The Flying U Ranch, B. M. Bower [diy ebook reader .txt] 📗

question which

remained unanswered; what interest he had felt at first was

smothered to death beneath that blanket of words, and he eagerly

followed the boys out and over to Rusty Brown’s place, where

Denson, because of an old grudge against Rusty, might be trusted

not to follow.

 

“Mamma!” Weary commented amusedly, when they were crossing the

street, “that Denson bunch can sure talk the fastest and longest,

and say the least, of any outfit I ever saw.”

 

“Wonder who did buy him out?” Jack Bates queried. “Old

ginger-whiskers didn’t pass out any facts, yuh notice. He

couldn’t have,got much; his land’s mostly gravel and ‘doby

patches. He’s got a water right on Flying U creek, you

know—first right, at that, seems to me—and a dandy fine spring

in that coulee. Wonder why our outfit didn’t buy him out—seeing

he wanted to sell so bad?”

 

“This wantin’ to sell is something I never heard of b’fore,” Slim

said slowly. “To hear him tell it, that ranch uh hisn was worth a

dollar an inch, by golly. I don’t b’lieve he’s been wantin’ to

sell out. If he had, Mis’ Bixby woulda said something about it.

She don’t know about this here sellin’ business, or she’d a

said—”

 

“Yeah, you can most generally bank on the Countess telling all

she knows,” Cal assented with some sarcasm; at which Slim grunted

and turned sulky afterward.

 

Denson and his affairs they speedily forgot for a time, in the

diversion which Rusty Brown’s familiar place afforded to young

men with unjaded nerves and a zest for the primitive pleasures.

Not until mid-afternoon did it occur to them that Flying U coulee

was deserted by all save old Patsy, and that there were chores to

be done, if all the creatures of the coulee would sleep in

comfort that night. Pink, therefore, withdrew his challenge to

the bunch, and laid his billiard cue down with a sigh and the

remark that all he lacked was time, to have the scalps of every

last one of them hanging from his belt. Pink was figurative in

his speech, you will understand; and also a bit vainglorious over

beating Andy Green and Big Medicine twice in succession.

 

It occurred to Weary then that a word of cheer to the Old Man and

his anxious watchers might not cone amiss. Therefore the Happy

Family mounted and rode to the depot to send it, and on the way

wrangled over the wording of the message after their usual

contentious manner.

 

“Better tell ‘em everything is fine, at this end uh the line,”

Cal suggested, and was hooted at for a poet.

 

“Just say,” Weary began, when he was interrupted by the

discordant clamor from a trainload of sheep that had just pulled

in and stopped. “‘Maa-aa, Ma-a-aaa,’ darn yuh,” he shouted

derisively, at the peering, plaintive faces, glimpsed between the

close-set bars. “Mamma, how I do love sheep!” Whereupon he put

spurs to his horse and galloped down to the station to rid his

ears of the turbulent wave of protest from the cars.

 

Naturally it required some time to compose the telegram in a

style satisfactory to all parties. Outside, cars banged together,

an engine snorted stertorously, and suffocating puffs of coal

smoke now and then invaded the waiting-room while the Happy

Family were sending that message of cheer to Chicago. If you are

curious, the final version of their combined sentiments was not

at all spectacular. It said merely:

 

“Everything fine here. Take good care of the Old Man. How’s the

Kid stacking up?”

 

It was signed simply “The Bunch.”

 

“Mary’s little lambs are here yet, I see,” the Native Son

remarked carelessly when they went out. “Enough lambs for all the

Marys in the country. How would you like to be Mary?”

 

“Not for me,” Irish declared, and turned his face away from the

stench of them.

 

Others there were who rode the length of the train with faces

averted and looks of disdain; cowmen, all of them, they shared

the range prejudice, and took no pains to hide it.

 

The wind blew strong from the east, that day; it whistled through

the open, double-decked cars packed with gray, woolly bodies,

whose voices were ever raised in strident complaint; and the

stench of them smote the unaccustomed nostrils of the Happy

Family and put them to disgusted flight up the track and across

it to where the air was clean again.

 

“Honest to grandma, I’d make the poorest kind of a sheepherder,”

Big Medicine bawled earnestly, when they were well away from the

noise and smell of the detested animals. “If I had to herd sheep,

by cripes, do you know what I’d do? I’d haze ‘em into a coulee

and turn loose with a good rifle and plenty uh shells, and call

in the coyotes to git a square meal. That’s the way I’d herd

sheep. It’s the only way you can shut ‘em up. They just ‘baa-aa,

baa-aa, baa-aa’ from the time they’re dropped till somebody kills

‘em off. Honest, they blat in their sleep. I’ve heard ‘em.”

 

“When you and the dogs were shooting off coyotes?” asked Andy

Green pointedly, and so precipitated dissension which lasted for

ten miles.

 

CHAPTER V. Sheep

 

Slim rising first from dinner on the next day but one opened the

door of the messhouse, and stood there idly picking his teeth

before he went about his work. After a minute of listening to the

boys “joshing” old Patsy about some gooseberry pies he had baked

without sugar, he turned his face outward, threw up his head like

a startled bull, and began to sniff.

 

“Say, I smell sheep, by golly!” he announced in the bellowing

tone which was his conversational voice, and sniffed again.

 

“Oh, that’s just a left-over in your system from the dose yuh got

in town Sunday,” Weary explained soothingly. “I’ve smelled sheep,

and tasted sheep, and dreamed sheep, ever since.”

 

“No, by golly, it’s sheep! It ain’t no memory. I—I b’hieve I

hear ‘em, too, by golly.” Slim stepped out away from the building

and faced suspiciously down the coulee.

 

“Slim, I never suspected you of imagination before,” the Native

Son drawled, and loitered out to where Slim stood still sniffing.

“I wonder if you’re catching it from Andy and me. Don’t you think

you ought to be vaccinated?”

 

“That ain’t imagination,” Pink called out from within. “When

anybody claims there’s sheep in Flying U coulee, that’s straight

loco.”

 

“Come on out here and smell ‘em yourself, then!” Slim bawled

indignantly. “I never seen such an outfit as this is gittin’ to

be; you fellers don’t believe nobody, no more. We ain’t all Andy

Greens.”

 

Upon hearing this Andy pushed back his chair and strolled

outside. He clapped his hand down upon Slim’s fat-cushioned

shoulder and swayed him gently. “Never mind, Slim; you can’t all

be famous,” he comforted. “Some day, maybe, I’ll teach yuh the

fine art of lying more convincingly than the ordinary man can

tell the truth. It is a fine art; it takes a genius to put it

across. Now, the only time anybody doubts my word is when I’m

sticking to the truth hike a sand burr to a dog’s tail.”

 

From away to the west, borne on the wind which swept steadily

down the coulee, came that faint, humming sing-song, which can be

made only by a herd of a thousand or more sheep, all blatting in

different keys—or by a distant band playing monotonously upon

the middle octave of their varied instruments.

 

“Slim’s right, by gracious! It’s sheep, sure as yuh live.” Andy

did not wait for more, but started at a fast walk for the stable

and his horse. After him went the Native Son, who had not been

with the Flying U long enough to sense the magnitude of the

affront, and Slim, who knew to a nicety just what “cowmen”

considered the unpardonable sin, and the rest of the Happy

Family, who were rather incredulous still.

 

“Must be some fool herder just crossing the coulee, on the move

somewhere,” Weary gave as a solution. “Half of ‘em don’t know a

fence when they see it.”

 

As they galloped toward the sound and the smell, they expressed

freely their opinion of sheep, the men who owned them, and the

lunatics who watched over the blatting things. They were

cattlemen to the marrow in their bones, and they gloried in their

prejudice against the woolly despoilers of the range.

 

All these years had the Flying U been immune from the nuisance,

save for an occasional trespasser, who was quickly sent about his

business. The Flying U range had been kept in the main inviolate

from the little, gray vandals, which ate the grass clean to the

sod, and trampled with their sharp-pointed hoofs the very roots

into lifelessness; which polluted the water-holes and creeks

until cattle and horses went thirsty rather than drink; which, in

that land of scant rainfall, devastated the range where they fed

so that a long-established prairie-dog town was not more barren.

What wonder if the men who owned cattle, and those who tended

them, hated sheep? So does the farmer dread an invasion of

grasshoppers.

 

A mile down the coulee they came upon the band with two herders

and four dogs keeping watch. Across the coulee and up the

hillsides they spread like a noisome gray blanket. “Maa-aa, maa-aa, maa-aa,” two thousand strong they blatted a strident medley

while they hurried here and there after sweeter bunches of grass,

very much like a disturbed ant-hill.

 

The herders loitered upon either slope, their dogs lying close

beside them. There was good grass in that part of the coulee; the

Flying U had saved it for the saddle horses that were to be

gathered and held temporarily at the ranch; for it would save

herding, and a week in that pasture would put a keen edge on

their spirits for the hard work of the calf roundup. A dozen or

two that ranged close had already been driven into the field and

were feeding disdainfully in a corner as far away from the sheep

as the fence would permit.

 

The Happy Family, riding close-grouped, stiffened in their

saddles and stared amazed at the outrage.

 

“Sheepherders never did have any nerve,” Irish observed after a

minute. “They keep their places fine! They’ll drive their sheep

right into your dooryard and tell ‘en to help themselves to

anything that happens to look good to them. Oh, they’re sure

modest and retiring!”

 

Weary, who had charge of the outfit during Chip’s absence, was

making straight for the nearest herder. Pink and Andy went with

him, as a matter of course.

 

“You fellows ride up around that side, and put the run on them

sheep,” Weary shouted back to the others. “We’ll start the other

side moving. Make ‘em travel—back where they came from.” He

jerked his head toward the north. He knew, just as they all knew,

that there had been no sheep to the south, unless one counted

those that ranged across the Missouri river.

 

As the three forced their horses up the steep slope, the herder,

sitting slouched upon a rock, glanced up at them dully. He had a

long stick, with which he was apathetically turning over the

smaller stones within his reach, and as apathetically killing the

black bugs that scuttled out from the moist earth beneath. He

desisted from this unexciting pastime as they drew near, and eyed

them with the sullenness that comes of long isolation when the

person’s nature forbids that other extreme of babbling garrulity,

for no man can live long months alone and remain perfectly

normal. Nature, that stern mistress,