Chapter 1

In a lonely shack by a railroad track
I spent my younger days...

I was two months shy of my fourteenth birthday when Ma died on March 10, 1871.

I reckon that was when Pa gave up on life too. He just never had the will to live after we lost Ma.

Pa had worked as an oiler on the Tebo and Neosho Railroad since he was thirteen. When the Union Pacific bought the Tebo and Neosho Short Line, Pa stayed at Sedalia, Missouri and worked for The Union Pacific in the Sedalia Railyards.

Ma once told me that she’d met Pa right here in this train yard. The westbound on which she was traveling broke down and had to layover a day and a night. She was sixteen at the time and Pa was nineteen, she told me.

She was supposed to be traveling to Wichita, Kansas to live with an aunt. She never made it out there. She wrote her aunt and told her that she was married to a railroad man in Sedalia. She said she never heard back from her aunt.

We lived in a small two-room shack just off the edge of the railroad property. I was born in that shack. I grew up there and went to school for five years in the little one-room schoolhouse in Sedalia while we lived in that shack. I learned to read and write as well as any boy or girl in my school. Reading was my only escape from that shack at the time, and I read everything I could get my hands on, at least three times ... The one thing I loved most about reading was, I got to discover other places as I read the words and pictured those places in my mind. I knew way back then, that one day, I would see some of those places I was reading about.

The mainline of the east-west Union Pacific Railroad was just a hundred feet or so from our shack, built at the edge right-of-way. I used to sit on the back porch and watch the outbound trains headed west, their whistles blowing to clear the tracks.

I dreamed of riding on one of them some day. One that was westbound anyway. For whatever reason, I never had a hankering to travel east. The tall tales I heard told around the train yard, were about the west and how wide open and wild it still was out there. I wanted to see some of that myself when I got older. They told that a man could buy an acre of land out there for as little as a dollar. I even dreamed of me owing a piece of that wild country way over yonder they called, Out West.

When Ma died, I buried her myself. I went to the man in charge of the cemetery and asked what it would cost me to bury my Ma there. He told me the grave site would cost me a dollar. Then another dollar to have the grave dug. With two more dollars I could have a pine coffin made.

I didn’t have but two dollars to my name, and Pa had spent the last of his money on whiskey. He always was a drinker, but now, he drank himself to sleep each night since he come home and found Ma dead. When Ma died, Pa just gave up.

I reckon I gave up on trying to help my Pa about that time too.

I talked the man into letting me dig Ma’s grave by myself. I told him I could build her a coffin too, out of some fine scrap pine lumber that I had scavenged from the empty boxcars over the years. It took me a day and a half to dig Ma’s grave, but the graveyard man told me I did a fair job of it. He measured the grave and told me it was as good as his men could dig. I took his measurements and built Ma a coffin that would fit her, and fit down in her grave.

She only had one Sunday dress and I put that one on her. I had to go get the graveyard man to come help me carry Ma’s coffin to her grave. Pa was still passed out drunk.

There was a preacher, who was preaching a funeral over on the far side of the cemetery, with people gathered around. I could hear him talking loud and clear as I covered Ma’s grave. His voice was the only sound in that quiet, peaceful, tree lined cemetery.

“Son, why are you covering this grave alone?” The preacher asked and I turned, surprised to see him standing right behind me. I was so lost in my own thoughts I never knew he was close by.

“I didn’t have the money to pay the men to help me bury my Ma.”

“Hand me that shovel, Son.”

The preacher took my shovel out of my hand and finished covering Ma’s grave. Then he picked up his bible and asked me what my Ma’s name was. He started preaching her funeral like he’d known her personally. When he was through, he handed the graveyard man a dollar and told him to put Ma’s name on a wooden cross for a grave marker. I gave the man Ma’s full name, her birth date and the date she died so he could carve that on there too.

Two days later, I got a job at the stockyards. I was making fifty cents a week. But that’s all they paid any of the boys for hustling cattle in and out of the pens, and into the loading chutes. The men got fifty cents a day for their work. It was messy as hell out there, with cow shit over my shoe tops, then cow shit and mud half knee-deep when it rained.

I cleaned horse stalls at night for the man who owned the stockyard. He paid me a dime to clean each of them once a week, and there were twenty in all.

I was working seven days a week, day and night. I slept maybe three to four hours most nights. But I was making and saving some money. I had my mind set on heading west as soon as I could purchase fare on a westbound train ... and some more clothes, that didn’t smell like mud and cow shit.

There were many other boys working at the stockyards at that time. Two of them were bad-ass bullies. One of the bullies was the owner’s son, which made it even worse. He and one of his friends by the name of Bernie, beat up a few of the other boys and made everyone pay ten cents a week, just to get to keep their job there.

They had yet to try me. I was bigger at thirteen years old than they were at fifteen. Then one night, less than two months into my job, both of them jumped me from behind in one of the stalls I was cleaning. I heard the scuffing of their feet on the dirt floor behind me just as they both plowed into me, knocking me face first onto the dirt floor covered in straw and horse shit, soaked in horse piss.

I came up off that floor with my pitchfork in my hands. Even then, both of them came at me again. I stuck that fork clean through the knee joint of Bernie’s right leg. He went down screaming as I tried to pull that pitchfork out of his knee. Just as I pulled that five-tined pitchfork free, Russ, the boss’ son rammed into me with his shoulder, knocking me backwards into the back wall of the stable. He started beating me around my head and face with his fists as I lay on my back under the feed troughs.

I was thrashing around, trying my best to keep him from beating me to death, when my right hand landed in a pile of fresh horse shit. With my fist full of horse shit, I caught an opening and slammed it right in his face, smearing shit in his mouth, trying to gouge his eyes out with my fingers covered in horse shit.

As I rolled him off me, my hand hit the handle of the pitchfork. I came real close to killing him right then and there, when I stood and looked down at him as he hunkered on the horse shit covered stall floor. I had my pitchfork right over the back of his neck, then I thought better of it. I flipped that fork around to use the hickory handle as a club. Swinging that long handle as hard as I could, I hit him across his back. He was still screaming, with his fingers clawing at the horse shit in his mouth and eyes when I hit him. He’s a tough, rawboned, mean-ass boy for his age. Even that lick across his back didn’t put a stop to him.

He was still on his knees when he turned and made a lunge for my legs. He managed to grab my left britches leg with one hand ... but just as he leaned back to jerk my foot from under me, I put the toe of my right shoe in his mouth ... All the way to the laces.

With all the commotion in the stables, as both of them yelled and screamed in pain, three men ran into the stall to see what was happening. One was the owner, the daddy of the boy with the bloody, toothless mouth. I just knew this was it for me.

That man grabbed his son up by his collar, turned him toward the doorway of the stall, and kicked him right square in his ass. I mean, the man kicked his son so hard, he lifted his feet clean off the dirt floor. Then the boy stumbled and staggered across to the other side of the stable where he hit the wall head-first and fell backwards on his ass.

“YOU!” The man turned to me, shouting as he pointed his finger right at me. I was ready to jump between the split-rails into the next stall and run like hell, when he called my name.

“Joss Edmon Wayward, you come go with me, Boy! I hate to lose a good hand such as you ... But you’ll have to leave here after this. I can’t have you beating my own son’s ass and still keep you on my payroll! Now follow me, Boy!”

He paid me what he owed me, and even paid me for the rest of the week. I was shocked at his generosity, but I took his money.

“Leave this town, Joss. Don’t you ever come back here again either. You’re a good hand, not at all like your old man. Stay away from that bottle, Boy, and keep working hard. Save your money and you’ll have your own spread one day. You got just the guts, grit, temperament, and mindset it’ll take to make it in this day and time. Head west as far as you got money to travel and don’t ever look back over your shoulder toward Missouri!”

It was daylight when I walked out of his office, which was nothing but a leanto built onto the side of the stable. I walked straight to the watering trough to wash my hands and my face. I knew I was a mess, with horse shit and piss all over me. I could smell it on me, and I stunk like hell. When I swiped my right sleeve across the cut on my left cheek bone, it burned like fire and the bleeding started again.

I’d always kept every bit of the money I owned in my right front pocket. Pa would get it if I didn’t. I run my hand down in my pocket to make sure it was still there. I never took it out to count it, but I figure I had close to twenty-two dollars in paper and maybe another two dollars in coins, just by the feel of it. It was all still there. I knew exactly how it feels when I run my hand down in my pocket.

I was walking past the last corrals, headed straight for the train depot. I knew I had enough money to at least buy me a train ticket to Somewhere. Somewhere other than here.

I heard a lot of yelling, with men whooping and hollering, cussing and laughing. I stepped over to the horse corrals and looked through the rails. There was a man and two boys trying to hold a big old wild bucking horse down until another man could get on him.

When they pulled the sack off that horse’s face and turned him loose, he bucked three times as hard and as high as he could kick, throwing the man in no time. There was already another man paying a dollar to the owner of the horse for a go at riding him.

“What’s the deal?” I asked a boy standing beside me. I’d seen him around him, but I didn’t know him.

“That’s old Wild Bill Singleton over there. He’s always bringing another of his wild broncs in here off the range over’n Kansas, to make money off him. See that saddle on ‘im? They’ve only got the front girth on the saddle. Then they left it cinched too loose and the rider’s ass just bounces up with the saddle when the horse bucks. Ain’t no way in hell they’ll ever ride ‘im thataway.”

“What does the rider get if he rides the horse, after paying a dollar to have a go on him?”

“The horse and saddle!”

“Oh Yeah? How would you ride him?”

“I’d grab that latigo tie strap and cinch it up under his belly just another inch or two tighter. They’ve got the horse lathered up now and the saddle is way loose on his back.”

“Why don’t you go ride him, if you think it’s that easy?”

“I broke my good arm and it’s still healing where a mule kicked me last month. You could ride him though. You’re tall an’ lanky and you’re tough as whet-leather. I saw you beat the livin’ shit out of Russ an’ his pal, Bernie back there in the stable a while ago. Go ride that horse, Joss. He’ll be your’n when you do.”

“He sure is a big’un ... Pretty one too ain’t he?”

“Yep. That’s a Red Roan and they’re not easy to come by. He’s just come five years old, I heard Wild Bill say. He’ll be worth a lot of money as a stud one day. If the right man owns him, that is.”

“I don’t know a lot about them, but I’ve been around them in the stables and the corrals for a while now ... where they breed them. Say ... why do the bronc riders always hold one arm up in the air like that with just one hand on the reins? Is it to show they don’t have to hold onto the saddlehorn while they ride?”

“That’s one of Wild Bill’s rules to ride his broncs, but Pa says the riders out west used to hold on with both hands. Then they started using one hand as a show of how good a rider could ride a bucking bronc without holding onto the saddlehorn. He said they figured out that by holding their free arm up in the air like that, it sort of helps their body take some of the whip out of the horse’s buck ... See how he’s got his arm kinda crooked forward? Then when the horse bucks, he lets his arm fly back and straighten out. Look at ‘im now, he’s got his arm crooked and ready for another buck before the horse is. That man could ride him if he wasn’t so damn scared of him.”

“I see all that with his arm and I can see how it works too ... Why do you say the man is scared of the horse?”

“He’s done pissed in his pants!”

“OH! I see that now. I’m glad I pissed before I left the stable ... Tell me how you’d ever handle that wild horse if you rode him and come to own him.”

“Just gentle the hell out of a horse and he’ll learn to do what you want him to ... That’s what Pa always tells me, and it works for me. Make him feel like he’s a friend of your’n, instead of just some damned old barn animal or pasture ornament.”

“You really think I could ride him?”

“Joss, you could ride a damn bucking bull buffalo clean to Wyoming and back, if you set your mind to it! You’ve got a belly full of guts, and more heart than any grown man in that corral or the onlookers hanging on around it. Now go ride that damn horse! Then ride that big Red Roan away from Sedalia and both of y’all head across The Missouri into Kansas!”