MONTANA STORYTELLING BOY

(This was typed off years ago.  I saved it because it's a tough story, but in some way among some people, it's very modern.)

BURY ME NOT

This story was in something I read yesterday, maybe even the newspaper but it's about something that happened a hundred years ago.  It was told by a man who was very old but remembered being on a trail ride bringing cattle up from Texas.  Many of the hands were just boys: pushouts, throwaways, runaways, and so on.  The storyteller had left his family with permission -- searching for adventure.  it was a life with a lot of exposure, not much sleep, hard work in the saddle all day, and monotonous food but a lot of it.  That's the way people ate in those days anyway: beans, biscuits and beef.  Lucky to have so much fresh beef.

A boy became ill on the trip.  He had come West because he had tuberculosis (the AIDS of the time) and the doctor had told him he'd have a chance to heal up if he could get where it was high and dry.  But he didn't heal.  He fell out of his saddle.

The trail boss took him into town and got him a hotel room.  The town doc looked and said he would die soon.  The trail boss went back to the herd and said, "Someone has got to stay with this boy while he dies."  And he looked right at the man, then only a boy, while telling the story.  So that he was the boy who went to the hotel room and the sick boy couldn't sleep unless the well boy lay down beside him and let the sick boy put his head on the storyteller's arm.  So he did that.

In a day or so the sick boy began to hemorrhage from his lungs badly.  The storyteller said he got newspapers and put them all over the bed and the floor next to the bed because there was so much blood it was on everything.  Then an unknown man from the town came and said the storytelling boy had not slept for days and was in danger, so the man would watch for a while.  So the storytelling boy went into the next room and slept until the man from town came and said, "It won't be long now."

The dying boy asked the storytelling boy to lie down with him so he could put his head on the storyteller's arm again.  So that's what they did.  In a few hours the boy died.  The man from town put his own coat and hat on the storytelling boy so he would look older and sent him out with a dollar to get himself a drink.

That was the whole story.  It happened in Montana.