30,000 On the Hoof

by Grey, Zane

  Lucinda was glad to get outdoors with Logan. She found that being penned indoors for months had contributed much to her inclination towards morbid thought. Her energy came back, and with it something of enthusiasm. At least, she found some satisfaction in her yielding to work in the open.

  She laboured steadily at the planting, though not violently, and appeared to grow less heavy and loggy for the exertion.

  To plant things in the earth seemed to Lucinda a happier and safer way to expend labour than to use it on the raising of cattle. In the main, the soil was sure. Lucinda loved the smell of the freshly tilled loam. She loved to get her hands in it.

  Logan's especial pride was in the cornfield. Only a man of such enormous strength and endurance as he possessed could have ploughed and planted such a big field, alone and in such short time. Besides that, with Lucinda's help he put in an acre of beans, a large plot of potatoes and many rows of cabbage, and lastly a considerable area of turnips. He had a leaning towards produce that could be fed to stock.

  Lucinda planted sunflowers and golden-glow on the porch side of the cabin. These homely flowers would be reminders of her mother, with whom they were favourites.

  Huett's estimate of the fertility of that canyon soil had not been without warrant. There was one section rich with black leaf-mould, where seeds sprouted as if by magic, and potatoes and cabbage came up almost over-night. Corn and beans followed as if loath to be left behind in the race for fecundity. Logan raved to his wife that Sycamore Canyon was a land of milk and honey.

  However, he had reckoned without his host! The crows and gophers began at once to contest with Logan his right to the soil. Once more he became a hunter. Lucinda heard a carbine popping all day long. He planted props with old coats and hats all around the fields. He made scarecrows of dead crows, and it was only by the greatest vigilance that he saved his crops.

  In June he took two days off to ride to Mormon Lake and drive back the new stock he had purchased from Holbert. When he turned these cows and heifers loose in the canyon no one would have guessed that he had suffered a grievous loss. Lucinda heard him laugh and whistle as he had while building the cabin. Then presently she heard him swear as never before. When his corns and beans attracted the deer, his rage knew no bounds. He did not want to shoot the deer; and every dawn and every dusk he and Coyote had to chase the four-footed destroyers out of the fields.

  As Lucinda's time drew nearer she fell prey to the morbid old fears.

  Logan had assured her that Mother Holbert had brought forth a troop of children, counting her own and her daughters', and that she would come the instant Logan rode after her. Holbert had a light buggy in which the trip back could be made in four hours. Nevertheless neither Logan nor this experienced old mother could still the voice that whispered to Lucinda. It was like the voice in the pine-tops, that whisper of tidings from the unknown. Lucinda had all the yearnings, the hallowed anticipations of a mother, the vague feelings of fulfilment to come; and these were beautiful, all-satisfying, strong and sweet and rewarding.

  Nevertheless they did not preclude the dark forebodings nor the instinctive blind terror of child-birth. All these distressed her despite Logan's assurances that a woman would be with her. A presentiment that she would be left alone filled her with uneasiness.

  Huett did not see this. He was kind, even loving, but he was stupid.

  Lucinda felt that she wanted to fly into a rage and flout him with his preoccupation in his practical tasks. Here she was about to go down into the valley of the shadow for him, for his offspring, and he felt no concern.

  Logan rose at daybreak and rushed out to shout and shoot the deer out of the fields. All day he toiled in the fields; at night he ate like a wolf, smoked a pipe, and if he conversed at all, it was about his new-born calves, or his corn. He then tumbled into bed to sleep the sleep of honest toil. In the darkness of night, while Lucinda lay awake, helpless in the loneliness he had failed to break through, she almost hated him.

  Then when day came again she would reproach herself for such black thoughts. This burden was something a woman must bear alone.

  Then one day she sustained a pang which instinctively warned her that the crucial time had come.

  "Logan!--Go after Mrs. Holbert! Make haste!" she implored.

  Her husband gave her one comprehending look and rushed out. A few minutes later Lucinda heard iron-shod hoofs cracking the rocks on the road. She sat down, composing herself with the courage of despair. Logan could be depended upon to return with someone in six hours or less. But that might be too late. She was but a woman whose intelligence grasped the inevitableness of the time, whose delicately sensitive nature shrank in terror from a repetition of that terrific first pang. It did not do any good to try to think how she would meet the situation alone. She felt the slow ascendancy of the animal. She was in the clutches of Nature. The pang recurred, to be prolonged into a paroxysm of agony. At its conclusion Lucinda heard voices and footsteps and Logan entered with a man and two women.

  "Luce! talk about--luck," panted Logan. "I run plumb--into these good folks... Tom Warnock--his wife and mother--travelling south... They'll see us--through this."

  Lucinda smiled a welcome to the kind-faced, eager women. Then she was seized again--dragged down to the primitive verge, where her last conscious thought was that she did not care for sympathy or help, or even for her life that was begetting life.

  The Warnocks stayed three days at Sycamore Canyon, until Lucinda's condition was satisfactory to the womenfolk, and then they drove away, leaving Lucinda immeasurably grateful, and Logan a prey to doubt and gloom. He told Lucinda that Warnock, a rancher and cattleman of long experience, thought that this natural-fenced canyon was a delusion and a snare. True, it would keep cattle from straying and it was wonderfully fertile, but that was all the good the could say for it. He advised Logan to homestead some other range.

  "What would you do, Luce?" he asked, appealingly.

  Lucinda was sure Logan would never give up his canyon. He had dreamed of it for years; he had set his heart upon it, and no matter what the obstacles were he would rise superior to them. She knew that her part was to encourage and sustain.

  "What do you care for Warnock's opinion?" she said sharply. "He was either envious or mistaken. He admitted you had a fenced range and a fertile one. Your strength and industry will make up for the drawbacks."

  She had never before seen her husband respond so markedly to words from her. He brightened and cast off his pondering dark mood.

  "Right! I should have come to you sooner," he declared. "I have my homestead, my cattle range. My dear wife and son! Surely I can work to deserve them."

  The baby made a vast and inexplicable difference to Lucinda. When she recovered her strength, so that she could go about her duties, she was as happy as she had been miserable. Logan named his son George Washington Huett, and worshipped him. Lucinda could never have been convinced that her husband had it in him to waste time over an infant in a basket. But eventually she divined that this tiny son was Huett's self repeated, his perpetuation. Huett might be thinking that George would grow into a sturdy son to help conquer this wilderness. Whatever it was that went through the father's mind, it made Lucinda rejoice.

  The canyon took on a transformation in Lucinda's eyes. Daily it grew in her sight until the long, grey sweep of range, the sloping, black-fringed walls were bearable. The great tall pines, never silent, always mournful, began to whisper a different language to her. The brook sang by day and the crickets by night that she must find herself and content her heart there. Such possibility had come with the baby.

  In six weeks she was working with Logan in the fields. Many times they were driven indoors by the sudden electrical storms. As the days grew more sultry these storms increased in frequency and intensity. The sky would be azure blue, with cloud-ships of white sailing across. Then some would show with darkening, mushrooming centres, followed by an inky pall.

  Jagged forked lig
htning and splitting thunderbolts, peculiarly Arizonian in their intensity and power, awakened Lucinda's old fear of storms. And it grew in proportion to the vastly sharper and more numerous zigzag flashes and the looming, thundering volume of sound. The splitting shock and the crash of a struck pine added materially to the threat of the storm, as well as the hollow slamming of echoes from wall to wall. The smell of brimstone always preceded the smell of electrically burned wood.

  Rain poured in torrents upon the cabin roof.

  "Nothing to be afraid of, wife," Logan said stolidly, as he watched from the open door. "Lightning never strikes down in a canyon. That's another good feature about our homestead."

  This period of storm lasted less than a month. For Logan its worst feature was that it beat down his corn and washed the soil from the roots of his beans. It was followed by hot weather. Day after day grew hotter.

  The heat reflected from the stone walls and proved that Logan had planted his corn and beans in the wrong place, and had made no provision for a blasting torrid spell. His patch of beans burned up; his half-matured cabbage wilted as if under the blast of a furnace; his turnips withered, and at last the ten acres of corn, over which he had toiled early and late and which had been his pride, drooped sear and brown, leaf and ear dead on the stalk.

  Huett took this sickening destruction of his crops bitterly to heart. It hurt him as had the depredations upon his cattle. His first herd--his first season's planting--all for naught!

  "But, husband dear, look at our baby. Look at little George Washington!" exclaimed Lucinda, praying to say the right thing, to renew the courage of this headstrong defeated man.

  Huett shouted, as if to the skies. "It was nothing. Only a lesson!... George and you are all that count--bless your hearts!"

  Chapter SIX.

  September came, with its fringe of golden rod and its clumps of purple asters. The hot spell slowly surrendered to the cooling nights.

  Holbert had brought Lucinda a neighbourly gift in the shape of a setting-hen and a dozen eggs, which he vowed were worth their weight in gold on the range. Lucinda diligently watched the hen, and when the twelve little fluffy chicks hatched out, her delight was unconfined. She had developed a deep satisfaction in the birth of living things. The hen was a great pet, and kept her brood round the cabin. Lucinda feared the prowlers of the night, and shut up her little feathered family carefully at sundown.

  Towards the end of September, when the chickens had grown to a respectable size, Lucinda missed one, then another, both of which disappeared during the daytime. Logan took the matter seriously. It seemed that whatever they attempted was destined to failure. He told Lucinda that he believed a coyote or fox was to blame for the depredations. Lucinda's chickens continued to vanish, and she was unable to discover the source of their disappearance until one day she heard the mother hen squawking at a great rate. She hurried to the door just in time to see a wide-winged hawk flying towards the tree-tops with a struggling pullet in its talons. Then, if never before in her life, Lucinda experienced the blood lust mounting dangerously within her. She watched the hawk fly to a dead limb and there calmly begin to rend and devour the chicken. Logan was close at hand, working on a fence with which he intended to enclose a large area under the opposite wall. At Lucinda's call he came running.

  "Logan! It's a murderous hawk," she cried, in rage, pointing at the bird of prey. "It's eating my chicken--right before my eyes. Kill it!"

  "Hen-hawk," muttered Logan. He dashed indoors to emerge with his rifle.

  "If he sets there a second longer it's Katy, bar the door!"

  Logan elevated the rifle and appeared to freeze into a statue. Lucinda clapped her hands over her ears, but she watched. At the sharp crack of the rifle she saw a puff of red-brown feathers drift away on the wind, and the hawk, releasing its prey, pitched off its perch to sail heavily downwards.

  "He's hard hit, Luce," said Logan, grimly. "But we won't take any chances." As the hawk came along overhead, sagging, Logan shot again to bring it hurtling to the ground across the brook. He went to fetch it, while Lucinda returned to the cabin a little surprised at the fierceness of her feeling and its weakening reaction. It was a death-dealing place, this awful wilderness of pine ridge and grassy canyon. Now she clearly saw that it was well that Logan possessed as unerring an aim as he did and an unrelenting heart. Not for days did she recover completely from the sickening spectacle of that hawk calmly devouring her pullet alive.

  Logan had told her that both wolves and cougars loved hot blood--to tear down their prey and glut themselves while the deer or heifer was dying.

  Before, this would have shocked her, but gradually she was growing insensible to all but the most devastating crises.

  October came with a promise of the quiet, purple, smoky days of autumn.

  The leaves appeared to be slow in colouring. Logan said there had been slight frosts, and that if rain came with the equinox, which was late that fall, there would be a riot of gold and scarlet and purple.

  Every day Lucinda carried the baby in his basket across to where Logan was at work, and while he slept in the shade she helped her husband. He was on a big job which he hoped to complete soon so that he could drive to Flagg for winter supplies. He was building a fence of Toles, high enough to shut out any beast but a cougar, and here he meant to keep the seven calves born the past summer. Shed and corral had already been completed under the wall.

  After Logan finished the fence he began to cut the unmatured corn. It would make good fodder, he said. Lucinda laid the stocks in bundles, as they were too short to stack. Logan hauled two wagon-loads to the shed and stored them for winter.

  "Won't you take me to Flagg with you?" she asked pleadingly, one evening, after their field work was done.

  "And take the baby?" he asked, in surprise.

  "Of course. I couldn't leave him here."

  "Wouldn't it be hard on the kid?"

  "That is what has worried me. Would it be--very?"

  "Would it? Well, I guess. Hard on you both. You've forgotten how rough that road is. I'll have a big load coming back. Reckon you better not risk it."

  Lucinda did not quite understand the gravity of her desire to visit Flagg, but she did not press Logan further. She wanted to, go to town, see people, make purchases with which Logan could not be trusted; she hated the thought of being left alone again--but none of these reasons accounted wholly for her intense wish to accompany him. At length she reluctantly decided to remain at home, and kept to herself one of her vague, queer intimations.

  "I'll have heaps of work when I get back," Logan said. "If we should have an early winter, I'd just be out of luck. And I'm afraid we will. I see birds dropping down here on their way south, and every varmint I've run across has thicker fur than last year. That's good, because I'm going to trap a lot of fur this winter. The acorns have thick hulls and they're falling already... By gosh, I was p sick about the corn and beans and cabbage that I forgot about the potatoes. Reckon they never grew at all.

  But that patch was planted in the black soil. Never saw such rich ground..."

  "I'll look, and if there are any I'll dig them," rejoined Lucinda.

  "Good. You'll find sacks in the shed... But doggone, I kind of hate to go this trip." He scratched his head. "No money. Six months of supplies. I need traps, and so many other things I haven't even counted them... Heigho. I'll need my credit this trip sure."

  "Why do you dislike taking credit?"

  "I don't. All farmers and ranchers live on it. But they have crops and herds coming on. My crop failed, and it'll be long before I raise any cattle. I must depend on the pelts I can trap. Last fall, when I was hunting over across the ridge, I ran on to a beaver dam that was a humdinger. Lake as big as this bench. Lots of beaver there. I'll work it this winter, till the snow gets too deep on top."

  Still Logan lingered on at the ranch, finding odd jobs to do. One of these was deflecting the outlet of the spring to run it down close by the cabin
, a task that could well have been left, but Lucinda had found it handy to fill a bucket right at her door. About mid-October, when the weather was at its best, she advised Logan to go. She resisted sending for things she thought she needed, although she had begun to realize how she could do without almost everything. What she could not improvise, she dispensed with. Clothes, medicines, luxuries--these she had forgotten. And when she remembered, she thought of her trunk full of bride's dresses and flimsy garments. How useless here on the range! But she vowed she would not give up yet and grow old and never care about her appearance.

  It dawned upon Lucinda after a day longer that Logan wanted to ask her for money, but was ashamed. She thought it best to keep that five-hundred-dollar marriage gift intact, for there would come a time when she would need it more than now.. So she pretended not to guess his feeling, and when he finally asked her outright, she evaded both consent and denial. Nevertheless Logan left in a huff, perhaps because he had weakened to ask her. How sure she was that he would be glad some day for her strength!

  As the weather had cooled, Lucinda's energy had returned full tide. She felt that she would develop into a fit mate for Huett, if she could only learn to subjugate her thoughts to the practical tasks that confronted settlers. But she always thought and felt too acutely.

  The morning of Logan's departure, she left Coyote to guard the baby, and she went up the canyon to gather wild grapes. This was the first time she had ever been round the bend. Here the canyon did not have the characteristics that marked it below. The walls were hidden; the forest covered slope and floor; the brook poured out from a green-gold bank to leap over a ledge; the aspens blazed in golden glory and the maples burned scarlet. The grape-vines hung from oak trees along the brook, and their mingled foliage of bronze and russet added to the prevailing colour. The pines were scattered, allowing the sun to shine through in broad rays. Lucinda stopped to gaze in surprise and what was almost consternation. It was lovely there. She had never until that moment accorded any beauty to Sycamore Canyon. She had seen it first at the drab end of autumn, when her receptiveness had been blunted by her terrible disappointment.