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Chapter 26 Frank Hawkins Lewis, Cattleman people on the Hawkins Ranch were the almost daily companions of my brother Frank in every stage of his life. When he was about five, Dode Green supervised him in ranching occupations, letting him join the other hands in holding a rope that held down a cow. Later, when he was old enough to be a useful cowhand himself, he worked alongside Arthur Green, Harry Gatson, Tibby and Preston Wyche, Douglas Chapman, and Rose’s father, Amos Franklin. Aunt Janie drilled Frank from when he was very young in the romance and family importance of the cattle business , and her instruction took such deep root that as an adult, he went eagerly and happily in the very direction toward which he was pointed. Aunt Janie took him into Houston to have the bootmaker at Stelzig’s Saddlery fit him with blunt-toed black cowboy boots, and he had child-sized chaps made like those the ranch hands used. The man at Stelzig’s fixed his black cowboy hat with a leather thong and slider to snug up under his chin. While still in high school Frank went with my father to a livestock sale where he saw a pretty paint pony and fell in love with it. My father agreed to place a bid, and the pony came trotting out on a lead. To Frank’s crushing disappointment, my father was absolutely silent, and the pony was sold. “You didn’t say anything!” Frank said. “You just wait and see,” said my father, who had gone around to consult Mr. Schwartz, a horse and mule trader who bought in large lots. As requested, Mr. Schwartz had placed the bid on the paint pony, and Frank brought him home. Frank named the paint Bobby and kept him in Aunt Janie’s cow lot and shed. The first thing Frank taught Bobby was to rear up on cue like a horse in the movies. Frank saddled Bobby, rode him, worked cattle on him, curried him, and worked with him for hours to get him into the right gait; a pacing gait called the “single foot” was the ideal. frank hawkins lewis, cattleman 179 Often Frank got one or two of his high school pals, like Frank Montague or Gordon Richardson, to team up with him for ranch work, and the boys were paid for their efforts. With the regular ranch hands, they herded cows and calves to the loading chute for shipment, helped at the dipping vat, threw down the calves to be branded, marked, and castrated. They were not put off by heat, dust, blood, grease, or mosquitoes. Sometimes the boys went on a coon hunt with John Ashcraft. He spoke in a high-pitched twang and loved to set loose his coon hounds at night and give them a holler to spur them on to catch some varmint in the woods. A night hunt with coon dogs was a favorite treat for my brother Frank. At our dinner table he described his expeditions, including a rendering of Ashcraft’s dialogue about his dogs: “That’s ole Blue,” Frank said, pitching his voice a few notes higher than usual, like Ashcraft’s. “He’s got that weasel that’s been getting at the hens.” We asked ourselves how in the world Mr. Ashcraft knew from Ole Blue’s howl that it was a weasel and not a squirrel or just empty baying at the moon. The students in Bay City High School must have been required to read Thoreau’s Walden, because one day at the dinner table Frank described Thoreau’s cabin, and my father immediately gave him a challenge and a project. “Why don’t you boys go down to the ranch and find a place on the Canoe Lake to build a cabin like Thoreau’s?” It was summer. With lots of slack time, Frank and some friends took the challenge and went to the lumber yard for tools, boards, nails, tar paper, and shingles. Fed by Canoe Bayou, Canoe Lake is strangely shaped—on a map it looks like a hammer. They selected a spot with some shade under scrubby oak trees. The project kept them busy every day for the whole summer. My mother gave the bridge foursome regular reports on the construction project, all of them agreeing that an idle mind was the devil’s workshop. At last the boys camped out in their cabin, which they called...

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