Frank Harris - My Life and Loves, Book 1

They were all ready, so the next day we rode out of Kansas City, about four o'clock in the morning, our course roughly south by west.

Everything was new and wonderful to me. In three days we had finished with roads and farmstead and we were on the open prairie; in two or three days more, the prairie became the great plains, which stretched four or five thousand miles from north to south with a breadth of some seven hundred. The plains wore buffalo grass and sage brush for a garment, and little else, save in the river bottoms, trees like the cottonwood; everywhere rabbits, prairie chicken, deer and buffalo abounded. We covered about thirty miles a day: Bob sat in the wagon and drove the four mules, while Bent and Charlie made us coffee and biscuits in the morning and cooked us sow-belly and any game we might bring in for dinner or supper. There was a small keg of rye whisky on the wagon, but we kept it for snake-bite or some emergency.

I became the hunter to the outfit, for it was soon discovered that by some sixth sense I could always find my way back to the wagon on a bee-line, and only Bob of the whole party possessed the same instinct. Bob explained it by muttering, «No Americano!» The instinct itself, which has stood me in good stead more times than I can count, is in essence inexplicable: I feel the direction; the vague feeling is strengthened by observing the path of the sun and the way the halms of grass lean, and the bushes grow. But it made me a valuable member of the outfit, instead of a mere parasite midway between master and man, and it was the first step to Bob's liking, which taught me more than all the other haps of my early life. I had bought a shotgun and a Winchester rifle and revolver in Kansas City, and Reece had taught me how to get weapons that would fit me, and this fact helped to make me a fair shot almost at once. Soon, to my grief, I found that I would never be a great shot, for Bob and Charlie and even Dell could see things far beyond my range of vision. I was short-sighted, in fact, through astigmatism, and even glasses, I discovered later, could not clear my blurred sight. It was the second or third disappointment of my life, the others being the conviction of my personal ugliness and the fact that I should always be too short and small to be a great fighter or athlete. As I went on in life, I discovered more serious disabilities, but they only strengthened my deep-seated resolve to make the most of any qualities I might possess; and meanwhile my life was divinely new and strange and pleasureful.

After breakfast, about five o'clock in the morning, I would ride away from the wagon till it was out of sight and then abandon myself to the joy of solitude, with no boundary between plain and sky. The air was brisk and dry, as exhilarating as champagne, and even when the sun reached the zenith and became blazing hot, the air remained lightsome and invigorating. Mid-Kansas is two thousand odd feet above sea-level and the air is so dry that an animal when killed dries up without stinking; and in a few months the hide's filled with mere dust. Game was plentiful: hardly an hour would elapse before I had got half a dozen ruffed grouse or a deer, and then I would walk my pony back to the midday camp, with perhaps a new wild-flower in my hand whose name I wished to learn. After the midday meal I used to join Bob in the wagon and learn some Spanish words or phrases from him or question him about his knowledge of cattle. In the first week we became great friends. I found, to my astonishment, that Bob was just as voluble in Spanish as he was tongue-tied in English, and his command of Spanish oaths, objurgations and indecencies was astounding.

Bob despised all things American with an unimaginable ferocity and this interested me by its apparent unreason. Once or twice on the way down we had a race; but Reece on a big Kentucky thoroughbred called Shiloh won easily. He told me, however, that there was a young mare called Blue Devil at the ranch which was as fast as Shiloh and of rare stay and stamina. «You can have her, if you can ride her,» he threw out carelessly and I determined to win the «Devil» if I could.

In about ten days we reached the ranch near Eureka; it was set in five thousand acres of prairie, a big frame dwelling that would hold twenty men; but it wasn't nearly so well built as the great brick stable, the pride of Reece's eye, which would house forty horses and provide half a dozen with good loose boxes besides, in the best English style.

The house and stable were situated on a long billowy rise, perhaps three hundred yards away from a good-sized creek, which I soon christened Snake Creek, for snakes of all sizes simply swarmed in the brush and woodland of the banks. The big sitting room of the ranch was decorated with revolvers and rifles of a dozen different kinds, and pictures, strange to say, cut out of the illustrated papers; the floor was covered with buffalo and bear rugs, and rarer skins of mink and beaver hung here and there on the wooden walls. We got to the ranch late one night and I slept in a room with Dell, he taking the bed while I rolled myself in a rug on the couch. I slept like a top and next morning was out before sunrise to take stock, so to speak. An Indian lad showed me the stable, and as luck would have it, Blue Devil in a loose box, all to herself and very uneasy, «What's the matter with her?» I asked, and the Indian told me she had rubbed her ear raw where it joins the head and the flies had got on it and plagued her; I went to the house and got Peggy, the mulatto cook, to fill a bucket with warm water, and with this bucket and a sponge I entered the loose box. Blue Devil came for me and nipped my shoulder, but as soon as I clapped the sponge with warm water on her ear, she stopped biting and we soon became friends. That same afternoon I led her out in front of the ranch saddled and bridled, got on her and walked her off as quiet as a lamb. «She's yours,» said Reece, «but if she ever gets your foot in her mouth, you'll know what pain is!»

It appeared that that was a little trick she had, to tug and tug at the reins till the rider let them go loose, and then at once she would twist her head round, get the rider's toes in her mouth and bite like a fiend. No one she disliked could mount her, for she fought like a man with her forefeet, but I never had any difficulty with her, and she saved my life more than once. Like most feminine creatures, she responded immediately to kindness and was faithful to affection.

I'm compelled to notice that if I tell the other happenings in this eventful year at as great length as I've told the incidents of the fortnight that brought me from Chicago to the ranch at Eureka, I'd have to devote at least a volume to them; so I prefer to assure my readers that one of these days, if I live, I'll publish my novel On the Trail, which gives the whole story in great detail. Now I shall content myself with saying that two days after reaching the ranch we set out, ten men strong and two wagons filled with our clothes and provender and dragged by four mules each, to cover the twelve hundred miles to southern Texas or New Mexico, where we hoped to buy five thousand or six thousand head of cattle at a dollar a head and drive them to Kansas City, the nearest train point. When we got on the great trail a hundred miles from Fort Dodge, the days passed in absolute monotony. After sunset a light breeze usually sprang up to make the night pleasantly cool and we would sit and chat about the camp fire for an hour or two. Strange to say, the talk usually turned to bawd or religion or the relations of capital and labor. It was curious how eagerly these rough cattlemen would often discuss the mysteries of this unintelligible world, and as a militant skeptic I soon got a reputation among them, for Dell usually backed me up, and his knowledge of books and thinkers seemed to us extraordinary.