Shaking the Nickel Bush (22 page)

I was out before daylight, and by eleven o'clock that night I'd been to every garage and gasoline station from one end of St. Joseph to the other. I hadn't missed a single movie theater, ice-cream parlor, or restaurant, but no one had seen a sign of Lonnie. Even though I'd been living on peanuts and canned salmon, I was down to my last dime, so there seemed nothing I could do but to go down to the depot and try my luck at flipping the midnight mail train for Denver. If I made it I could still reach Littleton before the roundup was over, and once there I knew I wouldn't have any trouble in finding a job.

To kill a little time I stopped at each garage I came to on my way to the depot, just in hope I might find some night man who hadn't been on duty when I made my first round. I found the right one when I had only a couple of blocks left to go. He was an old fellow, sitting in front of a little garage on a side street.

“Yeah, I seen 'em,” he said when I'd described Lonnie and Shiftless. “Kind of a chunky set boy, wearin' a light gray suit with a dark pencil-stripe? He was driving a 1914 Ford that looked close to new. Arizona license plate. Stopped here to gas up night before last . . . about midnight as I recollect. Lost his way comin' into town is how he got way off over here. Asked how to get back onto the road for Sioux City.”

“Was he alone?” I asked.

“Yeah, alone,” he told me. “Nice friendly sort of a boy . . . clever too. Cowboy artist, he said he was. Had a likeness he'd made of his own self . . . spittin' image of him.”

“Did he have it wrapped up?” I asked.

“Yeah. Yeah. In a blue shirt and pair of overhauls. He was takin' it home . . . present for his ma. Is he kin o' yours?”

“No,” I said, “just a friend. I'd hoped to meet him while he was in town.”

“Don't reckon he stopped over to see nobody,” the old man said. “Told me he had nigh onto eight hundred miles to make and aimed to do it in three days. Ought to be close to home by now.”

“Did he say where his home was?” I asked.

“Not that I recollect. Didn't ask him.”

“Hope he makes it okay,” I said. “Didn't seem short of cash, did he?”

“Wouldn't know about that,” he said. “Paid for his gas out of a ten, so he couldn'ta been too hard up.”

“Did he have a saddle and cowhand outfit in the flivver?”

The old man shook his head. “None that I seen. Not lest it was on the floor in back. All I seen was a bedroll and the likeness I was tellin' you of.”

There was no sense in asking any more questions, and even less sense in trying to follow Lonnie any farther, so I headed for the railroad tracks. I didn't go to the depot, but circled around a couple of blocks to the north, crossed the tracks, and hid in a ditch a hundred yards beyond the place where the engine of the Denver mail train had stopped the night before.

It was nearly half an hour before the train pulled in, and as I waited for it I had a chance to do some of the thinking I should have done before getting into any such fix. There was nobody to blame but myself. I'd thought I was pretty smart when I'd been sitting there in the restaurant and putting the pressure on Lonnie to sell Shiftless. If I'd stopped to do a little thinking before passing out all my wise advice, I might have known what would happen. Lonnie had been in love with old Shiftless ever since the first day he'd seen her. And his affection had never cooled for a moment, not even when we discovered how worn-out and worthless she was.

As I lay there in the ditch I could almost see him again, up there in the mountains when we'd sheered off the half-moon key. Lazy as he was about everything else, he'd started off the next morning for a new key—knowing he might have to walk eighty miles to town and back—rather than run the risk of my abandoning the old wreck. I might have known that he cared more for that old flivver than for all the girls in the world, and that his taking them to ride had been more for a chance to show off Shiftless than for any other reason.

Even though Lonnie had taken my Levi's by mistake—seven hundred dollars and all—I hadn't really lost anything yet. There wasn't the slightest doubt but that he was headed straight for home—wherever that might be. Unless he ran into a lot of bad luck on the way, the money he got for his outfit would be enough to see him through. And when he got there my Levi's would still be wrapped around the plaster bust I had made for him. He might throw britches away because they were too small for him or needed washing, but his mother wouldn't, and she wouldn't wash them without unfolding the cuffs. I might not know where to find Lonnie, but he knew I was going to Littleton, and that I had plenty of friends there. He might swipe chickens and mooch a little money to spend on the girls, but I knew him well enough to know that when my seven hundred was discovered he'd get it back to me, one way or another.

The more I thought of it the more I realized that I wouldn't have lost anything, even though my seven hundred were never found and returned. Less than eight months ago the specialists at the Boston hospital had given me only six months to live, but I was still alive, and had never felt healthier in my life. In the past two months I'd gained five pounds, and Mother had written that Dr. Gaghan was very pleased with my reports.

More than that, in a time when thousands of stout, healthy men were out of jobs and having to queue up in soup lines, or to take charity in order to feed their families, I'd been making money so fast I didn't dare let my mother find out about it. With what I'd sent to Grace the family would be safe for a year, even if I didn't send home another dime. But there was no fear of that; I had my sculpturing tools in my hip pocket, and my eye and hand were well practiced in the way to use them.

The mail train pulled in while I was still thinking back over the months Lonnie and I had spent together. I lay flat, and didn't even let myself think until the mail sacks had been tossed aboard, the conductor swung his lantern, and the wheels began turning. I jumped to my feet and made my run at the instant the engine headlight passed me, and I was running at full speed when I grabbed the hand bar on the front end of the first mail car and flipped aboard. There was nothing to slow me down, for all I was carrying was one dime, the little Bible that had been my father's, and my sculpturing tools.

The railroad cop who stopped me the night before was on duty again. He must have been in the service, and couldn't have been out long enough to forget his army training. He shouted, “Halt!” before I'd taken five steps, and I heard the whiz of a bullet before I heard the bark of his gun. The shot was either wild or intentionally high. It didn't even hit the train, but it did make my nerves jumpy for a few seconds. The mail train had picked up full speed before I could settle down comfortably in the deep, blind doorway of the mail car, knowing that no conductor or brakie could reach me—and that there was no danger of the train stopping till it was far, far along the rails toward Littleton and the Fourth-of-July roundup.

About the Author

R
ALPH
O
WEN
M
OODY
was born December 16, 1898, in Rochester, N. H. His father was a farmer whose illness forced the family to move to Colorado when Ralph was eight years old. The family's life in the new surroundings is told from the point of view of the boy himself in
Little Britches
.

The farm failed and the family moved into Littleton, Colorado, when Ralph was about eleven. Soon after, the elder Moody died of pneumonia, leaving Ralph as the oldest boy, the man of the family. After a year or so—described in
Man of the Family
and
The Home Ranch
—Mrs. Moody brought her three sons and three daughters back to Medford, Mass., where Ralph completed his formal education through the eighth grade of grammar school. This is the period of
Mary Emma & Company
. Later, Ralph joined his maternal grandfather on his farm in Maine—the period covered in
The Fields of Home
.

A new series of books, about Ralph's experiences as a young man, starts with
Shaking The Nickel Bush
.

In spite of his farming experience, Ralph Moody was not destined to be a farmer. He abandoned the land because his wife was determined to raise her family (they have three children) in the city.

“When I was twenty-one,” he writes, “I got a diary as a birthday present and I wrote in it that I was going to work as hard as I could, save fifty thousand dollars by the time I was fifty, and then start writing.” True to his word, he did start writing on the night of his fiftieth birthday.

—Adapted from the
Wilson Library Bulletin