The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  Cheered a bit, he set out sturdily over the hills toward the mouth of Suction Creek. The Happy Family would make all kinds of fools of themselves, he supposed, if he showed up like this; but he might not be obliged to appear before them in his present state of undress; he might strike some other camp, first. Happy Jack was still forced to be hopeful. He quite counted on striking another camp before reaching the wagons of the Flying U.

  The sun slid farther and farther toward the western rim of tumbled ridges as Happy Jack, in his strange raiment, plodded laboriously to the north. The mantle he was forced to shift constantly into a new position as the sun’s rays burned deep a new place, or the stiff hide galled his blistered shoulders. The sandals did better, except that the rotten strands of rope were continually wearing through on the bottom, so that he must stop and tie fresh knots, or replace the bit from the scant surplus which he had prudently brought along.

  Till sundown he climbed toilfully up the steep hills and then scrambled as toilfully into the coulees, taking the straightest course he knew for the mouth of Suction Creek; that, as a last resort, while he watched keenly for the white flake against green which would tell of a tent pitched there in the wilderness. He was hungry—when he forgot other discomforts long enough to think of it. Worst, perhaps, was the way in which the gaunt sage brush scratched his unclothed legs when he was compelled to cross a patch on some coulee bottom. Happy Jack swore a great deal, in those long, heat-laden hours, and never did he so completely belie the name men had in sarcasm given him.

  Just when he was given over to the most gloomy forebodings, a white square stood out for a moment sharply against a background of pines, far below him in a coulee where the sun was peering fleetingly before it dove out of sight over a hill. Happy Jack—of a truth, the most unhappy Jack one could find, though he searched far and long—stood still and eyed the white patch critically. There was only the one; but another might be hidden in the trees. Still, there was no herd grazing anywhere in the coulee, and no jingle of cavvy bells came to his ears, though he listened long. He was sure that it was not the camp of the Flying U, where he would be ministered unto faithfully, to be sure, yet where the ministrations would be mingled with much wit-sharpened raillery harder even to bear than was his present condition of sun-blisters and scratches. He thanked the Lord in sincere if unorthodox terms, and went down the hill in long, ungraceful strides.

  It was far down that hill, and it was farther across the coulee. Each step grew more wearisome to Happy Jack, unaccustomed as he was to using his own feet as a mode of travel. But away in the edge of the pine grove were food and raiment, and a shelter from the night that was creeping down on him with the hurried stealth of a mountain lion after its quarry. He shifted the sheepskin mantle for the thousandth time; this time he untied it from his galled shoulders and festooned it modestly if unbecomingly about his middle.

  Feeling sure of the unfailing hospitality of the rangeland, be the tent-dweller whom he might, Happy Jack walked boldly through the soft, spring twilight that lasts long in Montana, and up to the very door of the tent. A figure—a female figure—slender and topped by thin face and eyes sheltered behind glasses, rose up, gazed upon him in horror, shrieked till one could hear her a mile, and fell backward into the tent. Another female figure appeared, looked, and shrieked also—and even louder than did the first. Happy Jack, with a squawk of dismay, turned and flew incontinently afar into the dusk. A man’s voice he heard, shouting inquiry; another, shouting what, from a distance, sounded like threats. Happy Jack did not wait to make sure; he ran blindly, until he brought up in a patch of prickly-pear, at which he yelled, forgetting for the instant that he was pursued. Somehow he floundered out and away from the torture of the stinging spines, and took to the hills. A moon, big as the mouth of a barrel, climbed over a ridge and betrayed him to the men searching below, and they shouted and fired a gun. Happy Jack did not believe they could shoot very straight, but he was in no mood to take chances; he sought refuge among a jumble of great, gray bowlders; sat himself down in the shadow and caressed gingerly the places where the prickly-pear had punctured his skin, and gave himself riotously over to blasphemy.

  The men below were prowling half-heartedly, it seemed to him—as if they were afraid of running upon him too suddenly. It came to him that they were afraid of him—and he grinned feebly at the joke. He had not before stopped to consider his appearance, being concerned with more important matters. Now, however, as he pulled the scant covering of the pelt over his shoulders to keep off the chill of the night, he could not wonder that the woman at the tent had fainted. Happy Jack suspected shrewdly that he could, in that rig, startle almost any one.

  He watched the coulee wistfully. They were making fires, down there below him; great, revealing bonfires at intervals that would make it impossible to pass their line unseen. He could not doubt that some one was cached in the shadows with a gun. There were more than two men; Happy Jack thought that there must be at least four or five. He would have liked to go down, just out of gun range, and shout explanations and a request for some clothes—only for the women. Happy was always ill at ease in the presence of strange women, and he felt, just now, quite unequal to the ordeal of facing those two. He sat huddled in the shadow of a rock and wished profanely that women would stay at home and not go camping out in the Badlands, where their presence was distinctly inappropriate and undesirable. If the men down there were alone, he felt sure that he could make them understand. Seeing they were not alone, however, he stayed where he was and watched the fires, while his teeth chattered with cold and his stomach ached with the hunger he could not appease.

  Till daylight he sat there unhappily and watched the unwinking challenge of the flames below, and miserably wished himself elsewhere; even the jibes of the Happy Family would be endurable, so long as he had the comfort afforded by the Flying U camp. But that was miles away. And when daylight brought warmth and returning courage, he went so far as to wish the Flying U camp farther away than it probably was. He wanted to get somewhere, and ask help from strangers rather than those he knew best.

  With that idea fixed in his mind, he got stiffly to his bruised feet, readjusted the sheepskin and began wearily to climb higher. When the sun tinged all the hilltops golden yellow, he turned and shook his fist impotently at the camp far beneath him. Then he went on doggedly.

  Standing at last on a high peak, he looked away toward the sunrise and made out a white speck on a grassy side-hill; beside it, a gray square moved slowly over the green. Sheep, and a sheep camp—and Happy Jack, hater of sheep though he was, hailed the sight as a bit of rare good luck. His spirits rose immediately, and he started straight for the place.

  Down in the next coulee—there were always coulees to cross, no matter in what direction one would travel—he came near running plump into three riders, who were Irish Mallory, and Weary, and Pink. They were riding down from the direction of the camp where were the women, and they caught sight of him immediately and gave chase. Happy Jack had no mind to be rounded up by that trio; he dodged into the bushes, and though they dug long, unmerciful scratches in his person, clung to the shelter they gave and made off at top speed. He could hear the others shouting at one another as they galloped here and there trying to locate him, and he skulked where the bushes were deepest, like a criminal in fear of lynching.

  Luck, for once, was with him, and he got out into another brush-fringed coulee without being seen, and felt himself, for the present, safe from that portion of the Happy Family. Thereafter he avoided religiously the higher ridges, and kept the direction more by instinct than by actual knowledge. The sun grew hot again and he hurried on, shifting the sheepskin as the need impressed.

  When at last he sighted again the sheep, they were very close. Happy Jack grew cautious; he crept down upon the unsuspecting herder as stealthily as an animal hunting its breakfast. Herders sometimes carry guns—and the experience of last night burned hot in his memory.

  Slipping wari
ly from rock to rock, he was within a dozen feet, when a dog barked and betrayed his presence. The herder did not have a gun. He gave a yell of pure terror and started for camp after his weapon. Happy Jack, yelling also, with long leaps followed after. Twice the herder looked over his shoulder at the weird figure in gray hat and flapping sheepskin, and immediately after each glance his pace increased perceptibly. Still Happy Jack, desperate beyond measure, doggedly pursued, and his long legs lessened at each jump the distance between. From a spectacular viewpoint, it must have been a pretty race.

  The herder, with a gasp, dove into the tent; into the tent Happy Jack dove after him—and none too soon. The hand of the herder had almost clasped his rifle when the weight of Happy bore him shrieking to the earthen floor.

  “Aw, yuh locoed old fool, shut up, can’t yuh, a minute?” Happy Jack, with his fingers pressed against the windpipe of the other, had the satisfaction of seeing his request granted at once. The shrieks died to mere gurgling. “What I want uh you,” Happy went on crossly, “ain’t your lifeblood, yuh dam’ Swede idiot. I want some clothes, and some grub; and I want to borry that pinto I seen picketed out in the hollow, down there. Now, will yuh let up that yelling and act white, or must I pound some p’liteness into yuh? Say!”

  “By damn, Ay tank yo’ vas got soom crazy,” apologized the herder humbly, sanity growing in his pale blue eyes. “Ay tank—”

  “Oh, I don’t give a cuss what you tank,” Happy Jack cut in. “I ain’t had anything to eat sence yesterday forenoon, and I ain’t had any clothes on sence yesterday, either. Send them darn dogs back to watch your sheep, and get busy with breakfast! I’ve got a lot to do, t’-day. I’ve got to round up my horse and get my clothes that’s tied to the saddle, and get t’ where I’m going. Get up, darn yuh! I ain’t going t’ eat yuh—not unless you’re too slow with that grub.”

  The herder was submissive and placating, and permitted Happy Jack to appropriate the conventional garb of a male human, the while coffee and bacon were maddening his hunger with their tantalizing odor. He seemed much more at ease, once he saw that Happy Jack, properly clothed, was not particularly fearsome to look upon, and talked volubly while he got out bread and stewed prunes and boiled beans for the thrice-unexpected guest.

  Happy Jack, clothed and fed, became himself again and prophesied gloomily: “The chances is, that horse uh mine’ll be forty miles away and still going, by this time; but soon as I can round him up, I’ll bring your pinto back. Yuh needn’t t’ worry none; I guess I got all the sense I’ve ever had.”

  Once more astride a horse—albeit the pinto pony of a sheepherder—Happy Jack felt abundantly able to cope with the situation. He made a detour that put him far from where the three he most dreaded to meet were apt to be, and struck out at the pinto’s best pace for the river at the point where he had crossed so disastrously the day before.

  Having a good memory for directions and localities, he easily found the place of unhappy memory; and taking up Stranger’s trail through the sand from there, he got the general direction of his flight and followed vengefully after; rode for an hour up a long, grassy coulee, and came suddenly upon the fugitive feeding quietly beside a spring. The bundle of clothing was still tied firmly to the saddle, and at sight of it the face of Happy Jack relaxed somewhat from its gloom.

  When Happy rode up and cast a loop over his head Stranger nickered a bit, as if he did not much enjoy freedom while he yet bore the trappings of servitude. And his submission was so instant and voluntary that Happy Jack had not the heart to do as he had threatened many times in the last few hours—“to beat the hide off him.” Instead, he got hastily into his clothes—quite as if he feared they might again be whisked away from him—and then rubbed forgivingly the nose of Stranger, and solicitously pulled a few strands of his forelock from under the brow-band. In the heart of Happy Jack was a great peace, marred only by the physical discomforts of much sun-blister and many deep scratches. After that he got thankfully into his own saddle and rode gladly away, leading the pinto pony behind him. He had got out of the scrape, and the Happy Family would never find it out; it was not likely that they would chance upon the Swede herder, or if they did, that they would exchange with him many words. The Happy Family held itself physically, mentally, morally and socially far above sheepherders—and in that lay the safety of Happy Jack.

  It was nearly noon when he reached again the sheep camp, and the Swede hospitably urged him to stay and eat with him; but Happy Jack would not tarry, for he was anxious to reach the camp of the Flying U. A mile from the herder’s camp he saw again on a distant hilltop three familiar figures. This time he did not dodge into shelter, but urged Stranger to a gallop and rode boldly toward them. They greeted him joyfully and at the top of their voices when he came within shouting distance.

  “How comes it you’re riding the pinnacles over here?” Weary wanted to know, as soon as he rode alongside.

  “Aw, I just came over after more orders; hope they send somebody else over there, if they want any more repping done,” Happy Jack said, in his customary tone of discontent with circumstances.

  “Say! Yuh didn’t see anything of a wild man, down next the river, did yuh?” put in Pink.

  “Aw, gwan! what wild man?” Happy Jack eyed them suspiciously.

  “Honest, there’s a wild man ranging around here in these hills,” Pink declared. “We’ve been mooching around all forenoon, hunting him. Got sight of him, early this morning, but he got away in the brush.”

  Happy Jack looked guilty, and even more suspicious. Was it possible that they had recognized him?

  “The way we come to hear about him,” Weary explained, “we happened across some campers, over in a little coulee to the west uh here. They was all worked up over him. Seems he went into camp last night, and like to scared the ladies into fits. He ain’t got enough clothes on to flag an antelope, according to them, and he’s about seven feet high, and looks more like a missing link than a plain, ordinary man. The one that didn’t faint away got the best look at him, and she’s ready to take oath he ain’t more’n half human. They kept fires burning all night to scare him out uh the coulee, and they’re going to break camp today and hike for home. They say he give a screech that’d put a crimp in the devil himself, and went galloping off, jumping about twenty feet at a lick. And—”

  “Aw, gwan!” protested Happy Jack, feebly.

  “So help me Josephine, it’s the truth,” abetted Pink, round-eyed and unmistakably in earnest. “We wouldn’t uh taken much stock in it, either, only we saw him ourselves, not more than two hundred yards off. He was just over the hill from the coulee where they were camped, so it’s bound to be the same animal. It’s a fact, he didn’t have much covering—just something hung over his shoulders. And he was sure wild, for soon as he seen us he humped himself and got into the brush. We could hear him go crashing away like a whole bunch of elephants. It’s a damn’ shame he got away on us,” Pink sighed regretfully. “We was going to rope him and put him in a cage; we could sure uh made money on him, at two bits a look.”

  Happy Jack continued to eye the three distrustfully. Too often had he been the victim of their humor for him now to believe implicitly in their ignorance. It was too good to be real, it seemed to him. Still, if by any good luck it were real, he hated to think what would happen if they ever found out the truth. He eased the clothing cautiously away from his smarting back, and stared hard into a coulee.

  “It was likely some sheepherder gone clean nutty,” mused Irish.

  “Well, the most uh them wouldn’t have far to go,” ventured Happy Jack, thinking of the Swede.

  “What we ought to do,” said Pink, keen for the chase, “is for the whole bunch of us to come down here and round him up. Wonder if we couldn’t talk Chip into laying off for a day or so; there’s no herd to hold. I sure would like to get a good look at him.”

  “Somebody ought to take him in,” observed Irish longingly. “He ain’t safe, running around loose lik
e that. There’s no telling what he might do. The way them campers read his brand, he’s plumb dangerous to meet up with alone. It’s lucky you didn’t run onto him, Happy.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” growled Happy Jack. “And what’s more, I betche there ain’t any such person.”

  “Don’t call us liars to our faces, Happy,” Weary reproved. “We told yuh, a dozen times, that we saw him ourselves. Yuh might be polite enough to take our word for it.”

  “Aw, gwan!” Happy Jack grunted, still not quite sure of how much—or how little—they knew. While they discussed further the wild man, he watched furtively for the surreptitious lowering of lids that would betray their insincerity. When they appealed to him for an opinion of some phase of the subject, he answered with caution. He tried to turn the talk to his experiences on the Shonkin range, and found the wild man cropping up with disheartening persistency. He shifted often in the saddle, because of the deep sunburns which smarted continually and maddeningly. He wondered if the boys had used all of that big box of carbolic salve which used to be kept in a corner of the mess-box; and was carbolic salve good for sun-blisters? He told himself gloomily that if there was any of it left, and if it were good for his ailment, there wouldn’t be half enough of it, anyway. He estimated unhappily that he would need about two quarts.

  When they reached camp, the welcome of Happy Jack was overshadowed and made insignificant by the strange story of the wild man. Happy Jack, mentally and physically miserable, was forced to hear it all told over again, and to listen to the excited comments of the others. He was sick of the subject. He had heard enough about the wild man, and he wished fervently that they would shut up about it. He couldn’t see that it was anything to make such a fuss about, anyway. And he wished he could get his hands on that carbolic salve, without having the whole bunch rubbering around and asking questions about something that was none of their business. He even wished, in that first bitter hour after he had eaten and while they were lying idly in the shady spots, that he was back on the Shonkin range with an alien crew.