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; which 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