Wild Cow Tales by Ben K. Green

gettin’ good daylight. I got off my horse and eased up the side of the road fence where my log-draggin’ bull had stopped. He was on the other end of a forty-foot lariat rope and was pretty well worn out from draggin’ the log and bein’ horned by a bull that he couldn’t very well defend himself against. I crawled under the fence and eased up toward the log, feelin’ that the fence would give me a little protection. I laid down on my belly on the ground and wiggled through far enough on the back side of the log, took my pocketknife, and cut the rope.
    I scooted back under the fence, walked back down to where my horse was, got back out in the road, and got on my horse, and started a cow drive to town with thirty-seven head of wild cattle. This was the best stunt I had pulled in several weeks and I was really proud of myself.
    The drive to town was kinda easy. This was a mixed bunch of cattle, all ages and sizes—and there was a mahogany-brown long-haired one that I believed to be a pure-blooded Scotch Highland cow. I had heard it said that these pure-blooded cows were probably twenty years old if any of ’em were still alive. (It had been about that long since Scotty Perth had imported them.) This cow looked to be that old; however, she apparently had not had a calf in recent years and was in good flesh and led the herd to town.
    The railroad stock pens were at the edge of town and not too hard to get to from the road that I had broughtthese cattle on. It was late afternoon when me and Mustang pushed this bunch of cows into the railroad stock pens. I had just gotten the gate fastened and wired to and started to the depot to order a stockcar to ship these cattle in when up drove Scotty Perth in a one-horse gig. (He referred to this gig as his shay, which he had resorted to as a means of gettin’ around since he had lost his leg.)
    As Scotty got out of his shay you could tell at a glance that his face was flushed with anger. He raised his heavy voice to a loud pitch, and I am sure that people could hear him all the way to the mercantile. He waved his hands and arms in the air as he threw a pure-blooded Scottish rage. It seemed that the thing that helped to provoke him most to this state of anger was the presence of the old pure-blooded Scotch cow in the herd that he referred to as one of his “lassies.”
    Scotty was an old man in my eyes, crippled for life, and having some share of trouble. Although I was barely a grown man, he must have seen me as a smart-aleck kid, which made him all the madder.
    I had ridden all day without any breakfast or dinner, and it was midafternoon and me and my horse were tired, thirsty, and hungry. I didn’t know what to say to Scotty, so I just reined my horse toward the depot and didn’t say anything. But as I passed his shay I was stunned when I realized that Scotty Perth was drivin’ one of the horses to his shay that I had shod for the doctor. I didn’t think he would have the nerve to unfasten the stockyard gates, and if he did he couldn’t do anything about that bunch of cattle in his shay, so I rode on about my business.
    One of the things that he repeated several times in his broken Scottish brogue was, “I could gather the rest of them in me shay.”
    The railroad agent, like everybody else, wasn’t very friendly and seemed to begrudge the opportunity for the railroad to move another carload of Scotty Perth’s cattle. He told me that he would have a car spotted the next mornin’ at the stock-pen chute, but he advised me not to load it with the cattle until after noon because the train wouldn’t pick up the car until about three o’clock.
    I saw Scotty Perth goin’ back towards town in his shay as I rode toward the stock pens. The railroad had a stack of alfalfa hay just outside the stock pens for feedin purposes, so I broke several bales and gave it to the cattle, unsaddled my horse, put him in a separate pen where there was water, and gave him a lot of alfalfa and