“All right. I’ll tell Fletcher and Hill to round up some men. How many do you want to hire?”
Will did some quick math in his head. “How long do you reckon a gather like that will take?”
“Heh. You never know, son. Might be you head down there and round up a nice little herd in two days’ time. Might be you spend two weeks down there and don’t come back with enough cattle to pay off old Clyde here.”
“I’ll hire four men if they can be ready tomorrow,” Will said.
“That shouldn’t be a problem. Lots of good men with no way to feed their families now,” Forester said. “Can I tell them you’re offering two dollars a day, or do you want to haggle with them?”
“No haggling,” Will said. Eight dollars a day would add up quickly, but he had the money, and if these men each gathered even a few head of cattle each day, he’d still make a staggering profit. “I’ll pay.”
Forester smiled, clearly pleased by Will’s answer. “Good. A cattleman needs to think big and swagger. He does nothing by half measure.”
Will grinned. “I’m not a cattleman.”
“That’s what you say now, Will. You just wait until the end of the drive. You’re a cattleman. I can see it in your eyes.”
“All right,” Will said, figuring there was no sense in arguing the point. All he wanted to do was take care of his family. If Forester wanted to imagine Will was some natural-born cattleman, so be it.
“And you’ll feed them?” Forester asked.
Will could have slapped himself. He was so used to fending for himself and packing a light horse, he hadn’t even thought of food. “Yeah, I’ll feed them. Though I don’t know how, exactly. I suppose we might have to delay this gather after all.”
“No, no,” Forester said. “You go ahead and borrow my chuck wagon. I got enough supplies to see you through. If you’re hiring extra men and I’m getting half the gather, it’s only right I feed the lot of you. But you men’ll have to fend for yourselves. My cook got killed in the war.”
“All right,” Will said. “I appreciate it.”
“I got a good feeling about this,” Forester said, clapping him on the back. “And not just this venture. About you. And you, too, Rufus. Both of you. I got a feeling I’m witnessing the birth of a pair of real Texas cattlemen.”
CHAPTER 27
By the time they reached the Thicket, Will and the men had already rounded up forty-two unbranded head, mostly young stuff.
They pushed them into the Thicket, where the real work began.
After a week of hard work, beating the brush and working the brakes along the Sulfur from dawn to dusk, they had chased out two hundred and fifty-two head of wild cattle, bringing their herd to within spitting distance of three hundred, a number far greater than Will had expected.
It had been quite a week for him. Grueling, yes, but far more exciting than he could have ever imagined.
He’d always been at home atop a horse, and these were good horses—especially Clyde, who had proven Forester an honest man.
The blue roan had no quit in him and moved like an extension of Will’s consciousness, doing the work at hand even as it came into Will’s mind.
Clyde knew when to press a cow, when to flank them, and when to dodge a mean bull’s horns. And there was no shortage of mean bulls in the Thicket.
These old mossyhorns were the far-flung descendants of cattle abandoned hundreds of years earlier by the Spanish, and they had adapted over the years into creatures utterly at home in the canebrakes and pine groves and occasional grassy meadows as gators were to the hyacinth-clogged bayous that came in and out of the riders’ view.
From time to time, a startled cow would stumble into one of these bogs. Will would rope her, the action second nature to him as a longtime rider and veteran cavalryman. Then Clyde, or whatever horse Will was riding at the time—for even though the stallion showed no signs of exhaustion, Will was careful to rest him from time to time—would dig in and drag the blatting cow back to dry ground.
All of the horses knew the work, but Clyde ruled supreme. In these moments, he would hunker like a mustang sliding down a slope of loose shale, and his big muscles would tense, going hard as stone as he forced his will on the floundering animal.
Forester also hadn’t exaggerated the skill of Fletcher and Hill, nor had he assumed too much of the men they’d brought along, four Mexican vaqueros born to the saddle.
The days were long and exhausting, and the men and horses were all torn by thorns and cut by cane. Rufus had been unseated by a low-hanging limb but pushed through the pain, and one afternoon, Will had been charged by the biggest boar he’d ever seen.
The thing came charging out of the cane, its long tushes flashing like a pair of fixed bayonets, rushing straight at Clyde’s shanks.
Before Will could even pull his Colt and bring his sights onto the big boar, the stallion reared and brought down his hoofwith tremendous force, smashing the pig’s skull with the iron horseshoe and killing the boar instantly.
