The Flying U Ranch Page 9

  "Yuh dassent shoot," he stated sourly, and did not move.

  For answer, Weary pulled back the hammer; also he smiled as malignantly as it was in his nature to do, and hoped in his heart that he looked sufficiently terrifying to convince the man. So they faced each other in a silent clash of wills.

  Big Medicine had not been saying much on the way over, which was unusual. Now he rode forward until he was abreast of Weary, and he grinned down at the bug-killer in a way to distract his attention from the gun.

  "Nobody don't have to shoot, by cripes!" he bawled. "We hain't goin' to kill yuh. We'll make yuh wisht, by cripes, we had, though, b'fore we git through. Git to work, boys, 'n' gether up some dry grass an' sticks. Over there in them rose-bushes you oughta find enough bresh. We'll give him a taste uh what we was talkin' about comm' over, by cripes! I guess he'll be willin' to drive sheep, all right, when we git through with him. Haw-haw-haw-w-w!" He leaned forward in the saddle and ogled the bug-killer with horrid significance.

  "Git busy with that bresh!" he yelled authoritatively, when a glance showed him that the Happy Family was hesitating and eyeing him uncertainly. "Git a fire goin' quick's yuh kin—I'll do the rest. Down in Coconino county we used to have a way uh fixin' sheepherders—"

  "Aw, gwan! We don't want no torture business!" remonstrated Happy Jack uneasily, edging away.

  "Yuh don't, hey?" Big Medicine turned in the saddle wrathfully and glared. When he had succeeded in catching Andy Green's eye he winked, and that young man's face kindled understandingly. "Well, now, you hain't runnin' this here show. Honest to grandma, I've saw the time when a little foot-warmin' done a sheepherder a whole lot uh good; and, it looks to me, by cripes, as if this here feller needed a dose to gentle him down. You git the fire started. That's all I want you t' do, Happy. Some uh you boys help me rope him—like him and that other jasper over there done to Andy. C'mon, Andy—it ain't goin' to take long!"

  "You bet your sweet life I'll come on!" exclaimed Andy, dismounting eagerly. "Let me take your rope, Weary. Too bad we haven't got a branding iron—"

  "Aw, we don't need no irons." Big Medicine was also on the ground by then, and untying his rope. "Lemme git his shoes off once, and I'll show yuh."

  The bug-killer lifted his stick, snarling like a mongrel dog when a stranger tries to drive it out of the house; hurled the stick hysterically, as Big Medicine, rope in hand, advanced implacably, and, with a squawk of horror, turned suddenly and ran. After him, bellowing terribly, lunged Big Medicine, straight through the band like a snowplow, leaving behind them a wide, open trail.

  "Say, we kinda overplayed that bet, by gracious," Andy commented to Weary, while he watched the chase. "That gazabo's scared silly; let's try the other one. That torture talk works fine."

  In his enthusiasm Andy remounted and was about to lead the way to the other herder when Big Medicine returned puffing, the bug-killer squirming in his grasp. "Tell him what yuh want him to do, Weary," he panted, with some difficulty holding his limp victim upright by a greasy coat-collar. "And if he don't fall over himself doin' it, why—by cripes—we'll take off his shoes!"

  Whereupon the bug-killer gave another howl and professed himself eager to drive the sheep—well, what he said was that he would drive them to that place which ladies dislike to hear mentioned, if the Happy Family wanted him to.

  "That's all right, then. Start 'em south, and don't quit till somebody tells you to." Weary carefully let down the hammer of his six-shooter and shoved it thankfully into his scabbard.

  "Now, you don't want to pile it on quite so thick, next time," Irish admonished Big Medicine, when they turned away from watching the bug-killer set his dogs to work by gestures and a shouted word or two. "You like to have sent this one plumb nutty."

  "I betche Bud gets us all pinched for that," grumbled Happy Jack. "Torturing folks is purty darned serious business. You might as well shoot 'em up decent and be done with it."

  "Haw-haw-haw-w-w!" Big Medicine ogled the group mirthfully. "Nobody can't swear I done a thing, or said a thing. All I said definite was that I'd take off his shoes. Any jury in the country'd know that would be hull lot worse fer us than it would fer him, by cripes. Haw-haw-haw-w-w!"

  "Say, that's right; yuh didn't say nothin', ner do nothin'. By golly, that was purty slick work, all right!" Slim forgot his sore leg until he clapped his hand enthusiastically down upon the place as comprehension of Bud's finesse dawned upon him. He yelped, and the Happy Family laughed unfeelingly.

  "You want to be careful and don't try to see through any jokes, Slim, till that leg uh yours gets well," Irish bantered, and they laughed the louder.

  All this was mere byplay; a momentary swinging of their mood to pleasantry, because they were a temperamentally cheerful lot, and laughter came to them easily, as it always does to youth and perfect mental and physical health. Their brief hilarity over Slim's misfortune did not swerve them from their purpose, nor soften the mood of them toward their adversaries. They were unsmiling and unfriendly when they reached the man from Wyoming; and, if they ever behaved like boys let out of school, they did not show it then.

  The Wyoming man was wiser than his fellow. He had been given several minutes grace in which to meditate upon the unwisdom of defiance; and he had seen the bug-killer change abruptly from sullenness to terror, and afterward to abject obedience. He did not know what they had said to him, or what they had done; but he knew the bug-killer was a hard man to stampede. And he was one man, and they were many; also he judged that, being human, and this being the third offense of the Dot sheep under his care, it would be extremely unsafe to trust that their indignation would vent itself in mere words.

  Therefore, when Weary told him to get the stragglers back through the fence and up on the level, he stopped only long enough for a good look at their faces. After that he called his dogs and crawled through the fence.

  It really did not require the entire Family to force those sheep south that morning. But Weary's jaw was set, as was his heart, upon a thorough cleaning of that particular bit of range; and, since he did not definitely request any man to turn back, and every fellow there was minded to see the thing to a finish, they straggled out behind the trailing two thousand—and never had one bunch of sheep so efficient a convoy.

  After the first few miles the way grew rough. Sheep lagged, and the blatting increased to an uproar. Old ewes and yearlings these were mostly, and there were few to suffer more than hunger and thirst, perhaps. So Weary was merciless, and drove them forward without a stop until the first jumble of hills and deep-worn gullies held them back from easy traveling.

  But the Happy Family had not ridden those breaks for cattle, all these years, to be hindered by rough going. Weary, when the band stopped and huddled, blatting incessantly against a sheer wall of sandstone and gravel, got the herders together and told them what he wanted.

  "You take 'em down that slope till you come to the second little coulee. Don't go up the first one—that's a blind pocket. In the second coulee, up a mile or so, there's a spring creek. You can hold 'em there on water for half an hour. That's more than any of yuh deserve. Haze 'em down there."

  The herders did not know it, but that second coulee was the rude gateway to an intricate system of high ridges and winding waterways that would later be dry as a bleached bone—the real beginning of the bad lands which border the Missouri river for long, terrible miles. Down there, it is possible for two men to reach places where they may converse quite easily across a chasm, and yet be compelled to ride fifteen or twenty miles, perhaps, in order to shake hands. Yet, even in that scrap-heap of Nature there are ways of passing deep into the heart of the upheaval.

  The Happy Family knew those ways as they knew the most complicated figures of the quadrilles they danced so lightfootedly with the girls of the Bear Paw country. When they forced the sheep and their herders out of the coulee Weary had indicated he sent Irish and Pink ahead to point the way, and he told them to head for the Wash Bowl; whic
h they did with praiseworthy zeal and scant pity for the sheep.

  When at last, after a slow, heartbreaking climb up a long, bare ridge, Pink and Irish paused upon the brow of a slope and let the trail-weary band spill itself reluctantly down the steep slope beyond, the sun stood high in the blue above them and their stomachs clamored for food; by which signs they knew that it must be near noon.

  When the last sheep had passed, blatting discordantly, down the bluff, Weary halted the sweating herders for a parting admonition.

  "We don't aim to deal you any more misery, for a while, if you stay where you're at. You're only working for a living, like the rest of us—but I must say I don't admire your trade none. Anyway, I'll send some of your bunch down here with grub and beds. This is good enough range for sheep. You keep away from the Flying U and nobody'll bother you. Over there in them trees," he added, pointing a gloved finger toward a little grove on the far side of the basin, "you'll find a cabin, and water. And, farther down the river there's pretty good grass, in the little bottoms. Now, git."

  The herders looked as if they would enjoy murdering them all, but they did not say a word. With their dogs at heel they scrambled down the bluff in the wake of their sheep, and the Happy Family, rolling cigarettes while they watched them depart, told one another that this settled that bunch; they wouldn't bed down in the Flying U door-yard that night, anyway.

  CHAPTER XI. Weary Unburdens

  Hungry with the sharp, gnawing hunger of healthy stomachs accustomed to regular and generous feeding; tired with the weariness of healthy muscles pushed past their accustomed limit of action; and hot with the unaccustomed heat of a blazing day shunted unaccountably into the midst of soft spring weather, the Happy Family rode out of the embrace of the last barren coulee and up on the wide level where the breeze swept gratefully up from the west, and where every day brought with it a deeper tinge of green into its grassy carpet.

  Only for this harassment of the Dot sheep, the roundup wagons would be loaded and ready to rattle abroad over the land. Meadow larks and curlews and little, pert-eyed ground sparrows called out to them that roundup time was come. They passed a bunch of feeding Flying U cattle, and flat-ribbed, bandy-legged calves galloped in brief panic to their mothers and from the sanctuary of grass-filled paunches watched the riders with wide, inquisitive eyes.

  "We ought to be starting out, by now," Weary observed a bit gloomily to Andy and Pink, who rode upon either side of him. "The calf crop is going to be good, if this weather holds on another two weeks or so. But—" he waved his cigarette disgustedly "—that darned Dot outfit would be all over the place, if we pulled out on roundup and left 'em the run of things." He smoked moodily for a minute. "My religion has changed a lot in the last few days," he observed whimsically. "My idea of hell is a place where there ain't anything but sheep and sheepherders; and cowpunchers have got to spend thousands uh years right in the middle of the corrals."

  "If that's the case, I'm going to quit cussing, and say my prayers every night," Andy Green asserted emphatically.

  "What worries me," Weary confided, obeying the impulse to talk over his troubles with those who sympathized, "is how I'm going to keep the work going along like it ought to, and at the same time keep them Dot sheep outa the house. Dunk's wise, all right. He knows enough about the cow business to know we ye got to get out on the range pretty quick, now. And he's so mean that every day or every half day he can feed his sheep on Flying U grass, he calls that much to the good. And he knows we won't go to opening up any real gun-fights if we can get out of it; he counts on our faunching around and kicking up a lot of dust, maybe—but we won't do anything like what he'd do, in our places. He knows the Old Man and Chip are gone, and he knows we've just naturally got to sit back and swallow our tongues because we haven't any authority. Mamma! It comes pretty tough, when a low-down skunk like that just banks on your doing the square thing. He wouldn't do it, but he knows we will; and so he takes advantage of white men and gets the best of 'em. And if we should happen to break out and do something, he knows the herders would be the ones to get it in the neck; and he'd wait till the dust settled, and bob up with the sheriff—" He waved his hand again with a hopeless gesture. "It may not look that way on the face of it," he added gloomily, "but Dunk has got us right where he wants us. From the way they've been letting sheep on our land, time and time again, I'd gamble he's just trying to make us so mad we'll break out. He's got it in for the whole outfit, from the Old Man and the Little Doctor down to Slim. If any of us boys got into trouble, the Old Man would spend his last cent to clear us; and Dunk knows that just as well as he knows the way from the house to the stable. He'd see to it that it would just about take the Old Man's last cent, too. And he's using these Dot sheep like you'd use a red flag on a bull, to make us so crazy mad we'll kill off somebody.

  "That's why," he said to them all when he saw that they had ridden up close that they might hear what he was saying, "I've been hollering so loud for the meek-and-mild stunt. When I slapped him on the jaw, and he stood there and took it, I saw his game. He had a witness to swear I hit him and he didn't hit back. And when I saw them Dots in our field again, I knew, just as well as if Dunk had told me, that he was kinda hoping we'd kill a herder or two so he could cinch us good and plenty. I don't say," he qualified with a rueful grin, "that Dunk went into the sheep business just to get r-re-venge, as they say in shows. But if he can make money running sheep—and he can, all right, because there's more money in them right now than there is in cattle—and at the same time get a good whack at the Flying U, he's the lad that will sure make a running jump at the chance." He spat upon the burnt end of his cigarette stub from force of the habit that fear of range fires had built, and cast it petulantly from him; as if he would like to have been able to throw Dunk and his sheep problem as easily out of his path.

  "So I wish you boys would hang onto yourselves when you hear a sheep blatting under your window," he summed up his unburdening whimsically. "As Bud said this morning, you can't hang a man for telling a sheepherder you'll take off his shoes. And they can't send us over the road for moving that band of sheep onto new range to-day. Last night you all were kinda disorderly, maybe, but you didn't hurt anybody, or destroy any property. You see what I mean. Our only show is to stop with our toes on the right side of the dead line."

  "If Andy, here, would jest git his think-wheels greased and going good," Big Medicine suggested loudly, "he ought to frame up something that would put them Dots on the run permanent. I d'no, by cripes, why it is a feller can always think uh lies and joshes by the dozens, and put 'em over O. K. when there ain't nothing to be made out of it except hard feelin's; and then when a deal like this here sheep deal comes up, he's got about as many idees, by cripes, as that there line-back calf over there. Honest to grandma, Andy makes me feel kinda faint. Only time he did have a chanc't, he let them—" It occurred to Big Medicine at that point that perhaps his remarks might be construed by the object of them as being offensively personal. He turned his head and grinned good-naturedly in Andy's direction, and refrained from finishing what he was going to say. "I sure do like them wind-flowers scattered all over the ground," he observed with such deliberate and ostentatious irrelevance that the Happy Family laughed, even to Andy Green, who had at first been inclined toward anger.

  "Everything," declared Andy in the tone of a paid instructor, "has its proper time and place, boys; I've told you that before. For instance, I wouldn't try to kill a skunk by talking it to death; and I wouldn't be hopeful of putting the run on this Dunk person by telling him ghost stories. As to ideas—I'm plumb full of them. But they're all about grub, just right at present."

  That started Slim and Happy Jack to complaining because no one had had sense enough to go back after some lunch before taking that long trail south; the longer because it was a slow one, with sheep to set the pace. And by the time they had presented their arguments against the Happy Family's having enough brains to last them overnight, and the Happy
Family had indignantly pointed out just where the mental deficiency was most noticeable, they were upon that last, broad stretch of "bench" land beyond which lay Flying U coulee and Patsy and dinner; a belated dinner, to be sure, but for that the more welcome.

  And when they reached the point where they could look away to the very rim of the coulee, they saw sheep—sheep to the skyline, feeding scattered and at ease, making the prairie look, in the distance, as if it were covered with a thin growth of gray sage-brush. Four herders moved slowly upon the outskirts, and the dogs were little, scurrying, black dots which stopped occasionally to wait thankfully until the master-minds again urged them to endeavor.

  The Happy Family drew up and stared in silence.

  "Do I see sheep?" Pink inquired plaintively at last. "Tell me, somebody."

  "It's that bunch you fellows tackled last night," said Weary miserably. "I ought to have had sense enough to leave somebody on the ranch to look out for this."

  "They've got their nerve," stated Irish, "after the deal they got last night. I'd have bet good money that you couldn't drag them herders across Flying U coulee with a log chain."

  "Say, by golly, do we have to drive this here bunch anywheres before we git anything to eat?" Slim wanted to know distressfully.

  Weary considered briefly. "No, I guess we'll pass 'em up for the present. An hour or so won't make much difference in the long run, and our horses are about all in, right now—"

  "So'm I, by cripes!" Big Medicine attested, grinning mirthlessly. "This here sheep business is plumb wearin' on a man. 'Specially," he added with a fretful note, "when you've got to handle 'em gentle. The things I'd like to do to them Dots is all ruled outa the game, seems like. Honest to grandma, a little gore would look better to me right now than a Dutch picnic before the foam's all blowed off the refreshments. Lemme kill off jest one herder, Weary?" he pleaded. "The one that took a shot at me las' night. Purty, please!"