Shaking the Nickel Bush Read Online Free Page B

some of these Mex women ain’t so dumb. One of ’em made me pack her five buckets of water ’fore she’d give me a bowl of chile, about half of it gristle.”
    â€œHalf a bucket of water won’t make much of a supper,” I said. “I wish it was milk. Did you find out when the next train stops here?”
    â€œAin’t none,” he told me as he fished a long piece of string and a chunk of gristle out of his pocket. “Nine miles up the line there’s a water tank where all the freights stop at to fill the boiler. We’ll have to hoof it.”
    As Lonnie talked he tied the piece of gristle—about the size of a small grasshopper—onto the end of the string, then tossed it out into the middle of the pen. The rooster saw it sailing through the air, ran toward it, and gobbled it the instant it touched the ground. It was so big that he had to crane his neck two or three times before he could swallow it. Lonnie cussed in a whisper because the rooster got the gristle instead of one of the hens, but as he mumbled he kept drawing in slowly on the string. At first the old rooster tried to hold back, but, with that piece of gristle in his craw, Lonnie had him hooked like a fish. Step by step he brought the rooster closer until he could snatch him by the neck. Then he whispered to me, “Grab that bucket o’ water and duck into the brush!”
    I think that was the toughest rooster I ever tried to eat. After I’d sneaked back for our bedrolls we went far into the brush, built a fire, and boiled him all afternoon. The longer we boiled him the tougher he seemed to get, but we had full stomachs when we set out for the water tank.
    Lonnie saved the gristle and string, and caught us two fat hens before we reached Phoenix, but he didn’t get us any jobs when we got there. He seemed to know most of the fellows hanging around the stockyards, but I think it was only because they were drifters and moochers too. None of them had a job or seemed very anxious to find one. There was only one in the bunch who looked to me as if he might be a first-class cowhand, and he looked as though he’d just been run through a thrashing machine. He had a broken arm hanging in a sling, nearly half his face was covered with bandages, and his clothes were torn in a dozen places. Lonnie didn’t know him, and he was sitting off by himself, so I went over and sat down beside him.

    â€œHorse go through a fence with you?” I asked, just to have something to say.
    â€œUh-uh,” he grunted, “got busted up tryin’ to be a movie actor.”
    â€œIn California?” I asked.
    â€œUh-uh,” he said again. “Wickenburg.”
    â€œI don’t know where that is,” I told him, “but I thought they made all the moving pictures in California.”
    â€œWickenburg’s about fifty miles northwest, on the Santa Fe,” he told me. “They don’t make whole pi’tures out there; just horse-fall pieces that get spliced into cowboy-and-Injun filums. Reckoned I was goin’ to make a big stake in a hurry, but I got busted up on my first fall. Most of the boys does. It’s a wonder they ain’t killed off half the cowhands in these parts.”
    I talked to the boy for nearly an hour, and when we were through I knew what I was going to do. It doesn’t make a fellow very happy to be told that he may live only six months, but it surely cuts down the gamble on taking chances, and I’d reached the point where I had to do some gambling. I couldn’t live forever on chickens that Lonnie stole with a piece of gristle, I wouldn’t mooch for a living, there didn’t seem to be any chance of finding a safe job, and I couldn’t buy salmon and peanuts without money—or send report cards to Dr. Gaghan.
    I’d learned to do trick-riding when I was a kid, and my best stunt had been a good deal like a horse fall, except that the