Bowers stared after him open-mouthed and round-eyed. He had placed his visitor. “The feller that smelled like a Injun tepee in the drug store the night Mormon Joe was murdered!”
The discovery that his visitor was the malodorous stranger of the drug store impressed Bowers far more than his mocking message to Kate concerning her father. That might or might not be true, but he was entirely sure about the other.
His first impulse was to deliver the message, but upon second thought he decided that nothing would be accomplished by it, and it might disturb her. He argued that with a range war pending she already had enough worries. If only he could get word to Teeters somehow—or Lingle, even—to keep a lookout for the fellow, but since he was many miles off the line of travel and he dared not leave his sheep, there was small chance of notifying either.
It was a good many days before the incident was out of Bowers’s mind for any length of time. He kept his shotgun handy and was on the alert constantly, listening, searching the surrounding country for a moving object, and muttering frequently, “What was he doin’ here, anyhow—moggin’ round the mountains—comin’ from nowhur, goin’ nowhur!”
But a month passed and nothing happened, either in Bowers’s camp or at the others. Since the warning had implied that any attempt to move further would be stopped immediately, and yet all the wagons were now well up the mountain, both Kate and Bowers concluded that the threatening scrawl was intended only to annoy her.
“Ma-aa-aa!” Mary bleated like a fretful teething child, and held up his head for Bowers to rub the feverish horns as his foster parent sat on a box beside the wagon one lazy afternoon.
“I declare, Mary, I’ll be most as glad when them horns cut through as if they growed on me! I could raise a baby by hand 'thout any more trouble than it’s took to bring you up.” The lamb stood stock still as he yielded to his importunities, and Bowers continued whimsically: “I been a father and mother to you, Mary, an’ you might a-been an orphing through your own orn'riness if I hadn’t throwed down on that feller pretty pronto.
“No denyin’ ’twould have made a preacher peevish to have you land in the pit of his stummick with them sharp hoofs of yourn. But you’re only an innercent little sheep, and they wan’t no sense in his tryin’ to stomp on you.
“Well, I got to be stirrin’ up them woolies. Sorry I got to tie you, but you’re gittin’ such a durned nuisance, with playin’ half the night and slidin’ down my tepee. I’ll give you the big feed when I come down in the mornin’, so say your prayers and go to bed like a good lamb orta.”
Bowers tied Mary to the wagon wheel, and, with a final rub and pat and admonition, left the lamb, to start the herd feeding toward their bed-ground on the summit.
“Come out o’ that, Mother Biddies! Better start now and go to fillin’ up. I want them children of yourn to weigh sixty poun' each, come fall.”
The sheep, which had been lying in the shade or standing in a circle with their heads together as a protection against the flies, obeyed slowly, and Bowers followed as they grazed their way toward his tepee gleaming white among the rocks on the top of the mountain.
Occasionally he stopped to pick up something and examine it—a curious pebble, a rock that might make his fortune, a bit of grey moss, which always made him wonder what there was about it, dry as punk, brittle and tasteless, to make sheep prefer it to far better feed, to his notion—salt sage, black sage, grease wood, or even cactus with the thorns pawed off. No accounting for sheep anyway—“the better you knew ’em the less you understood ’em.”
“Git to the high hills, Sister!” He tossed a pebble at a lagging ewe. “Want to feed all day in the same spot? Climb, there, Granny! Better look out or you’ll git throwed in with the gummers and shipped afore you know it!”
While the sheep fed slowly toward the summit, Bowers sauntered after—tall, lank, neutral-tinted, his thoughts going round and round in the groove peculiar to herders—the sheep before him and their individual characteristics, the condition of the range, the weather, religion, the wickedness of “High Society,” the items on the next list he would send to the mail-order house in Chicago.
And so the afternoon passed as had hundreds like it in Bowers’s life until he sat down finally on a rock to watch the rays of the setting sun paint the clouds in ever-changing colors and lose himself in reflections, studying the gorgeous sea surrounding him.
It would be a great place up there for a feller’s soul to float—provided he had one—restin’ a while in that yaller one, or the rose-colored one up yonder, or takin’ a dip into that hazy purple and disappearin’. Personally, he told himself, he believed that when he was dead he was dead as a nit, and he’d never seen anything about dying folks to make him think otherwise.
That Scissor-bill from back East in Ioway that died of heart failure jest slipped and slid off his chair, slow and easy like a sack of bran—he didn’t show in his eyes any visions of future glory when he stretched on the floor behind the stove in the bunkhouse and closed ’em for good. Sometimes they kicked and struggled like pizened sheep in their sufferin’, and again they went off easy and comfortable, but without any glimpses of Paradise brightenin’ their countenances, so far as he could notice.
If he had a soul, all right; if he didn’t, all right; that’s the way he figgered it.
The lead sheep started for the bed-ground.
“Kick up your dust piles good, Mother Biddies, and git comfortable. Hurry up and blow out your lights so I can git to my readin’.”
The light had faded, and the dingy gray-white backs became indistinguishable from the rounded tops of the sagebrush, as night came upon the mountain. With much sniffling, bleating, asthmatic coughing and crackling of small split hoofs, each sheep settled itself in practically the same little hollow it had previously pawed out to fit itself. A soft rumble came from the band as they stirred in their little wallows.
Then Bowers fired a barrel of his shotgun into the air as a reminder to possible coyotes in the rim rocks that he was present, and lighted the lantern in his tepee.
“I’ll have to warsh that chimbly in a couple o’ years,” he commented as he set the lantern down and reached for a worn and tattered mail-order catalogue in the corner.
Fumbling under his pillow, he produced the stub of a pencil and a tablet, after which, crosslegged on his blankets and soogan, he pored over the catalogue. Jewelry, clothing, cooking utensils and upholstered furniture were on the list which Bowers, with corrugated forehead and much chewing of the pencil, made out laboriously. When the amount reached three hundred and sixty-five dollars, he hesitated over a further expenditure of nine for a manicure set and a pair of pink satin sleeve holders. That was a good deal of money to spend in one evening.
“Thunder!” he finally said recklessly. “No use to deny myself! I ain’t goin’ to send it, anyway!”
Having written it all in proper form and affixed his signature, he folded the paper and slipped it under his bed along with some three dozen other such orders that never got any farther.
This was Bowers’s evening diversion, one in which he experienced all the thrills of purchasing without the pain of paying. He entertained a peculiar feeling of friendship for the House whose catalogue had helped him through long winter evenings, when night came at four, and interminable spells of wet weather, so when he sent a bona fide order to Chicago he never failed to inquire as to the health of each member of the firm and inform them that his own was excellent at time of writing, adding such items concerning the condition of the range and stock as he thought would interest them.
Bowers now slipped the lantern inside a flour sack, went outside in his stocking feet, and wedged the lantern between two rocks. The light “puzzled” coyotes, according to his theory, and gave them something to think about besides getting into his sheep.
When he had folded his trousers under his head his preparations for the night were complete and, this accomplished, the almost immediate expulsion of his bre
ath in little puffs was proof enough that he was sleeping the peaceful sleep of the carefree.
A brisk breeze came at intervals to sway the tepee and snap the loose flaps. Sometimes a lamb bleated in a sleepy tremolo; occasionally, instead of puffing, Bowers snorted; but mostly it was as still as an uninhabited world up there on the tip-top of the Rockies.
Suddenly Bowers half sprang from his blankets—wide-awake, alert, listening intently. He had a notion that a sound had awakened him, something foreign, unfamiliar. Holding his breath, he strained his ears for a repetition. Everything was still. He stepped outside lightly. The sheep lay on their bed-ground, quiet and contented. Had he been dreaming? It must be. Too much shortening in the dough-gods probably. He’d have to stir up a batch of light bread to-morrow. It was curious, though—that strong impression of having heard something. He returned to his blankets and was puffing again almost immediately.
It was not much after half-past three when the first ewe got up, bleated for her lamb, and moved off slowly. Others rose, stood a moment as though to get the sleep out of their eyes, and followed her example. Ewes bleated for their lambs, lambs for their mothers, until quavering calls in many keys made a din to awaken any sleeper, while the whole mass of dingy, rounded woolly backs started moving from the bed-ground.
“Workin’ like angels,” Bowers muttered as he came out of the tepee dressed in his erstwhile pillow, to see the sheep spreading out before him.
He extinguished the lantern, replaced it in the tepee, and tied the flap, while the faint, gray streak in the east grew brighter.
“Ouhee! You pinto gypsy! Whur you roamin’ to now? Think I want to climb up there and pry you out o’ the rocks? Come back here 'fore I git in your wig. Ouhee! Mother Biddies! I’ll whittle on your hoofs, first thing you know. You won’t enjoy traveling' so fast, if you’re a little tender footed.
“That’s better—now you’re actin’ like ladies!”
The air was redolent of sheep and sagebrush, and pink and amber streaks shot up to paint out the dimming stars. Bowers drew a deep breath of satisfaction. O man! but sheep-herding was a great life in summer—like drawing, wages through a vacation. If those “High Society” folks that the Denver Post told of, them worse than Sodomites, steeped in sin and extravagance, could know the joys of getting up at half-past three in the morning and going down at ten to eat off a fat mutton—
Bowers’s rhapsody ended abruptly. He drew a hand across his eyes to clear his vision. Down below, where he was wont to look for the white top of the wagon, there was nothing but scattered wreckage! He heard the sound now that had awakened him—the detonation of a charge of dynamite! There was no need to go closer to learn the rest of the story.
Bowers’s face twisted in a queer grimace. He cried brokenly in a grief that can be understood fully only by the lonely:
“Pore little Mary! Pore little feller! Pore little innercent sheep that never done no harm to nobody!”
* * *
CHAPTER XX
THE FORK OF THE ROAD
It would have looked, to any casual passerby, a pleasant family group that occupied the front porch at the Scissor Ranch house one breezy morning.
There was Mrs. Rathburn in a wide-brimmed hat, plying her embroidery needle and looking, from afar, the picture of contentment. Equally serene, to all outward appearances, was her daughter, with her head swathed in veiling against the complexion-destroying wind as she rocked to and fro while bringing her already perfect nails to the highest degree of polish with a chamois-skin buffer. Hugh Disston sat on the top step cleaning and oiling his shotgun with the loving care of the man who is fond of firearms.
But if the Casual Passerby had ridden closer he might have observed that Mrs. Rathburn was thrusting her needle back and forth through the taut linen inside the embroidery hoop with a vigor which amounted to viciousness; that Miss Rathburn drew the buffer so briskly across her nails that the encircling flesh was all but blistered with the friction; and that Disston as he oiled and rubbed let his gaze wander frequently to the distant mountains and rest there wistfully.
Furthermore, the Casual Passerby—a blood relative of the Innocent Bystander—would have been apt to notice that this act of Disston’s seemed automatically to accelerate the movements of the embroidery needle and the chamois buffer, and speed up the rocking chairs.
Propinquity was not doing all that Mrs. Rathburn had anticipated. There were moments like the present when, with real pleasure, she could have run her needle to the hilt, as it were, in any convenient portion of Disston’s anatomy. She seethed with resentment, and took it out upon the climate, the inhabitants, the customs of the country, and Teeters—who gave her the careful but unenthusiastic attention he would have given to a belligerent porcupine.
Pique and disappointment smouldered also in the bosom of her fair daughter, who, if she had been less fair, might have been called sullen, since these emotions evidenced themselves in a scornful silence, which was not alleviated by the fact that Disston did not appear to notice it.
While the ladies attributed their occasional temperamental outbursts to the altitude, which was “getting on their nerves,” it was no secret between them that their irritability was due to exasperation with Disston. With scientific skill and thoroughness they dissected him privately until he was hash, working their scalpels far into the watches of the night with unflagging interest. His words, his actions, his thoughts, as indicated by his changing expressions, were analyzed, yet, to the present, Mrs. Rathburn, trained specialist that she was in this branch of psychology, was obliged to confess herself baffled to discover his real feelings and intentions toward her daughter.
From the first, Mrs. Rathburn had suspected the “sheep person,” and had cultivated Mrs. Emmeline Taylor who called for the purpose of obtaining supplementary details to the brief history that she had been able to extract from Disston and Teeters. What Mrs. Rathburn learned from that source was, temporarily, eminently satisfactory and soothing. It was too much to believe that Disston could be seriously interested in a woman of Kate Prentice’s reputation and antecedents. Her daughter’s account of her visit was equally gratifying, for Hugh Disston certainly was too fastidious to be attracted by a woman so uncouth of appearance and manner as portrayed in the vivid description the lady had received of her from Beth.
Yet as she looked back it seemed to her that some subtle change had come over Hugh from the very first day in Prouty, when he had seen the Prentice person and colored. He had been eager to go and see her, and had not been too keen for Beth’s company upon the occasion, she had imagined.
It was all a mystery, and, thoroughly discouraged, she was about convinced that they were wasting precious time and ruining their complexions.
Disston continued to polish vigorously, using the gun grease and cleaner until the barrels through which he squinted were spotless and shining. When it was to his satisfaction, Disston put the gun together and sat with it across his knees, staring absently at the spur of mountains which Beth Rathburn had come to feel she detested. She tingled with irritation. She wanted to say something mean, something to make him feel sorry and apologetic.
She did not quite dare to speak sneeringly of Kate with no apparent provocation, but a violent gust of wind that snatched off her veil and disarranged her carefully dressed hair furnished an excuse to rail against the country.
“Goodness!” she cried explosively, as she lifted the short ends of hair out of her eyes and replaced them. “Will this everlasting wind never stop blowing!”
The fact that Disston did not even hear added to her exasperation. The soft voice, which was one of her many charms, was distinctly shrill as she reiterated:
“I say, will this everlasting wind never stop blowing?”
“It is disagreeable,” he murmured, without looking at her.
“Disagreeable? It’s horrible! I detest the country and everybody in it!”
Mrs. Rathburn shook her head reprovingly, but at the same moment
another violent gust swept around the corner and lifted not only that lady’s broad-brimmed hat, but her expensive “transformation.”
Mrs. Rathburn replaced it with guilty haste, and declared furiously:
“I must say I agree with my daughter—the country and its people are equally impossible.”
“I’m sorry,” Disston replied contritely. “I shouldn’t have urged you to come, but I was hoping you would like it—its picturesqueness, the unconventionality, and the dozen-and-one other things which appeal to me so strongly. In my enthusiasm, perhaps I exaggerated.”
“I can’t see anything picturesque in discomfort,” Miss Rathburn retorted. “There’s nothing picturesque in trying to bathe in water that curdles when you put soap in it, and makes your hands like nutmeg graters; or in servants who call you by your first name; or in trying to ride scraggly horses that have no gaits and shake you to pieces; or anything even moderately interesting about a country where there are no trees to sit under and nothing to look at but sagebrush, and rocks, and prairie dogs, and mountains, and not a soul that one can know socially!”
“I had no notion you disliked it out here so much, Beth,” he replied gravely.
But he was not sufficiently apologetic, not sufficiently humble. She went on in a tone in which spite was uppermost:
“And furthermore, if unconventionality could ever make me look and act like that 'Sheep Queen' over there,” she nodded towards the mountain, “I hope to leave before it happens.”
“Hush, Beth!” Her mother’s expostulation was lost upon her for, looking at Disston, she was a little dismayed by the expression upon his face when he turned and, leaning his back against the porch post, faced her, saying with a sternness which was foreign to him:
“It’s quite impossible for you to understand or appreciate a woman like Kate Prentice, and you will oblige me, Beth, by refraining from criticising her, at least in my presence.”
The Fighting Shepherdess Page 20