to have this fellow put up his gun, and these—” he hesitated, after a swift glance, to apply any epithet whatever to the Happy Family. “I have two witnesses here to swear that you have without any excuse assaulted and maligned and threatened me, and you may consider yourselves lucky if I do not insist—”
“Ah, cut that out,” Andy advised wearily. “I don’t know how it strikes the rest, but it sounds pretty sickening to me. Don’t overlook the fact that two of us happen to know all about you; and we know just where to send word, to dig up a lot more identification. So bluffing ain’t going to help you out, a darned bit.”
“Miguel, you can go with Andy,” Weary said with brisk decision. “Take Dunk down to the ranch till the sheriff gets here—if it’s straight goods about Dunk sending for him. If he didn’t, we can take Dunk in tomorrow, ourselves.” He turned and fixed a cold, commanding eye upon the slack-jawed herders. “Come along, you two, and get these sheep headed outa here.”
“Say, we’ll just lock him up in the blacksmith shop, and come on back,” Andy amended the order after his own free fashion. “He couldn’t get out in a million years; not after I’m through staking him out to the anvil with a log-chain.” He smiled maliciously into Dunk’s fear-yellowed countenance, and waved him a signal to ride ahead, which Dunk did without a word of protest while the Happy Family looked on dazedly.
“What’s it all about, Weary?” Irish asked, when the three were gone. “What is it they’ve got on Dunk? Must be something pretty fierce, the way he wilted down into the saddle.”
“You’ll have to wait and ask the boys.” Weary rode off to hurry the herders on the far side of the band.
So the Happy Family remained perforce unenlightened upon the subject and for that they said hard things about Weary, and about Andy and Miguel as well. They believed that they were entitled to know the truth, and they called it a smart-aleck trick to keep the thing so almighty secret.
There is in resentment a crisis; when that crisis is reached, and the dam of repression gives way, the full flood does not always sweep down upon those who have provoked the disaster. Frequently it happens that perfectly innocent victims are made to suffer. The Happy Family had been extremely forbearing, as has been pointed out before. They had frequently come to the boiling point of rage and had cooled without committing any real act of violence. But that day had held a long series of petty annoyances; and here was a really important thing kept from them as if they were mere outsiders. When Weary was gone, Irish asked Pink what crime Dunk had committed in the past. And Pink shook his head and said he didn’t know. Irish mentally accused Pink of lying, and his temper was none the better for the rebuff, as anyone can readily understand.
When the herders, therefore, rounded up the sheep and started them moving south, the Happy Family speedily rebelled against that shuffling, nibbling, desultory pace that had kept them long, weary hours in the saddle with the other band. But it was Irish who first took measures to accelerate that pace.
He got down his rope and whacked the loop viciously down across the nearest gray back. The sheep jumped, scuttled away a few paces and returned to its nibbling progress. Irish called it names and whacked another.
After a few minutes he grew tired of swinging his loop and seeing it have so fleeting an effect, and pulled his gun. He fired close to the heels of a yearling buck that had more than once stopped to look up at him foolishly and blat, and the buck charged ahead in a panic at the noise and the spat of the bullet behind him.
“Hit him agin in the same place!” yelled Big Medicine, and drew his own gun. The Happy Family, at that high tension where they were ready for anything, caught the infection and began shooting and yelling like crazy men.
The effect was not at all what they expected. Instead of adding impetus to the band, as would have been the case if they had been driving cattle, the result was exactly the opposite. The sheep ran—but they ran to a common center. As the shooting went on they bunched tighter and tighter, until it seemed as though those in the center must surely be crushed flat. From an ambling, feeding company of animals, they become a lumpy gray blanket, with here and there a long, vacuous face showing idiotically upon the surface.
The herders grinned and drew together as against a common enemy—or as with a new joke to be discussed among themselves. The dogs wandered helplessly about, yelped half-heartedly at the woolly mass, then sat down upon their haunches and lolled red tongues far out over their pointed little teeth, and tilted knowing heads at the Happy Family.
“Look at the darned things!” wailed Pink, riding twice around the huddle, almost ready to shed tears of pure rage and helplessness. “Git outa that! Hi! Woopp-ee!” He fired again and again, and gave the range-old cattle-yell; the yell which had sent many a tired herd over many a weary mile; the yell before which had fled fat steers into the stockyards at shipping time, and up the chutes into the cars; the yell that had hoarsened many a cowpuncher’s voice and left him with a mere croak to curse his fate with; a yell to bring results—but it did not start those sheep.
The Happy Family, riding furiously round and round, fired every cartridge they had upon their persons; they said every improper thing they could remember or invent; they yelled until their eyes were starting from their sockets; they glued that band of sheep so tight together that dynamite could scarcely have pried them apart.
And the herders, sitting apart with grimy hands clasped loosely over hunched-up knees, looked on, and talked together in low tones, and grinned.
Irish glanced that way and caught them grinning; caught them pointing derisively, with heaving shoulders. He swore a great oath and made for them, calling aloud that he would knock those grins so far in that they would presently find themselves smiling wrong-side-out from the back of their heads.
Pink, overhearing him, gave a last swat at the waggling tail of a burrowing buck, and wheeled to overtake Irish and have a hand in reversing the grins. Big Medicine saw them start, and came bellowing up from the far side of the huddle like a bull challenging to combat from across a meadow. Big Medicine did not know what it was all about, but he scented battle, and that was sufficient. Cal Emmett and Weary, equally ignorant of the cause, started at a lope toward the trouble center.
It began to look as if the whole Family was about to fall upon those herders and rend them asunder with teeth and nails; so much so that the herders jumped up and ran like scared cottontails toward the rim of Denson coulee, a hundred yards or so to the west.
“Mamma! I wish we could make the sheep hit that gait and keep it,” exclaimed Weary, with the first laugh they had heard from him that day.
While he was still laughing, there was a shot from the ridge toward which they were running; the sharp, vicious crack of a rifle. The Happy Family heard the whistling hum of the bullet, singing low over their heads; quite low indeed; altogether too low to be funny. And they had squandered all their ammunition on the prairie sod, to hurry a band of sheep that flatly refused to hurry anywhere except under one another’s odorous, perspiring bodies.
From the edge of the coulee the rifle spoke again. A tiny geyser of dust, spurting up from the ground ten feet to one side of Cal Emmett, showed them all where the bullet struck.
“Get outa range, everybody!” yelled Weary, and set the example by tilting his rowels against Glory’s smooth hide, and heading eastward. “I like to be accommodating, all right, but I draw the line on standing around for a target while my neighbors practise shooting.”
The Happy Family, having no other recourse, therefore retreated in haste toward the eastern skyline. Bullets followed them, overtook them as the shooter raised his sights for the increasing distance, and whined harmlessly over their heads. All save one.
CHAPTER XIV
Happy Jack
Big Medicine, Irish and Pink, racing almost abreast, heard a scream behind them and pulled up their horses with short, stiff-legged plunges. A brown horse overtook them; a brown horse, with Happy Jack clinging to the saddle-horn, his body swaying far over to one side. Even as he went hurtling past them his hold grew slack and he slumped, head foremost, to