Mud, Blood & Glory!

My granddad once said there's three kinds of fellas: Boys, Men and Cowboys.

Not these dime store cowboys that buy a Stetson hat, or some Tony Lama boots, and the closest they ever come to a raging bull was watching movies.

No I'm talking about men that take their life into their hands to make sure that cattle gets to market. Riding on top of a quarter ton of horseflesh, pounding its hooves hard to the ground, screaming down the trail at a mile a minute, chasing down 5,000 angry head of cattle.

Doing that for a living?
Well, you'd have to be more than a little crazy.

Those days are mostly gone now. The spirit is still alive a little. We have rodeos keeping the art of bronc bustin around.

You also have a few families out here that keep the traditions of range riding alive, we're all but gone now though, because of progress.
Now days most cattle are kept in tiny little pens so tight they can barely turn around. Standing around all day in their own shit.

Disgusting

Animals need to be free to live a life, not kept in a pen and pumped full of drugs and hormones.

But this ain't about the animals though. Well not exactly. It's actually a love story. I'm going to tell you the story my grandfather told me about how his parents met. Why? Well why the hell not!

(note to readers, the picture above is a stock photo from pixabay https://pixabay.com chosen because it conveys the spirit. We don't have family photos that old)

Mud, Blood & Glory!

"My name is Ezra, Ezra Miller..." stuttered and coughed the portly, nervous gentleman. It was clearly Ezra's first day as a range master, probably his first time ever around cattle too, judging from the looks of the man.

"Well, Ezra, the name's Bill Banks, this here's my best hand, Jedikiah... better just call him Jed. I'll take you over to the camp. Where's your tack? I'll help you saddle up."

"Oh, I've got all I need, Bill, thank you. I won't be riding with you I'm afraid. I don't fair too well out in these parts. My wife normally handles these things actually, she's half Hopi and half Apache you see and a much better judge of these critters than I am. She's not doin too well right now though. I'm afraid, it's probably consumption and I can't leave her be too long. But someone needed to size the cattle and make sure we have a deal before I send on for your pay. So I brought my daughter along she knows these things and she says they look like like a fine herd."

"Wait, so you're not the new range master?"

"No, Bill, I'm afraid not. She is." He pointed to his right.

Out from behind the stage stood what had looked at first sight, like a scrawny, lanky, long haired boy of fourteen or thereabouts. Lean and deeply tanned, the boy had hopped out of the stage and started working with such gusto and without so much as a word. I had just assumed he was the extra hand we had hired and paid him no mind. On second glance, I still didn't see much to say it was a woman in there.

"Excuse me, but she? You sure that's a girl?"

"Yes Bill, she. That's my daughter. Her name is Gloria Miller. You can call her Glory. She'll be your range master on this, or we don't have a deal."

"What the blazes does she know about this sort of thing? How old is she even?" I began to holler.

"Don't be a moron, Bill. Glory is sixteen nearly seventeen, but she's been ranging, riding and roping since before she could walk. This is her 11th outing. How many have you been on?"

"This ain't proper, you know that!" I said angrily.

"Perhaps, Bill," he said gently, "but she's here to keep my investment safe. She knows what she's doing, she knows where you're heading and you have to follow her lead if you want to get paid."

I grumbled my consent, mostly because I'd had these cattle long enough and it was time to get them into someone else's hands and call it a season. Besides, the Millers had paid top dollar for good beef.

To distract myself, I walked over to the stagecoach that I only now realized was actually the Miller family carriage and not a stage at all.

I was upset about Gloria "Glory" Miller, being put in the middle of all this. What could I say, though? It's Miller beef now. They chose the range master they want for the drive and I guess Glory was their choice. We're only two weeks out from market anyways, so maybe it will be alright. She just had to know which way to go out here in the vast expanse of sage in the nowhere between New Mexico and Arizona.

I had to admit, it was a nice coach, painted slick with red, black and gold. It was fancy, and it looked padded and comfortable too.

The horses were good quality.
Gleaming ebony, lean, strong, and powerful. More statue than animal I supposed. They looked like they just might be the actual mold that God had decided to cast horses from. Just where the Millers got them from I never did learn, I ain't seen their like since though.

There were only the two hitched on this stage, probably because it was a small run between towns and not a cross country trip. I could see quickly that this carriage could carry up to 6 horses, full tilt it could probably do Santa Fe to Taos quick as a wink. "What the hell do the Millers need this for?" I then realized it was probably none of my concern and the Millers might not be the kind of folks that take kindly to too many questions.

Good enough for me, the herd was all the property of the Parker & Banks family ranches. For sure we were always an honest crew. However somewhere along the way we had picked up more than a few strays and not all of our brands were exactly proper you see. The Millers had come to us because they had lost a herd in a flash flood early in the season. This wasn't our entire herd, just 500 or so head, but the patriarch of the family, Jonas Miller had offered twice what we would be able to get for them at market with the brands the way they were. He said the military didn't care so much about those kinds of things, and they had a contract to keep.

"Don't just stand there lookin at 'em, Bill. Go fetch some feed and water while I help Jed!" barked Gloria.

"Yes, sir!" I grumbled as I went obediently to the camp to fetch supplies. At least she sounded like a woman.

The camp was about a mile off the trail. When we had ridden out to meet the coach in the first place, it went off trail a bit towards camp, then got bound up by something. Trail is probably stretching the truth a bit too. The best you could really say about this place was it looked like some cattle had been through it recently.

The sky was green grey, a storm was brewing. But this place is so damned dry this time of year, I figured the rain would sizzle on the hardpan dirt as it hit.

Still, nothin sells so well as sage fed beef. We had ranged them out all this way and the smell of sage brush filled my nostrils. I could smell something else: the oncoming storm.

The ride back to camp I rode at a canter. It was probably ten or fifteen minutes this way. But at full tilt it was just a smidge. I went canterwise because I still needed some time to think about all this.

I like women as much as any other man. But on the trail they can be a real liability. We need to act like a team, but a pretty face does nothing but distract the team. It wasn't her age or her experience. It was just her.

We had good hands, strong hands. Most were boys that had been with us five years or more. I was the oldest this year; at twenty-six years, I had been ranging for neigh on fourteen. Carl, the newest fella, was fifteen and had seen three seasons with us. That made him younger than Glory by a year, and he was a proven hand. Age wasn't the issue, you don't generally grow old doing this line of work. It's the sort of thing you start about ten or twelve and hope by the time you're thirty that you can finally settle down a bit. There's some won't settle. My dad was fifty years old and you couldn't pay him to sleep indoors during the summer. But there was a lot about that man that wasn't quite right.

The problem wasn't her age. It was just that she was a woman. All of us were respectable gentleman most of the time. Yet out on the long rides, men get a bit crazy. Would she be able to handle all that?

Just as I got back to camp, a dry lighting bolt struck off in the distance, smack dab in the middle of the herd. What followed wasn't rain so much as the wrath of an angry god. The kind of storm you read about in the bible when they really made God mad. I could understand where those stories come from now. I'd been out in these parts fourteen years, and I had never seen anything like it. Only once or twice in twenty more years of ranging did I ever see worse.

The cattle spooked, the horses spooked. Hell truth be told I spooked too!
It wasn't a second later but a hundred head took off in a dozen different directions at full tilt.

My horse, Jewel, she spooked too. I held on for dear life and I nearly got control of her as the rain started to fall. Then she slipped in the soapslick mud, and my right leg was pinned and caught up all wrong.

Jewel was struggling to stand, and I was struggling to get free before she did. Turns out she won that race. We were both so covered in mud at that point that it felt like being trapped in a grave. Just thick heavy and stuck like cement to everything.

Jewel was on her feet and started to panic, with me half hung by one boot. By the grace of God, she didn't get too far before I got loose . I guess I was pretty lucky there now I think about it. But that leg never would be the same.

Wasn't but a moment and I heard a voice yelling, "Get your ass up and lets go Ben!" Glory had unloosed the horses and was riding bare back with the finest piece of horse flesh I had ever seen in tow.

"Name's Bill miss, not Ben!" I shouted as I tried to get up. But between the now slicksticky mud and the fact that my right boot was God only knew where, I just couldn't make my feet.

Glory looked fierce and intense. Looking at those stunning icey blue eyes, I could see that, woman or not, this was someone I did not want to anger. I tried again and finally got my feet. But like I said, the leg wasn't the same. I fell sidelong and struggled.

She got off her horse, splashed down in the mud and examined my leg for a moment. I looked in those eyes again, something fiery with fierce intensity like blue lightning bolts. Yet not at all unkind. "It'll heal, but we need to go." She smiled at me with a look of genuine concern.

Grabbing my outstretched arm, she pulled me to my feet. I struggled to make the horse. It was right then that my leg decided to teach me that I hadn't really known pain before, so it would try the lesson again. But damned if I was going to be bested by anyone, let alone my own body.

I pushed away the mud and looked at my arms. There was a lot of blood and deep cuts, but I had worse before and we didn't have time to get out a needle and fix it anyways. I dug deep, took whatever I had left and just vaulted onto the back of that damned beast.

He wasn't happy with his new rider at first. I could see Glory trying to stifle a laugh. I'm sure it looked hilarious to her, seeing me covered head to toe in mud struggling to bring that animal under control.
I got it though and once she was sure I had myself, she handed me the reigns.

We rode off, the sun was high in the sky. I could tell because the storm was beginning to break a little. By the time we made camp again, we'd had a rough ten or twelve hours of hard riding, but eventually we got them all except five head that God had brought back to the pearly gates by way of lightning bolt.

We didn't talk much during the ride. We just had this energy between us. I would think a thing and she would already be on it. She would start to holler at me but I would already be heading that way. We yelled a bit here and there, but there never was time for idle talk.

When we made camp we didn't talk much either, too tired. She made a bed roll by the fire and was out before I was off my horse.

But laying there, hearing her snore like a freight train rollin by, I realized this was the woman I was going to marry someday. I realized she probably felt the same when I looked a bit closer and I noticed she was using my lost boot as a pillow.

Gloria "Glory" Miller Banks, nothin like her before or since!