No one writes the old west like Seven-time Spur Award-winning author Elmer Kelton. In The Cowboy Way, Kelton captures the action, adventure, brotherhood and betrayal of the old west, chronicling the highs and lows of cowboy life in these sixteen stories, collected together for the first time.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Release date:
November 10, 2020
Publisher:
Tom Doherty Associates
Print pages:
256
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Chuckwagon cooks were expected to be contrary. It was part of their image, their defense mechanism against upstart young cowpunchers who might challenge their authority to rule their Dutch-oven kingdoms fifty or so feet in all directions from the chuckbox. Woe unto the thoughtless cowboy who rode his horse within that perimeter and kicked up dust in the “kitchen.”
The custom was so deeply ingrained that not even the owner of a ranch would easily violate this divine right of kings.
Even so, there were bounds, and Hewey Calloway was convinced that Doughbelly Jackson had stepped over the line. He considered Doughbelly a despot. Worse than that, Doughbelly was not even a very good cook. He never washed his hands until after he finished kneading dough for the biscuits, and he often failed to pick the rocks out of his beans before he cooked them. Some of the hands said they could live with that because the rocks were occasionally softer than Doughbelly’s beans anyway, and certainly softer than his biscuits.
What stuck worst in Hewey’s craw, though, was Doughbelly’s unnatural fondness for canned tomatoes. They went into just about everything he cooked except the coffee.
“If it wasn’t for them tomatoes, he couldn’t cook a lick,” Hewey complained to fellow puncher Grady Welch. “If ol’ C.C. Tarpley had to eat after Doughbelly for three or four days runnin’, he’d fire him.”
C.C. Tarpley’s West Texas ranch holdings were spread for a considerable distance on both sides of the Pecos River, from the sandhills to the greasewood hardlands. They were so large that he had to keep two wagons and two roundup crews on the range at one time. Grady pointed out, “He knows. That’s why he spends most all his time with the other wagon. Reason he hired Doughbelly is that he can get him for ten dollars a month cheaper than any other cook workin’ out of Midland. Old C.C. is frugal.”
Frugal did not seem a strong enough word. Hewey said, “Tight, is what I’d call it.”
Doughbelly was by all odds the worst belly-robber it had been Hewey’s misfortune to know, and Hewey had been punching cattle on one outfit or another since he was thirteen or fourteen. He had had his thirtieth birthday last February, though it was four or five days afterward that he first thought about it. It didn’t matter; Doughbelly wouldn’t have baked him a cake anyway. The lazy reprobate couldn’t even make a decent cobbler pie if he had a washtub full of dried apples. Not that Old C.C. was likely to buy any such apples in the first place. C.C. was, as Hewey said, tight.
Grady was limping, the result of being thrown twice from a jug-headed young bronc. He said, “You ought to feel a little sympathy for Doughbelly. He ain’t got a ridin’ job like us.”
“He gets paid more than we do.”
Grady rubbed a skinned hand across a dark bruise and lacerations on the left side of his face, a present from two cows that had knocked him down and trampled him. “But he don’t have near as much fun as us.”
“I just think he ought to earn his extra pay, that’s all.”
Grady warned, “Was I you, I’d be careful what I said where Doughbelly could hear me. Ringy as he is, he might throw his apron at you and tell you to do the cookin’ yourself.”
It wasn’t that Hewey couldn’t cook. He had done his share of line-camp batching, one place and another. He could throw together some pretty nice fixings, even if he said so himself. He just didn’t fancy wrestling pots and pans. It was not a job a man could do a-horseback. Hewey had hired on to cowboy.
He appreciated payday like any cowpuncher, though money was not his first consideration. He had once quit a forty-dollar-a-month job to take one that paid just thirty. The difference was that the lower-paying outfit had a cook who could make red beans taste like ambrosia. A paycheck might not last more than a few hours in town, or anyway a long night, but good chuck was to be enjoyed day after day.
Hewey was tempted to draw his time and put a lot of miles between him and Doughbelly Jackson, but he was bound to the Two C’s by an old cowboy ethic, an unwritten rule. It was that you don’t quit an outfit in the middle of the works and leave it short-handed. That would increase the burden of labor on friends like Grady Welch. He and Grady had known each other since they were shirttail buttons, working their way up from horse jingler to top hand. They had made a trip up the trail to Kansas together once, and they had shared the same cell in jail after a trail-end celebration that got a little too loud for the locals.
Grady was a good old boy, and it wouldn’t be fair to ride off and leave him to pick up the slack. Hewey had made up his mind to stick until the works were done or he died of tomato poisoning, whichever came first.
It was the canned tomatoes that caused Doughbelly’s first real blowup. Hewey found them mixed in the beans once too often and casually remarked that someday he was going to buy himself a couple of tomatoes and start riding, and he would keep riding until he reached a place where somebody asked him what to call that fruit he was carrying on his saddle.
“That’s where I’ll spend the rest of my days, where nobody knows what a tomato is,” he said.
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