Water

Smith dug out the spring while I fought the cattle back with a shovel. They were crazy for water. They had upset the trough. It was dry as a bone and they had tramped the pipe into the mud. There was a big steer in the bunch that had showed his hocks to my pony several times on Mescal Mountain. He was as wild as a black-tailed buck. Now his sunken eyes burned like live coals. I had to bat him twice with the shovel.

We set the trough in place and Smith cleaned out the pipe with a wire. There was only a trickle of water. He ran the wire through the pipe again there was only a little trickle. Smith went kind of crazy then. He picked up a shovel and throwed it as far as he could. He said he hoped to God it never rained. He laughed and he cursed.

Then he went an' got on his pony. He didn't speak all the way into the ranch. I didn't say anything either. There wasn't anything to say with Mud Springs dry, it was all over. The outfit was blowed up and broke.

It was tough on Smith. It was tough on his wife, too. I was thinking of her as we rode to the ranch. Only the day before I'd come in ahead of Smith and found her kneeling on the ranch-house porch. "God give us rain," she says.

I don't know how she stood it as long as she did with the cattle bawling for water. They bawled all day. They bawled all night. It was a never-ending sound. It was getting on me so I dreaded to come in nights. Even in the ranch house it was always in your ears. Supper was waiting when Smith and me got in that night. His wife was pleasant as usual. And Smith was apparently over that spell of his at the spring. It was when she fetched the light that I noticed how old an' tired she was. Then I looked at Smith. He had aged ten years that day.

I noticed she didn't touch her food nor take a sip of coffee. Once way back when it started she had said it was all she could do to get it down when she thought of the thirsty cattle. Nobody spoke. Outside, the cattle bawled for water. Her eyes were on Smith's face. He wasn't eating either. Finally he pushed his plate aside. "I guess you know," he says.

She nodded her head. When she spoke her voice was firm. "I know," she says, "Mud Springs went dry today."

Something pinched me in the throat when the woman smiled, an' I walked outside the house. I knew they wanted to be alone.

Some thunderheads were hanging low over Mescal Rim. Once in the long ago it had been a sign of rain. But with tomorrow's blazing sun they would disappear again. A new moon was rising over Turnbull Peak. I had watched the new moon rise two years ago from the same place on the ranch-house porch the night I came to work for Smith.

It was a regular cow spread then, with fat ponies to ride and fat cattle. There had been good rains the year I come. There was plenty of feed and water. The big flats were covered with filaree where the cattle grazed knee-deep. There was grama on every hill. There wasn't an outfit in Arizona any better fixed for water.

I had often heard the woman speak of how they started out over twenty years before. She was teaching school. She had met Smith at a dance one night when he was a wild young puncher breaking horses at the Circles. Smith started to save his wages then an' he kept away from town. It was four years later that she put her money in with his and they bought a little remnant of cattle.

Smith had built the little house himself and he had put in all the corrals. Often she had held the lantern when he worked on them at night. There had been her little garden and an orchard.

Like all cow folks in Arizona they had had their ups and downs. There had been wet years and dry. They had owed the bank at different times but they always had paid out. They had watched the little remnant grow until they owned five thousand head. Then the drought. Now there wasn't half that many.

With rain the outfit could pull through even now. The cattle could live on browse and buck brush if only they had water. Even now there was plenty of feed way back in the hills if it rained an' put out water.

Thinking back, it was hard to remember when Smith or I had used a rope or branding iron. We rode with picks and shovels digging out the springs an' water holes. For weeks and months the thunderheads had come each day to mock us in the sky. But somehow there was always hope until Mud Springs went dry.

Their light still showed when I unrolled my bed roll on the porch. It didn't seem as if I'd been asleep. But it was the patter on the roof that woke me at daybreak. The sky was dark an' overcast. Mescal Rim was hid. The patter stopped an' then it came, it came in driving torrents.

I could hear the folks inside as I pulled on my boots. I guess I acted funny. I didn't remember that I yelled. Later Smith said it was the first time he ever saw a puncher drunk on nothing except water.

But I remember the woman kneeling in the rain an' Smith, his head thrown back, the water streaming from his face, both hands stretched toward the sky.

And still it came. It was noon when we thought of breakfast. We laughed an' talked all through the meal. We ate with the rain still pelting on the roof without any sign of a letup.

The three of us sat late that night, it was pleasant on the porch. We sat and listened to the rain. And for the first time in the long, cruel months the bawling cattle were quiet.

It was just before they went inside Smith turned to me an' spoke. "Yesterday at the spring," he said, "I didn't mean thatwhat I said about it never raining."

"Water," published in Collier's, April 27, 1935, and through whose permission this copyrighted story is reproduced, won the 1935 Ο. Henry Memorial Award for the nation's best short-short story.