by Jon E. Lewis
So they rode in the heat and the dust, each thinking his own thoughts. The herd plodded on in the scorching, windless heat, stepping more briskly as they neared the edge of the bench.
Bellowing thirstily, the cattle poured down the long, steep slope to the sluggish creek at the mouth of the narrow coulee. As the drag dipped down from the level, even Penny could see the long, level valley beyond and the little huddle of houses squatting against the farther hill. Two hundred yards up the creek and inside the coulee, the tents of the Flying U showed their familiar, homey blotches of gray-white against the brown grass. Behind them a line of green willows showed where the creek snaked away up the coulee. Never twice in the same setting, flitting like huge birds over the range to alight where water and feed were best, those two tents were home to the Flying U boys – a welcome sight when a long day’s work was done.
Chip’s eyes brightened at the sight, and he cleared his throat of the last clinging particles of dust. With a whoop he hailed the two men ambling out from camp to relieve them. Others would follow – were following even as he looked – to take charge of the tired, thirsty cattle already blotting the creek altogether from sight where they crowded to drink. Cal Emmett and Slim rode straight on to meet Chip and Penny.
“Gosh, ain’t it hot!” Cal greeted them, voicing an obvious fact as is the way of men who have nothing important to say. “Weather breeder, if yuh ask me.”
“Well, if it holds off till we get these cattle in the cars it can rain all it damn pleases,” Chip replied carelessly. “I want to get caught up on my sleep, anyway.”
“Don’t you ever think it’ll hold off! Bet you’ll be huntin’ buttons on your slicker tonight.” Cal grinned. “Sure glad I don’t have to stand guard t’night!”
“By golly, that’s right,” Slim agreed. “If it don’t cut loose an’ rain t’night I miss my guess.”
Penny scowled at him, grunted, and rode on past. “Let ’er rain and be damned to it!” he muttered as he pricked his horse into a lope. But Chip had also put his horse into a gallop and failed to hear anything Penny might say.
At the rope corral as they rode up, Shorty was speaking to someone over across the remuda, judging from the pitch of his voice.
“No, sir! The man that rides to town before this beef is loaded can take his bed along with him. The cars’ll be spotted sometime tonight, ready for us to start loadin’ whenever we’re ready tomorrow. I shore as hell ain’t goin’ to stop and round up a bunch of drunken punchers before I start workin’ the herd in the mornin’.”
Penny muttered an unprintable sentence as he dismounted and began loosening the latigo, and Chip gave him a quick questioning glance as he stepped down from his saddle close by. He glanced at Shorty, let his eyes go questing for the man he had been speaking to, and returned his glance to Penny.
“That’s him every time, hittin’ yuh over another man’s back,” Penny grumbled and shot an angry, sidelong glance at the wagon boss. “If he’s got anything to say to me, why don’t he spit it out to my face?”
“Ah, he wasn’t talking to you,” Chip protested, biting the words off short as Shorty turned and walked toward them.
The wagon boss gave them a sharp glance as he passed, almost as if he had overheard them. But he did not say anything and Penny did not look up.
Though other men chatted around him, Penny ate his supper in silence, scowling over his plate. Afterward he lay in the shade of the bed tent and smoked moodily until it was time to catch his night horse. No one paid any attention to him, for tempers were quite likely to be short at the end of a beef roundup, when sleep was broken with night-guarding a herd as temperamental as rival prima donnas are said to be and almost as valuable. If a man went into the sulks it was just as well to let him alone while the mood lasted. Which did not mean, however, that no one knew the state of mind he was in.
By the set of his head and the stiffness of his neck while he saddled his horse Penny proclaimed to his world that he was plenty mad. He looped up the long free end of the latigo, unhooked the stirrup from the horn, and let it drop with a snap that sent his horse ducking sidewise. He jerked him to a snorting stand, fixing a stern and warning eye upon him, hesitated just a second or two, and instead of tying him to the wagon as he should have done he jerked down his hat for swift riding, thrust his toe in the stirrup, and mounted.
“Here! Where you think you’re goin’?” Shorty called out in surprise, leaping up from the ground.
“Goin’ after my mail! Be right back.” Penny grinned impudently over his shoulder as he wheeled his horse toward the open land. He was off, galloping down the coulee before Shorty could get the slack out of his jaw.
“His mail! Hell!” Shorty spluttered angrily, glaring after the spurts of dust Penny left behind him. “He ain’t had a letter in all the two years I’ve knowed him.” He stood irresolute, plainly tempted to give chase. Then he relaxed with a snort. “Think I’ll hog-tie him and haul him out in the wagon again and sober him up?” he said disgustedly. “I’ll fire the son-of-a-gun—”
Then he remembered that he was no longer just one of the Happy Family, free to speak his mind, but a full-fledged roundup foreman who had the dignity of his position to maintain. He stalked off to the cook tent and unrolled his bed, knowing full well that Penny would be howling drunk before midnight, and that by morning he would be unable to sit in the saddle – to say nothing of reading brands and helping work the herd and weed out strays before loading the cattle. The Flying U was already working shorthanded. He’d just have to consider himself shy another man, which went against the grain. Penny sober was a top hand – and, darn the luck, Shorty liked him.
He spread his blankets and started to get ready to crawl in, then decided that the air was too sultry inside and dragged his bed out under the mess wagon. Other men were deserting their canvas shelter in spite of the threatening clouds. For even at dusk the air was stifling. If it busted loose and rained they could move inside, but they’d be darned if they were going to suffocate in the meantime.
“Saddle yourselves a night horse before you turn in, boys.” Shorty made a sudden decision as a whiff of cool air struck his face. “We can’t take any chances at this stage of the game.” And he went off to practice what he preached.
It was a sensible precaution, for if the storm did strike before morning there was no telling how bad it might be or how the herd would take it. Shorty had seen beef herds stampede in a thunderstorm and he hoped never to see another one – certainly not while he was responsible for the safety of the cattle. So, having done what he could to prepare for an emergency, Shorty crawled into his blankets and was snoring inside five minutes. And presently the dim bulks on the ground nearby were likewise sleeping with the deep, unheeding slumber of work-weary men untroubled by conscience or care.
Down beyond the coulee mouth the night guard rode slowly round and round the sleeping herd. By sound they rode mostly, and by that unerring instinct that comes of long habit and the intimate knowledge it brings. As the sullen clouds crept closer it was so dark they could not see one another as they met and passed on. But the droning lullaby tones of their voices met and blended for a minute or so in pleasant companionship and understanding. Then the voices would draw apart and recede into the suffocating blackness. The whisper of saddle leather, the mouthing of a bit, the faint rattle of bridle chains grew faint and finally were lost until, minutes later, the meeting came again.
Chip was young, and his imagination never slept. He liked the velvet blackness, the brooding mystery that descended upon the land with the dusk. Even the frogs over in the creek did their croaking tonight with bashful hesitation, as if they, too, felt the silence weigh upon them and only croaked because the habit was too strong for them. Chip thought of this breathless night as a curtained dome where some gigantic goddess walked and trailed her velvet robes, treading softly with her finger on her lips. Which only proves how young and imaginative he could be on night guard.
Away across the herd came the plaintive notes of a melancholy song that Weary Willie seemed to favor lately, for no good reason save that it had many verses and a tune that lent itself to melodious crooning. Chip hushed his own low singing to listen. In that breathless air, across twelve hundred sleeping steers, the words came clear.
“Oh, bury me not on the lone prairee
Where the wild coyotes will howl o’er me,
Where the rattlesnakes hiss and the wind blows free—
Oh-h, bury me not on the lone prairee.”
Chip wondered who had written those words, anyway. Not a real cowboy, he’d bank on that. They’d sing it, of course, with that same wailing chorus plaintively making its sickish plea between the verses. But he didn’t believe any real cowpuncher ever felt that way, when you came right down to it.
When a cowboy’s light went out – according to the opinion of all the fellows he had ever heard discoursing on the subject – he didn’t give a damn where they laid his carcass. They were quite likely to say, with unpleasant bluntness, “Just drag me off where I won’t stink.” But when they stood guard, like Weary tonight, nine times in ten they’d sing that maudlin old song. And though Chip would never admit it, over there in the dark the words lost their sickish sentimentality and seemed to carry a pulsing tremor of feeling.
“Oh, bury me where a mother’s prayer
And a sister’s tears may linger there!
Where my friends may come and weep o’er me—
Oh, bury me not on the lone prairee!”
In daylight Chip would have hooted at the lugubrious tones with which Weary Willie sang those words, but now he did not even smile to himself. The night like that and with sheet lightning playing along the skyline with the vague and distant mutter of thunder miles away, death and the tears and prayers of loved ones did not seem so incongruous.
“Oh, bury me not – but his voice failed there.
And they gave no heed to his dying prayer.
In a narrow grave just six by three-e.
They-y buried him there on the lone prairee—”
The singer was riding toward him, the soft thud of his horse’s feet and the faint saddle sounds once more audible. A steer close to Chip blew a snorting breath, grunted and got to his feet, his horns rattling against the horns of his nearest neighbor. Chip forgot Weary and his song and began a soothing melody of his own. Another steer got up, and another. Black as it was, he sensed their uneasy, listening attitudes.
It couldn’t have been Weary who wakened them. Weary had circled the herd many times with his melancholy ditty, his presence carrying reassurance. Chip dared not quicken his pace, dared not call a warning. Instead he began singing in his clear young tenor, hoping to override whatever fear was creeping on among the cattle.
“Come, love, come, the boat lies low—
The moon shines bright on the old bayou—”
Almost overhead the clouds brightened with the sudden flare of lightning, but the rumble that followed was slow and deep and need not have been disquieting to animals that had grown up in the land of sudden storms.
“Come, love, come, oh come along with me,
I’ll take you down-n to Tenn—”
Off in the night there came the drumming of hoofs – some strange horseman coming at a swift gallop straight toward the herd. A chill prickled up Chip’s neck. Slowly, carefully as a mother tiptoeing away from her sleeping baby, he reined aside and walked his horse out to meet and warn the approaching rider.
“Slow down!” he called cautiously when another lightning flare revealed the rider. “You’ll be on top of the herd in another minute, you damn fool!”
A shrill, reckless yell from just ahead answered him: “Ayee-ee – Yipee! Them’s the babies I’m a-lookin’ for! Gotta stand guard! Whee-ee! Bossies, here’s yer – what the hell?”
With an indescribable sound of clashing horns and great bodies moving in unison, the herd was up and away like flushed quail. There was no more warning than that first great swoosh of sound. Here and there steers bawled throatily – caught in the act of getting to their feet. Now they were battered back to earth as the herd lunged over them. For the cattle had taken fright on the outer fringe nearest camp and the open valley, and were stampeding across their own bed ground toward the bench.
The night was no longer silent under a velvety blackness. It was a roaring tumult of sound, the never-to-be-forgotten clamor of a stampede in full flight. Weary Willie, by God’s mercy out of their path as he swung round the side toward the valley, yelled to Chip above the uproar.
“What started ’em? Y’all right, Chip?”
And Penny, with a pint or more of whiskey inside him and two quart flasks in his pockets, answered with another yell, “I did! Jus’ sayin’ hello – the damn things’ve fergot me a’ready!” He gave a whoop and emptied his six-shooter into the air as he galloped.
“Go it like hell!” he jeered, racing jubilantly after them. “Git a move on! You don’t need no sleep, anyhow! What you want’s – ex-ercise! Dammit, ex-ercise, you rip-pety-rip—” Cursing, laughing, shooting, he rode like a wild man, urging them on up and over the hill.
Up in camp Shorty lifted his head as the distant yelling came faint on the still air. Then came the shots and the vibrant roar of the stampede, but that was when Shorty had already jumped to his feet.
“Pile out!” he yelled. “The cattle’s runnin’!”
Five words only, but they brought every man in camp out of his blankets, and grabbing for his clothes. Not much behind Shorty’s hurried dressing they jerked on their boots, stamping their feet in on their way to their horses. They untied their mounts by the sense of touch alone, felt for stirrups in the inky blackness between lightning flashes, mounted, and were off, streaming down the coulee at a dead run. Even Patsy the cook was up and dressed and standing outside listening and swearing and trying to guess which way the cattle were running. Patsy had been almost caught in a stampede once when a herd had run past camp, and since then he took no chance if he could help himself.
To have a beef herd stampede in the night is a catastrophe at any time. To have it happen on the last night before they are crowded into cars and sent lurching away to market is next to the worst luck that can happen to a range man at shipping time. The ultimate disaster, of course, would be to have the herd wiped out entirely.
Shorty looked at the clouds, quiet yet as approaching storms go, and wondered what had started the cattle. The shooting, he guessed, had been done in the hope of turning the herd. Then, above the fast decreasing rumble of the stampede, he heard a shrill yell he knew of old.
“Penny, by thunder!” He dug his heels into the flanks of his horse and swore aloud in his wrath. Certain broken phrases whipped backward on the wind he made in his headlong flight. “If I ever git my hands on the—” And again: “A man like him had oughta be strung up by the heels! – any damn fool that will go yellin’ and shootin’ into a beef herd bedded down—”
Shorty was not even aware that he was speaking. His horse stumbled over a loose rock, recovered himself with a lurch, and went pounding on across the creek and up the steep slope to the bench beyond. The horse knew and followed the sounds without a touch on the reins, would follow until he dropped or overtook the herd.
Around and behind him the riders were tearing along, their horses grunting as they took the steep hill in rabbit jumps. Good thing the cattle headed along the back trail, Shorty thought as his horse strained up the last bitter climb and lengthened his stride on the level. That hill would slow the herd down, maybe. Give the boys a chance to turn them. But with that drunken maniac still whooping up ahead, the prospect didn’t look very bright.
On the left flank of the herd the night guard were racing, yelling, and shooting to turn the cattle. But they could not cover the unmistakable bellowing chant of Penny riding behind and to the right of the maddened herd and undoing the work of the left-flank boys. Shorty was so incensed that he actually turned that way
with the full intention of overtaking Penny and shooting him off his horse. It seemed the only way to silence him. He didn’t want to kill the cussed lunatic, but if he had to do it to shut him up no jury of range men would call it murder.
The storm clouds, too, were moving overhead, the lightning playing behind the tumbling thunderheads and turning them a golden yellow, with an occasional sword thrust of vivid flame. But still the rain did not come down upon the thirsty land. The bulk of the storm, as Shorty saw with one quick backward glance, was swinging around to throw itself bodily against the rugged steeps of the mountains beyond.
Out upon the level, as the lightning brightened for an instant the whole landscape, they saw the herd a black blotch in the distance. With the cattle they glimpsed the night herders riding alongside the left flank, swinging the galloping herd more and more to the right. Of Penny they saw nothing. There was no more shooting, no more yelling.
“He’s cooled down mighty sudden,” Shorty gritted unforgivingly. “But that won’t do him a damn bit of good when I get my hands on him. I’ll sure as hell make him wish his mother’d been a man. He’s through with this outfit, the rippety-rip—”
Away on the ragged fringe of the herd rode Chip and two other herders, with voices and swinging loops forcing the leaders around until they were running back the way they had come. As the bulk of the herd followed blindly where the others led, they too changed the course of their flight. In ten minutes or less the entire herd ran in a huge circle that slowed to a trot, then to a walk. “Milling,” the cowboys called that uneasy circling round and round.
Within a mile or so the stampede was stopped, and except for one top hand forever disgraced and banished from the Flying U – and from the range, wherever the story seeped out – and a few broken-legged steers that would have to be shot, no harm had been done. The herd, at least, was intact. They had lost weight. Shorty would delay the shipping as long as he could hold the cars, to bring the cattle up to the best condition he could. A day, maybe – he’d ride in and see how much time he could have. Bad enough, but it could have been worse.