Wondering at her change of manner, he laughed as he shook hands with her.
“I hoped to—it’s one of the things I’ve been looking forward to.”
Beth Rathburn was looking, not at Kate, but at Disston, when he introduced them; she could not remember when she had seen him so animated, so genuinely glad.
“I’ve been enormously interested—however do you do it?” Miss Rathburn said in her cool drawl, while she studied Kate’s face curiously.
“It’s my business,” Kate replied simply, regarding her with equal interest.
“And you live out here by yourself, without any other woman? Aren’t you lonely?”
“I’m too busy.”
“You work with the men—just like one of them?”
“Just like a man,” Kate repeated evenly.
“It is quite—quite wonderful!” Beth subtly conveyed the impression that on the contrary she thought it was dreadful.
Kate drew back her head a little and looked at her visitor.
“Is it?” coolly.
“And Hugh never has told me a word about you—he’s been so reticent.” She laid her finger tips upon his arm in proprietory fashion while a sly malice shone through the mischievousness of her smile.
Disston colored.
Kate replied ironically:
“Perhaps he is one of those who do not boast of their acquaintance with sheepherders.”
“Kate!” he protested vigorously.
She regarded him with a faint inscrutable smile until Bowers interrupted:
“How many bells shall I put on them yearlin’s?”
“One in fifty; and cut those five wethers out of the ewe herd. Catch those yearling ewes with the wether earmark and change to the shoe-string.”
“What do you want done with that feller in the pen?”
“Saw his horn off and I’ll throw him into the buck herd later.”
“Where’ll Oleson hold his sheep?”
“Well up the creek; and if he lets them mix again—”
“He says he can’t do nothin’ without a dog,” Bowers ventured.
“Then he’d better quit right now—you can tell him.” Kate’s voice was curt, incisive, her tone final. “He can’t use a dog on these Rambouillets—they’re high-strung, nervous, different from the merinos. Anyway, I won’t have it.” She swung about to indicate that the conversation was ended.
“That’s all Greek to me. Do you understand it, Hugh?” Miss Rathburn’s lofty drawl, her faintly patronizing manner, all indicated amusement.
“I don’t know much about sheep,” he admitted.
“Do you know—” to Kate, with all her social manner—“you are deliciously unique?”
Kate, who detected the sneer, but had no social manner to meet it, asked brusquely:
“In what way?”
“You’re so—” she hesitated for a word and seemed to search her vocabulary for the right one—“so strong-minded.”
Kate’s eyes were sparkling.
“If by that you mean intelligent, I thank you for the compliment, and I’m sorry that I can’t—” She checked herself, but the inference was clear that she intended to add—“return it.”
Miss Rathburn’s fair skin became a deeper pink than even a pink-lined parasol warranted, while Kate addressed herself to Disston exclusively.
Disston had listened in dismay. Whatever was the matter? In truth, it must be, he told himself, that women were natural enemies. He never had seen this feline streak in Beth to recognize it, and he had felt instinctively that, on Kate’s side, from the first glance she had not liked her visitor.
To Beth Rathburn, it was ridiculous that Disston should take seriously this girl who, at the moment, was considerably less presentable than any one of their own servants—that he should treat her with all the deference he showed to any woman of his acquaintance, as if she were of his own class exactly! And a worse offense was his obviously keen interest in her. It was a new sensation for the southern girl to be ignored, or at least omitted from the conversation, and each second her resentment grew, though the underlying cause was that she felt herself overshadowed by Kate’s stronger personality.
To remind Disston of his remissness she walked over to a pen where Bowers, astride a powerful buck, saw in hand, was having his own troubles. She returned almost immediately, shuddering prettily:
“He’s sawing that sheep’s horn off! Doesn’t it hurt it?”
“Not nearly so much as letting it grow to put its eye out.”
“I presume you do that, too?” The girl’s eyes and tone were mocking.
“Oh, yes, I do everything that’s necessary.” There was something savage in Kate’s composure as she turned directly and looked at her. “I have sheared sheep when I had no money to pay herders, slept out in the hills on the ground on a saddle blanket with my saddle for a pillow. I’ve made my underwear out of flour sacks and my skirts of denim. I’ve lived on corn meal and salt pork and dried apples and rabbits for months at a time. I eat and hobnob with sheepherders from one year’s end to the other. I’m out with a drop bunch in the lambing season, and I brand the bucks myself—on the nose—burn them with a hot iron. I’ll send you word when I’m going to do it again and you can come over—it’s e-normously amusing. Just wait a minute—come over to the fence here—and I’ll show you something. I’m even more deliciously unique than you imagine.”
She walked to the gate and vaulted it easily. Hughie and Beth could do no less than follow as far as the fence, while Kate stood searching the band of sheep that milled about her. When she found what she sought, she made one of her swift swoops, caught the sheep by the hind leg and threw it with a dextrous twist. Then holding it between her knees, she took a knife from her pocket and tested the edge of the blade with her thumb.
The girl at the fence cried aghast:
“Oh, what’s she going to do?” Then she clutched Disston’s arm and stared in fascinated horror while Kate ear-marked the sheep and released it.
“She’s barbarous—horrible—impossible!”
“You brought it on yourself, Beth,” he reminded her in a low tone. “You—goaded her,”
“And you defend her?” she demanded, furiously. “Take me away from here—I’m nauseated!”
“I’ll say good-bye—you go on, and I’ll join you.”
He vaulted the fence and went up to Kate, who was going on with her work and ignoring them.
“Kate,” he put out his hand, “I’m sorry.”
She disregarded it and turned upon him, her eyes blazing:
“Don’t you bring any more velvet-pawed kittens here to sharpen their claws in me!”
“Kate,” earnestly, “I wouldn’t have been the means of hurting you for anything I can think of.”
“I’m not hurt,” she retorted, “I’m mad.”
“I’m coming to see you again—alone, next time. I want to know why you did not answer my letters—I want to know lots of things—why you’re so different—what has changed you so much.”
“And you imagine I’ll tell you?” she asked dryly.
“You wouldn’t?”
She shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t babble any longer.”
“It’s nothing to you whether I come or not?”
“I’m very busy.”
He looked at her for a moment in silence, then he held out his hand once more.
“I am disappointed in you!”
“Are you, Hughie?” she said indifferently, as she took his hand without warmth.
“Bowers!” Her tone was energetic and businesslike as she turned sharply. “Come here and help me earmark the rest of these yearlings.”
Disston stood for a moment, feeling himself dismissed and already forgotten, yet conscious with a rush of emotion which startled him, that in spite of the fact that her dress, speech, manner, occupation, mode of life violated every ideal and tradition, she appealed to him powerfully, stirred him as had no other woman. She aroused within h
im an enveloping tenderness—a desire to protect her—though she seemed the last woman who needed or cared for either.
When Oleson with the ewes and lambs was well up the creek, Kate gave Bunch his parting instructions:
“Let them spread out more. You Montana herders feed too close—it’s a fault with all of you. Can’t you see the grass is different here? Use your head a little. Got plenty of cartridges? I saw cat tracks in a patch of sand along the creek yesterday. He got eight lambs in his last raid on Oleson’s band. I’ll have to put out some poison.”
She walked slowly across the foot log after the last lamb had leaped bleating through the gate. She inspected her boots, noting that one heel had run over, and looked at her gauntlets, with the fingers protruding. Then, when she stepped inside the wagon, she walked straight to the mirror and stared at her reflection—dishevelled, her face frankly dirty, about her neck a handkerchief that was faded and unbecoming, a mouth that drooped a little with fatigue, her whole face wearing an expression of determination that she realized might very easily become hard. A few more years of work and exposure and she would be grim-featured and hopelessly weather-beaten. No wonder that girl had looked at her as though she were some curious alien creature with whom she had nothing at all in common! And Hughie had said he was disappointed in her.
This was Katie Prentice, she said to herself—Katie Prentice for whom the future, to which she had looked forward eagerly, had been another word for happiness—the Katie Prentice who had tripped in and out of that air castle of her building, looking like this girl that Hugh had brought with him. Now this image was the realization!
Just for the fraction of a second the corners of her mouth twitched, her chin quivered—then she raised it defiantly:
“To do what you set out to do—that’s the great thing. Nothing else matters.”
She slammed the door behind her and untied her horse from the wagon wheel.
“Come on, Cherokee, we’ll go and see what that Nebraskan’s doing.”
The Nebraskan was standing on a hilltop when she first saw him, facing the east and as motionless as the monument of stones beside him. His sheep were nowhere visible.
As Kate rode closer the same glance that disclosed the band of sheep showed her a coyote creeping down the side of a draw in which they were feeding. She reached instantly for her carbine and drew it from its scabbard, but she was not quick enough to shoot it before it had jumped for the lamb it had been stalking. The coyote missed his prey, but the lamb, which had been feeding a little apart from the others, ran into the herd with a terrified bleat and the whole band fled on a common impulse.
The coyote followed the lamb it had singled out, through all its twistings and turnings, but manœvering to work it to the outside where it could cut the lamb away from the rest and pull it down at its leisure.
Kate dared not shoot into the herd, and after a second’s consideration as to whether or not to follow, she thrust the rifle back in its scabbard and turned her horse up the hill.
Even the sound of hoofs did not rouse the herder from his deep absorption. His hands were hanging at his sides, and his mouth was partially open. He was staring towards the east with unblinking eyes, and with as little evidence of life as though he had died standing.
“What are you looking at, Davis?”
He whirled about, startled.
“I was calc'latin’ that Nebrasky must lay 'bout in that direction.” He pointed to a pass in the mountains.
“A little homesick, aren’t you?” Her voice was ominously quiet.
“Don’t know whether I’m homesick or bilious; when I gits one I generally gits the other.”
“You were wondering just then what your wife was doing that minute, weren’t you?”
Her suavity deceived him and he grinned sheepishly.
“Somethin’ like that, maybe.”
“You are married, then?”
The herder began to see where he was drifting.
“Er—practically,” he replied ambiguously.
“So you lied when you joined the Outfit and I asked you?”
The herder whined plaintively.
“I heerd you wouldn’t hire no fambly man if you knew it.”
“When I make a rule there’s a reason for it. 'Family men' are unreliable—they’ll quit in lambing time because the baby’s teething; they’ll leave at a moment’s notice when a letter comes that their wife wants to see them; their mind isn’t on their work and they’re restless and discontented. I knew you were married the first time I found you with your sheep behind instead of ahead of you.”
“You can’t understand the feelin’s of a fambly man away from home.” He rolled his eyes sentimentally. The subject was one which was dear to the uxorious herder. He pulled out the tremolo stop in his voice and quavered: “You feel like you’re goin’ ’round with nothin’ inside of you—a empty shell—or a puff-ball with the puff out of it. You got a feelin’ all the time like somethin’s pullin’ you.” He looked so hard towards Nebraska that he all but toppled. “Somethin’ here,” he laid a hand on his heart, approximately, “like a plaster drawin’. Love,” eloquently, “changes your hull nature. It makes lambs out o’ roughnecks and puts drunks on the wagon. It turns you kind and forgivin’ and takes the fight out o’ you. It makes you—”
“Maudlin! And weak! And inefficient!” Kate interrupted savagely. “It distracts your thoughts and dissipates your energy. It impairs your judgment, lessens your will power. It’s for persons who have no ambition or who have achieved it. For the struggler there’s nothing worth bothering with that doesn’t take him forward.”
“That’s a pretty cold-blooded doctrind,” declared the shocked herder. “If 'twant for love—”
“If 'twant for love,” Kate mimicked harshly, “you wouldn’t be indulging in a spell of homesickness and leaving your sheep to the coyotes! Sentiment is lovely in books, but it’s expensive in business, so I’m going to fire you. Bowers will be here with the supply wagon to-morrow, so I’ll take the sheep until he can relieve me. I’ll pay you off and you can walk back to the ranch or,” grimly, “take a short cut through the Pass up there—to ‘Nebrasky.’”
* * *
CHAPTER XVIII
A WARNING
“I can’t hold dem ewes and lambs on de bed-ground no more! Dey know it’s time to be gettin’ up to deir summer range; nobody has to tell a sheep when to move on.”
The Swede swirled his little round hat on his equally round little head and winked rapidly as he gave vent to his indignant protest. Kate looked at him in silence for a moment and then said in sudden decision:
“You can start to-morrow, Oleson.”
The early summer was fulfilling the promise of a hot rainless spring. Bitter Creek was drying up rapidly and the water holes, stagnant and strongly alkaline, had already poisoned a few sheep. The herders could not understand the sheep woman’s delay in moving to the mountains.
“I’m runnin’ myself ragged over these hills tryin’ to hold back them yearlin’s,” Bunch declared. Bowers, too, having his own special brand of grief with the buck herd, had looked the interrogation he had not voiced. Kate herself knew that the sheep should have been higher up, away from the ticks and flies and on good food and water all of two weeks ago, but, on one pretext or another, had postponed giving the order to start, though she knew in her heart that the real reason was because Disston had said he was coming again.
Now she told herself contemptuously that she was no different from the homesick Nebraskan, and, having made up her mind, lost no time in giving each herder his instructions as to when and where to move his sheep.
Kate never paid wages for anything that she could do herself, so the morning after her decision to start for the mountains she was in the saddle and leading two work horses on the way to move Oleson’s and Bowers’s camps before the sun was up.
The two sheep wagons were a considerable distance apart and the road over the broken country to the s
pot where Kate wished Oleson to make his first camp was a rough one, therefore it was late in the afternoon when Kate reached Bowers’s camp—too late to pull the wagon toward the mountains that night.
She pulled the harness from the tired horses, slipped on their nose bags with their allowance of oats, and, when they had finished, hobbled and turned them loose to graze in the wide gulch where the wagon stood. Then she warmed up a few pieces of fried mutton—and this, with a piece of baking-powder bread and a cup of water from the rivulet that trickled through the gulch, constituted her frugal supper.
While driving the sheep wagon it had required all her attention to throw the brake to keep the wagon off the horses’ heels, and release it as quickly, to select the best of a precarious road and maintain the wagon’s equilibrium, but immediately the strain was over and her mind free to ramble, her thoughts reverted at once to Disston, in spite of her efforts to direct them elsewhere.
Activity is the recognized panacea for a heavy heart, and efficacious while it lasts, but with a lull it makes itself felt like the return of pain through a dying opiate; and so it was with Kate as she lay wide-eyed on the bunk to-night with both the door and window open, while a warm wind, faintly scented with the wild peas that purpled the side of the gulch, blew across her face.
The rivulet gurgled under the overhanging willows and alder brush. A belated kildeer broke the night stillness with its cry. The hobbles clanked as the horses thumped their fore feet in working their way slowly to the top of the gulch. Bowers fired his evening salute before retiring as a hint to the coyotes, and, sometimes, when the wind veered, a far-off tinkle as a bell-sheep stirred on the bed-ground came to Kate’s ears—all were familiar sounds, so familiar that she heard them only subconsciously. In the same way she saw the dark outlines of objects inside the sheep wagon—the turkey-wing duster thrust between an oak bow and the canvas, the outline of the coffee pot on the stove, the cherished frying pans dangling on their nails, her rifle standing on the bench within reach. So far as she knew, she and Bowers were the only human beings within miles, yet she felt no fear; to be alone in the sheep wagon in the dusk of the gulch held no new sensation for her.
The Fighting Shepherdess Page 18