The Fighting Shepherdess

by Lockhart, Caroline

  She was thinking of Disston as the door of the wagon swung gently to and fro, rattling the frying pan which hung on a nail on the lower half of it, of her brusque and ungracious reply when he had told her he was coming again to see her, of the sorry figure she had cut beside the girl he had brought, and of her fierce resentment at the girl’s covert ridicule. She had shocked and disgusted Disston beyond doubt by the manner in which she had retaliated, yet she knew that in similar circumstances she would do the same again, for her first impulse nowadays was to strike back harder than she was struck.

  It seemed, she reflected, as though everything about her, her disposition, her history, her environment and work forbade any of the pleasant episodes, which the average woman accepted as a matter of course, ever happening in her life. To be an object of ridicule, the target of somebody’s wit, appeared to be her lot. At odds with humanity, engaged almost constantly in combating the handicaps imposed by Nature, the serenity of the normal woman’s life was not for her.

  Anyway, one thing was certain; her poor little romance, builded upon so slight a foundation as an impulsive boy’s ephemeral interest, was over. He would not come again—and she cared. She put her hand to her throat. It ached with the lump in it—yes, she cared.

  The tears slipped down and wet the flour-sack pillow case. The outlines of the coffee pot on the stove and the frying pan dangling on the door grew blurred. Her eyes were still swimming when she suddenly held her breath.

  An unfamiliar sound had caught her ear, a sound like a stealthy footstep. In the instant that she waited to be sure, a hand and forearm reached inside the door and laid something on the floor.

  “Who’s there?”

  There was no response to the imperative interrogation.

  With the same movement that she swung her feet over the edge of the bunk she reached for her rifle and ran to the door. There was not a sound or sign that was unusual save that the horses had stopped eating and with ears thrown forward were looking down the gulch. She picked up the paper that lay on the floor, struck a match and read a scrawl by its flare:

  WARNING

  Stop where you are if you ain’t looking for trouble. Them range maggots of yourn ain’t wanted on the mountain this summer.

  What did it mean? The match burned to her fingers while she conjectured. Who was objecting? Neifkins? Since there was ample range for both, and each had kept to the boundaries which he tacitly recognized, there had been no dispute. A horse outfit grazing a small herd of horses during the summer months, and a dry-farmer with a couple of milch cows, who, while he plowed and planted and prayed for rain, was incidentally demonstrating the exact length of time that a human being could live on jack-rabbit and navy beans, were the only other users of the mountain range. Was it the hoax of some local humorist? Or an attempt to intimidate and worry her by someone whose enmity she had incurred?

  Whatever the motive, was it possible that any one knew her so little as to believe they could frighten her in any such manner? Her lip curled as she asked herself the question. She had imagined that she had at least proved her courage.

  Bowers, she knew, would stand by her; the others, perhaps, would use the familiar argument that it cost too much for repairs to be shot up for forty-five dollars a month.

  Finally, she tossed the note on the sideboard and stepped out on the wagon tongue. The stars glimmered overhead and the shadows lay black and mysterious in the gulch, but she felt no fear as she stood there straight and soldierlike, her eyes sparkling defiance. She had, rather, a feeling of gratitude for the diversion—a hope that the threatened “trouble” might act as a kind of counter-irritant to the dull ache of her heavy heart.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XIX

  AN OLD, OLD FRIEND

  Bowers lay slumbering tranquilly in the shade of the wagon, his saddle blanket beneath him and his folded arms for a pillow as he slept on his face. The herd chewed its cud drowsily under the quaking asp nearby, out of the mid-day heat and away from pestiferous flies, while under a bush not far from the wagon a lamb lay with eyes half closed, waggling its narrow jaw, and grinding its sharp white teeth noisily.

  Quite as though some thought had come to it forcibly, the lamb got up and stood regarding Bowers reflectively with its soft black eyes. Then it swallowed its cud with a gulp and, making a run the length of the herder’s legs and spine, planted its forefeet in his neck, where it stopped.

  “Mary! You quit that!” Bowers murmured crossly.

  The lamb merely reached down and chewed energetically on Bowers’s ear.

  “Confound you—can’t you let a feller sleep?” The hand that pushed the lamb away was gentle in spite of the exasperation of his tone.

  The lamb backed away, eyed him attentively for several minutes as he lay prostrate, and then quite as though a tightly coiled spring had been released, leaped into the air and landed with all four feet bunched in the small of Bowers’s back.

  Bowers sat up and said complainingly as he grabbed the lamb by the wool and drew it towards him:

  “There ain’t a minute’s peace when you’re awake, Mary! If I done what I ort, I’d work you over. You’re the worst nuisance of a bum lamb ever raised on canned milk.”

  The lamb, which Bowers had named regardless of its sex, stood motionless with bliss as he rubbed the base of what would some day probably be as fine a pair of horns as ever grew on a buck. At present they were soft and not more than an inch and a half in length as they sprouted through its dingy wool. Thin in the shoulders and rump, yet “Mary’s” sides were distended until their contour resembled that of a toy balloon inflated to the bursting point.

  Now as the lamb’s long white lashes drooped until he seemed about to go to sleep and fall down under Bowers’s soothing ministrations, the latter continued the one-sided conversation which was a part of their daily life together:

  “You’re a smart sheep, Mary—no gittin’ away from it—but you’re a torment, and you ain’t no gratitude. Whur’d you been at if I hadn’t heard you blattin’ and went after you? A coyote would a ketched you before sundown. And ain’t I been a mother to you, giving up all my air-tight milk to feed you? Warmin’ it fer you and packin’ you ’round like you was a million-dollar baby so the bobcats won’t git you—kin you deny it? An’ this is my thanks fer it—wake me up walkin’ on me, to say nothin’ of mornin’s when you start jumpin’ on my tepee, makin’ a toboggan slide out'n it before any other sheep is stirrin’. Ain’t you no conscience a-tall, Mary?”

  “Ma-a-a-aa!”

  The quavering plaintiff bleat evoked a look of admiration.

  “Oh, you have—have you? I more'n half believe you know what I’m sayin’. You’re some sheep, Mary, an’ if you jest stick ’round with me till you’re growed I’ll make a man of you. How’d you like a cigarette?”

  “Ma-a-aa-aa!”

  Bowers chuckled.

  “Wait till I have my smoke an’ then you kin have yourn, young feller.”

  He rolled and smoked half a cigarette while the lamb stood looking up into his face wistfully.

  “I’ll jest knock the fire out fer you first, then you kin have your whack out of it.”

  He shook the tobacco from the paper into his hand and the lamb ate it to the last fleck with gusto.

  Bowers cried gleefully:

  “You’re a reg'lar roughneck, Mary! Doggone you! As you might say—you ain’t no lady!”

  The herder laughed aloud at his witticism and might have rambled on for some time longer if the crashing of brush had not attracted his attention. A man on horseback was picking his way through the quaking asp and Bowers awaited his approach with keen interest.

  “How are you?” the stranger nodded.

  “Won’t you git off?”

  Bowers strained his eyes to read the brand on the shoulder of the horse the man turned loose, but it told him nothing. While the stranger squatted on his heel, Bowers rubbed Mary’s horns during an interval of unembarrassed silence.


  “Bum?” inquired the stranger, eying Mary with a look which could not be called admiring.

  “Yep.” The garrulous Bowers had become suddenly reticent. The notion was growing that he did not like his visitor. He asked finally:

  “Et yet?”

  “Not sence daylight. I seen your tepee up toward the top and thought maybe I could locate your wagon and git dinner.”

  “I’ll feed anybody that’s hungry,” Bowers replied ambiguously.

  The stranger asked innocently:

  “Who does this Outfit belong to?”

  “Miss Kate Prentice owns this brand.”

  “Oh—the 'Cheap Queen'!”

  Bowers’s head swung as though on a pivot.

  “What did you say?”

  “I’ve heerd that’s what they call her.”

  Bowers’s eyes narrowed as he answered:

  “Not in my hearin’.” Then he added: “Nobody can knock the outfit I’m workin’ for and eat their grub while they’re doin’ it. Sabe?”

  “Don’t know as I blame you,” the stranger conciliated.

  “I’ll go cook,” said Bowers shortly, getting up.

  The stranger urged politely:

  “Don’t do nothin’ extry on my account.”

  “I ain’t goin’ to,” Bowers responded. “If we had some ham we’d have some ham and eggs if we had eggs. Do you like turnips?”

  “I kin eat ’em.”

  “My middle name is ‘turnips,’” said Bowers. “I always cooks about a bushel!”

  The look that his guest sent after him was not pleasant, if Bowers had chanced to see it, but since he did not, he was in a somewhat better humor by the time he hung out of the wagon and called with a degree of cordiality:

  “Come and git it!”

  The visitor arose with alacrity.

  “Want a warsh?”

  The stranger inspected a pair of hands that looked as if they had been greasing axles.

  “No, I ain’t very dirty.”

  “Grab a root and pull!” Bowers urged with all the hospitality he could inject into his voice, as the guest squeezed in between the table and the sideboard. “Jest bog down in that there honey, pardner—it’s something special—cottonwood blossoms and alfalfy. And here’s the turnips!”

  * * *

  Conversation was suspended until a pan of biscuits had vanished along with the fried mutton, when Bowers, feeling immeasurably better natured, inquired sociably as he passed the broom:

  “Where have I saw you before, feller? Your countenance seems kind of familiar.”

  The stranger looked up quickly.

  “I don’t think it. I’m a long way off my own range.”

  He averted his eyes from Bowers’s puzzled inquiring gaze and focused his attention upon the business of extracting a suitable straw from the politely tendered broom. When he had found one to his liking, he leaned back and operated with a large air of nonchalance.

  “You’re fixed pretty comfortable here,” he commented, as his roving eye took in the interior of the wagon.

  “'Tain’t bad,” Bowers agreed, prying into the broom for a straw that was clean, comparatively.

  “Is them all kin o’ yourn?” The stranger pointed to a wire rack suspended from a nail on the opposite side of the wagon in which was thrust some two dozen photographs, fly-specked and yellow, while the cut of the subjects’ clothes bore additional evidence of their antiquity.

  “Lord, no! I don’t know none of ’em. There was a couple of travelin’ photygraphers got snowed up here several year ago and I bought ten dollars’ worth of old pictures off ’em for company. I got ’em all named, and it’s real entertainin’ settin’ here evenin’s makin’ up yarns about ’em that’s more'n half true, maybe—Mis’ Taylor over to Happy Wigwam says I’m kind of a medium.”

  Glancing at his guest he observed that his eyes were fixed intently upon a photograph in the center and his expression was so peculiar that Bowers asked, curiously:

  “Ary friend o’ yours in my gallery?”

  “Not to say friend, exactly,” was the dry answer, “but what-fer-a-yarn have you made up about that feller?”

  “Well, sir,” Bowers said whimsically, “I’m sorry to tell you but that feller had a bad endin’. He had everything done fur him, too—good raisin’ and an education, but it was all wasted. That horse there was, as you might say, his undoin’. It was just fast enough to be beat everywhur he run him. But he kept on backin’ him till it broke him—no, sir, he hadn’t a dollar! Lost everything his Old Man left him and then took to drinkin’. His wife quit him and his only child died callin’ for its father. After that he drunk harder than ever, and finally died in the asylum thinkin’ he was Marcus Daly.” He demanded eagerly, “How clost have I come to it?”

  “Knowin’ what I know, it makes me creepy settin’ here listenin’.”

  “Shoo! I ain’t that good, am I?” Bowers looked his pleasure at the tribute.

  “Good?” ironically. “You oughta sew spangles on your shirt and wear ear-rings and git you a fortune-tellin’ wagon. You’re right about everything except that that horse never was beat while he owned him and he win about twenty thousand dollars on him, and that the last time I saw that feller he could buy sixteen outfits like this one without crampin’ him, and instead of goin’ to the asylum they sent him to the state senate.”

  Bowers laughed loudly to cover his annoyance at having bitten.

  “It’s come about queer, though,” he said, “your knowin’ him.”

  The stranger seemed to check an impulse to say something further; instead, he volunteered to wipe the dishes.

  “No, you go out and set in the shade—it’s cooler.”

  The truth was, Bowers did not want the man in the wagon, for his first feeling of mistrust and antagonism had returned even stronger.

  “That feller’s liable to pick up somethin’ and make off with it,” he mused as the stranger obeyed without further urging. “I shore have saw them quare eyes of his somewhur. Maybe it’ll come to me if I keep on thinkin’.”

  In the meanwhile the visitor dragged Bowers’s saddle blanket into the shade of the wagon and stretched himself upon it. Pulling his hat over his eyes he soon was dozing.

  Bowers, rattling the plates and pans inside the wagon, suddenly bethought himself of Mary. What was the lamb doing not to be about his feet begging for the condensed milk which he always prepared for it when his own meal was finished? He flirted the water from his hands and hung out of the doorway.

  Mary, a few feet from the unconscious stranger, was regarding him with the gentle speculative look which Bowers knew to presage mischief. It was not difficult to interpret Mary’s intentions, and Bowers was fully aware that it was his duty either to warn the sleeper or reprimand Mary. His eyes, however, had the fondness of a doting parent who takes a secret pride in his offspring’s naughtiness as he watched Mary. He did not like the stranger, anyhow, and the incident of the photograph still rankled.

  “The Smart Alec,” he muttered, grinning, “it won’t hurt him.”

  The lamb backed off a little, made a run, and with its four feet bunched, landed in the pit of the stranger’s stomach.

  With an explosive grunt, the stranger’s knees and chin came together like the sudden closing of a large pocket knife.

  In spite of himself, Bowers snickered, but his grin faded at the expression which came to the stranger’s face when he realized the cause of his painful awakening. It was devilish, nothing less than appalling, in its ferocity. Bowers had seen rage before, but the peculiar fiendishness of the man’s expression, not knowing himself observed, fascinated him.

  The lamb had backed off for another run when the stranger jumped for it. Bowers called sharply:

  “Don’t tech that little sheep, pardner!”

  The answer was snarled through white teeth:

  “I’m goin’ to kick its slats in! I’m goin’ to break every bone in its body.”

  “I wouldn�
�t advise nothin’ like that. Come here, Mary!” Bowers endeavored to speak calmly, but he was seized with a tremulous excitement when he saw that the stranger intended to carry out his threat.

  “I’ll pay you fer it,” he panted as he tried to catch the lamb, “but I’m aimin’ to kill that knot-head!”

  Bowers dried his hands on his overalls and stepped inside the wagon. He returned with his shotgun.

  “And I aim to blow the top of your head off ef you try it,” Bowers said, breathing heavily. “That little innercent sheep don’t mean no harm to nobody. Sence we’re speakin’ plain, I don’t like you nohow. I don’t like the way you act; I don’t like the way you talk; I don’t like the way your face grows on you; I don’t like nothin’ about you, and ef I never see you agin it’ll be soon enough. You’d better go while I’m ca’m, for when I gits mad I breaks in two in the middle and flies both ways!”

  Panting from his chase, the stranger stopped and stood looking at Bowers in baffled fury. Then he turned sharply on his heel, caught his horse and swung into the saddle. He hesitated for the part of a second before spurring his horse a little closer.

  “You kin take a message to your boss—you locoed sheepherder. Tell her it’s from an old friend that knew her when she was kickin’ in her cradle. Show her that photygraph of the feller with the runnin’ horse and tell her I said it was the picture of her father, and that he’s scoured the country for her, spendin’ more money to locate her than she’ll make if she wrangles woolies till she’s a hundred. Tell her a telegram would bring him in twenty-four hours—on a special, probably. Give her that message, along with the love of an old, old friend what was well acquainted with her at the Sand Coulee!” He laughed mockingly, and with a malevolent look at Bowers, plunged into the quaking asp and vanished.