Shaking the Nickel Bush Read Online Free

pawnshop where the owner would do a little trading.
    I had to try three or four pawnshops before I found one where I could make a decent deal. Of course, I expected to come out at the little end of the horn, but I didn’t get stuck too badly. The suitcase wasn’t new, I’d had the shoes six months and the suit a year, but the lunch basket had double covers and was brand new, and the watch had cost five dollars. After an hour’s haggling I traded them for a pretty good blanket, a tarpaulin that looked as though it would still shed rain, a pair of boots that were just a bit scuffed and run down at the heels, a jumper and pair of jeans that had been worn only enough to fade in good shape, and a throw rope that was almost new. I could have made the deal a lot quicker if I hadn’t held out for the throw rope, but I needed some practice to get my hand and eye back in, and I couldn’t do it without a rope.
    From the pawnshop I went back to my room, folded everything I had inside the blanket, and wrapped it in the tarp. When I had it corded up it looked like a good husky bedroll, so I took it down to the stockyards and tossed it into one corner of the scaler’s office, just as if I were a cowhand in with a bunch of cattle for shipping. During the day I tried to get a job from every cattleman who came to the yards, and in my spare time I practiced with the rope. It’s hard to get in any good rope practice without a horse and some cattle to work on. But I’d have made the drovers sore if I’d worked on any of the cattle in the pens, so I just sat astraddle of a fence to practice; trying to lay my loop around some pebble in an empty pen, or to make it stand close to the ground where some imaginary critter would step into it.
    That night, and for the rest of the week, I slept by a feed stack just outside the pens, and I wasn’t alone. There were eight or ten other fellows sleeping there, every one of them broke and looking for a cowhand job. That’s where I met Lonnie, and I don’t know yet whether it was good or bad.

2
    Land Rolling!
    L ONNIE was about my age, and told me he’d been brought up on a Wyoming ranch, drafted, and honorably discharged from the service after he’d nearly died with the flu. Ever since spring he’d been drifting around the Southwest—mostly by hopping freight trains—and hunting for a job as top hand or bronc buster. I think he was too lazy to have made a top hand, and I don’t know about his bronc riding, but he was friendly as the dickens and could handle a rope to beat the band; he showed me a couple of real handy tricks on turn-around forefooting. I couldn’t run past him fast enough that he couldn’t snag me by either foot he wanted to. It was because of Lonnie that I wrote Mother about being sent with another cowhand to a ranch near Phoenix.
    I was down to less than a dollar when Lonnie asked me how about catching the night freight and going up to Phoenix. He told me we’d be there by morning and that he knew a lot of fellows around the stockyards. He said that if we didn’t go out for top hands, but would settle for jobs at thirty or forty dollars a month, it would be a cinch to get them up there. Right then I’d have been glad to get a job anywhere, doing anything, for five dollars a month and my keep, so I told him I thought it was a good idea.
    It isn’t easy to flip a rolling freight train for the first time, especially if you have a bedroll lashed onto your back, but I didn’t have too much trouble that night in Tucson. Lonnie showed me how to do it on some empty boxcars out near the end of the freight yards, then we hid under them until the night freight pulled out. It was just beginning to pick up a little speed when we ducked out and ran along beside it. Lonnie flipped onto the step of one boxcar as it went past, and I flipped onto the next. We might have been better off if we’d been