The Cowboy Way by Elmer Kelton

Author:Elmer Kelton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

HORSE WELL

The Jigger Y chuckwagon was camped at Horse Well the night the showdown finally came between Jeff Bowman and Cleve Sharkey. I was just a button then, not yet ten years old. The first excitement of the Crane County oil boom had simmered down in the wake of the Depression, as every Texas oil boom did sooner or later. The place had almost settled into the calm that permanency brings, as much permanency as there can ever be for a community that depends on anything as hard to put a handle on as cattle and oil.

The times were still tight, and there were some around who would turn a fast dollar whenever the opportunity arose. A Jigger Y steer butchered in the dark and peddled out by the chunk in town and in the oil camps was one way to do it.

My dad was foreman of the Y. It was his job to make the cattle operation turn a profit whether beef prices were good or not. He usually went to Midland when it came time to hire cowboys; the men in Crane were mostly working in the oil fields. Dad knew a lot of people in Midland, and there were usually some job-hunting hands waiting around the Scharbauer Hotel for a ranch owner or a foreman to show up. That was where he hired Cleve Sharkey.

The next day Cleve Sharkey came sliding his shiny green Model A coupe to a stop on the gravel in front of the L-shaped kitchen and bunkhouse. As he stepped out, I decided he was the ideal cowboy to fit all those stories the old-timers used to tell about the good old days, back when they were young. He appeared to be seven feet tall, but of course I was looking up at him from pretty low down to the ground at that time. He wore his Levi’s jeans tucked into the tall tops of a fancy-stitched pair of high-heeled boots made for dancing, not for cow work. He was good-looking too, I thought, like the people in the stories I had heard old Wes Reynolds and Daddy George Lee and those others tell.

That was an early age for a boy to learn that you shouldn’t judge people by what they looked like. My old pet cat Blue Boy came ambling across the bunkhouse porch, full of curiosity about the new hand, and put himself right between Cleve’s feet. Cleve came near falling, and he gave Blue Boy a kick that boosted him off into the little patch of Bermuda grass at the edge of the porch.

Right there I got off to a bad start with Cleve. I told him what I thought about anybody who was mean to cats. He in turn told me what he thought about kids who mouthed off to grown-ups. My dad stepped out of our house about that time and came walking across the yard, still too far away to see that anything was wrong. Cleve carried

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