Текст книги "Paradise Sky"

Автор книги: Joe R. Lansdale

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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

24

I will make short work of our trip back to Deadwood, for that was the only wise place to go under the circumstances. We didn’t bury a one of those men but left them to the things that wiggle and the things that fly.

We gathered their weapons and tossed them in the wagon, took their horses, which we tied to the back of the wagon, except for one animal Cullen took in place of his, and started back swiftly as we could, considering Win had taken considerable mistreatment and the wagon’s rumblings was hard on her aching body. I will not spend time on what was done to her. I think that is obvious, but she was not only mistreated in as vile a way as a woman can be, she was also sick and bloody and headwise confused. But that is enough. I’ll draw the curtain on that.

Before we got back we seen some Sioux, perhaps some of them that had painted my face white. There wasn’t too many, and as an Indian is a smart opportunist, they probably decided since we was on horseback and well armed, the scuffle might not be worth the prize, so they let us go without bother.

We passed Weasel’s body, flocked with vultures, and when we did the birds rose up and flew away. Win asked if we would pause. I helped her out of the wagon, as she had grown mighty stiff. We did that so she could spit on his corpse. She was able to work up quite a wad and frighten a flock of innocent vultures.

Later, when we come to Madame’s body, Win found the strength to get out of the wagon again and look, to tell us that after the hooligans had done all they wanted, Golem twisted Madame’s neck like a chicken and threw her out of the back of the wagon, which is when he and Weasel went off together before having their divide. It was at that point, looking down on Madame, that some of Win’s mind took flight, and she didn’t say another word during our journey.

As for Madame, we had tools in the wagon, a shovel and hoe among them, some of our new supplies for a possible farm somewhere. It all seemed silly now, all those tools and supplies and nothing to do with them; it was like they was there to mock us.

We buried her out there on the plains, and Bronco Bob, who was also an ordained preacher of sorts, said some words over her. We gathered up a few stones and made a mound and went on.

Rolling into Deadwood, we was a despondent bunch, you can bet on that, and now me and Win had no home. When Madame and Win left their house there was no shortage of squatters waiting to move into it, and my little room was no longer mine, either. We ended up staying with Wow and Cullen in their small place, and Bronco Bob, having money and being white, went to the hotel, coming each day of the following week to check on mine and Win’s condition.

One day after a visit, I walked with him outside, said, “What do you think, Bronco?”

“Time could heal her.”

“What do you really think?”

“I can’t say for sure. Who can? But since you asked, I’m of the thought her spirit has gone out through a hole in the wind, and it’s not coming back. I say that knowing full well it’s only a guess. I had a cousin that had a very bad experience. She went through that hole, and somewhere her spirit is still rambling. One thing for sure, though: it never came home.”

“I must be hopeful,” I said.

“Of course,” he said.

When I was able to slow down, what had happened to me took hold, and I was laid up for three days, hardly able to move. It was recommended by the China girls that I drink lots of water, and they brewed some foul-smelling stuff to drink as well; it tasted like someone had peed in some dirty water with a dog turd at the bottom. I resisted, but Ching-a-ling, as she was calling herself that week, insisted I drink it. I did, and I am here to say I think it did much for me, renewing my physical energy to such an extent I was out of bed by the end of the week. Or maybe I just wanted to get well so I didn’t have to drink any more of it, and that may have been its most important curing property.

It was slower for Win, there being more than just bruises and humiliation but an assault upon the spirit, as Bronco Bob called it. Sometimes I’d take her for a buggy ride up to our hill, but it was like riding around with a bag of flour, bless her heart. I had hoped for some renewed vigor by stirring old memories, but no correction of spirit was forthcoming.

Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and she would be in a corner, her back to the wall, her knees drawn up, and I would have to coax her back to bed, which was a pallet on the floor. I would try and hold her, but she wasn’t having any of that. I’m sure it made her think of other things.

Though it was a tight squeeze there with Wow and Cullen, and I felt I was stretching their hospitality, I made no rush to head out again, though I had firmly made up my mind to track down Ruggert and the big Jew and kill them both. I was tempted to do it slowly and in some horrible fashion, and had dreams of tying them down and putting hot coals to the bottoms of their feet and forcing a gun barrel up their ass and firing until the trigger didn’t work no more. Actually, that was just some of the things I considered.

To be honest, my spirit, though not broken, had been twisted considerably. It was a day-to-day measure to regain my piss and vinegar and to think about starting out after them. I remembered that Weasel said he and Golem were to join Ruggert in the Kansas Territory, but that was a long ways off, and they could be any place there, if they went there at all. I decided if they was going to Kansas, Dodge was likely.

I couldn’t presume what Ruggert would have left to do with his life now. He had chased me for some time, and if he reckoned I was done in, and if he had stored some money secretly for himself, he might go from Kansas back to East Texas and take up residence again. I had no idea what the crazy Jew might do. A man who thinks he’s made of mud is not someone with average plans. It was all guesswork. But I was determined to find them. I should have killed that bastard Ruggert when I first realized who he was. Mercy has its limits.

Due to Bronco Bob being a talker, there was questions about things and all that had befallen us. Bronco Bob, having been the one who shot his mouth off in the first place, handled it well, explaining how I was set upon by those fellows, and he and Cullen come along just in time, and then we had to seek Win out and rescue her. He told in detail about how those boys died on account of their own actions and went into great detail about Cullen and his shotgun, having the fellow Cullen shot flying through the air from the blast, which any one of us knew was a lie, knowing full well them shotgun blasts didn’t push, they tore right through you. That was a detail the crowd was willing to let pass. The highlight of his story, and I am certain he told it many times, was my horseback ride with the reins in my teeth, shooting like a madman and hitting what I shot at. My pursuit of the younger one up on the hill became a little windy, and it turned into a glorious shoot-out, and of course it had been no such thing. I had told Bronco Bob exactly what happened up there, but I reckon he figured it sounded too much like murder, which I suppose it was. I never corrected him on his version of events. The part about his own self, and how he was wounded and how bad it was, swelled in the telling, too. Bronco Bob even favored his arm a little to make sure it was known he was well in the fight. He had a way of letting his arm dangle and twisting his mouth in just the right way so you might think the bullet had cut fresh; it gave his story a feeling of truth, and mostly it was true, though the wound had been nothing and was pretty much done with by the time we returned to Deadwood. I have never known a man that wanted to be a hero more than Bronco Bob, and in my eyes he had been one and didn’t even know it. He claimed I had been set upon for my prize money, and as they had taken it and I hadn’t gotten any of it back, the bodies not carrying a coin of it, that was a good enough story. He left Ruggert’s claim that I had stared at his wife’s butt and made advances on her out of the telling, not wishing to give any of the ex-Confederates in our midst any ideas that I might in fact be uppity. Bronco Bob said he was writing a book about it. Deadwood Dick and the Dark Riders of the Black Hills, and What Befell Them. He did, too, some years later, but I’ll come back to that.

Some of the fellows went out there to Split in the Rocks, as it was called, and seen what was left of the bodies, and come back saying Bronco Bob had told it true, even as to where the bodies was. They found bones they figured belonged to Weasel, which they left (ain’t nobody in town had liked him anyway), and come across the marker for Madame. The killings actually gave me a bigger name than I had right after the shooting match, and people took to treating me nicer. This irked me more than being treated like a black animal, because it wasn’t based on my character, just on my ability to kill folks.

The days turned into weeks, and I hadn’t worked a lick and didn’t know how much more I could ask Wow and Cullen to put up with us. I was thinking on this one day when Cullen came up to me, said, “You might think you are a hindrance to us, but you aren’t. You stay long as you want.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “I believe I will be leaving very soon, but I’d be obliged if Win could stay for a while, at least until I take care of some business.”

“I know what the business is,” he said.

“I’m sure you do.”

“She may stay as long as she likes,” he said. “As long as you would like for her to.”

Well, it wasn’t but a few days later that Cullen figured he had enough to buy him a spot of land with a cabin on it at the edge of the town. The cabin was built of whole logs and split logs, and there was dried-mud patching. It didn’t have no shingles, just an open roof, because the man who owned the property died from eating too many sweet potatoes—that’s what his wife told me—and never got the roof on it. She said she was selling on account of she was going back to Alabama. “I didn’t like my husband much, really,” she said. “And it’s kind of a relief.”

It made me wonder if something other than butter had been on those sweet potatoes.

It was a pretty big place. Me and Cullen roofed it ourselves, though I must admit my side of the roof was a little uneven.

Thinking Ruggert was in Kansas Territory was a high wish, but I felt I had to go there and see. I talked to Win about it, and she listened. Usually, that was all she did, as her willingness to talk, or even play her flute, which I had recovered from the wagon, wasn’t there. I laid out what I intended like she knew what I meant.

When I finished, she turned her head, for she had been eyeballing a corner in our room like it might be a path to glory, and said, “You kill him, Nat. You kill him good.”

I couldn’t have been more startled to discover green manure could be turned to gold.

“I will,” I said.

Then she went through that hole in the wind again, became silent as stone.

A few days before I was to leave, Cullen volunteered to go with me.

“Ain’t no man I’d rather have with me, Cullen. But you got a woman here, and I need you to look after Win best you can, and I will at some point need you to mail me those papers you’re keeping.”

“Wow can do that,” he said. I could tell he was serious about going, but I could also feel he didn’t really want to. He had Wow, and he had a life in Deadwood.

I told him no, I couldn’t do that.

He let out a sigh of relief, and I didn’t blame him.

I rode over to Charlie Utter’s camp, told him I was leaving Deadwood. Charlie shook my hand firmly, and his eyes got wet. He told me they sent that money to Bill’s widow, Agnes, added they hadn’t gotten nothing back from her on the matter, not even a goddamn two-word thank-you note.

“I’d have been happier with ‘Fuck you’ than silence,” he said.

He also afforded how the mail was slow sometimes, and maybe that was the problem, but he didn’t sound sincere about it. He said he was saddened by all that happened to me and Win, and that did sound sincere. He forced some money on me. I didn’t want to take it, but I did. It was well needed and much appreciated.

“I’ll pay you back, Charlie,” I said.

“No, you won’t. Because I won’t take it. It’s yours. Good luck to you, Deadwood Dick. At least you will miss a Black Hills winter. It is a frozen hell of snow and sleet and a wind so sharp it’ll blow up your ass and freeze the turds inside you.”

I thanked him for that parting information, and last on my list of good-byes was Bronco Bob. When I told him, he said, “Nat, I am going with you. You are a source of stories and a man of action, and I plan to write them all down and become rich for it, and you will, of course, receive a cut of the monies.”

“That would be grand, Bob, but mine may be a rough trail, and I don’t think white audiences much care to read about a colored man and his adventures.”

“We will see,” he said. “As for the journey, I can handle that, at least as far as Kansas. There I may choose another path. I’ve already sold my wagon and some of my guns, so I have traveling money. I’m willing to share it if the need arises. My days making my living as a shooter are quit. I have run out that string and have lost interest. I would delight in your company, as I have plans to leave anyway.”

This is how Bronco Bob became my traveling companion.

The night before the day I was leaving, in bed, I made a small effort to hold Win close, and she let me. It made me feel good to see she was getting better, if only in small doses, but it made me feel, too, that maybe I shouldn’t leave, that I should stay and help in her recovery. But I was too set in my plans to change them; at that point it would have been like turning a petrified tree back into common wood. Wasn’t going to happen.

Next morning I saddled up my horse, and Bronco Bob come and joined me, and Win even came out in the yard. I kissed her gently on the mouth, without any real response, hugged Wow and Cullen good-bye, and climbed on Satan. I said to Cullen, “Keep Win warm. Charlie Utter says the wind blows hard and sharp and cold come dead of winter.”

“She will be as warm as we are,” said Cullen, “and I like it warm.”

“Good enough,” I said.

As me and Bronco Bob rode away, I turned and looked back, seen Win turn quickly into the house. It hurt my heart to see her so eager to return to her spot in our room. But we hadn’t ridden far when I heard a sharp note cut the air, and then it was followed by a number of sweeter notes.

I turned on my horse for a look. Win had come out of the house with her flute and was playing us off on our mission. With a smile on my face, I raised my hand to her, and we rode on out of Deadwood to that high, sweet sound.

25

Having gone only a short distance, we realized we was being followed. This follower wasn’t so sneaky, as he was riding a mule and coming right behind us, purposely keeping some distance. I turned in the saddle, looked back, and recognized him. It was the boy Bronco Bob had hired to tote his guns and stuff at the match.

I said as much, and Bronco Bob said, “Tim?”

“Jim,” I said.

We slowed down, and Jim stopped coming, halting on his mule, just looking at us. Then Bronco Bob waved him in, and he put his heels to the mule and came riding up to us. We sat there on our animals and talked.

I tell you, that boy was worse-looking than the mule. He had gone down considerably since I had seen him last, the day of the shooting match some months back. His red hair was long and caked with mud, and his face was spotted with it, too. His knees and elbows, which was bony as an old cow carcass, was sticking through his clothes, and the soles on his oversize boots flapped like nags’ tongues when he came riding up. He was scummy around the eyes, and his teeth was a little green at the gums, like they was little trees with moss growing against them.

“What in hell are you doing out here, Tim?” Bronco Bob asked.

“I ain’t got no family. I been living under a porch. I hadn’t done nothing until you seen something in me and hired me, Mr. Bronco. It meant a lot to me.”

“Hell, boy, you just happened to be handy. It might well have been anybody.”

“Oh,” Jim said.

“He just don’t want you to get the big head,” I said, sensing right off that any confidence the boy had gained from having been the aide to Bronco Bob had just run down his leg. It was like someone had told a worm they was too high off the ground.

Bronco Bob seen how I was heading, and after having had that rare dull moment, said, “Yeah, I don’t want you getting all blowed up in your thinking, your head such a size you can’t walk through a doorway.”

“Yes, sir,” Jim said.

“Listen here,” I said. “You ain’t doing yourself any good out here with us. We got a long ride ahead of us.”

“I ain’t got nowhere to go,” said Jim. “Dogs like under that porch where I was sleeping, too, and when it rains I got to find a place higher. Just staying halfway dry and warm is some real work.”

“You’ll get wet out here, too,” I said. “And where’d you get that mule?”

“I borrowed it,” Jim said.

“I bet you did,” I said.

“It’s as poorly as me,” Jim said. “I was packing out goods for some miners, but they took to butt-fucking me and the mule, so I stole it when I seen you fellows leaving and come after you.”

“What was that you said about the miners?” Bronco Bob said.

Jim said it again.

“We should go back and kill them right away,” Bronco Bob said. This from a man who until a few days ago had never shot at a living human being.

“They moved on and left the mule to fend for itself cause it’s skinny, but that’s because they ain’t fed it good,” Jim said. “I get older, learn how to use a gun like you boys, I come across them butt-fuckers I’ll kill them myself.”

“What say you, Nat?”

I didn’t like it, adding a responsibility, as I hadn’t managed so well my last time out with my charges, but I said, “All right. But we got to decide on something right now. Are you Jim, or are you Tim?”

“I got called Jim by somebody sometime back, and I’ve kept the name. I don’t recall what I was named when I was little, as my folks run off and left me with a boot-shine kit and a cold potato in a sack. They just moved off and took their tent and supplies with them. I stayed with a Chinaman for a while, but I couldn’t understand him, so I left.”

“How long ago was that?” I asked.

“I don’t rightly reckon,” he said. “But I think I’m about sixteen, and that’s been seven, eight years ago I left. I ain’t got that boot-shine kit no more.” He added that as if we was about to ask him for a boot polish.

“My God, you were practically a baby,” Bronco Bob said.

“I ain’t never been a baby,” said Jim.

“All right, then. We still don’t know which you prefer,” I said. “Jim or Tim.”

“I come to most anything,” he said.

“Naw, that ain’t going to work,” I said. “Decide on your name.”

The boy looked at Bronco Bob, said, “I like Red, actually.”

“Then Red it is,” I said. “And remember, you got to tote your own weight if you’re going to be with us.”

“I been doing that and can keep on doing it.”

And that’s how Red, formerly Tim and formerly Jim, became our companion.

That first night we stopped to camp, we did so down in a ravine. We had a cold supper of beans, as we was worried about Indians. It was a clear and dry night, so the ravine was fine. It was lined with rocks, and there wasn’t no water in it right then. It was dry and a good windbreak. Bronco Bob dug around in his bedroll, where he had wound up his possibles, and pulled that white fringed jacket he had worn at the shooting match out of it, tossed it to Red.

“Put that on, and take care of it,” Bronco Bob said. “It’s yours, but you got to take care of it. This one will fit you better than me. I’m gaining in girth, and I prefer my big cotton one. It’ll warm you well enough.”

Red held the jacket like he had just been given baby Jesus’s fresh swaddling wrap. “Thank you, Mr. Bronco.” It was obvious he wanted to say something else, but his tongue had grown too thick and was blocking his throat.

“I catch you leaving it laying about,” Bronco Bob said, “I will take it away from you and give you a kick. You understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Red said.

“You got a few manners,” I said. “Where’d you learn that?”

“An old woman took me in for a year, and then she died. I didn’t tell no one right away, cause I figured I’d have to leave her house, and the weather was bad. I stayed there awhile longer, then she took to stinking too bad. I was going to bury her in the night, but she died in her big cloth chair and I waited too long and she melted into it. Her and that chair was one and the same. I was too little then to drag it. I just left. Someone finally found her, cause of the stink, and dogs had broken in and eaten part of her. I heard all about it on the street. She was buried sitting in that chair, or what was left of her, as most of her by then was in the cushions. She loved that chair, though. She was the one taught me manners good. I liked her a lot. I hated she died. She could sure cook good cornbread. I didn’t know until I come to live with her that you was supposed to wipe your asshole, even if it was with a rag or paper or leaves. I didn’t know it mattered, as hadn’t nobody told me until she did.”

“We get the idea,” Bronco Bob said. “Here is another thing. From here on out, you’ll take a pinch of salt, and when we have it, soda, and you will fray a small stick and dip it in the salt and clean your teeth with it. You almost got enough growth on your teeth there to cut and winnow. A young man like you may want some ass in the future, and I am not speaking of the lady mule you’re riding. If you prefer fairer ones to those less fair, nice teeth are important. From what I can see, those chompers are fair enough, just grimy, but they’ll go bad if you don’t get to work on them.”

Bronco Bob opened his bag, took out a small willow stick that was bunched up with others in a tied bundle, and handed it to him. It was a trick we all used to keep our teeth clean—that and a finger dipped in salt rubbed on the gums as well. Bronco Bob followed this up with a pinch of salt he put in the boy’s palm.

“Now, son, you spit in your hand, on the salt, fray that stick with your teeth, then use the frayed end and the salt to clean yourself. You start on it tonight so we don’t have to look at that grass growing on them in the morning. When we get somewhere where we can buy it, we’ll get some baking soda or tooth powder. You do that maintenance every day, and they’ll clean up. I got a mirror you can see into during the day, and you can do a more serious job of it. That will be your job until we arrive where we are going.”

It was a long ride, and we did see some Indians, but they looked more ragged than Red. They was few in numbers and kept their distance. We passed buffalo hunters and skinners who was hunting the herds, and they stunk so bad we could smell them coming for half a mile at least. A few lessons from that old lady who had taught Red to wipe his ass might have been of some benefit to them.

We didn’t spend any friendly time with them, as me and Bronco Bob was not taken by their lot, and neither was we proud of their profession. We came across carcasses of them buffalo they had shot and skinned, the meat left rotting on the prairie. For a fellow like me that had grown up looking for something to eat pretty much day up and day down, it was a terrible and senseless waste.

Anyway, we passed them and others, folks in wagons heading out to Deadwood for the mining, though the finds there was already playing out. We did camp with them a time or two, though there was those, mostly Southerners, who didn’t like the idea of being so near a colored on the prairie, thinking I might in the night murder them all and rape the women. Mostly folks was friendly, though. We asked if they had seen a burned-up man or a big fellow with a mark of some such on his forehead.

No one said they had at first, but when we was near across Nebraska, a man and woman with two young children told us they had in fact seen the burned-up man, and he had bummed a meal from them. They felt sorry for him and fed him supper, and come morning he decamped early, taking with him their frying pan, a bag of sugar, and some bacon. We hastened to add he wasn’t no friend of ours, and we was after him for other reasons, but didn’t dig into the details.

“It just goes to show, a fellow burned up like that might not need no more pity than a fellow that ain’t burned up,” the woman said. “He was just as bad as if he was everyday-looking.”

When we was back on the ride, Bronco Bob repeated the woman’s lines to me, the ones about a burned-up fellow not being necessarily any better than one that wasn’t. “There is a philosophy in there somewhere,” he said.

We rode on across Nebraska and come to the state of Kansas. We was certain of when we come to it, as Bronco Bob had traveled all that area when he was living off shooting matches. There wasn’t much out there in Kansas (not that there had been much in Nebraska), and I have to say I didn’t take to it at all. It was just too wide with nothing on it but tall grass. Bronco Bob said it was so tall cause there wasn’t enough buffalo coming through anymore, least not in the numbers they once was. Considering all those rotting carcasses we’d seen, this was understandable.

Along the way we started teaching Red how to better handle himself in polite society. We made sure he understood that farting at a meal was not a sign of respect for the vitals but was foul. We explained women especially disliked this, and when it was built up in you too tight, you had to find a place by yourself and let it go. I had learned this from Colonel Hatch back at the fort during my soldiering days.

We taught him that clean hands was best for eating, when you could wash them, and if you had a chance to eat with a knife or spoon you ought to. We discouraged eating with a knife, unless that’s all you had or there was no women around, which was our case right then.

Bronco Bob showed the boy a few boxing moves, and it was fun to see Bob dancing around, quick on his feet, his fist held up, throwing punches. He taught the boy how to do it, and they had a few matches, thumping each other in the chest, avoiding the head. I even took to doing it, too. I learned more about fisticuffs than I knew there was to learn. I thought before it was just about who was the strongest and how fast you swung your arms, but Bronco Bob taught me different. I couldn’t lay a hand on him, even though I was bigger and taller. Had he not been hitting me in the chest and ribs and pulling his punches, I would surely have taken a beating, especially if he decided to include punches to the head.

Red took to boxing and really seemed to enjoy it, though he always moved as if his ankles was tied together. He had good hands but not good feet. He couldn’t dance about and move like Bronco Bob, who said people use the weight of the arms too much, don’t apply the twisting of the hips, which he felt was the secret of success as a pugilist, as he referred to himself.

We also taught Red about gun shooting, and we was the right ones to do it. Still, Red had a knack right from the start, more so even than with boxing. He could hit targets right away, and he seemed to be one of those like me—if I do say so myself, and I do—who instinctively has an ability to point the gun and shoot and figure on its rise and sighting mostly by touch alone.

Red wasn’t no gun hand, but he was well on the way to being one if he wanted to put in the work. I even gave him my old Navy Colt and some shells. I figured with the Colt, LeMat, and Winchester Mr. Loving gave me, I was armed enough for most anything and could spare the pistol. Bronco Bob gave him a derringer, which is a good weapon if you can hold your man down and put it to his forehead, shoot him with it, and then go to beating on him with the butt of it to make sure he feels something.

By the time we got to Dodge City, Kansas, Red could shoot and box well enough, and his teeth was cleaned up and he had learned how to comb his hair and put a part down the middle. That red hair looked mighty odd to me, and the part in the middle made it look like someone had dragged a rake through some blooded grass. But over the weeks he had actually put on a few pounds, as had the mule, and had started to look manly.

Dodge City stank like cow shit and unbathed men on the day we showed up, and it was my figure it stank that way on the days we didn’t show up. There was cloud cover cloaking the town. It was as if we was having a sack pulled over our heads the air was so thick. It was cold, too, a dry kind of cold that was given a knife’s edge by a prairie wind blowing at our backs.

There was tents on the outskirts and large signs posted up that said we had to turn in our weapons. That was different from Deadwood, as turning in guns was only that way at the Gem, an idea I put into action, and as soon as that idea come about the murders in the place dropped considerable if didn’t disappear. There was always someone who sneaked a pistol in or was willing to gnaw someone’s throat out or beat them to death with a chair leg, but on the whole it was a little less rowdy. Thing was, after I quit being the bouncer, I can’t say if the rule was enforced anymore.

We rode by a big cannon in front of an army fort, and I tell you I got a little nervous passing by the fort for fear I might be identified as a deserter. But as this was a white bunch of soldiers, that was near impossible, unless one of the ranking white soldiers from my old regiment had been transferred and might recognize me. I knew it was unlikely, but it made me jittery just the same. I still carried more than a little guilt for having left my job with them.

We passed by the cattle yard, and there was cowboys hustling longhorn cows down the street and into catch pens. A goodly number of the cowboys was colored, and I seen a lot of Mexicans in their crowd as well, though some was so covered in dust I couldn’t quite figure what color they was, only that they were cowboys and knew how to move cattle.