30,000 On the Hoof

by Grey, Zane

  The days went by, too short by hours for the tasks of the housewife of the pioneer, the helper in the fields, the milkmaid and the teacher.

  Winter fled apace and the seasons rolled on.

  Lucinda's vision of the unremitting toil and the setbacks, with their consequent poverty, had been a true presagement of the future. But the toil and the privation did not obscure the rest of that vision--the crown of success in the years to come, the reward and the blessing of the boys and the girl.

  Huett lost sight of that. Like a galley-slave he toiled at his round of endless tasks. The bitter pill for him was that he had become a farmer, living from hand to mouth, when his heart was set on cattle. If he had any happiness, it was in the way his boys took to hunting, woodcraft, riding. Lucinda always felt glad for Logan when the fall season rolled around, and he could follow the game trails with the boys.

  For three autumns Logan had upward of fifty head of stock in the fenced pasture--cows, steers, heifers, calves; and as many times that fair start towards a herd had been ruined by the cougars, deep snows and cold of this inhospitable wilderness. Always after a setback like one of these, it took time to make another beginning. During another instance a sudden thaw and spring flood depleted his herd of their calves. He deserted that pasture and enclosed another on higher ground, taking up acres of slope where browsing on the oak thickets was good all winter.

  Still, no matter what he gained in bitter experience, no matter how unflaggingly he carried on, Lucinda saw the hard years wresting the heart of hope out of his life. Once a year he went to Flagg, traded his produce for supplies, and returned sick and brooding for days over the progress of the Arizona ranges, the influx of new settlers.

  Then followed several years--just as swift, but harder than ever--which tried Lucinda's soul. Towards the close of that period they had no flour, no sugar, and very few of the necessities of life. They lived on meat and beans--the stable product of that wilderness when all else, even the potato yield, failed. The boys went barefoot in all seasons except winter, when they wore moccasins. In fringed buckskin Barbara was a delight to Lucinda's eyes. She grew up strong, brown, beautiful despite poverty, happy at study as at work, loving the boys she believed to be her brothers, and worshipping the dark, silent, grey-eyed Abe, who had become straight and lithe; handsome as a young pine. They were all of the woodland, and they loved and kept wilderness pets, as they had when they were children. Lucinda's compensation lay in the fact that she had been Able to give them an elementary education, to instil in them ideals and loyalties, and belief in God. No poverty, no suffering, not even a permanent failure of Huett, could have robbed Lucinda of that joy. She had given them of herself, of her mind and heart. For the rest, for that physical prowess Logan put such store in, their infinite labours from childhood to youth, Lucinda thrilled to her depths at what she saw they would grow to be.

  But Huett sustained a growing bitterness as great as his pride, and it was that he could not give this wonderful family the bare necessities of life, let alone the pretty things a girl loved, and the implements, the guns, the equipment that boys should have had in wild country.

  Lucinda watched Logan with misgivings that she had to fight with all her courage and intelligence. She feared the iron that might enter his soul.

  She saw the hair whiten over his temples. She saw his great frame, grown heavier with the years, begin to bow a little across the broad shoulders.

  She saw him sit beside the hearth without the pipe of tobacco that had been his one extravagance, and ponder everlastingly over the problem of his cattle.

  His vigour and his will seemed to withstand all inroads of, toil and defeat. With the boys he planted more corn, more potatoes, more alfalfa, more beans each succeeding summer. Lucinda had worked with him until the boys laughingly, yet imperiously, had sent her, back to her manifold tasks at the homestead.

  Still she saw Logan at his work. She saw him from afar, and when he came stamping in at sunset, smelling of the earth and wiping the sweat from his furrowed brow, she was there to greet him. She often carried his lunch into the forest where it appeared he could cut wood faster than his sons could drag and stack it behind the cabin. The flashing axe, the ring of steel, the odorous, flying chips, the stalwart backwoodsman at his best--these, with the grey windfalls all around, the brown, fragrant mats under the junipers, the giant pines towering black-stemmed to spread into a canopy of green far overhead, the patches of gold-and-white aspens, and the scarlet maples--how these at last satisfied a nameless longing in Lucinda's heart! This wilderness was Logan's place. He fitted it. And he would have been happy save for that obsession of the cattle herd.

  Lucinda at last faced a winter which daunted even her fortitude. Logan's load of potatoes went to apply on a past debt and future credit was denied. He had come home without the supplies so necessary to any semblance of good living. She really worried more about her husband's gloom that time than about the lack of food and other supplies. A long, hard winter would reduce the Huetts to wretched condition.

  But Logan went into the woods with his rifle and returned to say there were signs foretelling a mild and open winter. That night, while talking to the boys, he seemed changed, more like he used to be. Lucinda took heart. Her prayers, her hopes, her visions could not be utterly futile.

  Indian summer held on long, a lovely interval, with frost at night and warm sun all day--the still, dreamy, smoky autumn time that Lucinda loved. Snow did not whiten the ridges until Christmas. And there was a merry Christmas at last for the Huetts! Logan and the boys had already tacked up a hundred beaver hides on the cabin walls, and marten, mink, and skunk hides too numerous to count. These already assured Huett of money to pay his debts and have some left over. Then there was the prospect of still better hunting and trapping during the balance of the winter.

  That belated stroke of good fortune carried on to great fulfilment. The wilderness yielded much to Logan Huett that mild winter. It paid him back in fur for much of his loss. In the spring, before the road was dry, he started for Flagg on the last trip for the faithful old oxen. He returned driving a new team of sturdy farm horses, drawing a new wagon loaded and piled high, with three mustangs haltered behind. His weather-beaten face wore the happiest mien Lucinda had seen there since the day she married him.

  The boys, whom he had not taken with him to Flagg, stood around the wagon wide-eyed, staring at the shaggy mustangs, fat and woolly from a winter pasture. Barbara forgot herself in awe and joy over the ponies she had heard the boys talk about for years. And Lucinda could have wept.

  "Well, you moon-eyed Huetts," said Logan, "from this day on you're cowboys!"

  "Aw, Paw, which is mine?" queried Grant, eagerly.

  "Grant, yours is the buckskin. And that's his name... Abe, the wild sorrel there, rarin' back on that rope, is yours... George, the bay belongs to you--if you can ride him."

  "Huh! I'll ride him all right," declared George, raptly. Abe did not have anything to say, but the look in his grey eyes was enough.

  "Tie them to the fence, there, and help me unpack this wagon," went on Logan, practically.

  Presently Logan lifted a huge pack, sewed up in burlap, and threw it at Lucinda's feet.

  "For you and Barbara. Every item on your list--and every doggone thing I could think of!"

  Barbara squealed with delight and pounced upon the pack, but she could not even budge it. Lucinda was not speechless so much from surprise and pleasure as she was at the unusual feeling exhibited by her husband. She watched him.

  "Saddles and bridles and spurs and chaps--all Mexican. Navajo saddle-blankets. Manila ropes. Rifle-sheaths and gun-belts... Here, cowboys, lift down this heavy one. Shells, plenty! I haven't seen so many since I was Indian scout for General Crook... Look at these. Colts.

  Forty-fives!... And here. Ha! ha!--Winchester rifles!--Forty-fours! Light, hard-shooting, easy to pack on a saddle!... Now, cowboys first and hunters second, the Huett outfit starts this day. And it's
a bad day for varmints of this range. Cougars, lofers, grizzlies, cinnamons, take notice!... And Outfit, listen to this news from Flagg. Rustlers have come in from New Mexico. Cattle-thieves! They're working the ranges east of Flagg. And rustling will grow in Arizona as the cattle increase. It's hard lines.

  Something I never reckoned on. I've fought the four-footed meat-eaters all these years. And snow and ice and blizzards and heat and drought and flood. But now comes the worst enemy of the cattlemen. The maverick hunter--the calf thief... Let that sink in deep, sons. But rustlers won't stop us. We've got this walled range, and grass and water. Nothing shall ever stop us from raising that thirty thousand head!"

  Chapter TEN.

  Logan Huett took no stock of the passing years. He did not count them, but he saw his sons grow into tall, broad-shouldered, small-hipped, round-limbed riders, lean-jawed men, with intent clear eyes and still, tanned faces. He saw them grow into the hunters and cowboys he had vowed to make them when they were little boys tumbling about the green bench with their pets. George was the born cattleman, Abe the woodsman, the keenest tracker, the best shot in that section of Arizona. Grant became the cowboy, the hardest rider, the most unerring roper from the Cibeque to the railroad.

  Likewise, and with almost as great satisfaction, Huett saw his little band of carefully guarded and nourished cattle grow into the nucleus of a herd. He counted them from calving time to the snows, and from the first white fall to the thaw in spring--jealously, morosely, sorrowfully in lean years, hopefully in those seasons that favoured him.

  In the same terms he saw and counted the new homesteaders, the settlers that drifted in, the cattlemen who opened up the wide range from Mormon Lake to Flagg, the squatters who located at a spring or water-hole, to eke out a bare, miserable existence in log shacks, always looking towards making a stake out of their water-rights. Nor did Huett miss any of the men who drifted in to make their homes back in the great forest. They lived on meat and beans, holed up in the winter, rode the trails in other seasons, and idled away fruitless hours in a few little hamlets that sprang up across the vast rangeland.

  Huett's failure for so many years was due to a one-man fight against too many obstacles. As his sons grew up, this condition imperceptibly diminished until it was overcome. If any one factor more than another contributed to this victory, it was the winter trapping of fur-bearing animals. But Huett developed his farm. This and the sale of pelts provided them with a living while his herd slowly grew.

  His habits of restless energy and indomitable purpose were transmitted to his sons. They were Logan Huett all over again. And as the bitter ordeal of the past years gradually faded and he saw the physical manifestations of his vision take shape before his eyes, he touched happiness almost as great as his pride in his boys.

  One late afternoon in the early spring Huett returned from the corrals to the cabin. His wife and Barbara had put the dining-table out on the porch for the first time that season, perhaps a little too early, considering the cool evenings But Huett liked to eat out where he could see the gar. den, the alfalfa, the pasture, and the cattle dotting the long valley.

  Abe had just come down from the rim, and stood leaning on his rifle talking to George and Grant. In buckskins, compared to the blue-jeaned, high-booted garb of his brothers, he appeared shorter, but the fact was that he equalled them in lithe six-foot manhood.

  "Dad, here's good news," spoke up' George, his intent eyes alight. "Abe trailed that bunch of wild horses down into the head of Three Spring Draw."

  "Ahuh. Well, he's always trailing something," replied Huett, with a laugh. "But what of it?"

  "We can drive them down into the canyon."

  "Trap them," added Grant, eagerly.

  "It could be done, if they're in that draw. I reckon, though, during the night they'll work out."

  Abe said he did not think so. Below the brakes of that ravine it opened out into a sunny park where the snow melted off early, and the young shoots of grass had come up rich and green. Abe recalled that once before he had seen wild horses down there.

  "How many of them?" asked Huett, becoming fired with possibilities.

  "Big drove. I saw a hundred head. Some fine stock. There's a blue roan stallion in that bunch I'd like to catch."

  "Well, I reckon if we trapped them we'd have a hell of a time catching them."

  "But, Dad, they could never climb out of the canyon. And it'll be a long time before our herd grows so big as to need all the grass."

  "Dad, it's sure a windfall of luck," put in George. "We need horses. We could cut out some of the best, catch them, break them. Breed them, too."

  "What's your plan, Abe?" asked Huett, convinced.

  "You go down the canyon in the morning, at daybreak, and tear down that pole fence half-way up the draw. We'll ride on top, spread out and roll rocks off the rim. Then we'll pile down the several trails, yelling and shooting. I'll bet the whole bunch will break for the canyon."

  "Supper's waiting, father," called Barbara, who stood by the table listening.

  "All right, Barbara, I'll be there pronto," he called gaily. "Fetch me a little hot water. I've got axle-grease on my hands."

  She brought it and stood by while he washed his hands. "Father, that's great--Abe's tracking wild horses into the draw, isn't it?"

  "Yes, Barbara, it sure is. I reckon our luck has changed. A bunch of fine horses, all at once--almost too good to be true."

  "Buck is old and lame now," went on Barbara. "He ought to be turned loose for good."

  "He's sure earned it... Barbara, I reckon what makes your eyes so bright is the chance for a new horse for you, eh?"

  "Oh, yes, I'd love to have one of my own," replied Barbara.

  Her earnest feeling touched Huett in that old sore spot--the poignant fact of his failure to give his loved ones the comforts, the pleasures, the rare luxuries which made life so much easier and happier. He had known some of these when a boy. Lucinda had never been without them until she came to him. And he had always shared her conviction that Barbara had come of fine stock, whatever the fatality and tragedy of her childhood.

  "Abe, this girl Barbara is raving about a wild mustang broken for her," he said, a little huskily.

  "Barbara, you shall have two and take your pick," replied Abe, with a warm, soft glow in his grey eyes.

  "Oh, grand!" she cried, ecstatically. "May I go with you to drive the wild horses down?"

  "Aw now, ask me an easy one," said Abe, regretfully. "Babs, you're good on a horse, but this drive will take awful hard riding. Suppose you go with Dad. You can help him tear down the fence, then, get back out of the way and watch those wild horses pile by out into the canyon. Watch for that blue roan stallion!"

  "Come to supper," called Lucinda, impatiently. "It's get; Ling cold."

  Logan straddled the crude deerskin-covered bench and sat down to the table that was likewise the work of his hands, It was laden with good wholesome food. He and his sons were too hungry to talk. The shades of the spring dusk fell upon them there.

  Before daylight the next morning Logan arose, scraped the red coals out of the ashes and started a fire. He put the kettle on. Then he called Barbara.

  "I'll be right down," she replied. "I heard you get up."

  "Boil some coffee. And butter sow biscuits. We might not get back in time for breakfast. I'll go milk--then saddle up."

  It was dark outside and coyotes were wailing over the ridge. The lofty pines stood up black and still. Logan heard the boys coming in with the horses. He went out, to find Buck and his steed saddled and haltered to the corral fence. Faint streaks of grey shone in the east, while the morning air was cold and raw. He could hear wild turkeys calling sleepily from their roost up in the forest. Returning, Logan found the boys had preceded him to the cabin. Barbara, clad in overalls and boots, looking like a lithe, sturdy boy with a pretty brown face, was serving them with coffee and biscuits.

  "Good! I reckoned you'd better have a snack of grub," said
Logan, as they greeted him. "What's the deal, sons?"

  "Dad, you'd better rustle," replied Abe. "We'll be at the head of Three Springs by sunrise."

  "Don't worry, Abraham. We'll have a hole in that fence."

  It was grey dawn when Logan set out riding down the canyon with Barbara.

  Five miles down the walled valley spread widest and then began to close in again. The walls grew more rugged and opened up with intersecting canyons'--or draws, the boys called them. The gorge called Three' Springs Draw was as deceiving as any ramification of this strange valley. Its opening appeared like a shallow cove in the east wall, but the inside soon spread out into a large area of grassy parks, groves of pine and maple, and thickets of oak. The fence of poles crossed the narrow neck between the open oval valley and the rough-timbered, rock-strewn gorge beyond.

  "Reckon this is a good place," said Logan, dismounting. "Barbara, pile off and tie Buck back-a-ways. Wild horses have a peculiar effect upon tame horses. Abe says a tame horse gone wild is almost impossible to catch... You climb on that fiat rock. You can see everything from there and be safe."

  "All right, that'll be jake," returned Barbara. "But can't I help you take down the fence?"

  "Sure, and let's rustle. Abe will be letting out that Indian yell of his pronto. That'll be their signal."

  Barbara did not have her, wide shoulders and strong arms for nothing. She had done her share of the Huett labours. Logan found a strong satisfaction in watching her. How well he remembered Lucinda's pride in Barbara's good looks, which some time got the better of Lucinda's need of help. Barbara always wore gloves for heavy work, and Lucinda worried too much about sun and dirt. Logan was always amused at these evidences of Lucinda's lingering vanity. For his part he thought Barbara a pretty girl, and what was better, good, obedient, and lovable, who would make some settler as wonderful a wife as was Lucinda. But that last thought always worried Logan. He did not want to lose Barbara.