Will nodded. He could understand that.
“You know what I really want to do, though?” Rufus asked.
“Tell me.”
“I want to gather cattle and drive them to market.”
“I heard folks are making money doing that.”
“Yessir, that’s a fact. It’s hard work. Dangerous. But I got a knack with cattle. Mr. Weatherspoon was one of the only men who managed to hold a herd through the war. I got out of the fields at fourteen and worked with the cattle. The last couple of years, I was foreman. Even went on a few gathers after the army confiscated some of Mr. Weatherspoon’s cattle. Rode down into the Thicket.”
“Rough country. I had an uncle who lived down there. Used to visit him from time to time, but he died in the war.”
Rufus nodded. “Yeah, it’s rough all right. Dangerous. Cattle down there are wild and crafty. Some of them old mossyhorns are meaner than wild boars. Some of them’ll catch a man’s scent and hunt him like prey.”
“Guess you want to be loaded for bear.”
“You got that right. It ain’t just the bulls that’ll trouble you. You gotta look out all the time. The Thicket’s got snakes and quicksand and tall-growing thorns that’ll put out your eyes, you make one wrong turn working the brakes.”
“These days, the biggest threat is men like Teal and his gang. They’re hiding out down there. I wouldn’t want to go down and run into that bunch,” Will said.
Of course, that was only half true. He very much wanted to run into Teal, very much wanted to make him pay for what he’d done to Maggie’s family and other Texans and for robbing the bank that held all Will’s money.
But a fight like that, he would need it to be on his terms, not Teal’s. Teal was a fighting man, a ruthless marauder who rode at the front of a gang of murdering savages, every last one of them battle-tested and hard as nails.
“That Thicket’s so big, you’d have to have awful bad luck to run into Teal or his kind,” Rufus said. “But yeah, you’d want to be careful. They like nothing better than stringing up black men—or people like you, folks who give us a chance.”
“Lot riskier than raising corn.”
Rufus shrugged. “I’m learning risk is what makes life worth living.”
Will couldn’t disagree. Unless you were born into wealth, like Sully Weatherspoon, you needed to work hard and take risks to build a good life.
“Men are making big money on cattle these days,” Rufus said. “They’ve been running herds to Kansas and Louisiana, and now, the north and west are opening up. Colorado, Wyoming, even.”
“I heard about that,” Will said. “Heard Charles Goodnight just struck a deal with the railroad up in Cheyenne.”
Rufus nodded. “Heard that, too.”
“Long way to drive cattle.”
“It is. But it can be done. Men are getting rich.”
“How rich?”
“I hear twenty dollars a head.”
Will whistled. “That’s a lot of money.”
“Yessir, it surely is. If we could get some men and gather some longhorns down in the Thicket, we could get some of it for ourselves.”
“Lot of risk,” Will said.
“Yessir, and a lot of reward.”
Will nodded. “You’ve captured my interest, Rufus.”
“It’d only take us a week and a half to drive them to Fort Worth. Or, if we had enough men, we could head up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene.”
