, and it seemed, as I thought it over, most singular that we had failed to meet with any of them.

The storm, the darkness, and the irritating calls of the coyotes had so worked upon my mind that I came to believe that all the stories we had heard of people who were to make homes in this new country had been false. It seemed to me that we were the only persons in the United States who had been so foolish as to venture across the Red River with wild dreams of fertile ranches and rapidly increasing herds of cattle or flocks of sheep.

TOO MUCH WATER

Three days passed before we again rejoiced in the light of the sun. During that time so much discomfort and actual danger had been met that I was sick at heart at the very sound of the name of Texas.

Before the end of the second day we had succeeded in making the cook shanty nearly waterproof, by stripping all the wagons of their covers, and pinning the canvas down over the pecan branches. This left our goods exposed to the rain, and many of our belongings were necessarily ruined, although we took little heed of that fact, if only it was possible to give mother some degree of comfort.

On the morning of the third day the valley was dotted here and there with pools of water, showing that the soil had drunk its fill and refused to take in more. In order to move about in the valley, it was necessary at times to wade ankle-deep. The result was that father and I, as well as the negroes, were forced to wear garments saturated with water, since it would have been useless to put on dry clothes, for after an hour of tramping to and fro they would have been in the same wet condition. Yet we had no thought of real danger. There was in our minds simply the painful idea that we must endure what could not be avoided; we never dreamed that worse was to come.

THE STREAM RISING

Just before time for dinner on the third day I noticed that the sheep were making their way rapidly up out of the valley, and, fearing lest they might stray so far that it would be impossible to herd them before nightfall, I followed, leaving father and the negroes crouching under one of the wagon bodies.

To my surprise, when I had walked a few yards from where we were encamped, I found the water in many of the pools nearly ankle-deep, and saw that the western side of the valley, that part farthest from the stream, was literally flooded.

Strange as it may seem, neither father nor I had given any particular heed to the rising of the stream. There was in our minds, dimly perhaps, an idea that the amount of water had increased during this long storm, and we were not disquieted on seeing it come up to the height of the banks; but now, being warned by the depth of water in the valley, I quite forgot the sheep for an instant, and ran back to where I could have a full view of the river.

The flood was already overlapping the banks at the northern end of the valley, a fact which accounted for the quantity of water I had found while going toward the sheep, and I fancied it was possible to hear, far away in the distance, a roaring noise such as a waterfall might produce.

TRYING TO SAVE THE STOCK

Heedless of the fact that my twelve sheep were stampeded, I ran swiftly along the edge of the stream toward the wagons, shouting wildly that a flood was upon us. I was yet twenty or thirty yards distant when father came out to learn why I was raising such an alarm.

It needed but one glance for him to understand that we were in the gravest danger. Even while I ran, it was possible for me to see the river rising, rising, until what, at the moment I set off to herd the sheep, had been comparatively dry land, was being flooded so rapidly that before I had gained the wagons, they were standing a full inch deep in the water.

Father ran hurriedly, with a look of alarm on his face, toward the cook shanty and shouted for mother to make all haste, to leave everything behind her, and to clamber into one of the wagons. Then, turning to the negroes, he literally drove them out from their shelter, ordering them to round up the mules without delay so we might hitch them to the wagons. It was not necessary that I should be told to obey this command on the instant, even though it was not directed to me. I wheeled about, intending to turn the mules in the direction of the wagons, leaving the slaves to bring up the harness, but while doing so, I saw that we were too late by at least three or four minutes, for the mules, having already taken alarm by the rising of the water, were making their way at a quick pace up the incline which led to the higher land, following directly behind the sheep.